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| A poetic device where the first consonant sounds or any vowel sounds in words or syllables are repeated. Example: "And in guise all of green, the gear and the man." |
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| A reference in a literary work to a person, place, or thing in history or another work of literature. |
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| Unrhymed iambic pentameter verse--composed of lines of 5 two-syllable feet with the first syllable accented, and the second unaccented. Example: "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot." |
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| In a tragedy, the quality within the hero or heroine which leads to his or her downfall. Example: Othello's jealousy, Hamlet's indecisiveness. |
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| A negative term implying both arrogant, excessive self-pride or self-confidence, and also a lack of some important perception or insight due to pride in one's abilities. Example: Tartuffe |
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| The release or purging of unwanted emotions -- specifically fear and pity -- brought about by exposure to or creation of art. |
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| A French word meaning "the unknotting." The denouement follows the climax and provides an outcome to the primary plot situation as well as an explanation of secondary plot complications. |
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| The turning point in a narrative, the moment when the conflict is at its most intense. |
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| Two lines of Poetry with the same rhyme and Meter, often expressing a complete and self-contained thought. Example from Alexander Pope's "Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady "Tis Use alone that sanctifies Expense, And Splendour borrows all her rays from Sense." |
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| A Latin term meaning "god out of a machine." In Greek drama, a god was often lowered onto the stage by a mechanism of some kind to rescue the hero or untangle the plot. By extension, the term refers to any artificial device or coincidence used to bring about a convenient and simple solution to a plot. |
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| The philosophical and artistic movement growing out of the Renaissance and continuing until the nineteenth century. The Enlightenment was an optimistic belief that humanity could improve itself by applying logic and reason to all things. It rejected untested beliefs, superstition, and the "barbarism" of the earlier medieval period, and embraced the literary, architectural, and artistic forms of the Greco-Roman world. Enlightenment thinkers were enchanted by the perfection of geometry. |
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| Enjambment (pronounced on-zhahm-mah) |
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| A line having no pause or end punctuation but having uninterrupted grammatical meaning continuing into the next line. Example from George S. Viereck's _The Haunted House_ "I lay beside you; on your lips the while/ Hovered most strange the mirage of a smile/ Such as a minstrel lover might have seen/ Upon the visage of some antique queen. . . ." |
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| It is a poem that is (a) a long narrative about a serious subject, (b) told in an elevated style of language, (c) focused on the exploits of a hero or demi-god who represents the cultural values of a race, nation, or religious group (d) in which the hero's success or failure will determine the fate of that people or nation. Usually, the epic has (e) a vast setting, and covers a wide geographic area, (f) it contains superhuman feats of strength or military prowess, and gods or supernatural beings. |
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Iambic pentameter definition can be clearly understood from the name of the meter itself. Iambic refers to the type of foot that is used, which is one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable and pentameter refers to the fact that a line of the verse has five feet. An iambic pentameter has ten syllables with five pairs of alternating stressed and unstressed syllables. Every pair of syllable is called an iambus. The rhythm of the meter is written as: da Dum
A verse that has an iambic |
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| A short poem (usually no more than 50-60 lines, and often only a dozen lines long) written in a repeating stanzaic form, often designed to be set to music. |
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| A comparison or analogy stated in such a way as to imply that one object is another one, figuratively speaking. Example: "You are the Earth; she is the moon." |
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| An analogy or comparison implied by using an adverb such as "like" or "as." Example: "You are like the Earth; she is like the moon." |
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| A myth is a traditional tale of deep cultural significance to a people . |
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| A literary movement in America, Europe, and England that developed out of naturalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The term realism applies to the tendency to create detailed, probing analyses of the way "things really are," usually involving an emphasis on nearly photographic details, the author's inclusion of in-depth psychological traits for his or her characters, and an attempt to create a literary facsimile of human existence unclouded by convention,& cliche. |
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| A literary movement seeking to depict life as accurately as possible, without artificial distortions of emotion, idealism, and literary convention. The school of thought is a product of post-Darwinian biology in the nineteenth century. It asserts that human beings exist entirely in the order of nature. |
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| Modern literary practices. Also, the principles of a literary school that lasted from roughly the beginning of the twentieth century until the end of World War II. Modernism is defined by its rejection of the literary conventions of the nineteenth century and by its opposition to conventional morality, taste, traditions, and economic values. |
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| An artistic composition dealing with the life of shepherds or with a simple, rural existence. It usually idealized shepherds' lives in order to create an image of peaceful and uncorrupted existence. More generally, pastoral describes the simplicity, charm, and serenity attributed to country life, or any literary convention that places kindly, rural people in nature-centered activities. |
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| Onomatopoeia (Prounounced "on-ah-mott-ah-pee-ah") |
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| The use of sounds that are similar to the noise they represent for a rhetorical or artistic effect. For instance, buzz, click, rattle, and grunt make sounds akin to the noise they represent. |
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| Writing from the 1960s forward characterized by experimentation and continuing to apply some of the fundamentals of modernism, which included existentialism and alienation. Postmodernists have gone a step further in the rejection of tradition begun with the modernists by also rejecting traditional forms, preferring the anti-novel over the novel and the anti-hero over the hero. (Dr. K's Note: Postmodernist literature is usually conscious of its own existence as literature.) |
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| A deliberate exaggeration used to achieve an effect. |
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| A trope in which abstractions, animals, ideas, and inanimate objects are given human character, traits, abilities, or reactions. |
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| The period of cultural, technological, and artistic vitality during the economic expansion in Britain in the late 1500s and early 1600s. Thinkers at this time and later saw themselves as rediscovering and redistributing the legacy of classical Greco-Roman culture by renewing forgotten studies and artistic practices, hence the name "renaissance" or "rebirth." |
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| A central idea or statement that unifies and controls an entire literary work. |
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| An attack on or criticism of any stupidity or vice in the form of scathing humor, or a critique of what the author sees as dangerous religious, political, moral, or social standards. Example: A Modest Proposal |
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| The Petrarchan sonnet has an eight line stanza (called an octave) followed by a six line stanza (called a sestet). The octave has two quatrains rhyming abba, abba, the first of which presents the theme, the second further develops it. In the sestet, the first three lines reflect on or exemplify the theme, while the last three bring the poem to a unified end. The sestet may be arranged cdecde, cdcdcd, or cdedce. |
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| A community's cultural and historical traditions passed down by word of mouth or example from one generation to another without written instruction. |
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| A member of a class of traveling poets, musicians, and storytellers who maintain a tradition of oral history in parts of West Africa. |
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| A character type that appears repeatedly in a particular literary genre, one which has certain conventional attributes or attitudes. (Note from Dr. K--A "stock character" is like a character that you could go to a store and order from "stock." Like a bumbling professor, an innocent child, an demanding mother, etc.) |
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| Any play or narrative poem in which the main characters manage to avert an impending disaster and have a happy ending. The comedy did not necessarily have to be funny, and indeed, many comedies are serious in tone. |
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| The Shakespearean sonnet uses three quatrains; each rhymed differently, with a final, independently rhymed couplet that makes an effective, unifying climax to the whole. Its rhyme scheme is abab, cdcd, efef, gg. Typically, the final two lines follow a "turn" or a "volta," (sometimes spelled volte, like volte-face) because they reverse, undercut, or turn from the original line of thought to take the idea in a new direction |
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| A type or category of literature or film marked by certain shared features or conventions. |
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| Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities. |
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| An arrangement of lines of verse in a pattern usually repeated throughout the poem. Typically, each stanza has a fixed number of verses or lines, a prevailing meter, and a consistent rhyme scheme. A stanza may be a subdivision of a poem, or it may constitute the entire poem. |
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| The movement toward classical architecture, literature, drama, and design that took place during the Restoration and Enlightenment. |
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| The general locale, historical time, and social circumstances in which the action of a fictional or dramatic work occurs; the setting of an episode or scene within a work is the particular physical location in which it takes place. |
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| The way a story gets told and who tells it. It is the method of narration that determines the position, or angle of vision, from which the story unfolds. Point of view governs the reader's access to the story. Many narratives appear in the first person (the narrator speaks as "I" and the narrator is a character in the story who may or may not influence events within it). Another common type of narrative is the third-person narrative (the narrator seems to be someone standing outside the story.) |
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| A protagonist who is a non-hero or the antithesis of a traditional hero. While the traditional hero may be dashing, strong, brave, resourceful, or handsome, the antihero may be incompetent, unlucky, clumsy, dumb, ugly, or clownish. Examples here might include the senile protagonist of Cervantes' Don Quixote. |
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| Any representation of an individual being presented in a dramatic or narrative work through extended dramatic or verbal representation. |
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| Any figure of speech that results in a change of meaning is called a trope. |
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| A deviation from what speakers of a language understand as the ordinary or standard use of words in order to achieve some special meaning or effect. Perhaps the two most common figurative devices are the simile--a comparison between two distinctly different things using "like" or &"as" ("My love's like a red, red rose")--and the metaphor--a figure of speech in which two unlike objects are implicitly compared without the use of "like"or "as." |
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| A composition in prose or verse presenting, in pantomime and dialogue, a narrative involving conflict between a character or characters and some external or internal force (see conflict). Playwrights usually design dramas for presentation on a stage in front of an audience. Aristotle called drama "imitated human action." |
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| A central idea or statement that unifies and controls an entire literary work. |
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| The structure and relationship of actions and events in a work of fiction. |
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| Romanticism rejected the earlier philosophy of the Enlightenment, which stressed that logic and reason were the best response humans had in the face of cruelty, stupidity, superstition, and barbarism. Instead, the Romantics asserted that reliance upon emotion and natural passions provided a valid and powerful means of knowing and a reliable guide to ethics and living. The Romantic movement typically asserts the unique nature of the individual,and the privileged status of imagination and fancy. |
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| The repetition of sound patterns that creates a rhythm in Poetry. |
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