kabuki [ka-boo-ki] A Japanese form of theatrical entertainment which is more popular than the aristocratic *nō plays, and combines song, dance, and stylized gesture in a prolonged spectacle set on a low stage. Scenery and costumes are elaborate, and the female roles are all played by men. Unlike the nō actor, the kabuki performer does not make use of masks, but employs heavy make-up. Kabuki plays are usually based on well-known *legends and *myths.
• Kabuki21: extensive summaries of plays, details of actors, etc.
katabasis [kat-ă-bay-sis] (plural –ases) A descent into the underworld, or a literary account of such a journey to the land of the dead, constituting a temporary visit followed by an anabasis (ascent). A conventional component of classical *epic, katabasis is found in the eleventh book of Homer’s Odyssey, in the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid, and more briefly in the story of Orpheus and Eurydice recounted by Ovid in the tenth book of his Metamorphoses. In medieval literature, the outstanding example is Dante’s Inferno. In modern literature, katabasis arises either in *burlesque forms such as the episode of Paddy Dignam’s funeral in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), or in retellings of the Orpheus-Eurydice story such as Mick Imlah’s poem ‘The Ayrshire Orpheus’ (2008), or in imaginatively extended senses: Doris Lessing’s novel Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) concerns a man undergoing a nervous breakdown; while Seamus Heaney’s verse sequence Station Island (1984) involves a pilgrimage to Lough Derg in which the speaker converses with various spirits of the dead. Adjective: katabatic.
Further reading: Rachel Falconer, Hell in Contemporary Literature (2004).
kenning (plural -ings or -ingar) A stock phrase of the kind used in Old Norse and Old English verse as a poetic *circumlocution in place of a more familiar noun. Examples are banhus (bonehouse) for ‘body’, and saewudu (sea-wood) for ‘ship’. Similar *metonymic compounds appear in colloquial speech, e.g. fire-water for ‘whisky’. A famous Shakespearean example is the beast with two backs for ‘copulation’. See also periphrasis.
kitchen-sink drama A rather condescending title applied from the late 1950s onwards in Britain to the then new wave of realistic drama depicting the family lives of working-class characters, on stage and in broadcast plays. Such works, by Sir Arnold Wesker, Alun Owen, and others, were at the time a notable departure from the conventions of middle-class drawing-room drama. Wesker’s play Roots (1959) actually does begin with one character doing the dishes in a kitchen sink.
Further reading: Stephen Lacey, British Realist Theatre (1995).
kitsch Rubbishy or tasteless pseudo-art of any kind. It is most easily recognizable in the products of the souvenir trade, especially those attempting to capitalize on ‘high’ art (Mona Lisa ashtrays, busts of Beethoven, etc.) or on religion (flesh-coloured Christs that glow in the dark); and is found in many forms of popular entertainment—the films of Cecil B. De Mille, much ‘Easy Listening’ music. It is harder to identify in written works, but the sentimental *doggerel found in greetings cards is one obvious example, while the trashier end of the science-fiction and sword-and-sorcery fiction markets provide many more pretentious cases.
Knittelvers (plural -erse) A German verse form consisting of four-stress lines rhymed as *couplets. Found in the popular poetry of the 15th and 16th centuries either in *accentual metre or in regular *octosyllabic lines, it was rejected by 17th-century poets as too clumsy (the word literally means ‘cudgel-verse’), but was revived in the 18th century by Gottsched, Schiller, and Goethe.
Künstlerroman (plural -mane) The German term (meaning ‘artist-novel’) for a novel in which the central character is an artist of any kind, e.g. the musical composer Leverkühn in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus (1947), or the painter Lantier in Zola’s L'Oeuvre (1886). Although this category of fiction often overlaps with the *Bildungsroman in showing the protagonist’s development from childhood or adolescence—most famously in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)—it also includes studies of artists in middle or old age, and sometimes of historical persons: in David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life (1978), for example, the central character and narrator is the Roman poet Ovid (43 bce–17 ce).