macaronic verse Poetry in which two or more languages are mixed together. Strictly, the term denotes a kind of comic verse in which words from a *vernacular language are introduced into Latin (or other foreign-language) verses and given Latin *inflections; such verse had a vogue among students in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, but is rare in English. More loosely, the term is applied to any verses in which phrases or lines in a foreign language are frequently introduced: several medieval English poems have Latin *refrains or alternating Latin and English lines, and in modern times the poems of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot have been called macaronic for their use of lines in several languages. Noun: macaronism.
Machiavel [mak-yă-vel] A type of stage *villain found in Elizabethan and *Jacobean drama, and named after the Florentine political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli, whose notorious book Il Principe (The Prince, 1513) justified the use of dishonest means to retain state power. Exaggerated accounts of Machiavelli’s views led to the use of his name—sometimes directly referred to in speeches—for a broad category of ruthless schemers, atheists, and poisoners. Shakespeare’s Iago and Richard III are the most famous examples of the type.
machinery The collective term applied since the 18th century to the supernatural beings—gods, angels, devils, nymphs, etc.—who take part in the action of an *epic or *mock-epic poem or in a dramatic work. The term is taken from the Greek dramatic convention of the *deus ex machina, and is also applied in a more familiar sense to the cranes, moving sets, and other contraptions used in the theatre.
madrigal A short *lyric poem, usually of love or *pastoral life, often set to music as a song for several voices without instrumental accompaniment. As a poetic form, it originated in 14th-century Italy, but it was revived and adopted by composers throughout Europe in the 16th century; the English madrigal flourished from the 1580s to the 1620s. There is no fixed metrical form or *rhyme scheme, but the madrigal usually ends with a rhyming *couplet. Adjective: madrigalian.
magic realism (magical realism) A kind of modern fiction in which fabulous and fantastical events are included in a *narrative that otherwise maintains the ‘reliable’ tone of objective realistic report. The term was once applied to a trend in German fiction of the early 1950s, but is now associated chiefly with certain leading novelists of Central and South America, notably Miguel Ángel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier, and Gabriel García Márquez. The latter’s Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967) is often cited as a leading example, celebrated for the moment at which one character unexpectedly ascends to heaven while hanging her washing on a line. The term has also been extended to works from very different cultures, designating a tendency of the modern novel to reach beyond the confines of *realism and draw upon the energies of *fable, *folktale and *myth while retaining a strong contemporary social relevance. Thus Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1959), Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) have been described as magic realist novels along with Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984) and Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988). The fantastic attributes given to characters in such novels—levitation, flight, telepathy, telekinesis—are among the means that magic realism adopts in order to encompass the often phantasmagoric political realities of the 20th century. See also fabulation, hysterical realism.
Further reading: Maggie Ann Bowers, Magic(al) Realism (2004).
malapropism [mal-ă-prop-izm] A confused, comically inaccurate use of a long word or words. The term comes from the character Mrs Malaprop (after the French mal à propos, ‘inappropriately’) in Sheridan’s play The Rivals (1775): her bungled attempts at learned speech include a reference to another character as ‘the very pine-apple of politeness’, instead of ‘pinnacle’. This kind of joke, though, is older than the name: Shakespeare’s Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing (c.1598) makes similar errors. Adjective: malapropian. Verb: malaprop.
manifesto (plural -festos or -festoes) A public self-justification or proclamation of intentions, usually issued by a political authority or party. Literary and artistic groups since the 19th century, especially those of the *avant-garde associated with *modernism, borrowed this political genre for their own purposes, usually to declare the obsolescence of some previous artistic movement and the arrival of a new era based upon their own new principles. The most famous political model for the genre is Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’s Communist Manifesto (1848), itself a modern rhetorical masterpiece. Notable literary examples include André Breton’s Manifeste du Surréalisme (1924) and the many manifestos (no fewer than five were issued between 1909 and 1913) of *Futurism. Less celebrated now is the Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile’s Manifesto degli intellettuali fascisti (1925).
Further reading: Janet Lyon, Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern (1999).
mannerism A vague term for the self-conscious cultivation of peculiarities of style—usually elaborate, ingenious, and ornate—in literary works of any period. Like the *baroque, with which it often overlaps, mannerism is a concept more clearly defined in art history than in literary studies: art historians have marked out a Mannerist period (roughly 1520–1610) between the High Renaissance and the Baroque, characterized by distortions of figure and perspective. Clear equivalents in English literature of this period would be the mannered style of *euphuism and the elaborate *conceits of the Elizabethan *sonnet. In Spanish literature, the term can apply to *conceptismo and *Gongorism; in Italian to *concettismo and *Marinism. But mannered styles can be found in many later periods, from the *Latinate style of Milton to the far-fetched similes of Raymond Chandler. A common indicator of literary mannerism is that the elaborate manner is maintained, whatever the nature of the matter treated.
Further reading: John H. Steadman, Redefining a Period Style (1990).
Märchen [mairh-yen] The German term for tales of enchantment and marvels, usually translated as ‘*fairy tales’ despite the absence of actual fairies from most examples; also for a single such tale (the singular and plural forms being the same). Märchen have been divided into two categories: the Volksmärchen are *folktales of the kind collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in their celebrated Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812–14), while Kunstmärchen are ‘art tales’, that is, literary creations like the uncanny tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann.
marginalia A term coined by S. T. Coleridge to denote material written into the margins of a book or manuscript, these usually being annotations upon the main text within the margins. A notable literary example is the series of exasperated comments written by the poet-artist William Blake in his copy of the Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, objecting vehemently to the latter’s aesthetic principles. There is no singular form except marginal note. To add marginalia to a text is to marginate it or simply to marginalize (although the latter form is now more often found to mean ‘push something to the margins’, by back-formation from the noun ‘marginalization’). A ‘marginalist’, however, is an adherent of the important school of economic theory known as marginalism. Adjective: marginalic.
Marinism (marinismo) The term given by later literary historians to a deliberately startling new poetic style inaugurated by the Italian poet Giovanbattista Marino (1569–1625) and his many followers, originally referred to as *concettismo. It cultivated powerful sense-impressions and especially the far-fetched *conceit or extended metaphor that connects hitherto remote things, sometimes on the basis of new scientific knowledge or exotic explorations. The style is exhibited most fully in Marino’s erotic *epic Adone (1623) but is visible in the widely-read collection of shorter poems Rime (1602); among the lesser Marinists who imitated it in the early 17th century were Marcello Macedonio and Giovan Leone Sempronio. It is one of several stylistic manifestations of the European *baroque cult of ingenuity, and has some parallels with the Spanish poetic movement of *conceptismo and with the practice of the English *metaphysical poets. See also mannerism, secentismo.
Martian poets The term applied in the 1980s to a small group of poets in Britain whose work is marked by the prominence of surprising visual *metaphors, *similes, and *conceits. The leading figures are Christopher Reid and Craig Raine, who both published important collections in 1979: Reid’s Arcadia and Raine’s A Martian Sends a Postcard Home both transform everyday objects, in a playful kind of *defamiliarization. The term comes from the title poem of Raine’s book, in which we are shown familiar earthly sights through the inexperienced eyes of a visiting Martian (‘Rain is when the earth is television’). Similar effects are achieved by David Sweetman in Looking Into the Deep End (1981) and by Oliver Reynolds in Skevington’s Daughter (1985). This tendency has been called Martianism.
marvellous, the (US marvelous) A category of fiction in which supernatural, magical, or other wondrous impossibilities are accepted as normal within an imagined world clearly separated from our own reality. The category includes *fairy tales, many *romances, and most *science fiction, along with various other kinds of *fantasy with ‘other-worldly’ settings, like J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954–5). Modern theorists have distinguished marvellous tales from those of the *uncanny in terms of the explanations offered for strange events: in the marvellous, these are explained as magic, while in the uncanny they are given psychological causes.
MARXIST CRITICISM
A tradition of literary and aesthetic interpretation and commentary derived from the principles of Marxism (‘historical materialism’), and thus tending to view literature in the light of modes of production (feudal, capitalist) and their property relations and class struggles. Little in this tradition derives directly from the writings of Karl Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels, who provided no developed aesthetic theory, although they expressed doubts about the value of propagandist fiction and thus discouraged the simple judgement of literary works according to the degree of socialist sentiment they express. In general, the claims of Marxist literary analysis have been more compatible with *literary history (in which the formative importance of economic factors in literary evolution has commonly been accepted) than with evaluative *criticism itself. Critical positions claiming to be Marxist arose later in the two divergent currents of official Communist doctrine in the Soviet Union and its satellite parties (1917–91) on the one hand, and of ‘Western Marxism’ on the other. Russian Communist literary policy generated a short-lived ambition for the proletarianization of literature and the rejection of the bourgeois inheritance, under the name of *proletcult (memorably derided by Leon Trotsky in his Literature and Revolution, 1924), and then a more conservative doctrine of *socialist realism, which tended to impose a bland official optimism upon writers while suppressing ‘decadent’ alternatives along with independent critical positions such as those of the *Russian Formalists and of the Bakhtin group (see carnivalization, dialogic).
The more creative and ultimately more influential trends in Marxist criticism emerged from various Western Marxist thinkers, who tended to disagree on a range of questions including the requirement upon writers to be ‘committed’ to the socialist cause and the progressive or reactionary tendencies of *realism and *modernism. Notable figures here include the Hungarian writer Georg Lukács, who in Studies in European Realism (1950) and other works upheld the value of ‘bourgeois’ realism as a basis for socialist literature while attacking the allegedly apolitical pessimism of modernist writing; the German poet-playwright Bertolt Brecht, who argued to the contrary in defending modernist experiment as potentially radical; and some writers associated with the *Frankfurt School, notably Walter Benjamin, who interpreted the significance of Brecht’s *epic theatre and whose essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1935) is a widely admired classic of Marxist reflection upon modern culture.
Western Marxist criticism underwent renewal and diversification in the 1960s and 1970s, becoming more visible within academic literary studies and interacting with a range of other critical schools from *structuralism, *psychoanalytic criticism, *feminist criticism, and *postcolonial theory to *deconstruction and *new historicism. In this ‘neo-Marxist’ phase, the traditional Marxist metaphor of economic causality in which a ‘superstructure’ of political and cultural forms grew up from a ‘base’ of economic forces and relations was either openly challenged (as it was by the British socialist critic Raymond Williams, who inspired the school of *cultural materialism) or quietly set aside in favour of explorations of literature’s relations with the specific cultural contradictions of modern capitalist society. In English, the leading figures in this phase have been the American theorist Fredric Jameson (in Marxism and Form (1971), and later works) and the prolific British essayist Terry Eagleton (in Criticism and Ideology (1976), The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), and numerous other works).
Further reading: Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (2nd edn, 2002); Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne (eds.), Marxist Literary Theory (1996).
http://www.marxists.org/subject/art/lit_crit
• Provides some early texts.
And who can fight against despair?
masculine rhyme The commonest kind of rhyme, between single stressed syllables (e.g. delay/stay) at the ends of verse lines. In contrast with *feminine rhyme, which adds further unstressed syllables after the rhyming stressed syllables, masculine rhyme matches only the final syllable with its equivalent in the paired line, as in Christina Rossetti’s *couplet:In French verse, the alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes became the norm from the 16th century onwards.
And all the rest forget,
But one remembers yet.
masque (mask) A spectacular kind of indoor performance combining poetic drama, music, dance, song, lavish costume, and costly stage effects, which was favoured by European royalty in the 16th and early 17th centuries, especially to celebrate royal weddings, birthdays and other special occasions. Members of the court would enter disguised, taking the parts of mythological persons alongside professional performers, and enact a simple *allegorical plot, concluding with the removal of masks, a dance joined by members of the audience, and a banquet. Shakespeare included a short masque scene in The Tempest (1611), and Milton’s play Comus (1634) is loosely related to the masque; these are now the best-known examples, but at the courts of James I and Charles I the highest form of the masque proper was represented by the quarrelsome collaboration of Ben Jonson with the designer Inigo Jones from 1605 to 1631 in the hugely expensive Oberon (1611) and other works. The parliamentary Revolution of the 1640s brought this form of extravagance to an abrupt end.
Further reading: Lauren Shohet, Reading Masques (2010).
http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/library/SLT/stage/themasquesubj.html
• Illustrated resource on masques at University of Victoria.
matter of Britain The *legends of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, which form the subject-matter for a number of medieval *romances—usually known as *Arthurian romances. These are often distinguished from the romances dealing with the matter of France (i.e. legends of Charlemagne and his knights) or the matter of Rome (classical Roman legends or myths).
maxim A short and memorable statement of a general principle; thus an *aphorism or *apophthegm, especially one that imparts advice or guidance. The French writer La Rochefoucauld published his aphorisms as Maximes (1665), while Benjamin Franklin included several celebrated examples in his Poor Richard’s Almanack (1733–58), including the maxim ‘Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead’. Adjective: maximic.
measure An older word for *metre. The term is also used to refer to any metrical unit such as a *foot, a *dipody, or a line.
medievalism (mediaevalism) Enthusiasm for or imitation of the arts and customs of Europe during the Middle Ages—that is, from about the 8th century to the 15th. In literature, this may manifest itself in the use of *archaisms, in the choice of medieval settings for *narrative works, or more broadly in endorsement of values associated with medieval societies (e.g. chivalry, religious faith, social hierarchy). Antiquarian interest in *ballads and other aspects of medieval art grew in the late 18th century, influencing the *Gothic novel and the strongly medievalist nostalgia of *Romanticism. Medievalism is a significant current in 19th-century literature from Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe (1819) and Keats’s poem ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ (1820) to the prose and verse *romances of William Morris. Important works of Victorian social criticism, notably Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present (1843) and John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice (1851–3), contrasted medieval social conditions favourably with those of the modern industrial city. A medievalist is usually a scholar studying some aspect of medieval history or culture.
Further reading: Michael Alexander, Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern Literature (2006).
medium (plural -dia) The material or the technical process employed in an art or a communication. In literature, the medium is language, although further distinctions are also made between the media of speech and print, between theatre and cinema, and between prose and poetry. A misleading implication in some uses of the term is that the meaning of a work already exists as a complete entity only requiring transmission through the medium of language; this notion is resisted by most modern theorists of literature.
meiosis [my-oh-sis] (plural -oses) The Greek term for understatement or ‘belittling’: a rhetorical *figure by which something is referred to in terms less important than it really deserves, as when Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet calls his mortal wound a ‘scratch’. Usually the effect is one of *irony or *anticlimax, but it may be disparaging, as when a writer is called a scribbler. The favoured form of meiosis is *litotes, in which an affirmation is made indirectly by denying its opposite, e.g. it was no mean feat. Adjective: meiotic.
Meistersinger (Mastersinger) A singing poet belonging to the musical guilds that flourished in the towns of southern Germany in the 15th and 16th centuries, claiming descent from the medieval *Minnesänger. The Meistersinger were craftsmen (e.g. Hans Sachs, a cobbler) whose singing and poetic composition, both secular and religious, were governed by strict and secretive rules. Their form of composition for unaccompanied singing is known as Meistersang or Meistergesang.
melodrama A popular form of sensational drama that flourished in the 19th-century theatre, surviving in different forms in modern cinema and television. The term, meaning ‘song-drama’ in Greek, was originally applied in the European theatre to scenes of mime or spoken dialogue accompanied by music. In early 19th-century London, many theatres were only permitted to produce musical entertainments, and from their simplified plays—some of them adapted from *Gothic novels—the modern sense of melodrama derives: an emotionally exaggerated conflict of pure maidenhood and scheming villainy in a plot full of suspense. Well-known examples are Douglas Jerrold’s Black-Ey’d Susan (1829), the anonymous Maria Marten (c.1830), and Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1842); the Irish playwright Dion Boucicault wrote several melodramas from the 1850s onwards, notably The Colleen Bawn (1860). Similar plots and simplified characterization in fiction, as in Dickens, can also be described as melodramatic. See also drame, grand guignol.
Further reading: Elaine Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics (1995).
memoir A narrative recollection of the writer’s earlier experiences, especially those involving unusual people, places, or events. A memoir is commonly distinguished from an *autobiography by its greater emphasis on other people or upon events such as war and travel experienced in common with others, and sometimes by its more *episodic structure, which does not need to be tied to the personal development of the narrator; however, the terms are often still confounded. Memoirs are supposed to be non-fictional, but the title has often been borrowed for a kind of fiction told as a *first-person narrative: see memoir-novel. A writer of memoirs is a memoirist. See also misery memoir.
memoir-novel A kind of novel that pretends to be a true *autobiography or *memoir. It was an important form in the emergence of the modern novel during the 18th century, in such works as Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) and John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Lady of Pleasure (1748–9; usually known as Fanny Hill). A similar pseudo-autobiographical mode of *first-person narrative is found in very many later novels, but the pretence that the real author was only an ‘editor’ of a true account did not outlive the 18th century. See also autobiografiction.
Menippean satire (Varronian satire) A form of intellectually humorous work characterized by miscellaneous contents, displays of curious erudition, and comical discussions on philosophical topics. The name comes from the Greek Cynic philosopher Menippus (3rd century bce), whose works are lost, but who was imitated by the Roman writer Varro (1st century bce) among others. The Canadian critic Northrop Frye revived the term in Anatomy of Criticism (1957) while also introducing the overlapping term *anatomy after a famous example of Menippean satire, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). The best-known example of the form is Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865); other examples include the novels of Thomas Love Peacock, and John Barth’s *campus novel Giles Goat-Boy (1966). The humour in these works is more cheerfully intellectual and less aggressive than in those works which we would usually call *satires, although it holds up contemporary intellectual life to gentle ridicule.
metacriticism Criticism of *criticism; that is, the examination of the principles, methods, and terms of criticism either in general (as in critical theory) or in the study of particular critics or critical debates. The term usually implies a consideration of the principles underlying critical interpretation and judgement.
metadrama (metatheatre) Drama about drama, or any moment of self-consciousness by which a play draws attention to its own fictional status as a theatrical pretence. Normally, direct addresses to the audience in *prologues, *epilogues, and *inductions are metadramatic in that they refer to the play itself and acknowledge the theatrical situation; a similar effect may be achieved in *asides. In a more extended sense, the use of a play-within-the-play, as in Hamlet, allows a further metadramatic exploration of the nature of theatre, which is taken still further in plays about plays, such as Luigi Pirandello’s Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1921). See also foregrounding, self-reflexive.
metafiction Fiction about fiction; or more especially a kind of fiction that openly comments on its own fictional status. In a weak sense, many modern novels about novelists having problems writing their novels may be called metafictional in so far as they discuss the nature of fiction; but the term is normally used for works that involve a significant degree of self-consciousness about themselves as fictions, in ways that go beyond occasional apologetic addresses to the reader. The most celebrated case is Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760–67), which makes a continuous joke of its own digressive form. A notable modern example is John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), in which Fowles interrupts the narrative to explain his procedures, and offers the reader alternative endings. Perhaps the finest of modern metafictions is Italo Calvino’s Se una notte d’inverno un viaggatore (If on a winter’s night a traveler, 1979), which begins ‘You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler.’ See also mise-en-abyme, postmodernism, self-reflexive.
Further reading: Patricia Waugh, Metafiction (1984).
metalanguage Any use of language about language, as for instance in *glosses, definitions, or arguments about the usage or meaning of words. Linguistics sometimes describes itself as a metalanguage because it is a ‘language’ about language; and so on the same assumption *criticism is a metalanguage about literature. Some theorists of *structuralism have spoken of metalanguages as if they were clearly separate from or standing above the ‘object-languages’ they describe, but this claim is denied by *post-structuralism, which points out that linguistics, criticism, etc., are still within the same general language, albeit as specialized uses with their own terminologies. Thus there is in principle no absolute distinction between criticism and literature. Roman Jakobson in his listing of linguistic *functions describes the ‘metalingual’ (or metalinguistic) function as that by which speakers check that they understand one another. In a wider sense, literary works often have a metalinguistic aspect in which they highlight uses of language: a very clear case of this is Shaw’s Pygmalion (1913). It is also possible to have a meta-metalanguage, i.e. a ‘third-level’ discourse such as an analysis of linguistics, or a work of *metacriticism.
metalepsis A term used in different senses in *rhetoric and *narratology. In rhetoric, the precise sense of metalepsis is uncertain, but it refers to various kinds of complex *figure or *trope that are figurative to the second or third degree; that is, they involve a figure that either refers us to yet another figure or requires a further imaginative leap to establish its reference, usually by a process of *metonymy. Extended *similes and *rhetorical questions sometimes show a metaleptic multiplication of figures. Thus Marlowe’s famous lines from Dr Faustus combine metaleptically a rhetorical question with *synecdoche and *hyperbole:Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
metaphor The most important and widespread *figure of speech, in which one thing, idea, or action is referred to by a word or expression normally denoting another thing, idea, or action, so as to suggest some common quality shared by the two. In metaphor, this resemblance is assumed as an imaginary identity rather than directly stated as a comparison: referring to a man as that pig, or saying he is a pig is metaphorical, whereas he is like a pig is a *simile. Metaphors may also appear as verbs (a talent may blossom) or as adjectives (a novice may be green), or in longer *idiomatic phrases, e.g. to throw the baby out with the bath-water. The use of metaphor to create new combinations of ideas is a major feature of *poetry, although it is quite possible to write poems without metaphors. Much of our everyday language is also made up of metaphorical words and phrases that pass unnoticed as ‘dead’ metaphors, like the branch of an organization. A mixed metaphor is one in which the combination of qualities suggested is illogical or ridiculous (see also catachresis), usually as a result of trying to apply two metaphors to one thing: those vipers stabbed us in the back. Modern analysis of metaphors and similes distinguishes the primary literal term (called the ‘*tenor’) from the secondary figurative term (the ‘vehicle’) applied to it: in the metaphor the road of life, the tenor is life, and the vehicle is the road.
Further reading: David Punter, Metaphor (2007).
metaphysical poets The name given to a diverse group of 17th-century English poets whose work is notable for its ingenious use of intellectual and theological concepts in surprising *conceits, strange *paradoxes, and far-fetched *imagery. The leading metaphysical poet was John Donne, whose colloquial, argumentative abruptness of rhythm and tone distinguishes his style from the *conventions of Elizabethan love-lyrics. Other poets to whom the label is applied include Andrew Marvell, Abraham Cowley, John Cleveland, and the predominantly religious poets George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and Richard Crashaw. In the 20th century, T. S. Eliot and others revived their reputation, stressing their quality of *wit, in the sense of intellectual strenuousness and flexibility rather than smart humour. The term metaphysical poetry usually refers to the works of these poets, but it can sometimes denote any poetry that discusses metaphysics, that is, the philosophy of knowledge and existence.
Further reading: A. J. Smith, Metaphysical Wit (2006).
metastasis [met-as-tă-sis] (plural –stases) In rhetoric, a rapid transition from one point to the next, or a glossing over of some point as of too little importance to dwell upon (e.g. if it would be troublesome to the speaker’s argument). Adjective: metastatic.
metatheatre See metadrama.
metathesis [met-ath-ě-sis] A transposition of sounds or letters, usually within a word or syllable. In etymology, it is invoked to explain changes of form, as in the case of the modern word thrill, which came from the older form thyrl; or nostril, which (from the same root) derives from Old English nosthyrl. A *Spoonerism is a special kind of metathesis that transposes sounds between words. Adjective: metathetic.
metonymy [met-on-ĭmi] A *figure of speech that replaces the name of one thing with the name of something else closely associated with it, e.g. the bottle for alcoholic drink, the press for journalism, skirt for woman, Mozart for Mozart’s music, the Oval Office for the US presidency. A well-known metonymic saying is the pen is mightier than the sword (i.e. writing is more powerful than warfare). A word used in such metonymic expressions is sometimes called a metonym [met-ŏnim]. An important kind of metonymy is *synecdoche, in which the name of a part is substituted for that of a whole (e.g. hand for worker), or vice versa. Modern literary theory has often used ‘metonymy’ in a wider sense, to designate the process of association by which metonymies are produced and understood: this involves establishing relationships of contiguity between two things, whereas *metaphor establishes relationships of similarity between them. The metonym/metaphor distinction has been associated with the contrast between *syntagm and *paradigm. See also antonomasia.
METRE (US METER)
The pattern of measured sound-units recurring more or less regularly in lines of verse. Poetry may be composed according to one of four principal metrical systems: (i) in quantitative metre, used in Greek and Latin, the pattern is a sequence of long and short syllables counted in groups known as feet (see foot, quantitative verse); (ii) in syllabic metre, as in French and Japanese, the pattern comprises a fixed number of syllables in the line (see syllabic verse); (iii) in accentual metre (or ‘strong-stress metre’), found in Old English and in later English popular verse, the pattern is a regular number of stressed syllables in the line or group of lines, regardless of the number of unstressed syllables (see accentual verse); (iv) in accentual-syllabic metre, the pattern consists of a regular number of stressed syllables appropriately arranged within a fixed total number of syllables in the line (with permissible variations including *feminine endings), both stressed and unstressed syllables being counted (see accentual-syllabic verse).
The fourth system—accentual-syllabic metre—is the one found in most English verse in the literary tradition since Chaucer; some flexible uses of it incline towards the accentual system. However, the descriptive terms most commonly used to analyse it have, confusingly, been inherited from the vocabulary of the very different Greek and Latin quantitative system. Thus the various English metres are named after the classical feet that their groupings of stressed and unstressed syllables resemble, and the length of a metrical line is still often expressed in terms of the number of feet it contains: a *dimeter has two feet, a *trimeter three, a *tetrameter four, a *pentameter five, a *hexameter six, and a *heptameter seven. A simpler and often more accurate method of description is to refer to lines in either accentual or accentual-syllabic metre according to the number of stressed syllables: thus an English tetrameter is a ‘four-stress line’, a pentameter a ‘five-stress line’ (these being the commonest lines in English).
English accentual-syllabic metres fall into two groups, according to the way in which stressed (●) and unstressed (○) syllables alternate: in duple metres, stressed syllables alternate more or less regularly with single unstressed syllables, and so the line is traditionally described as a sequence of disyllabic (2-syllable) feet; while in triple metres, stressed syllables alternate with pairs of unstressed syllables, and the line is seen as a sequence of trisyllabic (3-syllable) feet.
Of the two duple metres, by far the more common in English is the iambic metre, in which the stressed syllables are for the most part perceived as following the unstressed syllables with which they alternate (○●○●○● etc.), although some variations on this pattern are accepted. In traditional analysis by feet, iambic verse is said to be composed predominantly of *iambs (○●). This iambic pentameter by John Dryden illustrates the metre:And doom’d to death, though fated not to die.
Dark behind it rose the forest
Tyger, tyger, burning bright
Cannon in front of them (Tennyson: dactylic dimeter)
Of your fainting, dispirited race (Arnold: anapaestic trimeter)
All these patterns are open to different kinds of variation, of which the most common is traditionally called *substitution of one foot for another (but see also demotion, promotion); for the other feet sometimes mentioned in the context of substitution, see foot. Other variations include the addition or subtraction of syllables to alter the line’s length. The theory and practice of metrical verse is known as *prosody or metrics, while the detailed analysis of the metrical pattern in lines of verse is called *scansion.
Further reading: Derek Attridge, Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (1995); Martin J. Duffell, A New History of English Metre (2008).
metrics Another word for *prosody, that is, the theory and practice of poetic *metre. A poet composing metrical verse, or a theorist of metre, may be called a metrist or metrician.
Middle English The term used by historians of the English language to denote a stage of its development intermediate between *Old English (or ‘Anglo-Saxon’) and modern English. In this historical scheme, Middle English is the language spoken and written between about 1100 and about 1500. In this period, English is influenced in many aspects of its vocabulary by a new French-speaking ruling class, and by a clergy that wrote mainly in Latin. Middle English grammar and syntax are clearly those inherited from the Germanic basis of Old English, although now shedding its inflections and distinctions of gender. Strong differentiation appears among dialects, of which the East Midlands variety proved to be the most important basis of modern English. The period is commonly subdivided into Early Middle English (approximately 1100–1300) and Later Middle English (1300–1500). In its literary manifestations, Early Middle English is the language of The Owl and the Nightingale, while Later Middle English is that of Langland, Chaucer, and Malory.
Further reading: R. D. Fulk, An Introduction to Middle English (2012).
http://www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth
• Labyrinth, an extensive medieval studies resource.
middle generation A term increasingly used since the 1980s to refer collectively to American poets who had been born in the first twenty years of the 20th century, and who made their reputations in its middle decades, 1940–60. Schematically, the middle-generation poets are regarded as intermediate between poets associated with *modernism (most of those having been born in the 1880s) and the later cohorts of the *New York school and the *Beat writers, mostly born in the 1920s. The poets most often identified as belonging to the middle generation are, by date of birth, Theodore Roethke (1908), Elizabeth Bishop (1911), Delmore Schwartz (1913), Robert Hayden (1913), Randall Jarrell (1914), John Berryman (1914), and Robert Lowell (1917).
Miltonic sonnet See sonnet.
mime In the modern sense, a dramatic performance or scene played with bodily movement and gesture and without words; thus a non-literary art. However, in ancient Greece and Rome the mime was a kind of crude *farce about domestic life, including dialogue as well as gesture, both often obscene. A performer in such a play could also be called a mime. See also dumb show, pantomime.
mimesis [my-mees-is] The Greek word for imitation, a central term in aesthetic and literary theory since Aristotle. A literary work that is understood to be reproducing an external reality or any aspect of it is described as mimetic, while mimetic criticism is the kind of *criticism that assumes or insists that literary works reflect reality. See also diegesis, reflectionism, ut pictura poesis.
Further reading: Matthew Potolsky, Mimesis (2006).
minimalism A literary or dramatic style or principle based on the extreme restriction of a work’s contents to a bare minimum of necessary elements, normally within a short form, e.g. a *haiku, *epigram, brief dramatic *sketch, or *monologue. Minimalism is often characterized by bareness or starkness of vocabulary or of dramatic setting, and a reticence verging on or even becoming silence. The term has been borrowed from modern sculpture and painting, and applied especially to the later dramatic work of the Irish writer Samuel Beckett, whose 30-second play Breath (1969), for example, has no characters and no words. More loosely, the adjective minimalist may be applied to any strikingly abbreviated work, such as the shortest poems of *Imagism, or to the very short stories of Lydia Davis.
Minnesänger [min-ĕ-zeng-er] (Minnesingers) The poets of *courtly love (Minne) who flourished in southern Germany in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, composing their love-lyrics to be sung at aristocratic courts, where several of the Minnesänger were themselves noblemen. They are the German equivalents of the Provençal *troubadours and French *trouvères. Their form of love poetry is known as Minnesang, a term sometimes extended to cover other *lyrics of this period. Among the foremost Minnesingers were Dietmar von Aist, Hartmann von Aue, and Walther von der Vogelweide.
minstrel A professional entertainer of late medieval Europe, either itinerant or settled at a noble court. Minstrels of the 13th and 14th centuries, the descendants of the *jongleurs, sang and recited lyrics and narrative poems including *chansons de geste and *ballads. Their art, sometimes called minstrelsy, declined with the advent of printing. They are distinguished from the *troubadours, who were educated amateur poets of higher social rank. In the USA, the minstrel show was a 19th-century form of entertainment with white performers in blackface presenting stereotyped impressions of black American folk culture, and playing banjos.
miracle play A kind of medieval religious play representing non-scriptural legends of saints or of the Virgin Mary. The term is often confusingly applied also to the *mystery plays, which form a distinct body of drama based on biblical stories. Thanks to the book-burning zeal of the English Reformation, no significant miracle plays survive in English, but there is a French cycle of forty Miracles de Notre-Dame probably dating from the 14th century.
mise-en-abyme [meez on ab-eem] A term coined by the French writer André Gide, supposedly from the language of heraldry, to refer to an internal reduplication of a literary work or part of a work. Gide’s own novel Les Faux-Monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters, 1926) provides a prominent example: its central character, Édouard, is a novelist working on a novel called Les Faux-Monnayeurs which strongly resembles the very novel in which he himself is a character. The ‘Chinese box’ effect of mise-en-abyme often suggests an infinite regress, i.e. an endless succession of internal duplications. It has become a favoured device in *postmodernist fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and others. See also metafiction.
mise en scène [meez ahn sen] The French term for the staging or visual arrangement of a dramatic production, comprising scenery, properties, costume, lighting, and human movement. The term is also used in film-making for the staging of the action in front of the camera, i.e. for the combination of setting, lighting, acting, and costume, as distinct from camerawork and editing.
misery memoir A kind of *memoir or *autobiography notable for its account of the narrator suffering and subsequently surviving extremely disturbing experiences, especially in childhood, whether of poverty, neglect, persecution, or physical and sexual abuse. It came to be recognized as a popular subgenre in the 1990s with the success of such works as Jung Chang’s Wild Swans (1991), Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called “It” (1995), and Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996). The first decade of the 21st century witnessed a publishing boom in what came to be called misery lit, large numbers of such books being sold through supermarkets. The commercial temptations of this boom attracted some authors whose extremely harrowing stories were exposed as fabrications or wild exaggerations.
misprision Misreading or misunderstanding. Harold Bloom, in his theory of the *anxiety of influence, uses the term to mean a kind of defensive distortion by which a poet creates a poem in reaction against another poet’s powerful ‘precursor’ poem, and which is also necessarily involved in all readers’ interpretations of poetry.
mixed metaphor See metaphor.
mnemonic [ni-mon-ik] Helpful in remembering something; or (as a noun) a form of words or letters that assists the memory, e.g. the rhyme beginning ‘Thirty days hath September’. Rhyming verse is often employed for mnemonic purposes, and it is sometimes claimed that this was poetry’s original function.
mock epic A poem employing the lofty style and the conventions of *epic poetry to describe a trivial or undignified series of events; thus a kind of *satire that mocks its subject by treating it in an inappropriately grandiose manner, usually at some length. Mock epics incidentally make fun of the elaborate conventions of epic poetry, including *invocations, battles, supernatural *machinery, *epic similes, and *formulaic descriptions (e.g. of funeral rites or of warriors arming for combat). The outstanding examples in English are Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1712–14) and The Dunciad (1728–43), while Boileau’s Le Lutrin (1674–83) is an important French example. Adjective: mock-epic or *mock-heroic. See also burlesque, irony, parody.
mock-heroic Written in an ironically grand style that is comically incongruous with the ‘low’ or trivial subject treated. This adjective is commonly applied to *mock epics, but serves also for works or parts of works using the same comic method in various forms other than that of the full-scale mock-epic poem: Swift’s prose satire The Battle of the Books (1704) is an important case, as is Byron’s intermittently mock-heroic poem Don Juan (1819–24). Shorter satirical poems employing fewer epic conventions, such as Ben Jonson’s ‘On the Famous Voyage’ (1616) and Dryden’s MacFlecknoe (1682), are probably better described as mock-heroic poems rather than mock epics, partly because they are not long enough to be divided into *cantos. Theatrical *burlesques of *heroic drama, such as Henry Fielding’s Tom Thumb (1730) are also referred to as mock-heroic. See also heroic poetry, parody, satire.
Further reading: Ulrich Broich, The Eighteenth-Century Mock-Heroic Poem (1990).
mode An unspecific critical term usually designating a broad but identifiable kind of literary method, mood, or manner that is not tied exclusively to a particular *form or *genre. Examples are the *satiric mode, the *ironic, the *comic, the *pastoral, and the *didactic.
modernism A general term applied retrospectively to the wide range of experimental and *avant-garde trends in the literature (and other arts) of the early 20th century, including *Symbolism, *Futurism, *Expressionism, *Imagism, *Vorticism, *Ultraismo, *Dada, and *Surrealism, along with the innovations of unaffiliated writers. Modernist literature is characterized chiefly by a rejection of 19th-century traditions and of their consensus between author and reader: the conventions of *realism, for instance, were abandoned by Franz Kafka and other novelists, and by expressionist drama, while several poets rejected traditional *metres in favour of *free verse. Modernist writers tended to see themselves as an avant-garde disengaged from bourgeois values, and disturbed their readers by adopting complex and difficult new forms and styles. In fiction, the accepted continuity of chronological development was upset by Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner, while James Joyce and Virginia Woolf attempted new ways of tracing the flow of characters’ thoughts in their *stream-of-consciousness styles. In poetry, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot replaced the logical exposition of thoughts with *collages of fragmentary images and complex *allusions. Luigi Pirandello and Bertolt Brecht opened up the theatre to new forms of abstraction in place of realist and *naturalist representation.
Modernist writing is predominantly cosmopolitan, and often expresses a sense of urban cultural dislocation, along with an awareness of new anthropological and psychological theories. Its favoured techniques of juxtaposition and multiple *point of view challenge the reader to re-establish a coherence of meaning from fragmentary forms. In English, its major landmarks are Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land (both 1922).
Further reading:Peter Childs, Modernism (2nd edn, 2007); Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: An Introduction (2nd edn, 2009).
http://modernism.research.yale.edu/
• Modernism Lab: research resource at Yale.
modernismo A movement in Spanish-language poetry of the period from the 1880s to c.1916, inaugurated and named by the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, whose many followers in Mexico, Cuba, Peru, and elsewhere in Latin America, as well as in Spain became known as modernistas. They were dedicated to formal experiment, rhythmic flexibility, and ideals of artistic purity, partly under the influence of the French *Parnassians and *Symbolists. It is preferable to avoid Anglicizing this term to ‘*modernism’, since the latter term covers a much wider international range of work in prose as well as verse, extending into a slightly later period.
monodrama A play or dramatic scene in which only one character speaks; or a sequence of *dramatic monologues all spoken by the same single character. The second sense is rarely used, except of Tennyson’s Maud (1855), to which the author attached the subtitle A Monodrama in 1875. In the first sense, some German playwrights of the late 18th century wrote monodramas that had musical accompaniment, notably J. C. Brandes’s Ariadne auf Naxos (1774). Modern writers of monodramas include Samuel Beckett in Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) and Alan Bennett, who has written several monodramas for television. See also monologue.
monody An *elegy, *dirge, or *lament uttered by a single speaker, or presented as if to be spoken by a single speaker. In ancient Greek poetry, the term referred to an *ode sung by a single performer, as distinct from a choral ode. Milton applied the term to his elegy ‘Lycidas’ (1637), and Arnold used it in the subtitle of his ‘Thyrsis’ (1867). A composer or singer of monodies is a monodist. Adjective: monodic. See also threnody.
monograph A scientific or scholarly *treatise devoted to the sustained examination of a single clearly identified subject (originally a single species in natural history), as distinct from a general survey covering several related topics. This may be a short article, but is now usually understood to be a book-length work. The author of a monograph may be referred to as a monographer or monographist. Adjective: monographic.
monologic (monological) See dialogic.
monologue An extended speech uttered by one speaker, either to others or as if alone. Significant varieties include the *dramatic monologue (a kind of poem in which the speaker is imagined to be addressing a silent audience), and the *soliloquy (in which the speaker is supposed to be ‘overheard’ while alone). Some modern plays in which only one character speaks, like Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), are known either as *monodramas or as monologues. In prose fiction, the *interior monologue is a representation of a character’s unspoken thoughts, sometimes rendered in the style known as *stream of consciousness. The speaker of a monologue is sometimes called a monologuist.
monometer [mon-om-iter] A verse line consisting of only one *foot (or, in some classical Greek and Latin *metres, one *dipody, i.e. one linked pair of feet). Monometers are rarely used as the basis for whole poems, although Robert Herrick’s ‘Upon His Departure Hence’ (1648) is one English example. Adjective: monometric.
monorhyme A poem or poetic passage in which every line ends on the same rhyme; found more commonly in Welsh, in medieval Latin, and in Arabic than in English. Christina Rossetti’s poem ‘Passing Away, Saith the World, Passing Away’ (1862) is a notable English example.
morality play A kind of religious drama popular in England, Scotland, France, and elsewhere in Europe in the 15th and early 16th centuries. Morality plays are dramatized *allegories, in which personified virtues, vices, diseases, and temptations struggle for the soul of Man as he travels from birth to death. They instil a simple message of Christian salvation, but often include comic scenes, as in the lively obscenities of Mankind (c.1465). The earliest surviving example in English is the long Castle of Perseverance (c.1420), and the best-known is Everyman (c.1510). Most are anonymous, but Magnyfycence (c.1515) was written by John Skelton. Echoes of the morality plays can be found in Elizabethan drama, especially Marlowe’s Dr Faustus and the character of Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello, who resembles the sinister tempter known as the *Vice in morality plays. See also interlude, psychomachy.
morpheme A linguistic term for a minimal unit of grammatical meaning in a language. Words are composed of one or more morphemes (e.g. tables=table+s). Prefixes, suffixes, plural endings etc. are called ‘bound morphemes’ because they do not occur on their own. Adjective: morphemic. See also inflection.
morphology A branch of linguistics concerned with analysing the structure of words. The morphology of a given word is its structure or form.
mosaic rhyme See feminine rhyme, triple rhyme.
motif [moh-teef] A situation, incident, idea, image, or character-type that is found in many different literary works, folktales, or myths; or any element of a work that is elaborated into a more general *theme. The fever that purges away a character’s false identity is a recurrent motif in Victorian fiction; and in European *lyric poetry the *ubi sunt motif and the *carpe diem motif are commonly found. Where an image, incident, or other element is repeated significantly within a single work, it is more commonly referred to as a *leitmotif. See also archetype, stock character, topos.
Movement, the The term applied since 1954 to a loose group of English poets whose work subsequently appeared in the anthology New Lines (1956) edited by Robert Conquest. Apart from Conquest himself, the group included Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, D. J. Enright, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin, and John Wain. Their common ground was limited to an avoidance of romantic postures in favour of ironic detachment, a reaction against the excesses of *modernism, and a cultivation of poetry as a disciplined craft. The central figures—Larkin and Amis (who both also wrote as novelists)—are associated with a defiantly provincial Englishness, for which the term ‘movement’ is singularly inappropriate, but others—notably Davie, Enright, and Gunn—had or later acquired a more international perspective.
Further reading: Blake Morrison, The Movement (1980).
multi-accentuality The ability of words and other linguistic signs to carry more than one meaning according to the contexts in which they are used. The concept was introduced in an important Russian critique of Saussure’s abstract theory of la *langue: Valentin Voloshinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929; sometimes alleged to have been written by Mikhail Bakhtin) accused Saussure of attributing fixed meanings to signs, when in actual practice the meaning of words is open to continual redefinition within the struggles between social classes and groups. In certain historical circumstances, particular words become objects of struggle between groups for whom they have different meanings: the meaning of freedom is constantly contested, while recent examples would include terrorist, among many others. See also dialogic, polysemy.
muse A source of inspiration to a poet or other writer, usually represented as a female deity, and conventionally called upon for assistance in a poet’s *invocation. In ancient Greek religion, the muses were nine sister-goddesses, the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (the goddess of memory), who presided over various arts and some branches of learning. Their cult was associated particularly with the Pierian Spring on Mount Olympus, with Mount Parnassus near Delphi, and with Mount Helicon in Boeotia. Their names and responsibilities are as follows: Calliope (*epic poetry); Clio (history); Erato (*lyric love poetry); Euterpe (flute music); Melpomene (*tragedy); Polyhymnia (*hymns); Terpsichore (choral dance and song); Thalia (*comedy); and Urania (astronomy). Later poets of the *Renaissance, however, often referred to the women praised in their love poems as muses who inspired their verse; and in modern *criticism the term has often been extended to any cause or principle underlying a writer’s work.
mystery play A major form of popular medieval religious drama, representing a scene from the Old or New Testament. Mystery plays—also known as *pageants or as Corpus Christi plays—were performed in many towns across Europe from the 13th century to the 16th (and later, in Catholic Spain and Bavaria). They seem to have developed gradually from Latin *liturgical drama into civic occasions in the local languages, usually enacted on Corpus Christi, a holy feast day from 1311 onwards. Several English towns had *cycles of mystery plays, in which wagons stopping at different points in the town were used as stages for the various episodes, each presented by a trade guild (then known as a ‘mystery’). A full cycle, like the 48 plays enacted at York, would represent the entire scheme of Christian cosmology from the Creation to Doomsday. Other English cycles survive from Chester, Wakefield, and the unidentified ‘N-town’; the plays of the anonymous ‘Wakefield Master’, notably the Second Shepherds’ Play, are the most celebrated. See also miracle play, passion play.
http://www.luminarium.org/medlit/plays.htm
• Luminarium archive of play texts and other materials.
myth A kind of story or rudimentary *narrative sequence, normally traditional and anonymous, through which a given culture ratifies its social customs or accounts for the origins of human and natural phenomena, usually in supernatural or boldly imaginative terms. The term has a wide range of meanings, which can be divided roughly into ‘rationalist’ and ‘romantic’ versions: in the first, a myth is a false or unreliable story or belief (adjective: mythical), while in the second, ‘myth’ is a superior intuitive mode of cosmic understanding (adjective: mythic). In most literary contexts, the second kind of usage prevails, and myths are regarded as fictional stories containing deeper truths, expressing collective attitudes to fundamental matters of life, death, divinity, and existence (sometimes deemed to be ‘universal’). Myths are usually distinguished from *legends in that they have less of an historical basis, although they seem to have a similar mode of existence in oral transmission, re-telling, literary adaptation, and *allusion. A mythology is a body of related myths shared by members of a given people or religion, or sometimes a system of myths evolved by an individual writer, as in the ‘personal mythologies’ of William Blake and W. B. Yeats; the term has sometimes also been used to denote the study of myths. Verb: mythicize or mythologize. See also archetype, myth criticism, mythopoeia.
Further reading: Laurence Coupe, Myth (2nd edn, 2008).
myth criticism A kind of literary interpretation that regards literary works as expressions or embodiments of recurrent mythic patterns and structures, or of ‘timeless’ *archetypes. Myth criticism, which flourished in the 1950s and 1960s, is less interested in the specific qualities of a given work than in those features of its *narrative structure or *symbolism that seem to connect it to ancient myths and religions. An important precedent for many myth-critical studies was J. G. Frazer’s speculative anthropological work The Golden Bough (1890–1915), which proposed a cycle of death and rebirth found in fertility cults as the common basis for several mythologies. The most influential modern myth critic, Northrop Frye, translated this hypothesis into a universal scheme of literary history in his Anatomy of Criticism (1957), in which the major narrative *genres are related to the seasonal cycle. Other leading myth critics have included Gaston Bachelard, Richard Chase, and Leslie Fiedler. More recently, myth criticism has been widely dismissed as a form of *reductionism that neglects cultural and historical differences as well as the specific properties of literary works.
mythopoeia [mith-oh-pee-ă] (mythopoesis) [mith-ŏ-poh-ees-is] The making of myths, either collectively in the *folklore and religion of a given (usually pre-literate) culture, or individually by a writer who elaborates a personal system of spiritual principles as in the writings of William Blake. The term is often used in a loose sense to describe any kind of writing that either draws upon older myths or resembles myths in subject-matter or imaginative scope. Adjective: mythopoeic or mythopoetic.