Vocab 9 Flashcards
the reversion of the normally expected order of words: or, prosody, the turning around of a metrical foot. Order is a common form of poetic license allowing a poet to preserve the rhyme scheme or the metre of a verse line, or to place special emphasis on particular words. Common forms in English are the placing of an adjective after its noun (the body electric), the placing the grammatical subject after the verb (said she), and the placing of an adverb or adverbial phrase before it verb (sweetly blew the breeze).
inversion
An appeal made by a poet to a muse or deity for help in composing the poem. The blank of a muse was a convention in ancient Greek and Latin poetry, especially in the epic; it was followed later by many poets of the Renaissance and neoclassical period. Usually it is placed at the beginning of the poem, but may also appear in later positions, such as at the start of a new canto. It is one of the conventions ridiculed in mock-epic poetry: Byron begins the third Canto of Don Juan with the exclamation, “Hail, Muse! Etcetera.” In terms of rhetoric, the invocation is a special variety of apostrophe.
invocation
A Greek metrical foot consisted of two long syllables followed by two short syllables or of two short syllables followed by two long syllables. Associated with the early religious verse of the Ionians in Asia Minor, the metre was used by several Greek lyric poets, by the dramatist Euripides, and in Latin by Horace. Epilogue to Robert Browning’s Asolando
ionic
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
irony
Belonging to the period 1603-25, when James VI of Scotland reigned as King James I of England. High point of English drama, including the later plays of Shakespeare, the masques and major plays of Ben Jonson, and significant works by several other playwrights, notably John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. It includes the publication of Shakespeare Sonnets and Jonson’s The Forest. Literary legacy of this period is the King James Bible.
Jacobean
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”
kenning
An insulting written attack upon a real person, in verse or prose, usually involving caricature and ridicule. Among English writers who have indulged in this maliciously personal form of satire are Dryden, Pope, and Byron. The laws of libel have restricted its further development as a literary form.
lampoon
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)
legend
The Italian word for booklet, applied in English to the text of an opera, operetta, or oratorio, that is, to the words as opposed to the music; thus a kind of dramatic work written for operatic or other musical performance.Writers are: W.S. Gilbert or W.H. Auden
libretto
An English verse form consisting of five anapestic lines rhyming aabba, the third and fourth lines having two stresses and the other three. Early ex, are of Edward Lear in Book of Nonsense. Its almost always self-contained, humorous poem, and usually plays on rhymes involving the names of people or places. found in 1820 and popularized by Lear
Limerick
confined to the simplest primary meaning of a word, statement, or text, as distinct from any figurative sense which it may carry- whether ironic, allegorical, metaphoric, or symbolic. Most straightforward meaning. Tendency to interpret texts according to their most obvious meaning. Tries as far as possible to transfer each element of a text from one language into the other, without allowance for differences of idiom between the two languages
literal
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.
literature
A form of religious drama performed within a church as an extension of it. In medieval Europe, the introduction of chanted responses to the Easter services seems to have evolved into a more recognizably dramatic form of passion play, while the Christian service gave rise to the first Nativity plays, which came to be performed by lay actors in sites away from the churches themselves, and in the vernacular rather than in Latin.
liturgical drama
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
local color writing
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.
lost generation
