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GRE in Literature - Plot
Plot identification of plays and novels
53
English
Graduate
08/16/2008

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Cards

Term

This is a description of what work? "It is one of the central jokes of the novel that the narrator cannot explain anything simply. We do not reach the narrator's own birth until Volume III. Most of the action is concerned with domestic upsets or misunderstandings, which find humour in the opposing temperaments of Walter – splenetic, rational and somewhat sarcastic – and Uncle Toby, who is gentle, uncomplicated and a lover of his fellow man. In between such events, the narrator discourses at length on sexual practices, insults, the influence of one's name, noses, as well as explorations of obstetrics, siege warfare, and philosophy."

Definition
Sterne's Tristram Shandy
Term
This work is a sequel to D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow.
Definition
Women in Love
Term

This is a synopsis of what work? Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen are two sisters living in the Midlands of England in the 1910s. Ursula is a teacher; Gudrun an artist. They meet two men who live nearby, Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich. The four become friends. Ursula and Birkin become involved and Gudrun eventually begins a love affair with Gerald. All four are deeply concerned with questions of society, politics, and the relationship between men and women. At a party at Gerald's manor house, Gerald's sister, Diana, drowns. Gudrun becomes the teacher and mentor of his youngest sister. Soon Gerald's coal-mine-owning father passes away as well after a drawn-out illness. Birkin asks Ursula to marry him, and she agrees. Gerald and Gudrun's relationship, however, becomes stormy. The four vacation in the Alps. Gudrun begins an intense friendship with Loerke, a physically puny but emotionally commanding artist. Gerald, enraged by Loerke, by Gudrun's abuse and by his own destructive nature, tries to murder Gudrun. In failing, he retreats back over the mountains and falls to his death in the snow.

Definition
D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love
Term
The book is the story of a young man, Clyde Griffiths, whos troubles with women, whose troubles with women and the law take him from his religious upbringing in Kansas City to the fictional town of Lycurgus, New York. Among Clyde's love interests are the materialistic Hortense Briggs, the charming farmer's daughter Roberta Alden, and the aristocratic  Sondra Finchley.
Definition
Dreiser's An American Tragedy
Term

Who is the speaker and who is the author of the following? "I am an American, Chicago born--Chicago, that somber city--and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way." 

 

Hint: In this bildungsroman, the character's jobs include general assistance to the slightly corrupt Einhorn, helping in a dog training parlour, working for his brother at a coal-tip, working for with a Union - when he nearly gets beaten up - until finally he joins the merchant navy in the war.

 

Definition

Author: Saul Bellow

 

Speaker/Character: Augie March 

Term
The underlying theme of this novel is how one person has become strong by destroying another. The novel concerns Dick and Nicole Diver, a very glamorous couple, who take a villa in the South of France and surround themselves with a circle of friends, mainly Americans. Also staying at the resort is Rosemary Hoyt, a young actress, with her mother. Rosemary gets sucked into the circle of the Divers, and falls in love with Dick and also becomes adopted as a close friend by Nicole. Dick first toys with the idea of an affair with Rosemary at this point, which finally acts upon years later.
Definition
F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night
Term

The novel is centred on her attempts to find love and happiness within the the constraints and proprieties of her society, particularly concerning her relationship with the seemingly proud and cold Mr. Darcy.

 

What is the novel and who is "her" referring to? 

Definition
The novel is Austen's Pride and Prejudice. The character being described is Elizabeth Bennett.
Term

The story takes place at sea, near the Gulf of Siam and is told from the perspective of a young Captain who remains nameless throughout the story. The captain is unfamiliar with both his ship and his crew, having only joined their company a fortnight earlier. Her is unsure of himself, questioning his ability to fulfill his role. He encounters a naked swimmer holding onto the side of the ship while he is alone at night on look-out duty. He helps the mysterious swimmer onto the boat and hides him in his cabin. He immediately learns of the mysterious swimmer's past; his name is Leggatt, and he swam away from a nearby ship, called the Sephora, where, as chief mate, he killed another crew member for insolence during a storm. The narrator keeps Leggatt hidden in the Captain’s quarters, away from the suspicious crew members and a visit from the skipper of the Sephora. Eventually the Captain allows Leggatt to escape by bringing the ship close enough to land for Leggatt to swim away safely, though this risky sailing maneuver nearly sends the ship into the rocks. What work is being described here?

Definition
Conrad's The Secret Sharer
Term

The heroine of the novel, an innocent peasant girl, is the victim not only of her Victorian environment but also of people, including her siftless parents, her cruel seducer, and her morally rigid husband, Angel Clare, who recognizes too late his wife's fundamental purity.

 

The passage above describes what novel? 

Definition
Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Term

"I was unlike others of my generation in one thing only. I am very religious, and deprived by Huxley and Tyndall, whom I detested, of the syimple-minded religion of my childhood, I had made a new religion, almost an infallible church of poetic tradition..." 

 

John Tyndall and Thomas Henry Huxley were _________ in the _____________ period.

 

Whose autobiography is the above quote from? 

Definition
Tyndall and Huxley were scientists in the Victorian period. Yeats wrote the quote.
Term
The tragedy of Phaedra and her love for her stepson Hippolytus is dramatized by what two male playwrights? (Hint: One is Greek, the other British).
Definition
Euripides and Racine
Term
What is Houyhnhmland and which work is it from?
Definition
It's a land of talking horses in Swift's Gulliver's Travels.
Term
The king of this land looks upon Gulliver's kind as 'diminutive insects'; after learning about English society, he concludes that the English are 'the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth."
Definition
Brobdingnag
Term
_________ is a fictional flying island that can be maneuvered by its inhabitants in any direction using magnetic levitation. The population of the island mainly consists of educated people, who are fond of math, science, and technology, but fail to make practical use of their knowledge (the rest are their servants). They had mastered magnetic levitation and discovered the two moons of Mars (which in reality would not be discovered for another 150 years), but couldn't construct well-designed clothing or buildings - reason for this being that measurements are taken with instruments such as quadrants and a compass rather than with tapes. It is a male-dominated society; often, the wives of these men request to leave the island to visit the land below. However, these requests are almost never granted because the women never want to come back voluntarily.
Definition
Laputa (from Swift's Gulliver's Travels)
Term
The device described simply as The Engine is possibly the first literary description in history of something resembling a computer. The island's method of throwing rocks at rebellious surface cities also seems the first time that aerial bombardment was conceived and written about as a method of warfare. What work is credited with these two firsts?
Definition
Swift's Gulliver's Travels
Term
_________ details the rise and fall of Sutpen a white man born into poverty in Western Virginia who comes to Mississippi with the complementary aims of becoming rich and a powerful family patriarch. The story is told entirely in flashbacks narrated mostly by __________ with events told in non-chronological order and often retold by different people with differing details, resulting in a peeling-back-the-onion way of revealing the true story of the Sutpens to the reader. 
Definition

Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom

 

Quentin Compson, Rosa Coldfield, and Quentin's father

Term
__________________ is the first major novel by ___________. Published in 1926, it centers on a group of expatriate Americans in Europe during the 1920s. The book's title is taken from Ecclesiastes 1:5. The original title for the work was Fiesta, which was used in the UK, German and Spanish editions of the novel. It is narrated by ____________.
Definition

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

It is narrated by Jake Barnes. 

Term

This novel follows the trip of protagonist Lewis Lambert Strether to Paris in pursuit of his widowed fiancée's supposedly wayward son who has fallen into the clutches of a presumably wicked woman. Strether is to bring the young man back to the family business, but he encounters unexpected complications. The third-person narrative is told exclusively from Strether's point of view. 

 

What is the novel? What is the name of the son?

Definition

The novel is Henry James's The Ambassadors.

 

The son's name is Chad Newsome.

 

 

Term

__________ is a gloomy New England mansion, haunted from its foundation by fraudulent dealings, accusations of witchcraft and sudden death. The current resident, the dignified but desperately poor Hepzibah Pyncheon, opens a shop in a side room to support her brother Clifford, who is about to leave prison after serving thirty years for murder. The novel ends with the characters leaving the old house to start a new life, free of the burdens of the past.

  

Definition

The House of Seven Gables

 

(The novel is Hawthorne's.) 

 

 

Term

Unlike other such writings at the time, this novel is unusual in that it is not set in London (as was also the author's usual wont), but in the fictitious Victorian industrial town of Coketown, often claimed to be based on Preston.

 

What is the novel, and who is the author? 

Definition
Hard Times, Charles Dickens
Term

What is the name of the host in the Canterbury Tales? (The name is given in the prologue to the cook's tale.)

 

Hint: The person who tells the best story will receive a free meal at the host's tavern, courtesy of the other pilgrims. 

Definition
Harry Bailey
Term
Which of the Canterbury tales is about Perkyn Reveler and is left unfinished?
Definition
the cook's tale
Term
There are how many female storytellers in the Canterbury Tales? Name them.
Definition
2, the Wife of Bath and the Prioress
Term
Which five characters in the Canterbury Tales are most richly attired?
Definition
Wife of Bath, Squire, Monk, Physician, and Franklin
Term
Which two of the Canterbury tales are written in prose?
Definition
The Tale of Melibee and the Parson's Tale
Term
Which three of the Canterbury Tales center on women's patience, dutifulness, and suffering?
Definition
Man of Law's Tale, Physician's Tale, and Clerk's Tale
Term
Joshua, David, Judas Maccabeus, Hector, Alexander, Caesar, Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfre of Boullion
Definition
The Worthies
Term
________ focuses on the lives of Willie Stark, an upstart farm boy who rises through sheer force of will to become Governor of an unnamed Southern state during the 1930s, and _______, the novel's narrator, a cynical scion of the state's political aristocracy who uses his abilities as a historical researcher to help Willie blackmail and control his enemies. The novel deals with the large question of the responsibility individuals bear for their actions within the turmoil of history, and it is perhaps appropriate that the impetus of the novel's story comes partly from real historical occurrences--there are a number of important parallels between Willie Stark and Huey Long, who served Louisiana as both Governor and Senator from 1928 until 1935.
Definition

Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men

 

Jack Burden 

Term
The novel begins one fine morning with the arrest of Joseph K., a respectable functionary in a bank and ends with his execution almost 300 pages later, with neither the victim nor the reader any closer to an understanding of his crime. What is more disturbing is not so much that Joseph K. died "like a dog" after an execution plunged a knife into his hear, but that he was sentenced to death for no apprent reason. What novel is this?
Definition
Kafka's The Trial
Term
This novel concerns a woman named Laurel, who travels to New Orleans to take care of her father, Judge McKelva, after he has surgery for a detached retina. He fails to recover from the surgery, though, surrenders to his age, and dies slowly as Laurel reads to him from Dickens. Her father's second wife Fay, who is younger than Laurel, is a shrewish outsider from Texas. Her shrill response to the Judge's illness appears to accelerate his demise. Laurel and Fay are thrown together when they return the Judge to his home town of Mount Salus, Mississippi, where he will be buried. There, Laurel is immersed in the enveloping good neighborliness of the friends and family she knew before marrying and moving away to Chicago. Fay, though, has always been unwelcome and takes off for a long weekend, leaving Laurel in the big house full of memories; she comes to a place of understanding that Fay can never share, and leaves small town Mississippi with the memories she can carry with her.
Definition
The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty
Term
This novel centers on one society couple's impending marriage and the introduction of a scandalous woman whose presence threatens their happiness. Though the novel questions the assumptions and mores of turn of the century New York society, it never devolves into an outright condemnation of the institution. In fact, the author considered this novel an "apology" for the earlier, more brutal and critical, "The House of Mirth". Name the author, the title, and the names of the "society couple."
Definition

The novel is Wharton's Age of Innocence.

 

The central society couple is Newland Archer and May Welland.

Term
___________ goes by many names, among them La Longue Carabine (The Long Rifle), the scout, and Hawkeye and stars in multiple novels by _________. The character' chief strength is adaptability. His hybrid background breeds both productive alliances and disturbingly racist convictions. On one hand, the character cherishes individuality and makes judgments without regard to race. He cherishes Chingachgook for his value as an individual, not for a superficial multiculturalism fashionably ahead of its time. On the other hand, the character demonstrates an almost obsessive investment in his own “genuine” whiteness. He supports interracial friendship between men and objects to interracial sexual desire.
 
Definition

Natty Bumppo/Leatherstocking of James Fenimore Cooper's pentalogy known as the Leatherstocking Tales. Most famous in this series is The Last of the Mohicans.

 

 

Term
True or False: Leatherstocking is a man obsessed with an idea of godliness and personal purity. He pursues an undefiled nature and is overtaken and finally destroyed by the evils ofthe civilization he was presumptuous and innocent enough to flee.
Definition
True
Term
Despite his accomplishments and honors, the protagonist is overcome by the beauty of a Polish boy and, obsessed by loe, dies of the plague in Venice. This describes what character from which novel?
Definition
Gustav von Aschenbach in Gustav Mann's Death in Venice.
Term
This character is a friend of Marcel's family in Combray, he is also a celebrity in the Parisian social scene, counting among his friends the Prince of Wales and major players in the French aristocracy. A wealthy stockbroker, he becomes an expert art critic and dealer. He is also a womanizer who  compares women to paintings in order to make them more attractive. This tendency leads him to fall hopelessly in love with Odette even though she is not his "type." His love for her becomes a tragic form of vanity and self-love.
Definition
Charles Swann in Proust's Swann's Way
Term
Like the author's later novel The Charterhouse of Parma (La Chartreuse de Parme), ________ is a Bildungsroman. The protagonist, ________, is a driven and intelligent man, but equally fails to understand much about the ways of the world he sets out to conquer. He harbours many romantic illusions, and becomes little more than a pawn in the political machinations of the influential and ruthless people who surround him.
Definition

Stendhal's The Red and the Black

Protagonist:  Julien Sorel

Term
Who wrote the first biography of Charlotte Brontë?
Definition
Elizabeth Gaskell
Term
"The play is lurid and complicated. There is the heroine's secret and forbidden marriage to her steward Antonio. There are her two evil brother: Ferdinand who is drive mad by incestuous passion for her, and the Cardinal, who has schemed to be Pope/ After her marriage is discovered, she is imprisoned and tormeneted. At the end, everyone dies violently."
Definition
Webster's The Duchess of Malfi
Term
What spoke to Mrs. Moore in the nothinness of the cave was something ancient, "the undying worm itself," the echo that coils around the walls, denying value to "poor little talkative Christianity" and reason alike, so leveling everything that discriminations are impossible.
 
The above describes what work? 
Definition
Forster's A Passage to India
Term

Her three major novels, much admired by Jane Austen, are about the entry into the world of a young, beautiful, intelligent but inexperienced girl. Who is the author and what are the titles of these novels?

Definition
Fanny Burney; Evelina, Cecilia, and Camilla
Term
An intricate fiction that combines and elaborates on many of the motifs of his earlier work, including preterition, paranoia, racism, colonialism, conspiracy, synchronicity, and entropy, most of ___________takes place in London and Europe in the final months of WWII and the weeks immediately following VE Day. The text enacts an irony whereby neither the characters nor the various narrative voices are aware of specific historical circumstances, such as the Holocaust, which are, however, very much to the forefront of the reader's understanding of this time in history. The writer hails from Long Island, and the book described is his third. Name the writer and the novel.
Definition
Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow
Term
Written in diary format, the story centers on the life of an unemployed young man named Joseph, his relationships with his wife and friends, and his frustrations with life. Living in Chicago and waiting to be drafted, the diary acts as a philosophical confessional for his musings. It ends with his entrance into the army during WWII, and a hope that the regimentation of army life will relieve his suffering. Considered one of the author's 'apprentice' works. Name the author and the work.
Definition
Saul Bellow's Dangling Man
Term
It was Becht's aim to be entertaining and yet to retain the irony of the source play. His Macheath, the light-fingered, death-dealing leader of a cutthroat gang, is a roguish villain, in some ways the archetypal blackguard of nineteenth-century melodrama. Peachum,, the venal chieftain of London's underworld, is Macheath's vengeful father-in-law. What is the "source play" mentioned in line 2?
Definition
Gay's The Beggar's Opera
Term
Wealthy country man Mr Hardcastle arranges for his daughter Kate, to meet Charles Marlow, the son of a wealthy aristocrat, hoping the pair will marry. Unfortunately Marlow is nervous around upper-class women, yet the complete opposite around the lower-class females. On his first acquaintance with Kate, the latter realises she will have to pretend to be common, to make marital relations with the man possible. She poses as a barmaid. What is the work described here?
Definition
Goldsmith's, She Stoops to Conquer
Term
___________  developed from a short story that formed the novel's initial "Battle Royal" chapter
Definition
Ellison's Invisible Man
Term
_______________ is an 1864 poem which centers on a character from The Tempest, and his reflections on the brutal god he believes in. Some scholars see the author as being of the belief that God is in the eye of the beholder, and this is emphasized by a barbaric character believing in a barbaric god. Others feel that he was satirizing theologians of his time, who attempted to understand God as a reflection of themselves; this theory is supported by the epigraph, Psalm 50:21, "Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such a one as thyself."
Definition
Browning's Caliban upon Setebos
Term
Zeus was enamored of ________and thus he transformed himself into a tame white bull and mixed in with her father's herds. While _______and her female attendants were gathering flowers, she saw the bull, caressed his flanks, and eventually got onto his back. Zeus took that opportunity and ran to the sea and swam, with her on his back, to the island of Crete. He then revealed his true identity, and Europa became the first queen of Crete. Zeus gave her a necklace made by Hephaestus and three additional gifts: Talos, Laelaps and a javelin that never missed. Zeus later re-created the shape of the white bull in the stars, which is now known as the constellation Taurus. (Both blanks are the same name.)
Definition
Europa
Term
________ is about a young country girl who moves to Chicago. Instead of a "world of a light and merriment" she finds "the grimness of shift and toil." She starts realizing her own American Dream by first becoming a mistress to men that she perceives as superior and later as a famous actress.
Definition
Dreiser's Sister Carrie
Term
 ______ is a pastoral elegy dedicated to the memory of Edward King. The poem is 193 lines in length, and is irregularly rhymed.
Definition
Milton's Lycidas
Term
The author gave the following explanation of his poem: "the Author bewails a learned Friend, unfortunately drown'd ...  And by occasion foretels the ruine of our corrupted Clergy then in their height."
Definition
Milton's Lycidas
Term
And now the Sun had stretch'd out all the hills,
And now was dropt into the Western bay;
At last he rose, and twitch'd his Mantle blew:
To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new

These are the final lines of what poem?
Definition
Milton's Lycidas
Term
This novel tells the story of Milly Theale, an American heiress stricken with a serious disease, and her impact on the people around her. Some of these people befriend Milly with honorable motives, while others are more self-interested.
Definition
Henry James, The Wings of a Dove
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