Shared Flashcard Set

Details

Allusions: Literature and Biblical
Flashcards that describe allusions in from literature and from the bible
11
Literature
12th Grade
02/22/2010

Additional Literature Flashcards

 


 

Cards

Term
Babbitt
Definition
a self-satisfied person concerned chiefly with business and middle-class ideals like material success; a member of the American working class whose unthinking attachment to its business and social ideals is such to make him a model of narrow-mindedness and self-satisfaction; after George F. Babbitt, the main character in the novel Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
Term
Brobdingnagian
Definition
gigantic, enormous, on a large scale, enlarged; after Brobdingnag, the land of giants visited by Gullivar in Gullivar's Travels, by Jonathan Swift
Term
Bumble
Definition
to speak or behave clumsily or faltering, to make a humming or droning sound; Middle English bomblem; a clumsy religious figure (a beadle) in a work of literature
Term
Cinderella
Definition
one who gains affluence or recognition after obscurity and neglect, a person or thing whose beauty or worth remains unrecognized; after the fairy-tale heroine who escapes from a life of drudgery through the intervention of a fairy godmother and marries a handsome prince
Term
Don Juan
Definition
a libertine, profligate, a man obsessed with seducing women; after Don Juan, the legendary 14th century Spanish nobleman and libertine
Term
Don Quixote
Definition
someone overly idealistic to the point of having impossible dreams; from the crazed and impoverished Spanish noble who sets out to revive the glory of knighthood, romanticized in the musical The Man of La Mancha based on the story by Cervantes
Term
Panglossian
Definition
blindly or misleadingly optimistic; after Dr. Pangloss in Candide by Voltaire, a pedantic old tutor
Term
Falstaffian
Definition
full of wit and bawdy humor, after Falstaff, a fat, sensual, boastful and mendacious knight who was the companion of Henry, Prince of Wales
Term
Frankenstein
Definition
anything that threatens or destroys its creator; from the young scientist in Mary Shelley's novel of this name, who creates a monster that eventually destroys him
Term
Friday
Definition
a faithful and willing attendant, ready to turn his hand to anything; from the young savage found by Robinson Crusoe on a Friday, and kept as his servant and companion on the desert island
Term
Galahad
Definition
a pure and noble man with limited ambition; in the legends of King Arthur, the purest and most virtuous night of the Round Table, the only knight to find the holy grail
Supporting users have an ad free experience!