Handbook of Literary and Historical Terms

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1 Resource Center Handbook of Literary and Historical Terms The World of Work Writer s Handbook Language Handbook Glossary Spanish Glossary Academic Vocabulary Glossary in English and Spanish

2 Handbook of Literary and Historical Terms ALEXANDRINE A line of poetry made up of six iambs that is, a line written in iambic hexameter. The following alexandrine is from Lord Byron s Childe Harold s Pilgrimage (Collection 8): Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown. ALLEGORY A story in which the characters, settings, and events stand for abstract or moral concepts. Allegories thus have two meanings: a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning. Allegories were a popular literary form during the Middle Ages. The bestknown English allegory is John Bunyan s The Pilgrim s Progress (Collection 3), which recounts the adventures of a character named Christian. The hero s journey to the Celestial City brings him up against many trials that symbolize the pitfalls facing the Christian traveling through this world toward the spiritual world. ALLITERATION The repetition of consonant sounds in words that are close to one another. Alliteration occurs most often at the beginning of words, as in rough and ready. But consonants within words sometimes alliterate, as in baby blue. The echoes that alliteration creates can increase a poem s rhythmic and musical effects and make its lines especially memorable. In this line from Shakespeare s Sonnet 30 (page 393), the /w/ sounds emphasize the melancholy tone: And with old woes new wail my dear time s waste. Alliteration is an essential feature of Anglo-Saxon poetry; in most lines, two or three of the four stressed syllables alliterate. Basil, do you think the center is going to hold? Drawing by Booth; 1984 The New Yorker Magazine, Inc. ALLUSION A reference to a statement, person, place, event, or thing that is known from literature, history, religion, mythology, politics, sports, science, or popular culture. The concluding lines of Wilfred Owen s poem Dulce et Decorum Est (Collection 11) are Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori. ( It is sweet and proper to die for one s country ). These lines allude to a line from an ode by the Latin poet Horace. The title of William Faulkner s The Sound and the Fury is an allusion to a line from Shakespeare s Macbeth (Collection 4). The cartoon above alludes to William Butler Yeats s poem The Second Coming (Collection 12). ANALOGY A comparison of two things to show that they are alike in certain respects. Writers often make analogies to show how something unfamiliar is like something well-known or widely experienced. For example, people often draw an analogy between creating a work of art and giving birth to a child Handbook of Literary and Historical Terms

3 ANECDOTE A brief and sometimes witty story that focuses on a single interesting incident or event, often in order to make a point or teach a moral lesson. Sometimes an anecdote reveals the character of a famous person. Taoists, Zen Buddhists, and Sufis, among others, use anecdotes to convey indirectly the teachings of their philosophies. ANIMISM A belief that spirits or souls are present in all living things. This belief was at the heart of the ancient Celtic religion, and it can be found in many other ancient religions. ANTAGONIST The character or force that opposes or blocks the protagonist, or main character, in a narrative. Usually the antagonist is human, like Sir Modred, the villainous rebel who destroys the Round Table in Sir Thomas Malory s Le Morte d Arthur (Collection 2) or the schoolgirls who mercilessly taunt the Kelvey sisters in Katherine Mansfield s The Doll s House (Collection 13). Sometimes the antagonist is supernatural, like Satan, who opposes God in John Milton s Paradise Lost (Collection 3). ANTICLIMAX See Climax. ANTITHESIS A contrast of ideas expressed in a grammatically balanced statement. In the following line from Canto III of The Rape of the Lock (Collection 6), Alexander Pope balances noun against noun and verb against verb: And wretches hang that jurymen may dine. APHORISM A concise, sometimes witty saying that expresses a principle, truth, or observation about life. Alexander Pope s poetry contains some of the most famous aphorisms in the English language, as in this heroic couplet from An Essay on Criticism (Collection 6): To err is human, to forgive, divine. APOSTROPHE A figure of speech in which a speaker directly addresses an absent or dead person, an abstract quality, or something nonhuman as if it were present and capable of responding. Apostrophe was a popular device with the Romantic poets: Wordsworth, for example, apostrophizes the river Wye in his Tintern Abbey (Collection 7). Among the second-generation Romantics, Shelley apostrophized the west wind; Byron apostrophized the ocean; and Keats apostrophized a nightingale and a Greek urn (all in Collection 8). ARCHETYPE A pattern that appears in literature across cultures and is repeated through the ages. An archetype can be a character, a plot, an image, or a setting. All stories or myths that contain a quest, for example, share certain features, suggesting that each quest-story has been formed from a master pattern. Similarly, all epic heroes have a number of common characteristics, though each one also has culturally specific characteristics. Ignoring the culturally specific characteristics of a particular epic hero will allow you to perceive what the archetype of the epic hero is. ASIDE Private words that a character in a play speaks to the audience or to another character and that are not supposed to be overheard by others onstage. Stage directions usually tell when a speech is an aside. ASSONANCE The repetition of similar vowel sounds followed by different consonant sounds in words that are close together. Assonance differs from exact rhyme in that it does not repeat the consonant sound following the vowel. The words face and base rhyme, while the words face and fade are assonant. Like alliteration, assonance can create musical and rhythmic effects. In this line from Alfred, Lord Tennyson s The Lady of Shalott (Collection 9), the repetition of the short /a/ sounds creates a rhythmic effect that mimics the action being described: An abbot on an ambling pad, ATMOSPHERE The mood or feeling in a literary work. Atmosphere is usually created through descriptive details and evocative language. RESOURCE CENTER Handbook of Literary and Historical Terms Handbook of Literary and Historical Terms 1453

4 Handbook of Literary and Historical Terms RESOURCE CENTER AUGUSTAN Similar to the reign of Emperor Augustus (63 b.c. a.d. 14) or having qualities or tastes that are associated with classical Rome. In English literary history the Augustan Age dates from the Restoration to the middle of the eighteenth century. Perhaps more than anyone else, Alexander Pope (Collection 6) exhibits Augustan literary tastes in his poetry. AUTOBIOGRAPHY A written account of the author s own life. Unlike diaries, journals, and letters, autobiographies are unified narratives usually prepared for a public audience. And unlike memoirs, which often focus on famous events and people, autobiographies are usually quite introspective. George Orwell s Shooting an Elephant (Collection 11) is a well-known autobiographical essay. See also Memoir. BALLAD A song or songlike poem that tells a story. Most ballads have a regular pattern of rhythm and rhyme, and they use simple language with a great deal of repetition. Ballads generally have a refrain lines or words that are repeated at regular intervals. They usually tell sensational stories of tragedy, adventure, betrayal, revenge, and jealousy. Folk ballads are composed by anonymous singers and are passed down orally from generation to generation before they are written down (often in several different versions). Lord Randall (Collection 2) is an example of a folk ballad. Literary ballads, on the other hand, are composed and written down by known poets, usually in the style of folk ballads. Samuel Taylor Coleridge s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Collection 7) is a famous literary ballad. The typical ballad stanza is a quatrain with the rhyme scheme abcb. The first and third lines have four stressed syllables, and the second and fourth lines have three. The number of unstressed syllables in each line may vary, but often the meter is primarily iambic. an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable ( ). Blank verse is the most important metrical form used in English dramatic and epic poetry. It is the verse line used in Shakespeare s plays and John Milton s Paradise Lost (Collection 3). One of the reasons blank verse has been so popular, even among modern poets, is that it combines the naturalness of unrhymed verse with the structure of metrical verse. Except for free verse, it is the poetic form that sounds the most like natural speech. It also lends itself easily to slight variations within the basic pattern. Like most of the English Romantic poets, William Wordsworth made extensive use of blank verse, as in these lines from Tintern Abbey (Collection 7): And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought, With many recognitions dim and faint, And somewhat of a sad perplexity, The picture of the mind revives again: CADENCE The natural rise and fall of the voice. Poets who write in free verse try to imitate the natural cadences of spoken language. See also Rhythm. CAESURA A pause or break within a line of poetry, usually indicated by the natural rhythm of the language. A midline, or medial, caesura is a characteristic of Anglo-Saxon poetry; it divides the four-beat line in half. Later poets use the caesura less predictably, as in the following lines from Wilfred Owen s Dulce et Decorum Est (Collection 11). Here, the caesuras are indicated by the symbol. Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge BIOGRAPHY An account of a person s life written by another person. The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell is one of the most famous biographies ever written. BLANK VERSE Poetry written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. Blank means that the poetry is unrhymed. Iambic pentameter means that each line contains five iambs, or metrical feet, each consisting of CANTO A subdivision in a long poem, corresponding to a chapter in a book. Poems divided into cantos include Pope s The Rape of the Lock (Collection 6) and Byron s Childe Harold s Pilgrimage (Collection 8). Not all major subdivisions of long poems are called cantos: Milton s Paradise Lost (Collection 3) is divided into books, and Coleridge s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Collection 7) into parts Handbook of Literary and Historical Terms

5 The word canto comes from a Latin word for song and originally designated a section of a narrative poem that a minstrel could sing in one session. CAPITALISM An economic philosophy that advocates the idea that the means of production and distribution should be owned and controlled by private individuals. Adam Smith, an eighteenth-century economist, is one of the great theorists of capitalism, a system which helped to foster the conditions that produced the Industrial Revolution in England and the technological advances of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. See also Laissez Faire. CARPE DIEM A Latin phrase that literally means seize the day that is, make the most of present opportunities. The carpe diem theme is common in seventeenth-century English poetry, as in this famous line from Robert Herrick s To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time : Gather ye rosebuds while ye may. The theme is also forcefully expressed in Andrew Marvell s To His Coy Mistress (both in Collection 3) CHARACTER An individual in a story or play. A character always has human traits, even if the character is an animal, like the ravens in The Twa Corbies (Collection 2); or a god, as in the Iliad (Collection 1); or a monster, as in Beowulf (Collection 1). A character may also be a human with superhuman powers, like Gilgamesh (Collection 1). But most characters are ordinary human beings, like Geoffrey Chaucer s colorful pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales (Collection 2) and the boy in James Joyce s Araby (Collection 13). The process by which the writer reveals the personality of a character is called characterization. A writer can reveal a character in the following ways: 1. by telling us directly what the character is like: humble, ambitious, vain, easily manipulated, and so on 2. by describing how the character looks and dresses 3. by letting us hear the character speak 4. by revealing the character s private thoughts and feelings 5. by revealing the character s effect on other people showing how other characters feel or behave toward the character 6. by showing the character s actions The first method of revealing a character is called direct characterization. When a writer uses this method, we do not have to figure out what a character s personality is like the writer tells us directly. The other five methods of revealing a character are known as indirect characterization. When a writer uses these methods, we have to exercise our own judgment, putting clues together to figure out what a character is like just as we do in real life when we are getting to know someone. Characters can be classified as static or dynamic. A static character is one who does not change much in the course of a story. A dynamic character, on the other hand, changes in some important way as a result of the story s action. Characters can also be classified as flat or round. Flat characters have only one or two personality traits. They are one-dimensional they can be summed up by a single phrase. In contrast, round characters have more dimensions to their personalities they are complex, solid, and multifaceted, like real people. CHIVALRY The system of ideals and social codes governing the behavior of knights and gentlewomen in feudal times. The ideal knight was meant to be brave, honorable, and courteous; gentlewomen were meant to be chaste. The code of chivalry is reflected in medieval romance literature, particularly in Malory s Le Morte d Arthur (Collection 2). CLASSICISM A movement in art, literature, and music that advocates imitating the principles manifested in the art and literature of ancient ( classical ) Greece and Rome. Classicism emphasizes reason, clarity, balance, harmony, restraint, order, and universal themes. Classicism is often placed in direct opposition to Romanticism, with its emphasis on unrestrained emotions and personal themes. However, this opposition should be approached with caution, as it is sometimes exaggerated for effect. Classicism was particularly admired in art in the eighteenth century and is exemplified in Alexander Pope s mock heroic epic, The Rape of the Lock (Collection 6). See also Neoclassicism, Romanticism. CLICHÉ An expression that was fresh and apt when it was first coined but is now so overused that it has become hackneyed and stale. Busy as a bee and fresh as a daisy are two examples. Clichés are often likened to dead metaphors figures of speech ( leg of a chair, mouth of a river ) whose power to surprise has now been completely lost. RESOURCE CENTER Handbook of Literary and Historical Terms Handbook of Literary and Historical Terms 1455

6 Handbook of Literary and Historical Terms RESOURCE CENTER CLIMAX The point of greatest emotional intensity or suspense in a plot when the outcome of the conflict becomes known. In Shakespeare s plays, the climax usually occurs in the last act, just before the final scene. Following the climax, the story is resolved, or closed. Some critics talk of more than one climactic moment in a long work (though usually the greatest climax occurs near the end of the plot). In drama, one such climactic moment is called the turning point, or crisis. At the turning point, something happens that seals the fate of the hero. In Shakespeare s plays, this moment usually occurs in the third act. At the turning point the hero s fortunes begin to decline or improve. All the action leading up to this turning point is rising action, and all the action following it is falling action. The turning point in Guy de Maupassant s The Jewels (Collection 10) occurs when Madame Lantin dies, leaving her husband alone and ravaged by grief. From that point onward, it is downhill for Monsieur Lantin everything goes wrong, culminating in the story s climax, when Lantin, attempting to sell his wife s necklace, discovers that she has been deceptive. The sale of the jewels brings about the ironic resolution of the story: Lantin becomes wealthy and remarries, choosing a wife who is virtuous but makes him very unhappy. In contrast, when something trivial or comical occurs at the point in a narrative when one expects something important or serious, the accompanying deflation is called an anticlimax. James Joyce s Araby (Collection 13) contains such an anticlimactic moment. See also Plot. COMEDY In general, a story that ends happily. The hero of a comedy is usually an ordinary character who overcomes a series of obstacles that block what he or she wants. Often a comedy pits two young people who wish to marry against parental blocking figures who want to prevent the marriage. The wedding that concludes these comedies suggests the formation of a new society and a renewal of life. Comedy is distinct from tragedy, in which a great person comes to an unhappy or disastrous end, usually through some lapse in judgment or character flaw. Comedies are often, but not always, intended to make us laugh. Two famous comedies are Oscar Wilde s play The Importance of Being Earnest and George Bernard Shaw s Pygmalion. Even though it contains some of the darker elements of tragedy, Shakespeare s The Tempest is considered a comedy because harmony and reconciliation are achieved by the end of the play. See also Farce, Tragedy. COMMUNISM A philosophy that advocates the creation of a classless and stateless society in which economic goods are distributed equally. The most famous communist government is, of course, the now dissolved Soviet Union, a country which one could say perverted the ideals of communism, since it had a ruling class which was better off than the working class. Human nature seems to prevent people from bringing into being a perfect communist society. George Orwell s novel Animal Farm satirizes the ideals of communism, showing the ruination of a farm which has been taken over by radical animal reformers. CONCEIT A fanciful and elaborate figure of speech that makes a surprising connection between two seemingly dissimilar things. A conceit may be a brief metaphor, or it may form the framework of an entire poem. Two particularly important types of conceits are the Petrarchan conceit and the metaphysical conceit. Petrarchan conceits get their name from the fourteenth-century Italian poet Petrarch (page 400), who developed their use in his influential sonnet sequence. Poets influenced by Petrarch used these conceits to describe the beauty of the lady for whom they wrote. She invariably had hair of gold, lips of cherry red, and teeth of oriental pearl. In Sonnet 130 (Collection 4), Shakespeare ridicules the use of such conceits. Petrarchan conceits were also used to describe a paradoxical state. The metaphysical conceit is so called because it was widely used by the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets. This type of conceit is especially startling, complex, and ingenious. A famous example is John Donne s comparison of separated lovers to the legs of a compass in A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning (Collection 3). CONFLICT A struggle or clash between opposing characters, forces, or emotions. In an external conflict, a character struggles against some outside force: another character, society as a whole, or some natural force. An internal conflict, on the other hand, is a struggle between opposing needs, desires, or emotions within a single character. Many works, especially longer ones, contain both internal and external conflicts. In Doris Lessing s No Witchcraft for Sale (Collection 13), the conflict between Gideon and the scientist reflects larger cultural conflicts. See also Plot Handbook of Literary and Historical Terms

7 CONNOTATIONS All the meanings, associations, or emotions that have come to be attached to a word. For example, an expensive restaurant might prefer to advertise its delicious cuisine rather than its delicious cooking. Cuisine and cooking have the same literal meaning prepared food. But cuisine has connotations of elegance and sophistication, while cooking does not. The same restaurant would certainly not describe its food as great grub. Notice the difference between the following pairs of words: young/immature, ambitious/cutthroat, uninhibited/shameless, lenient/lax. We might describe ourselves using the first words but someone else using the second ones. The English philosopher Bertrand Russell once gave a classic example of the different connotations of words: I am firm. You are obstinate. He is a pigheaded fool. See also Denotation. CONSONANCE The repetition of final consonant sounds after different vowel sounds. The words east and west, dig and dog, turn and torn, and Shakespeare s famous struts and frets (from Macbeth, in Collection 4) are examples of consonance. The term is also sometimes used to refer to repeated consonant sounds in the middle of words, as in solemn stillness. (Consonance, when loosely defined, can be a form of alliteration. Strictly speaking, however, alliteration is the repetition of initial consonant sounds.) Like assonance, consonance is one form of approximate rhyme. See also Alliteration, Assonance. COUPLET Two consecutive lines of poetry that rhyme. The couplet has been widely used since the Middle Ages, especially to provide a sense of closure. A couplet that presents a completed thought is called a closed couplet. Shakespeare used closed couplets to end his sonnets, as in this example from Sonnet 29 (Collection 4): For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings That then I scorn to change my state with kings. A couplet written in iambic pentameter is called a heroic couplet. Although the heroic couplet has been used in English literature since Chaucer, it was perfected during the eighteenth century. Here is an example from Pope s An Essay on Man (Collection 6): Alike in ignorance, his reason such, Whether he thinks too little, or too much: COURTLY LOVE A conventional medieval code of behavior that informed a knight of the proper way to treat his lady. The code was first developed by the troubadours (lyric poets) of southern France and extensively employed in European literature from the twelfth century throughout the medieval period. DEISM The belief that God, after creating the universe, ceased to interfere with the laws of nature and society. Influenced by Newton s description of the universe as a great clock that was set in motion by the Creator, the deists of the mid-eighteenth century argued that people could only gain an understanding of the laws of nature and society by using their reason. DENOTATION The literal, dictionary definition of a word. For example, a denotation, or dictionary definition, of the word star (as in movie star ) is an eminent actor or actress, but the connotation is that of an actor or actress who is adored by fans and who leads a fascinating and glamorous life. See also Connotation. DENOUEMENT See Plot. DEUS EX MACHINA Any artificial or contrived device used at the end of a plot to resolve or untangle the complications. The term is Latin and means god from a machine. The phrase refers to a device used in ancient Greek and Roman drama: At the conclusion of the play, a god would be lowered onto the stage by a mechanical device so that he could save the hero and end the story happily. The term now refers to any device that resolves a plot in a forced or implausible way: An orphan finds that he has inherited a fortune just as he is being packed off to the poorhouse; a hero is saved because the villain has forgotten to load his gun. Oscar Wilde s The Importance of Being Earnest and Charles Dickens s Oliver Twist both contain examples of deus ex machina. DIALECT A way of speaking that is characteristic of a particular region or group of people. A dialect may have a distinct vocabulary, pronunciation system, RESOURCE CENTER Handbook of Literary and Historical Terms Handbook of Literary and Historical Terms 1457

8 Handbook of Literary and Historical Terms RESOURCE CENTER and grammar. In the Middle Ages, when Latin was the literary language of Europe, writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer (Collection 2) began writing for middle-class audiences in their own regional languages, or what are now interchangeably called dialects or vernaculars. Today one dialect usually becomes accepted as the standard for a country or culture. In the United States, the dialect used in formal writing and spoken by most TV and radio announcers is known as standard English. Writers often use other dialects, however, to establish character or to create local color. For example, V. S. Naipaul (Collection 13) has used the dialect spoken by Trinidad s Asian Indian population in many of his works. The East London cockney dialect, and the lower-class background it betrays, are at the very heart of George Bernard Shaw s famous play Pygmalion. In this excerpt from the play, Henry Higgins, with his friend Colonel Pickering in attendance, begins to instruct the flower girl Eliza Doolittle in how to speak proper English: Higgins. Say your alphabet. Liza. I know my alphabet. Do you think I know nothing? I dont need to be taught like a child. Higgins. (thundering). Say your alphabet. Pickering. Say it, Miss Doolittle. You will understand presently. Do what he tells you; and let him teach you in his own way. Liza. Oh well, if you put it like that Ahyee, beyee, ceyee, deyee Higgins. (with the roar of a wounded lion). Stop. Listen to this, Pickering.... (To Eliza) Say A, B, C, D. Liza. (almost in tears). But I m saying it. Ahyee, Bee, Ce-ee Diction is an essential element of a writer s style. A writer s diction can be simple or flowery (shop/boutique), modern or old-fashioned ( pharmacy/apothecary), general or specific (sandwich/grilled cheese on rye). Notice that the connotations of words (rather than their strict, literal meanings, or denotations) are an important aspect of diction. DIDACTIC LITERATURE Literary works that are meant to instruct, give advice, or convey a philosophy or moral message. Much didactic literature derives from religious teaching, as is the case with The Parable of The Prodigal Son (Collection 3) and the Taoist anecdotes (Collection 3). Secular works such as fables, folk tales and maxims are also didactic in intent. See also Fable, Parable. DISSONANCE (DIHS uh nuhns) A harsh, discordant combination of sounds. The opposite of euphony (YOO fuh nee), a pleasant, harmonious combination of sounds, dissonance is usually created by the repetition of harsh consonant sounds. Dissonance is often used in poetry to communicate energy. Dissonance is also called cacophony (kuh KAHF uh nee). DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE A poem in which a character addresses one or more listeners who remain silent or whose replies are not revealed. The occasion is usually a critical one in the speaker s life. Tennyson s Ulysses and Browning s My Last Duchess (Collection 9) are famous dramatic monologues. DIALOGUE Conversation between two or more people. Writers use dialogue to advance the action of a plot, to present an interplay of ideas and personalities, and to reveal the background, occupation, or social level of the characters through tone and dialect. DICTION A writer s or speaker s choice of words. Speakers and writers use different types of words depending on the audience they re addressing, the subject they re discussing, and the effect they re trying to produce. For example, slang that would be suitable in a casual conversation with a friend ( He s a total nerd ) would be unsuitable in a political debate. Similarly, the language that a nutritionist would use to describe a meal would be different from the language that a restaurant reviewer or a novelist would use. DRAMATIC SONG A poem found in a play that serves to establish mood, reveal character, or advance action. The songs in Shakespeare s plays are the best songs of this kind. Employing a variety of techniques and forms and relying heavily on onomatopoeia, Shakespeare wrote songs that can be read alone, but which are best understood within the context of the plays in which they appear. ELEGY A poem that mourns the death of a person or laments something lost. Elegies may lament the passing of life and beauty, or they may be meditations on the nature of death. A type of lyric, an elegy is usually formal in language and structure and solemn or even melancholy in tone. Much of English poetry is elegiac, from the Anglo-Saxon lyric The Seafarer 1458 Handbook of Literary and Historical Terms

9 (Collection 1) to A. E. Housman s To an Athlete Dying Young (Collection 10) and Dylan Thomas s Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night (Collection 12). END-STOPPED LINE A line of poetry in which the meter and the meaning conclude with the end of the line. Often the end-of-line pause is marked with punctuation, though it need not be. These lines from Alexander Pope s An Essay on Man (Collection 6) are end-stopped: Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man. See also Run-on line. ENLIGHTENMENT; THE AGE OF REASON Names historians have applied to the eighteenth century. The period has been called the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason because at that time, people began to rely on reason and experience, rather than superstition and church authority, to gain an understanding of the world. EPIC A long narrative poem that relates the great deeds of a larger-than-life hero who embodies the values of a particular society. Most epics include elements of myth, legend, folklore, and history. Their tone is serious and their language grand. Most epic heroes undertake quests to achieve something of tremendous value to themselves or their society. Homer s Odyssey and Iliad (Collection 1) and Virgil s Aeneid are the bestknown epics in the Western tradition. The two most important English epics are the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf (Collection 1) and John Milton s Paradise Lost (Collection 3). Many epics share standard characteristics and formulas known as epic conventions, which the oral poets drew upon to help them recall the stories they were recounting and which the writers of literary epics draw upon to establish the epic quality of their poems. The conventions include: an invocation, or formal plea for aid, to a deity or some other spiritual power; action that begins in medias res (literally in the middle of things ) and then flashes back to events that take place before the narrative s current time setting; epic similes, or elaborately extended comparisons relating heroic events to simple, everyday events; a consistently predictable metrical structure; and stock epithets, or descriptive adjectives or phrases used repeatedly with or in place of a noun or proper name. See also Literary Epic. EPIGRAM A brief, clever, and usually memorable statement. Alexander Pope s writings are epigrammatic in style. Here is an example from his Essay on Criticism: We think our fathers fools, so wise we grow, Our wiser sons, no doubt, will think us so. See also Maxim, Proverb. EPIPHANY In a literary work, a moment of sudden insight or revelation that a character experiences. The word comes from the Greek and can be translated as manifestation or showing forth. The term has religious meanings that have been transferred to literature by modern writers. James Joyce first gave the word its literary meaning in an early draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In Joyce s story Araby (Collection 13), the narrator experiences an epiphany at the end of the story when he recognizes the cheap vulgarity of the bazaar and the emptiness of his dream. EPITAPH An inscription on a tombstone or a commemorative poem written about a person who has died. Epitaphs range from the solemn to the farcical. Ben Jonson s On My First Son (Collection 3) contains a famously poignant epitaph. EPITHET An adjective or other descriptive phrase that is regularly used to characterize a person, place, or thing. Phrases such as Peter the Great, Richard the Lion-Hearted, and America the Beautiful are epithets. Homer created so many descriptive epithets in his Iliad (Collection 1) and Odyssey that his name has been permanently associated with a type of epithet. The Homeric epithet consists of a compound adjective that is regularly used to modify a particular noun. Famous examples are the wine-dark sea, the gray-eyed goddess Athena, and the rosy-fingered dawn. See also Kenning. RESOURCE CENTER Handbook of Literary and Historical Terms Handbook of Literary and Historical Terms 1459

10 Handbook of Literary and Historical Terms RESOURCE CENTER ESSAY A short piece of nonfiction prose that examines a single subject from a limited point of view. There are two major types of essays. Informal essays (also called personal essays) generally reveal a great deal about the personalities and feelings of their authors. They tend to be loosely structured, conversational, sometimes even humorous, in tone; and usually highly subjective. Formal essays (also called traditional essays) are usually serious and impersonal in tone. Because they are written to inform or persuade, they are expected to be factual, logical, and tightly organized. In the European literary tradition the essay began in France with Michel de Montaigne, who sought to test his own judgment by analyzing it in a series of short prose pieces, which he called essais, a common sixteenth-century spelling of the French word assay, which means trial or attempt. Sir Francis Bacon, who published his Essays (see Of Studies Collection 3) in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, brought the form into England and pioneered what we now call the formal essay. Notable twentieth-century English essayists include Virginia Woolf and George Orwell (both in Collection 11). EXAGGERATION See Hyperbole. FABLE A very brief story in prose or verse that teaches a moral, or a practical lesson about life. The characters in most fables are animals that behave and speak like humans. Some of the most popular fables are those attributed to Aesop, who was supposed to have been a slave in ancient Greece. Several of the pilgrims tales in Geoffrey Chaucer s The Canterbury Tales (Collection 2) also contain fables. Other popular and widely influential fables include those collected in the Panchatantra, like Right-Mind and Wrong-Mind. See also Parable. FALLING ACTION See Climax. FARCE A type of comedy in which ridiculous and often stereotyped characters are involved in farfetched, silly situations. The humor in farce is based on crude physical action, slapstick, and clowning. Characters may slip on banana peels, get pies thrown in their faces, and knock one another on the head with ladders. The movies featuring Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, and the Marx brothers are all examples of farces. The word farce comes from a Latin word for stuffing, and in fact farces were originally used to fill in the waiting time between the acts of a serious play. Even in tragedies, farcical elements are often included to provide comic relief, or a break from the pervading tension. Shakespeare frequently lets his common characters engage in farcical actions. FASCISM A nationalistic philosophy that advocates rule by a single charismatic dictator. Fascism properly speaking refers to the philosophy of Benito Mussolini s political party, which was founded in 1919 to oppose communism in Italy. The word, however, was soon used to describe the philosophies of similar repressive, nationalistic political parties in other countries. The German Nazis were fascists. The regimes of Francisco Franco in Spain and Juan Peron in Argentina were fascistic. FEUDALISM The economic, political, and social system of medieval Europe. This system was basically composed of three classes: the feudal lords, who were powerful landowners; vassals, who did work or military service for the feudal lords in exchange for land; and serfs, who were servants to the lords and vassals and who were bound to their masters land. FIGURE OF SPEECH A word or phrase that describes one thing in terms of another, dissimilar thing, and is not meant to be understood on a literal level. Some 250 different types of figures of speech have been identified, but the most common are the simile ( My love is like a red, red rose ), the metaphor ( The Lord is my shepherd ), and personification ( Death, be not proud ). These involve a comparison between unlike things, but not all figures of speech involve comparison. When one refers to the king using the word crown, one is not comparing the crown to the king, but associating the crown with the king. See also Hyperbole, Metaphor, Metonymy, Oxymoron, Personification, Simile, Symbol. FLASHBACK A scene in a movie, play, short story, novel, or narrative poem that interrupts the present action of the plot to flash backward and tell what happened at an earlier time. The Demon Lover by Elizabeth Bowen (Collection 11) includes a flashback that describes Mrs. Drover s farewell to her fiancé twenty-five years before the main action of the story takes place Handbook of Literary and Historical Terms

11 FOIL A character who sets off another character by strong contrast. This contrast emphasizes the differences between two characters, bringing out the distinctive qualities in each. In Gilgamesh (Collection 1), Enkidu is a foil to Gilgamesh. FORESHADOWING The use of clues to hint at what is going to happen later in the plot. Foreshadowing arouses the reader s curiosity and builds up suspense. Foreshadowing occurs in Elizabeth Bowen s The Demon Lover (Collection 11) when Mrs. Drover imagines spectral glitters in the place of her fiancé s eyes, and when we learn that she made an unnatural promise to him that she could not have plighted a more sinister troth. See also Suspense. FRAME STORY An introductory narrative within which one or more of the characters proceed to tell individual stories. Perhaps the best-known example of stories contained in a frame story is the Persian collection called The Thousand and One Nights. In English literature, Geoffrey Chaucer s The Canterbury Tales (Collection 2) uses a frame story involving a group of people on a pilgrimage; within the narrative frame, each of the pilgrims then tells his or her own story. FREE VERSE Poetry that has no regular meter or rhyme scheme. Free verse usually relies on the natural rhythms of ordinary speech. Poets writing in free verse may use alliteration, internal rhyme, onomatopoeia, and other musical devices to achieve their effects. They may also place great emphasis on imagery. Matthew Arnold s Dover Beach (Collection 10) is an early example of free verse, and T. S. Eliot s poems, including The Hollow Men (Collection 12), are especially fine and famous examples. GOTHIC A term used to describe literary works that contain primitive, medieval, wild, mysterious, or natural elements. Such elements were frowned upon by eighteenth-century neoclassicists but hailed by the Romantic writers of the following era. The Gothic novel, a genre popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, is chiefly characterized by gloomy settings and an atmosphere of terror and mystery. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley s Frankenstein is one of the most widely known Gothic novels. HAIKU A brief, unrhymed, three-line poem developed in Japan in the 1600s. The first and third lines of a traditional haiku have five syllables each, and the middle line has seven. Haiku generally juxtapose familiar images and present them in a compressed form, forcing the reader to make an imaginative leap to understand the connection between them. HUMANISM An intellectual movement of the Renaissance that restored the study of the classics and focused on examining human life here and now. Though humanists were still interested in theology and religious questions, the focus of their interest expanded to include earthly matters as well. Famous humanists include Sir Thomas More and Erasmus. HYPERBOLE A figure of speech that uses exaggeration to express strong emotion or create a comic effect. While hyperbole (also known as overstatement) does not express the literal truth, it is often used in the service of truth to capture a sense of intensity or to emphasize the essential nature of something. For instance, if you claim that it was 250 degrees in the shade, you are using hyperbole to express the truth that it was miserably hot. IAMBIC PENTAMETER A line of poetry made up of five iambs. An iamb is a metrical foot, or unit of measure, consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable ( ). The word suggest, for example, is made up of one iamb. Pentameter derives from the Greek words penta (five) and meter (measure). Here are two lines from John Keats s Ode to a Nightingale (Collection 8) that are written in iambic pentameter: Forlorn the very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self! Iambic pentameter is by far the most common verse line in English poetry. Shakespeare s sonnets and plays, for example, are written primarily in this meter. Many modern poets, such as W. H. Auden (Collection 12), have continued to use iambic pentameter. Other than free verse, it is the poetic meter that sounds the most like natural speech. See also Blank Verse. RESOURCE CENTER Handbook of Literary and Historical Terms Handbook of Literary and Historical Terms 1461

12 Handbook of Literary and Historical Terms RESOURCE CENTER IMAGERY Language that appeals to the senses. Most images are visual that is, they appeal to the sense of sight. But imagery can also appeal to the senses of hearing, touch, taste, or smell. While imagery is an element in all types of writing, it is especially important in poetry. INCREMENTAL REPETITION A device widely used in ballads whereby a line or lines are repeated with slight variations from stanza to stanza. Each repetition advances the plot of the narrative. Incremental repetition is used in the folk ballad Lord Randall (Collection 2). INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION The period of social and economic change following the replacement of hand tools by machines and power tools, which allowed manufacturers to increase their production and save money. The perfection of the steam engine in the last half of the eighteenth century signaled the arrival of the age of the machine. The Industrial Revolution began on a small scale among textile manufacturers in the middle of the eighteenth century, but soon spread rapidly. Most textile products were produced by steam-engine-powered machines by the early nineteenth century. As the nineteenth century progressed, other industries began to use steam engines to produce their goods. George Eliot used the Industrial Revolution as the backdrop for Silas Marner (1861), and Charles Dickens satirizes its social effects in Hard Times (1854). IN MEDIAS RES The technique of starting a story in the middle and then using a flashback to tell what happened earlier. In medias res is Latin for in the middle of things. Epics traditionally begin in medias res. For example, John Milton s Paradise Lost (Collection 3) opens with Satan and his cohorts in Hell, after the war in Heaven and their fall, events that are recounted later in a flashback. IRONY A contrast or discrepancy between expectation and reality between what is said and what is really meant, between what is expected and what really happens, or between what appears to be true and what really is true. Verbal irony occurs when a writer or speaker says one thing but really means something quite different often the opposite of what he or she has said. If you tell your friend that you just love being kept waiting in the rain, you are using verbal irony. A classic example of verbal irony is Jonathan Swift s suggestion in A Modest Proposal (Collection 5) that the Irish solve their poverty and overpopulation problems by selling their babies as food to their English landlords. Situational irony occurs when what happens is the opposite of what is expected or appropriate. In James Joyce s story Araby (Collection 13), the boy hears about a bazaar called Araby and imagines that it will be a splendid, exotic place, yet when he arrives, he finds that the bazaar is cheap and commonplace. Dramatic irony occurs when the audience or the reader knows something important that a character in a play or story does not know. Dramatic irony occurs in Elizabeth Bowen s The Demon Lover (Collection 11), when Mrs. Drover is riding in the taxi. The reader suspects that the taxi driver is the demon lover even though Mrs. Drover does not. Dramatic irony is a powerful device in William Blake s The Chimney Sweeper from Songs of Innocence (Collection 7). The speaker is a child who believes what he has been told that if all do their duty they need not fear harm. But the reader, who is not so innocent, knows this is not so. KENNING In Anglo-Saxon poetry, a metaphorical phrase or compound word used to name a person, place, thing, or event indirectly. Beowulf (Collection 1) includes the kennings whale-road for the sea and shepherd of evil for Grendel. See also Epithet. LAISSEZ FAIRE (LEHS ay FAIR) An economic policy based on the idea that economic forces should be allowed to operate freely and without government regulation. LITERARY EPIC Literary epics are epics that have been composed by individual writers, often following earlier models. Unlike an oral epic or a primary epic, which is performed by generations of anonymous storytellers and modified slightly with each retelling, a literary epic is the product of a single imagination working within the epic tradition. See also Epic Handbook of Literary and Historical Terms

13 LYRIC POETRY Poetry that focuses on expressing emotions or thoughts, rather than on telling a story. Most lyrics are short, and they usually imply rather than directly state a single strong emotion. The term lyric comes from the Greek. In ancient Greece, lyric poems were recited to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument called the lyre. Today, poets still try to make their lyrics melodious, but they rely only on the musical effects they can create with words (such as rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, and onomatopoeia). Samuel Taylor Coleridge s Kubla Khan, William Wordsworth s Tintern Abbey (both in Collection 7), and Matthew Arnold s Dover Beach (Collection 10) are all lyric poems. MAGIC REALISM A literary style that combines incredible events with realistic details and relates them all in a matter-of-fact tone. Magic realism originated in Latin America, where writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar drew on elements of surrealism and local folklore to create a style that is both timeless and innovative. MATERIALISM A belief that nothing exists except matter and that the operations of everything, including thought, will, and feeling, are caused by material agencies. MAXIM A brief, direct statement that expresses a basic rule of human conduct or a general truth about human behavior. It is better to give than to receive is an example of a well-known maxim. See also Epigram, Moral Tale, Proverb. MEMOIR A type of autobiography that usually focuses on a single time period or historical event. Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi (Collection 11) is a memoir about the author s experience at the death camp in Some metaphors are directly stated, like Percy Bysshe Shelley s comparison My soul is an enchanted boat. (If he had written, My soul is like an enchanted boat, he would have been using a simile.) Other metaphors are implied, like John Suckling s line Time shall molt away his wings. The words molt and wings imply a comparison between time and a bird shedding its feathers. An extended metaphor is a metaphor that is extended, or developed, over several lines of writing or even throughout an entire poem. A dead metaphor is a metaphor that has become so common that we no longer even notice that it is a figure of speech. Our everyday language is filled with dead metaphors, such as foot of the bed, bone of contention, and mouth of the river. A mixed metaphor is the incongruous mixture of two or more metaphors. Mixed metaphors are usually unintentional and often conjure up ludicrous images: If you put your money on that horse, you ll be barking up the wrong tree. METAPHYSICAL POETRY A term applied to the poetry of John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and other seventeenth-century poets who wrote in a difficult and abstract style. Metaphysical poetry is intellectual and detached. It is characterized by ingenious, obscure imagery, philosophical meditation, verbal wit, and it often uses rough-sounding meter. METER A generally regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry. When we want to indicate the metrical pattern of a poem, we mark the stressed syllables with the symbol and the unstressed syllables with the symbol. Indicating the metrical pattern of a poem in this way is called scanning the poem, or scansion. Here is how to scan these lines from William Blake s The Tyger (Collection 7): Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night RESOURCE CENTER Handbook of Literary and Historical Terms METAPHOR A figure of speech that makes a comparison between two seemingly unlike things without using a connective word such as like, as, than, or resembles. You are using a metaphor if you say you re at the end of your rope or describe two political candidates as running neck and neck. Meter is measured in units called feet. A foot usually consists of one stressed syllable and one or more unstressed syllables. The basic metrical feet used in English poetry are the iamb (as in cŏnvίnce), the trochee (as in bórrŏw), the anapest (as in cŏntrădíct), the dactyl (as in áccŭráte), and the spondee (as in séawéed). A poem is described as iambic, trochaic, Handbook of Literary and Historical Terms 1463