golssary

speech-act theory

"Speech-act theory," developed by the philosopher John Austin, was described most fully in his posthumous book How to Do Things with Words (1962) and was explored and expanded by other "ordinarylanguage philosophers," including John Searle and H. P. Grice. Austin's theory is directed against traditional tendencies of philosophers (1) to analyze the meaning of isolated sentences, abstracted from the context of a discourse and from the attendant circumstances in which a sentence is uttered; and (2) to assume, in what Austin calls a "logical obsession," that the standard sentence— of which other types are merely variants—is a statement that describes a situation or asserts a fact, and is to be judged as either true or false. John Searle's adoption and elaboration of Austin's speech-act theory opposes to these views the claim that when we attend to the overall linguistic and situational context—including the institutional conditions that govern many uses of language—we find that in speaking or writing we perform simultaneously three, and sometimes four, distinguishable kinds of speech acts: (1) We utter a sentence; Austin called this act a "locution." (2) We refer to an object and predicate something about that object. (3) We perform an illocutionary act. (4) Often, we also perform a perlocutionary act. The illocutionary act performed by a locution may indeed be the one stressed by traditional philosophy and logic, to assert that something is true; but it may instead be one of very many other possible speech acts, such as questioning, commanding, promising, warning, praising, thanking, and so on. A sentence consisting of the same words in the same grammatical form, such as "I will leave you tomorrow," may in a particular verbal and situational context turn out to have the "illocutionary force" either of an assertion, or of a promise, or of a threat. In an illocutionary act that is not an assertion, the prime criterion (although the utterance makes reference to some state of affairs) is not its truth or falsity but whether or not the act has been performed successfully, or in Austin's term, "felicitously." A felicitous performance of a particular illocutionary act depends on its meeting "appropriateness conditions" which obtain for that type of act; these conditions are tacit linguistic and social (or institutional) conventions, or rules, that are shared by competent speakers and interpreters of a language. For example, the "felicitous," or successful, performance of an illocutionary act of promising, such as "I will come to see you tomorrow," depends on its meeting its special set of appropriateness conditions: the speaker must be capable of fulfilling his promise, must intend to do so, and must believe that the listener wants him to do so. Failing the last condition, for example, the same verbal utterance might have the illocutionary force of a threat. In How to Do Things with Words, John Austin established an initial distinction between two broad types of locutions: constatives (sentences that assert something about a fact or state of affairs and are adjudged to be true or false) and performatives (sentences that are speech acts that accomplish something, such as questioning, promising, praising, and so on). As he continued his subtle analysis, however, Austin showed that this initial division of utterances into two sharply exclusive classes does not hold, in that many performatives also involve reference to a state of affairs, while constatives also perform an illocutionary act. Austin, however, drew special attention to the "explicit performative," which is a sentence whose utterance itself, when executed under appropriate institutional and other conditions, brings about the state of affairs that it signifies. Examples are "I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth"; "I apologize"; "I call this meeting to order"; "Let spades be trumps." If an illocutionary act has an effect on the actions or state of mind of the hearer which goes beyond merely understanding what has been said, it is also a perlocutionary act. Thus, the utterance "I am going to leave you," with the illocutionary force of a warning, not only may be understood as such but may have (or fail to have) the additional perlocutionary effect of frightening the hearer. Similarly, by the illocutionary act of promising to do something, one may please (or else anger) the hearer; and by asserting something, one may have the effect either of enlightening, or of inspiring, or of intimidating the hearer. Some perlocutionary effects are intended by the speaker; others occur without the speaker's intention, and even against that intention. For a useful exploration of the relations, in diverse cases, of illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts, see Ted Cohen, "Illocutions and Perlocutions," in Foundations of Language, Vol. 9 (1973). A number of deconstructive theorists have proposed that the use of language in fictional literature (which Austin had excluded from his consideration of what he called "seriously" intended speech acts) is in fact a prime instance of the performative, in that it does not refer to a pre-existing state of affairs but brings about, or brings into being, the characters, action, and world that it describes. On the other hand, since performative linguistic acts cannot avoid recourse to statement and assertion, some deconstructive theorists convert Austin's constative/performative distinction into an undecidable deadlock, or oscillation, of irreconcilable oppositions. See deconstruction and refer to Barbara Johnson, "Poetry and Performative Language: Mallarmé and Austin," in The Critical Difference (1980); Sandra Petrey, Speech Acts and Literary Theory (1990); Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (2nd ed., 2011), chapter 7, "Performative Language." Judith Butler has proposed that the terms we use to identify a person's gender and sexuality are modes of performative language, in that the reiterated application of such terms to persons, in accordance with the linguistic conventions that govern their use, in fact bring about (or cause persons to "perform") the identities and the modes of behavior that they purport to describe. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Excitable Speech (1997); refer also to queer theory. Since 1970, speech-act theory has influenced in conspicuous and varied ways the practice of literary criticism. When applied to the analysis of direct discourse by a character within a literary work, it provides a systematic but sometimes cumbersome framework for identifying the unspoken presuppositions, implications, and effects of speech acts which competent readers and critics have always taken into account, subtly though unsystematically. (See discourse analysis.) Speech-act theory has also been used in a more radical way, however, as a model on which to recast the theory of literature in general, and especially the theory of prose narratives (see fiction and truth). What the author of a fictional work—or else what the author's invented narrator—narrates is held to constitute a "pretended" set of assertions, which are intended by the author, and understood by the competent reader, to be free from a speaker's ordinary commitment to the truth of what he or she asserts. Within the frame of the fictional world that the narrative thus establishes, however, the utterances of the fictional characters—whether these are assertions or promises or marital vows—are held to be responsible to ordinary illocutionary commitments. Alternatively, some speech-act theorists propose a new version of mimetic theory (see imitation). Traditional mimetic critics had claimed that literature imitates reality by representing in a verbal medium the setting, actions, utterances, and interactions of human beings. Some speechact theorists, on the other hand, propose that all literature is simply "mimetic discourse." A lyric, for example, is said to be an imitation of that form of ordinary discourse in which we express our feelings about something, and a novel is an imitation of a particular form of written discourse, such as biography (Henry Fielding's The History of Tom Jones, 1749), or autobiography (Charles Dickens' David Copperfield, 1849-50), or even a scholar's annotated edition of a poetic text (Nabokov's Pale Fire, 1962).

Victorian and Victorianism

In its value-neutral use, "Victorian" simply identifies the historical era in England roughly coincident with the reign of Queen Victoria, 1837-1901. (See Victorian period, under periods of English literature.) It was a time of rapid and wrenching economic and social changes that had no parallel in earlier history—changes that made small-scale England, in the course of the nineteenth century, the leading industrial power, with an empire that occupied more than a quarter of the earth's surface. The pace and depth of such developments, while they fostered a mood of nationalist pride and optimism about future progress, also produced social stresses, class conflicts, and widespread anxiety about the ability of the nation and the individual to cope, socially, politically, and psychologically, with the cumulative problems of the age. England was the first nation to exploit the technological possibilities of steam power and steel, but its unregulated industrialization, while it produced great wealth for an expanding middle class, led also to the deterioration of rural England, a mushroom growth of often shoddy urbanization, and massive poverty concentrated in slum neighborhoods. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution (On the Origin of Species was published in 1859), together with the extension into all intellectual areas of positivism (the view that all valid knowledge must be based on the methods of empirical investigation established by the natural sciences), engendered sectarian controversy, doubts about the truth of religious beliefs, and in some instances a reversion to strict biblical fundamentalism. Contributing to the social and political unrest was what was labeled "the woman question"; that is, the early feminist agitation for equal status and rights. The Victorian age, for all its conflicts and anxieties, was one of immense, variegated, and often self-critical intellectual and literary activities. In our time, the term "Victorian," and still more Victorianism, is frequently used in a derogatory way, to connote narrow-mindedness, sexual priggishness, the determination to maintain feminine "innocence" (that is, sexual ignorance), and an emphasis on social respectability. Such views have a valid basis in attitudes and values expressed (and sometimes exemplified) by many members of the expanding middle class, with its roots in Puritanism and its insecurity about its newly won status. Later criticism of such Victorian attitudes, however, merely echo the vigorous attacks and devastating ridicule mounted against prevailing beliefs and attitudes by a number of thinkers and literary authors in the Victorian age itself. Refer to Jerome Buckley, The Victorian Temper (1951); W. E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind (1957); R. D. Altick, Victorian People and Ideas: A Companion for the Modern Reader of Victorian Literature (1974); G. M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (republished 1977); Antoinette Burton, ed., Politics and Empire in Victorian Britain: A Reader (2001); A. N. Wilson, The Victorians (2002). NeoVictorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century (2011) Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, eds., includes discussions of recent literary and cinematic interest in the Victorian era. On Victorian attitudes to love and sexuality, see Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud (Vol. 1, Education of the Senses, 1984; Vol. 2, The Tender Passion, 1986); and on the undercover aspect of Victorian sexual life, Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians (republished 1974).

stylists

Since the 1950s the term "stylistics" has been applied to critical procedures which undertake to replace what is claimed to be the subjectivity and impressionism of standard analyses with an "objective" or "scientific" analysis of the style of literary texts. Much of the impetus toward these analytic methods, as well as models for their practical application, was provided by the writings of Roman Jakobson and other Russian formalists, as well as by European structuralists. We can distinguish two main modes of stylistics, which differ both in conception and in the scope of their application: 1. In the narrower mode of formal stylistics, style is identified, in the traditional way, by the distinction between what is said and how it is said, or between the content and the form of a text. (See style.) The content is now often denoted, however, by terms such as "information," "message," or "propositional meaning," while the style is defined as variations in the presentation of this information that serve to alter its "aesthetic quality" or the reader's emotional response. The concepts of modern linguistics are used to identify the stylistic features, or "formal properties," which are held to be distinctive of a particular work, or else of an author, a literary tradition, or an era. These stylistic features may be phonological (patterns of speech sounds, meter, or rhyme), or syntactic (types of sentence structure), or lexical (abstract vs. concrete words, the relative frequency of nouns, verbs, adjectives), or rhetorical (the characteristic use of figurative language, imagery, and so on). A basic problem, acknowledged by a number of stylisticians, is to distinguish between the innumerable features and patterns of a text which can be isolated by linguistic analysis, and those features which are functionally stylistic—that is, features which make an actual difference in the aesthetic and other effects on a competent reader. See, for example, Michael Riffaterre's objection to the elaborate stylistic analysis of Charles Baudelaire's sonnet "Les Chats" (The Cats) by Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss, in Structuralism, ed. Jacques Ehrmann (1966). Stylisticians who aim to either replace or supplement the qualitative judgments of literary scholars by objectively determinable methods of research exploit the ever-increasing technological resources of computers in the service of what has come to be called stylometry: the quantitative measurement of the features of an individual writer's style. Literary and Linguistic Computing is a journal devoted to the use of computers in literary studies. See also B. H. Rudall and T. N. Corns, Computers and Literature: A Practical Guide (1987). Other analysts of style who use nonquantitative methods adopt concepts derived from language theory, such as the distinction between paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations, or the distinction between surface structure and deep structure in transformational linguistics, or the distinction between the propositional content and the illocutionary force of an utterance in speech-act theory. For a stylistic analysis of the ways a character's speech and thought are represented in narratives, refer to free indirect discourse, under point of view. Sometimes the stylistic enterprise stops with the qualitative or quantitative determination, or "fingerprinting," of the style of a single text or class of texts. Often, however, the analyst tries also to relate distinctive stylistic features to traits in an author's psyche; or to an author's characteristic ways of perceiving the world and organizing experience (see Leo Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History, 1948); or to the typical conceptual frame and the attitude toward reality in an historical era (Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, reissued 2003); or else to semantic, aesthetic, and emotional functions and effects in a particular literary text (Michael Riffaterre and others). Stanley Fish wrote a sharp critique of the scientific pretensions of formal stylistics; he proposed that since, in his view, the meaning of a text consists of a reader's total response to it, there is no valid way to make a distinction in this spectrum of response between style and content ("What Is Stylistics and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things about It?" in Is There a Text in This Class? 1980; see also reader-response criticism). In Clear and Simple as the Truth (1994), Francis-Nöel Thomas and Mark Turner claim that standard stylistic analyses concern merely the surface features of writing, and propose a set of more basic features by which to define styles of writing; see under style. On the other side, the validity of distinguishing between style and propositional meaning—not absolutely, but on an appropriate level of analysis—is defended by E. D. Hirsch, "Stylistics and Synonymity," in The Aims of Interpretation (1976). 2. In the second mode of stylistics, which became prominent in the mid1960s, proponents greatly expanded the conception and scope of their inquiry by defining stylistics as, in the words of one theorist, "the study of the use of language in literature," involving the entire range of the "general characteristics of language ... as a medium of literary expression." (Geoffrey N. Leech, A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry, 1969.) By this definition, stylistics is expanded so as to incorporate most of the concerns of both traditional literary criticism and traditional rhetoric; its distinction from these earlier pursuits is that it insists on the need to be objective by focusing sharply on the text itself and by setting out to discover the "rules" governing the process by which linguistic elements and patterns in a text accomplish their meanings and literary effects. The historian of criticism René Wellek has described this tendency of stylistic analysis to enlarge its territorial domain as "the imperialism of modern stylistics." A comprehensive anthology is The Stylistics Reader from Roman Jakobson to the Present, ed. Jean Jacques Weber (1996). On formal stylistics see Thomas A. Sebeok, ed., Style in Language (1960); Seymour Chatman, ed., Literary Style: A Symposium (1971). In the practice of some critics, stylistics includes the area of study known as discourse analysis, which is treated in a separate entry in this Glossary. For inclusive views of the realm of stylistics, see M. A. K. Halliday, Explorations in the Functions of Language (1973); G. N. Leech and M. H. Short, Style in Fiction (1981); Roger Fowler, Linguistic Criticism (1986); Ronald Carter and Paul Simpson, eds., Language, Discourse and Literature: An Introductory Reader in Discourse Stylistics (1989).

stock characters

Stock characters are types of persons that occur repeatedly in a particular literary genre, and so are recognizable as part of the conventions of the form. The Old Comedy of the Greeks had three stock characters whose interactions constituted the standard plot: the alazon, or impostor and self-deceiving braggart; the eiron, or self-derogatory and understating character, whose contest with the alazon is central to the comic plot; and the bomolochos, or buffoon, whose antics add an extra comic element. (See Lane Cooper, An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy, 1922.) In his Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Northrop Frye revived these old terms, added a fourth, the agroikos—the rustic or easily deceived character—and identified the persistence of these types (very broadly defined) in comic plots up to our own time. The Italian commedia dell'arte revolved around such stock characters as Pulcinella and Pantaloon; see commedia dell'arte. The plot of an Elizabethan romantic comedy, such as Shakespeare's As You Like It and Twelfth Night, often turned on a heroine disguised as a handsome young man; and a stock figure in the Elizabethan comedy of intrigue was the clever servant who, like Mosca in Ben Jonson's Volpone, connives with his master to fleece another stock character, the stupid gull. Nineteenth-century comedy, on stage and in fiction, exploited the stock Englishman with a monocle, an exaggerated Oxford accent, and a defective sense of humor. Western stories and films generated the tight-lipped sheriff who lets his gun do the talking; while a familiar figure in more modern fiction was the stoical Hemingway hero, unillusioned but faithful to his primal code of honor and loyalty in a civilization grown effete and corrupt. The Beat or hipster or alienated protagonist who, with or without the help of drugs, has opted out of the establishment, was a stock figure in fiction of the 1950s. In some literary forms, such as the morality play and Ben Jonson's comedy of humours, the artistic aim does not require more than type characters. (See also flat character, under character and characterization.) But even in realistic literary forms, the artistic success of a protagonist does not depend on whether or not an author incorporates an established type but on how well the type is re-created as a convincing individual who fulfills his or her function in the overall plot. Two of Shakespeare's greatest characters are patently conventional. Falstaff is in part a re-rendering of the Vice, the comic tempter of the medieval morality play, and in part of the familiar braggart soldier, or miles gloriosus, of Roman and Renaissance comedy, whose ancestry goes back to the Greek alazon; and Hamlet combines some stock attributes of the hero of Elizabethan revenge tragedies with those of the Elizabethan melancholic man. Jane Austen's delightful Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (1813) can be traced back through Restoration comedy to the type of intelligent, witty, and dauntless heroines that enliven Shakespeare's romantic comedies.

tragedy

The term is broadly applied to literary, and especially to dramatic, representations of serious actions which eventuate in a disastrous conclusion for the protagonist (the chief character). More precise and detailed discussions of the tragic form properly begin—although they should not end—with Aristotle's classic analysis in the Poetics (fourth century BC). Aristotle based his theory by reference to the only examples available to him, the tragedies of Greek dramatists such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. In the subsequent two thousand years and more, various new types of serious plots ending in a catastrophe have been developed—types that Aristotle had no way of foreseeing. The many attempts to stretch Aristotle's analysis to apply to later tragic forms serve merely to blur his critical categories and to obscure important differences among a diversity of plays, all of which have proved to be dramatically effective. When flexibly managed, however, Aristotle's discussions apply in some part to many tragic plots, and his analytic concepts serve as a suggestive starting point for identifying the distinctive attributes of various non-Aristotelian modes of tragic construction. Aristotle defined tragedy as "the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself," in the medium of poetic language and in the manner of dramatic rather than of narrative presentation, involving "incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish the catharsis of such emotions." (See imitation; and for an enlightening discussion of the emotions of pity and fear, refer to Martha C. Nussbaum, "Tragedy and Self-Sufficiency: Plato and Aristotle on Fear and Pity," Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Vol. 10, 1992, pp. 107-59.) Precisely how to interpret Aristotle's catharsis—which in Greek signifies "purgation," or "purification," or both—is much disputed. On two matters, however, many commentators agree. Aristotle in the first place sets out to account for the undeniable, though remarkable, fact that many tragic representations of suffering and defeat leave an audience feeling not depressed but relieved, or even exalted. In the second place, Aristotle uses this distinctive effect on the reader, which he calls "the pleasure of pity and fear," as the basic way to distinguish the tragic from comic or other forms, and he regards the dramatist's aim to produce this effect in the highest degree as the principle that determines the choice and moral qualities of the tragic protagonist and the organization of the tragic plot. Accordingly, Aristotle says that the tragic hero will most effectively evoke both our pity and terror if he is neither thoroughly good nor thoroughly bad but a mixture of both, and also that this tragic effect will be stronger if the hero is "better than we are," in the sense that he is of higher than ordinary moral worth. Such a man is exhibited as suffering a change in fortune from happiness to misery because of his mistaken choice of an action, to which he is led by his hamartia—his "error" or "mistake of judgment" or, as it is often, although misleadingly and less literally translated, his tragic flaw. (One common form of hamartia in Greek tragedies was hubris, that "pride" or overweening self-confidence which leads a protagonist to disregard a divine warning or to violate an important moral law.) The tragic hero, like Oedipus in Sophocles' Oedipus the King, moves us to pity because, since he is not an evil man, his misfortune is greater than he deserves; but he moves us also to fear because we recognize similar possibilities of error in our own lesser and fallible selves. Aristotle grounds his analysis of "the very structure and incidents of the play" on the same principle; the plot, he says, which will most effectively evoke "tragic pity and fear" is one in which the events develop through complication to a catastrophe in which there occurs (often by an anagnorisis, or discovery of facts hitherto unknown to the hero) a sudden peripeteia, or reversal in his fortune from happiness to disaster. (See plot.) Authors in the Middle Ages lacked direct knowledge either of classical tragedies or of Aristotle's Poetics. Medieval tragedies are simply the story of a person of high status who, whether deservedly or not, is brought from prosperity to wretchedness by an unpredictable turn of the wheel of fortune. The short narratives in "The Monk's Tale" of The Canterbury Tales (late fourteenth century) are all, in Chaucer's own term, "tragedies" of this kind. With the Elizabethan era came both the beginning and the acme of dramatic tragedy in England. The tragedies of this period owed much to the native religious drama, the miracle and morality plays, which had developed independently of classical influence, but with a crucial contribution from the Roman writer Seneca (first century), whose dramas got to be widely known earlier than those of the Greek tragedians. Senecan tragedy was written to be recited rather than acted; but to English playwrights, who thought that these tragedies had been intended for the stage, they provided the model for an organized five-act play with a complex plot and an elaborately formal style of dialogue. Senecan drama, in the Elizabethan Age, had two main lines of development. One of these consisted of academic tragedies written in close imitation of the Senecan model, including the use of a chorus, and usually constructed according to the rules of the three unities, which had been elaborated by Italian critics of the sixteenth century; the earliest English example was Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton's Gorboduc (1562). The other and much more important development was written for the popular stage and is called the revenge tragedy, or (in its most sensational form) the tragedy of blood. This type of play derived from Seneca's favorite materials of murder, revenge, ghosts, mutilation, and carnage, but while Seneca had relegated such matters to long reports of offstage actions by messengers, Elizabethan dramatists usually represented them on stage to satisfy the appetite of the contemporary audience for violence and horror. Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (1586) established this popular form; its subject is a murder and the quest for vengeance, and it includes a ghost, insanity, suicide, a play-within-a-play, sensational incidents, and a gruesomely bloody ending. Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta (c. 1592) and Shakespeare's early play Titus Andronicus (c. 1590) are in this mode; and from this lively but unlikely prototype came one of the greatest of tragedies, Hamlet, as well as John Webster's fine horror plays of 1612-13, The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil. Many major tragedies in the flowering time between 1585 and 1625, by Marlowe, Shakespeare, George Chapman, Webster, Sir Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, and Philip Massinger, deviate radically from the Aristotelian norm. Shakespeare's Othello is one of the few plays which accords closely with Aristotle's basic concepts of the tragic hero and plot. The hero of Macbeth, however, is not a good man who commits a tragic error but an ambitious man who knowingly turns great gifts to evil purposes and therefore, although he retains something of our sympathy by his courage and self-insight, deserves his destruction at the hands of his morally superior antagonists. Shakespeare's Richard III presents first the success, then the ruin, of a protagonist who is thoroughly malign, yet arouses in us a reluctant admiration by his intelligence and imaginative power and by the shameless candor with which he glories in his ambition and malice. Most Shakespearean tragedies, like Elizabethan tragedies generally, also depart radically from Aristotle's paradigm by introducing humorous characters, incidents, or scenes, called comic relief, which were in various ways and degrees made relevant to the tragic plot and conducive to enriching the tragic effect. There developed also in this age the mixed mode called tragicomedy, a popular non-Aristotelian form which produced a number of artistic successes. And later in the seventeenth century the Restoration Period produced the curious genre, a cross between epic and tragedy, called heroic tragedy. Until the close of the seventeenth century almost all tragedies were written in verse and had as protagonists men of high rank whose fate affected the fortunes of a state. A few minor Elizabethan tragedies, such as A Yorkshire Tragedy (of uncertain authorship), had as the chief character a man of the lower class, but it remained for eighteenth-century writers to popularize the bourgeois or domestic tragedy, which was written in prose and presented a protagonist from the middle or lower social ranks who suffers a commonplace or domestic disaster. George Lillo's The London Merchant: or, The History of George Barnwell (1731)—about a merchant's apprentice who succumbs to a heartless courtesan and comes to a bad end by robbing his employer and murdering his uncle—is still read, at least in college courses. Since that time most of the successful tragedies have been in prose and represent middle-class, or occasionally even working-class, heroes and heroines. The great and highly influential Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen wrote in the latter part of the nineteenth century tragedies in prose, many of which (such as A Doll's House, Ghosts, and An Enemy of the People) revolve around an issue of general social or political significance. (See problem play.) One of the more notable modern tragedies, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949), relies for its tragic seriousness on the degree to which Willy Loman, in his bewildered defeat by life, is representative of the ordinary man whose aspirations reflect the false values of a commercial society; the effect on the audience is one of compassionate understanding rather than of tragic pity and terror. The protagonists of some modern tragedies are not heroic but antiheroic, in that they manifest a character that is at an extreme from the dignity and courage of the protagonists in traditional dramas (see antihero); while in some modern works, tragic effects involve elements that were once specific to the genre of farce (see literature of the absurd and black comedy). Tragedy since World War I has also been innovative in other ways, including experimentation with new versions of ancient tragic forms. Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), for example, is an adaptation of Aeschylus' Oresteia, with the locale shifted from Greece to New England, the poetry altered to what is for the most part rather flat prose, and the tragedy of fate converted into a tragedy of the psychological compulsions of a family trapped in a tangle of Freudian complexes (see psychoanalysis). T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral (1935) is a tragic drama which, like Greek tragedy, is written in verse and has a chorus, but it also incorporates elements of two early Christian forms, the medieval miracle play (dealing with the martyrdom of a saint) and the medieval morality play. A tendency associated with the new historicism has been to interpret traditional tragedies primarily in political terms, as incorporating in the problems and catastrophe of the tragic individual an indirect representation of contemporary social or ideological dilemmas and crises. See Froma I. Zeitlin and John J. Winkler, eds., Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context (1990), and Linda Kintz, The Subject's Tragedy: Political Poetics, Feminist Theory, and Drama (1992). See genre, and refer to A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904); H. D. F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy (rev. 1954); Elder Olson, Tragedy and the Theory of Drama (1961); George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (1961); and Adrian Poole, Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction (2005). For other theoretical treatments of tragedy, see Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare (1982); and Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (1985). Richard H. Palmer, Tragedy and Tragic Theory: An Analytical Guide (1992), is a useful survey of contested issues in the theory and criticism of tragedy, with many quotations by theorists from the ancient Greeks to the present. For references to tragedy in other entries, see pages 334, 408. See also heroic drama; tragic irony; tragicomedy.

utopias and dystopias

The term utopia designates the class of fictional writings that represent an ideal, nonexistent political and social way of life. It derives from Utopia (1515-16), a book written in Latin by the Renaissance humanist Sir Thomas More, which describes a perfect commonwealth; More formed his title by conflating the Greek words "eutopia" (good place) and "outopia" (no place). The first and greatest instance of the literary type was Plato's Republic (later fourth century BC), which sets forth, in dialogue, the eternal Idea, or Form, of a perfect commonwealth that can at best be merely approximated by political organizations in the actual world. Most of the later utopias, like that of Sir Thomas More, represent their ideal state in the fiction of a distant country reached by a venturesome traveler. There have been many utopias written since More gave impetus to the genre, some as mere Arcadian dreams, others intended as blueprints for social and technological improvements in the actual world. They include Tommaso Campanella's City of the Sun (1623), Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (1627), Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), William Morris' News from Nowhere (1891), Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915), and James Hilton's Lost Horizon (1934). The utopia can be distinguished from literary representations of imaginary places which, because they are either inordinately superior to the present world or manifest exaggerated versions of some of its unsavory aspects, serve primarily as vehicles for satire on contemporary human life and society; notable examples are the fourth book of Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) and Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872). Samuel Johnson's Rasselas (1759) presents the "Happy Valley," which functions as a gentle satire on humanity's stubborn but hopeless dream of a utopia. Not only does Rasselas discover that no mode of life available in this world guarantees happiness; he also realizes that the utopian satisfaction of all human wishes in the Happy Valley merely replaces the unhappiness of frustrated desires with the unhappiness of boredom; see chapters 1-3. The term dystopia ("bad place") has come to be applied to works of fiction, including science fiction, that represent a very unpleasant imaginary world in which ominous tendencies of our present social, political, and technological order are projected into a disastrous future culmination. Examples are Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1986). Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), set in a bleak, postnuclear landscape, represents a dystopian extreme. Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974) contains both utopian and dystopian scenarios. For utopias and dystopias based on future developments in science and technology, see science fiction. Refer to Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (1934); Chad Walsh, From Utopia to Nightmare (1962); Nell Eurich, Science in Utopia (1967); Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (1979). For collections of Utopian writings, see Utopian Literature: A Selection, ed. J. W. Johnson (1968), and The Utopia Reader, eds. Gregory Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent (1999). Francis Bartkowski has analyzed Feminist Utopias (1989), from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915) to the present.

Satire

"Satire" can be described as the literary art of diminishing or derogating a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking toward it attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn, or indignation. It differs from the comic in that comedy evokes laughter mainly as an end in itself, while satire derides; that is, it uses laughter as a weapon, and against a butt that exists outside the work itself. That butt may be an individual (in "personal satire"), a type of person, a class, an institution, a nation, or even (as in the Earl of Rochester's "A Satyr against Mankind," 1675, and much of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, 1726, especially Book IV) the entire human race. The distinction between the comic and the satiric, however, is sharp only at its extremes. Shakespeare's Falstaff is mainly a comic creation, presented primarily for our enjoyment; the puritanical Malvolio in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night is for the most part comic but has aspects of satire directed against the type of the fatuous and hypocritical Puritan; Ben Jonson's Volpone (1607) clearly satirizes the type of person whose cleverness—or stupidity—is put at the service of his cupidity; and John Dryden's MacFlecknoe (1682), while representing a permanent type of the pretentious poetaster, satirized specifically the living author Thomas Shadwell. Satire has usually been justified, by those who practice it, as a corrective of human vice and folly; Alexander Pope, for example, remarked that "those who are ashamed of nothing else are so of being ridiculous." Its frequent claim (not always borne out in the practice) has been to ridicule the failing rather than the individual and to limit its ridicule to corrigible faults, excluding those for which a person is not responsible. As Swift said, speaking of himself in his ironic "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift" (1739). Satire occurs as an incidental element within many works whose overall mode is not satiric—in a certain character or situation, or in an interpolated passage of ironic commentary on some aspect of the human condition or of contemporary society. But for some literary writings, verse or prose, the attempt to diminish a subject by ridicule is the organizing principle of the whole, and these works constitute the formal genre labeled "satires."

Sentimentalism

"Sentimentalism" is now a derogatory term applied to what is perceived to be an excess of emotion to an occasion, and especially to an overindulgence in the "tender" emotions of pathos and sympathy. Since what constitutes emotional excess or overindulgence is relative both to the judgment of the individual and to large-scale historical changes in culture and in literary fashion, what to the common reader of one age is a normal and laudable expression of humane feeling may seem sentimental to many later readers. The emotional responses of a lover that Shelley expresses and tries to evoke from the reader in his "Epipsychidion" (1821) seemed sentimental to the New Critics of the 1930s and later, who insisted on the need for an ironic counterpoise to intense feeling in poetry. Most readers now find both the drama of sensibility and the novel of sensibility of the eighteenth century ludicrously sentimental, and respond with jeers instead of tears to once celebrated episodes of pathos, such as many of the death scenes, especially those of children, in some Victorian novels and dramas. A staple in current anthologies of bad poetry are sentimental poems which were doubtless written, and by some people read, with deep and sincere feeling. A useful distinction between sentimental and nonsentimental is one which does not depend on the intensity and type of the feeling expressed or evoked, but labels as sentimental a work or passage in which the feeling is rendered in commonplaces and clichés, instead of being freshly verbalized and sharply realized in the details of the representation.

Socialist Realism

"Socialist Realism" was a term used by Marxist critics for novels which, they claimed, reflected social reality—that is, novels that accorded with the Marxist view that the struggle between economic classes is the essential dynamic of society. After the 1930s, Socialist Realism was the officially sanctioned artistic mode for communist writers until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. In its crude version, it served as a term of approval for novels that adhered to the party line by stressing the oppression of workers by bourgeois capitalists, the virtues of the proletariat, and the felicities of life under a communist regime. A flexible Marxist critic such as Georg Lukács, on the other hand, applied complex criteria of narrative realism to analyze and laud the traditional classics of European realistic fiction.

stock situations

"Stock situations" are the counterparts to stock characters; that is, they are recurrent types of incidents or of sequences of actions in a drama or narrative. Instances range from single situations or events—the eavesdropper who is hidden behind a bush or in a closet, or the suddenly discovered will or birthmark—to the overall pattern of a plot. The Horatio Alger books for boys, in mid-nineteenth-century America, were all variations on the stock plot of rags-to-riches-by-pluck-and-luck, and we recognize the standard boymeets-girl incident in the opening episode of much popular fiction and in many motion pictures. It has been argued that certain recurrent character types and elements of plot, such as the sexually irresistible but fatal enchantress, the sacrificial scapegoat, and the underground journey constitute "archetypal" components that recur not simply because they are functional literary conventions but because, like some dreams and myths, they express and appeal to universal human impulses, anxieties, and needs. See archetype, and for structuralist analyses of recurrent plot types, narrative and narratology.

Style

"Style" has traditionally been defined as the manner of linguistic expression in prose or verse—as how speakers or writers say whatever it is that they say. The style specific to a particular work or writer, or else distinctive of a type of writings, has been analyzed in such diverse terms as the rhetorical situation and aim (see rhetoric); the characteristic diction, or choice of words; the type of sentence structure and syntax; and the density and kinds of figurative language

Synesthesia

"Synesthesia," in psychology, signifies the experience of two or more modes of sensation when only one sense is being stimulated. In literature, the term is applied to descriptions of one mode of sensation in terms of another; color is attributed to sounds, odor to colors, sound to odors, and so on. We often, for example, speak of loud colors, bright sounds, and sweet music. A complex literary instance of synesthesia (which is sometimes also called "sense transference" or "sense analogy") is this passage from Shelley's "The Sensitive Plant" (1820): And the hyacinth purple, and white, and blue, Which flung from its bells a sweet peal anew Of music so delicate, soft, and intense, It was felt like an odor within the sense. The varicolored, bell-shaped flowers of the hyacinth send out a peal of music which effects a sensation as though it were (what in fact it is) the scent of the flowers. Keats, in the "Ode to a Nightingale" (1819), calls for a draught of wine Tasting of Flora and the country green, Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth; that is, he calls for a drink tasting of sight, color, motion, sound, and heat. Occasional uses of synesthetic imagery have been made by poets ever since Homer. Such imagery became much more frequent in the Romantic Period and was especially exploited by the French Symbolists of the middle and later nineteenth century; see Baudelaire's sonnet "Correspondences," and Rimbaud's sonnet on the color of vowel sounds "A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue." Refer to the detailed analyses of literary synesthesia in Richard H. Fogel, The Imagery of Keats and Shelley (1949), chapter 3; also Simon Baron-Cohen, Synaesthesia: Classic and Contemporary Readings (1996); and John E. Harrison, Synaesthesia: The Strangest Thing (2001).

tension

"Tension" became a common descriptive and evaluative word in the criticism of the 1930s and later, especially after Allen Tate, one of the New Critics, proposed it as a term to be made by "lopping the prefixes off the logical terms extension and intension." In technical logic the "intension" of a word is the set of abstract attributes which must be possessed by any object to which the word can be literally applied, and the "extension" of a word is the class of concrete objects to which the word applies. The meaning of good poetry, according to Tate, "is its 'tension,' the full organized body of all the extension and intension that we can find in it." ("Tension in Poetry," 1938, in On the Limits of Poetry, 1948.) It would seem that by this statement Tate meant that a good poem incorporates both the abstract and the concrete, the general idea and the particular image, in an integral whole. See concrete and abstract. Other critics use "tension" to characterize poetry that manifests an equilibrium of the serious and the ironic, or "a pattern of resolved stresses," or a harmony of opponent tendencies, or any other mode of that stability-inopposition which was the favorite way in the New Criticism for conceiving the organization of a good poem. And some critics, dubious perhaps about the validity of Tate's logical derivation of the term, simply apply "tension" to any poem in which the elements seem tightly rather than loosely interrelated.

textual criticism

"Textual criticism" expounds the principles and procedures that will establish and validate the text of a literary or other work that an editor prepares and publishes. The theory and practice of textual criticism goes back many centuries. It was applied at first to biblical and classical texts, of which all the surviving manuscripts had been written (and often altered, deliberately or inadvertently) by scribes long after the death of the original writers. Later, textual criticism was adapted to apply to the early era of the printed book, then to later times when editors had access to diverse editions of a printed text, and sometimes to differing manuscripts written by the authors themselves, as well as differing transcripts of such manuscripts by various people. (See book editions and book format.) The ruling principle, whether explicit or tacit, of most modern textual criticism has been that the invariable task of a scholarly editor is to establish, from all the available evidences in manuscript and print, the text that as nearly as possible conforms to the text originally composed by its author. In the mid-twentieth century, most scholarly editors subscribed to the principles of the copy-text, as propounded in a highly influential paper by the English bibliographer W. W. Greg. Greg formulated his views mainly with reference to editing Shakespeare and other Renaissance authors, but the principles he proposed were soon expanded and modified by Fredson Bowers and others to apply also to later authors and modes of publication and transmission. The Greg-Bowers theory (as it is often called) proposed, as the goal of a scholarly edition, to establish a single "authoritative" or "definitive" text that represented the "final intentions" of the author at the conclusion of his or her process of composing and revising a work. Editors choose, as the "copy-text," that one of the existing texts judged to be closest to what the author wrote or intended to write; usually the copy-text is the earliest printed edition of a work (or in some cases, the author's written manuscript of a work), since this is considered to be closest to the author's own intentions. This base-text is emended by the editor to eliminate what are judged to be inadvertent errors made by the author in writing out his composition, and also to delete intrusive "substantive" changes (changes in wording) that are judged to have been introduced by other people without the author's "authorization." (Such nonauthorial intrusions and changes in the words of a text, by copy editors, printers, and others, are often labeled "corruptions" or "contaminations" of the original text.) The copy-text is further emended to include any later deletions or additions that the editor judges, from the available evidence, to have been introduced or authorized by the author himself or herself, and that therefore may be assumed to embody the author's "final intentions." The resulting published document (often with copious editorial footnotes and other materials to identify all these emendations and to record the textual "variants" that the editor has rejected) is known as an eclectic text, in that it accords with no single existing model but is constructed by fitting together materials from a variety of texts—materials that are sometimes supplemented by the editor's own conjectures. Beginning in the late 1920s, two developments helped to bring the copytext theory under increasing scrutiny and objection. One was the appearance of scholarly publications that made available a multitude of diverse forms of a single literary work, in drafts, manuscripts, transcriptions (sometimes with changes and insertions) by family and friends, and corrected proof sheets, even before the poem was originally published. The many volumes of the Cornell Wordsworth, for example, begun in 1975 under the general editorship of Stephen Parrish, record all such variants; for a number of Wordsworth's writings, they also print "reading copies" of the full text at sequential stages in the author's composition and revision of a single work. There are being printed also a number of texts from manuscripts that are versions of works by novelists that were rejected by the author, or radically revised before the final text was published. An early example was Stephen Hero, published in 1944, part of the first draft of A Portrait of the Artist, which James Joyce had published thirty years earlier; other examples are uncut versions from manuscripts of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel, and Richard Wright's Native Son. Herman Melville's Billy Budd exists only in this form, for it was left unfinished at his death, and later editors have had not only to organize the text and present it in coherent form but to determine what counts as "the text" in the first place. Another development was the poststructural climate of critical opinion, which brought into radical question the centrality of the "subject," or author, and denied the validity of appealing to the intention of a writer as determinative of text or meaning. A number of poststructural theorists also stressed the role of social factors in "constructing" the meanings of a text, or emphasized the variability in the reception and interpretation of a text over time. (See author and authorship, poststructuralism, and reception theory.) Scholarly endeavors at a single, eclectic, and definitive text of a literary work are now often derogated as resulting in an "ideal" text that never in fact existed, and is apt to incorporate the inclinations of the editor, labeled as the intentions of the author. In a Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983, reissued 1992), Jerome McGann expounded his social theory of textual criticism, in which he attributes "textual authority" to the cumulative social history of the work, including the contributions not only of the author but also of the editor, publisher, printer, and all others who have cooperated in bringing into being and producing a book that is made available to the public; all these components, in McGann's view, are valid determinants of a text and its meanings, considered as social constructions. (See social constructs, under new historicism, and book history studies.) In later writings, McGann has stressed also the material features of a book—including its typography, paper, format, and even pricing and advertising—as cooperative with its verbal element in generating its total cultural significance. (See McGann, The Textual Condition, 1991; refer also to D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and Sociology of Texts, 1986.) Attempts to edit by reference to an author's final intentions have been brought into further question by the view that most published works are in fact products of multiple authorship. See Jack Stillinger's Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (1991), which demonstrates by many examples that the printed text of a work is typically the joint product of a number of participants, including friends, family members, transcribers, literary agents, editors, and printers, in addition to the person who is ordinarily considered to be its sole author. Despite such critiques, the Greg-Bowers copy-text theory has continued to be defended and applied, although with various modifications, by a number of scholars, most prominently by G. Thomas Tanselle (see his A Rationale of Textual Criticism, 1989). Many editors now subscribe to some form of a theory of textual versions, of which an early exponent was James Thorpe in Principles of Textual Criticism (1972). The growing consensus is that the composition of a literary work is a continuous process without a fixed terminus or perfected state, and that each existing stage, or "version," of the process, whether in manuscript or print, has an equal right to be regarded as a product intended by the author at its particular time. A scholarly editor ought, therefore, to give up the hopeless aim to achieve a single definitive master text of a literary work. Instead, the editor should select and edit that textual "version" of a work that accords with the circumstances of the particular case, and also according to whether the editor's purpose is to approximate what the author wrote, or else to reproduce the printed text, however it came about, as it existed for its readers when it was first published. For a concise survey of the history of textual theory and criticism, see D. C. Greetham, Textual Scholarship: An Introduction (1992). Greetham has also edited, for the Modern Language Association of America, Scholarly Editing: A Guide to Research (1995), which includes a survey, written by specialists, of the history and types of scholarly editing applied to classical literature, the Bible, and a number of foreign literatures, as well as to the various periods of English literature. See also, in addition to works cited above, Fredson Bowers, Bibliography and Textual Criticism (1964); W. W. Greg, "The Rationale for Copy-Text," reprinted in his Collected Papers, ed. J. C. Maxwell (1966); and for subsequent developments, Donald H. Reiman, Romantic Texts and Contexts (1982); Gary Taylor and Michael Warren, eds., The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare's Two Versions of "King Lear" (1983); George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams, eds., Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities (1993). Walter Gabler describes briefly current modes of German and French textual theory and procedures in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, eds. Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth (1994).

Figures of speech

"figures of speech" which depart from what is experienced by competent users as the standard, or "literal," use of language mainly by the arrangement of their words to achieve special effects, and not, like metaphors and other tropes, by a radical change in the meaning of the words themselves. To achieve the maximum of concentrated verbal effects within the tight limits of the closed couplet, Pope in the early eighteenth century exploited all the language patterns described in this entry with supreme virtuosity. He is an English master of the rhetorical figures, as Shakespeare is of tropes.

Stanza

A "stanza" (Italian for "stopping place") is a grouping of the verse lines in a poem, often set off by a space in the printed text. Usually the stanzas of a given poem are marked by a recurrent pattern of rhyme and are also uniform in the number and lengths of the component lines. Some unrhymed poems, however, are divided into stanzaic units (for example, William Collins' "Ode to Evening," 1747), and some rhymed poems are composed of stanzas that vary in their component lines (for example, the irregular ode). Of the great diversity of English stanza forms, many lack specific names and must be described by specifying the number of lines, the type and number of metric feet in each line, and the pattern of the rhyme. Certain stanzas, however, are used so often that they have been given the convenience of a name.

surrealism

("superrealism"): Surrealism was launched as a concerted artistic movement in France by André Breton's Manifesto on Surrealism (1924). It was a successor to the brief movement known as Dadaism, which emerged in 1916 out of disgust with the brutality and destructiveness of the First World War, and set out, according to its manifestos, to engender a negative art and literature that would shock and bewilder observers and serve to destroy the false values of modern bourgeois society, including its rationality and the kind of art and literature that rationality had fostered. Among the exponents of Dadaism were, for a time, artists and writers such as Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Max Ernst. The expressed aim of surrealism was a revolt against all restraints on free creativity, including logical reason, standard morality, social and artistic conventions and norms, and all control over the artistic process by forethought and intention. To ensure the unhampered operation of the "deep mind," which they regarded as the only source of valid knowledge as well as art, surrealists turned to automatic writing (writing delivered over to the promptings of the unconscious mind), and to exploiting the material of dreams, of states of mind between sleep and waking, and of natural or drug-induced hallucinations. Surrealism was a revolutionary movement in painting, sculpture, and the other arts, as well as literature; and it often joined forces, although briefly, with one or another revolutionary movement in the political and social realm. The effects of surrealism extended far beyond the small group of its professed adherents such as André Breton, Louis Aragon, and the painter Salvador Dali. The influence, direct or indirect, of surrealist innovations can be found in many modern writers of prose and verse who have broken with conventional modes of artistic organization to experiment with free association, a broken syntax, nonlogical and nonchronological order, dreamlike and nightmarish sequences, and the juxtaposition of bizarre, shocking, or seemingly unrelated images. In England and America, such effects can be found in a wide range of writings, from the poetry of Dylan Thomas to the flights of fantasy, hallucinative writing, startling inconsequences, and black humor in the novels of Henry Miller, William Burroughs, and Thomas Pynchon. For a precursor of some aspects of surrealism, see decadence; for later developments that continued some of the surrealist innovations, see literature of the absurd; antinovel; magic realism; and postmodernism. Refer to David Gascoyne, A Short Survey of Surrealism (1935); A. E. Balakian, Literary Origins of Surrealism (1947); Mary Ann Caws, The Poetry of Dada and Surrealism (1970); Paul C. Ray, The Surrealist Movement in England (1971); Maurice Nadeau, History of Surrealism (trans. 1989); Mary Ann Caws, ed., Surrealist Painters and Poets: An Anthology (2001). In Dada Turns Red (1990), Helena Lewis explores the relations between surrealists and communists from the 1920s to the 1950s. In Automatic Woman: The Representation of Women in Surrealism (1996), Katharine Conley writes a feminist analysis of the obsessive and complex concern of male surrealists with the female body, which they often represented in a distorted or dissected form; she also discusses the work of two female surrealists, Unica Zürn and Leonora Carrington.

roman à clef

(French for "novel with a key"): A work of prose fiction in which the author expects the knowing reader to identify, despite their altered names, actual people of the time. The mode was begun in seventeenth-century France with novels such as Madeleine de Scudéry's Le Grand Cyrus (1649-53). An English example is Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey (1818), whose characters are entertaining caricatures of such contemporary literary figures as Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley. A later instance is Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point (1928), which represents, under fictional names, well-known English personages of the 1920s such as the novelist D. H. Lawrence, the critic John Middleton Murry, and the right-wing political extremist Oswald Mosely.

sonnet

: A lyric poem consisting of a single stanza of fourteen iambic pentameter lines linked by an intricate rhyme scheme. (Refer to meter and rhyme.) There are two major patterns of rhyme in sonnets written in the English language: 1. The Italian or Petrarchan sonnet (named after the fourteenth-century Italian poet Petrarch) falls into two main parts: an octave (eight lines) rhyming abbaabba followed by a sestet (six lines) rhyming cdecde or some variant, such as cdccdc. Petrarch's sonnets were first imitated in England, in both their stanza form and their standard subject—the hopes and pains of an adoring male lover—by Sir Thomas Wyatt in the early sixteenth century. (See Petrarchan conceit.) The Petrarchan form was later used, for a great variety of subjects, by Milton, Wordsworth, Christina Rossetti, D. G. Rossetti, and other sonneteers, who sometimes made it technically easier in English (which does not have as many rhyming possibilities as Italian) by introducing a new pair of rhymes in the second four lines of the octave. 2. The Earl of Surrey and other English experimenters in the sixteenth century also developed a stanza form called the English sonnet, or else the Shakespearean sonnet, after its greatest practitioner. This sonnet falls into three quatrains and a concluding couplet: abab cdcd efef gg. There was a notable variant, the Spenserian sonnet, in which Spenser linked each quatrain to the next by a continuing rhyme: abab bcbc cdcd ee. John Donne shifted from the hitherto primary subject, sexual love, to a variety of religious themes in his Holy Sonnets, written early in the seventeenth century; and Milton, in the latter part of that century, expanded the range of the sonnet to other matters of serious concern. Except for a lapse in the English Neoclassic Period, the sonnet has remained a popular form to the present day and includes among its distinguished practitioners, in the nineteenth century, Wordsworth, Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and in the twentieth century, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, and Dylan Thomas. The stanza is just long enough to permit a fairly complex lyric development, yet so short, and so exigent in its rhymes, as to pose a standing challenge to the ingenuity and artistry of the poet. The rhyme pattern of the Petrarchan sonnet has on the whole favored a statement of a problem, situation, or incident in the octave, with a resolution in the sestet. The English form sometimes uses a similar division of material but often presents instead a repetition-with-variation of a statement in each of the three quatrains; in either case, the final couplet in the English sonnet usually imposes an epigrammatic turn at the end. In Drayton's fine Elizabethan sonnet in the English form "Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part," the lover brusquely declares in the first quatrain, then reiterates in the second, that he is glad that the affair is cleanly ended, then hesitates at the finality of the parting in the third quatrain, and in the concluding couplet suddenly drops his swagger to make one last plea. Here are the third quatrain and couplet:

tragicomedy

: A type of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama which intermingled the standard characters and subject matter and the typical plot forms of tragedy and comedy. Thus, the important agents in tragicomedy included both people of high degree and people of low degree, even though, according to the reigning critical theory of that time, only upper-class characters were appropriate to tragedy, while members of the middle and lower classes were the proper subject solely of comedy; see decorum. Also, tragicomedy represented a serious action which threatened a tragic disaster to the protagonist, yet, by an abrupt reversal of circumstance, turned out happily. As John Fletcher wrote in his preface to The Faithful Shepherdess (c. 1610), tragicomedy "wants [that is, lacks] deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy, which must be a representation of familiar people.... A god is as lawful in [tragicomedy] as in a tragedy, and mean [that is, middle-class] people as in a comedy." (See comedy and tragedy.) Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice is by these criteria a tragicomedy because it mingles people of the aristocracy with lower-class characters (such as the Jewish merchant Shylock and the clown Launcelot Gobbo), and also because the developing threat of death to Antonio is suddenly reversed at the end by Portia's ingenious casuistry in the trial scene. Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher in Philaster, and numerous other plays on which they collaborated from about 1606 to 1613, inaugurated a mode of tragicomedy that employs a romantic and fast-moving plot of love, jealousy, treachery, intrigue, and disguises, and ends in a melodramatic reversal of fortune for the protagonists, who had hitherto seemed headed for a tragic catastrophe. Shakespeare wrote his late plays Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale, between 1609 and 1611, in this very popular mode of the tragicomic romance. The name "tragicomedy" is sometimes also applied more loosely to plays with double plots, one serious and the other comic; see double plots, under plot. Refer to E. M. Waith, The Pattern of Tragicomedy in Beaumont and Fletcher (1952); M. T. Herrick, Tragicomedy (1955). Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope have edited a collection of essays on The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After (1992).

Short Story

A "short story" is a brief work of prose fiction, and most of the terms for analyzing the component elements, the types, and the narrative techniques of the novel are applicable to the short story as well. The short story differs from the anecdote—the unelaborated narration of a single incident—in that, like the novel, it organizes the action, thought, and dialogue of its characters into the artful pattern of a plot, directed toward particular effects on an audience. (See narrative and narratology.) And as in the novel, the plot form may be comic, tragic, romantic, or satiric; the story is presented to us from one of many available points of view; and it may be written in the mode of fantasy, realism, or naturalism.

touchstone

A "touchstone" is a hard stone used to determine, by the streak left on it when rubbed by a piece of gold, whether the metal is pure gold, and if not, the degree to which it contains an alloy. The word was introduced into literary criticism by Matthew Arnold in "The Study of Poetry" (1880) to denote short but distinctive passages, selected from the writings of the greatest poets, which he used to determine the relative value of passages or poems which are compared to them. Arnold proposed this method of evaluation as a corrective for what he called the "fallacious" estimates of poems according to their "historic" importance in the development of literature, or else according to their "personal" appeal to an individual critic. As Arnold put it: There can be no more useful help for discovering what poetry belongs to the class of the truly excellent ... than to have always in one's mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and to apply them as a touchstone to other poetry.... If we have any tact we shall find them ... an infallible touchstone for detecting the presence or absence of high poetic quality, and also the degree of this quality, in all other poetry which we may place beside them. The touchstones he proposed are passages from Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton, ranging in length from one to four lines. Two of his best-known touchstones are also the shortest: Dante's "In la sua volontade è nostra pace" ("In His will is our peace"; Paradiso, III. 85), and the close of Milton's description in Paradise Lost, IV, 271-2, of the loss to Ceres of her daughter Proserpine, "... which cost Ceres all that pain / To seek her through the world."

Couplet

A couplet is a pair of rhymed lines that are equal in length. The octosyllabic couplet has lines of eight syllables, usually consisting of four iambic feet, as in Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" (1681):

stock response

A derogatory term for a reader's reaction that is considered to be habitual and stereotyped, in place of one which is genuinely and aptly responsive to a given literary passage or text. The term is sometimes applied to the response of authors themselves to characters, situations, or topics that they set forth in a work; usually, however, it is used to describe standard and inadequate responses of the readers of the work. I. A. Richards, in his Practical Criticism (1929), chapter 5, gave currency to this term by citing and analyzing stock responses by students and other respondents who wrote critiques of unidentified poems presented for their interpretation and evaluation.

hypotactic style

A hypotactic style is one in which the temporal, causal, logical, and syntactic relations between members and sentences are specified by words (such as "when," "then," "because," "therefore") or by phrases (such as "in order to," "as a result") or by the use of subordinate phrases and clauses. The style in this Glossary is mainly hypotactic.

paratactic style

A paratactic style is one in which the members within a sentence, or else a sequence of complete sentences, are put one after the other without any expression of their connection or relations except (at most) the noncommittal connective "and." An example is the passage just quoted from Addison's Spectator. Ernest Hemingway's style is characteristically paratactic. The members in this sentence from his novel The Sun Also Rises (1926) are joined merely by "ands": "It was dim and dark and the pillars went high up, and there were people praying, and it smelt of incense, and there were some wonderful big buildings." The curt paratactic sentences in his short story "Indian Camp" omit all connectives: "The sun was coming over the hills. A bass jumped, making a circle in the water. Nick trailed his hand in the water. It felt warm in the sharp chill of the morning."

Transcendentalism in America

A philosophical and literary movement, centered in Concord and Boston, which was prominent in the intellectual and cultural life of New England from 1836 until just before the Civil War. It was inaugurated in 1836 by a Unitarian discussion group that came to be called the Transcendental Club. In the seven years or so that the group met at various houses, it included at one time or another Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Frederick Henry Hedge, W. E. Channing and W. H. Channing, Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, George Ripley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Thoreau, and Jones Very. A quarterly periodical The Dial (1840-44) printed many of the early essays, poems, and reviews by the Transcendentalists. Transcendentalism was neither a systematic nor a sharply definable philosophy, but rather an intellectual mode and emotional mood that was expressed by diverse, and in some instances rather eccentric, voices. Modern historians of the movement tend to take as its central exponents Emerson (especially in Nature, "The American Scholar," the Divinity School Address, "The Over-Soul," and "Self Reliance") and Thoreau (especially in Walden and his journals). The term "transcendental," as Emerson pointed out in his lecture "The Transcendentalist" (1841), was taken from the writings of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Kant had confined the expression "transcendental knowledge" to the cognizance of those forms and categories— such as space, time, quantity, causality—which, in his view, are imposed on whatever we perceive by the constitution of the human mind. Emerson and others, however, extended the concept of transcendental knowledge, in a way whose validity Kant had specifically denied, to include an intuitive cognizance of moral and other truths that transcend the limits of sense experience. The intellectual antecedents of American Transcendentalism, in addition to Kant, were many and diverse and included post-Kantian German Idealists, the English thinkers Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle (themselves exponents of forms of German Idealism), Plato and Neoplatonists, the occult Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, and some varieties of Asian philosophy. What the various Transcendentalists had in common was less what they proposed than what they were reacting against. By and large, they were opposed to rigid rationalism; to eighteenth-century empirical philosophy of the school of John Locke, which derived all knowledge from sense impressions; to highly formalized religion, especially the Calvinist orthodoxy of New England; and to the social conformity, materialism, and commercialism that they found increasingly dominant in American life. Among the counterviews that were affirmed by Transcendentalists, especially Emerson, were confidence in the validity of a mode of knowledge that is grounded in feeling and intuition, and a consequent tendency to accept what, to logical reasoning, might seem contradictions; an ethics of individualism that stressed self-trust, selfreliance, and self-sufficiency; a turn away from modern society, with its getting and spending, to the scenes and objects of the natural world, which were regarded both as physical entities and as correspondences to aspects of the human spirit (see correspondences); and, in place of a formal or doctrinal religion, a faith in a divine "Principle," or "Spirit," or "Soul" (Emerson's "Over-Soul") in which both humanity and the cosmos participate. This omnipresent Spirit, Emerson said, constitutes the "Unity within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other"; it manifests itself to human consciousness as influxes of inspired insights; and it is the source of the profoundest truths and the necessary condition of all moral and spiritual development. Walden (1854) records how Thoreau tested his distinctive and radically individualist version of Transcendental values by withdrawing from societal complexities and distractions to a life of solitude and self-reliance in a natural setting at Walden Pond. He simplified his material wants to those he could satisfy by the bounty of the woods and lake or could provide by his own labor, attended minutely to natural objects both for their inherent interest and as correlatives to the mind of the observer, and devoted his leisure to reading, meditation, and writing. In his nonconformity to any social and legal requirements that violated his moral sense, he chose a day in jail rather than pay his poll tax to a government that supported the Mexican War and slavery. Brook Farm, on the other hand, was a short-lived experiment (1841-47) by more community-oriented Transcendentalists who established a commune on the professed principle of the equal sharing of work, pay, and cultural benefits. Hawthorne, who lived there for a while, later wrote about Brook Farm, with considerable skepticism about both its goals and practices, in The Blithedale Romance (1852). The Transcendental movement, with its optimism about the indwelling divinity, self-sufficiency, and high potentialities of human nature, did not survive the crisis of the Civil War and its aftermath; and Herman Melville, like Nathaniel Hawthorne, satirized aspects of Transcendentalism in his fiction. Some of its basic concepts and values, however, were assimilated by Walt Whitman, were later echoed in writings by Henry James and other major American authors, and continue to re-emerge, in both liberal and radical modes, in latter-day America. The voice of Thoreau, for example, however distorted, can be recognized still in some doctrines of the counterculture of the 1960s and later. See periods of American literature, and refer to F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (1941); the anthology edited, together with commentary, by Perry Miller, The Transcendentalists (1950); Joel Porte, Emerson and Thoreau: Transcendentalists in Conflict (1966); Lawrence Buell, Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance (1973). For a collection of writings on transcendentalism, see Perry Miller, ed., Transcendentalists: An Anthology (1971), and Joel Myerson, ed., Transcendentalism: A Reader (2000). See also Encyclopedia of Transcendentalism, ed. Wesley T. Mott (1996).

stream of consciousness

A phrase used by William James in his Principles of Psychology (1890) to describe the unbroken flow of perceptions, memories, thoughts, and feelings in the waking mind; it has since been adopted to describe a narrative method in modern fiction. Long passages of introspection, in which the narrator records in detail what passes through a character's awareness, are found in novelists from Samuel Richardson, through William James' brother Henry James, to many novelists of the present era. The long chapter 42 of James' Portrait of a Lady, for example, is entirely given over to the narrator's description of the sustained process of Isabel's memories, thoughts, and varying feelings. As early as 1888, a minor French writer, Edouard Dujardin, wrote a short novel Les Lauriers sont coupés ("The Laurels Have Been Cut") which undertakes to represent the scenes and events of the story solely as they impinge upon the consciousness of the central character. As it has been refined since the 1920s, "stream of consciousness" is the name applied specifically to a mode of narration that undertakes to reproduce the full spectrum and continuous flow of a character's mental process, in which sense perceptions mingle with conscious and half-conscious thoughts, memories, expectations, feelings, and random associations. Some critics use "stream of consciousness" interchangeably with the term interior monologue. It is useful, however, to follow the usage of critics who use the former as the inclusive term, denoting all the diverse means employed by authors to communicate the total state and process of consciousness in a character. "Interior monologue" is then reserved for that species of stream of consciousness which undertakes to present to the reader the course and rhythm of consciousness precisely as it occurs in a character's mind. In interior monologue the author does not intervene, or at any rate intervenes minimally, as describer, guide, or commentator, and does not tidy the vagaries of the mental process into grammatical sentences or into a logical or coherent order. The interior monologue, in its radical form, is sometimes described as the exact presentation of the process of consciousness; but because sense perceptions, mental images, feelings, and some aspects of thought itself are nonverbal, it is clear that the author can present these elements only by converting them into some sort of verbal equivalent. Much of this conversion is a matter of narrative conventions rather than of unedited, point-for-point reproduction, and each author puts his or her own imprint on the interior monologues that are attributed to characters in the narrative. For the linguistic techniques that have been used to render the states and flow of consciousness, see Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (1978). James Joyce developed a variety of devices for stream-of-consciousness narrative in Ulysses (1922). Here is a passage of interior monologue from the "Lestrygonians" episode, in which Leopold Bloom saunters through Dublin, observing and musing: Pineapple rock, lemon platt, butter scotch. A sugar-sticky girl shoveling scoopfuls of creams for a christian brother. Some school treat. Bad for their tummies. Lozenge and comfit manufacturer to His Majesty the King. God. Save. Our. Sitting on his throne, sucking red jujubes white. Dorothy Richardson sustains a stream-of-consciousness mode of narrative, focused exclusively on the mind and perceptions of her heroine, throughout the twelve volumes of her novel Pilgrimage (1915-38); Virginia Woolf employs the procedure as a prominent, although not exclusive, narrative mode in several novels, including Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927); and William Faulkner exploits it in the first three of the four parts of The Sound and the Fury (1929).

hyperbaton

A related figure of speech is hyperbaton, which refers more generally to figures of speech in which words normally grouped together are separated, as in the opening line of Virgil's Aeneid: "Arms and the man I sing." Some examples have become so habitual in common speech that the effect of inversion is largely lost, as in "Right you are."

Soliloquy/ Aside

A related stage device is the aside, in which a character expresses to the audience his or her thought or intention in a short speech which, by convention, is inaudible to the other characters on the stage. Both devices, common in Elizabethan and later drama, were largely rejected by dramatists in the later nineteenth century, when the increasing requirement that plays convey the illusion of real life impelled writers to exploit indirect means for revealing a character's state of mind, and for conveying exposition and guidance to the audience. Eugene O'Neill, however, revived and extended the soliloquy and aside and made them basic devices throughout his play Strange Interlude (1928).

Rhetorical question

A rhetorical question is a sentence in the grammatical form of a question which is not asked in order to request information or to invite a reply but to achieve a greater expressive force than a direct assertion. In everyday discourse, for example, if we utter the rhetorical question "Isn't it a shame?" it functions as a forceful alternative to the assertion "It's a shame." (In terms of modern speechact theory, its "illocutionary force" is not to question but to assert.) The figure is often used in persuasive discourse and tends to impart an oratorical tone to an utterance, whether in prose or verse. When "fierce Thalestris" in Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock (1714) asks Belinda, Gods! Shall the ravisher display your hair, While the fops envy, and the ladies stare? she does not stay for an answer, which she obviously thinks should be "No!" (A common form of rhetorical question is one that won't take "Yes" for an answer.) Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" (1820) closes with the most famous rhetorical question in English: O, Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? This figure was a favorite of W. B. Yeats. A well-known instance is "Among School Children," which ends with the rhetorical question, "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" In this instance the poetic context indicates that the question is left hanging because it is unanswerable, posing a problem for which there is no certain solution. In a deconstructive reading of this and other examples in his Allegories of Reading (1979), Paul de Man proposed that it is impossible to decide, not only what the answer is to the question, but also whether it is or is not a question.

canto

A section of a long poem or epic is commonly known as a canto. The term is applied, for example, to Dante's Divine Comedy or Lord Byron's Don Juan. Ezra Pound signaled his epic aspirations by the title he gave his immensely long poem: The Cantos.

Style 2

A very large number of loosely descriptive terms have been used to characterize kinds of style, such as "pure," "ornate," "florid," "gay," "sober," "simple," "elaborate," and so on. Styles are also classified according to a literary period or tradition ("the metaphysical style," "Restoration prose style"); according to an influential text ("biblical style," euphuism); according to an institutional use ("a scientific style," "journalese"); or according to the distinctive practice of an individual author (the "Shakespearean" or "Miltonic style"; "Johnsonese"). Historians of English prose style, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, have distinguished between the vogue of the "Ciceronian style" named after the characteristic practice of the Roman writer Cicero), which is elaborately constructed, highly periodic, and typically builds to a climax, and the opposing vogue of the clipped, concise, pointed, and uniformly stressed sentences in the "Attic" or "Senecan" styles (named after the practice of the Roman Seneca). See George Williamson, The Senecan Amble: A Study in Prose Form from Bacon to Collier (1951), and J. M. Patrick and others, eds., Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm: Essays by Morris W. Croll (1966). Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner, in Clear and Simple as the Truth (1994), claim that standard treatments of style such as those described above deal only with the surface features of writing. They propose instead a basic analysis of style in terms of a set of fundamental decisions or assumptions by an author concerning "a series of relationships: What can be known? What can be put into words? What is the relationship between thought and language? Who is the writer addressing and why? What is the implied relationship between writer and reader? What are the implied conditions of discourse?" An analysis based on all these elements yields an indefinite number of types, or "families," of styles, each with its own criteria of excellence. The authors focus on what they call "the classic style" exemplified in writings like René Descartes' Discourse on Method (1637) or Thomas Jefferson's "Declaration of Independence" (1776), but identify and discuss briefly a number of other styles such as "plain style," "practical style," "contemplative style," and "prophetic style." For developments in the analysis of style based on modern linguistic theory and philosophy of language, see stylistics and discourse analysis. Among the more traditional theorists and analysts of style are Herbert Read, English Prose Style (1928); Bonamy Dobree, Modern Prose Style (1934); W. K. Wimsatt, The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson (1941); P. F. Baum, The Other Harmony of Prose (1952); Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (trans. 1953, reissued 2003); Josephine Miles, Eras and Modes in English Poetry (1957); Louis T. Milic, ed., Stylists on Style: A Handbook with Selections for Analysis (1969).

structuralist criticism

Almost all literary theorists beginning with Aristotle have emphasized the importance of structure, conceived in diverse ways, in analyzing a work of literature. (See form and structure.) "Structuralist criticism," however, now designates the practice of critics who analyze literature on the explicit model of structuralist linguistics. The class includes a number of Russian formalists, especially Roman Jakobson, but consists most prominently of a group of writers, with their headquarters in Paris, who applied to literature the concepts and analytic distinctions developed by Ferdinand de Saussure in his Course in General Linguistics (1915). This mode of criticism is part of a larger movement, French structuralism, inaugurated in the 1950s by the cultural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who analyzed, on the model of Saussure's linguistics, such cultural phenomena as mythology, kinship relations, and modes of preparing food. See linguistics in literary criticism. In its early form, as employed by Lévi-Strauss and other writers in the 1950s and 1960s, structuralism cuts across the traditional disciplinary areas within and between the humanities and social sciences by undertaking to provide an objective account of all social and cultural practices, in a range that includes mythical narratives, literary texts, advertisements, fashions in clothes, and patterns of social decorum. It views these practices as combinations of signs that have a set significance for the members of a particular culture, and undertakes to make explicit the rules and procedures by which the practices have achieved their cultural significance, and to specify what that significance is, by reference to an underlying system (analogous to Saussure's langue, the implicit system of a particular language) of the relationships among signifying elements and their rules of combination. The elementary cultural phenomena, like the elements of language in Saussure's exposition, are not objective facts identifiable by their inherent properties, but purely "relational" entities; that is, their identity as signs is given to them by their relationships of differences from, and binary oppositions to, other elements within the cultural system. This system of internal relationships and of "codes" that determine significant combinations has been mastered by each person competent within a given culture, although he or she remains largely unaware of its nature and operations. The primary interest of the structuralist, like that of Saussure, is not in the cultural parole but in the langue; that is, not in any particular cultural phenomenon or event except as it provides access to the structure, features, and rules of the general system that engenders its significance. As applied in literary studies, structuralist criticism conceives literature to be a second-order signifying system that uses the first-order structural system of language as its medium, and is itself to be analyzed primarily on the model of linguistic theory. Structuralist critics often apply a variety of linguistic concepts to the analysis of a literary text, such as the distinction between phonemic and morphemic levels of organization, or between paradigmatic and syntagmatic relationships; and some critics analyze the structure of a literary text on the model of the syntax in a well-formed sentence. The undertaking of a thoroughgoing literary structuralism, however, is to explain how it is that a competent reader is able to make sense of a particular literary text by specifying the underlying system of literary conventions and rules of combination that has been unconsciously mastered by such a reader. The aim of classic literary structuralism, accordingly, is not (as in New Criticism) to provide the interpretation of single texts, but to make explicit, in a quasi-scientific way, the tacit grammar (the system of rules and codes) that governs the forms and meanings of all literary productions. As Jonathan Culler put it in his lucid exposition, the aim of structuralist criticism is "to construct a poetics which stands to literature as linguistics stands to language" (Structuralist Poetics, 1975, p. 257). Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, Julia Kristeva, and Tzvetan Todorov were, at least in some part of their careers, prominent structuralist critics of literature. Structuralism is in explicit opposition to mimetic criticism (the view that literature is primarily an imitation of reality), to expressive criticism (the view that literature primarily expresses the feelings or temperament or creative imagination of its author), and to any form of the view that literature is a mode of communication between author and readers. More generally, in its attempt to develop a science of literature and in many of its salient concepts, the radical forms of structuralism depart from the assumptions and ruling ideas of traditional humanistic criticism. (See humanism.) For example: 1. In the structuralist view, what had been called a literary "work" becomes a text; that is, a mode of writing constituted by a play of internal elements according to specifically literary conventions and codes. These factors may generate an illusion of reality but have no truth-value, nor even any reference to a reality existing outside the literary system itself. 2. The individual author, or subject, is not assigned any initiative, expressive intentions, or design as the "origin" or producer of a work. Instead the conscious "self" is declared to be a construct that is itself the product of the workings of the linguistic system, and the mind of an author is described as an imputed "space" within which the impersonal, "alwaysalready" existing system of literary language, conventions, codes, and rules of combination gets precipitated into a particular text. Roland Barthes expressed, dramatically, this subversion of the traditional humanistic view, "as institution, the author is dead" ("The Death of the Author," in Image-Music-Text, trans. 1977). See author and authorship and the subject, under poststructuralism. 3. Structuralism replaces the author with the reader as the central agency in criticism; but the traditional reader, as a conscious, purposeful, and feeling individual, is replaced by the impersonal activity of "reading," and what is read is not a work imbued with meanings, but écriture, writing. The focus of structuralist criticism, accordingly, is not on the sensibility of the reader but on the impersonal process of reading which, by bringing into play the requisite conventions, codes, and expectations makes literary sense of the sequence of words, phrases, and sentences that constitute a text. See text and writing (écriture). In the late 1960s, the structuralist enterprise, in its rigorous form and inclusive pretensions, ceded its central position to deconstruction and other modes of poststructural theories, which subverted the scientific claims of structuralism and its view that literary meanings are made determinate by a system of invariant conventions and codes. (See poststructuralism.) This shift in the prevailing point of view is exemplified by the changing emphases in the lively and influential writings of the French critic and man of letters Roland Barthes (1915-80). His early work developed the structuralist theory that was based on the linguistics of Saussure—a theory that Barthes applied not only to literature but also to decoding, by reference to an underlying signifying system, many aspects of popular culture. (See Barthes' Mythologies, 1957, trans. 1972, and refer to cultural studies.) In his later writings, Barthes abandoned the scientific aspiration of structuralism and distinguished between the "readerly" text such as the realistic novel that tries to "close" interpretation by insisting on specific meanings, and the "writerly" text that aims at the ideal of "a galaxy of signifiers," and so encourages the reader to be a producer of his or her own meanings according not to one code but to a multiplicity of codes. And in The Pleasure of the Text (1973) Barthes lauds, in contrast to the comfortable pleasure offered by a traditional text that accords with cultural codes and conventions, the "jouissance" (or orgasmic bliss) evoked by a text that incites a hedonistic abandon to the uncontrolled play of its signifiers. See Roland Barthes, in the entry text and writing (écriture). Structuralist premises and procedures, however, continue to be deployed in a number of current enterprises, and especially in the semiotic analysis of cultural phenomena, in stylistics, and in the investigation of the formal structures that, in their combinations and variations, constitute the plots in novels. See semiotics; cultural studies; stylistics; narrative and narratology. A clear and comprehensive survey of the program and accomplishments of structuralist literary criticism, in poetry as well as narrative prose, is Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (1975); also Robert Scholes, Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction (1974). For an introduction to the general movement of structuralism see Peter Caws, Structuralism: The Art of the Intelligible (1960); Philip Pettit, The Concept of Structuralism: A Critical Analysis (1975); and Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (1977). For critical views of structuralism see Gerald Graff, Literature against Itself (1979); Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (1980), chapters 4-5; J. G. Merquior, From Prague to Paris: A Critique of Structuralist and Post-Structuralist Thought (1986). Some collections of structuralist writings: David Robey, ed., Structuralism: An Introduction (1973); see also Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, eds., The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (1970). Among the books of structuralist literary criticism available in English translations are Roland Barthes, Critical Essays (1964); Stephen Heath, The Nouveau Roman: A Study in the Practice of Writing (1972); Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose (trans. 1977) and Introduction to Poetics (trans. 1981); Gérard Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse (trans. 1984). Structuralist treatments of cinema are Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (1969), and Christian Metz, Language of Film (1973).

Apostrophe

An apostrophe is a direct and explicit address either to an absent person or to an abstract or nonhuman entity. Often the effect is of high formality, or else of a sudden emotional impetus. Many odes are constituted throughout in the mode of such an address to a listener who is not literally able to listen. So John Keats begins his "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (1820) by apostrophizing the Urn—"Thou still unravished bride of quietness"—and directs the entirety of the poem to the Urn and to the figures represented on it. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's fine lyric "Recollections of Love" (1817) is an apostrophe addressed to an absent woman; at the end of the poem, Coleridge, while speaking still to his beloved, turns by a sudden impulse to apostrophize also the River Greta: But when those meek eyes first did seem To tell me, Love within you wrought— O Greta, dear domestic stream! Has not, since then, Love's prompture deep, Has not Love's whisper evermore Been ceaseless, as thy gentle roar? Sole voice, when other voices sleep, Dear under-song in clamor's hour. Many apostrophes, as in these examples from Keats and Coleridge, imply a personification of the nonhuman object that is addressed. (See Jonathan Culler, "Apostrophe," in The Pursuit of Signs, 1981.)

Sentimental novels ex.

An extreme English instance of the sentimental novel is Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling (1771), which represents a hero of such exquisite sensibility that he goes into a decline from excess of pent-up tenderness toward a young lady, and dies in the perturbation of finally declaring to her his emotion. "If all his tears had been tears of blood," declares an editor of the novel, Hamish Miles, "the poor man could hardly have been more debile." Jane Austen's gently satiric treatment of a young woman of sensibility in Sense and Sensibility (begun 1797, published 1811) marks the decline of the fashion, but the exploitation of the mode of literary sensibility survives in such later novelistic episodes as the death of Little Nell in Charles Dickens' Old Curiosity Shop (1841) and the death of Little Eva in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Sentimentality was exploited also in Victorian melodramas, as well as in many movies that Hollywood labeled "tearjerkers."

Anaphora

Anaphora (Greek for "repetition") is the deliberate repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of each one of a sequence of sentences, paragraphs, lines of verse, or stanzas. "A Song" by the seventeenth-century English poet Thomas Carew begins: Ask me no more where Jove bestows, When June is past the fading rose.... Each of the remaining four stanzas also begins with the words "Ask me no more." Anaphora is frequent in the Bible and in verse or prose strongly influenced by the Bible, such as Walt Whitman's poems or sermons by eloquent black preachers. In the powerful address to civil rights marchers by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., in front of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, five successive sentences begin, "I have a dream," and six later sentences begin, "Let freedom ring."

Anastrophe

Anastrophe is a figure of speech in which the normal word order, often involving an adjective and a noun, is reversed or inverted with the intention, or at least the effect, of emphasizing a certain word, as in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's famous line from Evangeline, "This is the forest primeval." John Milton uses the figure frequently in Paradise Lost, as when he describes Hell as A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round As one great Furnace flam'd, yet from those flames No light, but rather darkness visible Serv'd onely to discover sights of woe.... (Book 1, II. 61-64)

wit, humor, and the comic

At present both "wit" and "humor" designate species of the comic; that is, any element in a work of literature, whether a character, event, or utterance, which is designed to amuse or to excite mirth in the reader or audience. The words "wit" and "humor," however, had a variety of meanings in earlier literary criticism, and a brief comment on their history will help to clarify the differences between them in present usage. The term "wit" once signified the human faculty of intelligence, inventiveness, and mental acuity, a sense it still retains in the term "half-wit." In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it came to be used also for ingenuity in literary invention, and especially for the ability to develop brilliant, surprising, and paradoxical figures of speech; hence "wit" was often applied to the figurative language in what we now call metaphysical poetry. And in the eighteenth century there were attempts to distinguish the false wit of Abraham Cowley and other metaphysical stylists, who were said to aim at a merely superficial dazzlement, and "true wit," regarded as the apt rephrasing of truths whose enduring validity is attested by the fact that they are universal commonplaces. Thus Alexander Pope defined "true wit" in his Essay on Criticism (1711) as "What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed." See neoclassic. The most common present use of the term derives from its seventeenthcentury application to a brilliant and paradoxical style. Wit, that is, now denotes a kind of verbal expression which is brief, deft, and intentionally contrived to produce a shock of comic surprise; a typical form is that of the epigram. The surprise is usually the result of a connection or distinction between words or concepts which frustrates the listener's expectation, only to satisfy it in an unexpected way. Philip Guedalla wittily said: "History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other." Thus the trite comment about history turns out to be unexpectedly appropriate, with an unlooked-for turn of meaning, to the writers of history as well. The film actress Mae West once remarked: "Too much of a good thing can be—wonderful." The resulting laughter, in a famous phrase of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, arises "from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing"; it might be more precise to say, however, "from the sudden satisfaction of an expectation, but in a way we did not expect." Mae West's remark is what the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud called "harmless wit," which evokes a laugh or smile that is without malice. What Freud distinguished as "tendency wit," on the other hand, is aggressive: it is a derisive and derogatory turn of phrase, directing the laugh at a particular person or butt. "Mr. James Payn," in Oscar Wilde's barbed comment on a novelist of the 1890s, "hunts down the obvious with the enthusiasm of a short-sighted detective. As one turns over the pages, the suspense of the author becomes almost unbearable." Repartee is a term taken from fencing to signify a contest of wit, in which each person tries to cap the remark of the other, or to turn it to his or her own advantage. Attacking his opponent Disraeli in Parliament, Gladstone remarked that "the honorable gentleman will either end on the gallows or die of some loathsome disease." To which Disraeli rejoined: "That depends on whether I embrace the honorable gentleman's principles or his mistresses." Restoration comedies often included episodes of sustained repartee; a classic example is the give-and-take in the discussion of their coming marriage by the witty lovers Mirabel and Millamant in William Congreve's The Way of the World (1700), Act IV. "Humor" is a term that goes back to the ancient theory that the particular mixture of the four humours determines each type of personality, and from the derivative application of the term "humorous" to one of the comically eccentric characters in the Elizabethan comedy of humours. As we now use the word, humor may be ascribed either to a comic utterance or to a comic appearance or mode of behavior. In a useful distinction between the two terms, a humorous utterance may be said to differ from a witty utterance in one or both of two ways: (1) wit, as we saw, is always intended by the speaker to be comic, but many utterances that we find comically humorous are intended by the speakers themselves to be serious; and (2) a humorous saying is not cast in the neatly epigrammatic form of a witty saying. For example, the chatter of the old Nurse in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is verbose, and humorous to the audience, but not to the speaker; similarly, the discussion of the mode of life of the goldfish in Central Park by the inarticulate and irascible taxi driver in J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951) is unintentionally, but richly humorous, and is not cast in the form of a witty turn of phrase. More important still is the difference that wit refers only to the spoken or written word, while humor has a much broader range of reference. We find humor, for example, in the way Charlie Chaplin looks, dresses, and acts, and also in the sometimes wordless cartoons in The New Yorker. In a thoroughly humorous situation, the sources of the fun may be complex. In Act III, Scene iv of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Malvolio's appearance and actions, and his utterances as well, are humorous, but all despite his own very solemn intentions; and our comic enjoyment is increased by our knowledge of the suppressed hilarity of the plotters who are hidden auditors onstage. The greatness of a comic creation like Shakespeare's Falstaff is that he exploits the full gamut of comic possibilities. Falstaff is humorous in the way he looks and in what he does; what he says is sometimes witty and at most other times humorous; while his actions and speech are sometimes unintentionally humorous, sometimes intentionally humorous, and not infrequently—as in his whimsical account to his skeptical auditors of how heroically he bore himself in the highway robbery, in the second act of Henry IV, Part 1—they are humorous even beyond his intention. One other point should be made about humor and the comic. In normal use, the term "humor" refers to what is purely comic: it evokes, as it is sometimes said, sympathetic laughter, or else laughter which is an end in itself. If we extend Freud's distinction between harmless and tendency wit, we can say that humor is a "harmless" form of the comic. There is, however, another mode of the comic that might be called "tendency comedy," in which we are made to laugh at a person not merely because he is ridiculous but because he is being ridiculed—the laughter is derisive, with some element of contempt or malice, and serves as a weapon against its subject. Tendency comedy and tendency wit, rather than humor, are among the devices that a writer most exploits in satire, the literary art of derogating by deriding a subject. On the alternative use of the term "comic" to define the formal features of a type of dramatic or narrative plot, see comedy; on the form of humorin-horror in some present-day literature, see black humor. For diverse theories of wit, humor, and the comic, together with copious examples, refer to Sigmund Freud, Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious (1916); Max Eastman, Enjoyment of Laughter (1936); Stuart M. Tave, The Amiable Humorist (1960); Jerry Palmer, Taking Humor Seriously (1994).

Semiotics/Semiology

At the end of the nineteenth century Charles Sanders Peirce, the American philosopher, proposed and described a study that he called "semiotic," and in his Course in General Linguistics (1915) the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure independently proposed a science that he called "semiology." Since then semiotics and semiology have become alternative names for the systematic study of signs as these function in all areas of human experience. The consideration of signs (conveyors of meaning) is not limited to the realm of language. Morse code, traffic signs and signals, and a great diversity of other human activities and productions—our bodily postures and gestures, the social rituals we perform, the kinds of clothes we wear, the meals we serve, the buildings we inhabit, the objects we deal with—also convey common meanings to members who participate in a particular culture and so can be analyzed as signs which function in diverse modes of signifying systems. Although the study of language (the use of specifically verbal signs) is technically regarded as only one branch of the general science of semiotics, linguistics, the highly developed science of language, in fact has for the most part supplied the basic concepts and methods that a semiotician applies to the study of nonlinguistic sign systems.

Peirce (Semiotics)

C. S. Peirce distinguished three classes of signs, defined in terms of the kind of relation that exists between a signifying item and that which it signifies: (1) An icon functions as a sign by means of inherent similarities, or shared features, with what it signifies; examples are the similarity of a portrait to the person it depicts or the similarity of a map to the geographical area it stands for. (2) An index is a sign which bears a natural relation of cause or effect to what it signifies; thus, smoke is a sign indicating fire, and a pointing weathervane indicates the direction of the wind. (3) In the symbol (or in a less ambiguous term, the "sign proper"), the relation between the signifying item and what it signifies is not a natural one but is entirely a matter of social convention. The gesture of shaking hands, for example, in some cultures is a conventional sign of greeting or parting, and a red traffic light conventionally signifies "Stop!" The major and most complex examples of this third type of purely conventional sign, however, are the words that constitute a language.

Chiasmus

Chiasmus (derived from the Greek term for the letter X, or for a crossover) is a sequence of two phrases or clauses which are parallel in syntax, but which reverse the order of the corresponding words. So in this line from Pope, the verb first precedes, then follows, the adverbial phrase: Works without show, and without pomp presides. The crossover is sometimes reinforced by alliteration and other similarities in the length and component sounds of words, as in Pope's summary of the common fate of coquettes after marriage: A fop their passion, but their prize a sot. In Yeats' "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" (1919), the chiasmus consists in a reversal of the position of an entire phrase: The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind.9 And as a reminder that all figures of speech occur in prose as well as in verse, here is an instance of chiasmus in the position of the two adjectives in Shelley's Defence of Poetry (1821): "Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds."

Formal satire

Critics make a broad division between formal (or "direct") satire and indirect satire. In formal satire the satiric persona speaks out in the first person. This "I" may address either the reader (as in Pope's Moral Essays, 1731-35) or else a character within the work itself, who is called the adversarius and whose major artistic function is to elicit and add credibility to the satiric speaker's comments. (In Pope's "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," 1735, Arbuthnot serves as adversarius.) Two types of formal satire are commonly distinguished, taking their names from the great Roman satirists Horace and Juvenal. The types are defined by the character of the persona whom the author presents as the first-person satiric speaker and also by the attitude and tone that such a persona manifests toward both the subject matter and the readers of the work.

Cyberpunk

Cyberpunk emerged in the early 1980s as a postmodern form of science fiction in which the events take place partially or entirely within the "virtual reality" formed by computers or computer networks, in which the characters may be humans, or aliens, or artificial intelligences. Many cyberpunk works adapt elements from the detective novel and film noir in their description of the dystopian features of an electronic or posthuman society. Well-known instances are William Gibson's novel Neuromancer (1984), and the Matrix films (1999, 2003).

Satire based on age

Effective English satire has been written in every period beginning with the Middle Ages. Pieces in the English Punch and the American New Yorker demonstrate that formal essayistic satire, like satiric novels, plays, and cinema, still commands a wide audience; and W. H. Auden is a twentieth-century author who wrote superb satiric poems. The proportioning of the examples in this article, however, indicates how large the Restoration and eighteenth century loom in satiric achievement: the century and a half that included Dryden, the Earl of Rochester, Samuel Butler, Wycherley, Aphra Behn, Addison, Pope, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Swift, Gay, Fielding, Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, and late in the period (it should not be overlooked) the Robert Burns of "The Holy Fair" and "Holy Willie's Prayer" and the William Blake of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. This same span of time was also in France the period of such major satirists as Boileau, La Fontaine, and Voltaire, as well as Molière, the most eminent of all satirists in drama. In the nineteenth century, American satire broke free of English domination with the light satiric touch of Washington Irving's Sketch Book, the deft satiric essays of Oliver Wendell Holmes (The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table), and above all the satiric essays and novels of Mark Twain.

Saussure (semiotics)

Ferdinand de Saussure introduced many of the terms and concepts exploited by current semioticians; see Saussure under linguistics in modern criticism. Most important are the following: (1) A sign consists of two inseparable components or aspects, the signifier (in language, a set of speech sounds, or of marks on a page) and the signified (the concept, or idea, which is the meaning of the sign). (2) A verbal sign, in Saussure's term, is "arbitrary." That is, with the minor exception of onomatopoeia (words which we perceive as similar to the sounds they signify), there is no inherent, or natural, connection between a verbal signifier and what it signifies. (3) The identity of all elements of a language, including its words, their component speech sounds, and the concepts the words signify, are not determined by "positive qualities," or objective features in these elements themselves but by differences, or a network of relationships, consisting of distinctions and oppositions from other speech sounds, other words, and other signifieds that obtain only within a particular linguistic system. (4) The aim of linguistics, or of any other semiotic enterprise, is to regard the parole (a single verbal utterance, or a particular use of a sign or set of signs) as only a manifestation of the langue (that is, the general system of implicit differentiations and rules of combination which underlie and make possible a particular use of signs). The focus of semiotic interest, accordingly, is not in interpreting a particular instance of signification but in establishing the general signifying system that each particular instance relies upon.

sonnet sequences

Following Petrarch's early example, a number of Elizabethan authors arranged their poems into sonnet sequences, or sonnet cycles, in which a series of sonnets are linked together by exploring the varied aspects of a relationship between lovers, or else by indicating a development in the relationship that constitutes a kind of implicit plot. Shakespeare ordered his sonnets in a sequence, as did Sidney in Astrophel and Stella (1580) and Spenser in Amoretti (1595). Later examples of the sonnet sequence on various subjects are Wordsworth's The River Duddon, D. G. Rossetti's House of Life, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, and the American poet William Ellery Leonard's Two Lives. Dylan Thomas' Altarwise by Owl-light (1936) is a sequence of ten sonnets that are abstruse meditations on the poet's own life. George Meredith's Modern Love (1862), which concerns a bitterly unhappy marriage, is sometimes called a sonnet sequence, even though its component poems consist not of fourteen but of sixteen lines.

decasyllabic

Iambic pentameter lines rhyming in pairs are called decasyllabic ("ten-syllable") couplets or "heroic couplets."

invocation

If such an address is to a god or muse or other supernatural being to assist the poet in his composition, it is called an invocation. An invocation often serves to establish the authoritative or prophetic identity of the poetic voice; thus John Milton invokes divine guidance at the opening of Paradise Lost: And chiefly Thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer Before all temples th' upright heart and pure, Instruct me....

Sentimental novels in America

In America, sentimental novels were referred to as "woman's fiction" or "domestic novels" and often involved the story of a young girl who must make her way in the world unprotected. See Nina Baym, Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-70 (2nd ed., 1993). According to Jane Tompkins, many novels denigrated by sophisticated readers as overly sentimental or merely popular in fact represented attempts to reorganize culture from the women's point of view, and in some cases achieved devastating critiques of American society. See "Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Politics of Literary History," chapter 5 in Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (1985).

Horatian satire (formal)

In Horatian satire the speaker is an urbane, witty, and tolerant man of the world, who is moved more to wry amusement than to indignation at the spectacle of human folly, pretentiousness, and hypocrisy, and who uses a relaxed and informal language to evoke from readers a wry smile at human failings and absurdities—sometimes including his own. Horace himself described his aim as "to laugh people out of their vices and follies." Pope's Moral Essays and other formal satires for the most part sustain a Horatian stance.

Juvenalian satire (formal)

In Juvenalian satire, the speaker is a serious moralist who uses a dignified and public utterance to decry modes of vice and error which are no less dangerous because they are ridiculous, and who undertakes to evoke from readers contempt, moral indignation, or an unillusioned sadness at the aberrations of humanity. Samuel Johnson's "London" (1738) and "The Vanity of Human Wishes" (1749) are distinguished instances of Juvenalian satire. In its most denunciatory instances, this mode of satire resembles the jeremiad, whose model is not Roman but Hebraic.

Markman Ellis, Sensibility

In The Politics of Sensibility (1996), Markman Ellis departs from the usual derogatory treatment of the sentimental novels of the later eighteenth century by arguing that they contributed to movements for social reform, including opposition to slavery, criticism of the questionable morality involved in some commercial and business practices, and the movement for the reformation and relief of prostitutes.

Sentimental comedy

In literature these ideas and tendencies were reflected in the drama of sensibility, or sentimental comedy, which were representations of middleclass life that replaced the tough amorality and the comic or satiric representation of aristocratic sexual license in Restoration comedy. In the contemporary plays of sensibility, Oliver Goldsmith remarked in his "Comparison between Sentimental and Laughing Comedy" (1773), "the virtues of private life are exhibited rather than the vices exposed, and the distresses rather than the faults of mankind make our interest in the piece"; the characters, "though they want humor, have abundance of sentiment and feeling"; with the result, he added, that the audience "sit at a play as gloomy as at the tabernacle." Plays such as Richard Steele's The Conscious Lovers (1722) and Richard Cumberland's The West Indian (1771) present monumentally benevolent heroes and heroines of the middle class, whose dialogue abounds with elevated moral sentiments and who, prior to the manipulated happy ending, suffer tribulations designed to evoke from the audience the maximum of pleasurable tears.

Seven deadly sins

In medieval and later Christian theology these sins were usually identified as Pride, Covetousness, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Anger, and Sloth. They were called "deadly" because they were considered to put the soul of anyone manifesting them in peril of eternal perdition; such sins could be expiated only by absolute penitence. Among them, Pride was often considered primary, since it was believed to have motivated the original fall of Satan in heaven. Sloth was accounted a deadly sin because it signified not simply laziness but a torpid and despondent spiritual condition that threatened to make a person despair of any chance of achieving divine Grace. Alternative names for sloth were accidie, "dejection," and "spiritual dryness"; it was probably a condition close to that which present-day psychiatrists diagnose as acute depression. The seven deadly sins (or in an alternative term, cardinal sins) were defined and discussed at length by such major theologians as Gregory the Great and Thomas Aquinas, and served as the topic of countless sermons. They also played an important role in many works of medieval and Renaissance literature—sometimes in elaborately developed personifications—including William Langland's Piers Plowman (B, Passus 5), Geoffrey Chaucer's "Parson's Tale," William Dunbar's "The Dance of the Sevin Deidly Synnis," and Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene (Book I, Canto 4). See Morton W. Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins (1952). The seven deadly or cardinal sins were balanced by the seven cardinal virtues. Three of these, called the "theological virtues" because they were stressed in the New Testament, were Faith, Hope, and Charity (that is, Love)—see St. Paul's I Corinthians 13:13: "And now abideth faith, hope, and charity, these three." The other four, the "natural virtues," were derived from the moral philosophy of the ancient Greeks: justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude.

paralipsis

In paralipsis someone says that he need not, or will not, say something, then proceeds to do so. The most familiar use of the figure is on public occasions in which an introducer says that a speaker needs no introduction, then goes on to introduce him or her, often at considerable length. The classic literary example is Mark Antony's funeral oration, in the third act of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, which is constructed around the repeated and devastatingly ironic use of this figure. The speech begins, for example, with the statement "I came to bury Caesar, not to praise him," then proceeds to eulogize Caesar and to incite his auditors against the "honorable men" who have assassinated him.

High/ Middle/ Low Style

In standard theories based on Cicero and other classical rhetoricians, styles were usually classified into three main levels: the high (or "grand"), the middle (or "mean"), and the low (or "plain") style. The doctrine of decorum, which was influential through the eighteenth century, required that the level of style in a work be appropriate to the social class of the speaker, to the occasion on which it is spoken, and to the dignity of its literary genre (see poetic diction).

Symbol

In the broadest sense a symbol is anything which signifies something else; in this sense all words are symbols. In discussing literature, however, the term "symbol" is applied only to a word or phrase that signifies an object or event which in its turn signifies something, or suggests a range of reference, beyond itself. Some symbols are "conventional" or "public": thus "the Cross," "the Red, White, and Blue," and "the Good Shepherd" are terms that refer to symbolic objects of which the further significance is determinate within a particular culture. Poets, like all of us, use such conventional symbols; many poets, however, also use "private" or "personal symbols." Often they do so by exploiting widely shared associations between an object or event or action and a particular concept; for example, the general association of a peacock with pride and of an eagle with heroic endeavor, or the rising sun with birth and the setting sun with death, or climbing with effort or progress and descent with surrender or failure. Some poets, however, repeatedly use symbols whose significance they largely generate themselves, and these pose a more difficult problem in interpretation. Take as an example the word "rose," which in its literal use signifies a species of flower. In Robert Burns' line "O my love's like a red, red rose," the word "rose" is used as a simile; and in the lines by Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802-39), She was our queen, our rose, our star; And then she danced—O Heaven, her dancing! the word "rose" is used as a metaphor. In The Romance of the Rose, a long medieval dream vision, we read about a half-opened rose to which the dreamer's access is aided by a character called "Fair Welcome," but impeded or forbidden by other characters called "Reason," "Shame," and "Jealousy." We readily recognize that the whole narrative is a sustained allegory about an elaborate courtship, in which most of the agents are personified abstractions and the rose itself functions as an allegorical emblem (that is, an object whose significance is made determinate by its qualities and by the role it plays in the narrative) which represents both the lady's love and her lovely body. Then we read William Blake's poem "The Sick Rose." O Rose, thou art sick. The invisible worm That flies in the night In the howling storm Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy, And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy. This rose is not the vehicle for a simile or metaphor because it lacks the paired subject—"my love," or the girl referred to as "she," in the examples just cited—which is an identifying feature of these figures. And it is not an allegorical rose, since, unlike the flower in The Romance of the Rose, it is not part of an obvious double order of correlated references, one literal and the second allegorical, in which the allegorical or emblematic reference of the rose is made determinate by its role within the literal narrative. Blake's rose is a rose—yet it is patently also something more than a rose: words such as "bed," "joy," "love," which do not comport literally with an actual flower, together with the sinister tone, and the intensity of the lyric speaker's feeling, press the reader to infer that the described object has a further range of suggested but unspecified reference which makes it a symbol. But Blake's rose is a personal symbol and not—like the symbolic rose in the closing cantos of Dante's fourteenthcentury Paradiso and other Christian poems—an element in a set of conventional and widely known (hence "public") religious symbols, in which concrete objects of this passing world are used to signify, in a relatively determinate way, the objects and truths of a higher and eternal realm. (See Barbara Seward, The Symbolic Rose, 1960.) Only from the implicit suggestions in Blake's poem itself—the sexual connotations, in the realm of human experience, of "bed" and "love," especially in conjunction with "joy" and "worm"—supplemented by our knowledge of similar elements and topics in his other poems, are we led to infer that Blake's lament for a crimson rose which has been entered and sickened unto death by a dark and secret worm symbolizes, in the human realm, the destruction wrought by furtiveness, deceit, and hypocrisy in what should be a frank and joyous relationship of physical love. Various critics of the poem, however, have proposed alternative interpretations of its symbolic significance. It is an attribute of many private symbols—the White Whale in Melville's Moby-Dick (1851) is another famed example—as well as a reason why they are an irreplaceable literary device, that they suggest a direction or a broad area of significance rather than, like an emblem in an allegorical narrative, a relatively determinate reference. In the copious modern literature on the nature of the literary symbol, reference is often made to two seminal passages, written early in the nineteenth century by Coleridge in England and Goethe in Germany, concerning the difference between an allegory and a symbol. Coleridge is in fact describing what he believes to be the uniquely symbolic nature of the Bible as a sacred text, but later commentators have assumed that he intended his comment to apply also to the symbol in secular literature: Now an allegory is but a translation of abstract notions into a picturelanguage, which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the senses.... On the other hand a symbol ... is characterized by a translucence of the special [i.e., of the species] in the individual, or of the general [i.e., of the genus] in the special, or of the universal in the general; above all by the translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal. It always partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that unity of which it is the representative. [Allegories] are but empty echoes which the fancy arbitrarily associates with apparitions of matter.... (Coleridge, The Statesman's Manual, 1816) Goethe had been meditating about the nature of the literary symbol in secular writings since the 1790s but gave his concept its most specific formulation in 1824: There is a great difference, whether the poet seeks the particular for the sake of the general or sees the general in the particular. From the former procedure there ensues allegory, in which the particular serves only as illustration, as example of the general. The latter procedure, however, is genuinely the nature of poetry; it expresses something particular, without thinking of the general or pointing to it. Allegory transforms the phenomenon into a concept, the concept into an image, but in such a way that the concept always remains bounded in the image, and is entirely to be kept and held in it, and to be expressed by it. Symbolism [however] transforms the phenomenon into idea, the idea into an image, and in such a way that the idea remains always infinitely active and unapproachable in the image, and even if expressed in all languages, still would remain inexpressible. (Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, Nos. 279, 1112, 1113) It will be noted that, whatever the differences between these two cryptic passages, both Coleridge and Goethe stress that an allegory presents a pair of subjects (an image and a concept) but a symbol only one (the image alone); that the allegory is relatively specific in its reference, while the symbol remains indefinite but richly—even boundlessly—suggestive in its significance; and also that for this very reason, a symbol is the higher mode of expression. To these claims, characteristic in the Romantic Period, most critics have agreed. The deconstructive theorist Paul de Man, however, elevated allegory over symbol because, he claimed, allegory is less "mystified" (confused and deceived) about its status as a purely rhetorical device. See de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," in Interpretation: Theory and Practice, ed. C. S. Singleton (1969), and Allegories of Reading (1979). See also W. B. Yeats, "The Symbolism of Poetry" (1900), in Essays and Introductions (1961); H. Flanders Dunbar, Symbolism in Medieval Thought (1929); C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (1936); Elder Olson, "A Dialogue on Symbolism," in R. S. Crane, ed., Critics and Criticism (1952); Michael Ferber, A Dictionary of Literary Symbols (1999). See Symbolist Movement, and for references to a literary symbol in other entries, see page 0.

nonperiodic sentence

In the nonperiodic (or loose) sentence—more relaxed and conversational in its effect—the component members are continuous, but so loosely joined that the sentence would have been syntactically complete if a period had been inserted at one or more places before the actual close. So the two sentences in Joseph Addison's Spectator 105, describing the limited topics in the conversation of a "man-about-town," or dilettante, could each have closed at several points in the sequence of their component clauses: He will tell you the names of the principal favourites, repeat the shrewd sayings of a man of quality, whisper an intrigue that is not yet blown upon by common fame; or, if the sphere of his observations is a little larger than ordinary, will perhaps enter into all the incidents, turns, and revolutions in a game of ombre. When he has gone thus far he has shown you the whole circle of his accomplishments, his parts are drained, and he is disabled from any farther conversation.

short short story/ novella

Many distinguished short stories depart from this paradigm in various ways. It must be remembered that the name covers a great diversity of prose fiction, all the way from the short short story, which is a slightly elaborated anecdote of perhaps five hundred words, to such long and complex forms as Herman Melville's Billy Budd (c. 1890), Henry James' The Turn of the Screw (1898), Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902), and Thomas Mann's Mario and the Magician (1930). In such works, the status of middle length between the tautness of the short story and the expansiveness of the novel is sometimes indicated by the name novelette, or novella. This form has been especially exploited in Germany (where it is called the Novelle) after it was introduced by Goethe in 1795 and carried on by Heinrich von Kleist and many other writers; it has been the subject of special critical attention by German theorists.

three unities

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, critics of the drama in Italy and France added to Aristotle's unity of action, which he describes in his Poetics, two other unities, to constitute one of the so-called rules of drama known as "the " On the assumption that verisimilitude—the achievement of an illusion of reality in the audience of a stage play—requires that the action represented by a play approximate the actual conditions of the staging of the play, these critics imposed the requirement of the "unity of place" (that the action represented be limited to a single location) and the requirement of the "unity of time" (that the time represented be limited to the two or three hours it takes to act the play, or at most to a single day of either twelve or twenty-four hours). In large part because of the potent example of Shakespeare, many of whose plays represent frequent changes of place and the passage of many years, the unities of place and time never dominated English neoclassicism as they did criticism in Italy and France. A final blow was the famous attack against them, and against the principle of dramatic verisimilitude on which they were based, in Samuel Johnson's "Preface to Shakespeare" (1765). Since then in England, the unities of place and time (as distinguished from the unity of action) have been regarded as optional devices, available as needed by the playwright to achieve special effects of dramatic concentration. See René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, Vol. 1, The Later Eighteenth Century (1955); Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (1961).

tale

In the tale, or "story of incident," the focus of interest is primarily on the course and outcome of the events, as in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Gold Bug" (1843) and other tales of detection, in many of the stories of O. Henry (1862- 1910), and in the stock but sometimes well-contrived western, detective, and adventure stories in popular magazines. "Stories of character" focus instead on the state of mind and motivation, or on the psychological and moral qualities, of the protagonists. In some of the stories of character by Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), the Russian master of the form, nothing more happens than an encounter and conversation between two people. Ernest Hemingway's classic "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" consists only of a curt dialogue between two waiters about an old man who each day gets drunk and stays on in the café until it closes, followed by a brief meditation on the part of one of the waiters. In some stories there is a balance of interest between external action and character. Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" is as violent in its packed events as any sensational adventure tale, but every particular of the action and dialogue is contrived to test and reveal, with a surprising set of reversals, the moral quality of all three protagonists.

Indirect satire

Indirect satire is cast in some other literary form than that of direct address to the reader. The most common indirect form is that of a fictional narrative in which the objects of the satire are characters who make themselves and their opinions ridiculous or obnoxious by what they think, say, and do, and are sometimes made even more ridiculous by the author's comments and narrative style.

Indirect satire genres

It should be noted that any narrative or other literary vehicle can be adapted to the purposes of indirect satire. John Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel turns Old Testament history into a satiric allegory on Restoration political maneuverings. In Gulliver's Travels, Swift converts to satiric use the early eighteenth-century accounts of voyage and discovery, and his Modest Proposal is written in the form of a project in political economy. Many of Joseph Addison's Spectator papers are satiric essays; Byron's Don Juan is a versified satiric form of the old episodic picaresque fiction; Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, Molière's The Misanthrope, Wycherley's The Country Wife, and Shaw's Arms and the Man are satiric plays; and Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience, and other works such as John Gay's eighteenth-century Beggar's Opera and its modern adaptation by Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera (1928), are satiric operettas. T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) employs motifs from myth in a work which can be considered by and large as a verse satire directed against what Eliot perceives as the spiritual dearth in twentieth-century life. The greatest number of modern satires, however, are written in prose, and especially in novelistic form; for example Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, Joseph Heller's Catch-22, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Player Piano and Cat's Cradle. Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936) and The Great Dictator (1940) are classic instances of dramatic satire in the cinema. Much of the satiric thrust in black humor is directed against what the author conceives to be the widespread contemporary condition of social cruelty, inanity, or chaos.

Foucault (modern semiotics)

Michel Foucault developed a mode of semiotic analysis to deal with the changing medical interpretations of symptoms of disease; the diverse ways of identifying, classifying, and treating insanity; and the altering conceptions of human sexuality.

Lacan (modern semiotics)

Jacques Lacan has applied semiotics to Freudian psychoanalysis—interpreting the unconscious, for example, as (like language) a structure of signs.

Romance novels

Love stories that focus on the heroine rather than the hero, in which, after diverse obstacles have been overcome, the plots end happily with the betrothal or marriage of the lovers. This narrative form was exemplified early in such classic novels as Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) and in all six of Jane Austen's novels, published between 1811 and 1818. The term "romance novel," however, is usually applied specifically to works published since the 1950s and aimed at a mass market. Chief among them are the Harlequin romances published by Harlequin Enterprises, which is headquartered in Canada and employs over thirteen hundred authors, most of them women, who produce thousands of new titles each year in twentynine languages and on six continents. Such novels are sold in supermarkets and newsstands, rather than in traditional bookstores, and in annual sales far exceed all other novelistic types, including detective stories and science fiction.

Levi-Strauss (modern semiotics)

Modern semiotics, like structuralism, has developed in France under the aegis of Saussure, so that many semioticians are also structuralists. They deal with any set of social phenomena or social productions as texts; that is, as constituted by self-sufficient, self-ordering, hierarchical structures of differentially determined signs, codes, and rules of combination and transformation which make significant materials "meaningful" to members of a particular society who are competent in that signifying system. (See structuralist criticism.) Claude Lévi-Strauss, in the 1960s and later, inaugurated the application of semiotics to cultural anthropology, and also established the foundations of French structuralism in general, by using Saussure's linguistics as a model for analyzing, in primitive societies, a great variety of phenomena and practices, which he treated as quasi-languages that manifest the structures of an underlying signifying system. These include kinship systems, totemic systems, ways of preparing food, myths, and prelogical modes of interpreting the world.

sociology of literature

Most literary historians and critics have taken some account of the relation of individual authors to the circumstances of the social and cultural era in which they live and write, as well as of the relation of a literary work to the segment of society that its fiction represents or to the audience toward which the work is addressed. (For major exceptions, see Russian formalism, New Criticism, structuralism, deconstruction.) The term "sociology of literature," however, is applied only to the writings of those historians and critics whose primary, and sometimes exclusive, interest is in the ways that the subject matter and form of a literary work are affected by such circumstances as its author's class status, gender, and political and other interests; the ways of thinking and feeling characteristic of its era; the economic conditions of the writer's profession and of the publication and distribution of books; and the social class, conceptions, and values of the audience to which an author addresses the literary product. Sociological critics treat a work of literature as inescapably conditioned—in the choice and development of its subject matter, the ways of thinking it incorporates, its evaluations of the modes of life it renders, and even in its formal qualities—by the social, political, and economic organization and forces of its age. Such critics also tend to view the interpretation and assessment of a literary work by a reading public as shaped by the circumstances specific to that public's time and place. The French historian Hippolyte Taine is sometimes considered the first modern sociologist of literature in his History of English Literature (1863), which analyzed a work as determined by three factors: its author's "race," its geographical and social "milieu," and its historical "moment." For prominent sociological emphases in critical approaches to literature, see feminist criticism—which emphasizes the role of male interests and assumptions as determinants of the content, values, and interpretations of the standard literary canon—and also Marxist criticism. For an influential Marxist version, see Lucien Goldmann, Essays on Method in the Sociology of Literature (1980). For approaches by the Frankfurt School of Marxist criticism, see two essays by Leo Lowenthal, both titled "On Sociology of Literature" (1932, 1948, reprinted in Literature and Mass Culture, 1984). It should be noted that Marx's views of the economic basis of social organization, class ideologies, and class conflict have influenced the work of many critics who, although not committed to Marxist doctrine, stress the sociological context and content of works of literature. The most thoroughgoing treatments of literary works as cultural products that are embedded in the circumstances and discourses of a time and place are by advocates of the current modes of criticism called the new historicism. For late developments in the sociology of literary texts, see book history studies.

sestina

One of the most intricate of poetic forms is the sestina: a poem of six sixline stanzas in which the end words in the lines of the first stanza are repeated, in a set order of variation, as the end words of the stanzas that follow. The sestina concludes with a three-line envoy which incorporates, in the middle and at the end of the lines, all six of these end words. (An envoy, or "send-off," is a short formal stanza which is appended to a poem by way of conclusion.) This form, introduced in the twelfth century, was cultivated by Italian, Spanish, and French poets. Despite its extreme difficulty, the sestina has also been managed with success by the Elizabethan Sir Philip Sidney, the Victorian Algernon Swinburne, and the modern poets W. H. Auden and John Ashbery.

Menippean satire (indirect)

One type of indirect satire is Menippean satire, modeled on a Greek form developed by the Cynic philosopher Menippus. It is sometimes called Varronian satire, after a Roman imitator, Varro; Northrop Frye, in Anatomy of Criticism, pp. 308-12, suggests an alternative name, the anatomy, after a major English instance of the type, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). Such satires are written in prose, usually with interpolations of verse, and constitute a miscellaneous form often held together by a loosely constructed narrative. A prominent feature is a series of extended dialogues and debates (often conducted at a banquet or party) in which a group of loquacious eccentrics, pedants, literary people, and representatives of various professions or philosophical points of view serve to make ludicrous the attitudes and viewpoints they typify by the arguments they urge in their support. Examples are Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel (1564), Voltaire's Candide (1759), Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey (1818) and other satiric fiction, and Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point (1928); in this last novel, as in those of Peacock, the central satiric scenes are discussions and disputes during a weekend at an English country manor. Frye also classifies Lewis Carroll's two books about Alice in Wonderland as "perfect Menippean satires."

Ottava rima

Ottava rima, as the Italian name indicates, has eight lines; it rhymes abababcc. Like terza rima and the sonnet, it was brought from Italian into English by Sir Thomas Wyatt in the first half of the sixteenth century. Although employed by a number of earlier poets, it is notable especially as the stanza which helped Byron discover what he was born to write, the satiric poem Don Juan (1819-24). Note the comic effect of the forced rhyme in the concluding couplet:

Rime royal

Rime royal was introduced by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde (the latter 1380s) and other narrative poems; it is believed to take its name, however, from its later use by "the Scottish Chaucerian," King James I of Scotland, in his poem The Kingis Quair ("The King's Book"), written about 1424. It is a seven-line, iambic pentameter stanza rhyming ababbcc. This form was quite widely used by Elizabethan poets, including Shakespeare in "A Lover's Complaint" and The Rape of Lucrece, which begins:

Barthes (modern semiotics)

Roland Barthes, explicitly applying Saussurean principles and methods, has written semiotic analyses of the constituents and codes of the sign systems in advertisements which describe and promote women's fashions, as well as analyses of many "bourgeois myths" about the world which, he claims, are exemplified in such social sign systems as professional wrestling matches, children's toys, cookery, and the striptease. (See his Mythologies, trans. 1972.) In his earlier writings Barthes was also a major exponent of structuralist criticism, which deals with a literary text as "a second-order semiotic system"; that is, it views a literary text as employing the first-order semiotic system of language to form a secondary semiotic structure, in accordance with a specifically literary system of conventions and codes.

Soliloquy

Soliloquy is the act of talking to oneself, whether silently or aloud. In drama it denotes the convention by which a character, alone on the stage, utters his or her thoughts aloud. Playwrights have used this device as a convenient way to convey information about a character's motives and state of mind, or for purposes of exposition, and sometimes in order to guide the judgments and responses of the audience. Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (first performed in 1594) opens with a long expository soliloquy and concludes with another which expresses Faustus' frantic mental and emotional state during his belated attempts to evade damnation. The best-known of dramatic soliloquies is Hamlet's speech which begins "To be or not to be." Compare monologue.

Spenserian stanza

Spenserian stanza is a still longer form devised by Edmund Spenser for The Faerie Queene (1590-96)—nine lines, in which the first eight lines are iambic pentameter and the last iambic hexameter (an Alexandrine), rhyming ababbcbcc. Enchanted by Spenser's gracious movement and music, many poets have attempted this stanza in spite of its difficulties. Its greatest successes have been in poems which, like The Faerie Queene, evolve in a leisurely way, with ample time for unrolling the richly textured stanzas; for example, James Thomson's "The Castle of Indolence" (1748), John Keats' "The Eve of St. Agnes" (1820), Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Adonais" (1821), and the narrative section of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "The Lotos-Eaters" (1832).

Terza rima

Terza rima is composed of tercets which are interlinked, in that each is joined to the one following by a common rhyme: aba, bcb, cdc, and so on. Dante composed his Divine Comedy (early fourteenth century) in terza rima; but although Sir Thomas Wyatt introduced the form early in the sixteenth century, it has not been a common meter in English, in which rhymes are much harder to find than in Italian. Shelley, however, used it brilliantly in "Ode to the West Wind" (1820), and it occurs also in the poetry of Milton, Browning, and T. S. Eliot.

Rhetorical criticism

The Roman Horace in his versified Art of Poetry (first century BC) declared that the aim of a poet is to either instruct or delight a reader, and preferably to do both. This view, by making poetry a calculated means to achieve effects on its audience, breaks down Aristotle's distinction between imitative poetry and persuasive rhetoric (see rhetoric). Such pragmatic criticism became the dominant form of literary theory from late classical times through the eighteenth century. Discussions of poetry in that long span of time absorbed and expanded upon the analytic terms that had been developed in traditional rhetoric, and represented a poem mainly as a deployment of established artistic means for achieving foreseen effects upon its readers. The triumph in the early nineteenth century of expressive theories of literature (which conceive a work primarily as the expression of the feelings, temperament, and mental powers of the author), followed by the prominence, beginning in the 1920s, of objective theories of literature (which maintain that a work should be considered as an object in itself, independently of the attributes and intentions of the author and the responses of a reader), served to diminish, and sometimes to eliminate, rhetorical considerations in literary criticism. See under criticism. After the 1950s, however, there was a strong revival of interest in literature as a mode of communication between author and reader, and this led to the development of a rhetorical criticism which, without departing from a primary focus on the literary work itself, understood to identify and analyze those elements within a poem or a prose narrative which are there primarily in order to effect certain responses in a reader. As Wayne Booth said in the preface to his influential book The Rhetoric of Fiction (rev. 1983), his subject is "the rhetorical resources available to the writer of epic, novel, or short story as he tries, consciously or unconsciously, to impose his fictional world upon the reader." Many critics of prose fiction and of narrative and non-narrative poems have emphasized the author's use of a variety of means—including the authorial presence or "voice" that he or she projects—in order to engage the interest and guide the imaginative and emotional responses of the readers to whom, whether consciously or not, the literary work is addressed. (See persona, tone, and voice.) After the 1960s, there also emerged a form of readerresponse criticism that focuses on a reader's interpretive responses to the sequence of words in a literary text. Most of its representatives, however, either ignored or rejected the rhetorical view that such responses are effected by devices that, for the most part, are contrived for that purpose by the author.

Sublime

The concept was introduced into the criticism of literature and art by a Greek treatise Peri hupsous ("On the sublime"), attributed in the manuscript to Longinus and probably written in the first century AD. As defined by Longinus, the sublime is a quality that can occur in any type of discourse, whether poetry or prose. Whereas the effect of rhetoric on the hearer or reader of a discourse is persuasion, the effect of the sublime is "transport" (ekstasis)—it is that quality of a passage which "shatters the hearer's composure," exercises irresistible "domination" over him, and "scatters the subjects like a bolt of lightning." The source of the sublime, according to Longinus, lies in the capabilities of the speaker or writer. Three of these—the use of figurative language, nobility of expression, and elevated composition—are matters of art that can be acquired by practice; but two other, and more important, capabilities, are largely innate: "loftiness of thought" and "strong and inspired passion." The ability to achieve sublimity is in itself enough to prove the transcendent genius of a writer, and expresses the nobility of the writer's character: "sublimity is the ring of greatness in the soul." Longinus' examples of sublime passages in poems range from the epics of Homer through the tragedies of Aeschylus to a love lyric by Sappho; his examples in prose are taken from the writings of the philosopher Plato, the orator Demosthenes, and the historian Herodotus. Especially notable is his quotation, as a prime instance of sublimity, of the passage in the Book of Genesis written, he says, by "the lawgiver of the Jews": "And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light, 'Let there be land,' and there was land." Longinus' innovative treatise exerted a strong and persistent effect on literary criticism after it became widely known by way of a French translation by Boileau in 1674; eventually, it helped establish the expressive theory of poetry and also impressionistic criticism (see under criticism). In the eighteenth century, an important tendency in critical theory was to shift the application of the term "the sublime" from a quality of linguistic discourse that originates in the powers of a writer's mind, to a quality inherent in external objects and above all in the scenes and occurrences of the natural world. Thus Edmund Burke's highly influential Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, published in 1757, attributes the source of the sublime to those things which are "in any sort terrible"—that is, to whatever is "fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger"—provided that the observer is in a situation of safety from danger, and so is able to experience what would otherwise be a painful terror as a "delightful horror." (Compare distance and involvement.) The features of objects which evoke sublime horror are obscurity, immense power, and vastness in dimension or quantity. Burke's examples of the sublime include vast architectural structures, Milton's description of Satan in Paradise Lost, the description of the king's army in Shakespeare's 1 Henry IV, and natural phenomena; a sublime passion, he says, may be produced by "the noise of vast cataracts, raging storms, thunder or artillery," all of which evoke "a great and awful sensation in the mind." During the eighteenth century, tourists and landscape painters traveled to the English Lake Country and to the Alps in search of sublime scenery that was thrillingly vast, dark, wild, stormy, and ominous. Writers of what was called "the sublime ode," such as Thomas Gray and William Collins, sought to achieve effects of wildness and obscurity in their descriptive style and abrupt transitions, as well as to render the wildness, vastness, and obscurity of the sublime objects they described. (See ode.) Authors of Gothic novels exploited the sublimity of delightful horror in both the natural and architectural settings of their narratives and in the actions and events that they narrated. Samuel H. Monk, a pioneer historian of the concept of the sublime in the eighteenth century, cites as the "apotheosis" of the natural sublime the description of Simplon Pass in Wordsworth's The Prelude (1805), 4.554ff.: The immeasurable height Of woods decaying, never to be decayed, The stationary blasts of waterfalls, And everywhere along the hollow rent Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn, The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky, The rocks that muttered close upon our ears— Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside As if a voice were in them—the sick sight And giddy prospect of the raving stream, Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light.... (Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in EighteenthCentury England, 1935) In an extended analysis of the sublime in his Critique of Judgment (1790), the German philosopher Immanuel Kant divided the sublime objects specified by Burke and other earlier theorists into two kinds: (1) the "mathematical sublime" encompasses the sublime of magnitude—of vastness in size or seeming limitlessness or infinitude in number. (2) The "dynamic sublime" encompasses the objects conducive to terror at our seeming helplessness before the overwhelming power of nature, provided that the terror is rendered pleasurable by the safe situation of the observer. All of Kant's examples of sublimity are scenes and events in the natural world: "the immeasurable host" of starry systems such as the Milky Way, "shapeless mountain masses towering one above the other in wild disorder," "volcanoes in all their violence of destruction, hurricanes leaving desolation in their track, the boundless ocean rising with rebellious force, the high waterfall of some mighty river." Kant maintains, however, that the sublimity resides "not in the Object of nature" itself, but "only in the mind of the judging Subject" who contemplates the object. In a noted passage, he describes the experience of sublimity as a rapid sequence of painful blockage and pleasurable release—"the feeling of a momentary check to the vital forces followed at once by a discharge all the more powerful." In the mathematical sublime, the mind is checked by its inadequacy to comprehend as a totality the boundlessness or seeming infinity of natural magnitudes, and in the dynamic sublime, it is checked by its helplessness before the seeming irresistibility of natural powers. But the mind then goes on to feel exultation at the recognition of its inherent capacity to think a totality in a way that transcends "every standard of sense," or else at its discovery within itself of a capacity for resistance which "gives us courage to be able to measure ourselves against the seeming omnipotence of nature." In Kant's view, the experience of the sublime manifests on the one hand the limitations and weakness of finite humanity, but on the other hand its "pre-eminence over nature," even when confronted by the "immeasurability" of nature's magnitude and the "irresistibility" of its might. In The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (1976), Thomas Weiskel undertook to translate Kant's theory of the sublime, and especially his analysis of blockage and release, into terms both of semiotic theory and of psychoanalytic theory. See also the development of Kant's views by Neil Hertz, The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (1985). Slavoj Žižek applied the concept of the sublime to a Lacanian interpretation of ideology (see under Marxist criticism) in The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989). For the argument that eighteenth-century debates about the sublime illuminate debates in modern literary theory, see Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (1992). Refer to Elder Olson, "The Argument of Longinus' On the Sublime," in Critics and Criticism, Ancient and Modern, ed. R. S. Crane (1952); Marjorie Nicholson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (1959); Steven Knapp, Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge (1985); Philip Shaw, The Sublime (2005).

Demotic/ Hieratic Style

The critic Northrop Frye introduced a variant of this long-persisting analysis of stylistic levels in literature. He made a primary differentiation between the demotic style (which is modeled on the language, rhythms, and associations of ordinary speech) and the hieratic style (which employs a variety of formal elaborations that separate the literary language from ordinary speech). Frye then proceeded to distinguish a high, middle, and low level in each of these classes. See The Well-Tempered Critic (1963), chapter 2.

theories and movements in recent criticism

The entry in this Glossary on criticism describes traditional types of literary theory and of applied criticism from Aristotle through the early twentieth century. Since World War I, and especially since the 1960s, there have appeared a large number of innovative literary theories and methods of critical analysis, including revised and amplified versions of the earlier forms of Marxist criticism and psychoanalytic criticism. An entry on each of these latter-day critical modes is included in the Glossary, according to the alphabetic order of its title. Following is a table of the approximate time when these modes became prominent in literary criticism: 1920s-1930s Russian Formalism 1930s-1940s archetypal criticism 1940s-1950s New Criticism; phenomenological criticism 1960s modern forms of feminist criticism; structuralist criticism; stylistics 1970s theory of the anxiety of influence; deconstruction; discourse analysis; various forms of reader-response criticism; reception theory; semiotics; speech-act theory 1980s cultural studies; dialogic criticism; gender criticism; new historicism; queer theory 1990s Darwinian literary studies; ecocriticism; postcolonial studies 2000ff cognitive literary studies See the entry poststructuralism for current uses of the term "theory," as well as for a description of some critical perspectives and practices shared by a number of theories that have appeared after the 1960s.

heroic quatrain

The heroic quatrain, in iambic pentameter rhyming abab, is the stanza of Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751):

Sentimental novel

The novel of sensibility, or sentimental novel, of the latter part of the eighteenth century similarly emphasized the tearful distresses of the virtuous, either at their own sorrows or at those of their friends; some of them represented in addition a sensitivity to beauty or sublimity in natural phenomena which also expressed itself in tears. Samuel Richardson's Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) exploits sensibility in some of its scenes; and Laurence Sterne, in Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, published in the 1760s, gives us his own inimitable compound of sensibility, self-irony, and innuendo. The vogue of sensibility was international. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's novel Julie, or the New Héloise (1761) dealt with lovers who manifest sensibility, and in his autobiography, The Confessions (written 1764-70), Rousseau represented himself, in some circumstances and moods, as a man of extravagant sensibility. Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) was an enormously popular presentation of the aesthetic sensitivities and finespun emotional tribulations of a young man who, frustrated in his love for a woman betrothed to another and in general unable to adapt his sensibility to the demands of ordinary life, finally shoots himself.

Setting

The overall "setting" of a narrative or dramatic work is the general locale, historical time, and social circumstances in which its action occurs; the setting of a single episode or scene within the work is the particular physical location in which it takes place. The overall setting of Macbeth, for example, is medieval Scotland, and the setting for the particular scene in which Macbeth comes upon the witches is a blasted heath. The overall setting of James Joyce's Ulysses is Dublin on June 16, 1904, and its opening episode is set in the Martello Tower overlooking Dublin Bay. In works by writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Hardy, and William Faulkner, both the overall and individual settings are important elements in generating the atmosphere of their works. The Greek term opsis ("scene," or "spectacle") is now occasionally used to denote a particular visible or picturable setting in any work of literature, including a lyric poem. When applied to a theatrical production, "setting" is synonymous with décor, which is a French term denoting both the scenery and the properties, or movable pieces of furniture, on the stage. The French mise en scène ("placing on stage") is sometimes used in English as another synonym for "setting"; it is more useful, however, to apply the term more broadly, as the French do, to signify a director's overall conception, staging, and directing of a theatrical performance.

Periodic sentence

The periodic sentence is one in which the component parts, or "members," are so composed that the close of its syntactic structure remains suspended until the end of the sentence; the effect tends to be formal or oratorical. An example is the eloquent opening sentence of James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), in which the structure of the syntax is not concluded until we reach the final noun, "task": To write the life of him who excelled all mankind in writing the lives of others, and who, whether we consider his extraordinary endowments, or his various works, has been equaled by few in any age, is an arduous, and may be reckoned in me a presumptuous task.

quatrain

The quatrain, or four-line stanza, is the most common in English versification and is employed with various meters and rhyme schemes. The ballad stanza (in alternating four- and three-foot lines rhyming abcb, or less frequently abab) is one common quatrain; when this same stanza occurs in hymns, it is called common measure. Emily Dickinson is the most subtle, varied, and persistent of all users of this type of quatrain; her frequent resort to partial rhyme prevents monotony:

short story vs. novel

The short story differs from the novel in the dimension that Aristotle called "magnitude," and this limitation of length imposes differences both in the effects that the story can achieve and in the choice and elaboration of the elements to achieve those effects. Edgar Allan Poe, who is sometimes called the originator of the short story as an established genre, was at any rate its first critical theorist. He defined what he called "the prose tale" as a narrative which can be read at one sitting of from half an hour to two hours, and is limited to "a certain unique or single effect" to which every detail is subordinate (see his review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales, 1842). Poe's comment applies to many short stories and points to the economy of management which the tightness of the form always imposes in some degree. We can say that, by and large, the short story writer introduces a limited number of persons, cannot afford the space for a leisurely analysis and sustained development of character, and cannot develop as dense and detailed a social milieu as does the novelist. The author often begins the story close to, or even on the verge of, the climax, minimizes both prior exposition and the details of the setting, keeps the complications down, and clears up the dénouement quickly—sometimes in a few sentences. (See plot.) The central incident is often selected to manifest as much as possible of the protagonist's life and character, and the details are devised to carry maximum import for the development of the plot. This spareness in the narrative often gives the artistry in a good short story higher visibility than the artistry in the more capacious and loosely structured novel.

tercet

The tercet, or triplet, is a stanza of three lines, usually with a single rhyme. The lines may be the same length (as in Robert Herrick's "Upon Julia's Clothes," 1648, written in tercets of iambic tetrameter), or else of varying lengths. In Richard Crashaw's "Wishes to His Supposed Mistress" (1646), the lines of each tercet are successively in iambic dimeter, trimeter, and tetrameter:

Early short story

The type of prose narrative which approximates the present concept of the short story was developed, beginning in the early nineteenth century, in order to satisfy the need for short fiction by the many magazines (periodical collections of diverse materials, including essays, reviews, verses, and prose stories) that were inaugurated at that time. Among the early practitioners were Washington Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe in America; Sir Walter Scott and Mary Shelley in England; E. T. A. Hoffmann in Germany; Balzac in France; and Gogol, Pushkin, and Turgenev in Russia. Since then, almost all the major novelists in all the European languages have also written notable short stories. The form has flourished especially in America; Frank O'Connor has called it "the national art form," and its American masters include (in addition to the writers mentioned above) Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, John O'Hara, J. F. Powers, John Cheever, and J. D. Salinger.

stanzas from France

There are also various elaborate stanza forms imported from France, such as the rondeau, the villanelle, and the triolet, containing intricate repetitions, at set intervals, both of rhymes and of entire lines; these stanzas have been used mainly, but not exclusively, for light verse. Their revival by W. H. Auden, William Empson, and other mid-twentieth-century poets was a sign of renewed interest in high metrical artifice. Dylan Thomas' "Do not go gentle into that good night" is a villanelle; that is, it consists of five tercets and a quatrain, all on two rhymes, and with systematic later repetitions of lines 1 and 3 of the first tercet.

Science fiction and fantasy

These terms encompass novels and short stories that represent an imagined reality that is radically different in its nature and functioning from the world of our ordinary experience. Often the setting is another planet, or this earth projected into the future, or an imagined parallel universe. The two terms are not sharply discriminated, but by and large the term science fiction is applied to those narratives in which—unlike in pure fantasy—an explicit attempt is made to render plausible the fictional world by reference to known or imagined scientific principles, or to a projected advance in technology, or to a drastic change in the organization of society. Mary Shelley's remarkable Frankenstein (1818) is often considered a precursor of science fiction, but the basing of fictional worlds on explicit and coherently developed scientific principles did not occur until later in the nineteenth century, in such writings as Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth and H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. More recent important authors of science fiction include Isaac Asimov, Arthur Clarke, Ray Bradbury, J. G. Ballard, and Doris Lessing. Science fiction is also frequently represented in television and film; a notable and immensely popular instance is the Star Trek series. Fantasy is as old as the fictional utopias, and its satiric forms have an important precursor in the extraordinary countries portrayed in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726). Among the notable twentieth-century writers of fantasy are C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien (The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings), whose works incorporate materials from classical, biblical, and medieval sources. Ursula Le Guin is a major author of both science fiction and works of fantasy. Some instances of science fiction and fantasy project a future utopia (Le Guin's The Dispossessed), or else attack an aspect of current science or society by imagining their dystopian conclusion (George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949, and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, 1986); and many writers use their imaginary settings, as Swift had in Gulliver's Travels, for political and social satire (Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and much of Kurt Vonnegut's prose fiction). See utopia and dystopia and satire.

topographical poetry

Topographical poetry, also called local poetry, combines the description of a specific natural scene with historical, political, or moral reflections that are associated with the scene or are suggested by its details. Samuel Johnson, in his "Life of John Denham" (1779), attributed its origin to Denham's fine poem Cooper's Hill, first written in 1642; as Johnson defines the genre, "local poetry" is a species "of which the fundamental subject is some particular landscape to be poetically described, with the addition of such embellishments as may be supplied by historical retrospection or incidental meditation." See the analysis of a passage from Cooper's Hill, under heroic couplet. This poetic type had an enormous vogue through the eighteenth century; Robert Aubin, in Topographical Poetry in XVIII-Century England (1936), lists some two thousand examples. Many of these, like "Cooper's Hill," are prospect poemsthat describe the landscape that is visible from a high point of vantage; notable examples are John Dyer's "Grongar Hill" (1726) and Thomas Gray's "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College" (1747). Local poems were later developed into a major Romantic form, the descriptive-meditative lyric, which is characterized by a sustained flow of consciousness; a subtle interweaving of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings; and an integrated design. Early examples are Coleridge's "The Eolian Harp" (1796) and "Frost at Midnight" (1798), and Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" (1798); formal variants of the mode include Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode" (1802) and Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" (1807). See M. H. Abrams, "Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric," in The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism (1984). Related to the topographical poem is the country house poem, which had a brief vogue in the seventeenth century. This form describes and praises a rural estate and its grounds, and uses the occasion, by sometimes ingenious connections, to extol also its owner and the owner's family and family history. It was inaugurated by Aemilia Lanyer's "The Description of Cooke-ham" (1611) and Ben Jonson's "To Penshurst" (1616). Andrew Marvell's "Upon Appleton House" (1651) is the longest (776 lines), the most intricately wrought, and the wittiest of the country house poems.

text and writing (écriture)

Traditional critics conceived the object of their critical concern to be a literary "work"; that is, a human product whose form is achieved by its author's design and its meanings by the author's intentional uses of the verbal medium. French structuralist critics, on the other hand, depersonalized a literary product by conceiving it to be not a "work" but an impersonal text, a manifestation of the social institution called écriture (writing). The author is regarded as only an intermediary in whom the action of writing precipitates the elements and codes of the pre-existing linguistic and literary system into a particular text. The interpretation of this writing is effected by "lecture" (in French, the process of reading) which, by bringing to bear expectations formed by earlier exposure to the functioning of the linguistic system, invests the marks on the page with what merely seem to be their inherent meanings and references to an outer world. Structuralists differ about the degree to which the activity of reading a text is constrained by the literary conventions and codes that went into the writing; many deconstructive critics, however, propose that all writing, by the internal play of opposing forces, necessarily disseminates into an indefinite array of diverse and opposed meanings. The system of linguistic and literary conventions that constitute a literary text are said by structuralist and poststructuralist critics to be "naturalized" in the activity of reading, in that the artifices of a nonreferential "textuality" are made to seem vraisemblable (credible)—that is, made to give the illusion of referring to reality—by being brought into accord with modes of discourse and cultural stereotypes that are so familiar and habitual as to seem natural. Naturalization (an alternative term is recuperation) takes place through such habitual procedures in reading as assigning the text to a specific genre, or taking a fictional text to be the speech of a credibly human narrator, or interpreting its artifices as signifying characters, actions, and values that represent, or accord with, those in an extratextual world. To a thoroughgoing structuralist or poststructuralist critic, however, not only is the text's representation of the world no more than an illusory "effect" generated by the process of reading, but the world is itself held to be in its turn a text; that is, simply a structure of signs whose significance is constituted by the cultural conventions, codes, and ideology that happen to be shared by members of a cultural community. The term intertextuality, popularized especially by Julia Kristeva, is used to signify the multiple ways in which any one literary text is in fact made up of other texts, by means of its open or covert citations and allusions, its repetitions and transformations of the formal and substantive features of earlier texts, or simply its unavoidable participation in the common stock of linguistic and literary conventions and procedures that are "always-already" in place and constitute the discourses into which we are born. In Kristeva's formulation, accordingly, any text is in fact an "intertext"—the site of an intersection of numberless other texts, and existing only through its relations to other texts. Roland Barthes in S/Z (1970) proposed a distinction between a text which is "lisible" (readable) and one which, although "scriptible" (writable) is "illisible" (unreadable). Readable texts are traditional or "classical" ones—such as the realistic novels by Honoré Balzac and other nineteenth-century authors—which for the most part conform to the prevailing codes and conventions, literary and social, and so are readily and comfortably interpretable and naturalizable in the process of reading. An "unreadable" text (such as James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, or the French new novel, or a poem by a highly experimental poet) is one which largely violates, parodies, or innovates upon prevailing conventions, and thus persistently shocks, baffles, and frustrates standard expectations. In Barthes' view, an unreadable text, by drawing attention in this way to the pure conventionality and artifice of literature, laudably destroys any illusion that it represents reality. In The Pleasure of the Text (published 1973), Barthes assigns to the readable text the response of mere "plaisir" (quasi-erotic pleasure), but to the unreadable or unintelligible text the response of "jouissance" (orgasmic ecstasy). For related matters and relevant bibliographic references, see hypertext; poststructuralism; semiotics; structuralist criticism.

Symbolist movement

Various poets of the Romantic Period, including Novalis and Hölderlin in Germany and Shelley in England, often used private symbols in their poetry (see symbol). Shelley, for example, repeatedly made symbolic use of objects such as the morning and evening star, a boat moving upstream, winding caves, and the conflict between a serpent and an eagle. William Blake, however, exceeded all his romantic contemporaries in his recourse to a persistent and sustained symbolism—that is, a coherent system composed of a number of symbolic elements—in both his lyric poems and his long "prophetic," or epic poems. (See, for example, Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake, 1947.) In nineteenth-century America, a symbolist procedure was a prominent element in the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, the prose of Emerson and Thoreau, and the poetic theory and practice of Poe. (See Charles Feidelson, Jr., Symbolism and American Literature, 1953.) These writers derived the mode in large part from the native Puritan tradition of divine typology (see interpretation: typological and allegorical) and also from the theory of "correspondences" of the Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). In the usage of literary historians, however, Symbolist Movement designates specifically a group of French writers beginning with Charles Baudelaire (Fleurs du mal, 1857) and including such later poets as Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Paul Valéry. Baudelaire based the symbolic mode of his poems in part on the example of the American Edgar Allan Poe, but especially on the ancient belief in correspondences—the doctrine that there exist inherent and systematic analogies between the human mind and the outer world, and also between the material and the spiritual worlds. As Baudelaire put this doctrine: "Everything, form, movement, number, color, perfume, in the spiritual as in the natural world, is significative, reciprocal, converse, correspondent." The techniques of the French Symbolists, who exploited an order of private symbols in a poetry of rich suggestiveness rather than explicit signification, had an immense influence throughout Europe, and (especially in the 1890s and later) in England and America on poets such as Arthur Symons and Ernest Dowson (see Decadence) as well as W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, Hart Crane, e. e. cummings, and Wallace Stevens. Major symbolist poets in Germany are Stefan George and Rainer Maria Rilke. The Modern Period, in the decades after World War I, was a notable era of symbolism in literature. Many of the major writers of the period exploit symbols which are in part drawn from religious and esoteric traditions and in part invented. Some of the works of the age are symbolist in their settings, their agents, and their actions, as well as in the objects they refer to. Instances of a persistently symbolic procedure occur in lyrics (Yeats' "Byzantium" poems, Dylan Thomas' series of sonnets Altarwise by Owl-light), in longer poems (Hart Crane's The Bridge, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Wallace Stevens' "The Comedian as the Letter C"), and in novels (James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury). See Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899, reprinted 1958); Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle (1936); C. M. Bowra, The Heritage of Symbolism (1943); Anna Balakian, ed., The Symbolist Movement in the Literature of European Languages (1982); and René Taupin, The Influence of French Symbolism on Modern American Poetry (1920, trans. 1985).

literature of sensibility

When a contemporary critic talks of a poet's sensibility, the reference is to a characteristic way of responding, in perception, thought, and feeling, to experience; and when T. S. Eliot claimed that a dissociation of sensibility set in with the poetry of John Milton and John Dryden, he signified that there occurred at that time a division between a poet's sensuous, intellectual, and emotional modes of experience. When a literary historian, however, talks of the literature of sensibility, the reference is to a particular cultural phenomenon of the eighteenth century. This type of literature was fostered by the moral philosophy that had developed as a reaction against seventeenthcentury Stoicism (which emphasized reason and the unemotional will as the sole motives to virtue), and even more importantly, as a reaction against Thomas Hobbes' claims, in Leviathan (1651), that a human being is innately selfish and that the mainsprings of human behavior are self-interest and the drive for power and status. In opposition to such views, many sermons, philosophical writings, and popular tracts and essays proclaimed that "benevolence"—wishing other persons well—is an innate human sentiment and motive, and that the central elements in all morality are the feelings of sympathy and "sensibility"—that is, a hair-trigger responsiveness to another person's distresses and joys. (See empathy and sympathy.) "Sensibility" also connoted, in the eighteenth century, an intense emotional responsiveness to beauty and sublimity, whether in nature or in art, and such responsiveness was often represented as an index to a person's gentility—that is, to one's upper-class status. Emphasis on the human capability for sympathy and wishing others well—an important contribution was Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)—helped to develop social consciousness and a sense of communal responsibility in an era of expanding commercialism and of a market economy based on self-interest. (For an application of Smith's Theory of the Moral Sentiments to literature, see Martha Craven Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge, 1990, chapter 14.) Highly exaggerated forms of sympathy and manifestations of benevolence, however, became prominent in eighteenth-century culture and literature. It was a commonplace in widespread views of morality that readiness to shed a sympathetic tear, quite apart from moral actions, is the sign both of polite breeding and a virtuous heart; and such a view was often accompanied by the observation that sympathy with another's grief, unlike personal grief, is a pleasurable emotion, hence to be sought as a value in itself. Common phrases in the cult of sensibility were the oxymorons "the luxury of grief," "pleasurable sorrows," and "the sadly pleasing tear. It is clear that much of what in that age was called, with approval, "sensibility" we now call, with disapproval, sentimentalism.

frame-story

orists. The short narrative, in both verse and prose, is one of the oldest and most widespread of literary forms; the Hebrew Bible, for example, includes the stories of Jonah, Ruth, and Esther. Some of the narrative types which preceded the modern short story, treated elsewhere in this Glossary, are the fable, the exemplum, the folktale, the fabliau, and the parable. Early in its history, there developed the device of the frame-story: a preliminary narrative within which one or more of the characters proceeds to tell a series of short narratives. This device was widespread in the oral and written literature of the East and Middle East, as in the collection of stories called The Arabian Nights (see the Introduction to The Arabian Nights, trans. Husain Haddawy, 1990). This device was used by a number of other writers, including Boccaccio for his prose Decameron (1353) and by Chaucer for his versified Canterbury Tales (c. 1387). In the latter instance, Chaucer developed the frame-story of the journey, dialogue, and interactions of the Canterbury pilgrims to such a degree that the frame itself approximated the form of an organized plot. Within Chaucer's frame-plot, each story constitutes a complete and rounded narrative, yet functions also both as a means of characterizing the teller and as a vehicle for the quarrels and topics of argument en route. In its more modern forms, the frame-story may enclose either a single narrative (Henry James' The Turn of the Screw) or a sequence of narratives (Joel Chandler Harris' stories as told by Uncle Remus, 1881 and later; see under beast fable).

Zeugma

Zeugma in Greek means "yoking"; in the most common present usage, it is applied to expressions in which a single word stands in the same grammatical relation to two or more other words, but with an obvious shift in its significance. Sometimes the word is literal in one relation and metaphorical in the other. Here are two examples of zeugma in Pope: Or stain her honour, or her new brocade. Obliged by hunger, and request of friends. Byron uses zeugma for grimly comic effects in his description of a shipwreck in Don Juan (1819-24), Canto 2: And the waves oozing through the port-hole made His berth a little damp, and him afraid. The loud tempests raise The waters, and repentance for past sinning.