Literary Criticism Terms 2022 (B)

Balance

Characterizes a structure in which parts of the whole — as words, phrases, or clauses in a sentence — are set off against each other so as to emphasize a contrast. It also applies to the placement of a pause of caesura in the syllabic middle of a line of verse.

Ballad

A form of verse to be sung or recited and characterized by a dramatic or exciting episode in narrative or dramatic form. Though it is a form still much written, the so-called popular version in most literature belongs to the early period. In America, the folk of the southern Appalachian mountains have maintained a tradition. In Australia the "bush" version is still vigorous and popular. In the West Indies, the Calypso singers produce something close to this with their impromptu songs.

Barbarism

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

Baring the Device

A concept introduced by Viktor Sklovskij, it is the opposite of verisimilitude; instead of making the beholders forget or ignore the fact that they are encountering an artifact, much art bares its devices and admits that it is not transparent but opaque--not life or even like life but a willed simulacrum. Once the devices are bared, the work is free to concern itself with its proper business, which is probing of its own genesis and nature.

Bathos

The effect resulting from the unsuccessful effort to achieve dignity or sublimity of style; an unintentional anticlimax, dropping from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Beast Fable

A short tale in which the principal actors are animals.

Belles-Lettres

Literature — more especially, that body of writing — comprising drama, poetry, fiction, criticism, and essays that lives because of inherent imaginative and artistic rather than scientific, philosophical, or intellectual qualities. Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, for example, belongs definitely to the province of this term, whereas the mathematical works of the same man, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, do not. Now sometimes used to characterize light or artificial writing.

Biblical Allusion

A reference to the Bible in a work of literature.

Bildungsroman

A novel that deals with the development of a young person, usually from adolescence to maturity; it is frequently autobiographical. Dickens's Great Expectations and Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh are standard examples. The term is virtually synonymous with the apprenticeship novel, but this is currently the more fashionable.

Black Mountain School

A label applied to certain writers associated with the titular, experimental school in North Carolina. They published the Black Mountain Review, which was highly influential in the projective verse movement. The school itself was a bold experiment in aesthetic education, which included architecture and the graphic arts as well as literature; in its idealism and spirit, the school resembled the Brook Farm enterprise. Denise Levertov and Fielding Dawson.

Blank Verse

Unrhymed but otherwise regular verse — usually iambic pentameter.

Bloomsbury Group

A group of writers and thinkers, many of whom lived in Bloomsbury, a residential district near central London. These writers, with Virginia Woolf as the unofficial leader, began meeting early in the twentieth century and became a powerful force in British literary and intellectual life in 1920s and 1930s.

Blues

An African-American folk song developed in the southern U.S. One is characteristically short (three-line stanza), melancholy, marked by frequent repetition, and sung slowly in a minor mode. Probably each of these was originally the composition of one person, but so readily are they appropriated and changed that, in practice, they are a branch of folk literature. The classic three-line stanza is much like a heroic couplet, with the first line repeated and, frequently, with a conspicuous caesura after the second foot of each line.

Bluestockings

A term applied to women of pronounced intellectual interests. It gained currency after 1750 as a result of its application (for reasons not now easy to establish beyond dispute) to a London group of women of literary and intellectual tastes who held assemblies or "conversations" to which "literary and ingenious men" were invited.

Bob and Wheel

Term invented during the 19th century to describe the phenomenon peculiar to the revival of alliterative verse in the later Middle English Period; after a strophe of unrhymed alliterative lines, the poem (most often a medieval romance) shifts into a set of rhymed lines — the 1st line usually very short, and usually followed with a quatrain.

Boulevard Drama

Term applied to sophisticated comedy and melodrama popular in French theater in the 19th century. It centered around the Opera house, where the operettas of Jacques Offenbach and frequently books by Meilhac and Ludovic Halevy- with their extravagance and violent behavior- presented dramatic pictures of the irreverence, prankishness, and material practicality of the French Second Empire. In present-day usage, the term is sometimes applied to brittle, sophisticated comedy aimed at a popular audience.

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 Greek before 500 B.C.

Braggadocio

A noisy braggart who is actually a coward; a stock character with a long history stretching back to Greek and Roman comedy.

Brahmins

Members of the highest caste among the Hindus. The name is applied to certain socially exclusive families of New England, particularly in the nineteenth century.

Bucolic

A term used for pastoral writing that deals with rural life in a manner rather formal and fanciful. The plural refers collectively to the pastoral literature of such writers as Theocritus and Virgil. In the present loose usage, the expression connotes simply poetry with a rustic background — as to W. H. Auden's mixed sequence called the same as the plural form of this term — and is not necessarily restricted to verse with the conventional pastoral elements.

Burlesque

Form of comedy characterized by ridiculous exaggeration and distortion: the sublime may be made absurd; honest emotions may be turned to sentimentality; a serious subject may be treated frivolously or a frivolous subject seriously. The essential quality is the discrepancy between subject matter and style.

Byronism

A term used in recognition of Lord Byron's unique electricity. He was fabulously wealthy as well as fabulously handsome; he possessed extraordinary charm and wit; he was a genuine peer, a genuine patriot, and a great sinner; he was a charismatic hero or villain — and he was a literary genius of the first order.