Crash Course AP Literature

Tags: dignity and honor, racism, gender roles, cultural assimilation

Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern Are
Dead by Tom
Stoppard,
published 1967

Genre: play

Setting: late 1500s, Hamlet’s court

Main characters: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

Main Plot/Idea/Concept: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern try to discover the

cause of Hamlet’s madness and, at the same time, their own purpose in the

world.

Tags: satire, black comedy, making choices

The Sound and the
Fury by William
Faulkner,
published 1929

Genre: novel

Setting: Easter weekend, 1928, and June 1929 (with flashbacks); Jefferson,

Mississippi, and Cambridge, Massachusetts (Harvard University)

Main characters: children of the Compson family: Benjy, Quentin, Jason, and

Caddie, Quentin (Caddie’s daughter), and house-keeper Dilsey

Main Plot/Idea/Concept: A distinguished family falls from grace.

Tags: nihilism, order and chaos, time, structure (four different narrators),

stream of consciousness

A Streetcar Named
Desire by
Tennessee
Williams,
published 1947

Genre: play

Setting: 1940s, New Orleans, Louisiana

Main characters: Blanche DuBois, Stanley Kowalski

Main Plot/Idea/Concept: Blanche DuBois, an aging Southern debutante, tries

to flee a sordid past when she comes to live with her sister in New Orleans.

She hopes to begin again and reclaim her “glory,” but she is pitted against

working class Stanley Kowalski, her sister’s husband.

Tags: tragedy

The Sun Also Rises
by Ernest
Hemingway,
published 1926

Genre: novel

Setting: Paris, France, and Pamplona and Madrid, Spain: 1924

Main characters: Jake Barnes, Brett Ashley

Main Plot/Idea/Concept: Jake loves Lady Brett Ashley, but his impotence

caused by a war wound hinders their relationship. Jake loses numerous

friendships, and his life is repeatedly disrupted, because of his loyalty to Brett,