Unit 6 Literary Terms

genre

a kind, type, form or style of writing

ex | Gothic, Elizabethan

gobbledygook

slang for the inflated, involved, and obscure verbiage often characteristic of the pronouncements of officialdom (nonsense often stated by those in authority)

Gothic

having the characteristics and atmosphere associated with Medievalism or the Middle Ages; suggest rugged grandeur, emotional or spiritual appeal, and a shadowy mysteriousness

ex | gloomy castle, mysterious house, secret passageways

hack / hack writer

a writer who hires himself out for any sort of literary work or ghost writing

hackneyed

worn-out, like a hired horse; indiscriminate or vulgar use; threadbare, trite, commonplace

ex | After all is said and done, along these lines, budding genius, by leaps and bounds, deadly earnest, drastic action, it stands to reason, last but not least, and to relate, needs no introduction, shadow of the goalpost, etc.

heroic / mock heroic

the principle male figure in a narrative, provided he has brave and of noble qualities / a method of satirizing or mocking conventional or traditional concepts of heroism by giving them a ridiculous exaggeration

hexameter

meter of six feet to a line

historical present

the present tense when used in telling of past events as if they were taking place at the time of the recital; effects of immediacy and excitement are thus often gained for happening that have already taken place

homonym

a word pronounced the same as another but having different meaning

hubris

insolence, arrogance, or pride; usually the tragic flaw that leads to his/her downfall in Greek tragedy

ex | The swaggering protagonist of Oedipus Rex is ultimately made to suffer because of his hubris. He defies moral laws by unwittingly killing his father and marrying his mother, and then bragging about how his father’s murderer will be punished

hymn

a sacred song

hyperbole

a figure of speech using gross or absurd exaggeration for poetic or imaginative effect

ex | “Here once the embattled farmers stood

And fired the shot heard round the world.”

Emerson, “Concord Hymn”

iambic

poetic meter of one unaccented syllable followed by an accented one; most common foot in English

ideas

views, attitudes, thoughts, feelings, presented by the author in his work, on such subjects as human nature, life, society, politics, philosophy, morality, religion, art, etc.; sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit

idiom

an expression whose meaning as a whole is different from the meaning of the separate words comprising the expressions would lead one to expect

idyll (idyl)

a poem of moderate length presenting in simple fashion the picturesque scenes or incidents, usually of rustic life

image

a way of representing in a literary work a thought, feeling, attitude, or point of view of the author

ex | “It is a curious that the part played by recurrent images in raising, developing, sustaining, and repeated emotions in the tragedies (of Shakespeare) has not, so far as I know, ever been noticed. It is a part somewhat analogous to the action of a recurrent theme or “motif” in a musical figure or sonata, or in one of Wagner’s operas…”

imagery

general term for the main sensory figures of speech

ex |

Wait for a while, then slip downstairs

And bring us up some chilled white wine,

An some blue cheese, and crackers, and some fine

Ruddy-skinned pears.

\- Richard Wilbur, “A Late Aubade”

impropriety

the use of words in an incorrect sense

incident

any event of occurrence in a narrative; a series of related incidents when forming a unit in a story is called an episode

induction / inductive reasoning

the method of modern science, reasoning from a part to a whole, or drawing a general conclusion from particular cases; the danger of inductive reasoning arises from trying to draw conclusions from too few examples or instances