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…
Picaresque
A novel, typically loosely constructed along an incident-to-incident basis, that follows the adventures of a more or less scurrilous rogue whose primary concerns are filling his belly and staying out of jail.
Example: Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Also, Defoe’s Moll Flanders is a rare example of a female picaresque.
Picaresque novel – a popular subgenre of prose fiction which is usually satirical and depicts in realistic and often humorous detail the adventures of a roguish hero of low social class who lives by his or her wits in a corrupt society. Daniel DeFoe’s Moll Flanders is a good example.
Protagonist
The main character, usually the hero.
Example: In Shakespeare’s Othello, Othello is the protagonist.
Skeltonics
A form of humorous poetry, using very short, rhymed lines and a pronounced rhythm, made popular by John Skelton. The only real difference between a skeltonic and doggerel is the quality of the thought expressed.
Example: From "How the Dought Duke of Albany" by John Skelton: O ye wretched Scots, Ye puant pisspots, It shall be your lots To be knit up with knots.
Sprung Rhythm
The rhythm created and used in the nineteenth century by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Like Old English verse, sprung rhythm fits a varying number of unstressed syllables in a line - only the stresses count in scansion.
Example: From “Pied Beauty” by Gerald Manley Hopkins:
Glory be to God for dapple things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
Sprung rhythm – poetic rhythm designed to imitate the rhythm of natural speech. It is constructed from feet in which the first syllable is stressed and may be followed by a variable number of unstressed syllables. The British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins claimed to have discovered this previously-unnamed poetic rhythm in the natural patterns of English in folk songs, spoken poetry, Shakespeare, Milton, et al.
Synaesthesia
A term referring to phrases that suggest an interplay of the senses. “Hot pink” and “golden tones” are examples of synaesthesia.
Example: From John Keats’ “Old to a Nightingale”:
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a breaker of the warm South…
Synaethesia – The description of a sense impression (smell, touch, sound etc) but in terms of another seemingly inappropriate sense e.g. ‘a deafening yellow’. Synesthesia is particularly associated with the French symbolist poets. Keats also uses synesthesia in Ode to a Nightingale with the term ‘sunburnt mirth’.
Synecdoche
Synecdoche is a phrase that refers to a person or object by a single important feature of that object or person.
Examples: Take the following lines from T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” Because the “pair of ragged claws” only references the claws, but is used to mean the whole animal, it is an example of synecdoche.
Synecdoche: a figure of speech that presents a kind of metaphor in which:
* A part of something is used for the whole,
* The whole is used for a part,
* The species is used for the genus,
* The genus is used for the species, or
* The stuff of which something is made is used for the thing.
Synecdoche, as well as some forms of metonymy, is one of the most common ways to characterize a fictional character. Frequently, someone will be consistently described by a single body part or feature, such as the eyes, which comes to represent their person.
Voice
The perspective from which a story is written. Literature is most often written from the first person or the third person, though there are rare instances of artists utilizing the second person or the first-person plural. It is difficult to find an entire literary work that exemplifies each, as voice often changes within a particular literary work.
First Person
The work is narrated using the pronoun “I.” The narrator can be the protagonist. The narrator can also be an omniscient speaker who is not even a clear character in the story. There can also be multiple “I” narrators in the same work.
Example: “I met a traveler from an antique land who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone/stand in the desert.” Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias” is narrated from the first person in the first two lines, though the narrator later changes to the voice of Ozymandias himself.
Example: Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” is a perfect example of first person voice. The reader feels what the narrator is feeling as the story unfolds.
Example: William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is an example of a first-person narratives.
Third Person
The work is narrated using a name or a third-person pronoun (he, she, etc).
Example: “It is an ancient mariner, And he stoppeth one of three.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is narrated from the third person.
Example: Most of Jane Austen’s novels, including Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, are narrated from the third person.
Second Person
In this rarely utilized voice, the author speaks using the pronoun “you,” making the reader an active participant in the work.
First-Person Plural
Another rarely used point of view where the work is narrated using the pronoun “we.” This voice forces the reader to concentrate more on what the story is about than who is telling it.
Alliterative verse
Alliterative verse – Verse tradition stemming from the Germanic lands and evidenced in Anglo-Saxon epics and Icelandic sagas. The alliterative line was normally written in two halves - with each half containing two strongly stressed syllables. Of the four stressed syllables two, three or even four would begin with the same sound. During the 14th century in England there was an alliterative revival which produced works such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Vision of Piers Plowman by William Langland.
Aubade
Aubade – An aubade is a poem or song of or about lovers separating at dawn. Donne’s “The Sunne Rising” is a famous example.
Assonance
assonance – the repetition of vowel sounds within a short passage of verse or prose.
Ballad
Ballad – The ballad stanza is a quatrain where the second and fourth lines rhyme. La Belle Dame Sans Merci by John Keats is in ballad form. It usually features alternating four-stress and three-stress lines. The lines alternate between 8 and 6 syllables. Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is a ballad.
Blank Verse
Blank verse – a type of poetry, distinguished by having a regular meter, but no rhyme. In English, the meter most commonly used with blank verse has been iambic pentameter. It is widely associated with Shakespeare and Milton’s Paradise Lost. It was first used by the Earl of Surrey around 1540.
Bob and the Wheel
bob and the wheel – this is the mechanism used to end stanzas in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It consists of a short line (bob), followed by a trimeter quatrain (wheel).
Breton Lay
Breton Lay – is a form of medieval French and English romance literature. Lais are short (typically 600-1000 lines), rhymed tales of love and chivalry, often involving supernatural and fairy-world Celtic motifs. “The Franklin’s Tale” from the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer is an example
Chiasmus
chiasmus – a rhetorical construction in which the order of the words in the second of two paired phrases is the reverse of the order in the first. (“Pleasure’s a sin, and sometimes sin’s a pleasure” –Byron)
Conceit
conceit – an extended metaphor with a complex logic that governs an entire poem or poetic passage. It is especially associated with the metaphysical poets.
Elegy
elegy – a poem of mourning. Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is a good example. A subset of this classification is a pastoral elegy, in which the mourner is a shepherd. Milton’s Lycidas and Shelley’s Adonais are both examples of pastoral elegies.
End-stopped-line
End-stopped line – A line of verse which ends with a grammatical break such as a coma, colon, semi-colon or full stop etc. It is the opposite of enjambment.
Enjambment
Enjambment - the breaking of a syntactic unit (a phrase, clause, or sentence) by the end of a line or between two verses. Its opposite is end-stopping, where each linguistic unit corresponds with a single line.
The following lines from Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (c. 1611) are heavily enjambed:
I am not prone to weeping, as our sex
Commonly are; the want of which vain dew
Perchance shall dry your pities; but I have
That honourable grief lodged here which burns
Worse than tears drown.
Eclogue
Eclogue – An eclogue is a poem in a classical style on a pastoral subject. Poems in the genre are sometimes also called bucolics. See Virgil’s Ecologues and Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar.
Euphuistic Prose
euphuistic prose: Tending to or resembling euphuism; of the nature of euphuism; characterized by euphuism. Chiefly in inaccurate sense: Abounding in ‘highflown’ or affectedly refined expression. Highly associated with John Lyly whose popular prose romance, Euphues, or The Anatomy of Wit, set the fashion for the decade before Shakespeare started writing and is a moral romance distinguished by its elaborate style. Also, self-consciously laden with elaborate figures of speech—a popular form in the late 16th century.
Fabliau
fabliau – comic works that typical concern cuckolded husbands, rapacious clergy and foolish peasants. The form was popular in medieval times. Several appear in Chaucer’s Cantebury Tales.
Free Verse
Free verse – a term describing various styles of poetry that are not written using strict meter or rhyme, but that still are recognizable as ‘poetry’ by virtue of complex patterns of one sort or another that readers can perceive to be part of a coherent whole. Walt Whitman was a practitioner of free verse.
Heroic couplets
*Heroic couplets – rhyming pairs of iambic pentameter lines. You should associate heroic couplets almost exclusively with Restoration verse. Example: Pope’s Rape of the Lock.
Kunstlerroman
Kunstlerroman – a kind of Bildungsroman, a novel about an artist’s growth to maturity. Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers are both examples.
Monody
monody – an ode sung by one voice (Arnold’s Thyrsis and parts of Milton’s Lycidas)
Ottava Rima
Ottava Rima – The ottava rima stanza in English consists of eight iambic lines, usually iambic pentameters. Each stanza consists of three rhymes following the rhyme scheme a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c.. Byron’s Don Juan and Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” are examples.
Pathetic Fallacy
Pathetic fallacy – the description of inanimate natural objects in a manner that endows them with human emotions, thoughts, sensations, and feelings. The term was coined by John Ruskin. Ruskin’s famous examples is “The cruel crawling foam.”
Poetic Inversions
Poetic inversions - An inversion of the normal grammatical word order; it may range from a single word moved from its usual place to a pair of words inverted or to even more extremes (e.g. “chains adamantine” – Paradise Lost)
Prosopopoeia
Prosopopoeia – a rhetorical device in which a speaker or writer communicates to the audience by speaking as another person or object.
Rhyme Royal
Rhyme Royal – The rhyme royal stanza consists of seven lines, usually in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is a-b-a-b-b-c-c. Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde” is a good example.
Roman à clef
roman à clef – a novel describing real-life events behind a façade of fiction. Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance, Hemmingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, and Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar are all examples.
Sestina
Sestina – consists of thirty-nine lines; six six-line stanzas, usually ending with a triplet. It is an uncommon verse form. “Ye Goatherd Gods” from Sidney’s Arcadia is the only example that comes to mind.
Spenserian
Spensarian – a fixed verse form invented by Edmund Spenser for his epic poem The Faerie Queene. Each verse contains nine lines in total: eight lines of iambic pentameter, with five feet, followed by a single line of iambic hexameter, an “alexandrine,” with six. The rhyme scheme of these lines is “ababbcbcc.” Shelley’s elegy “Adonais” and Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Progress” both employ the Spensarian stanza.
Sturm und Drang
Sturm und Drang – a German literary movement which emphasized the volatile emotional life of the individual. This genre is especially associated with Goethe.
Terza Rima
terza rima: a three-line stanza using chain rhyme in the pattern a-b-a, b-c-b, c-d-c, d-e-d, etc. Terza rima is especially associated with Dante’s Divine Comedy. See also “Ode to the West Wind” by Shelley.
“ubi sunt” – a phrase taken from the Latin Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerent?, meaning “Where are those who were before us?” Ubi Sunt is a phrase that begins several Latin medieval poems. It refers to the tone of the poem, and can even be used to indicate the tone of another work, such as Beowulf.
Villanelle
Villanelle – The essence of the form is its distinctive pattern of rhyme and repetition, with only two rhyme-sounds (“a” and “b”) and two alternating refrains that resolve into a concluding couplet. Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” is a good example. Stephen Dedalus also writes one in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
