Term
|
Definition
| A story in which people, things, and events have another meaning. Examples of allegory are Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Spenser's Faerie Queene, and Orwell's Animal Farm. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| Multiple meanings a literary work may communicate, especially two meanings that are incompatible. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| Direct address, usually to someone or something that is not present. Keats's "Bright star! Would I were steadfast" is an apostrophe to a star, and "To Autumn" is an apostrophe to a personified season. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| The implications of a word or phrase, as opposed to its exact meaning (denotation). Both China and Cathay denote a region in Asia, but to a modern reader, the associations of the two words are different. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| A device of style or subject matter so often used that it becomes a recognized means of expression. For example, a lover observing the literary love conventions cannot eat or sleep and grows pale and lean. Romeo, at the beginning of the play is a conventional lover, while an overweight lover in Chaucer is consciously mocking the convention. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| The dictionary meaning of a word, as opposed to connotation. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
Explicitly instructive. A didactic poem or novel may be good or bad. Pope's "Essay on Man" is didactic; so are the novels of Ayn Rand. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| The use of material unrelated to the subject of a work. The interpolated narrations in the novels of Cervantes or Fielding may be called digressions, and Tristram Shandy includes a digression on digressions. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| A pithy saying, often using contrast. The epigram is also a verse form, usually brief and pointed. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| A figure of speech using indirection to avoid offensive bluntness, such as "deceased" for "dead" or "remains" for "corpse." |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| Characterized by distortions or incongruities. The fiction of Poe or Flannery O'Connor is often described as grotesque. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| Deliberate exaggeration, overstatement. As a rule, hyperbole is self-conscious, without the intention of being accepted literally. "The strongest man in the world" and "a diamond as big as the Ritz" are hyperbolic. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| The special language of a profession or group. The term jargon usually has pejorative associations, with the implication that jargon is evasive, tedious, and unintelligible to outsiders. The writings of the lawyer and the literary critic are both susceptible to jargon. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| Not figurative; accurate to the letter; matter of fact or concrete. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| Songlike; characterized by emotion, subjectivity, and imagination. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| A combination of opposites; the union of contradictory terms. Romeo's line "feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health" has four examples of the device. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| A story designed to suggest a principle, illustrate a moral, or answer a question. Parables are allegorical stories. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| A statement that seems to be self-contradicting but, in fact, is true. The figure in Donne's holy sonnet that concludes I never shall be "chaste except you ravish me" is a good example of the device. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| A composition that imitates the style of another composition normally for comic effect. Fielding's Shamela is a parody of Richardson's Pamela. A contest for parodies of Hemingway draws hundreds of entries each year. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| A figurative use of language that endows the nonhuman (ideas, inanimate objects, animals, abstractions) with human characteristics. Keats personifies the nightingale, the Grecian urn, and autumn in his major poems. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| A quality of some fictional narrators whose word the reader can trust. There are both reliable and unreliable narrators, that is, tellers of a story who should or should not be trusted. Most narrators are reliable (Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway, Conrad's Marlow), but some are clearly not to be trusted (Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart," several novels by Nabokov). And there are some about whom readers have been unable to decide (James's governess in The Turn of the Screw, Ford's The Good Soldier). |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| A question asked for effect, not in expectation of a reply. No reply is expected because the question presupposes only one possible answer. The lover of Suckling's "Shall I wasting in despair / Die because a lady's fair?" has already decided the answer is no. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| A speech in which a character who is alone speaks his or her thoughts aloud. A monologue also has a single speaker, but the monologuist speaks to others who do not interrupt. Hamlet's "To be, or not to be" and "O! what a rogue and peasant slave am I" are soliloquies. Browning's "My Last Duchess" and "Fra Lippo Lippi" are monologues, but the hypocritical monk of his "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" cannot reveal his thoughts to others. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| A conventional pattern, expression, character, or idea. In literature, a stereotype could apply to the unvarying plot and characters of some works of fiction (those of Barbara Cartland, for example) or to the stock characters and plots of many of the greatest stage comedies. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| A form of reasoning in which two statements are made and a conclusion is drawn from them. A syllogism begins with a major premise ("All tragedies end unhappily.") followed by a minor premise ("Hamlet is a tragedy.") and a conclusion (Therefore, "Hamlet ends unhappily."). |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| The theme, meaning, or position that a writer undertakes to prove or support. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| The repetition of identical or similar consonant sounds, normally at the beginning of words. "Gnus never know pneumonia" is an example of alliteration, because despite the spellings, all four words begin with the "n" sound. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| The repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds. "A land laid waste with all its young men slain" repeats the same "a" sound in "laid," "waste," and "slain." |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
A four-line stanza rhymed abcb with four feet in lines one and three and three feet in lines two and four. O mother, mother make my bed. O make it soft and narrow. Since my love died for me today, I'll die for him tomorrow. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
Unrhymed iambic pentameter. Blank verse is the meter of most of Shakespeare's plays, as well as that of Milton's Paradise Lost: Men called him Mulciber; and how he fell From heaven, they fabled, thrown by angry Jove Sheer o'er the crystal battlements: from morn To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| A metrical foot of three syllables: an accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| A line with a pause at the end. Lines that end with a period, comma, colon, semicolon, exclamation point, or question mark are end-stopped lines. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| Poetry which is not written in a traditional meter but is still rhythmical. The poetry of Walt Whitman is perhaps the best known example of free verse. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
Two end-stopped iambic pentameter lines rhymed aa, bb, cc with the thought usually completed in the two-line unit. When those fair suns shall set, as set they must, And all those tresses shall be laid in dust, This lock, the Muse shall consecrate to fame, And 'midst the stars inscribe Belinda's name. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| A line containing six feet. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| A two-syllable foot with an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable. The iamb is the most common foot in English poetry. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| Rhyme that occurs within a line, rather than at the end. "God save thee, ancient Mariner! From the friends, that plague thee thus!- Why look'st thou so?" - With my crossbow I shot the Albatross. Line three contains the internal rhyme of "so" and "bow." |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| The use of words whose sound suggests their meaning. Examples are "buzz," "hiss," or "honk." |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| A line containing five feet. The iambic pentameter is the most common line in English verse written before 1950. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| A seven-line stanza of iambic pentameter rhymed ababbcc, used by Chaucer and other medieval poets. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| Normally a fourteen-line iambic pentameter poem. The conventional Italian, or Petrachan, sonnet is rhymed abba, abba, cde, cde; the English, or Shakespearean, sonnet is rhymed abab, cdcd, efef, gg. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| Usually a repeated grouping of three or more lines with the same meter and rhyme scheme. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| A three-line stanza rhymed aba, bcb, cdc. Dante's Divine Comedy is written in terza rima. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| the noun or group of words acting as a noun to which the pronoun refers. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| a group of related words, but unlike a phrase, a clause has a subject and predicate. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| indicates an omission from a quotation. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| refers to the mood of the verb used in requests and commands. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| describes or limits another word or group of words. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| refers to matching grammatical structures; elements in a sentence that have the same function or express similar ideas should be grammatically parallel, or grammatically matched. |
|
|
