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| Used for poetic effect, a repetition of the initial sounds of several words in a group. The following line from Robert Frost's poem "Acquainted with the Night" provides us with an example of alliteration: "I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet." The repetition of the s' sound creates a sense of quiet, reinforcing the meaning of the line. |
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| Pertaining to the appreciation of and study of beauty or good taste, "aesthetic" means visually pleasing. The noun that corresponds to "aesthetic" is "aesthetics," which means the study of the appreciation of beauty. |
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| A reference in one literary work to a character or theme found in another literary work. T. S. Eliot, in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" alludes (refers) to the biblical figure John the Baptist in the line Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter, . . . In the New Testament, John the Baptist's head was presented to King Herod on a platter. |
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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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| The antithesis of something is its direct opposite. In literature, the use of antithesis as a figure of speech results in two statements that show a contrast through the balancing of two opposite ideas. Technically, it is the second portion of the statement that is defined as the "antithesis"; the first portion is the "thesis." An example of antithesis is found in the following portion of Abraham Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address"; notice the opposition between the verbs "remember" and "forget" and the phrases "what we say" and "what they did": "The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here." |
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A figure of speech wherein the speaker speaks directly to something nonhuman. In these lines from John Donne's poem "The Sun Rising" the poet scolds the sun for interrupting his nighttime activities: Busy old fool, unruly sun, Why dost thou thus, Through windows, and through curtains call on us? |
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| The two impulses believed to guide authors of dramatic tragedy. The Apollonian impulse is named after Apollo, the Greek god of light and beauty and the symbol of intellectual order. The Dionysian impulse is named after Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and the symbol of the unrestrained forces of nature. The Apollonian impulse is to create a rational, harmonious world, while the Dionysian is to express the irrational forces of personality. The ancient Greeks (according to Friedrich Nietzsche) believed that great art (and great human lives) had to somehow unite these two apparently contradictory energies'. |
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| The word archetype is commonly used to describe an original pattern or model from which all other things of the same kind are made. This term was introduced to literary criticismfrom the psychology of Carl Jung. It expresses Jung's theory that behind every person's "unconscious," or repressed memories of the past, lies the "collective unconscious" of the human race: memories of the countless typical experiences of our ancestors. These memories are said to prompt illogical associations that trigger powerful emotions in the reader. Often, the emotional process is primitive, even primordial. Archetypes are the literary images that grow out of the "collective unconscious." They appear in literatureas incidents and plots that repeat basic patterns of life. They may also appear as stereotyped characters. Examples of literary archetypes include themes such as birth and death and characters such as the Earth Mother. |
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| The repetition of vowel sounds in a literary work, especially in a poem. Edgar Allen Poe's "The Bells" conains numerous examples. Consider these from stanza 2:Hear the mellow wedding bells-' and From the molten-golden notes,' The repetition of the short "e" and long o sounds denotes a heavier, more serious bell than the bell encountered in the first stanza where the assonance included the i' sound in examples such as tinkle, sprinkle, and twinkle. |
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A poem written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. Consider the following from "The Ball Poem" by John Berryman: What is the boy now, who has lost his ball,
What, what is he to do? I saw it go
Merrily bouncing, down the street, and then
Merrily over-there it is in the water!'
This does not rhyme, but has five feet' or beats (stresses) per line, and ten syllables all in all per line. |
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| 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, a rational attitude towards life and respect for artistic tradition. It was the dominant mode of the 18C. Its opposite is Romanticism (common ca.1780-1820). It is related to the Apollonan impulse. An example of modern literary classicism that we have read is WH Auden's The Unknown citizen'. |
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A far-fetched simile or metaphor, a literary conceit occurs when the speaker compares two highly dissimilar things. In the following example from John Donne's The Flea': a lover's girlfriend will not be seduced, and he compares her killing the flea (who enjoys his life of biting both of them and swells, as if pregnant' with their blood!) to killing them as a couple: MARK but this flea, and mark in this, How little that which thou deniest me is ; It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee, And in this flea our two bloods mingled be. Thou know'st that this cannot be said A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead ; Yet this enjoys before it woo, And pamper'd swells with one blood made of two ; And this, alas ! is more than we would do. |
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| Connotation and Denotation |
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| The denotation of a word is its dictionary definition. The word wall, therefore, denotes an upright structure which encloses something or serves as a boundary. The connotation of a word is its emotional content. In this sense, the word wall can also mean an attitude or actions which prevent becoming emotionally close to a person. In Robert Frost's "Mending Wall," two neighbors walk a property line each on his own side of a wall of loose stones. As they walk, they pick up and replace stones that have fallen. Frost thinks it's unnecessary to replace the stones since thay have no cows to damage each other's property. The neighbor only says "Good fences make good neighbors." The wall, in this case, is both a boundary (denotation) and a barrier that prevents Frost and his neighbor from getting to know each other, a force prohibiting involvement (connotation). |
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Literature disigned explicitly to instruct. In this sense The Bible is didactic because it offers guidance in moral, religious, and ethical matters. But it also occurs in secular art, as in these lines from Jacque Prevert's "To Paint the Portrait of a Bird.": Paint first a cage with an open door paint then something pretty something simple something handsome something useful for the bird'. The term "didactic" also refers to texts that are overburdened with instructive and factual information, sometimes to the detriment of a reader's enjoyment. The opposite of "didactic" is "nondidactic." If a writer is more concerned with artistic form/structure and techniques than with conveying a message, then that piece of work is considered to be nondidactic, even if it is instructive. |
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A lyric poem lamenting death. These lines from Joachim Du Bellay's "Elegy on His Cat" are an example: I have not lost my rings, my purse, My gold, my gems-my loss is worse, One that the stoutest heart must move. My pet, my joy, my little love, My tiny kitten, my Belaud, I lost, alas, three days ago. |
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The running over of a sentence or thought into the next couplet or line without a pause at the end of the line; a run-on line. For example, the first two lines here are enjambed: Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds Or bends with the remover to remove. . . . --Shakespeare |
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| An eighteenth-century philosophical movement. It began in France but had a wide impact throughout Europe and America. Thinkers of this movement 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. Its attitudes were related to classicism in literature, against which Romanticism rebelled. |
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| 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 "epiphanies.". In our class, Tris in "Townsmen of a Stiller Town' has one when he sees the graffiti that he's seen a thousand times before, but which he sees as if for the first time, after visiting the morgue, and seeing his doppelganger: Your mama have any kids who lived, asshole?' |
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| for our purposes, literature that emphasises the meaninglessness of a world without God, and our thrownness' into a cold, empty universe that cares little for our small, human lives. See Matther Arnold's poem, Dover Beach'. [n.b., if you're interested: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 behavior or perception for religious and ethical matters] |
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| According to Sigmund Freud, humans have a life instinct - which he named 'Eros' - and a death drive, which is commonly called (though not by Freud himself) 'Thanatos'. This postulated death drive allegedly compels humans to engage in risky and self-destructive acts that could lead to their own death. Art often expresses the mystery of how these two contrary drives drive us, unknowingly, through life: see Dylan Thomas,esp. "The Force that Through the Green FUSE drives the flower" |
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| The substitution of a mild or less negative word or phrase for a harsh or blunt one, as in the use of "pass away" instead of "die." The basic psychology of euphemistic language is the desire to put something bad or embarrassing in a positive (or at least neutral light). Thus many terms referring to death, sex, crime, and excremental functions are euphemisms. Since the euphemism is often chosen to disguise something horrifying, it can be exploited by the writer of SATIRE through the use of irony and exaggeration. |
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| A prose or Verse narrative intended to convey a moral. Animals or inanimate objects with human characteristics often serve as characters in fables. A famous fable is Aesop's "The Tortoise and the Hare." |
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| In literature, a way of saying one thing and meaning something else. Take, for example, this line by Robert Burns, My luv is a red, red rose. Clearly Mr. Burns does not really mean that he has fallen in love with a red, aromatic, many-petalled, long, thorny-stemmed plant. He means that his love is as sweet and as delicate as a rose. While, figurative language provides a writer with the opportunity to write imaginatively, it also tests the imagination of the reader, forcing the reader to go below the surface of a literary work into deep, hidden meanings. Figure of Speech An example of figurative language that states something that is not literally true in order to create an effect. Similes, metaphors and personification are figures of speech which are based on comparisons. Metonymy, synecdoche, synesthesia, apostrophe, oxymoron, and hyperbole are other figures of speech. |
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Unrhymed Poetry with lines of varying lengths, and containing no specific metrical pattern. The poetry of Walt Whitman provides us with many examples. Consider the following lines from "Song of Myself.": I celebrate myself and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loaf and invite my soul, I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. |
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| a literary style popular during the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th. This style usually portrayed fantastic tales dealing with horror, despair, the grotesque and other "dark" subjects. Gothic literature was named for the apparent influence of the dark gothic architecture of the period on the genre. Also, many of these Gothic tales took places in such "gothic" surroundings, sometimes a dark and stormy castle as shown in Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, or Bram Stoker's infamous Dracula. Other times, this story of darkness may occur in a more everyday setting, such as the quaint house where the man goes mad from the "beating" of his guilt in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart". In essence, these stories were ROMANCES, largely due to their love of the imaginary over the logical, and were told from many different points of view. This literature gave birth to many other forms, such as suspense, ghost stories, horror, mystery, and also Poe's detective stories. Gothic literature wasn't so different from other genres in form as it was in content and its focus on the "weird" aspects of life. This movement began to slowly open may people's eyes to the possible uses of the supernatural in literature. David Lodge refers to Money as an example of contemporary gothic realism, since in Amis, the ordinary life of the street is just as horrific as the dark supernatural. |
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A figure of speech in which an overstatement or exaggeration occurs as in the following lines from Act 2, scene 2 of Shakespeare's "Macbeth." In this scene, Macbeth has murdered King Duncan. Horrified at the blood on his hands, he asks: Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No. This my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red.' Literally, it does not require an ocean to wash blood from one's hand. Nor can the blood on one's hand turn the green ocean red. The hyperbole works to illustrate the guilt Macbeth feels at the brutal murder of his king and kinsman. |
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| A word or group of words in a literary work which appeal to one or more of the senses: sight, taste, touch, hearing, and smell. The use of images serves to intensify the impact of the work. The following example of imagery in T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,": When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherized upon a table. This uses images of pain and sickness to describe the evening, which as an image itself represents society and the psychology of Prufrock, himself. |
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| An English and American Poetry movement that flourished between 1908 and 1917. The Imagists 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. Ezra Pound is the founder and most famous member of this movement (see his poem 'In a Station of the Metro') |
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| 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. |
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| Irony takes many forms. In irony of situation, the result of an action is the reverse of what the actor expected. Macbeth murders his king hoping that in becoming king he will achieve great happiness. Actually, Macbeth never knows another moment of peace, and finally is beheaded for his murderous act. In dramatic irony, the audience knows something that the characters in the drama do not. For example, the identity of the murderer in a crime thriller may be known to the audience long before the mystery is solved. In verbal irony, the contrast is between the literal meaning of what is said and what is meant. A character may refer to a plan as brilliant, while actually meaning that (s)he thinks the plan is foolish. Sarcasm is a form of verbal irony. |
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| refers to the theme of erotic death or love death meaning the two lovers' consummation of their love in death or after death.Two-sided examples include Tristan und Isolde, Romeo and Juliet - related to Freud's concept of Eros-Thanatos |
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| A short poem wherein the poet expresses ( sings') an emotion or illuminates some life principle. Emily Dickinson's "I Heard a Fly Buzz-When I Died" is a lyric poem wherein the speaker, on a deathbed expecting death to appear in all its grandeur, encounters a common housefly instead. This musical, expressive aspect separates it from it from narrative poems (long ones of which are epics', and which relate a narrative or story) and dramatic poems (plays).These poems are generally short, averaging roughly twelve to thirty lines, and rarely go beyond sixty lines. These poems express vivid imagination as well as emotion and all flow fairly concisely. Because of this aspect, as well as their steady rhythm, they were often used in song. In fact, most people still see a "lyric" as anything that is sung along to a musical instrument. |
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A regular pattern of unstressed and stressed syllables in a line or lines of poetry. As in iambic pentameter': cf. Robert Frost Whose woods these are I think I know the stress here is on the second of the two syllables in each pair. |
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| the psychological effect of place on character, e.g. Dickens's Coketown, where the monotony of industrial capitalism produces stunted human beings, concerned with only work and money |
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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. |
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| 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.. A motif may also be two contrasting elements in a work, such as good and evil. A motif is important because it allows one to see main points and themes that the author is trying to express, in order that one might be able to interpret the work more accurately. For example, the motifs of blood' and clothing' help Shakespeare to get us questioning the themes of what is natural, what kinship/loyalty means, appearance vs reality, etc. |
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| A poem or stanza composed of eight lines. The term octave most often represents the first eight lines of a Petrarchan sonnet. |
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| A serious poem in praise of something divine or expressing some noble idea. In' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," English poet John Keats expresses his appreciation of the beauty and agelessness of a work by a Grecian artisan: Thou still unravished bride of quietness, Thou foster child of silence and slow time,' |
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A literary device wherein the sound of a word echoes the sound it represents. The words "splash." "knock," and "roar" are examples. The following lines end Dylan Thomas' "Fern Hill:" Out of the whinnying green stable On to the fields of praise.' The word "whinnying" is onomatopoetic. |
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A combination of contradictory terms, such as used by Romeo in Act 1, scene 1 of Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet:" Why then, O brawling love! O loving hate! O heavy lightness, serious vanity;' |
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| A situation or a statement that seems to contradict itself, but on closer inspection, does not. This line from John Donne's "Holy Sonnet 14" provides an example: That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me,' The poet paradoxically asks God to knock him down so that he may stand. What he means by this is for God to destroy his present self and remake him as a holier person. |
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| A pastoral is a literary composition on a rural theme. In a pastoral, characters and language of a complex, urban 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 (n.b.: the term is derived from the Latin word "pastor," meaning shepherd) persona In literature, the persona (Greek = mask') is the narrator, or the storyteller, of a literary work created by the author. The persona is not the author, but the author's creation--the voice "through which the author speaks." In this sense the "I" in a poem does not = the biographical 'I' of the poet, and we should NEVER assume that a work of art relates to the artists real life. (It may, but how are we to know?) The persona could be a character in the work, or a fabricated onlooker, relaying the sequence of events in a narrative. Thus, the poet' in Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn' is not Keats himself, but a fictional creation that allows Keats to say other things than he might in a confessional' (pour your heart out) poem. |
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| 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 |
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| A four-line stanza of a poem or an entire poem consisting of four lines. |
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| In literary criticism, this term denotes the art of persuasion. In its strictest sense, adheres to various principles or tactics developed since classical times for arranging facts and ideas in a clear, persuasive, appealing manner. |
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| a way the events of a story are conveyed to the reader, it is the "vantage point" from which the narrative is passed from author to the reader. The point of view can vary from work to work. For example, in the Book of Genesis the objective third person point of view is presented, where a "nonparticipant" serves as the narrator and has no insight into the characters' minds. The narrator presents the events using the pronouns he, it, they, and reveals no inner thoughts of the characters. In Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Cask of Amontillado" the first person point of view is exhibited. In this instance the main character conveys the incidents he encounters, as well as giving the reader insight into himself as he reveals his thoughts, feelings, and intentions. Many other points of view exist, such as omniscient (or "all knowing") in which the narrator "moves from one character to another as necessary" to provide those character's respective motivations and emotions. Understanding the point of view used in a work is critical to understanding literature; it serves as the instrument to relay the events of a story, and in some instances the feelings and motives of the character(s). Another way of putting it is "Whose Story Is It?' as in Tiny Smiling Daddy' by Mary Gaitskill, the narrator is third person, but the story is told from the point of view of the father, so point of view can get complicated, subtle. |
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A question intended to provoke thought, but not an expressed answer, in the reader. It is most commonly used in oratory and other persuasive genres. The following lines from Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" ask rhetorical questions: Can storied urn or animated bust Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath? Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust, Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of Death? |
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| 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 of classicism. In this sense, Romanticism signifies any work or philosophy in which the exotic or dreamlike figure strongly, or that is devoted to individualistic expression, self-analysis, or a pursuit of a higher realm of knowledge than can be discovered by human reason. Prominent Romantics include Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Lord Byron, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe |
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| An extremely negative form of irony; a form of sneering criticism in which disapproval is often expressed as ironic praise. (Oddly enough, sarcastic remarks are often used between friends, perhaps as a somewhat perverse demonstration of the strength of the bond--only a good friend could say this without hurting the other's feelings, or at least without excessively damaging the relationship, since feelings are often hurt in spite of a close relationship. If you drop your lunch tray and a stranger says, "Well, that was really intelligent," that's sarcasm. If your girlfriend or boyfriend says it, that's love--I think.) |
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| Any six-line poem or stanza. Examples of the sestet include the last six lines of the Petrarchan sonnet form, the stanza form of Robert Burns's "A Poet's Welcome to his love-begotten Daughter," and the sestina form in W. H. Auden's "Paysage Moralise." |
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| a written narrative that imitates a spontaneous oral account in its use of dialect, slang, and the peculiar idiom of that persona. E.g. the street smart philistine, John Self in Martin Amis's Money |
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| is also known as near rhyme, half rhyme, off rhyme, imperfect rhyme, oblique rhyme, or pararhyme |
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| 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. It's not just writing whatever comes into YOUR mind, but a highly skillful selection of thoughts' to give the illusion of what is going on in a character's mind. |
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| In AESTHETICS, the sublime (from the Latin sublimis ([looking up from] under the lintel, high, lofty, elevated, exalted)) is the quality of greatness or vast magnitude, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness with which nothing else can be compared and which is beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation. This greatness is often used when referring to nature and its vastness, and so art that represents this, stirs in us feelings of attraction & repulsion, fear and trembling. |
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A device in literature where a specific, physical object represents an idea. In Willaim Blake's "The Lamb," the speaker tells the lamb that the force that made him or her is also called a lamb: Little lamb, who made thee? Little lamb, who made thee? Little lamb, I'll tell thee, Little lamb, I'll tell thee! He is called by thy name, For he calls himself a lamb; Symbols don't generally mean just one thing (if they do, you have an allegory' and not literature per se, as literature deals in ambiguity and not in simple answers. The symbol of the lamb in the above lines corresponds, partly to the symbolism of the lamb in Christianity wherein Christ is referred to as The Lamb of God, but it is also referring to innocence of childhood in general, and to the innocence of nature that is lost via the revolutions of industrial capitalism. |
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| A figure of speech wherein a Part of something represents the Whole thing. In this figure, the head of a cow might substitute for the whole cow. Therefore, a herd of fifty cows might be referred to as "fifty head of cattle." In Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Ulysses" Ulysses refers to his former companions as free hearts, free foreheads |
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| One sensory experience described in terms of another sensory experience. Emily Dickinson, in "I Heard a Fly Buzz-When I Died," uses a colour to describe a sound, the buzz of a fly: with blue, uncertain stumbling buzz' |
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| A key ingredient of a literary work and which gives the work unity (wholeness, structure, completeness). The theme provides an answer to the question What is the work about? Why did the author bother writing it? The themes Shakespeare's Macbeth are various: What is a human being (Man)? What is true leadership? What controls our destiny - our choices? Fate? Literature NEVER answers these questions, but by repeating and developing them, it forces us the reader/audience to question ourselves. Don't mistake theme for plot, which deals with the action of a work (what happens next?) You'll know it's art when you begs to be re-read, /seen. etc, because it so skilfully makes you question its themes, that you need to keep coming back to it, even though you already know the storyline. |
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| A statement which lessens or minimizes the importance of what is meant. For example, if one were in a desert where the temperature was 125 degrees, and if one were to describe thermal conditions saying "It's a little warm today." that would be an understamement. In Shakespeare's "Macbeth," Macbeth, having murdered his friend Banquo, understates the number of people who have been murdered since the beginning of time by saying "Blood hath been shed ere now." (The opposite is hyperbole) |
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