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Associated with the Irish Literary Revival, the Abbey Theatre was an outgrowth of an earlier group, the Irish Literary Theatre, founded by W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory in 1899, which later became the Irish National Theatre Society and still later moved to the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. It endured, producing plays with a markedly national emphasis, until the theater burned in 1951. W.B. Yeats was director of the Abbey Theatre until his death in 1939. Among the major playwrights of the company were Yeats, Lady Gregory, J.M. Synge, Sean O'Casey, James Stephens, and Lord Dunsany. See Celtic Renaissance. |
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| Abecedarian, Abecedarius, Abecedary |
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| An acrostic so arranged that the initial letters of successive lines (or other units) form an alphabet. Strictly speaking, each word in a line should begin witht the same letter, although this difficult task is seldom attempted. Such a poem by Alaric Alexander Watts, published in 1817, begins, "An Austrian army, awfully arrayed, / Boldly by battery besieged Belgrade" and ends "Yield, yield, ye youths! ye yeomen, yield your yell! / Zeus', Zarpater's, Zoroaster's zeal, / Attracting all, arms against acts appeal!" Many Psalms (e.g., 9,10,34,37,111,112,119, and 145) adhere to some principle of following successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet. |
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| (1)An alphabetical acrostic; a poem in which stanzas or lines begin with the letters of the alphabet, such as GeoffreyChaucer's poem sometimes called "Chaucer's A B C." a prayer that is a translation of a French poem. (2)A primer teaching the alphabet or other elementary parts of a field of study, such as Ezra Pound's "A B C of Reading" and "A B C of Economics." |
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| ABC-Book, Abcee-Book, Absey-Book |
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| A PRIMER or HORN-BOOK that introduces a subject; sometimes in the form of a CATECHISM or DIALOGUE. |
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| The act of the expression of solemn renunciation. |
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| The area of the front page that shows when a newspaper is in a news rack. The most conspiciuous part of the most important page of a paper. |
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| A shortened version of a work, but one that attempts to preserve essential elements. See ABSTRACT, EPITOME, SYNOPSIS, PRECIS. |
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| A term applied to anything totally independent of conditions, limitations, controls, or modifiers. In vocabulary, absolute refers to a word, such as "unique," that cannot be compared or qualified. In grammatical structure, abslolute refers to a phrase that is free of the customary syntactical relationships to other parts of the sentence. W.B. Yeats favored absolutes, as in "how can I, that girl standing there" and "what rough beast, its hour come round at last." Certain comparitive and superlative forms are call absolute if there is no indication of a specific context: "higher education" and "last resort" give no explicit details that justify the implied ranking. In CRITICISM, absolute implies inviolable standards by which a work should be measured. An absolutist critic holds that immutable values determine moral and aesthetic worth. |
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| A severe ABRIDGMENT that summarizes the principal ideas or arguments advanced in a much longer work. Abstracts of articles and dissertations are widely produced today. |
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| In reference to meaning, the term abstract is opposed to CONCRETE. With graphic art, the abstract usually means nonrepresentational or nonobjective |
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| In contemporary literature and criticism, a term applied to the sense that human beings, cut off from their roots, live in meaningless isolation in an alien universe. Although the literature of the absurd employs many of the devices of EXPRESSIONISM and SURREALISM, its philosophical base is a form of EXISTENTIALISM, which views human beings as moving from the nothingness from which they came to the nothingness in which they will end through an existence marked by anguish and absurdity. Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus is one central expression of this philosophy. Extreme forms of illogic, inconsistency, and nightmarish FANTASY mark the literature expressing this concept. The idea of the absurd has been powerfully expressed in drama (see ABSURD, THEATER OF THE) and in the NOVEL, where Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, Gunter Grass, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., have practiced it with distinction. See ANTIHERO; ANTINOVEL. |
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| A term invented by Martin Esslin for the kind of drama that presents a view of the absurdity of the human condition by the abandoning of usual or rational devices and by the use of nonrealistic form. Conceived in perplexity and spiritual anguish, the theater of the absurd portrays not a series of connected incidents telling a story but a pattern of images presenting people as bewildered creatures in an incomprehensible universe. The first true example of the theater of the absurd was Eugene Ionesco's The Bald Soprano (1950). THe most widely acclaimed play of the school is Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1953). Other playwrights in the school, which flourished in Europe and America in the 1950s and 1960s, include Jean Genet, Arthur Adamov, Edward Albee, Arthur Kopit, and Harold Pinter. See ABSURD; BLACK HUMOR. |
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| As a neutral term, academic refers to schools and academies in general. As a negative term, however, it means aridly theoretical in ideas or pedantic, conventional, and formalistic in style. |
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| Plays written and performed in schools and colleges in the Elizabethan age. See SCHOOL PLAYS. |
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| Associations devoted to the advancement of special fields of interest. The term is derived from "the olive grove of Academe" where Plato taught at Athens. (Evidently the land had belonged to a man named Academus.) One general purpose of literary academies has been, to quote the charter of l'Academie francaise (originated c. 1629), "to labor with all care and diligence to give certain rules to our language and to render it pure, eloquent, and capable of treating the arts and sciences." In addition to the French Academy and the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, the following are important: The Royal Academy of Arts founded in 1768 (England); the Real Academia Espanola founded in 1713 (Spain); and the American Academy of Arts and Letters founded in 1904. More like the original academy of Plato was the famous "Platonic Academy" led by Marcsilio Ficino at Florence in the late fifteenth century, which disseminated the doctrines of NEOPLATONISM. |
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| Metrically complete; applied to lines that carry out the basic metrical and rythmic pattern of a poem. See CATALEXIS. |
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In PROSODY, the EMPHASIS given to a SYLLABLE in articulation. Accent is considered a complex matter of force, timbre, duration, loudness, pitch, and various combinations of these. Customarily, however, it is used to describe some aspect of relative emphasis (strong or weak), as opposed to duration or quantity (long or short). A distinction is sometimes made betwee accent as the normal emphasis and STRESS as the emphasis required by a rhythmic pattern.
In VERSIFICATION, accent usually implies contrast; that is, a patterned succession of opposites, in this case, accented and unaccented syallables. In traditional terminology ICTUS is the name applied to the stress, ARSIS the name applied to the stressed syllable, and THESIS the name applied to the unstressed syllable. (The Greek usage, however, predating this Latin usage, applied THESIS to the stressed and ARSIS to the unstressed syllables.)
THere are three basic types of accent in English: word accent or the normal stress on syllables; rhetorical accent, in which the placement of stress is determined by the meaning of the words; and metrical accent, in which the placement of stress is determined by the rhythmic pattern of the line. If the metrical accent does violence to the word accent, the resulting alteration in pronunciation is called WRENCHED ACCENT, a phenomenon common in the folk ballad.
In linguistics, accent refers to the pronunciation of words and phrases according to regional or social patterns. See QUANTITY, METRICS, SCANSION, STRESS. |
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| Pasul Fusell's turm for "the theory of the line which considers the number of stresses to be its fundamental prosodic skeleton." Unlike SYLLABISM, which regards English as a language like French, with consistently uniform syllables, this theory recognizes that English is like German in having syllables of widely varying length and strength. The exponents of accentualism include Joshua Steele (Prosodia Rationalis, 1779), William Blake, and most of the significant writers of verse of the nineteenth century. |
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| Verse that depends for its RHYTHM both on the number of syllables per line and on the pattern of accented and unaccented syllables. The basic measures in English poetry are accentual-syllabic. See METER, FOOT. |
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| In TEXTUAL CRITICISM, an accidental is any element of a text not essential to the meaning of words; most commonly, accidentals include capitalization, spelling, and punctuation. See SUBSTANTIVE. |
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| A form of IRONY, a pretended refusal that is insincere or hypocritical. Caesar's refusal of the crown, as reported by Casca in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (1,2) and Richard's disavowal of his kingly qualities in Shakespeare's Richard III (3,7) are examples. |
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| "Headless"; see HEADLESS LINE. |
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| A conventional component of the FRONT MATTER of some printed documents--particularly nonfiction--wherein authors acknowledge help received from individuals and institutions. |
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| A movement in Russian poetry, begun around 1912 by members of the Poets' Guild to promote precise treatment of realistic subjects. The movement's emphasis on exactness of word and clarity of image invites comparison with its Anglo-American contemporary, Imagism. The founders of Acmeism were Nikolai Gumilev and Sergei Gorodetski. The organized group lasted only a few years, but the influence of its greatest adherents--such as Anna Akhmatova (who was married to Gumilev) and Osip Mandelstram--continues through the present day. |
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| A word formed by combining the initial letters or syllables of a series of words to form a name, as "radar," from "radio detecting and ranging." An acronym is akin to ACROSTIC. |
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| Calling a written symbol by the name of something that has that symbol at its beginning. Phoenician "Aleph" (Greek "alpha"), wich means "ox," became the name of the first letter in the word. In Old English, the symbols ae and bp, which come at the beginning of the tree names "ash" and "thorn," are called "ash" and "thorn." |
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A composition, usually VERSE, arranged in such a way that it spells words, phrases, or sentences when certain letters are selected according to an ordely sequence. The device was used by early Greek and Latin writers as well as by the monks of the Middle Ages. Though creditable verse has appeared in this form, acrostics are likely to be tricks of versifying. An acrostic in which the initial letters form a word is called a true acrostic. In the poem at the end of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, the first letters of the lines spell out "Alice Pleasance Liddell." The poem begins:
A boat, beneath a sunny sky
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July--
Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear....
An acrostic in which the final letters form a word is called a TELESTICH. Here is an example of a true acrostic-telestich presented through a riddle: 1. By Apollo was my first made. 2. A shoemaker's tool. 3. An Italian patriot. 4. A tropical fruit. The components "lyre," "awl," "Mazzini," and "banana" yield the acrostic "Lamb" and the telestich "Elia" (Charles Lamb's pen name):
1. L yr E
2. A w L
3. M azzin I
4. B anan A
An acrostic in which the middle letters form the word is called a MESOSTICH; one in which the first letter of the first line, the second letter of the second line, the third letter of the third line, etc., form the word is called a cross acrostic, of which Poe's "A Valentine" is an example. An acrostic in which the initial letters form the alphabet is called an ABECEDARIUS. In some ingenious varieties of word puzzles (sometimes called double-crostics), the first letters of the names of an author and a work come at the beginnings of words composed of letters from a quotation from that work. |
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| A major division of a DRAMA. The major parts of ancient Greek plays, distinguished by the appearance of the CHORUS, generally fell, as Aristotle implies, into five parts. The Latin tragedies of Seneca were divided into five acts; and, when English dramatists in the ELIZABETHAN AGE began usin act divisions, they followed their Roman models, as did other modern European dramatists. In varying degrees the five-act structure corresponded to the five main divisions of dramatic action: EXPOSITION, COMPLICATION, CLIMAX, FALLING ACTION, and CATASTROPHE. THe five-act structure was followed until the late nineteenth century, when under the influence of Ibsen, the fourth and fifth acts were combined. SInce the end of the nineteenth century, the standard form for serious drama has been three acts, for musical comedy and comic opera usually two; but great variation is used, with serious plays frequently divided into EPISODES or SCENES, without act-division. Late in the nineteenth century a shorter form, the ONE-ACT PLAY, developed. See DRAMATIC STRUCTURE, FREYTAG'S PYRAMID. |
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| The series of events that constiture a PLOT, what the characters say, do, think, or in some cases fail to do. Orderly action differs from aimless or episodic activity; an action customarily has a beginning, middle, and end. The action of a work is the answer to the question "What happens?" |
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| A style of entertainment popular in film and television productions after about 1950. In such MELODRAMA, the plot is little more than an elementary pattern of revenge or good-defeating-evil, characters are two-dimensional, and language conventional and undistinguished, with all the emphasis on action (often violent) and SPECIAL EFFECTS. |
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| One of the robotic SOAP actors in Alan Ayckbourn's comedy COmic Potential, emotionally managed by remote control from the future. Employed metaphorically for a person or character without will or personality. |
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| A person who performs in a drama in any form; the term has replaced the earlier PLAYER. THe word has been applied to male and female performers alike. |
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| A theater manager who also acts; a familiar type during the century after 1825. David Garrick had functioned as an actor-manager during the eighteenth century; later actor-managers include Charles Hawtrey and Herbert Beerbohm-Tree |
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| A PROVERB or SAYING made familiar by long use. Examples: "No bees, no honey" (Erasmus, Adagia); "A stitch in time saves nine." |
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| The rewriting of a work from its original form to fit it for another MEDIUM; also the new form of such a rewritten work. A NOVEL may be adapted for the STAGE, MOTION PICTURES, or TELEVISION; a PLAY may be rewritten as a NOVEL. The term normally implies an attempt to retain the chief CHARACTERS, ACTIONS, and as much as possible of the language and tone of the original. |
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| Addenda (plural of Addendum) |
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| Matter to be added to a pice of writing. Addenda may be appended in late stages of production or, after production, on a separatew slip attatched to the original document. Addenda are usually items inadvertently omitted or received too late for inclusion. |
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| In Greek and Latin PROSODY, the measure that consists of a DACTYL and a SPONDEE or a dactyl and a TROCHEE, probably so called after the Adonia, the festival of Adonis. |
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| Adventure Story (or Film) |
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| A story in which ACTION--often exterior, usually physical, and frequently violent--is the predominant material, stressed above CHARACTERIZATION, MOTIVATION, or THEME, SUSPENSE is engendered by the question "What will happen next?" rather than "Why?" or "To whom?" In a broader sense, as Henry James insisted in "The Art of Fiction," everything in fiction can be thought of as an adventure; he said, "It is an adventure--an immense one--for me to write this little article." A recagnizable subgenre is the outdoor-adventure film, of which the WESTERN remains the most popular form. |
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| The character in a FORMAL SATIRE who is addressed by the PERSONA and who functions to elicit and shape that speaker's remarks. Arbuthnot is adversarius to Pope in "The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot." Shuch a character serves to create a situation within which he or she may speak or play a role similar to that of a STRAIGHT MAN. |
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| Bookseller's abbreviation of "all edges gilt," referring to the paper on which a book is printed. |
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| A term used to describe the effect produced when an emotion or an experience, whether autobiographical or not, is so objectified that it can be understood as being independent of the immediate experience of its maker. This objectification involves whatever can displace immediacy and VERISIMILITUDE. THe term also applies to the reader's or audience's awareness that art and reality are separate. In this sense it is sometimes called "psychic distance." It is related to T.S. Elliot's OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE. See OBJECTIVITY, VERFREMDUNGSEFFEKT. |
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A nineteenth-century literary movement that rested on the credo of "ART FOR ART'S SAKE." Its roots reached back to Theophile Gautier's preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), which claimed that art had no utility, Poe's theory of "the poem per se" and his rejection of the "heresy of the didactic," Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, and Mallarme. Its originas had a close kinship to the reverence for beauty of the PRE-RAPHAELITES. Its dominant figures were Oscar Wilde, who insisted on the separation of art and morality, and Wilde's master, Walter Pater. The English PARNASSIANS--Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Andrew Lang, and Edmund Gosse--were a part of the movement but were primarily concerned with questions of form rather than sharp separations of art from moral issues. Tennyson angrily paraphrased "art for art's sake" as meaning:
The filthiest of all paintings painted well
Is mightier than the purest painted ill! |
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THe study or philosophy of the beautiful in nature and art. It has both a philosophical dimension--What is art? WHat is beauty? What is the relationship of the beautiful to other values?--and a psychological dimension--What is the source of aesthetic enjoyment? How is beauty perceived and recognized? From what impulse do art and beauty arise? The aesthetic study of literature concentrates on the sense of the beautiful rather than on moral, social, or practical considerations. When pursued rigorously, in leads to "ART FOR ART'S SAKE" and AESTHETICISM.
The Kantian tradition takes the aesthetic as the name of the attempt to bridge the gap between material and spiritual, a world of forces and magnitudes. Aesthetic objects, with their union or fusion of sensuous form and spiritual content, would serve as guarantors of the possibility of articulating the material with the spiritual. This sense of the aesthetic is not only Kant's: It is the one at issue in more recent debates, such as those involving Terry Eagleton (The Ideology of the Aesthetic) and Paul de Man (The Aesthetic Ideology). |
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| Abbreviations for the Latin aetatis suae, "of his or her age." The term is used to designate the year of a person's life at which an event occured. A picture of Henry David Thoreau bearing the legend "aet. 35" would be one made during Thoreau's thirty-fifth year, that is, when he was thirty-four years old. |
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| The judging of a work of art in terms of its results, especially its emotional effect. The term was introduced by W.K. Wimsatt, Jr., and M.C. Beardsley to describe the "confusion between the poem and its result (what it is and what it does)." It complements the INTENTIONAL FALLACY. Notable versions of the affective fallacy are Aristotle's CATHARSIS and Longinus's "transport." |
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| A verbal element added before (PREFIX), inside (INFIX), or after (SUFFIX) a base to change the meaning. |
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| African American Literature |
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Frequently called Afro-American or Black literature. The formal study of such writing, at one time a neglected area of American literary scholarship, is increasingly important. This heightened interest in the work of African Americans has come about for two primary reasons: the growing recognition of African Americans as a significant part of American culture and the recovery or development of a body of writing of impressive scope and quality.
For all practical purposes, African American literature began in the eighteenth century with the poetry of two slaves, Jupiter Hammon and Phillis Wheatley. The first half of the nineteenth century saw further efforts by slave poets, among them George Moses Horton, but it was particularly marked by a flood of autobiographical records of the slaves' terrible experiences, known as SLAVE NARRATIVES, of which the most famous is that by Frederick Douglass. There were also polemical pamphlets and fiery sermons, and in 1853 William Wells Brown, an escaped slave, published the first novel by an African American, Clotel, or, the Presidcent's Daughter. As the century closed, Charles W. Chesnutt began publishing the novels that established him as an important literary figure.
In the modern age, a host of skillful African American writers have produced distinguished work in every field. THere have been poets such as Paul Lawrence Dunbar, James Weldon Jonson, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, Countee Cullen, Gwendolyn Brooks (who was in 1949 the first African American to receive the PULITZER PRIZE), Michael Harper, Nikki Giovanni, Don L. Lee, Ethridge Knight, Clarence Major, and Rita Dove. The period since 1900 has been as particularly rich in African American novelists, including such writers as W.E.B. Du Bois, Walter White, Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Ishmael Reed. There have been anumber of African American playwrights, among them Hall Johnson, Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, Ossie Davis, and Imamu Baraka.
These African Americans, by writing with passion and conviction of the place they and their race have occupied and endured in a predominantly white society, have broadened the range, enriched the sympathy, and deepened the quality of American literary expression. Their contributions, notable most obviously for their power, are major forces changing the earlier American literary monolith of the white middle class. |
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| Some titles, especially of poems, suggest that a work was written after the manner of a certain writer, work, or body of literature, or after the reading of a work. These titles are typical: "After a Passage in Baudelaire" (Robert Duncan), "After Anacreon" (Lew Welch), "After Lorca" (both Robert Creeley and Ted Hughes), "After Plotinus" (WIlliam Stafford), and "After the Persian" (Louise Bogan). Frank O'Hara wrote "After Wyatt" and "An Airplane Whistle (after Heine)." G.K. Chesterton's "Variations of an Air" consists of three parodic versions of "Old King Cole" subtitled "after Lord Tennyson," "after W.B. Yeats," and "after Walt Whitman." Allen Ginberg's "After Yeats" is joined by Margaret McCann's "After Bob(After Yeats)." A.C. Swinburne wrote a poem called "After Looking into Carlyle's Reminiscences" (calling Carlyle "this dead snake"). |
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| Age of Johnson in English Literature |
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| The interval between 1750 and 1798 was a markedly transitional age in English literature. The NEOCLASSICISM that dominated the first half of the cenury was yielding in many ways to the impulse toward ROMANTICISM, although the period was still predominantly neoclassical. The NOVEL, which had come into being in the decades before 1750, continued to flourish, with sentimental attitudes and GOTHIC horrors becoming a significant part of its content. Little was accomplished in drama, except for the creation of "laughing" comedy by Sheridan and Goldsmith in reaction against SENTIMENTAL COMEDY. The cheif poets were Burns, Gray, Cowper, Johnson, and Crabbe--a list that indicates how thoroughly the pendulum was swinging away from Pope and Dryden. Yet it was Samuel Johnson--poet, lexicogroapher, essayist, novelist, journalist, and neoclassic critic--who was the major literary figure, and his friend Boswell's biography of him (1791) was the greatest work of the age, challenged for such honor only by Gibbon's monumental history, THe Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776). An interest in the past (particularly the Middle Ages), in the PRIMITIVE, and in the literature of the fold was developing and was contributing with increasing strength to the growing tide of ROMANTICISM. It is sometimes called the AGE OF SENSIBILITY, emphasizing the emergence of new attitudes and the development of semsibility as a major literary expression. See NEOCLASSIC PERIOD, AGE OF SENSIBILITY, SENSIBILITY. |
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| A term often applied to the NEOCLASSIC PERIOD IN ENGLISH LITERATURE and sometimes to the REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD IN AMERICAN LITERATURE, because these periods emphasized self-knowledge, self-control, RATIONALISM, discipline, and the rule of law, order, and DECORUM in public and private life and in art. |
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| Age of the Romantic Movement in England, 1798-1832 |
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| Although a major romantic poet, Robert Burns, had died in 1796, William Blake's Songs of Innocence had appeared in 1789, and adumbrations of ranticism had been apparent in English writing throughout much of the eighteenth century, the publication of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798 is often regared as marking the beginning of a period of more than three decades in which romanticism triumphed in British letters, a period that is often said to have ended in 1832, with the death of Scott. During these thirty-four years, the careers of Wordsworth, Coleridge, byron, Mary and P.B. Shelley, Felicia Hemans, and kEats flowered; Scott created the HISTORICAL NOVEL and made it a force in international literature; Wordsworth and Coleridge articulated a revolutionary theory of romantic poetry; Jane Austen wrote her NOVELS OF MANNERS; Mary Shelley uncannily combined the GOTHIC novel and SCIENCE FICTION, along with philosophic vision; and Lamb, DeQuincey, and Hazlitt raised the PERSONAL ESSAY to a high level of accomplishment. Romanticism did not die with Scott, but the decade of the thirties saw it begin a process of accommodation. See ROMANTICISM, ROMANTIC PERIOD IN ENGLISH LITERATURE, Outline of Literary History. |
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| A name frequently applied by literary historians, such as W.J. Bate, Harold Bloom, and Northrop Frye, to the last half of the eighteenth century in England, the time earlier called the AGE OF JOHNSON. The term Age of Sensibility results from seeing the interval between 1750 and 1798 as a seedfield for emerging romantic qualities in literature, such as PRIMITIVISM, SENSIBILITY, and the originality of the individual talent. The older term, AGE OF JOHNSON, tends to emphasize the strong continuing neoclassic qualities in the literature of the time. See AGE OF JOHNSON, NEOCLASSIC PERIOD, AGE OF THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT, ROMANTIC PERIOD IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. |
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| An amateur or professional representative acting as an artist's go-between in dealings with publishers, editors, producers, and other executives, chiefly in legal and financial matters but also occasionally including personal and artistic advice and assistance. The profession of literary agent dates back to the late nineteenth century, when A.P. Watt, sometimes considered the first professional agent, counted Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling among his clients, Before the close of the nineteenth century, Watt was joined, by J.B. Pinker and Curtis Brown. |
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| "Agitational PROPAGANDA," originally in behalf of the Soviet Union and communist ideology (the word is a Russian combination dating from the 1930s); later applied to any propagandistic effort. |
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| Agnomination (also Adnomination, Annomination) |
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| A term used between 1600 and 1800 to mean, variously, any PLAY ON WORDS, especially such as involved names of persons, as in Robert Greene's distortion of Shakespeare's name to "Shake-scene"; also applied to ALLITERATION in general. |
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| Literally, a contest of any kind. In Greek tragedy it was a prolonged dispute, often a formal debate in which the CHORUS divided and took sides with the disputants. In the OLD COMEDY in Greece this debate, called EPIRRHEMATIC AGON, involved elaborate exchanges between the chorus and the debaters, and addresses to the audience. In discussions of PLOT, agon has come to mean any conflict. Leading CHARACTERS are classified according to their relationship to this conflict, displayed by the element agon inside their designations: PROTAGONIST, ANTAGONIST, DEUTERAGONIST, and so on. As its title suggests, Milton's Samson Agonistes belongs in the category of the agon; T.S. Eliot's fragmentary Sweeney Agonistes seems to be a burlesque or caricature of the tradition. In the 1950s Igor Stravinsky composed a ballet called Agon. |
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| Literally, people living in an agricultural society, or espousing the merits of such a society, as the PHYSIOCRATS did. In this sense most espousers of PASTORAL traditions are agrarians. Thomas Jefferson was a noted early American agrarian. In literary history and criticism, however, the term is usually applied to a group of Southern American writers in Nashville, Tennessee, who published THe Fugitive (1922-1925), a little magazine of poetry and some criticism championing agrarian REGIONALISM but attacking "the old high-caste Brahmins of the Old South." Most of its contributors were associated with Vanderbilt University; among them were John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, Robert Penn Warren, and Merrill More. In the 1930s, championing an agrarian economy as opposed to that of industrial capitalism, they issued a collective manifest, I'll Take My Stand. Between 1933 and 1937 they were active in the publication of THe American Review, a socioeconomic magazine that also analyzed contemporary literature. They found an effective literary organ in The Southern Review (1935-1942) under the editorship of Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. In addition to their poetry and novels, the Agrarians were among the founders of the NEW CRITICISM. |
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| A character added by Northrop Fyre to the traditional three STOCK CHARACTERS of Greek OLD COMEDY. The usual agroikos is a rustic who is easily deceived, a form of the country bumpkin. |
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| The braggart or impostor in Greek comedy. He takes many forms: the quack, the religious fanatic, the swaggering soldier, the pedant--anyone pretentious who is held up to ridicule. From Plautus's Miles Gloriosus he enters English literature, where he is a STOCK CHARACTER in Elizabethan drama. He has been widely used in other literary forms, particularly the novel. James Fenimore COoper's Dr. Obed Battius, in The Prarie, is a good example of a later mutation of this character. A modern comic strip featured a character named Will Bragg. See MILES GLORIOSUS. |
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| A Provencal lament over the parting of lovers at the break of day, the name coming from the Provencal for "dawn." It has no fixed metrical form, but each stanza usually ends with "alba." The first alba is "Reis glorios" (c. 1200) by Giraut de Bornelh. With the next generation of troubadors the alba grew to a distinct literary form. On occasion they were religious, being addressed to the Virgin. See AUBADE. |
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| Verses written according to the manner of the odes of Alcaeus, usually a four-stanza poem, each stanza composed of four lines, the first two being HENDECASYLLABIC, the third being nine syllables, and the fourth DECASYLLABIC. Because the classical pattern is based on quantitative DACTYLS and TROCHEES, exact English Alcaics are practically impossible. The most notable English attempt is in Tennyson's "Milton." |
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| The spirit prevailing in the literary and scientific work of Hellenistic writers flourishing in Alexandria for about three centuries after 325 B.C. The literature is distinguished by originality, novelty, learning, and devotion to ancestral models. The academic studies are distinguished by BIBLIOPHILIA, attention to detail, the establishment and collection of CANONS, and thoroughgoing editing and annotating. The greatest names associated with Alexandrianism are Callimachus, Philetas, Theocritus, and Lycophron. |
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| A verse with six IAMBIC feet (iambic HEXAMETER). The form, that of HEROIC VERSE in France, received its name possibly from its use in Old French romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries describing the adventures of Alexander the Great, or possibly from the name of Alexandre Paris, a French poet who used this meter. Its appearance in English has been credited to Wyatt and Surrey. Perhaps the most conspicuous instance of its successful use in English is by Spenser, who, in his SPENSERIAN STANZA, after eight PENTAMETER lines employed a HEXAMETER line (Alexandrine) in the ninth. Both the line and its occasional |
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