English Literature - Read Mode
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These famous lines are from William Wordsworth's poem ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’. It captures a moment where the poet encounters a field of daffodils, which becomes a lasting source of joy for him.
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Graham Greene, despite being one of the leading English novelists of the 20th century, never won the Nobel Prize in Literature. T.S. Eliot, Toni Morrison, and William Faulkner were all Nobel laureates.
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‘Arms and the Man’ is a humorous play by George Bernard Shaw. It is a satire on the romanticized notions of war and love, contrasting pragmatism with idealism.
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The title character, Othello, is a general in the Venetian army and is consistently referred to as ‘The Moor’. The play explores themes of racial prejudice, jealousy, and betrayal centered on his identity.
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‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ is a famous lyric poem by W.B. Yeats. It expresses the poet's deep longing to escape the busy city life of London and live peacefully in a small cabin on the island of Innisfree.
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‘Riders to the Sea’ is a famous one-act play by Irish playwright J.M. Synge. It is a tragedy set in the Aran Islands, depicting a mother who has lost her husband and sons to the sea.
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Christopher Marlowe was a contemporary of Shakespeare and a major dramatist of the Elizabethan era (1558–1603). Dryden belongs to the Restoration, Pope to the Augustan, and Beckett to the Modern period.
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This is the most famous soliloquy in English literature, spoken by Prince Hamlet in Shakespeare's play ‘Hamlet’ (Act 3, Scene 1). He contemplates existence, suicide, and the unknown nature of death.
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George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) is the odd one out. She is the only female writer listed and belongs strictly to the Victorian era of realism, while Joyce, Conrad, and Hardy bridge or define Modernism.
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‘As I Lay Dying’ is a novel by William Faulkner. The other three options (‘The Bluest Eye’, ‘Sula’, ‘A Mercy’) are all novels written by Toni Morrison, making Faulkner's work the odd one out.