21st

• Epic poem - long narrative poem usually about hero's deed ( Ex: Beowulf )
• Sonnet - has fourteen line that follow a rhyme scheme ( Ex: Sonnet 18 of William Shakespeare '' Shall i compare thee to a summer's day '' )
• Drama - piece of writing to tell a story through dialogue and perform on stage ( Ex: The importance of being earnest by Oscar Wilde )
• Novel - a long prose narrative usually about fictional characters and events, which are told to a particular sequence
• simile - compares two unlike things with a common quality. The comparison is done using words such as '' like '' and '' as ''
• Metaphor - is a comparison that is done by stating that one thing is another in order to suggest their similarity or shared qualities
• Metonymy - refers to using a thing or idea that is not referred to by its own name but by a different one, a name of something with witch it is closely associated
• Synedoche - use a part of something to represent the whole to represent a part
• Figure of Emphasis - among to common figures of emphasis are hyperbole, oxymoron, and paradox
• Figures of Relationship - Figures of relationship include simile, methapor, metonymy, and synecdoche
• Hyperbole- use intentional exaggeration to achieve emphasis or produce a comic effect
• Oxymoron - is a word or a combination of words with contradictory meanings, as bittersweet and open secret
• Paradox - a statement that appears to hold contradictory ideas but may actually be true
• Figures of sound - among the figure of sound are literature and onomatopoeia
• Alliteration - refers to the use of closely spaced of words that have the same initial sounds
• Onamotepoeia - is the use of words that imitate the sound of what they are referring to
• Epic poem

  A long narrative poem usually about a hero and his deeds
• Sonnet

  A poem with fourteen lines that follow a rhyme scheme
• Drama


  A piece of writing that tells a story through dialogue, and is performed on stage
• Novel


  A long prose narrative usually about fictional characters and events, which are told in a particular sequence
• English literature is one of the richest, most developed, and most important bodies of literature in the world
• English literature encompasses both written and spoken works by writers from the United Kingdom
• Periods of English literature


  • Old English Literature (600 - 1100)
  • Middle English Literature (1100 - 1500)
  • Elizabethan Literature (1558 - 1603)
  • The Romantic Period (1800 - 1837)
  • The Victorian Period (1837 - 1900)
  • Twentieth Century (1900 - 2000)
• Old English literature


  • Spoken by the Anglo-Saxons, a Germanic tribe living in Britain during the fifth century
  • Beowulf is the longest epic poem in Old English, known for its use of kennings
• Middle English literature


  • A blend of Old English and Norman French, the French dialect spoken by the Normans
  • The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer is a fine example
• Elizabethan literature


  • The golden age of English literature and drama
  • William Shakespeare wrote his plays during this period, including Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, and The Merchant of Venice
  • He also wrote 154 sonnets
• Romantic period


  • The golden age of lyric poetry
  • Poetry became the expression of the poet's personal feelings and emotions
  • Notable works include Songs of Innocence and of Experience by William Blake, Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems by John Keats, "Don Juan" by Lord Byron, and "Ode to the West Wind" by Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Victorian period


  • The rise of the novel
  • Charles Dickens wrote Great Expectations
  • Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning wrote fine poetry, including In Memoriam A.H.H. and "My Last Duchess"
  • Oscar Wilde wrote the masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest
• Twentieth century


  • William Butler Yeats and Thomas Stearns Eliot wrote Modernist poems
  • Virginia Woolf and James Joyce used the stream of consciousness literary technique
• American literature refers to all works of literature in English produced in the United States
• 19th century American literature


  • William Cullen Bryant's "Thanatopsis"
  • Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"
  • Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher", "The Cask of Amontillado", "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", and "The Raven"
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Hollow of the Three Hills", "Young Goodman Brown", and The Scarlet Letter
  • Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass
  • Emily Dickinson's poems
• 20th century American literature


  • Robert Frost's "Mending Wall", "The Road Not Taken", and "After Apple-Picking"
  • E.E. cummings' poems
  • Ezra Pound's Ripostes and Lustra
  • Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and Death in the Woods
  • Ernest Hemingway's "The Killers" and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber"
  • Allen Ginsberg's "Howl"
  • Anne Sexton's Live or Die
• European literature refers to literatures in the Indo-European languages, and is considered the largest body of literature in the world
• Latin literature


  • The first part of the Golden Age of Latin Literature (70 BC–AD 18) is named the Ciceronian period after Marcus Tullius Cicero, the greatest Roman orator
  • Virgil, the greatest Roman poet, wrote the epic poem Aeneid during the Augustan Age (43 BC–AD 18), the second part of the Golden Age
• Greek literature


  • Homer is known for the epics The Iliad and The Odyssey
  • Sophocles was a tragic playwright known for Oedipus the King
• Italian literature


  • Francesco Petrarca perfected the Italian sonnet
  • Giovanni Boccaccio wrote the classic Italian masterpiece Decameron
• Spanish literature


  • Miguel de Cervantes wrote the novel Don Quixote
  • Lope de Vega was an outstanding dramatist who wrote cloak and sword dramas
• French literature


  • Gustave Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary marked the beginning of a new age of realism
  • Guy de Maupassant was the greatest French short story writer
• Russian literature


  • Leo Tolstoy wrote the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina
  • Anton Chekhov was a master of the modern short story and a Russian playwright
• Latin American literature refers to all works of literature in Latin American countries