English Literature (KS3)
UK Key Stage 3 English literature: Shakespeare, pre-1914 classics, poetry forms and literary devices.
Ämne: Engelska · Nivå: Högstadium (13–15) · 415 kort
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- William Shakespeare was born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon and died in 1616, making him the most influential playwright in the English language.
- Shakespeare is often called the 'Bard of Avon', a nickname that links him to his hometown on the River Avon in Warwickshire.
- The Globe Theatre in London opened in 1599 and was the main stage for Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men.
- The First Folio (1623) was the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, printed seven years after his death by his colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell.
- Shakespeare's plays are usually grouped into three categories: tragedies, comedies, and history plays.
- A tragedy is a serious play that ends in disaster or death for the main character, usually because of a personal flaw or fate.
- A soliloquy is a long speech delivered by a character alone on stage, revealing their private thoughts to the audience. Hamlet's 'To be, or not to be' is the most famous example.
- Dramatic irony occurs when the audience knows something that the characters on stage do not, creating tension or humour.
- Iambic pentameter is a line of verse with five 'feet', each containing an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (da-DUM x 5). Shakespeare wrote most of his dialogue in this rhythm.
- Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter. Most of Shakespeare's plays mix blank verse (for noble characters) with prose (for common characters and comic scenes).
- Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595) tells the story of two young lovers from feuding families in Verona; both die at the end, reconciling their families through grief.
- Macbeth is a Scottish nobleman who, after meeting three witches who prophesy he will be king, murders King Duncan and seizes the throne, eventually driven to madness by guilt.
- A Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedy set partly in an enchanted forest, where the fairy king Oberon and the mischievous Puck cause chaos with a love-potion.
- The Tempest, often considered Shakespeare's last solo play (c. 1611), follows the exiled magician Prospero on a remote island as he uses magic to confront his enemies and forgive them.
- Much Ado About Nothing is a comedy featuring the sharp-tongued Beatrice and Benedick, whose friends trick them into falling in love through overheard conversations.
- Julius Caesar dramatises the assassination of the Roman dictator in 44 BC by senators including Brutus and Cassius, and the civil war that follows.
- Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was a Victorian novelist whose serialised novels exposed poverty and social injustice in 19th-century England.
- A Christmas Carol (1843) by Dickens tells how the miser Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his partner Jacob Marley and three spirits, who transform him into a generous man.
- Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) is often called the first science-fiction novel; it tells of Victor Frankenstein, who creates a living creature and then abandons it.
- Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) follows Elizabeth Bennet and her changing relationship with the proud Mr Darcy in Regency-era England.
- Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) is a Gothic novel about an orphaned governess who falls in love with her employer, Mr Rochester, and uncovers a dark secret in his attic.
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created the detective Sherlock Holmes and his friend Dr Watson; the stories are set mainly at 221B Baker Street, London.
- A Shakespearean sonnet has 14 lines in iambic pentameter, rhymed abab cdcd efef gg, and ends with a rhyming couplet that often delivers a twist.
- A Petrarchan (Italian) sonnet has 14 lines split into an octave (8 lines, abbaabba) and a sestet (6 lines, various rhymes), with a 'volta' or turn between them.
- A haiku is a Japanese poetic form of three lines in 5-7-5 syllables, traditionally evoking a single image from nature.
- Wilfred Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum Est' (1917) is a First World War poem that rejects the old lie that it is sweet and proper to die for one's country, describing a gas attack on exhausted soldiers.
- Hamlet (c. 1600) is Shakespeare's longest play and tells of the Prince of Denmark, who is urged by his murdered father's ghost to take revenge on his uncle Claudius.
- Othello is a tragedy about a Moorish general in the Venetian army who is manipulated by his ensign Iago into believing his wife Desdemona has been unfaithful, leading him to murder her.
- King Lear is a tragedy in which an ageing king divides his kingdom between his daughters based on how much they say they love him, disinheriting his honest youngest daughter Cordelia and descending into madness.
- Twelfth Night is a comedy about Viola, who is shipwrecked in Illyria, disguises herself as a man called Cesario, and falls in love with Duke Orsino while serving him.
- The Merchant of Venice is a play in which the merchant Antonio borrows money from the moneylender Shylock, promising 'a pound of flesh' as security. It is often classed as a 'problem play' for its dark themes.
- Henry V is a history play dramatising the English king's invasion of France and his victory at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, famous for the rousing speech that begins 'Once more unto the breach, dear friends'.
- As You Like It is a pastoral comedy set in the Forest of Arden. The exiled heroine Rosalind disguises herself as a man called Ganymede, and the play contains the famous speech 'All the world's a stage'.
- Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets, published together in 1609. The first 126 are addressed to a young man (the 'Fair Youth'), and the last 28 to a mysterious 'Dark Lady'.
- A trochee is a metrical foot opposite to the iamb: one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed (DA-dum). Shakespeare uses trochees for unsettling effect, as in the witches' chant 'Double, double, toil and trouble'.
- A spondee is a metrical foot of two stressed syllables (DA-DA), used to slow a line and add emphasis. A pyrrhic foot is two unstressed syllables (da-da), which speeds the line.
- Enjambment is when a line of poetry runs on into the next line without a pause or punctuation, creating flow and sometimes mirroring the meaning (e.g. continuous motion).
- A caesura is a deliberate pause in the middle of a line of poetry, often marked by punctuation. It controls rhythm and can mimic hesitation, breathlessness, or emphasis.
- Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was a Victorian novelist and poet whose novels, set in the fictional region of Wessex, often depict ordinary people struggling against fate and society.
- Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) is a Gothic horror novel told through letters, diary entries and newspaper clippings, in which Count Dracula travels from Transylvania to England seeking new victims.
- H. G. Wells (1866-1946) was a pioneer of science fiction. The War of the Worlds (1898) imagines a Martian invasion of Victorian England, and The Time Machine (1895) follows a traveller to the year 802,701.
- Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Treasure Island (1883), one of the most influential pirate adventures, featuring Jim Hawkins and the one-legged cook Long John Silver in search of buried treasure.
- Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) follows a young girl who falls down a rabbit-hole into a nonsensical world of talking animals, mad tea parties and a tyrannical Queen of Hearts.
- Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868) is often called the first English detective novel. The Woman in White (1860) is another major work, an early sensation novel about identity, conspiracy and inheritance.
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) served as Poet Laureate for over 40 years. His poems include 'The Lady of Shalott' and 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', which commemorates a doomed cavalry attack in the Crimean War.
- John Keats (1795-1821) was a Romantic poet who died young of tuberculosis. His odes, including 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' and 'Ode to a Nightingale' (both 1819), meditate on beauty, mortality and art.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' (1798) tells of a sailor who shoots an albatross and is cursed; his ship and crew suffer a series of supernatural disasters at sea.
- Robert Browning's 'My Last Duchess' (1842) is a famous example of a dramatic monologue: a single speaker (a Duke) addresses a silent listener and unintentionally reveals his own jealous, controlling nature.
- William Blake (1757-1827) wrote 'Songs of Innocence and of Experience' (1789-1794), in which paired poems such as 'The Lamb' and 'The Tyger' explore opposite states of the human soul.
- Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) and Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) were First World War poets. Brooke's 'The Soldier' is patriotic in tone, while Sassoon's poems grew bitterly anti-war as the conflict went on.