WORLD LITERATURE

ASIAN LITERATURE
1. Panchatantra – a collection of fables
2. Sa’di (Muslihuddin Mushriibn Abdullah) – a Middle Eastern man-of-letters who wrote the works of Verse
Gulistan and Bustan.
3. Bustan (the Orchard), Gulistan (The Rose Garden), Divan (collection of poetry) – Sa’di’s works
4. Vedas – the earliest scriptures of Hinduism
5. Kalidasa – wrote Shakuntala
6. Valmiki – wrote Ramayana
7. Shah-Nameh (Book of Kings) – Firdausi
8. Granth – the sacred text of the Sikhs
9. Jayadeva – wrote Gita Govinda (Indian – Song of S ongs)
10. Rig Veda – the oldest Vedic literature, a book of metrical hymns to gods as powers in nature
11. Tu Fu – regarded as the greatest poet of ancient China
12. Raghuwamsa – is the best known epic poem of Kalidasa
13. Dhammapada – is a sacred literary text of Buddhism
14. Mahabharata – is the greatest, longest and one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India
15. Gitanjali (Song Offerings, 1912) – written by Rabindranath Tagore, which won the Nobel Prize in
Literature, 1913

EPICS OF DIFFERENT COUNTRIES

1. Aenid – Rome 6. Odyssey – Greece
2. Beowulf – England 7. Nibelungenlied – Germany
3. The Lusiads – Portugal 8. Divine Comedy – Italy
4. Mahabharata – India 9. Song of Roland – France
5. Kalevala – Finland 10. Gilgamesh – Babylon

QUOTES AND AUTHORS

1. “For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” – Alexander Pope
2. “Music hath charms to soothe a savage beast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.” – William
Concreve
3. “Love conquers all; let us, too, yield to love.” – Virgil
4. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” – John Keats
5. “No pain, no palm; no thorns, no throne; no gall, no glory; no cross, no crown.” ― William Penn
6. "Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise" - Benjamin Franklin
7. “There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds." - Alfred Lord Tennyson.
8. “Honor is the reward of virtue.” – Cicero
9. “That which in mean men we entitle patience is pale cold cowardice in noble breasts.” William
Shakespeare
10. “Man's love is of man's life a thing a part; ‘tis woman's whole existence.” - Lord Byron
11. “Laugh and the world laughs with you; weep, and you weep alone.” – Ella Wheeler Wilcox
12. “Tell me thy company and I will tell thee what thou art.” – Miguel de Cervantes
13. “We must all hang together or assuredly we will hang separately.” - Benjamin Franklin
14. “Give me liberty or give me death.” – Patrick Henry
15. “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” – James Howell
16. “I think, therefore I am.” – René Descartes
17. “Vengeance is sweet.” – William Painter
 18. “A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.” – Rudyard Kipling
19. “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” - Alfred Lord Tennyson.
20. “What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted!” - William Shakespeare

QUOTES FROM SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS

1. The quality of mercy is not strain’d;

It dropped as the gentle rain from heaven. (The Merchant of Venice)

2. ‘To be, or not to be: that is the question’

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer.” (Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1)

3. ‘All the world’s a stage,

and all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.’ (As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7)

4. ‘Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,

that struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
and then is heard no more;
it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing.’ (Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5)

5. Love is a smoke rais’d with the fume of sighs;

Being purg’d, a fire sparkling in lover’s eyes (Romeo and Juliet)

6. By heaven, me thinks it were an easy leap

To pluck bright honour from the pale-fac’d moon. (King Henry IV – Part I)

7. Cowards die many times before their deaths;

The valiant never taste of death but once. (Julius Caesar, Act 2, Scene 2)

8. Not poppy , not mandragora,

Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world (Othello)

9. Take, O take those lips away,

That so sweetly were foresworn (Measure to Measure)

10. All the glitters is not gold

Often what you heard that told (The Merchant of Venice, Act 2, Scene 7)

11. ‘If music be the food of love play on.‘ (Twelfth Night, Act 1, Scene 1)

12. ‘What’s in a name? 

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’ (Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2)

13. ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears:

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.’ (Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 2)

14. Cry “havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war‘ (Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 1)

15. ‘A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!‘ (Richard III, Act 5, Scene 4)
 16. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
17. ‘Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;
and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.’
18. ‘Brevity is the soul of wit.’
19. ‘This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle…
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.’
20. . ‘Some are born great, some achieve greatness,
and some have greatness thrust upon them.’
21. ‘A man can die but once.’
22. ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
to have a thankless child!’
23. ‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?’
24. ‘I am one who loved not wisely but too well.’
25. ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on,
and our little life is rounded with a sleep.’
26. ‘To thine own self be true, and it must follow,
as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.’
27. ‘There is nothing either good or bad,
but thinking makes it so.’
28. ‘Nothing will come of nothing.’
29. ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be!’
LITERARY WORKS AND AUTHORS
Casino Royale – Ian Fleming
The Little Prince – Antoine de-Saint Exupery
From Here to Eternity – Charles Jones
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – Lyman Franf Baum
Civil Disobedience – Henry David Thoreau
The Bridge of San Luis Rey – Thornton Wilder
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fritzgerald
The Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane
Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
Pinocchio – Carlo Collodi
Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott
Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller
(Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5)
(A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 1, Scene 1)
(Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2)
(Richard II, Act 2, Scene 1)
(Twelfth Night, Act 2, Scene 5)
(Henry IV, Part 2, Act 3, Part 2)
(King Lear, Act 1, Scene 4)
(The Merchant of Venice, Act 3, Scene 1)
(Othello, Act 5, Scene 2)
(The Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1)
(Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3)
(Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2)
(King Lear, Act 1, Scene 1)
(A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 1, Scene 1)
Vanity Fair – William Thackeray
A Streetcar Named Desire – Tennessee Williams
The Adventure of Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain
Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes
Dracula – Bram Stoker
The Prince and the Pauper – Mark Twain
The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
The Lord of the Rings – J. R. R. Tolkien
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Rape of the Lock – Alexander Pope
Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
Tarzan, the Apeman – Edgar Rice Burroughs
Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf – Edward Albee Paradise Lost – John Milton
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens Auld Lang Syne – Robert Burns
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift Song of Hiawatha – Henry Longfellow
Moby Dick – Herman Melville Harry Potter – J. K. Rowling

POEM EXCERPTS

1. Drink to me only with thine eyes, and I will pledge with mine To Celia
Or leave a kiss but in the cup, and I’ll not look for wine (Ben Jonson)

2. A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: its loneliness increases;

It will never pass into nothingness. Endymion (John Keats)

3. Out of the night that covers me, black as the Pit from pole to pole
I thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul.
(I am the master of my faith; I am the captain of my soul). (William Earnest Henley).

4. Come live with me, and be my love The Passionate Shepherd

And we will all the pleasures prove. To His Love (Christopher Marlowe)

5. If eyes were made for seeing, The Rhodora

Then beauty is its own excuse for being. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

6. And so, all the night-tide I lie down by the side Annabel Lee
Of my darling, my darling, my life, and my bride. (Edgar Allan Poe)

7. Stone walls do not prison make, nor iron bars a cage; To Althea, From Prison
Minds innocent and quiet take that for an hermitage. Richard Lovelace

8. The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, but I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
(Robert Frost)

9. Fear no more the heat of the sun nor the furious winter’s rages; Cymbeline
Thou thy wordly task hast done, home art gone and ta’en thy wages. (William Shakespeare)

10. Good friends, sweet friends, let me not stir you up Julius Caesar
To such a sudden flood of mutiny. (William Shakespeare)

11. So is it now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, My Heart Leaps Up

Or let me die! The Child is Father of the Man. (William Wordsworth)

12. A poem should be palpable and mute as a globed fruit… Ars Poetica
A poem should be wordless as the flights of the birds. (Archibald MacLeish)

13. On desperate seas long wont to roam To Helen

Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face. (Edgar Allan Poe)

14. Like the summer’s rain, or as the pearls of morning’s dew To Daffodils
Ne’er to be found again (Robert Herrick)

15. In what distant deeps or skies, Burnt the fire of thine eyes? The Tiger
On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare seize the fire? (William Blake)

16. There is Power whose care, Teaches thy way along the pathless To a Waterfowl
Coast – The desert and illimitable air” – Lone wandering but not lost. (William Cullen Bryant)

17. When I consider how my life is spent On His Blindness

Ere half my days in this dark world and wide. (John Milton)

18. I met a traveler from an antique land Ozymandias

Who said; Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert (Percy Bysshe Shelley)
 19. Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor in thy marble vault, shall sound, My echoing song; To His Coy Mistress
Then worms shall try that long preserved virginity (Andrew Marvell)

20. And fare thee weel, my only love, And fare thee weel awhile! My Love is Like a Red Red
And I will come again, my love, Tho’ it were ten thousand mile. Rose (Robert Burns)

21. Continuous as the stars that shine and twinkle on the milky way I Wandered Lonely as a
They stretched in never-ending line along the margin of a bay. Cloud (William Wordsworth)

22. Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear, Ode to the West Wind
And tremble and despoil themselves: oh hear! (Percy Bysshe Shelley)

23. What a vision, or a walking dream? Ode to a Nightingale

Fled is that music: - Do I wake or sleep? (John Keats)

24. What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape Ode to a Grecian Urn
Of deities or mortals, or of both (John Keats)

25. At the foot of my crags, O Sea!

But the tender grace of a day that is dead Break, Break, Break
Will never come back to me. (Alfred, Lord Tennyson)

26. The sea is calm tonight, The tide is full, the moon lies fair Dover Beach
Upon the straits; on – the French coast, the light gleams gone (Matthew Arnold)

27. Let me not to the marriage of true minds. Admit impediments. Sonnet 116
Love is not love, Which alters when its alteration finds (William Shakespeare)

28. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, old time is still a-flying To the Virgins, to Make
And this same flower that smiles today, tomorrow will be dying Much of Time (Robert Herrick)

29. So live, that when thy summons comes to join the innumerable
Caravan, which moves to that mysterious realm, where each shall Thanatopsis
Take his chamber in the silent halls of death (William Cullen Bryant)

30. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here The Gettysburg Address
But it can never forget what they did here. (Abraham Lincoln)

ENGLISH LITERATURE

A. Anglo-Saxon England (c. 450-1066)

1. Beowulf – is the oldest epic poem in a modern European language using the Old English dialect
2. Venerable Bede – a Benedictine monk, the first important writer of prose in England
3. Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Bede) – a valuable source of information about the history
of Britain.

B. Medieval Age (1086 – 1485)

1. Geoffrey Chaucer
2. Canterbury Tales (Chaucer) – one of the first books printed when William Caxton set up the first
English printing press in 1476. This is considered as the greatest piece of imaginative literature
produced in medieval England.
3. Sir Thomas Mallory – the author whom “King Arthur” is credited for.

C. The Elizabethan Age (1485-1625) – the age of the sonnet which originated in Italy, used by two
Italian masters, Dante and Petrarch.

1. Sir Walter Raleigh

2. Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard – introduced sonnet in England
3. Sir Philip Sidney – wrote Astrophel and Stella
4. Edmund Spencer – wrote the Faerie Queene 9with 12 books devoted to chivalry, holiness, temperance,
chastity).
5. Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Campion, William Shakespeare, Sir Francis Bacon
 D. The Seventeenth Century (1625 – 1700)

The Metaphysical Poets (emphasis on the intellect or wit as against feeling and emotion)
Abraham Cowley, John Donne, John Dryden, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, Ben Jonson, Richard
Lovelace, Andrew Marvell, John Milton, Samuel Pepys, John Suckling, George Wither

Paradise Lost (John Milton) – is the most famous English literary epic

E. The Eighteenth Century (1700 – 1798)

Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels), Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe), Alexander Pope (Rape of the
Lock), Samuel Johnson, Thomas Gray (Elegy Written on a Country Churchyard), Robert Burns, William
Blake, James Boswell

F. The Romantics (1798 – 1837)

William Wordsworth (The World is Too Much With Us, The Solitary Reaper); Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(Kubla Khan); George Gordon (Lord Byron); Percy Bysshe Shelley (Ozymandias, Ode to the West
Wind); John Keats (Ode to a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale); Charles Lamb

G. The Victorians (1837 – 1901)

Early Victorian Poets

Alfred Lord Tennyson (Ulysses; Break, Break, Break; Crossing the Bar); Robert Browning (My Last
Duchess); Matthew Arnold (Dover Beach)

Other Victorian Poets

Thomas Hardy, Gerard Hopkins, A. E. Housman (When I was One-and-Twenty), Charles Dickens
((Oliver Twist, David Copperfield); Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland)

H. Modern Short Stories (D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, John
Dahl, (Graham Greene, etc.)

I. Twentieth- Century Poetry

William Butler Yeats (Sailling to Byzantium), T. S. Eliot , etc.

J. Modern Drama (Bernard Shaw, Dylan Thomas, Harold Pinter)

SHAKESPEAREAN TITLES

1. Hamlet – Prince of Denmark 6. Mabeth – Thane of Cawdor

2. Cymbeline – King of Britain 7. King John – King of England
3. Titus Andronicus – General of the Roman Army 8. Pericles – Prince of Tyre
4. Julius Caesar – General of the Roman Army 9. Mark Anthony – Roman Triumyir
5. King Lear – King of Britain 10. Henry IV – King of England

AMERICAN LITERATURE

A. The Puritans – John Smith, William Bradford, Anne Bradsheet, Edward Taylor, Jonathan Edwards

B. The American Revolution (1750 – 1800) – This century is known as the Age of Reason, or the
Enlightenment, because writers and philosophers in Europe emphasized the role of reason, or rational
thought in human affairs.

Michael-Guillaume Jean de Crevecoeur Ubi panis ibi patria [where my bread is earned, there is my
country] (Letters from an American Farmer)

Benjamin Franklin I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at

moral perfection (Moral Perfection, The Autobiography)

Patrick Henry Give me liberty or give me death (Speech of the Virginia

Convention
Thomas Paine My country is the world and my religion is to do good. (The
Crisis)

Thomas Jefferson That these United Colonies are and of right ought to be,
FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES; that they are
absolved from all allegiance to the British crown, and that
all political connection between them and the state of
Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved… (The
Declaration of Independence)

Developing a National Literature (1800 – 1855) – The Romantic Tradition (intuition was more
important than reason, common people, their lives, emotions, and their experiences, became a
major focus).

“Knickerbocker” authors – James Fenimore Cooper (novel), William Cullen Bryant (poetry), Washington
Irving (short story, essay), wrote in the vicinity of New York City, their writing centers on human
relationships to nature and on the settlement of the nation.
Washington Irving (Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Camp of the Wild Horse, The Devil and Tom Walker)

Transcendentalist writers – Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau

Transcendentalism – was a movement among young intellectuals in Boston area in the 1930’s which
shared the general characteristics of Romanticism while exhibiting a few specialized traits of
its own.

Emmanuel Kant – The Critique of Pure Reason, spoke of “transcendent forms,” or kinds of knowledge
that exist above and beyond reason and experience.

Nathaniel Hawthorne – wrote the Scarlet Letter (1850), considered a masterpiece in world literature and
often is called the world’s first symbolic novel. It established his reputation, probes the
problems of evil and isolation in human life.

“Brooding romantics” – Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville – Theirs is a complex
philosophy, filled with dark currents and deep awareness of the human capacity for evil. They
are romantic in their emphasis on emotion, nature, the individual, and the unusual.

Herman Melville – Hawthorne’s friend (both are great American novelists), wrote Moby Dick, a story
about a giant whale, which probes questions of good and evil, fate and free will, appearance
and reality; thought of by many critics to be the great American novel

Edgar Allan Poe – the “great literary engineer”

William Cullen Bryant
Oliver Wendell Holmes
James Russell Lowell
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – “The Song of Hiawatha”
Ralph Waldo Emerson – “The Rhodora”
Henry David Thoreau

National Conscience (1855 – 1900)

Abraham Lincoln – “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

Stephen Crane – “The Red Badge of Courage”
Walt Whitman – “O Captain! My Captain!”
Emily Dickinson – “My Life closed Twice before its Close”
Mark Twain (Samuel Langhome Clemens) – “Lincoln of Literature)

1900 to the Present

Sherwood Anderson – “The Triumph of the Egg”

F. Scott Fitzgerald – “The Great Gatsby,” his masterpiece
Ernest Hemingway – “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” considered as his best novel
- “ A Farewell to Arms,” about World War I
- The Sun Also Rises,” about American expatriates who searched for meaning in the
wake of postwar disillusionment.
John Steinbeck – “The Grapes of Wrath,” his masterpiece, followed the Westward migration of
dispossessed farmers