GRE Literature in English (REA) Read Online Free PDF Page B

Ireland. Gulliver’s Travels is best remembered in association with these key names: the Lilliputians, who are very small; the Brobdignags, who are very large; the Houyhnhnms, very smart horses; and the Yahoos, brutish subhumans. It would be wise to look over at least the first two books of Gulliver’s Travels to get a feel for Swift’s incomparably witty prose style.
    Â 
    Â 
    ALEXANDER POPE
    Â 
    Pope is one of the finest craftsmen in English poetics. His verses are polished and painstakingly wrought, and his wit rivals that of Swift. He writes almost exclusively in heroic couplets, so his work is often easy to spot. Read his “Essay On Man” to get a sense of his style, but spend the most time reviewing “The Rape of the Lock,” the most famous mock epic in English. The story concerns an unappreciated haircut given to a lady by a lord at a high-society gathering and the chaos that ensues. Pope carefully follows the accepted epic conventions, and the result is a comedic and artistic achievement that stands out as one of the best-known works of the period.
    Â 
    Â 
    ADDISON AND STEELE
    Â 
    Joseph Addison had a major hit with his tragedy Cato , but he is probably still best known in conjunction with Richard Steele and their periodical The Spectator . Addison and Steele’s journalistic endeavors are important in the history of periodical publication and in the emerging category of the public intellectual in the eighteenth century. Looking over excerpts from The Spectator probably isn’t worth the time and trouble, but you should know who these men are and be able to place them in this period.
    Â 
    JOHNSON AND BOSWELL
    Â 
    Although he authored a few poems, most notably “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” produced a famous edition of Shakespeare’s works, and is responsible for the first comprehensive English language dictionary, Samuel Johnson is best known to us through the work of his biographer, James Boswell. It is in Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson and in his Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides that we get a taste of Johnson’s enormous intellect, wit and eccentricity, fixing Johnson as one of the great minds in English literary history.
    Â 
    Â 
    THE EARLY NOVELISTS: DEFOE, RICHARDSON, AND FIELDING
    Â 
    The novel has a long and complex history that involves developments in European and Classical literature, but generally speaking the English novel emerged in the beginning of the eighteenth century with the works of Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Samuel Richardson. You should be familiar with their positions as the first English novelists and with the themes and stylistic conventions that mark their respective works.
    Â 
    Â 
    Daniel Defoe
    Â 
    Defoe is best known for Robinson Crusoe , although Moll Flanders has been known to appear on the Subject Test. Robinson Crusoe , of course, is the story of a man’s solitary existence on an island following a shipwreck, the world he builds for himself there, and the native he eventually enlists as his servant, Friday. Defoe is known for his plain prose style and his journalistic style of reporting realistic details.
    Â 
    Â 
    Samuel Richardson
    Â 
    Richardson’s expansive works Pamela and Clarissa are landmarks of the early novel. They both concern the moral life of young women in England. In Pamela , as the subtitle tells us, virtue is rewarded when the young heroine, after a long resistance to the lascivious advances of her employer, Mr. B., is rewarded by his reformation and his sincere love. In contrast, Clarissa is a tragedy in which the morally upright heroine is raped by the rakish Lovelace and eventually slips into madness and death. Both novels take as a theme the importance of female chastity and virtue as a guiding force of morality in the face of rampant sexual vice. Richardson’s novels are all epistolary in form, meaning that they are written as a series of letters to, from,