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Literary Terminology
for the study of major British writers
60
English
Undergraduate 2
04/24/2012

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Term
Alexandrine
Definition
a metric line having six iambs, therefore iambic hexamater. Example: Wordsworth in the Immortality Ode uses Alexandrine as the concluding lines of his poem's first two stanzas.
Term
Alliteration
Definition
the repetition of initial sounds in poetry or prose
Term
Allusion
Definition
a reference to another (usually) literary work on which the current work bases itself or which it critiques or admires.
Term
Ballad
Definition
a narrative poem that proceeds on the basis of incremental repetition and is written in ballad measure, that is, rhyming xbxb (with x designating no rhyme) and usually in alternating lines of tetrameter and trimeter.
Term
Blank Verse
Definition
unrhymed iambic pentameter
Term
caesura
Definition
a pause or stop in a line of poetry.
Term
comedy of manners
Definition
a comedy (play which goes from bad fortune to good fortune) satirizing in witty dialogue the customs, rituals, speech, beliefs and values of a certain class. Example: Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest
Term
companion poem
Definition
poem with a counterpart poem that contrasts with it or answers it. Example: Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience contains companion poems.
Term
compensatory imagination
Definition
concept in Wordsworth's poetry that the power to imagine and to create fully compensates humanity for what has been lost as we move through the stages of maturation; despite our loss of childhood oneness with nature and of joy not bound to thought, the imagination affords us an "abundant recompense" for these losses as it allows us to add thought to sensation and feeling and to develop a moral sense.
Term
conversation poem
Definition
a poetic form developed by Coleridge in which the speaker locates the self in a specific place, allows the mind to travel, and then experiences the return of the mind to the same specific place, but the mind returns changed; the poem has a conversational tone but is written usually in iambic pentameter.
Term
couplet
Definition
two-line stanza
Example: A Shakespearean sonnet ends in a rhyming couplet
Term
dramatic monologue
Definition
a poem which catches its sole speaker at a moment of crisis; the speaker speaks to a silent but identifiable audience; during his monologue the speaker reveals information about himself/herself of which s/he is unaware.
Term
elegy
Definition
a poem generally about loss or death following the typical formula of past happiness, present sorrow, & future consolation.
Example: Tennyson's In Memoriam AHH
Term
"Emotion recollected in tranquility"
Definition
Wordsworth's theory of poetic composition, to be elaborated in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads; it holds that the poet recalls a deep emotion in a place and spirit removed from the original experience; in his recollection, the emotion emerges again but is changed by the addition of thought.
Term
end-stopped line
Definition
a poetic line whose meaning ends at the end of the line; the opposite of an enjambed line.
Example: Blake's "Little Black Boy" has several end-stopped lines.
Term
enjambment
Definition
a literary device in which the sense of the line of poetry carries over to the next line.
Term
epigraph
Definition
a quotation from another work which prefaces a new work and which relates in some way to the new work.
Example: Eliot's "The Hollow Men" has an epigraph from Heart of Darkness.
Term
epiphany
Definition
literally, a recognition of a god (as in the Christian Feast of the Epiphany when the Magi recognized the Christ Child as God); literarily, any sort of sudden realization or insight into the self or a situation. Gabriel Conroy in The Dead comes to such an epiphany at the end of the novella. A work that contains epiphanies is often called an epiphany.
Term
epistolary novel
Definition
a novel written in letters.
Example: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
Term
epithalamium
Definition
a wedding song.
Term
existentialism
Definition
literary and philosophical movement of the mid 20th century which embraced the atheistic philosophy of Sartre and others which denied any meaning to our lives, insisting that the only meaning our lives might have is the meaning we create for ourselves every day.

Example: Krapp's Last Tape
Term
eye rhyme
Definition
the rhyming words or syllables look as if they should rhyme, but they do not sound the same

Example: "wind" and "behind" in Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind"
Term
fourteeners
Definition
lines with fourteen syllables. Blake's favorite line.
Term
frame story
Definition
a narrative which contains other narratives embedded within it.

Example: Frankenstein opens with a frame story written in letters by and to Walton, the ship captain.
Term
free verse
Definition
lines of poetry without rhyme or meter. Example: Wole Soyinka's "Telephone Conversation"
Term
genre
Definition
a kind of literary work; the major genres are prose, poetry, and drama, but under them fall a multitude of genres such as the short story, the sonnet, and the one-act play.
Term
gloss
Definition
a marginal note in a text furnished either by an editor or by the author and meant to help the reader understand a passage. Coleridge added the glosses to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner when audiences asked for more clues to an understanding of the poem.
Term
heroic or elegiac quatrain
Definition
a four-line stanza written in iambic pentameter.

Example: Blake's "Little Black Boy"
Term
Horatian satire
Definition
gentle ridiculing of minor human foibles or weaknesses

Example: The Importance of Being Earnest pokes fun at Victorian upper-class lifestyles and values.
Term
iamb
Definition
the most common metric foot in English poetry, consisting of one relatively unstressed syllable followed by a relatively stressed one.

Example: the word bemoan
Term
iambic pentameter
Definition
a line of poetry consisting of five iambic feet
Term
intertextuality
Definition
the relationship one text has to another, especially in the way in which two or more texts may be in conversation with each other.

Example: Frankenstein re-writes Milton's Paradise Lost, and thus the two texts have an intertextual relationship.
Term
Irish Literary Renaissance
Definition
the great flowering in the early 20th century of poetry and prose drawing on Irish themes and legend; led by Yeats as an artistic movement which had the potential to bring freedom from British imperialism.
Term
irony
Definition
the gap between what is said and what is meant; what one character knows and another knows; what the character knows and what the audience knows.
Term
Lyrical Ballads
Definition
the revolutionary volume of poetry by Wordsworth and Coleridge whose publication in 1798 marked the beginning of English Romanticism
Term
manifesto
Definition
a statement of political or religious principles usually in essay form.

Example: "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" by Mary Wollstonecraft
Term
Matter of Britain
Definition
one of the three great narrative cycles dating from the Middle Ages, the Matter of Britain refers chiefly to work devoted to the legends of King Arthur and his court.

Examples: Tennyson's "Morte d'Arthur" and "The Lady of Shalott"
Term
metaphor
Definition
an implied comparison
Term
meter
Definition
the more or less regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of poetry.
Term
Modernism
Definition
the literary movement following Victorianism and occurring in the early to mid-20th century and including within it many smaller movements such as Imagism, Expressionism, and Surrealism; modernist writers wrote in despair at the great failings of humanity, especially those associated with imperialism, the World Wars, genocide; they felt acutely the emptiness of human lives lived without the values of faith, a sense of dignity, and a trust that goodness will prevail over evil.

Example: Eliot's "The Hollow Men"
Term
negative capability
Definition
Keats's theory that the poet can negate the self and become another self in the act of writing; for instance, in the "Ode to a Nightingale" the poet negates the self and becomes the nightingale and its song.
Term
novel
Definition
a long and extended prose narrative with several plot sequences, multiple characters, and multiple settings.
Term
novella
Definition
a short noel with fewer characters, plot sequences, and settings than the longer novel; the novella generally revolves around a symbol, the meaning of which often unfolds for the reader the meaning of the novella.

Example: The Dead
Term
ode
Definition
poem in an exalted tone on a lofty and single subject, a unified strain, and having an irregular appearance on the page.

Example: Keats's great odes
Term
Post-Colonialism
Definition
a literary movement coinciding with post-modernism (mid-20th to today) but which examines the relationship between the colonized and the colonizer, generally to critique hegemony and to understand how identity, nationhood, ethnicity, personhood develop under oppression and emerge from that oppression. Salman Rushdie famously summed up the political agenda of post-colonial literature by saying: "The Empire Writes Back"

Example: Wole Soyinka's poetry and Ngugi wa Thiongo's essay on decolonizing the mind express the early values of Post-Colonialism.
Term
Post-Modernism
Definition
the literary period following modernism, running from the mid-20th century through today, marked by extreme experimentalism, an exploration of gender/class/race issues as well as power relationships.

Example: Krapp's Last Tape
Term
quatrain
Definition
a four-line stanza. The heroic or elegiac quatrain is a four-line stanza written in iambic pentameter.

Example: Blake's "The Little Black Boy"
Term
reification
Definition
the objectification of persons or other animals, but especially of women, as when the Duke of Ferrara in Browning's "My Last Duchess" turns his late wife into an art object.
Term
rhyme scheme
Definition
the pattern in a poem of a line's ending word sounding like the ending word of another line. The pattern is usually regular.
Term
Romanticism
Definition
1798-1832, the period of innovative and experimental work in poetry and in prose by such writers as Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and the Shelleys; major principles of the romantics include exuberance, excess, the self, originality, the emotions, intuition, the imagination, a return to simple, rural values, etc.
Term
shaped verse
Definition
poetry whose physical appearance on the page resembles the subject of the poetry

Example: the three-line stanzas created for "The Convergence of the Twain" by Hardy to resemble the decks of a ship
Term
simile
Definition
a comparison using "like" or "as"
Term
sonnet
Definition
a 14-line poem or stanza; sonnets are usually either Shakespearean or Italian
Term
sonnet sequence
Definition
a series of sonnets on a single topic.

Example: Browning's Sonnets From the Portuguese redefines a genre previously "owned" by male writers to create love sonnets written from the female perspective.
Term
symbol
Definition
an object that is itself but that can take on fixed and loose associations
Term
Symbolism
Definition
an early 20th century movement coinciding with Modernism; Symbolist writers use symbols as a means to communicate across cultures and time, as through the workings of the collective unconscious and its store of human history and signs; they proclaim a world beyond that of concrete phenomena.

Example: Yeats's "The Circus Animal's Desertion"
Term
terza rima
Definition
a stanzaic and rhyme form developed by Dante for the Divine Comedy; characterized by tercets or triplets (3-line stanzas) with interlocking rhyme that tiesall the tercets together.

Example: Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" joins the ode with the sonnet form and terza rima.
Term
theater of the absurd
Definition
a term coined by the critic Martin Esslin to describe the work of playwrights like Beckett whose lays depict the meaninglessness or absurdity of human interaction and lives.

Example: Krapp's Last Tape
Term
Victorianism
Definition
the literary period following Romanticism from the mid-to the late-19th century, corresponding closely to the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) in which writers moved away from Romantic values and toward realism, away from the interest in the self to an interest in society and societal issues and ills; the Victorians embraced to a greater or lesser degree newer developments in science and technology, especially the theory of evolution which precipitated much religious doubt; the Victorian era marks the highpoint of British imperialism, a subject for much of the literature of the era.

Examples: Tennyson and Browning
Term
willing suspension of disbelief
Definition
a term developed by Coleridge to define a reader's (and a writer's) stance in the face of fantastic or supernatural events in a narrative or a poem, events that might easily be disbelieved.
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