A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
The glossary is in the process of being updated.
ACCENT (ALSO CALLED A STRESS): When the emphasis falls on a syllable, it is said to be accented, or stressed. For example, in the word "tango," the first syllable is accented and the second syllable is unaccented. An unaccented syllable can be called a "slack syllable." When scanning (determining the meter) of a poem, we put a curved line over the unaccented syllable and a slanted line over the accented syllable.
ACT: A major division in a play. Individual acts are often divided into smaller units ("scenes") that all take place in a specific location during a continuous time period.
ALLEGORY: The word derives from the Greek allegoria ("speaking otherwise"). It is a form of extended metaphor, in which persons, abstract ideas, or events represent not only themselves on the literal level, but also something else on the symbolic level. An allegorical reading usually involves moral or spiritual concepts that may be more significant than the actual, literal events described in a narrative. Typically, an allegory involves the interaction of multiple symbols, which together create a moral, spiritual, or even political meaning. The act of interpreting a story as if each object in it had an allegorical meaning is called allegoresis.
ALLITERATION: The repetition of initial identical consonant sounds (or, according to some definitions, also initial vowel sounds) in successive or closely associated words, especially in stressed syllables. An example from Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology from the poem “Mrs. Myers” follows: “Poor soul so sunk in sin she could not see.” An example of vowel alliteration is shown in the sentence: “Apt alliteration’s artful aid is often an occasional ornament in prose.” In Anglo-Saxon poetry and in some fourteenth century texts, such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, rigid patterns of alliteration were an essential part of the poetic form. (Assonance and consonance are related techniques.)
ALLUSION: An indirect reference to something outside the text or oral narrative that the writer or speaker believes the audience will understand. The allusion could be religious, literary, historical, cultural, etc. For example, in Angela Carter's short story "The Courtship of Mr. Lyon," a character comes across food and drink labeled "eat me" and "drink me," which allude to a passage in Lewis Carroll's first Alice book.
AMBIGUITY: Literary ambiguity refers to any wording, action, or symbol that can be read in different ways. A statement that can contain two or more meanings is another example of ambiguity.
ANTAGONIST: The character directly opposed to the protagonist (the primary character in a work of literature.
APOSTROPHE: The rhetorical figure whereby a speaker addresses an absent someone or something, including an abstraction or personification, as in John Donne's (1572-1631) "Death Be Not Proud," where he addresses death as a being capable of emotions and even human frailty: "death, thou shalt die."
ASIDE: A theatrical convention in drama, where a few words or a short passage spoken by one character to the audience while the other actors on stage pretend that their characters cannot hear the speaker's words. It is that the aside is not noticed by other characters on stage.
ASSONANCE: The patterning of identical vowel sounds in close proximity, generally without regard to consonants, as in “chain mail.”
ATMOSPHERE: The dominant feeling associated with a work or section of a work, created by diction, dialogue, setting, and description. Often the opening scene in a play or novel establishes the atmosphere. Sometimes the term is used interchangeably with mood, but many critics maintain that atmosphere is the emotional feeling produced by the setting--physical and sometimes emotional--of the work.
AUBADE: A poem about the coming of dawn or a piece of music meant to be sung or played outdoors at dawn. An aubade often deals with the subject of lovers parting at dawn, and it is usually joyful in tone. Shakespeare's "Hark! Hark! The Lark" is a good example of an aubade:
Hark! hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings,
And Phoebus 'gins arise,
His steeds to water at those springs
On chalic'd flowers that lies;
And winking Mary-buds begin
To ope their golden eyes;
With everything that pretty is,
My lady sweet, arise:
Arise, arise!Modern writers like Philip Larkin have used the form ironically, as his poem "Aubade" demonstrates.
BALLAD: "A form of verse to be sung or recited and characterized by its presentation of a dramatic or exciting episode in simple narrative form. . . . Though the ballad is a form still much written, the so-called popular ballad in most literatures belongs to the early periods before written literature was highly developed. . . . Certain common characteristics of these early ballads should be noted: the supernatural is likely to play an important part in events, physical courage and love are frequent themes, the incidents are usually such as happen to common people (as opposed to the nobility) and often have to do with domestic episodes, slight attention is paid to characterization or description, transitions are abrupt, action is largely developed through dialogue, tragic situations are presented with the utmost simplicity, incremental repetition is common. . . . ." (from C. Hugh Holman's Handbook to Literature.)
From M. H. Abrams' Glossary of Literary Terms:
The most common stanza form--called the ballad stanza--is a quatrain in alternate four- and three-stress iambic lines; usually only the second and fourth lines rhyme. This is the form of "Sir Patrick Spens"; the first stanza of this ballad also exemplifies the conventionally abrupt opening and the manner of proceeding by third-person narration, curtly sketched setting and action, sharp transition, and spare dialogue:
The king sits in Dumerling towne,
Drinking the blude-re wine:
"O What will I get a guid sailor,
To sail this shcip of mine?"The collecting and printing of popular ballads began in England, then in Germany, during the eighteenth century. In 1765 Thomas Percy published his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, which, although most of the contents had been rewritten in the style of that time, did much to inaugurate widespread interest in folk literature....
The ballad has had an enormous influence on the form and style of poetry, especially, in England, since Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads (1798). A literary ballad is a narrative poem written by a learned poet in deliberate imitation of the form and spirit of the popular ballad. Some of the greatest of these were composed in the Romantic period: Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (which, however, is much longer and more elaborately developed than the folk ballad), Scott's "Proud Maisie," and Keats's "La Belle Dame sans Merci." Wordsworth begins the narration in "We Are Seven" by introducing the narrator as an agent--"I met a little cottage girl"--which is probably one reason that he called it "a lyrical ballad." Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner," on the other hand, opens with the abrupt impersonal narration of the traditional ballad:
It is an ancient Mariner
And he stoppeth one of three.
BATHOS: (Greek for "depth") The created when a writer trying too hard to be moving or elevated produces trivial, even foolish, imagery, phrasing, or ideas. It is also used to describe insincere pathos and mawkish, overly-sentimental writing. Alexander Pope used the term to mock the work of bad writers, but later comic authors and poets used bathos intentionally for humor.
BILDUNGSROMAN: (German, "educational novel") A novel of formation or growth into maturity. The roots of the genre lie in late 16th century German literature, but it also became popular in English literature. Coming-of-age novels typically involve the loss of the protagonist's illusions and the difficult lessons he or she has to learn in the face of social, personal, sexual, and cultural challenges. Bildungsromane tend to be episodic in structure.
BLACK COMEDY: A literary genre involving the use of the morbid and the absurd for darkly comic purposes; the term refers as much to the tone of anger and bitterness as it does to the grotesque and morbid situations characteristic of the genre. A black comedy will take serious, even tragic situations, and deal with them in a comic manner. Examples include Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, a tragicomic opera about the infamous "Demon Barber of Fleet Street"; the musical Urinetown; and Stanley Kubrick's movie Dr. Strangelove.
BLACK HUMOR: Dark, disturbing, and often morbid or grotesque mode of humor found in some literary works and films, such as the black comedies mentioned above. Joseph Heller's war novel Catch-22 features much black humor. Black humor can also be found in the visual arts, such as in the illustrations and cartoons of Edward Gorey, like The Gashlycrumb Tinies.
BLANK VERSE: Usually unrhymed iambic pentameter--unrhymed lines of ten syllables each, with the second syllable in each foot bearing the accents. (Variations in this meter may appear occasionally.) Blank verse has been called the most "natural" verse form for poetry and dramatic works since it supposedly is the verse form most close to natural rhythms of English speech, and it has been the primary verse form of English drama and narrative poetry since the mid-sixteenth century. The Earl of Surrey first used the term "blank verse" in his 1540 translation of The Aeneid of Virgil. The opening lines of Dr. Faustus (A text, modernized language) provide an example of blank verse:
Not marching now in fields of Thrasimene,
Where Mars did mate the Carthaginians,
Nor sporting in the dalliance of love,
In courts of Kings where state is overturned,BLASON: (Sometimes spelled "blazon") A poem of praise that glorifies the beauty of various parts of the female anatomy detail by detail. A blason du corps feminin is a "top-to-toe" encomium (formal expression of praise) to a a woman's beauty. This kind of poetry was advanced by French poet Clément Marot (1496-1594), who used the term to describe a poem like this (it had existed earlier with different meanings) in 1536 and who began the fashion for this kind of poetry with his "Blason du Tetin," also called the "Beau Tetin" (the "Beautiful Breast"). Such poems frequently depend upon hyperbole in their metaphors and similes. Before Marot, Petrarch was known for his love poetry to a woman (who may not have existed) called Laura, which also emphasized fulsome praise.
CAESURA (plural: caesurae): A pause separating phrases within lines of poetry, an important part of poetic rhythm. The term caesura comes from the Latin "a cutting" or "a slicing."
CARPE DIEM: Latin for "seize the day," from carpere (to pluck, harvest, or grab) and the accusative form of die (day). The term refers to a common theme in classical literature that the reader should make the most out of life and should enjoy it before it ends. Poetry or literature that illustrates this idea is called poetry or literature of the "carpe diem" tradition. Examples include Andrew Marvell's famous "To His Coy Mistress" and Robert Herrick's equally famous "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time."
CATACHRESIS: A misuse of words, i.e. to use a word violating its normal or proper sense. This can be an error, as when students confuse ‘Hippocratic’ and ‘hypocritical’, but in literary language it can be intentional and used to powerful effect.
CATALEXIS: A catalectic line omits the final unaccented syllable or syllables of the meter.
CATASTROPHE: The "turning downward" of the plot in a classical tragedy. By tradition, the catastrophe occurs in the fifth act of the play after the climax. (Freytag's pyramid illustrates visually the normal charting of the catastrophe in a plotline.) In later drama, the terms conclusion, resolution, and denouement are traditionally used.
CATHARSIS: An emotional discharge that brings about a moral or spiritual renewal or welcome relief from tension and anxiety. According to Aristotle, catharsis is the marking feature and ultimate end of any tragic artistic work. He writes in his Poetics (c. 350 BCE): "Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; . . . through pity [eleos] and fear [phobos] effecting the proper purgation [catharsis] of these emotions" (Book 6.2). (See tragedy.) Click here to download Dr. Wheeler's pdf handout concerning this material.
CHORUS: (1) A group of singers who stand alongside or off stage from the principal performers in a dramatic or musical performance. (2) The song or refrain that this group of singers sings. In ancient Greece, the chorus was originally a group of male singers and dancers who participated in religious festivals and dramatic performances as actors, commenting on the deeds of the characters and interpreting the significance of the events within the play. Shakespeare alters the traditional chorus by replacing the singers with a single figure--often allegorical in nature. Other writers, like Marlowe, also used variations of a chorus. (You can see lampoons of Greek choruses in Woody' Allen's Mighty Aphrodite and in a television commercial for business solutions popular a few years ago.)
CLIMAX, LITERARY: (From Greek word for "ladder") The point of greatest tension in a plot; the moment in a play, novel, short story, or narrative poem at which the crisis--the major turning point in the action--reaches its point of greatest emotional intensity and is thereafter resolved. It is also intended to produce the peak of emotional response from a reader or spectator. The climax usually follows or overlaps with the crisis (turning point) of a story, though some critics use the two terms synonymously. (See conflict.)
COMEDY: (from Greek: komos, "songs of merrimakers"): In the original meaning of the word, comedy referred to a genre of drama during the Dionysian festivals of ancient Athens. The first comedies were loud and boisterous affairs, as the word's etymology suggests. Later, in medieval and Renaissance use, the word comedy came to mean any play or narrative poem in which the main characters manage to avert an impending disaster and have a happy ending. The comedy did not necessarily have to be funny, and indeed, many comedies are serious in tone. It is only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that comedy's exclusive connotations of humor arose.
CONCEIT: An extended metaphor with a complex logic that governs a poetic passage or entire poem. (John Donne's "The Flea" provides an excellent example; see also Metaphysical conceit). Extended conceits in English are part of the poetic idiom of Mannerism during the later sixteenth and early seventeenth century.
CONCLUSION: Simply put, the ending of a literary work. The terms resolution and denouement are synonyms. A conclusion to a work may have a closed or open ending. A closed ending ties up all the loose ends and provides a sense of resolution. For instance, at the end of Hamlet every major character (except for Horatio) who managed to survive till the final act is dead on the stage. An open ending deliberately leaves the reader with unanswered questions and uncertainty about what will happen next. Be careful not to interpret the term too broadly--any work of literature that doesn't kill off every single character is going to leave the possibility of imagining future outcomes should a reader decide to fantasize about such things. A true open ending in a work of literature involves the deliberate creation of suspense and uncertainty about important characters or events developed in the course of the work. Some critics will refer to works with closed or open-ended conclusions as having closed or open structures, respectively.
CONNOTATION: The emotional implications and associations that words may carry, as opposed to their literal (denotative) meanings. Connotation depends on usage in a particular community or culture. See "denotation."
CONFLICT: The opposition between two characters (such as a protagonist and an antagonist), between two large groups of people, or between the protagonist and a larger problem such as forces of nature, ideas, public mores, and so on. Conflict drives a plot. In complex works of literature, multiple conflicts may occur at once. For instance, in Shakespeare's Othello, one level of conflict is the unseen struggle between Othello and the machinations of Iago, who seeks to destroy him. Another level of conflict is Othello's struggle with his own jealous insecurities and his suspicions that Desdemona is cheating on him.
CONSONANCE: The relationship between words in which the final consonants (usually in stressed syllables) agree, but the preceding vowels differ, as in "cute cat" or "belle of the ball." Notice that these examples also involve alliteration, in that the opening consonant sounds are the same. Examples of consonance without alliteration are "big dog" and "lone man."
CONVENTION: A convention is a practice that became common either by continual usage or by agreement. It refers to any device commonly used in art (including literature) that is unrealistic, but accepted anyway. The use of a chorus and the unities are dramatic conventions of Greek tragedy, while the aside and the soliloquy (and boys playing the parts of women) are conventions in Elizabethan tragedy.
Another definition of convention is that it is any common feature that has become traditional or expected within a specific genre (category) of literature or film. For example, it is a convention for an English sonnet to have fourteen lines with a specific rhyme scheme (abab, cdcd, efef, gg). Conventions are often referred to as poetic, literary, or dramatic, depending upon whether the convention appears in a poem, short story or novel, or a play.
COUPLET: A stanza consisting of two successive lines of verse, usually rhymed. Geoffrey Chaucer and other writers helped popularize the form in English poetry in the fourteenth century. An especially popular form in later years (the 1600s through the late 1700s) was the heroic couplet, which was rhymed iambic pentameter.
CRISIS: The point in a plot where the conflict has intensified to such a level that the protagonist's situation will change decisively (for better or for worse). Some critics use this term synonymously with climax, as the two tend to go together.
DENOTATION: The literal meaning of a word. "Denotation is when you mean what you say, literally. Connotation is created when you mean something else, something that might be initially hidden. The connotative meaning of a word is based on implication, or shared emotional association with a word. Greasy is a completely innocent word: Some things, like car engines, need to be greasy. But greasy contains negative associations for most people, whether they are talking about food or about people. Often there are many words that denote approximately the same thing, but their connotations are very different. Innocent and genuine both denote an absence of corruption, but the connotations of the two words are different: innocent is often associated with a lack of experience, whereas genuine is not. Connotations are important in poetry because poets use them to further develop or complicate a poem's meaning."
--from Bedford/St. Martin's VirtuaLit Interactive Poetry Tutorial.
DENOUEMENT: Literally, "unknotting"; the final "unraveling" of a plot. According to A Handbook to Liteature (Harmon and Holman), it "implies an ingenious untying of the knot of an intrigue, involving not only a satisfactory outcome of the main situation but an explanation of all the secrets and misunderstandings connected with the plot complication."
DEUS EX MACHINA: In some classical Greek drama, a god resolved a crisis that was beyond the ability of mortals to accomplish. An actor playing the god was often brought out by a crane-like machine (mechane). This was the deus ex machina, translated as "god out of the machine" or "god from the machine." This type of plot device became standard in both Greek and Roman theater, and the term began to be used to refer to any improbable or particularly fortunate event. In the seventeenth century, the term began to appear in English contexts to mean the use of an improbable plot device to achieve resolution, and this is how the term is generally used today. Such conclusions are unsatisfactory to the critical consumer of literature or film because they do not develop believably or logically from character or plot and do not help to develop theme. In the conclusion of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728), however, a deus ex machina is used satirically and successfully to point out the absurdities of audience expectations and fashions in entertainment.
DIALECT: Usage and vocabulary that is characteristic of a specific group or region; "Her Southern dialect made it hard for her new Californian neighbors to understand her sometimes.
DIALOGUE: The lines spoken by a character or characters in a play, essay, story, or novel, especially a conversation between two characters, or a literary work that takes the form of such a characterization.
DICTION: Vocabulary choice; the manner in which something is expressed in words. (It contrasts with syntax, which is the arrangement of words in sentences.)
DIDACTIC LITERATURE: Writing that seeks to convince a reader of a particular point or lesson.
DOGGEREL: Verse that is trivial and inferior, often with a simplistic, cliched approach and subject matter. The term is also used for light verse that is metrically irregular for a comic effect.
DRAMA: A composition in prose or verse presenting, in pantomime and dialogue, a narrative involving conflict between a character or characters and some external or internal force. Playwrights usually design dramas for presentation on a stage in front of an audience, but there are also "closet dramas" written as plays but not designed to be performed on stage (they might involve apparitions and other factors the special effects of the time could not hope to reproduce). Aristotle called drama "imitated human action." Drama may have originated in religious ceremonies. Thespis of Attica (sixth century BCE) was the first recorded composer of a tragedy. Tragedies in their earliest stage were performed by a single actor who interacted with the chorus. The playwright Aeschylus added a second actor on the stage to allow additional conflict and dialogue. Sophocles and Euripides added a third. Medieval drama may have evolved independently from rites commemorating the birth and death of Christ. During the late medieval period and the early Renaissance, drama gradually altered to the form we know today. The mid-sixteenth century in England in particular was one of the greatest periods of world drama. In traditional Greek drama, as defined by Aristotle, a play was to consist of five acts and follow the three dramatic unities. In more recent drama (i.e., during the last two centuries), plays have frequently consisted of three acts. An individual work of drama is called a play. J. P. Manly suggested that three elements were necessary in drama: (1) a story (2) told in action (3) by actors portraying the characters. This could include pantomime, but most critics believe spoken lines must be present.
DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE: Poem narrated by a particular persona to an implied audience. Dramatic monologue poems were particularly developed during the 19th century by poets such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Thomas Hardy; and, most notably, Robert Browning ("My Last Duchess" and "Porphyria's Lover" are famous examples). The technique was later used to great effect by T. S. Eliot ("The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock") and Ezra Pound.
DYNAMIC CHARACTER: One whose personality changes or evolves over the course of a narrative, in contrast with a static character. Both Victor Frankenstein and the Creature are dynamic characters.
ELEGY: In classical Greco-Roman literature, "elegy" refers to any poem written in elegiac meter (alternating hexameter and pentameter lines). More broadly, elegy came to mean any poem dealing with the subject-matter common to the early Greco-Roman elegies—complaints about love, sustained formal lamentation, or somber meditations. More recently--and this is the meaning we are concerned with in our class--it usually refers to a solemn, dignified, melancholy poem lamenting something that causes grief, usually a subject's death (but perhaps ending in consolation). Technically, the subject matter does not have to be death, but it will deal with a sense of bereavement. For a short, excellent example of an elegy, see "Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter."
ELIZABETHAN ERA: The period associated with the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558 - 1603), often considered to be a golden age in English history. It was the height of the Renaissance in England and saw the flowering of English literature.
END-STOPPED LINE: a line ending in a full pause, often indicated by appropriate punctuation, such as a period or semicolon. This is in contrast with run-on lines (see "enjambment" below), in which the grammatical sense of the sentence continues uninterrupted into the next line.
ENGLISH (SHAKESPEAREAN) SONNET: Form composed of three quatrains and a couplet with the rhyme scheme abab, cdcd, efef, gg. This adaptation of the Italian form allowed for the sparser rhymes of the English language and also encouraged a "summing up" couplet at the end. This change from the earlier model contributed to the development of the sonnet as a dramatic form. Also sometimes called the Elizabethan sonnet. The first English sonneteer, Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) learned of the form during travels in Spain and Italy. He wrote thirty-two sonnets in the form that has come to be known as the Petrarchan sonnet. A friend of Wyatt, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547), shares credit for introducing the sonnet to English. Surrey's sonnets deviate somewhat more from Petrarch's conventions than do Wyatt's and represent a more complete evolution of the sonnet into the English language. Shakespeare, of course, is the undoubted master of the form that has come to be associated with his name.
ENJAMBMENT: (French, "straddling," in English also called "run-on line"); when a line has no pause or end punctuation and continues with uninterrupted grammatical meaning into the next line.
ENVOY: Also spelled envoi, the word envoy refers to a postscript added to the end of a prose writing or a short verse stanza (often of different meter and rhyme) attached to the conclusion of a poem. An example appears at the end of Chaucer's "Clerk's Tale."
EPIC: An epic in its most specific sense is a genre of classical poetry. It is a poem that is (a) a long narrative about a serious subject, (b) told in an elevated style of language, (c) focused on the exploits of a hero or demi-god who represents the cultural values of a race, nation, or religious group (d) in which the hero's success or failure will determine the fate of that people or nation. Usually, the epic has (e) a vast setting, and covers a wide geographic area, (f) it contains superhuman feats of strength or military prowess, and gods or supernatural beings frequently take part in the action. The poem begins with (g) the invocation of a muse to inspire the poet and, (h) the narrative starts in media res—in the middle of the action (i) The epic contains long catalogs of heroes or important characters, focusing on highborn kings and great warriors rather than peasants and commoners. The term applies most directly to classical Greek texts like the Iliad and the Odyssey. However, some critics have applied the term more loosely. The Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf has also been called an epic of Anglo-Saxon culture. A primary epic is an epic poem that comes from an oral tradition. The Iliad and Odyssey are primary epics. A secondary epic, such as The Aeneid, is a more deliberately literary production. Both terms were developed by C. S. Lewis. Beowulf would be a secondary epic. The oldest piece of literature is the Epic of Gilgamesh, a primary epic. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey are epics. In English literature, John Milton's Paradise Lost is an entirely literary epic--it did not develop from a primary epic.
EPIPHANY: (Greek for “manifestation”) In modern fiction and poetry, this is the standard term for a sudden, usually profound, insight on the part of a character. It is generally produced by a single object or situation. An epiphany may be a revelation so powerful that it alters the world-view of the character who experiences it. James Joyce is particularly associated with this term, using it to describe moments of personal revelation experienced by characters in his collection Dubliners, such as that of Gabriel Conroy in "The Dead" or the young narrator in "Araby."
EPITHET: A compound adjective, as in "all-seeing" love, "swift-footed" Achilles, "gray-eyed" Athena, "rosy-fingered" dawn, that is attached to a particular character.
EXPOSITION: In literature, this is the introductory material that provides information about the situation, setting, characters, previous action, and anything else necessary to the audience's understanding. It usually helps to set the tone of the work. (This is in contrast with works that begin "in media res," in the middle of things.)
FALLING ACTION: In drama, the part of a plot that follows the climax or the crisis (the terms are sometimes used interchangeably) and that leads to the conclusion (called, in classic tragedy, the catastrophe).
FARCE: (from Latin Farsus, "stuffed") A farce is a form of low comedy designed to provoke laughter through highly exaggerated caricatures of people in improbable or silly situations. Traits of farce include (1) physical bustle such as slapstick, (2) sexual misunderstandings and mix-ups, and (3) broad verbal humor such as puns. Many literary critics (especially in the Victorian period) have tended to view farce as inferior to "high comedy" that involves brilliant dialogue. Many of Shakespeare's early works, such as The Taming of the Shrew, are considered farces.
FEMININE RHYME: A rhyme in which the final syllable of a line is unstressed; also called "double rhyme because at least two syllables are required--an unstressed one following a stressed one. (It contrasts with "masculine rhyme," also called "single rhyme.") In the following lines from Lord Byron's Don Juan, the second and fourth lines employ feminine rhyme (new one/true one), while the first and third employ masculine rhyme.
- I want a hero: an uncommon want,
- When every year and month sends forth a new one,
- Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
- The age discovers he is not the true one;
FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE/FIGURES OF SPEECH: Nonliteral language used for poetic effect. Metaphor is a primary example. (See Answers.com figures of speech.)
FIRST PERSON: Point of view where a character in a work of fiction is narrating the events.
FIXED FORM POEM: (Also called closed form poem) is any poem that may be categorized by the pattern of its lines, meter, rhythm, or stanzas. A sonnet is a fixed form of poetry because by definition it must have fourteen lines. Other fixed forms include limerick, sestina, and villanelle. However, poems written in a fixed form may not always fit into categories precisely, because writers sometimes vary traditional forms to create innovative effects, as in Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art." (Contrast with open form.)
FLASHBACK: A scene that takes place before the ongoing events in a work; a method of narration in which present action is temporarily interrupted so that the reader can witness past events.
FLAT CHARACTER: One without extensive personality and characterization. Flat characters can be fairly stereotypical, as well. The term is used in contrast with a round character, who has psychological depth. A flat character is also very likely to be a static character.
FOOT: The most basic rhythmic unit within a line of poetry is called a foot. In English accentual-syllabic verse, the standard feet are iambic (one unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable), trochaic (one unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable), anapestic (two unaccented syllables followed by an accented syllable), dactylic (an accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables), spondaic (two accented syllables), and pyrrhic (two unaccented syllables). Meter, which refers to the rhythm established in poetry, is determined by identifying and counting the kinds of feet in a line of poetry (this process is called scanning poetry).
FORESHADOWING: Suggesting, hinting, indicating, or showing what will occur later in a narrative.
FORM: The organization, or "shape," of a poem. In one sense, this can be thought of as its physical structure--for instance, the form of an English sonnet is fourteen lines in iambic pentameter with an abab, cdcd, efef, gg rhyme scheme. However, some critics, like Helen Vendler, use the term "form" to discuss all the different organizational schemes of a poem, including its emotional arc. When we think about form in its larger sense, we can also think about such factors as speech acts--is the poem a series of assertions? Questions? Does is praise? Condemn? Complain? Mourn? How does it use imagery? Symbolism? Everything that makes up a poem can be considered to be part of its form.
FRAMING METHOD: Using same features, wording, setting, situation, or topic at both the beginning and end of a literary work so as to "frame" it or "enclose it." This technique often provides a sense of cyclical completeness or closure.
FREE VERSE: Poetry without a regular meter or a rhyme scheme.
GENRE: A French term derived from the Latin genus, generis, meaning "type," "sort," or "kind." It designates the literary form or type into which works are classified according to what they have in common, either in their formal structures or in their treatment of subject matter, or both.
GROTESQUE: From grotte, the Italian word for "grottoes" or "caves," a term first used in English in the sixteenth century to refer to decorative paintings or sculptures consisting of a fantastic interweaving of human and animal forms with flowers and foliage; a work of art, a figure or design in this style; a comically distorted figure or design. The term was used thus because of recently excavated rooms in ancient Roman houses where such works were found. In the seventeenth century the term came to be used as an adjective describing the gargoyles used in architecture, particularly on cathedrals. Elements in literature that combine disparate, exaggerated, sometimes fantastic elements, such as those found in the works of Edgar Allen Poe, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Angela Carter, are called grotesque. Here are some definitions compiled at the Victorian Web and "Reflections on the Grotesque" by Joyce Carol Oates. In literature, a character may be considered a grotesque if he or she induces both empathy and disgust (thus, both the grandmother and the Misfit in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" might be considered grotesque characters, depending on how the reader reacts to each of them.) Southern Gothic is the genre most frequently identified with grotesques. Flannery O'Connor wrote, "Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one" ("Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction," 1960).
HAMARTIA: (A term from Greek tragedy that literally means "missing the mark." ) The error, human frailty, mistaken judgment, accident, or misstep through which the fortunes of the protagonist of a tragedy--the "tragic hero"--are reversed, causing the character's downfall. This general term is often mistranslated at "tragic flaw." A tragic flaw, however, is a character trait that brings a character to his or her downfall. Hamartia is applicable to any error in judgment, whereas a tragic flaw refers to an inherent personality trait, such as ambition, arrogance, jealousy, etc. Hamartia can result from a character's tragic flaw, but it is not the flaw itself. It is the mistake that causes the character's downfall, and it can include errors in judgment based on incomplete information, for example, not only flaws in personality.
HIGH COMEDY: Elegant comedies characterized by witty banter and sophisticated dialogue rather than the slapstick physicality and blundering common to low comedy.
HEROIC COUPLET: Two successive rhyming lines of iambic pentameter. The second line is usually end-stopped. It was common practice to string long sequences of heroic couplets together in a pattern of aa, bb, cc, dd, ee, ff, and so on. Because this practice was especially popular in the Neoclassic Period between 1660 and 1790, the heroic couplet is often called the neoclassic couplet if the poem originates during this time period. From D. F. Felluga:
This verse form consists of iambic pentameter lines with rhymed couplets. In the eighteenth century, when this verse form was most popular, poets tended also to write in closed couplets, which is to say that the end of each couplet, and even each line, tended to coincide with the end of a sentence or a self-sufficient unit of syntax. The form became the predominant English measure in the eighteenth century and is in some ways reflective of eighteenth-century ideals of order, balance, and closure. That sense of balance was also achieved by a strong caesura usually right in the center of each verse line. A good example is the last lines of the First Epistle of Alexander Pope's An Essay on Man.
HUBRIS (sometimes spelled Hybris): The Greek term hubris is difficult to translate directly into English. It is a negative term implying both arrogant, excessive self-pride or self-confidence, and it is also a type of hamartia, a lack of some important perception or insight due to pride in one's abilities. It is the opposite of the Greek term arête, which implies a humble and constant striving for perfection and self-improvement combined with a realistic awareness that such perfection cannot be reached. As long as an individual strives to do and be the best, that individual has arête. As soon as the individual believes he has actually achieved arête, however, he or she has lost that exalted state and fallen into hubris, unable to recognize personal limitations or the humble need to improve constantly.
HYPERBOLE: A figure of speech consisting of exaggeration, not meant to be taken literally, as in "Her skin was white as snow" or "I could eat a horse." (Contrast with understatement.)
IAMBIC PENTAMETER: The meter of poetry written in lines consisting of five groups (pentameter) of two syllables each, the second syllable stressed more than the first (an iambic foot).
IMAGERY: The collection of images in a literary work—that is, anything that can be perceived by any of our senses, not just the visual. Imagery is the language used to describe the images.
IN MEDIA RES: A term from the Roman poet Horace, literally meaning "in the midst of things." It is used when a work of literature begins in the middle of some action and then supplying information about the beginning of the action through flashbacks or other methods. It is the conventional opening for an epic.
INTERTEXTUALITY: Interconnectedness among texts; relationship between two or more texts that quote from one another, allude to one another, or otherwise connect. For example, the play Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead draws upon other texts, primarily Hamlet. If the audience is not familiar with Shakespeare's Hamlet, primarily, as well as works by other writers, like Samuel Beckett, much of the humor and meaning of the play is lost.
INTRA-TEXTUAL MEANING: Meaning which originates not within a work itself, but which originates in a related work in the same collection. In the Canterbury Tales, the various pilgrims’ tales seem to "bounce off" each other, echoing the themes, phrasing, concerns, and ideas of previous storytellers. For instance, "The Wife of Bath's Prologue" raises the question of what makes a happy marriage. Later tales, such as the Clerk's, the Franklin's, and the Merchant's tales, will take up the same idea. Each one's final assertion about the nature of marriage is enriched and complicated by the ideas that appear in the earlier tales, even if the later writers make no direct reference to them. The overall meaning originates not in one single pilgrim's pronouncement, but rather between or amongst the various statements made by other pilgrims.
IRONY: A literary term referring to how a person, situation, statement, or circumstance is not as it would actually seem. Many times it is the exact opposite of what it appears to be. There are many types of irony. The three most common are verbal irony, dramatic irony, and cosmic irony. Verbal irony occurs when either the speaker means something totally different than what he or she is saying. Dramatic irony occurs when facts are not known to the characters in a work of literature but are known by the audience. Cosmic irony suggests that some unknown force brings about dire and dreadful events.
JACOBEAN: refers to a period in English history that pertains to the reign of James I (1603 – 25. (Jacobus is the Latin form of James.) The Jacobean era succeeds the Elizabethan age and specifically denotes a style of architecture, visual arts and literature that is predominant of that period. In literature, some of Shakespeare's most powerful plays are written in that period, as well as those by John Webster and Ben Jonson. Ben Jonson also contributed to some of the era's best poetry, together with John Donne and the Cavalier poets. In prose, the most representative works are found in those of Francis Bacon and the King James Bible. (WordIQ.com.) (See Elizabethan Era.)
LIMITED OMNISCIENT: A type of third person point of view where the author tells readers what one characters thinks or feels. The author may switch between different characters. This is also know as selective omniscience.
LITOTES: (Pronounced "LIE-TA-TEES.") An ironic understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by negating its opposite as in, "She was not unhappy with her $1,000,000 lottery winnings." (Compare with meiosis.)
LOW COMEDY: In contrast with high comedy, low comedy consists of silly, slapstick physicality, crude pratfalls, violence, scatology, and bodily humor rather than clever dialogue or banter.
LYRIC: A relatively brief, subjective poem exploring the speaker's emotional response to a subject. Originally, the Greeks distinguished between choric poetry spoken by a group (chorus) and lyric poetry, which involved a single singer accompanied by a lyre (hence our term for the words, or "lyrics," to a song). Modern lyric poetry is often very melodic in its rhythm, but the primary distinguishing characteristic of the lyric is its exploration of emotion. Subcategories include the aubade, elegy, and epithalamion.
MAGIC REALISM: A term originally applied in 1925 by Franz Roh to a school of German painters. In an essay in 1949, Alejo Carpentier applied the concept of lo real maravilloso to literature and the work of some Latin American writers, such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Colombia and Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina. It later began to be applied to the work of some European writers, as well, such as Gunter Grass in Germany and John Fowles, Salman Rushdie, and Angela Carter in England. American writers who employ magic realism include Toni Morrison. These writers combine realism in representing ordinary events and descriptive details together with fantastic and dreamlike elements, as well as with materials derived from myth and fairy tales. These novels violate the expectations of readers used to traditional novels by innovative experiments with form, style, and time sequences (traits of postmodern writing in general), as well as with mixtures of the everyday, the fantastic, the mythical, and the nightmarish. They often blur traditional distinctions, such as those between the serious and the trivial, the horrible and the ludicrous, the tragic and comic, and the grotesque and the beautiful. (For further information, see Magical Realism by Lindsay Moore of Emory University)
MASCULINE RHYME: A rhyme on a single stressed syllable at the end of a line. It is also called "single rhyme." (It contrasts with "feminine rhyme," also called "double rhyme.") In the following lines from Lord Byron's Don Juan, the second and fourth lines employ feminine rhyme (new one/true one), while the first and third employ masculine rhyme.
- I want a hero: an uncommon want,
- When every year and month sends forth a new one,
- Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
- The age discovers he is not the true one;
MEIOSIS: is a figure of speech which intentionally understates something or implies that it is less in significance, size, than it really is. It is a form of understatement like litotes, but where litotes is often uses understatement to amplify the importance of something, meiosis aims to make its subject appear smaller. For example, a lawyer defending a schoolboy who has set fire to his school, might call the act of arson, a "prank."
MELODRAMA: A dramatic form characterized by excessive sentiment, exaggerated emotion, sensational and thrilling action, and an artificially happy ending. Melodramas originally referred to romantic plays featuring music, singing, and dancing, but by the eighteenth century they connoted simplified and coincidental plots, bathos, and happy endings.
METAPHOR: A figure of speech (an example of nonliteral language) in which two things are compared, usually by saying one thing is the other ("love is a rose" or "life is a bitch") or by substituting one word or phrase for another ("the President ran the ship of state right into an iceberg"). Compare to simile.
METAPHYSICAL CONCEIT: In English literature the term is generally associated with the 17th century metaphysical poets, an extension of contemporary usage. A conceit is an extended metaphor with a complex logic that governs a poetic passage or entire poem. In the metaphysical conceit, metaphors have a much more purely conceptual, and thus tenuous, relationship between the things being compared.
METAPHYSICAL POETS: The name given by scholars to certain British lyric poets of the 17th century. They shared an interest in metaphysical concerns, and their work was characterized by their original and inventive (sometimes deliberately jarring) inventiveness of metaphor (these involved comparisons now known as metaphysical conceits). These poets were not formally affiliated. Their poetry was influenced greatly by the changing times and scientific progress of the 17th century. Their style was characterized by wit and metaphysical conceits (far-fetched or unusual similes or metaphors). Their poetry diverged from the style of their times, as they did not tend to employ images of nature or allusions to classical mythology, as were common.
METER: The recurrence in poetry of a rhythmic pattern established by the regular occurrence of similar units of sound. Accentual-syllabic meter occurs when both the number of syllables and the number of accents are fixed or nearly fixed; when the term meter is used in English, it often refers to this last type of rhythm. This is the type we discuss in English 1B. The rhythmic unit within the line is called a foot. Iambic pentameter is the most frequently-occurring meter in English poetry.
(1) Iambic (the noun is "iamb"): an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable. Example: "The Póet, géntle Créature ás he ís" (Wordsworth, Prelude, 1.135). (2) Trochaic (the noun is "trochee"): a stressed followed by an unstressed syllable. Example: "Thére they áre, my fífty mén and wómen" (Browning, "One Words More"). Note that most trochaic lines lack the final unstressed syllable; the technical term for such a line is "catalectic." Example: "Tíger! Tíger! búrning bríght/ Ín the fórest óf the níght" (Blake, "The Tyger").
(3) Anapestic (the noun is "anapest"): two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable. Example: "The Assy´rian came dówn like a wólf on the fóld" (Byron, "The Destruction of Sennacherib").
(4) Dactyllic (the noun is "dactyl"): a stressed syllable followed by two light syllables. Example: "Éve, with her básket, was/ Déep in the bélls and grass" (Ralph Hodgson, "Eve").
(5) Spondaic (the noun is "spondee"): two successive syllables with approximately equal strong stresses, as in the first two feet of this line: "Góod stróng thíck stúpefy´ing íncense smóke" (Browning, "The Bishop Orders His Tomb"). (6) Pyrrhic (the noun is also "pyrrhic"): two successive syllables with approximately equal light stresses, as in the second and fourth feet in this line: "My way is to begín with the begínning" (Byron, Don Juan). [Note: arguably, "way" in this line could well be considered a stressed syllable.]
A metric line is named according to the number of feet composing it: monometer (one foot), dimeter (two feet), trimeter (three feets), tetrameter (four feet), pentameter (five feet), hexameter (six feet), heptameter (seven feet), octameter (eight feet).
Click here to download a PDF handout giving examples of particular types of feet, or click here for a longer PDF handout discussing meter and scansion (taken from Dr. Wheeler's web site).
The four basic rhythmic patterns are (1) Quantitative, in which the rhythm is established by patterns of long and short syllables—this is the classical meter; (2) accentual, in which recurrence of syllables marked by stress or accent determines the basic unit regardless of the number of unstressed or unaccented syllables surrounding the stressed syllable; (3) syllabic, in which the number of syllables in a line is fixed, although the accent varies; and (4) accentual-syllabic, in which both the number of syllables and the number of accents are fixed or nearly fixed; when the term meter is used in English, it often refers to this last type of rhythm.
METONYMY: A figure of speech in which one thing is used to designate something with which it is commonly associated, for example, in the hard-boiled novels of thirties and forties detective fiction, calling a woman a "skirt."
MIXED METAPHOR: Using two living metaphors in obvious conflict, such as: "That wet blanket is a loose cannon"; "Strike while the iron is in the fire"; or (said by an administrator whose government-department's budget was slashed) "Now we can just kiss that program right down the drain."
MODERNISM: Here is an excerpt from an article by Dr. Mary Klages:
This movement is roughly coterminous with twentieth century Western ideas about art (though traces of it in emergent forms can be found in the nineteenth century as well). Modernism, as you probably know, is the movement in visual arts, music, literature, and drama which rejected the old Victorian standards of how art should be made, consumed, and what it should mean. In the period of "high modernism," from around 1910 to 1930, the major figures of modernism literature helped radically to redefine what poetry and fiction could be and do: figures like Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Proust, Mallarme, Kafka, and Rilke are considered the founders of twentieth-century modernism.
From a literary perspective, the main characteristics of modernism include:
1. an emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity in writing (and in visual arts as well); an emphasis on HOW seeing (or reading or perception itself) takes place, rather than on WHAT is perceived. An example of this would be stream-of-consciousness writing.
2. a movement away from the apparent objectivity provided by omniscient third-person narrators, fixed narrative points of view, and clear-cut moral positions. Faulkner's multiply-narrated stories are an example of this aspect of modernism.
3. a blurring of distinctions between genres, so that poetry seems more documentary (as in T.S. Eliot or e.e. cummings) and prose seems more poetic (as in Woolf or Joyce).
4. an emphasis on fragmented forms, discontinuous narratives, and random-seeming collages of different materials.
5. a tendency toward reflexivity, or self-consciousness, about the production of the work of art, so that each piece calls attention to its own status as a production, as something constructed and consumed in particular ways.
6. a rejection of elaborate formal aesthetics in favor of minimalist designs (as in the poetry of William Carlos Williams) and a rejection, in large part, of formal aesthetic theories, in favor of spontaneity and discovery in creation.
7. A rejection of the distinction between "high" and "low" or popular culture, both in choice of materials used to produce art and in methods of displaying, distributing, and consuming art.
MONOLOGUE: An extended narrative, spoken or written (in drama, only spoken, of course), delivered uninterrupted by one person.
MOOD: (from Anglo-Saxon, mod "heart" or "spirit"): A feeling, emotional state, or disposition of mind. Most pieces of literature have a prevailing mood, but shifts in this prevailing mood may function as a counterpoint, provide comic relief, or echo the changing events in the plot. Mood is also sometimes used interchangeably with atmosphere, but many critics maintain that atmosphere is the emotional feeling produced by the setting--physical and sometimes emotional--of the work.
MOTIF: A conspicuous recurring element, such as a type of incident, a device, a reference, or a verbal formula, which appears frequently in works of literature. For instance, the "loathly lady" who turns out to be a beautiful princess is a common motif in folklore. Often, writers create motifs in individual works in order to call attention to images, ideas, symbols, or objects that may be particularly important to a work's themes. The term "motif" is also used outside of literature. Recurring elements in music, architecture, and art, to name a few areas, are also called motifs. For example, ballerinas are a familiar motif in the works of the painter Degas, and water lilies are a familiar motif in the works of the painter Monet. In the American painter Edward Hopper, an atmosphere of isolation and loneliness is a familiar motif.
NARRATOR: The "voice" that speaks or tells a story. Some stories are written in a first-person point of view, in which the narrator's voice is that of the point-of-view character. In third-person narratives, it is the author, not a character, who is telling the story. A third-person narrative can be omniscient, with the author revealing what every character thinks and feels; limited omniscient, where only one character at a time is so revealed; or objective, with no character’s thoughts or feelings revealed (we are simply told what the characters actually do).
NATURALISM: A theory in literature that emphasizes the role of environment upon human characters. It is an extreme form of realism that arose in the early 20th century. Rather than focusing on the internal qualities of their characters, authors emphasized the effects of heredity and environment, on human beings. In American literature, Stephen Crane and Jack London are examples.
OBJECTIVE POINT OF VIEW: A type of third person point of view where the author doesn't tell readers what characters think or feel, but simply describes what characters do or say.
OCTAVE: A poem or stanza composed of eight lines. The term octave most often represents the first eight lines of a Petrarchan sonnet. In its strictest sonnet usage, an octave rhymes abbaabba, and it serves to state a situation resolved in the sestet.
OCTET: A group of eight lines of verse, sometimes used as a synonym for octave, the first eight lines of an Italian (Petrarchan) sonnet.
ODE: A type of lyric poem typically of varying line lengths and sometimes intricate rhyme schemes that is usually written or dedicated to a specific subject. Odes are generally serious and dignified in tone and characterized by exalted themes. (Another term for this type of poem is "hymn.")
OMNISCIENT POINT OF VIEW: A type of third person point of view where the author tells readers what characters think or feel and can also describe actions happening at other places or times ("omniscient" means "all knowing."
OMNISCIENT, LIMITED, POINT OF VIEW: A type of third person point of view where the author tells readers what one characters thinks or feels. The author may switch between different characters. This is also know as selective omniscience.
ONOMATOPOEIA: The use of sounds that are similar to the noise they represent for a rhetorical or artistic effect. For instance, "hiss," "bang," "sigh," and "moan" make sounds similar to the noise they represent.
OPEN FORM POETRY: The Bedford Online Glossary defines open form, or "free verse" poetry as follows:
Sometimes called "free verse," open form poetry does not conform to established patterns of meter, rhyme, and stanza. Such poetry derives its rhythmic qualities from the repetition of words, phrases, or grammatical structures, the arrangement of words on the printed page, or by some other means. The poet E. E. Cummings wrote open form poetry; his poems do not have measurable meters, but they do have rhythm.
What distinguishes open form poems is that they do not develop regular patterns with regard to lines, meter, rhythm and stanza. Their structure is more "organic" instead of being predetermined, following its own inner logic according to the emotion or thought expressed.
(Contrast with fixed form.)
PARODY: (Greek: "beside, subsidiary, or mock song"); A parody imitates the serious manner and characteristic features of a particular literary work in order to make fun of those same features. The humorist achieves parody by imitating or exaggerating certain traits common to the work, much as a caricaturist creates a humorous depiction of a person by magnifying and calling attention to the person's most noticeable features. Often the subject matter of a parody is comically inappropriate. Compare "The End of the Raven" with Edgar Allen Poe's famous "The Raven."
PASTORAL: (Latin pastor, "shepherd") An artistic composition dealing with the life of shepherds or with a simple, rural existence. It usually idealized shepherds' lives in order to create an image of peaceful and uncorrupted existence. More generally, pastoral describes the simplicity, charm, and serenity attributed to country life, or any literary convention that places kindly, rural people in nature-centered activities. The Greek Theocritus (316-260 BCE) first used the convention in his Idylls, though pastoral compositions also appear in Roman literature, in Shakespeare's plays, and in the writings of the Romantic poets. Typically, pastoral liturgy depicts beautiful scenery, carefree shepherds, seductive nymphs, and rural songs and dances. Conventional names for the shepherds and nymphs come from bastardized Latin nicknames such as Mopsy, Flopsy, and Dorcas (from Mopsius, Doricas, etc.).
PATHOS: (Greek, "emotion") In its rhetorical sense, pathos is a writer or speaker's attempt to inspire an emotional reaction in an audience--usually a deep feeling of suffering, but sometimes joy, pride, anger, humor, patriotism, or any of a dozen other emotions. In its critical sense, pathos signifies a scene or passage designed to evoke the feeling of pity or sympathetic sorrow in a reader or viewer.
PEJORATIVE: Having a negative connotation; A word or phrase is pejorative or derogatory if the meaning associated with it is negative. For example, thrifty" has a positive connotation, but "miserly," "mean," and "stingy" have negative connotations, so we say that they are used in a pejorative sense.
PERSONA: The first-person speaker in a literary work, especially a poem—not to be confused with the author him-or herself. (The term literally means “a mask.”) For example, a persona could be a completely fictional creation. Even when the author identifies himself as the narrator—as Chaucer does in the Canterbury Tales—we have reason to believe that he is fictionalizing his own personality. (Is he really as naïve as he presents himself? Does he really mean to apologize for all of his secular writing at the end?)
PERSONIFICATION: Assigning human characteristics to something nonhuman, like, "Justice is blind" or "Luck, be a lady tonight."
PETRARCHAN (ITALIAN) SONNET: The sonnet developed in Italy in the twelfth or thirteenth century, but it is most associated with the fourteenth-century poet Petrarch (1304-1374). The Italian sonnet is divided into two sections, known as the octave (eight line stanza) and sestet (six line stanza). The octave has two quatrains, rhyming a-b-b-a, a-b-b-a; the first quatrain presents the theme, the second develops it. The sestet is built on two or three different rhymes, arranged either c-d-e-c-d-e or c-d-c-d-c-d or c-d-e-d-c-e; the first three lines reflect on the theme and the last three lines bring the whole poem to a close. Petrarch's sonnets dealt with the theme of idealized love. From Petrarch, poets would receive a wealth of conventions, or "conceits." A poetic conceit is a fanciful notion, generally expressed through an elaborate analogy or metaphor. The sonneteers of the Renaissance took not only some of Petrarch's forms, but also conventional sentiments. The poet and his beloved are presented in terms of an idealized courtly love, and the beloved is often described in hyperbolic terms--her skin is fair as snow, her voice is sweeter than the songs of birds or angels, she doesn't merely walk, she floats, and so on. (See blason.) Shakespeare pokes great fun at such conventions with his Sonnet 130.
Here is one of Petrarch's sonnets, translated by Mark Musa (note particularly the sestet--the six lines at the end):
Sonnet XC
The golden hair was loosened in the breeze
That in many sweet knots whirled it and reeled,
And the dear light seemed ever to increase
Of those fair eyes that now keep it concealed:
And the face seemed to colour, and the glance
To feel pity, who knows if false or true;
I who had in my breast the loving cue,
Is it surprising if I flared at once?
Her gait was not like that of mortal things,
But of angelic forms; and her words' sound
Was not like that which from our voices springs;
A divine spirit and a living sun
Was what I saw; if such it is not found,
The wound remains, although the bow is gone.PHALLIC SYMBOL: (from Greek phallos, "penis") A phallic symbol is a sexualized representation of male potency, power, or domination--particularly through some object vaguely reminiscent of the penis. Common phallic symbols include sticks, staves, swords, clubs, towers, trees, missiles, and rockets. Contrast with a yonic symbol.
PLOT: The sequence of events in a narrative; what happens.
POINT OF VIEW: See narrator.
A general (and often hotly debated) label referring to the philosophical, artistic, and literary changes and tendencies after the 1940s and 1950s up to the present day. We can speak of postmodern art, music, architecture, literature, and poetry using the same generic label. The tendencies of postmodernism include (1) a rejection of traditional authority, (2) radical experimentation--in some cases bordering on gimmickry, (3) eclecticism and multiculturalism, (4) parody and pastiche, (5) deliberate anachronism or surrealism, and (6) a cynical or ironic self-awareness (often postmodernism mocks its own characteristic traits). In many ways, these traits are all features that first appeared in modernism, but postmodernism magnifies and intensifies these earlier characteristics. It also seems to me that, while modernism rejected much of tradition, it clung to science as a hopeful and objective cure to the past insanities of history, culture and superstition. Modernism hoped to tear down tradition and longed to build something better in its ruins. Postmodernism, on the other hand, is often suspicious of scientific claims, and often denies the possibility or desirability of establishing any objective truths and shared cultural standards. It usually embraces pluralism and spurns monolithic beliefs, and it often borders on solipsism. While modernism mourned the passing of unified cultural tradition, and wept for its demise in the ruined heap of culture, postmodernism tends to dance in the ruins and play with the fragments.
Some of the new literary movements growing from postmodernism include darker or horrific tales of science fiction, neo-Gothic literature, late twentieth-century horror stories, concrete poetry, magic realism, Theater of the Absurd, and so on. Finally, postmodernism is often used loosely and interchangeably with the critical movements following post-structuralism--the growing realms of Marxist, materialist, feminist, and psychoanalytical approaches to literature that developed during and after the 1970s. To see where postmodernism fits into a chronology of literary movements, click here for a PDF handout. -- Dr. L. Kip Wheeler
See also this link by Dr. Mary Klages.
PROTAGONIST: The chief character in a work. The term originally designated the "first" actor in early Greek drama, who was added to the Chorus and was its leader. The second most important character was the antagonist, the one with whom the antagonist struggles (the root word "agon" is Greek for contest). Today, protagonist versus antagonist is usually simplified to the notion of "good guy" vs. "bad guy," but it isn't that simple. The main character in a work is not always an entirely sympathetic or admirable character. (Later in the course, I will add an entry on the "antihero.")
PUN: The humorous use of a word in which to suggest two or more meanings, or of words of similar sounds but different meanings; a play on words. In one of Shakespeare's sonnets, for instance, he uses "lies" to suggest both dishonesty and sexual intercourse.
QUATRAIN: A stanza of four lines, usually (but not necessarily) rhyming abab.
QUARTO: A term from early bookmaking. When a single, large sheet is folded once to create two leaves (four pages counting the front and back), and then bound together, the resulting text is called a folio. If the folio is folded in half once more, the resulting size of page is called a quarto. Thus, a quarto is a sheet of material folded twice, to create four leaves, or eight pages, which results in a medium-sized book. On a single sheet, the page visible on the right-hand side of an open book or the "top" side of such a page is called the recto side (Latin for "right"), and the reverse or "bottom" side of such a page (the page visible on the left-hand side of an open book) is called the verso side. (In the jargon of Shakespearean scholars, a "bad quarto" is a copy of the play that a disloyal actor would recreate from memory and then submit for publication in a rival publishing house without the consent of the author. These bad quartos are often grossly inaccurate, but may contain useful stage directions not included in the original.)
QUEST: An adventurous journey undergone by the protagonist of a narrative. The protagonist usually meets with and overcomes a series of obstacles, returning in the end with the benefits of knowledge and experience. In Tolkien's The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins sets out on a quest with thirteen dwarves desirous of reclaiming their ancestral home from Smaug, a marauding dragon.
REALISM: A literary theory that endeavors to represent life as accurately as possible, with no romanticism or idealization.
RECTO: On a single sheet, the page visible on the right-hand side of an open book or the "top" side of such a page is called the recto side (Latin for "right").
REFRAIN: A line or set of lines at the end of a stanza or section of a longer poem or song--these lines repeat at regular intervals in other stanzas or sections of the same work. Sometimes the repetition involves minor changes in wording. A refrain might consist of a nonsense word (such as Shakespeare's "With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino" in the song from As You Like It), a single word (such as "Nevermore" in Poe's "The Raven"), or even an entire separate stanza that is repeated alternating with each stanza in the poem. If the refrain is meant to be sung by all the auditors listening, such as in Burns' "Auld Lang Syne," the refrain is often called a chorus. The device is ancient. Examples are found in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Bible, Greek, Latin, and Provençal verse, and in many ballads.
RESOLUTION: Conclusion; the culmination of a fictional plot, the concluding action of a drama. (See denouement.)
RHYME: The occurrence of the same or similar sounds at the end of two or more words. When people use the word rhyme, they generally actually mean "perfect rhyme," where the sounds at the ends of different words match exactly, as in "How now, brown cow." A dictionary definition of perfect rhyme says, "in two or more words, identity of sound from the last stressed vowel to the end, the consonant or consonant group preceding not being the same in both or all cases." When the rhyme occurs in a final stressed syllable, it is said to be masculine: cat/hat, desire/fire, observe/deserve. When the rhyme occurs in a final unstressed syllable, it is said to be feminine: longing/yearning. The pattern of rhyme in a stanza or poem is shown usually by using a different letter for each final sound. In a poem with an aabba rhyme scheme, the first, second, and fifth lines end in one sound, and the third and fourth lines end in another. The following quatrain from Shakespeare's Sonnet 144 has an abab rhyme scheme:
Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still,
The better angel is a man right fair:
The worser spirit a woman coloured ill.
Rhyme can be exact ("perfect rhyme"), with sounds at the ends of the words being identical, as in "cat" and "hat," or they can be approximate (also called half rhyme, oblique rhyme, and slant rhyme), as in "plain" and "game." There is even something called "eye rhyme," where two words do not actually rhyme at all, they just look like they should, as in "low" and "cow." There is also rime riche, where the words' sounds match exactly, as in "fair" (meaning pale or lovely) and "fair," as in "county fair." These two words are "homographs" because they are written the same way, as well as "homophones" (they sound the same). "Right" and "write" are examples of a rime riche that are homophones but no homographs.
RHYTHM: (from Greek, "flowing"); the varying speed, loudness, pitch, elevation, intensity, and expressiveness of speech, especially in poetry. In verse the rhythm is normally regular; in prose it may or may not be regular. See sprung rhythm for an exception to this general rule. Also see meter, dipody, and syzygy.
RISING ACTION: The part of a drama that usually follows the exposition and the inciting moment--the event that gives rise to the conflict--though the "inciting moment" may not exist as such in the ongoing action of the play (what, for example, incites Iago?). The rising action leads to the climax, or crisis. During rising action, the plot becomes more complicated and the conflict becomes more intense.
RIME RICHE: where the words' sounds match exactly, as in "fair" (meaning pale or lovely) and "fair," as in "county fair."
ROMANTIC COMEDY: Sympathetic comedy that presents the adventures of young lovers trying to overcome social, psychological, or interpersonal constraints to achieve a successful union. Several Shakespearean plays such as The Taming of the Shrew and A Midsummer Night's Dream also fall into this category.
ROMANTICISM: a movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that marked the reaction in literature, philosophy, art, religion, and politics from the neoclassicism and formal orthodoxy of the preceding period. Romanticism arose so gradually and exhibited so many phases that a satisfactory definition is not possible. The aspect most stressed in France is reflected in Victor Hugo's phrase "liberalism in literature," meaning especially the freeing of the artist and writer from restrains and rules and suggesting that phase of individualism marked by the encouragement of revolutionary political ideas. The poet Heine noted the chief aspect of German romanticism in calling it the revival of medievalism in art, letters, and life. Walter Pater thought the addition of strangement [sic] to beauty (the neoclassicists having insisted on order in beauty) constituted the romantic temper. An interesting schematic explanation calls romanticism the predominance of imagination over reason and formal rules (classicism) and over the sense of fact or the actual (realism), a formula that recalls Hazlitt's statement (1816) that the class beauty of a Greek temple resided chiefly in its actual form and its obvious connotations, whereas the "romantic" beauty of a Gothic building or ruin arose from associated ideas that the imagination was stimulated to conjure up. The term is used in many senses, a recent favorite being that which sees in the romantic mood a psychological desire to escape from unpleasant realities.
Perhaps more useful to the student than definitions will be a list of romantic characteristics, though romanticism was not a clearly conceived system. Among the aspects of the romantic movement in England may be listed sensibility; primitivism; love of nature; sympathetic interest in the past, especially the medieval; mysticism; individualism; romanticism criticism; and a reaction against whatever characterized neoclassicism. Among the specific characteristics embraced by these general attitudes are the abandonment of the heroic couplet in favor of blank verse, the sonnet, the Spenserian stanza, and many experimental verse forms; the dropping of the conventional poetic diction in favor of fresher language and bolder figures; the idealization of rural life (Goldsmith); enthusiasm for the wild, irregular, or grotesque in nature and art; unrestrained imagination; enthusiasm for the uncivilized or "natural"; interest in human rights (Burns, Byron); sympathy with animal life (Cowper); sentimental melancholy (Gray); emotional psychology in fiction (Richardson); collection and imitation of popular ballads (Percy, Scott); interest in ancient Celtic and Scandinavian mythology and literature ; renewed interest in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. Typical literary forms include the lyric, especially the love lyric, the reflective lyric, the nature lyric, and the lyric of morbid melancholy...;the sentimental novel; the metrical romance; the sentimental comedy; the ballad; the problem novel; the historical novel; the Gothic romance; the sonnet; and the critical essay....
The term designates a literary and philosophical theory that tends to see the individual at the center of all life, and it places the individual, therefore, at the center of art, making literature valuable as an expression of unique feelings and particular attitudes (the expressive theory of criticism) and valuing its fidelity in portraying experiences, however fragmentary and incomplete, more than it values adherence to completeness, unity, or the demands of genre. Although romanticism tends at times to regard nature as alien, it more often sees in nature a revelation of Truth, the "living garment of God," and a more suitable subject for art than those aspects of the world sullied by artifice. Romanticism seeks to find the Absolute, the Ideal, by transcending the actual, whereas realism finds its values in the actual and naturalism in the scientific laws the undergird the actual.
--from A Handbook to Literature, 6th ed., by Hugh Holman and William Harmon.
ROUND CHARACTER: One who is depicted with such psychological depth and complexity that he or she seems like a "real" person. The round character contrasts with the flat character. A round character may also be dynamic, but not necessarily so. (It is possible to do a compelling portrait of a realistic character who is not able to change and grow.) The terms "flat" and "round" were first used by E. M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel.
SATIRE: A work of literature or a film that mixes a critical attitude with wit and humor (often scathing) to attack stupidity, vice, or corruption in human attitudes and institutions, such as what the author sees as dangerous (or at least undesirable) religious, political, moral, cultural, or social standards. Ridicule, irony, exaggeration, and several other techniques are almost always present. The satirist may insert serious statements of value or desired behavior, but most often he or she relies on an implicit code, one that he or she hopes will be understood by the audience. Examples of satire in literature include Swift's Gulliver's Travels and "A Modest Proposal," and examples of satire in film include Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (this site has an extensive discussion of the film, but it also has annoying pop-ups.)
SCANSION: The act of "scanning" a poem to determine its meter. To perform scansion, the student breaks down each line into individual metrical feet and determines which syllables have heavy stress (are accented) and which have lighter stress (are unaccented). From M. H. Abrams' Glossary of Literary Terms:
To scan a passage of verse is to go through it line by line, analyzing the component feet, and also indicating where any major pauses fall within a line. Here is a scansion... [with the stresses marked] of the first five lines from Keats's Endymion (1818); the passage was chosen because it exemplifies a flexible and variable rather than a highly regular metrical pattern.
(1)A thíng of beáuty ís a jóy for éver;
(2)Its lóveliness incréases; // ít will néver
(3)Páss into nóthingness, // but stíll will kéep
(4)A bówer quíet for us, // and a sléep
(5)Fúll of sweet dréams, and héalth, and quíet bréathing.The prevailing meter is clearly iambic, and the lines are iambic pentameter. As in all fluent verse, however, there are variations upon the basic iambic foot, which are sometimes called "substitutions":
(1) the closing feet of lines 1, 2, 5 end with an extra light syllable, and are said to have a feminine ending. Lines 3 and 4, in which the closing feet, since they are standard iambs, end with a stressed syllable, are said to have masculine endings.
(2) In lines 3 and 5, the opening iambic feet have been "inverted" to form trochees. (These initial positions are the most common place for such inversions in iambic verse.) [Note that, following a different rhetorical accent, one might also scan this line: Full of swéet dréams, and héalth, and quíet bréathing. Such a reading would still fall within the line's pentameter beat.]
(3) I have marked the second foot in line 2, and the third foot of line 3 and line 4, as pyrrhics (two light stresses); these help to give Keats's verses their rapid movement. This is a procedure in scansion with which competent readers often disagree: some will feel enough of a metric beat in all these feet to mark them as iambs; others will mark still other feet (for example, the third foot of line 1) as pyrrhics also.... Notice, however, that these are differences in nuance rather than in essentials: the analysts agree that the prevailing pulse of Keats's versification is iambic throughout.Two other elements are important in the metric movement of Keats's passage: (1) In lines 1 and 5, the pause in the reading--which occurs naturally at the end of a clause or other syntactic unit--coincides with the end of the line; such lines are called end-stopped. Lines 2 through 4, other hand, are called run-on lines (or in a French term, they exhibit enjambment--"a striding-over"), because the pressure of the incompleted syntactic unit toward closure carries on over the end of the verse-line. (2) When a strong phrasal pause falls within a line, as in lines 2, 3, 4, it is called a caesura--indicated in the quoted passage by the conventional symbol, //. The management of these internal pauses is important for giving variety and for providing expressive emphases in the long pentameter line.
SCENE: A dramatic sequence that takes place within a single locale and a continuous time sequence on stage. Often scenes serve as the subdivision of an act within a play.
SELECTIVE OMNISCIENT: See narrator and limited omniscient.
SENSIBILITY: See the Dictionary of Sensibility.
SENTIMENTALITY: Extravagant or affected feeling or emotion. According to the Victorian Web, "We may define sentimentality as a writer's consciously indulging in emotion for its own sake, pushing the reader to emotional peaks through exaggeration, manipulation of language and situation, and such mechanical tricks as dwelling on the suffering and purity of a dying child." It can also be defined as mawkishness, or falsely emotional in a maudlin way.
SESTET: Any six-line poem or stanza. Examples of the sestet include the last six lines of the Petrarchan sonnet form.
SESTINA: A fixed form consisting of six six-line (usually unrhymed) stanzas in which the end words of the first stanza recur as end words of the following five stanzas in a successively rotating order and as the middle and end words of each of the lines of a concluding envoy in the form of a tercet. The usual ending word order for a sestina is as follows:
First stanza, 1- 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6
Second stanza, 6 - 1 - 5 - 2 - 4 - 3
Third stanza, 3 - 6 - 4 - 1 - 2 - 5
Fourth stanza, 5 - 3 - 2 - 6 - 1 - 4
Fifth stanza, 4 - 5 - 1 - 3 - 6 - 2
Sixth stanza, 2 - 4 - 6 - 5 - 3 - 1
Concluding tercet:
middle of first line - 2, end of first line - 5
middle of second line - 4, end of second line - 3
middle if third line - 6, end of third line - 1
SETTING: Time and place of a literary work. The setting of Kate Chopin's "Story of an Hour" is one hour in the afternoon in a woman's house--mostly her bedroom upstairs. The setting of The Quiet American is Indochina, specifically Vietnam, in the 1950s. Much of the play Wit is set in a cancer ward in a modern hospital.
SIMILE: An analogy made using "as" or 'like," for example, "My love is like a red, red rose."
SLANT RHYME: Also called half rhyme, approximate rhyme, sprung rhyme, , near rhyme, oblique rhyme, off rhyme, and imperfect rhyme is consonance on the final consonants of the words involved. Here is an example from Emily Dickinson:
- Hope is the thing with feathers
- That perches in the soul,
- And sings the tune without the words,
- And never stops at all.
SOLILOQUY: A speech given in a play when the character is (or believes himself or herself) to be alone. The technique frequently reveals a character's innermost thoughts, including feelings, state of mind, motives or intentions. The soliloquy often provides necessary but otherwise inaccessible information to the audience. The dramatic convention is that whatever a character says in a soliloquy to the audience must be true, or at least true in the eyes of the character speaking (i.e., the character may tell lies to mislead other characters in the play, but whatever he states in a soliloquy is a true reflection of what the speaker believes or feels). The soliloquy was rare in Classical drama, but Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights used it extensively, especially for their villains. Well-known examples include speeches by Iago in Othello.
SONNET: The term sonnet is derived from the Provençal word sonet and the Italian word sonetto, both meaning little song. By the thirteenth century, it had come to signify a lyric poem of fourteen lines following a strict rhyme scheme and logical structure. Italian (or Petrarchan) sonnets are divided into two quatrains, forming an octet (see also octave) and a six-line sestet, with the rhyme scheme abba abba cdecde (or cdcdcd). English (or Shakespearean) sonnets are composed of three quatrains and a final couplet, with a rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efef gg. English sonnets are usually in iambic pentameter. Sonnets were introduced to England by Wyatt and Surrey, but Shakespeare perfected the form and thus is most closely associated with it. Here is an outside link to Basic Sonnet Forms.
SOUTHERN GOTHIC: A sub-genre of the Gothic writing style that is unique to American literature. Like its parent genre, it relies on supernatural, ironic, or unusual events to guide the plot. Unlike its predecessor, it uses these tools not for the sake of suspense, but to explore social issues and reveal the cultural character of the South. One of the most notable features of the Southern Gothic is the grotesque, a character who possesses some cringe-inducing qualities, typically bigotry and self-righteousness, but also other traits can inspire empathy in the reader. Deeply flawed characters, while often disturbing to read about, provide the author with greater narrative range and more opportunities to highlight unpleasant aspects in Southern culture without moralizing. This genre of writing is seen in the work of such famous Southern writers as William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, Erskine Caldwell, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, and John Kennedy Toole. Tennessee Williams described Southern Gothic as a style that captured "an intuition, of an underlying dreadfulness in modern experience."
SPRUNG RHYTHM: Also called "accentual rhythm," sprung rhythm is a term invented by Gerard Manley Hopkins to describe his personal metrical system, in which the major stresses are "sprung" from each line of poetry. This method predates Hopkins, as it was not unknown in Old English and Middle English alliterative verse. However, Hopkins' poetry helped revitalize interest in accentual rhythm, and sprung rhythm has had a profound influence on T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Ted Hughes, and other modernists. The accent falls on the first syllable of every foot and a varying number of unaccented syllables following the accented one, but all feet last an equal amount of time when being pronounced. Hopkins' "Spring and Fall: To a Young Child" provides an example:
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.STATIC CHARACTER: A static character is a character who does not change or alter his or her personality over the course of a narrative. A static character different from a dynamic character.
STANZA: An arrangement of lines of verse in a pattern usually repeated throughout the poem. Typically, each stanza has a fixed number of verses or lines, a prevailing meter, and a consistent rhyme scheme. A stanza may be a subdivision of a poem, or it may constitute the entire poem. Early English terms for a stanza were "batch," "stave," and "fit."
STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS: The continuous flow of ideas and feelings that constitute an individual's conscious experience; a late nineteenth and 20th century literary technique in which authors represent the flow of sensations and ideas to depict the mind of characters. English novelist Virginia Woolf followed this approach to explore the characters of an Englishwoman and a young former soldier in Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Sometimes stream of consciousness challenges the reader. In To the Lighthouse (1927), Woolf achieves a deliberately disorienting effect by moving subtly from character to character, from past to present, and from external events to internal thoughts. James Joyce is another pioneer of this technique, particularly in Ullyses.
STROPHE: In the Pindaric ode, the strophe signifies the first stanza and every subsequent third stanza (the fourth, seventh, and so on). Some writers limit the word "stanza" to signify regular, recurrent, and typically rhymed sections of poems, using the term "strophe" to signify irregular, unrhymed subdivisions. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was written in a series of strophes followed by "bob-and-wheel" stanzas.
STRUCTURE: The planned framework of a work of literature. The term usually means the general plan or outline, but sometimes the type of verse or type of sentence are called structural features. When we talk about the Canterbury Tales as a series of thematically-related stories within a framework story, we are talking about its structure. When we talk about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a series of four fitts made up of strophes and bob-and-wheel stanzas, we are talking about its structure.
STYLE: In its strictest sense, the idiosyncratic way in which a writer handles language (diction and syntax). Some critics use the term much more broadly to describe all the techniques used by a particular writer, such as tone, symbolism, imagery, etc.
SYLLEPSIS: One verb using different objects, with the meaning of the verb changing with each object, as in, "If we don't hang together, we shall hang separately" (Ben Franklin).
SYNTAX: Sentence structure. (In contrast with diction, which is vocabulary choice; the manner in which something is expressed in words.)
SYMBOL: A word, place, character, or object that means something beyond what it is on a literal level. In literature, an object, a setting, or even a character can represent another, more general, idea. Allegories are narratives read in such a way that nearly every element serves as an interrelated symbol, and the narrative's meaning can be read either literally or as a symbolic statement about a political, spiritual, or psychological truth.
SYNECDOCHE: a figure of speech in which a part of something is is used to designate a whole, for example, using "keel" for "ship."
TENOR: The subject of a metaphor, the actual thing being described. When Shakespeare claims that "all the world's a stage," the entire world is the tenor for the metaphor of a stage. The stage is the vehicle, the part of the metaphor that "carries" the meaning of the intentional subject, the world itself.
TERCET: A stanza of three lines, usually rhyming aba or aaa.
TERZA RIMA: (Italian, "third rhyme") A three-line stanza form with interlocking rhymes that move from one stanza to the next. The typical pattern is aba, bcb, cdc, and so on. Dante chose terza rima's tripartite structure as the basic poetic unit of his trilogy, The Divine Comedy. An English example is found in Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind." Here are two sample stanzas:
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!TEXTUAL VARIANT: A version of a text that has alterations in wording or structure, especially one with missing lines or extra lines added. In some cases, textual variants reflect the difference between an author's early version or rough draft of a work and a later version or polished final product. Variance in Shakespeare's plays might have come about in the difference between the foul papers (handwritten rough drafts) and the fair copy (the largely corrected versions sent to the printers). Variations in Chaucer's manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales might reflect an earlier, alternative scheme for structuring the work that Chaucer later abandoned in favor of a revised order for the various tales. Other textual variants in literary works are the product of scribal corruption or errata.
THEME: A central idea, an abstract concept that is developed and manifested in a work. The theme can take the form of a brief and meaningful insight, a comprehensive vision of life; or a single idea. A theme is the author's way of communicating and sharing ideas, perceptions, and feelings with readers, and it may be directly stated in the work, or it may only be implied.
THIRD PERSON: Point of view where the narrator is the author, not a character in a work of fiction. An omniscient third-person narrator knows everything and can tell you the thoughts and feelings of all characters as well as any events transpiring anywhere. The limited, or selective, omniscient narrator focuses on one or only a few characters, though such a narrator may focus on different characters at different points in the text. An objective third-person narrator only describes what happens and what people say--the reader is not told what people think or feel.
TONE: The attitudes toward the subject and the audience implied by the writer in a literary work or film. Tone may be melancholy, formal, intimate, angry, serious, ironic, outraged, optimistic, pessimistic, etc. The tone can be at odds with the subject matter. For instance, Stanley Kubrick's satirical film Dr. Strangelove is about nuclear proliferation and finishes with the world about to be destroyed, but the tone throughout is comic.
TRAGEDY: A play in which the chief figures, by some peculiarity of character, pass through a series of misfortunes leading to a final, devastating catastrophe. According to Aristotle, catharsis is the marking feature and ultimate end of any tragedy. He writes in his Poetics (c. 350 BCE) that "Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; . . . through pity [pathos] and fear effecting the proper purgation [catharsis] of these emotions" (Book 6.2). Traditionally, a tragedy is divided into five acts. The first act introduces the characters in a state of happiness, or at the height of their power, influence, or fame. The second act typically introduces a problem or dilemma, which reaches a point of crisis in the third act, but which can still be successfully averted. In the fourth act, the main characters fail to avert or avoid the impending crisis or catastrophe, and this disaster occurs. The fifth act traditionally reveals the grim consequences of that failure. See also hamartia, hubris, anagnorisis, peripeteia, and catharsis. To download Dr. Wheeler's handout discussing medieval tragedy, click here.
TRAGICOMEDY: type of drama that combines certain elements of both tragedy and comedy. The play’s plot tends to be serious, leading to a terrible catastrophe, until an unexpected turn in events leads to a reversal of circumstance, and the story ends happily. Tragicomedy often employs a romantic, fast-moving plot dealing with love, jealousy, disguises, treachery, intrigue, and surprises, all moving toward a melodramatic resolution. Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice is a tragicomedy.
TRAGIC FLAW: See hamartia.
TRAGIC HERO: The protagonist of a tragedy whose downfall is the result of hamartia, perhaps resulting from a tragic flaw.
TRIPLET: A group of three successive lines of verse, especially when rhyming together and of the same length.
TROPE: Figures of speech with an unexpected twist in the meaning, like metaphor, simile, synecdoche, metonymy, personification, apostrophe, puns, and hyperbole.
UNDERSTATEMENT: is related to hyperbole in that understatement is the opposite of hyperbole: understatement implies more than is actually stated. If you took three courses in summer school, and someone asked you what kind of load you had, "It's kind of heavy" would be an understatement. Meiosis and litotes are two specific kinds of understatement.
UNITIES, THREE: (Also known as the "three dramatic unities"). In the 1500s and 1600s, critics of drama expanded Aristotle's ideas in the Poetics to create the rule of the "three unities." A good play, according to this doctrine, must have three traits. The first is unity of action (realistic events following a single plotline and a limited number of characters encompassed by a sense of verisimilitude). The second is unity of time, meaning that the events should be limited to the two or three hours it takes to view the play, or at most to a single day of twelve or twenty-four hours compressed into those two or three hours. Skipping ahead in time over the course of several days or years was considered undesirable, because the audience was thought to be incapable of suspending disbelief regarding the passage of time. The third is unity of space, meaning the play must take place in a single setting or location. It is notable that Shakespeare often broke the three unities in his plays, which may explain why these rules later were never as dominant in England as they were in French and Italian Neoclassical drama.
VARIORUM: A variorum edition is any published version of an author's work that contains notes and comments by a number of scholars and critics. The term is a shortened version of the Latin phrase cum notis variorum ("with the notes of various people"). The New Variorum Shakespeare is possibly the best known variorum edition in English.
VEHICLE: The literal meaning of a term or terms used in a metaphor, as opposed to the tenor. In literature, a vehicle also means the method by which an author accomplishes her purpose. Thus, one might say, "Swift uses the vehicle of satire to express his ideas," or that "Darwin employs the vehicle of clear diction to best communicate a scientific theory."
VELLUM: The skin of a young calf used as a writing surface--the medieval equivalent of "paper." A technical distinction is usually made between vellum and parchment, which is made from goatskin or sheepskin.
VERISIMILITUDE: The sense that what one reads is "real," or at least realistic and believable. For instance, the reader possesses a sense of verisimilitude when reading a story in which a character cuts his finger, and the finger bleeds. If the character's cut finger had produced sparks of fire rather than blood, the story would not possess verisimilitude. Note that even fantasy novels and science fiction stories that discuss impossible events can have verisimilitude if the reader is able to read them with suspended disbelief.
VERSO: the reverse, or "bottom," side of such a page (the page visible on the left-hand side of an open book)
VICTORIAN PERIOD: The Victorian period in English history is dated from 1837, when Queen Victoria took the throne, to 1901, when she died. Since monarch's reigns years rarely coincide perfectly with literary periods, sometimes people refer to the period as starting from roughly 1832 (when the Reform Bill was passed) and ending around 1900. The major British authors of the Victorian era include the novelists George Eliot; Charles Dickens; the Brontë sisters, Anne, Charlotte, and Emily; Wilkie Collins; Elizabeth Gaskell; Anthony Trollope, William Makepiece Thackeray; and Thomas Hardy; the poets Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Robert Browning; Gerard Manley Hopkins; Dante Gabriel Rossetti; and Christina Rosetti; the playwright and author of fairy tales and numerous essays and poetry, Oscar Wilde; and more miscellaneous writers like Lewis Carroll, G. K. Chesterton, John Ruskin, Carlyle, Arthur Conan Doyle, William Morris, and Walter Pater.
VILLANELLE: a genre of poem consisting of nineteen lines--five tercets and a concluding quatrain. The form requires that whole lines be repeated in a specific order, and that only two rhyming sounds occur in the course of the poem. The first line of the first tercet is the third line of the quatrain, and the third line of the first tercet is the fourth line of the quatrain. These two lines also appear, alternating, as the closing lines of the other tercets. The ryme scheme is aba in each tercet, and abaa in the quatrain. The most famous villanelle in English may be Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night":
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
VEHICLE: The immediate subject, as opposed to the intentional subject, of a metaphor. The vehicle "carries" the meaning of the metaphor. If you say that a difficult, even impossible task is "looking for a needle in a haystack," the needle in the haystack is the vehicle of meaning, carrying your meaning to your audience. The difficult task is the tenor--the thing you are really describing; your intention is to describe the task.
The term can also be used more loosely as a means of conveyance or transport, that is, the method by which an author accomplishes his or her purpose, as in "Behn uses the vehicle of melodrama in Oroonoko to express her ideas."
In an even broader sense, "vehicle" can be a work itself, especially one that displays the skills of a creator or performer, as in "The play Hamlet is a difficult vehicle that can showcase the skills of a consummate actor, but it has also been the downfall of many less gifted ones."
VOLTA: The turn in thought in a sonnet that is often indicated by such initial words as But, Yet, or And yet. The volta occurs between the octet and sestet in a Petrarchan sonnet. You can describe a turn of thought in other places in other types of sonnet as a volta, too, but we mainly associate the term with the Petrarchan sonnet, where it is always in the same place:
abbaabba
volta
cdecde (or some variation)
XANADU: A place of dreamlike magnificence and luxury. It comes from Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan." ( "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree . . .").
XANADUISM: Academic research that focuses on the sources behind imaginative works of literature and fantasy. John Livingstone Lowes, in his publication The Road to Xanadu (1927), inspired the name, which in turn goes back to Coleridge's poem. More recently, the term has been used in a pejorative sense to describe scholarship involving dubious scrutiny of amorphous, difficult-to-prove sources, especially simplistic studies lacking any redeeming theoretical perspectives.
YAHOO: Jonathan Swift coined the term in Gulliver's Travels, applying it to a race of coarse, filthy, barbaric humanoid brutes in contrast with the civilized race of intelligent horses, the Houynyhnm, found in Gulliver's last voyage. Mark Twain and other writers use it to refer to bumpkins, louts, or yokels.
YONIC SYMBOL: (from Sanskrit yoni, "vagina") Most people are familiar with the term "phallic symbol," but are unaware hat there is also an equivalent female symbol. A yonic symbol is a sexualized representation of femininity and reproductive power, particularly through some object vaguely reminiscent of the vagina. Common yonic symbols include cups, cauldrons, chalices, goblets, wells, caves, tunnels, circles, hoops, and pots.
ZEITGEIST: (German "Time-ghost" or "Spirit of the Age"): The preferences, fashions, and trends that characterize the intangible essence of a specific historical period.
ZEUGMA: One verb using different objects. (She sank the boat and his hopes.") When this changes the verb's meaning, it is called syllepsis, as in "If we don't hang together, we shall hang separately" (Ben Franklin).
This page was last updated on
Wednesday, 02 May 2012 04:29 PM
