abjection A psychological process of ‘casting off’, identified and theorized by the Bulgarian-French psychoanalytic philosopher Julia Kristeva as the basis of horror and revulsion, and so subsequently adopted by literary critics in attempted explanation of the imaginative effects of *horror stories, *Gothic fiction, and narratives of monstrosity. In her book Pouvoirs de l’horreur (1980; translated as Powers of Horror, 1982), Kristeva proposes that we are especially disgusted by anything that is ambiguously located at the physical boundaries of the self, neither clearly inside nor outside us: thus bodily excretions and secretions excite nausea, and so too, in this theory, do babies and indeed mothers. Such unsettling items are described as abject or abjected insofar as we attempt to maintain our stable sense of self by imaginatively expelling them or projecting them in the form of monstrous aliens, ghosts, or bogeys.
abridgement A shorter version of an otherwise lengthy written work; also the process of selective cutting that results in such an abridged *edition. Many classic literary works have appeared in abridged versions marketed to children or language students, for example, or in an attempt to make them digestible to the impatience of modern readers: Edward Gibbon’s six-volume The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), for instance, was reduced to a one-volume abridgement by D. M. Low in 1960.
absurd, the A term derived from the *existentialism of Albert Camus, and often applied to the modern sense of human purposelessness in a universe without meaning or value. Many 20th-century writers of prose fiction stressed the absurd nature of human existence: notable instances are the novels and stories of Franz Kafka, in which the characters face alarmingly incomprehensible predicaments. The critic Martin Esslin coined the phrase theatre of the absurd in 1961 to refer to a number of dramatists of the 1950s (led by Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco) whose works evoke the absurd by abandoning logical form, character, and dialogue together with realistic illusion. The classic work of absurdist theatre is Beckett’s En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot, 1952), which revives some of the conventions of clowning and *farce to represent the impossibility of purposeful action and the paralysis of human aspiration. Other dramatists associated with the theatre of the absurd include Edward Albee, Jean Genet, Harold Pinter, and Václav Havel.
Further reading: Neil Cornwell, The Absurd in Literature (2006).
academic drama (school drama) A dramatic tradition which arose from the *Renaissance, in which the works of Plautus, Terence, and other ancient dramatists were performed in schools and colleges, at first in Latin but later also in *vernacular adaptations composed by schoolmasters under the influence of *humanism. This tradition produced the earliest English comedies, notably Ralph Roister Doister (c.1552) by the schoolmaster Nicholas Udall.
acatalectic Possessing the full number of syllables in the final *foot (of a metrical verse line); not *catalectic. Noun: acatalexis.
accent The emphasis placed upon a syllable in pronunciation. The term is often used as a synonym for *stress, although some theorists prefer to use ‘stress’ only for metrical accent. Three kinds of accent may be distinguished, according to the factor that accounts for each: etymological accent (or ‘word accent’) is the emphasis normally given to a syllable according to the word’s derivation or *morphology; rhetorical accent (or ‘sense accent’) is allocated according to the relative importance of the word in the context of a sentence or question; metrical accent (or stress) follows a recurrent pattern of stresses in a verse line (see metre). Where metrical accent overrides etymological or rhetorical accent, as it often does in *ballads and songs (Coleridge: ‘in a far coun-tree’), the effect is known as a wrenched accent. See also ictus, recessive accent.
accentual-syllabic verse Verse in which the *metre assumes the counting both of stressed syllables and of the total number of syllables in the line. Thus in an English iambic *pentameter we normally expect to hear five stresses within a ten-syllable line, although in practice there are accepted variations affecting the tally. This accentual-syllabic principle has dominated the literary tradition of verse in English since Chaucer. It is distinguished from pure *accentual verse, in which the stresses alone are counted, and from *syllabic verse, which observes only the total syllable count.
accentual verse Verse in which the *metre is based on counting only the number of stressed syllables in a line, and in which the number of unstressed syllables in the line may therefore vary. Most verse in Germanic languages (including Old English) is accentual, and much English poetry of later periods has been written in accentual verse, especially in the popular tradition of songs, *ballads, nursery rhymes, and hymns. The predominant English metrical system in the ‘high’ literary tradition since Chaucer, however, has been that of *accentual–syllabic verse, in which both stressed and unstressed syllables are counted. See also alliterative metre.
acephalous [a-sef-ăl-ŭs] The Greek word for ‘headless’, applied to a metrical verse line that lacks the first syllable expected according to regular *metre; e.g. an iambic *pentameter missing the first unstressed syllable, as sometimes in Chaucer:
Twenty bookès, clad in blak or reed
Noun: acephalexis. See also truncation.
Acmeism A short-lived (c.1911–21) but significant movement in early 20th-century Russian poetry, aiming for precision and clarity in opposition to the alleged vagueness of the preceding *Symbolist movement. Its leaders, Nikolai Gumilev and Sergei Gorodetsky, founded an Acmeist ‘Poets’ Guild’ in 1911, and propounded its principles in the magazine Apollon. The principal poetic luminaries of this school were Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) and Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938).
Further reading: Justin Doherty, The Acmeist Movement in Russian Poetry (1995).
acrostic Usually a poem in which the initial letters of each line can be read down the page to spell either an alphabet, a name (often that of the author, a patron, or a loved one), or some other concealed message. Variant forms of acrostic may use middle letters or final letters of lines or, in prose acrostics, initial letters of sentences or paragraphs. There are also acrostic phrases that serve a *mnemonic function: the initial letters of ‘Richard of York gave battle in vain’ are those of the colours in a rainbow.
act A major division in the action of a play, comprising one or more *scenes. A break between acts often coincides with a point at which the action is interrupted before resuming at a later fictional time, or at which it moves to a different venue.
actant In the *narratology of A. J. Greimas, one of six basic categories of fictional role common to all stories. The actants are paired in *binary opposition: Subject/Object, Sender/Receiver, Helper/Opponent. A character (or acteur) is an individualized manifestation of one or more actants; but an actant may be realized in a non-human creature (e.g. a dragon as Opponent) or inanimate object (e.g. magic sword as Helper, or Holy Grail as Object), or in more than one acteur. Adjective: actantial.
adage [ad-ij] Another word for a *proverb or *maxim.
adaptation The process of making a work of art upon the basis of elements provided by an earlier work in a different, usually literary, medium; also the secondary work thus produced. Literary works have been adapted in many forms: fairy tales as ballets, plays as operas, novels as stage plays (see dramatization), stage plays as novels or short stories. Since the early 20th century, new entertainment media have encouraged the adaptation of plays and novels as films or as radio (and later, television) dramas, and conversely the ‘novelization’ of film or television screenplays into books. Distinctions are commonly drawn between ‘faithful’ adaptations, in which the distinctive elements (characters, settings, plot events, dialogue) of the original work are preserved as far as the new medium allows, and ‘free’ adaptations, sometimes called ‘versions’ or ‘interpretations’, in which significant elements of the original work are omitted or replaced by wholly new material.
Further reading: Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (2005).
adventure story A loose but commonly accepted term for a kind of prose *narrative addressed for the most part to boys, in which a hero or group of heroes engages in exotic and perilous exploration. It is a masculinized variety of *romance, one in which the erotic and religious dimensions common to other types are subordinated to or completely replaced by an emphasis on vigorous outdoor activity and the practical arts of survival amid unexpected dangers, along with a cultivation of such virtues as courage and loyalty. Marvellous events may be witnessed, but usually within a context provided by modern scientific knowledge. The genre flourished in the later 19th century, its most influential master being the French writer Jules Verne, whose series of eighteen Voyages extraordinaires include Voyage au centre de la terre (Journey to the Centre of the Earth, 1864) and Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, 1870). Popular examples in English included H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1886), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), and P. C. Wren’s Beau Geste (1924). Partial overlapping with *science fiction, as in Verne’s case, or with the *thriller and other popular forms, is sometimes found.
adynaton A *figure of speech related to *hyperbole that emphasizes the inexpressibility of some thing, idea, or feeling, either by stating that words cannot describe it, or by comparing it with something (e.g. the heavens, the oceans) the dimensions of which cannot be grasped. An example from Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby is ‘Language was not powerful enough to describe the infant phenomenon.’ It is often a rhetorical index of the *sublime.
Aestheticism The doctrine or disposition that regards beauty as an end in itself, and attempts to preserve the arts from subordination to moral, *didactic, or political purposes. The term is often used synonymously with the Aesthetic Movement, a literary and artistic tendency of the late 19th century which may be understood as a further phase of *Romanticism in reaction against *philistine bourgeois values of practical efficiency and morality. Aestheticism found theoretical support in the *aesthetics of Immanuel Kant and other German philosophers who separated the sense of beauty from practical interests. Elaborated by Théophile Gautier in 1835 as a principle of artistic independence, aestheticism was adopted in France by Baudelaire, Flaubert, and the *Symbolists, and in England by Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and several poets of the 1890s, under the slogan l’art pour l’art (‘*art for art’s sake’). Wilde and other devotees of pure beauty—like the artists Whistler and Beardsley—were sometimes known as aesthetes. See also decadence, fin de siècle.
Further reading: Leon Chai, Aestheticism (1990).
aesthetics (esthetics) Philosophical investigation into the nature of beauty and the perception of beauty, especially in the arts; the theory of art or of artistic taste. Adjective: aesthetic or esthetic.
affective Pertaining to emotional effects or dispositions (known in psychology as ‘affects’). Affective criticism or affectivism evaluates literary works in terms of the feelings they arouse in audiences or readers (see catharsis). It was condemned in an important essay by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley (in The Verbal Icon, 1954) as the affective fallacy, since in the view of these *New Critics such affective evaluation confused the literary work’s objective qualities with its subjective results. The American critic Stanley Fish has given the name affective stylistics to his form of *reader-response criticism. See also intentional fallacy.
afflatus A Latin term for poetic inspiration.
agitprop [aj-it-prop] A Russian abbreviation of ‘agitation and propaganda’, applied to the campaign of cultural and political propaganda mounted in the years after the 1917 revolution. The term is sometimes applied to the simple form of *didactic drama which the campaign employed, and which influenced the *epic theatre of Piscator and Brecht in Germany.
agon [a-gohn] (plural agones [ă-goh-niz]) The contest or dispute between two characters which forms a major part of the action in the Greek *Old Comedy of Aristophanes, e.g. the debate between Aeschylus and Euripides in his play The Frogs (405 bce). The term is sometimes extended to formal debates in Greek tragedies, and may be further applied to later forms such as the *psychomachy. In Harold Bloom’s theory of the *anxiety of influence, it is applied to the struggle between the new poet and the precursor. Adjective: agonistic.
alazon The *stock character of the braggart in ancient Greek comedies. The same comic type reappears in later dramatic traditions under new names: see braggadocio.
Alcaics A Greek verse form using a four-line *stanza in which the first two lines have eleven syllables each, the third nine, and the fourth ten. The *metre, predominantly *dactylic, was used frequently by the Roman poet Horace, and later by some Italian and German poets, but its *quantitative basis makes it difficult to adapt into English—although Tennyson and Clough attempted English Alcaics, and Peter Reading experimented with the form in Ukulele Music (1985) and other works.
aleatory [ayl-eer-tri] (aleatoric) Dependent upon chance. Aleatory writing involves an element of randomness either in composition, as in *automatic writing and the *cut-up, or in the reader’s selection and ordering of written fragments, as in B. S. Johnson’s novel The Unfortunates (1969), a box of 27 separately bound printed sections of which 25 can be read in any order.
Alexandrianism The works and styles of the Alexandrian school of Greek poets in the *Hellenistic age (323–31 bce), which included Callimachus, Apollonius Rhodius, and Theocritus. The Alexandrian style was marked by elaborate artificiality, obscure mythological *allusion, and eroticism. It influenced Catullus and other Roman poets.
alexandrine (alexandrin) A verse line of twelve syllables adopted by poets since the 16th century as the standard verse form of French poetry, especially dramatic and narrative. It was first used in 12th-century *chansons de geste, and probably takes its name from its use in Lambert le Tort’s Roman d’Alexandre (c.1200). The division of the line into two groups of six syllables, divided by a *caesura, was established in the age of Racine, but later challenged by Victor Hugo and other 19th-century poets, who preferred three groups of four, in a pattern referred to as the trimètre or as the alexandrin romantique. The English alexandrine is an iambic *hexameter (thus having six stresses), and is found rarely except as the final line in the *Spenserian stanza, as in Keats’s ‘The Eve of St Agnes’:
She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint.
A rare example of extended alexandrine composition in English is Robert Browning’s poem Fifine at the Fair (1872).
alienation effect (A-effect) The usual English translation of the German Verfremdungseffekt or V-effekt, a major principle of Bertolt Brecht’s theory of *epic theatre. It is a dramatic effect aimed at encouraging an attitude of critical detachment in the audience, rather than a passive submission to realistic illusion; and is achieved by a variety of means, from allowing the audience to smoke and drink to interrupting the play’s action with songs, sudden scene changes, and switches of role. Actors are also encouraged to distance themselves from their characters rather than identify with them; ironic commentary by a narrator adds to this ‘estrangement’. By reminding the audience of the performance’s artificial nature, Brecht hoped to stimulate a rational view of history as a changeable human creation rather than as a fated process to be accepted passively. Despite this theory, audiences still identify emotionally with the characters in Mother Courage (1941) and Brecht’s other plays. The theory was derived partly from the *Russian Formalists’ concept of *defamiliarization.
allegory A story or visual image with a second distinct meaning partially hidden behind its literal or visible meaning. The principal technique of allegory is *personification, whereby abstract qualities are given human shape—as in public statues of Liberty or Justice. An allegory may be conceived as a *metaphor that is extended into a structured system. In written narrative, allegory involves a continuous parallel between two (or more) levels of meaning in a story, so that its persons and events correspond to their equivalents in a system of ideas or a chain of events external to the tale: each character and episode in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), for example, embodies an idea within a pre-existing Puritan doctrine of salvation. Allegorical thinking permeated the Christian literature of the Middle Ages, flourishing in the *morality plays and in the *dream visions of Dante and Langland. Some later allegorists like Dryden and Orwell used allegory as a method of *satire; their hidden meanings are political rather than religious. In the medieval discipline of biblical *exegesis, allegory became an important method of interpretation, a habit of seeking correspondences between different realms of meaning (e.g. physical and spiritual) or between the Old Testament and the New (see typology). It can be argued that modern critical interpretation continues this allegorizing tradition. See also anagogical, emblem, exemplum, fable, parable, psychomachy, symbol.
Further reading: Jeremy Tambling, Allegory (2009).
alliteration (head rhyme; initial rhyme) The repetition of the same sounds—usually initial consonants of words or of stressed syllables—in any sequence of neighbouring words: ‘Landscape-lover, lord of language’ (Tennyson). Now an optional and incidental decorative effect in verse or prose, it was once a required element in the poetry of Germanic languages (including Old English and Old Norse) and in Celtic verse (where alliterated sounds could regularly be placed in positions other than the beginning of a word or syllable). Such poetry, in which alliteration rather than *rhyme is the chief principle of repetition, is known as alliterative verse; its rules also allow a vowel sound to alliterate with any other vowel. See also alliterative metre, alliterative revival, assonance, consonance.
alliterative metre The distinctive verse form of Old Germanic poetry, including Old English. It employed a long line divided by a *caesura into two balanced half-lines, each with a given number of stressed syllables (usually two) and a variable number of unstressed syllables. These half-lines are linked by *alliteration between both (sometimes one) of the stressed syllables in the first half and the first (and sometimes the second) stressed syllable in the second half. In Old English, the lines were normally unrhymed and not organized in *stanzas, although some works of the later Middle English *alliterative revival used both stanzaic patterns and rhyme. This *metre was the standard form of verse in English until the 11th century, and was still important in the 14th, but declined under the influence of French *syllabic verse. W. H. Auden revived its use in The Age of Anxiety (1948), as Richard Wilbur did in his shorter poem ‘Junk’ (1961). These lines from the 14th-century poem Piers Plowman illustrate the alliterative metre:
Al for love of oure Lord livede wel straite,
In hope for to have hevene-riche blisse.
See also accentual verse.
alliterative revival A term covering the group of late 14th-century English poems written in an *alliterative metre similar to that of Old English verse but less regular (notably in Langland’s Piers Plowman) and sometimes—as in the anonymous Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—using rhyme and elaborate *stanza structure. This group may represent more a continuation than a revival of the alliterative tradition.
Further reading: Thorlac Turville-Petre, The Alliterative Revival (1977).
allusion An indirect or passing reference to some event, person, place, or artistic work, the nature and relevance of which is not explained by the writer but relies on the reader’s familiarity with what is thus mentioned. The technique of allusion is an economical means of calling upon the history or the literary tradition that author and reader are assumed to share, although some poets (notably Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot) allude to areas of quite specialized knowledge. In his poem ‘The Statues’ (1939)—
When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side
What stalked through the Post Office?
—W. B. Yeats alludes both to the hero of Celtic legend (Cuchulain) and to the new historical hero (Patrick Pearse) of the 1916 Easter Rising, in which the revolutionaries captured the Dublin Post Office. In addition to such topical allusions to recent events, Yeats often uses personal allusions to aspects of his own life and circle of friends. Other kinds of allusion include the imitative (as in *parody), and the structural, in which one work reminds us of the structure of another (as Joyce’s Ulysses refers to Homer’s Odyssey). Topical allusion is especially important in *satire. Adjective: allusive.
Further reading: Joseph Pucci, The Full-Knowing Reader (1998).
alterity A *Latinate term meaning ‘otherness’, and commonly found in philosophy and literary theory since the 1970s. It often arises in analyses of relations between the self and the other (person), in discussions of encounters between different cultures, and in observations upon the difficulty of understanding the art and thought of past ages.
ambiguity Openness to different interpretations; or an instance in which some use of language may be understood in diverse ways. Sometimes known as ‘plurisignation’ or ‘multiple meaning’, ambiguity became a central concept in the interpretation of poetry after William Empson, in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), defended it as a source of poetic richness rather than a fault of imprecision. Ambiguities in everyday speech are usually resolved by their context, but isolated statements (‘they are hunting dogs’) or very compressed phrases like book titles (Scouting for Boys) and newspaper headlines (generals fly back to front) can remain ambiguous. The verbal compression and uncertain context of much poetry often produce ambiguity: in the first line of Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’,
Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
‘still’ may mean ‘even yet’ or ‘immobile’, or both. The simplest kind of ambiguity is achieved by the use of *homophones in the *pun. On a larger scale, a character (e.g. Hamlet, notoriously) or an entire story may display ambiguity. See also double entendre, equivoque, multi-accentuality, polysemy.
American Renaissance The name sometimes given to a flourishing of distinctively American literature in the period before the Civil War. As described by F. O. Matthiessen in his influential critical work American Renaissance (1941), this renaissance is represented by the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, H. D. Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman. Its major works are Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855). The American Renaissance may be regarded as a delayed manifestation of *Romanticism, especially in Emerson’s philosophy of *Transcendentalism.
amoebean verses [a-mĕ-bee-ăn] A poetic form in which two characters chant alternate lines, *couplets, or *stanzas, in competition or debate with one another. This form is found in the *pastoral poetry of Theocritus and Virgil, and was imitated by Spenser in his Shepheardes Calender (1579); it is similar to the *débat, and sometimes resembles *stichomythia. See also flyting.
amphibrach [am-fib-rak] A metrical *foot consisting of one stressed syllable between two unstressed syllables, as in the word ‘confession’ (or, in *quantitative verse, one long syllable between two shorts). It is the opposite of the *amphimacer. It was rarely used in classical verse, but may occur in English in combination with other feet.
amphimacer [am-fim-ăsĕ] A Greek metrical *foot, also known as the cretic foot. The opposite of the *amphibrach, it has one short syllable between two long ones (thus in English verse, one unstressed syllable between two stressed, as in the phrase ‘bowing down’). Sometimes used in Roman comedy, it occurs rarely in English verse. Blake’s ‘Spring’ is an example:
Sound the flute! | Now it’s mute; | Birds delight | Day and night.
amplification A general term in *rhetoric applied to various ways of expanding upon and thereby emphasizing an initial statement, usually by some sort of repetition employing devices such as *anaphora, *auxesis, *climax, and *epistrophe, but sometimes involving *hyperbole and other effects of rhetorical expansion.
anachronism The misplacing of any person, thing, custom, or event outside its proper historical time. Performances of Shakespeare’s plays in modern dress use deliberate anachronism, but many fictional works based on history include unintentional examples, the most famous being the clock in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Anachronism may be used deliberately as a structural principle of a work, as in T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (1922) or in W. H. Auden’s ‘The Fall of Rome’ (1947). Adjective: anachronistic.
anachrony [an-ak-rŏni] A term used in modern *narratology to denote a discrepancy between the order in which events of the *story occur and the order in which they are presented to us in the *plot. Anachronies take two basic forms: ‘flashback’ or *analepsis, and ‘flashforward’ or *prolepsis. Adjective: anachronic. See also in medias res.
anacoluthon [an-ă-kŏ-loo-thon] A grammatical term for a change of construction in a sentence that leaves the initial construction unfinished. For example, Mr Micawber in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield: ‘Accidents will occur in the best-regulated families; and in families not regulated by that pervading influence which sanctifies while it enhances the—a—I would say, in short, by the influence of Woman…’. Adjective: anacoluthic.
Anacreontics [ă-nayk-ri-on-tiks] Verses resembling, either metrically or in subject matter, those of the Greek poet Anacreon (6th century bce) or of his later imitators in the collection known as the Anacreontea. Metrically, the original Anacreontic line combined long (−) and short (⌣) syllables in the pattern ⌣ ⌣ − ⌣ − ⌣ − −. It was imitated in English by Sir Philip Sidney. More often, though, the term refers to the subject-matter: the celebration of love and drinking. Anacreontics in this sense are usually written in short *trochaic lines, as in Tom Moore’s translated Odes of Anacreon (1800):
Hither haste, some cordial soul! Give my lips the brimming bowl.
anacrusis (plural -uses) The appearance of an additional unstressed syllable or syllables at the beginning of a verse line, before the regular metrical pattern begins.
anadiplosis [an-ă-di-ploh-sis] (plural -oses) A *rhetorical figure of repetition in which a word or phrase appears both at the end of one clause, sentence, or stanza, and at the beginning of the next, thus linking the two units, as in the final line of Shakespeare’s 36th sonnet:
As thou being mine, mine is thy good report.
See also climax.
anagnorisis [an-ag-nor-ĭs-is] (plural -ises) The Greek word for ‘recognition’ or ‘discovery’, used by Aristotle in his Poetics to denote the turning point in a drama at which a character (usually the *protagonist) recognizes the true state of affairs, having previously been in error or ignorance. The classic instance is Oedipus’ recognition, in Oedipus Tyrannus, that he himself has killed his own father Laius, married his mother Jocasta, and brought the plague upon Thebes. The anagnorisis is usually combined with the play’s *peripeteia or reversal of fortunes, in comedy as in tragedy. Similarly, the plots of many novels involve crucial anagnorises, e.g. Pip’s discovery, in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860–61), that Magwitch rather than Miss Havisham has been his secret benefactor. See also dénouement.
Further reading: Terence Cave, Recognitions (1988).
anagogical [an-ă-goj-ik-ăl] Revealing a higher spiritual meaning behind the literal meaning of a text. Medieval Christian *exegesis of the Bible (see typology) reinterpreted many episodes of Hebrew scripture according to four levels of meaning: the literal, the allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical. Of these, the anagogical sense was seen as the highest, relating to the ultimate destiny of humanity according to the Christian scheme of universal history, whereas the allegorical and moral senses refer respectively to the Church and to the individual soul. Anagogy or anagoge is thus a specialized form of allegorical interpretation, which reads texts in terms of *eschatology. See also allegory.
analects A collection of ‘gleanings’ or fragments of writing and sayings attributed to a given author. The Confucian Analects are *maxims and other sayings attributed to Confucius, who did not leave behind any written works. The term is also applied to selected passages from a published author’s various writings.
analepsis (plural -pses) A form of *anachrony by which some of the events of a story are related at a point in the narrative after later story-events have already been recounted. Commonly referred to as retrospection or flashback, analepsis enables a storyteller to fill in background information about characters and events. A narrative that begins *in medias res will include an analeptic account of events preceding the point at which the tale began. See also prolepsis.
analogy Illustration of an idea by means of a more familiar idea that is similar or parallel to it in some significant features, and thus said to be analogous to it. Analogies are often presented in the form of an extended *simile, as in Blake’s *aphorism: ‘As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.’ In literary history, an analogue is another story or plot which is parallel or similar in some way to the story under discussion. Verb: analogize.
anapaest [an-ă-pest] (US anapest) A metrical *foot made up of two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable, as in the word ‘interrupt’ (or, in *quantitative verse, two short syllables followed by a long one). Originally a Greek marching beat, adopted by some Greek and Roman dramatists, the *rising rhythm of anapaestic (or anapestic) verse has sometimes been used by poets in English to echo energetic movement, notably in Robert Browning’s ‘How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’ (1845):
Not a word to each other; we kept the great pace
Neck by neck, stride by stride, never changing our place.
Others have used anapaestic verse for tones of solemn complaint, as in this famous line from Swinburne’s ‘Hymn to Proserpine’ (1866):
Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath.
Lines made up of anapaests alone are rare in English verse, though; more often they are used in combination with other feet. The commonest anapaestic verse form in English, the *limerick, usually omits the first syllable in its first, second, and fifth lines. See also metre, triple metre.
anaphora [a-naf-ŏ-ră] A rhetorical *figure of repetition in which the same word or phrase is repeated in (and usually at the beginning of) successive lines, clauses, or sentences. Found very often in both verse and prose, it was a device favoured by Dickens and used frequently in the *free verse of Walt Whitman. These lines by Emily Dickinson illustrate the device:
Mine—by the Right of the White Election!
Mine—by the Royal Seal!
Mine—by the Sign in the Scarlet prison
Bars—cannot conceal!
Adjective: anaphoral or anaphoric. See also epistrophe.
anaptyxis The insertion of an additional syllable in the middle of a word, usually after a stressed initial syllable and before r or l, as with Henery for Henry or Engerland for England. Poets sometimes, and songwriters more frequently resort to this device in order to maintain metrical regularity. Dickens produces a similar effect in Bleak House when the bombastic preacher Mr Chadband enthuses about ‘the light of Terewth’, i.e. Truth.
anatomy A written analysis of some subject, which purports to be thorough and comprehensive. The famous model for this literary form is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). The Canadian critic Northrop Frye, in Anatomy of Criticism (1957), discusses the anatomy as an important category of fiction similar to the *Menippean satire. A humorous display of extensive and detailed knowledge, as in Melville’s account of whaling in Moby-Dick (1851) or Thomas Pynchon’s rocket-lore in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), is characteristic of this *genre.
Angry Young Men A term applied by journalists in the 1950s to the authors and *protagonists of some contemporary novels and plays that seemed to sound a note of protest or resentment against the values of the British middle class. The most striking example of the angry young man was Jimmy Porter, the ranting protagonist of John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger (1956). Other works then taken to express ‘angry’ attitudes included Kingsley Amis’s *campus novel Lucky Jim (1954), and John Braine’s novel of social ambition, Room at the Top (1957), but the label is more appropriate to the *anti-heroes of these works than to the authors, whose views were hastily misinterpreted as being socially radical.
Further reading: Harry Ritchie, Success Stories (1988).
Angst The German word for ‘anxiety’ or ‘dread’, used by the philosophers of *existentialism—notably the Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard in Begrebet Angst (The Concept of Dread, 1844)—to denote a state of anguish that we feel as we are confronted by the burden of our freedom and the accompanying responsibility to impose values and meanings on an *absurd universe.
antagonist The most prominent of the characters who oppose the *protagonist or hero(ine) in a dramatic or narrative work. The antagonist is often a villain seeking to frustrate a heroine or hero; but in those works in which the protagonist is represented as evil, the antagonist will often be a virtuous or sympathetic character, as Macduff is in Macbeth.
antanaclasis A *figure of speech that makes a *pun or *paronomasia by repeating the same word, or two words sounding alike (see homophone), but with differing senses.
anthem Originally an *antiphon; Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ and W. H. Auden’s ‘Anthem for St Cecilia’s Day’ both preserve something of this antiphonal sense. The term is now used more often to denote a song in which the words affirm a collective identity, usually expressing attachment to some nation, institution, or cause. Anthems have been adopted, formally or informally, by states, schools, sports clubs, and social movements of all kinds.
anthology A collection of poems or other short writings chosen from various authors, usually as favourite pieces exhibiting the best of their kind. The term is Greek, meaning a garland of flowers. Various early anthologies of Greek *epigrams and other short poems were gathered and consolidated in about 900 ce by the Byzantine scholar Constantine Cephalas into what we now refer to simply as the Greek Anthology, which survives in two medieval manuscript versions. In modern times, various prose anthologies have appeared, exhibiting short stories, speeches, or extracts from longer prose works of all kinds. A compiler of anthologies is an anthologist, and a poem or prose piece selected for an anthology is said to have been anthologized.
anticlimax An abrupt lapse from growing intensity to triviality in any passage of dramatic, narrative, or descriptive writing, with the effect of disappointed expectation or deflated suspense. Where the effect is unintentionally feeble or ridiculous it is known as *bathos; but anticlimactic descent from the sublime to the ludicrous can also be used deliberately for comic effect. Byron employs comic anticlimax repeatedly in Don Juan, as in these lines from Canto II (1819), which describe the survivors of a shipwreck:
Though every wave roll’d menacing to fill,
And present peril all before surpass’d,
They grieved for those who perished with the cutter
And also for the biscuit-casks and butter.
The device is an important feature of W. H. Auden’s verse style, used less for comic effect than as part of a deflating *realism of tone.
anti-hero (anti-heroine) A central character in a dramatic or narrative work who lacks the qualities of nobility and magnanimity expected of traditional heroes and heroines in *romances and *epics. Unheroic characters of this kind have been an important feature of the Western *novel, which has subjected idealistic heroism to *parody since Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605). Flaubert’s Emma Bovary (in Madame Bovary, 1857) and Joyce’s Leopold Bloom (in Ulysses, 1922) are outstanding examples of this antiheroic ordinariness and inadequacy. The anti-hero is also an important figure in modern drama, both in the theatre of the *absurd and in the *tragedies of Arthur Miller, notably Death of a Salesman (1949). In these plays, as in many modern novels, the *protagonist is an ineffectual failure who succumbs to the pressure of circumstances. The anti-hero should not be confused with the *antagonist or the *villain.
anti-masque A comic and grotesque piece of clowning that sometimes preceded the performance of a *masque (hence the alternative spelling, antemasque). Ben Jonson introduced this farcical prelude to some of his masques from 1609 onwards, using it as a kind of *burlesque of the main action.
antimetabole [anti-me-tab-oli] A *figure of speech in which a pair of words is repeated in reverse order: ‘Pleasure’s a sin, and sometimes sin’s a pleasure’ (Byron). This figure is a subtype of *chiasmus.
anti-novel A form of experimental fiction that dispenses with certain traditional elements of novel-writing like the analysis of characters’ states of mind or the unfolding of a sequential *plot. The term is usually associated with the French *nouveau roman of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Michel Butor in the 1950s, but has since been extended to include other kinds of fictional experiment that disrupt conventional *narrative expectations, as in some works in English by Flann O’Brien, Vladimir Nabokov, B. S. Johnson, and Christine Brooke-Rose. Antecedents of the anti-novel can be found in the blank pages and comically self-defeating digressions of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67) and in some of the innovations of *modernism, like the absence of narration in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931). See also avant-garde, postmodernism.
antiphon A song, hymn, or poem in which two voices or choruses respond to one another in alternate verses or *stanzas, as is common in verses written for religious services. Adjective: antiphonal [an-tif-ŏn-ăl]. See also amoebean verses, anthem.
antiphrasis [an-tif-ră-sis] A *figure of speech in which a single word is used in a sense directly opposite to its usual meaning, as in the naming of a giant as ‘Tiny’ or of an enemy as ‘friend’; the briefest form of *irony. Adjective: antiphrastic.
anti-Stratfordian Reluctant to accept William Shakespeare (1564–1616) of Stratford-upon-Avon as the true author of the plays and poems published in his name. Despite the fact that several of Shakespeare’s own contemporaries, including Ben Jonson and the compilers of the 1623 First *Folio, clearly acknowledged him as the author of those works, a succession of amateur scholars and conspiracy theorists in the 19th and 20th centuries proposed various alternatives as the ‘true’ author. Although disagreeing among themselves on the central point of attribution, they shared common ground in their refusal to accept that a provincial glover’s son lacking any university education and working as an actor could have written such magnificent works himself: all anti-Stratfordian theories attribute the poems and plays to a better-educated or more socially distinguished contemporary, and most of them propose that William Shakespeare was used as a front-man to disguise the true identity of the hidden genius.
The first candidate in this tradition was the English philosopher, essayist, and lawyer Francis Bacon (1561–1627). The Baconian theory, as it became known, of Shakespearian authorship was launched in 1856 by Delia Bacon in an article for Putnam’s Magazine, and was soon endorsed by Dr William H. Smith’s Bacon and Shakespeare (1857). Several followers claimed to have discovered in the writings hitherto attributed to Shakespeare elaborate ciphers and numerological codes all pointing to Bacon’s authorship. But other hidden hands were detected by similar illogic, including the Cambridge-educated poet-playwright Christopher Marlowe (1564–93), whose death awkwardly predates nearly all of Shakespeare’s works; Queen Elizabeth I (1532–1603), whose death predates many of them and whose life left little enough time for secret literary careers; William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby (1561–1641), who is not known to have had any literary ability; and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550–1604), who was at least a theatrical patron and inferior poet, and who became the favoured candidate of anti-Stratfordians in the wake of Thomas J. Looney’s book ‘Shakespeare’ Identified (1920). The definitive refutation of these theories is to be found in Samuel Schoenbaum’s Shakespeare’s Lives (1970; rev. 1991).
http://www.shakespeareauthorship.com
• Shakespeare Authorship Page: provides evidence for the Stratfordian position.
antistrophe [an-tis-trŏ-fi] 1. The returning movement of the Greek dramatic *chorus of dancers, after their first movement or *strophe; hence also the accompanying verse lines recited by the chorus in a *stanza matching exactly the *metre of the preceding strophe. The *odes of Pindar and his imitators conform to a triple structure of strophe, antistrophe, and *epode. 2. In *rhetoric, antistrophe is also the name given to two rhetorical *figures of repetition: in the first, the order of terms in one clause is reversed in the next (‘All for one, and one for all’), this effect being better known as *chiasmus; in the second (also known as *epistrophe), a word or phrase is repeated at the end of several successive clauses, lines, or sentences (‘the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’). Adjective: antistrophic.
antithesis [an-tith-ĕ-sis] (plural -theses) A contrast or opposition, either rhetorical or philosophical. In *rhetoric, any disposition of words that serves to emphasize a contrast or opposition of ideas, usually by the balancing of connected clauses with parallel grammatical constructions. In Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), the characteristics of Adam and Eve are contrasted by antithesis:
For contemplation he and valour formed,
For softness she and sweet attractive grace;
He for God only, she for God in him.
Antithesis was cultivated especially by Pope and other 18th-century poets. It is also a familiar device in prose, as in John Ruskin’s sentence, ‘Government and cooperation are in all things the laws of life; anarchy and competition the laws of death.’ In philosophy, an antithesis is a second argument or principle brought forward to oppose a first proposition or *thesis (see dialectic). Adjective: antithetical.
antonomasia [an-ton-ŏ-may-ziă] A *figure of speech that replaces a proper name with an *epithet (the Bard for Shakespeare), official address (His Holiness for a pope), or other indirect description; or one that applies a famous proper name to a person alleged to share some quality associated with it, e.g. a Casanova, a little Hitler. Antonomasia is common in *epic poetry: Homer frequently refers to Achilles as Pelides (i.e. son of Peleus). Adjective: antonomastic. See also metonymy.
anxiety of influence In the unusual view of literary history offered by the critic Harold Bloom, a poet’s sense of the crushing weight of poetic tradition which he has to resist and challenge in order to make room for his own original vision. Bloom has in mind particularly the mixed feelings of veneration and envy with which the English Romantic poets regarded Milton, as a ‘father’ who had to be displaced by his ‘sons’. This theory represents the development of poetic tradition as a masculine battle of wills modelled on Freud’s concept of the Oedipus complex: the ‘belated’ poet fears the emasculating dominance of the ‘precursor’ poet and seeks to occupy his position of strength through a process of misreading or *misprision of the parent-poem in the new poem, which is always a distortion of the original. Thus Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ is a powerful misreading of Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, through which the younger poet seeks to free himself from the hold of his predecessor. Bloom’s theory is expounded in The Anxiety of Influence (1973), in which he claims that ‘the covert subject of most poetry for the last three centuries has been the anxiety of influence, each poet’s fear that no proper work remains for him to perform’.
aperçu [ap-air-soo] An insight. The French word for a ‘glimpse’, often used to refer to a writer’s formulation or discovery of some truth. Also an outline or summary of a story or argument.
aphorism A statement of some general principle, expressed memorably by condensing much wisdom into few words: ‘Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth’ (Wilde); ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’ (Blake). Aphorisms often take the form of a definition: ‘Hypocrisy is a homage paid by vice to virtue’ (La Rochefoucauld). An author who composes aphorisms is an aphorist. Adjective: aphoristic. Verb: aphorize. See also apophthegm, maxim, proverb.
apocalyptic Revealing the secrets of the future through prophecy; or having the character of an apocalypse or world-consuming holocaust. Apocalyptic writing is usually concerned with the coming end of the world, seen in terms of a visionary scheme of history, as in Yeats’s poem ‘The Second Coming’ (1920). See also eschatology.
apocrypha The collective term for writings that were once included among the recognized holy scriptures or among the works of a given author but have since been rejected as inauthentic. In the contexts of Jewish scripture and of the Christian Bible (especially its Protestant versions), the Apocrypha are those texts of various genres, such as the Book of Judith and the Book of Tobit, that have been excluded from the accepted *canon, or relegated to a status beneath it. These are referred to as apocryphal writings. Similarly in secular literature, works formerly attributed to a given author but subsequently discredited are called apocryphal. A major instance is the Shakespeare Apocrypha, which includes plays that appeared in the Third *Folio (1664) collection such as Locrine, Sir John Oldcastle, and A Yorkshire Tragedy as well as some plays doubtfully attributed to him at later dates such as Arden of Faversham and Edmund Ironside.
Apollonian and Dionysian Terms for the twin principles which the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche detected in Greek civilization in his early work Die Geburt der Tragödie (The Birth of Tragedy, 1872). Nietzsche was challenging the usual view of Greek culture as ordered and serene, emphasizing instead the irrational element of frenzy found in the rites of Dionysus (the god of intoxication known to the Romans as Bacchus). He associated the Apollonian tendency with the instinct for form, beauty, moderation, and symmetry, best expressed in Greek sculpture, while the Dionysian (or Dionysiac) instinct was one of irrationality, violence, and exuberance, found in music. This opposition has some resemblance to that between *classicism and *Romanticism. In Nietzsche’s theory of drama, the Apollonian (in dialogue) and the Dionysian (in choric song) are combined in early Greek tragedy, but then split apart in the work of Euripides; he hoped at first that Wagner’s operas would reunite them.
apologue Another word for a *fable, usually a *beast fable.
apology In the literary sense, a justification or defence of the writer’s opinions or conduct, not usually implying (as in the everyday sense) any admission of blame. The major classical precedent is the Apologia of Socrates as recorded by Plato (4th century bce), in which the philosopher defends himself unsuccessfully against the capital charge of impiety before the Athenian court, justifying his role as ‘gadfly’ to the state. Later writers adopted the title for various kinds of work from literary theory, as in Sidney’s An Apologie for Poetry (1595), to *autobiography, as in An Apology for the Life of Mr Colley Cibber, Comedian (1740) by the much-mocked poet laureate. John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua (‘apology for his life’, 1864) has a greater element of *polemic, justifying his adoption of Roman Catholicism against aspersions cast by Charles Kingsley. An apology is sometimes called an apologetic. An apologist is more often a defender of some other person’s actions, works, or beliefs.
apophthegm [ap-ŏ-them] (apothegm) An *aphorism or *maxim, especially one of the pithiest kind. Boswell refers to Johnson’s famous saying, ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’, as an apophthegm. A person who composes apophthegms is an apophthegmatist. Adjective: apophthegmatic or apothegmatic.
aporia In *rhetoric, a *figure of speech in which a speaker deliberates, or purports to be in doubt about a question, e.g. ‘Well, what can one say?’, or ‘I hardly know which of you is the worse.’ Hamlet’s famous ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy is an extended example. In the critical terminology of *deconstruction, the term is frequently used in the sense of a final impasse or *paradox: a point at which a *text’s self-contradictory meanings can no longer be resolved, or at which the text undermines its own most fundamental presuppositions. It is this aporia that deconstructive readings set out to identify in any given work or passage, leading to the claim that the text’s meanings are finally ‘undecidable’. Adjective: aporetic.
aposiopesis [ap-ŏ-syr-pee-sis] (plural -peses) A *rhetorical device in which the speaker suddenly breaks off in the middle of a sentence, leaving the sense unfinished. The device usually suggests strong emotion that makes the speaker unwilling or unable to continue. Shakespeare’s King Lear is notably given to such unfinished outbursts:
I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall–
Adjective: aposiopetic. See also anacoluthon.
apostrophe [ă-pos-trŏ-fi] A rhetorical *figure in which the speaker addresses a dead or absent person, or an abstraction or inanimate object. In classical *rhetoric, the term could also denote a speaker’s turning to address a particular member or section of the audience. Apostrophes are found frequently among the speeches of Shakespeare’s characters, as when Elizabeth in Richard III addresses the Tower of London:
Pity, you ancient stones, those tender babes
Whom envy hath immured within your walls.
The figure, usually employed for emotional emphasis, can become ridiculous when misapplied, as in Wordsworth’s line
Spade! with which Wilkinson hath tilled his lands
The apostrophe is one of the *conventions appropriate to the *ode and to the *elegy. The poet’s *invocation of a *muse in *epic poetry is a special form of apostrophe. Verb: apostrophize. Adjective: apostrophic. See also prosopopoeia.
Further reading: William Waters, Poetry’s Touch (2003).
apparatus A collective term (sometimes given in Latin as apparatus criticus) for the textual notes, glossary, lists of variant readings, appendices, introductory explanations and other aids to the study of a *text, provided in scholarly editions of literary works or historical documents.
arbitrary Lacking any natural basis or substantial justification. In the theory of the *sign elaborated by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, the relationship between the *signifier (the sound-image or written mark) and its *signified (or concept) is described as ‘unmotivated’ or arbitrary because there is no natural or necessary bond between them, only the convention of a given language. The same applies to the relationship between the sign and the object to which it refers. The arbitrariness of these relationships can be shown by comparing the ways in which different languages allocate signifiers to signifieds. Some theorists point out that the sense of randomness attached to the term is misleading, and that the term ‘conventional’ is preferable.
Arcadia (Arcady) An isolated mountainous region of Greece in the central Peloponnese, famed in the ancient world for its sheep and as the home of the god Pan. It was imagined by Virgil in his Eclogues (42–37 bce), and by later writers of *pastorals in the *Renaissance, as an ideal world of rural simplicity and tranquillity. The adjective Arcadian can be applied to any such imagined pastoral setting. See also idyll.
archaism [ark-ay-izm] The use of words or constructions that have passed out of the language before the time of writing; or a particular example of such an obsolete word or expression. A common feature of much English poetry from Spenser to Hardy, it rarely appears in prose or in modern verse. Archaism may help to summon up a nostalgic flavour of the past, as in Spenser’s use of Chaucerian expressions and in Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, which imitates old ballads:
‘There was a ship,’ quoth he.
‘Hold off! unhand me, greybeard loon!’
Eftsoons his hand dropped he.
Or it may help to maintain metrical regularity, as in the frequent use of the monosyllable morn for ‘morning’. Keats combines both motives in this line from ‘The Eve of St Agnes’:
Though thou forsakest a deceivèd thing
Here the archaic pronunciation maintains the *metre, and supports (with the ‘thou’) the poem’s medieval setting and atmosphere. See also diction, poeticism.
archetype [ar-ki-typ] A *symbol, theme, setting, or character-type that recurs in different times and places in *myth, *literature, *folklore, dreams, and rituals so frequently or prominently as to suggest (to certain speculative psychologists and critics) that it embodies some essential element of ‘universal’ human experience. Examples offered by the advocates of *myth criticism include such recurrent symbols as the rose, the serpent, and the sun; common themes like love, death, and conflict; mythical settings like the paradisal garden; *stock characters like the femme fatale, the hero, and the magician; and some basic patterns of action and plot such as the quest, the descent to the underworld, or the feud. The most fundamental of these patterns is often said to be that of death and rebirth, reflecting the natural cycle of the seasons: the Canadian critic Northrop Frye put forward an influential model of literature based on this proposition in Anatomy of Criticism (1957).
Archetypal criticism originated in the early 20th century from the speculations of the British anthropologist J. G. Frazer in The Golden Bough (1890–1915)—a comparative study of mythologies—and from those of the Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung, who in the 1920s proposed that certain symbols in dreams and myths were residues of ancestral memory preserved in the *collective unconscious. More recently, critics have been wary of the *reductionism involved in the application of such unverified hypotheses to literary works, and more alert to the cultural differences that the archetypal approach often overlooks in its search for universals.
architectonics The principle of structure and governing design in an artistic work, as distinct from its *texture or stylistic details of execution.
argument In the specialized literary sense, a brief summary of the *plot or subject-matter of a long poem (or other work), such as those prefixed to the books of Milton’s Paradise Lost; or, in a sense closer to everyday usage, the set of opinions expounded in a work (especially in *didactic works) and capable of being *paraphrased as a logical sequence of propositions.
Aristotelian [a-ris-tŏ-tee-li-ăn] Belonging to or derived from the works of the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 bce), the most important of all ancient philosophers in his influence on medieval science and logic, and on literary theory since the *Renaissance. In his Poetics, Aristotle saw poetry in terms of the imitation or *mimesis of human actions, and accordingly regarded the *plot or mythos as the basic principle of coherence in any literary work, which must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Since the Renaissance, his name has been associated most often with his concepts of tragic *catharsis, *anagnorisis, and unity of action (see unities). The *Chicago critics were self-proclaimed Aristotelians in the renewed emphasis they gave to the importance of plot in literature.
art for art’s sake The slogan of *Aestheticism in the 19th century, often given in its French form as l’art pour l’art. The most important early manifesto for the idea, Théophile Gautier’s preface to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), does not actually use the phrase itself, which is a simplified expression of the principle adopted by many leading French authors and by Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Arthur Symons in England.
arte mayor [ar-te ma-yor] A Spanish metrical term applied to verse employing lines of between eight and fourteen syllables, with four rhythmic stresses in two pairs divided by a *caesura at the middle of the line. The most common form is a twelve-syllable line with the caesura falling after the sixth syllable, the rhythm being predominantly *anapaestic.
arte menor [ar-te me-nor] A Spanish metrical term applied to verse employing lines of between two and eight syllables, with usually only the penultimate syllable being stressed. The term covers a great variety of popular song and verse, mostly rhyming or *assonantal. This kind of verse was deemed the ‘minor art’ because it is easier to compose than verse in *arte mayor.
Arthurian literature A large body of writings in various languages in the 12th and 13th centuries and thereafter, recounting legends of King Arthur, his sword Excalibur, his queen Guinevere, and his various knights at the court of Camelot. The historical Arthur, if he existed, seems to have been some kind of chieftain in 6th-century Wales. Literary legends about him and his deadly struggle with his treacherous nephew Modred or Mordred began with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (c.1138). The Norman poet Wace expanded this account in his Roman de Brut (1155), which introduced the Round Table and the belief in Arthur’s eventual resurrection. Wace’s story was in turn extended in the early 13th century in the first English version of the legend, the verse history Brut by the priest Layamon, who adds the passing of Arthur by boat to Avalon. Meanwhile the French poet Chrétien de Troyes had in his romance Lancelot (c.1180) developed the romantic story of Sir Lancelot and his adulterous affair with Guinevere. Chrétien also introduced Sir Perceval and the quest for the Holy Grail in his Perceval (c.1182), as did Wolfram von Eschenbach in his German epic Parzifal (c.1205).
In the 1220s a further important group of anonymous prose romances appeared in French on the subjects of Lancelot, Merlin, the Holy Grail, and Arthur’s death: this body of work, referred to now as the *Vulgate Cycle, formed the chief basis for the major English prose version of the legends, Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur (completed 1470, published 1485). Malory seems to have drawn also upon two 14th-century English verse narratives, each titled Morte Arthure, and upon other sources now lost. In the line from Chrétien to Malory, it is notable that Arthur himself, apart from the episodes of his birth, accession, and death, plays little part and is overshadowed by the loves and adventures of Merlin and of the knights Lancelot, Gawain, Tristram, Perceval, Galahad, and others.
These legends have been adapted and retold in various forms and languages over the centuries, the most ambitious version in English being Alfred Tennyson’s sequence of verse narratives published intermittently from 1859 and collected as Idylls of the King (1891). See also matter of britain.
Further reading: Derek Pearsall, Arthurian Romance (2003).
http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot
• Camelot Project, archive of Arthurian materials and links.
Asclepiad [as-klee-pi-ad] A Greek poetic *metre named after Asclepiades of Samos (c.300 bce), although it was used earlier in *lyrics and *tragedies. It consists of two or three *choriambs preceded by a *spondee and followed by an *iamb. Employed frequently by Horace and later adopted by the German poet Hölderlin, it is rarely found in English. Adjective: Asclepiadean.
aside A short speech or remark spoken by a character in a drama, directed either to the audience or to another character, which by *convention is supposed to be inaudible to the other characters on stage. See also soliloquy.
assonance [ass-ŏn-ăns] The repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds in the stressed syllables (and sometimes in the following unstressed syllables) of neighbouring words; it is distinct from *rhyme in that the consonants differ although the vowels or *diphthongs match: sweet dreams, hit or miss. As a substitute for rhyme at the ends of verse lines, assonance (sometimes called vowel rhyme or vocalic rhyme) had a significant function in early Celtic, Spanish, and French *versification (notably in the *chansons de geste), but in English it has been an optional poetic device used within and between lines of verse for emphasis or musical effect, as in these lines from Tennyson’s ‘The Lotos-Eaters’:
And round about the keel with faces pale,
Dark faces pale against that rosy flame,
The mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters came.
Adjective: assonantal. See also alliteration, consonance, half-rhyme.
asteismus A rhetorical term for a facetious reply, usually involving a *pun or pretended misunderstanding of a word used by the previous speaker. A common device of dramatic dialogue, especially in comedies, it was practised relentlessly by Shakespeare, as in the exchange:
Polonius: I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed i’th’Capitol. Brutus killed me.
Hamlet: It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf there.
See also antanaclasis, repartee.
asyndeton [a-sin-dĕt-on] (plural -deta) A form of verbal compression which consists of the omission of connecting words (usually conjunctions) between clauses. The most common form is the omission of ‘and’, leaving only a sequence of phrases linked by commas, as in these sentences from Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’: ‘An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was thick, warm, heavy, sluggish.’ The most famous example is Julius Caesar’s boast, Veni, vidi, vici (‘I came, I saw, I conquered’). Less common is the omission of pronouns, as in Auden’s early poem ‘The Watershed’: ‘two there were | Cleaned out a damaged shaft by hand’. Here the relative pronoun ‘who’ is omitted. Adjective: asyndetic. See also ellipsis, paratactic.
Attic style (Atticism) The style of *oratory or prose writing associated with the speeches of the great Attic (i.e. Athenian) orators of the 5th and 4th centuries bce, including Lysias and Demosthenes. Later Roman writers distinguished the purity and simplicity of these Attic models from the excessive artifice and ornamentation of the ‘Asiatic’ style that had since developed among the Greeks in Asia Minor.
aubade [oh-bahd] Also known by its Provençal name alba and in German as Tagelied (plural -lieder), a song or lyric poem lamenting the arrival of dawn to separate two lovers. The form, which has no fixed metrical pattern, flourished in the late Middle Ages in France; it was adopted in Germany by Wolfram von Eschenbach and in England by Chaucer, whose Troilus and Criseyde includes a fine aubade. Later English examples include Donne’s ‘The Sunne Rising’ and Act III, scene v of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Modern adaptations of the tradition include aubades by W. H. Auden, William Empson, and Philip Larkin.
Aufklärung The German term for the *Enlightenment.
Augustan Age The greatest period of Roman literature, adorned by the poets Virgil, Ovid, Horace, and Propertius. It is named after the reign (27 bce–14 ce) of the emperor Augustus, but many literary historians prefer to date the literary period from the death of Julius Caesar in 44 bce, thus including the early works of Virgil and Horace. In English literary history, the term is usually applied to the period from the accession of Queen Anne (1702) to the deaths of Pope and Swift (1744–5), although John Dryden, whose major translation of Virgil’s works appeared in 1697, may also be regarded as part of the English phenomenon known as Augustanism. The Augustans, led by Pope and Swift, wrote in conscious emulation of the Romans, adopted their literary forms (notably the *epistle and the *satire), and aimed to create a similarly sophisticated urban literary milieu: a characteristic preference in Augustan literature, encouraged by the periodicals of Addison and Steele, was for writing devoted to the public affairs and coffee-house gossip of the imperial capital, London. See also neoclassicism.
Further reading: Pat Rogers, The Augustan Vision (1974).
aureate diction A highly ornate (‘gilded’) poetic *diction favoured by the *Scottish Chaucerians and some English poets in the 15th century, notably John Lydgate. The aureate style, perfected by William Dunbar, is notable for its frequent use of *internal rhyme and of *coinages adapted from Latin. Noun: aureation.
autobiografiction A *portmanteau word revived by Max Saunders in his book Self Impression (2010), which provides both a history of the term (it had been coined by the English poet Stephen Phillips in 1906) and a classification of its sub-types. It covers a range of narratives that are ambiguously located in the borderlands between recognized forms of *life writing (autobiography, memoir, biography, diary, etc.) and fiction. These include novels presented in the form of a diary written by the *protagonist, as in Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée (1938) or Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996); memoirs of the real author purporting to be those of a fictional character, as in Siegfried Sassoon’s Complete Memoirs of George Sherston (1937); and autobiographies purporting to be biographical accounts written by another real person, as with Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) and Thomas Hardy’s Life of Thomas Hardy (1928–30, published posthumously under the name of his widow Florence Hardy).
The most common kind of autobiografiction, though, is the ‘autobiographical novel’ (sometimes called an autofiction, a coinage of 1977 by the French writer Serge Doubrouwsky) in which some of the author’s own experiences are presented as those of a fictional protagonist, whether in the form of a first-person memoir, as with Marcel Proust’s novel-sequence A la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27) or as a third-person account, as in Dorothy Richardson’s novel-sequence Pilgrimage (1915–38). Saunders distinguishes all those kinds of autobiografiction proper from biografictions, in which the narrator is ostensibly a biographer attempting to reconstruct the life of one who is evidently an invented person, as in Virginia Woolf’s mock-biographical novel Orlando (1928), and from imaginary portraits, which are character-sketches of invented subjects, although sometimes with oblique autobiographical reference, as with Walter Pater’s Imaginary Portraits (1887). Meanwhile, partly in dialogue with Saunders’s work, Lucia Boldrini in her book Autobiographies of Others (2012) has proposed the term heterobiography for the distinct category of novels that are presented in the form of autobiographical reminiscences composed by historical persons who could not be mistaken for the real author, as with Robert Graves’s I, Claudius (1934) or Peter Ackroyd’s The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983).
autobiography A narrative account of an extended period of some person’s life, written by, or presented as having been written by, that person; or the practice of writing such works. Autobiography differs from biography not only in its evidently more subjective narrative point of view but in its inconclusiveness: an autobiographer cannot recount her or his own death, whereas a biographer will almost always offer an account of the subject’s life to the very end. Many autobiographies indeed restrict their scope to a phase of the author’s early life and conclude at some point long before the time of writing. Autobiography also differs from other related *genres of *life writing: from the *memoir in its focus upon the self rather than on notable people and events that the author has encountered, and from the journal or diary in its attempt to produce a connected retrospective account.
The term is a modern one, put into circulation in the early 19th century by the English poet Robert Southey, and the genre itself is predominantly a modern phenomenon, although there are classic earlier examples of spiritual autobiography relating crises of conversion, notably the 4th-century Confessions of St Augustine, the mid-16th-century Vita of Benvenuto Cellini (published 1728), and John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666). Distinct from such early ‘conversion narratives’, the modern and largely secular tradition of autobiography arose in the late 18th century with the highly influential Les Confessions (1781–8) of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and in English with the Memoirs (1796) of Edward Gibbon. Most autobiographies are written in prose, but William Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1850) is a lengthy account of selected aspects of the poet’s youth written in *blank verse. Since Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), many *novels written in the *first-person voice have presented themselves as autobiographies of fictional persons, as with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847), and these are often classified as fictional autobiographies or as pseudo-autobiographical novels.
The widely used term autobiographical novel (often qualified as ‘semi-autobiographical’), however, refers not to this pretence but to a kind of novel, often a *Bildungsroman, in which the events, settings, and characters are based upon those of the author’s own life: D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913), for example, is told entirely in the *third person, but its *protagonist, Paul Morel, is clearly a version of Lawrence’s own younger self, and the author’s former fiancée Jessie Chambers easily identified herself as the basis for the fictional ‘Miriam’. So a fictional autobiography such as Jane Eyre is a novel disguised as an autobiography, whereas an autobiographical novel such as Sons and Lovers may be understood to be a kind of autobiography in the form of a novel.
Not all autobiographies are actually written by their subjects: The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964), for instance, was written by Alex Haley on the basis of taped interviews. Such use of a *ghost-writer is now common in supposed autobiographies by sports stars and other celebrities.
Further reading: Linda Anderson, Autobiography (2nd edn, 2010); Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography (2001).
automatic writing A method of composition that tries to dispense with conscious control or mental censorship, transcribing immediately the promptings of the unconscious mind. Some writers in the early days of *Surrealism attempted it, notably André Breton and Philippe Soupault in their work Les Champs Magnétiques (1919). W. B. Yeats had earlier conducted similar experiments with Georgie Hyde-Lees after their marriage in 1917; these séances influenced the mystical system of his prose work A Vision (1925).
auto sacramental (plural autos sacramentales) A Spanish form of allegorical religious play in one act performed at the feast of Corpus Christi between the 16th and 18th centuries. These were didactic plays on biblical or historical subjects, usually culminating in the display of a large host and chalice symbolizing the sacrament of the Eucharist; hence the term ‘sacramental play’. Performances were provided by civic authorities, as open-air events with scenery on moveable carts. The most important examples are those written by the major playwright Calderón (Pedro Calderón de la Barca, 1600–1681), who claimed to have written more than 70 such pieces, having held for many years a monopoly on their composition in Madrid. The autos sacramentales were eventually banned by order of Charles III in 1765.
autotelic Having, as an artistic work, no end or purpose beyond its own existence. The term was used by T. S. Eliot in 1923 and adopted by *New Criticism to distinguish the self-referential nature of literary art from *didactic, philosophical, critical, or biographical works that involve practical reference to things outside themselves: in the words of the American poet Archibald MacLeish, ‘A poem should not mean | But be’. A similar idea is implied in the theory of the ‘poetic function’ put forward in *Russian Formalism.
auxesis A *figure of speech that lists a series of things in ascending order of importance, as in this line from Shakespeare’s Richard II:
O’erthrows thy joys, friends, fortune, and thy state
Adjective: auxetic. See also climax.
avant-garde The French military and political term for the vanguard of an army or political movement, extended since the late 19th century to that body of artists and writers who are dedicated to the idea of art as experiment and revolt against tradition. Ezra Pound’s view, that ‘Artists are the antennae of the race’, is a distinctly modern one, implying a duty to stay ahead of one’s time through constant innovation in forms and subjects. Peter Bürger’s book Theory of the Avant-garde (1984) proposed a distinction between modernist innovation in general and the true avant-garde, which for him means those who set out to destroy the very idea of Art, principally the *Dada group. Some commentators on *modernism have adopted Bürger’s narrower definition, while others have retained a more inclusive model.