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Pride and Prejudice is a novel by Jane Austen, first published in 1813. It centers on Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy and satirizes courtship and social class in Regency England.
A sonnet is a fourteen-line poem, traditionally in iambic pentameter, with a structured rhyme scheme such as Shakespearean or Petrarchan. The form is defined by line count and rhyme pattern, not by subject matter.
A simile explicitly compares two things using 'like' or 'as,' as in 'her voice was like velvet.' A metaphor makes a comparison without such markers.
Macbeth begins as Thane of Glamis; the witches greet him with that title before he is later made Thane of Cawdor. Fife is associated with Macduff, and Ross is another Scottish noble.
An adverb modifies a verb, adjective, or other adverb; in this sentence 'fast' modifies 'ran' and answers how he ran. 'He' is a pronoun, 'ran' is the verb, and 'runner' is a noun.
The Waste Land (1922) is a landmark modernist poem by T.S. Eliot. Its fragmented structure and dense allusions reflect post-war disillusionment.
English strong verbs form principal parts by vowel change: write (base), wrote (past), written (past participle). The past participle is used after auxiliary 'have' and in passive constructions.
The antagonist creates conflict with the protagonist; the term is defined by narrative function, not by moral villainy. A foil contrasts with another character, and the narrator tells the story.
The Augustan or Neoclassical period, roughly 1660–1780, valued reason, order, wit, and satire. It is associated with writers such as Pope, Swift, and Dryden.
Milton announces that he will 'assert Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men.' The poem explores the Fall of Adam and Eve within a cosmic struggle.
A morpheme is the minimal unit that carries meaning or grammatical function, such as 'book' or the plural '-s.' Phonemes are sound units, graphemes are writing units, and lexemes are dictionary words.
The Shakespearean sonnet has three quatrains and a final couplet, rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. The Petrarchan sonnet instead uses an octave and sestet, often ABBAABBA CDECDE.
Swift published A Modest Proposal in 1729 as a Juvenalian satire on English exploitation of Ireland. Its shocking proposal is ironic rather than literal.
The journey into the interior mirrors Marlow's discovery of greed, brutality, and moral confusion in European colonialism. Conrad uses the physical landscape as a correlative for psychological and ethical regression.
The past subjunctive 'were' is used in hypothetical conditions contrary to fact, as in 'If I were you.' In informal speech 'was' occurs, but standard formal usage prefers 'were' in this construction.
Stream of consciousness presents a character's continuous flow of thoughts and perceptions, often without conventional logical transitions. Virginia Woolf uses it in novels such as Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse.
The sentence opens Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859), set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. Its antithetical structure introduces the novel's themes of sacrifice and resurrection.
Voiced sounds, such as /b/ and /z/, involve periodic vibration of the vocal folds. Voiceless sounds, such as /p/ and /s/, are produced without that vibration.
Things Fall Apart (1958) is Chinua Achebe's first novel and a foundational text of modern African literature. It portrays Igbo society and the impact of British colonialism through Okonkwo's story.
A soliloquy reveals a character's inner thoughts while alone on stage, as in Hamlet's 'To be, or not to be.' An aside is directed to the audience or another character and is not heard by everyone on stage.
Derrida developed deconstruction, which examines how texts undermine their own apparent binary oppositions and stable meanings. It is associated with poststructuralist philosophy and literary analysis.
Between roughly the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, the long vowels of Middle English changed their pronunciation, eventually producing many of the vowel sounds of Modern English. The shift is a key reason English spelling and pronunciation diverge.
The Spenserian stanza has nine lines: eight in iambic pentameter followed by a hexameter alexandrine, rhyming ababbcbcc. Spenser devised it for The Faerie Queene.
A bound morpheme cannot stand alone as a word and must attach to a free morpheme, as '-ness' does in 'happiness.' 'Book,' 'happy,' and 'the' can all stand alone.
Bhabha uses hybridity to describe the mixing and negotiation of cultural identities that unsettles fixed colonial categories. His work emphasizes mimicry, ambivalence, and the 'third space.'
The Spanish Tragedy, a foundational revenge tragedy, was written by Thomas Kyd in the late 1580s or early 1590s. Marlowe wrote Doctor Faustus, Jonson wrote Volpone, and Webster wrote The Duchess of Malfi.
Standard English declarative clauses normally place the subject first, the verb second, and the object or complement third, giving the order SVO. Other orders occur only in marked constructions such as questions or emphasis.
Pride and Prejudice was published by Jane Austen in 1813 and follows Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy. Brontë wrote Jane Eyre, Eliot wrote Middlemarch, and Shelley wrote Frankenstein.
Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds in nearby words, often used to create a particular mood or musical effect. Alliteration repeats initial consonants, while onomatopoeia imitates sounds directly.
Othello is a tragedy centred on jealousy and betrayal, ending in the deaths of Desdemona and Othello. The other three plays are romantic comedies.
Semantics examines how meaning is encoded in words, phrases, and sentences. Phonetics studies speech sounds, morphology studies word structure, and syntax studies sentence structure.
Tragedy traditionally presents a protagonist of high standing who suffers a reversal and a disastrous conclusion. Comedy, farce, and satire are comic or corrective modes rather than tragic ones.
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats are central figures of the Romantic movement, which emphasised imagination, nature, and individual feeling. The Restoration and Augustan periods precede them, while the Victorian period follows.
Dramatic irony depends on a gap between the audience's knowledge and a character's understanding, so the audience recognises implications the character misses. It is distinct from a soliloquy, a plot reversal, or metatheatrical commentary.
A bildungsroman traces a protagonist's moral and psychological growth from youth toward maturity. Great Expectations follows Pip's development and changing social aspirations, making it a standard example of the form.
Fricatives are produced by forcing air through a narrow constriction, creating friction noise, as in /f/ and /s/. Plosives involve complete closure and release, nasals direct air through the nose, and approximants involve little or no friction.
New Criticism treats the poem or literary work as a self-contained verbal object and emphasises close reading of its formal and stylistic features. It is associated with the idea of the intentional fallacy, which cautions against judging a work by the author's intentions or biography.
Inflectional morphemes mark grammatical features such as number, tense, or case without creating a new lexical item. The plural -s changes 'cat' to 'cats' but does not alter the word's basic meaning or category in the way a derivational affix does.
Conversational implicature is the additional meaning a hearer infers from what a speaker says in context, often by assuming cooperation. It differs from entailment, which is a logical consequence, and from presupposition, which is backgrounded information.
'Ode to a Nightingale' is one of the odes John Keats composed in 1819. Shelley wrote 'Ode to the West Wind', Wordsworth wrote 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality', and Coleridge wrote 'Dejection: An Ode'.
An omniscient narrator has access to the inner lives of multiple characters and can move freely between them. A limited narrator stays within one character's perspective, while a first-person narrator speaks as 'I'.
A dialect is a regional or social variety of a language distinguished by vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar. An idiolect is an individual's personal speech habits, while a register is a style suited to a particular situation.
'My Last Duchess' by Robert Browning presents a single speaker addressing a silent listener, revealing his character through what he says. That dramatic situation and self-revelation are hallmarks of the dramatic monologue.
The Norman Conquest of 1066 made French the language of the English court and administration for centuries, leading to extensive French borrowing into English. The Great Vowel Shift was a later change in pronunciation, not a political event that imported vocabulary.
In Chomskyan models, deep structure represents the underlying grammatical relations, and transformations map it onto surface structure, the form that is actually pronounced. Surface structure is therefore the output of syntactic transformations rather than the lexicon or phonology alone.
Bakhtin used heteroglossia to describe the coexistence of multiple social voices and language varieties within a single literary work. The concept underpins his account of the novel as dialogic rather than monologic.
Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) analyses how Western scholarship and culture constructed an imagined 'East' that served colonial power. The concept is central to postcolonial critique of representation and knowledge production.
Samuel Richardson's Pamela is told through a series of letters, making it a classic epistolary novel. Tom Jones and Robinson Crusoe use third-person and first-person prose narratives respectively, while Tristram Shandy is experimental but not epistolary.
Entailment is a logical relation: if sentence A is true, sentence B must also be true, as when 'The king was assassinated' entails 'The king is dead'. Presupposition and implicature involve background assumptions or contextual inference rather than strict logical consequence.
'Paradise Lost' is a blank-verse epic published by John Milton in 1667, retelling the biblical fall of humanity. Milton's authorship is a standard fact of seventeenth-century English literature.