gaff A 19th-century term for a rudimentary kind of theatre offering cheap entertainment, usually in the form of *melodrama; such theatres were often referred to as ‘penny gaffs’, on the basis of the admission price.
galliambics Verses written in a Greek *metre associated with the Galli, who were the eunuch priests of the goddess Cybele. Used in Greek by Callimachus, and more famously in Latin by Catullus, the galliambic line is a variant of the *ionic tetrameter. A rare adaptation of this metre into English stress-patterns is Tennyson’s poem ‘Boadicea’, written in awkwardly long lines of between 16 and 18 syllables:
Lash the maiden into swooning, me they lash’d and humiliated.
Geneva school A group of critics associated with the University of Geneva from the 1940s to the 1960s. Its most prominent figure was the Belgian critic Georges Poulet, while in the USA J. Hillis Miller was a significant practitioner of the school’s methods before he adopted those of *deconstruction; others include Jean Rousset, Jean Starobinski, and Jean-Pierre Richard. Drawing on the philosophical tradition of *phenomenology, these ‘critics of consciousness’ (as they have sometimes been called) saw the critic’s task as one of identifying, and fully identifying with, the unique mode of consciousness pervading a given author’s works. Thus an author’s particular sense of time and space would be seen as the unifying source of his or her entire *oeuvre, regardless of the differences between individual works. Although related to some of the assumptions of biographical criticism, the ‘phenomenological’ approach of the Geneva critics differs in that it works back from the texts to the mind behind them, not from the life to the texts. An impressive example of this approach at work in English is J. Hillis Miller’s Charles Dickens: The World of his Novels (1959).
genre [zhahnr] The French term for a type, species, or class of composition. A literary genre is a recognizable and established category of written work employing such common *conventions as will prevent readers or audiences from mistaking it for another kind. Much of the confusion surrounding the term arises from the fact that it is used simultaneously for the most basic modes of literary art (*lyric, *narrative, dramatic); for the broadest categories of composition (poetry, prose fiction), and for more specialized sub-categories, which are defined according to several different criteria including formal structure (*sonnet, *picaresque novel), length (*novella, *epigram), intention (*satire), effect (*comedy), origin (*folktale), and subject-matter (*pastoral, *science fiction). While some genres, such as the pastoral *elegy or the *melodrama, have numerous conventions governing subject, style, and form, others—like the *novel—have no agreed rules, although they may include several more limited *subgenres. Adjective: generic. See also decorum, form, mode, type.
Further reading: John Frow, Genre (2005).
genre fiction The broad class of fiction that is easily identifiable as belonging within any of the recognized *genres, especially of popular novel or *romance, such as *science fiction, *detective story, *thriller, western, historical romance, or love story. Genre fiction, then, is the kind of story that offers readers more or less what they would expect upon the basis of having read similar books before, whereas its presumed opposite, now increasingly referred to as ‘literary fiction’, is expected to go beyond generic boundaries and offer more original imaginative exploration.
Further reading: Ken Gelder, Popular Fiction (2004).
Georgian poetry A body of English verse published in the first half of George V’s reign (1910–36) in five anthologies edited by Edward Marsh as Georgian Poetry (1912–22). The group of poets represented here included Rupert Brooke, Walter de la Mare, John Drinkwater, James Elroy Flecker, John Masefield, and J. C. Squire. They are now usually regarded as minor poets, quietly traditional in form and devoted to what Robert Graves called ‘uncontroversial subjects’ of rural and domestic life. The term Georgianism is sometimes used in a slightly extended sense to embrace this group along with other more or less traditional poets of the time (e.g. Edward Thomas) in contrast with the contemporary movement of *modernism in English verse. The term Georgian is only rarely applied to the literature of the period of the first four Georges (1714–1830).
Further reading: Rennie Parker, The Georgian Poets (1999).
georgic [jor-jik] A *didactic poem giving instruction on farming, husbandry, or some comparable pursuit, often involving praise of rural life. The earliest Greek example is Hesiod’s Works and Days (8th century bce), but the most influential work was the Georgics (37–30 bce) of the Roman poet Virgil, which includes advice on bee-keeping and vines. Several English poets in the 18th century produced banal georgics in imitation of Virgil, including John Dyer in The Fleece (1757) and James Grainger in The Sugar-Cane (1759). Apart from its didactic intention, the georgic is distinguished from the *pastoral in that it regards nature in terms of necessary labour, not of harmonious idleness.
ghazal (ghasel; gazal; ghazel) A short *lyric poem written in *couplets using a single rhyme (aa, ba, ca, da, etc.), sometimes mentioning the poet’s name in the last couplet. The ghazal is an important lyric form in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu poetry, often providing the basis for popular love songs. Its usual subject-matter is amatory, although it has been adapted for religious, political, and other uses. Goethe and other German poets of the early 19th century wrote some imitations of the Persian ghazal, and the form has been adopted by a number of modern American poets, notably Adrienne Rich.
ghost story A modern form of *short story designed to provoke dread and unease in its readers by bringing about a crisis in which fictional characters are confronted terrifyingly by spirits of the returning dead. Such stories draw upon ancient traditions of *folklore concerning ghosts, but their narrative conventions date from the mid-19th century, when the Anglo-Irish writer J. Sheridan LeFanu perfected the required manipulation of suspense in his Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery (1851) and later collections. Other popular Victorian writers took part in this new craze, notably Charles Dickens (as in his ‘The Signalman’, 1866) and Amelia B. Edwards (in ‘The Phantom Coach’, 1864), while magazine editors adopted the habit of publishing such works in their Christmas numbers. The classic age of the ghost story in English lasted through the early 20th century, when the recognized master of the genre was M. R. James, author of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904) and other collections. The ghost story may be distinguished from its apparent near neighbour the Gothic tale (derived from the longer *Gothic novel) in one of two ways: it often employs settings that are distinctly non-Gothic in their apparently rational modernity; and it must exhibit a ghost, which need not actually appear in a Gothic tale.
Further reading: Julia Briggs, Night Visitors (1977).
ghost-writer (ghostwriter) A term used since the 1920s to designate a writer who is paid to produce books or articles that are presented as being written by somebody else. Typically this will be a sports journalist who writes a newspaper column or an entire *autobiography in the name of a well-known athlete whose own literary talents are insufficient for the task; but there are equivalent cases of ghost-writing in the worlds of cinema, music, politics, etc. Adjective: ghost-written.
glosa (in English, glose; gloss)
A poem composed as an amplification of lines taken from an earlier and usually better-known poem, although not literally as a *gloss in the explanatory sense. The standard form begins with a sequence of lines—commonly a *quatrain—from the source-poem, following this with a sequence of stanzas each ending with one (in variant forms, two) of these lines in succession. The term is Spanish, this kind of poem having been devised by Spanish courtiers in the early 15th century. There are English examples in the recent work of the American poet Marilyn Hacker, whose Essays on Departure (2006) includes poems entitled ‘Glose’, all developing four quoted lines from earlier poets into four rhymed stanzas.
gloss An explanation or translation of a difficult word or phrase, usually added to a text by a later copyist or editor, as in many modern editions of Chaucer. When placed between the lines of a text, it is known as an ‘interlinear gloss’, but it may appear in the margin, or as a footnote, or in an appendix, and may form an extended commentary. A rare example of a poem that includes the author’s own marginal glosses is Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798; glosses added 1817). A special poetic sense of the term is that of a poem developed from selected lines of an earlier poem, the English equivalent of the Spanish *glosa. A glossary is a list of difficult words and phrases with accompanying explanations. Verb: gloss.
gnomic [noh-mik] Characterized by the expression of popular wisdom in the condensed form of *proverbs or *aphorisms, also known as gnomes. The term was first used of the ‘Gnomic Poets’ of 6th-century Greece, although there are older traditions of gnomic writing in Chinese, Egyptian, and other cultures; the Hebrew book of Proverbs is a well-known collection. The term is often extended to later writings in which moral truths are presented in maxims or aphorisms. See also sententia.
Golden Age In Classical mythology, variously resumed by writers of the *Renaissance, the earliest period of humanity, imagined as one of uncomplicated harmony and happiness, particularly in *pastoral writing. In Spanish, the term refers to the greatest period of literature in that language, usually taken to be from about 1500 to the death of Calderón in 1681.
Golden-Age detective writing In the context of the *detective story, a term denoting (not without some ironic exaggeration) a period of uncomplicated happiness for devotees of such fiction, usually associated with the period 1920–39 in England, although some date it back to 1913. This was the period in which appeared such major new talents as Agatha Christie (from 1920 with her series detective Hercule Poirot and from 1930 with Miss Marple), Dorothy L. Sayers (from 1923 with Lord Peter Wimsey), Margery Allingham (from 1929 with Albert Campion), Gladys Mitchell (from 1929 with Mrs Lestrange Bradley), and Nicholas Blake (from 1935 with Nigel Strangeways). The distinctive new feature of detective fiction in the Golden Age was the cultivation of the murder-mystery narrative as a light-hearted intellectual puzzle, no longer as a sensational treatment of bloody outrages. A new kind of detective figure also appears in this period, noted for a self-mocking strain of humour and for aesthetic connoisseurship of criminal enigmas, by contrast with the earnest dedication to battling crime shown by Sherlock Holmes. These detectives delight in exposing violent hatreds behind the apparently orderly and harmless appearances of an English village or country house, and Golden-Age fiction is especially associated with clichés of English social hierarchy, although in fact there were also some significant American contributors to this phase, including S. S. Van Dine (from 1926 with Philo Vance) and ‘Ellery Queen’ (from 1929).
Further reading: Lee Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (2005).
goliardic verse [gohli-ard-ik] A kind of medieval lyric poetry typically celebrating love and drink, attributed to the goliards, who were supposedly wandering scholars in France, Germany, and England in the 12th and 13th centuries. Some of the goliardic lyrics also contain *satire against the clergy. The most famous examples of goliardic verse appear in the Carmina Burana, a 13th-century collection of Latin and German poems discovered in a Bavarian monastery in the 19th century.
Gongorism (Gongorismo) An artificial poetic style cultivated by the major Spanish poet Góngora (Luis de Góngora y Argote, 1561–1627), especially in his Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea (1613) and in his unfinished Soledades (1627). It is remarkable for its *Latinate syntax and diction, *archaism, mythological allusions, and sumptuously colourful imagery. In the heated debates over style in the early 17th century, Gongorism was mocked relentlessly by the poet’s younger rival Quevedo, who characterized it as a kind of culteranismo, i.e. an over-refined or affected manner. See also baroque, mannerism.
Gothic novel (Gothic romance) A story of terror and suspense, usually set in a gloomy old castle or monastery (hence ‘Gothic’, a term applied to medieval architecture and thus associated in the 18th century with superstition). Following the appearance of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), the Gothic novel flourished in Britain from the 1790s to the 1820s, dominated by Ann Radcliffe, whose Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) had many imitators. She was careful to explain away the apparently supernatural occurrences in her stories, but other writers, like M. G. Lewis in The Monk (1796), made free use of ghosts and demons along with scenes of cruelty and horror. The fashion for such works, ridiculed by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey (1818), gave way to a vogue for *historical novels, but it contributed to the new emotional climate of *Romanticism. In an extended sense, many novels that do not have a medievalized setting, but which share a comparably sinister, *grotesque, or claustrophobic atmosphere, have been classed as Gothic: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is a well-known example; and there are several important American tales and novels with strong Gothic elements in this sense, from Poe to Faulkner and beyond. A popular modern variety of women’s *romance dealing with endangered heroines in the manner of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) is also referred to as Gothic. See also fantastic, horror story, preromanticism.
Further reading: Fred Botting, Gothic (2nd edn, 1996).
grammatology The title adopted by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, in his book De la grammatologie (1967), for the general theory of writing; this is a mode of inquiry involving the critique of *phonocentrism, rather than a science with a known object. See *deconstruction.
Grand Guignol [grahn gween-yol] A popular French form of *melodrama featuring bloody murders, rapes, and other sensational outrages, presented in lurid and gruesome detail. It is named after Guignol, a French puppet-character similar to Mr Punch. The term is now often applied to horror movies; while in late 20th-century fiction, several of Angela Carter’s stories are studies in Grand Guignol.
grand narrative A term imperfectly translated from Jean-François Lyotard’s influential account of *postmodernism in La Condition postmoderne (1979), in which he condemns big bad ‘totalizing’ theories and systems of thought, principally Marxism and Hegelianism. These are ‘big stories’ (grands récits) which claim to explain everything, whereas the postmodern condition, by which Lyotard means the hoped-for next phase of thought, will be characterized by a rejection of such systems in favour of harmless micro-narratives (petits récits) that do not make any claim to anything so ‘authoritarian’ as truth. A literary narrative characterized by grandeur, however, is simply called an *epic.
grapheme The smallest meaningful unit of a written language. As with the concept of the *phoneme, a grapheme is defined negatively by its differences from other units of writing. Thus the letter b makes a difference in meaning because it differs from the letter d, so big and dig mean different things. The study of graphic signs in a given language is known as graphemics or graphology.
graphic novel A book-length narrative in comic-strip form. The genre has been known by other names such as ‘picture novel’ and ‘comic-strip novel’, but graphic novel, a term first found in the 1960s, has more often been adopted since the 1980s. The term is also being applied retrospectively to the bound versions of narratives originally *serialized in newspapers, such as the many books comprising Les Aventures de Tintin (1929–76) by the Belgian cartoonist Hergé. The graphic novel attained literary recognition in the later 20th century with the critical praise accorded to Raymond Briggs’s When the Wind Blows (1982) and especially with the award of the Pulitzer Prize (1992) to Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust narrative Maus (2 vols., 1986, 1991).
Further reading: Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey, The Graphic Novel: An Introduction (2014).
graveyard poetry The term applied to a minor but influential 18th-century tradition of meditative poems on mortality and immortality, often set in graveyards. The so-called ‘graveyard school’ of poets in England and Scotland was not in fact an organized group. The best-known examples of this melancholic kind of verse are ‘A Night-Piece on Death’ (1721) by the Irish poet Thomas Parnell, Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742–6), the Scottish clergyman Robert Blair’s The Grave (1743), and the culmination of this tradition in English, Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy written in a Country Churchyard’ (1751; usually called ‘Gray’s Elegy’). These works had many imitators in Europe, and constitute a significant current of *preromanticism.
greater Romantic lyric A term devised by the American scholar M. H. Abrams in his essay ‘Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric’ (1965; reprinted in Abrams’s book The Correspondent Breeze, 1984), to denote an extended *lyric poem of description and serious meditation, as practised by some of the English Romantic poets (S. T. Coleridge, William Wordsworth, P. B. Shelley, and John Keats). Abrams justified this new term on the grounds that although several examples are called *odes, others are not, despite exhibiting the ode’s expected serious meditative development. The earliest examples, indeed, are Coleridge’s *conversation poems. Other central examples that do not identify themselves as odes are Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ (i.e. ‘Lines Composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour. July 13, 1798’) and Shelley’s ‘Stanzas Written in Dejection’. The word ‘greater’ in this term derives from the older custom of referring to the *Pindaric ode as the ‘greater ode’ by comparison with the less elevated *Horatian kind; so it is not an assertion of artistic greatness. Abrams’s general claim about this verse genre is that it was a new form developed by the English Romantics, remarkable for its integration of local description and general moral or philosophical meditation. Abrams also indicates that there are later examples of the genre, by Tennyson, Auden, and Stevens, among others of the post-Romantic generations.
griot [gree-oh] A kind of *bard or itinerant minstrel found in western African societies, who usually sings of local legends, histories, genealogies, or heroic deeds.
grotesque Characterized by bizarre distortions, especially in the exaggerated or abnormal depiction of human features. The literature of the grotesque involves freakish caricatures of people’s appearance and behaviour, as in the novels of Dickens. A disturbingly odd fictional character may also be called a grotesque.
Further reading: Justin Edwards and Runo Graulund, Grotesque (2013).
Grub Street A street in London (now renamed Milton Street) off Chiswell Street by Finsbury Square, which was occupied in the 18th century by impoverished writers reduced to turning out third-rate poems, reference books, and histories to make a living. The term now covers any such underworld of literary penury and its products, as in George Gissing’s novel New Grub Street (1891). Its writers are known as ‘hacks’, an abbreviation of ‘hackney’, a hired horse.
gynesis A term coined by the American feminist theorist Alice Jardine as part of her attempt to bring together certain *post-structuralist ideas with those of *feminist criticism in her book Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (1985). Writing partly under the influence of Julia Kristeva (some of whose works she translated) and of other leaders of ‘French’ feminism, she suggested that the contemporary crisis in Western thought was intimately related to the emergence of new concepts that could be gendered as feminine (e.g. ‘madness’ in the work of Michel Foucault). In this extremely abstract sense, ‘woman’ (not to be confused with any real woman) was undermining old intellectual certainties. This may help to elucidate Jardine’s definition of gynesis (which, etymologically, should mean ‘woman-process’) as the ‘putting into discourse of “woman”’. In practice, neither the term nor Jardine’s argument achieved any lasting circulation.
gynocritics The branch of modern feminist literary studies that focuses on women as writers, as distinct from the feminist critique of male authors. The term was coined by Elaine Showalter in her article ‘Toward a Feminist Poetics’ (1979), in which she explains that gynocritics is concerned ‘with woman as the producer of textual meaning, with the history, themes, genres, and structures of literature by women’. It thus includes critical works like Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own (1977), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), and several other such studies published since the mid-1970s. Some writers have amended the term to ‘gynocriticism’, using ‘gynocritics’ to denote instead the practitioners of this kind of feminist study. Adjective: gynocritical.