Glossary Flashcards
Alliteration.
An example of the patterning of sound in poetry, when words that appear in close proximity to one another begin with the same sound or letter.
E.g. Othello: Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven (1.3.141) - repeats ‘r’ & ‘h’ sounds.
Allegory.
A narrative that has a sustained parallel meaning.
An extended metaphor in the form of a story.
E.g. John Bunyan’s ‘The Holy War’ narrates story of El-Shaddai & Diabolus, simultaneously pointing to several parallel narratives like the stories of God & the Devil, & Cromwell & Charles I.
Antithesis.
Opposed/contrasting ideas juxtaposed in quick succession.
E.g. Pope’s ‘An Essay on Man’: All partial evil, universal good.
Plural: antitheses.
Aside.
Dramatic device involving a character onstage expressing their thoughts to the audience but not to any other characters present onstage, to whom the speech is supposedly inaudible.
Blank verse.
Unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter.
Thought to be verse form most closely resembling rhythms of spoken English.
Became standard metre for Renaissance verse drama.
Characterisation
Technique used by a writer to create a character in a dramatic/narrative work.
Dumb show
Part of a play performed without words, in pantomime.
Chorus
In ancient Greek tragedies this was a collection of people commenting on the action & characters.
Often represented traditional moral & social values.
Context
Derives from Latin for ‘connection’.
Often been used to refer to relationship between different parts of piece of writing/speech.
Passage from literary text can be studied ‘in its context’ by considering how its meaning is determined by passages coming immediately before & after it.
Now used more broadly, denoting cultural/political/social circumstances/conditions in which literary text was written & how this affects meaning.
Couplet
Pair of rhymed lines.
E.g. Iago: I have’t! It is engendered: Hell and Night / Must bring this monstrous birth to the world’s light (1.3.392-3).
Early modern dramatists were fond of using a couplet to bring a scene to a close.
Denouement
French for ‘unknotting’.
General term for final resolution of a play, novel or other narrative.
Discourse.
Referring to forms of expression & vocabulary associated with particular area of knowledge.
E.g. ‘Legal discourse’ describing modes of expression & vocabulary associated with the law.
Particular words used in one discourse might assume quite different meanings when used in another discourse.
Dramatic irony
When audience/reader is in possession of knowledge of which a character is ignorant.
Exposition
Opening section of a play when characters are introduced & essential information imparted to the audience.
Figurative language
Language used in non-literal way with view to achieving particular effect.
Most well-known examples of this are metaphor & similie.
First-person narrator
First-person narrative has ‘I’/’We’ as originator of narrative.
‘I’ of narrative may correspond with historical figure of the author, e.g. William Bligh, or may be fictional invention of author, e.g. Robinson Crusoe.
Useful to think of first-person narrator as a character in the story, who happens to be telling the story.
Genre
From French for ‘kind’.
Category/type of art work with its own form & conventions.
E.g. In literary studies, tragedy is a distinct genre of drama characterised by (among other things) an unhappy ending.
Hyperbole
Extravagant overstatement.
Iambic pentameter
Line of ten syllables that fall into five measures of two syllables each, in which one unstressed syllable is followed by one stressed syllable.
Ideology
Set of assumptions, ideas, representations & narratives that together promote/support particular world view.
Close inspection may reveal contradictions & inconsistencies.
Function is to present its specific world view as ‘natural’/’universal truth’.
E.g. ‘Nationalist ideology’ presents promotion of national interest as self-evidently paramount.
Idiom
Manner of expression, especially one peculiar to a person or language.
Imagery
General term for images appearing in poem/literary text.
Tend to evoke strong sense impressions in readers & audiences, often visual & create vivid pictures in the mind.
Images can be figurative/literal.
Implied reader
Refers to hypothetical figure of person best equipped to respond fully to particular literary text.
Any text has an implied reader whose attitudes (cultural, moral, etc) enable it to achieve its full effect.
Irony
Generally speaking involves implying something other than what is explicitly said.
Requires readers to read between the lines & to perceive more than a fictional/dramatic character does.
Literary self-consciousness, author signals their freedom from the limits of a given work by puncturing its fictional illusion & exposing its processes of composition as a matter of authorial whim.
Metaphor
Type of figurative language establishing identity between two apparently dissimilar things.
E.g. Bosola asking Duchess of Malfi ‘and do these love drop off now?’ (3.2.232) identifies Duchess’s officers with small, parasitic insects.
Shelley’s ‘Lines written in the Vale of Chamouni’ establish implicit comparison between ‘the everlasting universe of things’ & a river & are therefore metaphorical.
Distinguished from similie as doesn’t use ‘like’/’as’.
Morality play
Kind of religious drama prevalent in Middle Ages seeking to dramatise the battle between good & evil within the individual.
Pastoral
Literary genre with history dating back to classical times.
Describes poems, plays or novels set in the countryside.
Assumption of rural innocence/purity providing moral reference point for corruption, greed & decadence if cities.
Persona
Latin for ‘mask’.
Used in literary studies to refer to the person/the ‘I’ who speaks in a poem, novel or other literary work.
Mask & voice adopted explicitly/implicitly by an author whether in their own person/some fictive narrator in order to tell a story, provide a description or make an argument.
Personifying
Attributing human qualities to inanimate object/abstract concept.
Kind of figurative language known as personification.
Plot
Can be defined in opposition to a story which is narrative of events told in the order in which they happened. Story turns into a plot when it is told in a particular way with a stress on cause & effect (why things happened), & with any number of emphases & distortions.
Need not be chronological.
Writers normally structure the plot in a way to arouse curiosity in the reader.
Point of view
Refers to perspective from which a story is told.
First-person narratives tend to be told from the point of view of the first-person narrator.
Third-person narratives may change the point of view from one person to another through third-person narrators though one point of view may be privileged.
Proleptic irony
Foreshadowing of an event that will take place later in a play/literary text.
Protagonist
Chief character in a literary work.
Pun
Play on words that sound identical/similar but have very different meanings, often with comic effect.
Reception history
How literary texts have been interpreted by different readers, audiences & critics over time.
Might include literary reworkings of original text.
Historical events written up in a particular way might have a ‘reception history’ as they are rewritten again and again at later historical moments.
Register
Particular type/style of language associated with a particular context.
Can have formal & informal registers/registers associated with different professions (legal, medical, academic).
Often employed by writers as a technique of characterisation.
Rhetoric
Language designed to persuade/impress.
Satire
A work that seeks to diminish its subject through ridicule.
Similie
Comparison of two apparently dissimilar things that uses either ‘like’ or ‘as’ to enforce the comparison.
Soliloquy
A speech, usually of substantial length, in which a character gives voice to their thoughts & emotions while alone onstage.
Early modern dramatists like Shakespeare & Webster employed the soliloquy often & to great dramatic effect.
Sonnet
14-line lyric poem in iambic pentameter with a complex rhyme scheme depending on whether it belongs to the Petrarchan/Shakespearean variant.
English sonnet conventionally adopts one of these variants & typically involves a ‘turn’ from the argument of the first 8 lines to the final 6 which serve as a conclusion.
Petrarchan scheme (abba abba cde cde) ends with a pair of tercets (sets of three lines).
Shakespearean scheme (abab cdcd efef) ends with clinching rhyming couplet, two lines that rhyme with each other.
Sub-plot
Subsidiary plot in a play/narrative that may comment on the main plot in a number of ways.
Third-person narrator
Contrast to first-person narrator (‘I’/’we’) who is character within the story.
Not a character in the story but tells it from outside/above the characters & events.
All characters are described in the third-person (she/he/they).
Many third-person narrators are endowed with omniscience & so know everything about the story they are telling.
Tradition
In literary studies a tradition denotes a well-established literary practice.
A mode/genre of writing with its own conventions which is part of a writer’s literary inheritance.
Tragedy
A play/other literary work dealing with matters considered to be serious & important & which culminates in a disastrous conclusion for the protagonist.
Verbal irony
Occurs when the actual meaning of a text is quite different from its ostensible meaning.
Allusion
Literary text invoking another older literary text/author.
Done by direct quotation (correct/incorrect & with/without attribution).
Looser form known as ‘echo’ where literary text consciously/unconsciously repeats rhythms/words from another text.
Apostrophe
Direct address made in the first person (‘I’) to someone/something which is characterised in the second person (‘you’/’thee’).
Wordsworth’s poem ‘To the Cuckoo’ begins with an apostrophe to the bird that extends through the entire first stanza.
De Quincey makes use of apostrophe for his grander effects as in address to opium in ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’.
Assonance
Example of poetic patterning of sound.
Occurs when words that appear in close proximity to one another contain the same/similar vowel sounds within them.
Author
Writer of the text.
Also carries greater cultural weight, especially from the Romantic period onwards.
Includes motion that authors have especially direct & privileged relation to an imaginative reality & that this gives them a potentially prophetic power & voice.
Implies increased sense of authorial celebrity & carries implication that author’s writings can be understood by appeal to their life & their life can be read through their writings.
Broadsheet ballad
Ballad printed on a single sheet of paper (a broadsheet) & sold on the streets.
Subjects varied from crimes & scandals to political agitation & hard-luck war stories.
Cadence
Comes from Latin ‘cadere’ (to fall).
Describes melodic pattern of a writer’s voice.
Denotes closing of poetic line with a fall in the rhythm, stress, or tone on the last word/syllable.
Diction
Style characterised by a writer’s vocabulary.
Specific choice of words used by a writer.
Also used to describe the type of language that characterises a particular literary work.
Dramatic monologue
Device often used in poetry in which imaginary speaker addresses an imaginary audience.
Popular in 19th century poetry & draws upon soliloquy in drama.
Elegy
Mode of poetry derived from the ancient Greek & revived by English poets in the Romantic period.
Elegiac writing is mournful, contemplative & reflective & considered to be most fitting mode of poetry in English poetry in Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (1751).
Empirical evidence
Evidence that can be measured/recorded accurately.
E.g. Distance, weight, time or frequency in standard units.
Can be derived from observation alone/controlled experiment but is capable of being verified by repetition.
Enjambement
Describing the way a sentence in a poem runs over into the next line/lines without pausing because the grammatical unit is not yet complete.
E.g. Wordsworth’s ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’: ‘The waves beside them danced, but they / Outdid the sparkling waves in glee.’
Epic poetry
Regarded as the ‘highest’ poetic form & was therefore most ambitious form to attempt.
Descended from Homeric epic (The Iliad) through to John Milton’s Paradise Lost, aims to describe the ways of the cosmos & place of man in it.
Epistolary novel
Story told in the form of letters between two or more people.
From ‘epistle’ (letter).
Popular in 18th century because it gave readers a sense of the events being part of real life rather than fiction.
Fantasy
Characterised by its interest in characters & events that have no part of real life rather than fiction.
Gothic
Defined by anxiety about the unknown.
Characterised by use of terror & suspense, often accompanied & highlighted by elements of the supernatural.
Specialises in evocation of nightmarish repetition & claustrophobic atmosphere.
Hybrid
Writing that shows characteristics of two or more literary traditions/forms.
E.g. Wuthering Heights demonstrates both gothic & realist qualities & so can be classified as a hybrid.
Information economy
Where increasing numbers of people were literate & had ready access to information & where information itself had an intrinsic economic value.
E.g. Huge increase in circulation of newspapers during the 19th century shows that news had a value & that large number of people were prepared to pay to access this valuable, up-to-date information.
Lexicon
Vocabulary used by a writer.
Lyric
Literally as song, a short poem devoted to expressing a single mood/moment of consciousness & which usually foregrounds the poet as a first-person speaker.
Typically deeply personal in mode & specific to time & place.
Prose can be described as lyrical when it adopts a strongly emotional & evocative way of describing seasons, landscape or weather, or more generally when it aspires to poetic condensation & intensity.
Metonym
Form of metaphor where comparison is made via substitution of a part for the whole.
Metre
General technical term for the underlying regular rhythm/beat that a poem may adopt.
A number of conventional metres, including the iambic (an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one) & the trochaic (a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one).
E.g. Wordsworth ‘I dipped my oars into the silent Lake’ (from The Prelude) is example of iambic pentameter; Shelley’s ‘Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!’ (From ‘To the Skylark’) is example of trochaic.
Iambic pentameter is a line ten syllables that fall into five iambic measures/’feet’.
Unrhymed iambic pentameter is also known as blank verse, basic metre of Milton’s Paradise Lost & Wordsworth’s The Prelude.
For Romantic writers it carried connotations of ‘freedom’ because it did not rhyme.
Ballad metre is trochaic feet with four stresses in each line.
Novella
A work of sustained prose fiction between 20,000 - 40,000 words in length. Longer than a short story but shorter than a novel.
Became clearly identified as an intermediate literary form between the short story & novel in a range of European literatures during the course of the 19th century.
Unlike full novel, novella will rarely have a complicated sub-plot or multiple narrators & numerous highly developed characters, instead it typically depends on developing a single character/point of view.
Unlike short stories, novellas are long enough to explore more than a single episode/point in time.
Ode
A lyric poem, usually addressing a particular person/thing.
Two forms: the Pindaric (written by Greek poet Pindar) & the Horatian (invented by Latin poet Horace).
Modern idea do not necessarily have a regular metre, fixed form or prescribed rhyme scheme although they often adopt the lofty style associated with the form.
Personification
Variety of metaphoric comparison in which human qualities are attributed to a non-human object.
E.g. De Quincey’s apostrophe in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater regarding Oxford.
Prolepsis
Opposite of analepsis.
Analepsis is a ‘flashback’, a moment when narrative leaps backwards in time.
Prolepsis is a ‘flashforward’, when narrative leaps forward in time before returning to original chronological sequence & pacing of events.
Realism
Literary term used to describe modes of writing concerned with characters & events that would be plausible in the real, natural world.
Works characterised by their author’s interest in representing human life & experience ‘as they really are’.
Often opposed to Romantic fiction which tends to represent human existence as we might like it to be.
Rhyme
Sound patterning in poetry.
May be ‘end-rhyme’ where the sound at the end of each line of the poem rhymes with another line.
May be ‘half-rhyme’ where the sound at the end of each line is similar but not exact.
Rhyme scheme may be marked up with first rhyme as ‘a’, second as ‘b’, etc.
Certain verse forms such as terza rima & the sonnet have prescribed rhyme schemes.
Two consecutive lines which rhyme are known as a rhyming couplet.
Romance
Literary term used to describe a mode of writing that engage with the desires & imaginative lives of its characters & readers.
Significant & insignificant detail
Small details in the narrative of detective fiction, such as objects/pieces of information, that might be clues in helping to solve the crime.
In detective fiction the two may appear to be interchangeable & will be scattered throughout narratives.
Ability to distinguish between the two is often a test of the reader’s attention & helps to keep interest in the narrative to the end.
Sublime
Key concept for 18th & 19th century thinking about the imagination, the divine & nature.
Experience of the sublime involves extreme landscapes/situations which elicit in the observer a state of awareness combining fear, admiration & awe.
Landscapes often described as themselves sublime, the apprehension of sublimity arises in the observer’s consciousness.
Syntax
Technical term for sentence structure.
