early modern period A period of European history broadly equivalent to that of the 16th and 17th centuries. The term has since the 1980s been increasingly adopted by historians, including literary historians, in preference to the once customary term *Renaissance. This is for a number of reasons: in part because ‘Renaissance’ tends to overemphasize the flourishing of art and learning in the Italian city-states of the 14th and 15th centuries at the expense both of non-artistic developments and of later developments beyond Italy (e.g. printing, Protestantism, and the European exploration of the Americas); in part also because ‘Renaissance’ carries with it an implied disparagement of the so-called ‘Middle Ages’, which the *humanists of the 16th century invented as a supposedly benighted period of ignorance between classical antiquity and their own time. So ‘early modern’ has been preferred as both more neutral and in chronological terms more precise. In literary terminology, this has meant that Shakespeare and others who were once habitually classed as Renaissance dramatists are now more often called early-modern dramatists.
eclogue [ek-log] A short *pastoral poem, often in the form of a shepherds’ *dialogue or a *soliloquy. The term was first applied to the ‘bucolic’ poems of Virgil, written in imitation of the *idylls of Theocritus; Virgil’s work became known as the Eclogues (42–37 bce). The form was revived in the Italian *Renaissance by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and appears in English in Spenser’s The Shephearde’s Calender (1579). Some later poets have extended the term to include non-pastoral poems in dialogue form.
ecocriticism A new subfield of literary and cultural enquiry that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, devoted to the investigation of relations between literature and the natural world and to the rediscovery and reinterpretation of ‘nature writings’ such as those of H. D. Thoreau and the poets of *Romanticism (sometimes categorized as ‘environmental literature’) in the light of recent ecological concerns. Ecocriticism is not a method of analysis or interpretation but a redefined area of research and rediscovery. Most of this work has been pursued in the USA, where a special emphasis has been given to Native American folklore and literature; but much ecocritical work has also been devoted to the English Romantic tradition, notably by the British literary historian Jonathan Bate in his books Romantic Ecology (1991) and The Song of the Earth (2000). Special varieties within this field include ecofeminist criticism.
Further reading: Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (2nd edn, 2011).
• Association for the Study of Literature and Environment.
écriture [ay-kri-tewr] The French word for ‘writing’. Where it appears in this form in English texts, it refers to one or more specific senses used by modern French theorists: 1. Writing as style, in Roland Barthes’s book Le Degré Zéro de l’Écriture (Writing Degree Zero, 1953), which attacks the illusion of a blank or neutral writing on the grounds that all writing has some style or *discourse that shapes our view of the world. 2. Writing as an intransitive activity, as proposed in Barthes’s later essay ‘Écrivains et écrivants’ (‘Writers and Authors’, 1960) which contrasts écrivants writing ‘about’ something for an ulterior purpose with écrivains for whom writing is self-directed, about itself as language. 3. Writing as *différance as opposed to the illusory authenticity of speech (see logocentrism) according to Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of *deconstruction. 4. Écriture féminine, or specifically gendered women’s writing, as conceived by Hélène Cixous, whose works of the 1970s discuss the sense in which women’s writing overflows the *binary oppositions of patriarchal logic.
Edda The Old Norse name given to two important collections of early Icelandic writing. The Elder or Poetic Edda is a collection of poems written down in the late 13th century but including works from an oral tradition going back to the 9th century; it contains heroic *narrative poems about Sigurd and other heroes, along with mythological tales of the Norse gods. The Younger or Prose Edda is a handbook of *poetics by Snorri Sturluson, written in the early 13th century; it also contains mythological lore. Adjective: Eddaic.
edition A printed version of a given work that may be distinguished from other versions either by its published format (e.g. paperback edition, popular edition, abridged edition), or by its membership of a complete batch of copies printed from the same setting of type, usually at the same time and place. These batches come to be numbered as first, second, third, etc. editions, each time a new version is set again from fresh type; where the same type is used to run off further copies, the batches are known as second, third, fourth, etc. ‘printings’ or ‘impressions’ of the relevant edition. The term is also applied rather differently to the works of an author as edited by a particular scholar or by a team of scholars sharing the same procedures, e.g. Christopher Ricks’s edition of Tennyson, or the Arden editions of Shakespeare. See also variorum edition.
Edwardian Belonging to or characteristic of the period from January 1901 to May 1910, when Edward VII was King of England, following the end of the *Victorian age. This at least is the chronologically strict sense of the term; but it is not unusual to find it extended to reach up to the next major historical landmark, the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914, or even beyond that. For example, Sandra Kemp and her co-editors in their reference work Edwardian Fiction (1997) in practice cover the period up to 1915. Since Edward’s reign was a comparatively short one, it does not have such a distinct literary identity as the *Elizabethan or Victorian ages do, and there are hardly any ‘Edwardian writers’ who were not also late-Victorian writers beforehand or *Georgian writers afterwards. Literary history therefore tends to treat the period either as a late extension of Victorian literature or as an interregnum before the arrival of *modernism. Influential essays by Virginia Woolf in the 1920s disparaged several of the foremost writers of the period, tending to use ‘Edwardian’ as a dismissive insult. The writers who flourished during this reign or whose work is most often associated with it include W. B. Yeats, Joseph Conrad, John Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, E. M. Forster, Bernard Shaw, J. M. Barrie, Rudyard Kipling, G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and John Masefield.
Further reading: Anthea Trodd, A Reader’s Guide to Edwardian Literature (1991).
egotistical sublime The phrase by which John Keats, in a letter to Richard Woodhouse (27 Oct. 1818), criticized what he felt to be the excessively self-centred quality of Wordsworth’s poetry, in contrast with his own ideal of *negative capability, which he found in the more anonymous imagination of Shakespeare. See also sublime.
eiron [I-ron] A *stock character in Greek *comedy, who pretends to be less intelligent than he really is, and whose modesty of speech contrasts with the boasting of the stock braggart or alazon. Our word *irony derives from the pretence adopted by the eiron.
ekphrasis (ecphrasis) (plural -ases) A verbal description of, or meditation upon, a non-verbal work of art, real or imagined, usually a painting or sculpture. In classical literature, the most famous case is the lengthy description in the 18th book of Homer’s Iliad of the decorated shield made for Achilles by the god Hephaestos, which in turn is the basis of W. H. Auden’s ekphrastic poem ‘The Shield of Achilles’ (1952). Auden’s earlier poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ (1939), a meditation on Brueghel’s Fall of Icarus, is a celebrated modern example, as is John Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ (1975; on a curious painting by Parmigianino). An earlier English classic of this genre is John Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (1820). Ekphrastic passages can be found in prose writings, too: for example, the nineteenth chapter of Charlotte Brontë’s novel Villette (1853) includes description of a painting of Cleopatra, whose voluptuous semi-nudity offends the heroine, Lucy Snowe.
Further reading: Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis (1992).
elegy An elaborately formal *lyric poem lamenting the death of a friend or public figure, or reflecting seriously on a solemn subject. In Greek and Latin verse, the term referred to the *metre of a poem (alternating dactylic *hexameters and *pentameters in couplets known as elegiac *distichs), not to its mood or content: love poems were often included. Likewise, John Donne applied the term to his amorous and satirical poems in *heroic couplets. But since Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ (1637), the term in English has usually denoted a *lament (although Milton called his poem a ‘monody’), while the adjective ‘elegiac’ has come to refer to the mournful mood of such poems. Two important English elegies that follow Milton in using *pastoral conventions are Shelley’s ‘Adonais’ (1821) on the death of Keats, and Arnold’s ‘Thyrsis’ (1867). This tradition of the pastoral elegy, derived from Greek poems by Theocritus and other Sicilian poets in the 3rd and 2nd centuries bce, evolved a very elaborate series of *conventions by which the dead friend is represented as a shepherd mourned by the natural world; pastoral elegies usually include many mythological figures such as the nymphs who are supposed to have guarded the dead shepherd, and the *muses invoked by the elegist. Tennyson’s In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850) is a long series of elegiac verses (in the modern sense) on his friend Arthur Hallam, while Whitman’s ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’ (1865) commemorates a public figure—Abraham Lincoln—rather than a friend; Auden’s ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’ (1939) does the same. In a broader sense, an elegy may be a poem of melancholy reflection upon life’s transience or its sorrows, as in Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (1751), or in Rilke’s Duino Elegies (1912–22). The elegiac stanza is a *quatrain of iambic pentameters rhyming abab, named after its use in Gray’s Elegy. In an extended sense, a prose work dealing with a vanished way of life or with the passing of youth may sometimes be called an elegy. See also dirge, graveyard poetry, monody, threnody.
Further reading: David Kennedy, Elegy (2007).
elision The slurring or suppression of a vowel sound or syllable, usually by fusing a final unstressed vowel with a following word beginning with a vowel or mute h, as in French l’homme or in Shakespeare’s ‘Th’expense of spirit’. In poetry, elision is used in order to fit the words to the *metre of a verse line (see synaeresis). Another form of contraction sometimes distinguished from elision is *syncope, in which a letter or syllable within a word is omitted (e.g. o’er for over, heav’n for heaven). Verb: elide. See also hiatus.
Elizabethan Belonging to or characteristic of the period 1558–1603 when Elizabeth I reigned as Queen of England, continuing the Tudor dynasty of her father Henry VIII but also bringing that dynasty to a close by dying childless. Despite attempts to revive the term at the start of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II (1952– ), it has not been widely adopted as a designation for the late 20th and early 21st centuries, so the name remains unambiguously applicable to the late 16th century. In English literature, that period has long been celebrated as an outstanding one in poetry, both dramatic and non-dramatic: it includes the work of Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, and Christopher Marlowe, along with the early work of Ben Jonson and the greater portion of Shakespeare’s (including all the English *history plays and most of the comedies along with Hamlet, but excluding the other great tragedies, which belong to the succeeding *Jacobean period). Landmarks in prose writing include the earlier works of Sir Francis Bacon, notably the Essays of 1597. A scholar whose work is devoted to this period is an Elizabethanist.
• Renaissance: The Elizabethan World: links to a range of study resources.
ellipsis (ellipse) (plurals -pses) The omission from a sentence of a word or words that would be required for complete clarity but which can usually be understood from the context. A common form of compression both in everyday speech and in poetry (e.g. Shakespeare, ‘I will [go] to Ireland’), it is used with notable frequency by T. S. Eliot and other poets of *modernism. The sequence of three dots (…) employed to indicate the omission of some matter in a text is also known as an ellipsis. Adjective: elliptical or elliptic. See also asyndeton, lacuna, paratactic.
éloge [ay-lohzh] The French term for a eulogy or *encomium, and in literary contexts especially for a solemn speech, usually published later as a kind of obituary tribute, given to one of the great French Academies (Académie Française, Académie des Sciences, etc.) in praise of a recently deceased academician; or, usually as a competitive exercise in pursuit of an academic prize, in commemoration of some illustrious person of a past age. A notable 18th-century practitioner was Antoine-Léonard Thomas, who won several prizes for éloges on historical figures, and wrote a study of this genre, the Essai sur les éloges (1773). Better-known French authors who composed éloges include Condorcet and d’Alembert.
embedded Enclosed within a *frame narrative as a tale-within-the-tale, like the pilgrims’ stories in the Canterbury Tales, which are embedded within Chaucer’s account of the journey to Canterbury.
emblem A picture with a symbolic meaning, as in heraldry or visual *allegory; or a simple kind of literary *symbol with a fixed and relatively clear significance. In the 16th and 17th centuries the term was applied to a popular kind of woodcut or engraving accompanied by a motto and a short verse explanation of its meaning. The vogue for the emblem books in which these were found began with Andrea Alciato’s Emblemata (1531) and culminated in England with the Emblems (1635) of Francis Quarles. Poets of this period often drew upon such works for their *imagery. The term emblem poem is sometimes applied to *pattern poems. Adjective: emblematic.
http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/
• University of Glasgow Emblem archive.
emendation A correction made to a *text in the belief that the author’s original wording has been wrongly altered, e.g. by scribal error, printer’s misreading, or the intervention of censorship. Unlike an amendment, which creates a fresh wording, an emendation aims to restore a lost original.
encomium [in-koh-mi-ŭm] (plural -mia) A composition in prose or verse written in praise of some person, event, or idea; a eulogy. Originally denoting a Greek choral song in praise of a victorious athlete, the term was later extended to include prose compositions devoted to praise, usually involving elaborate *rhetoric. Many *odes and *elegies are wholly or partly encomiastic. An author of encomia is an encomiast. See also panegyric.
Encyclopédistes The group of writers and philosophers led by Denis Diderot and Jean d’Alembert who contributed to the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonnée des sciences, des arts et des métiers which began to appear in 1751 under Diderot’s editorship, eventually running to 35 volumes including indexes. Other leading contributors were Condillac, Helvétius, Voltaire, and the Baron d’Holbach, who played host to the meetings of this loose association. The Encyclopédistes were the leading spirits of the *Enlightenment, hoping through this ambitious project to sweep away the superstitions of Church and State by offering a rational account of the universe. See also philosophes.
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/did
• The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project at University of Michigan, offering selected articles in English.
endecasyllabo (plural -syllabi ) The Italian hendecasyllabic verse line, the standard line for *epic verse, *sonnets, and many other forms including *blank verse, known in Italian as endecasyllabi sciolti (‘free hendecasyllables’). Italian versification counts the syllables of a verse line up to the last stressed syllable, which in the endecasyllabo is the tenth, and assumes one further unstressed syllable (see verso piano); so although the usual form of the line is truly hendecasyllabic, there are accepted ten- and twelve-syllable variants (see verso tronco). Apart from the required stress on the tenth syllable, a stress is expected on either the fourth or the sixth syllable, or both.
end-rhyme Rhyme occurring at the ends of verse lines, as opposed to *internal rhyme and ‘head-rhyme’ (*alliteration); the most familiar kind of rhyming.
end-stopped Brought to a pause at which the end of a verse line coincides with the completion of a sentence, clause, or other independent unit of *syntax. End-stopping, the opposite of *enjambment, gives verse lines an appearance of self-contained sense; it was favoured especially by Pope and other 18th-century poets in English in their *heroic couplets, and by the classical French poets in their *alexandrines. See also closed couplet.
Eng. Lit. A common abbreviation for English Literature as an academic subject or as a *canon of ‘set texts’ for study. This abbreviated usage often implies a disrespectful attitude to the traditional limits of the canon or to the routine examination cramming that has beset the subject.
enjambment (enjambement) The running over of the sense and grammatical structure from one verse line or couplet to the next without a punctuated pause. In an enjambed line (also called a ‘run-on line’), the completion of a phrase, clause, or sentence is held over to the following line so that the line ending is not emphasized as it is in an *end-stopped line. Enjambment is one of the resources available to poets in English *blank verse, but it appears in other verse forms too, even in *heroic couplets: Keats rejected the 18th-century *closed couplet by using frequent enjambment in Endymion (1818), of which the first and fifth lines are end-stopped while the lines in between are enjambed.
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Enlightenment, the A general term applied to the movement of intellectual liberation that developed in Western Europe from the late 17th century to the late 18th (the period often called the ‘Age of Reason’), especially in France and Switzerland. The Enlightenment culminated with the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the *Encyclopédistes, the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and the political ideals of the American and French Revolutions, while its forerunners in science and philosophy included Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Newton, and Locke. Its central idea was the need for (and the capacity of) human reason to clear away ancient superstition, prejudice, dogma, and injustice. Kant defined enlightenment (die Aufklärung) as man’s emancipation from his self-incurred immaturity. Enlightenment thinking encouraged rational scientific inquiry, humanitarian tolerance, and the idea of universal human rights. In religion, it usually involved the sceptical rejection of superstition, dogma, and revelation in favour of ‘Deism’—a belief confined to those universal doctrines supposed to be common to all religions, such as the existence of a venerable Supreme Being as creator. The advocates of enlightenment tended to place their faith in human progress brought about by the gradual propagation of rational principles, although their great champion Voltaire, more militant and less optimistic, waged a bitter campaign against the abuses of the ancien régime under the virtually untranslatable slogan écrasez l’infâme! (for which a rough equivalent would be ‘smash the system!’).
In English, the attitudes of the Enlightenment are found in the late 18th century, in the historian Edward Gibbon and the political writers Thomas Paine and William Godwin, as well as in the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. The flourishing of philosophy and science in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the 18th century is known as the Scottish Enlightenment; its leading figures included David Hume and Adam Smith. See also philosophes.
Further reading: Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment (1968); Roy Porter, Enlightenment (2000).
énoncé and énonciation Terms of a distinction observed in *structuralist theory, between what is said (the énoncé) and the act or process of saying it (the énonciation). The linguist Émile Benveniste defined énonciation as a process by which a speaker (or writer) adopts a position within language as an ‘I’ addressing a ‘you’ and perhaps referring to a ‘they’. Whenever I say ‘I’, however, the I who speaks can be distinguished (as the ‘subject of the énonciation’) from the ‘I’ that is thus spoken of (the ‘subject of the énoncé’). This splitting of the subject by language has been of great interest to theorists of *post-structuralism, notably the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. In literary analysis, the distinction leads to a further differentiation between *discours, in which first- and second-person pronouns and other markers of the situation of the énonciation are evident (see deixis), and the more ‘objective’ mode of *histoire in which the énonciation seems to have disappeared into or behind the énoncé. So while a *first-person narrative will show a split between the narrating I of the énonciation and the younger ‘I’ spoken of (énoncé) in the narrative, a *third-person narrative will often be able to disguise the distinction between the process of narration and its result.
entremés (plural -meses) The Spanish term for a short comical performance presented between the acts of a more serious drama. This form flourished on the Spanish stage in the first half of the 17th century. Numerous entremeses are attributed to Lope de Vega (1562–1635) and his associates, and a few to Cervantes.
envelope A structural device in poetry, by which a line or *stanza is repeated either identically or with little variation so as to enclose between its two appearances the rest (or part) of the poem: a stanza may begin and end with the same line, or a poem may begin and end with the same line or stanza. A well-known example is Blake’s poem ‘The Tiger’, in which the opening stanza is repeated as the last with only one change of wording. The effect of an envelope pattern is subtly different from that of a *refrain. The term envelope stanza has also been applied to stanzas not involving repeated lines but having a symmetrical *rhyme scheme (almost always abba) which encloses one set of rhymes within another, as in the *In Memoriam stanza.
envoi (envoy) The additional half-stanza that concludes certain kinds of French poetic form, principally the *ballade but also the *chant royal and the *sestina. Its length is usually four lines in a ballade, five or seven in a chant royal, and three in a sestina. In the ballade and chant royal it repeats the *metre and *rhyme scheme of the previous half-stanza, along with the poem’s *refrain, and is conventionally addressed to a prince or other noble personage.
epanalepsis A *figure of speech in which the initial word of a sentence or verse line reappears at the end. See also ploce.
épater les bourgeois [ay-pat-ay lay boor-zhwah] A French phrase that can be translated only rather clumsily, as ‘to shock the (respectable) middle-class citizens’. This has often been the conscious aim of the literary and artistic *avant-garde in Europe since the late 19th century, especially in the movements of *decadence, *Dada, and *Surrealism.
epic A long *narrative poem celebrating the great deeds of one or more legendary heroes, in a grand ceremonious style. The hero, usually protected by or even descended from gods, performs superhuman exploits in battle or in marvellous voyages, often saving or founding a nation—as in Virgil’s Aeneid (30–20 bce)—or the human race itself, in Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). Virgil and Milton wrote what are called ‘secondary’ or literary epics in imitation of the earlier ‘primary’ or traditional epics of Homer, whose Iliad and Odyssey (c.8th century bce) are derived from an oral tradition of recitation. They adopted many of the *conventions of Homer’s work, including the *invocation of a muse, the use of *epithets, the listing of heroes and combatants, and the beginning *in medias res (for other epic conventions, see epic simile, formulaic, machinery). The Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf (8th century ce) is a primary epic, as is the oldest surviving epic poem, the Babylonian Gilgamesh (c.3000 bce). In the *Renaissance, epic poetry (also known as ‘heroic poetry’) was regarded as the highest form of literature, and was attempted in Italian by Tasso in Gerusalemme Liberata (1575), and in Portuguese by Camoëns in Os Lusiadas (1572). Other important national epics are the Indian Mahābhārata (3rd or 4th century ce) and the German Nibelungenlied (c.1200). The action of epics takes place on a grand scale, and in this sense the term has sometimes been extended to long *romances, to ambitious *historical novels like Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1863–9), and to some large-scale film productions on heroic or historical subjects.
Further reading: Paul Innes, Epic (2013).
http://www.auburn.edu/~downejm/hyperepos.html
• Hyperepos: a resource for the study of epic.
epic simile An extended *simile elaborated in such detail or at such length as to eclipse temporarily the main action of a *narrative work, forming a decorative *digression. Usually it compares one complex action (rather than a simple quality or thing) with another: for example, the approach of an army with the onset of storm-clouds. Sometimes called a Homeric simile after its frequent use in Homer’s epic poems, it was also used by Virgil, Milton, and others in their literary epics.
epic theatre A revolutionary form of drama developed by the German playwright Bertolt Brecht from the late 1920s under the influence of Erwin Piscator. It involved rejecting the *Aristotelian models of dramatic unity in favour of a detached *narrative (hence ‘epic’) presentation in a succession of loosely related episodes interspersed with songs and commentary by a *chorus or narrator. As a Marxist, Brecht turned against the bourgeois tradition of theatre in which the audience identifies emotionally with psychologically rounded characters in a *well-made play; he aimed instead for an *alienation effect which would keep the audience coolly reflective and critical, partly by setting his plays in remote times and places, and also by stressing the contrived nature of the drama. The best examples of this drama are Brecht’s plays The Threepenny Opera (1928), Mother Courage (1941), and The Good Woman of Setzuan (1943).
epideictic Intended for display at public occasions. Epideictic *oratory was one of the three branches of classical *rhetoric, differing from legal argument or political persuasion in being devoted to public praise (or blame), as in funeral orations, *panegyrics, etc. Epideictic poetry is verse for special occasions, such as *epithalamia, many *odes, and other kinds of poem now usually referred to as *occasional verses. See also encomium.
epigone (epigon) [ep-ig-ohn] (plural -oni or -ones) An inferior or derivative follower of some more distinguished writer.
epigram A short poem with a witty turn of thought; or a wittily condensed expression in prose. Originally a form of monumental inscription in ancient Greece, the epigram was developed into a literary form by the poets of the *Hellenistic age and by the Roman poet Martial, whose Epigrams (86–102 ce) were often obscenely insulting. This epigram by Herrick is adapted from Martial:
Lulls swears he is all heart, but you’ll suppose
By his proboscis that he is all nose.
The art of the epigram was cultivated in the 17th and 18th centuries in France and Germany by Voltaire, Schiller, and others. In English, epigrams have been written by several poets since Ben Jonson’s Epigrams (1616), and are found in the prose of Oscar Wilde and other authors, who are thus known as epigrammatists. Some of the more pointed *closed couplets of Pope are called epigrams although they are not independent poems. Adjective: epigrammatic. See also aphorism.
epigraph A quotation or motto placed at the beginning of a book, chapter, or poem as an indication of its theme. The term can also refer to an inscription on a monument or coin. Epigraphy is the collective term for any body of epigraphs in either sense, and for the study of epigraphs. Adjective: epigraphic.
epilogue [ep-i-log] A concluding section of any written work. At the end of some plays in the age of Shakespeare and Jonson, a single character would address the audience directly, begging indulgence and applause; both the speech and the speaker were known as the epilogue, as in Rosalind’s closing address in As You Like It. Some novels have epilogues in which the characters’ subsequent fates are briefly outlined. Verb: epilogize. Adjective: epilogistic.
epinicion (epinikion; epinicium; epinician ode) A kind of Greek *ode composed in honour of a victor in the Olympic Games or equivalent festivals at Delphi and Corinth. Such odes were sung in chorus in a triadic structure of *strophe, antistrophe, and epode, by custom upon the return of the victor to his home city. They praised the city and the victor’s family along with him, also adding mythological narrative and some moral reflections. Examples survive by Pindar (see pindaric) and by his rival Bacchylides, sometimes praising the same victor (e.g. of the Delphic chariot-race of 470 bce).
epiphany [i-pif-ăni] The term used in Christian theology for a manifestation of God’s presence in the world. It was taken over by James Joyce to denote secular revelation in the everyday world, in an early version of his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) later published as Stephen Hero (1944). Here Joyce defined an epiphany as ‘a sudden spiritual manifestation’ in which the ‘whatness’ of a common object or gesture appears radiant to the observer. Much of Joyce’s fiction is built around such special moments of sudden insight, just as Wordsworth’s long autobiographical poem The Prelude (1850) is constructed around certain revelatory ‘spots of time’. Adjective: epiphanic.
Further reading: Morris Beja, Epiphany in the Modernist Novel (1971).
episodic Constructed as a narrative by a succession of loosely connected incidents rather than by an integrated *plot. *Picaresque novels and many medieval *romances have an episodic structure in which the only link between one episode and the next is the presence of the same central character.
episteme [ep-is-teem] (épistème [ay-pi-stem]) The accepted mode of acquiring and arranging knowledge in a given period. An episteme unites the various *discourses (legal, scientific, etc.) and guarantees their coherence within an underlying structure of implicit assumptions about the status of knowledge. The term has gained currency from the work of the French historian Michel Foucault, especially his Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things, 1966). Foucault attempted to show how an episteme based on the detection of resemblances was replaced in the 17th century by a new episteme of differences and distinctions, while the 19th century introduced a further episteme of historical evolution. Adjective: epistemic.
epistle [ip-iss-ŭl] A letter. As a literary form, the verse epistle is a poem in the form of a letter to a friend or patron in a familiar, conversational style. The theme of the most common kind (the *Horatian, moral, or familiar epistle) is usually some moral, philosophical, or literary subject. The chief classical model is Horace’s Epistulae (c.15 bce), written in *hexameters and treating various matters from the pleasures of his rural retreat to the state of Roman literature. The Horatian epistle was a favoured form among poets from the *Renaissance to the 18th century: Jonson’s ‘Epistle to Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland’ (1616) and Pope’s Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot (1735) are fine examples; more recent epistles in English include Auden’s New Year Letter (1940) and Derek Mahon’s ‘Beyond Howth Head’ (1975). A distinct tradition of ‘sentimental’ epistles derives from Ovid’s Heroides (c.20 bce); these are in the form of letters imagined as being addressed by heroines of legend to their husbands or lovers, and were imitated in English by Drayton in England’s Heroical Epistles (1597). Pope’s ‘Eloisa to Abelard’ is a later Ovidian epistle. Adjective: epistolary.
epistolary novel A novel written in the form of a series of letters exchanged among the characters of the story, with extracts from their journals sometimes included. A form of narrative often used in English and French novels of the 18th century, it has been revived only rarely since then, as in John Barth’s Letters (1979). Important examples include Richardson’s Pamela (1740–1) and Clarissa (1747–8), Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), and Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782).
Further reading: Joe Bray, The Epistolary Novel (2003).
epistrophe [i-pis-trŏfi] A rhetorical *figure by which the same word or phrase is repeated at the end of successive clauses, sentences, or lines, as in Whitman’s Song of Myself (1855):
The moth and the fish-eggs are in their place,
The bright suns I see and the dark suns I cannot see are in their place,
The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.
Adjective: epistrophic. See also anaphora, antistrophe.
epitaph A form of words in prose or verse suited for inscription on a tomb—although many facetious verses composed as epitaphs have not actually been inflicted on their victims’ graves. Epitaphs may take the form of appeals from the dead to passers-by, or of descriptions of the dead person’s merits. Many ancient Greek epitaphs survive in the Greek Anthology (c.920 ce), and both Johnson and Wordsworth wrote essays on the epitaph as an art. Adjective: epitaphic. See also lapidary.
epithalamion [epi-thă-lay-mion] (epithalamium) (plural -amia) A song or poem celebrating a wedding, and traditionally intended to be sung outside the bridal chamber on the wedding night. Some epithalamia survive from ancient literature, notably by Catullus, but the form flourished in the Renaissance: Edmund Spenser’s ‘Epithalamion’ (1595) is the most admired English model, but others were written by Sidney, Donne, Jonson, Marvell and Dryden. Later examples are those by Shelley and Auden. Adjective: epithalamic.
epithet An adjective or adjectival phrase used to define a characteristic quality or attribute of some person or thing. Common in historical titles (Catherine the Great, Ethelred the Unready), ‘stock’ epithets have been used in poetry since Homer. The Homeric epithet is an adjective (usually a compound adjective) repeatedly used for the same thing or person: the wine-dark sea and rosy-fingered Dawn are famous examples. In the transferred epithet (or *hypallage), an adjective appropriate to one noun is attached to another by association: thus in the phrase sick room it is not strictly the room that is sick but the person in it. Adjective: epithetic. See also antonomasia.
epizeuxis A rhetorical *figure by which a word is repeated for emphasis, with no other words intervening:
Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
(Tennyson)
epode [ep-ohd] The third part of the triadic structure used in the Pindaric *ode and in Greek dramatic *choruses, following the *strophe and *antistrophe and differing from them in length and metrical form. The term was also used for a Greek *metre invented by Archilochus (7th century bce), in which a longer line was followed by a shorter one (e.g. a *trimeter followed by a *dimeter); in this metre, adopted in Latin by Horace, the shorter line can also be called the epode. Adjective: epodic.
eponymous [ip-on-imŭs] Name-giving: a term applied to a real or fictitious person after whom a place, thing, institution, meal, or book is named. Thus Anna Karenina is called the eponymous heroine of Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina. The term is often extended beyond its strict sense to describe a character who is referred to indirectly (i.e. not by name) in the title of a work: thus Michael Henchard is called the eponymous hero of Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. An eponym is a name transferred from a person to a place or thing, either in its original form or as adapted (e.g. Bolivar or Bolivia). See also antonomasia.
epos The *epic poetry of an early oral tradition.
epyllion (plural -llia) A miniature *epic poem, resembling an epic in *metre and/or style but not in length. The term dates from the 19th century, when it was applied to certain shorter *narrative poems in Greek and Latin, usually dealing with a mythological love story in an elaborately digressive and allusive manner, as in Catullus’ poem on Peleus and Thetis. The nearest equivalents in English poetry are the Elizabethan erotic narratives such as Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (1598) and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593), although the term has also been applied to later non-erotic works including Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum (1853).
equivoque [ek-wi-vohk] A *pun or deliberately ambiguous expression. Adjective: equivocal. Verb: equivocate. See also ambiguity, double entendre, paronomasia.
erasure The placing of a concept under suspicion by marking the word for it as crossed (e.g. 
), in order to signal to readers that it is both unreliable and at the same time indispensable. The device of placing words sous rature (‘under erasure’) has sometimes been adopted in modern philosophy and criticism, notably in *deconstruction.
erlebte Rede The German term for *free indirect style.
ermetismo See hermeticism.
erotica The collective term for materials of an erotic nature, and particularly for prose or verse narratives of sexual fantasy ranging from explicitly *pornographic novels to jocular poems on sexual subjects, whether or not these are illustrated pictorially. The term was for a long time a booksellers’ euphemism for such forbidden materials. Within this broad category are works of genuine literary distinction categorized as erotic poetry, including some of the poems of Catullus and Ovid, Marlowe’s narrative poem Hero and Leander (completed by George Chapman, 1598), Shakespeare’s narrative poem Venus and Adonis (1593), and several French lyrics by Paul Verlaine. Erotic fiction in English includes John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748–9; popularly known as Fanny Hill), once an underground classic but now legitimately published in scholarly editions for students; and D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), a banned book until a landmark legal verdict in an obscenity trial in 1960. The much-disputed boundary between erotica and pornography is not open to settlement by dictionary definitions, but shifts according to the climate of public opinion. Since the 1960s, written texts have been not only less subject to sexual censorship but increasingly marginal to the image-dominated pornography industry proper; so that fiction that would once have counted as pornographic is now called erotica, and more than ever marketed in anthologies addressed to lesbians and heterosexual women as well as to men.
Erziehungsroman Another term for *Bildungsroman.
eschatology [esk-ă-tol-ŏji] The theological study or artistic representation of the end of the world. Eschatological writing is found chiefly in religious *allegories, but also in some *science fiction. The term should not be confused with *scatology, which is the scientific or humorous consideration of excrement. See also anagogical, apocalyptic.
espinela [es-pin-ay-ă] (espinella) Another name for the Spanish *decastich more often known as the *décima.
essay A short written composition in prose that discusses a subject or proposes an argument without claiming to be a complete or thorough exposition. A minor literary form, the essay is more relaxed than the formal academic dissertation. The term (‘trying out’) was coined by the French writer Michel de Montaigne in the title of his Essais (1580), the first modern example of the form. Francis Bacon’s Essays (1597) began the tradition of essays in English, of which important examples are those of Addison, Steele, Hazlitt, Emerson, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. The verse essays of Pope and of Robert Pinsky are rare exceptions to the prose norm.
esthetics See aesthetics.
estrangement See defamiliarization.
euphony [yoo-fŏni] A pleasing smoothness of sound, perceived by the ease with which the words can be spoken in combination. The use of long vowels, liquid consonants (l, r), and semi-vowels (w, y), contributes to euphony, along with the avoidance of adjacent stresses; the meaning of the words, however, has an important effect too. Euphony is the opposite of *cacophony. Adjective: euphonious.
euphuism [yoo-few-izm] An elaborately ornate prose style richly decorated with rhetorical *figures. The term comes from the popularity of two prose romances by John Lyly: Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), and its sequel Euphues and His England (1580). Lyly’s style, later parodied by Shakespeare among others, is marked by the repeated use of *antitheses reinforced by *alliteration, along with *rhetorical questions and various figures of repetition. It is also notable for its frequent use of *sententiae and elaborate *similes drawn from real and fabulous birds and beasts. This example comes from a *soliloquy spoken by the character Euphues:
Ah Euphues, into what misfortune art thou brought! In what sudden misery art thou wrapped! It is like to fare with thee as with the eagle, which dieth neither for age nor with sickness but with famine, for although thy stomach hunger, thy heart will not suffer thee to eat. And why shouldst thou torment thyself for one in whom is neither faith not fervency? Oh the counterfeit love of women! Oh inconstant sex! I have lost Philautus. I have lost Lucilla. I have lost that which I shall hardly find again: a faithful friend. Ah, foolish Euphues! Why didst thou leave Athens, the nurse of wisdom, to inhabit Naples, the nourisher of wantonness? Had it not been better for thee to have eaten salt with the philosophers in Greece than sugar with the courtiers in Italy?
Adjective: euphuistic.
exclamatio A rhetorical *figure in which high emotion is expressed in the form of a sudden exclamation, which is often an *apostrophe: ‘O Richard! York is too far gone with grief ’ (Shakespeare, Richard II).
excursus (plural -suses) A *digression in which some point is discussed at length; or an appendix devoted to detailed examination of some topic held over from the main body of the text. Adjective: excursive.
exegesis [eks-ĕ-jee-sis] (plural -geses) The interpretation or explanation of a *text. The term was first applied to the interpretation of religious scriptures (or oracles and visions), but has been borrowed by literary *criticism for the analysis of any poetry or prose. Literary scholars have likewise inherited some of the procedures of biblical exegesis, for instance the decoding of *allegories (see typology). A person who practises exegesis is an exegete. Adjective: exegetic or exegetical.
exemplum (plural -pla) A short tale used as an example to illustrate a moral point, usually in a sermon or other *didactic work. The form was cultivated in the late Middle Ages, for instance in Robert Mannyng of Brunne’s Handlyng Synne (early 14th century) and in Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale and Nun’s Priest’s Tale, as well as in many prose collections for the use of preachers. See also allegory, fable, parable.
existentialism [eksi-stench-ăl-izm] A current in European philosophy distinguished by its emphasis on lived human existence. Although it had an important precursor in the Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard in the 1840s, its impact was fully felt only in the mid-20th century in France and Germany: the German philosophers Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers prepared some of the ground in the 1920s and 1930s for the more influential work of Jean-Paul Sartre and the other French existentialists including Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In terms of its literary impact, the thought of Sartre has been the most significant, presented in novels (notably La Nausée (Nausea), 1938) and plays (including Les Mouches (The Flies), 1943) as well as in the major philosophical work L’Être et le néant (Being and Nothingness), 1943).
Sartrean existentialism, as distinct from the Christian existentialism derived from Kierkegaard, is an atheist philosophy of human freedom conceived in terms of individual responsibility and authenticity. Its fundamental premiss that ‘existence precedes essence’, implies that we as human beings have no given essence or nature but must forge our own values and meanings in an inherently meaningless or *absurd world of existence. Obliged to make our own choices, we can either confront the anguish (or *Angst) of this responsibility, or evade it by claiming obedience to some determining convention or duty, thus acting in ‘bad faith’. Paradoxically, we are ‘condemned to be free’. Similar themes can be found in the novels and essays of Camus; both authors felt that the absurdity of existence could be redeemed through the individual’s decision to become engagé (‘committed’) within social and political causes opposing fascism and imperialism. Some of the concerns of French existentialism are echoed in English in Thom Gunn’s early collection of poems, The Sense of Movement (1957), and in the fiction of Iris Murdoch and John Fowles. See also phenomenology.
Further reading: Kevin Aho, Existentialism: An Introduction (2014).
exordium The first part of a speech, according to the structure recommended in classical *rhetoric; or the introductory section of a written work of argument or exposition. Adjective: exordial.
experimentalism The commitment to exploring new concepts and representations of the world through methods that go beyond the established *conventions of literary tradition. Experimentalism was an important characteristic of 20th-century literature and art, in which successive *avant-garde movements arose in continual reaction against what they regarded as decayed or ossified forms of expression. For examples, see dada, expressionism, futurism, modernism, nouveau roman, surrealism, vorticism.
explication The attempt to analyse a literary work thoroughly, giving full attention to its complexities of form and meaning. The term has usually been associated with the kind of analysis practised in the USA by *New Criticism and in Britain under the name of *practical criticism or *close reading. Explication in this sense is normally a detailed explanation of the manner in which the language and formal structure of a short poem work to achieve a unity of *form and *content; such analysis tends to emphasize ambiguities and complexities of the text while putting aside questions of historical or biographical context. A less thorough form of analysis is the French school exercise known as explication de texte, in which students give an account of a work’s meaning and its stylistic features. Adjective: explicatory or explicative. See also criticism, exegesis, hermeneutics.
exposition The setting forth of a systematic explanation of or argument about any subject; or the opening part of a play or story, in which we are introduced to the characters and their situation, often by reference to preceding events. Adjective: expository. Verb: expound.
expressionism A general term for a mode of literary or visual art which, in extreme reaction against *realism or *naturalism, presents a world violently distorted under the pressure of intense personal moods, ideas, and emotions: image and language thus express feeling and imagination rather than represent external reality. Although not an organized movement, expressionism was an important factor in the painting, drama, poetry, and cinema of German-speaking Europe between 1910 and 1924. The term did not come into use until 1911, but has since been applied retrospectively to some important forerunners of expressionist technique, going as far back as Georg Büchner’s plays of the 1830s and Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings of the 1880s; other significant precursors include the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, the Swedish playwright August Strindberg (in his Dream Play, 1902), and the German playwright Frank Wedekind. Within the period 1910–24, consciously expressionist techniques of abstraction were promoted by Wassily Kandinsky and the ‘Blue Rider’ group of painters, while in drama various anti-naturalist principles of abstract characterization and structural discontinuity were employed in the plays of Ernst Toller, Georg Kaiser, and Walter Hasenclever; these had some influence on the early plays of Bertolt Brecht, notably Baal (1922). The poetry of Georg Trakl, Gottfried Benn, August Stramm, and Franz Werfel displayed comparable distortions of accepted structures and syntax in favour of symbolized mood. The nightmarish labyrinths of Franz Kafka’s novels are the nearest equivalent in prose fiction.
German expressionism is best known today through the wide influence of its cinematic masterpieces: Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926). Along with their much-imitated visual patterns of sinister shadows, these films reveal a shared obsession with automatized, trance-like states, which appears in expressionist literature too: a common concern of expressionism is with the eruption of irrational and chaotic forces from beneath the surface of a mechanized modern world. Some of its explosive energies issued into *Dada, *Vorticism, and other *avant-garde movements of the 1920s. In the English-speaking world, expressionist dramatic techniques were adopted in some of the plays of Eugene O’Neill and Sean O’Casey, and in the ‘Circe’ episode of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922); in poetry, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) may be considered expressionist in its fragmentary rendering of postwar desolation. In a further sense, the term is sometimes applied to the belief that literary works are essentially expressions of their authors’ moods and thoughts; this has been the dominant assumption about literature since the rise of *Romanticism.
Further reading: Neil H. Donahue (ed.), A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism (2002).
expurgate To remove objectionable (especially sexual or politically sensitive) passages from a text. Noun: expurgation. See also bowdlerize, unexpurgated.
extempore [iks-tem-pǒ-ri] Composed on the spur of the moment, without preparation. Some kinds of oral poetry involve a degree of extemporization. Verb: extemporize.
extravaganza A theatrical entertainment consisting of a mild *burlesque of some *myth or fairy tale enlivened by *puns, music, dance, and elaborate spectacle. The form was made popular in the mid-19th century by J. R. Planché, and influenced the development both of *pantomime and of the light operas of Gilbert and Sullivan. The term is now applied to any lavishly staged musical *revue.
eye rhyme A kind of *rhyme in which the spellings of paired words appear to match but without true correspondence in pronunciation: dive/give, said/maid. Some examples, like love/prove, were originally true rhymes but have become eye rhymes through changes in pronunciation: these are known as ‘historical rhymes’. See also consonance, half-rhyme, poetic licence.