Accentual - syllabic verse

verse that establishes its rhythm by counting both stressed and unstressed syllables. The dominant mode of English versification since Chaucer (1343 - 1400).

Amphibrach

a metrical foot consisting of three syllables, where the second one is stressed.

Anapest

a metrical foot consisting of two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable. Originally a Greek marching beat, the rising rhythm of anapestic verse has been used by poets to echo energetic movement. The first line of this couplet it anapestic tetrameter:

Not a word to each other; we kept the great pace

Neck by neck, stride by stride, never changing our place . (R.Br.)

Antagonist

in Greek drama, the character who opposes the protagonist or hero, or any character who opposes another, e.g., Creon in Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex. In some works the antagonist plays the role of a villain: cf. Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667); Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello (1604).

Archetype

a plot pattern, image, descriptive detail, or character that appears in narratives articulated by different cultures at different times. Myths, fairy tales, and fables are usually seen as the source of these universal patterns and images. In our century, the term was popularized by Carl Jung (1875-1961), who believed that part of the mind is informed by a collective unconscious – a repository of common symbols and patterns that are the products of a collective past and the basis of a universal way of thinking. Examples include images of birth, death, rebirth, and the seasons. Thus, a flower symbolizes spring, and the four seasons represent the four stages of life.

Atmosphere

the tonality pervading a literary work which fosters in the readers expectations as to the course of events, whether happy or (more commonly) disastrous.

Ballad

a poem of moderate length that can be recited or sung, and that tells a dramatic story using simple language or a simple repeated tune. In England, the traditional or folk ballad dates from the Middle Age, when ballad singing was an important way of passing on history, legends or information in illiterate or semiliterate communities. The traditional ballads are anonymous and no doubt changed over time according to the imaginative talents of singers or story-tellers. Many ballads are well-known and are sung or recited worldwide; e.g. Clementine from North America or Sir Patrick Spens from Scotland. Of the older ones the best known are the ballad about Robin Hood and his Merry Men.

Bildungsroman

(from the German Bildung, “formation” or “education”, and the French roman, "novel") a novel dealing with the growth of the protagonist as an individual, usually focusing on the educational process that effects the transition from youth to adulthood. The founder of the genre was Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahr (1830 – William Meister’s Learning-year). J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Doris Lessing’s Children of Violence (1969) are more contemporary examples. When a bildungsroman concerns the development of an artist, as in James Joyce’s Portrait a/the Artist As a Young Man (1916), it is called a Kuunstlerroman, which means "artist novel."

Blank verse

unrhymed iambic pentameter. After its introduction by Henry, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547), in the sixteenth century in his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, it was widely used in drama, for example by Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), and by William Shakespeare (1564-1616):

But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks?

It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. (W. Sh.)

Campus novel

a novel set on university campus, usually written by novelists who are also academics. In Britain, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954), David Lodge’s Changing Places (1975), and Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man (1975), are examples; in the States, Alison Lurie’s The War Between the Tates (1974), and Barbara Prym’s Less Than Angels (1955)

Canto

a subdivision of a long narrative or epic poem employed in the works of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1535), Torquato Tasso (1544-1595) and others. Edmund Spenser was the first to use this term in English; cf. his Faerie Queene (1596). Ezra Pound entitled the long series of poems he worked on for most of his life the Cantos. A canto is roughly equivalent to a chapter in a prose work.

Character

a person represented in a story, novel, play, narrative poem or dramatic monologue; or, the moral and psychological make-up of such a person.

Characterization

the representation of persons in narrative and dramatic works. In autobiography, biography, and history; this means inditing the discernible characteristics of real people. In fiction, the author uses similar techniques to create imaginary characters.

Characterizations may include:

a) Direct methods, where the narrator or speaker attributes specific qualities to characters in the form of description or commentary; this is form of direct narrative address; b) there are seven means of indirect characterization: characters’ actions, speech, appearance, relations with other people, psychological portrayal and motive, name, through a foil. The distinction between methods becomes complicated with the development of various narrative devices. Often, in a first-person novel the narrator will dramatically reveal aspects of his own character while directly describing the qualities of others; cf. Nick Carraway, the narrator in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). In Aspects of the Novel (1927), E.M. Foster makes the distinction between "flat" characters, who are simple and unchanging, and "round" characters, who are complex, dynamic, and less predictable because they develop as a work progresses.

Climax

a moment of great intensity in a literary work, esp. drama. In rhetoric the term to a figure of speech in which a sequence of terms is linked by chain-like repetition through three or more clauses in an ascending order of importance. A well-known example is Benjamin Franklin’s (1706-1790) cautionary maxim:

For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for want for a shoe the.
Horse was lost; for want of a horse the rider was lost.

Couplet

a pair of successive, rhyming lines, usually in the same meter. A closed couplet is one which, like an epigram, forms a complete sense-unit.

The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, 1 think, do there embrace . (A. M.)

Dactylic meter
(or dactyl)

trisyllabic metrical foot consisting of one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables. The first and third lines consist of three dactyls followed by a trochee.

After the pangs of a desperate lover
When day and night 1 have signed in vain:
Ah, what a pleasure it is to discover
In her eyes pity, what causes my pain!. (J. Dr.)

Denouement

(from the French for "unknotting") – the final unravelling of plot complications towards the end of a play or novel, usually occurring after the climax. In includes the outcome together with explanations of any mysteries or problem. The last acts of William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1604) and his Cymbeline (1610) are unravelling of particularly complicated plots. The traditional type of denouement is often avoided by contemporary writers who instead choose open, ambiguous endings which resolve nothing. This puts anticlimax. See, for example, Samuel Beckett in Waiting for Godot (1995) and Harold Pinter in The Caretaker (1960).

Drama

[from the Greek for "to do"] a literary form designed to be acted out in front of an audience. Normally, actors play roles by performing specified actions and by uttering the written dialogue.

Dramatic irony

this form of irony occurs when a character in a drama or fiction says something that has a more profound significance than he or she knows. The readers in contrast to the character, are aware of the circumstances that make the statement more meaningful. Romeo’s speech upon finding Juliet in her family tomb in Romeo and Juliet (1597) is a good example, since he does not know that she is not really dead.

Dystopia

an anti-utopia, a work of fiction that represents some futuristic imaginary world in which certain tendencies of our present social, political and technological order reach their horrific culmination. As in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four (1949) and Kadzuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005).

Eclogue

a short pastoral poem, presenting scenes from simple, rustic life.

Elegy

a poem mourning the death or other forms of serious loss, as in Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Graveyard (1751).

Enjambment

is the opposite of an end-stopped line. In enjambment a syntactical unit runs from one line into the next so that the line-break does not coincide with a grammatical break, e.g.

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
Full sweet dreams, and heath, and quiet breathing. (J.K.)

Epic

is a long narrative poem dealing with heroic characters and great actions, e.g. Iliad and Odyssey by Homer. Nowadays not only Dante’s Divine Comedy (1321) but also H. Melville’s Moby Dick, Tolstoy’s War and Peace are called epics. Its setting is usually ample in range, often embracing the whole world, or at least a broad social order as background, while the action involves an unusual, sometimes even superhuman, deeds in battles.

Epigram

is a short poem which often ends with a satirical jibe.

Epigraph

a quotation placed as a clue to the sense at the beginning of a work or chapter. Very often it clarifies the author’s general intention. Part of the pleasure a reader gains from an epigraph derives from the decision whether or not to take it seriously.

Epilogue

an address to the audience at the end of a play, or the final section of some narratives, coming after the denouement. Normally, the epilogue either describes what happens to characters after the conclusion of the tale or asks for a fair evaluation of the work presented.

Epistolary novel

is a novel composed as a series of letters written by one or more characters. The form became popular in the 18th century in works like Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe (1747-1748) and Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaiaons Dangereuses (1782), but it dropped out of popularity in the 19th. The epistolary novel has made a comeback in more recent years.

Eponym

the name of a real or imagined person from which a place, period, 0country etc. has, or is thought to have, derived its name; e.g. Romulus is the eponym of Rome, Elizabeth I is the eponym of the Elizabethan drama. One speaks of the eponymous protagonists of such works as Othello (1602-1604), Robinson Crusoe (1719), and Oliver Twist (1837-1838).

Euphemism

[Greek for "good speech"] a pleasant word used as a substitute for a more disquieting word or concept. The most common example in America is probably saying "he passed away" for "he died".

Eye-rhyme

a rhyme based on the way words look rather than on the way they sound; e.g. stone and one, come and home, forth and worth.

Fable

a brief, allegorical tale, in either prose or verse, told to point a moral. The characters are most frequently animals, but people and inanimate objects are sometimes used as well. Aesop (6th c. B.C.E.), the legendary fabulist, is credited with many now well-known animal fables, e.g. The Fox and the Grapes.

Fabliau (pl. fabliaux)

a medieval short tale, often bawdy, sometimes grossly obscene, realistic, with middle-class or lower-class characters. The genre originated in France. Geoffrey Chaucer superbly adapted this kind in his Canterbury Tales (1387). See the tales told by the Miller, the Reeve, the Friar, the Summoner, and the Merchant, for example.

Fabula

the term used in Russian Formalism for the “raw material” of story events as they occur in chronological order, as opposed to the finished arrangement of the plot (sujet). In other words it illustrated the distinction between story and plot.

Foot

a conventional subdivision of lines of strict metrical verse, usually containing one stressed syllable and one or more unstressed syllables.

Frame narrative

a narrative that surrounds a story or a series of stories, acting as the vehicle and setting for their enunciation. In Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1387), the various narrators are pilgrims on their way to visit the shrine of the holy martyr at Canterbury. In Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness (1899), Marlow, the frame narrator, tells a story about a journey up the Congo river in Africa while on a boat near the mouth of the Thames.

Free verse

a translation of the French vers libre, the term refers to verse of irregular length and meter. Free verse is mainly a twentieth-century phenomenon, but it has its roots in the poetry of Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and the French Symbolists of the 1880s and 1890s.

Genre

a term used to designate conventional forms of literary expression.

Gothic novel

a novel full of macabre, fantastic, and supernatural elements usually set amidst haunted castles, graveyards, and wild, picturesque landscapes. The plots often involve murder and mystery. Gothic novels reached the height of their popularity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, A Gothic Tale (1764) was one of the earliest examples of the genre. Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775-1818), and J.S.Le Fanu (1814-1873) were popular authors in their day. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein, (1818) added a moral element to the conventional plot of murder and mystery. Today the term is also used to describe the grotesque tales of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), the romances of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), and the more recent fiction of Angela Carter (1940-1992) in Britain, and Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) in the Southern U.S. Horror films and detective novels are the most recent heirs to the tradition.

Historical drama

any drama based, however loosely, on historical material. Cf. William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599) and Antony and Cleopatra (1606) on the history of the Roman Empire; T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral (1935) on the-murder of Thomas Beckett; Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953) on the Salem witch trials of 1867.

Historical novel

a novel set in a period before the birth of the author, and often containing not only fictional but historical people and/or events. In England Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814) established the form so distinctly that its influence spread throughout Europe, and it continued to flourish for the rest of the century in England in the works of William M. Thackeray (1811-1863), Charles Dickens (1812-1870), and Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), among others. Writers as diverse as Mary Renault (1905-1983), William Golding (b.1911), and James G. Farrell (1935-1970) have written historical novels in the twentieth century. Documentary "faction", which mingles fact and fiction, is often seen as an extension of the genre.

Iamb

a metrical foot of two syllables, one unaccented, the other accented.

In medias res

(from the Latin for “in the middle of things”) term used to designate a story or narrative which, like The Iliad, begins in the middle of a chain of events rather than at their chronological starting point.

Interior monologue

the presentation of a character’s thoughts as if they were being spoken in monologue. The technique is characteristic of stream of consciousness, which often mixes internally vocalized utterances with barely verbal impressions and perceptions. Here is an example of interior monologue taken from William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930), a novel famous for its use of the technique.

Intertextuality

the relation between a given text and the other texts it cites, rewrites, absorbs, problematizes, or generally transforms. In a sense, the term describes a point in criticism where allusion ceases to be a literary device and instead becomes the precondition of meaning. Julia Kristeva (b. 1941) first formulated the notion of intertextuality based on Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1895-1975) theories of the dialogic nature of all acts of communication. In other words, the fundamental concept of intertextualitiy is that no text is original and unique in itself but is full of references to and quotations from other texts.

Intrusive narrator

an omniscient narrator who both reports and makes comments on plot events, offering judgments on characters, incidents, and the process of writing in general. The device was very popular in the nineteenth century and was used by realists like George Eliot (1819-1880). Novels that use intrusive narrators tend to draw as much attention to what is told as to how it is told.

Kiinstlerroman

[fromthe German for "artist novel"] a type of Bildungsroman or "formation novel" dealing with the artistic development of the protagonist. James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) is the most famous example in English. As Stephen Dedalus says in the penultimate sentence of the novel,

I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and

to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my ace. (J.J.)

Limerick

a verse form of five lines written in anapestic meter, with a punch. The usual rhyme scheme in a limerick is aabba.

Masculine rhyme

a rhyme on the stressed syllable at the end of a line (e.g. "delay"/"stay"; "still"/"hill". This is the most common type of rhyme in English

For Adoration all the ranks
Of angels yield eternal thanks.(Ch.Sm.)

Metafiction

a novel or short story which calls into question its own status as fiction and the nature of fiction itself. The term is often used to describe twentieth-century literature.

Meter

the organized rhythm of accented and unaccented syllables. The five basic metrical units (feet) in English verse are iamb, trochee, dactyl, amphibrach, anapest.

Miracle play

atype of medieval drama taking as its subject the lives of saints and the acts of the Apostles. Cf. The Martyrdom of St. Apolonia (1460).

Mood

refers to the particular atmosphere of a literary work. A tragedy is serious, a comedy light-hearted.

Naive narrator

a narrator who recounts a tale without fully understanding its implications. The effect is one of dramatic irony, and sometimes pathos depending on how the readers feel about the narrator and his ignorance. William Faulkner made memorable use of various naive narrators in The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I lay Dying (1930).

Narrative

an account of a series of events, whether real or imaginary. Different narrative patterns are possible, as the plot sequencing does not always coincide with the actual (or probable) chronology of a story.

Narrator

one who narrates a story. He or she may function as a protagonist in the events recounted, as in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861), as an important but subordinate character, as in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby (1925), or as a minor character, as in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887). If the narrator is not a character in the story, he or she is called a third person narrator.

Novel

a long and sustained prose narrative in which characters operate within a plot. The novel is the dominant genre of our time. It has developed into many specialized subgenres such as the detective story, the romance, the thriller, the western, and fantasy and science fiction.

Octave

a division of the Italian sonnet, grouping together the first eight lines, usually by rhyme scheme, but also in syntax, imagery, argument, and so on.

Ode

a long, serious lyric poem, often composed in complex and varied stanzas, and usually taking the form of an address.

Parable

a story illustrating a moral or religious lesson; the most famous are biblical parables like The Prodigal Son (Luke, 15.11-32) and The Good Samaritan (Luke, 10.30-37).

Personification

the technique of treating inanimate objects and abstract ideas as if they had human qualities and attributes.

Picaresque novel

a novel depicting the adventures of a wandering rogue of low social rank as he or she – but usually he – survives by wit and luck.

Plot

a narrative with a combined emphasis on chronology and causality.

E.M. Forster proposes a useful distinction in his Aspects of the Novel (1927):"The king died and then the queen died is a story" he explained; whereas, "the king died and then the queen died of grief is a plot".

Poetry

a type of writing that emphasizes the manipulation of rhyme, meter, imagery, syntax, and formal layout. There is much debate about the distinction between poetry and prose.

Prologue

a short introduction, usually to a play, and usually spoken by a character who exists solely for that purpose.

Protagonist

the principal character in a plot. This character dominates the action of a drama or narrative either by the length of his or her role, or by the fact that the, audience are most keen on his or her thoughts and not on those of the other characters.

Pyrrhic

a metrical unit of two unaccented syllables.

Quatrain

is a four-line stanza with the rhyming scheme abab, usually by rhyme, and also often in imagery and syntax. The component blocks of the first twelve lines of the English sonnet.

e.g. AdIeu, adieu! my native shore
Fades a 'er the the waters blue;
The night-winds sigh, the breakers roar
And shrieks the wild sea-mew.

a
b
a
b

Its variant abcb, defe, etc. where only the second and fourth lines are rhymed is characteristic of ballads, e.g.

O up and spake an eldern knight,
Sat at the king’s right knee:
"Sir Patrick Spens is the best sailor
That ever sailed the sea."

Rhyme

repetition of the end syllable sounds in successive words, either as full rhymes or as part rhymes in which the end consonants match but not the vowels; at the end of lines or internal to them.

Rhythm

the patterned recurrence OF accents, stresses, and pauses in prose or verse. Rhythm depends on the arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables; on the length of words, phrases, clauses, and lines (in verse); on the use of enjambment vs. end-stopped lines (also in verse).

Roman a clef

(French for "novel with a key") a novel in which the characters are ciphers for real people.

Romance

the most common plot structure involves a knight errant performing heroic deeds for the sake of his lady, often in a fairy land replete with mythical beasts and magic spells.

Roman-fleuve

(pl. romans-fleuves; French for "a novel that flows like a river") a multivolume novel or a series of novels that deals with members of the same family or social group over the span of several years or even generations.

Sentimental novel

a type of novel, popular in the 18th century, that tries to provoke the reader to tears. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1941) is probably the first of many examples.

Setting

the location of a story in time and place; where and when it occurs. The term is sometimes expanded to include the social atmosphere, ethos, or milieu of a story.

Short story

a prose narrative shorter than a novella and longer than an anecdote. The scope of the action is usually restricted to a small group of characters dealing with a single event or situation.

Sonnet

a fourteen-line poem with tightly structured rhyme patterns, in iambic pentameter. The sonnetis not a stanza but a complete poem consisting of three quatrains and a couplet with the rhyme scheme ababcdcdefefgg. The English sonnet divides into three units of four lines each (quatrains) and a rhymed couplet. The Italian sonnet divides into two units, the first of eight lines (octave) followed by six lines (sestet) with (usually) no rhymed couplet at the end, but rather structured through a variety of other rhyme patterns.

Spenserian stanza

is a 9-line verse with the rhyme scheme ababbcbcc. The last line in the stanza is longer than the previous 8. Byron’s Childe Hariold’s Pilgrimage is written in this stanza.

Spondee

a metrical foot with two stressed syllables.

Subplot

a secondary plot in a literary work, often involving the main characters in a different situation, or involving different characters in a situation that mirrors the plot in miniature.

Tone

the author’s attitude towards his subject matter or audience. The tone of a work may be sentimental, patriotic, ironic, serious, etc., or it may express the prevailing mood or attitude or a given period.

Tragedy

a serious fiction, in verse or prose, involving the downfall of a hero or heroine of high station.

Tragicomedy

a play that brings its characters to the brink of catastrophe only to produce a comic resolution.

Triplet

Music resembles Poetry, in each
Are nameless Graces which no Methods teach,
And which a Master-Hand alone can reach. (A.P.)

Its variant is a tercet (terza rhima) – a more intricate stanza with an interlocking pattern of rhymes, namely aha bcbcdc, etc., e.g.

My Mother
’s maids, when they did sew and Mouse,
That for because her livelihood was but thin
Would needs
go seek her town ish sister’s house
She thought herself endured to much pain:
The stormy blasts her cave so sore did souse...(T. W.)

Versification

the art and technical process of making poetry; also, the form of a poetical composition (its structure and meter).