intro to lit terms (end-term)

Enlightenment

: the, a general term applied to the movement of intellectual liberation that developed in Western Europe from the late 17th century to the late 18th (the period often called the 'Age of Reason'), especially in France and Switzerland. The Enlightenment culminated with the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the *ENCYCLOPEDISTES, the philosophy ofImmanuel Kant, and the political ideals of the American and French Revolutions, while its forerunners in science and philosophy included Bacon, Descartes, Newton, and Locke. Its central idea was the need for (and the capacity of) human reason to clear away ancient superstition, prejudice, dogma, and injustice. Kant defined enlightenment (die Aujkliirung) as man's emancipation from his selfincurred immaturity. Enlightenment thinking encouraged rational scientific inquiry, humanitarian tolerance, and the idea of universal human rights. In religion, it usually involved the sceptical rejection of superstition, dogma, and revelation in favour of 'Deism' -a belief confined to those universal doctrines supposed to be common to all religions, such as the existence of a venerable Supreme Being as creator. The advocates of enlightenment tended to place their faith in human progress brought about by the gradual propagation of rational principles, although their great champion Voltaire, more militant and less optimistic, waged a bitter campaign against the abuses of the ancien regime under the virtually untranslatable slogan ecrasez l'infiime! (for which a rough equivalent would be 'smash the system!'). In English, the attitudes of the Enlightenment are found in the late 18th century, in the historian Edward Gibbon and the political writers Thomas Paine and William Godwin, as well as in the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. The flourishing of philosophy and science in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the 18th century is known as the Scottish Enlightenment; its leading figures included David Hume and Adam Smith. See also philosophes. For more extended accounts, consult Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment (1968) and, on the British dimension, Roy Porter, Enlightenment (2000).

personification

a *FIGURE OF SPEECH by which animals, abstract ideas, or inanimate things are referred to as if they were human, as in Sir Philip Sidney's line: Invention, Nature's child, fled stepdame Study's blows This figure or *TROPE, known in Greek as prosopopoeia, is common in most ages of poetry, and particularly in the 18th century. It has a special function as the basis of * ALLEGORY. In drama, the term is sometimes applied to the impersonation of non-human things and ideas by human actors. Verb: personifY. See also pathetic fallacy.

postmodernism

a disputed term that has occupied much recent debate about contemporary culture since the early 1980s. In its simplest and least satisfactory sense it refers generally to the phase of 20thcentury Western culture that succeeded the reign of high *MODERNISM, thus indicating the products of the age of mass television since the mid- 1950s. More often, though, it is applied to a cultural condition prevailing in the advanced capitalist societies since the 1960s, characterized by a superabundance of disconnected images and styles-most noticeably in television, advertising, commercial design, and pop video. In this sense, promoted by Jean Baudrillard and other commentators, postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals. As applied to literature and other arts, the term is notoriously ambiguous, implying either that modernism has been superseded or that it has continued into a new phase. Postmodernism may be seen as a continuation of modernism's alienated mood and disorienting techniques and at the same time as an abandonment of its determined quest for artistic coherence in a fragmented world: in very crude terms, where a modernist artist or writer would try to wrest a meaning from the world through myth, symbol, or formal complexity, the postmodernist greets the * ABSURD or meaningless confusion of contemporary existence with a certain numbed or flippant indifference, favouring selfconsciously 'depthless' works of *PABULATION, *PASTICHE, *BRICOLAGE, or * ALEATORY disconnection. The term cannot usefully serve as an inclusive description of all literature since the 1950s or 1960s, but is applied selectively to those works that display most evidently the moods and formal disconnections described above. It seems to have little relevance to modern poetry, and limited application to drama outside the 'absurdist' tradition, but is used widely in reference to fiction, notably to the novels (or *ANTI-NOVELS) and stories of Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, William S. Burroughs, Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie, Peter Ackroyd, Julian Barnes, Jeanette Winterson, and many of their followers. Some of their works, like Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973) and Nabokov's Ada (1969), employ devices reminiscent of *SCIENCE FICTION, playing with contradictory orders of reality or the irruption of the fabulous into the secular world. Opinion is still divided, however, on the value of the term and of the phenomenon it purports to describe. Those who most often use it tend to welcome 'the postmodern' as a liberation from the hierarchy of 'high' and 'low' cultures; while sceptics regard the term as a symptom of irresponsible academic euphoria about the glitter of consumerist capitalism and its moral vacuity. For more extended discussions, consult Jean-Fran\=ois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (1986); H. Bertens and D. Fokkema (eds.), Approaching Postmodernism (1986); and Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (1987). See also post-structuralism.

modernism

a general term applied retrospectively to the wide range of experimental and * AVANT-GARDE trends in the literature (and other arts) of the early 20th century, including *SYMBOLISM, *FUTURISM, *EXPRESSIONISM, *IMAGISM, *VORTICISM, *DADA, and *SURREALISM, along with the innovations of unaffiliated writers. Modernist literature is characterized chiefly by a rejection of 19th-century traditions and of their consensus between author and reader: the conventions of *REALISM, for instance, were abandoned by Franz Kafka and other novelists, and by expressionist drama, while several poets rejected traditional *METRES in favour of *PREE VERSE. Modernist writers tended to see themselves as an avant-garde disengaged from bourgeois values, and disturbed their readers by adopting complex and difficult new forms and styles. In fiction, the accepted continuity of chronological development was upset by Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner, while James Joyce and Virginia Woolf attempted new ways of tracing the flow of characters' thoughts in their *STREAM-OFCONSCIOUSNESS styles. In poetry, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot replaced the logical exposition of thoughts with *COLLAGES of fragmentary images and complex * ALLUSIONS. Luigi Pirandello and Bertolt Brecht opened up the theatre to new forms of abstraction in place of realist and * NATURALIST representation. Modernist writing is predominantly cosmopolitan, and often expresses a sense of urban cultural dislocation, along with an awareness of new anthropological and psychological theories. Its favoured techniques of juxtaposition and multiple *POINT OF VIEW challenge the reader to reestablish a coherence of meaning from fragmentary forms. In English, its major landmarks are Joyce's Ulysses and Eliot's The Waste Land (both 1922). In Hispanic literature the term has a special sense: modernismo denotes the new style of poetry in Spanish from 1888 to c.1910, strongly influenced by the French *SYMBOLISTS and *PARNASSIANS and introduced by the Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario and the Mexican poet Manuel Gutierrez Najera. For a fuller account, consult Peter Childs, Modernism (2000).

realism

a mode of writing that gives the impression of recording or 'reflecting' faithfully an actual way of life. The term refers, sometimes confusingly, both to a literary method based on detailed accuracy of description (Le. *VERISIMILITUDE) and to a more general attitude that rejects idealization, escapism, and other extravagant qualities of *ROMANCE in favour of recognizing soberly the actual problems oflife. Modern criticism frequently insists that realism is not a direct or simple reproduction of reality (a 'slice oflife') but a system of *CONVENTIONS producing a lifelike illusion of some 'real' world outside the text, by processes of selection, exclusion, description, and manners of addressing the reader. In its methods and attitudes, realism may be found as an element in many kinds of writing prior to the 19th century (e.g. in Chaucer or Defoe, in their different ways); but as a dominant literary trend it is associated chiefly with the 19th-century novel of middle- or lower-class life, in which the problems of ordinary people in unremarkable circumstances are rendered with close attention to the details of physical setting and to the complexities of social life. The outstanding works of realism in 19th-century fiction include Honore de Balzac's fllusions perdues (1837-43), Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857), and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-2). In France, a selfconsciously realist school announced itself in 1857 with the publication of Champfleury' s Le Realisme, but the term normally refers to the general convention rather than to this barely significant group. In the work of some novelists, realism passes over into the movement of * NATURALISM, in which sociological investigation and determinist views of human behaviour predominate. Realism also established itself as an important tradition in the theatre in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in the work of Henrik Ibsen, Bernard Shaw, and others; and it remains a standard convention of film and television drama. Despite the radical attempts of *MODERNISM to displace the realist emphasis on external reality (notably in the movements of *EXPRESSIONISM and * SURREALISM), realism survived as a major current within 20th-century fiction, sometimes under the label of *NEO-REALISM. For a fuller account, consult Damian Grant, Realism (1970).

structuralism

a modem intellectual movement that analyses cultural phenomena according to principles derived from linguistics, emphasizing the systematic interrelationships among the elements of any human activity, and thus the abstract *CODES and *CONVENTIONS governing the social production of meanings. Building on the linguistic concept of the * PHONEME-a unit of meaningful sound defined purely by its differences from other phonemes rather than by any inherent features-structuralism argues that the elements composing any cultural phenomenon (from cooking to drama) are similarly 'relational': that is, they have meaning only by virtue of their contrasts with other elements of the system, especially in *BINARY OPPOSITIONS of paired opposites. Their meanings can be established not by referring each element to any supposed equivalent in natural reality, but only by analysing its function within a self-contained cultural code. Accordingly, structuralist analysis seeks the underlying system or *LANGUE that governs individual utterances or instances. In formulating the laws by which elements of such a system are combined, it distinguishes between sets of interchangeable units (*PARADIGMS) and sequences of such units in combination (*SYNTAGMS), thereby outlining a basic '*SYNTAX' of human culture. Structuralism and its 'science of signs' (see semiotics) are derived chiefly from the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), and partly from *RUSSIAN FORMALISM and the related *NARRATOLOGY of Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (1928). It flourished in France in the 1960s, following the widely discussed applications of structural analysis to mythology by the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. In the study ofliterary works, structuralism is distinguished by its rejection of those traditional notions according to which literature 'expresses' an author's meaning or 'reflects' reality. Instead, the '*TEXT' is seen as an objective structure activating various codes and conventions which are independent of author, reader, and external reality. Structuralist criticism is less interested in interpreting what literary works mean than in explaining how they can mean what they mean; that is, in showing what implicit rules and conventions are operating in a given work. The structuralist tradition has been particularly strong in narratology, from Propp's analysis of narrative *PUNCTIONS to Greimas' theory of * ACTANTS. The French critic Roland Barthes was an outstanding practitioner of structuralist literary analysis notably in his book S/Z (1970)-and is famed for his witty analyses of wrestling, striptease, and other phenomena in Mythologies (1957): some of his later writings, however, show a shift to *POST-STRUCTURALISM, in which the over-confident 'scientific' pretensions of structuralism are abandoned. For more extended accounts of this enterprise, consult Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (1977), Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (1975), and Robert Scholes, Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction (1974).

New Criticism

a movement in American literary * CRITICISM from the 1930s to the 1960s, concentrating on the verbal complexities and ambiguities of short poems considered as self-sufficient objects without attention to their origins or effects. The name comes from John Crowe Ransom's book The New Criticism (1941), in which he surveyed the theories developed in England by T. S. Eliot, 1. A. Richards, and William Empson, together with the work of the American critic Yvor Winters. Ransom called for a more 'objective' criticism focusing on the intrinsic qualities of a work rather than on its biographical or historical context; and his students Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren had already provided a very influential model of such an approach in their college textbook Understanding Poetry (1938), which helped to make New Criticism the academic orthodoxy for the next twenty years. Other critics grouped under this heading, despite their differences, include Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur, W. K. WimsattJr, and Kenneth Burke. Influenced by T. S. Eliot's view of poetry's * AUTOTELIC status, and by the detailed *SEMANTIC analyses of 1. A. Richards in Practical Criticism (1929) and Empson in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), the American New Critics repudiated 'extrinsic' criteria for understanding poems, dismissing them under such names as the * AFFECTIVE FALLACY and the *INTENTIONAL FALLACY. Moreover, they sought to overcome the traditional distinction between *PORM and *CONTENT: for them, a poem was ideally an 'organic unity' in which tensions were brought to equilibrium. Their favoured terms of analysis-*IRONY, *PARAOOX, * IMAGERY, *METAPHOR, and * SYMBoL-tended to neglect questions of * GENRE, and were not successfully transferred to the study of dramatic and *NARRATIVE works. Many later critics-often unsympathetic to the New Critics' Southern religious conservatism-accused them of cutting literature off from history, but their impact has in some ways been irreversible, especially in replacing biographical source-study with textcentred approaches. The outstanding works of New Criticism are Brooks's The Well-Wrought Urn (1947) and Wimsatt's The Verballcon (1954).

paraphrase

a restatement of a text's meaning in different words, usually in order to clarify the sense of the originaL Paraphrase involves the separation or abstraction of * CONTENT from *FORM, and so has been resisted strongly by *NEW CRITICISM and other schools of modern critical opinion: Cleanth Brooks in The Well-Wrought Urn (1947) issued a notable denunciation of the 'heresy of paraphrase' , i.e. the idea that a poem is paraphrasable. This is a necessary theoretical warning, since the particular form and * DICTION of a poem (or other work) give it meanings that are not reducible to simple statements and that do not survive the substitution of *SYNONYMS; but the practice of paraphrase can help to establish this very fact, and is an analytic procedure too useful to be outlawed. Adjective: paraphrastic.

post-structuralism

a school of thought that emerged partly from within French *STRUCTURALISM in the 1960s, reacting against structuralist pretensions to scientific objectivity and comprehensiveness. The term covers the philosophical *DECONSTRUCTION practised by Jacques Derrida and his followers, along with the later works of the critic Roland Barthes, the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, the historical critiques of Michel Foucault, and the cultural-political writings ofJean-Fran\=ois Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze. These thinkers emphasized the instability of meanings and of intellectual categories (including that of the human 'subject'), and sought to undermine any theoretical system that claimed to have universal validity-such claims being denounced as 'totalitarian'. They set out to dissolve the fixed *BINARY OPPOSITIONS of structuralist thought, including that between language and * METALANGUAGE-and thus between literature and criticism. Instead they favoured a non-hierarchical plurality or 'free play' of meanings, stressing the * INDETERMINACY of texts. Although waning in French intellectual life by the end of the 1970s, post-structuralism's delayed influence upon literary and cultural theory in the English-speaking world has persisted. For a fuller account, consult Madan Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism (1988).

Russian Formalism

a school ofliterary theory and analysis that emerged in Russia around 1915, devoting itself to the study of * LITERARINESS, i.e. the sum of' devices' that distinguish literary language from ordinary language. In reaction against the vagueness of previous literary theories, it attempted a scientific description ofliterature (especially poetry) as a special use oflanguage with observable features. This meant deliberately disregarding the contents ofliterary works, and thus inviting strong disapproval from Marxist critics, for whom *PORMALISM was a term of reproach. With the consolidation of Stalin's dictatorship around 1929, Formalism was silenced as a heresy in the Soviet Union, and its centre of research migrated to Prague in the 1930s. Along with 'literariness', the most important concept of the school was that of *OEPAMILIARIZATION: instead of seeing literature as a 'reflection' of the world, Victor Shklovsky and his Formalist followers saw it as a linguistic dislocation, or a 'making strange'. In the period of Czech Formalism, Jan Mukarovsky further refined this notion in terms of *POREGROUNDING. In their studies of * NARRATIVE, the Formalists also clarified the distinction between *PLOT (sjuzet) and *STORY (fabula). Apart from Shklovsky and his associate Boris Eikhenbaum, the most prominent of the Russian Formalists was Roman Jakobson, who was active both in Moscow and in Prague before introducing Formalist theories to the United States (see function). A somewhat distinct Russian group is the 'Bakhtin school' comprising Mikhail Bakhtin, Pavlev Medvedev, and Valentin Voloshinov; these theorists combined elements of Formalism and Marxism in their accounts of verbal *MULTIACCENTUALITY and of the * DIALOGIC text. Rediscovered in the West in the 1960s, the work of the Russian Formalists has had an important influence on *STRUCTURALIST theories ofliterature, and on some of the more recent varieties of Marxist literary criticism. For a fuller account, consult Peter Steiner, Russian Formalism (1984).

Romanticism

a sweeping but indispensable modem term applied to the profound shift in Western attitudes to art and human creativity that dominated much of European culture in the first half of the 19th century, and that has shaped most subsequent developments in literature-even those reacting against it. In its most coherent early form, as it emerged in the 1790s in Germany and Britain, and in the 1820s in France and elsewhere, it is known as the Romantic Movement or Romantic RevivaL Its chief emphasis was upon freedom of individual self-expression: sincerity, spontaneity, and originality became the new standards in literature, replacing the decorous imitation of classical models favoured by 18th-century *NEOCIASSICISM. Rejecting the ordered rationality of the *ENLIGHTENMENT as mechanical, impersonal, and artificial, the Romantics turned to the emotional directness of personal experience and to the boundlessness of individual imagination and aspiration. Increasingly independent of the declining system of aristocratic patronage, they saw themselves as free spirits expressing their own imaginative truths; several found admirers ready to heroworship the artist as a genius or prophet. The restrained balance valued in 18th-century culture was abandoned in favour of emotional intensity, often taken to extremes of rapture, nostalgia (for childhood or the past), horror, melancholy, or sentimentality. Some-but not all-Romantic writers cultivated the appeal of the exotic, the bizarre, or the macabre; almost all showed a new interest in the irrational realms of dream and delirium or offolk superstition and legend. The creative imagination occupied the centre of Romantic views of art, which replaced the 'mechanical' rules of conventional form with an 'organic' principle of natural growth and free development. The emergence of Romanticism has been attributed to several developments in late 18th-century culture (see preromanticism), including a strong antiquarian interest in *BALLADS and medieval *ROMANCES (from which Romanticism takes its name). The immediate inspiration for the first self-declared Romantics-the German group including the Schlegel brothers and Novalis-was the transcendental philosophy of Kant and Fichte, which stressed the creative power of the mind and allowed nature to be seen as a responsive mirror of the soul. This new German thinking spread via S. T. Coleridge to Britain and via Mme de Stael to France, eventually shaping American *TRANSCENDENTALISM. English Romanticism had emerged independently with William Blake's then little-known antiEnlightenment writings of the 1790s and with the landmark of William Wordsworth's 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads. In a second wave after the Napoleonic wars, Romanticism established itself in France and across Europe; by the 1830s the movement extended from Pushkin in Russia to Poe in the USA. Romanticism drew some of its energies from the associated revolutionary movements of democracy and nationalism, although the 'classical' culture of the French Revolution actually delayed the arrival of French Romanticism, and a strong element of conservative nostalgia is also evident in many Romantic writers. The literary rebellion of Wordsworth in England and Victor Hugo in France declared an end to the artificiality of older *CONVENTIONS, breaking up the 18th-century system of distinct * GENRES and of *POETIC diction. *LYRIC poetry underwent a major revival led by Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Pushkin, Leopardi, Heine, and others; *NARRATIVE verse took on a new subjective dimension in the work of Wordsworth and Byron, but the theatre tended towards the sensationalism of *MELODRAMA. In fiction, Hoffmann and Poe pioneered the tale of terror in the wake of the *GOTHIC NOVEL, while the *HISTORICAL NOVELS of Walter Scott, Alessandro Manzoni, Victor Hugo, and James Fenimore Cooper combined bold action with nostalgic sentiment. A new wave of women novelists led by Mary Shelley, George Sand, and the Bronte sisters broke the imposed restraints of modesty in works of powerful imaginative force. The astonishing personality of Byron provided Alfred de Musset, Mikhail Lermontov, and other admirers throughout Europe with a model of the Romantic poet as tormented outcast. The growing international cult of Shakespeare also reflected the Romantic heroworship which, in the writings of Thomas Carlyle and R. W. Emerson, became a 'heroic' view of history as the product of forceful personalities like Napoleon. Although challenged in the second half of the 19th century by the rise of * REALISM and *NATURALISM, Romanticism has in some ways maintained a constant presence in Western literature, providing the basis for several schools and movements from the *PRE-RApHAELITES and *SYMBOLISTS to *EXPRESSIONISM and *SURREALISM. In a broader sense, the term 'romantic' may be applied to works and authors of other periods, by explicit or implicit comparison with a 'classical' standard: thus Shakespeare is more romantic than Moliere or Ben Jonson, both because he disregards the structural models of Greek drama and because he exploits freely the supernatural elements offolk legend; and in a different way, W. B. Yeats and D. H. Lawrence are more romantic than W. H. Auden and E. M. Forster, because they assert the absolute primacy of their personal visions, rejecting common norms of objectivity. For a fuller account, consult Aidan Day, Romanticism (1996).

classicism

an attitude to literature that is guided by admiration of the qualities of formal balance, proportion, *OECORUM, and restraint attributed to the major works of ancient Greek and Roman literature ('the classics') in preference to the irregularities oflater *VERNACULAR literatures, and especially (since about 1800) to the artistic liberties proclaimed by *ROMANTICISM. A classic is a work of the highest class, and has also been taken to mean a work suitable for study in school classes. During and since the *RENAISSANCE, these overlapping meanings came to be applied to (and to be virtually synonymous with) the writings of major Greek and Roman authors from Homer to Juvenal, which were regarded as unsurpassed models of excellence. The adjective classical, usually applied to this body of writings, has since been extended to outstandingly creative periods of other literatures: the 17th century may be regarded as the classical age of French literature, and the 19th century the classical period of the Western novel, while the finest fiction of the United States in the mid-19th century from Cooper to Twain was referred to by D. H. Lawrence as Classic American Literature (despite the opposition between 'classical' and 'romantic' views of art, a romantic work can now still be a classic). A classical style or approach to literary composition is usually one that imitates Greek or Roman models in subject-matter (e.g. Greek legends) or in form (by the adoption of *GENRES like *TRAGEDY, *EPIC, *ODE, or verse *SATIRE), or both. As a literary doctrine, classicism holds that the writer must be governed by rules, models, or conventions, rather than by wayward inspiration: in its most strictly codified form in the 17th and 18th centuries (see neoclassicism), it required the observance of rules derived from Aristotle's Poetics (4th century BCE) and Horace's Ars Poetica (c.20 BCE), principally those of decorum and the dramatic *UNITIES. The dominant tendency of French literature in the 17th and 18th centuries, classicism in a weaker form also characterized the * AUGUSTAN AGE in England; the later German classicism of the late 18th and early 19th centuries was distinguished by its exclusive interest in Greek models, as opposed to the Roman bias of French and English classicisms. After the end of the 18th century, 'classical' came to be contrasted with 'romantic' in an opposition of increasingly generalized terms embracing moods and attitudes as well as characteristics of actual works. While partisans of Romanticism associated the classical with the rigidly artificial and the romantic with the freely creative, the classicists condemned romantic self-expression as eccentric self-indulgence, in the name of classical sanity and order. The great German writer J. W. von Goethe summarized his conversion to classical principles by defining the classical as healthy, the romantic as sickly. Since then, literary classicism has often been less a matter of imitating Greek and Roman models than of resisting the claims of Romanticism and all that it may be thought to stand for (Protestantism, liberalism, democracy, anarchy): the critical doctrines of Matthew Arnold and more especially ofT. S. Eliot are classicist in this sense of reacting against the Romantic principle of unrestrained selfexpression. For a fuller account, consult Dominique Secretan, Classicism (1973).

catharsis

the effect of 'purgation' or 'purification' achieved by tragic drama, according to Aristotle's argument in his Poetics (4th century BCE). Aristotle wrote that a *TRAGEDY should succeed 'in arousing pity and fear in such a way as to accomplish a catharsis of such emotions'. There has been much dispute about his meaning, but Aristotle seems to be rejecting Plato's hostile view of poetry as an unhealthy emotional stimulant. His metaphor of emotional cleansing has been read as a solution to the puzzle of audiences' pleasure or relief in witnessing the disturbing events enacted in tragedies. Another interpretation is that it is the *PROTAGONIST'S guilt that is purged, rather than the audience's feeling of terror. Adjective: cathartic.

characterization,

the representation of persons in *NARRATIVE and dramatic works. This may include direct methods like the attribution of qualities in description or commentary, and indirect (or 'dramatic') methods inviting readers to infer qualities from characters' actions, speech, or appearance. Since E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel (1927) a distinction has often been made between 'flat' and 'two-dimensional' characters, which are simple and unchanging, and 'round' characters, which are complex, 'dynamic' (i.e. subject to development), and less predictable. See also stock character, type.

dissociation of sensibility

the separation of thought from feeling, which T. S. Eliot diagnosed as the weakness of English poetry from the Revolution of the 1640s until his own time. In his influential essay 'The Metaphysical Poets' (1921), Eliot argued that whereas in Donne and other pre-Revolutionary poets 'there is a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling', from the time of Milton and Dryden 'a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered'. This view had some influence in British and American criticism in the mid-20th century, notably in the *CAMBRIDGE SCHOOL and among the *NEW CRITICS, but it has frequently been challenged as a misleading simplification ofliterary history.

novel

: nearly always an extended fictional prose *NARRATIVE, although some novels are very short, some are non-fictional, some have been written in verse, and some do not even tell a story. Such exceptions help to indicate that the novel as a literary *GENRE is itself exceptional: it disregards the constraints that govern other literary forms, and acknowledges no obligatory structure, style, or subject-matter. Thriving on this openness and flexibility, the novel has become the most important literary genre of the modem age, superseding the *EPIC, the *ROMANCE, and other narrative forms. Novels can be distinguished from *SHORT STORIES and *NOVELLAS by their greater length, which permits fuller, subtler development of characters and themes. (Confusingly, it is a shorter form of tale, the Italian novella, that gives the novel its name in English.) There is no established minimum length for a novel, but it is normally at least long enough to justify its publication in an independent volume, unlike the short story. The novel differs from the prose romance in that a greater degree of *REALISM is expected of it, and that it tends to describe a recognizable secular social world, often in a sceptical and prosaic manner inappropriate to the marvels of romance. The novel has frequently incorporated the structures and languages of non-fictional prose forms (history, autobiography, journalism, travel writing), even to the point where the non-fictional element outweighs the fictional. It is normally expected of a novel that it should have at least one character, and preferably several characters shown in processes of change and social relationship; a *PLOT, or some arrangement of narrated events, is another normal requirement. Special *SUBGENRES of the novel have grown up around particular kinds of character (the *KiiNSTLERROMAN, the spy novel), setting (the *HISTORICAL NOVEL, the * CAMPUS NOVEL), and plot (the detective novel); while other kinds of novel are distinguished either by their structure (the * EPISTOLARY NOVEL, the *PICARESQUE NOVEL) or by special emphases on character (the *BILDUNGSROMAN) or ideas (the * ROMAN A THESE). Although some ancient prose narratives like Petronius' Satyricon (1st century CE) can be called novels, and although some significant forerunners of the novel-including Fran\=ois Rabelais's Gargantua (1534)-appeared in the 16th century, it is the publication in Spain of the first part of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote de la Mancha in 1605 that is most widely accepted as announcing the arrival of the true novel. In France the inaugural landmark was Madame de Lafayette's La Princesse de Cleves (1678), while in England Daniel Defoe is regarded as the founder of the English novel with his Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722). The novel achieved its predominance in the 19th century, when Charles Dickens and other writers found a huge audience through serial publication, and when the conventions of realism were consolidated. In the 20th century a division became more pronounced between the popular forms of novel and the various experiments Of*MODERNISM and *POSTMODERNlsM-from the *STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS to the * ANTI-NOVEL; but repeated reports of the 'death of the novel' have been greatly exaggerated. Adjective: novelistic. See also fiction.

automatic writing:

a method of composition that tries to dispense with conscious control or mental censorship, transcribing immediately the promptings of the unconscious mind. Some writers in the early days of * SURREALISM attempted it, notably Andre Breton and Philippe Soupault in their work Les Champs Magnetiques (1919). W. B. Yeats had earlier conducted similar experiments with Georgie Hyde-Lees after their marriage in 1917; these seances influenced the mystical system of his prose work A Vision (1925).

deconstruction

a philosophically sceptical approach to the possibility of coherent meaning in language, initiated by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in a series of works published in 1967 (later translated as Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology, and Writing and Difference), and adopted by several leading literary critics in the United States-notably at Yale University-from the early 1970s onwards. Derrida's claim is that the dominant Western tradition of thought has attempted to establish grounds of certainty and truth by repressing the limitless instability oflanguage. This '*LOGOCENTRIC' tradition sought some absolute source or guarantee of meaning (a 'transcendental signified') which could centre or stabilize the uncertainties of signification, through a set of 'violent hierarchies' privileging a central term over a marginal one: nature over culture, male over female, and most importantly speech over writing. The '*PHONOCENTRIC' suspicion of writing as a parasite upon the authenticity of speech is a crucial target ofDerrida's subversive approach to Western philosophy, in which he inverts and dissolves conceptual hierarchies to show that the repressed or marginalized term has always already contaminated the privileged or central term. Thus, drawing on Saussure's theory of the *SIGN, Derrida argues that the stable self-identity which we attribute to speech as the authentic source of meaning is illusory, since language operates as a selfcontained system of internal differences rather than of positive terms or presences: writing, distrusted in the Western 'metaphysics of presence' because it displays the absence of any authenticating voice, is in this sense logically prior to speech. Derrida's central concept (although in principle it ought not to occupy such a 'hierarchical' position) is presented in his coining of the term * DIFFERANCE, a French * PO RTMANTEAU WO RD combining' difference' with 'deferral' to suggest that the differential nature of meanings in language ceaselessly defers or postpones any determinate meaning: language is an endless chain or 'play of differance' which logocentric discourses try vainly to fix to some original or final term that can never be reached. Deconstructive readings track down within a *TEXT the * APORIA or internal contradiction that undermines its claims to coherent meaning; or they reveal how texts can be seen to deconstruct themselves. Derrida's difficult and paradoxical attitude to the metaphysical tradition seeks to subvert it while also claiming that there is no privileged vantage-point from which to do this from outside the instabilities of language. Deconstruction thus undermines its own radical scepticism by admitting that it leaves everything exactly as it was; it is an unashamedly selfcontradictory effort to think the 'unthinkable', often by recourse to strange *NEOLOGISMS, *PUNS, and other word-play. Although initially directed against the scientific pretensions of *STRUCTURALISM in the human sciences, it was welcomed enthusiastically into literary studies at Yale University and elsewhere in the English-speaking world, partly because it seemed to place literary problems of *PIGURATIVE language and interpretation above philosophers' and historians' claims to truth, and partly because it opened up limitless possibilities of interpretation. The writings of Paul de Man, Barbara Johnson, J. Hillis Miller, and Geoffrey Hartman in the 1970s and 1980s applied and extended Derrida's concepts to critical questions of interpretation, tending to challenge the status of the author's intention or of the external world as a source of meaning in texts, and questioning the boundary between criticism and literature. These and other deconstructionists came under fierce attack for dogmatic nihilism and wilful obscurity. For an extended introduction to this sometimes bewildering school of thought, consult Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (1982). See also dissemination, indeterminacy, post-structuralism.

tone

a very vague critical term usually designating the mood or atmosphere of a work, although in some more restricted uses it refers to the author's attitude to the reader (e.g. formal, intimate, pompous) or to the subject-matter (e.g. ironic, light, solemn, satiric, sentimental). Adjective: tonal. See also voice.

convention

an established practice-whether in technique, style, structure, or subject-matter-commonly adopted in literary works by customary and implicit agreement or precedent rather than by natural necessity. The clearest cases of the 'unnatural' devices known as conventions appear in drama, where the audience implicitly agrees to suspend its disbelief and to regard the stage as a battlefield or kitchen, the actors as historical monarchs or fairy godmothers; likewise author and audience observe an unwritten agreement that a character speaking an * ASIDE cannot be heard by other characters on stage. But conventions are, in less immediately striking ways, essential to poetry and to prose fiction as well: the use of *METRE, *RHYME, and *STANZAIC forms is conventional, as are the * NARRATIVE techniques of the *SHORT STORY (e.g. the neat or surprising ending) and the *NOVEL (including chronological presentation and *POINT OF VIEw), and the *STOCK CHARACTERS of both fiction and drama. Some dramatic and literary forms are clearly composed of very elaborate or very recognizable conventions: opera, * MELODRAMA, *KABUKI, the pastoral *ELEGY, the *CHIVALRIC ROMANCE, the detective story, and the *GOTHIC NOVEL are instances. In these and other cases an interrelated set of conventions in both *FORM and *CONTENT has constituted a *GENRE. Since the advent of*RoMANTICISM and of *REALISM in the 19th century, however, it has become less apparent (although no less true) that literature is conventional, because realism-and later, * NATuRALIsM-attempted as far as possible to diminish or conceal those conventions considered unlifelike while Romanticism tried to discard those that were insincere, thus giving rise to that pejorative sense of' conventional' which devalues traditionally predictable forms. As much modern criticism has to argue, such rebellions against conventions are fated to generate new conventions of their own, which may be less elaborate and less noticeable in their time. This does not render innovation futile, since the new conventions will often be appropriate to changed conditions, but it does mean that while some literary works may be 'unconventional', none can be conventionless. Literary theorists (notably those influenced by * STRUCTURALISM) tend to confirm the inevitability of conventions by appealing to modern linguistics, which claims that languages can produce meanings only from '* ARBITRARY' or conventional *SIGNS.

autotelic

having, as an artistic work, no end or purpose beyond its own existence. The term was used by T. S. Eliot in 1923 and adopted by *NEW CRITICISM to distinguish the self-referential nature ofliterary art from *OIDACTIC, philosophical, critical, or biographical works that involve practical reference to things outside themselves: in the words of the American poet Archibald MacLeish, 'A poem should not mean / But be'. A similar idea is implied in the theory of the 'poetic function' put forward in *RUSSIAN FORMALISM.

symbol

in the simplest sense, anything that stands for or represents something else beyond it-usually an idea conventionally associated with it. Objects like flags and crosses can function symbolically; and words are also symbols. In the *SEMIOTICS of C. S. Peirce, the term denotes a kind of *SIGN that has no natural or resembling connection with its referent, only a conventional one: this is the case with words. In literary usage, however, a symbol is a specially evocative kind of image (see imagery); that is, a word or phrase referring to a concrete object, scene, or action which also has some further significance associated with it: roses, mountains, birds, and voyages have all been used as common literary symbols. A symbol differs from a * METAPHOR in that its application is left open as an unstated suggestion: thus in the sentence She was a tower of strength, the metaphor ties a concrete image (the 'vehicle': tower) to an identifiable abstract quality (the *TENOR: strength). Similarly, in the systematically extended metaphoric parallels of * ALLEGORY, the images represent specific meanings: at the beginning of Langland's allegorical poem Piers Plowman (c.1380), the tower seen by the dreamer is clearly identified with the quality of Truth, and it has no independent status apart from this function. But the symbolic tower in Robert Browning's poem' "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came'" (1855), orthat in W. B. Yeat's collection of poems The Tower (1928), remains mysteriously indeterminate in its possible meanings. It is therefore usually too simple to say that a literary symbol 'stands for' some idea as if it were just a convenient substitute for a fixed meaning; it is usually a substantial image in its own right, around which further significances may gather according to differing interpretations. The term symbolism refers to the use of symbols, or to a set of related symbols; however, it is also the name given to an important movement in late 19th-century and early 20th-century poetry: for this sense, see Symbolists. One of the important features of *ROMANTICISM and succeeding phases of Western literature was a much more pronounced reliance upon enigmatic symbolism in both poetry and prose fiction, sometimes involving obscure private codes of meaning, as in the poetry of Blake or Yeats. A well-known early example of this is the albatross in Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' (1798). Many novelistsnotably Herman Melville and D. H. Lawrence-have used symbolic methods: in Melville's Moby-Dick (1851) the White Whale (and indeed almost every object and character in the book) becomes a focus for many different suggested meanings. Melville's extravagant symbolism was encouraged partly by the importance which American *TRANscENDENTALIsM gave to symbolic interpretation of the world. Verb: symbolize. See also motif.

poetics [poh-et-iks]

the general principles of * POETRY or of* LITERATURE in general, or the theoretical study of these principles. As a body of theory, poetics is concerned with the distinctive features of poetry (or literature as a whole), with its languages, forms, *GENRES, and modes of composition. A theorist of poetry or literature may be called a poetician. See also aesthetics, criticism.

pathetic fallacy

the poetic convention whereby natural phenomena which cannot feel as humans do are described as if they could: thus rainclouds may 'weep', or flowers may be 'joyful' in sympathy with the poet's (or imagined speaker's) mood. The pathetic fallacy normally involves the use of some * METAPHOR which falls short of full-scale * PERSONIFICATION in its treatment of the natural world. The rather odd term was coined by the influential Victorian art critic John Ruskin in the third volume of his Modern Painters (1856). Ruskin's strict views about the accurate representation of nature led him to distinguish great poets like Shakespeare, who use the device sparingly, from lesser poets like Wordsworth and Shelley, whose habitual use of it becomes 'morbid'. Later critics, however, employ the term in a neutral sense. See also apostrophe, poetic licence.

allegory

: a story or visual image with a second distinct meaning partially hidden behind its literal or visible meaning. The principal technique of allegory is * PERSONIFICATION, whereby abstract qualities are given human shape-as in public statues of Liberty or Justice. An allegory may be conceived as a *METAPHOR that is extended into a structured system. In written narrative, allegory involves a continuous parallel between two (or more) levels of meaning in a story, so that its persons and events correspond to their equivalents in a system of ideas or a chain of events external to the tale: each character and episode in John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), for example, embodies an idea within a pre-existing Puritan doctrine of salvation. Allegorical thinking permeated the Christian literature of the Middle Ages, flourishing in the * MORALITY PLAYS and in the *OREAM VISIONS of Dante and Langland. Some later allegorists like Dryden and Orwell used allegory as a method of * SATIRE; their hidden meanings are political rather than religious. In the medieval discipline of biblical *EXEGESIS, allegory became an important method of interpretation, a habit of seeking correspondences between different realms of meaning (e.g. physical and spiritual) or between the Old Testament and the New (see typology). It can be argued that modem critical interpretation continues this allegorizing tradition. See also anagogical, emblem, exemplum, fable, parable, psychomachy, symbol.

anxiety of influence

: in the unusual view of literary history offered by the critic Harold Bloom, a poet's sense of the crushing weight of poetic tradition which he has to resist and challenge in order to make room for his own original vision. Bloom has in mind particularly the mixed feelings of veneration and envy with which the English Romantic poets regarded Milton, as a 'father' who had to be displaced by his 'sons'. This theory represents the development of poetic tradition as a masculine battle of wills modelled on Freud's concept of the Oedipus complex: the 'belated' poet fears the emasculating dominance of the 'precursor' poet and seeks to occupy his position of strength through a process of misreading or *MISPRISION of the parent-poem in the new poem, which is always a distortion of the original. Thus Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind' is a powerful misreading of Wordsworth's 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality', through which the younger poet seeks to free himself from the hold of his predecessor. Bloom's theory is expounded in The Anxiety of Influence (1973), in which he claims that 'the covert subject of most poetry for the last three centuries has been the anxiety of influence, each poet's fear that no proper work remains for him to perform'.

Apollonian and Dionysian

: terms for the twin principles which the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche detected in Greek civilization in his early work Die Geburt der Tragiidie (The Birth of Tragedy, 1872). Nietzsche was challenging the usual view of Greek culture as ordered and serene, emphasizing instead the irrational element of frenzy found in the rites of Dionysus (the god of intoxication known to the Romans as Bacchus). He associated the Apollonian tendency with the instinct for form, beauty, moderation, and symmetry, best expressed in Greek sculpture, while the Dionysian (or Dionysiac) instinct was one of irrationality, violence, and exuberance, found in music. This opposition has some resemblance to that between * CLASSICISM and *ROMANTICISM. In Nietzsche's theory of drama, the Apollonian (in dialogue) and the Dionysian (in choric song) are combined in early Greek tragedy, but then split apart in the work of Euripides; he hoped at first that Wagner's operas would reunite them.

gynocritics

: the branch of modern feminist literary studies that focuses on women as writers, as distinct from the feminist critique of male authors. The term was coined by Elaine Showalter in her article 'Toward a Feminist Poetics' (1979), in which she explains thatgynocritics is concerned 'with woman as the producer of textual meaning, with the history, themes, genres, and structures ofliterature by women'. It thus includes critical works like Showalter's A Literature of Their Own (1977), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), and several other such studies published since the mid-1970s. Some writers have amended the term to 'gynocriticism', using 'gynocritics' to denote instead the practitioners of this kind offeminist study. Adjective: gynocritical.

imagination

: the mind's capacity to generate images of objects, states, or actions that have not been felt or experienced by the senses. In the discussion of psychology and art prior to *RoMANTICISM, imagination was usually synonymous with *FANCY, and commonly opposed to the faculty of reason, either as complementary to it or as contrary to it. S. T. Coleridge's famous distinction between fancy and imagination in his Biographia Literaria (1817) emphasized the imagination's vitally creative power of dissolving and uniting images into new forms, and of reconciling opposed qualities into a new unity. This freely creative and transforming power of the imagination was a central principle of Romanticism.

metonymy [met-on-Imi]

a *FIGURE OF SPEECH that replaces the name of one thing with the name of something else closely associated with it, e.g. the bottle for alcoholic drink, the press for journalism, skirt for woman, Mozart for Mozart's music, the Oval Office for the US presidency. A well-known metonymic saying is the pen is mightier than the sword (i.e. writing is more powerful than warfare). A word used in such metonymic expressions is sometimes called a metonym [met-6nim]. An important kind of metonymy is *SYNECDOCHE, in which the name of a part is substituted for that of a whole (e.g. hand for worker), or vice versa. Modern literary theory has often used 'metonymy' in a wider sense, to designate the process of association by which metonymies are produced and understood: this involves establishing relationships of contiguity between two things, whereas *METAPHOR establishes relationships of similarity between them. The metonym/metaphor distinction has been associated with the contrast between *SYNTAGM and *PARADIGM. See also antonomasia.

archetype [ar-ki-typ]:

a *SYMBOL, theme, setting, or character-type that recurs in different times and places in *MYTH, *UTERATURE, *POLKLORE, dreams, and rituals so frequently or prominently as to suggest (to certain speculative psychologists and critics) that it embodies some essential element of 'universal' human experience. Examples offered by the advocates of *MYTH CRITICISM include such recurrent symbols as the rose, the serpent, and the sun; common themes like love, death, and conflict; mythical settings like the paradisal garden; *STOCK CHARACTERS like the femme fatale, the hero, and the magician; and some basic patterns of action and plot such as the quest, the descent to the underworld, or the feud. The most fundamental of these patterns is often said to be that of death and rebirth, reflecting the natural cycle of the seasons: the Canadian critic Northrop Frye put forward an influential model of literature based on this proposition in Anatomy of Criticism (1957). Archetypal criticism originated in the early 20th century from the speculations of the British anthropologist J. G. Frazer in The Golden Bough (1890-1915)-a comparative study of mythologies-and from those of the Swiss psychologist C. G. lung, who in the 1920s proposed that certain symbols in dreams and myths were residues of ancestral memory preserved in the *COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS. More recently, critics have been wary of the *REDUCTIONISM involved in the application of such unverified hypotheses to literary works, and more alert to the cultural differences that the archetypal approach often overlooks in its search for universals.

humanism

a 19th-century term for the values and ideals of the European *RENAISSANCE, which placed a new emphasis on the expansion of human capacities. Reviving the study of Greek and Roman history, philosophy, and arts, the Renaissance humanists developed an image of 'Man' more positive and hopeful than that of medieval ascetic Christianity: rather than being a miserable sinner awaiting redemption from a pit of fleshly corruption, 'Man' was a source of infinite possibilities, ideally developing towards a balance of physical, spiritual, moral, and intellectual faculties. Most early humanists like Erasmus and Milton in the 16th and 17th centuries combined elements of Christian and classical cultures in what has become known as Christian humanism, but the 18th-century *ENLIGHTENMENT began to detach the ideal of human perfection from religious supernaturalism, so that by the 20th century humanism came to denote those moral philosophies that abandon theological dogma in favour of purely human concerns. While being defined against theology on the one side, humanism came also to be contrasted with scientific materialism on the other: from the mid- 19th century onwards, Matthew Arnold and others (including the New Humanists in the United States, led by Paul More and Irving Babbitt in the 1920s) opposed the claims of science with the ideal of balanced human perfection, self-cultivation, and ethical self-restraint. This Arnoldian humanism, which has enjoyed wide influence in AngloAmerican literary culture, is one variety of the prevalent liberal humanism, which centres its view of the world upon the notion of the freely self-determining individual. In modern literary theory, liberal humanism (and sometimes all humanism) has come under challenge from *POST-STRUCTURALISM, which replaces the unitary concept of 'Man' with that of the 'subject', which is gendered, 'de-centred', and no longer self-determining. For a fuller account, consult Tony Davies, Humanism (1996).

synaesthesia [sin-es-thee-zia]

a blending or confusion of different kinds of sense-impression, in which one type of sensation is referred to in terms more appropriate to another. Common synaesthetic expressions include the descriptions of colours as 'loud' or 'warm', and of sounds as 'smooth'. This effect was cultivated consciously by the French *SYMBOLISTS, but is often found in earlier poetry, notably in Keats. See also catachresis.

canon

a body of writings recognized by authority. Those books of holy scripture which religious leaders accept as genuine are canonical, as are those works of a literary author which scholars regard as authentic. The canon of a national literature is a body of writings especially approved by critics or anthologists and deemed suitable for academic study. Canonicity is the quality of being canonicaL Verb: canonize. See also corpus, oeuvre.

literature

a body of written works related by subject-matter (e.g. the literature of computing), by language or place of origin (e.g. Russian literature), or by prevailing cultural standards of merit. In this last sense, 'literature' is taken to include oral, dramatic, and broadcast compositions that may not have been published in written form but which have been (or deserve to be) preserved. Since the 19th century, the broader sense ofliterature as a totality of written or printed works has given way to more exclusive definitions based on criteria of imaginative, creative, or artistic value, usually related to a work's absence offactual or practical reference (see autotelic). Even more restrictive has been the academic concentration upon poetry, drama, and fiction. Until themid-20th century, many kinds of non-fictional writing-in philosophy, history, biography, *CRITICISM, topography, science, and politics-were counted as literature; implicit in this broader usage is a definition of literature as that body of works which-for whatever reason-deserves to be preserved as part of the current reproduction of meanings within a given culture (unlike yesterday's newspaper, which belongs in the disposable category of ephemera). This sense seems more tenable than the later attempts to divide literature-as creative, imaginative, fictional, or non-practical-from factual writings or practically effective works of propaganda, *RHETORIC, or * DIDACTIC writing. The *RUSSIAN FORMALISTS' attempt to define *LITERARINESS in terms oflinguistic deviations is important in the theory of *POETRY, but has not addressed the more difficult problem of the non-fictional prose forms. See also belleslettres, canon, paraliterature. For a fuller account, consult Peter Widdowson, Literature (1998).

reception theory

a branch of modem literary studies concerned with the ways in which literary works are received by readers. The term has sometimes been used to referto *READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM in general, but it is associated more particularly with the 'reception-aesthetics' (German, Rezeptionsasthetik) outlined in 1970 by the German literary historian Hans Robert Jauss. Drawing on philosophical *HERMENEUTICS, Jauss argued that literary works are received against an existing *HORIZON OF EXPECTATIONS consisting of readers' current knowledge and presuppositions about literature, and that the meanings of works change as such horizons shift. Unlike most varieties of reader-response theory, then, reception theory is interested more in historical changes affecting the reading public than in the solitary reader.

sociology of literature

a branch ofliterary study that examines the relationships between literary works and their social contexts, including patterns ofliteracy, kinds of audience, modes of publication and dramatic presentation, and the social class positions of authors and readers. Originating in 19th-century France with works by Mme de Stael and Hippolyte Taine, the sociology ofliterature was revived in the English-speaking world with the appearance of such studies as Raymond Williams's The Long Revolution (1961), and is most often associated with Marxist approaches to cultural analysis.

anti-hero or anti-heroine

a central character in a dramatic or narrative work who lacks the qualities of nobility and magnanimity expected of traditional heroes and heroines in *ROMANCES and *EPICS. Unheroic characters of this kind have been an important feature of the Western *NOVEL, which has subjected idealistic heroism to *PARODY since Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605). Flaubert's Emma Bovary (in Madame Bovary, 1857) and Joyce' s Leopold Bloom (in Ulysses, 1922) are outstanding examples of this antiheroic ordinariness and inadequacy. The anti-hero is also an important figure in modem drama, both in the theatre of the * ABSURD and in the *TRAGEDIES of Arthur Miller, notably Death of a Salesman (1949). In these plays, as in many modem novels, the * PROTAGONIST is an ineffectual failure who succumbs to the pressure of circumstances. The anti-hero should not be confused with the * ANTAGONIST or the *VILLAIN.

organic form

a concept that likens literary works to living organisms forming themselves by a process of 'natural' growth. The doctrine oforganic form, promoted in the early 19th century by S. T. Coleridge and subsequently favoured by American *NEw CRITICISM, argues that in an artistic work the whole is more than the mere sum of its component parts, and that *PORM and *CONTENT fuse indivisibly in an 'organic unity'. It rejects as 'mechanical' the *NEOCLASSICAL concept of conformity to rules, along with the related assumption that form or style is an 'ornament' to a pre-existing content. It tends to be hostile to conceptions of *GENRE and *CONVENTION, as it is to the practice of *PARAPHRASE. Carried to a dogmatic conclusion, its emphasis on unity condemns any literary analysis as a destructive abstraction; this attitude is sometimes referred to as organicism.

reader-response criticism

a general term for those kinds of modern * CRITICISM and literary theory that focus on the responses of readers to literary works, rather than on the works themselves considered as selfcontained entities. It is not a single agreed theory so much as a shared concern with a set of problems involving the extent and nature of readers' contribution to the meanings ofliterary works, approached from various positions including those of * STRUCTURALISM (see competence), psychoanalysis, *PHENOMENOLOGY, and *HERMENEUTICS. The common factor is a shift from the description of *TEXTS in terms of their inherent properties to a discussion of the production of meanings within the reading process. Important contributions to this debate include Wolfgang Iser's The Act afReading (1978), which sees readers as 'actualizing' texts by filling in their 'gaps' or * INDETERMINACIES of meaning, and Stanley Fish's Is There a Text in this Class? (1980), which gives the reader an even more active role as the text's true producer. A somewhat distinct line of historical investigation is represented by the *RECEPTION THEORY of Hans Robert Jauss. For a fuller account, consult Elizabeth Freund, The Return afthe Reader (1987).

Beat writers

a group of American writers in the late 1950s, led by the poet Allen Ginsberg and the novelist Jack Kerouac. Writers of the 'beat generation' dropped out of middle-class society in search of 'beatific' ecstasy through drugs, sex, and Zen Buddhism. Their loose styles favour spontaneous self-expression and recitation to jazz accompaniment. The principal works of the group are Ginsberg's Howl (1956) and Kerouac's On the Road (1957). Significant contributions in poetry were Gregory Corso's Gasoline (1958) and Gary Snyder's Riprap (1959); while in prose, the group's mentor William S. Burroughs published The Naked Lunch in 1959. The poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti was another leading figure. The Beats had a strong influence on the 'counter-culture' of the 1960s.

pastiche [pas-teesh]

a literary work composed from elements borrowed either from various other writers or from a particular earlier author. The term can be used in a derogatory sense to indicate lack of originality, or more neutrally to refer to works that involve a deliberate and playfully imitative tribute to other writers. Pastiche differs from * PARODY in using imitation as a form of flattery rather than mockery, and from * PLAGIARISM in its lack of deceptive intent. A well-known modern example is John Fowles's novel The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), which is partly a pastiche of the great Victorian novelists. The frequent resort to pastiche has been cited as a characteristic feature of * POSTMODERNISM. A writer of pastiches is sometimes called a pasticheur. Verb: pastiche.

Bloomsbury group

a loose *COTERIE of writers linked by friendship to the homes of Vanessa Stephen (from 1907 Vanessa Bell) and her sister Virginia (from 1912 Virginia Woolf) in Bloomsbury-the university quarter of London near the British Museum-from about 1 906 to the late 1930s. In addition to the sisters and their husbands-Clive Bell, the art critic, and Leonard Woolf, a political journalist-the group included the novelist E. M. Forster, the biographer Lytton Strachey, the economist John Maynard Keynes, and the art critic Roger Fry. It had no doctrine or aim, despite a shared admiration for the moral philosophy ofG. E. Moore, but the group had some importance as a centre of modernizing liberal opinion in the 1920s, and later as the subject of countless memoirs and biographies.

free indirect style or free indirect discourse

a manner of presenting the thoughts or utterances of a fictional character as if from that character's point of view by combining grammatical and other features of the character's 'direct speech' with features of the narrator's 'indirect' report. Direct discourse is used in the sentence She thought, '1 will stay here tomorrow', while the equivalent in indirect discourse would be She thought that she would stay there the next day. Free indirect style, however, combines the person and tense of indirect discourse ('she would stay') with the indications of time and place appropriate to direct discourse ('here tomorrow'), to form a different kind of sentence: She would stay here tomorrow. This form of statement allows a *THIRD-PERSON NARRATIVE to exploit a first-person *POINT OF VIEW, often with a subtle effect of *IRONY, as in the novels of Jane Austen. Since Flaubert's celebrated use of this technique (known in French as Ie style indirect libre) in his novel Madame Bovary (1857), it has been widely adopted in modern fiction.

parody

a mocking imitation of the * STYLE of a literary work or works, ridiculing the stylistic habits of an author or school by exaggerated mimicry. Parody is related to *BURLESQUE in its application of serious styles to ridiculous subjects, to *SATIRE in its punishment of eccentricities, and even to * CRITICISM in its analysis of style. The Greek dramatist Aristophanes parodied the styles of Aeschylus and Euripides in The Frogs (405 BCE), while Cervantes parodied *CHIVALRIC ROMANCES in Don Quixote (1605). In English, two of the leading parodists are Henry Fielding and James Joyce. Poets in the 19th century, especially William Wordsworth and Robert Browning, suffered numerous parodies of their works. Adjective: parodic. See also mock-heroic, travesty. For a fuller account, consult Simon Dentith, Parody (2000).

travesty

a mockingly undignified or trivializing treatment of a dignified subject, usually as a kind of * PARODY. Travesty may be distinguished from the *MOCK EPIC and other kinds of *BURLESQUE in that it treats a solemn subject frivolously, while they treat frivolous subjects with mock solemnity. Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605) is a travesty of chivalric *ROMANCES, and James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) is partly a travesty of Homer's Odyssey. Verb: travesty.

character

a personage in a *NARRATIVE or dramatic work (see characterization); also a kind of prose sketch briefly describing some recognizable type of person. As a minor literary *GENRE, the character originates with the Characters (late 3rd century BCE) of the Greek writer Theophrastus; it was revived in the 17th century, notably by Sir Thomas Overbury in his Characters (1614) and by La Bruyere in Les Caracteres (1688). See also humours, stock character, type.

comedy

a play (or other literary composition) written chiefly to amuse its audience by appealing to a sense of superiority over the characters depicted. A comedy will normally be closer to the representation of everyday life than a *TRAGEDY, and will explore common human failings rather than tragedy's disastrous crimes. Its ending will usually be happy for the leading characters. In another sense, the term was applied in the Middle Ages to narrative poems that end happily: the title of Dante's Divine Comedy (c.1320) carries this meaning. As a dramatic form, comedy in Europe dates back to the Greek playwright Aristophanes in the 5th century BCE. His *Ow COMEDY combines several kinds of mischief, including the satirical mockery of living politicians and writers. At the end of the next century, Menander established the fictional form known as *NEW COMEDY, in which young lovers went through misadventures among other *STOCK CHARACTERS; this tradition was later developed in the Roman comedy of Plautus and Terence, and eventually by Shakespeare in England and Lope de Vega in Spain. The great period of European comedy, partly influenced by the *COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE, was the 17th century, when Shakespeare, de Vega, and Jonson were succeeded by Moliere and by the *RESTORATION COMEDY of Congreve, Etheredge, and Wycherley. There are several kinds of comedy, including the *ROMANTIC COMEDY of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (c.1596), the *SATIRE in Jonson's Volpone (1606) or in Moliere's Le Tartuffe (1669), the sophisticated verbal wit of the *COMEDY OF MANNERS in Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), and the more topical 'comedy of ideas' in the plays of George Bernard Shaw. Among its less sophisticated forms are * BURLESQUE and *FARCE. See also black comedy, comic relief, humours, tragicomedy. For a fuller account, consult W. Moelwyn Merchant, Comedy (1972).

essay

a short written composition in prose that discusses a subject or proposes an argument without claiming to be a complete or thorough exposition. A minor literary form, the essay is more relaxed than the formal academic dissertation. The term ('trying out') was coined by the French writer Michel de Montaigne in the title of his Essais (1580), the first modern example of the form. Francis Bacon's Essays (1597) began the tradition of essays in English, of which important examples are those of Addison, Steele, Hazlitt, Emerson, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. The verse essays of Pope are rare exceptions to the prose norm.

irony

a subtly humorous perception of inconsistency, in which an apparently straightforward statement or event is undermined by its * CONTEXT so as to give it a very different significance. In various forms, irony appears in many kinds ofliterature, from the *TRAGEDY of Sophocles to the novels of Jane Austen and Henry James, but is especially important in *SATIRE, as in Voltaire and Swift. At its simplest, in verbal irony, it involves a discrepancy between what is said and what is really meant, as in its crude form, sarcasm; for the *FIGURES OF SPEECH exploiting this discrepancy, see antiphrasis, litotes, meiosis. The more sustained structural irony in literature involves the use of a naIve or deluded hero or *UNRELIABLE NARRATOR, whose view of the world differs widely from the true circumstances recognized by the author and readers; literary irony thus flatters its readers' intelligence at the expense of a character (or fictional narrator). A similar sense of detached superiority is achieved by dramatic irony, in which the audience lmows more about a character's situation than the character does, foreseeing an outcome contrary to the character's expectations, and thus ascribing a sharply different sense to some of the character's own statements; in *TRAGEDIES, this is called tragic irony. The term cosmic irony is sometimes used to denote a view of people as the dupes of a cruelly mocking Fate, as in the novels of Thomas Hardy. A writer whose works are characterized by an ironic tone may be called an ironist. For a fuller account, consult D. C. Muecke, Irony and the Ironic (1982).

new historicism

a term applied to a trend in American academic literary studies in the 1980s that emphasized the historical nature of literary texts and at the same time (in contrast with older historicisms) the 'textual' nature of history. As part of a wider reaction against purely formal or linguistic critical approaches such as the *NEw CRITICISM and *OECONSTRUCTION, the new historicists, led by Stephen Greenblatt, drew new connections between literary and non-literary texts, breaking down the familiar distinctions between a text and its historical 'background' as conceived in established historical forms of criticism. Inspired by Michel Foucault's concepts of *DISCOURSE and power, they attempted to show how literary works are implicated in the power-relations of their time, not as secondary 'reflections' of any coherent world-view but as active participants in the continual remaking of meanings. New historicism is less a system of interpretation than a set of shared assumptions about the relationship between literature and history, and an essayistic style that often develops general reflections from a startling historical or anthropological anecdote. Greenblatt's books Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) and Shakespearean Negotiations (1988) are the exemplary models. Other scholars of Early Modem ('Renaissance') culture associated with him include Jonathan Goldberg, Stephen Orgel, Lisa Jardine, and Louis Montrose. The term has been applied to similar developments in the study of *ROMANTICISM, such as the work of Jerome McGann and Marjorie Levinson. A major concern of new historicism, following Foucault, is the cultural process by which subversion or dissent is utimately contained by 'power'. For a fuller account, consult Paul Hamilton, Historicism (1996).

horizon of expectations

a term used in the *RECEPTION THEORY of Hans Robert Jauss to designate the set of cultural norms, assumptions, and criteria shaping the way in which readers understand and judge a literary work at a given time. It may be formed by such factors as the prevailing *CONVENTIONS and definitions of art (e.g. *DECORUM), or current moral codes. Such 'horizons' are subject to historical change, so that a later generation of readers may see a very different range of meanings in the same work, and revalue it accordingly.

omniscient narrator [om-nish-ent]

an 'all-knowing' kind of * NARRATOR very commonly found in works of fiction written as *THIRDPERSON NARRATIVES. The omniscient narrator has a full knowledge of the story's events and of the motives and unspoken thoughts of the various characters. He or she will also be capable of describing events happening simultaneously in different places-a capacity not normally available to the limited *POINT OF VIEW of *FIRST-PERSON NARRATIVES. See also intrusive narrator.

device

an all-purpose term used to describe any literary technique deliberately employed to achieve a specific effect. In the theories of *RUSSIAN FORMALISM and *BRECHTIAN theatre, the phrase 'baring the device' refers to the way that some works expose or highlight the means (linguistic or theatrical) by which they operate on us, rather than conceal them. See also foregrounding, metadrama.

figure (or figure of speech)

an expression that departs from the accepted literal sense or from the normal order of words, or in which an emphasis is produced by patterns of sound. Such figurative language is an especially important resource of poetry, although not every poem will use it; it is also constantly present in all other kinds of speech and writing, even though it usually passes unnoticed. The ancient theory of *RHETORIC named and categorized dozens of figures, drawing a rough and often disputed distinction between those (known as *TROPES or figures of thought) that extend the meaning of words, and those that merely affect their order or their impact upon an audience (known as figures of speech, schemes, or rhetorical figures). The most important tropes are *METAPHOR, *SIMILE, *METONYMY, *SYNECDOCHE, *PERSONIFICATION, and *IRONY; others include *HYPERBOLE (overstatement), *LITOTES (understatement), and *PERIPHRASIS (circumlocution). The minor rhetorical figures can emphasize or enliven a point in several different ways: by placing words in contrast with one another (* ANTITHESIS), by repeating words in various patterns (* ANADIPLOSIS, * ANAPHORA, * ANTISTROPHE, *CHIASMUS), by changing the order of words (*HYPERBATON), by missing out conjunctions (* ASYNDETON), by changing course or breaking off in mid-sentence (* ANACOLUTHON, * APOSIOPESIS), or by assuming special modes of address (* APOSTROPHE) or inquiry (*RHETORICAL QUESTION). A further category of figures, sometimes known as 'figures of sound', achieves emphasis by the repetition of sounds, as in * ALLITERATION, * ASSONANCE, and *CONSONANCE.

objective correlative

an external equivalent for an internal state of mind; thus any object, scene, event, or situation that may be said to stand for or evoke a given mood or emotion, as opposed to a direct subjective expression of it. The phrase was given its vogue in modern criticism by T. S. Eliot in the rather tangled argument of his essay 'Hamlet and His Problems' (1919), in which he asserts that Shakespeare's Hamlet is an 'artistic failure' because Hamlet's emotion does not match the 'facts' of the play's action. The term is symptomatic of Eliot's preference-similar to that of *IMAGISM-for precise and definite poetic images evoking particular emotions, rather than the effusion of vague yearnings which Eliot and Ezra Pound criticized as a fault of 19th-century poetry.

style

any specific way of using language, which is characteristic of an author, school, period, or *GENRE. Particular styles may be defined by their * DICTION, *SYNTAX, *IMAGERY, *RHYTHM, and use of *PIGURES, or by any other linguistic feature. Different categories of style have been named after particular authors (e.g. Ciceronian), periods (e.g. Augustan), and professions (e.g. journalistic), while in the *RENAISSANCE a scheme of three stylistic 'levels' was adopted, distinguishing the high or 'grand' style from the middle or 'mean' style and the low or 'base' style. The principle of *DECORUM held that certain subjects required particular levels of style, so that an *EPIC should be written in the grand style whereas * SATIRES should be composed in the base style. Since the literary revolution of *RoMANTICISM, however, this hierarchy has been replaced by the notion of style as an expression of individual personality. Adjective: stylistic.

Aristotelian [a-ris-to-tee-li-an]

belonging to or derived from the works of the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BCE), the most important of all ancient philosophers in his influence on medieval science and logic, and on literary theory since the *RENAISSANCE. In his Poetics, Aristotle saw poetry in terms of the imitation or *MIMESIS of human actions, and accordingly regarded the *PLOT or mythos as the basic principle of coherence in any literary work, which must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Since the Renaissance, his name has been associated most often with his concepts of tragic * CATHARSIS, * ANAG NORIS IS, and unity of action (see unities). The *CHICAGO CRITICS have been regarded as Aristotelian in the renewed emphasis they gave to the importance of plot in literature.

baroque [ba-rok]

eccentric or lavishly ornate in style. The term is used more precisely in music and in art history than it is in literary history, where it usually refers to the most artificial poetic styles of the early 17th century, especially those known as Gongorism and Marinism after the Spanish poet Luis de Gongora and the Italian poet Giovanni Battista Marini. In English, the ornate prose style of Sir Thomas Browne may be called baroque, as may the strange *CONCEITS of the *METAPHYSICAL POETS, especially Richard Crashaw. Some critics have tried to extend the term to Milton and the later works of Shakespeare as welL See also mannerism, rococo.

foregrounding

giving unusual prominence to one element or property of a *TEXT, relative to other less noticeable aspects. According to the theories of*RusSIAN FORMALISM, literary works are special by virtue of the fact that they foreground their own linguistic status, thus drawing attention to how they say something rather than to what they say: poetry 'deviates' from everyday speech and from prose by using * METRE, surprising *METAPHORS, * ALLITERATION, and other devices by which its language draws attention to itself. See also defamiliarization, literariness.

practical criticism

in the general sense, the kind of * CRITICISM that analyses specific literary works, either as a deliberate application of a previously elaborated theory or as a supposedly non-theoretical investigation. More specifically, the term is applied to an academic procedure devised by the critic 1. A. Richards at Cambridge University in the 1920s and illustrated in his book Practical Criticism (1929). In this exercise, students are asked to analyse a short poem without any information about its authorship, date, or circumstances of composition, thus forcing them to attend to the 'words on the page' rather than refer to biographical and historical contexts. This discipline, enthusiastically adopted by the *CAMBRIDGE SCHOOL, became a standard model of rigorous criticism in British universities, and its style of' close reading' influenced the *NEW CRITICISM in America. See also explication.

impressionism

in the literary sense borrowed from French painting, a rather vague term applied to works or passages that concentrate on the description of transitory mental impressions as felt by an observer, rather than on the explanation of their external causes. Impressionism in literature is thus neither a school nor a movement but a kind of subjective tendency manifested in descriptive techniques. It is found in * SYMBOLIST and *IMAGIST poetry, and in much modern verse, but also in many works of prose fiction since the late 19th century, as in the novels of Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf. Impressionistic criticism is the kind of *CRITICISM that restricts itself to describing the critic's own subjective response to a literary work, rather than ascribing intrinsic qualities to it in the light of general principles. Walter Pater's defence of such criticism, in the Preface to his Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), was that 'in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one's object as it really is, is to know one's own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly'. The most common kind of impressionistic criticism is found in theatre and book reviews: 'I laughed all night'; 'I couldn't put it down'.

poetry

language sung, chanted, spoken, or written according to some pattern of recurrence that emphasizes the relationships between words on the basis of sound as well as sense: this pattern is almost always a rhythm or *METRE, which may be supplemented by *RHYME or * ALLITERATION or both. The demands of verbal patterning usually make poetry a more condensed medium than *PROSE or everyday speech, often involving variations in * SYNTAX, the use of special words and phrases (*POETIC DICTION) peculiar to poets, and a more frequent and more elaborate use of *FIGURES OF SPEECH, principally * METAPHOR and * SIMILE. All cultures have their poetry, using it for various purposes from sacred ritual to obscene insult, but it is generally employed in those utterances and writings that call for heightened intensity of emotion, dignity of expression, or subtlety of meditation. Poetry is valued for combining pleasures of sound with freshness of ideas, whether these be solemn or comicaL Some critics make an evaluative distinction between poetry, which is elevated or inspired, and *VERSE, which is merely clever or mechanicaL The three major categories of poetry are *NARRATIVE, dramatic, and *LYRIC, the last being the most extensive.

ambiguity:

openness to different interpretations; or an instance in which some use oflanguage may be understood in diverse ways. Sometimes known as 'plurisignation' or 'multiple meaning', ambiguity became a central concept in the interpretation of poetry after William Empson, in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), defended it as a source of poetic richness rather than a fault of imprecision. Ambiguities in statements ('they are hunting dogs') or very compressed phrases like book titles (Scouting for Boys) and newspaper headlines (GENERALS FLY BACK TO FRONT) can remain ambiguous. The verbal compression and uncertain context of much poetry often produce ambiguity: in the first line of Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, 'still' may mean 'even yet' or 'immobile', or both. The simplest kind of ambiguity is achieved by the use of *HOMOPHONES in the *PUN. On a larger scale, a character (e.g. Hamlet, notoriously) or an entire story may display ambiguity.

affective

pertaining to emotional effects or dispositions (known in psychology as 'affects'). Affective criticism or affectivism evaluates literary works in terms of the feelings they arouse in audiences or readers (see e.g. catharsis). It was condemned in an important essay by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley (in The Verbal Icon, 1954) as the affective fallacy, since in the view of these *NEW CRITICS such affective evaluation confused the literary work's objective qualities with its subjective results. The American critic Stanley Fish has given the name affective stylistics to his form of *READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM. See also intentional fallacy.

aesthetics (US esthetics)

philosophical investigation into the nature of beauty and the perception of beauty, especially in the arts; the theory of art or of artistic taste. Adjective: aesthetic or esthetic.

Renaissance

the 'rebirth' ofliterature, art, and learning that progressively transformed European culture from the mid-14th century in Italy to the mid-17th century in England, strongly influenced by the rediscovery of classical Greek and Latin literature, and accelerated by the development of printing. The Renaissance is commonly held to mark the close of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modem Western world, although the problems of dating this process have caused much debate: the existence of a significant renaissance of European learning in the 12th century is now accepted, while the 18th-century *ENLIGHTENMENT is a direct continuation of the Renaissance's intellectual tendencies. However, the term normally refers to the combined intellectual and artistic transformations of the 15th and 16th centuries, including the emergence of *HUMANISM, Protestant individualism, Copernican astronomy, and the discovery of America. In literary terms, the Renaissance may be seen as a new tradition running from Petrarch and Boccaccio in Italy to Jonson and Milton in England, embracing the work of the French *PLEIADE and of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare; it is marked by a new self-confidence in *VERNACULAR literatures, a flourishing of * LYRIC poetry, and a revival of such classical forms as *EPIC and *PASTORAL literature. The term 'Renaissance' has also been extended to various literary revivals in specific times and places: for examples, see American Renaissance, Harlem Renaissance.

avant-garde

the French military and political term for the vanguard of an army or political movement, extended since the late 19th century to that body of artists and writers who are dedicated to the idea of art as experiment and revolt against tradition. Ezra Pound's view, that 'Artists are the antennae of the race', is a distinctly modern one, implying a duty to stay ahead of one's time through constant innovation in forms and subjects.

genre [zhahnr]

the French term for a type, species, or class of composition. A literary genre is a recognizable and established category of written work employing such common * CONVENTIONS as will prevent readers or audiences from mistaking it for another kind. Much of the confusion surrounding the term arises from the fact that it is used simultaneously for the most basic modes ofliterary art (*LYRIC, *NARRATIVE, dramatic); for the broadest categories of composition (poetry, prose fiction), and for more specialized sub-categories, which are defined according to several different criteria including formal structure (*SONNET, *PICARESQUE NOVEL), length (*NOVELLA, *EPIGRAM), intention (*SATIRE), effect (*COMEDY), origin (*FOLKTALE), and subject-matter (*PASTORAL, *SCIENCE FICTION). While some genres, such as the pastoral *ELEGY or the *MELODRAMA, have numerous conventions governing subject, style, and form, others-like the *NovEL-have no agreed rules, although they may include several more limited *SUBGENRES. Adjective: generic. See also decorum, form, mode, type.

lisible [liz-eebl]

the French word for 'legible', used in a specific sense by the critic Roland Barthes in his book S/Z (1970), and usually translated as 'readerly' or 'readable'. Barthes applies this term to texts (usually of the * REALIST tradition) that involve no true participation from the reader other than the consumption of a fixed meaning. A readerly text can be understood easily in terms of already familiar *CONVENTIONS and expectations, and is thus reassuringly' closed'. By contrast, the texte * SCRIPTIBLE ('writerly' text, usually *MODERNIST) challenges the reader to produce its meanings from an 'open' play of possibilities. See also jouissance.

mimesis [my-mees-is]

the Greek word for imitation, a central term in aesthetic and literary theory since Aristotle. A literary work that is understood to be reproducing an external reality or any aspect of it is described as mimetic, while mimetic criticism is the kind of * CRITICISM that assumes or insists that literary works reflect reality. See also diegesis, reflectionism, ut pictura poesis.

persona [per-soh-na] (plural-onae)

the assumed identity or fictional 'I' (literally a 'mask') assumed by a writer in a literary work; thus the speaker in a *LYRIC poem, or the * NARRATOR in a fictional narrative. In a *ORAMATIC MONOLOGUE, the speaker is evidently not the real author but an invented or historical character. Many modern critics, though, insist further that the speaker in any poem should be referred to as the persona, to avoid the unreliable assumption that we are listening to the true voice of the poet. One reason for this is that a given poet may write different poems in which the speakers are of distinct kinds: another is that our identification of the speaking voice with that of the real poet would confuse imaginative composition with autobiography. Some theorists of narrative fiction have preferred to distinguish between the narrator and the persona, making the persona equivalent to the *IMPLIEO AUTHOR.

explication

the attempt to analyse a literary work thoroughly, giving full attention to its complexities of form and meaning. The term has usually been associated with the kind of analysis practised in the USA by *NEw CRITICISM and in Britain under the name of * PRACTICAL CRITICISM. Explication in this sense is normally a detailed explanation of the manner in which the language and formal structure of a short poem work to achieve a unity of *PORM and *CONTENT; such analysis tends to emphasize ambiguities and complexities of the text while putting aside questions of historical or biographical context. A less thorough form of analysis is the French school exercise known as explication de texte, in which students give an account of a work's meaning and its stylistic features. Adjective: explicatory or explicative. See also criticism, exegesis, hermeneutics.

empiricism [im-pi-ri-sizm]

the belief in observation and experience as the basis of knowledge, rather than logical deduction. As used in modern literary theory, the term usually has an unfavourable sense, referring to those critical approaches that dismiss theoretical abstraction in the belief that *TEXTS (or facts of history or biography) can 'speak for themselves' without the intervention of analysis and interpretation. The more neutral adjective empirical refers to research based upon observation. One who pursues any inquiry within the limits of empiricism, or who regards theory as a distraction, is an empiricist.

paraliterature

the category of written works relegated to the margins of recognized * LITERATURE and often dismissed as sub literary despite evident resemblances to the respectable literature of the official * CANON. Paraliterature thus includes many modern forms of popular fiction and drama: children's adventure stories, most detective and spy thrillers, most *SCIENCE FICTION and * FANTASY writing, *PORNOGRAPHY and women's *ROMANCES, along with much television and radio drama.

diction

the choice of words used in a literary work. A writer's diction may be characterized, for example, by * ARCHAISM, or by *LATINATE or Anglo-Saxon derivations; and it may be described according to the oppositions formal/colloquial, abstract/concrete, and literal/figurative. For the specific * CONVENTIONS of diction in poetry, see poetic diction.

comparative literature

the combined study of similar literary works written in different languages, which stresses the points of connection between literary products of two or more cultures, as distinct from the sometimes narrow and exclusive perspective of *ENG. LIT. or similar approaches based on one national *CANON. Advocates of comparative literature maintain that there is, despite the obvious disadvantages, much to be gained from studying literary works in translation.

defamiliarization

the distinctive effect achieved by literary works in disrupting our habitual perception of the world, enabling us to 'see' things afresh, according to the theories of some English Romantic poets and of *RUSSIAN FORMALISM. Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Biographia Literaria (1817) wrote of the 'film of familiarity' that blinds us to the wonders of the world, and that Wordworth's poetry aimed to remove. P. B. Shelley in his essay The Defence of Poetry' (written 1821) also claims that poetry 'makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar' by stripping 'the veil of familiarity from the world'. In modem usage, the term corresponds to Viktor Shklovsky's use of the Russian word ostranenie ('making strange') in his influential essay 'Poetry as Technique' (1917). Shklovsky argued that art exists in order to recover for us the sensation oflife which is diminished in the 'automatized' routine of everyday experience. He and the other Formalists set out to define the devices by which literary works achieve this effect, usually in terms of the '*FOREGROUNDING' of the linguistic medium. Brecht's theory of the * ALIENATION EFFECT in drama starts from similar grounds. See also literariness.

Imagism

the doctrine and poetic practice of a small but influential group of American and British poets calling themselves Imagists or Imagistes between 1912 and 1917. Led at first by Ezra Pound, and thenafter his defection to *VORTICISM-by Amy Lowell, the group rejected most 19th-century poetry as cloudy verbiage, and aimed instead at a new clarity and exactness in the short *LYRIC poem. Influenced by the Japanese *HAIKU and partly by ancient Greek lyrics, the Imagists cultivated concision and directness, building their short poems around single images; they also preferred looser *CADENCES to traditional regular rhythms. Apart from Pound and Lowell, the group also included Richard Aldington, 'H.D.' (Hilda Doolittle), F. S. Flint, D. H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, and William Carlos Williams. Imagist poems and manifestos appeared in the American magazine Poetry and the London journal The Egoist. Pound edited Des Imagistes: An Anthology (1914), while the three further anthologies (1915-17), all entitled Some Imagist Poets, were edited by LowelL See also modernism.

Aestheticism

the doctrine or disposition that regards beauty as an end in itself, and attempts to preserve the arts from subordination to moral, *OIDACTIC, or political purposes. The term is often used synonymously with the Aesthetic Movement, a literary and artistic tendency of the late 19th century which may be understood as a further phase of *ROMANTICISM in reaction against * PHILISTINE bourgeois values of practical efficiency and morality. Aestheticism found theoretical support in the * AESTHETICS oflmmanuel Kant and other German philosophers who separated the sense of beauty from practical interests. Elaborated by Theophile Gautier in 1835 as a principle of artistic independence, aestheticism was adopted in France by Baudelaire, Flaubert, and the *SYMBOLISTS, and in England by Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and several poets of the 1890s, under the slogan j'art pour j'art (*'art for art's sake'). Wilde and other devotees of pure beauty-like the artists Whistler and Beardsley-were sometimes known as aesthetes.

Platonism [play-ton-izm]

the doctrines of the Greek philosopher Plato (Platon, 427-347 BCE), especially the idealist belief that the perceptible world is an illusory shadow of some higher realm of transcendent Ideas or Forms. Despite Plato's hostility to poets as misleading imitators of worldly illusions, Platonic ideas have repeatedly been adopted in Western literature: in the *RENAISSANCE his view of physical beauty as an outward sign of spiritual perfection is prevalent in love poetry, while in the age of *ROMANTICISM his idealist philosophy was absorbed by many poets, notably Percy Bysshe Shelley. The Cambridge Platonists were a group of theologians associated with Cambridge University in the mid-17th century, who sought to reconcile the Anglican faith with human Reason while promoting religious tolerance; their leading writers were Henry More and Ralph Cudworth. See also Neoplatonism.

fiction

the general term for invented stories, now usually applied to novels, short stories, novellas, romances, fables, and other * NARRATIVE works in prose, even though most plays and narrative poems are also fictional. The adjective fictitious tends to carry the unfavourable sense of falsehood, whereas 'fictional' is more neutral, and the archaic adjective fictive, revived by the poet Wallace Stevens and others, has a more positive sense closer to 'imaginative' or 'inventive'. Verb: fictionalize. See also metafiction.

neoclassicism

the literary principle according to which the writing and * CRITICISM of poetry and drama were to be guided by rules and precedents derived from the best ancient Greek and Roman authors; a codified form of *CLASSICISM that dominated French literature in the 17th and 18th centuries, with a significant influence on English writing, especially from c.1660 to c.1780. Ina more general sense, often employed in contrast with *RoMANTICISM, the term has also been used to describe the characteristic world-view or value-system of this 'Age of Reason', denoting a preference for rationality, clarity, restraint, order, and *DECORUM, and for general truths rather than particular insights. In its more immediately literary sense as a habitual deference to Greek and Roman models in literary theory and practice, neoclassicism emerged from the rediscovery of Aristotle's Poetics (4th century BCE) by Italian scholars in the 16th century, notably by J. c. Scaliger, whose dogmatic interpretation of the dramatic *UNITIES in his Poetica (1561) profoundly affected the course of French drama. Along with Aristotle's theory of poetry as imitation and his classification of * GENRES, the principles of the Roman poet Horace as expounded in his Ars Poetica (c.20 BCE) dominated the neoclassical or neoclassic view of literature: these included the principle of decorum by which the style must suit the subject-matter, and the belief that art must both delight and instruct. The central assumption of neoclassicism was that the ancient authors had already attained perfection, so that the modern author's chief task was to imitate them-the imitation of Nature and the imitation of the ancients amounting to the same thing. Accordingly, the approved genres of classicalliterature-*EPlc, *TRAGEDY, *COMEDY, *ELEGY, *ODE, *EPISTLE, *ECLOGUE, *EPIGRAM, *FABLE, and * SATIRE-Were adopted as the favoured forms in this period. The most influential summary of neoclassical doctrine is Boileau's verse treatise L'Art poetique (1674); its equivalent in English is Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism (1711). In England, neoclassicism reached its height in the * AUGUSTAN AGE, when its general view of the world was presented memorably in Pope's Essay on Man (1733-4). Some modern critics refer to the period 1660-1780 in England as the 'Neoclassical period', but as an inclusive label this is misleading in that one very important development in this period-the emergence of the *NovEL-falls outside the realm of neoclassicism, there being no acknowledged classical model for the new form.

metaphor

the most important and widespread *FIGURE OF SPEECH, in which one thing, idea, or action is referred to by a word or expression normally denoting another thing, idea, or action, so as to suggest some common quality shared by the two. In metaphor, this resemblance is assumed as an imaginary identity rather than directly stated as a comparison: referring to a man as that pig, or saying he is a pig is metaphorical, whereas he is like a pig is a *SIMILE. Metaphors may also appear as verbs (a talent may blossom) or as adjectives (a novice may be green), or in longer *IDIOMATIC phrases, e.g. to throw the baby out with the bath-water. The use of metaphor to create new combinations of ideas is a major feature of *POETRY, although it is quite possible to write poems without metaphors. Much of our everyday language is also made up of metaphorical words and phrases that pass unnoticed as 'dead' metaphors, like the branch of an organization. A mixed metaphor is one in which the combination of qualities suggested is illogical or ridiculous (see also catachresis), usually as a result of trying to apply two metaphors to one thing: those vipers stabbed us in the back. Modern analysis of metaphors and similes distinguishes the primary literal term (called the '*TENOR') from the secondary figurative term (the 'vehicle') applied to it: in the metaphor the road oflife, the tenor is life, and the vehicle is the road. For a fuller account, consult Terence Hawkes, Metaphor (1972).

intentional fallacy

the name given by the American *NEW CRITICS W. K. Wimsatt Jr and Monroe C. Beardsley to the widespread assumption that an author's declared or supposed intention in writing a work is the proper basis for deciding on the meaning and the value of that work. In their 1946 essay The Intentional Fallacy' (reprinted in Wimsatt's The Verballcon, 1954), these critics argue that a literary work, once published, belongs in the public realm oflanguage, which gives it an objective existence distinct from the author's original idea of it: The poem is not the critic's own and not the author's (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it). The poem belongs to the public.' Thus any information or surmise we may have about the author's intention cannot in itself determine the work's meaning or value, since it still has to be verified against the work itself. Many other critics have pointed to the unreliability of authors as witnesses to the meanings of their own works, which often have significances wider than their intentions in composing them: as D. H. Lawrence wrote in his Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), 'Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.'

Leavisites

the name given to followers of the English literary critic F. R. Leavis, who achieved an extensive influence in mid-20th century British culture as co-editor of the journal Scrutiny (1932-53), as a teacherin Cambridge, and as the author of New Bearings in English Poetry (1932), Revaluation (1936), The Great Tradition (1948), and several other books. Leavis's attitude to literature and society, strongly influenced by his wife Q D. Leavis's book Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), was marked by an intense moral seriousness and a militant hostility both to Marxism and to the utilitarian values of modern' commercialism'. He saw the critic's task as one of preserving the values of the best literature-identified with those of 'Life' -against the hostile cultural environment of 'mass' society. His harshly exclusive literary judgements were influenced partly by T. S. Eliot's rejection of 19th-century poetry in favour of the * METAPHYSICAL POETS, and partly by admiration for the work ofD. H. Lawrence. Many of his pronouncements on the decline of English culture followed Eliot's hypothesis of the *DISSOCIATION of sensibility and invoked the supposed merits of the 'organic community' of the rural past. The Leavisite influence on the teaching of English literature (which Leavis saw as central to cultural survival) was strong in Britain during the 1950s and 1960s, and produced a detailed version of English literary history in The Pelican Guide to English Literature (ed. Boris Ford, 7 vols., 1954-61), but it has declined sharply since Leavis's death in 1978. The Leavisites are sometimes referred to as 'Scrutineers', after the name of their journal. The adjective Leavisian is applied more neutrally to ideas characteristic of Leavis's work. See also Cambridge school.

Cambridge school

the name sometimes given to an influential group of English critics associated with the University of Cambridge in the 1920s and 1930s. The leading figures were 1. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, Q D. Leavis, and William Empson. Influenced by the critical writings of Coleridge and ofT. S. Eliot, they rejected the prevalent biographical and historical modes of criticism in favour of the' close reading' of texts. They saw poetry in terms of the reintegration of thought and feeling (see dissociation of sensibility), and sought to demonstrate its subtlety and complexity, notably in Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930). The Leavises achieved great influence through the journal Scrutiny (1932-53), judging literary works according to their moral seriousness and 'lifeenhancing' tendency. See also Leavisites, practical criticism.

plot

the pattern of events and situations in a narrative or dramatic work, as selected and arranged both to emphasize relationshipsusually of cause and effect-between incidents and to elicit a particular kind of interest in the reader or audience, such as surprise or suspense. Although in a loose sense the term commonly refers to that sequence of chief events which can be summarized from a story or play, modern criticism often makes a stricter distinction between the plot of a work and its *STORY: the plot is the selected version of events as presented to the reader or audience in a certain order and duration, whereas the story is the full sequence of events as we imagine them to have taken place in their 'natural' order and duration. The story, then, is the hypothetical 'raw material' of events which we reconstruct from the finished product of the plot. The critical discussion of plots originates in Aristotle's Poetics (4th century BCE), in which his term mythos corresponds roughly with our 'plot'. Aristotle saw plot as more than just the arrangement of incidents: he assigned to plot the most important function in a drama, as a governing principle of development and coherence to which other elements (including character) must be subordinated. He insisted that a plot should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and that its events should form a coherent whole. Plots vary in form from the fully integrated or 'tightly knit' to the loosely *EPISODIC. In general, though, most plots will trace some process of change in which characters are caught up in a developing conflict that is finally resolved. See also intrigue, subplot.

point of view

the position or vantage-point from which the events of a story seem to be observed and presented to us. The chief distinction usually made between points of view is that between *THIRD-PERSON NARRATIVES and *FIRST-PERSON NARRATIVES. A third-person *NARRATOR may be *OMNISCIENT, and therefore show an unrestricted knowledge of the story's events from outside or 'above' them; but another kind of third-person narrator may confine our knowledge of events to whatever is observed by a single character or small group of characters, this method being known as 'limited point of view' (see focalization). A firstperson narrator's point of view will normally be restricted to his or her partial knowledge and experience, and therefore will not give us access to other characters' hidden thoughts. Many modern authors have also used 'multiple point of view', in which we are shown the events from the positions of two or more different characters.

criticism

the reasoned discussion of literary works, an activity which may include some or all of the following procedures, in varying proportions: the defence of * LITERATURE against moralists and censors, classification of a work according to its * GENRE, interpretation of its meaning, analysis of its structure and style, judgement of its worth by comparison with other works, estimation of its likely effect on readers, and the establishment of general principles by which literary works (individually, in categories, or as a whole) can be evaluated and understood. Contrary to the everyday sense of criticism as 'fault-finding', much modern criticism (particularly of the academic kind) assumes that the works it discusses are valuable; the functions of judgement and analysis having to some extent become divided between the market (where reviewers ask 'Is this worth buying'?') and the educational world (where academics ask 'Why is this so good?'). The various kinds of criticism fall into several overlapping categories: theoretical, practical, *IMPRESSIONISTIC, * AFFECTIVE, *PRESCRIPTIVE, or descriptive. Criticism concerned with revealing the author's true motive or intention (sometimes called 'expressive' criticism) emerged from *ROMANTICISM to dominate much 19th- and 20th-century critical writing, but has tended to give way to 'objective' criticism, focusing on the work itself (as in *NEW CRITICISM and *STRUCTURALISM), and to a shift of attention to the reader in *READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM. Particular schools of criticism also seek to understand literature in terms of its relations to history, politics, gender, social class, mythology, linguistic theory, or psychology. See also exegesis, hermeneutics, metacriticism, poetics.

literariness

the sum of special linguistic and formal properties that distinguish literary texts from non-literary texts, according to the theories of*RusSIAN FORMALISM. The leading Formalist RomanJakobson declared in 1919 that 'the object of literary science is not literature but literariness, that is, what makes a given work a literary work'. Rather than seek abstract qualities like * IMAGINATION as the basis ofliterariness, the Formalists set out to define the observable 'devices' by which literary texts-especially poems-*POREGROUNO their own language, in *METRE, rhyme, and other patterns of sound and repetition. Literariness was understood in terms of *OEPAMILIARIZATION, as a series of deviations from 'ordinary' language. It thus appears as a relation between different uses oflanguage, in which the contrasted uses are liable to shift according to changed contexts. See also function, literature.

content

the term commonly used to refer to what is said in a literary work, as opposed to how it is said (that is, to the *PORM or *STYLE). Distinctions between form and content are necessarily abstractions made for the sake of analysis, since in any actual work there can be no content that has not in some way been formed, and no purely empty form. The indivisibility of form and content, though, is something of a critical truism which often obscures the degree to which a work's matter can survive changes in its manner (in *REVISIONS, translations, and *PARAPHRASES); and it is only by positing some other manner in which this matter can be presented that one is able in analysis to isolate the specific form of a given work.

logocentrism

the term used by Jacques Derrida and other exponents of *OECONSTRUCTION to designate the desire for a centre or original guarantee of all meanings, which in Derrida's view has characterized Western philosophy since Plato. The Greek word logos can just mean 'word', but in philosophy it often denotes an ultimate principle of truth or reason, while in Christian theology it refers to the Word of God as the origin and foundation of all things. Derrida's critique of logocentric thinking shows how it attempts to repress difference (see dijJerance) in favour of identity and presence: the philosophical 'metaphysics of presence' craves a 'transcendental signified' or ultimately self-sufficient meaning (e.g. God, Man, Truth). The most significant case of logocentrism is the enduring *PHONOCENTRISM that privileges speech over writing because speech is held to guarantee the full 'presence' and integrity of meaning.

plagiarism [play-ja-rizm]

the theft of ideas (such as the plots of narrative or dramatic works) or of written passages or works, where these are passed off as one's own work without acknowledgement of their true origin; or a piece of writing thus stolen. Plagiarism is not always easily separable from imitation, adaptation, or *PASTICHE, but is usually distinguished by its dishonest intention. A person practising this form ofliterary theft is a plagiarist. The older term plagiary was applied both to plagiarisms and to plagiarists. Verb: plagiarize.

hermeneutics

the theory of interpretation, concerned with general problems of understanding the meanings of texts. Originally applied to the principles of *EXEGESIS in theology, the term has been extended since the 19th century to cover broader questions in philosophy and * CRITICISM, and is associated in particular with a tradition of German thought running from Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey in the 19th century to Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer in the 20th. In this tradition, the question of interpretation is posed in terms of the *HERMENEUTIC CIRCLE, and involves basic problems such as the possibility of establishing a determinate meaning in a text, the role of the author's intention, the historical relativity of meanings, and the status of the reader's contribution to a text's meaning. A significant modern branch of this hermeneutic tradition is *RECEPTION THEORY. See also phenomenology. For an extended account, consult Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics (1969).

alienation effect or A-effect

the usual English translation of the German Veifremdungseffekt or V-effekt, a major principle ofBertolt Brecht's theory of * EPIC THEATRE. It is a dramatic effect aimed at encouraging an attitude of critical detachment in the audience, rather than a passive submission to realistic illusion; and achieved by a variety of means, from allowing the audience to smoke and drink to interrupting the play's action with songs, sudden scene changes, and switches of role. Actors are also encouraged to distance themselves from their characters rather than identify with them; ironic commentary by a narrator adds to this 'estrangement'. By reminding the audience of the performance's artificial nature, Brecht hoped to stimulate a rational view of history as a changeable human creation rather than as a fated process to be accepted passively. Despite this theory, audiences still identify emotionally with the characters in Mother Courage (1941) and Brecht's other plays. The theory was derived partly from the *RUSSIAN FORMALISTS' concept of *OEFAMILIARIZATION.

context

those parts of a *TEXT preceding and following any particular passage, giving it a meaning fuller or more identifiable than if it were read in isolation. The context of any statement may be understood to comprise immediately neighbouring *SIGNS (including punctuation such as quotation marks), or any part of-or the whole of-the remaining text, or the biographical, social, cultural, and historical circumstances in which it is made (including the intended audience or reader). The case of *IRONY shows clearly how the meaning of a statement can be completely reversed by a knowledge of its context. An interpretation of any passage or text that offers to explain it in terms of its context is sometimes said to contextualize it. Adjective: contextual.