A Handbook to Literature

Clinamen

A trope, meaning a "swerving away," latterly adopted in Harold Bloom's criticism to describe the inaugural gesture of a typical "strong" post-Enlightenment lyric

Abbey Theatre

Associated with the Irish Literary revival and was directed by W.B Yeats.

Abecedarian

An acrostic arranged so each word of every line starts with the letters of the alphabet.

ABC

An alphabetical acrostic.

ABC - Book

A primer/hornbook that introduces a subject.

Abridgement

A shortened version of a work.

Absolute

Totally independent from conditions and controls.

Absolute grammatical structure

A sentence that is free from syntactic relationships to other parts of the sentence, such as 'How can I, that girl standing there'.

Absolute comparative and superlative forms

No indication of a specific context.

Criticism

The standards by which a work should be measured.

Absolutist critic

A critic that holds that immutable values determine moral and aesthetic worth.

Abstract, adj.

Removal from the real world and connotes with 'non-representative'.

Abstract, noun

An abridgement that summarizes the principal ideas in a longer work, such as abstracts of articles and dissertations.

Absurd (in contemporary literature and criticism)

'Absurd' refers to human beings living in meaningless isolation in an alien universe, combining expressionism, surrealism, and existentialism.

Theatre of the Absurd

The Theatre of the Absurd is a kind of drama invented by Marlin Esslin that presents a view of the absurdity of humans, abandoning usual and rational people as bewildered creatures in an incomprehensible universe.

Academic

Refers to schools and academics neutrally, or negatively to aridly theoretical ideas or pedantic, conventional, and formalistic style.

Academic drama

Academic drama refers to plays written and performed in schools, particularly during the Elizabethan age.

Academics

Academics are associations devoted to the advancement of special fields of interest.

Acatalectic

Refers to lines that are metrically complete and carry out the basic metrical and arithmetic pattern of a poem.

Accent (prosody)

An accent in prosody refers to the emphasis given to a syllable in articulation, combining force, timbre, duration, loudness, and pitch. It is not the same as stress, which is the emphasis required by a rhythmic pattern.

Accent

The normal stress on syllables.

Ictus

The Latin name applied to the stress itself.

Thesis

The Latin name applied to the unstressed syllable; in Greek, the definition is switched with arsis.

Arsis

The Latin name applied to the stressed syllable; in Greek, the definition is switched with thesis.

Rhetorical accent

The placement of stress determined by the meaning.

Metrical accent

The placement of stress determined by the arithmetic pattern of the line.

Linguistic accent

The pronunciation of words and phrases according to regional or social patterns.

Accentualism

English is like German; it has syllables of varying length and strength and is not uniform.

Accentual (syllabic verse)

Verse that depends for its rhythm both on the number of syllables per line and on the pattern of accented and unaccented syllables.

Accidental (noun)

Any element of a text that is not essential to the meaning of the words; ex. Capitalizations, spelling, and punctuation.

Accismus

A form of irony where a pretended refusal is insincere or hypocritical.

Acephalous

A line from which an unstressed syllable has been dropped at the beginning.

Acknowledgements

A component in the front matter of a document where the author acknowledges help received from individuals and institutions.

Acmeism

A movement in Russian Poetry to promote the treatment of realistic subjects (exactness of words and clarity of images).

Acronym

A word formed by combining the initial letters or syllables of a series of words to form a name.

Acrophony

Calling a written symbol by the name of a word that is spelled with the symbol at the beginning, ex. Alpha.

Acrostic

A composition arranged to spell out a word, phrase, or sentence when certain letters are selected.

Telestich acrostic

An acrostic where the final letters spell out a word.

Mesostich acrostic

An acrostic where the middle letters form a word.

Acrostic

A poem where the first letter of each line forms a word.

Cross acrostic

An acrostic where the first letter of each line forms a word.

Abecedarius acrostic

An acrostic where the initial words form the alphabet.

Act

A major division of a drama, typically consisting of 5 parts.

What are the 5 parts of an act in Greek and Roman plays?

Exposition, complication, falling action, and catastrophe.

How many acts are typically found in dramas from the end of the 19th century?

3 acts.

Action

A series of events that constitutes a plot.

What is the difference between action and activity

Action has a beginning, middle, and end, while activity does not.

Action-adventure story

A style of entertainment with 2-dimensional characters and a good vs. evil theme.

Actor

A person who performs in a drama.

Actor manager

A theater manager who also acts.

Actress

A female actor.

Adage

A saying made familiar by long use.

Adaptation

The rewriting of a work to fit it into another medium.

Addendum

Matter to be added to a piece of writing, often items inadvertently omitted or received too late for inclusion.

Addumitatio

The Latin counterpart of diaphoresis, in which a speaker expresses doubt, whether genuine or feigned.

Adventure story

A story where action is the predominant material and is stressed above the importance of characterization and motivation.

Aesthetic Distance

The gap between a viewer's conscious reality and the fictional reality presented in a work of art; viewing it with detachment or objectivity

Adversarius

The "straight" character in formal satire who is addressed by the persona and who functions to elicit and shape the speaker's remarks

Aesthetics

The philosophy of the beautiful in nature and art. In Kantian tradition, it is the bridge between material and spiritual.

Aet. or Aetat

The term used to designate a year of person's life. Ex. a subtitle with "aet. 35" would be in persons 35th year.

Affective Fallacy

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

Affix

A verbal ellemnt added before, withinm or after a base to change its meaning.

African American Literature

Formal study of writing which began with the poetry of two slaves in the eighteenth century. This evolved into slave narratives and then into published works by runaways. In the modern age a host of skillful Black writers have produced work in every field.

"After"

Some titles, especially of poems, suggest that a work was written after the manner of a certain writer, work, or body of literature or after the reading og a work. Ex. "After a Passage in Baudelaire", "After the persian"

Age of Johnson

Interval between 1750 and 1798 that marked a transition in English literature. Neoclssicism faded into Romanticism, although mainly neo classic. Sameul Johnson was the main literary figure here.

Age of Reason

Aka the Enlighterment in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Emphasized self-knowledge, self-control, rationalsim, discipline, and the rile of law, order, and decorum in public and private life and in art.

Age of the Romantic Movement in England

1798-1832; Started with the publication of "Lyrical Ballads" by Wordsmith and Coleridge in 1798 and ended with the death of Scott

Age of Sensibility

1750 -1798, applied to the last half of the eightennth century in England, the time earlier called the Age of Johnson. Emphasized on emriging romantic qualities in literature.

Agent

A representative for an artist. Earliest in the late nineteenth century ex. A. P. Watt.

Agititprop

Agitational Propaganda

Agnomination (also adnomination, annomination)

Any PLAY ON WORDS, especially involving names of people, ex. Robert Greene's "Shake-scene"; ALLITERATION in general.

Agon

A contest or conflict

Agrarians

A person who favors an agricultural way of life, Ex. Thomas Jefferson

Agroikos

A country bumpkin in Greek works.

Alazon

Imposter in Greek comedy; usually a man, he is pretintius and is held up to ridicule. Ex. the quack, the religoius fanatic, the swaggering soldier

Alba

A Provençal lement over the parting of lovers at the break of day

Album Verse

Casual verse designed to be included in a keepsake album

Alcaics

Verses written according to the manner of the odes of Alcaeus, usually a four-stanza poem, each stanza composed of four lines, the first two being Hendecasyllabic, the third being nine syllables, and the fourth decasyllabic. English ____ are almost impossible but the most notable English attempt is Tennyson's "Milton"

Alexandrianism

The spirit prevailing in the literary and scientific work of Hellenistic writers flourishing in Alexandria for about three centuries after 325 B.C.

Alexandrine

A verse with six iambic feel (iambic hexameter); 12 syllables

Alienation Effect

quality of theatre that keeps audience from getting lost in story so they think critically not emotionally; allows politcal messages to be delivered; achieved by devices that departs from representational realism to everyday experience; ex. masks, alien setting, distubances of time sequences, rupturing of the fourth wall

Allegory

A story in which each aspect of the story has a symbolic meaning outside the tale itself.

Allelograph

A variant form of a word used in the vicinity of the basic form itself. Ex. Ne'er and never, lovest and lov'st)

Alliteration

Repetition of consonant and vowel sounds

Allitarative Prose

adding alliterative verse to prose

Alliterative Romance

A metrical romance written in alliterative verse, especially produced during the revival of interest in alliterative poetry in the fourteenth century

Alliterative Verse

a form of verse that uses alliteration as the principal ornamental device to help indicate the underlying metrical structure, as opposed to other devices such as rhyme; typically found in Germanic or Celtic verse

Alloeostropha

Milton's term for the variable division of the choric odes in Samson Agonistes into what he called irregular "stanzas or pauses"

Allonym

the name of another person taken by an author as a pen name; also used to refer to the work/piece

Allusion

A reference to another work of literature, person, or event; Biblical Allusion are very common in English literature

Allusion Book

A collection of allusions to a writer or a writer's works, sometimes for a specific period. Ex. "Spense Allusion Book 1599-1750) would catalogue allusions to Spense in works from the period indicated

Almanac

an annual calendar containing important dates and statistical information such as astronomical data and tide tables.

Almanac Poem

a poem suitable for inclusion in an old-fashioned almanac, with advice for farmers and astrological information

Altar Poem

Another term for a Carmen Figuratum, a poem in which the lines are so arranged that they form a design of the page, taking the shape of the subject, frequently an altar or a cross.

Alterity

the state of being other or different; otherness

Alternative History

A species of fiction in which much depends on some major reversal of known geography or history

Ambages

Where truth is spoken in a way that tends to decieve or mislead

Ambiguity

An event or situation that may be interpreted in more than one way due to either mulitple meanings or cloudy refrences of a pronoun, or faulty/ inverted sequence.

Amphimacer

Metrical foot as followed: stressed, unstressed, stressed; ex. nevermore

Amphisbaenic Rhyme

named for the monster in Greek fable that has a head at each end and can go in either direction, the term is used to describe backward rhyme-- that is, two rhyme words the second of which inverts the order of the first as in "step" and "pets"