cacoethes scribendi [ka-koh-eth-ess skri-ben-dee] A mania for writing; or writing regarded as an ingrained bad habit. The Latin phrase, derived from Greek, comes from Juvenal’s Seventh Satire, and has been found in English writings since the 16th century.
cacophony [kă-ko-fŏni] Harshness or discordancy of sound; the opposite of *euphony. Usually the result of awkward *alliteration as in tongue-twisters, it is sometimes used by poets for deliberate effect, as in these lines from Robert Browning’s ‘Caliban upon Setebos’:
And squared and stuck there squares of soft white chalk,
And, with a fish-tooth, scratched a moon on each,
And set up endwise certain spikes of tree,
And crowned the whole with a sloth’s skull a-top.
Adjective: cacophonous or cacaphonic. See also dissonance.
cadence [kay-dĕns] The rising and falling *rhythm of speech, especially that of the balanced phrases in *free verse or in prose, as distinct from the stricter rhythms of verse *metre. Also the fall or rise in pitch at the end of a phrase or sentence. Adjective: cadent.
caesura [si-zew-ră] (plural -as or -ae) A pause in a line of verse, often coinciding with a break between clauses or sentences. It is usually placed in the middle of the line (‘medial caesura’), but may appear near the beginning (‘initial’) or towards the end (‘terminal’). In *scansion, a caesura is normally indicated by the symbol ∥. If it follows a stressed syllable, it is known as a ‘masculine’ caesura, while if it follows an unstressed syllable, it is ‘feminine’. The regular placing of the caesura was an important metrical requirement in much Greek and Latin verse, in the Old English and Middle English *alliterative metre, and in the French *alexandrine; but in the English iambic *pentameter there is scope for artful variation between medial, initial, and terminal positions, and a line may have more than one caesura, or none. In Greek and Latin *prosody, the term is also applied to a break between words within a *foot: the opposite of *diaeresis. Adjective: caesural.
Cambridge school The name sometimes given to an influential group of English critics associated with the University of Cambridge in the 1920s and 1930s. The leading figures were I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, Q. D. Leavis, and William Empson. Influenced by the critical writings of Coleridge and of T. S. Eliot, they rejected the prevalent biographical and historical modes of criticism in favour of the ‘close reading’ of texts. They saw poetry in terms of the reintegration of thought and feeling (see dissociation of sensibility), and sought to demonstrate its subtlety and complexity, notably in Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930). The Leavises achieved great influence through the journal Scrutiny (1932–53), judging literary works according to their moral seriousness and ‘life-enhancing’ tendency. See also leavisites, practical criticism.
A second group sometimes referred to in the contexts of *tragedy and *myth as the Cambridge school, although more often known as the Cambridge Ritualists or the myth-and-ritual school, was made up of the classical scholars Jane Harrison, Gilbert Murray, F. M. Cornford, and A. B. Cook, who in the early 20th century applied the anthropological theories of J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890–1915) to the origins of Greek tragedy, arguing that the drama was derived from religious rituals. Their views influenced the development of *myth criticism.
Further reading: Robert Ackerman, The Myth and Ritual School (1991).
camp A style of performance popularly associated with male homosexual behaviour, in which exaggerated gestures and tones of effeminacy are flaunted and serious subjects are reduced flippantly to sexually suggestive mockery. In the early 20th century, the term was used (as adjective, noun, and verb) simply to denote effeminate homosexual mannerisms or their representation by actors; but in the latter part of that century the camp phenomenon came to be regarded by some writers as a larger aesthetic principle: the novelist Christopher Isherwood suggested that most *baroque art could be regarded as ‘high’ camp in its cultivation of ornate artifice, and the cultural critic Susan Sontag in her influential essay ‘Notes on “Camp”’ (1965) saw camp as a version of *Aestheticism in its preference for the artificial over the natural. The subsequent growth of gay literary studies and of *Queer theory has led to new interpretations of camp as a ‘transgressive’ challenge to social norms of gender because it implies that all gendered identities are more or less stylized performances. In literary contexts, ostentatiously flippant styles cultivated by such writers as Oscar Wilde, Saki, Ronald Firbank, and Joe Orton have been described as camp.
Further reading: David Bergman (ed.), Camp Ground (1993).
campus novel A novel, usually comic or satirical, in which the action is set within the enclosed world of a university (or similar seat of learning) and highlights the follies of academic life. Many novels have presented nostalgic evocations of college days, but the campus novel in the usual modern sense dates from the 1950s: Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe (1952) and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954) began a significant tradition in modern fiction including John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy (1966), David Lodge’s Changing Places (1975), and Robertson Davies’s The Rebel Angels (1982).
Further reading: Elaine Showalter, Faculty Towers (2005).
canon A body of writings recognized by authority. Those books of holy scripture which religious leaders accept as genuine are canonical, as are those works of a literary author which scholars regard as authentic. The canon of a national literature is a body of writings especially approved by critics or anthologists and deemed suitable for academic study. Canonicity is the quality of being canonical. Verb: canonize. See also corpus, oeuvre.
Further reading: Christopher Kuipers, The Canon (2007).
cantar (plural cantares) The Spanish term for a poem originally sung or set to music within an *oral tradition. Within this general category, a notable subtype is the cantar de gesta, a kind of *epic poem resembling the French *chanson de geste; of these, the most celebrated is the 12th-century Castilian epic known as the Cantar de mio Cid or as the Poema de mio Cid.
cantiga [kan-tee-gă] (cantega) A kind of song or poem set to music in medieval Portuguese and Galician traditions. Cantigas are usually short, typically of twelve lines, and of various types including the cantiga de amigo sung by a woman to a man, the cantiga de amor sung by a man to a woman, and the cantiga de burlas, satirical in subject; there are also *devotional cantigas, notably the four hundred Cantigas de Santa Maria attributed to King Alfonso X (‘el Sabio’) of Castile (1221–84).
canto A subdivision of an *epic or other narrative poem, equivalent to a chapter in a prose work.
canzone [can-tsoh-ni] (plural -oni) A term covering various kinds of medieval Provençal and Italian *lyric poem. The most influential form was the *Petrarchan canzone, which has five or six *stanzas and a shorter concluding *envoi (or half-stanza); the lengths of the stanzas (equal in each poem) ranged from seven to twenty lines. See also chanson.
carnivalization The liberating and subversive influence of popular humour on the literary tradition, according to the theory propounded by the Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin in his works Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929) and Rabelais and his World (1965). Bakhtin argued that the overturning of hierarchies in popular carnival—its mingling of the sacred with the profane, the sublime with the ridiculous—lies behind the most ‘open’ (*dialogic or *polyphonic) literary *genres, notably *Menippean satire and the *novel, especially since the *Renaissance. Carnivalized literary forms allow alternative voices to dethrone the authority of official culture: Rabelais, for example, subverts the asceticism of the medieval Church by giving free rein to the bodily profanity of folk festivities. Adjective: carnivalistic or carnivalesque.
carol A song of religious rejoicing, usually associated with Christmas or Easter in the Christian calendar. In the Middle Ages, however, a carol could be a purely secular song of love or *satire. A carol in this earlier sense is a song appropriate for a round dance, composed in regular rhyming *stanzas with a *refrain or *burden: a common form was the four-line stanza rhyming aaab with a two-line burden rhyming bb.
Caroline Belonging to the period 1625–49, when Charles I (Latin, Carolus) reigned as king of England, Scotland, and Ireland. This period includes the later *metaphysical poets, the early work of Milton, and the so-called ‘*Cavalier poets’ Thomas Carew, Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, and Sir John Suckling.
carpe diem [kar-pe dee-em] A quotation from Horace’s Odes (I, xi) meaning ‘seize the day’, in other words ‘make the best of the present moment’. A common theme or *motif in European *lyric poetry, in which the speaker of a poem argues (often to a hesitant virgin) that since life is short, pleasure should be enjoyed while there is still time. The most celebrated examples in English are Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ (1681) and Herrick’s ‘To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time’ (1648), which begins ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may’. In some Christian poems and sermons, the carpe diem motif warns us to prepare our souls for death, rather than our bodies for bed.
catachresis [kat-ă-kree-sis] The misapplication of a word (e.g. disinterested for ‘uninterested’), or the extension of a word’s meaning in a surprising but strictly illogical *metaphor. In the second sense, a well-known example from Hamlet is ‘To take arms against a sea of troubles’. Adjective: catachretic.
catalectic Lacking the final syllable or syllables expected in the regular pattern of a metrical verse line (see metre). The term is most often used of the common English *trochaic line in which the optional final unstressed syllable (or *feminine ending) is not used. Of these lines from Shelley’s ‘To a Skylark’, the second and fourth are catalectic:
In the golden lightning
Of the sunken sun,
O’er which clouds are bright’ning,
Thou dost float and run
The first and third lines, which have the full number of syllables, are acatalectic. Unlike most English adjectives, ‘catalectic’ and its opposite ‘acatalectic’ usually follow the nouns they qualify: thus the last of Shelley’s lines quoted above would be called a trochaic *trimeter catalectic. A line which is short by more than one syllable is brachycatalectic, while a line with one syllable too many is hypercatalectic. Noun: catalexis. See also acephalous, defective foot, truncation.
catalogue verse (US catalog) Verse that records the names of several persons, places, or things in the form of a list. It is common in *epic poetry, where the heroes involved in a battle are often enumerated. Other types of catalogue verse record genealogical or geographical information. Walt Whitman created a new kind of catalogue verse in his Song of Myself (1855), which celebrates the huge variety of peoples, places, and occupations in the United States in the form of long lists. Similar effects are found in Allen Ginsberg’s poem ‘Howl’ (1956).
catastrophe The final resolution or *dénouement of the plot in a *tragedy, usually involving the death of the *protagonist.
catharsis The effect of ‘purgation’ or ‘purification’ achieved by tragic drama, according to Aristotle’s argument in his Poetics (4th century bce). Aristotle wrote that a *tragedy should succeed ‘in arousing pity and fear in such a way as to accomplish a catharsis of such emotions’. There has been much dispute about his meaning, but Aristotle seems to be rejecting Plato’s hostile view of poetry as an unhealthy emotional stimulant. His metaphor of emotional cleansing has been read as a solution to the puzzle of audiences’ pleasure or relief in witnessing the disturbing events enacted in tragedies. Another interpretation is that it is the *protagonist’s guilt that is purged, rather than the audience’s feeling of terror. Adjective: cathartic.
cauda A ‘tail’ (Latin); thus a short final line of a verse *stanza, usually rhyming with a similarly short line earlier in the stanza, as in the *tail-rhyme stanza. A stanza or *verse form employing such a line is said to be caudate.
causerie The French word for a chat, sometimes used to denote an informal literary essay or article, after the Causeries du lundi—the famous weekly articles by the French literary critic Sainte-Beuve published in Parisian newspapers from 1849 to 1869.
Cavalier poets A collective term applied by some literary historians to a group of English lyric poets of the *Caroline period, and derived from the popular designation for supporters of King Charles in the Civil War. The principal figures in the group are Thomas Carew, Richard Lovelace, Robert Herrick, and Sir John Suckling. They are noted for their elegantly witty short lyric poems, usually love poems. They were influenced by Ben Jonson, and like him tended to avoid employing the *sonnet form.
Celtic Revival A term sometimes applied to the period of Irish literature in English (c.1885–1939) now more often referred to as the *Irish Literary Renaissance or Revival. There are other similar terms: Celtic Renaissance, Celtic Dawn, and Celtic Twilight (the last famously mocked by James Joyce as the ‘cultic twalette’). These Celtic titles are misleading as descriptions of the broader Irish Revival, but they indicate a significant factor in the early phase of the movement: Celticism involves an idea of Irishness based on fanciful notions of innate racial character outlined by the English critic Matthew Arnold in On the Study of Celtic Literature (1866), in which Celtic traits are said to include delicacy, charm, spirituality, and ineffectual sentimentality. This image of Irishness was adopted in part by W. B. Yeats in his attempt to create a distinctively Irish literature with his dreamy early verse and with The Celtic Twilight (1893), a collection of stories based on Irish folklore and fairy-tales. Apart from the poet ‘AE’ (George Russell), the other major figures in the Irish Literary Revival—Synge, O’Casey, and Joyce—had little or nothing to do with such Celticism.
Further reading: Gregory Castle, Modernism and the Celtic Revival (2001).
cénacle [say-nahkl] A clique or *coterie of writers that assembles around a leading figure. A characteristic of the hero-worshipping culture of *Romanticism, cénacles appeared in Paris from the 1820s onwards around Charles Nodier and, most famously, Victor Hugo.
cento [sen-toh] A written composition made up of fragments taken from other writers. This may be a prose composition, but the term is applied most often to poem that is made up of lines from other poems. See also collage, glosa, pastiche.
chanson [shahn-son] The French word for a song, also applied specifically to the kind of love song composed by the Provençal *troubadours of the late Middle Ages. This usually has five or six matching *stanzas and a concluding *envoi (or half-stanza), and its subject is *courtly love. The *metres and *rhyme schemes vary greatly, as the form was seen as a test of technical skills. See also canzone.
chanson de geste [shahn-son dĕ zhest] A kind of shorter *epic poem in Old French, composed between the late 11th century and the early 14th century, celebrating the historical and legendary exploits (gestes) of Charlemagne (late 8th century) and other Frankish nobles in holy wars against the Saracens or in internal rebellions. The chansons de geste were sung by *jongleurs in *strophes of varying length known as laisses, usually composed of 10-syllable lines linked by *assonance (or by rhyme in later examples). About 80 of these poems survive, of which the most celebrated is the Chanson de Roland (late 11th century). Some similar cantares de gesta appeared in Spain, notably the Cantar de mio Cid, a Castilian epic of the 12th or 13th century.
Further reading: Sarah Kay, The Chansons de Geste in the Age of Romance (1995).
chant royal [shahn rwa-yal] A French verse form normally consisting of five *stanzas of eleven 10-syllable lines rhyming ababccddede, followed by an *envoi (or half-stanza) rhyming ddede. The last line of the first stanza is repeated as a *refrain at the end of the succeeding stanzas and of the envoi. The pattern is similar to that of the *ballade, but even more demanding. Most chants royaux were *allegories on dignified subjects. They appeared in France from the time of Eustache Deschamps (late 14th century) to that of Clément Marot (early 16th century), but very rarely in English.
chapbook The name given since the 19th century to a kind of small, cheaply printed book or pamphlet hawked by chapmen (i.e. pedlars) from the 16th century to the early 19th century, and containing *ballads, fairy-tales, old *romances, accounts of famous criminals, and other popular entertainments.
character A personage in a *narrative or dramatic work (see characterization); also a kind of prose sketch briefly describing some recognizable type of person. As a minor literary *genre, the character originates with the Characters (late 3rd century bce) of the Greek writer Theophrastus; it was revived in the 17th century, notably by Sir Thomas Overbury in his Characters (1614) and by La Bruyère in Les Caractères (1688). See also humours, stock character, type.
characterization The representation of persons in *narrative and dramatic works. This may include direct methods like the attribution of qualities in description or commentary, and indirect (or ‘dramatic’) methods inviting readers to infer qualities from characters’ actions, speech, or appearance. Since E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927) a distinction has often been made between ‘flat’ and ‘two-dimensional’ characters, which are simple and unchanging, and ‘round’ characters, which are complex, ‘dynamic’ (i.e. subject to development), and less predictable. See also stock character, type.
Chaucerian stanza See rhyme royal.
cheville The French word for a plug, applied to any word or phrase of little semantic importance which is used by a poet to make up the required number of syllables in a metrical verse line (see metre). Chaucer used chevilles with shameless frequency, often plugging his lines with eek, for sothe, ywis, I gesse, I trowe, and similar interjections.
chiasmus [ky-az-mŭs] (plural -mi) A *figure of speech by which the order of the terms in the first of two parallel clauses is reversed in the second. This may involve a repetition of the same words (‘Pleasure’s a sin, and sometimes sin’s a pleasure’—Byron), in which case the figure may be classified as *antimetabole, or just a reversed parallel between two corresponding pairs of ideas, as in this line from Mary Leapor’s ‘Essay on Woman’ (1751):
Despised, if ugly; if she’s fair, betrayed.
The figure is especially common in 18th-century English poetry, but is also found in prose of all periods. It is named after the Greek letter chi (χ), indicating a ‘criss-cross’ arrangement of terms. Adjective: chiastic. See also anadiplosis, antithesis, parallelism.
Further reading: William E. Engel, Chiastic Design in English Literature (2009).
Chicago critics A group of critics associated with the University of Chicago, who contributed to the volume Critics and Criticisms: Ancient and Modern (1952) edited by the most prominent figure, R. S. Crane. Other members included W. R. Keast, Elder Olson, and Bernard Weinberg; Wayne C. Booth, the author of The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), was also associated with the group. The Chicago critics were concerned with accounting for the variety of critical approaches to literature in terms of assumptions about the nature of literary works. They also emphasized the larger structures of literary works, following the example of Aristotle, whom they admired for basing his Poetics (4th century bce) on actual examples rather than on preconceptions. Their interest in *plot, structure, and *genre distinguishes them from the *New Critics, who concentrated on the study of *metaphor and *symbol in *lyric verse. See also aristotelian.
chick lit A kind of light commercial fiction addressed to British women readers of the late 1990s and early 2000s and subsequently imitated in the United States and beyond. The term appeared from 1996 as a flippant counterpart to the *lad-lit fiction of that time. The defining model for the genre was Helen Fielding’s comic novel Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996), a widely discussed bestseller in which the heroine, a single working woman, records her frustrations with a succession of unsatisfactory boyfriends while also keeping track of her attempts to lose weight. Chick-lit novels are written by women about the misadventures of contemporary unmarried working women in their 20s or 30s who struggle with multiple pressures from reproachful mothers, inadequate boyfriends, and tyrannical bosses while consoling themselves with shopping trips, chocolate, and erotic daydreams. The stories are commonly told in the first person in tones of humorous self-deprecation. As the boom in this kind of fiction, sometimes referred to as chic fic, continued into the early 21st century, new *subgenres emerged, including ‘nanny lit’ and ‘mommy lit’.
Further reading: Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young (eds.), Chick Lit: The New Women’s Fiction (2005).
chivalric romance [shi-val-rik] The principal kind of *romance found in medieval Europe from the 12th century onwards, describing (usually in verse) the adventures of legendary knights, and celebrating an idealized code of civilized behaviour that combines loyalty, honour, and *courtly love. The emphasis on heterosexual love and courtly manners distinguishes it from the *chanson de geste and other kinds of *epic, in which masculine military heroism predominates. The most famous examples are the *Arthurian romances recounting the adventures of Lancelot, Galahad, Gawain, and the other Round Table knights. These include the Lancelot (late 12th century) of Chrétien de Troyes, the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late 14th century), and Malory’s prose romance Le Morte Darthur (1485).
Further reading: Lee C. Ramsey, Chivalric Romances (1983).
choral character A term sometimes applied to a character in a play who, while participating in the action to some degree, also provides the audience with an ironic commentary upon it, thus performing a function similar to that of the *chorus in Greek *tragedy. Two examples are Thersites in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and Wong in Brecht’s The Good Woman of Setzuan.
choriamb [kor-i-am] (choriambus) A metrical unit combining one *trochee (or ‘choree’) and one *iamb into a single *foot of four syllables, with two stressed syllables enclosing two unstressed syllables, as in the word hullabaloo (or, in *quantitative verse, two long syllables enclosing two shorts). It was used frequently in Greek dramatic choruses and lyrics, and by the Roman poet Horace, and later in some German verse. Usually, as in the *Asclepiad, it is combined with other feet. A rare English example of choriambic verse is Swinburne’s ‘Choriambics’ (1878), in which the line consists of one trochee, three choriambs, and one iamb:
Ah, thy snow-coloured hands! once were they chains, mighty to bind me fast;
Now no blood in them burns, mindless of love, senseless of passions past.
chorus A group of singers distinct from the principal performers in a dramatic or musical performance; also the song or *refrain that they sing. In classical Greek *tragedy a chorus of twelve or fifteen masked performers would sing, with dancing movements, a commentary on the action of the play, interpreting its events from the standpoint of traditional wisdom. This practice appears to have been derived from the choral lyrics of religious festivals. The Greek tradition of choral *lyric includes the *dithyramb, the *paean, and the choral *odes of Pindar. In some Elizabethan plays, like Shakespeare’s Henry V, a single character called a chorus introduces the setting and action. Except in opera, the group chorus is used rarely in modern European drama: examples are T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1948). The term has also been applied to certain groups of characters in novels, who view the main action from the standpoint of rural tradition, as in some works of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and William Faulkner. See also choral character.
chrestomathy [kres-tom-ă-thi] A collection or *anthology of passages in prose or verse, often selected for purposes of literary or linguistic study.
chronicle A written record of events presented in order of time, and updated regularly over a prolonged period. The chroniclers of the Middle Ages, from the compilers of King Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (9th to 12th century) onwards, tended to mix *legend and rumour with fact in their accounts. Significant chronicles in the later Middle Ages include those of Matthew Paris (St Albans, late 13th century) and the accounts of the wars against the English written by the French chronicler Jean Froissart (late 14th century). Raphael Holinshed and his collaborators published in 1577 the Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland which (in an expurgated edition of 1587) were adapted by Shakespeare and other dramatists in their *chronicle plays.
chronicle novel A long novel or connected sequence of novels in which the narrative recounts the fortunes of a family or similar group of recurring characters over many years, usually covering at least two generations. This category of fiction overlaps with the *saga novel, where the emphasis is on changes within a family; but where the story attempts to reflect typical developments in social history over a sustained period, the term ‘chronicle novel’ may be preferred, especially if the story’s events are connected with notably historic dates and events. Significant modern examples in English include John Galsworthy’s sequence of Forsyte novels (1906–28) which attempt to chart English social history from the 1880s to 1926, and C. P. Snow’s eleven-volume sequence Strangers and Brothers (1940–70), which follows its central character through changes in the English governing elite from 1925 to 1964.
chronicle play A *history play, especially of the kind written in England in the 1590s and based upon the revised 1587 edition of Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles. This group of plays includes Marlowe’s Edward II (1592) and the three parts of Shakespeare’s Henry VI (c.1590–2). Later historical dramas that may be regarded as chronicle plays include Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen (1773) and Noël Coward’s Cavalcade (1931).
chronotope A term employed by the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) to refer to the co-ordinates of time and space invoked by a given *narrative; in other words to the ‘setting’, considered as a spatio-temporal whole.
Ciceronian [sis-e-rohn-yăn] Belonging to or characteristic of the Roman statesman, orator, and prose writer Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106–43 bce), especially in relation to prose style; or, as a noun, a follower of Cicero. His style of oratory and prose, marked by logical but elaborately balanced subordinate clauses (see periodic sentence), was adopted as the purest model by subsequent writers of Latin, and often imitated to a slavish degree during the *Renaissance, when some dogmatic Ciceronians regarded Latin words and expressions that postdated his writings as impure, thus tending to ossify the language. A few English prose writers of the 16th century, notably Richard Hooker, imitated Cicero’s Latin constructions, but this model was largely rejected by later generations as too pompous and inflexible. A Ciceronianism is an expression typical of Cicero or his imitators; but a cicerone is a guide, usually one who is well acquainted with the antiquities and history of an old city.
cinquain [sang-kayn] A verse *stanza of five lines, more commonly known as a *quintain. Examples of such stanzas include the English *limerick, the Japanese *tanka, and the Spanish *quintilla; others include the variant *ballad stanza employed intermittently by S. T. Coleridge in his ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798), and many more varieties with no name.
circumlocution The roundabout manner of referring to something at length rather than naming it briefly and directly, usually known in literary terminology as *periphrasis. The *kenning is a distinctive circumlocutory device found especially in Old Norse verse.
city comedy (citizen comedy) A kind of comic drama produced in the London theatres of the early 17th century, characterized by its contemporary urban subject-matter and its portrayal, often satirical, of middle-class life and manners. The principal examples are John Marston’s The Dutch Courtezan (1605), Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614), and Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613).
claque [klahk] The French word for a handclap, applied to a group of people hired by a theatre manager to applaud a performance, thus encouraging the paying audience to do likewise. The French writer Villiers de l’Isle-Adam described this widespread corrupt practice in the theatres of 19th-century Paris as ‘the avowed symbol of the Public’s inability to distinguish by itself the worth of what it is listening to’.
classic A work of the highest class, or so exemplary as to be studied as a model in classrooms. A literary classic is a work admired in both these senses, and usually one that is deemed to have stood the test of time and outlasted changes in critical taste; such works may be of relatively recent date, and so regarded as ‘modern classics’. Classics as an academic subject, however, is the study of ancient Greek and Latin language and literature, often with aspects of Greek and Roman civilization such as mythology and philosophy. The adjective classical is in most literary contexts also strongly associated with the works of the greatest Greek and Roman writers or with the periods in which they lived (as with ‘classical civilization’, ‘classical mythology’, and so forth). By extension, it may apply to works of later periods that are inspired by or modelled upon the Greek or Roman traditions, so that one may refer to a classical tendency in modern literature, often opposed to a romantic tendency (see classicism). There are, however, some uses of the term that apply to later periods in which some branch of literary art has flourished: thus one may refer to the 17th century as the classical period of French drama, or to the 19th as the classical period of the Western novel; these are loosely equivalent to the usages found in ‘classical’ music, ballet, economics, etc.
Further reading: Frank Kermode, The Classic (1975).
classicism An attitude to literature that is guided by admiration of the qualities of formal balance, proportion, *decorum, and restraint attributed to the major works of ancient Greek and Roman literature (‘the classics’) in preference to the irregularities of later *vernacular literatures, and especially (since about 1800) to the artistic liberties proclaimed by *Romanticism. A classic is a work of the highest class, and has also been taken to mean a work suitable for study in school classes. During and since the *Renaissance, these overlapping meanings came to be applied to (and to be virtually synonymous with) the writings of major Greek and Roman authors from Homer to Juvenal, which were regarded as unsurpassed models of excellence.
The adjective classical, usually applied to this body of writings, has since been extended to outstandingly creative periods of other literatures: the 17th century may be regarded as the classical age of French literature, and the 19th century the classical period of the Western novel, while the finest fiction of the United States in the mid-19th century from Cooper to Twain was referred to by D. H. Lawrence as Classic American Literature (despite the opposition between ‘classical’ and ‘romantic’ views of art, a romantic work can now still be a classic).
A classical style or approach to literary composition is usually one that imitates Greek or Roman models in subject-matter (e.g. Greek legends) or in form (by the adoption of *genres like *tragedy, *epic, *ode, or verse *satire), or both. As a literary doctrine, classicism holds that the writer must be governed by rules, models, or conventions, rather than by wayward inspiration: in its most strictly codified form in the 17th and 18th centuries (see *neo-classicism), it required the observance of rules derived from Aristotle’s Poetics (4th century bce) and Horace’s Ars Poetica (c.20 bce), principally those of decorum and the dramatic *unities. The dominant tendency of French literature in the 17th and 18th centuries, classicism in a weaker form also characterized the *Augustan Age in England; the later German classicism of the late 18th and early 19th centuries was distinguished by its exclusive interest in Greek models, as opposed to the Roman bias of French and English classicisms.
After the end of the 18th century, ‘classical’ came to be contrasted with ‘romantic’ in an opposition of increasingly generalized terms embracing moods and attitudes as well as characteristics of actual works. While partisans of Romanticism associated the classical with the rigidly artificial and the romantic with the freely creative, the classicists condemned romantic self-expression as eccentric self-indulgence, in the name of classical sanity and order. The great German writer J. W. von Goethe summarized his conversion to classical principles by defining the classical as healthy, the romantic as sickly. Since then, literary classicism has often been less a matter of imitating Greek and Roman models than of resisting the claims of Romanticism and all that it may be thought to stand for (Protestantism, liberalism, democracy, anarchy): the critical doctrines of Matthew Arnold and more especially of T. S. Eliot are classicist in this sense of reacting against the Romantic principle of unrestrained self-expression.
Further reading: Craig W. Kallendorf (ed.), A Companion to the Classical Tradition (2007).
clausula (plural -ulae) The closing words of a prose sentence, especially when characterized by a distinct rhythm or *cadence, as in the Latin *oratory of Cicero (106–43 bce) or his imitators.
clerihew A form of comic verse named after its inventor, Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875–1956). It consists of two metrically awkward *couplets, and usually presents a ludicrously uninformative ‘biography’ of some famous person whose name appears as one of the rhymed words in the first couplet:
Geoffrey Chaucer
Could hardly have been coarser,
But this never harmed the sales
Of his Canterbury Tales.
climax Any moment of great intensity in a literary work, especially in drama (see also anagnorisis, catastrophe, crisis, dénouement, peripeteia). Also in *rhetoric, a figure of speech in which a sequence of terms is linked by chain-like repetition through three or more clauses in ascending order of importance. A well-known example is Benjamin Franklin’s cautionary maxim, ‘For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; for want of a horse the rider was lost.’ This figure uses a repetitive structure similar to that of *anadiplosis. Adjective: climactic. See also auxesis, scène à faire.
closed couplet Two lines of metrical verse in which the *syntax and sense come to a conclusion or a strong pause at the end of the second line, giving the couplet the quality of a self-contained *epigram. The term is applied almost always to rhyming couplets, especially to the *heroic couplet; but whereas the heroic couplets of Chaucer and Keats often allow the sense to run on over the end of the second line (see enjambment), those written by English poets in the late 17th century and in the 18th are usually *end-stopped, and are thus closed couplets, as in these lines about men from Sarah Fyge Egerton’s ‘The Emulation’ (1703):
They fear we should excel their sluggish parts,
Should we attempt the sciences and arts;
Pretend they were designed for them alone,
So keep us fools to raise their own renown.
close reading A term commonly applied to the detailed analysis of a literary text, usually a short poem or prose excerpt. In a modern tradition inaugurated by Laura Riding and Robert Graves in their book A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927), the close reader typically attempts to account for and justify the presence of all the text’s features of sound and sense, usually detecting sonic correspondences such as internal rhyme and *alliteration, along with ambiguities of meaning, and the complex deployment of rhetorical *figures, all integrated into a formal unity. Following the success of William Empson’s book Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), written under the influence of Riding and Graves, close reading was often cultivated in the *Cambridge school of criticism, and developed most influentially in the US by the *New Critics and their successors including the school of *deconstruction. Various reactions against this tradition have emerged, ranging from the *Chicago critics’ contrary emphasis on *genre and plot, to Franco Moretti’s experiments with a new kind of *distant reading.
closet drama A literary composition written in the form of a play (usually as a dramatic poem), but intended—or suited—only for reading in a closet (i.e. a private study) rather than for stage performance. *Senecan tragedy is thought to have been written for private recitation, and there are several important examples of closet drama in English, including Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671), Byron’s Manfred (1817), Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820), and Arnold’s Empedocles on Etna (1852).
closure The sense of completion or resolution at the end of a literary work or part of a work (e.g. a *stanza or *closed couplet); or, in literary criticism, the reduction of a work’s meanings to a single and complete sense that excludes the claims of other interpretations. The contrast between ‘closed’ texts and ‘open’ texts has been a common topic of modern criticism, as in Roland Barthes’s theory of the *lisible.
coda See tail-rhyme stanza.
code A shared set of rules or *conventions by which *signs can be combined to permit a message to be communicated from one person to another; it may consist of a language in the normal sense (e.g. English, Urdu) or of a smaller-scale ‘language’ such as the set of hand-signals, horns, grimaces, and flashing lights used by motorists. The code is one of the six essential elements in Roman Jakobson’s influential theory of communication (see function), and has an important place in *structuralist theories, which stress the extent to which messages (including literary works) call upon already coded meanings rather than fresh revelations of raw reality. An important work in this connection is Roland Barthes’s S/Z (1970), in which a story by Balzac is broken down into five codes, ranging from the ‘hermeneutic code’ (which sets up a mystery and delays its solution) to the ‘cultural code’ (which refers to accepted prejudices, stereotypes, and values). Verbs: codify, decode, encode.
codex (plural codices) A book consisting of ancient manuscripts. The study of codices is called codicology.
cohesion A term used in linguistic analyses of *texts such as those undertaken in *stylistics, in reference to the degrees and kinds of internal connection that link different parts of the same text. Cohesion between one sentence, stanza or other unit, and another may be established by sound-patterns such as *metre, *rhyme, and *alliteration, or by pronominal back-reference (she, those, etc.), or by the use of similar syntactical constructions (e.g. *parallelism), or by conjunctions and similar linking phrases (nor, however, consequently, etc.). Adjective: cohesive.
coinage A newly invented word or expression. See also neologism, nonce word.
collage [kol-ahzh] A work assembled wholly or partly from fragments of other writings, incorporating *allusions, quotations, and foreign phrases. Originally applied to paintings with pasted-on elements, the term has been extended to an important kind of *modernist poetry, of which the most significant examples are the Cantos of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The collage technique can also be found sometimes in prose works. See also bricolage, macaronic verse, pastiche.
collation A ‘bringing together’, used in various literary senses. In *textual criticism, collation is the process of comparing differing manuscripts or *editions of the same work in order to establish a corrected text. A new edition of the work may be also be described as a collation if it results from such a comparative exercise. In *bibliography, collation is the process by which the printer or binder brings together the sheets of paper or folded sets of such sheets (known as quires) to make up a book or bound manuscript. A description of the physical make-up of a book, in terms of the number of its quires and the number of sheets per quire, is also called a collation.
collective unconscious The term given by the Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung (1875–1961) to the inborn racial memory which he believed to be the primitive source of the *archetypes or ‘universal’ *symbols found in legends, poetry, and dreams. See also myth criticism.
colloquialism The use of informal expressions appropriate to everyday speech rather than to the formality of writing, and differing in pronunciation, vocabulary, or grammar. An example is Rudyard Kipling’s *ballad beginning
When ’Omer smote ’is bloomin’ lyre
He’d ’eard men sing by land and sea;
An’ what he thought ’e might require,
’E went an’ took—the same as me!
colophon The publisher’s imprint or emblem usually displayed on the title page of a book; or (in older books) an inscription placed at the end of a book, naming the printer and the date and place of publication.
colportage Cheap popular literature, originally sold by itinerant hawkers called colporteurs. The category includes religious tracts, sensational novels and *romances, *chapbooks, and *broadsides.
comédie larmoyante A ‘tearful play’, in other words a tear-jerking sentimental drama. A kind of French *sentimental comedy inclining to *melodrama that flourished briefly in the mid-18th century. These plays were usually in verse, and were intricately plotted exhibitions of the virtues of patience and forgiveness. The best-known examples were Nivelle de la Chaussée’s Mélanide (1741) and Madame de Graffigny’s prose play Cénie (1750).
comedy A play (or other literary composition) written chiefly to amuse its audience by appealing to a sense of superiority over the characters depicted. A comedy will normally be closer to the representation of everyday life than a *tragedy, and will explore common human failings rather than tragedy’s disastrous crimes. Its ending will usually be happy for the leading characters. In another sense, the term was applied in the Middle Ages to narrative poems that end happily: the title of Dante’s Divine Comedy (c.1320) carries this meaning.
As a dramatic form, comedy in Europe dates back to the Greek playwright Aristophanes in the 5th century bce. His *Old Comedy combines several kinds of mischief, including the satirical mockery of living politicians and writers. At the end of the next century, Menander established the fictional form known as *New Comedy, in which young lovers went through misadventures among other *stock characters; this tradition was later developed in the Roman comedy of Plautus and Terence, and eventually by Shakespeare in England and Lope de Vega in Spain. The great period of European comedy, partly influenced by the *commedia dell’ arte, was the 17th century, when Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, and Jonson were succeeded by Molière and by the *Restoration comedy of Congreve, Etheredge, and Wycherley. There are several kinds of comedy, including *sentimental comedy, the *romantic comedy of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c.1596), the *satire in Jonson’s Volpone (1606) or in Molière’s Le Tartuffe (1669), the sophisticated verbal wit of the *comedy of manners in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), and the more topical ‘comedy of ideas’ in the plays of Bernard Shaw. Among its less sophisticated forms are *burlesque, *pantomime, and *farce.
The adjective comedic means ‘characteristic of comedy’ and is sometimes preferred as more neutral than ‘comic’ or ‘comical’ in that it avoids suggesting that the referent is funny. See also black comedy, comic relief, humours, tragicomedy.
Further reading: Andrew Stott, Comedy (2nd edn, 2014).
comedy of humours See humours.
comedy of manners A kind of *comedy representing the complex and sophisticated code of behaviour current in fashionable circles of society, where appearances count for more than true moral character. Its *plot usually revolves around intrigues of lust and greed, the self-interested cynicism of the characters being masked by decorous pretence. Unlike *satire, the comedy of manners tends to reward its cleverly unscrupulous characters rather than punish their immorality. Its humour relies chiefly upon elegant verbal wit and *repartee. In England, the comedy of manners flourished as the dominant form of *Restoration comedy in the works of Sir George Etherege, William Wycherley (notably The Country Wife, 1675), and William Congreve; it was revived in a more subdued form in the 1770s by Goldsmith and Sheridan, and later by Oscar Wilde. Modern examples of the comedy of manners include Noël Coward’s Design for Living (1932) and Joe Orton’s Loot (1965).
Further reading: David L. Hirst, Comedy of Manners (1979).
comic relief The interruption of a serious work, especially a *tragedy, by a short humorous episode. The inclusion of such comic scenes, characters, or speeches can have various and complex effects, ranging from relaxation after moments of high tension to sinister ironic brooding. Famous instances are the drunken porter’s speech in Macbeth (Act II, scene iii), and the dialogues between Hamlet and the gravediggers in Hamlet (Act V, scene i). Other playwrights of Shakespeare’s time made frequent use of this technique, which can also be found in some prose works like Malcolm Lowry’s tragic novel Under the Volcano (1947). See also satyr play, subplot, tragicomedy.
coming-of-age novel An English term adopted as an approximate equivalent to the German *Bildungsroman, although with an implied distinction in terms of time-span. Whereas a fully developed English Bildungsroman or ‘education novel’ such as Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849–50) will follow the maturation of the protagonist from infancy—or even from before that, in the case of D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913)—to early adulthood, a coming-of-age novel may be devoted entirely to the crises of late adolescence involving courtship, sexual initiation, separation from parents, and choice of vocation or spouse. One among many modern examples is H. G. Wells’s Ann Veronica (1909), which opens with the *eponymous heroine at the age of 21 and about to run away from her father’s home to explore life for herself.
commedia dell’ arte The Italian term for ‘professional comedy’, a form of improvised comic performance popular between the 16th and 18th centuries in Italy, France, and elsewhere in Europe, acted in masks by travelling companies of professional actors each of whom specialized in a *stock character. The plots involved intrigues carried on by young lovers and their servants against the rich father (‘Pantaloon’) of the leading lady (the ‘Inamorata’), and included stock characters like Harlequin, Pulcinella, and Scaramouche, who survive as part of theatrical folklore. This form of comedy had an important influence on later forms of *farce, *pantomime, and light opera, as well as on some major dramatists including Molière and Goldoni. It was also drawn upon by the French *Symbolist poets, notably Paul Verlaine in his collection Fêtes galantes (1869).
common measure (common metre) A form of verse *quatrain (also called the ‘hymnal stanza’) often used in hymns. Like the *ballad metre, its first and third lines have four *stresses, and its second and fourth have three; but it tends to be more regularly *iambic, and it more often rhymes not only the second and fourth lines (abcb) but the first and third too (abab). A variant form is long measure or long metre, in which all four lines have four stresses, and in which the rhyme scheme aabb is sometimes also used. See also short measure.
commonplace book Not a dull or trite book, as the usual sense of ‘commonplace’ would suggest, but a writer’s notebook in which interesting ideas and quotations are collected for further reflection and possible future use. In this sense, a commonplace is a remark or written passage that is worth remembering or quoting. Notable examples of commonplace books that have been published include Ben Jonson’s Timber (1640) and W. H. Auden’s A Certain World (1971).
companion poem A poem that is to be understood as paired with another poem, as reply, inversion, contradiction, or similar complementary relation. The best-known examples in English are John Milton’s L’Allegro and Il penseroso (1645). Several examples are also to be found among the contrasting poems of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794).
comparative literature The combined study of similar literary works written in different languages, which stresses the points of connection between literary products of two or more cultures, as distinct from the sometimes narrow and exclusive perspective of *Eng. Lit. or similar approaches based on one national *canon. Advocates of comparative literature maintain that there is, despite the obvious disadvantages, much to be gained from studying literary works in translation. A scholar engaged in such studies is a comparatist.
Further reading: Susan Bassnett, Comparative Literature (1993).
competence The term established by the American linguist Noam Chomsky to denote that unconscious store of linguistic knowledge which enables us to speak and understand our first language properly without having to think about it, permitting us to utter and comprehend sentences that we may never have heard before. Competence is what we know about the language we speak (without having to know that we know it), whereas performance is what we do with this knowledge in practice: that is, actual utterances. The distinction between competence and performance (similar to Saussure’s distinction between *langue and parole) is made in order to isolate the proper object of linguistics, which is to make the implicit rules of speakers’ competence explicit in the form of grammar. The concept has been extended by theorists of communication, as ‘communicative competence’, and also adapted by some literary theorists who identify a ‘literary competence’ in experienced readers’ implicit recognition of *narrative structures and other literary *conventions: a competent audience, for instance, will recognize the difference between the end of a scene and the end of the whole play, and so applaud at the right time.
complaint A kind of *lyric poem common from the Middle Ages to the 17th century, in which the speaker bewails either the cruelty of a faithless lover or the advent of some misfortune like poverty or exile. This kind of *monologue became highly conventional in love poetry, as can be seen from ‘The Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse’, in which the poet wittily addresses his light purse as if it were a ‘light’ (i.e. promiscuous) mistress. Chaucer also wrote serious complaints, as did Villon, Surrey, and Spenser. See also lament.
conceit An unusually far-fetched or elaborate *metaphor or *simile presenting a surprisingly apt parallel between two apparently dissimilar things or feelings: ‘Griefe is a puddle, and reflects not cleare | Your beauties rayes’ (T. Carew). Under *Petrarchan influence, European poetry of the *Renaissance cultivated fanciful comparisons and conceits to a high degree of ingenuity, either as the basis for whole poems (notably Donne’s ‘The Flea’) or as an incidental decorative device. Poetic conceits are prominent in Elizabethan love *sonnets, in *metaphysical poetry, in the French dramatic verse of Corneille and Racine, and in the Italian and Spanish styles known respectively as *concettismo and *conceptismo. Conceits often employ the devices of *hyperbole, *paradox, and *oxymoron.
conceptismo [kon-thep-teez-moh] A Spanish term for ‘conceitism’, i.e. a cultivation in poetry of *conceits or elaborate *metaphors and paradoxical images that challenge the reader to notice occult relations among things. This became something of slogan among some early 17th-century Spanish poets, who on this account became known as conceptistas, notably Alonso de Ledesma Buitrago in his three-volume Conceptos espirituales (1600–12) and the more important figure of Quevedo. The doctrine of conceptismo was theorized in terms of *wit (agudeza) and of the combined virtues of obscurity and brevity by the prose writer Baltasar Gracián y Morales in his critical treatise Agudeza y arte de ingenio (1648). There are some parallels here with the practice of the English *metaphysical poets, and more clearly with the equivalent Italian movement of *concettismo. See also baroque, mannerism.
concettismo An Italian word for ‘conceitism’, or the cult of strikingly ingenious *conceits, *metaphors, *paradoxes, and *wit (ingegno) in both prose and verse of the early 17th century. Its most prominent exponent was the poet Giovanbattista Marino (1569–1625), whose elaborate and surprising metaphors won many imitators, and whose name eventually provided the term *Marinism that came in literary history to replace both the original concettismo and the disparaging *Secentismo. The use of far-fetched metaphor found in concettismo came to be justified and theorized by Matteo Peregrini in Delle acutezze (1639) and later by Emanuele Tesauro in Il cannocchiale aristotelico (1654), but by this time the movement was fading. The equivalent trend in Spanish poetry is known as *conceptismo. See also baroque, mannerism.
concordance An alphabetical index of all the significant words used in a text or related group of texts, indicating all the places in which each word is used. Concordances to the Bible and to the complete works of Shakespeare have been followed, especially since the advent of computers, by similar reference books on other works.
concrete poetry A kind of picture made out of printed type, and regarded in the 1950s and 1960s, when it enjoyed an international vogue, as an experimental form of poetry. It usually involves a punning kind of typography in which the visual pattern enacts or corresponds in some way to the sense of the word or phrase represented: a well-known early example is Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem ‘Il pleut’ (‘It rains’, 1918), in which the words appear to be falling down the page like rain. The Scottish artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay was one of the few significant practitioners in English; his works come closer to sculpture than to two-dimensional art. Most concrete poems are apprehended instantaneously by the viewer as visual shapes, since they dispense with the linear sequence demanded by language; these therefore have little claim to the status of poetry. Others are closer to the traditional form of *pattern poetry, in which typographical presentation supports an already coherent poem.
http://www.gardendigest.com/concrete
• Provides bibliography and links.
confessional poetry An autobiographical mode of verse that reveals the poet’s personal problems with unusual frankness. The term and its cognate confessionalism are usually applied to certain poets of the United States from the late 1950s to the late 1960s, notably Robert Lowell, whose Life Studies (1959) and For the Union Dead (1964) deal with his divorce and mental breakdowns. Lowell’s candour had been encouraged in part by that of the gay poet Allen Ginsberg in Howl (1956) and by the intensely personal poetry of Theodore Roethke. Other important examples of confessional poetry are Anne Sexton’s To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) and All My Pretty Ones (1962), including poems on abortion and life in mental hospitals; John Berryman’s Dream Songs (1964–8) on alcoholism and insanity; Sylvia Plath’s poems on suicide in Ariel (1965); and W. D. Snodgrass’s Heart’s Needle (1959) on his divorce. The term is sometimes used more loosely to refer to any personal or autobiographical poetry, but its distinctive sense depends on the candid examination of what were at the time of writing virtually unmentionable kinds of private distress. The genuine strengths of confessional poets, combined with the pity evoked by their high suicide rate (Berryman, Sexton, and Plath all killed themselves), encouraged in the reading public a romantic confusion between poetic excellence and inner torment. Poets of later generations who have written on similar topics under the apparent influence of the original confessional poets are sometimes referred to as neo-confessional: the work of Sharon Olds in Satan Says (1980) and later volumes has often been placed under that description.
Further reading: Adam Kirsch, The Wounded Surgeon (2005).
confidant(e) A minor or secondary character in a play (or other literary work), in whom the *protagonist confides, revealing his or her state of mind in dialogue rather than in *soliloquies. Commonly the trusted servant of the leading lady in drama has the role of confidante: Charmian, for example, in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. See also ficelle, soubrette.
connotation The range of further associations that a word or phrase suggests in addition to its straightforward dictionary meaning (the primary sense known as its denotation); or one of these secondary meanings. A word’s connotations can usually be formulated as a series of qualities, contexts, and emotional responses commonly associated with its *referent (that to which it refers). Which of these will be activated by the word will depend on the context in which it is used, and to some degree on the reader or hearer. *Metaphors are made possible by the fact that the two terms they identify both have overlapping connotations. For example, the word worm denotes a small, slender invertebrate; but its connotation of slow burrowing activity also allows an ingratiating person to be described metaphorically as ‘worming his way into favour’, while other connotations based on emotional response (sliminess, insignificance) permit a person to be described simply as ‘a worm’. Adjective: connotative. Verb: connote.
consonance The repetition of identical or similar consonants in neighbouring words whose vowel sounds are different (e.g. coming home, hot foot). The term is most commonly used, though, for a special case of such repetition in which the words are identical except for the stressed vowel sound (group/grope, middle/muddle, wonder/wander); this device, combining *alliteration and terminal consonance, is sometimes known more precisely as ‘rich consonance’, and since c.1920 has frequently been used at the ends of verse lines as an alternative to full rhyme (see pararhyme). Consonance may be regarded as the counterpart to the vowel-sound repetition known as *assonance. The adjective consonantal is sometimes ambiguous in that it also means, more generally, ‘pertaining to consonants’.
conte The French word for a tale, applied since the 19th century to *short stories, but previously used to denote a more fanciful kind of short prose fiction, especially that deriving from *oral tradition. Among the kinds of conte are the *folktale or conte populaire, the *fairy tale (conte merveilleux or conte de fées), and the *nursery rhyme or conte rimé. In the more literary manner is the conte philosophique, of which Voltaire’s Zadig (1747) and Candide (1759) are major examples. A storyteller is a conteur.
content The term commonly used to refer to what is said in a literary work, as opposed to how it is said (that is, to the *form or *style). Distinctions between form and content are necessarily abstractions made for the sake of analysis, since in any actual work there can be no content that has not in some way been formed, and no purely empty form. The indivisibility of form and content, though, is something of a critical truism which often obscures the degree to which a work’s matter can survive changes in its manner (in *revisions, translations, and *paraphrases); and it is only by positing some other manner in which this matter can be presented that one is able in analysis to isolate the specific form of a given work.
context Those parts of a *text preceding and following any particular passage, giving it a meaning fuller or more identifiable than if it were read in isolation. The context of any statement may be understood to comprise immediately neighbouring *signs (including punctuation such as quotation marks), or any part of—or the whole of—the remaining text, or the biographical, social, cultural, and historical circumstances in which it is made (including the intended audience or reader). The case of *irony shows clearly how the meaning of a statement can be completely reversed by a knowledge of its context. An interpretation of any passage or text that offers to explain it in terms of its context is sometimes said to contextualize it. Adjective: contextual.
convention An established practice—whether in technique, style, structure, or subject-matter—commonly adopted in literary works by customary and implicit agreement or precedent rather than by natural necessity. The clearest cases of the ‘unnatural’ devices known as conventions appear in drama, where the audience implicitly agrees to suspend its disbelief and to regard the stage as a battlefield or kitchen, the actors as historical monarchs or fairy godmothers; likewise author and audience observe an unwritten agreement that a character speaking an *aside cannot be heard by other characters on stage. But conventions are, in less immediately striking ways, essential to poetry and to prose fiction as well: the use of *metre, *rhyme, and *stanzaic forms is conventional, as are the *narrative techniques of the *short story (e.g. the neat or surprising ending) and the *novel (including chronological presentation and *point of view), and the *stock characters of both fiction and drama. Some dramatic and literary forms are clearly composed of very elaborate or very recognizable conventions: opera, *melodrama, *kabuki, the pastoral *elegy, the *chivalric romance, the *detective story, and the *Gothic novel are instances. In these and other cases an interrelated set of conventions in both *form and *content has constituted a *genre.
Since the advent of *Romanticism and of *realism in the 19th century, however, it has become less apparent (although no less true) that literature is conventional, because realism—and later, *naturalism—attempted as far as possible to diminish or conceal those conventions considered unlifelike while Romanticism tried to discard those that were insincere, thus giving rise to that pejorative sense of ‘conventional’ which devalues traditionally predictable forms. As much modern criticism has to argue, such rebellions against conventions are fated to generate new conventions of their own, which may be less elaborate and less noticeable in their time. This does not render innovation futile, since the new conventions will often be appropriate to changed conditions, but it does mean that while some literary works may be ‘unconventional’, none can be conventionless. Literary theorists (notably those influenced by *structuralism) tend to confirm the inevitability of conventions by appealing to modern linguistics, which claims that languages can produce meanings only from ‘*arbitrary’ or conventional *signs.
conversation poem The term often applied to certain important *blank-verse poems written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the late 1790s. These are addressed to close friends, and are characterized by an informal but serious manner of deliberation that expands from a particular setting. Apart from ‘The Nightingale’ (1798)—which Coleridge subtitled ‘A Conversation Poem’—the group of poems includes ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’, ‘Frost at Midnight’ (addressed to his infant son), and ‘Fears in Solitude’. There are some equivalents among the poems of his friend William Wordsworth—most importantly ‘Tintern Abbey’ (1798). Sometimes the term ‘conversation poem’ or ‘conversation piece’ is applied more generally to informal verse *epistles by other poets.
copy-text The specific *text used as the basis for a later *edition of a given work. The scholarly editor of a literary work by a deceased author will decide upon the copy-text and reproduce this, accompanied by lists of variant readings found in other editions (or manuscripts) of the same work. Standard editorial procedure is to adopt as the copy-text the last edition of the work that was published during the author’s lifetime; but there may be strong reasons for preferring the first published edition, or a manuscript version, or a set of proofs corrected by the author.
coronach [ko-ro-nak] A Gaelic funeral song or *dirge.
corpus A related ‘body’ of writings, usually sharing the same author or subject-matter. See also canon, oeuvre.
coterie [koh-tĕ-ri] A small group of writers (and others) bound together more by friendship and habitual association than by a common literary cause or style that might unite a school or movement. The term often has pejorative connotations of exclusive cliquishness. The *Bloomsbury group is one well-known example. The term coterie verse is sometimes applied to poems that seem to address the poet’s intimate circle of friends, making use of private references that may be obscure to readers outside such circles. See also cénacle, salon, vers de société.
country house poem A minor genre of poetry which has some importance in 17th-century English verse. It is defined by its subject-matter, which is the fruitfulness and stability of a patron’s country estate, and the patron’s own conservative virtues. Ben Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’ (1616) is the model in English, based partly on Latin poems by Martial and Horace. Later examples include Thomas Carew’s ‘To Saxham’ (1640), and Andrew Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’ (written c.1652).
Further reading: Malcolm Kelsall, The Great Good Place: The Country House in English Literature (1993).
coup de théâtre [koo dĕ tay-ahtr] A sudden, surprising turn of events that gives a new twist to the plot of a play. Typical coups de théâtre involve the unveiling of a disguised character or the reappearance of one assumed by the audience to be dead. See also peripeteia.
couplet [kup-lit] A pair of rhyming verse lines, usually of the same length; one of the most widely used verse forms in European poetry. Chaucer established the use of couplets in English, notably in the Canterbury Tales, using rhymed iambic *pentameters later known as *heroic couplets: a form revived in the 17th century by Ben Jonson, Dryden and others, partly as the equivalent in *heroic drama of the *alexandrine couplets which were the standard verse form of French drama in that century. Alexander Pope followed Dryden’s use of heroic couplets in non-dramatic verse to become the master of the form, notably in his use of *closed couplets. The octosyllablic couplet (of 8-syllable or 4-stress lines) is also commonly found in English verse. A couplet may also stand alone as an *epigram, or form part of a larger *stanza, or (as in Shakespeare) round off a *sonnet or a dramatic *scene. See also distich.
courtesy book A book that gives advice to aspiring young courtiers in etiquette and other aspects of behaviour expected at royal or noble courts. This kind of work—sometimes written in verse—first became popular in various parts of Europe in the late Middle Ages. In the *Renaissance, some important courtesy books expanded more philosophically on the nature of the ideal gentleman and his varied accomplishments. The most influential of these was Baldessare Castiglione’s Il Libro del Cortegiano (1528), a sequence of dialogues on court life and platonic love. English examples include Henry Peacham’s The Compleat Gentleman (1622).
courtly love A modern term (coined by the French scholar Gaston Paris in 1883, as amour courtois) for the literary cult of heterosexual love that emerged among the French aristocracy from the late 11th century onwards, with a profound effect on subsequent Western attitudes to love. Probably influenced by Arabic love poetry, the *troubadours of southern France were followed by northern French *trouvères, by German *Minnesänger, and by Dante, Petrarch, and other Italian poets in converting sexual desire from a degrading necessity of physical life into a spiritually ennobling emotion, almost a religious vocation. An elaborate code of behaviour evolved around the tormented male lover’s abject obedience to a disdainful, idealized lady, who was usually his social superior. Some of these conventions may derive from misreadings of the Roman poet Ovid, but this form of adoration also imitated both feudal servitude and Christian worship, despite celebrating the excitements of clandestine adultery (as in stories of Lancelot and Guinevere) rather than the then merely economic relation of marriage.
The most important literary treatments of courtly love appear in Chrétien de Troyes’s *romance Lancelot (late 12th century), and in the first part of the 13th-century allegorical poem, the Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris, later translated by Chaucer. Middle English literature shows less enthusiasm for, or understanding of, courtly love: Chaucer treated the cult sceptically, if sympathetically, but its later influence, established and modified through the *Petrarchan tradition, is strong in 16th-century English *lyrics.
Further reading: David Burnley, Courtliness and Literature in Medieval England (1998).
Cowleyan ode See ode.
crambo A versifying game in which players are challenged to produce rhymes for given words or lines (see also bouts-rimés); or a poem written in response to such a challenge. In a more specialized sense, the term denotes a poem in which all the words that could rhyme with some person’s name are accumulated to the point of absurdity. A notable English example is Molly Mog, or The Fair Maid of the Inn (1726), a *ballad attributed to John Gay and his drinking partners, who seem to have encouraged each other to rhyme upon the name of an attractive barmaid. In a more general sense, the term is applied to any unimpressively repetitious use of rhyming.
cretic See amphimacer.
crisis A decisive point in the plot of a play or story, upon which the outcome of the remaining action depends, and which ultimately precipitates the *catastrophe or *dénouement. See also anagnorisis, climax, peripeteia.
criterion [kry-teer-iŏn] (plural -eria) A standard or principle by which literary works can be judged or compared.
Critical Theory The term adopted by the *Frankfurt School for its intellectual project, essentially one of understanding the relation between freedom and reason in the modern world in the light of an independent form of Marxism revised under influences from sociology (e.g. Max Weber), psychology (Freud), and philosophy (Hegel, Nietzsche). The term when used in this specific sense is often capitalized as here in order to distinguish it from the confusingly similar ‘critical theory’ in the more general sense of theory pertaining to (literary or aesthetic) criticism: this latter is less confusingly designated as *metacriticism or simply literary theory.
http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations
• Illuminations: a Critical Theory site at University of Texas.
criticism The reasoned discussion of literary works, an activity which may include some or all of the following procedures, in varying proportions: the defence of *literature against moralists and censors, classification of a work according to its *genre, interpretation of its meaning, analysis of its structure and style, judgement of its worth by comparison with other works, estimation of its likely effect on readers, and the establishment of general principles by which literary works (individually, in categories, or as a whole) can be evaluated and understood. Contrary to the everyday sense of criticism as ‘fault-finding’, much modern criticism (particularly of the academic kind) assumes that the works it discusses are valuable; the functions of judgement and analysis having to some extent become divided between the market (where reviewers ask ‘Is this worth buying?’) and the educational world (where academics ask ‘Why is this so good?’).
The various kinds of criticism fall into several overlapping categories: theoretical, practical, *impressionistic, *affective, *prescriptive, or descriptive. Criticism concerned with revealing the author’s true motive or intention (sometimes called ‘expressive’ criticism) emerged from *Romanticism to dominate much 19th- and 20th-century critical writing, but has tended to give way to ‘objective’ criticism, focusing on the work itself (as in *New Criticism and *structuralism), and to a shift of attention to the reader in *reader-response criticism. Particular schools of criticism also seek to understand literature in terms of its relations to history, politics, gender, social class, mythology, linguistic theory, or psychology, as with *psychoanalytic criticism, *Marxist criticism, *feminist criticism, *myth criticism, *ecocriticism, and others. See also exegesis, hermeneutics, higher criticism, metacriticism, poetics, textual criticism.
critique A considered assessment of a literary work, usually in the form of an essay or review. Also, in philosophy, politics, and the social sciences, a systematic inquiry into the nature of some principle, idea, institution, or ideology, usually devoted to revealing its limits or self-contradictions. Verb: critique.
crossed rhyme The rhyming of one word in the middle of a long verse line with a word in a similar position in the next line. Sometimes found in rhyming *couplets, crossed rhyme has the effect of making the couplet sound like a *quatrain rhyming abab, as in Swinburne’s ‘Hymn to Proserpine’ (1866):
Will ye bridle the deep sea with reins, will ye chasten the high sea with rods?
Will ye take her to chain her with chains, who is older than all ye Gods?
crown A linked sequence of *lyric poems (usually *sonnets), in which the last line of each poem is repeated as the first line of the next, until the final line of the last (usually the seventh) poem repeats the opening line of the first. An Italian form of poetic tribute to the person addressed, the crown of sonnets was used in English by John Donne in the introductory sequence of his Holy Sonnets (1633). Sir Philip Sidney had earlier written a crown of *dizains in his Arcadia (1590).
crux (plural cruces) A difficult or ambiguous passage in a literary work, upon which interpretation of the rest of the work depends.
culteranismo See gongorism.
cultural materialism An approach to the analysis of literature, drama, and other cultural forms, adopted by some critics, mainly in Britain, since the early 1980s. Its principles, derived from western traditions of *Marxist criticism, were outlined most influentially by Raymond Williams in his later writings, notably Problems in Materialism and Culture (1980) and Culture (1981). Here the orthodox Marxist model of an economic ‘base’ determining a cultural (and political, religious, etc.) ‘superstructure’ is challenged and replaced by a more flexible model in which cultural activities themselves are regarded as ‘material’ and productive processes. Cultural materialist approaches to literature emphasize the social and economic contexts (publishing, theatre, education) in which it is produced and consumed. They are also interested in the ways in which the meanings of literary and dramatic works are remade in new social and institutional contexts, especially in re-stagings of Shakespeare. Critics who have identified their work as cultural materialist include Alan Sinfield, Catherine Belsey, and Jonathan Dollimore. Their approach has been distinguished from the somewhat similar school of *new historicism in that they hold a less pessimistic view of the prospects of cultural dissidence and resistance to established powers.
Further reading: John Brannigan, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (1998).
Cultural Studies An academic field of interdisciplinary research that grew out of literary studies in the early 1960s in Britain and extended its investigations of culture, language, and social meanings into neighbouring realms of cinema, television, print journalism, advertising, and fashion as well as popular literature and drama. In reaction against the alleged narrowness of literary studies, with their concentration on a *canon of ‘high’ literary art, it aimed to take a much wider range of cultural productions as its object of study, and it helped to generate further academic ventures in the form of Film Studies and Media Studies. As a distinct enterprise, Cultural Studies first became visible with the foundation by Richard Hoggart of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham in 1964, at first within the Department of English and then from 1972 as an independent unit. In its early phase, Cultural Studies at Birmingham and elsewhere was broadly an extension of the *sociology of literature inspired by Raymond Williams’s The Long Revolution (1961), combined with ‘communications studies’ of media and advertising, and with social history of working-class subcultures. Under Stuart Hall’s directorship of the CCCS (1969–79) and thereafter, the new discipline came increasingly under the influence of French *structuralist, *poststructuralist, and neo-Marxist theories, and devoted itself to showing how ‘discursive practices’ (Hollywood movies, TV advertisements, etc.) constructed ‘subject positions’ that held their viewers in thrall to capitalism. Cultural Studies remains a recognized academic term, less for the study of culture or cultures than for the cultivation of *Theory as applicable equally to literary and non-literary cultural productions and processes, all being counted as ‘texts’ to be decoded.
Further reading: Graeme Turner, British Cultural Studies: An Introduction (3rd edn, 2003).
http://www.culturemachine.net/csearch
• Culturemachine: searchable database of free texts.
cunto [kuun-toh] (plural cunti) A Neapolitan dialect word for a tale or short story (in Italian, *novella), as in the title of Giambattista Basile’s Lo cunto de li cunti (1634–6), an important early collection of *fairy tales and other *folktales within a *frame narrative, more widely known as the Pentamerone and translated into Italian in 1747.
curtain-raiser A brief dramatic entertainment, usually a light one-act play, preceding the full-length drama that formed the main part of a theatre’s programme. A common form in the late 19th-century theatre, although now obsolete.
curtal sonnet The name given by the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89) to a curtailed form of the *sonnet which he invented. The curtal sonnet has ten lines with an additional half-line at the end. Hopkins wrote two of these: ‘Peace’ and ‘Pied Beauty’.
cut-up A technique used by the novelist William S. Burroughs in some passages of his works, notably The Ticket That Exploded (1962), whereby a pre-existing written text is cut into segments which are reshuffled at random before being printed in the resulting accidental order. See also aleatory, collage.
cyberpunk A phase of American *science fiction in the 1980s and 1990s most often associated with William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984) and its sequels, and with the work of Bruce Sterling, who edited Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986). By contrast with earlier mainstream science fiction, which commonly implied a utopian confidence in technological progress, cyberpunk fiction is influenced by the gloomier world of *hard-boiled detective fiction and by film *noir thrillers; it foresees a near future in which sinister multinational corporations dominate the ‘cyberspace’ (that is, the world computerized information network) upon which an impoverished metropolitan populace depends. In a broader sense, the term refers to a larger body of work in the 1980s and after—including such films as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982)—in which the interpenetration of human and technological or electronic realms, in androids or in ‘virtual’ reality, is taken as the basis of fictional speculation, usually *dystopian.
Further reading: Larry McCaffery (ed.), Storming the Reality Studio (1992).
cycle A group of works, usually narrative poems, that either share a common theme or subject (e.g. the Trojan war, Charlemagne, the Knights of the Round Table), or are linked together as a sequence. In addition to *epics, *sagas, *romances, and *chansons de geste, which scholars have categorized into different cycles, the *mystery plays of the Middle Ages that were performed as a sequence during the same festival at a particular place are referred to as the York Cycle, the Chester Cycle, etc. The term is also applied to sequences of sonnets by the same author, and sometimes to sequences of novels or stories (see roman-fleuve). Adjective: cyclic.
cynghanedd [kung-han-ĕth] An elaborate system of sound-correspondences employed by poets in the Welsh language since the 14th century. Its conventions, formally adopted by an assembly of *bards (Eisteddfod) in 1523, govern the positions of stressed syllables and *caesurae in different kinds of verse line, from which are generated various patterns of internal rhyme and *alliteration. In one such pattern, for example, the second part of a tripartite line will rhyme with the first part while its sequence of consonants will be repeated in the third part.