Vocab 6 Flashcards
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
Fable
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.
Falling rhythm
a general term for any kind of fictional work that is not primarily devoted to realistic representation of the known world. The category includes several literary genres (e.g. dream vision, fable fairy tale, romance, science fiction) describing imagined worlds in which magical powers and other impossibilities are accepted. Recent theorists of fantasy have attempted to distinguish more precisely between the self- contained magical realms of the marvelous, he psychologically explicable delusions of the uncanny, and the inexplicable meeting of both in the fantastic
Fantasy
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.
Farce
In the works of Eugene Labiche in the 1850s, and of A. W. Pinero and Georges Feydeau in the 1880s and 1890s. Brandon Thomas’s Charley’s Aunt (1892) is recognized as a classic of the genre. The bedroom one, involving bungled adultery in rooms with too many doors, has had prolonged commercial success in London’s West End since the 1920s, wen Ben Travers perfected the genre at the Aldwych Theatre. Joe Orton used it conventions to create a disturbing kind of satire in What The Butler Saw (1969).
Farce
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.
Feminine ending
also called double rhyme, a rhyme on two syllables, the first stressed and the second unstressed (e.g. mother/another), commonly found in many kinds of poetry but especially in humorous verse.
Feminine rhyme
does not employ unstressed syllables. Where more than one word is used in one of the rhyming units, as in the example above, the rhyme is sometimes called a “mosaic rhyme”. In French verse, the alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes become the norm during the 16th century.
Masculine rhythm
A mode of literary and cultural discussion and reassessment inspired by modern feminist thought, from which has developed since the 1970’s not a method of interpretation but an arena of debate about the relations between literature and the socio-cultural subordination borne by women as writers, readers or fictional characters within a male-dominated social order. Examples Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf.
Feminist Criticism
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.
First-person narrative
a character whose qualities or actions serve to emphasize those of the protagonist (or of some other character) by providing a strong contrast with them. Helen Burns is Jane Eyre’s.
Foil
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.
Folklore
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.
foot
in the most general sense, the cultivation of artistic technique at the expense of subject-matter, either in literary practice or in criticism. The term has been applied, often in a derogatory sense, to several kinds of approach to literature in which form is emphasized in isolation from a work’s meanings or is taken as the chief criterion of aesthetic value. In modern critical discussion, however, the term frequently refers more specifically to the principles of certain Russian and Czech theorists.
Formalism
a story in which another story is enclosed or embedded as a “tale within the tale”, or which contains several such tales. Prominent examples of frame narratives enclosing several tales are Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights employ a narrative structure in which the main action is relayed at second hand through an enclosing story.
Frame narrative or frame story
