English Literature Vocabulary

Flashcards covering key vocabulary from the provided lecture notes on English literature.

Literature

A specific literary tradition studied at university, such as French, American, or Danish literature.

Canon

The list of so-called 'great books' which are considered important and of literary value, often determining what is studied.

Literature (Form Definition)

The artistic use of language, employing creative or unusual language in a non-instrumental or 'autotelic' way.

Literature (Content Definition)

Literary work that is an imitation of fictional events or characters.

Genre

A conventional category or group of literary texts with similar textual features, aiding both authors in writing and readers in interpreting texts.

New Criticism

A very influential way of analyzing literary texts, focusing on texts without studying their cultural background but paying attention to every word and formal properties of texts.

New Criticism

A textual approach that uses “close reading” techniques to study the linguistic features of the text instead of turning to history, the writer, or the reader (to avoid intentional or affective fallacies).

New Historicism

A contextual approach that mixes textual and historical methods to study how older literary and non-literary texts fit into broader discourses and help to create or contest the political status quo.

Imagism

An early-20th-century avant-garde movement of poets who use striking, direct images and free verse (no fixed rhyme/rhythm).

Haiku

A genre of short poetry from Japan of three lines (5-7-5) and contains a reference to nature/seasons.

Poetry

A description that reveals the mood of the speaker (vs the story).

Rhetoric

The art of using language effectively and persuasively in spoken or written form; employing techniques and strategies to influence an audience, convey ideas clearly, and provoke emotional or intellectual responses.

Diction

Choice of words from a colloquial, formal or technical register.

End-stopping

End of grammatical unit within poetry.

Enjambment

Sentence runs on beyond the end the line within poetry.

Anaphora

Repetition of individual words at start of successive phrases.

Epiphora

Repetition of individual words at the end of phrases.

Parallelism

Reuse of equivalent syntactic structures.

Chiasmus

Inversion of established sequence.

Hyperbaton

Rearrangement of expected word order.

Euphemism

Mild/positive expression vs bad/offensive word.

Hyperbole

Overstatement, exaggeration.

Antiphrasis

Say opposite of what is meant, form of irony.

Apophasis

Identify something that you are not going to discuss.

Oxymoron

Combination of incompatible terms.

Synesthesia

Description that mixes different senses.

Paronomasia

Humorous use of 1 word with 2 meanings.

Apostrophe

Speaker addresses someone/something who is absent.

Topos

A commonplace in literature.

Ekphrasis

A topos whereby a visual artwork is described in a poem.

Epic

Long narrative poem celebrating martial heroes and the history of the nation, often invoking divine inspiration, beginning in media res (into the middle of things), written in a high style.

Lyric

A short poetic form in which the expression of personal emotion, often by a voice in the first person, is more important than a clear storyline.

Sonnet

A fourteen-line-poem, usually in rhyming iambic pentameter, with a turn or “volta” at the end.

Ode

A lyric poem in an elevated style, often addressed to a natural force, a person, or an abstracted quality.

Dramatic monologue

A poem in which the voice of a historical or fictional character, who’s clearly not the poet, speaks to an implied though silent audience.

Elegy

This term originally referred to a particular form, but later started referring to the poetry of loss, either through the death of a loved person or via broader awareness of mortality.

Aubade

A dawn poem in which the lover expresses sadness over the arrival of the day and the inevitable separation of the lovers.

Epithalamium

A wedding poem, which celebrates the marriage and wishes the couple good fortune.

Occasional poem

A poem written to document or to comment on a important event.

Topographical poem

A poem devoted to the meditative description of a particular place.

Pastoral/georgic

Poems dealing with the countryside in distinctive ways; pastoral treats the countryside as a peaceful place of recreation and love among shepherds, whereas georgic treats it as a place of productive labor.

Real author vs career author

the flesh and blood person vs public image of the writer produced by their oeuvre/interviews

Reception history

Study the changing interpretations of texts and writers, because texts do not have 1 meaning but slowly unfold many potential meanings.

Metaphor

A rhetorical device in which you identify one thing with another with which is not literally identifiable but with which it shared hidden similarities, for example “the king is a wolf”.

Tenor

The target domain in a metaphor

Vehicle

The source domain in a metaphor.

Metonymy

A rhetorical device in which you use a word to refer to another word that is closely (often physically) associated with it.

Narratology

Study of narrative structure.

Constituent events

Essential to the story’s chain of events.

Supplementary events

Not necessary to advance the story.

Story

Linear/chronological sequence of events involving entities

Discourse

Representation of that story in language/images

Narrator

The person who speaks in the text; is not the flesh-and-blood author, nor the “implied author”.

Implied author

The implied moral perspective reconstructed by the reader.

Unreliable narrator

A narrator whose perceptions and moral sensibility differ from those of the implied author.

I-experiencer

Tells of events as they are happening.

I-narrator

Teller of events as they already happened.

Third person limited

Access to one or some minds but not all.

Camera eye narrator

No access to minds at all.

Focalizer

The perspective of a specific character.

Implied reader

Not a real person, but the intended recipient of the literary text as reconstructed by the reader on the basis of the text.

Narratee

Not a real person, but the (implicit) entity in the storyworld who is supposed to be listening the story of the narrator.

Character

Human or humanlike entities involved in the action that have agency.

Agency

Capacity of an entity to cause events (to engage acts).

Flat characters

Characters are based on a single idea or quality type of entities. They usually have a comic, simple role and can be expressed in one formula; they are static and predictable.

Round characters

Characters that play a large role and cannot be summed up in a single phrase. They are dynamic and unpredictable.

Character-spaces

Space devoted to individual characters.

Character system

Constellation of different characters.

Novel

A flexible genre in prose, usually long, that concentrates on credible events experienced by a small circle of characters in a specific social world.

Realism

In realistic genre, like the modern novel you find an elevated style to discuss unimportant figures.

Formal realism

the representation of minute details to create an illusion of reality, particularly in literature

Polyphony

In novels, we encounter not one speaker but a mix of voices, sociolects, languages, etc.

Heteroglossia

a quality of language exhibiting a diversity of tonalities, styles, or points of view.

Novel (Bakhtin's definition)

A genre involving dialogues between voices/sociolects related to central theme(s), leading to a critical attitude towards language.

Imagined community

As members of a nation, we are all part of a community despite our differences and this community differs from that of other nations.

Drama

The text originally created by the playwright.

Theatre

Movements or gestures of performers enacting the script.

Performance

The entire event, including the audience and the technicians.

Comedy

A term typically applied to drama and derived from ancient drama which deals with humorously confusing situations, in which the ending is, nevertheless, happy.

Tragedy

A term typically applied to drama, and derived from ancient drama. It deals with the fall of kings and nobles, beginning in happiness and ending in catastrophe.

Tragicomedy

A play in which potentially tragic events turn out to have a happy or comic ending.

Theatre of absurd

Form of tragicomic post war similar to existentialist philosophy, which explores the absurd condition by revealing the meaningless nature of human language and existence.

Performance

Everyday life is quite similar to a theatrical performance.

Gender performativity

We are all actors, playing social roles, like students, and gender too is something you perform like an actor, so it is not fixed but “socially constructed”.

Media combination

When different media are present in the same work.

Media transposition

When a work is transformed from one medium into another.

Intermedial references

When a work in one medium imitates aspects of another medium.

Allusion

Individual author skillfully selects and deliberately refers to a specific pre-existing text, and often a thematic contrast.

Parody

The text borrows and exaggerates elements from preexisting text or broader genre conventions with a strong critical/satirical intent.

Pastiche

Also imitates another text or genre but usually less critical than parody, the aim here is to pay homage to this text or genre.

Adaptation

A transfer of a work or story from one medium to another, such as from a novel to a film or stage play.

Cause and Effect

Treat a person ill, and he will become wicked

Frame story

A narrative that frames or surrounds another story or set of stories.

Modern Prometheus

Defies the laws of nature, punished more for his rejection and abandonment of this creation.

Sympathetic character

Express and describe someone's true innermost self.

Ecocriticism

The study of interactions among literary texts and environmental issues.

Short story

The study of short stories; unity of impression through series of emotions called forth by a single situation.

Children of the Sea

It involves all the slaves and people who died similarly trying to escape or not having chose their fate. They all drowned, dying as refugees.

Braided narrative

A blending of political concerns with intimate voices and similar plots.

Romanticism

The definition of this period is difficult (differences between the authors and countries).