Literary Allusions in Context - The Girl Who was Supposed to Die

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Literary Allusions in Context

What is an allusion?

Allusion is a brief and indirect reference to a person, place, thing or idea of historical, cultural, literary or political significance. It does not describe in detail the person or thing to which it refers.

Common Allusions you might not have realized are allusions

Scrooge:

Scrooge has taken on a pop culture life of its own, but, at its core, it's still the name of the character in Charles Dickens'

"A Christmas Carol".

Common Allusions you might not have realized are allusions

Big Brother. Big Brother is the name of the omnipresent dictatorship in George Orwell's "1984". Over time, it's really evolved into being the go-to term for when the

government is over-monitoring its people. But its origins are literary... it's not just a modern-day cautionary catchphrase.

Common Allusions you might not have realized are allusions

Yahoo.We know it a search engines. But... yahoo is really a term that was coined by Jonathan Swift in "Gulliver's Travels".

In the book, Gulliver ends up in a country ruled by horses... where they boss around deformed, brutish, primitive humans, called Yahoos.

That's how the term yahoo entered the cultural lexicon as a way to describe low-brow humans. And, apparently, the guys who founded Yahoo.com picked that name because they felt the word yahoo described the unsophisticated, undeveloped Internet at that time.

Common Allusions you might not have realized are allusions

Blood on my hands.This comes from "Macbeth“ written by William Shakespeare.

Allusions in Commercials

 The Scarlet Letter is a famous novel in which a woman is banished and forced to wear the letter “A” on her.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nt5XZ9EVg&index=5&list=PLiCDB0SvS4n97df0beZrFsjkfjKNXoeKc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-3HEyRc3M&list=PLiCDB0SvS4n97df0beZrFsjkfjKNXoeKc&index

=2

Movie Allusions

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaNQnJFq-1o

Remember Dr. Seuss

 The more that you read, the more that you know. The more that you know, the more places you can go.

 How does this relate to allusions?

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