130 Lit Crit Terms

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Kabuki

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A popular form of theater in Japan since the mid-seventeenth century. Kabuki uses stories, scenes, dances, and music, some more than a thousand years old. It is a dance and musical theater, with elaborate sets. The actors—all of whom are skilled dancers and acrobats—are men, but some portray women.

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Senryu

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Named for the poet Karai Senryu, the senryu has the same form as the haiku—seventeen syllables arranged in lines of five, seven, and five syllables—but a different spirit, relying on humor or satire rather than conventions related to seasons.

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130 Terms

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Kabuki

A popular form of theater in Japan since the mid-seventeenth century. Kabuki uses stories, scenes, dances, and music, some more than a thousand years old. It is a dance and musical theater, with elaborate sets. The actors—all of whom are skilled dancers and acrobats—are men, but some portray women.

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Senryu

Named for the poet Karai Senryu, the senryu has the same form as the haiku—seventeen syllables arranged in lines of five, seven, and five syllables—but a different spirit, relying on humor or satire rather than conventions related to seasons.

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Tanka

A kind of Japanese poetry similar to the haiku. It consists of thirty-one syllables, arranged in five lines, each of seven syllables, except the first and third, which are each five.

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Tableau

An interlude in which the actors freeze in position and then resume action as before or hold their positions until the curtain falls.

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Tautology

The use of repetitious words. Tautology repeats an idea without adding force or clarity. “Devoid,” say, means “completely empty,” so “wholly devoid” is a tautology.

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Triple Rhyme

Rhyme in which the rhyming stressed syllable is followed by two unstressed, undifferentiated syllables, as in “meticulous” and “ridiculous.”

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Trochee

A foot consisting of an accented and an unaccented syllable, as in the word happy. / -

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Abecedarian / Abecedarius / Abecedary

An acrostic so arranged that the initial letters of successive lines (or other units) form an alphabet. Strictly speaking, each word in a line should begin with the same letter, although this difficult task is seldom attempted.

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Abridgment

A shortened version of a work but one that attempts to preserve essential elements.

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Acmeism

A movement in Russian poetry, begun around 1912 by members of the Poets’ Guild, to promote precise treatment of realistic subjects. The movement’s emphasis on exactness of word and clarity of image invites comparison with its Anglo-American contemporary, imagism.

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Acrostic

A composition, usually verse, arranged in such a way that it spells words, phrases, or sentences when certain letters are selected according to an orderly sequence.

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Aestheticism

A nineteenth-century literary movement that rested on the credo of “Art for Art’s Sake.”

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Affective Fallacy

The judging of a work of art in terms of its results, especially its emotional effect.

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Amphibology

A term applied to statements capable of two different meanings—a kind of Ambiguity.

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Amphigory

Verse that sounds well but contains little or no sense or meaning; either Nonsense verse or nonsensical Parody.

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Anadiplosis

A kind of repetition in which the last word or phrase of one sentence or line is repeated at the beginning of the next.

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Anapest

A metrical foot consisting of three syllables, with two unaccented syllables followed by an accented one. - - /

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Anthropomorphism

The ascription of human characteristics to nonhuman objects. In some mythologies, the gods are described as having human form and attributes. Whereas Anthropomorphism is the conceptual presentation of some nonhuman entity in human form, Personification is the much more limited rhetorical presentation of some nonhuman entity in figuratively human form or with figuratively human qualities. To represent Zeus as an “all-father” with human qualities and features is anthropomorphism; to represent “Father Time” carrying a scythe and an hourglass is personification.

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Antithesis

A figure of speech characterized by strongly contrasting words, clauses, sentences, or ideas, as in “Man proposes, God disposes.” Antithesis is a balancing of one term against another.

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Aphorism

A concise statement of a principle or precept given in pointed words. The opening sentence of Hippocrates’s Aphorisms is famous: “Life is short, art is long, opportunity fleeting, experimenting dangerous, reasoning difficult.” Aphorism usually implies specific authorship and compact, telling expression.

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Apocope

The omission of one or more sounds from a word, as “even” for “evening” or “bod” for “body.”

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Apostrophe

A figure of speech in which someone (usually but not always absent), some abstract quality, or a nonexistent personage is directly addressed as though present. Characteristic instances of apostrophe are found in invocations or an address to God.

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Aside

A dramatic convention by which an actor directly addresses the audience but is not supposed to be heard by the other actors on stage. Widely used to allow inner feelings to be made known to the audience. (breaking the fourth wall)

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Asyndeton

A condensed form of expression in which elements customarily joined by conjunctions are presented in series without the conjunctions. Ex. “Veni, vidi, vici” (I came, I saw, I conquered instead of “…, AND I conquered”), “of the people, by the people, for the people” (instead of “…, AND for the people”), and “a man I know” (instead of “a man WHOM I know”).

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Barbarism

A mistake in the form of a word or a word that results from such a mistake. Strictly speaking, a barbarism results from the violation of an accepted rule, as hern for hers, goodest for best, clomb for climbed.

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Beginning Rhyme

Rhyme that occurs in the first syllable or syllables of lines.

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Bildungsroman

A novel that deals with the development of a young person, usually from adolescence to maturity; it is frequently autobiographical.

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Blank Verse

Unrhymed but otherwise regular verse—usually iambic pentameter.

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Boustrophedon

Running alternately from left to right and from right to left; a term—literally, “ox plowing”—that describes the direction of writing in certain ancient inscriptions, such as some in Greek before 500 B.C. The term has also been proposed to supersede amphisbaenic as it relates to such rhymes as “loop” and “pool.”

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Breve

The name of the symbol (˘) used to indicate a short syllable in the scansion of quantitative verse and an unstressed syllable in accentual-syllabic verse.

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Caesura (or Cesura)

A pause or break in a line of verse.

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Catalexis

Incompleteness of the last foot of a line; truncation by omission of one or two final syllables; the opposite of Anacrusis.

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Chiasmus

A pattern in which the second part is balanced against the first but with the parts reversed, as in Coleridge’s line “Flowers are lovely, love is flowerlike.”

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Chrestomathy

A collection of choice passages to be used in the study of a language or a literature and, thus, a kind of anthology.

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Clerihew

A form of light verse invented by and named for Edmund Clerihew Bentley, who also wrote detective fiction. In its proper form, the clerihew concerns an actual person, whose name makes up the first line of a quatrain with a strict aabb rhyme scheme and no regularity of rhyme or meter.

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Dactyl

A foot consisting of one accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables. / - -

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Dadaism

A movement in Europe during and just after the World War I that ignored logical relationships between idea and statement, argued for absolute freedom, and delivered itself of numerous provocative manifestos.

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Dead Metaphor

A figure of speech used so long that it is taken in its denotative sense only, without any conscious comparison to a physical object it once conveyed. For example, in the sentence “The keystone of his system is the belief in an omnipotent God,” “keystone”—literally an actual stone arch—functions as a dead metaphor.

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Diminishing Metaphor

A type of metaphor that utilizes a deliberate discrepancy of connotation between tenor and vehicle. Its special quality lies in its use of a pejorative vehicle in reference to a tenor of value and desirability. Thus, the function seems to lie in forcing on the reader an intellectual reaction.

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Double Entendre

A statement that is deliberately ambiguous, one of whose possible meanings is risqué or suggestive of some impropriety.

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Dramatic Monologue

A poem that reveals “a soul in action” through the speech of one character in a dramatic situation. The character is speaking to an identifiable but silent listener at a dramatic moment in the speaker’s life.

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Deconstruction

A widespread philosophical and critical movement that owes its name and energy to the precepts and examples of Jacques Derrida. One important doctrine leading to deconstruction is Saussure’s conclusion that “in language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms.

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Avant-Garde

A military metaphor drawn from the French “vanguard” and applied to new writing that shows striking (and usually self-conscious) innovations in style, form, and subject matter. The military origin of the term is appropriate, for in every age, the avant-garde (by whatever name it is known) makes a frontal and often an organized attack on the established forms and literary traditions of its time.

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Echo Verse

Poetry in which the closing syllables of one line are repeated, as by an echo, in the following line—and usually making up that line—with a different meaning and thus forming a reply or a comment.

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Ellipsis

The omission of one or more words that, while essential to a grammatic structure, are easily supplied. Ex. The land’s sharp features seemed to be / The century’s corpse outleant, / His crypt the cloudy canopy, / The wind his death-lament. The first clause contains the “seemed to be” that is omitted by ellipsis in the second and third.

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Enjambment

The continuation of the sense and grammatical construction of a line on to the next verse or couple. Enjambment occurs in run-on lines and offers contrast to end-stopped lines.

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Epanalepsis

The repetition at the end of a clause of a word or phrase that occurred at its beginning.

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Epic Simile

An elaborated comparison. The epic simile differs from an ordinary simile in being more involved or ornate—in a conscious imitation of the Homeric manner.

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Excursus

A formal, lengthy digression

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Existentialism

A group of attitudes (current in philosophical, religious, and artistic thought during and after World War II) that emphasizes existence rather than essence and sees the inadequacy of human reason to explain the enigma of the universe as the basic philosophical question.

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Expressionism

A movement affecting painting and literature, which followed and went beyond impressionism in its efforts to “objectify inner experience.” Fundamentally, it means the yielding up of the realistic and naturalistic method of verisimilitude in order to use external objects not as representational but as transmitters of the internal impressions and moods.

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Eye Rhyme

Rhyme that appears correct from the spelling but is not so from the pronunciation, as “watch” and “match” or “love” and “move.”

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Fabliau

A humorous tale popular in medieval France. The conventional verse form of the fabliau was the eight-syllable couplet. Fabliaux were stories of various types, but one point was uppermost—humorous, sly satire.

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Feminine Rhyme

A rhyme in which the rhyming stressed syllables are followed by an undifferentiated identical unstressed syllable, such as waken and forsaken. Also called double rhyme.

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Free Verse

Ezra Pound once quoted T. S. Eliot as saying, “No vers is libre from the man who wants to do a good job.” Because vers libre equals “free verse,” the same maxim applies. It certainly may be the case that no verse is free if it uses a common language because every human language is an overweening system of regulation and bondage that no speaker can escape without landing in unintelligibility.

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Half Rhyme

Imperfect rhyme, usually the result of consonance.

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Harangue

A vehement speech designed to arouse strong emotions. Today, the term is applied to any form of rabble-rousing address.

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Hendiadys

A figure of speech in which an idea is expressed by giving two components as though they were independent and connecting them with a coordinating conjunction rather than subordinating one part to the other. “Try and do better” instead of “Try to do better” is an example.

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Hiatus

A pause or break between two vowel sounds not separated by a consonant. It is the opposite of elision, which prompts the sliding over of one of the vowels, whereas a hiatus occurs only in a break between two words when the final vowel of the first and the initial vowel of the second are each sounded.

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Hypallage

A figure of speech in which an epithet is moved from the proximate to the less proximate of a group of nouns.

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Hyperbaton

A figure of speech in which normal sentence order is transposed or rearranged in a major way.

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Hypotaxis

Arrangement of clauses, phrases, or words in dependent or subordinate relationships.

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Hypotyposis

Vivid description, especially when used for rhetorical or dramatic effect. Preachers may use evocations of the pains of hell, for example, in a sermon designed to frighten the wicked.

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Iamb

A foot consisting of an unaccented syllable and an accented. - /

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Identical Rhyme

A phenomenon, also called redundant rhyme or rime riche, in which a syllable both begins and ends in the same way as a rhyming syllable, without being the same word. If two lines end with “rain,” that is simple repetition. If, however, “rain” occurs in the rhyming position with “rein” or “reign,” that is identical rhyme.

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Impressionism

A highly personal manner of writing in which the author presents materials as they appear to an individual temperament at a precise moment and from a particular vantage point rather than as they are presumed to be in actuality.

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Intentional Fallacy

The judging of the meaning of success or a work of art by the author’s expressed or ostensible intention in producing it.

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Internal Rhyme

Rhyme that occurs at some place before the last syllables in a line. In the opening line of Eliot’s “Gerontion”— “Here I am, an old man in a dry month”—there is internal rhyme between “an” and “man” and between “I” and “dry.”

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Inversion

The placing of a sentence element out of its normal position. Probably the most offensive common use of inversion is the placing of the adjective after the noun in such expressions as “house beautiful” or “lady fair.”

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Jest Books

Collections of humorous, witty, or satirical anecdotes and jokes that had some vogue in Europe in the sixteenth and succeeding centuries.

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Leonine Rhyme

The internal rhyming of the last stressed syllable before the caesura, with the last stressed syllable of the line.

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Liminality

The state of being on a threshold in space or time.

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Litotes

A dorm of understatement in which a thing is affirmed by stating the negative of its opposite. To say “She was not unmindful” when one means that “She gave careful attention” is to employ litotes.

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Malapropism

An inappropriateness of speech resulting from the use of one word for another, which resembles it.

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Masculine Rhyme

Rhyme that falls on the stressed concluding syllables of the rhyme words. Masculine rhyme accounts for a majority of rhymes in English. “Mount” and “fount” make a masculine rhyme; “mountain” and “fountain” a feminine.

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Melopoeia

A Greek term renovated by Ezra Pound, who used it for the whole articulatory-acoustic-auditory range of poetry.

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Metalepsis

A complex figure—also called transumption—dismissed by classical and Renaissance critics (Quintilian, Puttenham) as affected and far-fetched but during the 1970s and 1980s given newly sympathetic attention by some sensitive critics. Definitions vary and even diverge, but the point of metalepsis seems to be adding of one trope or figure to another, along with such extreme compression that the literal sense of the statement is eclipsed or reduced to anomaly or nonsense.

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Metathesis

The interchange of position between sounds in a word. Many modern English words have undergone metathesis; an example is the word “curly,” which in Chaucer was “crulle.”

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Metonymy

The substitution of the name of an object closely associated with a word for the word itself. We commonly speak of the monarch as “the crown,” an object closely associated with royalty, thus being made to stand for it.

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Mosaic

Another name for heteromerous rhyme. Mosaic is also applied to compositions consisting of quotations from one or more authors.

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Motif

A simple element that serves as a basis for expanded narrative; or, less strictly, a conventional situation, device, interest, or incident. The carrying off of a mortal queen by a fairy lover is a motif around which full stories were built in medieval romance.

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Controlling Image

An image or metaphor that runs throughout and determines the form or nature of a literary work.

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Neologism

A new word introduced into a language, especially for enhancing style.

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Neoplatonism

A philosophical system that originated in Alexandria in the third century, with elements of Platonism mixed with Oriental beliefs and with some aspects of Christianity. Its leading representative was Plotinus.

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Novel of Character

A novel that emphasizes character rather than exciting episode, as in the novel of incident or unity of plot.

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Novel of Incident

A term for a novel in which episodic action dominates and plot and character are subordinate. The structure is loose; emphasis is on thrilling incident rather than on characterization or suspense.

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Novel of Manners

A novel dominated by social customs, manners, conventions, and habits of a definite social class. In the true novel of manners, the mores of a specific group—described in detail and with great accuracy—become powerful controls over characters. The novel of manners is often, although by no means always, satiric; it is always realistic, however.

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Novel of Sensibility

A novel in which the characters have a heightened emotional response to events, producing in the reader a similar response.

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Conceit

Originally, the term—cognate and almost synonymous with “concept” or “conception”—implied something conceived in the mind. Its later application to a type of poetic metaphor retains the original sense in that conceit implies ingenuity whether applied to the Petrarchan conventions of the Elizabethan period or the elaborate analogies of the writers of metaphysical verse.

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Palindrome

Writing that reads the same from left to right and from right to left, such as the word “civic” or the statement “ Able was I ere I saw Elba.”

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Parabasis

In Greek Old Comedy, a long address to the audience by the chorus speaking for the author. It usually consisted of witty remarks on contemporary affairs, frequently with overt personal references. It was not directly related to the plot of the comedy itself.

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Paradox

A statement that although seemingly contradictory or absurd may actually be well-founded or true.

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Pathetic Fallacy

A phrase coined by Ruskin to denote the tendency to credit nature with human emotions. In a larger sense, the pathetic fallacy is any false emotionalism resulting in a too impassioned description of nature.

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Dandyism

A literary style used by the English and French decadent writers of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The term is derived from dandy: one who gives exaggeratedly fastidious attention to dress and appearance. Dandyism is marked by excessively refined emotion and preciosity of language.

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Pastiche

A French word for a parody or literary imitation. Perhaps for humorous or satirical purposes, perhaps as a mere literary exercise or jeu d’esprit, perhaps in all seriousness (as in some closet dramas), a writer imitates the style or technique of some recognized writer or work.

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Pleonasm

The use of superfluous syllables or words. Pleonasm may consist of needless repetition or of the addition of unnecessary words. For example, in the sentence, “He walked the entire distance to the station on foot.”

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Minimalism

A modern movement in politics, economics, and all the arts, especially noticeable in architecture (Mies van der Rohe: “Less is more”) and music.

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Ploce

A kind of repetition whereby different forms and senses of a word are “woven” through an utterance, as in Blake’s “… And mark in every face I meet/Marks of weakness, marks of woe”: The first “mark” is a verb; the second and third are nouns.

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Polemic

A vigorously argumentative work, setting forth its author’s attitudes on a highly controversial subject.

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Polyptoton

The repetition in close proximity of words that have the same roots. Polyptoton may involve the use of the same word but in a different grammatical case; more commonly, there is some basic difference in the words, although they share common roots. Shakespeare gives three examples in two lines from Troilus and Cressida: “The Greeks are strong and skilful in their strength, / Fierce in their skill, and to the fierceness valiant.”