Scheherazade is the narrator of the Arabian Nights (c. 1450), who tells stories night after night to keep her husband, the Sultan Schahriah, from strangling her at dawn.
Scheherazade tells her stories to her sister Dinarzade in the Sultan’s hearing.
Joseph Conrad define his task as a writer as, “to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see!” in the preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897).
The interminable law case in Dickens’s Bleak House was Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, a case stemming from a dispute about distribution of an estate.
Two hundred and forty-four deceased inhabitants of Spoon River recite their verse epitaphs in Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology.
Sir Edward Dyer said, “My mind to me a kingdom is” in his 1588 poem of the same name.
The subtitle of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) was A Romance.
Lolita was twelve when Humbert Humbert first met her.