Vocab 7 Flashcards
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.
Genre
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).
Ghost Story
In classical mythology, variously resumed by writers of the “Renaissance”, the earliest period of humanity, imagined as one of uncomplicated harmony and happiness, particularly in pastoral writing. In Spanish, the term refers to the greatest period of literature in that language.
Golden Age
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.
Gothic novel or Gothic Romance
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.
Haiku
Imperfect rhyme, in which the final consonants of stressed syllables agree but the vowel sounds don’t match (cape/deep), sometimes taking the form of ‘rich’ consonance, in which the preceding consonants also correspond (cape/keep). Used in early Icelandic, Irish, and Welsh poetry. Emily Dickinson and G.M. Hopkins made frequent use of it. W.B. Yeats and Wilfred Owen encouraged its increasingly widespread use in English since the early 20th century.
Half-rhyme
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.
Harlem Renaissance
A period of Greek literature and learning from the death of Alexander the Great to that of Cleopatra, when the center of Greek culture had shifted to the settlements of the eastern Mediterranean, notably the great of Alexandria. This period includes the poetry of Callimachus and Theocritus, the philosophy of Epicurus and the Stoics, and the scientific achievements of Aristarchus, Archimedes, and Euclid.
Hellenistic
A model of the process of interpretation, which begins from the problem of relating a work’s parts to the work as a whole: since the parts cannot be understood without some preliminary understanding of the whole, and the whole cannot be understood w/o comprehending its parts, our understanding of a work must involve an anticipation of the whole that informs our view of the parts while simultaneously being modified by them.
Hermeneutic circle
This problem, variously formulated, has been a recurrent concern of German philosophy since the work of the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher in the early 19th century. the writings of Hans-George Gadamer in the 1960s tackled a similar blank which we can understand the present only in the context of the past, and vice versa; his solutions to this puzzle have influenced the emergence of reception theory.
Hermeneutic circle
The theory of interpretation, concerned w/ general problems of understanding the meanings of texts. Originally applied to the principles of exegesis in theology, the term has been extended since the 19th century to cover broader questions in philosophy and criticism, and is associated in particular with a tradition of German thought running from Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey in the 19th century to Martin Heidegger and Hans-George Gadamer in the 20th.
Hermeneutics
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
Heroic Couplet
A kind of tragedy or tragic comedy that came into vogue w/ the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660. Influenced by French classical tragedy and its dramatic unities, it aimed at epic grandeur, usually by means of bombast, exotic settings, and lavish scenery. The noble hero would typically be caught in a conflict between love and patriotic duty, leading to emotional scenes presented in a manner close to opera. The leading English exponent of it was John Dryden; his The Conquest of Granada and Aureng Zebe were both written in them.
Heroic Drama
A metrical verse line of six feet. Its most important form is the dactylic hexameter used in Greek and Latin epic poetry and in the elegiac distich: this quantitative metre permitted the substitution of any of the first four dactyls by a spondee, and was catalectic in that the final foot was either a spondee or a trochee.
Hexameter
The Greek word for ‘insolence’ or ‘affront’, applied to the arrogance or pride of the protagonist in a tragedy in which he or she defies moral laws or the prohibitions of the gods. The protagonist’s transgression or hamartia leads eventually to commonly translated as “overweening pride”. In proverbial terms, hubris is thus the pride that comes before a fall.
Hubris
