Foundations of English - Bedford Terms

irony

A contradiction or incongruity between appearance or expectation and reality. This disparity may be manifested in a variety of ways. A discrepancy may exist between what someone says and what he or she actually means, between what someone expects to happen and what really happens, or between what appears to be true and what actually is true. The term may be applied to events, situations, and structural elements of a work, not just to statements. Irony may even be used as a general mode of expression, in which case one might describe an author's very tone as ironic. Irony comes from the greek eiron, which derives from eironeia, meaning "dissembling." In Greek drama, the eiron was a character who, although weaker than his opponent, the braggart alazon, nevertheless defeated him by misrepresenting himself in some way, for instance by acting foolish or stupid. Meiosis, or understatement, was perhaps the eiron's most potent - and, to the audience, humorous - weapon. Irony has been called the subtlest comic and rhetorical form. instead of flatly stating a point, the ironist's speech is often tongue-in-cheek, deliberately polished and refined, leaving the impression of intentional restraint. The ironist's approach to a subject may even seem unemotional, a wry illustration of a point. Notably, the success of any irony is subject to a paradox: the ironist wears a mask that must be perceived as such. The audience must recognize the discrepancy at issue, or the irony fails to achieve its effect. Irony should not be confused with either sarcasm or satire. Sarcasm is intentional derision that usually involves an obvious, even exaggerated form of verbal irony, such as false praise, and is generally directed at a specific person with a hurtful aim. Irony is more restrained, may employ false blame as well as false praise, is often directed toward a situation rather than a person, and generally lacks hurtful intent. Satire is a literary genre in which irony, with, and sometimes sarcasm are used to expose human weaknesses, spurring reform through ridicule. Irony is a device or mode, not a genre, and typically lacks satire's ameliorative aim. Several types of irony exist, all of which may be classified under one of three rubrics: verbal irony (also called rhetorical irony), situational irony (also called irony of situations), and structural irony. Verbal irony, the most common kind of irony, is characterized by a discrepancy between what a speaker or writer says and what he or she means or believes to be true. IN fact, a speaker or writer using verbal irony frequently says the opposite of what he or she actually means. For instance, imagine that you have come home after a day on which you failed a test, wrecked your car, and had a fight with your best friend. If your roommate were to ask you how your day went and you replied, "Great day. Best ever," you would be using verbal irony, just as the narrator of Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist (1837) did when he said that "the parish authorities magnanimously and humanely resolved that Oliver should be 'farmed,' or, in other words, dispatched to a branch workhouse some three miles off." Verbal irony is sometimes viewed as a trope, on of the two major divisions of figures of speech, since it involves saying one thing but meaning another. Balancing the characteristic restraint of irony with the need for recognition makes verbal irony a particularly difficult device to master. Tone probably keys the listener in to the irony more than any other element, but knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the statement may also spur recognition of the speaker's true meaning. Taking the aforementioned example, your roommate might pick up on the irony either through your tone or by knowing that you had suffered one or more calamities that day. Since readers do not have the benefit of hearing a particular speaker's tone, knowledge of circumstances and the general tone of the work play a greater role in accurately identifying ironic statements. Situational irony, the second type of irony, typically involves a discrepancy between expectation and reality and derives primarily from events or situations themselves, as opposed to statements made by individuals, whether or not they understand the situation as ironic. For instance, situational irony existed when college-bound men in Vietnam War era celebrated their avoidance of the draft, unaware that their exemption as college students was about to be revoked by Congress. Situational irony continued to exist even after the men learned about the revocation, provided that their college applications had been motivated solely by a desire to avoid the draft, the exemption was revoked after they went through the trouble of applying, and they actually got drafted. The scenarios described by Alanis Morissette in her song "Ironic" (1995) also exemplify situational irony: dying the day after you win the lottery; working up the courage to take your first airplane flight and then crashing; finding the man of your dreams only to discover that he has a beautiful wife; and so forth. Literary examples of situational irony include O. Henry's short story "The Gift of the Magi" and the mythic story of King Midas. In "The Gift of the Magi," both husband and wife give up their most prized possession in order to give something to complement the other's most prized possession. The woman sells her beautiful long hair to buy a platinum fob chain for the man's watch; the man sells hi watch to buy the woman tortoiseshell combs to hold up her hair. In the story of King Midas, Bacchus grants the king's wish that everything he touch he turned to gold; much to his chagrin, the king finds that this power does anything but enhance his true wealth when he hugs his beloved daughter, thereby (inadvertently) turning her to gold as well. A poetic example of situational irony is Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias" (1818), in which "a traveller from an antique land" tells of coming upon a ruined statue, the pedistal of which reads "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Subsets of situational irony include dramatic irony, tragic irony, and Socratic irony (also called dialectical irony). Dramatic irony may involve a situation in which a character's words come back to haunt him or her but more commonly involves a discrepancy between a character's perception and what the reader or audience knows to be true. Lacking some material information that the reader or audience possesses, the character responds to a statement or situation in a discordant fashion, whether in the form of an inappropriate statement, expectation, or action. A verbal response involves dramatic irony when a character fails to recognize the true import of his or her words; characters with partial information may thus assign meanings to their words that differ from the meanings assigned by the reader or audience. Expectation and action involve dramatic irony when they are inappropriate under the circumstances that actually exist. Characters may even accurately assess a situation without realizing it, attributing to someone or something a truth that they do not recognize as such. Dramatic irony has often been used synonymously with tragic irony, but this usage is incorrect. Dramatic irony occurs in a wide variety of works, ranging from the comic to the tragic. Tragic irony is a type of dramatic irony marked by a sense of foreboding. As with all dramatic irony, tragic irony involves imperfect information, but the consequences of this ignorance are catastrophic, leading to the character's tragic downfall. In Sophocles' Oedipus Rex (430 B.C.), for instance, Oedipus, the King of Thebes, vows to find the murderer of the prior king, only to find out something the audience knew all along: that he himself is the guilty party. Socratic irony, named for the fifth-century B.C. Greek philosopher Socrates, is, loosely speaking, situational in nature. Plato's dialogues (early fourth century B.C.), describe Socrates as assuming the role of the eiron, acting foolish or naive in questioning fellow citizens and drawing out the irrationality or preposterous implications of their positions. For instance, when Euthyphro, an Athenian who is about to turn his father in for murder, says that this is obviously the right thing to do, Socrates pretends to be impressed by Euthyphro's moral certainty, asking a series of seemingly naive questions demonstrating not that Euthyphro is wrong to turn his father in but, rather, that his grounds for doing so are irrational and self-contradictory. Works that exhibit structural irony, the third major type of irony, contain an internal feature that creates or promotes a discrepancy that typically operates throughout the entire work. Some element of the work's structure (or perhaps even its form), unrelated to the plot per se, invites the audience or reader to probe beneath surface statements or appearances. Narration is the most common vehicle for structural irony, especially the use of a naive or otherwise unreliable narrator whose flaw the audience or reader readily recognizes. A naive narrator means what he or she says, but the audience or reader mistrusts the narrator's perceptions or version of events and thus seeks a different meaning that reflects the author's intention. For instance, the reader of Jonathan Swift's "A modest Proposal" (1729) quickly recognizes that its narrator - an economist who advocates cannibalism, specifically, selling poor Irish infants to "persons of quality and fortune through the kingdom" as "wholesome food" to solve Ireland's prepetual, cyclic problems of poverty, overpopulation, and starvation - is fallible. Since no reasonable reader would take this work at face value, discovering why Swift used a fallible narrator becomes the reader's task. (Swift's title can also be seen as an example of verbal irony, since he most certainly did not consider the proposal "modest.") Structural irony should not be confused with situational irony. The former involves a sustained feature in the frame of the work, whereas the latter involves an event or comment keyed to the plot. Granted, this difference sometimes seems more one of degree than absolute, as in the case where a plot element underlies the entire work. Examples include Oedipus Rex and Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), where lack of knowledge about identity serves as the basis of the plots. Nevertheless, both works involve situational rather than structural irony, for the ironic discrepancies arise from the story lines rather than the structure or form of the works themselves. Subsets of structural irony include cosmic iron (also called irony of fate) and romantic irony. Cosmic irony arises from the disparity between a character's (incorrect) belief in his or her ability to shape his or her destiny and the audience's recognition that an external, supernatural force has power over that character's fate. Just as the unreliable narrator serves as a structural device giving rise to structural irony, so the supernatural force of cosmic irony is more than a matter of plot. Cosmic irony is characterized by four elements. First, it typically involves a powerful deity (or, sometimes, fate itself) with the ability and desire to manipulate or even control events in a character's life. Second, the character subject to this irony believes - erroneously - in free will. Whether or not the character acknowledges the deity's existence, he or she persists in attempting to affect events. Third, the deity toys with the character much as a cat might with a mouse; the outcome is clear to the disinterested observer, but the mouse hopes desperately for escape. Fourth, cosmic irony involves a tragic outcome; ultimately, the character's struggle against destiny will be for naught. Cosmic irony is notably apparent in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), the last chapter of which contains the statement "the President of the Immortals... had ended his sport with Tess." Romantic irony, as defined by nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Schlegel, is present in poems and poser works whose authors or speakers at some point reveal their narration to be the capricious fabrication of an idiosyncratic and highly self-conscious creator. Romantic ironists typically "give up the game" only after they have carefully constructed some vision of "reality," however. They may reveal their narrator to be a liar, for instance, or they may speak directly to the reader as an author. As a result, they wreak havoc with the reader's or audience's usual suspension of disbelief, debunking as illusion the normal operation assumption that the narration is a believable representation of reality. Romantic ironists want their readers or audiences to "see through" them, that is, to appreciate the manipulative nature of their art and the slightly comic quality of even their most serious artistic endeavors. In Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt (1875), for example, one of the characters says, "One cannot die in the middle of Act Five." Other examples of romantic irony include Steven Millhauser's Edwim Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright (1972) - the fictional biography of a cartoon-crazy preteen supposedly written by his best friend - and David Leavitt's The Term Paper Artist (1997). This novella blurs the line between fiction and autobiography by giving its protagonist the same name, profession, publishers, and written works as the author and by making the protagonist the subject of a plagiarism charge and lawsuit by an English poet, just as the author was in his own life. As Leavitt the character notes at the end of the novella, "Writers often disguise their lives as fiction. The thing they almost never do is disguise fiction as their lives." Further Examples: Sometimes different types of irony come into play at once, as in the following passage from Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis (c. 405 B.C.). Agamemnon has brought his daughter Iphigenia to Aulis to be sacrificed to the gods; Iphigenia thinks a marriage has been arranged for her at Aulis with Achilles. Agamemnon's comments exemplify rhetorical irony, given the discrepancy between his literal words and what he really means, whereas Iphigenia's failure to understand the true import of her words exemplifies dramatic irony: Iphigenia: It's a long journey then; and you're leaving me behind! Agamemnon: Yours is a long journey too, like mine. Iphigenia: We could travel together then. you could arrange it. Agamemnon: No, your journey is different. You must remember me. Iphigenia: Will my mother sail with me? Or must I travel alone? Agamemnon: You'll sail alone... without father or mother. Iphigenia: Have you found me a new home, Father? Where is it? Agamemnon: That's enough... There are some things young girls shouldn't know. Iphigenia: Sort the Phrygians out quickly, Daddy, and come back to me. Agamemnon: I must perform a sacrifice, before I go. Iphigenia: Of course you must! The right sacred rituals. Agamemnon: You'll be there too. By the holy water. Iphigenia: Shall I be part of the ceremonies at the altar?

formalism

A general term covering several similar types of literary criticism that arose in the 1920s and 1930s, flourished during the 1940s and 1950s, and are still in evidence today. Formalists see the literary work as an object in its own right. Thus, they tend to devote their attention to its intrinsic nature, concentrating their analyses on the interplay and relationships between the text's essential verbal elements. They study the form of the work (as opposed to its content0, although form to a formalist can connote anything from genre (for example, one may speak of "the sonnet form") to grammatical or rhetorical structure to the "emotional imperative" that engenders the work's (more mechanical structure. No matter which connotation of form pertains, however, formalists seek to be objective in their analysis, focusing on the work itself and eschewing external considerations. They pay particular attention to literary devices used in the work and to the patterns these devices establish. Formalism developed largely in reaction to the practice of interpreting literary texts by relating them to "extrinsic" issues, such as the historical circumstances and politics of the era in which the work was written, its philosophical or theological milieu, or the experiences and frame of mind of its author. Although the term formalism was coined by critics to disparage the movement, it is now used simply as a descriptive term. Formalists have generally suggested that everyday language, which serves simply to communicate information, is stale and unimaginative. They argue that literariness has the capacity to overturn common and expected patterns (of grammar, of story line), thereby rejuvenating language. Such novel uses of language supposedly enable readers to experience no only language but also the world in an entirely new way. A number of schools of literary criticism have adopted a formalist orientation, or at least make use of formalist concepts. The New Criticism, and approach to literature that reached its height in the U.S. in the 1940s and 1950s, is perhaps the most famous type of formalist. But Russian formalist was the first major formalist movement; after the Stalinist regime suppressed it in the early 1930s, the Prague Linguistic Circle adopted its analytical methods. The Chicago school has also been classified as formalist insofar as Chicago critics focus on textual analysis, but their interest in authorial intention and historical material is decidedly not formalist.

caesura (cesura)

A pause in a line of poetry. The caesura is dictated not by meter but by natural speaking rhythm. Sometimes it coincides with the poet's punctuation, but occasionally it occurs where some pause in speech is inevitable. In scansion, the caesura is indicated by the symbol ||. Example: In the following lines from William Butler Yeats's "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" (1893), the caesura in the first line coincides with Yeats's punctuation, whereas the one in the second is indicated solely by natural rhythms of speech: I will arise and go now, || for always night and day I hear lake water lapping || with low sounds by the shore...

philology

Broadly defined, the study of language and literature. More narrowly defined, the study of language, particularly the historical and comparative development of languages. In the twentieth century, the term linguistics eclipsed philology in denoting the scientific study of language, focusing on spoken rather than written language and on how language functions as a system.

affective fallacy

A term coined by New Critics William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley in their essay "The Affective Fallacy" (1946) to refer to what they regarded as the erroneous practice of interpreting texts according to the psychological responses of readers. Wimsatt and Beardsley described the affective fallacy as "a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does)... It begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological effects of the poem and ends in impressionism and relativism." Reader-response critics, who study the way individual readers and interpretive communities go about making sense of texts, reject the concept of the affective fallacy.

intentional fallacy

A term coined by New Critics William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley in their essay "The Intentional Fallacy" (1946) to refer to the practice of basing interpretations on the expressed or implied intentions of authors, a practive they judged to be erroneous. Wimsatt and Beardsley argued that "the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art." As formalists, they viewed literary works as objects in their own right and maintained that the critic's task is to show what is actually in the text, not what an author intended to put there.

denotation

A word's literal meaning(s), independent of any connotations - associations evoked by the word - that a given individual might attach to it; the "dictionary definition" of a word.

Old English Period

Also referred to as the Anglo-Saxon Period by historians, an era usually said to have begun in the first half of the fifth century A.D. with the migration to Britain by members of four principal Germanic tribes from the European continent: the Frisians, the Jutes, the Saxons, and the Angles (whose name, by the seventh century, was used to refer to all of the Germanic inhabitants of "Engla-land," hence, England). Old English refers to the synthetic,or fairly heavily inflected, language system of these peoples, once they were separated from their Germanic roots. By the time the Germanic tribes arrived, the British Isles had been inhabited for centuries by Celtic peoples, who had been under Roman occupation for nearly four hundred years (A.D. 43-410). While some of these native British had learned Latin, their Celtic language and culture had remained intact. Christianity had also been introduced under the Roman occupation, and a British (as well as Irish) church flourished almost completely independent of Rome, helping to sustain the literate and learned traditions of the Latin West when non-Christian Germanic peoples swept into the Roman Empire. According to Bede, a Benedictine monk often called the "father of English history" for his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People) (c. A.D. 730), the Britons, abandoned by the Romans, invited help from the Anglo-Saxons against marauding tribes to the north, only to have the mercenaries turn on them. King Arthur - if he ever existed - may have been a Romano-British war leader (perhaps nicknamed "Arcturus," Latin for "The Bear") and is credited with holding off the first waves of Germanic invader-immigrants in the early fifth century. But the Anglo-Saxons soon drove the native British into Wales and Cornwall. The invaders were themselves converted to Christianity after the arrival of Augustine (not to be confused with his famous predecessor of the same name, the fifth-century Bishop of Hippo_ in 597, whose mission from Rome also included bringing the British Christian clergy into the Roman Catholic sphere. Christianity brought literacy to the orally based culture of the Anglo-Saxons; by the eighth century, Anglo-Saxon monks were prominent scholars and leading missionaries among the Germanic peoples on the Continent. England was invaded several more times during the Old English Period by Germanic cousins of the Anglo-Saxons: Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes, all of whom were called "Vikings" by the english. These peoples were not Christianized when they arrived, beginning in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, and again in the tenth century, but eventually, like the Anglo-Saxons, they settled the lands they seized and adopted the religion of their inhabitants. The Norman conquest of England in 1066 - at the hands of still other Germanic peoples, the "Northmen" who had settled the northern area of modern France and whose language was a dialect of Old French - is generally said to have ended the Old English Period and to have inaugurated the subsequent Middle English Period (1100-1500). King Alfred, often referred to by the epithet "Alfred the Great," is the best-known figure of the Old English Period because of his success in unifying the Anglo-Saxons against the Vikings during the ninth century. Alfred also sponsored the translation of several Latin works into Old English and inaugurated the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a record of events in England that was kept through the twelfth century. Under his influence, West Saxon, the language of almost all of the period's surviving manuscripts, emerged as a sort of "standard" among the four principal dialects. The epic Beowulf, parts of which may have taken shape in early Germanic oral tradition but which was written down in Old English after A.D. 1000, is the period's most famous literary work and is concerned exclusively with Scandinavian peoples and events. Other notable poems, most of which were committed to writing in the eleventh century, include "Deor," "The Seafarer," "The Wanderer," and "The Dream of the Rood" (or Cross). This last poem comes from the less well-known but large body of verse that is explicitly religious in theme, including stories from Genesis and Exodus, as well as saints' lives and prose sermons. Although these works were put in writing in a Christianized culture, they nonetheless represent the pre-Christian Germanic past of the Anglo-Saxons. The work of a fe poets, such as Cynewulf and Cædmon, was more obviously Christian in subject. Most of the writing of the period that was predominantly religious consisted of biblical narratives and saints' lives retold in Old English verse and homilies or sermons in Old English prose, alongside and in communication with a flourishing Latin literature.

form

Either the general type or the unique structure of a literary work. In the sense of "general type," form refers to the categories according to which literary works are commonly classified (e.g., ballads, novellas, sonnets) and may imply a set of conventions related to a particular genre. It may also refer to metrical arrangements, thyme patterns, and so forth (blank verse, the heroic couplet form, quatrain forms). The term is often used more specifically, however, to refer to the structure of a particular work; in this case, from involves the arrangement of component parts by some organizational principle, such as parallelism or the chronological sequence of events. Some theorists (such as those associated with the new Criticism) have equated form and structure, whereas others (such as those associated with the Chicago school) have distinguished between the terms, arguing that form is the emotional force or shaping principle that gives rise to the mechanics of structure. Others have debated whether or not form and style are the same, separate, or overlapping features of the work - and whether or not style and content are separable. Still others have challenged the oft-made distinction between form and content - traditionally manifested in the vie that form is the structure devised by the author to contain the content (and ultimately the meaning) conveyed by a work - as misleading and even inaccurate. most contemporary critics argue that form, structure, style, and content are intertwined and that distinctions among them, though useful tools of literary analysis, tend to obscure the intimate interrelationships that are essential to the effectiveness of the literary text as a whole. Such a critic might speak of concepts like aesthetic form, extending consideration to the integration of internal structural elements as well as to the external organizational qualities of form.

genre

From the French for "kind" or "type," the classification of literary works on the basis of their content, form, or technique. For centuries works have been grouped according to a number of classificatory schemes and distinctions, such as prose/poem, epic/drama/lyric, and the traditional classical divisions comedy/tragedy/lyric/pastoral/epic/satire. Current usage is broad enough to permit umbrella categories of literature (e.g., fiction, the novel) as well as subcategories (e.g., science fiction, the sentimental novel) to be denoted by the term genre. Scholars and critics of the Renaissance and Neoclassical Period tended to take a rigid approach to genre, ranking genres hierarchically, advocating strict boundaries between genres, identifying "laws of kind" for each genre, and judging works accordingly. The emphasis on generic purity generated critical controversies over works that did not "fit," such as the hybrid tragicomedy, and sometimes even led to formal proceedings against noncompliant authors. For instance, in seventeenth-century France, Pierre Corneille had to defend himself before the Académie Française against charges of breaking the classical rule of the three unities in his play Le Cid (1636). With the advent of romanticism, which emphasized innovation, imagination, and the individual, as well as the emergence of new categories such as the novel, the genre system began to decline. A few critics have proposed new classificatory schemes; archetypal critic Northrop Frye, for instance, argued in The Anatomy of Criticism (1957) that literary works may be associated with one of four mythoi (types of plots) that are in turn associated with the four seasons, yielding four main genre classifications: comedy (spring), romance (summer), tragedy (fall), and satire (winter). Most critics, however, have roundly criticized traditional thinking about genre, especially the underlying idea that literary works can be classified according to set, specific categories. Those who still employ rigid genre distinctions are often accused of overgeneralizing and of obscuring aspects of works that "cross" or "mix" genres. Contemporary theorists of genre tend to follow the lead of Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who in Philosophische Untersuchungen (Philosophical Investigations) (1953) characterized genre in terms of "family resemblances," a set of similarities some (but by no means all) of which are shared by works classified together. Viewed this way, genre is a helpful, though arguably loose and arbitrary, categorizing and descriptive device that provides a basic vantage point for examining most historical and many modern and contemporary works. Genre classifications also remain a staple of everyday discourse. Bookstores and libraries organize their collections on the basis of genre; movies are marketed as documentaries, dramas, or even docudramas; television shows are classified as educational programming, reality TV, sitcoms, and so forth. In art criticism, the term genre has a specific (and nonliterary) application, referring to paintings that depict ordinary life in a realistic manner. Notable genre painters include seventeenth-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer and twentieth-century American painter Norman Rockwell. Genres defined in this glossary include the Absurd, acrostic, alba, allegory, Anacreontic poetry, anecdote, antinovel, apocalyptic literature, aubade, autobiography, ballad, ballade, bardic poetry, the baroque, beast fable, bildungsroman, biography, blank verse, blues, Breton Lai, bucolic poetry, burlesque, the character, chronicle play, closet drama, comedy, comedy of humors, comedy of manners, commedia dell'arte, concrete poetry, confessional poetry, courtesy book, crime novel, curtal sonnet, cyberfiction, detective fiction, didactic literature, dirge, dithyramb, domestic tragedy, drama, dramatic monologue, dream vision, eclogue, ecopoetry, elegy, encomium, Entwicklungsroman, epic, epigram, epistolary novel, epithalamium, Erziehungsroman, essay, exemplum, fable, fabliau, faction, fairy tale, fantasy fiction, farce, fiction, folk drama, folk song, folk tale, free verse, Gothic literature, the grotesque, graphic novel, hagiography, haiku, hard-boiled detective fiction, historical novel, historical romance, history play, Homeric ode, Horatian satire, horror, Hudibrastic verse, hymn, idyll, interlude, irregular ode, Italian sonnet, Juvenalian satire, Künstlerroman, lai, lampoon, Language poetry, legend, light verse, limerick, literature of sensibility, local color writing, lyric, madrigal, magic realism, masque, medieval romance, metrical romance, melodrama, memoir, Menippean satire, metafiction, metaphysical poetry, miracle play, mock epic, mock heroic, monody, morality play, mummers' play, mystery fiction, mystery play, myth, nature writing, New Wave, nonfiction, nonfiction novel, nonsense verse, nouveau roman, novel, novella, occasional verse, ode, ottava rima, palinode, pantomime, parable, parody, pastiche, pastoral, pastoral elegy, picaresque novel, Pindaric ode, play, poetry, postcolonial literature, problem novel, prose, prose poem, psychological novel, pulp fiction, quest romance, realistic novel, renga, revenge tragedy, roman à clef, romance, romantic comedy, rondeau, rondel, roundel, sapphic, satire, science fiction, Senecan tragedy, sentimental comedy, sentimental novel, sestina, Shakespearean sonnet, short story, situation comedy, slapstick, slave narrative, socialist realism, sociological novel, sonnet, sonnet redoublé, Spenserian sonnet, spoof, spy fiction, stream-of-consciousness narrative, suspense fiction, tale, terza rima, thesis novel, threnody, thriller, tragedy, tragedy of blood, tragicomedy, travesty, triolet, urban legend, utopian literature, vers de société, verse, villanelle, whodunit, and wonder tale.

sonnet

From the Italian word for "little song," a lyric poem that typically consists of fourteen lines (usually printed as a single stanza) and that typically follows one of several conventional rhyme schemes. Sonnets may address a range of issues or themes, but love, the original subject of the sonnet, is perhaps still the most common. Two major types of sonnets exist: the Italian, or Petrarchan, sonnet and the English, or Shakespearean, sonnet. (Petrarchan and Shakespearean refer, respectively, to the most famous practitioners of these forms: Francesco Petrarca and William Shakespeare.) The Italian sonnet has two parts: the octave, eight lines with the rhyme scheme abbaabba, and the sestet, six lines usually rhyming cdecde or cdcdcd. The English sonnet is divided into three quatrains and a couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg. The Spenserian sonnet, which follows the same basic stanza form as the English sonnet, consists of three quatrains rhyming abab bcbc cdcd, to link the quatrains together, and a couplet rhyming ee. Iambic pentameter is the most common meter for all three forms. The sonnet originated in Italy in the thirteenth century, developed by Sicilian poet Giacomo da Lentini and Tuscan poet Guittone d'Arezzo. The form eventually spread to other European countries, flourishing during the Renaissance and reaching England in the early sixteenth century. Sir Thomas Wyatt, who translated and imitated Italian sonnets, is generally credited with introducing the form into England; Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, is generally credited with developing the English sonnet form specifically. Subsequently, during the Neoclassical Period, the sonnet declined throughout Europe before being revived by romantic poets in the nineteenth century. Over time, various poets have experimented with the sonnet form. George Meredith, and English novelist and poet, wrote sixteen-line poems with an abba cddc effe ghhg rhyme scheme in his sequence Modern Love (1862). Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins developed the curtal sonnet, a short, ten-line form divided into a six-line stanza followed by a four-line stanza with a half-line tail. Nineteenth-century French poet Paul Cerlaine and twentieth-century English poet Rupert Brooke tried "inverting" sonnets; Verlaine flipped the parts of the Italian sonnet in "Sappho," the last sonnet in his collection Les amies (The Girlfriends) (1868), opening iwth the sestet, and Brooke inverted the English form, beginning with a couplet in "Sonnet Reversed" (1911). Terza rima sonnets follow the linking rhyme scheme aba bcb cdc ded ee. Many twentieth-century and contemporary sonneteers have experimented even more radically with the form, dispensing with meter and/or rhyme altogether. Noted sonneteers writing in English include Sir Philip Sidney, John Milton, John Keats, William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, W. H. Auden, and Robert Lowell. Other noted sonneteers include Joachim du Bellay, Pierre de Ronsard, and Charles Baudelaire, writing in French; in German, Georg Rudolf Weckherlin, Gottfried Bürger, August Graf von Platen, and Rainer Maria Rilke; in Italian, Dante Alighieri and Michelangelo; and, in Spanish, Garcilaso de la Vega. Examples: Sidney's sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella (1591); Donne's Holy Sonnets (c.1607-13). Oscar Wilde included "Hélas," an Italian sonnet about his career as a writer, as an epigraph to his Poems (1881): To drift with every passion till my soul Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play, Is it for this that I have given away Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control?- Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll Scrawled over on some boyish holiday With idle songs for pipe and virelay(jingle) Which do but mar the secret of the whole. Surely there was a time I might have trod The sunlight heights, and from life's dissonance Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God: Is that time dead? lo! with a little rod I did but touch the honey of romance- And must I lose a soul's inheritance? Twentieth-century examples include Claude McKay's "If We Must Die" (1919), Pablo Neruda's Cien sonetos de amor (100 Love Sonnets) (1960), Ted Berrigan's The Sonnets (1964), Seamus Heaney's sonnet sequence "Clearances) (1987), Bernadette Mayer's Sonnets (1989), and Wanda Coleman's American Sonnets (1994). marilyn Hacker's verse novel Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (1986) is composed of sonnets and villanelles.

medieval

From the Latin for "middle age," an adjective now used broadly to refer to a period of European history ranging from about the fifth to fifteenth centuries A.D. and alternatively called the Middle Ages or, more specifically, to aspects and products of the period. Thus one may refer not only to the Medieval Period but also to medieval art, architecture, attitudes, history, literature, philosophy, and theology. The term Middle Ages - or its equivalent in languages other than English - was first used during the Renaissance by writers who felt more artistic, intellectual, and spiritual affinity with the classical world of ancient Greece and Rome than with Europe as it had evolved, after the fall of the Roman Empire, under the control of what we now call the Catholic Church. The term medieval (originally spelled mediaeval) was not introduced into English until the nineteenth century, a period of heightened interest in the art, history, and thought of the Middle Ages. This interest, exhibited in the work of certain romantic poets and furthered by the Victorian poets and painters associated with Pre-Raphaelitism, came to be called medievalism. There is some disagreement about whether the Medieval Period, or Middle Ages, began in the third, fourth, or fifth century A.D. Most scholars, however, associate its onset with the Roman Empire's collapse, which began in A.D. 410 as tribes of Germanic "Visigoths" advanced southward through Italy and into Rome, and was complete by A.D. 476, when the Emperor Romulus was swept out of power by a German tribal chief named Odoacer. Scholars also debate when the Medieval Period ended. Some pinpoint the year 1453, when Turkish forces conquered Constantinople, triggering the migration of Greek scholars into Western Europe. Others take the more general view that the Middle Ages ended with the rise of the Renaissance, which spread beyond Italy throughout Europe during the fifteenth century. Scholars generally agree, however, that the persistent popular assumption that centuries associated with the Medieval Period can be accurately represented by the phrase Dark Ages is misleading at best and grossly inaccurate at worst. The tribes of Visigoths, or Goths (the source of the word Gothic), that defeated the armies of Rome also penetrated westward into Gaul (now France) and Spain. Later, the Goths were themselves defeated by Moorish Africans who invaded Spain in 711 and subsequently introduced sophisticated elements of Arabic civilization throughout Spain and other parts of southern Europe. In the meantime, from Italy northward to Germany - under the influence of a Church that, though centered in Rome, had survived and then thrived following the empire's collapse - medieval societies developed that were anything but barbaric and chaotic, artless and ignorant. The Church successfully conveyed to a diverse group of peoples (many of whom had lived in wandering tribes) the value of a stable moral and civil order. Notably, the foundations of several modern European nations were laid during medieval times. Charlemagne ("Charles the Great") not only conquered vast areas of what is now France but also set out to organize, educate, and unify the people living in the areas he ruled as King of the Franks beginning in 768 and as Emperor of the West from 800 until his death in 814. IN England, a group of noblemen united in 1215 to dilute the power of King John, forcing the autocratic monarch to sign a list of rights and provisions guaranteeing, among other things, that taxes could only be "levied with the consent of a council of prelates and greater barons" and that "no freeman shall be arrested, imprisoned, or deprived of property except by judgment of his equals or the law of the land." This list, known as the Magna Carta, or "Great Charter," limited the power of King John and subsequent English monarchs over their subjects and pointed the way toward more democratic government. Certain historical developments identified with medieval history were unquestionably uncivilized; bloody Inquisitions designed to root heretics out of the Church are among the reasons the Middle Ages have been labeled "dark." However, chivalric ideals (such as courtesy) and highly "civilized" courtly love traditions and conventions were also developed during the Middle Ages. Furthermore, some of the imperialistic military initiatives, such as the Crusades, led to new markets and some degree of cultural cross-fertilization between Western Europe on the one hand and Arabic, Jewish, and Byzantine civilizations on the other. Perhaps as a result, medieval romances paint a portrait of Western Europe delicately marked by Eastern influences, such as those of the Persian tale. Medieval literature encompassed a variety of religious and secular works, with verse predominating over prose. Common manifestations of religious literature included exempla, hagiography, hymns, medieval dramas such as miracle plays and mystery plays, and theological treatises. Common secular forms included chronicle plays, courtly love lyrics, epics, fabliaux, lais, medieval romances, and travel literature. Noted medieval works include Roman philosopher Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy (524), written while he was in prison; the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf (c. 700); the Middle High German epic poem Niebelungenlied (c. 1200); Icelandic sagas including the Völsunga saga (c. 1270) and Grettis saga (c. 1320); the dream vision Le roman de la rose (The Romance of rhe Rose), initially composed by Guillaume de Lorris around 1230 and expanded by Jean de Meung around 1270; Dante Alighieri's Divina commedia (The Divine Comedy) (1321); Petrarch's (Francesco Petrarca) sonnets (c. 1350); and geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (c. 1387). When referring specifically to medieval literature in English, scholars typically divide the Medieval Period into the Old English Period, covering the first half of the fifth century to the Norman conquest of England in 1066, and the Middle English Period, usually said to span the years 1100-1500. Medieval art showed similar variety, encompassing media ranging form architecture, painting, sculpture, and stained glass to jewelry, metalwork, manuscripts, and tapestries. Noted works include lavishly colored "illuminated" manuscripts produced from the seventh through the fifteenth centuries throughout Europe, including in the British Isles, France, Spain, and the Low Countries; cathedrals such as those at Chartres (France) and Cologne (Germany), begun in the 1100s and 1200s, respectively; the paintings of Giotto, including a fresco cycle in the Arena Chapel at Padua (Italy) portraying scenes from the lives of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ (completed c. 1305); and the sculptures of Claus Sluter, such as the Well of Moses (1395-1403), a fountain commissioned for a monastery near Dijon (France).

ambiguity

Lack of clarity or uncertainty in meaning. A word, phrase, statement, or passage is ambiguous when it can be understood or interpreted in more than one way. Ambiguity often results from use of pronouns without proper referents, use of words with multiple meanings, unusual syntax, and inordinate brevity. Ambiguity may be intentional or unintentional and, depending on the context, may be a virtue or a flaw. If denotative precision is required, as is often the case in speech, ambiguity is a flaw. But if plurisignation, or multiple meanings, are intended or desirable, as is often the case in literature, ambiguity is a virtue. The richness and complexity of literary works depend to a great extent on ambiguity, which can be used to create alternate meanings or levels of meaning or to leave meaning indeterminate. In his exploration of ambiguity as a literary device in English poetry, critic William Empson highlighted the importance of connotation to meaning and identified various types of ambiguity in his book Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930). Examples: The following lines of poetry contain verbal ambiguities: Piping songs of pleasant glee On a cloud I saw a child... -William Blake, "Introduction" to Songs of Innocence (1789) Who is piping: the speaker or the child? And who is on the cloud? The pears are not seen As the observer wills. -Wallace Stevens, Study of Two Pears" (1938) What point is Stevens trying to make? That the observer does not want to see the pears and so does not see them? Or that the observer wants the pears to be seen in a certain way, but they have not been depicted in that way by the painter of the "Study"? Sometimes ambiguity is of a more general nature. Whether the ghosts of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) and Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898) are supernatural beings or hallucinations is left ambiguous. General ambiguity, of course, depends upon an accumulations of verbal ambiguities, as may be seen in the passage from The Turn of the Screw in which the narrator, a governess, relates the death of her charge Miles. Suspecting that the child has seen the ghost of Peter Quint, the governess asks: "Whom do you mean by 'he'?" "Peter Quint - you devil!" His face gave again, round the room, its convulsed supplication. "Where?" Is Miles's exclamatory statement an answer to the governess's question (in which case he is calling his governess a "devil"), or is it an address to the ghost of Quint (in which case he is calling Quint a "devil")? And why is Miles asking "Where?" The governess's narrative continues: They are in my ears still, his supreme surrender of the name and his tribute to my devotion. "What does he matter now, my own? - what will he ever matter? I have you," I launched at the beast, "but he has lost you for ever!" Then for the demonstration of my work, "There, there!" I said to Miles. But he had already jerked straight round, stared, glared again, and seen but the quiet day. With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of he uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp with which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall. I caught him, yes, I held him - it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped. Has the governess frightened Miles to death? Murdered him in some more direct way? Is the child the victim of a successful but fatal exorcism? James chose to leave the answer to these and many other questions ambiguous, thereby igniting a century of critical controversy.

canon

Most generally, a body of written works accepted as authoritative or authentic. As a religious term, canon has been used with reference to Christianity since the fourth century A.D. to refer to books of the Bible accepted as Holy Scripture, that is, as being divinely inspired. The term is also used in the phrase Saints' Canon to refer to the group of people that the Catholic Church officially recognizes as saints. As a literary term, canon may refer to the body of works that scholars generally attribute to a particular author or, more broadly, to those literary works that are privileged (accorded special status) by a given culture. Thus we speak of the "Shakespearean canon" (thirty-seven or thirty-eight plays that scholars believe can be definitely attributed to William Shakespeare) or the "Western canon" (the fundamental literary texts of Western culture). Works widely regarded as classics, or "Great Books" - texts that are repeatedly reprinted, anthologized, and taught in classes - constitute the canon in its broader literary sense. By contrast, the term apocryphal generally refers to written works of doubtful or uncertain authenticity or authorship. Books or other works outside of the canon (noncanonical works) that religious bodies consider apocryphal are not viewed as divinely inspired but may still have high status. For instance, while the Book of Judith does not appear in the Hebrew Bible, it is included in the apocrypha of the King James Bible. Literary works are considered apocryphal when their authorship is disputed or otherwise uncertain. For instance, several plays including Locrine (1595) and The Puritan (1607), both attributed to "W.S.," are included in the "Shakespeare Apocrypha," given insufficient evidence of Shakespeare's authorship as well as evidence suggesting the authorship of another playwright such as Wentworth Smith or Thomas Middleton. Contemporary Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial critics have argued that, for political reasons, many excellent works never enter the canon. Canonized works, they claim, are those that reflect - and respect - the culture's dominant ideology or perform some socially acceptable or even necessary form of "cultural work." Attempts have been made to broaden or redefine the canon by rediscovering valuable texts, or versions of texts, that were repressed or ignored for political reasons. These have been published in both traditional and nontraditional anthologies. The most outspoken critics of the canon, especially certain critics practicing cultural criticism, have called into question the whole concept of canon or "canonicity." These critics, who do not privilege any form of expression, treat cartoons, comic strips, and soap operas with the came cogency and respect they accord novels, poems, and plays.

New Criticism

Named after John Crowe Ransom's book The New Criticism (1941), a type of formalist literary criticism characterized by close textual analysis that reached its height in the U.S. in the 1940s and 1950s. New Critics treated literary works, which they viewed as carefully crated, orderly objects containing observable formal patterns, as self-contained and self-referential and thus based their interpretations on elements within the text rather than on external factors such as the effects of a work or biographical and historical materials. Ransom, for instance, asserted in "Criticism, Inc." (1937) that the "first law" of criticism was to "be objective, [to] cite the nature of the object rather than its effects upon the subject"; indeed, he argued that concern with the effects of a work "denies the autonomy of the artist as one who interests himself in the artistic object in his own right, and likewise the autonomy of the work as existing for its own sake." In analyzing texts, New Critics performed close readings, concentrating on the relationships among elements such as images, rhythm, and symbols and paying special attention to repetition. They also emphasized that the structure of a text should not be divorced from its meaning and praised the use of literary devices such as irony and paradox to harmonize dissimilar, even conflicting, elements. The foundations of the New Criticism were laid in books and essays written during the 1920s and 1930s by theorists in England, notably I. A. Richards (Practical Criticism [1929]), William Empson (Seven Types of Ambiguity [1930]), and T. S. Eliot ("The Function of Criticism" [1933]). The approach was significantly developed, however, by a group of American poets and critics - with whom the term new Critics is most often associated - including Ransom, R. P. Blackmur, Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and William K. Wimsatt. Generally Southern, religious, and culturally conservative, these critics argued that literature has its own mode of language, in contradistinction to the logical and scientific, such that a literary work exists in its own world and has inherent worth. As Tate asserted in "Literature as Knowledge" (1941), poetry "is neither the world of verifiable science nor a projection of ourselves; yet it is complete." The New Criticism quickly gained ascendancy in American academia, with textbooks such as Brooks and Warren's Understanding Poetry (1938) becoming standard in college and even high school courses well into the 1970s; in their introductory "Letter to the Teacher," Brooks and Warren opened with the assertion that "if poetry is worth teaching at all it is worth teaching as poetry," emphasizing the importance of treating the poem "as a literary construct," "as an object in itself." Given its focus on the text, the New Criticism has often been seen as an attack on romanticism and impressionism, particularly impressionistic criticism, which centers on the critic's subjective impressions of a literary work. New Critics believed that it was erroneous to interpret texts according to the psychological responses of readers, a practice they termed the affective fallacy. They also rejected the practice of basing interpretation on an author's intentions, which they called the intentional fallacy. By the 1970s, the New Criticsm came under increasing attack with the advent of reader-response criticism and poststructuralist approaches such as deconstruction. Yet many of its emphases and procedures, particularly close reading and the accompanying explication of literary texts, have survived and thrived; as William E. Cain pointed out in "The Institutionalization of the New Criticism" (1982), "what was once the aim of a particular critical movement now defines the general aims of criticism. Close reading of literary texts is the ground that nearly all theories and methods build upon or seek to occupy."

connotation

The association(s) evoked by a word beyond its denotation, or literal meaning. A connotation may be perceived and understood by almost everyone if it reflects broad cultural associations, or it may be recognized by comparatively few readers or listeners who have certain knowledge or experience. A connotation may even be unique to a particular individual, whose personal experiences have led him or her to associate a given word with some idea or thing in a way that would not be familiar to others. Examples: The word water might commonly evoke thoughts or images of an ocean, a fountain, thirst, or even water balloon. Less common would be thoughts of the Wicked Witch of the West (from L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz [1900]), who melted when Dorothy threw a bucket of water on her, or of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798), which includes the famous lines "Water, water, everywhere,/ And all the boards did shrink;/ Water, water, everywhere,/ nor any drop to drink." A near-drowning victim might associate water with sheer terror, as would someone who was hydrophobic. A woman whose husband had proposed to her on a canoeing trip might associate water with her engagement ring or, more broadly, her personal happiness. A passage from Alice Munro's story "Boys and Girls" (1968) explains connotation without explicitly using the term: The word girl had formerly seemed to me innocent and unburdened, like the word child; now it appeared that it was no such thing. A girl was not, as I had supposed, simply what I was; it was what I had to become. It was a definition, always touched with reproach and disappointment.

allegory

The concrete presentation of an abstract idea, typically in a narrative - whether prose, verse, or drama - with at least two levels of meaning. The first level is the surface story line, which can be summed up by stating who did what to whom when. The second level is typically moral, political, philosophical, or religious. To facilitate recognition of this deeper level of meaning, allegories are often thinly veiled; personification is common, and sometimes characters bear the names of the qualities or ideas the author wishes to represent. Allegories need not be entire narratives, however, and narratives may contain allegorical elements or figures. Many critics consider the allegory to be an extended metaphor and, conversely, consider metaphors - which involve saying one thing but meaning another - to be "verbal allegories." Allegories generally fall into two major categories: (1) the political and historical allegory; and (2) the allegory of abstract themes. IN the first type, the figures, settings, or actions correspond directly and specifically to historical personages, places, and events (Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo, for instance). In the second type, the characters stand for ideas or abstract qualities. (In an allegory warning against laziness, the main character might encounter figures such as Sloth and Perseverance.) Allegory continues to be used as a narrative device today, although its popularity peaked in the Middle Ages, when the dream vision was a prevalent form. Types of allegory common in other historical periods include the fable, exemplum, and parable. Examples: John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678), an allegory of abstract themes, is the most famous English allegory. On the surface, it tells the story of a man named Christian who journeys from one city to another, but on a deeper level, the problems he encounters represent obstacles that a good Christian must overcome to live a godly life. Christian encounters such blatantly allegorical figures as Mr. Worldly Wiseman and places such as Vanity Fair and the Slough of Despair. In "Lend Me Your Light," an autobiographical short story from Rohinton Mistry's collection Swimming Lessons (1989), the protagonist, an Indian émigré who has returned to Bombay for a visit home, observes the activity at a train station, enacted "with all the subtlety of a sixteenth-century morality play": The drama began when the train, Reality, rolled into the station. It was overcrowded because everyone wanted to get on it: Virtue, Vice, Apathy, Corruption, all of them. Someone, probably Poverty, dropped his plastic lunch bag amidst the stampede, nudged on by Fate. Then Reality rolled out of the station with a gnashing and clanking of its metal, leaving in its wake the New Reality. And someone else, probably Hunger, matter-of-factly picked up Poverty's mangled lunch, dusted off a chapati which had slipped out of the trampled bag, and went his way. In all of this, was there a lesson for me? To trim my expectations and reactions to things, trim them down to the proper proportions? The graphic novelist Neil Gaiman introduced an allegorical dimension to his Sandman series (1991-97) by giving the major recurring characters names such as Dream, Desire, and Destiny.

periodicity

The idea that there are distinct periods or ages within the literature of a nation or culture; the traditional framework for literary studies in English. Scholars and critics who adhere to the concept of periodicity maintain that writers within a given historical era, including those working in different genres, have more in common in terms of form, style, and themes than writers from other eras, even those that are chronologically adjacent. Recently, critics of periodicity have pointed out that the parameters of literary periods are arbitrarily drawn and have little, if anything, to do with literary periods are arbitrarily drawn and have little, if anything, to do with literature. For instance, the Victorian Period is said to span the years 1837-1901 because those are the years of Queen Victoria's reign in England, but why should we assume that Victoria's reign made Alfred, Lor Tennyson's Poems (1830) less like the poems of John Keats (1795-1821) and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) than like Thomas Hardy's fin de siécle novel Jude the Obscure (1895)? Critics of periodicity also point out that many writers span periods; Hardy (1840-1928), for instance, wrote during the Victorian Period and the Modern Period, and William Shakespeare wrote plays during the Elizabethan Age and the Jacobean Age. To the extent that the works of writers such as Hardy and Shakespeare are aesthetically and thematically consistent, such consistency undermines the claims of scholars and critics who would differentiate the periods during which they were written. Few scholars and critics today explicitly advocate periodicity. Somewhere between those who do and those who don't are somewhat traditional literary historians who argue that it is useful to think of works as falling within chronological periods loosely defined, insofar as texts are inevitably rooted in historical contexts, however broadly those roots may extend and however questionable our definitions of those contexts may be. Other defenders argue that periodicity promotes interdisciplinarity and intertextuality, providing a flexible framework for examining relationships among texts, whether literary or nonliterary, or for linking texts to the real world. Such scholars and critics thus might defend preservation of a university literature curriculum consisting of courses that group literary works under traditional chronological rubrics (e.g., "Restoration Age Drama"). And they undoubtedly would defend the inclusion in this glossary of entries defining the various Periods in English literature and Period in American literature. Those most radically opposed to periodicity, on the other hand, would argue that it is misleading and thus intellectually harmful to organize a literary curriculum around periods. They might even argue that this glossary, in defining those periods traditionally, perpetuates and preserves a set of distinctions leading readers to see textual similarities - and differences - that are highly suspect and easily contradicted.

alliteration

The repetition of sounds in a sequence of words. Alliteration generally refers to repeated consonant sounds (often initial consonant sounds or those at the beginning of stressed syllables) but has also been used by some critics to refer to repeated vowel sounds. When s is the repeated sound, the result is said to be sibilant. Alliteration was especially important in Old English verse, establishing the rhythm and structure of the poetic line. Since then, its role has diminished, although poets to this day use alliteration to create powerful musical effects and to highlight and emphasize key words, concepts, and relationships. Densely alliterative utterances that are difficult to pronounce - such as "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers" and "She sells seashells by the seashore" - are called tongue twisters. Examples: The last line of Wallace Stevens's poem "Of Mere Being" (1955): The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down. S appears as a sibilant alliterative sound in this passage from Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899): The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting, the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace. An example of alliteration gone overboard appears in this description of "progression" by Warren G. Harding, nominating William Howard Taft for president at the 1912 Republican convention, eight years before Harding himself made a successful run at the presidency: Progression is not proclamation nor palaver. It is not pretense nor play on prejudice. It is not of personal pronouns, nor perennial pronouncement. It is not the perturbation of a people passion-wrought, nor a promise proposed. The following passage from Michael Byers's short story "Blue River, Blue Sun," from his collection The Coast of Good Intentions (1998), is packed with s and p sounds: The plastic water vials shifted in his pack like tiny men shifting in sleep, and when he dipped to fill a sample his old knees popped and pinged. Away across the grasses he could see his students advancing one slow step at a time. Sheryl Crow's rowdy pop son "All I Wanna Do [Is Have Some Fun]" (1993) is heavily alliterative, repeating the letters b and l in eleven of the twenty-eight words - e.g., beet, bar, early, Billy, peel, labels, Bud, bottle - in the two opening lines. Moreover, alliteration is a common device in hip hop - itself an alliterative term. Examples include Nas's "It Ain't Hard to Tell" (Illmatic, 1994), which plays on the letter l, especially in the second verse, and the opening lines of Pharoahe Monch's "Hell" (Internal Affairs, 1999), in which f is the repeated sound.

Spenserian Stanza

a

blank verse

d

Jacobean Age

e

frame story

e

heroic couplet

e

novel

e

parallelism

e

lyric

g

point of view

g

Colonial Period

n

Elizabethan Era

n

epic

n

iambic pentameter

n

postcolonial literature/postcolonial theory

n

slave narrative

n

metaphor

o

pastoral

o

realism

o

rhyme

p

Renaissance Period

r

free indirect discourse

r

Freytag's Pyramid

t

conceit

u

Middle English Period

v

romanticism

v

enjambment

w

Metaphysical Poetry

y