Terms Flashcards
Allegory
The term loosely describes any writing in verse or prose that has a double meaning. This narrative acts as an extended metaphor in which persons, abstract ideas, or events represent not only themselves on the literal level, but they also stand for something else on the symbolic level. An allegorical reading usually involves moral or spiritual concepts that may be more significant than the actual, literal events described in a narrative.
Apostrophe
a direct and explicit address either to an absent person or to an abstract or nonhuman entity. Often the address is of high formality, or else of a sudden emotional impetus
Captivity Narrative
accounts of kidnapping by Indians of white persons, usually women, taken by long journeys into the wilderness
Common Measure
Also called common meter, common measure consists of closed poetic quatrains rhyming ABAB or ABCB, in which the lines of iambic tetrameter (eight syllables) alternate with lines of iambic trimeter (six syllables).
Doppelganger
A dopplegänger is often the ghostly counterpart of a living person. It can also mean a double, alter ego, or even another person who has the same name. In analyzing the dopplegänger as a psychic projection caused by unresolved anxieties, Otto Rank decribed the double as possessing traits both complementary and antithetical to the character involved.
Enlightenment
the philosophical and artistic movement growing out of the Renaissance and continuing until the nineteenth century. The Enlightenment was an optimistic belief that humanity could improve itself by applying logic and reason to all things. It rejected untested beliefs, superstition, and the “barbarism” of the earlier medieval period, and embraced the literary, architectural, and artistic forms of the Greco-Roman world.
Gothic Novel
A type of romance wildly popular between 1760 up until the 1820s that has influenced the ghost story and horror story. The stories are designed to thrill readers by providing mystery and blood-curdling accounts of villainy, murder, and the supernatural. As J. A. Cuddon suggests, the conventions include wild and desolate landscapes; ancient buildings such as ruined monasteries, cathedrals, and castles with dungeons, torture chambers, secret doors, and winding stairways; apparitions such as phantoms, demons, and necromancers; an atmosphere of brooding gloom; and youthful, handsome heroes and fainting (or screaming!) heroines who face off against corrupt aristocrats, wicked witches, and hideous monsters.
Inversion
reversal of normal word order, for the sake of meter…rhyme scheme, or emphasis
Jeremiad
As a literary term, jeremiad is applied to any work which, with a magniloquence like that of the Old Testament prophet (although it may be in secular rather than religious terms), accounts for the misfortune of an era as a just penalty for its social and moral wrongdoings, but usually holds open the possibility for reforms that will bring a happier future
Pathetic Fallacy
signify any representation of inanimate natural objects that ascribes to them human capabilities, sensations, and emotions…Pathetic Fallacy” is now used mainly as a neutral name for a procedure in which human traits are ascribed to natural objects in a way that is less formal and indirect than in the figure called personification
Parallelism
Correspondence, in sense or construction, of successive clauses or passages …Parallelism is part of the formal rhetoric of ancient Hebrew poetry and prose, and is also a common feature of poetry of or based in oral traditions.
Periodic Sentence
A long sentence that is not grammatically complete (and hence not intelligible to the reader) until the reader reaches the final portion of the sentence.
Rhetorical Question
a sentence in the grammatical form of a question which is not asked in order to request information or to invite a reply, but to achieve a greater expressive force than a direct assertion
Synaeresis
-[in poetry] contraction…which joins two vowels to create a single syllable, a sort of nonce dipthong: “Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit”
Syncope
-[in poetry] the omission of a consonant (as in “ne’er”) or the dropping of an unstressed vowel which is flanked by consonants: “Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey”
