paean [pee-ăn] (pean) A song or chant of triumphant rejoicing usually after a military victory. Originally choral hymns of thanksgiving to the Greek god Apollo, paeans were later extended to other gods and to military leaders.
paeon [pee-on] A Greek metrical unit (*foot) consisting of one long syllable and three short syllables, usually in that order (− ⌣ ⌣ ⌣, known as the ‘first paeon’ from the position of the long syllable). Named after its use in *paeans, it occurs in some classical Greek comedy. In English, the paeon combines one stressed syllable with three unstressed syllables; but the foot is rarely found outside the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, who used the second (○•○○) and third (○○•○) paeons in combination with other feet in his ‘The Windhover’ and other poems. Adjective: paeonic.
pageant A wagon used as a mobile stage on which were performed *mystery plays and related dramas in the Middle Ages. The term is sometimes also applied to a play performed on such a movable stage, usually a mystery play. In a later sense, a pageant is a public procession displaying *tableaux and costumes appropriate to the commemoration of some historical event or tradition, sometimes involving short dramatic scenes.
palaeography [pal-i-og-răfi] The study and deciphering of old manuscripts.
palimpsest A manuscript written on a surface from which an earlier text has been partly or wholly erased. Palimpsests were common in the Middle Ages before paper became available, because of the high cost of parchment and vellum. In a figurative sense, the term is sometimes applied to a literary work that has more than one ‘layer’ or level of meaning. Adjective: palimpsestic.
palindrome A word (like deed, eye, or tenet) that remains the same if read backwards; or a sentence or verse in which the order of letters is the same reading backwards or forwards, disregarding punctuation and spaces between words: Madam, I'm Adam. Adjective: palindromic.
palinode A poem or song retracting some earlier statement by the poet. A notable example in English is Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women, written to recant his earlier defamation of women in Troilus and Criseyde.
panegyric [pan-ĕ-ji-rik] A public speech or written composition devoted to the prolonged, effusive praise of some person, group of people, or public body (e.g. a government or army). This branch of *rhetoric was particularly cultivated in ancient Greece and Rome. A composer or speaker of a panegyric is known as a panegyrist. Verb: panegyrize. See also encomium, éloge.
pantomime Now a theatrical entertainment for children, based on a *fairy tale but including songs, dances, topical jokes, and the playing of the hero’s part by a woman. In ancient Rome, however, a pantomime was a play on a mythological subject, in which a single performer mimed all the parts while a *chorus sang the story. The term is sometimes also used as a *synonym for *mime or *dumb show. Adjective: pantomimic.
pantoum (pantun) A verse form of Malay origin, employing *quatrains rhyming abab and repetition of whole lines so that the second and fourth lines of each stanza are repeated as the first and third lines of the next, and in the final quatrain the poem’s first line appears as the final line, its third line as the second. Unlike the *villanelle and the *triolet, which use similar kinds of repetition, it has no fixed number of lines. The form, originally known as the pantun, was discovered and domesticated by French poets in the 19th century, including Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire, under the spelling ‘pantoum’, which has become standard in English. A modern example in English is Marilyn Hacker’s twenty-stanza ‘Pantoum’ (1980).
parable A brief tale intended to be understood as an *allegory illustrating some lesson or moral. The forty parables attributed to Jesus of Nazareth in Christian literature have had a lasting influence upon the Western tradition of *didactic allegory. A modern instance is Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘The Parable of the Old Man and the Young’ (1920), which adapts a biblical story to the 1914–18 war; a longer prose parable is John Steinbeck’s The Pearl (1948). Adjective: parabolic. See also fable.
paradigm [pa-ră-dym] In the general sense, a pattern or model in which some quality or relation is illustrated in its purest form; but in the terminology of *structuralism, a set of linguistic or other units that can be substituted for each other in the same position within a sequence or structure. A paradigm in this sense may be constituted by all words sharing the same grammatical function, since the substitution of one for another does not disturb the *syntax of a sentence. Linguists often refer to the paradigmatic [pa-ră-dig-mat-ik] dimension of language as the ‘vertical axis’ of selection, whereas the syntagmatic dimension governing the combination of linguistic units is the ‘horizontal axis’ (see syntagm). Thus any *sign has two kinds of relation to other signs: a paradigmatic relation to signs of the same class (which are absent in any given utterance), and a syntagmatic relation to signs present in the same sequence.
paradox A statement or expression so surprisingly self-contradictory as to provoke us into seeking another sense or context in which it would be true (although some paradoxes cannot be resolved into truths, remaining flatly self-contradictory, e.g. Everything I say is a lie). Wordsworth’s line ‘The Child is father of the Man’ and Shakespeare’s ‘the truest poetry is the most feigning’ are notable literary examples. Ancient theorists of *rhetoric described paradox as a *figure of speech, but 20th-century critics have given it a higher importance as a mode of understanding by which poetry challenges our habits of thought. Paradox was cultivated especially by poets of the 17th century, often in the verbally compressed form of *oxymoron. It is also found in the prose *epigram; and is pervasive in the literature of Christianity, a notoriously paradoxical religion. In a wider sense, the term may also be applied to a person or situation characterized by striking contradictions. A person who utters paradoxes is a paradoxer.
paralipsis (paralepsis; paraleipsis) A rhetorical figure in which the speaker or writer draws attention to some important matter by pretending to pass over it, as in the everyday expression ‘not to mention…’. It is also known under its Latin name, occupatio.
paraliterature The category of written works relegated to the margins of recognized *literature and often dismissed as subliterary despite evident resemblances to the respectable literature of the recognized *canon. Paraliterature thus includes many modern forms of popular fiction and drama: children’s adventure stories, most *detective and spy *thrillers, most *science fiction and *fantasy writing, *pornography and women’s *romances, along with much television and radio drama.
parallelism The arrangement of similarly constructed clauses, sentences, or verse lines in a pairing or other sequence suggesting some correspondence between them. The effect of parallelism is usually one of balanced arrangement achieved through repetition of the same syntactic forms (see syntax). In classical *rhetoric, this device is called parison or isocolon. These lines from Shakespeare’s Richard II show parallelism:
I'll give my jewels for a set of beads,
My gorgeous palace for a hermitage,
My gay apparel for an almsman’s gown,
My figured goblets for a dish of wood…
Parallelism is an important device of 18th-century English prose, as in Edward Gibbon’s sentence from his Memoirs (1796): ‘I was neither elated by the ambition of fame, nor depressed by the apprehension of contempt.’ Where the elements arranged in parallel are sharply opposed, the effect is one of *antithesis. In a more extended sense, the term is applied to correspondences between larger elements of dramatic or narrative works, such as the relation of *subplot to main *plot in a play.
paraphrase A restatement of a text’s meaning in different words, usually in order to clarify the sense of the original. Paraphrase involves the separation or abstraction of *content from *form, and so has been resisted strongly by *New Criticism and other schools of modern critical opinion: Cleanth Brooks in The Well-Wrought Urn (1947) issued a notable denunciation of the ‘heresy of paraphrase’, i.e. the idea that a poem is paraphrasable. This is a necessary theoretical warning, since the particular form and *diction of a poem (or other work) give it meanings that are not reducible to simple statements and that do not survive the substitution of *synonyms; but the practice of paraphrase can help to establish this very fact, and is an analytic procedure too useful to be outlawed. Adjective: paraphrastic.
pararhyme A rhyming effect produced by ‘rich’ *consonance (see rime riche) without assonance: thus the consonantal sounds before and after the stressed vowels of a rhyming pair are matched while the vowel sounds are not, e.g. love/leave. This unusual variety of *half-rhyme is found in various traditions of poetry, especially in Welsh, but in English it was re-invented in 1917 by Wilfred Owen for some of his war poems, notably ‘Strange Meeting’ (1918). The term was coined by Edmund Blunden in the introduction to his edition of The Poems of Wilfred Owen (1931). Owen himself in private correspondence had referred to this form of rhyming as ‘my vowel-rhyme stunt’, apparently forgetting that its basis is consonantal, not vocalic.
paratactic Marked by the juxtaposition of clauses or sentences, without the use of connecting words: I'll go; you stay here. A paratactic style has the effect of abruptness, because the relationship between one statement and the next is not made explicit. This passage from H. D. Thoreau’s Walden (1854) displays parataxis in the lack of obvious connection between sentences:
I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere. Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as our strength. The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well nigh incurable form of disease.
The opposite, explicitly connected style is called *hypotactic. See also asyndeton, polysyndeton.
paratext A textual item that serves some supplementary function in relation to a principal text that it describes, introduces, justifies, or explains. There are several kinds of paratext, including prefaces, introductions, *forewords, afterwords, *glosses, blurbs, footnotes, and appendices. Adjective: paratextual. See also apparatus.
parison See parallelism.
Parnassians (Parnassiens) A group of French poets who set a new standard of formal precision in *lyric poetry from the 1860s to the 1890s, partly in reaction against the emotional extravagance of *Romanticism. Adopting Leconte de Lisle as their leader, they followed Théophile Gautier’s principle of *art for art’s sake, sometimes championing the virtues of impersonality and of traditional verse forms. Their work appeared in the anthology La Parnasse contemporain (1866), which was followed by two further collections with the same title in 1871 and 1876. The leading figures in the group included José-Maria de Hérédia—whose sonnets in Les Trophées (1893) constitute the foremost achievement of Parnassianism—along with R.-F.-A. Sully-Prudhomme, Catulle Mendès, Léon Dierx, and François Coppée. Their name refers to Mount Parnassus, a site associated with the Greek *muses.
Further reading: Robert T. Denommé, The French Parnassian Poets (1972).
parody A mocking imitation of the *style of a literary work or works, ridiculing the stylistic habits of an author or school by exaggerated mimicry. Parody is related to *burlesque in its application of serious styles to ridiculous subjects, to *satire in its punishment of eccentricities, and even to *criticism in its analysis of style. The Greek dramatist Aristophanes parodied the styles of Aeschylus and Euripides in The Frogs (405 bce), while Cervantes parodied *chivalric romances in Don Quixote (1605). In English, two of the leading parodists are Henry Fielding and James Joyce. Poets in the 19th century, especially William Wordsworth and Robert Browning, suffered numerous parodies of their works. Adjective: parodic. See also mock-heroic, travesty.
Further reading: Simon Dentith, Parody (2000).
paronomasia [pa-rŏ-noh-may-ziă] Punning; the term used in ancient *rhetoric to refer to any play on the sounds of words. Adjective: paronomastic. See antanaclasis, pun.
passim A Latin word meaning ‘widely scattered’, used in scholarly notes with the sense ‘throughout’, to indicate that the word or expression referred to occurs so often in a given text that references to specific instances are needless.
passion play A religious play representing the trials, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Performances of such plays are recorded in various parts of Europe from the early 13th century onwards, in Latin and in the *vernaculars. Some formed part of the cycles of *mystery plays, others were performed separately, usually on Good Friday. The most famous example today is the Oberammergauer Passionsspiel still performed by the villagers of Oberammergau in Bavaria at ten-year intervals; this custom originated in a vow made during an outbreak of plague in 1633.
passus (plural passus) A section of a longer poem or story, especially a medieval work such as William Langland’s Piers Plowman. The term is borrowed from the Latin word for a ‘step’. See also canto.
pastiche [pas-teesh] A literary work composed from elements borrowed either from various other writers or from a particular earlier author. The term can be used in a derogatory sense to indicate lack of originality, or more neutrally to refer to works that involve a deliberate and playfully imitative tribute to other writers. Pastiche differs from *parody in using imitation as a form of flattery rather than mockery, and from *plagiarism in its lack of deceptive intent. A well-known modern example is John Fowles’s novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), which is partly a pastiche of the great Victorian novelists. The frequent resort to pastiche has been cited as a characteristic feature of *postmodernism. A writer of pastiches is sometimes called a pasticheur. Verb: pastiche.
Further reading: Richard Dyer, Pastiche (2007).
pastoral A highly conventional mode of writing that celebrates the innocent life of shepherds and shepherdesses in poems, plays, and prose *romances. Pastoral literature describes the loves and sorrows of musical shepherds, usually in an idealized Golden Age of rustic innocence and idleness; paradoxically, it is an elaborately artificial cult of simplicity and virtuous frugality. The pastoral tradition in Western literature originated with the Greek *idylls of Theocritus (3rd century bce), who wrote for an urban readership in Alexandria about shepherds in his native Sicily. His most influential follower, the Roman poet Virgil, wrote *eclogues (42–37 bce) set in the imagined tranquillity of *Arcadia. In the 3rd century ce, the prose romance Daphnis and Chloe by Longus continued the tradition. An important revival of pastoral writing in the 16th century was led by Italian dramatists including Torquato Tasso and Battista Guarini, while long prose romances also appeared in other languages, notably Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1590) and Honoré d'Urfé’s L'Astrée (1607–27).
English pastorals were written in several forms, from the eclogues of Edmund Spenser’s The Shephearde’s Calender (1579) and the comedy of Shakespeare’s As You Like It (c.1599) to *lyrics like Marlowe’s ‘The Passionate Sheepeard to his Love’ (1600). A significant form within this tradition is the pastoral *elegy, in which the mourner and the mourned are represented as shepherds in decoratively mythological surroundings: the outstanding English example is John Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ (1637). While most forms of pastoral literature died out during the 18th century, Milton’s influence secured for the pastoral elegy a longer life: P. B. Shelley’s ‘Adonais’ (1821) and Matthew Arnold’s ‘Thyrsis’ (1867) are both elegiac imitations of ‘Lycidas’. By the late 18th century, pastoral poetry had been overshadowed by the related but distinct fashions for *georgics and *topographical poetry, and it came to be superseded by the more realistic poetry of country life written by George Crabbe, William Wordsworth, and John Clare.
Further reading: Terry Gifford, Pastoral (1999).
pastourelle A short *narrative poem in which a knight relates his encounter with a humble shepherdess whom he attempts (with or without success) to seduce in the course of their amusing *dialogue. Such poems were fashionable in France, Italy, and Germany in the 13th century.
pathetic fallacy The poetic convention whereby natural phenomena which cannot feel as humans do are described as if they could: thus rain-clouds may ‘weep’, or flowers may be ‘joyful’ in sympathy with the poet’s (or imagined speaker’s) mood. The pathetic fallacy normally involves the use of some *metaphor which falls short of full-scale *personification in its treatment of the natural world. The rather odd term was coined by the influential Victorian art critic John Ruskin in the third volume of his Modern Painters (1856). Ruskin’s strict views about the accurate representation of nature led him to distinguish great poets like Shakespeare, who use the device sparingly, from lesser poets like Wordsworth and Shelley, whose habitual use of it becomes ‘morbid’. Later critics, however, employ the term in a neutral sense. See also apostrophe, poetic licence.
pathos [pay-thoss] The emotionally moving quality or power of a literary work or of particular passages within it, appealing especially to our feelings of sorrow, pity, and compassionate sympathy. Adjective: pathetic.
patronage The provision of financial or other material assistance to a writer by a wealthy person or public institution, in return for entertainment, prestige, or homage. Dr Johnson defined a patron as ‘a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery’. The system of patronage has had several varieties, from the accommodation of a poet in a royal household to the payment of a single fee for a flattering dedication. Its importance declined sharply in the 18th century with the appearance of a publishing market, but patronage continues in some modern forms such as business sponsorship of dramatic performances, or government subsidies to the arts.
pattern poetry Verse that is arranged in an unusual shape on the page so as to suggest some object or movement matching the ideas or mood of the words. Pattern poems were known in Greece in the 4th century bce. A well-known English example is George Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings’ (1633); later poets who have used this form in English include e. e. cummings and Dylan Thomas. Since the 1950s, pattern poetry has often been referred to as *concrete poetry or as visual poetry.
Further reading: Willard Bohn, Reading Visual Poetry (2010).
http://www.gardendigest.com/concrete
• Bibliography and links for pattern and concrete poetry.
penny dreadful The name given in the Victorian age to a kind of cheaply produced book containing bloodthirsty narratives of crime, sometimes merely *plagiarisms from *Gothic novels. In the later 19th century the term was extended to include tamer adventure stories for boys in cheap formats.
pentameter [pen-tamm-ĕt-er] A metrical verse line having five main *stresses, traditionally described as a line of five ‘feet’ (see foot). In English poetry since Chaucer, the pentameter—almost always an *iambic line normally of 10 syllables—has had a special status as the standard line in many important forms including *blank verse, the *heroic couplet, *ottava rima, *rhyme royal, and the *sonnet. In its pure iambic form, the pentameter shows a regular alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables, as in this line by Percy Bysshe Shelley:
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
There are, however, several permissible variations in the placing of stresses, which help to avoid the monotony of such regular alternation (see demotion, promotion, inversion); and the pentameter may be lengthened from 10 syllables to 11 by a *feminine ending. In classical Greek and Latin poetry, the second line of the elegiac *distich, commonly but inaccurately referred to as a ‘pentameter’ is in fact composed of two half-lines of two and a half feet each, with *dactyls or *spondees in the first half and dactyls in the second.
Further reading: Peter Groves, Strange Music: Metre in the English Heroic Line (1998).
pentastich (pen-tă-stik) A *stanza or poem of five lines, more often known as a *quintain, quintet, or *cinquain. Examples include the *limerick, the Spanish *lira and *quintilla, and the Japanese *tanka.
performative A kind of utterance that performs with language the deed to which it refers (e.g. I promise to come), instead of describing some state of affairs. The term was coined by the philosopher J. L. Austin in How to Do Things with Words (1962) as part of his *speech act theory. Austin distinguishes ‘constative’ utterances, which state that something is or is not the case, from performatives, which are verbal actions rather than true or false statements; however, he goes on to argue that constatives are also implicitly performative, in that they perform the act of asserting something. The concept has been adapted in *Queer theory and related discussions of gender, notably by Judith Butler, who has argued that a person’s gender is continually and variably performed rather than given as a fact. See also illocutionary act.
Further reading: James Loxley, Performativity (2006).
periodical A magazine published at regular intervals, usually weekly, fortnightly, monthly, or quarterly.
periodic sentence A long sentence in which the completion of the *syntax and sense is delayed until the end, usually after a sequence of balanced subordinate clauses. The effect is a kind of suspense, as the reader’s attention is propelled forward to the end, as in this sentence from Ann Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest (1791), describing the heroine’s response to an unwelcome sexual advance:
While he was declaring the ardour of his passion in such terms, as but too often make vehemence pass for sincerity, Adeline, to whom this declaration, if honourable, was distressing, and if dishonourable, was shocking, interrupted him and thanked him for the offer of a distinction, which, with a modest, but determined air, she said she must refuse.
See also hypotactic, latinate.
peripeteia [pe-ri-pĕ-tee-ă] (peripety [pe-rip-ĕti]) A sudden reversal of a character’s circumstances and fortunes, usually involving the downfall of the *protagonist in a *tragedy, and often coinciding with the ‘recognition’ or *anagnorisis. In a *comedy, however, the peripeteia abruptly restores the prosperity of the main character(s). See also coup de théâtre.
periphrasis [pe-rif-ră-sis] (plural -ases) A roundabout way of referring to something by means of several words instead of naming it directly in a single word or phrase. Commonly known as *circumlocution, periphrasis is often used in euphemisms like passed away for ‘died’, but can have a more emphatic effect in poetry, as in the use of *kennings. It was especially cultivated by 18th-century poets whose principle of *decorum discouraged them from using commonplace words: thus fish were called the finny tribe, and in Robert Blair’s poem ‘The Grave’ (1743) a telescope is the sight-invigorating tube. The 17th-century French fashion for *préciosité cultivated periphrasis to excess. Adjective: periphrastic. See also antonomasia, litotes, poetic diction.
perlocutionary act A term used in *speech act theory to designate an utterance that has an effect upon the actions, thoughts, or feelings of the listener, e.g. convincing, alarming, insulting, boring. The perlocutionary effect of an utterance may differ from the intended effect of the speaker’s *illocutionary act. See also affective.
peroration [pe-rŏ-ray-shŭn] The conclusion of a formal speech (or written argument), in which the previous points are summed up in a forceful appeal to the audience; or any formal and impassioned speech, in its entirety. Verb: perorate. Adjective: perorational or perorative. See also epilogue.
persona [per-soh-nă] (plural -onae) The assumed identity or fictional ‘I’ (literally a ‘mask’) assumed by a writer in a literary work; thus the speaker in a *lyric poem, or the *narrator in a fictional narrative. In a *dramatic monologue, the speaker is evidently not the real author but an invented or historical character. Many modern critics, though, insist further that the speaker in any poem should be referred to as the persona, to avoid the unreliable assumption that we are listening to the true voice of the poet. One reason for this is that a given poet may write different poems in which the speakers are of distinct kinds: another is that our identification of the speaking voice with that of the real poet would confuse imaginative composition with autobiography. Some theorists of narrative fiction have preferred to distinguish between the narrator and the persona, making the persona equivalent to the *implied author.
personification A *figure of speech by which animals, abstract ideas, or inanimate things are referred to as if they were human, as in Sir Philip Sidney’s line:
Invention, Nature’s child, fled stepdame Study’s blows
This figure or *trope, known in Greek as prosopopoeia, is common in most ages of poetry, and particularly in the 18th century. It has a special function as the basis of *allegory. In drama, the term is sometimes applied to the impersonation of non-human things and ideas by human actors. Verb: personify. See also pathetic fallacy.
Petrarchan [pet-rar-kăn] Characteristic of, or derived from, the work of the major Italian poet Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304–74), especially his *sonnets and other love *lyrics in Italian. The Petrarchan sonnet, also known as the Italian sonnet, is divided into an *octave rhyming abbaabba and a *sestet normally rhyming cdecde, and thus avoids the final *couplet found in the English or ‘Shakespearean’ sonnet. The Petrarchan conceit is an exaggerated comparison or striking *oxymoron of the kind found in sonnets written under Petrarch’s influence: common varieties are the comparison of a lady’s eyes with the sun, and the description of love in terms of its pleasurable pains. The widespread imitation of Petrarch’s love poetry in Europe, reaching its height in the 16th century, is known as Petrarchism. This important imitative tradition is marked by the increasingly conventional presentation of *courtly love, in which the despairing poet speaks in fanciful and paradoxical terms of his torments as the worshipper of a disdainful mistress. A notable Petrarchan *convention is the *blazon or catalogue of the lady’s physical beauties: coral lips, pearly teeth, alabaster neck, etc. Petrarchism is evident in French poets of the *Pléiade and in the English sonneteers from Wyatt to Shakespeare.
Further reading: Gordon Braden, Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance (1998).
phenomenology A philosophical movement based on the investigation of ‘phenomena’ (i.e. things as apprehended by consciousness) rather than on the existence of anything outside of human consciousness. Phenomenology was founded in the early years of the 20th century by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl, who hoped to return philosophy to concrete experience and to reveal the essential structures of consciousness. In an amended form, Husserl’s phenomenology was developed by his student Martin Heidegger, and became an important influence on *existentialism and the modern tradition of *hermeneutics. Its impact on literary studies is most evident in the work of the *Geneva school on authors' characteristic modes of awareness; but other kinds of phenomenological criticism—such as that of the Polish theorist Roman Ingarden—place more emphasis on the reader’s consciousness of literary works. In this sense, phenomenology has prepared the ground for *reception theory.
Further reading: Robert R. Magliola, Phenomenology and Literature (1977).
philistine A person devoted narrow-mindedly to material prosperity at the expense of intellectual and artistic awareness; or (as an adjective) ignorantly uninterested in culture and ideas. This sense of the term comes from the insulting label Philister applied by German students to their non-academic neighbours in university towns, likening them to the enemies of the chosen people in the Hebrew scriptures; it was given wide currency in English by the poet and critic Matthew Arnold in his book Culture and Anarchy (1869), which attacks the philistinism of the British middle class. Arnold usually applied the term ‘the Philistines’ to the prosperous bourgeoisie, especially to its nonconformist Liberal representatives.
philology A field of scholarly study that investigates languages and their literatures, especially in their historical evolution. It covers a wide range of scholarly endeavour, from the decipherment of ancient scripts and *textual criticism to the interpretation of literary texts; but since the emergence of *linguistics as a distinct and professedly scientific discipline in the early 20th century, ‘philology’ has tended to refer to the 19th-century tradition of historical and comparative linguistic studies. Its older and broader meaning survives in the names of some university departments and academic journals. A researcher in this scholarly field is a philologist.
philosophes [feel-o-zof] The French word (‘philosophers’) applied especially to the sceptical thinkers of the 18th-century *Enlightenment in France, who subjected the established institutions and beliefs of their time to rational criticism. The foremost philosophes included Voltaire, Montesquieu, Helvétius, and the *Encyclopédistes led by Diderot, d'Alembert and d'Holbach. Their sceptical undermining of religious dogma and political injustice is often regarded as a factor contributing to the downfall of the ancien régime in the French Revolution.
phoneme [foh-neem] A minimal unit of potentially meaningful sound within a given language’s system of recognized sound distinctions. Each phoneme in a language acquires its identity by contrast with other phonemes, for which it cannot be substituted without potentially altering the meaning of a word: our recognition of a difference between the words level and revel indicates a phonemic distinction in English between /l/ and /r/. (It is usual for phonemic symbols to be printed between oblique strokes in this fashion.) However, the actual phonetic difference between the two /l/ sounds in most pronunciations of the word level is disregarded by speakers of English, who treat them as ‘allophones’ (i.e. phonetic variations) of the same phoneme. Each language divides up the infinite number of possible sounds into a fairly small number of distinct phonemes, in ways which do not always match the distinctions observed in other languages (/l/ and /r/ are not distinguished in Chinese, for example). The concept of the phoneme has great significance for *structuralism, because it suggests that meanings are dependent on an abstract system of differences. The branch of linguistics that analyses the sound systems of languages is known as phonemics. See also grapheme, morpheme, phonology.
phonetics [fŏ-net-iks] The science devoted to the physical analysis of the sounds of human speech, including their production, transmission, and perception. A pure science connected to acoustics and anatomy, phonetics is concerned with the accurate description of speech sounds as sounds, rather than with the way languages divide sounds up into meaningful units (this being the domain of *phonology). A person practising the science of phonetics is a phonetician.
phonocentrism The term employed in *deconstruction to refer to an alleged bias in Western thinking about language, whereby writing is regarded suspiciously as an untrustworthy parasite upon the authenticity of speech. According to Jacques Derrida in his book De la grammatologie (1967), the preference for speech—whose truth seems to be guaranteed by the presence of the speaker—is still upheld even in the modern linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure (see sign), despite Saussure’s demonstration that language is a system of abstract differences. Derrida’s argument equates ‘writing’ with difference, and speech with illusory presence; he can thus claim that speech actually relies upon a prior ‘writing’—that is, upon that system of differences which produces meanings in a language. Phonocentrism is one important aspect of a more general attachment to stability of meanings, which Derrida calls *logocentrism.
phonology [fŏ-nol-ŏji] The branch of linguistics concerned with the analysis of sound-systems as they function in languages (rather than with physical sounds as such, as in *phonetics). The term is sometimes also applied to the sound-system itself, in a given language: the ‘phonology of English’ is the system of distinctions and rules governing the speech of this language. The founding concept of phonology is that of the *phoneme.
Phosphorists (fosforister, fosforisterna) A group of Swedish poets and critics based at Uppsala in the early 19th century, so named after their journal Phosphoros (1810–13), which absorbed and promoted the new influences of German *Romanticism. The group’s dominant figure, as editor of the journal, was the poet Per Daniel Amadeus Atterbom, founder both of the pro-Romantic Auroraförbundet (‘Aurora League’, 1807) and of the larger Romantic tradition in Swedish poetry. Since the late 19th-century spelling reforms that abolished ph in Swedish, this group has been referred to as the fosforisterna, the name of their journal being retrospectively corrected to Fosforos.
picaresque novel [pik-ă-resk] In the strict sense, a *novel with a picaroon (Spanish, picaró: a rogue or scoundrel) as its hero or heroine, usually recounting his or her escapades in a *first-person narrative marked by its *episodic structure and realistic low-life descriptions. The picaroon is often a quick-witted servant who takes up with a succession of employers. The true Spanish picaresque novel is represented by the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) and by Mateo Alemán’s more widely influential Guzmán de Alfarache (1599–1604); its imitators include Johann Grimmelhausen’s Simplicissimus (1669) in German, Alain-René Lesage’s Gil Blas (1715–35) in French, and Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) in English. In the looser sense now more frequently used, the term is applied to *narratives that do not have a picaroon as their central character, but are loosely structured as a sequence of episodes united only by the presence of the central character, who is often involved in a long journey: Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605), Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) are examples of novels that are referred to as being wholly or partly picaresque in this sense, while Byron’s narrative poem Don Juan (1819–24) is a rare case of a picaresque story in verse.
Further reading: Walter L. Reed, An Exemplary History of the Novel (1981).
Pindaric [pin-da-rik] Characteristic of or derived from the work of the Greek poet Pindar (Pindaros, 518–438 bce), a writer of public choral *odes. The Pindaric ode has an unfixed number of *stanzas arranged in groups of three, in which a *strophe and *antistrophe sharing the same length and complex metrical pattern are followed by an *epode of differing length and pattern. This triadic arrangement matches the movements of the *chorus that would have performed Pindar’s works on public occasions. In English, two rare examples of ‘regular’ odes conforming to this Pindaric model are Thomas Gray’s ‘The Progress of Poesy’ and ‘The Bard’ (both 1747). More common, though, is the ‘irregular’ or ‘Cowleyan’ ode comprising a number of strophes that do not correspond in length or in the arrangement of their lines: Abraham Cowley’s ‘Pindarique Odes’ (1656) began this kind of departure from strict Pindaric precedent. A more clearly distinct tradition in the composition of odes is represented by the *Horatian ode, which employs a regularly repeated stanza form.
pirated Published without the author’s permission by some other person who thereby steals part of the author’s potential income from a written work. Literary piracy was often a problem for writers before the enforcement of international copyright agreements in the late 19th century.
plagiarism [play-jă-rizm] The theft of ideas (such as the plots of narrative or dramatic works) or of written passages or works, where these are passed off as one’s own work without acknowledgement of their true origin; or a piece of writing thus stolen. Plagiarism is not always easily separable from imitation, adaptation, or *pastiche, but is usually distinguished by its dishonest intention. A person practising this form of literary theft is a plagiarist. The older term plagiary was applied both to plagiarisms and to plagiarists. Verb: plagiarize.
Platonism [play-tŏn-izm] The doctrines of the Greek philosopher Plato (Platon, 427–347 bce), especially the idealist belief that the perceptible world is an illusory shadow of some higher realm of transcendent Ideas or Forms. Despite Plato’s hostility to poets as misleading imitators of worldly illusions, Platonic ideas have repeatedly been adopted in Western literature: in the *Renaissance his view of physical beauty as an outward sign of spiritual perfection was prevalent in love poetry, while in the age of *Romanticism his idealist philosophy was absorbed by many poets, notably Percy Bysshe Shelley. The Cambridge Platonists were a group of theologians associated with Cambridge University in the mid-17th century, who sought to reconcile the Anglican faith with human Reason while promoting religious tolerance; their leading writers were Henry More and Ralph Cudworth. See also neoplatonism.
Pléiade, Ia [play-ahd] The name given to an important group of 16th-century French poets founded in 1549 and led by Pierre de Ronsard. The name, taken from the constellation of seven stars known in English as the Pleiades, had formerly been applied to a group of Greek *Alexandrian poets; Ronsard himself adopted it for his group in 1556. The group of seven comprised Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay, Pontus de Tyard, Jean-Antoine de Baïf, Etienne Jodelle, Remy Belleau, and either Jacques Peletier or Jean Dorat (according to differing lists). Devoted students and translators of the Greek and Latin classics, the poets of the Pléiade were nevertheless strongly committed to developing the French language as a medium for major poetry, in emulation of the Italian poets whom they also admired. Rejecting the popular traditions and forms of medieval verse, they transformed French poetry by establishing the *alexandrine as the major verse line, and by introducing the *ode and the *sonnet into the language. Their most important manifestos are Du Bellay’s Deffence et illustration de la langue francoyse (1549) and Ronsard’s Preface to his Odes (1550). The same name is now used by the distinguished Paris publisher Gallimard for its prestigious series of edited works by French and other Francophone writers: a modern author whose works appear in a Pléiade edition is deemed to have been elevated to the *canon.
Further reading: Grahame D. Castor, Pléiade Poetics (1964).
pleonasm [plee-ŏn-azm] The use of unnecessary additional words; or a phrase in which such needless repetition occurs, e.g. the main protagonist or at this moment in time. Adjective: pleonastic.
ploce [ploh-kay] (ploche) A very common *figure of speech that consists in a delayed repetition of the same word or words: ‘the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’. By contrast with *epizeuxis (immediate repetition), it interposes some other words between the recurrences of the terms emphasized. See also epanalepsis.
plot The pattern of events and situations in a narrative or dramatic work, as selected and arranged both to emphasize relationships—usually of cause and effect—between incidents and to elicit a particular kind of interest in the reader or audience, such as surprise or suspense. Although in a loose sense the term commonly refers to that sequence of chief events which can be summarized from a story or play, modern criticism often makes a stricter distinction between the plot of a work and its *story: the plot is the selected version of events as presented to the reader or audience in a certain order and duration, whereas the story is the full sequence of events as we imagine them to have taken place in their ‘natural’ order and duration. The story, then, is the hypothetical ‘raw material’ of events which we reconstruct from the finished product of the plot. The critical discussion of plots originates in Aristotle’s Poetics (4th century bce), in which his term mythos corresponds roughly with our ‘plot’. Aristotle saw plot as more than just the arrangement of incidents: he assigned to plot the most important function in a drama, as a governing principle of development and coherence to which other elements (including character) must be subordinated. He insisted that a plot should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and that its events should form a coherent whole. Plots vary in form from the fully integrated or ‘tightly knit’ to the loosely *episodic. In general, though, most plots will trace some process of change in which characters are caught up in a developing conflict that is finally resolved. See also intrigue, subplot.
plurisignation See ambiguity.
poetaster [poh-ĕt-as-ter] A writer of verse who does not deserve to be called a poet, despite his or her pretensions; an inferior poet lacking in ability. Trivial or worthless verse may sometimes be called poetastery.
poète maudit [poh-et moh-dee] A French phrase for an ‘accursed’ poet, usually a brilliant but self-destructive writer misunderstood by an indifferent society. The name for this romantic stereotype comes from the title of Paul Verlaine’s collection of essays on Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and other French poets, Les Poètes maudits (1884).
poetic diction In the most general sense, the choice of words and *figures in poetry. The term is more often used, however, to refer to that specialized language which is peculiar to poetry in that it employs words and figures not normally found in common speech or prose. Some elements of poetic diction, such as *kennings, compound *epithets, contracted and elided forms (yon, o'er, etc.), and *archaisms, occur widely in earlier periods of poetry, as do poetic figures such as *apostrophe; but the most elaborate system of poetic diction in English is found among poets of the 18th century, when the principle of *decorum required the use of *periphrasis to avoid naming ‘common’ things: thus Pope refers to a pair of scissors as ‘the glitt'ring Forfex’. Poetic diction in the 18th century is also marked by *Latinate vocabulary, conventional epithets and archaisms, and frequent use of *personification; it was rejected as ‘gaudy and inane phraseology’ by William Wordsworth, whose Preface to the second edition (1800) of Lyrical Ballads argues for a plainer diction closer to ‘the real language of men’. See also poeticism.
Further reading: Emerson R. Marks, Taming the Chaos: English Poetic Diction Theory since the Renaissance (1998).
poetic drama The category of plays written wholly or mainly in verse. This includes most *tragedies and other serious plays from the earliest times to the 19th century, along with most *comedy up to the late 17th century. Strictly speaking, the term is not identical with dramatic poetry (see drama), which also includes verse compositions not suited for the stage, such as *closet dramas.
poetic justice The morally reassuring allocation of happy and unhappy fates to the virtuous and the vicious characters respectively, usually at the end of a *narrative or dramatic work. The term was coined by the critic Thomas Rymer in his The Tragedies of the Last Age Consider'd (1678) with reference to Elizabethan *poetic drama: such justice is ‘poetic’, then, in the sense that it occurs more often in the fictional plots of plays than in real life. As Miss Prism explains in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, ‘The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.’ In a slightly different but commonly used sense, the term may also refer to a strikingly appropriate reward or punishment, usually a ‘fitting retribution’ by which a villain is ruined by some process of his own making. See also nemesis.
poetic licence (US license) The imaginative and linguistic freedom granted to poets, allowing them to depart from normal prose standards of factual accuracy, *syntax, grammar, or pronunciation where this may produce a more satisfying imaginative or metrical effect. Depending upon prevailing aesthetic conventions, this may permit the use of *elision or of syntactic *inversion to fit the *metre of a line, of *eye rhyme or *broken rhyme to fit a *rhyme scheme, of unusual *diction, of illogical *figures (e.g. *catachresis, *hyperbole), or of other imaginative ‘liberties’ ranging from *personification and the *pathetic fallacy to inaccuracies of chronology (*anachronism), geography, or natural science.
poeticism [poh-et-is-izm] A word or phrase that survives only within a tradition of *poetic diction, usually an *archaism like of yore or a conventional *syncope such as o’er.
poetics [poh-et-iks] The general principles of *poetry or of *literature in general, or the theoretical study of these principles. As a body of theory, poetics is concerned with the distinctive features of poetry (or literature as a whole), with its languages, forms, *genres, and modes of composition. A theorist of poetry or literature may be called a poetician. See also aesthetics, criticism.
poetry Language sung, chanted, spoken, or written according to some pattern of recurrence that emphasizes the relationships between words on the basis of sound as well as sense: this pattern is almost always a rhythm or *metre, which may be supplemented by *rhyme or *alliteration or both. The demands of verbal patterning usually make poetry a more condensed medium than *prose or everyday speech, often involving variations in *syntax, the use of special words and phrases (*poetic diction) peculiar to poets, and a more frequent and more elaborate use of *figures of speech, principally *metaphor and *simile. All cultures have their poetry, using it for various purposes from sacred ritual to obscene insult, but it is generally employed in those utterances and writings that call for heightened intensity of emotion, dignity of expression, or subtlety of meditation. Poetry is valued for combining pleasures of sound with freshness of ideas, whether these be solemn or comical. Some critics make an evaluative distinction between poetry, which is elevated or inspired, and *verse, which is merely clever or mechanical. The three major categories of poetry are *narrative, dramatic, and *lyric, the last being the most extensive.
Further reading: Jeffrey Wainwright, Poetry: The Basics (2004).
• Academy of American Poets: extensive guide to poets and poems.
point of view The position or vantage-point from which the events of a story seem to be observed and presented to us. The chief distinction usually made between points of view is that between *third-person narratives and *first-person narratives. A third-person *narrator may be *omniscient, and therefore show an unrestricted knowledge of the story’s events from outside or ‘above’ them; but another kind of third-person narrator may confine our knowledge of events to whatever is observed by a single character or small group of characters, this method being known as ‘limited point of view’ (see focalization). A first-person narrator’s point of view will normally be restricted to his or her partial knowledge and experience, and therefore will not give us access to other characters' hidden thoughts. Many modern authors have also used ‘multiple point of view’, in which we are shown the events from the positions of two or more different characters.
polemic [pŏ-lemm-ik] A thorough written attack on some opinion or policy, usually within a theological or political dispute, sometimes also in philosophy or *criticism. Notable polemicists in English are John Milton, whose Areopagitica (1644) attacks censorship, and H. D. Thoreau, whose ‘Slavery in Massachusetts’ (1854) berates upholders of the Fugitive Slave Law. Adjective: polemical.
police procedural See detective story.
polyphonic [poli-fon-ik] Literally ‘many-voiced’, a term found in the writings of the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, where it is equivalent to *dialogic. Thus a polyphonic novel is one in which several different voices or points of view interact on more or less equal terms. The term polyphonic prose has been applied to a kind of *free verse printed as if it were prose and showing similarities to the *prose poem, as in Amy Lowell’s Can Grande’s Castle (1918). Noun: polyphony.
polyptoton A *figure of speech in which a partial repetition arises from the use in close proximity of two related words having different forms, e.g. singular and plural forms of the same word. An example is found at the close of this couplet by Byron:
A little while she strove, and much repented,
And whispering ‘I will ne'er consent’—consented.
polysemy [poli-see-mi] A linguistic term for a word’s capacity to carry two or more distinct meanings, e.g. grave: ‘serious’ or ‘tomb’ (see also homonym). In some modern linguistic and literary theory, it is argued that all *signs are polysemic, and the term has been extended to larger units including entire literary works. See also ambiguity, multi-accentuality.
polysyndeton [poli-sin-dĕ-ton] A rhetorical term for the repeated use of conjunctions to link together a succession of words, clauses, or sentences, as in Keats’s Endymion (1818):Polysyndeton is the opposite of *asyndeton. Adjective: polysyndetic.
And soon it lightly dipped, and rose, and sank,
And dipped again…
pornography A kind of fictional writing composed so as to arouse sexual excitement in its readers, usually by the repeated and explicit description of sexual acts in abstraction from their emotional and other interpersonal contexts; also visual images having the same purpose. The distinction between pornography and literary *erotica is open to continued debate, but it is commonly accepted that eroticism treats sexuality within some fuller human and imaginative context, whereas pornographic writing tends to be narrowly functional and often physiologically improbable. Further confusion arises from the questionable assimilation of the term into the distinct legal concept of obscenity, which usually governs the public mention or display of specific acts, organs, words, and supposed ‘perversions’. Several works of serious literary merit, including Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), have been legally condemned as obscene although they do not fit most definitions of pornography. The term’s etymology is of little help: it is a rather bogus 19th-century coinage combining Greek words to mean ‘writing about prostitutes’.
portmanteau word A word concocted by fusing two different words together into one: a common example is brunch, from ‘breakfast’ and ‘lunch’; other modern colloquial cases are motel and guesstimate. The term was coined by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass (1871), where he invents the word slithy from ‘lithe’ and ‘slimy’; the portmanteau referred to is a kind of suitcase composed of two halves. The most extended literary use of portmanteau words is found in James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake (1939). See also coinage, neologism, nonce word, pun.
postcolonial literature A category devised to replace and expand upon what was once in Britain called Commonwealth Literature. As a label, it thus covers a very wide range of writings from countries that were once colonies or dependencies of the European powers. There has been much debate about the scope of the term: should predominantly white ex-colonies like Ireland, Canada, and Australia be included? why are the United States exempted both from the accepted list of former colonies and from the category of colonizing powers? In practice, the term is applied most often to writings from Africa, the Indian sub-continent, the Caribbean, and other regions whose histories during the 20th century were marked by colonialism, anti-colonial movements, and subsequent transitions to post-Independence society. Critical attention to this large body of work in academic contexts is often influenced by a distinct school of postcolonial theory which developed in the 1980s and 1990s, under the influence of Edward W. Said’s landmark study Orientalism (1978). Postcolonial theory considers vexed cultural-political questions of national and ethnic identity, ‘otherness’, race, imperialism, and language, during and after the colonial periods. It draws upon *post-structuralist theories such as those of *deconstruction in order to unravel the complex relations between imperial ‘centre’ and colonial ‘periphery’, often in ways that have been criticized for being excessively abstruse. The principal luminaries of postcolonial theory after Said have been Gayatri C. Spivak and Homi K. Bhabha.
Further reading: A. Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (1998); Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory (1997).
http://www.postcolonialweb.org
• Postcolonial Web: general resource for postcolonial literature and theory at National University of Singapore.
POSTMODERNISM
A disputed term that occupied much late 20th-century debate about culture from the early 1980s. In its simplest and least satisfactory sense it refers generally to the phase of 20th-century Western culture that succeeded the reign of high *modernism, thus indicating the products of the age of mass television since the mid-1950s. More often, though, it is applied to a cultural condition prevailing in the advanced capitalist societies since the 1960s, characterized by a superabundance of disconnected images and styles—most noticeably in television, advertising, commercial design, and pop video. In this sense, promoted by Jean Baudrillard and other commentators, postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals.
As applied to literature and other arts, the term is notoriously ambiguous, implying either that modernism has been superseded or that it has continued into a new phase. Postmodernism may be seen as a continuation of modernism’s alienated mood and disorienting techniques and at the same time as an abandonment of its determined quest for artistic coherence in a fragmented world: in very crude terms, where a modernist artist or writer would try to wrest a meaning from the world through myth, symbol, or formal complexity, the postmodernist greets the *absurd or meaningless confusion of contemporary existence with a certain numbed or flippant indifference, favouring self-consciously ‘depthless’ works of *fabulation, *pastiche, *bricolage, or *aleatory disconnection. The term cannot usefully serve as an inclusive description of all literature since the 1950s or 1960s, but is applied selectively to those works that display most evidently the moods and formal disconnections described above. In poetry, it has been applied most often to the work of the *New York school and to *Language poetry; in drama mainly to the ‘absurdist’ tradition; but is used more widely in reference to fiction, notably to the novels (or *anti-novels) and stories of Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, William S. Burroughs, Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie, Peter Ackroyd, Julian Barnes, Jeanette Winterson, and many of their followers. Some of their works, like Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and Nabokov’s Ada (1969), employ devices reminiscent of *science fiction, playing with contradictory orders of reality or the irruption of the fabulous into the secular world.
Opinion is still divided, however, on the value of the term and of the phenomenon it purports to describe. Those who most often use it tend to welcome ‘the postmodern’ as a liberation from the hierarchy of ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures; while sceptics regard the term as a symptom of irresponsible academic euphoria about the glitter of consumerist capitalism and its moral vacuity. See also post-structuralism.
Further reading: Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (1987); Ian Gregson, Postmodern Literature (2004).
post-structuralism A school of thought that emerged partly from within French *structuralism in the 1960s, reacting against structuralist pretensions to scientific objectivity and comprehensiveness. The term covers the philosophical *deconstruction practised by Jacques Derrida and his followers, along with the later works of the critic Roland Barthes, the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, the historical critiques of Michel Foucault, and the cultural-political writings of Jean-François Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze. These thinkers emphasized the instability of meanings and of intellectual categories (including that of the human ‘subject’), and sought to undermine any theoretical system that claimed to have universal validity—such claims being denounced as ‘totalitarian’. They set out to dissolve the fixed *binary oppositions of structuralist thought, including that between language and *metalanguage—and thus between literature and criticism. Instead they favoured a non-hierarchical plurality or ‘free play’ of meanings, stressing the *indeterminacy of texts. Although waning in French intellectual life by the end of the 1970s, post-structuralism’s delayed influence upon literary and cultural theory in the English-speaking world has persisted.
Further reading: Catherine Belsey, Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction (2002).
pot-boiler A derogatory term for a work written solely or mainly to earn money.
poulter’s measure An English poetic *metre composed of alternate lines of 12 and 14 syllables (iambic *hexameters and *heptameters), usually in rhyming *couplets, as shown in these lines by the Earl of Surrey, a 16th-century poet:
Then comes a sudden fear, that riveth all my rest,
Lest absence cause forgetfulness to sink within her breast.
Although popular in the 16th century, the metre was rarely used thereafter. It seems to be related to *short measure and to the *limerick, despite differences in *rhyme scheme. Its name comes from the poulterer’s former custom of providing eggs in ‘dozens’ of twelve and fourteen. See also fourteener.
practical criticism In the general sense, the kind of *criticism that analyses specific literary works, either as a deliberate application of a previously elaborated theory or as a supposedly non-theoretical investigation. More specifically, the term is applied to an academic procedure devised by the critic I. A. Richards at Cambridge University in the 1920s and illustrated in his book Practical Criticism (1929). In this exercise, students are asked to analyse a short poem without any information about its authorship, date, or circumstances of composition, thus forcing them to attend to the ‘words on the page’ rather than refer to biographical and historical contexts. This discipline, enthusiastically adopted by the *Cambridge school, became a standard model of rigorous criticism in British universities, and its style of ‘*close reading’ influenced the *New Criticism in America. See also explication.
Prague School The name commonly given to the Prague Linguistic Circle, a group of linguistic and literary theorists based at Charles University, Prague, from 1926 to 1948, of whom the most influential was Roman Jakobson, who had arrived from Moscow bringing the principles of *Russian Formalism, which were to be further developed in Prague. Other important figures were Jan Mukařovský, who developed the theory of *foregrounding, René Wellek, later a leading *New Critic in America, and the literary historian Felix Vodička. The Prague School was a major influence on the development of *structuralism.
Further reading: F. W. Galan, Historic Structures: The Prague School Project, 1928–1946 (1985).
préciosité, la A cult of refined language and manners that established itself in French high society of the mid-17th century, led by the *salon of Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet from about 1618 to 1650. The précieuses devised elegant expressions to remedy what they felt to be the indelicacies of French speech; many of these are recorded in A. B. de Somaize’s Dictionnaire des précieuses (1660). This sometimes excessive fashion for *periphrasis was satirized by Molière in his one-act comedy Les Précieuses ridicules (1659). The English term preciosity has a less specific sense, referring to any kind of affectation.
précis [pray-see] A short summary of the essential points of some longer text. See also abridgement, paraphrase.
Pre-Raphaelites A group of English artists and writers of the Victorian period, associated directly or indirectly with the self-styled Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of young artists founded in 1848 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt. The PRB (as it is usually abbreviated) rebelled against the conventional academic styles of painting modelled upon Raphael (1483–1520), seeking a freshness and simplicity found in earlier artists, along with a closer fidelity to Nature. The organized Brotherhood itself lasted only a few years, but Pre-Raphaelitism as a broader current survived in the paintings of Edward Burne-Jones, the designs of William Morris, and the art criticism of John Ruskin, as well as in the poetry of Christina Rossetti, D. G. Rossetti, Morris, and A. C. Swinburne—the last three being dubbed ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’ in a hostile review by Robert Buchanan (Contemporary Review, 1871). Pre-Raphaelite poetry is often characterized by dreamy *medievalism, mixing religiosity and sensuousness, notably in D. G. Rossetti’s ‘The Blessed Damozel’ (1850), Morris’s The Defence of Guenevere (1858), and Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads (1866).
http://www.pre-raphaelitesociety.org
• Site of the Pre-Raphaelite Society.
preromanticism A general term applied by modern literary historians to a number of developments in late 18th-century culture that are thought to have prepared the ground for *Romanticism in its full sense. In various ways, these are all departures from the orderly framework of *neoclassicism and its authorized *genres. The most important constituents of preromanticism are the *Sturm und Drang phase of German literature; the *primitivism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and of *Ossianism; the cult of *sensibility in the *sentimental novel; the taste for the *sublime and the picturesque in landscape; the sensationalism of the early *Gothic novels; the melancholy of English *graveyard poetry; and the revival of interest in old *ballads and *romances. These developments seem to have helped to give a new importance to subjective and spontaneous individual feeling.
Further reading: Marshall Brown, Preromanticism (1991).
prescriptive Seeking to lay down rules and instructions. Prescriptive *criticism formulates the norms according to which literary works ought to be written, whereas descriptive criticism tries to account for the ways in which they actually have been written. In discussions of language, prescriptivism is the attitude that tries to impose an unchanging standard of ‘correct’ usage in language, especially in grammar; it is rejected as a misconceived dogma by most modern linguists.
primitivism A preference for the supposedly free and contented existence found in a ‘primitive’ way of life as opposed to the artificialities of urban civilization. Often connected with a nostalgia for a lost Eden or Golden Age (as in much *pastoral literature), primitivism is found in the literature of many periods, but it had a particular prominence in 18th-century Europe and 19th-century America, contributing to the values of *Romanticism. The most influential primitivist, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, argued in his Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité (1755) and other writings that the freedom and dignity of the ‘noble savage’ had become stifled by the constraints of civilized society. The popularity of the supposedly ancient epic poems of ‘Ossian’ (see ossianism) encouraged this view, which was given a new form by William Wordsworth in his exaltation of rural simplicity, and by several American writers including James Fenimore Cooper, H. D. Thoreau, and Herman Melville in the mid-19th century. Later, D. H. Lawrence maintained a strongly primitivist stance against industrial society and its crushing of individual spontaneity.
Further reading: Michael Bell, Primitivism (1972).
problem play Usually a play dealing with a particular social problem in a realistic manner designed to change public opinion; also called a thesis play. Significant examples are Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879), on women’s subordination in marriage, and Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession (1902) on prostitution. In studies of Shakespeare, however, the term has been used since the 1890s to designate a group of his plays written in the first years of the 17th century: the ‘dark comedies’ Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well, and the *tragicomedy Troilus and Cressida. Critics have often been disturbed by the sombre and cynical mood of these plays, which seems to clash oddly with their comic conventions. See also discussion play.
proem A preface or introduction to a work. Adjective: proemial.
Projectivism The poetic doctrine of Charles Olson and of his followers in the *Black Mountain group of American poets, declared in his essay ‘Projective Verse’ (1950). See open form.
prolepsis (plural -epses) The Greek word for ‘anticipation’, used in three senses: 1. In a speech, the trick of answering an opponent’s objections before they are even made. 2. As a *figure of speech, the application of an *epithet or description before it actually becomes applicable, e.g. the wounded Hamlet’s exclamation ‘I am dead, Horatio’. 3. In narrative works, a ‘flashforward’ by which a future event is related as an interruption to the ‘present’ time of the narration. A well-known example of this occurs in the thirteenth chapter of Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World (1932): Lenina is distracted by Henry Foster from her task of inoculating bottled human embryos against sleeping-sickness, and the narrator observes, before returning to Lenina’s conversation with Henry, that the first fatal case of the disease would occur twenty-two years later (as the result of her inattention, we assume). In this third sense, prolepsis is an *anachrony which is the opposite of ‘flashback’ or *analepsis. Adjective: proleptic.
proletcult An abbreviation for ‘proletarian culture’ (Russian, proletarskaya kul'tura), the slogan and title adopted by a movement of cultural revolution and popular education in the Soviet Union, launched in 1917 by A. A. Bogdanov. It claimed to be initiating a new working-class culture uncontaminated by the bourgeois artistic heritage, and it promoted the publication of works by proletarian writers.
prologue [proh-log] An introductory section of a play, speech, or other literary work. The term is also sometimes applied to the performer who makes an introductory speech in a play.
promotion The use of an unstressed syllable to realize the rhythmic ‘beat’ in a position normally occupied within a metrical verse line by a stressed syllable (see metre). This common device of metrical variation in English verse occurs where an unstressed syllable appears between two other unstressed syllables, or between an unstressed syllable and a line-break. In Keats’s line:
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might.
the syllable of has been promoted to a ‘beat’ position between two other unstressed syllables; this does not mean, though, that it should be heavily stressed in reading aloud. Where promotion occurs on the last syllable of an *iambic line, it sometimes produces a *weak ending. See also demotion.
prompt-book An official copy of the script of a play, held by the theatre’s prompter in order to remind performers of their entrances and, if forgotten, their lines. Before the practice of prompting was adopted in the English theatre, which seems to have been in the eighteenth century, an official copy of the script was held by the theatre’s ‘bookkeeper’ for other purposes: under conditions of censorship, this copy contained the censor’s licence, and from it the actors' parts were copied. In theatrical jargon, this copy is often known simply as the Book, sometimes as the play-book.
propagandism The tendency to compose literary works chiefly to serve the purpose of propaganda, that is, writing to persuade people to support a particular religious or political cause. Propagandist writing is thus a kind of *didactic literature directed toward changing or confirming readers' and audiences' allegiances. Although the concept of propaganda derives from Christian evangelizing traditions, this term is usually applied to socialist literature of the 20th century taking forms such as *agitprop, *socialist realism, or the *epic theatre of Brecht.
props The usual abbreviation for stage ‘properties’, i.e. those objects that are necessary to the action of a dramatic work (other than scenery, costumes, and fixed furnishings): weapons, documents, cigarettes, items of food and drink, etc.
proscenium arch [prŏ-seen-iŭm] The structure separating the main acting area from the auditorium in most Western theatres of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It usually forms a rectangular ‘picture frame’, the ‘picture’ being revealed by opening a curtain. Its associated dramatic *conventions often involve the illusion of looking into a room through an invisible ‘fourth wall’.
prose The form of written language that is not organized according to the formal patterns of *verse; although it will have some sort of rhythm and some devices of repetition and balance, these are not governed by a regularly sustained formal arrangement, the significant unit being the sentence rather than the line. Some uses of the term include spoken language as well, but it is usually more helpful to maintain a distinction at least between written prose and everyday speech, if not formal *oratory. Prose has as its minimum requirement some degree of continuous coherence beyond that of a mere list. The adjectives prosaic and prosy have a derogatory meaning of dullness and ordinarinesss; the neutral adjective is simply ‘prose’, as in ‘prose writings’.
prose poem A short composition employing the rhythmic *cadences and other devices of *free verse (such as poetic *imagery and *figures) but printed wholly or partly in the format of prose, i.e. with a right-hand margin instead of regular line-breaks. This *genre emerged in France during the 19th century, notably in Charles Baudelaire’s Spleen de Paris (1869) and Arthur Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations (1886); a significant English sequence of prose poems is Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns (1971). A prose poem is a self-contained work usually similar to a *lyric, whereas poetic prose may occur intermittently within a longer prose work.
prosody [pros-ŏdi] The systematic study of *versification, covering the principles of *metre, *rhythm, *rhyme, and *stanza forms; or a particular system of versification. In linguistics, the term is applied to patterns of *stress and *intonation in ordinary speech. Prosody in the literary sense is also known as *metrics. Adjective: prosodic. See also scansion.
prosopopoeia [pros-ŏ-pŏ-pee-ă] The Greek rhetorical term for a *trope consisting either of the *personification of some non-human being or idea, or of the representation of an imaginary, dead, or absent person as alive and capable of speech and hearing, as in an *apostrophe. Adjective: prosopopoeial.
protagonist [proh-tag-ŏn-ist] The chief character in a play or story, who may also be opposed by an *antagonist. Originally, in ancient Greek theatre, the protagonist was the principal actor in a drama. The phrase ‘main protagonist’ often found in popular usage is a *pleonasm. The word is also often misused to mean ‘advocate’, ‘proponent’, or ‘champion’. See also hero.
prothalamion [proh-thă-lam-iŏn] A marriage-poem. The term, invented by Edmund Spenser for the title of his poem celebrating the weddings of Katherine and Elizabeth Somerset in 1596, is derived from *epithalamion, literally meaning ‘before the bridal chamber’.
proverb A short popular saying of unknown authorship, expressing some general truth or superstition: ‘Too many cooks spoil the broth.’ Proverbs are found in most cultures, and are often very ancient. The Hebrew scriptures include a book of Proverbs. Many poets—notably Chaucer—incorporate proverbs into their works, and others imitate their condensed form of expression: William Blake’s ‘Proverbs of Hell’ in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793) are, strictly speaking, *aphorisms, since they originate from a known author. Adjective: proverbial.
psalm A sacred song or *hymn. The term usually refers to the Hebrew verses in the biblical book of Psalms, traditionally (but unreliably) attributed to King David. These psalms, notably in the English translation attributed to Miles Coverdale and found in the Book of Common Prayer, have had an important place in Christian worship, in English religious poetry, and in the development of *free verse. The art of singing psalms is called psalmody, while a collection of psalms is known as a psalter. Adjective: psalmic or psalmodic.
pseudepigrapha [soo-dĕ-pig-ră-fă] The collective term for spurious or inauthentic writings, usually those falsely attributed to persons other than their true authors. Adjective: pseudepigraphic. See also apocrypha.
pseudo-statement A term invented by the British critic I. A. Richards in Science and Poetry (1926) in an attempt to distinguish the special kind of ‘truth’ provided by poetry and fiction: whereas scientific or ordinary ‘referential’ language makes statements that are either true or false, poetry’s ‘emotive’ language gives us pseudo-statements, i.e. utterances that are not subject to factual verification but which are valuable in ‘organizing our attitudes’. The term proved to be controversial, partly because it was misunderstood to mean ‘falsehood’, and partly because it implied that poetry can have no cognitive status; but the idea itself is traditional: Sir Philip Sidney’s Apology for Poetry (1595) argued that the poet ‘nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth’. A somewhat similar distinction is involved in the later concept of the *performative.
PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM
A tradition of modern literary interpretation employing methods derived from psychoanalysis, whether in its orthodox forms based on the works of Sigmund Freud or in various heretical versions. This tradition is almost exclusively interpretative, showing little interest or competence in evaluation. It originates in the method of dream-analysis exhibited in Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and in similar analyses of jokes, slips of the tongue, and neurotic symptoms in his later writings. Here Freud argues that a dream is the disguised expression of a wish; and he outlines his dynamic theory of ‘drives’ coming from the Unconscious and meeting repression from the mind’s censoring functions, which force it to seek indirect expression in *symbols and in condensed or displaced images resembling, as some commentators observe, the rhetorical forms of *metaphor, *metonymy, and other *tropes. In tandem with this theory, Freud also outlined a narrative model of child development explaining how the unreasonable demands of the infant are subdued to the requirements of civilization: the infant boy who desires undisputed possession of his mother wishes therefore to dispose of his father, but is coaxed into deferment of gratification until he can assume the father’s powers. This resolution of the Oedipus Complex is a victory for civilization, but splits the mind into the competing realms of the Id (‘It’), Ego, and Superego or conscience. As for girls, Freud conceded defeat in the face of the ‘dark continent’ of feminine psychology.
The application of these theories to literary interpretation is as old as psychoanalysis itself: Freud drew heavily upon myth and literature, paying tribute to the poets and playwrights who had understood the workings of the Unconscious long before he reformulated them. His model of the Oedipus Complex itself may be understood as a commentary on Sophocles' play Oedipus the King, and he used it to suggest an answer to the enigma of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (later elaborated by his British disciple Ernest Jones), namely that the Prince feels unable to avenge his father’s murder because his uncle Claudius has done what he himself unconsciously desired: kill the father to possess the mother. This interpretation typifies the way in which Freudian reading treats a text like a dream, which has a manifest content that disguises a latent content at a deeper level. Objectors protest that such an approach disregards the conscious element in literary composition and strips away the linguistic texture of a work (Shakespeare’s dramatic poetry, in this case) to disclose something supposedly more authentic behind it.
Freud also attempted to psychoanalyse long-dead artists and writers including Leonardo da Vinci and E. T. A. Hoffman, thus founding the tradition of *psychobiography in which characteristics of an author’s work are traced to imputed neuroses or other pathologies. In doing so he contravened his own strictures, which permit analysis only of patients who willingly make themselves available to answer an analyst’s questions, which dead authors and fictional characters (who have no real past to discuss) cannot do. Psychoanalysis of authors and of characters is questionable in analytic terms, and many writers have found it objectionable in literary terms too: even critics who were sympathetic to Freud, such as Lionel Trilling and his associates in the *New York Intellectual circle saw a danger of reducing art to symptoms of neuroses. There remains an alternative field of psychoanalytic investigation, necessarily speculative, which is the understanding of readers' fascination with certain kinds of narrative or drama. Here Freudian answers can be given in terms of the overcoming of fears, as with horror stories, or of the resolution of conflicting desires, as in *romance or *comedy.
There are many versions of psychoanalytic criticism that follow authorities other than Freud, principally C. G. Jung in the case of *archetypal or *myth criticism, Melanie Klein or Julia Kristeva (see abjection) in some versions of *feminist criticism, and the complex theories of Jacques Lacan in the *post-structuralist tradition. Lacan’s work, widely influential since the 1970s, has offered some interpreters a way of understanding literary works in terms of their quest for an imaginary wholeness that is lost upon our entry into the linguistic realm of differences and distinctions (see symbolic). Other unauthorized critical approaches draw upon aspects of Freud’s model selectively, as in Harold Bloom’s Oedipal theory of the poetic *anxiety of influence.
Further reading: Elizabeth Wright, Psychoanalytic Criticism (2nd edn, 1998).
psychobiography A kind of *biography that seeks to explain the character and behaviour of its subject according to a psychological theory of human development, usually one derived from Freudian psychoanalysis. The links that Freud made in several of his case histories between disturbing events in an individual’s childhood and neurotic symptoms in later life offered an explanatory model that some biographers adopted under his influence, among the earliest of these being Lytton Strachey, whose book Elizabeth and Essex (1928) offered to explain the political conduct of Queen Elizabeth I as the result of an early deformation of her sexuality. Freud himself wrote a psychobiographical essay on Leonardo da Vinci (1910), and among his immediate disciples Marie Bonaparte wrote a full-length study of Edgar Allan Poe (1935) that arrives at a clinical diagnosis of his writings as symptoms of necrophilic sadism. More sophisticated exercises in psychobiography appeared in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, notably Leon Edel’s five-volume life of Henry James (1953–72) and Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther (1968). Since then, a more sceptical intellectual climate has led biographers to be cautious about the dangers of *reductionism in this approach. For a series of introductory accounts, consult William Todd Schultz (ed.), Handbook of Psychobiography (2005).
psychomachy [sy-kom-ăki] A battle for the soul. The term comes from the Latin poem Psychomachia (c.400 ce) by Prudentius, describing a battle between virtues and vices for the soul of Man. This depiction of moral conflict had an important influence on medieval *allegory, especially in the *morality plays. Later echoes of medieval psychomachy can be found in Shakespeare’s 144th sonnet and in Tennyson’s poem ‘The Two Voices’ (1842).
pulp fiction A colloquial American term for cheaply produced books and magazines of the early 20th century containing popular kinds of fiction ranging from westerns and *detective stories to *romances and *science fiction. The name comes from the cheap kind of paper upon which they were printed, and is often abbreviated simply to ‘pulp’, as in ‘pulp writer’, ‘pulp magazine’, etc. See also dime novel, novelette, paraliterature.
pun An expression that achieves emphasis or humour by contriving an *ambiguity, two distinct meanings being suggested either by the same word (see polysemy) or by two similar-sounding words (see homophone). In the terminology of *rhetoric, punning is regarded as a *figure of speech, and known as *paronomasia. See also antanaclasis, double entendre, equivoque.
purple patch An over-written passage in which the writer has strained too hard to achieve an impressive effect, by elaborate *figures or other means. The phrase (Latin, purpureus pannus) was first used by the Roman poet Horace in his Ars Poetica (c.20 bce) to denote an irrelevant and excessively ornate passage; the sense of irrelevance is normally absent in modern usage, although such passages are usually incongruous. By extension, ‘purple prose’ is lavishly figurative, rhythmic, or otherwise overwrought. See also bombast, fustian.
pyrrhic A hypothetical metrical unit sometimes invoked in traditional *scansion: it consists of two unstressed syllables (or, in *quantitative verse, two short syllables), and is rather questionably referred to as a *foot. It has been called upon in many attempts to clear up problems of traditional scansion by feet, as a device of *substitution. Some modern systems of scansion, however, have abolished it by considering pairs of unstressed syllables in terms of *promotion and other concepts. See also metre.
pythiambics Verses in uneven couplets in which dactylic *hexameters alternate with iambic lines either of *dimeter or *trimeter length. Some of Horace’s Epodes employ this kind of couplet.