lacuna [lă-kew-nă] (plural -unae or -unas) Any gap or missing element in a text, usually in a manuscript. Adjective: lacunal or lacunose. See also ellipsis, hiatus.
lad lit A marketing term of the 1990s in Britain, referring to a new kind of popular fiction concerning the ‘lad’ of that period, a supposedly carefree hedonist devoted to football, beer, music, and casual sex: a figure created in contrast to the feminist-defined ‘New Man’ of previous decades. Some publishers believed that such fiction would open up a lucrative new lad readership, but they discovered that although lads bought glossy magazines pitched to them at that time (Arena, FHM, Loaded), they hardly ever bought books. The key texts of this genre were the early novels of Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch (1992) and High Fidelity (1995), each of which has a protagonist dominated by a typically masculine obsession (Arsenal Football Club, a record collection) that highlights his inability to communicate with women. Other authors associated with this new wave of fictions about inadequate young British masculinities include Tony Parsons (Man and Boy, 1991), Tim Lott, and Mike Gayle. The term has sometimes been extended retrospectively to cover earlier fictions about selfish young men, including Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers (1973) and even the American novelist Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero (1985). Since British lad lit arrived in the USA slightly later than the more successful first wave of *chick lit, it was mistakenly believed to be a backlash against the Bridget Jones phenomenon; in fact the correct answer to the question ‘which came first, the chick or the lad?’ is: the lad. Adjective: lad-lit.
lai (lay) A term from Old French meaning a short *lyric or *narrative poem. The Contes (c.1175) of Marie de France were narrative lais of *Arthurian legend and other subjects from Breton folklore, written in *octosyllabic couplets. They provided the model for the so-called ‘Breton lays’ in English in the 14th century, which include Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale and the anonymous Sir Orfeo. Since the 16th century, the term has applied to songs in general, and to short narrative poems, as in T. B. Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome (1842).
laisse [less] A subdivision within a medieval French *chanson de geste. In such poems, the laisses were *verse paragraphs of unequal length. See also strophe.
Lake poets (Lake school) A term applied in the 19th century to a group of English poets, namely William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey, all resident in the Lake District of northern England, Coleridge briefly (1800–04) and the others permanently. The term appears in journals from 1817, and became established through the publication of Thomas De Quincey’s memoir Recollections of the Lake Poets (1834–9), in which he denied that they constituted a school. Other poets of the time wrote about lakes, notably Walter Scott in The Lady of the Lake (1810; set in Loch Katrine, Perthshire), but this did not qualify them to be called lake poets.
lament Any poem expressing profound grief or mournful regret for the loss of some person or former state, or for some other misfortune. See also complaint, dirge, elegy, jeremiad, monody, threnody, ubi sunt.
lampoon An insulting written attack upon a real person, in verse or prose, usually involving caricature and ridicule. Among English writers who have indulged in this maliciously personal form of *satire are Dryden, Pope, and Byron. The laws of libel have restricted its further development as a literary form. See also flyting, invective.
Language poetry An avant-garde movement in American poetry and poetics since the 1970s, with roots in both San Francisco and New York City and an academic centre at the State University of New York, Buffalo. It is a highly theorized tendency that draws not only upon late *modernist traditions of American *free verse (Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley) and upon the inspiration of the *New York school but upon *post-structuralist arguments about language and representation in support of its central emphases on the self-referential nature of language and the incoherence of the authorial self. As with other avant-garde groups, it claimed to be undermining the linguistic pillars of bourgeois power, such as *closure, meaning, etc. The principal figures in this movement have been Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, and Ron Silliman; others associated with the movement were Michael Palmer, Clark Coolidge, and Bob Perelman. An important vehicle for their essays and poems was the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (1978–82) edited by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, who later selected an anthology of its materials as The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (1984). Bernstein’s book A Poetics (1992) is an important restatement of the group’s aims.
Further reading: Linda Reinfeld, Language Poetry (1992).
http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/projects/LANGUAGE
• Archive of early issues of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E.
langue [lahng] The French word for language or tongue, which has had a special sense in linguistics since the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, in his Cours de linguistique générale (1915), distinguished langue from parole. In this sense, langue refers to the rules and conventions of a given language—its phonological distinctions, its permitted grammatical combinations of elements, etc.—whereas parole (‘speech’) refers to the sphere of actual linguistic events, i.e. utterances. Saussure proposed that because langue underlies and makes possible the infinitely varied forms of parole, it should be the primary object of linguistic science. The langue/parole distinction is one of the theoretical bases of *structuralism, although some structuralist writings have encouraged a confusion between langue (the rules of a specific language) and Saussure’s distinct third term langage (the concept ‘language’ as such): the power attributed to ‘Language’ in this tradition has little to do with Saussure’s notion of langue, and owes more to abstract conceptions of langage as a universal ‘system’.
lapidary Suitable for engraving in stone. A lapidary inscription is one that is actually carved in stone, while a style of writing—especially in verse—may be called lapidary if it has the dignity or the concision expected of such inscriptions, or otherwise deserves to be passed on to posterity. As a noun, the term also applies to a book about gems, or to a jeweller. See also epigram.
Latinate Derived from or imitating the Latin language. Latinate *diction in English is the use of words derived from Latin rather than those originating in Old English, e.g. suspend rather than hang. A Latinate style may also be marked by prominent syntactic *inversion, especially the delaying of the main verb: while the normal English word order is subject-verb-object, Milton frequently uses the Latin order object-subject-verb in his poem Paradise Lost (1667), as in the line
His far more pleasant garden God ordained
It was at Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.
Latinity Proficiency in the Latin language, or a tendency to use *Latinate diction or style. In the first sense, Latinity may be an individual acquisition or a feature of an entire educational culture. A serious student of Latin language and literature is a Latinist, but an incompetent or fraudulent one may be called a Latinitaster, or in the worst case completely Latinless.
Leavisites The name given to followers of the English literary critic F. R. Leavis, who achieved an extensive influence in mid-20th-century British culture as co-editor of the journal Scrutiny (1932–53), as a teacher in Cambridge, and as the author of New Bearings in English Poetry (1932), Revaluation (1936), The Great Tradition (1948), and several other books. Leavis’s attitude to literature and society, strongly influenced by his wife Q. D. Leavis’s book Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), was marked by an intense moral seriousness and a militant hostility both to Marxism and to the utilitarian values of modern ‘commercialism’. He saw the critic’s task as one of preserving the values of the best literature—identified with those of ‘Life’—against the hostile cultural environment of ‘mass’ society. His harshly exclusive literary judgements were influenced partly by T. S. Eliot’s rejection of 19th-century poetry in favour of the *metaphysical poets, and partly by admiration for the work of D. H. Lawrence. Many of his pronouncements on the decline of English culture followed Eliot’s hypothesis of the *dissociation of sensibility. The Leavisite influence on the teaching of English literature (which Leavis saw as central to cultural survival) was strong in Britain during the 1950s and 1960s, and produced a detailed version of English literary history in The Pelican Guide to English Literature (ed. Boris Ford, 7 vols., 1954–61), but it has declined sharply since Leavis’s death in 1978. The Leavisites, including L. C. Knights, Denys Thompson, and Derek Traversi, are sometimes referred to as ‘Scrutineers’, after the name of their journal. The adjective Leavisian is applied more neutrally to ideas characteristic of Leavis’s work. See also cambridge school.
Further reading: Christopher Hilliard, English as a Vocation (2012).
legend A story or group of stories handed down through popular *oral tradition, usually consisting of an exaggerated or unreliable account of some actually or possibly historical person—often a saint, monarch, or popular hero. Legends are sometimes distinguished from *myths in that they concern human beings rather than gods, and sometimes in that they have some sort of historical basis whereas myths do not; but these distinctions are difficult to maintain consistently. The term was originally applied to accounts of saints' lives (see hagiography), but is now applied chiefly to fanciful tales of warriors (e.g. King Arthur and his knights), criminals (e.g. Faust, Robin Hood), and other sinners; or more recently to those bodies of biographical rumour and embroidered anecdote surrounding dead film stars and rock musicians (Judy Garland, John Lennon, etc.). Adjective: legendary. See also folklore.
leitmotif [lyt-moh-teef] (leitmotiv) A frequently repeated phrase, image, *symbol, or situation in a literary work, the recurrence of which usually indicates or supports a *theme. The term (German, ‘leading motif’) comes from music criticism, where it was first used to describe the repeated musical themes or phrases that Wagner linked with particular characters and ideas in his operatic works. The repeated references to rings and arches in D. H. Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow (1915) are examples of the use of a leitmotif; the repetition of set phrases in the novels of Muriel Spark is another example. See also motif.
lemma (plural lemmata) A heading or title, especially in a glossary (see gloss), textual commentary, footnote, or dictionary. So in a dictionary such as this one, the word or phrase appearing in bold type at the start of each entry is the lemma (or ‘headword’), and the remainder of the entry is the commentary upon it. Adjective: lemmatical or lemmatic.
leonine rhyme A form of *internal rhyme in which a word or syllable(s) in the middle of a verse line rhymes with the final word or syllable(s) of the same line, as in the opening line of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’ (1845):Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary
letrilla [let-ree-yă] A kind of Spanish lyric poem in short lines (of eight syllables or fewer), with a one-line *refrain (estribillo) at the end of each stanza. There are many lettrillas from the classical age of Spanish poetry, by Lope de Vega, Góngora, Quevedo, and others. They vary in subject from the religious to the satirical and erotic.
lexis A term used in linguistics to designate the total vocabulary of a language, or sometimes the vocabulary used in a particular text (see diction). The adjective lexical means ‘of vocabulary’ or sometimes ‘of dictionaries’. A lexicon is a dictionary, while a lexicographer is a person who compiles dictionaries and is thus a practitioner of lexicography.
libretto (plural -etti or -ettos) The Italian word for a booklet, applied in English to the text of an opera, operetta, or oratorio, that is, to the words as opposed to the music; thus a kind of dramatic work written for operatic or other musical performance. A writer of libretti, such as W. S. Gilbert or W. H. Auden, is known as a librettist.
life writing A modern term meant to cover the general realm of non-fictional writings about the lives, experiences, and memories of individual people or small groups of people. Thus although excluding most other kinds of history or ethnology it includes *autobiography, *biography, *hagiography, *apology, and *memoir, along with certain kinds of diary, journal, letter, *travelogue, and personal *essay.
light verse The general term for various kinds of verse that have no serious purpose and no solemnity of tone. They may deal with trivial subjects, or bring a light-hearted attitude to more serious ones. Light verse is often characterized by a display of technical accomplishment in the handling of difficult rhymes, *metres, and *stanza forms. The many forms of light verse include *Anacreontics, *clerihews, *epigrams, *jingles, *limericks, *mock epics, *nonsense verse, *parodies, and *vers de société.
limerick [limm-ĕ-rik] An English verse form consisting of five *anapaestic lines rhyming aabba, the third and fourth lines having two *stresses and the others three. Early examples, notably those of Edward Lear in his Book of Nonsense (1846), use the same rhyming word at the end of the first and last lines, but most modern limericks avoid such repetition. The limerick is almost always a self-contained, humorous poem, and usually plays on rhymes involving the names of people or places. First found in the 1820s, it was popularized by Lear, and soon became a favourite form for the witty obscenities of anonymous versifiers. The following is one of the less offensive examples of the coarse limerick tradition:
There was a young fellow named Menzies
Whose kissing sent girls into frenzies;
But a virgin one night
Crossed her legs in a fright
And fractured his bi-focal lenses.
lipogram A written composition that deliberately avoids using a particular letter of the alphabet. Examples have been found in ancient Greek poetry, but the most extravagant curiosities of this pointless game include Alonso Alcalá y Herrera’s Varios effectos de amor (1641)—a sequence of five novellas each eschewing a different vowel, J. R. Ronden’s play La Pièce sans A (1816), and Georges Perec’s novel La Disparition (1969; later translated into English as A Void), which dispenses with e. Lipograms are extremely rare in English, although one Ernest Wright managed a 50,000-word novel, Gadsby (1939), without using e.
lira A five-line Spanish *stanza form of Italian origin, combining seven-syllable and eleven-syllable lines in the order 7,11,7,7,11, with the standard *rhyme scheme ababb. Its name (‘lyre’) comes from the final word of the opening line in a well-known such stanza by the early 16th-century poet Garcilaso de la Vega, whose exile in Naples led to his influential importation of Italian verse forms into Spanish. The art of the Spanish lira was perfected later in that century in the religious verse of Luis de León and Juan de la Cruz.
lisible [liz-eebl] The French word for ‘legible’, used in a specific sense by the critic Roland Barthes in his book S/Z (1970), and usually translated as ‘readerly’ or ‘readable’. Barthes applies this term to texts (usually of the *realist tradition) that involve no true participation from the reader other than the consumption of a fixed meaning. A readerly text can be understood easily in terms of already familiar *conventions and expectations, and is thus reassuringly ‘closed’. By contrast, the texte *scriptible (‘writerly’ text, usually *modernist) challenges the reader to produce its meanings from an ‘open’ play of possibilities. See also jouissance.
litany [litt-ăni] A kind of prayer consisting of a long sequence of chanted supplications and responses; also, by extension, any prolonged or repetitive speech or written composition. Some kinds of *catalogue verse and *incantation resemble the repetitive forms of litany. Adjective: litaneutical.
literal Confined to the simplest primary meaning of a word, statement, or text, as distinct from any figurative sense (see figure) which it may carry—whether *ironic, *allegorical, *metaphoric, or *symbolic. Thus the literal sense of a text is its most straightforward meaning. Literalism is a tendency to interpret texts according to their most obvious meaning, often disregarding their *connotations as well as their figurative senses. A literal translation is one that tries as far as possible to transfer each element of a text from one language into the other, without allowance for differences of *idiom between the two languages.
literariness The sum of special linguistic and formal properties that distinguish literary texts from non-literary texts, according to the theories of *Russian Formalism. The leading Formalist Roman Jakobson declared in 1919 that ‘the object of literary science is not literature but literariness, that is, what makes a given work a literary work’. Rather than seek abstract qualities like *imagination as the basis of literariness, the Formalists set out to define the observable ‘devices’ by which literary texts—especially poems—*foreground their own language, in *metre, rhyme, and other patterns of sound and repetition. Literariness was understood in terms of *defamiliarization, as a series of deviations from ‘ordinary’ language. It thus appears as a relation between different uses of language, in which the contrasted uses are liable to shift according to changed contexts. See also function, literature.
literary criticism See criticism.
literary history The practice of recounting in narrative form some process of change in a given body of *literature (e.g. in a national literature or in a *genre such as drama); or an example of such an account of literary developments. Literary history as we know it dates from the 18th century, and was at first strongly associated with the antiquarian and *bibliographic cataloguing of rare manuscripts and books in a given country or language. With the development of 19th-century nationalism, it lent itself increasingly to the rediscovery and celebration of the literary treasures (understood to disclose the essential national ‘spirit’) of a given nation or linguistic community, e.g. the German- or English- or Spanish-speaking peoples. In the early 20th century it came under some challenge for its habits of tracing sources, influences, and movements on the larger scale without addressing the unique value of the individual literary work; and its former prestige in the academic study of literature suffered under the rival claims of *criticism and *Theory. Classic modern examples in English include C. S. Lewis’s English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1954) and Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957).
literati [litt-ĕ-rah-ti] The collective term for educated people, especially those involved in studying, writing, or criticizing literary works. The term is often used disrespectfully. The singular forms, literatus (masculine) and literata (feminine), are rarely used; the French term *littérateur is more frequently found.
literature A body of written works related by subject-matter (e.g. the literature of computing), by language or place of origin (e.g. Russian literature), or by prevailing cultural standards of merit. In this last sense, ‘literature’ is taken to include oral, dramatic, and broadcast compositions that may not have been published in written form but which have been (or deserve to be) preserved. Since the 19th century, the broader sense of literature as a totality of written or printed works has given way to more exclusive definitions based on criteria of imaginative, creative, or artistic value, usually related to a work’s absence of factual or practical reference (see autotelic). Even more restrictive has been the academic concentration upon poetry, drama, and fiction. Until the mid-20th century, many kinds of non-fictional writing—in philosophy, history, biography, *criticism, topography, science, and politics—were counted as literature; implicit in this broader usage is a definition of literature as that body of works which—for whatever reason—deserves to be preserved as part of the current reproduction of meanings within a given culture (unlike yesterday’s newspaper, which belongs in the disposable category of ephemera). This sense seems more tenable than the later attempts to divide literature—as creative, imaginative, fictional, or non-practical—from factual writings or practically effective works of propaganda, *rhetoric, or *didactic writing. The *Russian Formalists' attempt to define *literariness in terms of linguistic deviations is important in the theory of *poetry, but has not addressed the more difficult problem of the non-fictional prose forms. See also belles-lettres, canon, paraliterature.
Further reading: Peter Widdowson, Literature (1998).
litotes [ly-toh-teez] A *figure of speech by which an affirmation is made indirectly by denying its opposite, usually with an effect of understatement: common examples are no mean feat and not averse to a drink. This figure is not uncommon in all kinds of writing. For example, William Wordsworth in his autobiographical poem The Prelude (1850) frequently uses the phrase ‘not seldom’ to mean ‘fairly often’. See also meiosis.
littérateur [lit-er-at-er] A person occupied with literature, usually as a professional writer or critic. The term is often used with a disparaging suggestion of pretentiousness. See also literati.
little magazine A magazine, usually of literature and art, that has only a small circulation. It is the tiny readership that makes it little, not its physical size as a publication: some little magazines, for example Blast (1914–15), have been rather large in format. During the heyday of such magazines, approximately 1890–1950, several of them enjoyed a literary influence out of proportion to their commercial fragility: one of the earliest, The Yellow Book (London, 1894–7), became a legend in helping to define the temperament of its time. Others, such as The Egoist (London, 1914–19), Dial (New York, 1916–29), and Scrutiny (Cambridge, 1932–53), were important shapers of modern critical opinion.
Further reading: Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman, Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction (2010).
• Modernist Journals Project at Brown and Tulsa universities, with archive of early modernist journals.
liturgical drama A form of religious drama performed within a church as an extension of the liturgy (i.e. the established form of Christian worship in the Mass or Eucharist). In medieval Europe, the introduction of chanted responses to the Easter services seems to have evolved into a more recognizably dramatic form of *passion play, while the Christmas service gave rise to the first Nativity plays. Liturgical drama is generally thought to be the origin of *mystery plays and *miracle plays, which came to be performed by lay actors in sites away from the churches themselves, and in the *vernacular rather than in Latin.
loc. cit. Common abbreviation for loco citato (Latin, ‘in the place cited’), a phrase employed in scholarly footnotes and endnotes to indicate that a quotation just given is from the same place (i.e. the same page or paragraph) as the previous quotation given from that work. This is a more specific direction than ‘*ibid.’ or ‘*op. cit.’, which indicate that the quotation comes from the same article or book.
local color writing A kind of fiction that came to prominence in the USA in the late 19th century, and was devoted to capturing the unique customs, manners, speech, folklore, and other qualities of a particular regional community, usually in humorous short stories. The most famous of the local colorists was Mark Twain; others included Bret Harte, George Washington Cable, Joel Chandler Harris, Kate Chopin, and Sarah Orne Jewett. The trend has some equivalents in European fiction, notably in the attention given by Zola and Hardy to the settings of their stories.
loco-descriptive See topographical poetry.
logocentrism The term used by Jacques Derrida and other exponents of *deconstruction to designate the desire for a centre or original guarantee of all meanings, which in Derrida’s view has characterized Western philosophy since Plato. The Greek word logos can just mean ‘word’, but in philosophy it often denotes an ultimate principle of truth or reason, while in Christian theology it refers to the Word of God as the origin and foundation of all things. Derrida’s critique of logocentric thinking shows how it attempts to repress difference (see différance) in favour of identity and presence: the philosophical ‘metaphysics of presence’ craves a ‘transcendental signified’ or ultimately self-sufficient meaning (e.g. God, Man, Truth). The most significant case of logocentrism is the enduring *phonocentrism that privileges speech over writing because speech is held to guarantee the full ‘presence’ and integrity of meaning.
log-rolling A disreputable form of collusion in the reviewing of books, whereby one author writes a glowing appraisal of his or her friend’s book, and the friend repays the favour by endorsing the first author’s books too. The term arises from the proverbial phrase ‘You roll my log and I'll roll yours’. See also claque.
long measure (long metre) See *common measure.
longueur [long-ger] The French word for ‘length’, applied to any tediously prolonged passage or scene in a literary work.
lost generation A phrase sometimes applied to the younger American writers and intellectuals of the 1920s, on the grounds of their supposed disillusionment and loss of moral bearings in the wake of the First World War. It derives from a remark made by Gertrude Stein to Ernest Hemingway and recorded as the *epigraph to his novel The Sun Also Rises (1926): ‘You are all a lost generation’. The more general reference is usually to writers born, like Hemingway, in the late 1890s, e.g. Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Hart Crane.
lyric [li-rik] In the modern sense, any fairly short poem expressing the personal mood, feeling, or meditation of a single speaker (who may sometimes be an invented character, not the poet). In ancient Greece, a lyric was a song for accompaniment on the lyre, and could be a choral lyric sung by a group (see chorus), such as a *dirge or *hymn; the modern sense, current since the *Renaissance, often suggests a song-like quality in the poems to which it refers. Lyric poetry is the most extensive category of verse, especially after the decline—since the 19th century in the West—of the other principal kinds: *narrative and dramatic verse. Lyrics may be composed in almost any *metre and on almost every subject, although the most usual emotions presented are those of love and grief. Among the common lyric forms are the *sonnet, *ode, *elegy, *haiku, and the more personal kinds of hymn. Lyricism is the emotional or song-like quality, the lyrical property, of lyric poetry. A writer of lyric poems may be called a lyric poet, a lyricist, or a lyrist. In another sense, the lyrics of a popular song or other musical composition are the words as opposed to the music; these may not always be lyrical in the poetic sense (e.g. in a narrative song like a *ballad).
Further reading: Scott Brewster, Lyric (2007).