Glossary

A

The movement began in reaction to prevailing utilitarian social  philosophies and to what was perceived as the ugliness and philistinism of the industrial age. Its philosophical foundations were laid in the 18th century by Immanuel Kant, who postulated the autonomy of aesthetic standards from morality, utility, or pleasure. This idea was amplified by J.W. von Goethe, J.L. Tieck, and others in Germany and by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle in England. The  movement was popularized in France by Madame de Staël, Théophile Gautier, and the philosopher Victor Cousin, who coined the phrase  l'art pour l'art ("art for art's sake") in 1818.

In England, the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, from 1848,  had sown the seeds of Aestheticism, and the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, and Algernon Charles Swinburne exemplified it in expressing a yearning for ideal beauty through conscious medievalism. The attitudes of the movement were also represented in the writings of Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater and the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley in the periodical The Yellow Book. The painter James McNeill Whistler raised the movement's ideal of the cultivation of refined sensibility to perhaps its highest point.

Contemporary critics of Aestheticism included William Morris and  John Ruskin and, in Russia, Leo Tolstoy, who questioned the value of art divorced from morality. Yet the movement focused attention on the formal aesthetics of art and contributed to the art criticism of Roger Fry and Bernard Berenson. It was unparochial in its affinities with the French Symbolist movement, fostered the Arts and Crafts Movement, and sponsored Art Nouveau, with its decisive impact on 20th-century art. "Aestheticism" Britannica Online.  <http://www.eb.com:180/cgi-bin/g?DocF=micro/7/1.html> [Accessed 27 January 1998].

Allegory -- the expression by means of symbolic fictional figures and actions of truths or generalizations about human existence; also : an instance (as in a story or painting) of such expression 2 : a symbolic representation : Emblem

Alliteration Pronunciation: &-"li-t&-'rA-sh&n  noun Etymology: ad- + Latin littera letter
(Date: circa 1656): the repetition of usually initial consonant sounds in two or more neighboring words or syllables (as wild and woolly, threatening throngs) -- called also head rhyme, initial rhyme.  In studies of poetry this is important to understand in alliterative verse. Early verse of the Germanic languages in which alliteration, the repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words or stressed syllables, is a basic structural principle rather than an occasional embellishment. Although alliteration is a common device in almost all poetry, the only Indo-European languages that used it as a governing principle, along with strict rules of accent and quantity, are Old Norse, Old English, Old Saxon, Old Low German, and Old High German.  This is the nature of the Beowulf Epic especially.

Antagonist -- Properly used to refer to the character in a story who works against the protagonist. The protagonist in a story initiates the action, and the antagonist opposes that action. In practical usage, the term "protagonist" is often used simply to refer to the main character or the hero of a story, and "antagonist" to refer to the villain. The terms have their origins in the days of ancient Greek drama, in which the protagonist was always the first actor in a chorus, and the antagonist the second actor; a part of each play would be devoted to their conflict.

Antifeminist literature -- In the literature of the Western Civilization there is a tradition of works which portrays strong willed women negatively, usually comically.  In the Roman de La Rose the old crone, who is an expert in being a wife, gives an earthy but rather unromantic speech concerning a woman's potential manipulative use of sex and love.  She is an ancestor to Chaucer's Wife of Bath who bucks her society's role for women and its view of sexuality.  A similar but less sexual figure is the wife of Noah in the medieval drama who while her husband is desperately trying to get her on board the ark, insists at staying at the fence and gossiping with her neighbors.  The Taming of the Shrew can also be placed into this category but like Chaucer, Shakespeare's creative genius develops characters which are more alive than the two dimension stereotypes found in other examples of this sub-genre.
 

B

Ballad:   This is a short narrative folk song whose distinctive style crystallized in Europe in the late Middle Ages and persists to the present day in communities where literacy, urban contacts, and mass media have not yet affected the habit of folk singing. British and American ballads are invariably rhymed and strophic (i.e., divided into stanzas).  

Typically, the folk ballad tells a compact little story that begins eruptively at the moment when the narrative has turned decisively toward its catastrophe or resolution.  How ballads are composed and set afloat in tradition has been the subject of bitter quarrels among scholars.

Since ballads thrive among unlettered people and are freshly created from memory at each separate performance, they are subject to constant variation in both text and tune. Where tradition is healthy and not highly influenced by literary or other outside cultural influences, these variations keep the ballad alive by gradually bringing it into line with the style of life, beliefs, and emotional needs of the immediate folk audience. Ballad tradition, however, like all folk arts, is basically conservative, a trait that explains the references in several ballads to obsolete implements and customs, as well as the appearance of words and phrases that are so badly garbled as to indicate that the singer does not understand their meaning though he takes pleasure in their sound and respects their traditional right to a place in his version of the song.

Ballad Metre -- or Common Metre abbreviated C.M.,  also called hymnal stanza a metre used in English ballads that is equivalent to ballad metre, though ballad metre is often less regular and more conversational than common metre. Whereas ballad metre usually has a variable number of unaccented syllables, common metre consists of regular iambic lines with an equal number of stressed and unstressed syllables. The song “Amazing Grace” by John Newton is an example of common metre, as can be seen in the following verse:

Amazing grace! how sweet the sound.
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

Ballad Stanza: a verse stanza common in English ballads that consists of two lines in ballad metre, usually printed as a four-line stanza with a rhyme scheme of abcb, as in The Wife of Usher's Well, which begins:

There lived a wife at Usher's Well,
And a wealthy wife was she;
She had three stout and stalwart sons,
And sent them o'er the sea.

They hadna been a week from her,
A week but barely ane,
Whan word came to the carlin wife,
That her three sons were gane.

"Ballad Stanza." Encyclopædia Britannica 2003  Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
21 Jan, 2003  <http://search.eb.com/eb/article?eu=137091>.

Bildungsonroman: bil.dungs.ro.man n [G, fr. Bildung education + Roman novel] (1910): a novel about the moral and psychological growth of the main character
  Webster defintion--Encyclopedia Britannica comments follow. . .

German: "novel of formative education"), class of novel in German literature that deals with the formative years of an individual.

The folklore tale of the dunce who goes out into the world seeking adventure and learns wisdom the hard way was raised to literary heights in Wolfram von Eschenbach's medieval epic Parzival and in Hans Grimmelshausen's picaresque tale Simplicissimus (1669). The first novelistic development of this theme was J.W. von Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-96; Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship), and it remains the classic example of the type. Other examples are Adalbert Stifter's Nachsommer (1857; "Indian Summer") and Gottfried Keller's Grüne Heinrich (1854-55; Green Henry). The Bildungsroman ends on a positive note, though it may be tempered by resignation and nostalgia. If the grandiose dreams of the hero's youth are over, so are many foolish mistakes and painful disappointments, and a life of usefulness lies ahead.

A common variation of the Bildungsroman is the Künstlerroman (q.v.),  a novel that deals with the formative years of an artist. Other variations are the Erziehungsroman ("novel of upbringing") and the
 Entwicklungsroman ("novel of character development"), although the differences between these terms and the Bildungsroman are so slight that they are sometimes used interchangeably.

Biography  This is a form of nonfictional literature, the subject of which is the life of an individual. One of the oldest forms of literary expression, it seeks to recreate in words the life of a human being, that of the writer himself or of another person, drawing upon the resources, memory and all available evidences--written, oral, pictorial.

Aspects of Biography

Historical Biography is sometimes regarded as a branch of history, and earlier biographical writings--such as the 15th-century Mémoires of the French councellor of state, Philippe de Commynes, or George Cavendish's 16th-century life of Thomas Cardinal Wolsey--have often been treated as historical material rather than as literary works in their own right. Some entries in ancient Chinese chronicles included biographical sketches; imbedded in the Roman historian Tacitus' Annals is the most famous biography of the emperor Tiberius; conversely, Sir Winston Churchill's magnificent life of his ancestor John Churchill, first duke of Marlborough, can be read as a history (written from a special point of view) of Britain and much of Europe during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14). Yet there is general recognition today that history and biography are
quite distinct forms of literature. History usually deals in generalizations about a period of time (for example, the
Renaissance), about a group of people in time (the English colonies in North America), about an institution (monasticism during the Middle Ages). Biography focusses upon a single human being and deals in the particulars of his life. (See historiography, Churchill, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer, "Marlborough: His Life and Times".)

Both biography and history, however, are concerned with the past, and it is in the hunting down, evaluating, and selection of sources that they are akin. In this sense biography can be regarded as a craft rather than an art: techniques of research and general rules for testing evidence can be learned by anyone and thus need involve
comparatively little of that personal commitment associated with art.

A biographer in pursuit of an individual long dead is usually hampered by a lack of sources: it is often impossible to check or verify what written evidence there is; there are no witnesses to cross-examine. No method has yet been developed by which to overcome such problems. Each life, however, presents its own opportunities as well as specific difficulties to the biographer: the ingenuity with which he handles gaps in the record--by providing information, for example, about the age that casts light upon the subject--has much to do with the quality of his resulting work.  James Boswell knew comparatively little about Dr. Johnson's earlier
years; it is one of the greatnesses of his Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. (1791) that he succeeded, without inventing matter or deceiving the reader, in giving the sense of a life progressively unfolding. Another masterpiece of reconstruction in the face of little evidence is A.J.A. Symons' biography of the English author and eccentric Frederick William Rolfe, The Quest for Corvo (1934). A further difficulty is the unreliability of most collections of papers, letters, and other memorabilia edited before the 20th century. Not only did editors feel free to omit and transpose materials, but sometimes the authors of documents revised their personal writings for the benefit of posterity, often falsifying the record and presenting their biographers with a difficult situation when the originals were no longer extant. (See Symons, A. J. A..)

The biographer writing the life of a person recently dead is often faced with the opposite problem: an abundance of living witnesses and a plethora of materials, which include the subject's papers and letters, sometimes reports of telephone conversations and conferences transcribed from tape, as well as the record of
interviews granted the biographer by his subject's friends and associates. Frank Friedel, for example, in creating a biography of the United States president Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), has had to wrestle with something like 40 tons of paper. But finally, when writing the life of any man, whether long or recently dead, the
biographer's chief responsibility is vigorously to test the authenticity of his materials by whatever rules and techniques are open to him.

To cite this page:
"biography" Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
<http://search.eb.com/bol/topic?eu=119382&sctn=1>
[Accessed December 7 1999].

C

Carpe Diem ("seize the day") the enjoyment of the pleasures of the moment without concern for the future. Originally this term was specifically aimed at the kind of poetry used by male speakers to convince young ladies to share their physical charms right away and not wait for marriage and such.  Over time it came to mean to go for all the gusto of life or as it is described in Dead Poets Society using Theroue's line from Walden Pond to suck the marrow out of life.  So many Christians feel comfortable with the call to as Christ said "to live life and live it more abundantly" (John 10:10).  But the fact remains for Christian readers there are some real moral ambiguities in this type of poetry especially in its earlier manifestations such as Shakespeare's "Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May" or  Marvell's "To My Coy Mistress."

Catharsis: Latin from the Greek Katharsis meaning purification or cleansing , is a sudden emotional breakdown or climax that constitutes overwhelming feelings of great pity, sorrow, laughter, or any extreme change in emotion that results in the renewal, restoration and revitalization for living.  Catharsis is a form of emotional cleansing first defined by the Greek philosopher Aristotle in his Poetics. It refers to the sensation, or literary effect, that would ideally overcome an audience upon finishing watching a tragedy. The fact that there existed those who could suffer a worse fate than them was to them a relief, and at the end of the play, they felt ekstasis (literally, astonishment), from which the modern word exstasis and ecstasy are derived. While seemingly related to schadenfreude, it is not, however, in the sense that the audience is not intentionally led to feel happy in light of others' misfortunes; in an invariant sense, their spirits are refreshed through having greater appreciation for life. "Catharsis" Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia  5 June 2006. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharsis> 6 June 2006

Cavalier Poets: any of a group of English gentlemen poets, called Cavaliers because of their loyalty to Charles I (1625–49) during the English Civil Wars, as opposed to Roundheads, who supported Parliament. They were also cavaliers in their style of life and counted the writing of polished and elegant lyrics as only one of their many accomplishments as soldiers, courtiers, gallants, and wits. The term embraces Richard Lovelace , Thomas Carew, Sir John Suckling, Edmund Waller, and Robert Herrick . Although Herrick, a clergyman, was detached from the court, his short, fluent, graceful lyrics on love and dalliance, and his carpe diem (“seize the day”) philosophy (“Gather ye rose-buds while ye may”) are typical of the Cavalier style. Besides writing love lyrics addressed to mistresses with fanciful names like Anthea, Althea, Lucasta, or Amarantha, the Cavaliers sometimes wrote of war, honour, and their duty to the king. Sometimes they deftly combined all these themes as in Richard Lovelace's well-known poem, “To Lucasta, Going to the Wars,” which ends,

I could not love thee, dear, so much
Loved I not honour more. 

Chorus--a company of singers and dancers in Athenian drama participating in or commenting on the action; also : a similar company in later plays.  The ritualistic dancing and singing of the chorus was the center of the early Dionysian festivals until about 534 B.C., while Greek tragedy was in its infancy.  As the role of the actors in tragedy increased, the role of the chorus diminished in importance, and its size decreased from fifty members to fifteen; however, the chorus continued to play a vital part in Greek tragedy.

The chorus had two main functions: First, the chorus sang and danced during the interludes between the dialogues.  Second, the chorus carried out many dramatic functions in the tragedies.  One of its most important roles was that of the "ideal spectator."

In this role, the chorus embodied the moral ideas of society and often admonished the characters against breaking these moral laws.  In some tragedies, the chorus played a main role.  In addition, the chorus performed a very technical functions which aided the movement of the story.  For instance, the chorus often announced the entrances and exits of characters, or foreshadowed events in the action.  Another technical role it played was to recount or interpret history or past events for the purpose of clarification of the plot.

Courtly Love  French AMOUR COURTOIS, in the later Middle Ages, a highly conventionalized code that prescribed the behaviour of ladies and their lovers. Amour courtois also provided the theme of an extensive courtly medieval literature that began with the troubadour poetry of Aquitaine and Provence in southern France toward the end of the 11th century. It constituted a revolution in thought and feeling, the effects of which are still apparent in Western culture. (click here for more)
 

Culture --  the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon man's capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations b : the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group c : the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes a company or corporation.

Cultural Text -- A cultural text is one in which the knowledge of the text is so widely known that members of a culture can recognize and refer to it without ever having actually read the text.  This goes beyond being popular.  An understanding of the text must permeate the entire culture.  Some examples might be A Christmas Carol, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or the figure of Sherlock Holmes.  Star Wars may have reached this saturation point in our culture when references to Darth Vader can be made and even people who have never seen the film (and have no intention of doing so) still recognize him.

D

Deus ex machina -- A power, event, person, or thing that comes in the nick of time to solve a difficulty; providential interposition, esp. in a novel or play.

Drama: 1 : a composition in verse or prose intended to portray life or character or to tell a story usually involving conflicts and emotions through action and dialogue and typically designed for theatrical performance : PLAY -- compare CLOSET DRAMA

Dramatic Monologue  a poem written in the form of a speech of an individual character; it compresses into a single vivid scene a narrative sense of the speaker's history and psychological insight into his character.

E

Epic Poetry: The nature of the literary form known as epic can be summed up by the title of James Agee's book ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men'. Most epics are legendary tales about the glorious deeds of a nation's past heroes.  Epic poetry has been used by peoples in all parts of the world to transmit their traditions from one generation to another. The poems may deal with such topics as heroic legends, histories, religious tales, animal stories, or moral theories. The most ancient of these stories were passed from one generation to the next by storytellers long before they were written. The oral epic tradition continued for as long as the people of a nation were largely unable to read and write. Thus an epic poem not only tells a story, it is usually a story of considerable length, and it is a story which tells the listeners what the nature of the cosmos is as well as what part they play in it

F

Formulaic: (1) when describing fiction in general the term describes works which follow a customary or set form or method.  Viewers or readers come to a work with certain expectations.  The term is often used in a critical or pejorative sense in that such rules might allow for little room for originality.  Thus, the basic problem with Harlequin Romances is that works published under that label must have specific qualities.  For example the publishers require that the heroine "drives the story — the reader lives vicariously through her. This doesn't mean there can't be a hero point-of-view — this is important to give the hero depth and credibility" (Click Here to see more details). However, that being said, Shakespeare, Dickens, and enumerable other great authors have written works following the formulaic expectation of a subgenera and have yet still created masterworks.  Thus I have never assumed that a Harlequin author to be inferior, neither do I make such an assumption about authors of video game story lines.  I haven't seen greatness here yet, but I haven't been looking either.

(2) When used with Epic poetry "formulaic" refers to the way oral poets [like Homer] rely heavily on the use not only of stock epithets and repeated verses or groups of verses--which can also be found to a much lesser extent in a literate imitator like Virgil--but also on a multitude of fixed phrases that are employed time and time again to express a similar idea in a similar part of the verse.

The clearest and simplest instance is the so-called noun-epithet formulas. These constitute a veritable system, in which every major god or hero possesses a variety of epithets from which the choice is made solely according to how much of the verse, and which part of it, the singer desires to use up. Odysseus is called divine Odysseus, many-counseled Odysseus, or much-enduring divine Odysseus simply in accordance with the amount of material to be fitted into the remainder of the hexameter (six-foot) verse. A ship is described as black, hollow, or symmetrical not to distinguish this particular ship from others but solely in relation to the qualities and demands of the rhythmical context. The whole noun-epithet system is both extensive and economical--it covers a great variety of subjects with very little exact reduplication or unnecessary overlap. It would seem that so refined and complex a system could could not be the invention of a single poet but must have been gradually evolved in a long-standing tradition that needed both the extension and the economy for functional reasons--that depended on these fixed phrase units because of its oral nature, in which memory, practice, and a kind of improvising replace the deliberate, self-correcting, word-by-word progress of the pen-and-paper composer.

G

H Hamartia: (from Greek hamartanein, "to err"), also called TRAGIC FLAW, inherent defect or shortcoming in the hero of a tragedy, who is in other respects a superior being favoured by fortune.  Aristotle introduced the term casually in the Poetics in describing the tragic hero as a man of noble rank and nature whose misfortune is not brought about by villainy but by some "error of judgment" (hamartia). This imperfection later came to be interpreted as a moral flaw, such as
Othello's jealousy or Hamlet's irresolution, although most great tragedies defy such a simple interpretation.

Hubris:  The term is also spelled HYBRIS, and in classical Greek ethical and religious thought, it describes overweening presumption suggesting impious disregard of the limits governing human action in an orderly universe. It is the sin to which the great and gifted are most susceptible, and in Greek tragedy it is usually the hero's tragic flaw. Perhaps the simplest example occurs in the Persians of Aeschylus, in which the arrogance of Xerxes in building a bridge of ships across the Hellespont flaunts nature by turning sea into land. He is punished by the crushing defeat of the Persians at Salamis. In most other Greek tragedies the hero's hubris is more subtle, and sometimes he appears wholly blameless.

I

Iambic: metrical foot consisting of one short syllable (as in classical verse) or one unstressed syllable (as in English verse) followed by one long or stressed syllable, as in the word be|cause´ . Considered by the ancient Greeks to approximate the natural rhythm of speech, iambic metres were used extensively for dramatic dialogue, invective, satire, and fables. Also suited to the cadence of the English language, iambic rhythms, especially iambic tetrameter and pentameter, are the preeminent metres of English verse. Substitution of other types of feet to add variety is common in basically iambic verse. An example of iambic metre is the English ballad, composed of quatrains written in alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. For example:

Irony:  Roughly speaking, a discrepancy between the appearance of a situation, statement, or development and its real meaning. Among the many kinds of irony, verbal irony is probably the most common--it occurs when a person says one thing while meaning its opposite. In The Catcher in the Rye, for instance, Holden Caulfield's constant use of sarcasm leads to frequent verbal irony, as when he calls something he despises "great." Situational or circumstantial irony occurs when an action produces a result opposite the character's expectation for it, as in Don Quixote, when characters' attempts to cure the knight of his delusions repeatedly cause them to become embroiled in his fantasy situations. Dramatic irony occurs when an audience's or reader's knowledge of events exceeds that of a character's, allowing the audience or reader to recognize the folly of a character's actions. In Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, one of the most famous instances of dramatic irony in all of literature occurs when Oedipus begins a quest to find the murderer of Laius, not knowing that he himself killed Laius.

J

L

Lyric poetry

M

Such novels as Evelyn Waugh's Handful of Dust (1934) depend on the exact notation of the manners of a closed society, and personal tragedies are a mere temporary disturbance of collective order. Even Waugh's trilogy Sword of Honour is as much concerned with the minutiae of surface behaviour in an army, a very closed society, as with the causes for which that army fights. H.H. Munro ("Saki"), in The Unbearable Bassington (1912), an exquisite novel of manners, says  more of the nature of Edwardian society than many a more earnest work.

It is conceivable that one of the novelist's duties to posterity is to inform it of the surface quality of the society that produced him; the great psychological profundities are eternal, manners are ephemeral and have to be caught. Finally, the novel of manners may be taken as an artistic symbol of a social order that feels itself to be secure.

"manners, novel of" Britannica Online.
<http://www.eb.com:180/cgi-bin/g?DocF=micro/372/85.html>

Marginalized: In cultural studies this term has come to refer to any individual whose culture, defined by ethnic, racial or sexual preference,  has been forced to exist on the fringes of the mainstream culture (rightfully so or not is immaterial).  Being "outsiders" such individuals often have a unique perspectives on the assumptions in culture most of us live with and define as "normal."

Metaphor: Function: noun Etymology: Middle French or Latin; Middle French metaphore, from Latin metaphora, from Greek, from metapherein to transfer, from meta- + pherein to bear -- more at BEAR Date: 1533  1 : a figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them (as in drowning in money); broadly : figurative language -- compare SIMILE

Metaphysical Poets: any of the poets in 17th-century England who inclined to the personal and intellectual complexity and concentration that is displayed in the poetry of John Donne , the chief of the Metaphysicals. Others include George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, Andrew Marvell, John Cleveland, and Abraham Cowley.

Their work is a blend of emotion and intellectual ingenuity, characterized by conceit (q.v.) or “wit”—that is, by the sometimes violent yoking together of apparently unconnected ideas and things so that the reader is startled out of his complacency and forced to think through the argument of the poem. Metaphysical poetry is less concerned with expressing feeling than with analyzing it, with the poet exploring the recesses of his consciousness. The boldness of the literary devices used—especially obliquity, irony, and paradox—are always reinforced by a dramatic directness of language, whose rhythm is derived from that of living speech.

Esteem for Metaphysical poetry never stood higher than in the 1930s and '40s, largely because of T.S. Eliot's influential essay “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921). In this essay Eliot pointed out that the works of these men embody a fusion of thought and feeling that later poets were unable to achieve because of a “dissociation of sensibility,” which resulted in works that were either intellectual or emotional but not both at once. In their own time, however, the epithet “metaphysical” was used pejoratively: in 1630 the Scottish poet William Drummond of Hawthornden objected to those of his contemporaries who attempted to “abstract poetry to metaphysical ideas and scholastic quiddities.” At the end of the century, John Dryden censured Donne for affecting “the metaphysics” and for perplexing “the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy when he should engage their hearts . . . with the softnesses of love.” Samuel Johnson, in referring to the learning that their poetry displays, also dubbed them “the metaphysical poets,” and the term has continued in use ever since. For an attempt to establish the justice of this term in relation to their work, Sir Herbert Grierson's Metaphysical Poems and Lyrics of the 17th Century (1921) and James Smith's essay “On Metaphysical Poetry” in Determinations (ed. F.R. Leavis, 1934) are of interest. 

Mimetic:  mi·met·ic adjective Pronunciation: -'me-tik   Etymology: Late Latin mimeticus, from Greek mimEtikos, from mimeisthai to imitate, from mimos mime1 : IMITATIVE  2 : relating to, characterized by, or exhibiting mimicry <mimetic coloring of a butterfly>a : (marked by imitation <acting is an imitative art.).  For our concerns mimetic refers to how much does art copy the world around it in contrast to how much of art is purely created.

Miracle Play: A miracle play presents a real or fictitious account of the life, miracles, or martyrdom of a saint. The genre evolved from liturgical offices developed during the 10th and 11th centuries to enhance calendar festivals. By the 13th century they had become vernacularized and filled with unecclesiastical elements. They had been divorced from church services and were performed at public festivals. Almost all surviving miracle plays concern either the Virgin Mary or St. Nicholas , the 4th-century bishop of Myra in Asia Minor. It is one of three principal kinds of vernacular drama of the European Middle Ages (along with the mystery play and the morality play).

Misogyny: a hatred of women

- miso·gy·nic /"mi-s&-'ji-nik, -'gI-/ adjective
- mi·sog·y·nist /m&-'sä-j&-nist/ noun or adjective
- mi·sog·y·nis·tic /m&-"sä-j&-'nis-tik/ adjective

Mock Heroic: also called mock-epic form of satire that adapts the elevated heroic style of the classical epic poem to a trivial subject. The tradition, which originated in classical times with an anonymous burlesque of Homer, the Batrachomyomachia (Battle of the Frogs and the Mice), was honed to a fine art in the late 17th- and early 18th-century Neoclassical period. A double-edged satirical weapon, the mock-epic was sometimes used by the “moderns” of this period to ridicule contemporary “ancients” (classicists). More often it was used by “ancients” to point up the unheroic character of the modern age by subjecting thinly disguised contemporary events to a heroic treatment. The classic example of this is Nicolas Boileau 's Le Lutrin (1674–83; “The Lectern”), which begins with a quarrel between two ecclesiastical dignitaries about where to place a lectern in a chapel and ends with a battle in a bookstore in which champions of either side hurl their favourite “ancient” or “modern” authors at each other. Jonathan Swift's “Battle of the Books” (1704) is a variation of this theme in mock-heroic prose. The outstanding English mock-epic is Alexander Pope 's brilliant tour de force The Rape of the Lock (1712–14), which concerns a society beau's theft of a lock of hair from a society belle; Pope treated the incident as if it were comparable to events that sparked the Trojan War.

Morality Play: also called Morality, an allegorical drama popular in Europe especially during the 15th and 16th centuries, in which the characters personify moral qualities (such as charity or vice) or abstractions (as death or youth) and in which moral lessons are taught. Together with the mystery play and the miracle play, the morality play is one of the three main types of vernacular drama produced during the Middle Ages.

Motifs: Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text's major themes.

Motiveless Malignancy:  A term coined by S.T. Coleridge to describe the condition of someone who, for no apparent reason, commits evil.   Coleridge came up with the phrase to describe the unclear reasons for Iago’s hatred for Othello.  However, it has also been applied to Coleridge’s own character of the Albatross killing sailor from “Rime of the Ancient Mariner."  

Mystery Play: usually representing biblical subjects, developed from plays presented in Latin by churchmen on church premises and depicted such subjects as the Creation, Adam and Eve, the murder of Abel, and the Last Judgment. During the 13th century, various guilds began producing the plays in the vernacular at sites removed from the churches. It's called a mystery play because the events portrayed illustrate the mystery of God's ongoing grace to lost humankind. One of three principal kinds of vernacular drama of the European Middle Ages (along with the miracle play and the morality play).

N

Narrative poetry, like long fiction, tells a story. Best known among narrative works are the Greek epics—the ‘Iliad' and the ‘Odyssey'. But this form includes others which are distinct from the Epic.  The Bible's Book of Job is also a narrative. The anonymous ‘Song of Roland' is a narrative from the Middle Ages. Later examples of the type are Sir Walter Scott's ‘The Lady of the Lake', Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's ‘The Courtship of Miles Standish', and Benét's ‘John Brown's Body'. Shorter narrative poems include Robert Browning's ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin' and Robert Frost's ‘The Death of the Hired Man'.  For Prof. Rearick's students there are also "The Lady of Shalott" Tennyson as well as both "The Wife of Bath's Tale" and The Knight's Tale by Chaucer.

In part, Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society.  In a broader study this is the ability for an artist to create a work which seems to have little of his or her  agenda in it.  I use this term especially when asking the question can any artist truly cross the gender barrier and create a character alien to his or her own sexual orientation?

Novel: an invented prose narrative of considerable length and a certain complexity that deals imaginatively with human experience usually through a connected sequence of events involving a group of persons in a specific setting. Within its broad framework, the genre of the novel has encompassed an extensive range of types and styles: picaresque, epistolary, Gothic, romantic, realist, historical--to name only some of the more important ones.

 Although forerunners of the genre are to be found in a number of places, including classical Rome, 11th-century Japan, and Elizabethan England,  the European novel is usually said to have begun with the Don Quixote of Miguel de Cervantes (part I, 1605). In its juxtaposition of impossible idealism and earthy practicality in the figures of the knight and his squire, this work adumbrates what was to become one of the central concerns of the Western novel, just as its playful exploitation of the authorial  persona anticipates many of the technical questions raised by later novelists.

Despite some interesting works in 17th-century France, it was in England that the genre first took permanent root. Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding were all writing in the first half of the 18th century, and their works did much to establish the novel as the most popular literary form in England. This popularity soon became a general phenomenon, leading in the 19th century to an extraordinary surge of fiction writing, particularly in Britain, France, Russia, and the United States.

A partial explanation of the novel's popularity is to be found in the scope it gave writers to explore areas of human experience that had previously lain outside the province of literature. For the first time, the minutiae of daily life became a fit subject for the writer's attention. The heroes and heroines of this new genre were as likely to be servants as courtiers. Their lives did not have to display preeminent virtue or vice; there needed be nothing epic in their destinies. Inevitably, this shift in emphasis was helped or hindered by the social and historical context in any given country.

When all the exceptions have been counted, however, it remains the case that the mainstream of the European novel has based its appeal on the claim to provide a more faithful image of everyday reality than can be achieved by any other literary form. Even the extravagant fantasies of the Gothic novel or the modern novel of science fiction depend for their impact on the detailed rendering of surface reality. The history of the novel is in part a history of the changes in conventions established to achieve this verisimilitude. Perhaps because of the novel's realist bias, its  greatest period is usually held to be the mid- to late-19th century, a time when improved literacy rates had increased the size of the potential audience and the modern mass media had not yet arrived to diminish it.

Across this period and just before, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and George Eliot were writing in England; Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Émile Zola in France; Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky in Russia; and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville in the United States.

With the coming of the 20th century the novel began to change somewhat in character. The old certainty that experience could be adequately represented by the language and structures of the conventional novel was increasingly called into question. Writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Dorothy Richardson began to examine the ways in which reality eluded the grasp of literature. In trying to capture the complex and fragmentary quality of experience, some of these writers stretched the limits of the conventional novel to a point at which it became more and more remote from the expectations--and sometimes the comprehension or interest--of the average reader, a process that perhaps culminated in the mid-20th century in the so-called antinovel, or nouveau roman. These modernist experiments sometimes produced works of outstanding interest, but they also tended to widen the gap between the popular and the "literary" novel.
Copyright © 1994-1997 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc "novel" Britannica Online.  <http://www.eb.com:180/cgi-bin/g?DocF=micro/431/8.html>
[Accessed 04 February 1998].

Click Here to read Anthony Burgess' full analysis of the novel from "The Art of Literature: NARRATIVE FICTION: THE NOVEL" which originally came found at Britannica Online.  <http://www.eb.com:180/cgi-bin/g?DocF=macro/5003/81/137.html>

Novella: Characterized by brevity, self-contained plots that end on a note of irony, a literate and facile style, restraint of emotion, and objective rather than subjective presentation, these tales were a major stimulant to the development of the modern short story in Germany. The Novelle also survived as a unique form, although unity of mood and style often replaced the traditional unity of action; the importance of the frame was diminished, as was the necessity for maintaining absolute objectivity.

Examples of works considered to be novellas, rather than novels or short stories, are Leo Tolstoy's Smert Ivana Ilicha (The Death of Ivan Ilich), Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Zapiski iz podpolya (Notes from the Underground), Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Dickens' A Christmas Carol and Henry James's “The Aspern Papers.” Longer than a novel but too long to read in a single sitting as Hawthorne defined the short story.

O

P

Personification, a figure of speech in which human characteristics are attributed to an abstract quality, animal, or inanimate object. An example is "The Moon doth with delight / Look round her when the heavens are bare" (William Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," 1807). Another is "Death lays his icy hand on kings" (James Shirley, "The Glories of Our Blood and State," 1659). Personification has  been used in European poetry since Homer and is particularly common in  allegory; for example, the medieval morality play Everyman (c. 1500) and the Christian prose allegory Pilgrim's Progress (1678) by John Bunyan  contain characters such as Death, Fellowship, Knowledge, Giant Despair,  Sloth, Hypocrisy, and Piety. Personification became almost an automatic mannerism in 18th-century Neoclassical poetry, as exemplified by these lines from Thomas Gray's "An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard":
Encyclopedia Britanica On Line

Poetry. Poetry is the other way of using language. Perhaps in some hypothetical beginning of things it was the only way of using language or simply was language tout court, prose being the derivative and younger rival. Both poetry and language are fashionably thought to have belonged to ritual in early agricultural societies; and poetry in particular, it has been claimed, arose at first in the form of magical spells recited to ensure a good harvest.  Whatever the truth of this hypothesis, it blurs a useful distinction: by the time there begins to be a separate class of objects called poems, recognizable as such, these objects are no longer much regarded for their possible yam-growing properties, and such magic as they may be thought capable of has retired to do its business upon the human spirit and not directly upon the natural world outside.

Formally, poetry is recognizable by its greater dependence on at least one more parameter, the line, than appears in prose composition. This changes its appearance on the page; and it seems clear that people take their cue from this changed appearance, reading poetry aloud in a very different voice from their habitual voice, possibly because, as Ben Jonson said, poetry "speaketh somewhat above a mortal mouth." If, as a test of this description, people are shown poems printed as prose, it most often turns out that they will read the result as prose simply because it looks that way; which is to say that they are no longer guided in their reading by the balance and shift of the line in relation to the breath as well as the syntax. (See prosody.)

That is a minimal definition but perhaps not altogether uninformative. It may be all that ought to be attempted in the way of a definition: Poetry is the way it is because it looks that way, and it looks that way because it sounds that way and vice versa.

 

Prescriptive, pre.scrip.tive adj (1748) 1: serving to prescribe <~ rules of usage> 2: acquired by, founded on, or determined by prescription or by long-standing custom -- pre.scrip.tive.ly adv

Protagonist--Properly used to refer to the character in a story who initiates the main action. The protagonist in a story is directly opposed to the antagonist, who works against the action initiated by the protagonist. In practical usage, the term "protagonist" is often used simply to refer to the main character or the hero of a story, and "antagonist" to refer to the villain. In Hamlet, for instance, Hamlet is often called the protagonist of the story, even though one of the themes of the story is Hamlet's inability to initiate action. The terms "protagonist" and "antagonist" have their origins in the days of ancient Greek drama, in which the protagonist was always the first actor in a chorus, and the antagonist the second actor; a part of each play would be devoted to their conflict.

Q

R

Such figures may be said to pertain either to the texture of the discourse, the local color or details, or to the structure, the shape of the total argument. Ancient rhetoricians made a  functional distinction between trope (like metaphor, a textural effect) and scheme (like allegory, a structural principle). To the former category belong such figures as metaphor, simile (a comparison announced by "like"  or "as"), personification (attributing human qualities to a non human being or object), irony (a discrepancy between a speaker's literal statement and his attitude or intent), hyperbole (overstatement or exaggeration) or understatement, and metonymy (substituting one word for another which it suggests or to which it is in some way related--as part to whole, sometimes  known as synecdoche). 

To the latter category belonged such figures as allegory, parallelism (constructing sentences or phrases that resemble one another syntactically), antithesis (combining opposites into one  statement--"To be or not to be, that is the question"), congeries (an accumulation of statements or phrases that say essentially the same thing),  apostrophe (a turning from one's immediate audience to address another, who may be present only in the imagination), enthymeme (a loosely syllogistic form of reasoning in which the speaker assumes that any  missing premises will be supplied by the audience), interrogatio (the "rhetorical" question, which is posed for argumentative effect and requires no answer), and gradatio (a progressive advance from one statement to another until a climax is achieved). However, a certain slippage in the categories trope and scheme became inevitable, not simply because rhetoricians were inconsistent in their use of terms but because well-constructed discourse reflects a fusion of structure and texture. One is virtually indistinguishable from the other. 

Donne's compass comparison, for example, creates a texture that is not isolable from other effects in the poem; rather, it is consonant with a structural principle that makes the comparison both appropriate and coherent. Above all, a modern rhetorician would insist that the figures, like all elements of rhetoric, reflect and determine not only the conceptualizing processes of the speaker's mind but also an audience's potential response. For all these reasons figures of  speech are crucial means of examining the transactional nature of discourse. Encyclopedia Britanica On Line

Rhyme: also spelled rime the correspondence of two or more words with similar-sounding final syllables placed so as to echo one another. Rhyme is used by poets and occasionally by prose writers to produce sounds appealing to the reader's senses and to unify and establish a poem's stanzaic form. End rhyme (i.e., rhyme used at the end of a line to echo the end of another line) is most common, but internal, interior, or leonine rhyme is frequently used as an occasional embellishment in a poem—e.g., William Shakespeare's “Hark; hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings,” or as part of the regular rhyme scheme:

And the silken sad uncertain rustling of eachpurple curtain
Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrorsnever felt before
So that now, to still the beating of my heart,I stood repeating:
“Tis some visitor entreating entrance atmy chamber door.”

(Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven”)

There are three rhymes recognized by purists as “true rhymes”: masculine rhyme , in which the two words end with the same vowel–consonant combination (stand / land), feminine rhyme (sometimes called double rhyme), in which two syllables rhyme (profession / discretion), and trisyllabic rhyme, in which three syllables rhyme (patinate / latinate). The too-regular effect of masculine rhyme is sometimes softened by using trailing rhyme, or semirhyme, in which one of the two words trails an additional unstressed syllable behind it (trail / failure). Other types of rhyme include eye rhyme , in which syllables are identical in spelling but are pronounced differently (cough / slough), and pararhyme, first used systematically by the 20th-century poet Wilfred Owen, in which two syllables have different vowel sounds but identical penultimate and final consonantal groupings (grand / grind). Feminine pararhyme has two forms, one in which both vowel sounds differ, and one in which only one does (ran in / run on; blindness / blandness). Weakened, or unaccented, rhyme occurs when the relevant syllable of the rhyming word is unstressed (bend / frightened). Because of the way in which lack of stress affects the sound, a rhyme of this kind may often be regarded as consonance , which occurs when the two words are similar only in having identical final consonants (best / least).

Another form of near rhyme is assonance , in which only the vowel sounds are identical (grow / home). Assonance was regularly used in French poetry until the 13th century, when end rhyme overtook it in importance. It continues to be significant in the poetic technique of Romance languages but performs only a subsidiary function in English verse.

Many traditional poetic forms utilize set rhyme patterns—for example, the sonnet, villanelle, rondeau, ballade, chant royal, triolet, canzone, and sestina. Rhyme seems to have developed in Western poetry as a combination of earlier techniques of end consonance, end assonance, and alliteration. It is found only occasionally in classical Greek and Latin poetry but more frequently in medieval religious Latin verse and in songs, especially those of the Roman Catholic liturgy, from the 4th century. Although it has been periodically opposed by devotees of classical verse, it has never fallen into complete disuse. Shakespeare interspersed rhymed couplets into the blank verse of his dramas; Milton disapproved of rhyme, but Samuel Johnson favoured it. In the 20th century, although many advocates of free verse ignored rhyme, other poets continued to introduce new and complicated rhyme schemes.

"Rhyme." Encyclopædia Britannica 2003  Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
21 Jan, 2003  <http://search.eb.com/eb/article?eu=65094>.

Romance-- ro.mance n [ME romauns, fr. OF romans French, something written in French, fr. L romanice in the Roman manner, fr. romanicus Roman, fr. Romanus] (14c)a prose narrative treating imaginary characters involved in events remote in time or place and usu. heroic, adventurous, or  mysterious.  A literary form, usually characterized by its treatment of chivalry, that came into being in France in the mid-12th century . It had antecedents in many prose works from classical antiquity (the so-called Greek romances), but as a distinctive genre it was developed in the context of the aristocratic courts   Both Chaucer's "The Wife of Bath's Tale" and "The Knight's Tale" are examples of English romances.

S

Click Here read a full analysis of the the short story which originally came found at Britannica Online

Simile: Middle English, from Latin, comparison, from neuter of similis
Date: 14th century: a figure of speech comparing two unlike things that is often introduced by like or as (as in cheeks like roses) -- compare METAPHOR

Sonnet: a poem consisting of 14 lines (of 11 syllables in Italian, generally 12 in French, and 10 in English), with rhymes arranged according to one or other of certain definite schemes of which the Petrachan and the Elizabethan are the principle, viz.: (1) a b b a a b b a, followed by two or three other rhymes in the remaining sex lines with a pause in the thought after the octave (not always observed by English imitators of whom Milton and Wordsworth are prominent examples; (2) ababcdcdefefgg.  The sonnets of Shakespeare in the later form.

The sonnet was introduced to England by Wyatt and developed by Surrey, Shakespeare, Sidney, Daniel, Spencer and other poets of the Golden period, most of which are amatory in nature and contain a certain narrative development: later some sequences on the theme of love include those of D.G, Rossetti and E.B, Browning.  Milton, Donne, Keats and Yeats have all used the form to great and varied effect, and its continues to flourish in the 20th Century.  (The Oxford Companion to English Literature).

Spontaneous Overflow of Emotions Recollected in Tranquility: This is Wordworth's famous definition of lyrical poetry.  His and Coleridge's Preface to "Lyrical Ballads" is considered a central work of Romantic literary theory. In it, Wordsworth discusses what he sees as the elements of a new type of poetry, one based on the "real language of men" and which avoids the poetic diction of much eighteenth-century poetry. Here, Wordsworth also gives his famous definition of poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from emotions recollected in tranquility." "William Wordsworth"  Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia  5 June 2006. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wordsworth> 6 June 2006

Sub-genre:  Since a genre is defined as "category of artistic, musical, or literary composition characterized by a particular style, form, or content," the subgenre is a category of any of the above fields of art. Often these subcategories are less formally recognized but are still useful in "compartmentalizing" information.  If a novel is a genre within literature, some sub-genres would be "horror", "mystery," "western," "science fiction," or "romance,"  Here is an example of how the Encyclopedia Britanica uses the term:

This flowering of realist fiction was accompanied, perhaps
inevitably, by a revival of its opposite, the romance. The 1860s
produced a new sub-genre, the sensation novel, seen at its best in
the work of Wilkie Collins. Gothic novels and romances by
Sheridan Le Fanu, Robert Louis Stevenson, William Morris, and
Oscar Wilde; utopian fiction by Morris and Samuel Butler; and the
early science fiction of H.G. Wells make it possible to speak of a
full-scale romance revival. (Emphasis Mine)

Stanza: a division of a poem consisting of two or more lines arranged together as a unit. More specifically, a stanza usually is a group of lines arranged together in a recurring pattern of metrical lengths and a sequence of rhymes.

The structure of a stanza (also called a strophe or stave) is determined by the number of lines, the dominant metre, and the rhyme scheme. Thus, a stanza of four lines of iambic pentameter, rhyming abab, could be described as a quatrain.

Some of the most common stanzaic forms are designated by the number of lines in each unit—e.g., tercet or terza rima (three lines) and ottava rima (eight lines). Other forms are named for their inventors or best-known practitioners or for the work in which they first were heavily used—e.g., the Spenserian stanza, named for Edmund Spenser, or the In Memoriam stanza, popularized by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in the poem by that title. The term strophe is often used interchangeably with stanza, although strophe is sometimes used specifically to refer to a unit of a poem that does not have a regular metre and rhyme pattern or to a unit of a Pindaric ode.

Stock Character: A stock character is a fictional character that relies heavily on cultural types or stereotypes for its personality, manner of speech, and other characteristics. Stock characters are instantly recognizable to members of a given culture. Because of this, a frequent device of both comedy and parody is to wildly exaggerate the expected mannerisms of stock characters.  In our Shakespeare studies the Shrew and the Pantaloon are two especially important ones. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_character> 26 March 2008  For more contemporary examples see Wikipedia's lists of stock characters.

Symbols: Symbols in literature are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

T

Themes:  Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

Tragedy: A branch of drama that treats in a serious and dignified style the sorrowful or terrible events encountered or caused by a heroic individual. By extension the term may be applied to other literary works, such as the novel. . .The term primarily "refers to a work of art that probes with high seriousness questions concerning the role of man in the universe." 

U

V

Aristotle in his Poetics insisted that literature should reflect nature--that even highly idealized characters should possess recognizable human qualities--and that what was probable took precedence over what was merely possible.

Following Aristotle, the 16th-century Italian critic Lodovico Castelvetro pointed out that the non-dramatic poet had only words with which to imitate words and things but the dramatic poet could use words to imitate words, things to imitate things, and people to imitate people. His influence on the French neoclassical dramatists of the 17th century is reflected in their preoccupation with vraisemblance and their contribution of many refinements in respect to appropriate diction and gesture to the theory.

The concept of verisimilitude was incorporated most fully by Realist writers of the late 19th century, whose works are dominated by well developed characters who very closely imitate real people in their speech, mannerisms, dress, and material possessions.

These definitions were found on the Encyclopedia Britannica On-Line

W

X

Y

Z

• Aestheticism
• Allegory
• Alliteration
• Antagonist
• Antifeminist literature
• Ballad
• Ballad Metre
• Ballad Stanza
• Bildungsonroman
• Canon
• Carpe Diem
• Catharsis 
• Cavalier Poets
• Courtly Love
• Culture
• Cultural Text
• Descriptive
• Deus ex machina
• Drama
• Dramatic Monologue
• Epic Poetry
• Fabliau
• Genre
• Hamartia
• Hubris
• Iambic
• Irony
• Lyric poetry
• Manners, the novel of
• Marginalized
• Metaphor
• Metaphysical Poets
• Mimetic
• Misogyny
• Miracle Play
• Mock Epic
• Mock Heroic
• Morality Play
• Motifs
• Motiveless Malignancy
• Mystery Play
• Narrative poetry
• Negative capability
• Novel
• Novella
• Patriarchy
• Personification
• Prescriptive
• Protagonist
• Poetry
• Rhetoric
• Rhyme
• Romance
• Short Story
• Simile
• Sonnet
• Spontaneous Overflow of Emotions Recollected in Tranquility
• Sub-genre
• Stanza
• Stock Character
• Symbols
• Themes
• Tragedy
• Verisimilitude
• Willing Suspension Disbelief

Last Updated

Sept. 5, 2005

Return to Dr. Rearick's Reading Corner

Return to Dr. Rearick's Office