The Mongol emperor Kublai Khan (1215-1294) had a residence in K’ai-p’ing in southeastern Mongolia.
Also known as Shang-Tu, this became Xanadu, the site of the emperor’s pleasure garden in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s unfinished poem “Kubla Khan” (1797).
The title of Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel “gone with the wind”comes from a poem by Ernest Dowson, a poet of the 1890s, called “Non Sum Qualis Eram,” or “Cynara.”
The phrase “What hath God wrought” comes from the Bible, Numbers 23:23. It is now best known as the first message sent by telegraph, May 28, 1844.
The main character in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is Humphrey Chimpden Ear-wicker, a pubkeeper in Dublin who is trying to live down an undisclosed crime he committed against a young woman (or man) in the park. Earwicker is also known as Here Comes Everybody and Haveth Childer Everywhere, and is linked with Adam, Jesus Christ,…
Medea was the Princess of Colchis and the wife of Jason, the King of Iolcus. Her father was King Aeetes of Colchis. Medea, by Euripides, was first performed in 431 B.C.
Dr. Spielvogel is the psychiatrist to whom Alexander Portnoy tells his story in Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint.
Bertolt Brecht follows the general outline of English playwright John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), but focuses more on social evils in The Threepenny Opera.