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| "Philosophical investigation into the nature of beauty and the perception of beauty, especially in the arts; the theory of art or artistic taste." |
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| A statement which can contain two or more meanings. For example, when the oracle at Delphi told Croesus that if he waged war on Cyrus he would destroy a great empire, Croesus thought the oracle meant his enemy's empire. In fact, the empire Croesus destroyed by going to war was his own. |
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| repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses, or sentences. "We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France." |
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| A very short tale told by a character in a literary work. In Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales,""The Miller's Tale" and "The Carpenter's Tale" are examples. |
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| An inspiration saying or platitude. |
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| A specialized vocabulary used by a group of people; jargon or a style or manner of expression peculiar to a given people. |
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| Theories regarding symbolism and how people glean meaning from words, sounds, and pictures. |
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| The mythos of literature concerned primarily with an idealized world. A form of prose fiction practiced by Scott, Hawthorne, William Morris, etc., distinguishable from the novel. |
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| A story in which one or more other stories are told. Examples include the Prologue to "The Canterbury Tales" and the play at the beginning of the "Taming of the Shrew." |
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| Romanticism, which was a reaction to the classicism of early 18th century, favored feeling over reason and placed great emphasis on subjective, or personal, experience of the individual. Nature was also a major theme. |
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| A far-fetched simile or metaphor, a literary conceit occurs when the speaker compares two highly dissimilar things. |
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| An unrealistic or unexpected intervention to rescue the protagonist or resolve the conflict. The term means "The god out of the machine," and refers to stage machinery. |
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| Critical interpretation of a text, especially a biblical text; from the Greek ex- + egeisthai meaning "to lead out." |
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| A type of comedy based on a humorous situation such as a bank robber who mistakenly wanders into a police station to hide. It is the situation here which provided the humor, not he cleverness of a plot or lines. |
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| characterized by gloom and mystery and the grotesque; gothic novels include Mary Shelly's "Frankenstein" and Bram Stoker's "Dracula." |
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| Intertextuality is, thus, a way of accounting for the role of literary and extra-literary materials without recourse to traditional notions of authorship. A literary work, then, is not simply the product of a single author, but of its relationship to other texts and to the structures of language itself. |
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| In or into the middle of a sequence of events, as in a literary narrative. |
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| Assuming from the text what the author intended to mean. |
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| A passage included in an author's work without his/her consent. |
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| A literary technique where the disbelief of the reader and writer produces a momentary shift in the real world wherein an element of the surreal enters and leaves with ease. |
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| technique that records the multifarious thoughts and feelings of a character without regard to logical argument or narrative sequence. The writer attempts by the stream of consciousness to reflect all the forces, external and internal, influencing the psychology of a character a single moment. |
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| the character flaw or error of a tragic hero that leads to his downfall. |
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| A serious play in which the chief figures, by some peculiarity of character, pass through a series of misfortunes leading to a final, devastating catastrophe. |
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| An imaginary and indefinitely remote place of ideal perfection especially in laws, government, and social conditions. |
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| An imaginary place where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives; an imaginary place or state where everything is as bad as it possibly can be: or a description of such a place. |
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| Of, relating to, or being a literary or other artistic work that portrays or evokes rural life, usually in an idealized way. |
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