saga The Norse name for various kinds of prose tales composed in medieval Scandinavia and Iceland and written down from the 12th century to the 14th. These usually tell of heroic leaders—early Norse kings or 13th-century bishops—or of the heroic settlers of Iceland in the 9th and 10th centuries; others, like the Vqlsunga saga, relate earlier legends. The emphasis on feuds and family histories in some famous sagas like Njáls saga has led to the term’s application in English to any long family story spanning two or more generations: this may take the form of a lengthy novel like D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915) or of a novel-sequence (see roman-fleuve) such as John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga (1922).
salon A French cultural institution consisting of a weekly social gathering at the private house of an aristocratic lady, at which social, artistic, and scientific questions are discussed. From the early 17th century to the early 19th, several important literary and philosophical salons provided a social base for French writers. The term can also refer to an exhibition of paintings by living artists, so that in a second literary sense the title Salon has been given to an essay on contemporary art and related matters: Diderot in the 18th century and Baudelaire in the 19th both wrote important Salons. In this capacity they may be referred to as salonniers, i.e. art critics. See also cénacle.
samizdat A Russian word meaning ‘self-publishing’, applied since the 1960s to a clandestine mode of publication by which ‘dissident’ writings and other banned works were secretly circulated during the late Soviet period, usually in typed carbon copies or photocopies. Novels by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and articles by Andrei Sakharov were among the important samizdat works of the 1960s and 1970s.
Sapphics *Lyric verses written in a Greek *metre named after Sappho, the legendary woman poet of Lesbos (7th/6th century bce). Sapphic verse uses *stanzas of four lines, the first three having eleven syllables, the last having five. In the first three lines, the sequence of five metrical feet is: *trochee; trochee or *spondee; *dactyl; trochee; trochee or spondee. In the fourth line, a dactyl is followed by a trochee or a spondee. The metre was used frequently in Latin by Horace, but it is difficult to adapt to the stress-patterns of English. Sidney, Swinburne, and Pound are among the poets who have attempted English Sapphics.
satire A mode of writing that exposes the failings of individuals, institutions, or societies to ridicule and scorn. Satire is often an incidental element in literary works that may not be wholly satirical, especially in *comedy. Its tone may vary from tolerant amusement, as in the verse satires of the Roman poet Horace, to bitter indignation, as in the verse of Juvenal and the prose of Jonathan Swift (see juvenalian). Various forms of literature may be satirical, from the plays of Ben Jonson or of Molière and the poetry of Chaucer or Byron to the prose writings of Rabelais and Voltaire. The models of Roman satire, especially the verse satires of Horace and Juvenal, inspired some important imitations by Boileau, Pope, and Johnson in the greatest period of satire—the 17th and 18th centuries—when writers could appeal to a shared sense of normal conduct from which vice and folly were seen to stray. In this classical tradition, an important form is ‘formal’ or ‘direct’ satire, in which the writer directly addresses the reader (or recipient of a verse letter) with satiric comment. The alternative form of ‘indirect’ satire usually found in plays and novels allows us to draw our own conclusions from the actions of the characters, as for example in the novels of Evelyn Waugh or Chinua Achebe. See also lampoon.
Further reading: Ruben Quintero (ed.), A Companion to Satire (2006).
satyr play (satyric drama) A humorous performance presented in Athenian dramatic contests, following a *trilogy of tragedies. The satyr play had a *chorus of satyrs (men with horses’ tails and ears), and its action was a *burlesque of some mythical story appropriate to the fore-going tragedies, involving obscene language and gestures. Although fragments of satyr plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles have been found, the only complete example to have survived is the Cyclops (c.412 bce) of Euripides. Tony Harrison’s The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus (1988) is a modern satyr play adapted from the fragmentary Ichneutae of Sophocles.
scansion The analysis of poetic *metre in verse lines, by displaying *stresses, pauses, and rhyme patterns with conventional visual symbols. The simplest system, known as graphic scansion, marks stressed syllables (′ or − or •), unstressed syllables (× or ⌣ or ○), divisions between metrical units or ‘feet’ (see foot) (∣), and major pauses or *caesuras (∥) in a verse line, determining whether its metre is, for example, *iambic or *dactylic, and how many feet make up the line. In Greek and Latin *quantitative verse, the symbols − and ⌣ indicate long and short syllables respectively. Scansion also analyses the *rhyme scheme in a poem or *stanza, giving alphabetical symbols to the rhymes: abcb or abab in most *quatrains, aabba in *limericks, for instance. The verb scan is applied not only to the activity of analysing metre, but also to the lines analysed: of a line with an irregular or inconsistent metrical pattern it is said that it does not scan. See also diacritic, prosody.
scatology The study of excrement, e.g. in medicine or palaeontology. In the literary sense it means repeated reference to excrement and related matters, as in the coarse humour of François Rabelais or Jonathan Swift, whose works have passages of a scatological nature.
scenario [sin-ar-i-oh] A brief outline of the *plot, characters, and scene-changes of a play; or the script of a film. In the cinematic sense, a scenario is usually more detailed, whereas the theatrical scenarios of the *commedia dell’ arte were ‘skeleton’ summaries used as the basis for improvisations. A writer of scenarios, usually for the cinema, is sometimes called a scenarist.
scene In a drama, a subdivision of an *act or of a play not divided into acts. A scene normally represents actions happening in one place at one time, and is marked off from the next scene by a curtain, a black-out, or a brief emptying of the stage. In the study of *narrative works, ‘scene’ is also the name given to a ‘dramatic’ method of narration that presents events at roughly the same pace as that at which they are supposed to be occurring, i.e. usually in detail and with substantial use of *dialogue. In this sense the scenic narrative method is contrasted with ‘summary’, in which the duration of the story’s events is compressed into a brief account. Adjective: scenic.
scène à faire [sen a fair] A French term for the kind of *scene within a drama towards which the preceding action seems inevitably to tend, such as the crucial encounter between hero and villain. It usually provides an emotional *climax. The term is sometimes rendered in English as ‘obligatory scene’. See also anagnorisis, catastrophe, crisis, dénouement, well-made play.
Schauerroman [show-er-roh-man] (plural -mane) The German term for a *Gothic novel or similar horror story, literally a ‘shudder-novel’.
scheme A term once used for a rhetorical *figure (or figure of speech), usually one that departs from the normal order or sound of words but does not extended their meanings as a *trope does. Some rhetoricians, however, have used the term to cover tropes as well.
scholasticism The methods and doctrines of the leading academic philosophers and theologians of the late Middle Ages in Europe. The schoolmen of the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries attempted to reconcile Christian theology with the Greek philosophy of Aristotle. The leading figures of scholasticism included Peter Abelard, Albertus Magnus, Duns Scotus, and above all Thomas Aquinas, whose Summa Theologica (mid-13th century) is the most ambitious of scholastic works; his followers are called Thomists. During the *Renaissance, the deductive logic of scholasticism was superseded by the inductive methods of modern science, while its theological concerns were challenged by the emergence of *humanism.
school drama See academic drama.
science fiction A popular modern branch of prose fiction that explores the probable consequences of some improbable or impossible transformation of the basic conditions of human (or intelligent non-human) existence. This transformation need not be brought about by a technological invention, but may involve some mutation of known biological or physical reality, e.g. time travel, extraterrestrial invasion, ecological catastrophe. Science fiction is a form of literary *fantasy or *romance that often draws upon earlier kinds of *utopian and *apocalyptic writing. The term itself was first given general currency by Hugo Gernsback, editor of the American magazine Amazing Stories from 1926 onwards, and it is usually abbreviated to SF or sci-fi; before this, such works were called ‘scientific romances’ by H. G. Wells and others. Several early precedents have been claimed for the genre—notably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)—but true modern science fiction begins with Jules Verne’s Voyage au centre de la terre (1864) and H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895). Once uniformly dismissed as *pulp fiction, SF gained greater respect during the 1950s, as writers like Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke expanded its range. SF has also had an important influence on *postmodernist fiction by writers not devoted to this *genre alone: Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Doris Lessing, and Italo Calvino are significant examples.
Further reading: Roger Luckhurst, Science Fiction (2005).
http://library.tamu.edu/cushing/sffrd
• Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Database at Texas A&M.
Scottish Chaucerians The name given to a group of 15th- and 16th-century Scottish poets who wrote under the influence of Geoffrey Chaucer (or of his follower John Lydgate), often using his seven-line *rhyme royal stanza. The most important poets of this group were Robert Henryson, whose Testament of Cresseid continues and reinterprets the story of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, and William Dunbar, whose Lament for the Makaris briefly pays tribute to Chaucer. Other figures are Gavin Douglas, Sir David Lyndsay, and (if his authorship of The Kingis Quair be accepted) King James I of Scotland. The term unfortunately diverts attention from the genuinely original character of these poets, and is thus not much favoured in Scotland.
Scottish Renaissance A term applied to the notable revival of literary innovation in Scotland, and by émigré Scottish writers elsewhere, in the 1920s and 1930s. Before becoming recognized as an achievement, the Scottish Renaissance was first projected as a goal, partly in emulation of the *Irish Literary Renaissance and in response to European *modernism, in critical articles of the early 1920s by Christopher M. Grieve, who subsequently wrote under the pen-name Hugh MacDiarmid. His long poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926) is the first major work of this movement. At this time MacDiarmid wrote in a newly devised literary dialect known as ‘synthetic Scots’ or ‘Lallans’, blending Lowlands speech with *diction derived from etymological dictionaries; this he later abandoned, while other Scottish poets of this period, notably Edwin Muir, preferred standard English. In prose fiction, the term is applied to the early novels of Neil M. Gunn and Nan Shepherd, but the outstanding work is Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s novel trilogy A Scots Quair (1932–4). Accounts of modern Scottish literature usually apply the term principally to these nationally self-conscious works by MacDiarmid and his associates (some of whom also helped to revive political nationalism at this time), and sometimes include writings by Naomi Mitchison, A. J. Cronin, and others. Some popular Scottish-born writers of the time—Arthur Conan Doyle, J. M. Barrie, John Buchan—are usually not counted as participants in the Renaissance.
Further reading: Margery Palmer McCulloch, Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959 (2009).
screenplay The script of a film, comprising *dialogue (and/or *narration) with instructions for sets and camera positions.
scriptible [scrip-teebl] A term used by the French critic Roland Barthes in his book S/Z (1970), and usually translated as ‘writerly’. In contrast with the easily readable or ‘readerly’ text (texte *lisible), the writerly text does not have a single ‘closed’ meaning; instead, it obliges each reader to produce his or her own meanings from its fragmentary or contradictory hints. Ideally—and the concept is very much a theoretical ideal rather than a description—the writerly text is challengingly ‘open’, giving the reader an active role as co-writer, rather than as passive consumer. The nearest actual equivalents of this ideal would seem to be the more difficult works of *modernism and *postmodernism. See also indeterminacy, jouissance.
Secentismo A general and commonly disparaging Italian term for the various kinds of elaborately artificial styles cultivated in the literature of the 17th century (the Seicento), more commonly known as *baroque styles, including *Marinism and *concettismo.
seguidilla [seg-i-dee-yă] A Spanish verse form consisting of a *quatrain of alternate long and short lines, the first and third lines of six or seven syllables, the second and fourth of five or six syllables. The rhyme scheme is abab, but in some variants the first and third lines are unrhymed. An extended version known as the seguidilla compuesta adds a three-line refrain (estribillo) to form a seven-line stanza. The form was derived from *folk songs by poets of the 16th century, and was employed by many Spanish poets from Lope de Vega to Federico García Lorca.
self-reflexive A term applied to literary works that openly reflect upon their own processes of artful composition. Such self-referentiality is frequently found in modern works of fiction that repeatedly refer to their own fictional status (see metafiction). The *narrator in such works, and in their earlier equivalents such as Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67), is sometimes called a ‘self-conscious narrator’. Self-reflexivity may also be found often in poetry. See also mise-en-abyme, romantic irony.
semantics The philosophical or linguistic study of meanings in language. The semantic aspect of any expression is its meaning as opposed to its form.
seme An elementary unit of meaning, usually a defining feature or characteristic of something. A basic description of a person as, e.g., ‘white, male, grey-haired, clean-shaven’ is a listing of semes. Some *structuralist studies of fiction have analysed fictional characters in terms of the presence or absence of given semes. Adjective: semic.
semiotic, the A term used by Julia Kristeva in La Révolution du langage poétique (1974) to designate the flow of pre-linguistic rhythms or ‘pulsions’ that is broken up by the child’s entry into the *Symbolic order of language. The unconscious energies of the semiotic are repressed and marginalized by patriarchal logic and rationality, but they may still disrupt the Symbolic order, transgressing its rigid categories (including those of identity and sexual difference). In Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory, the semiotic is associated with the mother’s body, but she detects the anarchic energies of the semiotic in the writings of both female and male authors, especially those of the *Symbolist and *modernist avant-garde.
semiotics (semiology) The systematic study of *signs, or, more precisely, of the production of meanings from sign-systems, linguistic or non-linguistic. As a distinct tradition of inquiry into human communications, semiotics was founded by the American philosopher C. S. Peirce (1839–1914) and separately by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), who proposed that linguistics would form one part of a more general science of signs: ‘semiology’. Peirce’s term ‘semiotics’ is usually preferred in English, although Saussure’s principles and concepts—especially the distinctions between *signifier and *signified and between *langue and parole—have been more influential as the basis of *structuralism and its approach to literature. Semiotics is concerned not with the relations between signs and things but with the interrelationships between signs themselves, within their structured systems or *codes of signification (see paradigm, syntagm). The semiotic approach to literary works stresses the production of literary meanings from shared *conventions and codes; but the scope of semiotics goes beyond spoken or written language to other kinds of communicative systems such as cinema, advertising, clothing, gesture, and cuisine. A practitioner of semiotics is a semiotician. The term semiosis is sometimes used to refer to the process of signifying.
Further reading: Winfried Nöth, Handbook of Semiotics (1990).
http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/semiotics
• University of Colorado site with clearly arranged links.
Senecan tragedy A form of *tragedy developed by the Roman philosopher-poet Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c.4 bce–65 ce) in his nine plays based on Greek drama (especially that of Euripides), and further adapted by playwrights of the Italian, French, and English *Renaissance. Seneca’s plays were almost certainly *closet dramas intended for recitation rather than stage performance. Composed in five acts with intervening *choruses, they employ long rhetorical speeches, with important actions being recounted by messengers. Their bloodthirsty *plots, including ghosts and horrible crimes, appealed to the popular English dramatists of the late 16th century, who presented such horrors on stage in their *revenge tragedies. These were preceded by a purer form of English Senecan tragedy, notably in Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s Gorboduc (1561), the first English tragedy. The conventional five-act structure of Renaissance drama owes its origin to the influence of Seneca.
sensation novel A kind of *novel that flourished in Britain in the 1860s, exploiting the element of suspense in stories of crime and mystery. The most successful examples are Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas (1864). The sensation novel has been seen as an early kind of *thriller in that it exposes dark secrets and conspiracies, but is distinguished from the classic *detective story by its lack of a central detective figure.
Further reading: Lyn Pykett, The Sensation Novel (1994).
sensibility An important 18th-century term designating a kind of sensitivity or responsiveness that is both aesthetic and moral, showing a capacity to feel both for others’ sorrows and for beauty. The term is also used in a different sense in modern *criticism, the sensibility of a given writer being his or her characteristic way of responding—intellectually and emotionally—to experience (see also dissociation of sensibility). Its major significance, though, is as a concept or mood of 18th-century culture. In terms of moral philosophy, it signalled a reaction against Thomas Hobbes’s view of human behaviour as essentially selfish: the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury and other 18th-century thinkers argued that human beings have an innate ‘benevolence’ or sympathy for others. In literature, the quality of sensibility was explored and displayed in the ‘novel of sensibility’ (see sentimental novel), in *sentimental comedy, in *graveyard poetry, and in the poems of William Cowper among others. The cult of sensibility is also apparent in late 18th-century *primitivism and in the new interest in the *sublime. At its self-indulgent extremes—later criticized by Jane Austen in Sense and Sensibility (1811)—it is called sentimentalism. It was one of the cultural trends that gave rise to *Romanticism (see preromanticism).
Further reading: Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (1986).
http://graduate.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/dictionary
• The Dictionary of Sensibility: project at University of Virginia.
sententia (plural -tiae) A Latin term for an *aphorism or *maxim. Its English adjective, sententious, usually has a pejorative sense, referring to a style or statement that is condescending or self-important in giving advice; but it may be used neutrally to mean ‘aphoristic’.
sentimental comedy A kind of *comedy that achieved some popularity with respectable middle-class audiences in the 18th century. In contrast with the aristocratic cynicism of English *Restoration comedy, it showed virtue rewarded by domestic bliss; its plots, usually involving unbelievably good middle-class couples, emphasized *pathos rather than humour. Pioneered by Richard Steele in The Funeral (1701) and more fully in The Conscious Lovers (1722), it flourished in mid-century with the French *comédie larmoyante (‘tearful play’) and in such plays as Hugh Kelly’s False Delicacy (1768). The pious moralizing of this tradition, which survived into 19th-century *melodrama, was opposed in the 1770s by Sheridan and Goldsmith, who attempted a partial return to the *comedy of manners.
sentimental novel (novel of sentiment; novel of sensibility) An emotionally extravagant *novel of a kind that became popular in Europe in the late 18th century. Partly inspired by the emotional power of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), the sentimental novels of the 1760s and 1770s exhibit the close connections between virtue and sensibility, in repeatedly tearful scenes; a character’s feeling for the beauties of nature and for the griefs of others is taken as a sign of a pure heart. An excessively sentimental example is Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771), but Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) and Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768) are more ironic. In Europe, the most important sentimental novels were J.-J. Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) and J. W. von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774; see wertherism). The fashion lingered on in the early *Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe in the 1790s.
Further reading: R. F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress (1974).
septenary A verse line of seven feet (see foot) or of seven metrical stresses, more commonly known as a *heptameter.
septet A *stanza of seven lines, such as the English *rhyme royal stanza.
serialized Published in successive instalments, either in a newspaper or magazine, or independently in cheaply bound pamphlet form. Serialization of literary works, especially novels, was a major feature of magazine and newspaper culture from the early 19th century to the early 20th. Alexander Pushkin’s verse novel Eugene Onegin, for example, first appeared serially in magazines from 1825 to 1831 before becoming available as a book in 1833. Many of Charles Dickens’s novels were first issued in monthly parts, usually containing three chapters apiece. An author of serialized works is a serialist.
Further reading: Graham Law, Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press (2000).
sestet A group of six verse lines forming the second part of a *sonnet (in its Italian or Petrarchan form), following the opening *octave. More rarely, the term may refer to a *stanza of six lines (also called a sexain, sextain, or sextet), such as the *Burns stanza or the stanza used in a *sestina.
sestina [ses-tee-nă] A poem of six 6-line *stanzas and a 3-line *envoi, linked by an intricate pattern of repeated line-endings. The most elaborate of the medieval French *fixed forms, it uses only six end-words (normally unrhymed), repeating them in a different order in each stanza so that the ending of the last line in each stanza recurs as the ending of the first line in the next. The envoi uses all six words, three of them as line-endings. The established pattern of repetition for the six stanzas is as follows: 1-ABCDEF, 2-FAEBDC, 3-CFDABE, 4-ECBFAD, 5-DEACFB, 6-BDFECA. The form was introduced into English by Sir Philip Sidney in his Arcadia (1590). Modern examples include W. H. Auden’s ‘Paysage Moralisé’ (1933) and John Ashbery’s ‘The Painter’ (1970). Even more remarkable as a technical feat is A. C. Swinburne’s ‘The Complaint of Lisa’ (1878), a rhyming double sestina with twelve 12-line stanzas and a 6-line envoi.
sex’n’shopping novel A kind of popular *romance marketed to women, flourishing as a distinctive commercial *genre in the 1980s. Its characteristic features include shamelessly explicit descriptions of expensive clothes, jewellery, cars, perfumes, and other accessories of the very rich, naming actual brands; a few graphic accounts of sexual encounters are usually thrown in, providing a flimsy excuse for the more delirious excitements of the shopping and dressing-up scenes. The founding work of this tradition was Judith Krantz’s Scruples (1978), which inspired numerous imitations. The formula was revived, with a flavouring of light bondage, in E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey (2011) and its sequels. The term originally used by book-trade insiders for such fiction was Shopping and Fucking, sometimes discreetly abbreviated to S&F.
Shakespearean sonnet See sonnet.
Shavian [shay-vi-ăn] Belonging to or characteristic of the work of the Irish playwright and controversialist Bernard Shaw (1856–1950). See also Ibsenite; discussion play.
short measure (short metre) A form of verse *quatrain often used in *hymns. A variant of *common metre, it has four *stresses in its third line, but only three stresses in the other three, the metre usually being *iambic. The *rhyme scheme is usually abcb, or, as in this cheerful example from the children’s hymn-writer Isaac Watts, abab:
There is a dreadful Hell,
And everlasting pains;
There sinners must with devils dwell
In darkness, fire, and chains.
The form has some similarity to *poulter’s measure.
short story A fictional prose tale of no specified length, but too short to be published as a volume on its own, as *novellas sometimes and *novels usually are. A short story will normally concentrate on a single event with only one or two characters, more economically than a novel’s sustained exploration of social background. There are similar fictional forms of greater antiquity—*fables, *lais, *folktales, *parables, and the French *conte—but the short story as we know it flourished in the magazines of the 19th and early 20th centuries, especially in the USA, which has a particularly strong tradition.
Further reading: Adrian Hunter, The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English (2007).
sibilance The marked recurrence of the ‘hissing’ sounds known as sibilants (usually spelt s, sh, zh, c). The effect, also known as sigmatism after the Greek letter sigma, is often exploited in poetry, as in Long-fellow’s lines
Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing;
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness
See also alliteration.
sign A basic element of communication, either linguistic (e.g. a written character or a word) or non-linguistic (e.g. a picture, or article of dress); or anything that can be construed as having a meaning. According to the influential theory of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, every sign has two inseparable aspects: the *signifier, which is the materially perceptible component such as a sound or written mark, and the *signified, which is the conceptual meaning. In a linguistic sign, according to Saussure, the relationship between signifier and signified is ‘unmotivated’ or *arbitrary; that is, it is based purely on social convention rather than on natural necessity: there is nothing about a horse which demands that it be called ‘horse’, since the French call the same thing un cheval. Saussure’s theory deliberately leaves out the *referent or real external object referred to by a sign. The alternative theory of the American philosopher C. S. Peirce has more room for referents and for ‘motivated’ signs. Peirce calls the unmotivated sign a *symbol, while identifying two further kinds of sign: the *icon, which resembles its referent (e.g. a photograph), and the *index, which is caused by its referent (e.g. a medical symptom). Verb: signify. See also semiotics.
signified The conceptual component of a *sign, as distinct from its material form, the *signifier. The signified, also known in French as the signifié, is the idea conventionally indicated by the signifier, rather than the actual external object or *referent (if any).
signifier The concretely perceptible component of a *sign, as distinct from its conceptual meaning (the *signified). In language, this may be a meaningful sound, or a written mark such as a letter or sequence of letters making up a word. The term often appears in its French form, significant.
sijo [shee-joh] The principal verse-form of Korean lyric poetry in a tradition traced at least as far back as the 14th century. Originally composed to be sung, the sijo, like its younger and shorter cousin the Japanese *haiku, is a three-line *syllabic form, although with longer lines, each divisible into four syllable-groups. The first two lines contain 14 or 15 syllables each, depending on permissible variation in the third syllable-group, while the stricter pattern of the 15-syllable final line follows a syllable-count of 3, 5, 4, and 3. The first half of this final line is expected to provide a surprising ‘twist’ in sound or sense. Original English-language sijo by Larry Gross and others emerged in the specialist journal Sijo West (1995–9). Because each line comes in two halves or *hemistichs, it has become customary for English-language sijo, whether original or translated, to be presented as six lines, each of 7 or 8 syllables.
Further reading: Richard Rutt (ed.), The Bamboo Grove: An Introduction to Sijo (1998).
silver-fork novel A kind of *novel that was popular in Britain from the 1820s to the 1840s, and was marked by concentration upon the fashionable etiquette and manners of high society. The term was used mockingly by critics of the time, and has been applied to works by Theodore Hook, Catherine Gore, Frances Trollope, Lady Caroline Lamb, Benjamin Disraeli, and Susan Ferrier.
Further reading: Alison Adburgham, Silver Fork Society (1983).
simile [sim-ĭ-li] An explicit comparison between two different things, actions, or feelings, using the words ‘as’ or ‘like’, as in Wordsworth’s line:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
A very common *figure of speech in both prose and verse, simile is more tentative and decorative than *metaphor. A lengthy and more elaborate kind of simile, used as a digression in a narrative work, is the *epic simile.
sjuzet [syuu-zhet] (suzet; syuzhet) The term used in *Russian Formalism to denote the *plot of a narrative work, as opposed to the events of its *story (called the *fabula). The sjuzet is the finished arrangement of narrated events as they are presented to the reader, rather than the sequence of such events as reconstructed in their ‘true’ sequence and duration.
skald (scald) An Old Norse word for a poet, usually applied to a Norwegian or Icelandic court poet or *bard of the period from the 9th century to the 13th. Skaldic verse is marked by its elaborate patterns of *metre, rhyme, and *alliteration, and by its use of *kennings.
skaz A Russian term, derived from skazat (‘to tell’), for a kind of *folktale in which an episode of rustic life is recounted in the first person and in colloquial style. The term is now used more generally in studies of fictional prose for the exploitation of colloquial speech in first-person narratives, especially where the *narrator’s language is marked by non-literary or indecorous features such as slang and dialect terms, expletives, *solecisms, *malapropisms, hesitations, and other indications that the narrative is to be understood as being ‘spoken’ rather than written down. In English, the prominent use of skaz in prose fiction begins with Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), in which the story is told by an uneducated fourteen-year-old boy. Another notable instance, in which again a teenage boy narrates, is J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951). Older narrators can be used in similar ways to create the skaz effect, though: James Kelman’s How Late it Was, How Late (1994) gives us a story told by a hard-drinking Glaswegian ex-convict, in a ‘spoken’ style notable for its repetitive use of expletives. See also idiolect.
Skeltonics Verses written in the manner favoured by John Skelton (c.1460–1529), whose lively satirical poems use irregular short lines of two or three *stresses, and often extend the same rhyme over several consecutive lines. A similar effect of vivid colloquial word-play is often found in modern *dub poetry.
sketch A short composition, dramatic, narrative, or descriptive. In the theatre, a sketch is a brief, self-contained dramatic scene, usually comic. As a kind of prose narrative, a sketch is more modest than a *short story, showing less development in *plot or *characterization. The term is also applied to brief descriptions of people (the ‘character sketch’) or places, as in the non-fictional components of Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (1836).
slant rhyme See half-rhyme.
slave narrative A written account by an escaped or freed slave of his or her experiences of slavery. A special American form of autobiography, the slave narrative appeared as an important kind of abolitionist literature in the period preceding the Civil War. The outstanding example is the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845).
socialist realism A slogan adopted by the Soviet cultural authorities in 1934 to summarize the requirements of Stalinist dogma in literature: the established techniques of 19th-century *realism were to be used to represent the struggle for socialism in a positive, optimistic light, while the allegedly ‘decadent’ techniques of *modernism were to be avoided as bourgeois deviations. The approved model was Maxim Gorky’s novel The Mother (1907). A few outstanding novels have conformed to this official prescription, including Mikhail Sholokhov’s Virgin Soil Upturned (1932) and Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Grey Granite (1934), but the doctrine acted chiefly to stifle imaginative experiment, and has been rejected as such by many leading socialist writers, notably Bertolt Brecht. See also proletcult, propagandism.
sociology of literature A branch of literary study that examines the relationships between literary works and their social contexts, including patterns of literacy, kinds of audience, modes of publication and dramatic presentation, and the social class positions of authors and readers. Originating in 19th-century France with works by Mme de Staël and Hippolyte Taine, the sociology of literature was revived in the English-speaking world with the appearance of such studies as Raymond Williams’s The Long Revolution (1961), and is most often associated with Marxist approaches to cultural analysis.
Socratic [sŏ-krat-ik] Pertaining to the Greek philosopher Socrates (469–399 bce). His manner of feigning ignorance in order to expose the self-contradictions of his interlocutors through cross-examination is known as Socratic irony. His method of seeking the truth by such processes of question-and-answer is illustrated in the Socratic Dialogues of his follower, Plato.
solecism [sol-ĭ-sizm] A grammatical error; or, more loosely, any mistake that exposes the perpetrator’s ignorance. Adjective: solecistic.
soliloquy [sǒl-il-ǒ-kwi] A dramatic speech uttered by one character speaking aloud while alone on the stage (or while under the impression of being alone). The soliloquist thus reveals his or her inner thoughts and feelings to the audience, either in supposed self-communion or in a consciously direct address. Soliloquies often appear in plays from the age of Shakespeare, notably in his Hamlet and Macbeth. A poem supposedly uttered by a solitary speaker, like Robert Browning’s ‘Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister’ (1842), may also be called a soliloquy. Soliloquy is a form of *monologue, but a monologue is not a soliloquy if (as in the *dramatic monologue) the speaker is not alone. Verb: soliloquize.
SONNET
A short *lyric poem, usually comprising fourteen rhyming lines of equal length: iambic *pentameters in English, *alexandrines in French, *hendecasyllables in Italian. The *rhyme schemes of the sonnet follow two basic patterns. 1. The Italian sonnet (also called the *Petrarchan sonnet after the most influential of the Italian sonneteers) comprises an 8-line ‘octave’ of two *quatrains, rhymed abbaabba, followed by a 6-line ‘sestet’ usually rhymed cdecde or cdcdcd. The transition from octave to sestet usually coincides with a ‘turn’ (Italian, volta) in the argument or mood of the poem. In a variant form used by the English poet John Milton, however, the ‘turn’ is delayed to a later position around the tenth line. Some later poets—notably William Wordsworth—have employed this feature of the ‘Miltonic sonnet’ while relaxing the rhyme scheme of the octave to abbaacca. The Italian pattern has remained the most widely used in English and other languages. 2. The English sonnet (also called the Shakespearean sonnet after its foremost practitioner) comprises three quatrains and a final couplet, rhyming ababcdcdefefgg. An important variant of this is the Spenserian sonnet (introduced by the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser), which links the three quatrains by rhyme, in the sequence ababbabccdcdee. In either form, the ‘turn’ comes with the final couplet, which may sometimes achieve the neatness of an *epigram.
Originating in Italy, the sonnet was established by Petrarch in the 14th century as a major form of love poetry, and came to be adopted in Spain, France, and England in the 16th century, and in Germany in the 17th. The standard subject-matter of early sonnets was the torments of sexual love (usually within a *courtly love convention), but in the 17th century John Donne extended the sonnet’s scope to religion, while Milton extended it to politics. Although largely neglected in the 18th century, the sonnet was revived in the 19th by Wordsworth, Keats, and Baudelaire, and is still widely used. Some poets have written connected series of sonnets, known as sonnet sequences or sonnet cycles: of these, the outstanding English examples are Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella (1591), Spenser’s Amoretti (1595), and Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609); later examples include Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and W. H. Auden’s ‘In Time of War’ (1939). A group of sonnets formally linked by repeated lines is known as a *crown of sonnets. Irregular variations on the sonnet form have included the 12-line sonnet sometimes used by Elizabethan poets, G. M. Hopkins’s *curtal sonnets of 10½ lines, and the 16-line sonnets of George Meredith’s sequence Modern Love (1862).
Further reading: Michael R. G. Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet (1992); Stephen Burt and David Mikics, The Art of the Sonnet (2010); A. D. Cousins and Peter Howarth (eds), The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet (2011).
• Sonnet Central: archive of sonnets with historical notes and links.
soubrette The *stock character of the heroine’s maidservant in French comedy of the 17th and 18th centuries. The soubrette usually protests against the delusions of her master, ingeniously scheming on behalf of her young mistress. The character of Dorine in Molière’s Le Tartuffe (1664) is a model for the type, which originated in the *commedia dell’ arte.
Spasmodic School A title applied mockingly by the Scottish poet and critic W. E. Aytoun in 1854 to a group of poets who had lately achieved some popularity in Britain: P. J. Bailey, Sydney Dobell, Alexander Smith, and others. Their work is marked by extravagant attempts to represent emotional turmoil, sometimes in a manner derived from Byron. Dobell’s dramatic poem Balder (1853) includes the notorious line:
Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!
The term has sometimes been extended to the comparable emotional intensities of Tennyson’s Maud (1855), and of some poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
speech act theory A modern philosophical approach to language, which has challenged the long-standing assumption of philosophers that human utterances consist exclusively of true or false statements about the world. Initiated by the English philosopher J. L. Austin in lectures published posthumously as How to Do Things with Words (1962), speech act theory begins with the distinction between ‘constative’ utterances (which report truly or falsely on some external state of affairs) and *performatives (which are verbal actions in themselves—such as promising—rather than true or false statements). Further analysis reveals that a single utterance may comprise three distinct kinds of speech act: in addition to its simple ‘locutionary’ status as a grammatical utterance, it will have an *illocutionary force (i.e. an active function such as threatening, affirming, or reassuring), and probably a *perlocutionary force (an effect on the listener or reader). After Austin’s death in 1960, speech act theory was developed further by J. R. Searle in Speech Acts (1969) and other works, and applied to problems of literary analysis by Mary Louise Pratt in Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (1977).
Spenserian stanza An English poetic *stanza of nine *iambic lines, the first eight being *pentameters while the ninth is a longer line known either as an iambic hexameter or as an *alexandrine. The rhyme scheme is ababbcbcc. The stanza is named after Edmund Spenser, who invented it—probably on the basis of the *ottava rima stanza—for his long allegorical *romance The Faerie Queene (1590–96). It was revived successfully by the younger English Romantic poets of the early 19th century: Byron used it for Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812, 1816), Keats for ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ (1820), and Shelley for The Revolt of Islam (1818) and Adonais (1821). For the Spenserian sonnet, see sonnet.
spondee A metrical unit (*foot) consisting of two *stressed syllables (or, in *quantitative verse, two long syllables). Spondees occur regularly in several Greek and Latin metres, and as substitutes for other feet, as in the dactylic *hexameter; but in English the spondee is an occasional device of metrical variation. The normal alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables in English speech makes it virtually impossible to compose a complete line of true spondees. Some English compound words like childbirth are spondaic, although even these do not have exactly equal stresses. The occurrence of adjacent stressed syllables in English verse may be accounted for more convincingly in terms of *demotion, rather than in the doubtfully applicable terms of classical quantitative feet.
Spoonerism A phrase in which the initial consonants of two words have been exchanged, creating an amusing new expression. It takes its name from the Revd W. A. Spooner (1844–1930), Warden of New College, Oxford. His reputed utterances, like the accusation that a student had ‘hissed my mystery lectures’, appear to have been inadvertent slips, but Spoonerisms may also be used for deliberately humorous effect: W. H. Auden referred dismissively to Keats and Shelley as ‘Sheets and Kelly’, while a feminist theatre group toured Britain in the 1970s under the name Cunning Stunts. See also metathesis.
sprung rhythm The term used by the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89) to describe his peculiar metrical system, based on the *accentual verse of nursery rhymes and on medieval *alliterative metres. It counts the number of strong stresses in a line, regardless of the number of unstressed syllables, and permits the juxtaposition of stressed syllables more frequently than normal English *duple or *triple metre (see metre). Hopkins saw his metre as having four kinds of *foot, each beginning with a stressed syllable: the stressed monosyllable (●), the *trochee (●○), the *dactyl (●○○), and the first *paeon (●○○○); additional unstressed syllables or ‘outrides’ were also permitted. Hopkins’s aim was to make use of the energies of everyday speech, and his sprung rhythm may be regarded as a kind of *free verse based partly on accentual metres.
squib Another word for a *lampoon: a short satirical attack upon a person, work, or institution.
stanza A group of verse lines forming a section of a poem and sharing the same structure as all or some of the other sections of the same poem, in terms of the lengths of its lines, its *metre, and usually its *rhyme scheme. In printed poems, stanzas are separated by spaces. Stanzas are often loosely referred to as ‘verses’, but this usage causes serious confusion and is best avoided, since a verse is, strictly speaking, a single line. Although some writers regard the *couplet and the *tercet as kinds of stanza, the term is most often applied to groups of four lines or more, the four-line *quatrain being by far the most common, in the *ballad metre and various other forms. Among the longer and more complex kinds of stanza used in English are the *Burns stanza, *ottava rima, *rhyme royal, and the *Spenserian stanza; but there are many others with no special names. The *fixed forms derived from medieval French verse have their own intricate kinds of stanza. Poems that are divided regularly into stanzas are stanzaic, whereas poems that form a continuous sequence of lines of the same length are referred to as being *stichic or composed in *block form. In many poems which are divided up irregularly (usually those written in *blank verse, *heroic couplets, or *free verse), the sections are sometimes called *verse paragraphs, but in the irregular form of the *ode, these unmatched subdivisions are usually called stanzas or *strophes.
stave Another word for a *stanza, especially in a song.
stichic [stik-ik] Composed as a continuous sequence of verse lines of the same length and *metre, and thus not divided into *stanzas. Poems written in *blank verse or in *heroic couplets are usually stichic; if divided up at all, their uneven subdivisions are called *verse paragraphs.
stichomythia [stik-oh-mith-iă] A form of dramatic *dialogue in which two disputing characters answer each other rapidly in alternating single lines, with one character’s replies balancing (and often partially repeating) the other’s utterances. This kind of verbal duel or ‘cut and thrust’ dialogue was practised more in ancient Greek and Roman tragedy than in later drama, although a notable English example occurs in the dialogue between Richard and Elizabeth in Shakespeare’s Richard III (Act IV, scene iv). See also hemistich, repartee.
stilnovisti The collective term for the poetic pioneers and partisans of the Italian *dolce stil novo in the late 13th century and early 14th. These were Guido Cavalcanti (1260?–1300), Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), and Cino da Pistoia (c.1270–1337).
stock character A stereotyped character easily recognized by readers or audiences from recurrent appearances in literary or folk tradition, usually within a specific *genre such as comedy or fairy tale. Common examples include the absent-minded professor, the country bumpkin, the damsel in distress, the old miser, the whore with a heart of gold, the bragging soldier, the villain of *melodrama, the wicked stepmother, the jealous husband, and the *soubrette. Similarly recognizable incidents or plot-elements which recur in fiction and drama are known as stock situations: these include the mistaken identity, the ‘eternal triangle’, the discovery of the birthmark, the last-minute rescue, the dying man’s confession, and love at first sight. See also archetype, convention, type.
stock response A routinely insensitive reaction to a literary work or to some element of it. A stock response perceives in a work only those meanings that are already familiar from a reader’s or audience’s previous experience, failing to recognize fresh or unfamiliar meanings. Writers may deliberately exploit stock responses (e.g. our sympathy for the hero or heroine), but often fall victim to them when attempting to reach beyond readers’ habitual expectations.
story In the everyday sense, any *narrative or tale recounting a series of events. In modern *narratology, however, the term refers more specifically to the sequence of imagined events that we reconstruct from the actual arrangement of a narrative (or dramatic) *plot. In this modern distinction between story and plot, derived from *Russian Formalism and its opposed terms *fabula and *sjuzet, the story is the full sequence of events as we assume them to have occurred in their likely order, duration, and frequency, while the plot is a particular selection and (re-)ordering of these. Thus the story is the abstractly conceived ‘raw material’ of events which we reconstruct from the finished arrangement of the plot: it includes events preceding and otherwise omitted from the perceived action, and its sequence will differ from that of the plot if the action begins *in medias res or otherwise involves an *anachrony. As an abstraction, the story can be translated into other languages and media (e.g. film) more successfully than the style of the *narration could be.
strambotto (plural -otti ) A short Italian poem meant to be set to music, and usually taking the form of eight rhymed *hendecasyllabic lines (see endecasyllabo), although some are of six lines. In the most common form, known as the Sicilian octave (ottava siciliana), the rhyme scheme is abababab, but there are others including the Tuscan octave (ottava toscana) with the scheme abababcc. This kind of octave is sometimes divided into two *quatrains. An alternative name for it, principally in Tuscany, is the rispetto. It was used widely in the 15th and 16th centuries.
stream of consciousness The continuous flow of sense-perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and memories in the human mind; or a literary method of representing such a blending of mental processes in fictional characters, usually in an unpunctuated or disjointed form of *interior monologue. The term is often used as a synonym for interior monologue, but they can also be distinguished, in two ways. In the first (psychological) sense, the stream of consciousness is the subject-matter while interior monologue is the technique for presenting it; thus Marcel Proust’s novel A la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27) is about the stream of consciousness, especially the connection between sense-impressions and memory, but it does not actually use interior monologue. In the second (literary) sense, stream of consciousness is a special style of interior monologue: while an interior monologue always presents a character’s thoughts ‘directly’, without the apparent intervention of a summarizing and selecting narrator, it does not necessarily mingle them with impressions and perceptions, nor does it necessarily violate the norms of grammar, syntax, and logic; but the stream-of-consciousness technique also does one or both of these things. An important device of *modernist fiction and its later imitators, the technique was pioneered by Dorothy Richardson in Pilgrimage (1915–35) and by James Joyce in Ulysses (1922), and further developed by Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway (1925) and William Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury (1928).
stress The relative emphasis given in pronunciation to a syllable, in loudness, pitch, or duration (or some combination of these). The term is usually interchangeable with *accent, although some theorists of *prosody reserve it only for the emphasis occurring according to a metrical pattern (see metre). In English verse, the metre of a line is determined by the number of stresses in a sequence composed of stressed and unstressed syllables (also referred to as strongly stressed and weakly stressed syllables). In *quantitative verse, on the other hand, the metrical pattern is made up of syllables measured by their duration rather than by stress.
strong-stress metre Another term for the metre of *accentual verse, in which only the stressed syllables are counted while the unstressed syllables may vary in number. The term thus encompasses the Old Germanic *alliterative metre, various kinds of popular English metre, and G. M. Hopkins’s *sprung rhythm.
strophe [stroh-fi] A *stanza, or any less regular subdivision of a poem, such as a *verse paragraph. In a special sense, the term is applied to the opening section (and every third succeeding section) of a Greek choral *ode. In the *Pindaric ode, sometimes imitated in English, the strophe is followed by an *antistrophe having the same number of lines and the same complex metrical arrangement; this is then followed by an *epode of differing length and structure, and the triadic pattern may then be repeated a number of times. In choral odes, the *chorus would dance in one direction while chanting the strophe, then back again during the antistrophe, standing still for the epode. Adjective: strophic.
structuralism A mid 20th-century intellectual movement that analysed cultural phenomena according to principles derived from linguistics, emphasizing the systematic interrelationships among the elements of any human activity, and thus the abstract *codes and *conventions governing the social production of meanings. Building on the linguistic concept of the *phoneme—a unit of meaningful sound defined purely by its differences from other phonemes rather than by any inherent features—structuralism argued that the elements composing any cultural phenomenon (from cooking to drama) are similarly ‘relational’: that is, they have meaning only by virtue of their contrasts with other elements of the system, especially in *binary oppositions of paired opposites. Their meanings can be established not by referring each element to any supposed equivalent in natural reality, but only by analysing its function within a self-contained cultural code. Accordingly, structuralist analysis sought the underlying system or *langue that governs individual utterances or instances. In formulating the laws by which elements of such a system are combined, it distinguished between sets of interchangeable units (*paradigms) and sequences of such units in combination (*syntagms), thereby outlining a basic ‘*syntax’ of human culture.
Structuralism and its ‘science of signs’ (see semiotics) were derived chiefly from the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), and partly from *Russian Formalism and the related *narratology of Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (1928). It flourished in France in the 1960s, following the widely discussed applications of structural analysis to mythology by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. In the study of literary works, structuralism was distinguished by its rejection of those traditional notions according to which literature ‘expresses’ an author’s meaning or ‘reflects’ reality. Instead, the ‘*text’ was seen as an objective structure activating various codes and conventions which are independent of author, reader, and external reality. Structuralist criticism was less interested in interpreting what literary works mean than in explaining how they can mean what they mean; that is, in showing what implicit rules and conventions are operating in a given work. The structuralist tradition has been particularly strong in narratology, from Propp’s analysis of narrative *functions to Greimas’s theory of *actants. The French critic Roland Barthes was an outstanding practitioner of structuralist literary analysis notably in his book S/Z (1970)—and is famed for his witty analyses of wrestling, striptease, and other phenomena in Mythologies (1957): some of his later writings, however, show a shift to *post-structuralism, in which the over-confident ‘scientific’ pretensions of structuralism are abandoned.
Further reading: John Sturrock, Structuralism (2nd edn, 2002).
Sturm und Drang [shtoorm uunt drang] The name—‘Storm and Stress’—given to a short-lived but important movement in German literature of the 1770s. An early precursor of *Romanticism, it was passionately individualistic and rebellious, maintaining a hostile attitude to French *neoclassicism and the associated rationalism of the *Enlightenment. The term is taken from the title of a play by F. M. Klinger (1776), but the leaders of the movement were J. G. Herder and J. W. von Goethe. Herder, inspired by the *primitivism of J.-J. Rousseau, encouraged the cult of *Ossianism and praised the ‘natural’ qualities of Shakespeare and of folk song. Goethe’s play Götz von Berlichingen (1773), a Shakespearean *chronicle play about a leader in the 16th-century peasants’ revolt, is the major dramatic work of the Sturm und Drang period, while his *sentimental novel of hopeless love and suicide, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), is its most significant novel. A belated product of the movement is Friedrich Schiller’s play Die Räuber (1781), which influenced the later development of *melodrama.
Further reading: Alan C. Leidner, The Impatient Muse: Germany and the Sturm und Drang (1994).
style Any specific way of using language, which is characteristic of an author, school, period, or *genre. Particular styles may be defined by their *diction, *syntax, *imagery, *rhythm, and use of *figures, or by any other linguistic feature. Different categories of style have been named after particular authors (e.g. Ciceronian), periods (e.g. Augustan), and professions (e.g. journalistic), while in the *Renaissance a scheme of three stylistic ‘levels’ was adopted, distinguishing the high or ‘grand’ style from the middle or ‘mean’ style and the low or ‘base’ style. The principle of *decorum held that certain subjects required particular levels of style, so that an *epic should be written in the grand style whereas *satires should be composed in the base style. Since the literary revolution of *Romanticism, however, this hierarchy has been replaced by the notion of style as an expression of individual personality. Adjective: stylistic.
stylistics A branch of modern linguistics devoted to the detailed analysis of literary *style, or of the linguistic choices made by speakers and writers in non-literary contexts.
Further reading: Mick Short, Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose (1996).
subgenre [sub-zhahnr] Any category of literary works that forms a specific class within a larger *genre: thus the *pastoral elegy may be regarded as a subgenre of *elegy, which is in turn a subgenre of *lyric poetry.
sublime, the A quality of awesome grandeur in art or nature, which some 18th-century writers distinguished from the merely beautiful. An anonymous Greek critical treatise of the 1st century ce, Peri hypsous (‘On the Sublime’, mistakenly attributed to the 3rd-century rhetorician Longinus), provided the basis for the 18th-century interest in sublimity, after Boileau’s French translation in 1672. ‘Longinus’ refers to the sublime as a loftiness of thought and feeling in literature, and associates it with terrifyingly impressive natural phenomena such as mountains, volcanoes, storms, and the sea. These associations were revived in Edmund Burke’s influential Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), which argues that the sublime is characterized by obscurity, vastness, and power, while the beautiful is light, smooth, and delicate. The 18th-century enthusiasm for the sublime in landscape and the visual arts was one of the developments that undermined the restraints of *neoclassicism and thus prepared the way for *Romanticism. Interest in the sublime has more recently become a feature of the discourses of *postmodernism, especially under the influence of the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard.
Further reading: Philip Shaw, The Sublime (2005).
subplot A secondary sequence of actions in a dramatic or narrative work, usually involving characters of lesser importance (and often of lower social status). The subplot may be related to the main plot as a parallel or contrast, or it may be more or less separate from it. Subplots are especially common in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, a famous example being that of Gloucester and his sons in Shakespeare’s King Lear; but they are also found in long novels such as those of Dickens.
substitution A term used in traditional *prosody to denote the use of one kind of *foot in place of the foot normally required by the metrical pattern of a verse line. In English verse, the kind of substitution most commonly referred to by prosodists is the replacement of the first *iamb in an iambic line by a *trochee; this ‘initial trochaic *inversion’, as it is called, appears in Tennyson’s line:
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
The substitution of an *anapaest for an iamb, or of a *dactyl for a trochee, is called trisyllabic substitution, since it increases the number of syllables from two to three. The feet known as the *spondee (●●) and the *pyrrhic (○○) are sometimes invoked as substitute feet where stressed or unstressed syllables occur in pairs. Thus Keats’s line
O for a beaker full of the warm South
shows, in addition to its initial trochaic inversion, a metrical variation at the end, which would be described in traditional prosody as the substitution of a pyrrhic and a spondee for the final two iambs. Some more modern theories of versification, however, have rejected the concept of the foot and along with it that of substitution, accounting for such metrical variations in terms of *demotion, *promotion, and the ‘pairing’ of stressed and unstressed syllables. In this view, the ending of Keats’s line illustrates a permissible variation in English iambic verse, whereby the occurrence of two stressed syllables together can be compensated (in certain positions) by the pairing of two unstressed syllables. In Greek and Latin *quantitative verse, some kinds of substitution are governed by the principle of ‘equivalence’ whereby one long syllable is equal to two short syllables, so that under certain conditions a spondee, for example, can stand in for a dactyl.
subtext Any meaning or set of meanings which is implied rather than explicitly stated in a literary work, especially in a play. Modern plays such as those of Harold Pinter, in which the meaning of the action is sometimes suggested more by silences and pauses than by dialogue alone, are often discussed in terms of their hidden subtexts.
succès d’estime [suuk-sed est-eem] A high reputation enjoyed by a work on the basis of critics’ favourable judgements; thus a critical success rather than a merely commercial one. Another kind of reputation for which the French have a phrase is the succès de scandale: a success based on notoriety, when a work becomes famous because of some public excitement or outrage not directly arising from its actual merits. Some works have both kinds of success: Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita (1956) enjoyed a succès de scandale based on its notorious paedophilic subject-matter, but still ranks as a succès d’estime on the strength of its widely admired use of English prose.
Surrealism An anti-rational movement of imaginative liberation in European (mainly French and Spanish) art and literature in the 1920s and 1930s, launched by André Breton in his Manifeste du Surréalisme (1924) after his break from the *Dada group in 1922. The term surréaliste had been used by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917 to indicate an attempt to reach beyond the limits of the ‘real’. Surrealism seeks to break down the boundaries between rationality and irrationality, exploring the resources and revolutionary energies of dreams, hallucinations, and sexual desire. Influenced both by the *Symbolists and by Sigmund Freud’s theories of the unconscious, the surrealists experimented with *automatic writing and with the free association of random images brought together in surprising juxtaposition. Although surrealist painting is better known, a significant tradition of surrealist poetry established itself in France, in the work of Breton, Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon, and Benjamin Péret. Although dissolved as a coherent movement by the end of the 1930s, its tradition has survived in many forms of post-war experimental writing, from the theatre of the *absurd to the songs of Bob Dylan and the poetry of the *New York school. The adjectives surreal and surrealistic are often used in a loose sense to refer to any bizarre imaginative effect.
Further reading: David Hopkins, Dada and Surrealism (2004).
http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk
• Surrealism Centre: Tate Gallery, with Essex and Manchester Universities.
syllabic verse [si-lab-ik] (syllabics) Verse in which the lines are measured according to the number of syllables they contain, regardless of the number of *stresses. This syllabic principle operates in the poetry of the Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, etc.) and of Chinese and Japanese; but in English, purely syllabic verse occurs only in an experimental modern tradition launched by Robert Bridges in 1921 and exhibited notably in his Testament of Beauty (1929); this was taken up later in some poems by Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, and Thom Gunn, among others. Otherwise the *haiku derived from Japanese principles is the only widely recognized syllabic form in English. The conventions of European syllabic verse give us the names of certain standard lines: the *hendecasyllable is important in Italian verse, as the 12-syllable *alexandrine is in French, while *octosyllabic verse is very common in many languages including English (where it is composed in four-stress lines). See also metre.
syllepsis A construction in which one word (usually a verb or preposition) is applied to two other words or phrases, either ungrammatically or in two differing senses. In the first case, the verb or preposition agrees grammatically with only one of the two elements which it governs, e.g. ‘He works his work, I mine’ (Tennyson). In the second case, the word also appears only once but is applied twice in differing senses (often an abstract sense and a concrete sense), as in Pope’s The Rape of the Lock:A more far-fetched instance occurs in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers when it is said of a character that she ‘went home in a flood of tears and a sedan chair’. There is usually a kind of *pun involved in this kind of syllepsis, as in Anthony Hecht’s poem ‘The Feast of Stephen’ (1977), which refers to ‘the flush | Of health and toilets’. The term is frequently used interchangeably with *zeugma, attempts to distinguish the two terms having foundered in confusion: some rhetoricians place the ungrammatical form under the heading of syllepsis while others allot it to zeugma. It seems preferable to keep zeugma as the more inclusive term for syntactic ‘yoking’ and to reserve syllepsis for its ungrammatical or punning varieties. Adjective: sylleptic.
Here, thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey
Dost sometimes counsel take—and sometimes tea.
syllogism [sil-ŏ-jizm] A form of logical argument that derives a conclusion from two propositions (‘premisses’) sharing a common term, usually in this form: all x are y (major premiss); z is x (minor premiss); therefore z is y (conclusion). For example: all poets are alcoholics; Jane is a poet; therefore Jane is an alcoholic. In this deductive logic, the conclusion is of course reliable only if both premisses are true. Syllogistic reasoning was cultivated in medieval *scholasticism, and is sometimes found in Chaucer and Shakespeare. Verb: syllogize.
symbol In the simplest sense, anything that stands for or represents something else beyond it—usually an idea conventionally associated with it. Objects like flags and crosses can function symbolically; and words are also symbols. In the *semiotics of C. S. Peirce, the term denotes a kind of *sign that has no natural or resembling connection with its referent, only a conventional one: this is the case with words. In literary usage, however, a symbol is a specially evocative kind of image (see imagery); that is, a word or phrase referring to a concrete object, scene, or action which also has some further significance associated with it: roses, mountains, birds, and voyages have all been used as common literary symbols. A symbol differs from a *metaphor in that its application is left open as an unstated suggestion: thus in the sentence She was a tower of strength, the metaphor ties a concrete image (the ‘vehicle’: tower) to an identifiable abstract quality (the *tenor: strength). Similarly, in the systematically extended metaphoric parallels of *allegory, the images represent specific meanings: at the beginning of Langland’s allegorical poem Piers Plowman (c.1380), the tower seen by the dreamer is clearly identified with the quality of Truth, and it has no independent status apart from this function. But the symbolic tower in Robert Browning’s poem ‘ “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” ’ (1855), or that in W. B. Yeats’s collection of poems The Tower (1928), remains mysteriously indeterminate in its possible meanings. It is therefore usually too simple to say that a literary symbol ‘stands for’ some idea as if it were just a convenient substitute for a fixed meaning; it is usually a substantial image in its own right, around which further significances may gather according to differing interpretations. The term symbolism refers to the use of symbols, or to a set of related symbols; however, it is also the name given to an important movement in late 19th-century and early 20th-century poetry: for this sense, see symbolists. One of the important features of *Romanticism and succeeding phases of Western literature was a much more pronounced reliance upon enigmatic symbolism in both poetry and prose fiction, sometimes involving obscure private codes of meaning, as in the poetry of Blake or Yeats. A well-known early example of this is the albatross in Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798). Many novelists—notably Herman Melville and D. H. Lawrence—have used symbolic methods: in Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) the White Whale (and indeed almost every object and character in the book) becomes a focus for many different suggested meanings. Melville’s extravagant symbolism was encouraged partly by the importance which American *Transcendentalism gave to symbolic interpretation of the world. Verb: symbolize. See also motif.
Symbolic, the A term used by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and by the literary theorist Julia Kristeva to designate the objective order (sometimes called the Symbolic Order) of language, law, morality, religion, and all social existence, which is held to constitute the identity of any human subject who enters it. Drawing on Freud’s theory of the Oedipus Complex and on the *structuralist anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Lacan developed an opposition between the ‘Imaginary’ state enjoyed by the infant who has no distinct sense of a self opposed to the world, and the Symbolic Order in which the child then becomes a separate subject within human culture. The Symbolic is the realm of distinctions and differences—between self and others, subject and object—and of absence or ‘lack’, since in it we are exiled from the completeness of the Imaginary, and can return to it only in fantasized identifications. The infant’s entry into the Symbolic is associated with the ‘splitting’ of the subject by language, which allots distinct ‘subject-positions’ (‘I’ and ‘you’) for us to occupy in turn. In Kristeva’s literary theory, the Symbolic is opposed to the disruptive energies of the *semiotic, which have their source in the Imaginary state.
Symbolists An important group of French poets who, between the 1870s and the 1890s, founded the modern tradition in Western poetry. The leading Symbolists—Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stephane Mallarmé—wrote in reaction against *realism and *naturalism, and against the objectivity and technical conservatism of the *Parnassians. Among the minor Symbolist poets were Jules Laforgue and Tristan Corbière. The Symbolists aimed for a poetry of suggestion rather than of direct statement, evoking subjective moods through the use of private *symbols, while avoiding the description of external reality or the expression of opinion. They wanted to bring poetry closer to music, believing that sound had mysterious affinities with other senses (see synaesthesia). Among their influential innovations were *free verse and the *prose poem. Their chief inspiration was the work of the poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), especially his theory of the ‘correspondences’ between physical and spiritual realms and between the different senses; Baudelaire had also promoted Edgar Allan Poe’s doctrine of ‘pure’ poetry, which the Symbolists attempted to put into practice.
As a self-conscious movement, French symbolism declared itself under that name only in 1886, forming part of the so-called *decadence of that period. It appeared in drama too, notably in the works of the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck in the 1890s; and some of its concerns were reflected in novels by J.-K. Huysmans and Édouard Dujardin. The influence of symbolism on European and American literature of the early 20th century was extensive: Paul Valéry in French, Rainer Maria Rilke in German, and W. B. Yeats in English carried the tradition into the 20th century, and hardly any major figure of *modernism was unaffected by it. See also hermeticism, impressionism, poète maudit.
Further reading: Charles Chadwick, Symbolism (1971).
synaeresis [sin-eer-ĭsis] (syneresis) A form of contraction or *elision in which two adjacent vowel sounds are run together into a single *diphthong or vowel: thus ‘the effect’ becomes th’effect, and ‘seëst’ becomes seest. The device is used in poetry for the sake of conformity to the *metre, especially in *syllabic and accentual-syllabic verse. A distinction is sometimes made between synaeresis, which creates diphthongs, and sinizesis, which creates simple vowels. See also diaeresis, syncope.
synaesthesia [sin-ĕs-thee-ziă] A blending or confusion of different kinds of sense-impression, in which one type of sensation is referred to in terms more appropriate to another. Common synaesthetic expressions include the descriptions of colours as ‘loud’ or ‘warm’, and of sounds as ‘smooth’. This effect was cultivated consciously by the French *Symbolists, but is often found in earlier poetry, notably in Keats. See also catachresis.
synchronic [sin-kron-ik] Concerned only with the state of something at a given time, rather than with its historical development. In modern linguistics, the synchronic study of language as it is has generally been preferred to the *diachronic study of changes in language that dominated the concerns of 19th-century *philology. Noun: synchrony.
syncope [sink-ŏ-pi] A kind of verbal contraction by which a letter or syllable is omitted from within a word (rather than from the beginning or end of the word, as in *elision). Obvious cases are heav’n for ‘heaven’ and o’er for ‘over’; but the term also covers the omission of sounds without indication in the spelling (e.g. the word extraordinary, commonly pronounced as four or five syllables instead of six). The device is especially common in *syllabic and accentual-syllabic verse, where it keeps the word within the metrical scheme. Adjective: syncopal or syncopic.
synecdoche [si-nek-dŏki] A common *figure of speech (or *trope) by which something is referred to indirectly, either by naming only some part or constituent of it (e.g. hands for manual labourers) or—less often—by naming some more comprehensive entity of which it is a part (e.g. the law for a police officer). Usually regarded as a special kind of *metonymy, synecdoche occurs frequently in political journalism (e.g. Moscow for the Russian government) and sports commentary (e.g. Liverpool for one of that city’s football teams), but also has literary uses like Dickens’s habitual play with bodily parts: the character of Mrs Merdle in Little Dorrit is referred to as ‘the Bosom’. Adjective: synecdochic.
synizesis See synaeresis.
synonym A word that has the same—or virtually the same—meaning as another word, and so can substitute for it in certain contexts. This identity of meaning is called synonymy. Adjective: synonymous.
synopsis A brief summary or précis of a work’s *plot or argument. Adjective: synoptic.
syntagm [sin-tam] (syntagma [sin-tag-mă]) A linguistic term designating any combination of units (usually words or *phonemes) which are arranged in a significant sequence. A sentence is a syntagm of words. Language is said to have two distinct dimensions: the syntagmatic or ‘horizontal’ axis of combination in which sequences of words are formed by combining them in a recognized order, and the *paradigmatic or ‘vertical’ axis of selection, from which particular words are chosen to fill given functions within the sequence. The syntagmatic dimension is therefore the ‘linear’ aspect of language. See also syntax.
syntax The way in which words and clauses are ordered and connected so as to form sentences; or the set of grammatical rules governing such word-order. Syntax is a major determinant of literary *style: while simple English sentences usually have the structure ‘subject-verb-object’ (e.g. Jane strangled the cat), poets often distort this syntax through *inversion, while prose writers can exploit elaborate syntactic structures such as the *periodic sentence.