fable A brief tale in verse or prose that conveys a moral lesson, usually by giving human speech and manners to animals and inanimate things (see beast fable). Fables often conclude with a moral, delivered in the form of an *epigram. A very old form of story related to *folklore and *proverbs, the fable in Europe descends from tales attributed to Aesop, a Greek slave in the 6th century bce: his fable of the fox and the grapes has given us the phrase ‘sour grapes’. An Indian collection, the Bidpai, dates back to about 300 ce. The French fabulist La Fontaine revived the form in the 17th century with his witty verse adaptations of Greek fables. More recent examples are Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories (1902), James Thurber’s Fables of Our Time (1940), and George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945). Adjectives: fabular, fabulous. See also allegory, exemplum.
fabliau [fab-li-oh] (plural -liaux) A coarsely humorous short story in verse, dealing in a bluntly realistic manner with *stock characters of the middle class involved in sexual intrigue or obscene pranks. Fabliaux flourished in France in the 12th and 13th centuries, and were usually written in *octosyllabic couplets; some 150 French examples survive, most of them anonymous. They were imitated in English by Chaucer (in rhyming *pentameters), notably in his Miller’s Tale and Reeve’s Tale. Many fabliaux involve *satire against the clergy. A standard plot is the cuckolding of a slow-witted husband by a crafty and lustful student.
Further reading: John Hines, The Fabliau in English (1993).
fabula The term used in *Russian Formalism for the ‘raw material’ of *story events as opposed to the finished arrangement of the *plot (or sjuzet); the distinction reappears in later French *narratology as that between histoire (story) and récit (account). In Latin literature, fabula (plural -lae) is also the general name for various kinds of play, of which the most significant *genres are fabula Atellana or Atellan *farce, and fabula palliata or Roman *New Comedy.
fabulation A term used by some modern critics for a mode of modern fiction that openly delights in its self-conscious verbal artifice, thus departing from the conventions of *realism. Robert Scholes in his book The Fabulators (1967) describes fabulation in the works of John Barth, Kurt Vonnegut, and others as an essentially comic and *allegorical mode of fiction that often adopts the forms of *romance or of the *picaresque novel. See also magic realism, metafiction, postmodernism.
faction A short-lived *portmanteau word denoting works that present verifiably factual contents in the form of a fictional novel, as in Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night (1968). Although still sometimes used by journalists, the term suffers from the disadvantage of already meaning something else (i.e. a conspiratorial group within a divided organization), so the preferred term is *New Journalism.
fairy tale (fairy story) A traditional *folktale adapted and written down for the entertainment of children, usually featuring *marvellous events and characters, although fairies as such are less often found in them than princesses, talking animals, ogres, and witches. The term is a direct translation of the French conte de fée, the writing down of fairy tales having emerged from a fad for such stories among the French aristocracy of the late 17th century. Many of these stories are of incalculable antiquity, some deriving from Sanskrit, Chinese, Arabic, and Persian traditions, and a few had appeared in early *chapbooks and *romances, but the first major literary collection was Charles Perrault’s Histoires, ou contes du temps passé (1697, better known as Contes de ma mère l’Oye or Mother Goose’s Tales), containing ‘The Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Cinderella’, ‘Little Red Riding-Hood’, ‘Bluebeard’, ‘Puss in Boots’, and others. ‘Beauty and the Beast’ appeared in 1756 from the pen of Marie de Beaumont, a French governess working in England. Such stories began to be used as the basis for *pantomimes from the late 18th century, and were soon joined by the anonymous early 19th-century English tale ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’.
The fairy-tale canon was expanded in the early 19th century by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, whose researches into folklore resulted in their written versions of 200 Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812–14) (see märchen), including ‘Rapunzel’, ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarves’, ‘Hansel and Gretel’, and ‘Rumpelstiltskin’. The third major author of modern fairy tales was the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen, who published his first collection in 1835, following this with ‘The Ugly Duckling’ (1845) and dozens of others in a cycle completed in 1874. Andrew Lang then collected various fairy tales from around the world in his series of Fairy Books (1899–1910).
Further reading: Andrew Teverson, Fairy Tale (2013).
falling rhythm (descending rhythm) A rhythmical effect often found in metrical verse in which the unstressed syllables are perceived as being attached to the preceding stressed syllables rather than to those following. In the terms of classical *prosody, lines composed of *dactyls or *trochees may be marked by falling rhythm, although this is not inevitable. Falling rhythm is less common in English verse than its opposite, *rising rhythm.
fancy The mind’s ability to produce new combinations of images or ideas, usually in a more limited, superficial, or whimsical manner than that achieved by the *imagination proper. Before S. T. Coleridge’s distinction between the faculties of fancy and imagination, the terms were often synonymous, ‘fancy’ being an abbreviation of ‘fantasy’. Coleridge, in Biographia Literaria (1817), argued that the fancy was merely ‘a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space’ and was thus able to combine and reassemble ready-made images in new spatial and temporal arrangements, but not able to dissolve and unite them in new creations as the imagination could.
fantastic, the A mode of fiction in which the possible and the impossible are confounded so as to leave the reader (and often the narrator and/or central character) with no consistent explanation for the story’s strange events. Tzvetan Todorov, in his Introduction à la littérature fantastique (1970; translated as The Fantastic, 1973), argues that fantastic narratives involve an unresolved hesitation between the supernatural explanation available in *marvellous tales and the natural or psychological explanation offered by tales of the *uncanny. The literature of the fantastic flourished in 19th-century ghost stories and related fiction: Henry James’s mysterious tale The Turn of the Screw (1898) is a classic example.
fantasy A general term for any kind of fictional work that is not primarily devoted to realistic representation of the known world. The category includes several literary *genres (e.g. *dream vision, *fable, *fairy tale, *romance, *science fiction) describing imagined worlds in which magical powers and other impossibilities are accepted. Recent theorists of fantasy have attempted to distinguish more precisely between the self-contained magical realms of the *marvellous, the psychologically explicable delusions of the *uncanny, and the inexplicable meeting of both in the *fantastic.
Further reading: Brian Attebery, Strategies of Fantasy (1992).
farce A kind of *comedy that inspires hilarity mixed with panic and cruelty in its audience through an increasingly rapid and improbable series of ludicrous confusions, physical disasters, and sexual innuendos among its *stock characters. Farcical episodes of buffoonery can be found in European drama of all periods since Aristophanes, notably in medieval France, where the term originated to describe short comic *interludes; but as a distinct form of full-length comedy farce dates from the 19th century, in the works of Eugène Labiche in the 1850s, and of A. W. Pinero and Georges Feydeau in the 1880s and 1890s. Brandon Thomas’s Charley’s Aunt (1892) is recognized as a classic of the *genre. The bedroom farce, involving bungled adultery in rooms with too many doors, has had prolonged commercial success in London’s *West End since the 1920s, when Ben Travers perfected the genre at the Aldwych Theatre. Joe Orton used its *conventions to create a disturbing kind of *satire in What the Butler Saw (1969), while the Italian playwright-activist Dario Fo used them for political satire in his Morte accidentale di un anarchico (1970). A writer of farces is sometimes called a farceur, although in everyday French usage this usually means a joker.
Further reading: Jessica Milner Davis, Farce (2nd edn, 2003).
Fastnachtspiel (plural -spiele) A kind of short popular drama performed by townsfolk in Germany during the Shrove Tuesday (Fastnacht) festivals in the 16th century. Most surviving examples are from Nuremburg, where Hans Sachs (1494–1576) was the foremost author of such plays.
feminine ending The ending of a metrical verse line on an unstressed syllable, as in the regular *trochaic line. In English iambic *pentameters, a feminine ending involves the addition of an eleventh syllable, as in Shakespeare’s famous line
To be, or not to be; that is the question
In French, a feminine line is one ending with a mute e, es, or ent. A feminine *caesura is a pause following an unstressed syllable, usually in the middle of a line. See also metre, stress.
feminine rhyme (double rhyme) A *rhyme on two syllables, the first stressed and the second unstressed (e.g. mother/another), commonly found in many kinds of poetry but especially in humorous verse, as in Byron’s Don Juan:
Christians have burned each other, quite persuaded
That all the Apostles would have done as they did.
*Masculine rhyme, on the other hand, does not employ unstressed syllables. Where more than one word is used in one of the rhyming units, as in the example above, the rhyme is sometimes called a ‘mosaic rhyme’. In French verse, the alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes became the norm during the 16th century.
FEMINIST CRITICISM
A mode of literary and cultural discussion and reassessment inspired by modern feminist thought, from which has developed since the 1970s not a method of interpretation but an arena of debate about the relations between literature and the socio-cultural subordination borne by women as writers, readers, or fictional characters within a male-dominated (‘patriarchal’) social order. This tradition, mostly American and British, honours certain earlier pioneers of such discussion, notably Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf (in her long essays A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), sometimes regarded as the founding documents of the movement), and Simone de Beauvoir (whose Le Deuxième Sexe (1949, translated as The Second Sex) enjoys a similar status). In its recognizable modern form, however, the founding texts are Mary Ellmann’s Thinking About Women (1968), a wittily satirical survey of male writers’ stereotypes of women, and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970), an enraged polemic against the alleged misogyny of D. H. Lawrence and other modern male authors. These works inspired others to extend the variety of feminist criticism that came to be known as ‘Images-of-Women’ study, e.g. in the essays collected in Susan K. Cornillon (ed.), Images of Women in Fiction (1972) or in Judith Fetterley’s The Resisting Reader (1978).
A major redirection of attention away from the sins of male authors and towards the virtues of women’s writing (often regarded as having been unjustly neglected by a patriarchal critical establishment) was soon launched by a second wave of critics and literary historians, notably Ellen Moers in Literary Women (1976), Elaine Showalter in A Literature of Their Own (1977), and Sandra M. Gilbert with Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). This form of feminist criticism, termed ‘*gynocritics’ by Showalter, attempts to reconstruct an occluded tradition of women’s writing in which female authors are inspired by their ‘foremothers’ rather than by male authors; it meanwhile reinterprets women’s writings as coded expressions of their rage or frustration against patriarchy.
Since the 1980s, these early styles of American feminist criticism, based on ‘female experience’ and literary fidelity or infidelity to it, have come under some challenge both from women critics speaking for ethnic and sexual minorities with different experiences, and from feminist scholars more inclined to draw upon Marxist, psychoanalytic, or *poststructuralist thinking (despite counter-charges that such *Theory is in effect ‘male’ theory). In this latter group, some preferred to pursue the distinct agenda of so-called ‘French feminism’ in the writings of Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous (who were usually wary of styling themselves as feminists), with their theories of gendered language and of *écriture feminine; others grew sceptical of what they saw as ‘essentialist’ models of sexual difference (see gynesis). Feminist criticism and the allied project of feminist literary history have thus become highly variegated and hyphenated (as ecofeminist criticism, vegetarian-feminist criticism, etc.).
Further reading: Mary Eagleton (ed.), Feminist Literary Theory (2nd edn, 1995); Ruth Robbins, Literary Feminisms (2000); Ellen Rooney (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory (2006).
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism
• Feminist theory site at Virginia Tech.
Festschrift (plural -iften) A volume of essays written by the disciples of an eminent scholar or writer, to whom it is presented as a tribute on a special occasion such as a birthday or retirement. The custom and the term (‘celebration-writing’) originated in German universities in the 19th century.
feuilleton [fer-yĕ-ton] A French term for the literary section of a daily newspaper: originally the lower part of the front page, devoted to drama criticism, but later a separate page or pages. The roman-feuilleton is a novel *serialized in a newspaper; this form flourished in France in the 1840s, bringing great financial rewards to Balzac, George Sand, Dumas père, and other authors.
fiaba (plural fiabe) The Italian word for a *fable or *folktale, often with the more specific sense of a *fairy tale, as in Italo Calvino’s much-admired retelling of Fiabe italiane (1956).
ficelle [fi-sell] The term used by Henry James in the prefaces to some of his novels to denote a fictional character whose role as *confidant or confidante is exploited as a means of providing the reader with information while avoiding direct address from the *narrator: in James’s novel The Ambassadors (1903), Maria Gostrey is the ficelle to whom the *protagonist Lambert Strether discloses confidentially his opinions about the complex state of affairs in which he is involved. In French, the word denotes a string used to manipulate a puppet, or more broadly, any underhand trick.
fiction The general term for invented stories, now usually applied to novels, short stories, novellas, romances, fables, and other *narrative works in prose, even though most plays and narrative poems are also fictional. The adjective fictitious tends to carry the unfavourable sense of falsehood, whereas ‘fictional’ is more neutral, and the archaic adjective fictive, revived by the poet Wallace Stevens and others, has a more positive sense closer to ‘imaginative’ or ‘inventive’. Verb: fictionalize. See also metafiction.
figure (figure of speech) An expression that departs from the accepted literal sense or from the normal order of words, or in which an emphasis is produced by patterns of sound. Such figurative language is an especially important resource of poetry, although not every poem will use it; it is also constantly present in all other kinds of speech and writing, even though it usually passes unnoticed. The ancient theory of *rhetoric named and categorized dozens of figures, drawing a rough and often disputed distinction between those (known as *tropes or figures of thought) that extend the meaning of words, and those that merely affect their order or their impact upon an audience (known as figures of speech, schemes, or rhetorical figures). The most important tropes are *metaphor, *simile, *metonymy, *synecdoche, *personification, and *irony; others include *hyperbole (overstatement), *litotes (understatement), and *periphrasis (circumlocution). The minor rhetorical figures can emphasize or enliven a point in several different ways: by placing words in contrast with one another (*antithesis), by repeating words in various patterns (*anadiplosis, *anaphora, *antistrophe, *chiasmus), by changing the order of words (*hyperbaton), by missing out conjunctions (*asyndeton), by changing course or breaking off in mid-sentence (*anacoluthon, *aposiopesis), or by assuming special modes of address (*apostrophe) or enquiry (*rhetorical question). A further category of figures, sometimes known as ‘figures of sound’, achieves emphasis by the repetition of sounds, as in *alliteration, *assonance, and *consonance.
Further reading: Anthony Quinn, Figures of Speech (1982).
http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/silva
• Silva Rhetoricae (The Forest of Rhetoric): lists and describes a huge number of figures.
fin de siècle [fan dĕ si-airkl] The French phrase (‘end of century’) often used to refer to the characteristic world-weary mood of European culture in the 1880s and 1890s, when writers and artists like Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, and the French *symbolists, under the slogan ‘*art for art’s sake’, adopted a ‘decadent’ rejection of any moral or social function for art. Reacting against *realism and *naturalism, they sought a pure beauty entirely removed from the imperfections of nature and from the drabness of contemporary society. See also aestheticism, decadence.
first-person narrative A narrative or mode of storytelling in which the *narrator appears as the ‘I’ recollecting his or her own part in the events related, either as a witness of the action or as an important participant in it. The term is most often used of novels such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), in which the narrator is also the central character. The term does not mean that the narrator speaks only in the first person, of course: in discussions of other characters, the third person will be used. See also autobiografiction.
fit An obsolete term for a *canto or division of a long poem. The 14th-century English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is composed of four fits.
fixed forms The general term covering the various kinds of poem in which the *metre and *rhyme scheme are governed by a prescribed pattern. The term usually refers to a class of medieval French verse forms including the *ballade, *chant royal, *rondeau, *sestina, *triolet, and *villanelle; but there are some other fixed poetic forms, the most significant being the *sonnet, the *haiku, and the *limerick. Various established *stanza forms such as *ottava rima and *rhyme royal may also be considered as ‘fixed’.
flyting A slanging match in verse, usually between two poets who insult each other alternately in profanely abusive verses. The finest example from the strong Scottish tradition is the early 16th-century Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie. The term has also been applied to the boasting matches between warriors in some *epic poems. See also amoebean verses, débat, invective.
focalization The term used in modern *narratology for ‘*point of view’; that is, for the kind of perspective from which the events of a story are witnessed. Events observed by a traditional *omniscient narrator are said to be non-focalized, whereas events witnessed within the story’s world from the constrained perspective of a single character, the focalizer, are ‘internally focalized’. The nature of a given narrative’s focalization is to be distinguished from its narrative ‘voice’, as seeing is from speaking.
foil A character whose qualities or actions serve to emphasize those of the *protagonist (or of some other character) by providing a strong contrast with them. Thus in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the passive obedience of Jane’s school-friend Helen Burns makes her a foil to the rebellious heroine.
folio A large size of book in which the page size results from folding a standard printer’s sheet of paper in half, forming two leaves (i.e. four pages). The collected editions of Shakespeare’s plays published after his death, as distinct from the earlier unauthorized *quarto editions, are often referred to as the Folios: the First Folio was published by his colleagues Heming and Condell in 1623, as Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. Published according to the true Originall Copies, and three others followed in 1632, 1663, and 1685.
http://firstfolio.bodleian.ox.ac.uk
• The Bodleian First Folio: digital facsimile.
folklore A modern term for the body of traditional customs, superstitions, stories, dances, and songs that have been adopted and maintained within a given community by processes of repetition not reliant on the written word. Along with *folk songs and *folktales, this broad category of cultural forms embraces all kinds of *legends, *riddles, jokes, *proverbs, games, charms, omens, spells, and rituals, especially those of pre-literate societies or social classes. Those forms of verbal expression that are handed on from one generation or locality to the next by word of mouth are said to constitute an *oral tradition. Adjective: folkloric.
folk song A song of unknown authorship that has been passed on, preserved, and adapted (often in several versions) in an *oral tradition before later being written down or recorded. Folk songs usually have an easily remembered melody and a simple poetic form such as the *quatrain. The most prominent categories are the narrative *ballad and the *lyric love-song, but the term also covers lullabies, *carols, and various songs to accompany working (e.g. the sea shanty), dancing, and drinking.
folktale A story passed on by word of mouth rather than by writing, and thus partly modified by successive re-tellings before being written down or recorded. The category includes *legends, *fables, jokes, *tall stories, and *fairy tales or *Märchen. Many folktales involve mythical creatures and magical transformations.
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/folktexts.html
• Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts: large archive of folktales at University of Pittsburgh.
foot (plural feet) A group of syllables taken as a unit of poetic *metre in traditional *prosody, regardless of word-boundaries. As applied to English verse, the foot is a certain fixed combination of syllables, each of which is counted as being either stressed (●) or unstressed (○); but in Greek and Latin *quantitative verse, from which the various names of feet are derived, it is a combination of long (−) and short (⌣) syllables. While the concept of the foot is clearly applicable to the quantitative principles of Greek and Latin verse, its widespread use in the analysis of the very different stress-based patterns of English verse is often very unhelpful and misleading, especially in *accentual verse. It is worth remembering that the foot is only an abstract unit of analysis in *scansion, not a substantial rhythmic entity.
The most common feet in English prosody are the *iamb (○●: to be) and the *trochee (●○: beat it); these disyllabic or ‘duple’ feet are the units of metrical lines described as iambic and trochaic respectively, according to the perceived predominance of one or other foot in the line. Less common in English are the trisyllabic or ‘triple’ feet known as the *dactyl (●○○: heavenly) and the *anapaest (○○●: to the wall); again, these feet when predominant in a line give their names to dactylic and anapaestic metres. Two other feet are sometimes referred to in English prosody, although they do not form the basis for whole lines: these are the *spondee (●●: home-made) and the *pyrrhic (○○: in a), which are both regarded as devices of metrical *substitution. There are several other Greek quantitative feet, for which equivalents are occasionally found or fabricated in English: these include the *amphibrach (⌣−⌣), the *amphimacer or cretic (− ⌣ −), the *choriamb (− ⌣⌣ −), the *ionic (⌣⌣−− or −−⌣⌣), the *paeon (−⌣⌣⌣ or ⌣⌣⌣−), and the epitrite (− ⌣−− or −−⌣−). In traditional prosody, it is the number of feet in a line that determines the description of its length: thus a line of four feet is called a *tetrameter, while a line of five feet is a *pentameter.
foregrounding Giving unusual prominence to one element or property of a *text, relative to other less noticeable aspects. According to the theories of *Russian Formalism, literary works are special by virtue of the fact that they foreground their own linguistic status, thus drawing attention to how they say something rather than to what they say: poetry ‘deviates’ from everyday speech and from prose by using *metre, surprising *metaphors, *alliteration, and other devices by which its language draws attention to itself. See also defamiliarization, literariness.
foreword A short introductory essay placed at the beginning of a book, and usually written by somebody other than the book’s author, e.g. by a translator or by a better-known writer introducing a new author to the public. Sometimes such a piece is placed at the book’s end and is, logically, called an afterword.
form A critical term with a confusing variety of meanings. It can refer to a *genre (e.g. ‘the short story form’), or to an established pattern of poetic devices (as in the various *fixed forms of European poetry), or, more abstractly, to the structure or unifying principle of design in a given work. Since the rise of *Romanticism, critics have often contrasted the principle of *organic form, which is said to evolve from within the developing work, with ‘mechanic form’, which is imposed as a predetermined design. When speaking of a work’s formal properties, critics usually refer to its structural design and patterning, or sometimes to its style and manner in a wider sense, as distinct from its *content.
Further reading: Angela Leighton, On Form (2007).
formalism In the most general sense, the cultivation of artistic technique at the expense of subject-matter, either in literary practice or in criticism. The term has been applied, often in a derogatory sense, to several kinds of approach to literature in which *form is emphasized in isolation from a work’s meanings or is taken as the chief criterion of aesthetic value. In modern critical discussion, however, the term frequently refers more specifically to the principles of certain Russian and Czech theorists: for this sense, see russian formalism. In the context of modern American poetry, the term has the specific sense of adherence to traditional metres and verse forms, as with the work of Howard Nemerov, Richard Wilbur, and the later poets of the *New Formalism, in contrast with the more widely adopted use of *free verse.
formulaic Characterized by the repetition of certain stock phrases, known as formulae. Many orally composed poems, especially *epics, are formulaic in that they repeatedly use the same *epithets and the same forms of introduction to episodes and speeches. In another sense, a work may be called formulaic if it conforms in a predictable way to the established patterns of a *genre.
four-hander A play written for only four speaking parts, such as Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land (1975).
fourteener A line of verse containing fourteen syllables. It usually has seven stresses in an *iambic metre, in which case it can also be called an iambic *heptameter. Fourteeners, usually in rhyming *couplets or *poulter’s measure, were often used by English poets in the 15th and 16th centuries, but rarely after George Chapman’s famous translation of the Iliad (1611), from which this fourteener comes:So Agamemnon did sustain the torment of his wound.
In couplets, fourteeners strongly resemble the *ballad metre.
frame narrative (frame story) A story in which another story is enclosed or *embedded as a ‘tale within the tale’, or which contains several such tales. Prominent examples of frame narratives enclosing several tales are Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353) and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c.1390), while some novels such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) employ a narrative structure in which the main action is relayed at second hand through an enclosing frame story. See also diegesis.
Frankfurt School A group of neo-Marxist social theorists and philosophers associated with the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) which was established at Frankfurt University in 1923, driven into exile in 1933, with a base at Columbia University, New York, from 1936, and returned to Frankfurt in 1950. The group espoused a non-dogmatic version of Marxism that it called *Critical Theory, incorporating various influences from modern traditions of philosophy, sociology, and psychology. Early members of the group included Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse. More marginal but supported by the Institute and later regarded as a major figure was the essayist Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), whose influence in literary theory has generally been felt more strongly than that of the rest of the group, notably through his essays selected in English as Illuminations (1968). Adorno’s influence has been felt in part through his analyses of the ‘culture industry’ as a means of social control. In the post-1950 phase of the school, the leading figure has been the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who has been notable for defending the tradition of the *Enlightenment against the inroads of *postmodernism.
Further reading: Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School (1994).
free indirect style (free indirect discourse) A manner of presenting the thoughts or utterances of a fictional character as if from that character’s point of view by combining grammatical and other features of the character’s ‘direct speech’ with features of the narrator’s ‘indirect’ report. Direct discourse is used in the sentence She thought, ‘I will stay here tomorrow’, while the equivalent in indirect discourse would be She thought that she would stay there the next day. Free indirect style, however, combines the person and tense of indirect discourse (‘she would stay’) with the indications of time and place appropriate to direct discourse (‘here tomorrow’), to form a different kind of sentence: She would stay here tomorrow. This form of statement allows a *third-person narrative to exploit a first-person *point of view, often with a subtle effect of *irony, as in the novels of Jane Austen. Since Flaubert’s celebrated use of this technique (known in French as le style indirect libre) in his novel Madame Bovary (1857), it has been widely adopted in modern fiction.
free verse (French, vers libre)
A kind of poetry that does not conform to any regular *metre: the length of its lines is irregular, as is its use of rhyme—if any. Instead of a regular metrical pattern it uses more flexible *cadences or rhythmic groupings, sometimes supported by *anaphora and other devices of repetition. Now the most widely practised verse form in English, it has precedents in translations of the biblical Psalms and in some poems of Blake and Goethe, but established itself only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with Walt Whitman, the French *Symbolists, and the poets of *modernism. Free verse should not be confused with *blank verse, which does observe a regular metre in its unrhymed lines. A writer of free verse is sometimes called a verslibriste.
Further reading: H. T. Kirby-Smith, The Origins of Free Verse (1996).
Fugitives A group of American poets and critics in the 1920s associated with Vanderbilt University, Tennessee and more directly with the bimonthly poetry magazine The Fugitive (1922–5). The group had no strict doctrine, but tended to insist on poetry as an act of adult intelligence, and to scorn the *local color tradition of Southern US writing. The developing critical positions of some of its members eventually helped to shape the highly influential *New Criticism. The most prominent members were Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Merrill Moore, Laura Riding, and Robert Penn Warren.
Further reading: Charlotte H. Beck, The Fugitive Legacy (2001).
function A concept employed in *structuralist literary theory in two senses: either as a kind of use to which language can be directed, or as an action contributing towards the development of a *narrative. The first sense is employed in the influential model of communication outlined in Roman Jakobson’s ‘Closing statement: linguistics and poetics’ (1960). Here Jakobson defines six linguistic functions according to the element of the communicative act that each function makes predominant. Thus the emotive function orients the communication towards the ‘addresser’ (i.e. speaker or writer), expressing an attitude or mood; the conative (or connotative) function orients a communication towards its ‘addressee’ or recipient, as in commands; the most commonly used function, the referential, orients a message towards a context beyond itself, conveying some information; the phatic function is oriented to the ‘contact’ between addresser and addressee, maintaining or confirming their link (e.g., in conversation, ‘well, here we are, then’; or by radio, ‘receiving you loud and clear’); the metalingual function is oriented towards the *code, usually to establish that it is shared by both parties (e.g. ‘understood?’ or ‘it depends what you mean by…’); finally, the poetic function is oriented towards the ‘message’ itself, that is, to the communication’s linguistic features of sound, *syntax, and *diction (see also foregrounding). The second sense of ‘function’ is used in *narratology, denoting a fundamental component of a tale: an action performed by a character that is significant in the unfolding of the story. Vladimir Propp, in his Morphology of the Folktale (1928), described 31 such narrative functions in Russian fairy tales, claiming that their order of appearance is invariable, although not every function will appear in one tale. Thus the 11th function (‘the hero leaves home’) necessarily precedes the 18th (‘the villain is defeated’) and the 20th (‘the hero returns’).
fustian Pretentiously inflated or pompous language. See also bombast, rodomontade.
Futurism A short-lived *avant-garde movement in European art and literature launched in 1909 by the Italian poet Filippo Marinetti in the first of many Futurist *manifestos. Futurism violently rejected all previous artistic traditions and conventions along with accepted grammatical rules, in an attempt to express the dynamism and speed of the 20th-century machine age. Its new poetic techniques included typographic experiments and the composition of poems made up of meaningless sounds. Marinetti’s aggressive masculine cult of machinery and warfare was eventually exploited by Mussolini as part of official Fascist culture in Italy, although a distinct revolutionary socialist group of Futurists also appeared in Russia in 1912, led by the poet and playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky. Elsewhere in Europe, Futurism influenced the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire and the *Dada movement, and provoked the emergence of *Vorticism. The adjective futuristic usually has no reference to this movement, but is applied to fictional works (usually of *science fiction or *utopian fantasy) that describe some imagined future society.
Further reading: John J. White, Literary Futurism (1990).
http://www.italianfuturism.org
• Italian Futurism site, including English versions of all the manifestos.