ballad A *folk song or orally transmitted poem telling in a direct and dramatic manner some popular story usually derived from a tragic incident in local history or legend. The story is told simply, impersonally, and often with vivid dialogue. Ballads are normally composed in *quatrains with alternating four-stress and three-stress lines, the second and fourth lines rhyming (see ballad metre); but some ballads are in *couplet form, and some others have six-line *stanzas. Appearing in many parts of Europe in the late Middle Ages, ballads flourished particularly strongly in Scotland from the 15th century onwards. Since the 18th century, educated poets outside the folk-song tradition—notably Coleridge and Goethe—have written imitations of the popular ballad’s form and style: Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798) is a celebrated example. The art of composing ballads is called balladry, as is any large corpus of ballads.

Further reading: David Atkinson, The English Traditional Ballad (2002).

• Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads site with international links to other ballad archives.

ballade [bal-ahd] A form of French *lyric poem that flourished in the 14th and 15th centuries, notably in the work of François Villon. It normally consists of three *stanzas of eight lines rhyming ababbcbc, with an *envoi (i.e. a final half-stanza) of four lines rhyming bcbc. The last line of the first stanza forms a *refrain which is repeated as the final line of the subsequent stanzas and of the envoi. Conventionally, the envoi opens with an address to a prince or lord. Variant forms include the ballade with ten-line stanzas and a five-line envoi, and the double ballade with six stanzas and an optional envoi. Poets who have used this very intricate form in English include Chaucer and Swinburne.

ballad metre (ballad stanza) The usual form of the folk ballad and its literary imitations, consisting of a *quatrain in which the first and third lines have four stresses while the second and fourth have three stresses. Usually only the second and fourth lines rhyme. The rhythm is basically *iambic, but the number of unstressed syllables in a line may vary, as in this *stanza from the traditional ‘Lord Thomas and Fair Annet’:

‘O art thou blind, Lord Thomas?’ she said,

‘Or canst thou not very well see?

Or dost thou not see my own heart’s blood

Runs trickling down my knee?’

This *metre may also be interpreted (and sometimes printed) as a couplet of seven-stress lines, as in Kipling’s ‘Ballad of East and West’ (1889):

The Colonel’s son has taken horse, and a raw rough dun was he,

With the mouth of a bell and the heart of Hell and the head of a gallows-tree.

See also common measure.

barcarole Literally a ‘boat song’, from the Italian barca, but also any poem or song about boats, rowing, sailing, or the world of water generally. The best-known English example is Andrew Marvell’s ‘Bermudas’ (1681).

bard A poet who was awarded privileged status in ancient Celtic cultures, and who was charged with the duty of celebrating the laws and heroic achievements of his people. In modern Welsh usage, a bard is a poet who has participated in the annual poetry festival known as the Eisteddfod. The nostalgic mythology of *Romanticism tended to imagine the bards as solitary visionaries and prophets. Since the 18th century, the term has often been applied more loosely to any poet, and as a fanciful title for Shakespeare in particular. Adjective: bardic.

bardolatry [bar-dol-ătri] Excessive veneration of Shakespeare. Ben Jonson said of Shakespeare, ‘I loved the man, and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any.’ A bardolater is one who goes even further in revering ‘the Bard’. Adjective: bardolatrous.

baroque [bă-rok] Eccentric or lavishly ornate in style. The term is used more precisely in music and in art history than it is in literary history, where it usually refers to the most artificial poetic styles of the early 17th century, especially those known as *Gongorism and *Marinism after the Spanish poet Luis de Góngora and the Italian poet Giovanbattista Marini, and more generally as *conceptismo in Spanish and as *concettismo and *Secentismo in Italian. In English, the ornate prose style of Sir Thomas Browne may be called baroque, as may the strange *conceits of the *metaphysical poets, especially Richard Crashaw. Some critics have tried to extend the term to Milton and the later works of Shakespeare as well. See also mannerism, rococo.

Further reading: Peter Davidson, The Universal Baroque (2008).

bathos [bay-thos] A lapse into the ridiculous by a poet aiming at elevated expression. Whereas *anticlimax can be a deliberate poetic effect, bathos is an unintended failure. Pope named this stylistic blemish from the Greek word for ‘depth’, in his Peri Bathous, or the Art of Sinking in Poetry (1727). This example comes from Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis (1667):

The Eternal heard, and from the heavenly quire

Chose out the Cherub with the flaming sword

And bad him swiftly drive the approaching fire

From where our naval magazines were stored.

Wordsworth, Whitman, and other poets who seek to dignify humble subjects are especially vulnerable to such lapses. Adjective: bathetic.

beast fable The commonest type of *fable, in which animals and birds speak and behave like human beings in a short tale usually illustrating some moral point. The fables attributed to Aesop (6th century bce) and those written in verse by Jean de la Fontaine (from 1668) are the best known, along with the fables of Brer Rabbit adapted by the American journalist Joel Chandler Harris from black *folklore in his ‘Uncle Remus’ stories (from 1879). A related form is the beast epic, which is usually a longer tale written in pseudo-*epic style. Pierre de Saint-Cloud’s Roman de Renart (1173) was an influential beast epic containing the Chanticleer story later adapted by Chaucer in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale. There were many other beast epics of Reynard the Fox in late-medieval France and Germany.

Further reading: Jill Mann, From Aesop to Reynard (2009).

Beat writers A group of American writers in the late 1950s, led by the poet Allen Ginsberg and the novelist Jack Kerouac. Writers of the ‘beat generation’ dropped out of middle-class society in search of ‘beatific’ ecstasy through drugs, sex, and Zen Buddhism. Their loose styles favour spontaneous self-expression and recitation to jazz accompaniment. The principal works of the group are Ginsberg’s Howl (1956) and Kerouac’s On the Road (1957). Significant contributions in poetry were Gregory Corso’s Gasoline (1958) and Gary Snyder’s Riprap (1959); while in prose, the group’s mentor William S. Burroughs published The Naked Lunch in 1959. The poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti was another leading figure. The Beats had a strong influence on the ‘counter-culture’ of the 1960s.

Further reading: Ann Charters, The Portable Beat Reader (1992).

belatedness In Harold Bloom’s theory of literary history (see anxiety of influence), the predicament of the poet who feels that previous poets have already said all that there is to say, leaving no room for new creativity.

belles-lettres [bel-letr] The French term for ‘fine writing’, originally used (as in ‘fine art’) to distinguish artistic literature from scientific or philosophical writing. Since the 19th century, though, the term has more often been used dismissively to denote a category of elegant essay-writing and lightweight literary chatter, of which much was published in Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Max Beerbohm’s essays and Andrew Lang’s Letters to Dead Authors (1896) are examples. An author of such elegant trifles is a belletrist. Adjective: belletristic.

bestiary A description of animal life in verse or prose, in which the characteristics of real and fabulous beasts (like the phoenix or the unicorn) are given edifying religious meanings. This kind of *allegory was popular in the Middle Ages, and survives in some later children’s books as well as in the rare modern example of J. L. Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings (1969). See also beast fable, emblem.

Further reading: Debra Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries (1995).

http://www.abdn.ac.uk/bestiary

• Aberdeen Bestiary Project, a well-illustrated archive.

bibliography The description of books: 1. A systematic list of writings by a given author or on a given subject. 2. The study of books as material objects, involving technical analysis of paper, printing methods, bindings, page-numbering, publishing history, and library holdings. A compiler of bibliographies or a practitioner of bibliography is a bibliographer. Adjectives: bibliographic, bibliographical.

Further reading: Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (2nd edn, 1985).

Bildungsroman [bil-duungz-raw-mahn] (plural -ane) A kind of novel that follows the development of the hero or heroine from childhood or adolescence into adulthood, through a troubled quest for identity. The term (‘formation-novel’) comes from Germany, where Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–6) set the pattern for later Bildungsromane. Many outstanding novels of the 19th and early 20th centuries follow this pattern of personal growth: Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849–50), for example. When the novel describes the formation of a young artist, as in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), it may also be called a *Künstlerroman.

Further reading: Franco Moretti, The Way of the World (1987).

binary opposition The principle of contrast between two mutually exclusive terms: on/off, up/down, left/right etc; an important concept of *structuralism, which sees such distinctions as fundamental to all language and thought. The theory of *phonology developed by Roman Jakobson uses the concept of ‘binary features’, which are properties either present or absent in any *phoneme: voicing, for example is present in /z/ but not in /s/. This concept has been extended to anthropology by Claude Lévi-Strauss (in such oppositions as nature/culture, raw/cooked, inedible/edible), and to *narratology by A. J. Greimas (see actant).

BIOGRAPHY

A narrative history of the life of some person; or the practice of writing such works. Most biographies provide an account of the life of a notable individual from birth to death, or in the case of living persons from birth to the time of writing; but some treat the connected lives of paired subjects or of groups (known as ‘group biography’); and since the late 20th century the term has been stretched to cover accounts of non-human subjects such as houses, cities, or commodities, in which case ‘a biography’ really means an intimate or gossipy history. The Western tradition of biography originates with the Greek historian Plutarch and his Bioi paralleloi (Parallel Lives, c.100 ce), in which he compares and contrasts the virtues of several Greek leaders with their Roman counterparts. Sir Thomas North’s English translation of this work (1579) became a main source for Shakespeare’s Roman plays. Medieval biographical writing was restricted to works in praise of monarchs or of saints (for the latter, see hagiography). The modern tradition in English, which has generally been more vigorous than in other languages, may be dated from Izaak Walton’s Life of John Donne (1640), but its most influential founder, as biographer, subject, and theorist, was Samuel Johnson (1709–84), who wrote The Life of Mr Richard Savage (1744), the important essay ‘On the Genius of Biography’ (1750), and the long sequence of Lives of the English Poets (1779–81) before himself becoming the subject of the most famous biography in the language, James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791).

In the 19th century biography became a literary industry, consolidated in great national reference works such as the French Biographie universelle (ed. L.-G. Michaud, 1811–28) and the British Dictionary of National Biography (ed. Leslie Stephen, 1885–90). In reaction against the often turgidly pious works of that age, a new movement emerged from 1918, known as the new biography, led by Lytton Strachey in England and André Maurois in France, in which biography was treated as an imaginative art in which invented dialogues, *interior monologues and other techniques borrowed from the *novel were employed. The new biography was also less reverential towards its subjects, notably in Strachey’s landmark sequence of biographical essays, Eminent Victorians (1918). The 20th century also saw the emergence of *psychobiography, informed by psychoanalytic theories of development, and of sensational biographies exposing the sexual and other personal secrets of famous figures.

Biography has a number of *subgenres, of which the most important is *autobiography, in which the subject and the author are the same person. Other recognized types are distinguished by the walk of life in which the subject was noted, e.g. political, military, artistic, theatrical, scientific, sporting; among these, literary biography retains a favoured position. An unusually disreputable minor form, practised mostly in the United States, is the campaign biography, a one-sidedly glowing account of a candidate for political office: Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote one in 1852 for his friend Franklin Pierce, who won the US Presidency and rewarded the author with the consulship at Liverpool.

Further reading: Hermione Lee, Biography: A Very Short Introduction (2009).

black comedy A kind of drama (or, by extension, a non-dramatic work) in which disturbing or sinister subjects like death, disease, or warfare, are treated with bitter amusement, usually in a manner calculated to offend and shock. Prominent in the theatre of the *absurd, black comedy is also a feature of Joe Orton’s Loot (1965). A similar black humour is strongly evident in modern American fiction from Nathanael West’s A Cool Million (1934) to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).

Black Mountain poets A group of American poets of the 1950s identified as distinctive by Donald Allen in his influential anthology The New American Poetry: 1945–1960 (1960). The leading figures in this group were associated with Black Mountain College, a tiny experimental academy established in 1933 near Asheville, North Carolina. The group’s leader was Charles Olson, who taught at the College from 1948, as its Rector from 1951 until its closure in 1956. He derived his poetic principles from the examples of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, and summarized these in his essay ‘Projective Verse’ (1950). His chief disciples were Robert Creeley, who briefly taught at the College (1954–5), also editing the Black Mountain Review (seven issues, 1954–7), and Robert Duncan, who briefly joined the faculty. Among their students were the poets Ed Dorn, Joel Oppenheimer, John Wieners, and John Williams, while a few others who never attended the College, including Paul Blackburn, Larry Eigner, and Denise Levertov, became associated with the group by publishing work in their Review or in the sympathetic magazine Origin (1951–7). The common feature of their work was a rejection of regular lines, *metres, and *stanzas in favour of a kind of *open form in which the shape and movement of the poem evolve spontaneously in exploratory response to its subject.

Further reading: Edward Halsey Foster, Understanding the Black Mountain Poets (1994).

blank verse Unrhymed lines of iambic *pentameter, as in these final lines of Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ (1842):

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Blank verse is a very flexible English verse form which can attain rhetorical grandeur while echoing the natural rhythms of speech and allowing smooth *enjambment. First used (c.1540) by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, it soon became both the standard *metre for dramatic poetry and a widely used form for *narrative and meditative poems. Much of the finest verse in English—by Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Stevens—has been written in blank verse. In other languages, notably Italian (in *hendecasyllables) and German, blank verse has been an important medium for poetic drama. Blank verse should not be confused with *free verse, which has no regular metre.

Further reading: Robert B. Shaw, Blank Verse (2007).

blazon (blason) A poetic catalogue of a woman’s admirable physical features, common in Elizabethan *lyric poetry: an extended example is Sidney’s ‘What tongue can her perfections tell?’ The *Petrarchan conventions of the blazon include a listing of parts from the hair down, and the use of *hyperbole and *simile in describing lips like coral, teeth like pearls, and so on. These conventions are mocked in the tradition of the counter-blazon, of which the best-known example is Shakespeare’s 130th sonnet, ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’.

block form The arrangement of lines of verse into a continuous sequence that is not divided into *stanzas or *verse paragraphs. The term is a recent substitute for the traditional category of *stichic verse, although it may be applied to poems employing varying lengths of line, whereas stichic verse is normally expected to follow the same *metre throughout. A poem written in this form is sometimes called a block poem.

Bloomsbury group A loose *coterie of writers linked by friendship to the homes of Vanessa Stephen (from 1907 Vanessa Bell) and her sister Virginia (from 1912 Virginia Woolf) in Bloomsbury—the university quarter of London near the British Museum—from about 1906 to the late 1930s. In addition to the sisters and their husbands—Clive Bell, the art critic, and Leonard Woolf, a political journalist—the group included the novelist E. M. Forster, the biographer Lytton Strachey, the economist John Maynard Keynes, and the art critic Roger Fry. It had no doctrine or aim, despite a shared admiration for the moral philosophy of G. E. Moore, but the group had some importance as a centre of modernizing liberal opinion in the 1920s, and later as the subject of countless memoirs and biographies.

Further reading: S. P. Rosenbaum, Aspects of Bloomsbury (1998).

bluestocking (blue-stocking) A disparaging term for a woman devoted to literary or scholarly pursuits. The name comes from the Blue Stocking social circle of London intellectuals of the second half of the 18th century, so nicknamed after the unorthodox evening wear of one regular participant, Benjamin Stillingfleet, who wore cheap blue worsted stockings instead of the finer black silk variety. The original Blue Stocking circle was an interlinked network of literary *salons notable for encouraging intelligent conversation among women and men. From the early 1750s, its receptions hosted by Mrs Elizabeth Vesey, Mrs Elizabeth Montagu, Mrs Frances Boscawen, and others substituted conversation and tea-drinking for card-games and alcohol, while also discouraging political talk or swearing. Many of London’s leading literary men were regular guests, including Samuel Johnson, Horace Walpole, Samuel Richardson, James Boswell, and the actor-manager David Garrick. The poet and playwright Hannah More (1745–1833) was a significant beneficiary of this group’s encouragement, which she repaid by praising its virtues in her poem Bas Bleu (1786). The dismissive application of the term to intellectual women in general became current in the 19th century, but died out as attitudes to women’s education changed.

http://www.faculty.umb.edu/elizabeth_fay/archive2.html

• The Bluestocking Archive.

bob and wheel A short sequence of rhymed lines that concludes the larger unrhymed *strophes of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and some other Middle English *romances. It consists of one short line (the bob) with a single stress, followed by four three-stress lines (the wheel) of which the second and fourth lines rhyme with the bob.

bodice-ripper A popular modern variety of *romance that emphasizes the sexual excitement of seduction and ‘ravishment’, usually in colourful settings based on the conventions of the *historical novel and peopled by pirates, highwaymen, wenches, etc. A classic example is Kathleen Winsor’s best-selling romance, Forever Amber (1944).

bombast Extravagantly inflated and grandiloquent *diction, disproportionate to its subject. It was a common feature of English drama of Shakespeare’s age, and of later *heroic drama. Marlowe is known especially for the bombastic ranting of his Tamburlaine the Great (1590):

Our quivering lances, shaking in the air,
And bullets, like Jove’s dreadful thunderbolts,
Enroll'd in flames and fiery smouldering mists,
Shall threat the gods more than Cyclopean wars;
And with our sun-bright armour, as we march,
We'll chase the stars from heaven, and dim their eyes
That stand and muse at our admired arms.

See also fustian, hyperbole, rodomontade.

bouts-rimés [boo-ree-may] A parlour-game in which a volunteer is provided with a set of rhyming words or phrases and is then challenged to compose lines of verse which make some sort of sense with these as end-rhymes. The term (‘rhymed endings’) and the craze came from 17th-century France, whence they spread throughout fashionable European society during the 18th and 19th centuries.

bovarysme [bohv-ar-eezm] A disposition towards escapist day dreaming in which one imagines oneself as a heroine or hero of a *romance and refuses to acknowledge everyday realities. This condition (a later version of Don Quixote’s madness) can be found in fictional characters before Emma Bovary, the *protagonist of Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary (1857), gave it her name: for example, Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818) makes similar confusions between fiction and reality. Novelists have often exposed bovarysme to ironic analysis, thus warning against the delusive enchantments of the romance tradition.

bowdlerize To censor or expurgate from a literary work those passages considered to be indecent or blasphemous. The word comes from Dr Thomas Bowdler, who published in 1818 The Family Shakespeare, ‘in which those words or expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family’. Many oaths and sexually suggestive speeches were cut, and even entire characters like Doll Tearsheet in Henry IV, Part Two. Similarly bowdlerized editions of Gulliver’s Travels and Moby-Dick have been produced for children. Nouns: bowdlerization, bowdlerism.

brachylogia [brak-i-loh-jă] (brachiologia; brachylogy; brachiology) Concision of speech or writing; thus also any condensed form of expression, as for example when Antony in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra tells a messenger ‘Grates me: the sum’, meaning ‘This is annoying me; get to the point of what you have to say’. The term is most often applied to expressions involving the omission of conjunctions, as in the figure known as *asyndeton.

braggadocio [brag-ă-doh-chi-oh] A cowardly but boastful man who appears as a *stock character in many comedies; or the empty boasting typical of such a braggart. This sort of character was known in Greek comedy as the *alazon. When he is a soldier, he is often referred to as the miles gloriosus (‘vainglorious soldier’) after the title of a comedy by the Roman dramatist Plautus. The most famous example in English drama is Shakespeare’s Falstaff.

Brechtian Belonging to or derived from the work of Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), German poet, playwright, and dramatic theorist. When applied to the work of other dramatists, the term usually indicates their use of the techniques of *epic theatre, especially the disruption of realistic illusion known as the *alienation effect.

bricolage [brik-ŏ-lahzh] A French term for improvisation or a piece of makeshift handiwork. It is sometimes applied to artistic works in a sense similar to *collage: an assemblage improvised from materials ready to hand, or the practice of transforming ‘found’ materials by incorporating them in a new work. Verb: bricoler.

broadside A large sheet of paper printed on one side only, often containing a song or *ballad, and sold by wandering pedlars in Britain from the 16th century until the beginning of the 20th century, when they were superseded by mass-circulation newspapers; they also appeared in the USA in the late 19th century. The broadside ballads were intended to be sung to a well-known tune; often they related topical events, and some were adopted as *folk songs. Broadsides are sometimes called broadsheets.

broken rhyme The splitting of a word (not in fact of the rhyme) at the end of a verse line, to allow a rhyme on a syllable other than the final one, which is transferred to the following line. It is a liberty taken for comic effect in light verse, and more rarely used in serious works. Hopkins employed it frequently: the first line of ‘The Windhover’ ends with the first syllable of ‘king/dom’ to rhyme with ‘wing’ in line four.

bucolic poetry [bew-kol-ik] (bucolics) Another term for *pastoral poetry, especially for Virgil’s Eclogues (42–37 bce) and later imitations. More loosely, any verse on rustic subjects. See also eclogue, idyll.

burden The *refrain or chorus of a song; or the main theme of a song, poem, or other literary work. A burden is sometimes distinguished from a refrain in that it starts the song or poem, and stands separate from the *stanzas (as in many medieval *carols), whereas a refrain usually appears as the final part of each stanza.

burlesque [ber-lesk] A kind of *parody that ridicules some serious literary work either by treating its solemn subject in an undignified style (see travesty), or by applying its elevated style to a trivial subject, as in Pope’s *mock-epic poem The Rape of the Lock (1712–14). Often used in the theatre, burlesque appears in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (in the Pyramus and Thisbe play, which mocks the tradition of *interludes), while The Beggar’s Opera (1728) by John Gay burlesques Italian opera. An early form of burlesque is the Greek *satyr play. In the USA, though, burlesque was also a disreputable form of comic entertainment with titillating dances or striptease. See also extravaganza, satire.

Burns stanza (Burns metre) A six-line *stanza rhyming aaabab, the first three lines and the fifth having four *stresses, and the fourth and sixth having two stresses. Although it was used much earlier in medieval English *romances and Provençal poetry, it is named after the Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759–96), who used it frequently, as in ‘A Poet’s Welcome to his love-begotten Daughter’:

Welcome! My bonie, sweet, wee dochter!

Though ye come here a wee unsought for;

And though your comin I hae fought for,

Baith Kirk and Queir;

Yet by my faith, ye're no unwrought for,

That I shall swear!

Byronic Belonging to or derived from Lord Byron (1788–1824) or his works. The Byronic hero is a character-type found in his celebrated narrative poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18), his verse drama Manfred (1817), and other works; he is a boldly defiant but bitterly self-tormenting outcast, proudly contemptuous of social norms but suffering for some unnamed sin. Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (1847) is a later example. See also poète maudit.

Further reading: Atara Stein, The Byronic Hero (2004).