REPRESENTATIVE BRITISH AUTHORS
A Supplementary Critical Anthology

Fall 2002
 

 
Contents
 

The Sixteenth Century


The Early Seventeenth Century


The Restoration and Eighteenth Century


The Romantic Period

  • Felicia Hemans, "Cassabianca," Elizabeth Carter


The Victorian Age


The Twentieth Century


Questions for Review
 

 
Checklist


Does your site include:

1) an annotated text (with date of composition or publication) of whatever primary work you've been considering (for most of you, a poem);

2) a revised analysis/interpretation of that work;

3) a revised essay on that work as representative of its author (with dates of the author's birth and death); 

4) the text (lightly annotated) of another representative work by the author;

5) relevant links, each with a descriptive sentence or two?

Did you revise your essays with your audience--your classmates in English 241--in mind?

Have you put to basic use such features of Web technology as hyperlinks, targets (internal links), and images?

Have you viewed your site, tested the links, and proofread it carefully?

>Calendar>
>Syllabus>

 
 
Questions for Review
(6 December 2002)


Spenser

  • In "Like as a huntsman..." by Edmund Spenser, the hunter's pursuit of the deer is likely a metaphor for what?
  • In "One day I wrote her name..." the speaker proposes to write his lover's name with what and where in order to immortalize their relationship?
Shakespeare
  • What is bothering the speaker of Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, "That time of year"?
  • What human emotion finally comforts the downcast speakers of the two sonnets, "When in disgrace" (Sonnet 29) and "That time of year" (Sonnet 73)?
Donne
  • With what object does Donne compare the two lovers at the end of "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"?
  • Why doesn't the speaker of the poem want his lover to mourn his departure?
Jonson
  • On which does Jonson's invitation place greater value: the sumptuous food that his guest will enjoy at his supper table or the excellent company that his guest will provide?
  • To what extent if any does Jonson's invitation endorse the "carpe diem" imperative? 
Herbert
  • What does George Herbert name as his harvest in "The Collar"?
  • What are two possible meanings--one of them a pun--of the title of Herbert's poem?
Dryden
  • With what figure from Greek mythology does Dryden compare St. Cecilia?
  • According to Dryden, St. Cecilia excelled that mythological personage by doing what?
Blake
  • According to the mother of Blake's Little Black Boy, what is the purpose of our earthly existence?
  • In Blake's poem "The Chimney Sweeper," the coffins in Tom's richly symbolic dream correspond with what?
Wordsworth
  • How does the old man whom Wordsworth encounters in "Resolution and Independence" earn his livelihood?
  • What qualities does the old man come to embody for Wordsworth?
Shelley
  • At what stage in life did Shelley first experience "intellectual beauty"?
  • According to Shelley, how have religions dealt with the phenomenon that he calls "intellectual beauty"?
Keats
  • What does Keats believe that one should do when feeling melancholy?
  • What does Wolf's-bane represent?
R. Browning
  • With what "weapon" does Porphyria's Lover murder Porphyria?
  • Both "Porphyria's Lover" and "My Last Duchess" exemplify what type of poem that Browning virtually created and certainly popularized?
Arnold
  • The beach at Dover--the "shingle"--consists not of white sand, but of what? 
  • The high tide at Dover, which Arnold observes in "Dover Beach," contrasts with the tide--the low tide--of what allegorical sea?
Yeats
  • What natural phenomenon arouses Yeats's anxiety for his sleeping daughter in "A Prayer for My Daughter"?
  • Yeats prays that his daughter will resemble a laurel tree in what way?
Woolf
  • In Virginia Woolf's "The Mark on the Wall," the mark is literally what? 
  • "The Mark on the Wall" exemplifies what innovative narrative technique?
Joyce
  • What does Chandler's wife snatch from his arms at the end of the story "A Little Cloud"?
  • In "A Little Cloud," what does London--in contrast to Dublin, where the story takes place--represent for the protagonist?
      
 
The painting at top is The Seeds and Fruits of English Poetry (1853?) by the British artist Ford Madox Brown (1821-1893) in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, England. According to ArtMagick, "This painting shows Chaucer reading at the court of Edward III with his patron, the Black Prince, on his left. In the wings appear the 'fruits' of English poetry: Milton, Spenser and Shakespeare on the left; Byron, Pope and Burns on the right; Goldsmith and Thomson in the roundels; and the names of Campbell, Moore, Shelley, Keats, Chatterton, Kirke White, Coleridge and Wordsworth are written on the cartouches held by the standing children in the base."