Glossary Of Literary Terms Flashcards
Alliteration
The use of a repeated consonant or sound, usually at the beginning of a series of words.
Example: “I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet/When far away an interrupted cry/Came over houses from another street…”
“Acquainted with the Night” by Robert Frost
Alexandrine
A line of iambic hexameter. The final line of a Spenserian stanza is an alexandrine.
Example: “A needless alexandrine ends the song/that like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.” The second line of this couplet from Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Criticism” is an alexandrine.
alexandrine – Another name for iambic hexameter. ETS is going to ask you to identify the final line of a Spenserian stanza as an alexandrine.
Allusion
A reference to someone or something, usually literary.
Example: “Call me Ishmael.” This opening line from Moby-Dick by Herman Melville alludes to the biblical figure of Ishmael.
Example: The title of William Faulkner’s novel, The Sound and the Fury is an allusion to Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “…it is a tale/told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/signifying nothing.”
Antagonist
The main character opposing the protagonist. Usually the villain.
Example: Iago, from Shakespeare’s Othello, is the quintessence of an antagonist.
Anthropomorphism
The assigning of human attributes, such as emotions or physical characteristics, to nonhumans, most often plants and animals. It differs from personification in that it is an intrinsic premise and an ongoing pattern applied to a nonhuman character throughout a literary work.
Example: The character of Aslan in C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia is a lion, but is addressed and behaves as a human.
Example: All the characters of George Orwell’s anti-Communist novel Animal Farm are anthropomorphic.
Example: The Greek god Zeus is supposed to be superhuman but is often given to human emotions and behaviors.
Apostrophe
A speech addressed to someone not present, or to an abstraction. “History! You will remember me…” Is an example of apostrophe. The innate grandiosity of apostrophe lends itself to parody.
Example: John Donne, in his poem “The Sun Rising,” directly addresses the sun itself: “Busy old fool, unruly sun,/Why dost thou thus,/Through windows, and through curtains call on us?”
apostrophe – is an exclamatory rhetorical figure of speech, when a speaker or writer breaks off and directs speech to an imaginary person or abstract quality or idea. In dramatic works and poetry, it is often introduced by the word “O” (not the exclamation “oh”).
~ To what green altar, O mysterious priest, / Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, / And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?” John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”.
~ “Roll on thou dark and deep blue ocean.” Lord Byron, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”.
Bildungsroman
A German term meaning a “novel of education.” It typically follows a young person over a period of years, from naïveté and inexperience through the first struggles with the harsher realities and hypocrisies of the adult world.
Example: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce and The Catcher in the Rye are both classic examples of coming-of-age novels.
Caesuras
The pause that breaks a line of Old English verse. Also, any particularly deep pause in a line of verse.
Example: “Hwaet! we Gar-Dena || on geardagum…” (“Lo! we Spear-Danes, in days of yore…”) -Beowulf
Example: “Arma virumque cano, || Troiae qui primes ab oris…” (“I sing of arms and the man, who first from the shores of Troy…”) -Aeneid
caesura – an audible pause that breaks up a line of verse. This may come in the form of any sort of punctuation which causes a pause in speech; such as a comma; semicolon; full stop etc. It is especially common and apparent in Old English verse.
Ex. Hwæt! we Gar-Dena || on geardagum
(“Lo! we Spear-Danes, in days of yore. . .”)
Decorum
One of the neoclassical principles of drama. Decorum is the relation of style to content in the speech of dramatic characters. For example, a character’s speech should be appropriate to his or her social station.
Example: In Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, the characters regularly exhibit decorum in the way they speak.
Doggerel
A derogatory term used to describe poorly written poetry of little or no literary value.
Example: Shakespeare is known to have purposely employed doggerel in dialogue between the Dromio twins in The Comedy of Errors for comedic effect.
Epithalamium
A work, especially a poem, written to celebrate a wedding.
Example: Edmund Spenser’s “Epithalamium”:
Song! made in lieu of many ornaments,
With which my love should duly have been dect,
Which cutting off through hasty accidents,
Ye would not stay your dew time to expect,
But promist both to recompens;
Be unto her a goodly ornament,
And for a short time an endlesse moniment.
epithalamium – refers to a form of poem that is written for the bride or to celebrate a wedding generally. See Spenser’s Epithalamium.
Euphuism
A word derived from Lyly’s Euphues (1580) to characterize writing that is self-consciously laden with elaborate figures of speech. This was a popular and influential mode of speech and writing in the late sixteenth century.
Example: The character of Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet demonstrates this literary device, exemplified by his most famous lines:
“To thine own self be true.”
“Neither a borrower nor a lender be.”
“Brevity is the soul of wit.”
Feminine Rhyme
Lines rhymed by their final two syllables. A pair of lines ending “running” and “gunning” would be an example of feminine rhyme. Properly, in a feminine rhyme (and not simply a “double rhyme”) the penultimate syllables are stressed and the final syllables unstressed.
Example: Sonnet 20 - “A woman’s face with nature’s own hand” by William Shakespeare:
A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women’s fashion…
feminine rhyme – a rhyme that matches two or more syllables at the end of the respective lines. Usually the final syllable is unaccented. Shakespeare’s Sonnet number 20, uniquely among the sonnets, makes use exclusively of feminine rhymes.
Flat and Round Characters
Terms coined by E.M. Forster to describe characters built around a single dominant trait (flat characters), and those shaded and developed with greater psychological complexity (round characters).
Example of the flat: The character of Mrs. Micawber in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield is flat character.
Example of round: Anna Karenina in Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is a round character.
flat and round characters – used to describe characters who do and do not develop over the course of a work respectively. The distinction was first made by E.M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel.
Georgic
Not be confused with pastoral poetry, which idealizes life in the countryside, georgic poems deal with people laboring in the countryside, pushing plows, raising crops, etc.
Example: The work from which this term was derived is an excellent example of the term itself: Virgil’s Georgics. Essentially, it’s a poem about the virtues of the farming life.
georgic – a poem dealing with agriculture. Derived from Virgil’s Georgics.
Hamartia
Aristotle’s term for what is popularly called “the tragic flaw.” Hamartia differs from tragic flaw in that hamartia implies fate, whereas tragic flaw implies an inherent psychological flaw in the tragic character.
Example: Oedipus, in his hasty temper, is tragically flawed. Macbeth, in his lust for power, is also tragically flawed.
hamartia – tragic mistake or tragic flaw. It is derived from Aristotle’s Poetics.
Homeric Epithet
A repeated descriptive phrase, as found in Homer’s epics.
Example: “Rosy-fingered dawn,” “the wine-dark sea,” and “the ever-resourceful Odysseus” are all examples.
Homeric epithet – A characteristic of Homer’s style is the use of recurring epithets, such as the rosy-fingered dawn or swift-footed Achilles. These epithets were metric stop-gaps as well as mnemonic devices.
Hudibrastic
A term derived from Samuel Butler’s Hudibras. It refers specifically to the couplets of rhymed tetrameter lines (well, eight syllables long, anyway), which Butler employed in Hudibras, or more generally to any deliberate, humorous, ill-rhythmed, ill-rhymed couplets. Butler had a genius for “bad” poetry.
Example: We grant, although he had much wit He was very shy of using it As being loathe to wear it out And therefore bore it not about, Unless on holidays, or so As men their best apparel do. Besides, tis' known he could speak Greek As naturally as pigs squeak.
Hudibrastic – Hudibrastic is a type of English verse named for Samuel Butler’s Hudibras of 1672. For the poem, Butler invented a mock-heroic verse structure. Instead of pentameter, the lines were written in iambic tetrameter. The rhyme scheme is the same as in heroic verse (aa, bb, cc, dd, etc.).
Hyperbole
A deliberate exaggeration.
Example: “Here once embattled farmers stood/ And fired the shot heard round the world.” This line from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Concord Hymn” denotes obvious exaggeration, employed for the purpose of highlighting the importance of that battle.
Litotes
An understatement created through a double negative (or more precisely, negating the negative).
Example: From the Book of Acts in the Bible: “Paul answered, ‘I am a Jew, from Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of no ordinary city. Please let me speak to the people.’” (Acts 21:39)
Litotes – a figure of speech in which the speaker emphasizes the magnitude of a statement by denying its opposite. Example: “That [sword] was not useless / to the warrior now.” (Beowulf)
Masculine Rhyme
A rhyme ending on the final stressed syllable (aka, regular old rhyme).
Example: Robert Frost’s “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening” illustrates this term:
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
Masculine rhyme – a rhyme that ends on a final, stressed syllable (as opposed to two final rhyming syllables in feminine rhyme).
Metonymy
A term for a phrase that refers to a person or object by a single important feature of the person.
Example: the famous line, “The pen is mightier than the sword,” from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s play Richelieu, is an example of metonymy. The sentence is essentially saying that the written word is often more powerful and influential than acts of war and violence, but it uses the pen to represent the written word, and the sword to represent violent acts.
Neoclassical Unities
Principles of dramatic structure derived (and applied somewhat too strictly) from Aristotle’s Poetics. They are called the neoclassical unities because of their popularity in the neoclassical movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The essential unities are of time, place, and action:
- To observe unity of time, a work should take place within the span of one day.
- To observe the unity of place, a work should take place within the confines of a single locale.
- To observe unity of action, a work should contain a single dramatic plot, with no subplots.
Neo-classical unities – principles of dramatic unity popular in antiquity and until after the renaissance. The three unities are place, time, and action.
Pastoral Elegy
A type of poem that takes the form of an elegy (a lament for the dead) sung by a shepherd. In this conventionalized form, the shepherd who sings the elegy is a stand-in for the author, and the elegy is for another poet.
Example: Milton’s “Lycidas” and Shelley’s “Adonais” (a lament for John Keats).
Pastoral Literature
A work that deals with the lives of people, especially shepherds, in the country or in nature.
Example: Christopher Marlowe’s poem “The Passionate Shepherd to his Love” is a classic example of pastoral literature.
Pathetic Fallacy
A term coined by John Ruskin. It refers to ascribing emotion and agency to inanimate objects.
Example: Ruskin’s famous line: “The cruel crawling foam.”
Personification
Giving an inanimate object human qualities or form.
Example: This excerpt from “The Train” by Emily Dickinson demonstrates this, as the train in the poem is said to “lap,” “lick,” and “step”:
I like to see it lap the miles,
And lick the valleys up,
And stop to feed itself at tanks;
And then, prodigious, step…
