Hollywood-ish
A macabre television sitcom poking fun at normal suburban families
The Addams Family
The title of this chapter is from Albert Camus’ novel of the same name
A Happy Death
American author whose life Bruce begins to copy. For example, he courted his wife Zelda through letters while he was in the army
F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Grimm fairy tale in which twins are abandoned in the woods by their parents and almost cooked in an oven by an evil witch
Hansel and Gretel
a reference, typically brief, to a person, place, thing, event, or other literary work with which the reader is presumably familiar.
allusion
a 1946 American Christmas supernatural drama about a man named George who has given up his personal dreams in order to help others in his community and whose thoughts of suicide on Christmas Eve bring about the intervention of his guardian angel who shows George all the lives he touched and what the world would be like if he did not exist
It's a Wonderful Life
a Spanish epic novel by Miguel de Cervantes revolving around the adventures of a hidalgo from La Mancha named Alonso Quijano, who reads so many chivalric romances that he loses his mind and decides to become a knight-errant to revive chivalry and serve his nation
Don Quixote
an American modernist poet who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems in 1955
Wallace Stevens
Half-man, half-bull monster at the heart of the labyrinth built by Daedalus
Minotaur
a comparison between two things, objects, persons, or situations based on some aspects of resemblances in both
analogy
In the film It’s a Wonderful Life, he and Donna Reed fix up an old house – but Bruce gets angry a lot more than the father in the movie
Jimmy Stewart
a comedy by William Shakespeare depicting the courtship of Petruchio and Katherina, the headstrong, obdurate shrew
The Taming of the Shrew
an American poet, essayist and feminist credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse"
Adrienne Rich
Son of Daedalus, he flew too close to the sun on waxen wings and fell into the sea
Icarus
As a literary device, allusion is used for this in a literary work through reference to a well-known or familiar person, place, event, or other work of literature
context
Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, this 1925 novel-turned 2013 film depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby's obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan
The Great Gatsby
the story of a spirited young American woman who, "affronting her destiny,” finds it overwhelming
Portrait of a Lady
A French writer and philosopher associated with absurdism
Albert Camus
A line echoing the fairy tale story of Rumpelstiltskin, in which the titular villain granted a poor family the power to spin gold from straw – at a price
My father could spin garbage into gold
if an allusion is this, it can lose effectiveness by confusing the reader
obscure or misunderstood
A fictional character from the Addams Family multimedia franchise created by American Charles Addams in 1933. She plays the role of the family's reserved matriarch.
Morticia Addams
The title of this chapter is from James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in which the protagonist is named Stephen Dedalus, itself an allusion to the famous myth
Old Father, Old Artificer
a French-born American diarist, essayist, novelist, and writer of short stories and erotica
Anais Nin
a demon featured in German folklore that originally appeared in literature as the demon in the Faust legend
Mephistopheles
Most literary allusions are not directly explained to the reader but instead rely on this from the reader
inferential ability