My Lit Terms

An acrostic in which the first letter of every word, strophe or verse follows the order of the alphabet. Also used as a generic term for an alphabet book, which dates back to Biblical writings such as the Psalms, which used successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet as the first letter of each stanza.

A line of verse having the metrically complete number of syllables in the final foot. When talking about poetry written in English this term is arguably of limited significance or utility, for the simple reason that this type of verse is considered to be the "usual case" in the large majority of metrical contexts and therefore explicit reference to it proves almost universally superfluous.

The emphasis or stress placed on a syllable in poetry. In poetry, this refers to the stressed syllable of a polysyllabic word, or a monosyllabic word that receives stress because it belongs to an "open class" of words (noun, verb, adjective, adverb) or because of "contrastive" or "rhetorical" stress. In basic analysis of a poem by scansion, they are represented with a slash ("/") and there is generally one in each foot of a line, unless the foot is a spondee (//).

A narrative technique in which characters representing things or abstract ideas are used to convey a message or teach a lesson. Typically used to teach moral, ethical, or religious lessons but is sometimes used for satiric or political purposes.

A poetic device where the first consonant sounds or any vowel sounds in words or syllables are repeated.
And in guise all of green, the gear and the man:
A coat cut close, that clung to his sides
An a mantle to match, made with a lining
Of furs cut and fitted — the fabric was noble....

A short poem that tells a simple story and has a repeated refrain. Originally intended to be sung. Examples - "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and John Keats's "La Belle Dame sans Merci" are examples of literary ballads

The natural rhythm of language caused by the alternation of accented and unaccented syllables. Much modern Poetry— notably free Verse — deliberately manipulates cadence to create complex rhythmic effects

A protest movement in art and literature founded by Tristan Tzara in 1916. Followers of the movement expressed their outrage at the destruction brought about by World War I by revolting against numerous forms of social convention and by presenting works marked by calculated madness and flamboyant nonsense. They stressed total freedom of expression, commonly through primitive displays of emotion and illogical, often senseless, Poetry. The movement ended shortly after the war, when it was replaced by surrealism

In classical literature, a poem featuring rural themes and structured as a dialogue among shepherds. Often these specific poetic forms, are elegies or love poems. Some were written as the Soliloquy of a shepherd. In later centuries, these came to refer to any poem that was in the pastoral tradition or that had a dialogue or Monologue structure. A classical example is Virgil but Edmund Spenser, Andrew Marvell, Jonathan Swift, and Louis MacNeice also wrote them.

A prose or verse narrative intended to convey a moral. Animals or inanimate objects with human characteristics often serve as characters in the narratives. A famous example is Aesop's "The Tortoise and the Hare."

A category of literary work. In critical theory, this term may refer to both the content of a given work — tragedy, Comedy, pastoral — and to its form, such as Poetry, novel, or drama. This term also refers to types of popular literature, as in the Science Fiction blank or the detective story blank.

The shortest form of Japanese poetry, constructed in three lines of five, seven, and five syllables respectively. The message of a this kind of poem usually centers on some aspect of spirituality and provokes an emotional response in the reader. Early masters of this form include Basho, Buson, Kobayashi Issa, and Masaoka Shiki. English writers include the Imagists, notably Ezra Pound, H. D., Amy Lowell, Carl Sandburg, and William Carlos Williams.

A word construction or verbal expression closely associated with a given language. For example, in colloquial English the construction "how come" can be used instead of "why" to introduce a question. Similarly, "a piece of cake" is sometimes used to describe a task that is easily done.

The period of the reign of James I of England (1603-1625). The early literature of this period reflected the worldview of the Elizabethan Age, but a darker, more cynical attitude steadily grew in the art and literature of the Jacobean Age. This was an important time for English drama and Poetry.
Milestones include William Shakespeare's tragedies, tragi-comedies, and sonnets; Ben Jonson's various dramas; and John Donne's metaphysical poetry

A somewhat indistinct group of New York writers of the first half of the nineteenth century. Members of the group were linked only by location and a common theme New York life. Two famous members of this Group were Washington Irving and William Cullen Bryant. The group's name derives from Irving's Blank History of New York.

(Also known as the Lake Poets) These poets all lived in the Lake District of England at the turn of the nineteenth century. As a group, they followed no single "school" of thought or literary practice, although their works were uniformly disparaged by the Edinburgh Review.

Exaggerated, artificial adherence to a literary manner or style. Also, a popular style of the visual arts of late sixteenth-century Europe that was marked by elongation of the human form and by intentional spatial distortion. Literary works that are self-consciously high-toned and artistic are often said to be "mannered." Authors of such works include Henry James and Gertrude Stein.

A reference to a familiar literary or historical person or event, used to make an idea more easily understood. For example, describing someone as a "Romeo"

A comparison of two things made to explain something unfamiliar through its similarities to something familiar, or to prove one point based on the acceptedness of another.

A metrical foot used in formal poetry. consists of two short syllables followed by a long one.
I am out of humanity's reach
I must finish my journey alone

The major character in a narrativeor drama who works against the hero or protagonist.

The presentation of animals or objects in human shape or with human characteristics. The term is derived from the Greek word for "human form."

A central character in a work of literature who lacks traditional heroic qualities such as courage, physical prowess, and fortitude. Typically distrust conventional values and are unable to commit themselves to any ideals. They generally feel helpless in a world over which they have no control. Usually accept, and often celebrate, their positions as social outcasts.

A term coined by French critic Jean-Paul Sartre. It refers to any experimental work of fiction that avoids the familiar conventions of the novel. Usually fragments and distorts the experience of its characters, forcing the reader to construct the reality of the story from a disordered narrative.

Something is its direct opposite. In literature, as a figure of speech this results in two statements that show a contrast through the balancing of two opposite ideas.
An example of is found in the following portion of Abraham Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address”: "The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here."

Writings tentatively attributed to an author but not proven or universally accepted to be their works. The term was originally applied to certain books of the Bible that were not considered inspired and so were not included in the "sacred canon."
Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Middleton, and John Marston all have apocrypha. Apocryphal books of the Bible include the Old Testament's Book of Enoch and New Testament's Gospel of Thomas.

The two impulses believed to guide authors of dramatic tragedy.

A statement, question, or request addressed to an inanimate object or concept or to a nonexistent or absent person.
"O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!...
Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood!..."

Commonly used to describe an original pattern or model from which all other things of the same kind are made. They appear in literature as incidents and plots that repeat basic patterns of life. They may also appear as stereotyped characters. Examples of include themes such as birth and death and characters such as the Earth Mother.

A comment made by a stage performer that is intended to be heard by the audience but supposedly not by other characters.

The repetition of similar vowel sounds in Poetry.
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

The people for whom a piece of literature is written.

A connected narrative in which an individual tells his or her life story.

A French term meaning "vanguard." It is used in literary criticismto describe new writing that rejects traditional approaches to literature in favor of innovations in style or content.

A short poem that tells a simple story and has a repeated refrain. Originally intended to be sung. Examples - "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and John Keats's "La Belle Dame sans Merci" are examples of literary ballads.

A term used in literary criticism to describe literature that is complex or ornate in style or diction. These literary works typically express tension, anxiety, and violent emotion. Examples - William Shakespeare's As You Like It.

A period featuring a group of American poets and novelists of the 1950s and 1960s — including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti — who rejected established social and literary values. Using such techniques as stream of consciousness writing and jazz-influenced free Verse and focusing on unusual or abnormal states of mind — generated by religious ecstasy or the use of drugs — these writers aimed to create works that were unconventional in both form and subject matter. Best exemplified by Kerouac's On the Road.

A French term meaning "fine letters" or "beautiful writing." It is often used as a synonym for literature, typically referring to imaginative and artistic rather than scientific or expository writing. Current usage sometimes restricts the meaning to light or humorous writing and appreciative essays about literature.

A German word meaning "novel of development." The bildungsromanis a study of the maturation of a youthful character, typically brought about through a series of social or sexual encounters that lead to self-awareness. Ex: James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, and S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders.

A connected narrative that tells a person's life story. Typically aim to be objective and closely detailed. James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson.

This was the first major African-American artistic movement since the Harlem Renaissance and was closely paralleled by the civil rights and black power movements.

Writing that places grotesque elements side by side with humorous ones in an attempt to shock the reader, forcing him or her to laugh at the horrifying reality of a disordered world. Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22 is considered a superb example of the use of black humor. Other well-known authors who use black humor include Kurt Vonnegut, Edward Albee, Eugene Ionesco, and Harold Pinter.

The College and three of its instructors — Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Charles Olson — were all influential in projective verse, so poets working in projective verse are now referred as members of the this school.

Loosely, any unrhymed poetry, but more generally, unrhymed iambic pentameter verse (composed of lines of five two-syllable feet with the first syllable accented, the second unaccented). This verse has been used by poets since the Renaissance for its flexibility and its graceful, dignified tone, and most of William Shakespeare's plays are written in this verse.

A group of English writers, artists, and intellectuals who held informal artistic and philosophical discussions in a district of London, from around 1907 to the early 1930s. This group held no uniform philosophical beliefs but did commonly express an aversion to moral prudery and a desire for greater social tolerance. This group included Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, and John Maynard Keynes.

A French term meaning "good word." A witty remark or clever observation. Two examples by Oscar Wilde stand out (1) "All women become their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his." (2) "A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

Any literary work that uses exaggeration to make its subject appear ridiculous, either by treating a trivial subject with profound seriousness or by treating a dignified subject frivolously. Examples would include the comedies of Aristophanes and Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote.

The natural rhythm of language caused by the alternation of accented and unaccented syllables. Much modern Poetry— notably free Verse — deliberately manipulates cadence to create complex rhythmic effects.

A pause in a line of Poetry, usually occurring near the middle. It typically corresponds to a break in the natural rhythm or sense of the line but is sometimes shifted to create special meanings or rhythmic effects.
The opening line of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" contains a caesura following "dreary" "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary….”

A short Italian or Provencal lyric poem, commonly about love and often set to music. Typically contains five or six stanzas made up of seven to twenty lines of eleven syllables each. A shorter, five- to ten-line "envoy," or concluding stanza, completes the poem.

A Latin term meaning "seize the day." This is a traditional theme of Poetry, advising the reader or the person it addresses to live for today and enjoy the pleasures of the moment.
Two celebrated carpe diem poems are Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" and Robert Herrick's poem beginning "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may...."

The release or purging of unwanted emotions — specifically fear and pity — brought about by exposure to art. The term was first used by the Greek philosopher Aristotle in his Poeticsto refer to the desired effect of tragedy on spectators.
A famous example is realized in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex,when Oedipus discovers that his wife, Jacosta, is his own mother and that the stranger he killed on the road was his own father.

A period of Irish literary and cultural history at the end of the nineteenth century. Followers of the movement aimed to create a romantic vision of Celtic myth and legend. The most significant works of the Celtic Renaissance typically present a dreamy, unreal world, usually in reaction against the reality of contemporary problems.
William Butler Yeats's The Wanderings of Oisinis is a primary example.

Broadly speaking, a person in a literary work. The actions of these figures are what constitute the plot of a story, novel, or poem. There are numerous types, ranging from simple, stereotypical figures to intricate, multifaceted ones.

Is the process by which an author creates vivid, believable characters in a work of art. This may be done in a variety of ways, including (1) direct description of the character by the narrator; (2) the direct presentation of the speech, thoughts, or actions of the character; and (3) the responses of other characters to the character.

In ancient Greek drama, a group of actors who commented on and interpreted the unfolding action on the stage. Initially this was a major component of the presentation, but over time it became less significant, with its numbers reduced and its role eventually limited to commentary between Acts.

A record of events presented in chronological order. Although the scope and level of detail provided varies greatly, some, feature vivid descriptions and a lively recounting of events. During the Elizabethan Age, many dramas were based on material from these works.

In its strictest definition in literary criticism, classicism refers to works of ancient Greek or Roman literature. The term may also be used to describe a literary work of recognized importance (a "classic") from any time period or literature that exhibits the traits of classicism.

A term used in literary criticism to describe critical doctrines that have their roots in ancient Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, and art. Works associated with classicism typically exhibit restraint on the part of the author, unity of design and purpose, clarity, simplicity, logical organization, and respect for tradition.
Examples of literary classicism include Cicero's prose, the dramas of Jean Racine, and the Poetry of John Dryden and Alexander Pope, and T. S. Eliot.

The turning point in a narrative, the moment when the conflict is at its most intense. Typically, the structure of stories, novels, and plays is one of rising action, in which tension builds to this point, followed by falling action, in which tension lessens as the story moves to its conclusion.

A word, phrase, or form of pronunciation that is acceptable in casual conversation but not in formal, written communication. It is considered more acceptable than slang.
An example of is Rudyard Kipling's Barrack-room Ballads
When 'Omer smote 'is bloomin' lyre
He'd 'eard men sing by land and sea;
An' what he thought 'e might require
'E went an' took — the same as me!

One of two major types of drama, the other being tragedy. Its aim is to amuse, and it typically ends happily. This type of drama assumes many forms, such as farce and burlesque, and uses a variety of techniques, from parody to satire. In general usage it is commonly applied to nondramatic works. Examples: Geoffrey Chaucer's tales and William Shakespeare's plays to Noel Coward's play Private Lives and James Thurber's short story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty."

A play about the mores and conventions of an aristocratic, highly sophisticated society. The characters are usually types rather than individualized personalities, and plot is less important than atmosphere. Such plays were an important aspect of late seventeenth-century English Comedy. Examples - Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest in the nineteenth century, and W. Somerset Maugham's The Circle in the twentieth century.

The use of humor to lighten the mood of a serious or tragic story, especially in plays. The technique is very common in Elizabethan works, and can be an integral part of the plot or simply a brief event designed to break the tension of the scene. The Gravediggers' scene in William Shakespeare's Hamlet is a frequently cited example.

An Italian term meaning "the Comedy of guilds" or "the comedy of professional actors." This form of dramatic comedy was popular in Italy during the sixteenth century. Actors were assigned stock roles (such as Pulcinella, the stupid servant, or Pantalone, the old merchant) and given a basic plot to follow, but all dialogue was improvised. The roles were rigidly typed and the plots were formulaic, usually revolving around young lovers who thwarted their elders and attained wealth and happiness. A rigid convention of the commedia dell'arte is the periodic intrusion of Harlequin, who interrupts the play with low buffoonery.

A lyric poem, popular in the Renaissance, in which the speaker expresses sorrow about his or her condition. Typically, the speaker's sadness is caused by an unresponsive lover, but some complaints cite other sources of unhappiness, such as poverty or fate.

A clever and fanciful metaphor, usually expressed through elaborate and extended comparison, that presents a striking parallel between two seemingly dissimilar things — for example, elaborately comparing a beautiful woman to an object like a garden or the sun. This was a popular device throughout the Elizabethan Age and Baroque Age and was the principal technique of the seventeenth-century English metaphysical poets. This usage of the word is unrelated to the best-known definition of someone who has an arrogant attitude or behavior.

The opposite of abstract, and refers to a thing that actually exists or a description that allows the reader to experience an object or concept with the senses. Henry David Thoreau's Walden contains this type of description of nature and wildlife.

Poetry in which visual elements play a large part in the poetic effect. Punctuation marks, letters, or words are arranged on a page to form a visual design a cross, for example, or a bumblebee.

A form of Poetry in which the poet reveals very personal, intimate, sometimes shocking information about himself or herself.

The issue to be resolved in the story. It usually occurs between two characters, the protagonist and the antagonist, or between the protagonist and society or the protagonist and himself or herself. Jack London's short story "To Build a Fire" concerns the protagonist's battle against the cold and himself.

The impression that a word gives beyond its defined meaning and may be universally understood or may be significant only to a certain group. Both "horse" and "steed" denote the same animal, but "steed" has a different meaning, deriving from the chivalrous or romantic narratives in which the word was once often used.

(Also known as Half Rhyme or Slant Rhyme.) Occurs in Poetry when words appearing at the ends of two or more verses have similar final consonant sounds but have final vowel sounds that differ, as with "stuff" and "off." Example - "The curfew tolls the knells of parting day" from Thomas Grey's "An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard."

Any widely accepted literary device, style, or form. A soliloquy, in which a character reveals to the audience his or her private thoughts, is an example.

A Mexican ballad.

Two lines of Poetry with the same rhyme and Meter, often expressing a complete and self-contained thought. 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.

A genre of fiction that focuses on the environment, behavior, and psychology of criminals. Prominent writers of crime novels include John Wainwright, Colin Watson, Nicolas Freeling, Ruth Rendell, Jessica Mann, Mickey Spillane, and Patricia Highsmith.

The systematic study and evaluation of literary works, usually based on a specific method or set of principles. An important part of literary studies since ancient times, this practice has given rise to numerous theories, methods, and "schools," sometimes producing conflicting, even contradictory, interpretations of literature in general as well as of individual works. Seminal texts include Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Poetics, Sir Philip Sidney's The Defence of Poesie, John Dryden's Of Dramatic Poesie, and William Wordsworth's "Preface" to the second edition of his Lyrical Ballads. Contemporary schools of criticism include deconstruction, feminist, psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, new historicist, postcolonialist, and reader-response.

A protest movement in art and literature founded by Tristan Tzara in 1916. Followers of the movement expressed their outrage at the destruction brought about by World War I by revolting against numerous forms of social convention and by presenting works marked by calculated madness and flamboyant nonsense. They stressed total freedom of expression, commonly through primitive displays of emotion and illogical, often senseless, Poetry. The movement ended shortly after the war, when it was replaced by surrealism.

The followers of a nineteenth-century literary movement that had its beginnings in French Aestheticism. This literature displays a fascination with perverse and morbid states; a search for novelty and sensation — the "new thrill"; a preoccupation with mysticism; and a belief in the senselessness of human existence. The movement is closely associated with the doctrine Art for Art's Sake. Major French writers of this movement are Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud. English writers include Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson, and Frank Harris.

A method of literary criticism developed by Jacques Derrida and characterized by multiple conflicting interpretations of a given work. This school of criticism considers the impact of the language of a work and suggests that the true meaning of the work is not necessarily the meaning that the author intended.
Jacques Derrida's De la grammatologie is the seminal text on this school criticism; among American practitioners of this method of criticism are Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller.

The process of reaching a conclusion through reasoning from general premises to a specific premise.
An example of is present in the following syllogism
Premise All mammals are animals.
Premise All whales are mammals.
Conclusion Therefore, all whales are animals.

The definition of a word, apart from the impressions or feelings it creates in the reader.
The word "apartheid" denotes a political and economic policy of segregation by race, but its connotations — oppression, slavery, inequality — are numerous.

(Also known as Falling Action.) A French word meaning "the unknotting." In literary criticism, it denotes the resolution of conflict in fiction or drama. The denouement follows the climax and provides an outcome to the primary plot situation as well as an explanation of secondary plot complications. The denouement often involves a character's recognition of his or her state of mind or moral condition.
A well-known example of denouement is the last scene of the play As You Like It by William Shakespeare, in which couples are married, an evildoer repents, the identities of two disguised characters are revealed, and a ruler is restored to power.

Descriptive writing is intended to allow a reader to picture the scene or setting in which the action of a story takes place. The form this description takes often evokes an intended emotional response — a dark, spooky graveyard will evoke fear, and a peaceful, sunny meadow will evoke calmness.
An example of a descriptive story is Edgar Allan Poe's Landor's Cottage, which offers a detailed depiction of a New York country estate.

A narrative about the solution of a mystery or the identification of a criminal. The conventions of the detective story include the detective's scrupulous use of logic in solving the mystery; incompetent or ineffectual police; a suspect who appears guilty at first but is later proved innocent; and the detective's friend or confidant — often the narrator — whose slowness in interpreting clues emphasizes by contrast the detective's brilliance.
Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" is commonly regarded as the earliest example of this type of story. With this work, Poe established many of the conventions of the detective story genre, which are still in practice. Other practitioners of this vast and extremely popular genre include Arthur Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammett, and Agatha Christie.

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. This is a common device in melodramas and includes such fortunate circumstances as the sudden receipt of a legacy to save the family farm or a last-minute stay of execution. When used it invariably rewards the virtuous and punishes evildoers.
Examples include King Louis XIV in Jean-Baptiste Moliere's Tartuffe and Queen Victoria in The Pirates of Penzance by William Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. Bertolt Brecht parodies the abuse of such devices in the conclusion of his Threepenny Opera.

In its widest sense, this is simply conversation between people in a literary work; in its most restricted sense, it refers specifically to the speech of characters in a drama. As a specific literary genre, it is a composition in which characters debate an issue or idea.
The Greek philosopher Plato frequently expounded his theories in this form.

A personal written record of daily events and thoughts. As private documents, these are supposedly not intended for an audience, but some, such as those of Samuel Pepys and Anais Nin, are known for their high literary quality.
The Diary of Anne Frank is an example of a well-known diary discovered and published after the author's death. Many writers have used the diary form as a deliberate literary device, as in Nikolai Gogol's story "Diary of a Madman." (Compare with Autobiography.)

The selection and arrangement of words in a literary work. Either or both may vary depending on the desired effect. There are four general types: "formal," used in scholarly or lofty writing; "informal," used in relaxed but educated conversation; "colloquial," used in everyday speech; and "slang," containing newly coined words and other terms not accepted in formal usage.

A term used to describe works of literature that aim to teach some moral, religious, political, or practical lesson. This term usually refers to literature in which the message is more important than the form. The term may also be used to criticize a work that the critic finds heavy-handed in its delivery of a lesson.
Examples of this literature include John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Alexander Pope's essay on Criticism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile, and Elizabeth Inchbald's Simple Story.

A Latin phrase meaning "discord in harmony." The term was coined by the eighteenth-century English writer Samuel Johnson to describe "a combination of dissimilar images or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike." Johnson created the expression by reversing a phrase by the Latin poet Horace.
The metaphysical poetry of John Donne, Richard Crashaw, Abraham Cowley, George Herbert, and Edward Taylor among others, contain many examples of this term. In Donne's "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning," the poet compares the union of himself with his lover to a draftsman's compass.
If they be two, they are two so,
As stiff twin compasses are two
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do;
And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
(Compare with conceit.)

A combination of harsh or jarring sounds, especially in Poetry. Although such combinations may be accidental, poets sometimes intentionally make them to achieve particular effects. This term is also sometimes used to refer to close but not identical rhymes. When this is the case, the word functions as a synonym for Consonance.
Robert Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and many other poets have made deliberate use of this.

A work that features a large amount of documentary material such as newspaper stories, trial transcripts, and legal reports. Such works can include fictionalized segments or may contain a fictional story in which the author incorporates real-life information or events; these are referred to as documentary novels.
Examples include the works of Theodore Dreiser, Emile Zola, John Dos Passos, and James T. Farrell.

(Also known as The Double.) A literary technique by which a character is duplicated (usually in the form of an alter ego, though sometimes as a ghostly counterpart) or divided into two distinct, usually opposite personalities. The use of this character device is widespread in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, and indicates a growing awareness among authors that the "self" is really a composite of many "selves." A well-known story containing a duplicate character is Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

A corruption of a French phrase meaning "double meaning." The term is used to indicate a word or phrase that is deliberately ambiguous, especially when one of the meanings is risque or improper. An example of a double entendre is the Elizabethan usage of the verb "die," which refers both to death and to orgasm.

Any preliminary version of a written work. An author may write dozens of these which are revised to form the final work, or he or she may write only one, with few or no revisions. Dorothy Parker's observation that "I can't write five words but that I change seven" humorously indicates the purpose of this term.

In its widest sense, any work designed to be presented by actors on a stage. Similarly, it also denotes a broad literary genre that includes a variety of forms, from pageant and spectacle to tragedy and comedy, as well as countless types and subtypes. More commonly in modern usage, however, this type of written work addresses serious subjects and themes but does not aim at the grandeur of tragedy. This use of this term originated with the eighteenth-century French writer Denis Diderot, who coined the term to designate his plays about middle-class life; thus these works typically features characters of a less exalted stature than those of tragedy.
Examples include Menander's comedy Dyscolus and Sophocles' tragedy Oedipus Rex. Contemporary examples include Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, Lillian Hellman's Little Foxes, and August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.

Occurs when the audience of a play or the reader of a work of literature knows something that a character in the work itself does not know. The term defines the contrast between the intended meaning of the statements or actions of a character and the additional information understood by the audience.
A celebrated example is in Act V of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, where two young lovers meet their end as a result of a tragic misunderstanding. Here, the audience has full knowledge that Juliet's apparent "death" is merely temporary; she will regain her senses when the mysterious "sleeping potion" she has taken wears off. But Romeo, mistaking Juliet's drug-induced trance for true death, kills himself in grief. Upon awakening, Juliet discovers Romeo's corpse and, in despair, slays herself.

Any lyric work that employs elements of drama such as dialogue, conflict, or characterization, but excluding works that are intended for stage presentation. A Monologue is a common form of this form.

The characters in a work of literature, particularly a drama. This term is also used for the list of characters printed before the main text of a play or in the program.

A literary allegory convention, chiefly of the Middle Ages, where a story is presented as a literal dream of the narrator. This device was commonly used to teach moral and religious lessons.

An imaginary place in a work of fiction where the characters lead dehumanized, fearful lives. Jack London's The Iron Heel, Yevgeny Zamyatin's My, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four, and Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale portray versions of these imaginary places.

Describes cultural conventions identified with the period of the reign of Edward VII of England (1901-1910). Writers of this period or Age typically displayed a strong reaction against the propriety and conservatism of the Victorian Age. Their work often exhibits distrust of authority in religion, politics, and art and expresses strong doubts about the soundness of conventional values. Writers of this era include George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad. (Compare with Victorian.)

A daughter's amorous obsession with her father.
The name for this term comes from the plays of Euripides and Sophocles, in which the character drives her brother Orestes to kill their mother and her lover in revenge for the murder of their father. (Compare with Oedipus Complex.)

A lyric poem that laments the death of a person or the eventual death of all people. In a conventional elegy, set in a classical world, the poet and subject are spoken of as shepherds. In modern criticism, the word elegy is often used to refer to a poem that is melancholy or mournfully contemplative. John Milton's "Lycidas" and Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Adonais" are two examples of this form. (See also Pastoral.)

A period of great economic growth, religious controversy, and nationalism closely associated with the reign of s monarch in England (1558-1603). This Age is considered a part of the general Renaissance — that is, the flowering of arts and literature — that took place in Europe during the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. The era is also considered the golden age of English literature. The most important dramas in English and a great deal of lyric Poetry were produced during this period, and modern English criticism began around this time. The notable authors of the period — Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon, and John Donne — are among the best in all of English literature.

English comic and tragic plays produced during the Renaissance, or more narrowly, those plays written during the last years of and few years after this monarchs reign. William Shakespeare is considered a dramatist of this type in the broader sense, although most of his work was produced during the reign of James I.
Examples of comedies include John Lyly's The Woman in the Moone, Thomas Dekker's The Roaring Girl, or, Moll Cut Purse, and William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Examples of tragedies include William Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, and John Webster's The Tragedy of the Duchess of Malfi.

A sense of shared experience, including emotional and physical feelings, with someone or something other than oneself. Empathy is often used to describe the response of a reader to a literary character.
An example of an this is a passage is William Shakespeare's description in his narrative poem
Venus and Adonis of
the snail, whose tender horns being hit,
Shrinks backward in his shelly cave with pain.

The running over of the sense and structure of a line of verse or a couplet into the following verse or couplet.
Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" is structured as a series of this kind of verse, as in lines 11-12
"My vegetable love should grow/Vaster than empires and more slow."

An eighteenth-century philosophical movement. It began in France but had a wide impact throughout Europe and America. Thinkers of this time valued reason and believed that both the individual and society could achieve a state of perfection. Corresponding to this essentially humanist vision was a resistance to religious authority. Important figures of this period were Denis Diderot and Voltaire in France, Edward Gibbon and David Hume in England, and Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson in the United States. (Compare with Neoclassicism.) (See also Humanism.)

A long narrative poem about the adventures of a hero of great historic or legendary importance. The setting is vast and the action is often given cosmic significance through the intervention of supernatural forces such as gods, angels, or demons. Works of this kind are typically written in a classical style of grand simplicity with elaborate Metaphors and allusions that enhance the symbolic importance of a hero's adventures. Some well-known classic examples are Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, and John Milton's Paradise Lost.

A theory of theatrical presentation developed by twentieth-century German playwright Bertolt Brecht. Brecht created a type of drama that the audience could view with complete detachment. He used what he termed "alienation effects" to create an emotional distance between the audience and the action on stage. Among these effects are short, self-contained scenes that keep the play from building to a cathartic climax; songs that comment on the action; and techniques of acting that prevent the actor from developing an emotional identity with his role.
Besides the plays of Bertolt Brecht, other plays that utilize these conventions include those of Georg Buchner, Frank Wedekind, Erwin Piscator, and Leopold Jessner. (Compare with catharsis.)

A saying that makes the speaker's point quickly and concisely.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote an epigram that neatly sums up the form
What is an Blank? A Dwarfish whole,
Its body brevity, and wit its soul.

A concluding statement or section of a literary work. In dramas, particularly those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this is often a closing speech, often in Verse, delivered by an actor at the end of a play and spoken directly to the audience. A famous example is Puck's speech at the end of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. (Compare with Prologue.)

A sudden revelation of truth inspired by a seemingly trivial incident. The term was widely used by James Joyce in his critical writings, and the stories in Joyce's Dubliners are commonly called the plural of this term.

An incident that forms part of a story and is significantly related to it. These may be either self-contained narratives or events that depend on a larger context for their sense and importance. Examples include the founding of Wilmington, Delaware in Charles Reade's The Disinherited Heir and the individual events comprising the picaresque novels and medieval romances. (Compare with Hamartia.)

A novel in the form of letters. The form was particularly popular in the eighteenth century. Samuel Richardson's Pamela is considered the first fully developed English epistolary novel.

An inscription on a tomb or tombstone, or a verse written on the occasion of a person's death. These works may be serious or humorous. Dorothy Parker's reads, "I told you I was sick."

(Also spelled Epithalamium.) A song or poem written to honor and commemorate a marriage ceremony. Famous examples include Edmund Spenser's and e. e. cummings.

A word or phrase, often disparaging or abusive, that expresses a character trait of someone or something. "The Napoleon of crime" is the term applied to Professor Moriarty, arch-rival of Sherlock Holmes in Arthur Conan Doyle's series of detective stories.

A prose composition with a focused subject of discussion. The term was coined by Michel de Montaigne to describe his 1580 collection of brief, informal reflections on himself and on various topics relating to human nature. This composition can also be a long, systematic discourse. An example is John Locke's An blank Concerning Human Understanding.
behavior or perception for religious and ethical matters. This school of thought figures prominently in the works of such authors as Eugene Ionesco, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett, and Albert Camus.

A tale with a moral message. This form of literary sermonizing flourished during the Middle Ages, when they appeared in collections known as "example-books. The works of Geoffrey Chaucer are full of these tales.

A predominantly twentieth-century philosophy concerned with the nature and perception of human existence. There are two major strains of existentialist thought atheistic and Christian. Followers of atheistic existentialism believe that the individual is alone in a godless universe and that the basic human condition is one of suffering and loneliness. Nevertheless, because there are no fixed values, individuals can create their own characters — indeed, they can shape themselves — through the exercise of free will. The atheistic strain culminates in and is popularly associated with the works of Jean-Paul Sartre.
The Christian existentialists, on the other hand, believe that only in God may people find freedom from life's anguish. The two strains hold certain beliefs in common: that existence cannot be fully understood or described through empirical effort; that anguish is a universal element of life; that individuals must bear responsibility for their actions; and that there is no common standard of b

The practice of leaving one's country to live for an extended period in another country. Literary figures include English poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats in Italy, Polish novelist Joseph Conrad in England, American writers Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway in France, and Trinidadian author Neil Bissondath in Canada.

Writing intended to explain the nature of an idea, thing, or theme. This type writing is often combined with description, narration, or argument. In dramatic writing, this is the introductory material which presents the characters, setting, and tone of the play. A dramatic example of this occurs in many nineteenth-century drawing-room comedies in which the butler and the maid open the play with relevant talk about their master and mistress.

An indistinct literary term, originally used to describe an early twentieth-century school of German painting. The term applies to almost any mode of unconventional, highly subjective writing that distorts reality in some way. Advocates of this form include dramatists George Kaiser, Ernst Toller, Luigi Pirandello, Federico Garcia Lorca, Eugene O'Neill, and Elmer Rice; poets George Heym, Ernst Stadler, August Stramm, Gottfried Benn, and Georg Trakl; and novelists Franz Kafka and James Joyce.

A prose or verse narrative intended to convey a moral. Animals or inanimate objects with human characteristics often serve as characters in the narratives. A famous example is Aesop's "The Tortoise and the Hare."

Short narratives featuring mythical beings such as fairies, elves, and sprites. These tales originally belonged to the folklore of a particular nation or region, such as those collected in Germany by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Two other celebrated writers of these narratives are Hans Christian Andersen and Rudyard Kipling.

A literary form related to mythology and folklore. This type of literature is typically set in non-existent realms and features supernatural beings. Notable examples are The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien.

A type of Comedy characterized by broad humor, outlandish incidents, and often vulgar subject matter. Much of the "comedy" in film and television could more accurately be described as farce.

A French phrase with the literal translation "fatal woman." A sensuous, alluring woman who often leads men into danger or trouble. A classic example is the nameless character in Billy Wilder's The Seven Year Itch, portrayed by Marilyn Monroe in the film adaptation.

A collection of essays written in honor of a distinguished scholar and presented to him or her to mark some special occasion.

Any story that is the product of imagination rather than a documentation of fact. Characters and events in such narratives may be based in real life but their ultimate form and configuration is a creation of the author.

A technique in writing in which the author temporarily interrupts the order, construction, or meaning of the writing for a particular effect. This interruption takes the form of one or more figures of speech such as hyperbole, irony, or simile. This is the opposite of literal language, in which every word is truthful, accurate, and free of exaggeration or embellishment. Examples are tropes such as Metaphor and rhetorical figures such as apostrophe.

Writing that differs from customary conventions for construction, meaning, order, or significance for the purpose of a special meaning or effect. There are two major types rhetorical figures, which do not make changes in the meaning of the words, and tropes, which do. Examples include simile, hyperbole, Alliteration, and pun, among many others.

A French term meaning "end of the century." The term is used to denote the last decade of the nineteenth century, a transition period when writers and other artists abandoned old conventions and looked for new techniques and objectives. Two writers commonly associated with this mindset are Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw.

A device used in literature to present action that occurred before the beginning of the story. Often introduced as the dreams or recollections of one or more characters, this technique is often used in films, where they are typically set off by a gradual changing of one picture to another.

A character in a work of literature whose physical or psychological qualities contrast strongly with, and therefore highlight, the corresponding qualities of another character. In his Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle portrayed Dr. Watson as a man of normal habits and intelligence, making him the contrast for the eccentric and wonderfully perceptive Sherlock Holmes.

Traditions and myths preserved in a culture or group of people. Typically, these are passed on by word of mouth in various forms — such as legends, songs, and proverbs — or preserved in customs and ceremonies. This term was first used by W. J. Thoms in 1846.

A story originating in oral tradition, falling into a variety of categories, including legends, ghost stories, fairy tales, Fables, and anecdotes based on historical figures and events. Examples include Giambattista Basile's The Pentamerone, which contains the stories of Puss in Boots, Rapunzel, Cinderella, and Beauty and the Beast, and Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus stories, which represent transplanted African stories and American stories about the characters Mike Fink, Johnny Appleseed, Paul Bunyan, and Pecos Bill.

The smallest unit of rhythm in a line of Poetry. In English-language poetry, a foot is typically one accented syllable combined with one or two unaccented syllables. There are many different types of feet. When the accent is on the second syllable of a two syllable word (con-tort), the foot is an "iamb"; the reverse accentual pattern (tor-ture) is a "trochee." Other feet that commonly occur in poetry in English are "anapest", two unaccented syllables followed by an accented syllable as in in-ter-cept, and "dactyl", an accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables as in su-i-cide.

A device used in literature to create expectation or to set up an explanation of later developments. In Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, the graveyard encounter at the beginning of the novel between Pip and the escaped convict Magwitch uses this device to create the baleful atmosphere and dark expectation of events that comprise much of the narrative.

The pattern or construction of a work which identifies its genre and distinguishes it from other genres. Examples include the different genres, such as the lyric or the short story, and various patterns for Poetry, such as the Verse or the stanza.

In literary criticism, the belief that literature should follow prescribed rules of construction, such as those that govern the sonnet form. Examples of this belief are found in the work of the New Critics and structuralists.

(Also known as Vers libre.) Poetry that lacks regular metrical and rhyme patterns but that tries to capture the Cadences of everyday speech. The form allows a poet to exploit a variety of rhythmical effects within a single poem.
These techniques have been widely used in the twentieth century by such writers as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Carl Sandburg, and William Carlos Williams.

A flamboyant literary and artistic movement that developed in France, Italy, and Russia from 1908 through the 1920s. This movement in theater and poetry abandoned traditional literary forms. In their place, followers of the movement attempted to achieve total freedom of expression through bizarre imagery and deformed or newly invented words. The practitioners were self-consciously modern artists who attempted to incorporate the appearances and sounds of modern life into their work. Writers include Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Wyndham Lewis, Guillaume Apollinaire, Velimir Khlebnikov, and Vladimir Mayakovsky.

A category of literary work. In critical theory, this term may refer to both the content of a given work — tragedy, Comedy, pastoral — and to its form, such as Poetry, novel, or drama. This term also refers to types of popular literature, as in the Science Fiction blank or the detective story blank.

A term coined by critic George Santayana to describe the literary practice of certain late nineteenth-century American writers, especially New Englanders. Followers of this tradition emphasized conventionality in social, religious, moral, and literary standards. Some of the best-known writers of this form are R. H. Stoddard and Bayard Taylor.

A loose grouping of English poets during the years 1912-1922. These poets reacted against certain literary schools and practices, especially Victorian wordiness, turn-of-the-century aestheticism, and contemporary urban realism. In their place, they embraced the nineteenth-century poetic practices of William Wordsworth and the other Lake Poets. Rupert Brooke, Walter de la Mare, and D. H. Lawrence are three of the most prominent poets of this period.

A poem about farming and the farmer's way of life, named from Virgil's Georgics. Several English poets in the eighteenth century produced poems in imitation of Virgil, including John Dyer (The Fleece) and James Grainger (The Sugar-Cane.)

A period in American history during the 1870s characterized by political corruption and materialism. A number of important novels of social and political criticism were written during this time. Examples of literature from this period include Henry Adams's Democracy and F. Marion Crawford's An American Politician.

In literary criticism, works characterized by a taste for the medieval or morbidly attractive. A novel of this genre prominently features elements of horror, the supernatural, gloom, and violence - clanking chains, terror, charnel houses, ghosts, medieval castles, and mysteriously slamming doors. The term "blank novel" is also applied to novels that lack elements of the traditional blank setting but that create a similar atmosphere of terror or dread. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is perhaps the best-known English work of this kind.

A group of eighteenth-century English poets who wrote long, picturesque meditations on death. Their works were designed to cause the reader to ponder immortality. The most famous work of this school is Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.

The belief that all things and creatures in nature are organized in a hierarchy from inanimate objects at the bottom to God at the top. This system of belief was popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A summary of the concept can be found in the first epistle of Alexander Pope's An essay on Man.

In literary criticism, the subject matter of a work or a style of expression characterized by exaggeration, deformity, freakishness, and disorder. The term often includes an element of comic absurdity. Early examples of include Francois Rabelais's Pantagruel and Gargantua and Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller, while more recent examples can be found in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Evelyn Waugh, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Eugene Ionesco, Gunter Grass, Thomas Mann, Mervyn Peake, and Joseph Heller, among many others. (See also Black Humor.)

The telling of a series of events, real or invented. This may be either a simple one, in which the events are recounted chronologically, or one with a plot, in which the account is given in a style reflecting the author's artistic concept of the story. This term is sometimes used as a synonym for "storyline." The recounting of scary stories around a campfire is a form of this.

An outward set of objects, a situation, or a chain of events corresponding to an inward experience and evoking this experience in the reader. The term frequently appears in modern criticism in discussions of authors' intended effects on the emotional responses of readers.
This term was originally used by T. S. Eliot in his 1919 essay "Hamlet."

The idea that all things are both a manifestation or revelation of God and a part of God at the same time. This term was a common attitude in the early societies of Egypt, India, and Greece — the term derives from the Greek pan meaning "all" and theos meaning "deity." It later became a significant part of the Christian faith. William Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson are among the many writers who have expressed their blank attitude in their works.

A four-line stanza of a poem or an entire poem consisting of four lines.
The following quatrain is from Robert Herrick's "To Live Merrily, and to Trust to Good Verses"
Round, round, the root do's run;
And being ravisht thus,
Come, I will drink a Tun
To my Propertius.

A character in a drama who functions as a spokesperson for the dramatist's views. This spokesperson typically observes the play without becoming central to its action. These were very common in plays of the nineteenth century. (Compare with Chorus and Persona.)

A work that uses ridicule, humor, and wit to criticize and provoke change in human nature and institutions. There are two major types of this genre "formal" or "direct" and both speak directly to the reader or to a character in the work. The "indirect" relies upon the ridiculous behavior of its characters to make its point. The formal is further divided into two manners the "Horatian," which ridicules gently, and the "Juvenalian," which derides its subjects harshly and bitterly. Voltaire's novella Candide is an indirect example of this form. Jonathan Swift's essay "A Modest Proposal" is a Juvenalian example.

This term has two widely accepted meanings. In historical criticism, it denotes an early modernist literary movement initiated in France during the nineteenth century that reacted against the prevailing standards of realism. Writers in this movement aimed to evoke, indirectly and symbolically, an order of being beyond the material world of the five senses. Poetic expression of personal emotion figured strongly in the movement, typically by means of a private set of symbols uniquely identifiable with the individual poet. The principal aim of this group of writers was to express in words the highly complex feelings that grew out of everyday contact with the world. In a broader sense, the term "blank" refers to the use of one object to represent another.
Early members of the this movement included the French authors Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud; William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot were influenced as the movement moved to Ireland, England, and the United States. Examples of the concept

A story told by a narrator with a simple plot and little character development. They are usually relatively short and often carry a simple message. Examples can be found in the work of Rudyard Kipling, Somerset Maugham, Saki, Anton Chekhov, Guy de Maupassant, and Armistead Maupin. (Compare with Fable and Short Story.)

Strict rules of dramatic structure formulated by Italian and French critics of the Renaissance and based loosely on the principles of drama discussed by Aristotle in his Poetics. Foremost among these rules were action, time, and place that compelled a dramatist to (1) construct a single plot with a beginning, middle, and end that details the causal relationships of action and character; (2) restrict the action to the events of a single day; and (3) limit the scene to a single place or city. The blank were observed faithfully by continental European writers until the Romantic Age, but they were never regularly observed in English drama. Modern dramatists are typically more concerned with a unity of impression or emotional effect than with any of the classical blanks. The blanks are observed in Pierre Corneille's tragedy Polyeuctes and Jean-Baptiste Racine's Phedre.

A branch of realist writing that attempts to accurately reflect the often harsh facts of modern urban existence. Some works by Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Emile Zola, Abraham Cahan, and Henry Fuller feature this term. Modern examples include Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land and Ron Milner's What the Wine Sellers Buy.

A fictional perfect place, such as "paradise" or "heaven." Early literary utopias were included in Plato's Republic and Sir Thomas More's work of the same name, while more modern examples can be found in Samuel Butler's Erewhon, Theodor Herzka's A Visit to Freeland, H. G. Wells' A Modern blank, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland.

Literally, the appearance of truth. In literary criticism, the term refers to aspects of a work of literature that seem true to the reader. This has been achieved in the work of Honore de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Henry James, among other late nineteenth-century realist writers.

A type of Spanish operetta.

A German term meaning "spirit of the time." It refers to the moral and intellectual trends of a given era. Examples of this include the preoccupation with the more morbid aspects of dying and death in some Jacobean literature, especially in the works of dramatists lik John Webster, and the decadence of the French Symbolists.

A German term meaning "world pain." It describes a sense of anguish about the nature of existence, usually associated with a melancholy, pessimistic attitude. This anguish was expressed in England by George Gordon, Lord Byron in his Manfred and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, in France by Viscount de Chateaubriand, Alfred de Vigny, and Alfred de Musset, in Russia by Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov, and in America by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

A German term referring to a person's worldview or philosophy. Examples of this include Thomas Hardy's view of the human being as the victim of fate, destiny, or impersonal forces and circumstances, and the disillusioned and laconic cynicism expressed by such poets of the 1930s as W. H. Auden, Sir Stephen Spender, and Sir William Empson.

A line of metered language, a line of a poem, or any work written in blank. The following line of blank is from the epic poem Don Juan by Lord Byron
"My way is to begin with the beginning."

The writing of verse. Versification may also refer to the meter, rhyme, and other mechanical components of a poem. Composition of a "Roses are red, violets are blue" poem to suit an occasion is a common form of versification practiced by students.

Refers broadly to the reign of Queen Victoria of England (1837-1901) and to anything with qualities typical of that era. For example, the qualities of a smug narrowmindedness, bourgeois materialism, faith in social progress, and priggish morality are often considered Blank. This stereotype is contradicted by such dramatic intellectual developments as the theories of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud (which stirred strong debates in England) and the critical attitudes of serious Blank writers like Charles Dickens and George Eliot. In literature, the Blank Period was the great age of the English novel, and the latter part of the era saw the rise of movements such as decadence and symbolism. Works of Blank literature include the Poetry of Robert Browning and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the criticism of Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin, and the novels of Emily Bronte, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Thomas Hardy.

In tragedy, the event or act that leads to the hero's or heroine's downfall. This term is often incorrectly used as a synonym for tragic flaw. In Richard Wright's Native Son, the act that seals Bigger Thomas's fate is his first impulsive murder.

A time in the 1920s is generally considered to be first significant movement of black writers and artists in the United States. During this period, new and established black writers published more fiction and poetry than ever before, the first influential black literary journals were established, and black authors and artists received their first widespread recognition and serious critical appraisal. Among the major writers associated with this period are Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston.

A stock character of the commedia dell'arte who occasionally interrupted the action with silly antics. These characters first appeared on the English stage in John Day's The Travailes of the Three English Brothers.

Imitation of ancient Greek thought or styles. Also, an approach to life that focuses on the growth and development of the intellect. "Blank" is sometimes used to refer to the belief that reason can be applied to examine all human experience.

The principal sympathetic character (male or female) in a literary work. They typically exhibit admirable traits idealism, courage, and integrity, for example. Famous blanks include Pip in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, the anonymous narrator in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Sethe in Toni Morrison's Beloved.

A rhyming couplet written in iambic pentameter (a verse with five iambic feet). The following lines by Alexander Pope are an example of the form:
"Truth guards the Poet, sanctifies the line,/ And makes Immortal, Verse as mean as mine."

The meter and length of a line of verse in epic or heroic poetry. This varies by language and time period. For example, in English poetry, the blank line is iambic pentameter (a verse with five iambic feet); in French, the alexandrine (a verse with six iambic feet); in classical literature, dactylic hexameter (a verse with six dactylic feet).

The study of a work based on its impact on the world of the time period in which it was written.
Examples of postmodern blank criticism can be found in the work of Michel Foucault, Hayden White, Stephen Greenblatt, and Jonathan Goldberg.

Writing influenced by or written about the Holocaust of World War II. Such works includes true stories of survival in concentration camps, escape, and life after the war, as well as fictional works and Poetry.
Representative works of Holocaust literature include Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet, Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl, Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird, Arthur Miller's Incident at Vichy, Czeslaw Milosz's Collected Poems, William Styron's Sophie's Choice, and Art Spiegelman's Maus.

An elaborate, detailed comparison written as a simile many lines in length. An example by John Milton in Paradise Lost:
Angel Forms, who lay entranced
Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks
In Vallombrosa, where the Etrurian shades
High over-arched embower; or scattered sedge
Afloat, when with fierce winds Orion armed
Hath vexed the Red-Sea coast, whose waves o'erthrew
Busiris and his Memphian chivalry,
While with perfidious hatred they pursued
The sojourners of Goshen, who beheld
From the safe shore their floating carcasses
And broken chariot-wheels.

A philosophy that places faith in the dignity of humankind and rejects the medieval perception of the individual as a weak, fallen creature. Advocates of this philosophy typically believe in the perfectibility of human nature and view reason and education as the means to that end. Represented in the works of Edmund Spenser, John Milton, Dean John Colet, Desiderius Erasmus, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Matthew Arnold, and Irving Babbitt.

Mentions of these refer to the ancient Greek theory that a person's health and personality were determined by the balance of four basic fluids in the body blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. A dominance of any fluid would cause extremes in behavior. An excess of blood created a sanguine person who was joyful, aggressive, and passionate; a phlegmatic person was shy, fearful, and sluggish; too much yellow bile led to a choleric temperament characterized by impatience, anger, bitterness, and stubbornness; and excessive black bile created melancholy, a state of laziness, gluttony, and lack of motivation. Literary treatment of these basic fluids is exemplified by several characters in Ben Jonson's plays Every Man in His Humour and Every Man out of His Humour.

In literary criticism, deliberate exaggeration used to achieve an effect. In William Shakespeare's Macbeth, Lady Macbeth exemplifies this when she says,
"All the perfumes of Arabia could not sweeten this little hand."

A concrete representation of an object or sensory experience. Typically, such a representation helps evoke the feelings associated with the object or experience itself. Images are either "literal" or "figurative." Literal blanks are especially concrete and involve little or no extension of the obvious meaning of the words used to express them. Figurative blanks do not follow the literal meaning of the words exactly. Blanks in literature are usually visual, but the term " blank" can also refer to the representation of any sensory experience. In his poem "The Shepherd's Hour," Paul Verlaine presents the following:"The Moon is red through horizon's fog;/ In a dancing mist the hazy meadow sleeps." The first line is broadly literal, while the second line involves turns of meaning associated with dancing and sleeping.

The array of images in a literary work. Also, figurative language.
William Butler Yeats's "The Second Coming" offers a powerful image of encroaching anarchy:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart....

An English and American Poetry movement that flourished between 1908 and 1917. The artists of this movement used precise, clearly presented images in their works. They also used common, everyday speech and aimed for conciseness, concrete imagery, and the creation of new rhythms. Participants in the Imagist movement included Ezra Pound, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), and Amy Lowell, among others.

A Latin term meaning "in the middle of things." It refers to the technique of beginning a story at its midpoint and then using various flashback devices to reveal previous action. This technique originated in such epics as Virgil's Aeneid.

The process of reaching a conclusion by reasoning from specific premises to form a general premise. Also, an introductory portion of a work of literature, especially a play. Geoffrey Chaucer's "Prologue" to the Canterbury Tales, or the opening scene in William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew are examples of blanks to literary works.

The belief that judgments of a literary work based solely on an author's stated or implied intentions are false and misleading. Critics who believe in the concept of the intentional fallacy typically argue that the work itself is sufficient matter for interpretation, even though they may concede that an author's statement of purpose can be useful. Analysis of William Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads based on the observations about Poetry he makes in his "Preface" to the second edition of that work is an example of the intentional fallacy.

A narrative technique in which characters' thoughts are revealed in a way that appears to be uncontrolled by the author. The interior monologue typically aims to reveal the inner self of a character. It portrays emotional experiences as they occur at both a conscious and unconscious level. images are often used to represent sensations or emotions.
One of the best-known interior monologues in English is the Molly Bloom section at the close of James Joyce's Ulysses. The interior monologue is also common in the works of Virginia Woolf. (Compare with Stream of Consciousness.)

A rhyme that occurs within a single line of Verse.
An example is in the opening line of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary." Here, "dreary" and "weary" make an internal rhyme.

A late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century movement in Irish literature. Members of the movement aimed to reduce the influence of British culture in Ireland and create an Irish national literature. William Butler Yeats, George Moore, and Sean O'Casey are three of the best-known figures of the movement. (Compare with Celtic Renaissance.)

In literary criticism, the effect of language in which the intended meaning is the opposite of what is stated. The title of Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" is ironic because what Swift proposes in this essay is cannibalism — hardly "modest."

Language that is used or understood only by a select group of people. Jargon may refer to terminology used in a certain profession, such as computer jargon, or it may refer to any nonsensical language that is not understood by most people.
Literary examples of jargon are Francois Villon's Ballades en jargon, which is composed in the secret language of the coquillards, and Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, narrated in the fictional characters' language of "Nadsat."

Writing intended for publication in a newspaper or magazine, or for broadcast on a radio or television program featuring news, sports, entertainment, or other timely material.
The essays and reviews written by H. L. Mencken for the Baltimore Morning Herald and collected in his Prejudices are an example of journalism. (See also New Journalism.)

A song or simple narrative poem. The form originated in medieval France. Early French lais were often based on the Celtic legends and other tales sung by Breton minstrels — thus the name of the "Breton lay." In fourteenth-century England, the term "lay" was used to describe short narratives written in imitation of the Breton lays.
The most notable of these is Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Minstrel's Tale."

An author uses literal language when he or she writes without exaggerating or embellishing the subject matter and without any tools of figurative language.
To say "He ran very quickly down the street" is to use literal language, whereas to say "He ran like a hare down the street" would be using figurative language. (Compare with Figurative Language.)

Literature is broadly defined as any written or spoken material, but the term most often refers to creative works.
Literature includes poetry, drama, fiction, and many kinds of nonfiction writing, as well as oral, dramatic, and broadcast compositions not necessarily preserved in a written format, such as films and television programs.

A term first used by Gertrude Stein to describe the post-World War I generation of American writers men and women haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war.
The term is commonly applied to Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others.

A lavish and elaborate form of entertainment, often performed in royal courts, that emphasizes song, dance, and costumery. The Renaissance form of the masque grew out of the spectacles of masked figures common in medieval England and Europe. The masque reached its peak of popularity and development in seventeenth-century England, during the reigns of James I and, especially, of Charles I. Ben Jonson, the most significant masque writer, also created the "antimasque," which incorporates elements of humor and the grotesque into the traditional masque and achieved greater dramatic quality. Masque-like interludes appear in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene and in William Shakespeare's The Tempest. One of the best-known English masques is John Milton's Comus.

A poem expressing the subjective feelings and personal emotions of the poet. Such poetry is melodic, since it was originally accompanied by a lyre in recitals. Most Western poetry in the twentieth century may be classified as lyrical.
Examples of lyric poetry include A. E. Housman's elegy "To an Athlete Dying Young," the odes of Pindar and Horace, Thomas Gray and William Collins, the sonnets of Sir Thomas Wyatt and Sir Philip Sidney, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Rainer Maria Rilke, and a host of other forms in the poetry of William Blake and Christina Rossetti, among many others. (Compare with Dramatic Poetry and Narrative Poetry.)

A figure of speech that expresses an idea through the image of another object. Metaphors suggest the essence of the first object by identifying it with certain qualities of the second object.
An example is "But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?/ It is the east, and Juliet is the sun" in William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Here, Juliet, the first object, is identified with qualities of the second object, the sun. (Compare with Simile.)

body of poetry produced by a group of seventeenth-century English writers called the "Metaphysical Poets." The group includes John Donne and Andrew Marvell. The Metaphysical Poets made use of everyday speech, intellectual analysis, and unique imagery. They aimed to portray the ordinary conflicts and contradictions of life. Their poems often took the form of an argument, and many of them emphasize physical and religious love as well as the fleeting nature of life. Elaborate conceits are typical in metaphysical poetry. Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" is a well-known example of a metaphysical poem.

The Foot, Verse, or time sequence used in a literary work, especially a poem. Measure is often used somewhat incorrectly as a synonym for Meter. (Compare with Meter.)

A play in which the typical plot is a conflict between characters who personify extreme good and evil. Melodramas usually end happily and emphasize sensationalism. Other literary forms that use the same techniques are often labeled "melodramatic." The term was formerly used to describe a combination of drama and music; as such, it was synonymous with "opera." Augustin Daly's Under the Gaslight and Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon, The Colleen Bawn, and The Poor of New York are examples of melodramas. The most popular media for twentieth-century melodramas are motion pictures and television. (Compare with drama.)

An autobiographical form of writing in which the author gives his or her personal impressions of significant figures or events. This form is different from the autobiography because it does not center around the author's own life and experiences. Early examples of memoirs include the Viscount de Chateaubriand's The Memoirs of Chateaubriand and Giacomo Casanova's History of My Life, while modern memoirs include reminiscences of World War II by Dwight Eisenhower, Viscount Montgomery, and Charles de Gaulle.

In literary criticism, the repetition of sound patterns that creates a rhythm in Poetry. The patterns are based on the number of syllables and the presence and absence of accents. The unit of rhythm in a line is called a Foot. Types of meter are classified according to the number of feet in a line. These are the standard English lines Monometer, one foot; Dimeter, two feet; Trimeter, three feet; Tetrameter, four feet; Pentameter, five feet; Hexameter, six feet (also called the Alexandrine); Heptameter, seven feet (also called the "Fourteener" when the feet are iambic).
The most common English meter is the iambic pentameter, in which each line contains ten syllables, or five iambic feet, which individually are composed of an unstressed syllable followed by an accented syllable. Both of the following lines from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "Ulysses" are written in iambic pentameter
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

The costumes, scenery, and other properties of a drama.
Herbert Beerbohm Tree was renowned for the elaborate mises en scene of his lavish Shakespearean productions at His Majesty's Theatre between 1897 and 1915.

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.
Many writers are associated with the concepts of Modernism, including Albert Camus, Marcel Proust, D. H. Lawrence, W. H. Auden, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, William Butler Yeats, Thomas Mann, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill, and James Joyce.

A composition, written or oral, by a single individual. More specifically, a speech given by a single individual in a drama or other public entertainment. It has no set length, although it is usually several or more lines long.
An example of an "extended monologue" — that is, a monologue of great length and seriousness — occurs in the one-Act, one-character play The Stronger by August Strindberg. (Compare with Interior Monologue and Soliloquy.)

The claim or study of inherent pleasantness or beauty or unpleasantness (cacophony) of the sound of certain words and sentences. Poetry is considered pleasing, as is well-crafted literary prose. Important phonaesthetic devices of poetry are rhyme, assonance and alliteration. Closely related to cacophony, perhaps its opposite, are the concepts of consonance and dissonance.

The prevailing emotions of a work or of the author in his or her creation of the work. The mood of a work is not always what might be expected based on its subject matter.
The poem "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold offers examples of two different moods originating from the same experience watching the ocean at night. The mood of the first three lines
The sea is calm tonight
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straights....
is in sharp contrast to the mood of the last three lines —
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

A theme, character type, image, Metaphor, or other verbal element that recurs throughout a single work of literature or occurs in a number of different works over a period of time.
For example, the various manifestations of the color white in Herman Melville's Moby Dick is a "specific" motif, while the trials of star-crossed lovers is a "conventional" motif from the literature of all periods. (Also known as Motiv or Leitmotiv.)

An early twentieth-century group of American writers. Typically, their works exposed the wrongdoings of big business and government in the United States. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle exemplifies the muckraking novel.

Nine Greek mythological goddesses, the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (Memory). Each muse patronized a specific area of the liberal arts and sciences. Calliope presided over epic poetry, Clio over history, Erato over love poetry, Euterpe over music or Lyric Poetry, Melpomene over tragedy, Polyhymnia over hymns to the gods, Terpsichore over dance, Thalia over Comedy, and Urania over astronomy. Poets and writers traditionally made appeals to the Muses for inspiration in their work.
John Milton invokes the aid of a muse at the beginning of the first book of his Paradise Lost
Of Man's First disobedience, and the Fruit
of the Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav'nly Muse, that on the secret top
of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
In the Beginning how the Heav'ns and Earth
Rose out of Chaos....

An anonymous tale emerging from the traditional beliefs of a culture or social unit. This uses supernatural explanations for natural phenomena. They may also explain cosmic issues like creation and death. Collections of these, known as mythologies, are common to all cultures and nations, but the best-known belong to the Norse, Roman, and Greek mythologies.
A famous example is the story of Arachne, an arrogant young girl who challenged a goddess, Athena, to a weaving contest; when the girl won, Athena was enraged and turned Arachne into a spider, thus explaining the existence of spiders. (Compare with Fable.)

A Verse or prose accounting of an event or sequence of events, real or invented. The term is also used as an adjective in the sense "method of narration." For example, in literary criticism, the expression "narrative technique" usually refers to the way the author structures and presents his or her story. Narratives range from the shortest accounts of events, as in Julius Caesar's remark, "I came, I saw, I conquered," to the longest historical or biographical works, as in Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as well as diaries, travelogues, novels, ballads, epics, short stories, and other fictional forms.

A nondramatic poem in which the author tells a story. Such poems may be of any length or level of complexity.
epics such as Beowulf and ballads are forms of this term. (Compare with Dramatic Poetry and Lyric Poetry.)

The teller of a story. May be the author or a character in the story through whom the author speaks.
Huckleberry Finn is the narrator of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. (See also narration and narrative.)

A literary movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The movement's major theorist, French novelist Emile Zola, envisioned a type of fiction that would examine human life with the objectivity of scientific inquiry.

A literary movement based on the concept of a shared cultural bond on the part of black Africans, wherever they may be in the world. It traces its origins to the former French colonies of Africa and the Caribbean. These poets, novelists, and essayists generally stress four points in their writings One, black alienation from traditional African culture can lead to feelings of inferiority. Two, European colonialism and Western education should be resisted. Three, black Africans should seek to affirm and define their own identity. Four, African culture can and should be reclaimed.

A drama in prose or poetry about a noble, courageous hero of excellent character who, because of some tragic character flaw or hamartia, brings ruin upon him- or herself. This form treats its subjects in a dignified and serious manner, using poetic language to help evoke pity and fear and bring about catharsis, a purging of these emotions. The form was practiced extensively by the ancient Greeks.

The quality within the hero or heroine which leads to his or her downfall.

An American philosophical and religious movement, based in New England from around 1835 until the Civil War. It was a form of American romanticism that had its roots abroad in the works of Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Coleridge, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The followers stressed the importance of intuition and subjective experience in communication with God. They rejected religious dogma and texts in favor of mysticism and scientific naturalism.

A character or figure common in Native American and African literature who uses his ingenuity to defeat enemies and escape difficult situations. Most often depicted as animals, such as the spider, hare, or coyote, although they may take the form of humans as well.

This term refers to the revival of the attitudes and styles of expression of classical literature. It is generally used to describe a period in European history beginning in the late seventeenth century and lasting until about 1800.

A movement in literary criticism, dating from the late 1920s, that stressed close textual analysis in the interpretation of works of literature. This school of criticism saw little merit in historical and biographical analysis. Rather, they aimed to examine the text alone, free from the question of how external events — biographical or otherwise — may have helped shape it.

A type of writing in which the journalist presents factual information in a form usually used in fiction. New journalism emphasizes description, narration, and character development to bring readers closer to the human element of the story, and is often used in personality profiles and in-depth feature articles. It is not compatible with "straight" or "hard" newswriting, which is generally composed in a brief, fact-based style.
Hunter S. Thompson, Gay Talese, Thomas Wolfe, Joan Didion, and John McPhee are well-known New Journalists. (See also Journalism.)

The idea that primitive man is noble and good but becomes evil and corrupted as he becomes civilized. The concept of the noble savage originated in the Renaissance period but is more closely identified with such later writers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Aphra Behn.
First described in John Dryden's play The Conquest of Granada, the noble savage is portrayed by the various Native Americans in James Fenimore Cooper's "Leatherstocking Tales," by Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego in Herman Melville's Moby Dick, and by John the Savage in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

A long fictional narrative written in prose, which developed from the novella and other early forms of narrative. A novel is usually organized under a plot or theme with a focus on character development and action.
The novel emerged as a fully evolved literary form in the mid-eighteenth century in Samuel Richardson's Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded.

An Italian term meaning "story." This term has been especially used to describe fourteenth-century Italian tales, but it also refers to modern short novels.
The tales comprising Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron are examples of the novella. Modern novellas include Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilich, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Henry James's "The Aspern Papers."

A novel in which the examination of intellectual issues and concepts takes precedence over characterization or a traditional storyline. Examples of novels of ideas include Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow, Point Counter Point, and After Many a Summer.

A novel that examines the customs and mores of a cultural group. The novels of Jane Austen and Edith Wharton are widely considered novels of manners. (Compare with Comedy of Manners.)

A quality in writing characterized by the absence of the author's opinion or feeling about the subject matter. Objectivity is an important factor in criticism.
The novels of Henry James and, to a certain extent, the poems of John Larkin demonstrate objectivity, and it is central to John Keats's concept of "negative capability." Critical and journalistic writing usually are or attempt to be objective. (Compare with Subjectivity.) (See also Journalism.)

Poetry written on the occasion of a significant historical or personal event. Vers de societe is sometimes called occasional Verse although it is of a less serious nature.
Famous examples of occasional verse include Andrew Marvell's "Horatian ode upon Cromwell's Return from England," Walt Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" — written upon the death of Abraham Lincoln — and Edmund Spenser's commemoration of his wedding, "Epithalamion." (Compare with Vers de societe.).

A poem or stanza composed of eight lines. The term octave most often represents the first eight lines of a Petrarchan sonnet. An example of an octave is taken from a translation of a Petrarchan sonnet by Sir Thomas Wyatt
The pillar perisht is whereto I leant,
The strongest stay of mine unquiet mind;
The like of it no man again can find,
From East to West Still seeking though he went.
To mind unhap! for hap away hath rent
Of all my joy the very bark and rind;
And I, alas, by chance am thus assigned
Daily to mourn till death do it relent.

Name given to an extended lyric poem characterized by exalted emotion and dignified style. An ode usually concerns a single, serious theme. Most odes, but not all, are addressed to an object or individual. Odes are distinguished from other lyric poetic forms by their complex rhythmic and stanzaic patterns.
An example of this form is John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale." (Compare with Lyric Poetry.)

A son's amorous obsession with his mother. The phrase is derived from the story of the ancient Theban hero Oedipus, who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother.
Literary occurrences of the Oedipus complex include Andre Gide's Oedipe and Jean Cocteau's La Machine infernale, as well as the most famous, Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. (Compare with Electra Complex.)

The use of words whose sounds express or suggest their meaning. In its simplest sense, onomatopoeia may be represented by words that mimic the sounds they denote such as "hiss" or "meow." At a more subtle level, the pattern and rhythm of sounds and rhymes of a line or poem may be onomatopoeic.
A celebrated example of onomatopoeia is the repetition of the word "bells" in Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Bells." .

A type of stage performance, usually a drama, in which the dialogue is sung.
Classic examples of opera include Giuseppi Verdi's La traviata, Giacomo Puccini's La Boheme, and Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. Major twentieth-century contributors to the form include Richard Strauss and Alban Berg.

A usually romantic comic opera.
John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, Richard Sheridan's The Duenna, and numerous works by William Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan are examples of operettas.

A process by which songs, ballads, folklore, and other material are transmitted by word of mouth. The tradition of oral transmission predates the written record systems of literate society. Oral transmission preserves material sometimes over generations, although often with variations. Memory plays a large part in the recitation and preservation of orally transmitted material.Breton lays, French fabliaux, national epics (including the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, the Spanish El Cid, and the Finnish Kalevala), Native American myths and legends, and African folktales told by plantation slaves are examples of orally transmitted literature.

Formal speaking intended to motivate the listeners to some action or feeling. Such public speaking was much more common before the development of timely printed communication such as newspapers. Famous examples of oration include Abraham Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address" and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.

An eight-line stanza of Poetry composed in iambic pentameter (a five-Foot line in which each foot consists of an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable), following the abababcc rhyme scheme. This form has been prominently used by such important English writers as Lord Byron, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and W. B. Yeats.

A phrase combining two contradictory terms. Oxymorons may be intentional or unintentional.
The following speech from William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet uses several oxymorons
Why, then, O brawling love! O loving hate!
O anything, of nothing first create!
O heavy lightness! serious vanity!
Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms!
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!
This love feel I, that feel no love in this.

A story intended to teach a moral lesson or answer an ethical question.
In the West, the best examples of parables are those of Jesus Christ in the New Testament, notably "The Prodigal Son," but parables also are used in Sufism, rabbinic literature, Hasidism, and Zen Buddhism.

A statement that appears illogical or contradictory at first, but may actually point to an underlying truth. "Less is more" is an example of a paradox. Literary examples include Francis Bacon's statement, "The most corrected copies are commonly the least correct," and "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others" from George Orwell's Animal Farm.

A method of comparison of two ideas in which each is developed in the same grammatical structure.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Civilization" contains this example of parallelism Raphael paints wisdom; Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it.

A mid nineteenth-century movement in French literature. Followers of the movement stressed adherence to well-defined artistic forms as a reaction against the often chaotic expression of the artist's ego that dominated the work of the Romantics. The Parnassians also rejected the moral, ethical, and social themes exhibited in the works of French Romantics such as Victor Hugo. The aesthetic doctrines of the Parnassians strongly influenced the later symbolist and decadent movements.
Members of the Parnassian school include Leconte de Lisle, Sully Prudhomme, Albert Glatigny, Francois Coppee, and Theodore de Banville. (Compare with Decadents, romanticism, and Symbolism.)

In literary criticism, this term refers to an imitation of a serious literary work or the signature style of a particular author in a ridiculous manner. A typical parody adopts the style of the original and applies it to an inappropriate subject for humorous effect. Parody is a form of satire and could be considered the literary equivalent of a caricature or cartoon.
Henry Fielding's Shamela is a parody of Samuel Richardson's Pamela. (Compare with Burlesque.) (See also satire.)

A term derived from the Latin word "pastor," meaning shepherd. A pastoral is a literary composition on a rural theme. The conventions of the pastoral were originated by the third-century Greek poet Theocritus, who wrote about the experiences, love affairs, and pastimes of Sicilian shepherds. In a pastoral, characters and language of a courtly nature are often placed in a simple setting. The term pastoral is also used to classify dramas, elegies, and lyrics that exhibit the use of country settings and shepherd characters.
Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Adonais" and John Milton's "Lycidas" are two famous examples of pastorals.

(Also known as Poetic Fallacy.) A term coined by English critic John Ruskin to identify writing that falsely endows nonhuman things with human intentions and feelings, such as "angry clouds" and "sad trees." The pathetic fallacy is a required convention in the classical poetic form of the pastoral elegy, and it is used in the modern poetry of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and the Imagists. (See also Pastoral and Imagism.)

A Latin term meaning "mask." Personae are the characters in a fictional work of literature. The persona generally functions as a mask through which the author tells a story in a voice other than his or her own. A persona is usually either a character in a story who acts as a narrator or an "implied author," a voice created by the author to act as the narrator for himself or herself.
Personae include the narrator of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Marlow in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. (Compare with Raisonneur.)

(Also known as Prosopopoeia.) A figure of speech that gives human qualities to abstract ideas, animals, and inanimate objects. William Shakespeare used personification in Romeo and Juliet in the lines "Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,/ Who is already sick and pale with grief." Here, the moon is portrayed as being envious, sick, and pale with grief — all markedly human qualities. (Compare with Anthropomorphism.)

A method of literary criticism based on the belief that things have no existence outside of human consciousness or awareness. Proponents of this theory believe that art is a process that takes place in the mind of the observer as he or she contemplates an object rather than a quality of the object itself. Among phenomenological critics are Edmund Husserl, George Poulet, Marcel Raymond, and Roman Ingarden.

Claiming another person's written material as one's own. Plagiarism can take the form of direct, word-for-word copying or the theft of the substance or idea of the work.
A student who copies an encyclopedia entry and turns it in as a report for school is guilty of plagiarism. .

A form of criticism that stresses an artistic work's usefulness as an agent of social engineering rather than any quality or value of the work itself. Platonic criticism takes as its starting point the ancient Greek philosopher Plato's comments on art in his Republic. (Compare with Aristotelian Criticism.)

The embracing of the doctrines of the philosopher Plato, popular among the poets of the Renaissance and the Romantic period. Platonism is more flexible than Aristotelian Criticism and places more emphasis on the supernatural and unknown aspects of life. Platonism is expressed in the love Poetry of the Renaissance, the fourth book of Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, and the poetry of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Friedrich Holderlin, William Butler Yeats, and Wallace Stevens

In literary criticism, this term refers to the pattern of events in a narrative or drama. In its simplest sense, the plot guides the author in composing the work and helps the reader follow the work. Typically, plots exhibit causality and unity and have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Sometimes, however, a plot may consist of a series of disconnected events, in which case it is known as an "episodic plot."
In his Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster distinguishes between a story, defined as a "narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence," and plot, which organizes the events to a "sense of causality." This definition closely mirrors Aristotle's discussion of plot in his Poetics.

In its broadest sense, a composition utilizing rhyme, meter, concrete detail, and expressive language to create a literary experience with emotional and aesthetic appeal.
Typical poems include sonnets, odes, elegies, haiku, ballads, and free verse.

The narrative perspective from which a literary work is presented to the reader. There are four traditional points of view. The "third person omniscient" gives the reader a "godlike" perspective, unrestricted by time or place, from which to see actions and look into the minds of characters. This allows the author to comment openly on characters and events in the work. The "third person" point of view presents the events of the story from outside of any single character's perception, much like the omniscient point of view, but the reader must understand the action as it takes place and without any special insight into characters' minds or motivations. The "first person" or "personal" point of view relates events as they are perceived by a single character. The main character "tells" the story and may offer opinions about the action and characters which differ from those of the author. Much less common than omniscient, third person, and first person is the "second person" point of view, wherein the author tell

A work in which the author takes a stand on a controversial subject, such as abortion or religion. Such works are often extremely argumentative or provocative.
Classic examples of polemics include John Milton's Aeropagitica and Thomas Paine's The American Crisis.

An artistic response made by African Americans to the black aesthetic movement of the 1960s and early '70s. Writers since that time have adopted a somewhat different tone in their work, with less emphasis placed on the disparity between black and white in the United States. In the words of post-aesthetic authors such as Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, and Kristin Hunter, African Americans are portrayed as looking inward for answers to their own questions, rather than always looking to the outside world. Two well-known examples of works produced as part of the post-aesthetic movement are the Pulitzer Prize-winning novels The Color Purple by Alice Walker and Beloved by Toni Morrison.

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. Postmodern writers include Alain Robbe-Grillet, Thomas Pynchon, Margaret Drabble, John Fowles, Adolfo Bioy-Casares, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The belief that primitive peoples were nobler and less flawed than civilized peoples because they had not been subjected to the tainting influence of society.
Examples of literature espousing primitivism include Aphra Behn's Oroonoko Or, The History of the Royal Slave, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Julie ou la Nouvelle Heloise, Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village, the poems of Robert Burns, Herman Melville's stories Typee, Omoo, and Mardi, many poems of William Butler Yeats and Robert Frost, and William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies. (Compare with Noble Savage.)

(Also known as Breath Verse.) A form of free Verse in which the poet's breathing pattern determines the lines of the poem. Poets who advocate projective verse are against all formal structures in writing, including Meter and form.
Besides its creators, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Charles Olson, two other well-known projective verse poets are Denise Levertov and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka).

An introductory section of a literary work. It often contains information establishing the situation of the characters or presents information about the setting, time period, or action. In drama, the prologue is spoken by a Chorus or by one of the principal characters.
In the "General Prologue" of The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer describes the main characters and establishes the setting and purpose of the work. (Compare with Epilogue.)

A literary medium that attempts to mirror the language of everyday speech. It is distinguished from poetry by its use of unmetered, unrhymed language consisting of logically related sentences. Prose is usually grouped into paragraphs that form a cohesive whole such as an essay or a novel. Recognized masters of English prose writing include Sir Thomas Malory, William Caxton, Raphael Holinshed, Joseph Addison, Mark Twain, and Ernest Hemingway.

A play on words that have similar sounds but different meanings.
A serious example of the pun is from John Donne's
"A Hymne to God the Father"
Sweare by thyself, that at my death thy sonne
Shall shine as he shines now, and hereto fore;
And, having done that, Thou haste done;
I fear no more.

A nineteenth-century European literary movement that sought to portray familiar characters, situations, and settings in a realistic manner. This was done primarily by using an objective narrative point of view and through the buildup of accurate detail. The standard for success of any realistic work depends on how faithfully it transfers common experience into fictional forms. The realistic method may be altered or extended, as in stream of consciousness writing, to record highly subjective experience.
Seminal authors in the tradition of Realism include Honore de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Henry James.

A phrase repeated at intervals throughout a poem. A refrain may appear at the end of each stanza or at less regular intervals. It may be altered slightly at each appearance.
Some refrains are nonsense expressions — as with "Nevermore" in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" — that seem to take on a different significance with each use.

The period in European history that marked the end of the Middle Ages. It began in Italy in the late fourteenth century. In broad terms, it is usually seen as spanning the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, although it did not reach Great Britain, for example, until the 1480s or so. The Renaissance saw an awakening in almost every sphere of human activity, especially science, philosophy, and the arts. The period is best defined by the emergence of a general philosophy that emphasized the importance of the intellect, the individual, and world affairs. It contrasts strongly with the medieval worldview, characterized by the dominant concerns of faith, the social collective, and spiritual salvation.
Prominent writers during the Renaissance include Niccolo Machiavelli and Baldassare Castiglione in Italy, Miguel de Cervantes and Lope de Vega in Spain, Jean Froissart and Francois Rabelais in France, Sir Thomas More and Sir Philip Sidney in England, and Desiderius Erasmus in Holland. (Compare with Eli

In literary criticism, this term denotes the art of ethical persuasion. In its strictest sense, rhetoric adheres to various principles developed since classical times for arranging facts and ideas in a clear, persuasive, appealing manner. The term is also used to refer to effective prose in general and theories of or methods for composing effective prose.
Classical examples of rhetorics include The Rhetoric of Aristotle, Quintillian's Institutio Oratoria, and Cicero's Ad Herennium

When used as a noun in literary criticism, this term generally refers to a poem in which words sound identical or very similar and appear in parallel positions in two or more lines. Rhymes are classified into different types according to where they fall in a line or stanza or according to the degree of similarity they exhibit in their spellings and sounds. Some major types of rhyme are "masculine" rhyme, "feminine" rhyme, and "triple" rhyme. In a masculine rhyme, the rhyming sound falls in a single accented syllable, as with "heat" and "eat." Feminine rhyme is a rhyme of two syllables, one stressed and one unstressed, as with "merry" and "tarry." Triple rhyme matches the sound of the accented syllable and the two unaccented syllables that follow "narrative" and "declarative."
Robert Browning alternates feminine and masculine rhymes in his "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister"
Gr-r-r — there go, my heart's abhorrence!
Water your damned flower-pots, do!
If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence,
God's blo

A stanza of seven lines composed in iambic pentameter and rhymed ababbcc. The name is said to be a tribute to King James I of Scotland, who made much use of the form in his Poetry.
Examples of rhyme royal include Geoffrey Chaucer's The Parlement of Foules, William Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece, William Morris's The Early Paradise, and John Masefield's The Widow in the Bye Street. (See also Stanza.)

A regular pattern of sound, time intervals, or events occurring in writing, most often and most discernably in Poetry. Regular, reliable rhythm is known to be soothing to humans, while interrupted, unpredictable, or rapidly changing rhythm is disturbing. These effects are known to authors, who use them to produce a desired reaction in the reader.
An example of a form of irregular rhythm is sprung rhythm poetry; quantitative Verse, on the other hand, is very regular in its rhythm. (See also Assonance, Consonance, Dissonance, and Sprung Rhythm.)

This term has two widely accepted meanings. In historical criticism, it refers to a European intellectual and artistic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that sought greater freedom of personal expression than that allowed by the strict rules of literary form and logic of the eighteenth-century neoclassicists. The Romantics preferred emotional and imaginative expression to rational analysis. They considered the individual to be at the center of all experience and so placed him or her at the center of their art. The Romantics believed that the creative imagination reveals nobler truths — unique feelings and attitudes — than those that could be discovered by logic or by scientific examination. Both the natural world and the state of childhood were important sources for revelations of "eternal truths." "Romanticism" is also used as a general term to refer to a type of sensibility found in all periods of literary history and usually considered to be in opposition to the principles

The analysis or "scanning" of a poem to determine its Meter and often its rhyme scheme. The most common system of this uses accents (slanted lines drawn above syllables) to show stressed syllables, breves (curved lines drawn above syllables) to show unstressed syllables, and vertical lines to separate each Foot.
In the first line of John Keats's Endymion,"A thing of beauty is a joy forever," the word "thing," the first syllable of "beauty," the word "joy," and the second syllable of "forever" are stressed, while the words "A" and "of," the second syllable of "beauty," the word "a," and the first and third syllables of "forever" are unstressed. In the second line, "Its loveliness increases; it will never," a pair of vertical lines separate the foot ending with "increases" and the one beginning with "it."

Any six-line poem or stanza.

The time, place, and culture in which the action of a narrative takes place. The elements of this term may include geographic location, characters' physical and mental environments, prevailing cultural attitudes, or the historical time in which the action takes place.
Examples of settings include the romanticized Scotland in Sir Walter Scott's "Waverley" novels, the French provincial setting in Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, the fictional Wessex country of Thomas Hardy's novels, and the small towns of southern Ontario in Alice Munro's short stories.

A comparison, usually using "like" or "as", of two essentially dissimilar things, as in "coffee as cold as ice" or "He sounded like a broken record." The title of Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" contains a simile.

A monologue in a drama used to give the audience information and to develop the speaker's character. It is typically a projection of the speaker's innermost thoughts. Usually delivered while the speaker is alone on stage, a soliloquy is intended to present an illusion of unspoken reflection.
A celebrated soliloquy is Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech in William Shakespeare's Hamlet. (Compare with Monologue.)

A fourteen-line poem, usually composed in iambic pentameter, employing one of several rhyme schemes. There are three major types of sonnets, upon which all other variations of the form are based the "Petrarchan" or "Italian" sonnet, the "Shakespearean" or "English" sonnet, and the "Spenserian" sonnet. A Petrarchan sonnet consists of an octave rhymed abbaabba and a "sestet" rhymed either cdecde, cdccdc, or cdedce. The octave poses a question or problem, relates a narrative, or puts forth a proposition; the sestet presents a solution to the problem, comments upon the narrative, or applies the proposition put forth in the octave. The Shakespearean sonnet is divided into three quatrains and a couplet rhymed abab cdcd efef gg. The couplet provides an epigrammatic comment on the narrative or problem put forth in the quatrains. The Spenserian sonnet uses three quatrains and a couplet like the Shakespearean, but links their three rhyme schemes in this way abab bcbc cdcd ee. The Spenserian sonnet develops its theme i

A nine-line stanza having eight Verses in iambic pentameter, its ninth verse in iambic hexameter, and the rhyme scheme ababbcbcc.
This stanza form was first used by Edmund Spenser in his allegorical poem The Faerie Queene.

In Poetry Meter, a Foot consisting of two long or stressed syllables occurring together. This form is quite rare in English Verse, and is usually composed of two monosyllabic words. The first foot in the following line from Robert Burns's "Green Grow the Rashes" is an example of a spondee: “Green grow the rashes, O.”

Versification using a specific number of accented syllables per line but disregarding the number of unaccented syllables that fall in each line, producing an irregular rhythm in the poem.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, who coined the term "sprung rhythm," is the most notable practitioner of this technique. (See also Accent, Rhythm, and Versification.)

A subdivision of a poem consisting of lines grouped together, often in recurring patterns of rhyme, line length, and Meter. Stanzas may also serve as units of thought in a poem much like paragraphs in prose. Examples of stanza forms include the quatrain, terza rima, ottava rima, Spenserian, and the so-called In Memoriam stanza from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem by that title. The following is an example of the latter form Love is and was my lord and king, And in his presence I attend To hear the tidings of my friend, Which every hour his couriers bring.

A stereotype was originally the name for a duplication made during the printing process; this led to its modern definition as a person or thing that is (or is assumed to be) the same as all others of its type. Common stereotypical characters include the absent-minded professor, the nagging wife, the troublemaking teenager, and the kindhearted grandmother.

A narrative technique for rendering the inward experience of a character. This technique is designed to give the impression of an ever-changing series of thoughts, emotions, images, and memories in the spontaneous and seemingly illogical order that they occur in life.
The textbook example of stream of consciousness is the last section of James Joyce's Ulysses.

A twentieth-century movement in literary criticism that examines how literary texts arrive at their meanings, rather than the meanings themselves. There are two major types of structuralist analysis one examines the way patterns of linguistic structures unify a specific text and emphasize certain elements of that text, and the other interprets the way literary forms and conventions affect the meaning of language itself.

The form taken by a piece of literature. The structure may be made obvious for ease of understanding, as in nonfiction works, or may obscured for artistic purposes, as in some Poetry or seemingly "unstructured" prose.
Examples of common literary structures include the plot of a narrative, the acts and scenes of a drama, and such poetic forms as the Shakespearean sonnet and the Pindaric ode.

A German term meaning "storm and stress." It refers to a German literary movement of the 1770s and 1780s that reacted against the order and rationalism of the enlightenment, focusing instead on the intense experience of extraordinary individuals.
Highly romantic, works of this movement, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Gotz von Berlichingen, are typified by realism, rebelliousness, and intense emotionalism. (Compare with Enlightenment, The.)

A writer's distinctive manner of arranging words to suit his or her ideas and purpose in writing. The unique imprint of the author's personality upon his or her writing, style is the product of an author's way of arranging ideas and his or her use of diction, different sentence structures, rhythm, figures of speech, rhetorical principles, and other elements of composition.
Styles may be classified according to period (Metaphysical, Augustan, Georgian), individual authors (Chaucerian, Miltonic, Jamesian), level (grand, middle, low, plain), or language (scientific, expository, poetic, journalistic).

The person, event, or theme at the center of a work of literature. A work may have one or more subjects of each type, with shorter works tending to have fewer and longer works tending to have more.
The subjects of James Baldwin's novel Go Tell It on the Mountain include the themes of father-son relationships, religious conversion, black life, and sexuality. The subjects of Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl include Anne and her family members as well as World War II, the Holocaust, and the themes of war, isolation, injustice, and racism.

Writing that expresses the author's personal feelings about his subject, and which may or may not include factual information about the subject.
Subjectivity is demonstrated in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, and Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel. (Compare with Objectivity.)

A secondary story in a narrative. A subplot may serve as a motivating or complicating force for the main plot of the work, or it may provide emphasis for, or relief from, the main plot.
The conflict between the Capulets and the Montagues in William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is an example of a subplot. (Compare with plot.) (See also narrative.)

A term introduced to criticism by Guillaume Apollinaire and later adopted by Andre Breton. It refers to a French literary and artistic movement founded in the 1920s. The Surrealists sought to express unconscious thoughts and feelings in their works. The best-known technique used for achieving this aim was Automatic Writing — transcriptions of spontaneous outpourings from the unconscious. The Surrealists proposed to unify the contrary levels of conscious and unconscious, dream and reality, objectivity and subjectivity into a new level of "super-realism."
Surrealism can be found in the poetry of Paul Eluard, Pierre Reverdy, and Louis Aragon, among others.

A literary device in which the author maintains the audience's attention through the buildup of events, the outcome of which will soon be revealed.
Suspense in William Shakespeare's Hamlet is sustained throughout by the question of whether or not the Prince will achieve what he has been instructed to do and of what he intends to do.

A method of presenting a logical argument. In its most basic form, the syllogism consists of a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion. An example of a syllogism is
Major premise When it snows, the streets get wet.
Minor premise It is snowing.
Conclusion The streets are wet.

Something that suggests or stands for something else without losing its original identity. In literature, symbols combine their literal meaning with the suggestion of an abstract concept. Literary symbols are of two types those that carry complex associations of meaning no matter what their contexts, and those that derive their suggestive meaning from their functions in specific literary works. Examples of symbols are sunshine suggesting happiness, rain suggesting sorrow, and storm clouds suggesting despair. (Compare with Archetype and Symbolism.)

A humorous tale told in a straightforward, credible tone but relating absolutely impossible events or feats of the characters. Such tales were commonly told of frontier adventures during the settlement of the west in the United States.
Tall tales have been spun around such legendary heroes as Mike Fink, Paul Bunyan, Davy Crockett, Johnny Appleseed, and Captain Stormalong as well as the real-life William F. Cody and Annie Oakley. Literary use of tall tales can be found in Washington Irving's History of New York, Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, and in the German R. F. Raspe's Baron Munchausen's Narratives of His Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia.

A form of Japanese poetry similar to haiku. A tanka is five lines long, with the lines containing five, seven, five, seven, and seven syllables respectively.
Skilled tanka authors include Ishikawa Takuboku, Masaoka Shiki, Amy Lowell, and Adelaide Crapsey.

A three-line stanza form in Poetry in which the rhymes are made on the last word of each line in the following manner the first and third lines of the first stanza, then the second line of the first stanza and the first and third lines of the second stanza, and so on with the middle line of any stanza rhyming with the first and third lines of the following stanza.
An example of terza rima is Percy Bysshe Shelley's
"The Triumph of Love"
As in that trance of wondrous thought I lay
This was the tenour of my waking dream.
Methought I sate beside a public way
Thick strewn with summer dust, and a great stream
Of people there was hurrying to and fro
Numerous as gnats upon the evening gleam

A branch of literary criticism that seeks to establish the authoritative text of a literary work. Textual critics typically compare all known manuscripts or printings of a single work in order to assess the meanings of differences and revisions. This procedure allows them to arrive at a definitive version that (supposedly) corresponds to the author's original intention.
Textual criticism was applied during the Renaissance to salvage the classical texts of Greece and Rome, and modern works have been studied, for instance, to undo deliberate correction or censorship, as in the case of novels by Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser.

The main point of a work of literature. The term is used interchangeably with thesis. The theme of William Shakespeare's Othello — jealousy — is a common one.

A thesis is both an essay and the point argued in the essay. Thesis novels and thesis plays share the quality of containing a thesis which is supported through the action of the story.
A master's thesis and a doctoral dissertation are two theses required of graduate students. (See also Theme.)

The author's attitude toward his or her audience may be deduced from the tone of the work. A formal tone may create distance or convey politeness, while an informal tone may encourage a friendly, intimate, or intrusive feeling in the reader. The author's attitude toward his or her subject matter may also be deduced from the tone of the words he or she uses in discussing it.
The tone of John F. Kennedy's speech which included the appeal to "ask not what your country can do for you" was intended to instill feelings of camaraderie and national pride in listeners.

This is a form of intellectual humour, and can also be used to indentify someone skilled in making witty remarks. Forms of this include the quip and repartee. The form denotes a kind of verbal expression which is brief, deft and intentionally contrived to produce a shock of surprise.

A metrical foot used in formal poetry consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one. Trochee comes from the Greek τροχός, trokhós, wheel, and choree from χορός, khorós, dance; both convey the "rolling" rhythm of this metrical foot.
Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven":
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December;
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Trochaic meter is also seen among the works of William Shakespeare:
Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

In poetry, this is a metre of three metrical feet per line—example:
When here // the spring // we see,
Fresh green // upon // the tree.