Semester Exam

Question 1

A literary and artistic tendency of the late 19th century which may be understood as a further phase of Romanticism in reaction against philistine bourgeois values of practical efficiency and morality

Answer 1

Aesthetic Movement

Question 2

A story or visual with a second distinct meaning partially hidden behind its literal or visible meaning. A principle technique is personification. It may be perceived as a metaphor

Answer 2

Allegory

Question 3

The reputation of the same sounds- usually initial consonants of words or of stressed syllables- in any sequence of neighboring words: landscape lover, lord of language

Answer 3

Alliteration

Question 4

A statement of some general principle, expressed memorably by condensing much wisdom into a few words
“Give a man a mask and he’ll tell you the truth”

Answer 4

Aphorism

Question 5

A work of the highest class. A work deemed to have stood the test of time and outlasted changes in critical taste

Answer 5

Classic

Question 6

An unusually far-fetched or elaborate metaphor or simile presenting a surprisingly apt parallel between two apparently dissimilar things or feelings

Answer 6

Conceit

Question 7

Poet awarded privileged status in ancient Celtic cultures, and who was charged with the duty of celebrating the laws and heroic achievements of his people.

Answer 7

Bard

Question 8

Unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter. It’s a very flexible English verse from which can attain rhetorical grandeur while echoing the natural rhythms of speech and allowing smooth enjambment.

Answer 8

Blank verse

Question 9

Quote from Horace’s Odes meaning “seize the day”.A common theme or motif in European lyric poetry, where the speaker of a poem argues that since life is short, pleasure should be enjoyed while there’s still time.

Answer 9

Carpe Diem

Question 10

Romance found in medieval Europe from the 12th century onwards, describing the adventures of legendary Knights, and celebrating an idealized code of civilized behavior that combines loyalty, honor and courtly love. Heterosexual love and courtly manners distinguishes it from Chanson de Geste

Answer 10

Chivalric Romance

Question 11

A long novel in which the narrative recounts the fortunes of a family or similar group of recurring characters over many years (covering at least 2 generations)
Reflects social history over a substantial period of time

Answer 11

Chronicle novel

Question 12

The roundabout manner of referring to something at length rather than naming it briefly and directly, usually known in literary terminology as periphrasis

Answer 12

Circumlocution

Question 13

A written piece used to amuse its audience by appealing to a sense of superiority over the characters depicted. Explore common human failing.
Ex; Dante’s Divine Comedy
European comedy was greatly influenced by the COMMEDIA DELL’ ARTE

Answer 13

Comedy

Question 14

Interruption of a serious work, by a short humorous episode. It can range from relaxation after high tension to sinister ironic brooding.
Ex: dialogue between hamlet and the grave diggers

Answer 14

Comic relief

Question 15

German: Bildungsroman
Novel may be devoted entirely to the crisis of late adolescence involving courtship, sexual initiation, separation from parents, and choice of vocation or spouse
DAVID COPPERFIELD & SONS and LOVERS

Answer 15

Coming of age novel

Question 16

An alphabetical index of all the significant words used in a text or related group of texts, indicating all the places in which each word is used
BIBLE
SHAKESPEARE

Answer 16

Concordance

Question 17

Minor or secondary character in a literary work in which the main character confides in
Ex: chartinian in Antony and Cleopatra

Answer 17

Confidant(e)

Question 18

A pair of rhyming verse lines. Most widely used in English poetry
Ex CHAUCER in CANTERBURY TALES

Answer 18

Couplet

Question 19

A metrical unit of verse, having one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables, as in the word carefully

Answer 19

Dactyl

Question 20

The underlying structure of meaning in any utterance as opposed to the observable arrangement in which it’s presented.

Answer 20

Deep structure

Question 21

The clearing up or ‘untying’ of the complications of the plot in a play or story; usually a final scene or chapter in which mysteries, confusions, and doubtful destinies are clarified

Answer 21

Denouement

Question 22

Mark placed above or below a letter or syllable to specify it's distinctive sound. Acute accent é, grave accent è, circumflex ô, umlaut ö, and cedilla c. 
Macron (-) long syllables
Breve (--) short syllables 
Virgule (') for stressed syllables 
x for unstressed

Answer 22

Diacritic

Question 23

Choice of words used in a literary work.
Formal/colloquial
Abstract/concrete
Literal/figurative

Answer 23

Diction

Question 24

Narrative in which the narrator falls asleep and dreams the events of the tale

Answer 24

Dream Vision

Question 25

movement of intellectual liberation that developed in Western Europe from the late 17th century to the late 18th. ‘Age of Reason’. It culminated with the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Encycopedistes, the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Its central idea was the need for human reason to clear away ancient superstition, prejudice, dogma, and injustice

Answer 25

Enlightenment

Question 26

a short poem with a witty turn of thought; or a wittily condensed expression in prose. Originally a form of monumental inscription in ancient Greece. It was developed into a literary form by the poets of the Hellenistic age and by the Roman poet Martial, whose were often obscenely insulting. The art of it was cultivated in the 17th and 18th centuries in France and Germany by Voltaire, Schiller, and others.
Ben Jonson, Oscar Wild

Answer 26

Epigram

Question 27

a general term for a mode of literary or visual art which in extreme reaction against realism or naturalism, presents a world violently distorted under the pressure of intense personal moods, ideas, and emotions; image and language thus express feeling and imagination rather than represent external reality. It’s an important factor in the painting, drama, poetry, and cinema of the German-speaking Europe between 1910-1924.

Answer 27

Expressionism

Question 28

a brief tale in verse or prose that conveys a moral lesson, usually by giving human speech and manners to animals and inanimate things. They often conclude with a moral, delivered in the form of an epigram. A very old form of story related to folklore and proverbs, in Europe they descends from tales attributed to Aesop, a Greek slave in the 6th century BCE: his of the fox and the grapes has given us the phrase ‘sour grapes’. More examples are Kipling’s Just So Stories, Thurber’s Blank of Our Time, and Orwell’s Animal Farm

Answer 28

Fable

Question 29

a rhythmical effect often found in metrical verse in which the unstressed syllables are perceived as being attached to the preceding stressed syllables rather than to those following. In the terms of classical prosody, lines composed of dactyls or trochees may be marked by it, although this is not inevitable. It is less common in English verse than its opposite, rising rhythm.

Answer 29

Falling rhythm

Question 30

a kind of comedy that inspires hilarity mixed with panic and cruelty in its audience through an increasingly rapid and improbable series of ludicrous confusions, physical disasters, and sexual innuendos among its stock characters. Farcical episodes of buffoonery can be found in European drama of all periods since Aristophanes, notably in medieval France, were the term originated to describe short comic interludes; but as a distinct form of full-length comedy dates from the 19th century.

Answer 30

Farce

Question 31

the ending of a metrical verse line on an unstressed syllable, as in the regular trochaic line. In English iambic pentameters, it involves the addition of an eleventh syllable, as in Shakespeare’s famous line, “To be, or not to be; that is the question.” In French, a feminine line is one ending with a mute e, es, or ent. A feminine caesura is a pause following an unstressed syllable, usually in the middle of a line.

Answer 31

Feminine ending

Question 32

a narrative or mode of storytelling in which the narrator appears as the “I” recollecting his or her own part in the events related, either as a witness of the action or as an important participant in it.

Answer 32

First-person narrative

Question 33

a character whose qualities or actions serve to emphasize those of the protagonist (or of some other character) by provide a strong contrast with them. Helen Burns is Jane Eyre’s.

Answer 33

Foil

Question 34

a modern term for the body of traditional customs, superstitions, stories, dances, and songs that have been adopted and maintained within a given community by processes of repetition not reliant on the written word.

Answer 34

Folklore

Question 35

a group of syllables taken as a unit of poetic metre, in traditional prosody, regardless of word-boundaries. As applied to English verse, it is a fixed combination of syllables, each of which is counted as being either stressed or unstressed.

Answer 35

Foot

Question 36

French term for a type, species, or class of composition. It is a recognizable and established category of written form employing such common conventions as will prevent readers from mistaking it for another kind. It is used for the most basic modes of literary art (lyric, narrative, dramatic); for the broadest categories of composition (poetry, prose fiction), and for more specialized sub categories, which are defined according to several different criteria including formal structure, length, intention, effect, origin, and subject matter.

Answer 36

Genre

Question 37

Modern form of short story designed to provoke dread and unease in its readers by bringing about a crisis in which fictional characters are confronted terrifyingly by spirits of the returning dead. They draw upon ancient traditions of folklore concerning ghosts.Authors include Charles Dickens (The Signalman), J. Sheridan LeFanu, Amelia B. Edwards (The Phantom Coach).

Answer 37

Ghost story

Question 38

A story of terror and suspense, usually set in a gloomy old castle or monastery. Examples: The Castle of Otranto, Anne Radcliffes’s Mysteries of Udolpho. M.G. Lewis’s The Monk, made free use of ghosts and demons along with scenes of cruelty and horror. In an extended sense, many novels that don’t have a medievalized setting, but which share a comparably sinister, grotesque, or claustrophobic atmosphere have been classified as it.Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is an example, and Jane Eyre, and Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier.

Answer 38

Gothic novel (romance)

Question 39

A form of Japanese lyric verse that encapsulates a single impression of a natural object or scene, within a particular season, in seventeen syllables arranged in three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables. Arising in the 16th century, it flourished in the hands of Basho; and Buson. The convention whereby feelings are suggested by natural images rather than directly stated has appealed to many Western imitators, and Imagists.

Answer 39

Haiku

Question 40

A notable phase of black American writing centered in Harlem in the 1920s. Announced by Alain Locke’s anthology “The New Negro”, the movement included the poets Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay, continuing into the 1930s with the novels of Zora Neale Hurston and Arna Bontemps. It brought a new self awareness and criticcal respect to black literature in the United States.

Answer 40

Harlem Renaissance

Question 41

A rhymed pair of iambic pentameter lines. Named from its use by Dryden and others in the heroic drama of the late 17th century, it has been established much earlier by Chaucer as a major English verse form for narrative and other kinds of non-dramatic poetry; it dominated English poetry of the 18th century, notably in the closed couplets of Pope, before declining in importance in the early 19th century

Answer 41

Heroic couplet

Question 42

metrical unit of verse having one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable (beyond). Most important form is the 10-syllable iambic pentameter, either rhymed (as in heroic couplets, sonnets etc.) or unrhymed in blank verse.

Answer 42

Iamb

Question 43

a term widely used in scholarly footnotes and endnotes when these provide bibliographical references for quotations or facts cited. In these contexts it means “in the same work already mentioned”.

Answer 43

Ibid

Question 44

One of the most contested terms in modern politics and culture. It has two meanings 1) a body of unreasonable dogmatic claims asserted by radical intellectuals 2) a body of unacknowledged yet fundamental assumptions made about the world by everybody except radical intellectuals. The first sense, promulgated by no less a figure than Napoleon Bonaparte when he dismissed some of his opponents as ideologues, it is a newfangled notion that goes against the common sense of right-minded people. The second sense, derived by some neo-Marxist writers since the 1960’s from Marx’s theory of commodity, it is the common sense of right-minded people that is the ideology. The term has no specific literary significance except in the contexts of Marxist literary criticism, especially influenced by Althusser, and in some related political forms of literary theory.

Answer 44

Ideology

Question 45

A phrase or grammatical construction that cannot be translated literally into another language because its meaning is not equivalent to that of its component words. Common examples, of which there are thousands in English, include follow suit, hell for leather, flat broke, on the wagon, etc. By extension, the term is sometimes applied more loosely to any style or manner of writing that is characteristic of a particular group or movement.

Answer 45

Idiom

Question 46

A short poem describing an incident of country life in terms of idealized innocence and contentment, or any such episode in a poem or prose work. The term is virtually synonymous with pastoral poems.

Answer 46

Idyll

Question 47

covers those uses of language in a literary work that evoke sense-impressions by literal or figurative reference to perceptible or concrete objects, scenes, actions, or states, as distinct from the language of abstract argument or exposition. It comprises the set of images that it uses; these need not be mental pictures, but may appeal to senses other than sight. Applies to metaphors and similes. Images suggest further meanings. New Criticism and in some influential studies of Shakespeare.

Answer 47

Imagery

Question 48

term used by Wolfgang Iser and some other theorists of reader response criticism to denote the hypothetical figure of the reader to whom a given work is designed to address itself. Any text may be said to presuppose an ‘ideal’ reader who has the particular attitudes appropriate to that text in order for it to achieve its full effect.

Answer 48

Implied reader

Question 49

the chanting or reciting of any form of words deemed to have magical power, usually in a brief rhyming spell w/ an insistent rhythm and other devices of repetition; or the form of words thus recited. It is characteristic of magical charms, curses, prophecies, and the conjuring of spirits. Macbeth

Answer 49

Incantation

Question 50

A subtly humorous perception of inconsistency, in which an apparently straightforward statement or event is undermined by its context so as to give it a very different significance. It appears in Sophocles, Jane Austen and Henry James, Voltaire and Swift. Involves the use of naive or deluded hero or unreliable narrator, whose view of the world differs widely from the true circumstances recognized by the author and readers

Answer 50

Irony

Question 51

A stock phrase of the kind used in Old Norse and Old English verse as a poetic circumlocution in place of a more familiar work. Examples are banhus (bonehouse) for “body”, and saewudu (sea-wood) for “ship” Similar metaphoric compounds appear in colloquial speech, e.g. fire-water for “whisky”

Answer 51

Kenning

Question 52

A story or group of stories handed down through popular oral tradition, usually consisting of an exaggerated or unreliable account of some actually or possibly historical person-often a saint, monarch or popular hero. They are concerned with human beings, and they have some sort of historical basis. They are applied to tales of warriors (King Arthur) criminals (Robin Hood) and other sinners. Rock stars and film stars (Judy Garland, John Lennon)

Answer 52

Legend

Question 53

Body of written works related by subject matter, by language or place of origin, or by prevailing cultural standards of merit. It’s taken to include oral, dramatic, and broadcast compositions that may not have been published in written form but which have been preserved.

Answer 53

Literature

Question 54

A kind of fiction that came to prominence in the USA in the late 19th century, and was devoted to capturing the unique customs, manners, speech, folklore, and other qualities of a particular regional community, usually in humorous short stories. The most famous of the local colorists was Mark Twain; Bret Hare, George Washington Cable, Joel Chandler Harris, Kate Chopin, and Sarah Orne Jewett. Zola and Hardy

Answer 54

Local color writing

Question 55

A phrase sometimes applied to the younger American writers and intellectuals of the 1920s, on the grounds of their supposed disillusionment and loss of moral bearings in the wake of the First World War. It derives from a remark made by Gertrude Stein to Ernest Hemingway and recorded as the epigraph to his novel The Sun Also Rises. The more general reference is usually to writers born, like Hemingway, in the late 1890s, including Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner and Hart Crane.

Answer 55

Lost generation