Unit 5 Terms Flashcards
The Belief that human reason rather than revelation or authority is the source of all knowledge and the only valid basis for action
Rationalism
A reverence for tradition as a source of authority or values in religion, morality, or art.
Traditionalism
The philosophical view that all knowledge originates in sensory experiences. (John Locke’s philosophy that human beings know only what they see, hear, feel, taste or smell and what they can conclude from reflecting on their sensory experience.)
Empiricism
Corrective ridicule in literature, or a work that is designed to correct an evil by means of ridicule. Not to be confused with verbal irony or sarcasm.
Satire
A cultural attraction to the art and thought of Ancient Greece and Rome. Beginning in 16th century Italy as a result of the study of classical literature.
Neoclassicism
A reaction against the cultural climate and values of neoclassicism. It insisted on the greater importance of 1.) individualism, 2.) imagination, 3.) nature, 4.) the distant
Romanticism
The attempt in fiction to create an illusion of actuality by the use of seemingly random detail or the inclusion of the ordinarily or unpleasant in life.
Realism
A long, stylized narrative poem celebrating the deeds of a national or ethnic hero.
Epic
A short, highly compressed poem making a wise or humorous observations and ending with a witty twist.
Epigram
A standard type or category of literature.
Genre
Drama that ends unhappily
Tragedy
Drama that ends happily
Comedy
A witty and often licentious satirical comedy and popular during the reign of Charles II.
Comedy of Manners
Highly emotionalized and moralized comedy designed to arouse benevolent feelings.
Sentimental Comedy
An 18th-century reaction against neoclassicism that anticipated romanticism. In subject matter writers favored the quality picturesque or the pitiful, aiming to arouse human feelings through scenes of contentment or pathos.
Sentimentalism
A long, highly stylized lyric poem written in a complex stand on a serious theme and often for a specific occasion.
Ode
As pair of rhymed lines written in iambic pentameter.
Heroic Couplet
An invented prose narrative. Whether it is allegorical or not may serve the purpose of truth and virtue.
Fiction
The official poet of a nation or region.
Poet Laureate
Poetry that’s written to enhance or make memorable a particular occasion, normally public and contemporary.
Occasional Verse
A story with a literal and an implied level of meaning. The implied level of meaning may suggest actual persons, places, events, and situations or a set of ideas.
Allegory
Artificially selected and refined language once considered essential to poetic expression.
Poetic Diction
The inclusion of minute, or even superfluous, details to create an allusion of actuality.
Verisimilitude
A special form of satire that mocks its subject by incongruous imitation either of its style or content or by incongruous representation in terms of high seriousness.
Burlesque
A minor neoclassical poetic genre in which a poem, usually of high moral seriousness takes the form of an address to a friend.
Verse Epistle
Instructions in literature.
Didacticism
The regular recurrence of accented syllables in line of poetry.
Meter
A Variation of ballad stanza relevant among hymns. (The first and third lines usually also rhyme)
Common Meter
Identical sounds in corresponding words or phrases.
Rhyme
Unrhymed iambic pentameter.
Blank Verse
The giving of personal characteristics to something that is not a person.
Personification
In poetic fictions: a roundabout, more elegant designation of something common.
Periphrases
The addressing of some non-personal (or absent) object as if it were able to reply.
Apostrophe
A short, narrative song.
Ballad
Consists of four iambic lines, of which the first and third have four stresses and the second and fourth have three stresses and rhymes.
Ballad Stanza
A nine-line stanza popular among romantic poetry rhyming ababbcbcc with eight iambic pentameter lines followed by a line of iambic hexameter.
Spenserian Stanza
