dactyl A metrical unit (*foot) of verse, having one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables, as in the word carefully (or, in *quantitative verse, one long syllable and two short ones). Dactylic *hexameters were used in Greek and Latin *epic poetry, and in the elegiac *distich, but dactylic verse is rare in English: Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ uses it, as does Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Voice’, which begins
Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me
See also falling rhythm, metre, triple metre.
Dada (Dadaism) An *avant-garde movement of anarchic protest against bourgeois society, religion, and art, founded in 1916 in Switzerland by Tristan Tzara, a Romanian-born French poet. From 1919 the Dadaist group assembled in Paris, issuing nihilistic manifestos against the culture which had been discredited by the 1914–18 war, and experimenting with anti-logical poetry and *collage pictures and sculptures. The group included the artists Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, the poet-sculptor Hans Arp, and the young poets André Breton, Paul Éluard, and Louis Aragon. Dada was short-lived, but it ushered in the *Surrealism which superseded it from 1922.
Further reading: David Hopkins, Dada and Surrealism (2004).
• International Dada Archive at University of Iowa.
death of the author A slogan launched by the French literary theorist Roland Barthes in an influential essay of 1968, ‘La mort de l’auteur’, in which he proclaimed the corresponding ‘birth of the reader’. In partial imitation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s announcement of the ‘death of God’ in the late 19th century, Barthes sought to topple the supposedly godlike authority of the writer over the possible meanings of his or her work, and to grant more freedom of interpretation to readers; he thereby gave important encouragement to *reader-response criticism. He drew upon *structuralist principles, according to which the meanings of texts derive from pre-existing linguistic and cultural *codes which the author may combine or activate but does not originate. Barthes was reacting both against a *Romantic cult of genius and originality, in which authors are creative while readers are essentially receptive, and against academic tendencies to grant conclusive authority in the determination of literary meaning to biographical sources such as prefaces or letters written by an author about the work in question. The argument that the author had in principle no such authority had been advanced twenty years earlier by some of the American *New Critics (see intentional fallacy), without resort to bloodthirsty metaphors. Barthes’s phrase has become widely identified with the iconoclastic tendencies of structuralist and *post-structuralist theory.
Further reading: Sean Burke, The Death and Return of the Author (1992).
débat [day-bah] A poem in the form of a debate between two characters, who are usually *personifications of opposed principles or qualities: body and soul, water and wine, winter and summer, etc. The débat was much practised in Europe during the 12th and 13th centuries, both in Latin and in the *vernacular languages. The outstanding English example is the early 13th-century poem The Owl and the Nightingale, in which the two birds—probably representing religious and secular poetry respectively—dispute over the benefits they bring to mankind. In French, François Villon later wrote a débat between the heart and the body. The débat commonly ends with an inconclusive reference of the issue to a judge. The form has some classical precedents in the *agon of Aristophanes’ comedies and the *eclogues of Theocritus; and it may in turn have influenced the structures of later medieval drama. See also amoebean verses, dialogue.
decadence A state of decay shown in either the inferior literary quality or the looser moral standards of any period’s works compared with a preceding period, as with *Hellenistic Greek or post-*Augustan Latin literatures; or the 19th-century literary movement in Paris, London, and Vienna that cultivated the exhausted refinement and artificiality it admired in the ‘decadent’ ages of Greek and Latin literature. Although the term has various unfavourable connotations ranging from simple inferiority to moral ‘degeneracy’, several writers in the late 19th century accepted the description proudly, thus implying a shocking parallel between their imperial societies and the decline of the Roman empire. The Decadent movement, closely associated with the doctrines of *Aestheticism, can be traced back to the writings of Théophile Gautier and Edgar Allan Poe in the 1830s, but became a significant presence only after the publication of Charles Baudelaire’s influential collection of poems, Les Fleurs du mal (1857), and culminated in the *fin-de-siècle culture of the 1880s and 1890s.
The basic principle of this decadence, expounded in the 1860s by Gautier and Baudelaire, was complete opposition to Nature: hence its systematic cultivation of drugs, cosmetics, Catholic ritual, supposedly ‘unnatural’ sexual practices, and sterility and artificiality in all things. A complete decadent way of life is portrayed in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel A Rebours (Against the Grain or Against Nature, 1884), upon which Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) is partly based. In France, decadence became almost synonymous with the work of the *Symbolists, some of whom were associated in the 1880s with the journal Le Décadent. In England, it emerged from the *Pre-Raphaelite circle, in the poetry of D. G. Rossetti and in Swinburne’s scandalous Poems and Ballads (1866), leading to the work of Wilde, Ernest Dowson, and Arthur Symons in the 1890s, until Wilde’s imprisonment in 1895 suddenly ended the decadent episode. Symons, in his essay ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’ (1893), described the phenomenon as ‘an interesting disease’ typical of an over-luxurious civilization, characterized by ‘an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity’.
Further reading: George C. Schoolfield, A Baedeker of Decadence (2003).
decastich [dek-ă-stik] A *stanza or poem of ten lines, for example the stanza used by Keats in his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (both 1820), or the Spanish *décima.
decasyllabic Made up of ten syllables. In English verse, the iambic *pentameter is normally decasyllabic, although it sometimes becomes *hendecasyllabic with the addition of an eleventh syllable. On the other hand, the hendecasyllabic line (endecasyllabo) of Italian verse employed by Dante and Petrarch may in practice be decasyllabic if no further unstressed syllables follow the stressed tenth syllable (see verso tronco).
décima [deth-i-mă] A Spanish verse *stanza of ten *octosyllabic lines rhyming abbaaccddc. It is sometimes referred to as an espinela after one of its notable practitioners, Vicente Espinel (1550–1624), whose contemporaries mistakenly believed he had invented the form.
deconstruction A philosophically sceptical approach to the possibility of coherent meaning in language, initiated by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) in a series of works published in 1967 (later translated as Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology, and Writing and Difference), and adopted by several leading literary critics in the United States—notably at Yale University—from the early 1970s onwards. Derrida’s claim is that the dominant Western tradition of thought has attempted to establish grounds of certainty and truth by repressing the limitless instability of language. This ‘*logocentric’ tradition sought some absolute source or guarantee of meaning (a ‘transcendental signified’) which could centre or stabilize the uncertainties of signification, through a set of ‘violent hierarchies’ privileging a central term over a marginal one: nature over culture, male over female, and most importantly speech over writing. The ‘*phonocentric’ suspicion of writing as a parasite upon the authenticity of speech is a crucial target of Derrida’s subversive approach to Western philosophy, in which he inverts and dissolves conceptual hierarchies to show that the repressed or marginalized term has always already contaminated the privileged or central term. Thus, drawing on Saussure’s theory of the *sign, Derrida argues that the stable self-identity which we attribute to speech as the authentic source of meaning is illusory, since language operates as a self-contained system of internal differences rather than of positive terms or presences: writing, distrusted in the Western ‘metaphysics of presence’ because it displays the absence of any authenticating voice, is in this sense logically prior to speech.
Derrida’s central concept (although in principle it ought not to occupy such a ‘hierarchical’ position) is presented in his coining of the term *différance, a French *portmanteau word combining ‘difference’ with ‘deferral’ to suggest that the differential nature of meanings in language ceaselessly defers or postpones any determinate meaning: language is an endless chain or ‘play of différance’ which logocentric discourses try vainly to fix to some original or final term that can never be reached. Deconstructive readings track down within a *text the *aporia or internal contradiction that undermines its claims to coherent meaning; or they reveal how texts can be seen to deconstruct themselves. Derrida’s difficult and paradoxical attitude to the metaphysical tradition seeks to subvert it while also claiming that there is no privileged vantage-point from which to do this from outside the instabilities of language.
Deconstruction thus undermines its own radical scepticism by admitting that it leaves everything exactly as it was; it is an unashamedly self-contradictory effort to think the ‘unthinkable’, often by recourse to strange *neologisms, *puns, and other word-play. Although initially directed against the scientific pretensions of *structuralism in the human sciences, it was welcomed enthusiastically into literary studies at Yale University and elsewhere in the English-speaking world, partly because it seemed to place literary problems of *figurative language and interpretation above philosophers’ and historians’ claims to truth, and partly because it opened up limitless possibilities of interpretation. The writings of Paul de Man, Barbara Johnson, J. Hillis Miller, and Geoffrey Hartman in the 1970s and 1980s applied and extended Derrida’s concepts to critical questions of interpretation, tending to challenge the status of the author’s intention or of the external world as a source of meaning in texts, and questioning the boundary between criticism and literature. This ‘*Yale school’ and other deconstructionists came under fierce attack for dogmatic nihilism and wilful obscurity. See also dissemination, indeterminacy, post-structuralism.
Further reading: Nicholas Royle (ed.), Deconstructions: A User’s Guide (2000).
decorum [di-kor-ŭm] A standard of appropriateness by which certain styles, characters, forms, and actions in literary works are deemed suitable to one another within a hierarchical model of culture bound by class distinctions. Derived from Horace’s Ars Poetica (c.20 bce) and other works of classical criticism, decorum was a major principle of late *Renaissance taste and of *neoclassicism. It ranked and fixed the various literary *genres in ‘high’, ‘middle’, and ‘low’ stations, and expected the style, characters, and actions in each to conform to its assigned level: thus a *tragedy or *epic should be written in a high or ‘grand’ style about high-ranking characters performing grand deeds, whereas a *comedy should treat humble characters and events in a ‘low’ or colloquial style. The mixture of high and low levels, as in Shakespeare, was seen as indecorous, although it could be exploited for humorous effect in *burlesques and *mock-heroic works. The strict application of these principles of decorum was overturned by the advent of *Romanticism; although in a general sense writers always suit style to subject-matter according to their purposes. See also convention, diction, style.
deep structure The underlying structure of meaning in any utterance, as opposed to the observable arrangement (the surface structure) in which it is presented. The distinction between deep structure and surface structure is a major principle of the revolution in grammatical theory led by the American linguist Noam Chomsky in the 1960s, and has been adopted by some theorists of *narratology. According to Chomsky, the deep structure of a sentence is its underlying semantic content, an abstraction decoded from the actual syntactic sequence of its surface structure (see semantics, syntax). Thus the sentence The mariner shot the albatross differs in surface structure from The albatross was shot by the mariner, but shares the same deep structure. The distinction is broadly similar to that between *content and *form. Some narratologists have attempted to define the deep structures of narratives on the model of linguistic analyses of sentences: thus A. J. Greimas distinguishes the underlying *binary oppositions between basic roles (or *actants) from their surface realization as contrasts between characters in a sequential *plot.
defamiliarization The distinctive effect achieved by literary works in disrupting our habitual perception of the world, enabling us to ‘see’ things afresh, according to the theories of some English Romantic poets and of *Russian Formalism. Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Biographia Literaria (1817) wrote of the ‘film of familiarity’ that blinds us to the wonders of the world, and that Wordworth’s poetry aimed to remove. P. B. Shelley in his essay ‘The Defence of Poetry’ (written 1821) also claims that poetry ‘makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar’ by stripping ‘the veil of familiarity from the world’. In modern usage, the term corresponds to Viktor Shklovsky’s use of the Russian word ostranenie (‘making strange’) in his influential essay ‘Poetry as Technique’ (1917). Shklovsky argued that art exists in order to recover for us the sensation of life which is diminished in the ‘automatized’ routine of everyday experience. He and the other Formalists set out to define the devices by which literary works achieve this effect, usually in terms of the ‘*foregrounding’ of the linguistic medium. Brecht’s theory of the *alienation effect in drama starts from similar grounds. See also literariness.
defective foot An incomplete *foot in a line of metrical verse. The term, sometimes applied to *catalectic lines, is misleadingly pejorative, since the deficiency is usually not in the verse itself but rather in the metrical analysis that attempts to make the *metre conform to an abstract scheme of feet. See also acephalous, truncation.
deixis A term used in linguistics to denote those aspects of an utterance that refer to and depend upon the situation in which the utterance is made. Deictic words indicate the situational ‘co-ordinates’ of person (I/you, us/them), place (here/there, this/that), and time (now/then, yesterday/today).
demotic [di-mot-ik] Derived from or using the language of the common people rather than the more formal style of a priesthood or other educated élite. See also colloquialism, vernacular.
demotion The use of a stressed syllable in an ‘offbeat’ position in a metrical verse line that would normally be occupied by an unstressed syllable. An important means of variation in English verse, demotion usually has the effect of slowing the rhythm of the line, as in the *iambic verse of Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’:
The long day wanes, the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices
where ‘day’, ‘moon’, and ‘Moans’ are all demoted to offbeat positions. This does not mean that they should be read as unstressed: in fact the effect depends upon their retaining at least some of their normal *stress. The demotion rules formulated by Derek Attridge in The Rhythms of English Verse (1982) permit a stressed syllable to realize an offbeat between two other stressed syllables or at the beginning of a line before a stressed syllable. In similar positions in *triple metre, a stressed syllable may realize an offbeat, either on its own, or with an unstressed syllable, or (more rarely) with another stressed syllable. The concepts of demotion and *promotion account more successfully for those metrical variations that traditional *prosody described in terms of *substitution. See also metre.
denotation See connotation.
dénouement [day-noo-mahn] The clearing up or ‘untying’ of the complications of the *plot in a play or story; usually a final scene or chapter in which mysteries, confusions, and doubtful destinies are clarified. See also catastrophe.
DETECTIVE STORY
A story in which the principal action and focus of interest is the investigation of a crime or apparently criminal enigma by a detective figure, either professional or amateur. The centrality of this detective figure distinguishes the detective story proper from some other kinds of crime fiction in which the emphasis lies upon the actions of a crime’s perpetrator or victim (see also thriller, sensation novel). Conventionally, the crime should be an especially baffling case that requires the uncommon ingenuity of the detective to find a solution and identify or pin the blame on the true perpetrator, who commonly has an apparently safe alibi or has left a false trail incriminating others. Various kinds of crime are possible subjects, although murder, and preferably multiple murder involving the elimination of witnesses to the original crime, has been found to be the most appetizing to readers addicted to the *genre—tax evasion and non-lethal motoring offences, for instance, being passed over as insufficiently colourful. The superior insight of the detective is often contrasted with the gullibility of others in the story, usually unimaginative police officers self-blinded by routines and habitual assumptions.
Detective fiction comes in two sizes: the *short story and the short or mid-length *novel (lengthy novels are rare in this genre). From the origins of detective fiction in the mid-19th century until the 1920s, the short story tended to be more important, from Edgar A. Poe’s founding tale ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories in the Strand magazine collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892) and several later volumes, to the Father Brown stories (1911–35) of G. K. Chesterton. The full-length detective novel was inaugurated in France by Emile Gaboriau’s L’Affaire Lerouge (1866), and grew in importance in the early 20th century with the success of such major practitioners as Agatha Christie (from her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, 1920) and the Belgian author Georges Simenon (from his first Maigret novel, Pietr-le-Letton, 1931).
Various *subgenres of detective story are recognized by its devotees, among them the ‘locked room mystery’ involving an apparently impossible crime perpetrated within an enclosed space with ostensibly no exit or entrance (Poe’s Rue Morgue story being an example); and the ‘police procedural’, in which the investigation is conducted by a professional team employing normal methods, as in Ed McBain’s series (from 1956) set in the offices of the 87th Precinct of the New York Police Department. Otherwise detective stories are divided loosely according to kinds of detective figure (amateur, private eye, police) or according to their settings (railway, village, ship, or the favourite English country house) or professional mileux (ecclesiastical, medical, academic, theatrical, etc.). Certain major traditions or schools are also well recognized in the history of the genre, the most important being *Golden-Age detective writing and the *hard-boiled school.
Further reading: Julian Symons, Bloody Murder (3rd edn, 1992); T. J. Binyon, Murder Will Out (1991).
• Crimeculture: web resource for academic study of crime fiction.
deus ex machina [day-uus eks mak-ină] The ‘god from a machine’ who was lowered on to the stage by mechanical contrivance in some ancient Greek plays (notably those of Euripides) to solve the problems of the *plot at a stroke. A later example is Shakespeare’s introduction of Hymen into the last scene of As You Like It to marry off the main characters. The term is now used pejoratively for any improbable or unexpected contrivance by which an author resolves the complications of the plot in a play or novel, and which has not been convincingly prepared for in the preceding action: the discovery of a lost will was a favourite resort of Victorian novelists. See also coup de théâtre, dénouement, machinery.
device An all-purpose term used to describe any literary technique deliberately employed to achieve a specific effect. In the theories of *Russian Formalism and *Brechtian theatre, the phrase ‘baring the device’ refers to the way that some works expose or highlight the means (linguistic or theatrical) by which they operate on us, rather than conceal them. See also foregrounding, metadrama.
devotional poetry Poetry expressing religious worship or prayer. This is a large and varied category of verse, distinguished from secular poetry of all kinds, especially in the study of medieval lyrics. A secular love poem may express devotion to the beloved, but it would still not be classed as devotional poetry.
diachronic [dy-ă-kron-ik] Relating to historical change over a span of time. The revolution in linguistics begun by Ferdinand de Saussure in the Cours de linguistique générale (1915) is founded partly on the distinction between the diachronic study of linguistic features evolving in time and the *synchronic study of a language as a complete system operating at a given moment. Saussure argued, against the historical bias of 19th-century *philology, that the synchronic dimension or ‘axis’ must be given precedence. Noun: diachrony.
diacritic A mark placed above or below a letter or syllable to specify its distinctive sound value. Diacritics commonly found are the acute accent (é), grave accent (è), circumflex (ô), umlaut (ö), and cedilla (ç). Diacritical markings commonly used in *scansion include the macron (−) for long syllables, the breve (⌣) for short syllables, the acute accent or the virgule (′) for stressed syllables, and the × symbol for unstressed syllables.
diaeresis [dy-err-ĕsis] (dieresis) (plural -eses) A Greek word for ‘division’, used in three different senses: 1. In classical *prosody, the coincidence of a word ending with the end of a *foot. 2. The separation of two adjacent vowels into distinct sounds (e.g. Zoë, coöperate), also the umlaut mark which indicates this. 3. In *rhetoric, a *figure by which the parts or attributes of anything are enumerated.
dialect A distinctive variety of a language, spoken by members of an identifiable regional group, nation, or social class. Dialects differ from one another in pronunciation, vocabulary, and (often) in grammar. Traditionally they have been regarded as variations from a ‘standard’ educated form of the language, but modern linguists point out that standard forms are themselves dialects which have come to predominate for social and political reasons. The study of variations between different dialects is known as dialectology. Adjective: dialectal.
dialectic 1. The art of formal reasoning, especially the procedure of seeking truth through debate or discussion. 2. The reasoning or logical structure that holds together a continuous argument or exposition. 3. The interplay of contradictory principles or opposed forces, as understood in the European tradition of philosophy influenced by G. W. F. Hegel and including Marx and Engels. Some schematic versions of dialectical philosophy speak of a unification of opposites in which the thesis is opposed by the antithesis but united with it in a higher synthesis.
dialogic (dialogical) Characterized or constituted by the interactive, responsive nature of *dialogue rather than by the single-mindedness of *monologue. The term is important in the writings of the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, whose book Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929) contrasts the dialogic or *polyphonic interplay of various characters’ voices in Dostoevsky’s novels with the ‘monological’ subordination of characters to the single viewpoint of the author in Tolstoy’s . In the same year, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (probably by Bakhtin, although published under the name of V. N. Voloshinov) argued, against Saussure’s theory of la *langue, that actual utterances are ‘dialogic’ in that they are embedded in a context of dialogue and thus respond to an interlocutor’s previous utterances and/or try to draw a particular response from a specific auditor. See also carnivalization, multi-accentuality. Noun: dialogism.
Further reading: Michael Holquist, Dialogism (1990).
http://www.shef.ac.uk/bakhtin/
• Site of the Bakhtin Centre, University of Sheffield.
dialogue Spoken exchanges between or among characters in a dramatic or narrative work; or a literary form in prose or verse based on a debate or discussion, usually between two speakers. Dialogue is clearly a major aspect of drama, and is usually a significant component of prose fictions and of some narrative poetry, as in the *ballad. As a literary form, the dialogue was much favoured in ancient Greek and Latin literature for *didactic and *satirical purposes as well as in *pastoral poetry. The *Socratic dialogues of Plato (4th century bce) are the most influential ancient works in dialogue form; a modern counterpart is Wilde’s The Critic as Artist (1891). The *débat and the *flyting are special varieties of verse dialogue. In modern poetry, W. B. Yeats often used the dialogue form, as in ‘Michael Robartes and the Dancer’ (1921). See also amoebean verses.
diction The choice of words used in a literary work. A writer’s diction may be characterized, for example, by *archaism, or by *Latinate or Anglo-Saxon derivations; and it may be described according to the oppositions formal/colloquial, abstract/concrete, and literal/figurative. For the specific *conventions of diction in poetry, see poetic diction.
didactic [dy-dak-tik] Instructive; designed to impart information, advice, or some doctrine of morality or philosophy. Much of the most ancient surviving literature is didactic, containing genealogies, proverbial wisdom, and religious instruction. Most European literary works of the Middle Ages have a strong didactic element, usually expounding doctrines of the Church. Practical advice has often been presented in verse, as in the Georgics (37–30 bce) of Virgil, which give advice on farming, and in the imitative *georgics of the 18th century. Since the ascendancy of *Romanticism and *Aestheticism in the 19th century, didactic writing has been viewed unfavourably as foreign to true art, so that the term didacticism refers (usually pejoratively) to the use of literary means to a doctrinal end. Some imaginative works still contain practical information, however: Robert Pinsky’s verse sequence ‘Tennis’ (1975) offers practical tips on service, backhand shots, and other relevant skills. The boundaries of didactic literature are open to dispute, since both the presence and the prominence of doctrinal content are subject to differing interpretations. In the broadest sense, most *allegories and *satires implying a moral or political view may be regarded as didactic, along with many other kinds of work in which the *theme embodies some philosophical or other belief of the author. A stricter definition would confine the term to those works that explicitly tell readers what they should do. See also propagandism.
diegesis [dy-ĕ-jee-sis] An analytic term used in modern *narratology to designate the narrated events or *story (French, *histoire) as a ‘level’ distinct from that of the *narration. The diegetic level of a narrative is that of the main story, whereas the ‘higher’ level at which the story is told is extradiegetic (i.e. standing outside the sphere of the main story). An *embedded tale-within-the-tale constitutes a lower level known as hypodiegetic. In an older sense outlined in Aristotle’s Poetics, diegesis is the reporting or narration of events, contrasted with *mimesis, which is the imitative representation of them: so a character in a play who performs a certain action is engaged in mimesis, but if she recounts some earlier action, she is practising diegesis. The distinction is often cast as that between ‘showing’ and ‘telling’.
différance [dif-air-ahns] A term coined by the philosopher Jacques Derrida to combine two senses of the French verb différer (to differ, and to defer or postpone) in a noun which is spelt differently from différence but pronounced in the same way. The point of this *neologism is to indicate simultaneously two senses in which language denies us the full presence of any meaning: first, that no linguistic element (according to Saussure’s theory of the *sign) has a positive meaning, only an effect of meaning arising from its differences from other elements; second, that presence or fullness of meaning is always deferred from one sign to another in an endless sequence. Thus if you look up a word in a dictionary, all it can give you is other words to explain it; so—in theory, at least—you will then have to look these up, and so on without end. Différance, then, may be conceived as an underlying principle of non-identity which makes signification possible only by ‘spacing out’ both *signifiers and concepts (*signifieds) so that meaning appears merely as a ‘trace’ of other terms within or across any given term. Derrida tried to avoid placing différance as a fixed concept, preferring to use it as an unstable term, although it is fundamental to his philosophy of *deconstruction. See also dissemination.
digression A temporary departure from one subject to another more or less distantly related topic before the discussion of the first subject is resumed. A valuable technique in the art of storytelling, digression is also employed in many kinds of non-fictional writing and *oratory. Adjective: digressive. See also excursus.
dime novel A cheap and usually violently sensational *novel, so called because of its price (a dime being ten US cents) in the late 19th century, although in fact many of these books were cheaper still at five cents. The dime novel flourished from the 1860s to the 1890s, and provided tales of adventure about war, crime, or life on the Western frontier, featuring characters such as the real-life frontiersman Deadwood Dick or the entirely fictional New York detective Nick Carter.
http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/dp/pennies
• Dime Novel and Story Paper Collection at Stanford University, a large archive.
dimeter [dim-it-er] A line of verse consisting of two metrical feet (see foot). In English verse, this means a line with two main *stresses. The term originally referred, in classical *prosody, to a line of two *dipodies, i.e. four feet.
Dionysian See apollonian.
diphthong A vowel sound that changes noticeably in quality during the pronunciation of a syllable, as in the English words wide, late, beer, or round. Diphthongs are thus distinguished from simple vowels (cat, feed, etc.), which are referred to by phoneticians as monophthongs. Adjective: diphthongal.
dipody [dip-ŏdi] A pair of metrical feet (see foot) considered as a single unit. Dipodic verse, commonly found in *ballads and nursery rhymes, is characterized by the pairing together of feet, in which one usually has a stronger *stress.
dirge A song of lamentation in mourning for someone’s death; or a poem in the form of such a song, and usually less elaborate than an *elegy. An ancient *genre employed by Pindar in Greek and notably by Propertius in Latin, the dirge also occurs in English, most famously in Ariel’s song ‘Full fathom five thy father lies’ in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
dirty realism A critical label attached since the early 1980s to a group of American short-story writers, of whom the best-known are Raymond Carver, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Tobias Wolff. The term refers to a tendency for their stories to recount incidents of impoverished life among blue-collar workers in small-town America, in a bare, unsensational style.
discours [dis-koor] The French word for *discourse or conversation. When it appears in this form in modern theoretical writings in English, it usually carries a special sense given to it by the linguist Émile Benveniste in his Problèmes de linguistique générale (1966), in which he distinguishes discours as a ‘subjective’ mode of speech (or writing) from *histoire, which is apparently ‘objective’. In discours, the present situation of speech or writing is indicated by signs of *deixis (e.g. the pronouns I and you, the adverbs here, now, there, etc.) and by the use of tense (she has gone rather than she went). While discours thus displays its nature as an enunciation involving a relationship between a speaker/writer and a listener/reader, histoire conceals this by its concentration on the enounced (see énoncé). Confusingly, another distinction is made between these two terms in *narratology, where histoire is *story, and discours is language or *narration.
discourse Any extended use of speech or writing; or a formal exposition or dissertation. In linguistics, discourse is the name given to units of language longer than a single sentence; discourse analysis is the study of *cohesion and other relationships between sentences in written or spoken discourse. In modern cultural theory, especially in the *post-structuralism associated with the French historian Michel Foucault, the term has been used to denote any coherent body of statements that produces a self-confirming account of reality by defining an object of attention and generating concepts with which to analyse it (e.g. medical discourse, legal discourse, aesthetic discourse). The specific discourse in which a statement is made will govern the kinds of connections that can be made between ideas, and will involve certain assumptions about the kind of person(s) addressed. By extension, as a free-standing noun (‘discourse’ as such), the term denotes language in actual use within its social and ideological context and in institutionalized representations of the world called discursive practices. In general, the increased use of this term in modern cultural theory arises from dissatisfaction with the rather fixed and abstract term ‘language’ (see langue); by contrast, ‘discourse’ better indicates the specific contexts and relationships involved in historically produced uses of language. See discours for a further sense. See also episteme, rhetoric.
Further reading: Sara Mills, Discourse (2nd edn, 2004).
discovery A term sometimes used as an English equivalent for *anagnorisis, that is, a point in a play or story at which a character recognizes the true state of affairs. See also dénouement.
discussion play A kind of drama in which debate and discussion are more important than plot, action, or character. Some of Bernard Shaw’s plays are of this kind, notably Misalliance (1910) and Heartbreak House (1919). See also problem play.
disintegration A term coined by E. K. Chambers, in his day the leading authority on the history of English theatre, in his British Academy lecture The Disintegration of Shakespeare (1924), characterizing the efforts of earlier scholars (principally F. G. Fleay and J. M. Robertson) to attribute some of the plays of Shakespeare wholly or partly to other Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights such as Christopher Marlowe, George Chapman, and Ben Jonson. The disintegrators, as Chambers called them, had based their reattributions upon supposedly scientific analyses of the plays’ versification, and upon unsupported assumptions that Shakespeare had revised plays written by others. Chambers’s arguments against the disintegration of the Shakespeare *canon were generally accepted, although scholars do now broadly agree that a few of the plays did involve partial collaboration with John Fletcher and Thomas Middleton. Disintegration is a phenomenon entirely distinct from the *anti-Stratfordian conspiracy theories, which usually deny Shakespeare the authorship of any of the works published in his name.
dissemination In the terminology of *deconstruction, the dispersal of meanings among infinite possibilities; the effect of *différance in the ‘free play’ of signification beyond the control of concepts or stable interpretation. Whereas *ambiguity usually involves a limited number of possible meanings, dissemination is an endless proliferation of possibilities. See also indeterminacy.
dissociation of sensibility The separation of thought from feeling, which T. S. Eliot diagnosed as the weakness of English poetry from the Revolution of the 1640s until his own time. In his influential essay ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1921), Eliot argued that whereas in Donne and other pre-Revolutionary poets ‘there is a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling’, from the time of Milton and Dryden ‘a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered’. This view had some influence in British and American criticism in the mid-20th century, notably in the *Cambridge school and among the *New Critics, but it has frequently been challenged as a misleading simplification of literary history.
dissonance Harshness of sound and/or rhythm, either inadvertent or deliberate. The term is nearly equivalent to *cacophony, but tends to denote a lack of harmony between sounds rather than the harshness of a particular sound in isolation. Browning, Hopkins, and many other poets have made deliberate use of dissonance. Adjective: dissonant.
distant reading A provocative slogan launched by the Italian literary historian Franco Moretti in his article ‘Conjectures on World Literature’ (2000; later reprinted with related pieces in his collection Distant Reading, 2013). Coined in direct opposition to the tradition of *close reading cultivated in the English-speaking academic world, Moretti’s phrase indicates his apparently perverse attempts to discover what may be learned about novels without actually reading them. His research projects have included quantitative bibliometric analyses of thousands of forgotten novels, for example, detecting trends in the length of their titles as listed in catalogues.
distich [dis-tik] A pair of verse lines, usually making complete sense, as in the *closed couplet. The term is most often applied to the Greek verse form in which a dactylic *hexameter is followed by a ‘pentameter’ (actually composed of two dactylic half-lines of two-and-a-half feet each). This form, known as the elegiac distich or elegiac couplet, was used in Greek and Latin verse for *elegies and *epigrams, and later by some German poets including Goethe.
dit [dee] A late-medieval French term for a kind of poem distinguished neither by verse-form (although octosyllabic couplets are common), nor by subject-matter (the dit could be erotic, satirical, devotional etc.), but by its first-person voice. This element of personal testimony separates the narrative dit from the third-person voice of the contemporary *lai or of the verse *romance, while the non-narrative dit is distinguished from the *lyric in that it presents itself not as song but as spoken or written composition. There are many examples from the 13th and 14th centuries, including Rutebeuf’s scurrilous narrative Dit de frère Denise (1262), Guillaume de Machaut’s Dit du Lyon (1342), and Jean Froissart’s Joli Buisson de Jonece (1373).
dithyramb [dith-i-ram] A form of *hymn or choral *lyric in which the god Dionysus was honoured in Greek religious festivities from about the 7th century bce onwards. Later in Athenian competitions, dithyrambs were composed—by Pindar among others—on episodes from myths of other gods, and the arrangement in matched *strophes came to be relaxed. Dithyrambs seem to have been performed by a large *chorus of singers, possibly dressed as satyrs, to flute accompaniment. A rare English imitation is Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast (1697). The adjective dithyrambic is sometimes applied to *rhapsodies, or wildly impassioned chants.
divan (diwan) A Persian—and later, Arabic and Turkish—word of numerous senses, among which the specialized literary meaning is that of a collection of poems, usually the complete shorter poems of an individual author. Joseph Hammer-Purgstall’s 1812 German translation of the Divan of the 14th-century Persian poet Hafiz brought the term, along with the Persian verse tradition, to the attention of Goethe, who composed his own collection of orientally inspired poems, partly in collaboration with Marianne von Willemer, publishing this as the West-östlicher Divan (1819).
dizain [dee-zen] A French verse *stanza of ten lines, of which each normally has ten syllables, or more rarely eight. The dizain was employed by French poets of the 15th and 16th centuries either as an independent poem rhyming ababbccded or as a stanza of the *ballade or *chant royal. In English, Sir Philip Sidney wrote a *crown of dizains rhyming ababbcacdd.
docudrama A term dating from the 1960s for a kind of television *documentary that incorporates semi-fictional or imagined sequences played by actors, e.g. representing historical persons or recently convicted criminals. A loosely related genre from the 1990s is the docusoap, a documentary in several episodes showing the lives of real people, usually in a specific working environment, such that viewers can follow the fortunes of these ‘characters’ as they would those of a fictional TV soap opera.
documentary Usually a non-fiction film that offers an informative view of some aspect of nature or society. The term occasionally has literary uses, too: some kinds of travel writing and *memoir, for example, have been called documentaries, as have some essays in sociological investigation. George Orwell’s book about poverty in northern England, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), could be counted as one. Certain kinds of fiction, too, are described as exhibiting ‘documentary *realism’ if they include accurately researched factual information about places and ways of life, as with some of the novels of Emile Zola, or Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle (1906), which exposed real problems of exploitation in the Chicago meat-packing industry; and a novel may be said to have a documentary element on the same basis, as with the cetology (whale-lore) exhibited in many chapters of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851). Documentary poems are also possible, at least as contributions to film documentaries: a notable instance is W. H. Auden’s ‘Night Mail’ (1938), which formed part of the soundtrack for a film of the same title praising the wonders of the British postal system. A maker of documentaries is a documentarist.
Further reading: Barbara Foley, Telling the Truth: The Theory and Practice of Documentary Fiction (1986).
doggerel Clumsy verse, usually monotonously rhymed, rhythmically awkward, and often shallow in sentiment, as in greetings cards. The notoriously irregular verses of William McGonagall (?1830–1902) are doggerel. Some poets, like Skelton and Stevie Smith, have deliberately imitated doggerel for comic effect. See also clerihew, hudibrastic, light verse, skeltonics.
dolce stil novo (nuovo) A new style of Italian lyric love poetry practised in the late 13th century by Guido Cavalcanti, Dante Alighieri, and Cino da Pistoia, along with some imitators. The name (‘sweet new style’) comes from a dialogue in Dante’s Purgatorio (xxiv. 57). This style is marked mainly by praise of the beloved in religious terms as an embodiment of divine grace, an attitude seemingly influenced by *troubadour poetry and the codes of *courtly love. The practitioners and partisans of this kind of lyric are sometimes referred to as stilnovisti.
domestic tragedy A kind of *tragedy in which the leading characters belong to the middle class rather than to the royal or noble ranks usually represented in tragic drama, and in which the action concerns family affairs rather than public matters of state. A few English verse plays from Shakespeare’s time belong to this category: the chief examples are the anonymous Tragedy of Mr Arden of Feversham (1592), Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), and A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608, of uncertain authorship). Domestic tragedy was revived in prose by George Lillo with The London Merchant (1732) and his new version of Arden of Feversham (1759). Lillo’s influence led to the appearance of ‘domestic’ prose dramas in Germany with G. E. Lessing’s tragedy Miss Sara Sampson (1755), and in France with Diderot’s *drames. This tradition was renewed by the late 19th-century plays of Henrik Ibsen and subsequently in the American tragedies of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. Domestic tragedy is sometimes known as ‘bourgeois tragedy’.
donnée A French word for something ‘given’, sometimes used to refer to the original idea or starting-point from which a writer elaborates a complete work. This initial choice of subject-matter may be a very simple situation or a basic relationship between two characters which is then complicated as the work takes shape.
double dactyl A form of humorous light verse in two stanzas of four lines each, with ponderous dactylic rhythm. In each stanza the first three lines are double *dactyls, i.e. of six syllables with the stress on the first and fourth, while the final line is truncated to four syllables (the first and fourth again stressed). These final lines rhyme with each other, all the other lines being unrhymed. The devilish rules of this verse form additionally require that the first line should be a compound nonsense phrase (e.g. higgledy-piggledy), the second line the name of some person who happens to be blessed with a doubly dactylic appellation (e.g. Christopher Isherwood), and the sixth line a single six-syllable word (e.g. elephantiasis); otherwise it is all very simple.
Further reading: Jiggery-Pokery, eds. A. Hecht and J. Hollander (1967).
double entendre [doo-blahn-tah ndr] A French phrase for ‘double meaning’, adopted in English to denote a *pun in which a word or phrase has a second, usually sexual, meaning, as in Elizabethan uses of the verb ‘die’ referring both to death and to orgasm. Modern French usage prefers the form double entente. See also ambiguity, equivoque.
double rhyme A *rhyme on two syllables, the first stressed and the second unstressed (e.g. tarry/marry, adore us/chorus), also known as *feminine rhyme, and opposed to *masculine rhyme, which matches single stressed syllables.
drama The general term for performances in which actors impersonate the actions and speech of fictional or historical characters (or non-human entities) for the entertainment of an audience, either on a stage or by means of a broadcast; or a particular example of this art, i.e. a play. Drama is usually expected to represent stories showing situations of conflict between characters, although the *monodrama is a special case in which only one performer speaks. Drama is a major *genre of literature, but includes non-literary forms (in *mime), and has several dimensions that lie beyond the domain of the literary dramatist or playwright (see mise en scène). The major dramatic genres in the West are *comedy and *tragedy, but several other kinds of dramatic work fall outside these categories (see drame, history play, masque, melodrama, morality play, mystery play, tragicomedy). Dramatic poetry is a category of verse composition for theatrical performance; the term is now commonly extended, however, to non-theatrical poems that involve a similar kind of impersonation, as in the *closet drama and the *dramatic monologue.
Further reading: Simon Shepherd and Mick Wallis, Drama/Theatre/Performance (2004); John Lennard and Mary Luckhurst, The Drama Handbook (2002).
dramatic irony See irony.
dramatic monologue A kind of poem in which a single fictional or historical character other than the poet speaks to a silent ‘audience’ of one or more persons. Such poems reveal not the poet’s own thoughts but the mind of the impersonated character, whose personality is revealed unwittingly; this distinguishes a dramatic monologue from a *lyric, while the implied presence of an auditor distinguishes it from a *soliloquy. Major examples of this form in English are Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ (1842), Browning’s ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ (1855), and T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1917). Some plays in which only one character speaks, in the form of a *monologue or soliloquy, have also been called dramatic monologues; but to avoid confusion it is preferable to refer to these simply as monologues or as *monodramas.
Further reading: Glennis Byron, Dramatic Monologue (2003).
dramatis personae [dram-ă-tis per-soh-ny] The Latin phrase for ‘persons of the play’, used to refer collectively to the characters represented in a dramatic work (or, by extension, a *narrative work). This phrase is the conventional heading for a list of characters published in the text of a play or in a theatrical programme.
dramatization The process of *adaptation whereby a stage play or film drama is created from major elements (plot, characters, settings) derived from a non-dramatic literary or historical work, usually a novel, romance, short story, or biography; or the new dramatic work thereby created. This commonly involves some degree of simplification, e.g. by the omission of some minor characters or episodes, or the reduction in the number of settings; and sometimes it involves substantial transformations to the plot of the original work, e.g. by making a happy ending from a plot that originally lacked one. A second, more general and figurative sense of this term is the ‘bringing to life’ of some element of a written work by the use of any technique that involves the reader more closely with the story, e.g. by narration in the present tense or by prominent use of dialogue. These techniques are deemed dramatic in the sense that they give readers the impression of the story unfolding as ‘live’ action, as it would if presented as a stage play, rather than being recounted from the distance of retrospect. Since the late 19th century, critical discussion of the techniques of the novel, especially under the influence of Henry James, has often recommended that novelists dramatize their stories in such ways; and similar devices are used by historians and biographers.
dramaturgy [dram-ă-ter-ji] The theory and practice of *drama, now usually called dramatics. A dramaturge or dramaturgist is a playwright, or in some contexts (especially German) a literary adviser or theatrical director. Adjective: dramaturgic or dramaturgical.
drame [dramm] The French word for drama, applied more specifically by Denis Diderot and later writers to plays that are intermediate between *comedy and *tragedy. Diderot outlined his theory of the drame in the prefaces to his plays Le Fils naturel (1757) and Le Père de famille (1758), which both exemplify this moralizing blend of *sentimental comedy with *domestic tragedy, being serious in content but still ending happily. The category of drames came to include both the drame bourgeois of contemporary domestic problems in the middle classes, and, closer to tragedy and *melodrama, the drame romantique of the 19th century, of which Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830) was an influential example. See also tragicomedy.
dream vision (dream allegory) A kind of *narrative (usually but not always in verse) in which the narrator falls asleep and dreams the events of the tale. The story is often a kind of *allegory, and commonly consists of a tour of some marvellous realm, in which the dreamer is conducted and instructed by a guide, as Dante is led through hell by Virgil in his Divine Comedy (c.1320)—the foremost example of the form. The dream vision was much favoured by medieval poets, most of them influenced by the 13th-century Roman de la rose by the French poets Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung. In English, Chaucer devoted much of his early work to dream visions, including The Parlement of Foules, while Langland wrote the more substantial Piers Plowman; another fine 14th-century example is the anonymous poem Pearl. Some later poets have adopted the *conventions of the dream vision, as in Shelley’s The Triumph of Life (1824) and Wilfred Owen’s ‘The Show’ (1919). Significant examples in prose include Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) and William Morris’s vision of socialism in News from Nowhere (1890).
dub poetry A kind of poetry that emerged in Jamaica and England during the early 1970s, influenced by the rhythms of reggae music. The term was at first applied to the improvised ‘rapping’ of the Jamaican disc-jockeys known as ‘toasters’, who sang or recited their own words over the dub versions of reggae records (i.e. the purely instrumental re-mixed versions on the B-sides); but it has come to be adopted as a collective label for a tradition of popular poetry in the Jamaican (and black British) *vernacular or ‘Patwah’, inaugurated by Mutabaruka and Oku Onuora in Jamaica and by Linton Kwesi Johnson in England. Dub poetry includes *lyrics and *narrative poems on various subjects including protest against racism and police brutality, the celebration of sex, music, and ganja, and Rastafarian religious themes. Although primarily an oral poetry for public performance, it has increasingly appeared in print, notably in Johnson’s Dread Beat and Blood (1975) and Benjamin Zephaniah’s The Dread Affair (1985). Other leading dub poets include Michael Smith, Jean Binta Breeze, and Levi Tafari.
dumb show A short piece of silent action or *mime included in a play. A common device in Elizabethan and *Jacobean drama, it was sometimes used to summarize the succeeding spoken scene, as in the dumb show preceding the players’ main performance in Hamlet (Act III, scene ii).
duodecimo [dew-oh-des-i-moh] A small size of book in which the page size results from folding a standard printer’s sheet of paper into twelve leaves (i.e. 24 pages). Abbreviated as 12mo, it is thus sometimes called ‘twelvemo’. See also folio, octavo, quarto.
duple metre A term covering poetic *metres based upon a *foot of two syllables (a duple foot), as opposed to *triple metre, in which the predominant foot has three syllables. Most English metrical verse is in duple metre, either *iambic or *trochaic, and thus displays an alternation of stressed syllables with single unstressed syllables (see stress). In the context of classical Greek and Latin poetry, however, the term often refers to verse composed of *dipodies.
dystopia [dis-toh-piă] A modern term invented as the opposite of *utopia, and applied to any alarmingly unpleasant imaginary world, usually of the projected future. The term is also applied to fictional works depicting such worlds. A significant form of *science fiction and of modern *satire, dystopian writing is exemplified in H. G. Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980).