Glossary extracted starting with automatic seeds, with BOW for the domain lit and language EN
| protagonist | the main character in a story or drama |
| periphrasis | The substitution of an elaborate phrase in place of a simple word or expression, as "fragrant beverage drawn from China's herb" for tea |
| elegy | (1) since the Renaissance, usually a formal lament on the death of a particular person, but focusing mainly on the speaker’s efforts to come to terms with his or her grief; (2) more broadly, any lyric in sorrowful mood that takes death as its primary subject |
| monosyllable | A word of one syllable. |
| alliteration | the repetition of usually initial consonant sounds through a sequence of words—for example, "While I nodded, nearly napping" in Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Raven." |
| narrator | the voice of the speaker in a story |
| lullaby | A lullaby is a soothing song, usually sung to young children before they go to sleep, with the intention of speeding that process |
| italian form | such as Longfellow's "Divina Commedia |
| props | objects or items used by the actors on the stage |
| variorum | A variorum is a work that collates all known variants of a text |
| homonym | One of two or more words which are identical in pronunciation and spelling, but different in meaning, as the noun bear and the verb bear. |
| asyndeton | The artistic elimination of conjunctions in a sentence to create a particular effect |
| paronym | A word derived from or related to another word; also, the form in one language for a word in another, as in the English canal for the Latin canalis. |
| stock character | a character not fully developed who seems to represent a type more than a real personality (see also flat character) |
| epiphany | Christian thinkers used this term to signify a manifestation of God's presence in the world |
| ionic | A Classical Greek and Latin double foot consisting of two unstressed syllables and two stressed syllables, either ionic a majore / ' ' ~ ~ / or ionic a minore / ~ ~ ' ' /. |
| syllepsis | which use one word to serve for two; and aposiopesis |
| asyndeton | The omission of a conjunction from a list ('chips, beans, peas, vinegar, salt, pepper') |
| inductive/deductive reasoning | inductive reasoning moves from observation of specific circumstances and makes a general conclusion; deductive reasoning takes a general truth and applies it to specific circumstances |
| apocrypha | In the context of fiction, apocrypha includes those fictional stories that do not belong within a fictional universe's canon, yet still have some authority relating to that fictional universe |
| silbido | (Spanish m.) whistle, whistling, sifflement (French) |
| litterateur - intellectual | An intellectual is a person who uses intelligence (thought and reason) and critical or analytical reasoning in either a professional or a personal capacity. |
| baroque | Baroque (pronounced /bəˈroʊk/ bə-rohk in American English or /bəˈrɒk/ in British English) is an artistic style prevalent from the late 16th century to the early 18th century in Europe |
| sipario | (Italian m.) curtain, drape |
| ecologue | A pastoral poem (after Virgil). |
| rhyme | The occurrence of the same or similar sounds at the end of two or more words |
| epiphany | a sudden revelation of truth, often inspired by a seemingly simple or commonplace event |
| transferred epithet - hypallage | Hypallage (pronounced /haɪˈpælədʒiː/, from the Greek: ὑπαλλαγή, hypallagḗ, "interchange, exchange") is a literary device that is the reversal of the syntactic relation of two words (as in "her beauty's face"). |
| script | the printed text of a drama |
| dramatic poetry | where the hemistichs are split into two short lines, it is used whenever characters exchange short bursts of dialogue rapidly, heightening the effect of quarrelsome disagreement; in classical poetry such a series is called hemistichomythia |
| motif | an image or action in a literary work that is shared by other works and that is sometimes thought to belong to a collective unconsciousness. |
| epic | An extended narrative poem, usually simple in construction, but grand in scope, exalted in style, and heroic in theme, often giving expression to the ideals of a nation or race. |
| epizenxis | repetition of a word several times without connectives. |
| archaism | The intentional use of a word or expression no longer in general use, for example, thou mayst is an archaism meaning you may |
| onomatopeia | an instance where the sound of a word directly imitates its meaning (for example, "choo-choo," "hiss"), sometimes termed echoism. |
| georgian poetry | Georgian Poetry was the title of a series of anthologies showcasing the work of a school of English poetry that established itself during the early years of the reign of King George V of the United Kingdom. |
| romanzo d' appendice | Romanzo d'appendìce (Italian for Feuilleton) was a popular genre in literature, which originated in England and France, in the second half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th. |
| modulation | In poetry, the harmonious use of language relative to the variations of stress and pitch. |
| kenning | Tmesis) (Compare Close Rhyme, Neologism, Nonce Word, Portmanteau Word) |
| humour | Humour or humor (see spelling differences) is the tendency of particular cognitive experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement |
| repetition | Repetition is the simple repeating of a word, within a sentence or a poetical line, with no particular placement of the words, in order to emphasize |
| catastrophe | the reversal of the tragic heros good fortune in Greek Tragedy |
| terza rima | Terza rima is a rhyming verse stanza form that consists of an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme |
| rhyme scheme | as: aba, bcb, cdc, etc |
| the long hill | " in which the climb up the hill symbolizes life and the brambles are symbolic of life's adversities. |
| style | The author's words and the characteristic way that writer uses language to achieve certain effects |
| epizenxis | Repetition of a word several times without connectives. |
| syllable | A vowel preceded by from zero to three consonants ("awl" .. |
| ploce | The general term for a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is repeated in close proximity within a clause or line, usually for emphasis or for extended significance, as "a wife who was a wife indeed" or "there are medicines and medicines." |
| image | An expression that describes a literal sensation, whether of hearing, seeing, touching, tasting, and feeling. |
| denotation | Paronomasia, Pun) (Compare Connotation) |
| sich versprechen | (German) to make a slip of the tongue |
| horatian ode | of which "Ode to a Nightingale," considered to be one of John Keats' finest works, is an example |
| theme | The central idea, topic, or didactic quality of a work. |
| epithalamion | lyric poem in praise of Hymen (the Greek god of marriage) or of a particular wedding, such as Edmund Spenser's "Epithalamion." |
| metaphysical | Objectivism |
| sentence | This is a term which professional linguists still find impossible to define adequately |
| sixth flute | a descant/soprano-sized recorder in D |
| marginalia | Drawings, notation, illumination, and doodles appearing in the margins of a medieval text, rather than the central text itself. |
| perfect rhyme | Also called true rhyme or exact rhyme, a rhyme which meets the following requirements: (1) an exact correspondence in the vowel sound and, in words ending in consonants, the sound of the final consonant, (2) a difference in the consonant sounds preceding the vowel, and (3) a similarity of accent on the rhyming syllable(s). |
| deictic | Words that point to particulars, as names and pronouns do for individual places and persons (such as Edwin Arlington Robinson's "Miniver Cheevy" and "Richard Cory"), and demonstrative-adjective-noun combinations (such as Benjamin Franklin King's "Here's that ten dollars that I owe" in "If I Should Die To-night") do for things. |
| alexandrine | A line of poetry that has 12 syllables |
| epic | A poem of considerable length, recounting the heroic trials, tribulations, and triumphs of one or more characters |
| jacobean era | Jacobean era refers to the period in English and Scottish history that coincides with the reign of King James VI (1567â€"1625) of Scotland, who also inherited the crown of England in 1603 |
| aestheticism | A literary movement in the nineteenth century of those who believed in art for arts sake in opposition to the utilitarian doctrine that everything must be morally or practically useful |
| tragic hero | A tragic hero is usually the main character in a piece of work |
| character | a person in fiction, drama, or poetry |
| pun | A comic effect suggesting two meanings from one word or phrase. |
| focalization | Dutch literary theorist Mieke Bal coined the term focalization to describe a shift in perspective that takes place in literature when an author switches from one character's perspective to another |
| simile | A figure of speech in which two things are compared explicitly, using the word "like" or "as". |
| antithesis | Contrasting or combining two terms, phrases, or clauses with opposed or antithetical meanings. |
| classicism | Idealism, Metaphysical, Objectivism, Realism, Romanticism) |
| fantasy | a genre of literary work featuring strange settings and characters and often involving magic or the supernatural; though closely related to horror and science fiction, fantasy is typically less concerned with the macabre or with science and technology |
| box set | a stage set composed of flats or connected walls enclosing three sides of the stage, with an invisible fourth wall open to the audience |
| canon | someone's list of authors or works considered to be "classic," that is, central to the identity of a given literary tradition or culture. |
| antithesis | A figure of speech in which a thought is balanced with a contrasting thought in parallel arrangements of words and phrases, such as, "he promised wealth and provided poverty," or "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, " or from Pope's An Epistle to Dr |
| archaic language | language no longer in use |
| archetype | something in the world, and described in literature, that, according to the psychologist Karl Jung, manifests a dominant theme in the collective unconscious of human beings |
| ellipsis | indication of an omission of words in a quote |
| scansion | the chief object of this on-line tutorial: an analytic process of mapping the convergence and divergence (reinforcement and counterpoint) between the |
| persona | the voice or figure of the author who tells and structures the story and who may or may not share the values of the actual author; also called implied author. |
| setting | the environment in which the work takes place |
| bard | An ancient composer, singer or declaimer of epic verse, celebrating the deeds of gods and heroes. |
| polysyndeton | A figure of speech where successive clauses or phrases are linked by one or more conjunctions. |
| persona | A personality, in the word's everyday usage, is a social role or a character played by an actor |
| antiphon | Sung verse. |
| end-stopped | a verse line ending at a grammatical boundary or break, such as a dash, a closing parenthesis, or punctuation such as a colon, a semi-colon, or a period |
| linguistics | Linguistics is the scientific study of human language |
| pilgrimage | An act of spiritual devotion or penance in which an individual travels without material comforts to a distant holy place |
| syllables | i.e., syllables which take a longer or shorter quantity of time to pronounce |
| end-stopped | Line of verse whose thought ends at the line's end |
| bed-trick | The term for a recurring folklore motif in which circumstances cause two characters in a story to end up having sex with each other because of mistaken identity--either confusion in a dark room or deliberate acts of disguise in which one character impersonates another |
| nonce word | Portmanteau Word) |
| epode | An epode is the last of three series of lines forming the divisions of each section of a Pindaric ode. |
| ghazal | An Eastern verse form consisting of successive couplets whose lines all end with the same refrain phrase (the qafia), just before which is placed the couplet's rhyming word (radif) |
| distich | A strophic unit of two lines; a pair of poetic lines or verses which together comprise a complete sense. |
| shakujo | Japanese stick rattle, used to accompany shomyo, Buddhist chanting of sacred texts or sutra |
| thesis | the central debatable claim articulated, supported, and developed in an essay or other work of expository prose. |
| couplet | a pair of successive rhyming lines, usually of the same length, termed "closed" when they form a bounded grammatical unit like a sentence, and termed "heroic" in 17th- and 18th-century verse when serious in subject, five-foot iambic in form, and holding a complete thought. |
| metaphorical language | Metaphorical language is the use of a complex system of metaphors to create a sub-language within a common language which provides the basic terms (verbs, prepositions, conjunctions) to express metaphors. |
| stress | emphasis that a syllable receives in metered verse; scansion mark ⁄ Stress may be due to |
| mise en scène | Mise-en-scène (French: "placing on stage") is an expression used to describe the design aspects of a theatre or film production, which essentially means "visual theme" or "telling a story" —both in visually artful ways through storyboarding, cinematography and stage design, and in poetically artful ways through direction |
| theme | relating to the praise of love and wine, as in Abraham Cowley's Anacreontiques |
| consonance | Sometimes just a resemblance in sound between two words, or an initial or head rhyme like alliteration, but also refined to mean shared consonants, whether in sequence ("bud" and "bad") or reversed ("bud" and "dab"). |
| scheme | Figure of speech that varies the order and sound of words |
| catastrophe | The "turning downward" of the plot in a classical tragedy |
| epic | an extended narrative poem with a heroic or superhuman protagonist engaged in an action of great significance in a vast setting (often including the underworld and engaging the gods) |
| signo de marca registrada | (Spanish m.) registered mark (®) |
| fourfold meaning | Another term for fourfold interpretation, this word refers to the medieval idea that every passage in the Bible can be interpreted according to at least one of four possible levels of meaning |
| metonym | When one noun is used in place of another. |
| tableau vivant | Tableau vivant (plural: tableaux vivants) is French for "living picture." The term describes a striking group of suitably costumed actors or artist's models, carefully posed and often theatrically lit |
| meter | the recurring, invariant pattern of |
| point of view | the perspective from which people, events, and other details in a work of fiction are viewed; also called focus, though the term point of view is sometimes used to include both focus and voice |
| mock-epic or mock-heroic | A satiric literary form that treats a trivial or commonplace subject with the elevated language and heroic style of the classical epic. |
| mood | the atmosphere or tone of a work |
| sich überlegen | (German) to think over, to consider |
| metre | The underlying pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line. |
| tanka | A Japanese syllabic verse form, arranged 5/7/5/7/7. |
| onomatopoeia | A figure of speech in which the sound of the word(s) imitate the sounds of what they describe |
| tragic flaw - hamartia | Hamartia (Ancient Greek: ἁμαρτία) is a term developed by Aristotle in his work Poetics |
| close rhyme | A rhyme of two contiguous or close words, such as in the idiomatic expressions, "true blue" or "fair and square." |
| antiphon | A sacred poem with responses or alternative parts. |
| shakespearean sonnet - sonnet | * Sicilian octave |
| amphitheater | a semi-circular large, outdoor theater with seats rising in tiers from a central acting area |
| truncated line - acatalexis | An acatalectic line of verse is one having the metrically complete number of syllables in the final foot |
| emblem | An emblem is a pictorial image, abstract or representational, that epitomizes a concept — e.g., a moral truth, or an allegory — or that represents a person, such as a king or saint. |
| irony | Verbal irony is a figure of speech in the form of an expression in which the use of words is the opposite of the thought in the speaker's mind, thus conveying a meaning that contradicts the literal definition, as when a doctor might say to his patient, " the bad news is that the operation was successful." Dramatic or situational irony is a literary or theatrical device of having a character utter words which the reader or audience understands to have a different meaning, but of which the character himself is unaware |
| scansion | Scansion is the act of determining and (usually) graphically representing the metrical character of a line of verse. |
| sípok | (Hungarian, literally 'shepherd's pipe') ancient pipes, with varying numbers of holes, that were made of reed, bone and wood |
| falling action | the fourth of the five phases or parts of plot, in which the conflict or conflicts move toward resolution. |
| anagram | A word spelled out by rearranging the letters of another word |
| eponymous author | The eponymous author of a literary work, often a work that is meant to be prophetic or homiletic, is not really the author |
| exposition - dramatic structure | Dramatic structure is the structure of a dramatic work such as a play or film |
| nonce word | From the expression, for the nonce, a word coined or used for a special circumstance or occasion only, |
| sftmc | the San Francisco Tape Music Center was founded by Morton Subotnick and Ramon Sender on Divisadero Street in San Francisco in 1962 |
| asemic writing | Asemic writing is a wordless open semantic form of writing |
| assonance | harmonious repetition of the same vowel sound in nearby words. See also |
| anaphora | In rhetoric, an anaphora (Greek: ἀναφορά, "carrying back") is a rhetorical device that consists of repeating a sequence of words at the beginnings of neighboring clauses, thereby lending them emphasis |
| diction | or lexis, or vocabulary of a passage refers to nothing more or less then its words |
| comitatus | (Latin: "companionship" or "band"): The term describes the tribal structure of the Anglo-Saxons and other Germanic tribes in which groups of men would swear fealty to a hlaford (lord) in exchange for food, mead, and heriot, the loan of fine armor and weaponry |
| pantoum | A poem in a fixed form, consisting of a varying number of 4-line stanzas with lines rhyming alternately; the second and fourth lines of each stanza are repeated to form the first and third lines of the succeeding stanza; the first and third lines of the first stanza form the second and fourth of the last stanza, but in reverse order, so that the opening and closing lines of the poem are identical. |
| eye rhyme | Eye rhyme, also called visual rhyme and sight rhyme, is a similarity in spelling between words that are pronounced differently and hence, not an auditory rhyme |
| dissonance | The use of discordant sounds either to create an unpleasant effect or to create an interesting variation from what is rhythmically expected. |
| syntax | word order; the way words are put together to form phrases, clauses, and sentences. |
| narration | (1) broadly, the act of telling a story or recounting a narrative; (2) more narrowly, the portions of a narrative attributable to the narrator rather than words spoken by characters (that is, dialogue). |
| aristeia | An aristeia or aristia (Ancient Greek: ἀριστεία, IPA: [aristéːa], "excellence"; English: /à¦rɨËstiË.É/) is a scene in the dramatic conventions of such works as the Iliad in which a hero in battle has his finest moments (aristos = best) |
| analects | Lunyu (English: Analects) (simplified Chinese: 论语; traditional Chinese: 論語; pinyin: Lún Yǔ), also known as the Analects of Confucius, are considered a record of the words and acts of the central Chinese thinker and philosopher Confucius and his disciples, as well as the discussions they held. |
| ottava rima | Ottava rima is a rhyming stanza form of Italian origin |
| atmosphere | The mood or pervasive feeling insinuated by a literary work. |
| assonance | The rhyme-pattern produced inside the poetic line by repeating similar vowels, or clusters of consonants and vowels. |
| aside | a brief comment by an actor, heard by the audience, but not the other characters on stage |
| caesura | A pause or breathing-place about the middle of a metrical line, generally indicated by a pause in the sense |
| sho | a Japanese free-reed mouth organ, similar to the Chinese sheng, in which each free-reed pipe will sound the same note when the player exhales or inhales |
| broadside | A broadside is the side of a ship; the battery of cannon on one side of a warship; or their simultaneous (or near simultaneous) fire in naval warfare. |
| signs of the zodiac | signes du zodiaque (Italian), Tierkreiszeichen des Zodiaks (German), signes du zodiaque (French), signos zodiacales (Spanish) |
| verism | Verism is the artistic preference of contemporary everyday subject matter instead of the heroic or legendary in art and literature; a form of realism |
| juggernaut | Juggernaut is a term used in the English language to describe a literal or metaphorical force regarded as unstoppable. |
| couplets | after Hudibras |
| personification | Personification means to give human attributes to objects or ideas |
| realism | A movement in literature to represent life as it really is |
| personification | a figure of speech that involves treating something nonhuman, such as an abstraction, as if it were a person by endowing it with humanlike qualities, as in "Death entered the room." |
| melodrama | plays with elaborate but oversimplified plots, flat characters, excessive sentiment, and happy endings |
| stanza | A stanza is an arrangement of a certain number of lines, usually four or more, sometimes having a fixed length, meter, or rhyme scheme, forming a division of a poem. |
| acrostic | A poem in which the first or last letters of each line vertically form a word, phrase, or sentence |
| unities | The unities of time, place, and action as principles of dramatic composition have been hotly debated since Aristotles Poetics |
| antanaclasis | A figure of speech in which the same word is repeated in a different sense within a clause or line, e.g., "while we live, let us live." |
| archaism | Using obsolete or archaic words when current alternatives are available. |
| characterization | Characterisation or characterization is the process of conveying information about characters in narrative or dramatic works of art or everyday conversation |
| rhythmic | it is usually metrical |
| shape | the direction of a melody |
| round character | a fully developed character with the complexities of real person |
| hamartia | Hamartia (Ancient Greek: ἁμαρτία) is a term developed by Aristotle in his work Poetics |
| metaphor | artificially strained or far-fetched, in which the subject is compared with a simpler analogue usually chosen from nature or a familiar context |
| consonance | repetition of final consonant sounds in words close together (short and sweet, struts and frets) |
| comedy of manners | A comic drama consisting of five or three acts in which the attitudes and customs of a society are critiqued and satirized according to high standards of intellect and morality |
| bad quarto | In the jargon of Shakespearean scholars, a "bad quarto" is a copy of the play that a disloyal actor would recreate from memory and then submit for publication in a rival publishing house without the consent of the author |
| internal rhyme | A poetic device in which a word in the middle of a line rhymes with a word at the end of the same metrical line |
| language interpretation | Language interpretation is the facilitating of oral or sign-language communication, either simultaneously or consecutively, between users of different languages |
| aphorism | A brief statement which expresses an observation on life, usually intended as a wise observation |
| surrealistic drama | seeks its truth in the irrationality of the unconscious mind |
| unreliable narrator | a narrator who tells the story from a biased, erroneous perspective |
| sound | syllables, words, syntactic elements, lines, stanzaic forms, and metrical patterns establishes cycles of expectation which are reinforced with each successive fulfillment. |
| prosody | The study or science of versification and its many aspects |
| trouvère | Trouvère (is the Northern French (langue d'oïl) form of the word trobador (as spelled in the langue d'oc) |
| theater of the grotesque | Terza Rima: A three-line stanza form in Poetry in which the rhymes are made on the last word of each line in the following manner: the first and third lines of the first stanza, then the second line of the first stanza and the first and third lines of the second stanza, and so on with the middle line of any stanza rhyming with the first and third lines of the following stanza |
| hypocorism | A hypocorism (from Greek ὑποκορίζεσθαι hypokorizesthai, "to use child-talk") is a shorter form of a word or given name, for example, when used in more intimate situations as a nickname or term of endearment. |
| ubi sunt | Ubi sunt (literally "where are...") is a phrase taken from the Latin Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?, meaning "Where are those who were before us?" |
| roman à clef | Roman à clef or roman à clé (French for novel with a key, is the term used for a novel describing real life, behind a façade of fiction |
| tragic flaw | the tragic heros flaw (often excessive pride or hubris") which leads directly to a reversal of his good fortune (catastrophe) |
| cross rhyme | The rhyme scheme of abab, also called alternate rhyme, in which the end words of alternating lines rhyme with each other, i.e., the rhymes cross intervening lines. |
| prose | Ordinary language people use in speaking or writing, as distinguished from the heightened language of poetry |
| metre | The pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a poem. |
| shigin | (Japanese) a form of Japanese poetry, which is usually chanted, either individually or within a group |
| meter | The arrangement of a line of poetry by the number of syllables and the rhythm of accented (or stressed) syllables. |
| virelay | An ancient French verse form consisting of stanzas of indeterminate length and number, with alternating long and short lines and an interlaced rhyme scheme, as abab bcbc cdcd dada. |
| decorum | In literary parlance, the appropriateness of a work to its subject, its genre and its audience. |
| encomium | A poem praising a person, object or idea. |
| avant-garde | Avant-garde (French pronunciation: [avɑ̃ɡaʁd]) means "advance guard" or "vanguard" |
| melodrama | The term melodrama refers to a dramatic work which exaggerates plot and characters in order to appeal to the emotions |
| trope | The intentional use of a word or expression figuratively, i.e., used in a different sense from its original significance in order to give vividness or emphasis to an idea |
| metonymy | Using one object to stand for another to which it is related by contiguity, not similaritySynecdoche A form of metonymic association that involves substitution of part for whole, genus for species, or vice versaAntonomasia Substitution of a proper name for a particular quality associated with it |
| apologue | An apologue (from the Greek "αÏολογοÏ," a "statement" or "account") is a brief fable or allegorical story with pointed or exaggerated details, meant to serve as a pleasant vehicle for a moral doctrine or to convey a useful lesson without stating it explicitly |
| ballad | A narrative poem, often composed to be sung |
| enjambment | in poetry, the technique of running over from one line to the next without stop, as in the following lines by William Wordsworth: "My heart leaps up when I behold / A rainbow in the sky." The lines themselves would be described as enjambed. |
| euphony | Modulation, Resonance, Sound Devices) (Compare Alliteration, Assonance, Rhyme) |
| point of view | The perspective from which the narrator speaks to us |
| foot | A foot is a group of two or more syllables in which one syllable has the major stress, forming the basic unit of poetic rhythm. |
| argument | In logic, an argument is a set of one or more meaningful declarative sentences (or "propositions") known as the premises along with another meaningful declarative sentence (or "proposition") known as the conclusion |
| enjambement | The running over of a sentence or phrase from one verse to the next, without terminal punctuation, hence not end-stopped |
| enjambment | provides a variation by making a pause in the thought appear at some place other than the end of a line, but they should not be over-used. |
| epic | In literature generally, a major work dealing with an important theme |
| symbols | and ideas in such as way as to evoke mental images |
| form | consisting of a varying number of 4-line stanzas with lines rhyming alternately; the second and fourth lines of each stanza are repeated to form the first and third lines of the succeeding stanza; the first and third lines of the first stanza form the second and fourth of the last stanza, but in reverse order, so that the opening and closing lines of the poem are identical. |
| expository essay | an essay which shares, explains, suggests, or explores information, emotion, and ideas |
| freytag’s pyramid | a diagram of plot structure first created by the German novelist and critic Gustav Freytag (1816–1895). |
| objective correlative | An objective correlative is a literary term referring to a symbolic article used to provide explicit, rather than implicit, access to such traditionally inexplicable concepts as emotion or colour. |
| poetry | one of the three major genres of imaginative literature, which has its origins in music and oral performance and is characterized by controlled patterns of rhythm and syntax (often using meter and rhyme); compression and compactness and an allowance for ambiguity; a particularly concentrated emphasis on the sensual, especially visual and aural, qualities and effects of words and word order; and especially vivid, often figurative language. |
| accentual verse | Syllabic Verse) |
| anacrusis | The insertion of one or more unstressed syllables at the beginning of a line where the poetical metre would normally demand a stressed syllable. |
| imagery | Use of a comparison, often between an idea or emotion and a concrete object, to convey the idea or emotion more vividly. |
| couplet | tersest of rhyming forms, a 2-line pattern of verse, whether free-standing (aa), gathered into stanzas (e.g., aabbcc), or extended at great length in narrative or deliberative poetry: aabbccddeeff |
| analogue | The term analogue is used in literary history in two related senses: |
| anceps | A metrical unit that can be long or short, stressed or unstressed |
| allegory | An allegory is a symbolic story that serves as a disguised representation for meanings other than those indicated on the surface |
| naga-uta | Japanese form of indeterminate length that alternates lines of five and seven syllables and ends with an additional seven-syllable line. |
| accentual verse | Lines whose rhythm arises from its stressed syllables rather than from the number of its syllables, or from the length of time devoted to their sounding |
| autobiography | An autobiography (from the Greek, αὐτός-autos self + βίος-bios life + γράφειν-graphein to write) is a book about the life of a person, written by that person. |
| anticlimax | The intentional use of elevated language to describe the trivial or commonplace, or a sudden transition from a significant thought to a trivial one in order to achieve a humorous or satiric effect, as in Pope's The Rape of the Lock: |
| primary / secondary sources | A primary source is the original text or materials |
| quantity | with the words arranged to form a systematic succession of long and short syllables, but this began to decline under the Roman Empire; the Romance Languages, being accentual in character, gave rise to accentual verse, which stressed certain syllables instead of giving time quantities to them |
| voice | Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds, with sounds described as either voiceless (unvoiced) or voiced |
| vers | Not to be confused with verse, below, a vers is a song in Old Provencal almost indistinguishable from the chanson, but vers is the older term. |
| metaphysical | Objectivism, Realism, Romanticism, Symbolism) |
| mixed metaphor | A metaphor whose elements are either incongruent or contradictory by the use of incompatible identifications, such as "the dog pulled in its horns" or "to take arms against a sea of troubles." |
| connotation | Those words, things, or ideas with which a word often keeps company but which it does not actually denote |
| melic verse | An ornate form of Greek poetry of the 7th and 6th centuries BC which was written to be sung, either by a single voice or a chorus, to the accompaniment of musical instruments. |
| climax | Rhetorically, a series of words, phrases, or sentences arranged in a continuously ascending order of intensity |
| polysyndeton | a figure of speech where successive clauses or phrases are linked by one or more conjunctions. |
| box set | A theatrical structure common to modern drama in which the stage consists of a single room setting in which the "fourth wall" is missing so the audience can view the events within the room |
| acrostic | An acrostic is a series of lines or verses in which the first, last or other particular letters, when taken in order, spell out a word or phrase. |
| skene | a low building in the back of the stage area in classical Greek theaters |
| attitude | An attitude is a hypothetical construct that represents an individual's degree of like or dislike for an item |
| silbar | (Spanish) to whistle, siffler (French) |
| feudalism | The medieval model of government predating the birth of the modern nation-state |
| choka | Japanese form with alternating lines of five and seven syllables, ending with a couplet of seven-syllable lines. |
| comic opera | An outgrowth of the eighteenth-century ballad operas, in which new or original music is composed specially for the lyrics |
| tragicomedy | Tragicomedy is fictional work that blends aspects of the genres of tragedy and comedy |
| analogue | A comparison between two similar things |
| chant royale | a complex French form of the ballade, having various forms. |
| prosody | the diaeresis was a break or pause in a line of verse occurring when the end of a foot coincides with the end of a word. |
| encomium | A speech or composition in high praise of a person, object, or event. |
| comic relief | A humorous scene, incident, character, or bit of dialogue occurring after some serious or tragic moment |
| symbolic | and synesthetic effects of the words themselves and their syntactic arrangement to resemble, reinforce, shape, and temper their lexical sense in a manner that mirrors the meaning |
| aural | and syntactic |
| stock character | see character. |
| explication de texte | Explication de Texte is a French formalist method of literary analysis that allows for limited reader response, similar to close reading in the English-speaking literary tradition |
| sink | plumbed-in basin (especially in a kitchen or larder), place where foul liquid collects, place of vice |
| accentual verse | lines whose rhythm arises from its stressed syllables rather than from the number of its syllables, or from the length of time devoted to their sounding |
| sida | (Swedish) page |
| alliteration | the repetition of initial consonant sounds in words close together (e.g |
| hyperbaton | An inversion of the normal grammatical word order; it may range from a single word moved from its usual place to a pair of words inverted or to even more extremes of syntactic displacement |
| oxymoron | an expression impossible in fact but not necessarily self-contradictory, such as John Milton's description of Hell as "darkness visible" in Book I of Paradise Lost. |
| débat | a medieval poem in dialogue that takes the form of a debate on a topic |
| auditor | an imaginary listener within a literary work, as opposed to the reader or audience outside the work. |
| accentual | Lines controlled by certain number of stressesAccentual-Syllabic Lines controlled by number of stresses and syllablesSyllabic Lines controlled by number of syllablesQuantitative Lines controlled by time allotted to pronunciation of vowel-sounds, long or short |
| sound devices | Resources used by writers of verse to convey and reinforce the meaning or experience of poetry through the skillful use of sound. |
| sinfonietta | (Italian f.) a small-scale symphony, particularly one for chamber orchestra |
| homonyms | Two words having identical spellings and pronunciations, but different origins and meanings (i.e |
| simile | A comparison of one thing with another, using the words 'like' or 'as'. |
| versification | to transfer words and meaning into the heightened expression of poetry, using selective arrangements of syntax, sound, forms, rhythm, and imagery. |
| elision | The omission of one or more letters or syllables from a word |
| canon | Someone's list of authors or works considered to be "classic," that is, central to the identity of a given literary tradition or culture. |
| impressionism | Objectivism, Realism, Romanticism, Symbolism) |
| groundlings | While the upper class paid two pennies to sit in the raised area with seats, and some nobles paid three pennies to sit in the Lords' rooms, the majority of viewers who watched Shakespeare's plays were called groundlings or understanders |
| rhyming couplet | Rhyming couplets are a pair of lines that are the same length and usually rhyme and form a complete thought |
| legitimate theater | The term "legitimate theater" dates back to the Licensing Act of 1737, which restricted "serious" theatre performances to the two patent theatres licensed to perform "spoken drama" after the English Restoration in 1662 |
| plot | The structure of the story |
| motif | Theme) |
| tragedy | classic tragedy follows the plight of a noble person who is flawed by a defect and whose actions cause him to break some moral law and suffer downfall and destruction |
| paradox | A self-contradictory phrase or sentence, such as "the ascending rain" or Alexander Pope's description of man, "Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all." Don Marquis's "quote buns by great men quote" (archys life of mehitabel [London: Faber and Faber, 1934]: 103-04), describes a drunk trying to go up a down-escalator as "falling upwards / through the night" (the poem also parodies Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "St |
| kenning | A kenning is a poetic phrase of one line used in place of a person / place / object, for example 'a wave rider','for','a boat' |
| sil-snyan | from India and China, a pair of cymbals connected by a cord that passes through the center hole |
| regency novel | Regency novels are either: |
| envelope | A poetic device in which a line, phrase, or stanza is repeated so as to enclose other material, as in Dryden's: |
| sight reading | to perform a piece of music never seen before |
| hubris | Hubris (also hybris) means extreme haughtiness or arrogance |
| catachresis | Enallage, Malapropism, Mixed Metaphor, Synesthesia) (Compare Antiphrasis, Antithesis) |
| canzone | hendecasyllabic lines in stanza form |
| allusion | An implied or indirect reference to something assumed to be known, such as a historical event or personage, a well-known quotation from literature, or a famous work of art, such as Keats' allusion to Titian's painting of Bacchus in "Ode to a Nightingale." |
| experimental/visual poetry | The presentation of a poetic movement in a visual manner that implies other meanings or implications that aren't reflected in the words themselves |
| aesthetic movement | A literary belief that art is its own justification and purpose, advocated in England by Walter Pater and practised by Edgar Allan Poe, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, and others. |
| cockney school of poetry | A mocking name for London romantic poets such as John Keats and Leigh Hunt (from a scathing review in Blackwood's Magazine in October 1817). |
| canzone | Hendecasyllabic lines in stanza form |
| syntax | as in Pope's "a fop their passion, but their prize a sot," or Goldsmith's "to stop too fearful, and too faint to go." |
| beat generation | The Beat Generation is a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired |
| pathetic fallacy | The pathetic fallacy or anthropomorphic fallacy is the treatment of inanimate objects as if they had human feelings, thought, or sensations |
| parataxis | Linking clauses just by sequencing them, often without conjunction(s) and only by means of associations that are implied, not stated. |
| signal generator | also called 'tone generator' (in audio only), 'waveform generator', or 'frequency generator', an electronic instrument that generates repeating electronic signals |
| anthology | An anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler |
| anagram | a word spelled out by rearranging the letters of another word |
| tale | Tale may refer to: |
| colloquialism | A word or phrase used everyday in plain and relaxed speech, but rarely found in formal writing |
| singing glasses | among the The Cries of London Engraved after ye Designs made from ye Life by M Lauron |
| repetition | A poet may repeat words or ideas to emphasise thoughts and feelings, for example ‘Five of us; dark He, fair He, dark She, fair She’ (The Five Students by Thomas Hardy). |
| catalogue | An extended list of itemsPolysyndeton Repetition of the connective between each term in a seriesAsyndeton Its opposite is asyndeton, the omission of connectivesEllipsis Omission, leaving out any word or phrase that is understoodZeugma Special form of ellipsis, in which a single verb governs more than one object, each in a different way |
| morality play | The morality play is a genre of Medieval and early Tudor theatrical entertainment |
| antithesis | contrasting or combining two terms, phrases, or clauses with opposed or antithetical meanings. |
| sestina | an elaborate verse structure written in blank verse that consists of six stanzas of six lines each followed by a three- line stanza |
| couplet | thus a rhyme scheme |
| victorianism | Victorianism is the name given to the attitudes, art, and culture of the later two-thirds of the 19th century |
| eclogue | A pastoral poem, especially a pastoral dialogue, usually indebted to the Virgillian tradition. |
| tricolon | The repetition of a parallel grammatical construction three times for rhetorical effect |
| eiron | In Greek comedy, the eiron was a stock male character known for his ironic understatement |
| experimental novel | Experimental literature refers to written works - often novels or magazines - that place great emphasis on innovations regarding technique and style. |
| didactic | teaching a lesson or having a moral" |
| strophe | The first part of a choral ode in Ancient Greek drama, in which the chorus moved from one part of the stage to the other |
| discriminated occasion | a specific, discrete moment portrayed in a fictional work, often signaled by phrases such as "At 5:05 in the morning |
| burlesque | A work caricaturing another serious work |
| critical essay | an essay which interprets and/or evaluates |
| vellum | The skin of a young calf used as a writing surface--the medieval equivalent of "paper." A technical distinction is usually made between vellum and parchment; the latter is made from goatskin or sheepskin |
| assonance | the repetition of internal vowel sounds in words close together (time line, free and easy) |
| enjambment | The continuation of the sense and therefore the grammatical construction beyond the end of a line of verse or the end of a couplet. |
| accentual prosody | Poetry where the stressed syllables are the only syllables counted. |
| allegory | A figurative illustration of truths or generalizations about human conduct or experience in a narrative or description by the use of symbolic fictional figures and actions which the reader can interpret as a resemblance to the subject's properties and circumstances. |
| rhyme | when final vowel and consonant sounds in the last syllable of one word match those of another, usually at the end of lines |
| ballad | a narrative poem, usually sung or recited |
| antonym | Homonym, Paronym) |
| robinsonade | Robinsonade is a literary genre that takes its name from the 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe |
| slice of life | Slice of life is a theatrical term that refers to a naturalistic representation of real life, sometimes used as an adjective, as in "a play with 'slice of life' dialogue." The term originated in 1890–95 as a translation from the French phrase tranche de vie, credited to the French playwright Jean Jullien (1854–1919). |
| soliloquy | A soliloquy is a device often used in drama whereby a character relates his or her thoughts and feelings to him/herself and to the audience without addressing any of the other characters |
| caesura | In meter, a caesura (alternative spellings are cæsura and cesura) is a complete stop in a line of poetry |
| sirtaki | also sirtáki or syrtáki, a popular line or circle dance of Greek origin |
| sound | gives a reinforcement to stresses, and can also serve as a subtle connection or emphasis of key words in the line, but alliterated words should not "call attention" to themselves by strained usage. |
| rondeau | A rondeau is a short poem of fixed form, consisting of 13 or 10 lines on two rhymes and having the opening words or phrase used in two places as an unrhymed refrain. |
| simultaneous masking | in acoustics, simultaneous masking is masking between two concurrent sounds |
| analogue | usually a semantic or narrative feature in one work said to resemble something in another work, without necessarily implying that a cause-and-effect relationship exists (as would be the case with source and influence) |
| metaphor | A figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one object or idea is applied to another, thereby suggesting a likeness or analogy between them, as: |
| consonance | sometimes just a resemblance in sound between two words, or an initial or head rhyme like alliteration, but also refined to mean shared consonants, whether in sequence ("bud" and "bad") or reversed ("bud" and "dab"). |
| rhyme | The use of words with matching sounds, usually at the end of each line, for example ‘Whenever Richard Cory went down town/We people on the pavement looked at him/He was a gentleman from sole to crown/Clean-favoured, and imperially slim.’ (Richard Cory by E A Robinson). |
| thrust stage | a stage design that allows the audience to sit around three sides of the major acting area. |
| impressionism | Objectivism |
| style | the choice of words and sentence structure which makes each authors writing different |
| belles-lettres | Belles-lettres or belles lettres is a term that is used to describe a category of writing |
| syllepsis | A pun that involves a double entendre on a single wordAntanaclasis Pun on a word repeated with a second meaningParonomasia Pun that plays on similarity of soundNeologism Creative act of diction, "minting" of a new wordMalapropism A confusion of words |
| purple prose | Purple prose is a term of literary criticism used to describe passages, or sometimes entire literary works, written in prose so overly extravagant, ornate, or flowery as to break the flow and draw attention to itself |
| arena stage | a stage design in which the audience is seated all the way around the acting area; actors make their entrances and exits through the auditorium. |
| metaphor | Transfer of designation from one object to another, based on a similarity between the objects (or between the ways they relate to each other or to a user)Simile Differs from metaphor in that the similarity is made explicitConceit A farfetched or more fully extended metaphor |
| periphrasis | some kennings are instances of metaphor, metonymy, or synecdoche. |
| classicism | Imagism, Impressionism, Metaphysical, Objectivism, Romanticism, Symbolism) |
| flourisher | In medieval times, this was a professional artist who works in conjunction with illuminators and rubricators to design pen-work decoration on initials and /or flourishwork on the borders of decorated books |
| university wits | University Wits were a group of late 16th century English playwrights who were educated at the universities (Oxford or Cambridge) and who became playwrights and popular secular writers |
| cockney school of poetry | a mocking name for London romantic poets such as John Keats and Leigh Hunt (from a scathing review in Blackwood's Magazine in October 1817). |
| clause | The word is often used but very hard to define |
| analogue | Usually a semantic or narrative feature in one work said to resemble something in another work, without necessarily implying that a cause-and-effect relationship exists (as would be the case with source and influence) |
| sentimentality | evoking a predictable emotional response with a clichéd prompt |
| mythography | The commentary, writings, and interpretations added to myths |
| structuralism | Structuralism is an intellectual movement that developed in France in the 1950s and 1960s, in which human culture is analysed semiotically (i.e., as a system of signs). |
| n-plural | The plural form of a few modern English weak nouns derives from the n-stem declension or n-plural of Anglo-Saxon (Old English) |
| asyndeton | which omits conjunctions; zeugma |
| magic realism | Magic realism or magical realism is an aesthetic style or genre of fiction in which magical elements are blended into a realistic atmosphere in order to access a deeper understanding of reality |
| groundlings | Members of an Elizabethan audience who paid a very low entrance fee and stood in the open area below and around the stage |
| shout chorus | a passage in a big band arrangement in which the melody instruments play a line (usually highly syncopated) in rhythmic unison |
| consonance | Slave Narrative: Autobiographical accounts of American slave life as told by escaped slaves |
| metaphor | the transfer of a quality or attribute from one thing or idea to another in such a way as to imply some resemblance between the two things or ideas: 'his eyes blazed' implies that his eyes become like a fire |
| antanaclasis | Syllepsis) |
| epizeuxis | In linguistics, an epizeuxis is the repetition of words in immediate succession, for vehemence or emphasis. |
| alliteration | Also called initial rhyme, alliteration is a rhyme-pattern produced inside the poetic line by repeating sounds at the beginning of words |
| narrative essay | An essay that tells a story |
| mora | Mora (plural moras or morae) is a unit of sound used in phonology that determines syllable weight (which in turn determines stress or timing) in some languages |
| theme | relating to the praise of love and wine, as in Abraham Cowley's Anacreontiques. |
| synesthesia | a blending of different senses in describing something. |
| alliteration | Two or more words with the same initial sound (or cluster of sounds) occur in a line or phrase. |
| scheme | figure of speech that varies the order and sound of words |
| strophe | A strophe is the first of three series of lines forming the divisions of each section of a Pindaric ode. |
| comedy | A literary work which is amusing and ends happily |
| black comedy | Black humour (from the French humour noir) is a term coined by Surrealist theoretician André Breton in 1935, to designate the sub-genre of comedy and satire in which laughter arises from cynism and skepticism |
| amplification | Rhetorical figures of speech that repeat and vary the expression of a thought. |
| sound | syllables, words, syntactic |
| tiring-house | An enclosed area in an Elizabethan theater where the actors awaited their cue to go on stage, changed their costumes, and stored stage props |
| french scene | A numbering system for a play in which a new scene is numbered whenever characters exit or enter the stage |
| scriptorium | An area set aside in a monastery for monks to work as scribes and copy books. |
| alliteration | Using the same consonant to start two or more stressed words or syllables in a phrase or verse line, or using a series of vowels to begin such words or syllables in sequence |
| onomatopoeia | a word which sounds like what it represents (e.g., the buzzing of a bee) |
| genetic fallacy | The genetic fallacy is a fallacy of irrelevance where a conclusion is suggested based solely on something or someone's origin rather than its current meaning or context |
| accentual verse | syllabic verse |
| paradox | Apparent contradiction that suggests a deeper truth. |
| end-stopped | A verse line ending at a grammatical boundary or break, such as a dash, a closing parenthesis, or punctuation such as a colon, a semi-colon, or a period |
| feminine rhyme | Feminine rhyme is a rhyme either of two syllables of which the second is unstressed (double rhyme), as in motion, notion, or of three syllables of which the second and third are unstressed (triple rhyme), as in fortunate, importunate. |
| liverpool poets | A 1960s group of popular writers from the west-England city of Liverpool, including Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, and Brian Patten. |
| variorum | A variorum edition is any published version of an author's work that contains notes and comments by a number of scholars and critics |
| exegesis | (1) In Roman times, the term exegesis applied to professional government interpretation of omens, dreams, and sacred laws, as Cuddon notes (315) |
| ode | A type of lyric or melic verse, usually irregular rather than uniform, generally of considerable length and sometimes continuous, sometimes divided in accordance with transitions of thought and mood in a complexity of stanzaic forms; it often has varying iambic line lengths with no fixed system of rhyme schemes and is always marked by the rich, intense expression of an elevated thought, often addressed to a praised person or object. |
| poulter's measure | A meter consisting of alternate Alexandrines and fourteeners, i.e., twelve-syllable and fourteen-syllable lines, a common measure in Elizabethan times. |
| poetry | A heightened literary expression cast in lines, rather than sentences, in which language is used in a concentrated blend of sound, meaning, and imagery to create an emotional response; essentially rhythmic, it is usually metrical and frequently structured in stanzas. |
| syllabic verse | A type of verse distinguished primarily by the syllable count, i.e., the number of syllables in each line, rather than by the rhythmical arrangement of accents or time quantities. |
| sic transit gloria mundi | (Latin, literally 'thus the glory of the world passes away') a Latin phrase that has been interpreted as 'fame is fleeting' |
| echo verse | Echo verse is a poem in which the words or syllables at the end of a line are repeated as a repsonse in the next line, often for ironic purposes. |
| diction | choice of words |
| neoclassicism | a movement which dominated during the eighteenth century and was notable for its adherence to the forms of classical drama |
| in medias res | In medias res or medias in res (into the middle of things) is a Latin phrase denoting the literary and artistic narrative technique wherein the relation of a story begins either at the mid-point or at the conclusion, rather than at the beginning (cf |
| theme | A prevailing idea in a work, but sometimes not explicitly stated, as in Ogden Nash's "Candy is dandy, / But liquor is quicker," which is about neither candy nor liquor. |
| shamanism | a religious practice first identified by anthropologists studying hunter-gatherer tribes in Siberia, Alaska, and northern Canada in which a shaman would serve as a mediator between his tribal community and the spirit world |
| novella | a work of prose fiction that falls somewhere in between a short story and a novel in terms of length, scope, and complexity |
| literature | Literature (from Latin litterae (plural); letter) is the art of written works |
| stereotype | A character who is so ordinary or unoriginal that the character seems like an oversimplified representation of a type, gender, class, religious group, or occupation |
| dipody | as in Robert Herrick's "Upon His Departure Hence." |
| alliteration | The repetition of the same or similar sounds at the beginning of words: “What would the world be, once bereft/Of wet and wildness?” (Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Inversnaid”) |
| counting | A technique of determining stylistic qualities of a piece of writing by counting the numbers of words in paragraphs or sentences, and determining the average number of modifiers, average word lengths, and so on. |
| shakuhachi | (Japanese, a reference to the instrument's length in ancient Japanese units) traditional Japanese end-blown flute, about 55 cm |
| stress | Emphasis given to a syllable in pitch, volume or duration (or several of these) |
| consonance | Repetition of consonantal sounds to make a pattern, usually in verse. |
| antanaclasis | Epizeuxis, Ploce, Polyptoton) |
| travesty | - Travesti, transgendered men in South America - Travesti (theatre), about men and women playing the opposite sex in Western opera, ballet and theatre |
| tercets | usually in iambic |
| connotation | those words, things, or ideas with which a word often keeps company but which it does not actually denote |
| extended metaphor | An extended metaphor, also called a conceit, is a metaphor that continues into the sentences that follow |
| denouement | A French word meaning "unknotting" or "unwinding," denouement refers to the outcome or result of a complex situation or sequence of events, an aftermath or resolution that usually occurs near the final stages of the plot |
| anti-masque | An anti-masque (also spelled antimasque) is a comic or grotesque dance presented before or between the acts of a masque, a type of dramatic composition |
| john skelton | short verses of irregular meter |
| diction | The social position (the sociolect or idiolect) indicated by the choice of words for the poem. |
| rhetoric | The art of speaking or writing effectively; skill in the eloquent use of language. |
| rhyming slang | A slang popular in Great Britain in the early part of the 20th century, in which a word was replaced by a word or phrase that rhymed with it, as loaf of bread for head |
| form | however, lies more in its touch and tone than in its syllabic structure |
| symbol | When a word, phrase or image represents a complex set of ideas, the meaning of which is determined by the surrounding context, for example, the gifts the jester gives to the Queen in The Cap and Bells by W B Yeats. |
| chain rhyme | as in the aaba, bbcb, ccdc, dddd of Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." |
| classicism | The principles and ideals of beauty that are characteristic of Greek and Roman art, architecture, and literature |
| antonym | Homonym, Synonym) |
| parallelism | Two or more expressions that share traits, whether metrical, lexical, figurative, or grammatical, and can take the form of a list. |
| tercet | A stanza structure of three lines, metrically aligned |
| homographs | Two words with identical spellings, but different meanings and pronunciations (i.e |
| sestina | A poem consisting of six six-line stanzas and a three-line envoy, where the words ending the lines of the first stanza are repeated in a different order at the end of lines in each of the subsequent five stanzas and, two to a line, in the middle and at the end of the three lines in the closing envoy |
| shinshin | North-American vessel rattle |
| ambiguity | A statement with two or more meanings that may seem to exclude one another in the context |
| stereotype | A stereotype is a held popular belief about specific social groups or types of individuals |
| didactic literature | Literature disigned explicitly to instruct as in these lines from Jacque Prevert's "To Paint the Portrait of a Bird." Paint first a cage with an open door paint then something pretty something simple something handsome something useful for the bird Return to Menu |
| denotation | What a word points to, names, or refers to, either in the world of things or in the mind. |
| impressionism | Metaphysical, Objectivism, Realism, Symbolism) |
| consonance | Hamartia: In tragedy, the event or act that leads to the hero's or heroine's downfall |
| assonance | Assonance is the refrain of vowel sounds to create internal rhyming within phrases or sentences, and together with alliteration and consonance serves as one of the building blocks of verse |
| classicism | A movement or tendency in art, music, and literature to retain the characteristics found in work originating in classical Greece and Rome |
| composition | (of writing) The putting together of words in a correct and effective way. |
| crossing the bar | " demonstrates the effectiveness of this device: metaphorically, he compares a sandbar in the Thames River over which ships cannot pass until high tide, with the natural time for completion of his own life's journey from birth to death. |
| content | Form, Motif, Style, Texture) |
| paradox | but more compact, usually consisting of just two successive words. |
| periphrasis | Using a wordy phrase to describe something for which one term exists. |
| fable | A brief narrative in prose or verse that illustrates a moral or teaches a lesson, usually in which animals or inanimate objects are personified with human feelings and motivations. |
| singsong | informal singing party |
| autotelic | Autotelic is defined by one "having a purpose in and not apart from itself" |
| redaction | In the study of literature, redaction is a form of editing in which multiple source texts are combined (redacted) and subjected to minor alteration to make them into a single work |
| completeness | The second aspect of Aristotle's requirements for a tragedy |
| canto | subdivision of an Italian epic or long narrative poem, such as Dante's Divina Commedia, first employed in English by Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene, popularized by Byron in "Don Juan," and restored to epic dignity by Ezra Pound in his Pisan Cantos. |
| liverpool poets | a 1960s group of popular writers from the west-England city of Liverpool, including Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, and Brian Patten. |
| gamebook | A gamebook (also sometimes referred to as choose your own adventure books or CYOA books, not to be confused with the series by that title) is a work of fiction that allows the reader to participate in the story by making choices that affect the course of the narrative, which branches down various paths through the use of numbered paragraphs or pages |
| anecdote | a brief personal story used to illustrate a point |
| antonym | In lexical semantics, opposites are words that lie in an inherently incompatible binary relationship as in the opposite pairs male : female, long : short, up : down, and precede : follow |
| denotation | The literal dictionary meaning(s) of a word as distinct from an associated idea or connotation. |
| intertextuality | Intertextuality is the shaping of texts' meanings by other texts |
| hypallage | A type of hyperbaton involving an interchange of elements in a phrase or sentence so that a displaced word is in a grammatical relationship with another that it does not logically qualify, as in: |
| logical fallacy - fallacy | In logic and rhetoric, a fallacy is incorrect reasoning in argumentation resulting in a misconception |
| poetry | using selective arrangements of syntax |
| triad | A triad in simplest terms is defined as a "group of three". |
| reversal | the change from good to bad fortune in classic tragedy; from bad to good fortune in classic comedy |
| polysyndeton | The use of multiple conjunctions, usually where they are not strictly necessary ('chips and beans and fish and egg and peas and vinegar and tomato sauce') |
| ambiguity | Denotation, Equivoke, Paronomasia) (Compare Antanaclasis, Syllepsis) |
| meiosis | An understatement; the presentation of a thing with underemphasis in order to achieve a greater effect, such as, "the building of the pyramids took a little bit of effort." |
| shetland fiddle | Duke Ellington said that there are only two types of music which possess swing; one is jazz, the other Scottish music |
| impressionism | Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that began as a loose association of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence in the 1870s and 1880s |
| beast poetry | Beast poetry, in the context of European literature and Medieval studies, refers to a corpus of poems written in Latin from the 8th to the 11th century. |
| metaphysical conceit - conceit | In English literature the term is generally associated with the 17th century metaphysical poets, an extension of contemporary usage |
| antagonist | See discussion under character, below. |
| singing by ear | an unusual feature of traditional klapa singing in which the harmony in extemporised a technique called pjevanje na uho |
| proscenium arch | a frame around the stage which separates the actors and the set from the audience |
| irony | Words implying meaning opposite to their normal meaning. |
| stigma of print | The stigma of print is the concept that an informal social convention restricted the literary works of aristocrats in the Elizabethan and Tudor age to private and courtly audiences — as opposed to commercial endeavors — at the risk of social disgrace if violated, and which obliged the author to profess an abhorrence of the press and to restrict his works from publication |
| miscellanies - anthology | An anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler |
| imagism | Impressionism, Metaphysical, Objectivism, Realism, Romanticism, Symbolism) |
| anacrusis | In poetry, anacrusis (Ancient Greek: ἀνάκρουσις "pushing back") is the lead-in syllables, collectively, that precede the first full measure. |
| grand guignol | Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol (French: "The Theater of the Big Puppet") — known as the Grand Guignol — was in the Pigalle area of Paris (at 20 bis, rue Chaptal) |
| l'allegro | " or Homer's "rosy-fingered dawn." |
| hiatus | In phonology, hiatus or diaeresis refers to two vowel sounds occurring in adjacent syllables, with no intervening consonant |
| signum congruentia | often shortened to signum, a sign that shows the start and end of a derived part in a canon, which was widely used in the 15th-century |
| symbolist drama | seek its truth in symbols, myths, and dreams |
| prolepsis | Syllepsis |
| antagonist | a character who seems to be the major force in opposition to the protagonist or main character |
| guignol - grand guignol | Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol (French pronunciation: [ɡʁɑ̃ ɡiɲɔl]: "The Theater of the Big Puppet") — known as the Grand Guignol — was in the Pigalle area of Paris (at 20 bis, rue Chaptal) |
| single reed | lengüeta simple (Spanish f.), caña simple (Spanish f.), caña única (Spanish f.), einfaches Rohrblatt (German n.), anche simple (French f.), ancia semplice (Italian f.) |
| flat character | a character not fully developed who seems to represent a type more than a real personality (see also stock character) |
| chiasmus | An inverted parallelism; the reversal of the order of corresponding words or phrases (with or without exact repetition) in successive clauses which are usually parallel in syntax, as in Pope's "a fop their passion, but their prize a sot," or Goldsmith's "to stop too fearful, and too faint to go." |
| poetry | a form of speech or writing that harmonizes the music of its language with its subject |
| epithet | but which involves a multi-noun replacement for a single noun, such as wave traveler for boat or whale-path for ocean, used especially in Old English, Old Norse and early Teutonic poetry |
| epic | A long narrative poem with an exalted style and heroic theme. |
| alliteration | using the same consonant to start two or more stressed words or syll= ables in a phrase or verse line, or using a series of vowels to begin such words or syllables in sequence |
| verse novel | A verse novel tells a long and complex story with many characters, much as a novel would, through the medium of narrative verse |
| anachronism | Placing an event, person, item, or verbal expression in the wrong historical period |
| translation | Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text |
| ode | A lyric poem form usually rhymed and in the form of an address |
| ionic | a Classical Greek and Latin double foot consisting of two unstressed syllables and two stressed syllables, either ionic a majore / ' ' ~ ~ / or ionic a minore / ~ ~ ' ' /. |
| gvs | The abbreviation that linguists and scholars of English use to refer to the Great Vowel Shift |
| renku | A renku is, by strict definition, a smaller, more rigidly-structured subset of renga, with three-line haikus (five syllables / seven syllables / seven syllables) alternating with two-line stnzas of seven syllables each. |
| burlesque | An imitation of a literary style, or of human action, that aims to ridicule by incongruity of style and subject |
| proverb | A proverb (from Latin: proverbium) is a simple and concrete saying popularly known and repeated, which expresses a truth, based on common sense or the practical experience of humanity |
| simile | a figure of speech involving a direct, explicit comparison of one thing to another, usually using the words like or as to draw the connection, as in "My love is like a red, red rose." An analogy is an extended simile |
| pararhyme | Pararhyme, also known as partial or imperfect rhyme is a term devised by the poet Edmund Blunden to describe a near rhyme in which the consonants in two words are the same, but the vowels are different |
| impressionism | Metaphysical, Objectivism, Romanticism) |
| impressionism | Metaphysical, Objectivism, Realism) |
| connotation | The linguistic term used for the associations which may be usually evoked by the word, or which may be evoked by a specific context, as opposed to the literal sense of a word or its strict dictionary definition which is called its denotation. |
| oneiromancy | The belief that dreams could predict the future, or the act of predicting the future by analyzing dreams |
| shouqiu | (China) a ball-shaped rattle |
| epistle | a verse epistle imitates the form of a personal letter, addressed to someone in particular, often very personal and occasional, and sometimes dated, with a location affixed |
| ode to a nightingale | " considered to be one of John Keats' finest works, is an example |
| foot | A basic unit of meter consisting of a set number of strong stresses and light stresses |
| metonymy | Metonymy is a figure of speech used in rhetoric in which a thing or concept is not called by its own name, but by the name of something intimately associated with that thing or concept |
| rhyme | Normally end-rhyme, that is, lines of verse characterized by the consonance of terminal words or syllables |
| trope | a semantic figure of speech or of thought that varies the meaning of a word or passage |
| epic | An extended narrative poem with a heroic or superhuman protagonist engaged in an action of great significance in a vast setting (often including the underworld and engaging the gods) |
| bathos | Bathos comes from the Greek for deep (as in bathyscape, bathymetric) and in the arts refers to an abrupt descent from the exalted to the banal, either in style or content. |
| foil | a character that serves as a contrast to another. |
| rhyme scheme | as abab bcbc cdcd dada. |
| caesura | A natural pause or break in a line of poetry, usually near the middle of the line |
| pun | An expression that uses a homonym (two different words spelled identically) to deliver two or more meanings at the same time |
| side-blown trumpet | a trumpet where the mouthpiece lies on the side of the instrument rather than at one end |
| metaphysical | Objectivism, Romanticism, Symbolism) |
| figures of speech | elaborate expressions, sound devices |
| caesura | A Caesura is a pause in a line of verse dictated by sense or natural speech rhythm rather than by metrics. |
| epitaph | An epitaph (from Greek ἐπιτάφιον epitaphion "a funeral oration" from ἐπί epi "at, over" and τάφος taphos "tomb") is a short text honouring a deceased person, strictly speaking that is inscribed on their tombstone or plaque, but also used figuratively |
| anagogical | In fourfold interpretation, the anagogical reading is the fourth type of interpretation in which one reads a religious writing in an eschatological manner, i.e., the interpreter sees the passage as a revelation concerning the last days, the end of time, or the afterlife. |
| tautology | a statement redundant in itself, such as "The stars, O astral bodies!" |
| jabberwocky | " and may employ unusual syntax |
| summary | the material condensed to its main points |
| pathetic fallacy | an expression that endows inanimate things with human feelings. |
| pun | an expression that uses a homonym (two different words spelled identically) to deliver two or more meanings at the same time |
| resonance | The quality of richness or variety of sounds in poetic texture, as in Milton's: |
| laureate | In English, the word laureate has come to signify eminence or association with literary or military glory |
| fantasy | Fantasy is a genre that uses magic and other supernatural phenomena as a primary element of plot, theme, and/or setting |
| high comedy | High comedy or 'pure comedy' is a type of comedy characterized by witty dialog, satire, biting humor, or criticism of life. |
| end-stopping | The effect achieved when the syntax of a line coincides with the metrical boundary at the end of a line |
| anagnorisis | Anagnorisis (pronounced /ˌænəɡˈnɒrɨsɨs/; Ancient Greek: ἀναγνώρισις) is a moment in a play or other work when a character makes a critical discovery |
| episteme | Episteme, as distinguished from techne, is etymologically derived from the Greek word ἐπιστήμη for knowledge or science, which comes from the verb ἐπίσταμαι, "to know". |
| golden line | The golden line is a type of Latin dactylic hexameter frequently mentioned in Latin classrooms in English speaking countries and in contemporary scholarship written in English. |
| characterization | the development of characters in fiction, drama, or poetry |
| romantic comedy | Sympathetic comedy that presents the adventures of young lovers trying to overcome social, psychological, or interpersonal constraints to achieve a successful union |
| singspiel | (German n., literally 'sing-play') a form of opera which evolved in Germany and Austria in the 18th-century as an equivalent of the French opéra-comique or the English 'ballad opera' |
| synesthesia | A blending of different senses in describing something. |
| amplification | rhetorical figures of speech that repeat and vary the expression of a thought. |
| sharakan | Armenian religious chant |
| stress | The prominence or emphasis given to particular syllables |
| buskins | Originally called kothorni in Greek, the word buskins is a Renaissance term for the elegantly laced boots worn by actors in ancient Greek tragedy |
| homophones | Words which sound exactly the same but which have different meanings ('maid' and 'made'). |
| tract | A tract is a literary work, and in current usage, usually religious in nature |
| emendation - improve | Improve means to make something better. |
| renaissance | There are two common uses of the word. |
| hendecasyllable | The hendecasyllable is a verse of eleven syllables, used in Ancient Greek and Latin quantitative verse as well as in medieval and modern European poetry. |
| central consciousness | a character whose inner thoughts, perceptions, and feelings are revealed by a third-person limited narrator who does not reveal the thoughts, perceptions, or feelings of other characters. |
| strambotto - ottava rima | Ottava rima is a rhyming stanza form of Italian origin |
| verisimilitude | from the Latin phrase verisimiles ("like the truth"); the internal truthfulness, lifelikeness, and consistency of the world created within any literary work when we judge that world on its own terms rather than in terms of its correspondence to the real world |
| phronesis | Phronēsis (Greek: φρόνησις) in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is the virtue of practical thought, usually translated "practical wisdom", sometimes as "prudence". |
| allegory | A story illustrating an idea or a moral principle in which objects take on symbolic meanings |
| sixte | (French f.) sixth |
| limerick | A fixed verse form appearing first in The History of Sixteen Wonderful Old Women (1820), popularized by Edward Lear, and rhyming aabba, where a-lines have five feet and the b-lines three feet, and where the first and last lines end with the same word (a practice dropped in the 20th century) |
| neologism | a newly-coined word, like Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky." |
| tudor interlude | Short tragedies, comedies, or history plays performed by either professional acting troupes or by students during the early sixteenth century. |
| assonance | The relatively close juxtaposition of the same or similar vowel sounds, but with different end consonants in a line or passage, thus a vowel rhyme, as in the words, date and fade. |
| epic | A narrative poem of heroic exploits usual undertaken by a male hero who (like modern block-buster movie protagonists) disregards the rules |
| connotation | the personal definition or association triggered by a word |
| representative character | A flat character who embodies all of the other members of a group (such as teachers, students, cowboys, detectives, and so on) |
| sight rhyme | Words which are similar in spelling but different in pronunciation, like mow and how or height and weight |
| sgra-snyan | Himalayan lute |
| foot | The basic unit of metre; in poetry written in English, usually consists of one stressed syllable and a number of unstressed syllables. |
| end stopped line | A poetic line in which the end of the line coincides with the end of the grammatical unit, usually the sentence. |
| epithet | An adjective or adjectival phrase, usually attached to the name of a person or thing, such as "Richard the Lion-Hearted," Milton's "ivy-crowned Bacchus" in "L'Allegro," or Homer's "rosy-fingered dawn." |
| shuang qin | a Chinese lute similar to the sanxian |
| siku | Andean double-row panpipes typically made of cane or clay |
| assonance | Assonance is the repetition of similar vowel sounds in neighbouring words, to create the effect of rhyme within phrases or lines of verse. |
| sonnet | Enjambment: The running over of the sense and structure of a line of Verse or a couplet into the following verse or couplet |
| hysteron proteron | The hysteron proteron (from the Greek: ὕστερον πρότερον, hýsteron próteron, "latter before") is a rhetorical device in which the first key word of the idea refers to something that happens temporally later than the second key word |
| quantitative metre | lines whose rhythm depends on the duration or length of time a line takes to utter |
| paralepsis | Making a statement while pretending not to. |
| voice | the verbal aspect of point of view, the acknowledged or unacknowledged source of a story’s words; the speaker; the "person" telling the story and that person’s particular qualities of insight, attitude, and verbal style |
| underground press | The phrase underground press is most often used to refer to the independently published and distributed underground papers associated with the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and other western nations |
| impressionism | Metaphysical |
| apology | Apologetics (from Greek αÏολογία, "speaking in defense") is the discipline of defending a position (usually religious) through the systematic use of reason |
| consonance | repetition of the same consonant sound in nearby words; also called “euphony.” See also |
| sich verschlafen | (German) to oversleep |
| prose | the regular form of spoken and written language, measured in sentences rather than lines, as in poetry. |
| menippean satire | The genre of Menippean satire is a form of satire, usually in prose, which has a length and structure similar to a novel and is characterized by attacking mental attitudes instead of specific individuals |
| syllable | A word or part of a word representing a sound produced as a unit by a single impulse of the voice, consisting of either a vowel sound alone as in oh or a vowel with attendant consonants, as in throne. |
| figure of speech | one of many kinds of word-play, focusing either on sound and word-order (schemes) or on semantics (tropes) |
| feet | widely used in English poetry in the middle of the 16th century. |
| liturgy | A liturgy is a form of public worship. |
| early modern english | Modern English covers the time-frame from about 1450 or so up to the present day |
| episode | An episode is a part of a dramatic work such as a serial television or radio program |
| epistrophe | The opposite form, where repetition appears in a final positionPloce All cases of insistent repetition that fall into no set patternsSymploce Combination of anaphora and epistrophe--double repetition at both beginning and endEpanalepsis Repetition of the same word or phrase at both beginning and end of a single line or phraseAnadiplosis Repetition of the last word of one phrase at the beginning of the next |
| shamisen | (English, German n./f.) also samisen or sangen , a long necked Japanese 3-string fretless lute, plucked with a heavy ivory plectrum, that first became popular in the pleasure districts during the Edo Period (1600-1868) when it appeared as part of the musical accompaniment in kabuki and bunraku performances |
| gather | Gather, gatherer, or gathering may refer to: |
| aesthetic movement | a literary belief that art is its own justification and purpose, advocated in England by Walter Pater and practised by Edgar Allan Poe, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, and others. |
| rhetorical device | In rhetoric, a rhetorical device or resource of language is a technique that an author or speaker uses to convey to the listener or reader a meaning with the goal of persuading him or her towards considering a topic from a different perspective |
| ballad | Folklore: Traditions and myths preserved in a culture or group of people |
| old comedy | The Athenian comedies dating to 400-499 BCE, featuring invective, satire, ribald humor, and song and dance |
| hyperbaton | a figure of speech |
| syllabic verse | A metrical system which depends solely on syllable count, and which takes no account of stress |
| cancel | A bibliographical term referring to a leaf which is substituted for one removed by the printers because of an error |
| living newspaper | Living Newspaper is a term for a theatrical form presenting factual information on current events to a popular audience |
| antistrophe | An antistrophe is the last of three series of lines forming the divisions of each section of a Pindaric ode. |
| breve | A mark in the shape of a bowl-like half circle that indicates a light stress or an unaccented syllable. |
| frankenstein | Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft/ Weinberg, Larry (ADP)/ Barr, Ken (ILT) |
| antiphon | a sacred poem with responses or alternative parts. |
| pathos | Pathos (Greek: πάθος, for "suffering" or "experience;" adjectival form: 'pathetic' from παθητικός) represents an appeal to the audience's emotions |
| antonym | Paronym, Synonym) (Contrast Sight Rhyme) |
| sine die | (Latin, literally 'without a day') (postponed) indefinitely |
| syllable | a vowel preceded by from zero to three consonants ("awl" .. |
| accent | The prominence or emphasis given to a syllable or word |
| pathetic fallacy | Describing an inanimate object as though it were animate. |
| sounds | and rhythmic |
| ambiguity | The possibility of more than one meaning, for example the ending of The Five Students by Thomas Hardy. |
| verse | a line or the form of poetry |
| syntax | In linguistics, syntax (from Ancient Greek σύνταξις "arrangement" from σύν syn, "together", and τάξις táxis, "an ordering") is the study of the principles and rules for constructing sentences in natural languages. |
| conceit | Metaphysical Poetry: The body of poetry produced by a group of seventeenth-century English writers called the "Metaphysical Poets." The group includes John Donne and Andrew Marvell |
| documentation | accounting for and giving credit to the origin of a source |
| analogy | An agreement or similarity in some particulars between things otherwise different; sleep and death, for example, are analogous in that they both share a lack of animation and a recumbent posture. |
| shophar | (Hebrew) translated as 'trumpet' (Numbers 10:10), synonymous with keren, a wind-instrument made from a ram's horn |
| oxymoron | An expression impossible in fact but not necessarily self-contradictory, such as John Milton's description of Hell as "darkness visible" in Book I of Paradise Lost. |
| rhyming | an xbyb rhyme scheme |
| neologism | A newly-coined word, like Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky." |
| sestina | Verse form originating in Medieval Provence where the final words of six unrhymed stanzas are repeated in a certain fixed order, ending with a tercet which uses three or six of the terminal words. |
| humorism | Humorism, or humoralism, is a discredited theory of the makeup and workings of the human body adopted by Greek and Roman physicians and philosophers |
| irony | stating something by saying another quite different thing, sometimes its opposite |
| critical reading | Careful analysis of an essay's structure and logic in order to determine the validity of an argument |
| syntax | the ordering of words in a sentence |
| sheng | ancient Chinese mouth organ, consisting of a bundle of between 17 to 37 pipes seated on a small wind chamber |
| anecdote | A very short tale told by a character in a literary work |
| tragic hero | as defined by Aristotle, a man of noble stature who is admired by society but flawed |
| antagonist | a character or a nonhuman force that opposes or is in conflict with the protagonist. |
| sprung rhythm | A poetic rhythm characterized by feet varying from one to four syllables which are equal in time length but different in the number of syllables |
| link | Chaucer scholars use the word "link" or "linking passage" to refer to the material connecting the individual tales in the Canterbury Tales to the surrounding stories |
| climax | The climax (from the Greek word "κλῖμαξ" (klimax) meaning "staircase" and "ladder") or turning point of a narrative work is its point of highest tension or drama or when the action starts in which the solution is given. |
| apocalypse | From the Greek word apocalypsis ("unveiling"), an apocalypse originally referred to a mystical revelation of a spiritual truth, but has changed in twentieth-century use to refer specifically to mystical visions concerning the end of the world |
| sonnet | Phenomenology: A method of literary criticism based on the belief that things have no existence outside of human consciousness or awareness |
| universality | Universality may refer to: |
| legend | a type of tale conventionally set in the real world and in either the present or historical past, based on actual historical people and events, and offering an exaggerated or distorted version of the truth about those people and events |
| syllabic verse | the successive lines containing two, four, six, eight and two syllables |
| jeremiad | A jeremiad is a long literary work, usually in prose, but sometimes in poetry, in which the author bitterly laments the state of society and its morals in a serious tone of sustained invective, and always contains a prophecy of society's imminent downfall. |
| miracle of the virgin | A vita or a miracle play that dramatizes some aspect of humanity activity, and ends with the miraculous intervention of the Blessed Virgin |
| image / imagery | descriptive language which helps us see, hear, smell, taste, or feel |
| quantitative metre | Lines whose rhythm depends on the duration or length of time a line takes to utter |
| picaresque novel | The picaresque novel (Spanish: "picaresca", from "pícaro", for "rogue" or "rascal") is a popular sub-genre of prose fiction which is usually satirical and depicts, in realistic and often humorous detail, the adventures of a roguish hero of low social class who lives by his wits in a corrupt society |
| syntax | Refers to the order in which words are placed |
| canon | the range of works that a consensus of scholars, teachers, and readers of a particular time and culture consider "great" or "major." |
| miles gloriosus | Miles Gloriosus (literally, "glorious soldier", in Latin) is a stock character of a boastful soldier from the comic theatre of ancient Rome, and variations on this character have appeared in drama and fiction ever since |
| apocope | In phonology, apocope (pronounced /əˈpɒkəpiː/, from the Greek apokoptein "cutting off", from apo- "away from" and koptein "to cut") is the loss of one or more sounds from the end of a word, and especially the loss of an unstressed vowel. |
| versification | to transfer words and meaning into the heightened expression of poetry |
| onomatopoeia | Refers to the property of a word whose pronunciation sounds like the thing it describes |
| polyptoton | repetition of the same word in different forms, achieved by varying the case, adding affixes, etc. |
| elegy | the principle aim of the dirge is to lament the dead, rather than to console survivors. |
| tropological | Not to be confused with either typology or the rhetorical device of the trope, the term tropological refers to the interpretation of literature in which the interpreter focuses on the ethical lesson presented in the text, i.e., "the moral of the story." See more discussion under fourfold interpretation. |
| argumentative essay | an essay that tries to prove a point by supporting it with evidence |
| dialogue | (1) usually, words spoken by characters in a literary work, especially as opposed to words that come directly from the narrator in a work of fiction; (2) more rarely, a literary work that consists mainly or entirely of the speech of two or more characters; examples include Thomas Hardy’s poem "The Ruined Maid" and Plato’s treatise Republic. |
| motif | In narrative, a motif (pronunciation) (help·info) is any recurring element that has symbolic significance in a story |
| eschatological narrative | Eschatalogy in Christian theology is the study of the end of things, including the end of the world, life-after-death, and the Last Judgment |
| personification | an anthropomorphic figure of speech where the poet describes an abstraction, a thing, or a non-human form as if it were a person |
| sestina | serving as a concise summary, as in Villon's "Des Dames du Temps Jadis |
| epithet | From Latin epitheton, from Greek, from epitithenai meaning to add, an adjective or adjectival cluster that is associated with a particular person or thing and that usually seems to capture their prominent characteristics |
| foot | repeating pattern of |
| gloss | A gloss (from Latin: glossa, from Greek: γλῶσσα glóssa "tongue") is a brief notation of the meaning of a word or wording in a text |
| inference | Inference is the act of drawing a conclusion by deductive reasoning from given facts |
| parallelism | Repetition of the same grammatical structure, especially at the beginning of lines. |
| onomatopoeia | Words which actually convey the sound being made, for example ‘Bubbles gargled delicately’ (Death of a Naturalist by Seamus Heaney). |
| buskin | A buskin is a knee- or calf-length boot made of leather or cloth which laces closed, but is open across the toes |
| antithesis | A figure of speech in which words and phrases with opposite meanings are balanced against each other |
| shuiqiang | Chinese whistle |
| anachronism | Someone or something belonging to another time period than the one in which it is described as being. |
| classicism | Idealism, Impressionism, Metaphysical, Objectivism, Realism) |
| trope | A figure of speech, such as metaphor or metonymy, in which words are not used in their literal (or actual) sense but in a figurative (or imaginative) sense. |
| symbolist movement | late 19th-century French writers, including Mallarmé and Valéry, whose verse dealt with transcendental phenomena or with images and actions whose meaning was associative rather than referential. |
| vates | The earliest Latin writers used vates to denote "prophets" and soothsayers in general; the word fell into disuse in Latin until it was revived by Virgil |
| ghost characters | This term should not be confused with characters who happen to appear on stage as ghosts |
| burlesque | a work caricaturing another serious work |
| showcase | one of the two forms of dance competition for choreographed performance routines |
| allusion | A reference in one literary work to a character or theme found in another literary work |
| antagonist | A person or force which opposes the protagonist in a literary work |
| ottava rima | an Italian stanza of eight 11-syllable lines, with the rhyme scheme abababcc, introduced by Sir Thomas Wyatt and by W |
| simile | an analogy or comparison implied by using an adverb such as like or as, in contrast with a metaphor which figuratively makes the comparison by stating outright that one thing is another thing |
| ubi sunt | A literary motif dealing with the transitory nature of things, like life, beauty, youth, etc. |
| syntax | The way in which linguistic elements (words and phrases) are arranged to form grammatical structure. |
| bretons | The Celtic inhabitants of Brittany ("Little Britain") in northeast France who speak the Breton language |
| sic | (Latin) thus, just so |
| alliteration | In language, alliteration refers to the repetition of a particular sound in the first syllables of a series of words and/or phrases |
| encomium | Ode or song of praise for a person (usually alive). |
| asyndeton | lists of words, phrases, or expressions without conjunctions such as `and' and `or' to link them |
| tyger! tyger! | " or Byron's "The Bride of Abydos |
| verse | as a mass noun, poetry in general (but in a non-judgmental sense); and, as a regular noun, a line of poetry. |
| inversion | Deviation from normal word orderAnacoluthon Syntax is not merely inverted but deliberately ungrammatical, often changing gammatical structure mid-sentenceAposiopesis Syntactic effect to leave a sentence unfinishedAnthimeria Playing with grammatical expectations by substituting a "wrong" part of speech |
| microcosm | a smaller version or little world" |
| sikyi | a recreational music and dance of the youth of Ashanti |
| metrical pause | A "rest" or "hold" that has a temporal value, usually to compensate for the omission of an unstressed syllable in a foot. |
| apotropaic | Designed to ward off evil influence or malevolent spirits by frightening these forces away |
| parody | A ludicrous imitation, usually intended for comic effect but often for ridicule, of both the style and content of another work |
| silba | (Spanish f.) hissing |
| sillería | (Spanish f.) chairs, set of chairs, choir stalls |
| alliteration | Repetition of the same or similar sounds (usually consonants) at the beginning of words |
| protagonist | the most neutral and broadly applicable term for the main character in a work, whether male or female, heroic or not heroic |
| figure of speech | A mode of expression in which words are used out of their literal meaning or out of their ordinary use in order to add beauty or emotional intensity or to transfer the poet's sense impressions by comparing or identifying one thing with another that has a meaning familiar to the reader |
| boulevard theatre | Boulevard theatre is a theatrical aesthetic which emerged from the boulevards of Paris's old city. |
| trochaic rhyme | Another word for double rhyme in which the final rhyming word consists of a heavy stress followed by a light stress. |
| hubris | excessive pride which usually leads to the downfall of the tragic hero in Greek drama |
| antithesis | Antithesis (Greek for "setting opposite", from ἀντί "against" + θέσις "position") is a counter-proposition and denotes a direct contrast to the original proposition |
| quire | A collection of individual leaves sewn together, usually containing between four and twelve leaves per quire |
| ode | A lyric poem that is serious and thoughtful in tone and has a very precise, formal structure |
| historical linguistics | Historical linguistics (also called diachronic linguistics) is the study of language change |
| antimetabole | In rhetoric, antimetabole (pronounced /æntɨməˈtæbəliː/ AN-ti-mə-TAB-ə-lee) is the repetition of words in successive clauses, but in transposed grammatical order (e.g., "I know what I like, and I like what I know") |
| juxtaposition - contrast | In semantics, contrast is a relationship between two discourse segments |
| quantity | a metrical principle of Greek and Latin |
| singing school | a school for teaching vocal music |
| symbol | an object or action that represents more than itself |
| apocope | The omission of the last syllable of a word |
| stress | In linguistics, the emphasis, length and loudness that mark one syllable as more pronounced than another |
| pun | A word play suggesting, with humorous intent, the different meanings of one word or the use of two or more words similar in sound but different in meaning, as in Mark A |
| occupatio | A figure of rhetoric where a writer explains that he or she will not have time or space to say something but then goes on to say that thing anyway, possibly at length. |
| alliteration | Used for poetic effect, a repitition of the initial sounds of several words in a group |
| euphony | Modulation, Resonance) (Compare Assonance, Consonance, Rhyme, Sigmatism) |
| side project | in popular music, a side project is a project undertaken by one or more persons already known for their involvement in another band |
| canto | Subdivision of an Italian epic or long narrative poem, such as Dante's Divina Commedia, first employed in English by Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene, popularized by Byron in "Don Juan," and restored to epic dignity by Ezra Pound in his Pisan Cantos. |
| isocolon | A line or lines that consist of clauses of equal length. |
| shahnai | north Indian shawm |
| evidence | Evidence in its broadest sense includes everything that is used to determine or demonstrate the truth of an assertion |
| shiak | (Dominica) or gwage, a percussion instrument |
| apron stage | A stage that projects out into the auditorium area |
| thesis | A dissertation or thesis is a document submitted in support of candidature for a degree or professional qualification presenting the author's research and findings |
| subject | Usually the person or thing who is performing the action of a verb |
| troubadour | One of a class of Occitan lyric poets and poet-musicians, often of knightly rank, who flourished from the 11th through the 13th centuries in Southern France and neighboring areas of Italy and Spain, and who wrote of courtly love. |
| half rhyme | a rhyme in which the sounds are similar, but not exact, as in home and come or close and lose |
| shimmy | African-American dance of the late 1880s |
| canto | A sub-division of an epic or narrative poem comparable to a chapter in a novel |
| extrametrical verse - acatalexis | An acatalectic line of verse is one having the metrically complete number of syllables in the final foot |
| accentual verse | Accentual verse has a fixed number of stresses per line or stanza regardless of the number of syllables that are present |
| literary criticism | the mainly interpretive (versus evaluative) work written by readers of literary texts, especially professional ones (who are thus known as literary critics) |
| dialogue | conversation of characters in fiction or drama |
| monograph | A monograph is a work of writing upon a single subject, usually by a single author |
| prosody | study or practice or study of versification: what this tutorial is all about. Also called “metrics” in the case of |
| shred guitar | a heavy metal guitar playing style where technical proficiency and playing speed are the major goals, often in a neoclassical framework |
| versification | meter depended on the way long and short syllables were arranged to succeed one another, but in English the distinction is between accented and unaccented syllables |
| denotation | The literal sense of a word or its strict dictionary definition, as opposed to connotation which refers to the attitudes, emotions and values which may be usually evoked by the word, or which may be evoked by it in a specific context. |
| melic verse | usually irregular rather than uniform, generally of considerable length and sometimes continuous, sometimes divided in accordance with transitions of thought and mood in a complexity of stanzaic forms |
| enjambment | A line which ends before grammatical and semantic unity has been achieved and where the sense therefore carries on to the next line without a pause. |
| romanticism | The late 18th-century, early 19th-century period of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and Byron. |
| orchestra | in classical Greek theater, a semicircular area used mostly for dancing by the chorus. |
| orchestra | the playing area in an ancient Greek theater |
| ambiance | Loosely the term is equivalent to atmosphere or mood, but more specifically, ambiance is the atmosphere or mood of a particular setting or location |
| expressionism | a movement in drama which emphasizes subjectivity of perception |
| emblem book | Emblem books are a category of illustrated book printed in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries, typically containing a number of emblematic images with explanatory text. |
| close reading | Reading a piece of literature carefully, bit by bit, in order to analyze the significance of every individual word, image, and artistic ornament |
| hebraism | Hebraism is the identification of a usage, trait, or characteristic of the Hebrew language |
| theme | as do the suggestions of dissolution, depression, and mortality in John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale." |
| ethos | Ethos is an English word based on a Greek word and denotes the guiding beliefs or ideals that characterize a community, a nation or an ideology |
| theme | a prevailing idea in a work, but sometimes not explicitly stated, as in Ogden Nash's "Candy is dandy, / But liquor is quicker," which is about neither candy nor liquor. |
| consonance | The repetition of consonants, other than those at the beginning of words. |
| carpe diem | A Latin expression that means “seize the day.” Carpe diem poems urge the reader (or the person to whom they are addressed) to live for today and enjoy the pleasures of the moment |
| consonance | The repetition of similar consonant sounds, especially at the ends of words, as in lost and past or confess and dismiss. |
| action | any event or series of events depicted in a literary work; an event may be verbal as well as physical, so that saying something or telling a story within the story may be an event |
| personification | the attribution to a non-animate thing of human attributes |
| free verse | new rhythmic effects, colloquial language, and the expression of ideas and emotions, with clear, well-defined images, rather than through romanticism |
| atmosphere | the dominant mood or tone of setting |
| concrete language | words which represent specific, particular, graphic qualities and characteristics |
| virelai | A virelai is a form of medieval French verse used often in poetry and music |
| onomatopoeia | Onomatopoeia means to use words to imitate sounds |
| paradox | a self-contradictory phrase or sentence, such as "the ascending rain" or Alexander Pope's description of man, "Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all." Don Marquis's "quote buns by great men quote" (archys life of mehitabel [London: Faber and Faber, 1934]: 103-04), describes a drunk trying to go up a down-escalator as "falling upwards / through the night" (the poem also parodies Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "St |
| lexical set | words that are habitually used within a given environment constitute a lexical set |
| parataxis | linking clauses just by sequencing them, often without conjunction(s) and only by means of associations that are implied, not stated. |
| verse | As a mass noun, poetry in general (but in a non-judgmental sense); and, as a regular noun, a line of poetry. |
| polyptoton | Repetition of the same word in different forms, achieved by varying the case, adding affixes, etc. |
| sinister | evil or villainous in appearance or manner, wicked, criminal, ominous |
| consonance | The close repetition of the same end consonants of stressed syllables with differing vowel sounds, such as boat and night, or the words drunk and milk in the final line of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan." |
| personal essay | an essay which emphasizes a personal, subjective view |
| nonsense verse | lines that read like word-salad, where individually the terms may be recognizable but in their order and grammatical relations make no sense, or where common words accompany neologisms in expressions intended to mystify and amuse |
| neologism | A new word or phrase that ties together existing words or ideas |
| initiation story | a kind of short story in which a character—often a child or young person—first learns a significant, usually life-changing truth about the universe, society, people, or himself or herself; also called a coming-of-age story |
| foot | The metrical unit of verse comprising a number of stressed and unstressed syllables |
| byronic hero | The Byronic hero is an idealised but flawed character exemplified in the life and writings of Lord Byron, characterised by his ex-lover Lady Caroline Lamb (who said it before becoming Byron's lover) as being "mad, bad, and dangerous to know" |
| classification | Classification is a figure of speech linking a proper noun to a common noun using the or other articles. |
| personification | A figure of speech in which things or abstract ideas are given human attributes: dead leaves dance in the wind, blind justice. |
| personification | Presentation of inanimate objects as having human qualities, for example ‘And all that mighty heart is lying still!’ (Composed Upon Westminster Bridge by William Wordsworth). |
| paraphrase | Paraphrase is restatement of a text or passages, using other words |
| shogun | (Japanese, from the Chinese) the hereditary commander-in-chief of the Japanese army, who until 1867 was the virtual ruler of Japan |
| isocolon | a line or lines that consist of clauses of equal length. |
| shakespearian sonnet | The most popular form in English is the English or Shakespearian Sonnet |
| texture | as in Milton's: |
| head rhyme | Another term for alliteration--especially alliteration of consonants at the beginning of words, rather than alliteration of internal consonants within the bodies of words |
| chiasmus | A rhetorical figure with two syntactically parallel constructions, one of which has the word order reversed |
| simile | is an announced comparison introduced with the words like or as" |
| serpentine verses | Verses ending with the same word with which they begin. |
| elision | The omission of part of a word (oer, neer) to make a line conform to a metrical pattern. |
| singe | (in cooking) to brown or colour, (in general) to scorch or burn superficially or lightly |
| six-to-octave cadence | in the middle ages and the renaissance, cadences were thought of contrapuntally rather than harmonically, so that a dominant-to-tonic chord sequence would be expressed in terms of two voices moving together so that the interval between them changes from a sixth to an octave |
| shinobue | Japanese bamboo transverse flute |
| shinteki | (Japanese) or minteki, a traverse flute used in minshingaku (the Chinese-style chamber ensemble of Japan) |
| death of the novel | The death of the novel is the common name for the theoretical discussion of the declining importance of the novel as literary form |
| foot | the basic unit for describing metre, usually consisting of a certain number and combination of stressed and unstressed syllables |
| holograph | A holograph is a document written entirely in the handwriting of the person whose signature it bears |
| acrostic poem | A poem in which certain letters of the lines, usually the first letters, form a word or message relating to the subject |
| syllable | Each pronounced part of a word is a syllable |
| allegory | A pattern of reference in the work which evokes a parallel action of abstract ideas |
| euphony - phonaesthetics | Phonaesthetics (from the Greek, "voice-sound"; and "aesthetics") is the claim or study of inherent pleasantness or beauty (euphony) or unpleasantness (cacophony) of the sound of certain words and sentences |
| poets' corner | A portion of the South Transept of Westminster Abbey which contains the remains of many famous literary figures, including Chaucer and Spenser, and also displays memorials to others who are buried elsewhere. |
| impressionism | Metaphysical, Realism, Romanticism, Symbolism) |
| sillet du bas | (French m.) Untersattel (German m.), capo-cordiera (Italian m.), (on a violin, etc.) the lower saddle takes the pull of the tailgut off the edge of the belly |
| catharsis | an emotional purging or cleansing experienced by an ancient Greek audience at the end of a tragedy |
| textual criticism | Textual criticism (or lower criticism) is a branch of literary criticism that is concerned with the identification and removal of transcription errors in the texts of manuscripts |
| ode | An ode is a more or less formal address to a person or an embodied thing. |
| censorship ordinance of 1559 | This law under Queen Elizabeth required the political censorship of public plays and all printed materials in matters of religion and the government |
| couplet | A couplet is a pair of lines that are the same length and usually rhyme and form a complete thought |
| quantity | with the words arranged to form a systematic succession of long and short syllables |
| amphitheater | a theater consisting of a stage area surrounded by a semicircle of tiered seats. |
| couplet | In a poem, a pair of lines that are the same length and usually rhyme and form a complete thought |
| accent | There is a normal pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables associated with each word in a language |
| epistrophe | successive phrases, lines, or clauses that repeat the same word or words at their ends. |
| denotation | the literal, dictionary definition of a word |
| metonymy | A figure of speech involving the substitution of one noun for another of which it is an attribute or which is closely associated with it, e.g., "the kettle boils" or "he drank the cup." Metonymy is very similar to synecdoche. |
| low comedy | Low comedy is a type of comedy characterized by "horseplay", slapstick or farce |
| exordium | In Western classical rhetoric, the exordium was the introductory portion of an oration |
| image | an expression that describes a literal sensation, whether of hearing, seeing, touching, tasting, and feeling. |
| conjunction | A word used to connect words or constructions |
| gonzo journalism | Gonzo journalism is a style of journalism that is written subjectively, often including the reporter as part of the story via a first-person narrative |
| narrative | Telling a story |
| parallelism | The repetition of syntactical similarities in passages closely connected for rhetorical effect, as in Pope's An Epistle to Dr |
| anglican church | The Protestant Church in England that originated when King Henry VIII broke his ties to the Vatican in Rome (the Catholic Church). |
| sich verhalten | (German) to behave, to act, to be |
| meter | Meter is the arrangement of a line of poetry by the number of syllables and the rhythm of stressed syllables. |
| regionalism | In literature, regionalism or local color fictionality refers to fiction or poetry that focuses on specific features – including characters, dialects, customs, history, and topography – of a particular region. |
| flashback | A method of narration in which present action is temporarily interrupted so that the reader can witness past events--usually in the form of a character's memories, dreams, narration, or even authorial commentary (such as saying, "But back when King Arthur had been a child |
| archaism | using obsolete or archaic words when current alternatives are available. |
| loose sentence | A loose sentence is a type of sentence in which the main idea (independent clause) comes first, followed by dependent grammatical units such as phrases and clauses |
| apothegm | An adage (pronounced /ˈædɨdʒ/), or adagium (Latin), is a short but memorable saying which holds some important fact of experience that is considered true by many people, or that has gained some credibility through its long use |
| caesura | A natural pause in the speaking voice, which may be short or (as between sentences) longEnd-stopped line A verse line ending with a pauseRun-on line A verse line "running on" into the next lineEnjambment The thrust of an incompleted sentence continuing over the end of one verse line |
| ellipsis | The non-metrical omission of letters or words whose absence does not impede the reader's ability to understand the expression |
| theme | as do the suggestions of dissolution, depression, and mortality in John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale |
| semiotic literary criticism | Semiotic literary criticism, also called literary semiotics, is the approach to literary criticism informed by the theory of signs or semiotics |
| shoegazing | a style of music that emerged in the UK in the late 1980s characterised by the use of distortion and the fuzzbox, droning riffs and a Phil Spector-esque wall of sound from the noisy guitars |
| harlem renaissance | Neoclassical Period: See Neoclassicism |
| irony | Stating something by saying another quite different thing, sometimes its opposite |
| prothalamion | or Villon's "Des Dames du Temps Jadis |
| motif | it is preferable to recognize the difference between the two terms. |
| verso | See discussion under quarto or examine this chart. |
| sonnet | Originated by Giacomo de Lentino in the 13th century, it is one of the world's most famous and most taught poetic forms, known for its 14-line lengths and variable rhyme schemes |
| sestina | A fixed form consisting of six 6-line (usually unrhymed) stanzas in which the end words of the first stanza recur as end words of the following five stanzas in a successively rotating order and as the middle and end words of each of the lines of a concluding envoi in the form of a tercet |
| non-fiction novel | The non-fiction novel or faction is a literary genre which, broadly speaking, depicts real events narrated with techniques of fiction |
| preposition | A part of speech which indicates a connection, between two other parts of speech, such as 'to', 'with', 'by' or 'from' |
| canzone | A predecessor of the sonnet, with a poem-verse form consisting of stanzas written in 10- to 12-syllable lines, without a refrain and used in three ways: tragic, comic, and elegiac |
| primal scene | In psychoanalysis, the primal scene is the initial witnessing by a child of a sex act, usually between the parents, that traumatizes the psychosexual development of that child |
| eschatology | The branch of religious philosophy or theology focusing on the end of time, the afterlife, and the Last Judgment |
| verisimilitude | Verisimilitude, with the meaning ˝of being true or real˝ is a likeness or resemblance of the truth, reality or a fact's probability |
| syllogism | A syllogism (Greek: συλλογισμός – syllogismos – "conclusion," "inference") or logical appeal is a kind of logical argument in which one proposition (the conclusion) is inferred from two others (the premises) of a certain form, i.e |
| symbolism | Frequent use of words, places, characters, or objects that mean something beyond what they are on a literal level |
| periphrasis | using a wordy phrase to describe something for which one term exists. |
| enjambement | the running over of a sentence or phrase from one verse to the next, without terminal punctuation, hence not end-stopped |
| anastrophe | Hypallage) (Compare Envelope, Palindrome) |
| revenge tragedy | Tragic Flaw: In a tragedy, the quality within the hero or heroine which leads to his or her downfall |
| syllable | The smallest unit of speech that normally occurs in isolation, or a distinct sound element within a word |
| resolution | the final phase of the falling action in plot when things are returned to normal |
| simile | A figure of speech in which two things are compared using the word “like” or “as.” An example of a simile using like occurs in Langston Hughes's poem “Harlem”: “What happens to a dream deferred?/ Does it dry up/ like a raisin in the sun?” |
| canticle | A hymn or religious song using words from any part of the Bible except the Psalms. |
| drama | a literary genre consisting of works in which action is performed and all words are spoken before an audience by an actor or actors impersonating the characters |
| sound devices | and syntactic |
| carpe diem | A Latin phrase which translated means "Sieze (Catch) the day," meaning "Make the most of today." The phrase originated as the title of a poem by the RomanHorace (65 B.C.E.-8B.C.E.) and caught on as a theme with such English poets as Robert Herrick and Andrew Marvell |
| sica | a variation on the Puerto Rican bomba |
| aleatory verse | Uses chance (random words from a book, etc) to determine word choice. |
| aphesis | the omission of the initial syllable of a word |
| allusion | a reference to another literary / artistic/ historic, work, author, character, or event (frequently biblical or mythological) |
| simile | A comparison which uses the words ‘like’ or ‘as’, for example ‘And bent nails/ dance all over the surfacing/like maggots’ (Love Song: I and Thou by Alan Dugan). |
| sixteen-bar blues | a blues chord progression very similar to the eight bar blues form, except that blues is not traditionally associated with any set notation so sometimes it can be called sixteen bars instead of eight |
| simile | a comparison between two objects or ideas which is introduced by 'like' or 'as' |
| catachresis | Malapropism, Mixed Metaphor, Oxymoron, Paradox, Solecism, Synesthesia) (Compare Hypallage) |
| bouts-rimés | Bouts-Rimés, literally (from the French) "rhymed-ends", is the name given to a kind of poetic game defined by Addison, in the Spectator, as |
| metaphor | A figure of speech in which two things are compared, usually by saying one thing is another, or by substituting a more descriptive word for the more common or usual word that would be expected |
| sinfonie | (German f.) the name given by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) to his three-part contrapuntal works for keyboard but which, today, are called three-part inventions |
| epistle | A verse epistle imitates the form of a personal letter, addressed to someone in particular, often very personal and occasional, and sometimes dated, with a location affixed |
| didactic poetry | Poetry which is clearly intended for the purpose of instruction -- to impart theoretical, moral, or practical knowledge, or to explain the principles of some art or science, as Virgil's Georgics, or Pope's An Essay on Criticism. |
| stichomythia | dialogue in alternate verse-lines. |
| high comedy | Elegant comedies characterized by witty banter and sophisticated dialogue rather than the slapstick physicality and blundering common to low comedy. |
| lexis | In linguistics, a lexis (from the Greek: λέξις "word") is the total word-stock or lexicon having items of lexical rather than grammatical, meaning |
| leaf - bookbinding | Bookbinding is the process of physically assembling a book from a number of folded or unfolded sheets of paper or other material |
| hypotaxis | Hypotaxis is the grammatical arrangement of functionally similar but "unequal" constructs (hypo="beneath", taxis="arrangement"), i.e., constructs playing an unequal role in a sentence. |
| personification | An anthropomorphic figure of speech where the poet describes an abstraction, a thing, or a non-human form as if it were a person |
| euphemism | A mild word of phrase which substitutes for another which would be undesirable because it is too direct, unpleasant, or offensive |
| recognition | the point near the end of a classic tragedy when the protagonist recognizes the causes and consequences of his reversal |
| metaphor | A metaphor is a figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance |
| couplet | Two consecutive lines of poetry which are paired in length or rhyme, for example ‘I was angry with my friend: I told my wrath, my wrath did end’ (A Poison Tree by William Blake). |
| villain | a character who not only opposes the hero or heroine (and is thus an antagonist) but also is characterized as an especially evil person or "bad guy." |
| falling action | the action which follows the crisis and climax (see also catastrophe, denouement, resolution, catharsis) |
| pentameter | so called for its use in the composition of epic |
| sheets of sound | a term coined in 1958 by Down Beat magazine jazz critic Ira Gitler to describe the new, unique style of John Coltrane |
| epistle | An epistle (pronounced /i'pis.l/; Greek ἐπιστολή, epistolē, 'letter') is a writing directed or sent to a person or group of people, usually an elegant and formal didactic letter |
| canon | In a literary sense, the authoritative works of a particular writer; also, an accepted list of works perceived to represent a cultural, ideological, historical, or biblical grouping. |
| hypermetric | a verse with one or more syllables than the metre calls for, a line with metrically redundant syllables. |
| gallery | The elevated seating areas at the back and sides of a theater. |
| paraphrase | to record someone elses words in the writers own words |
| catharsis | An emotional discharge that brings about a moral or spiritual renewal or welcome relief from tension and anxiety |
| sgallinacciare | (Italian, from gallinaccio, a turkey-cock) to crow |
| copyright notice | Please respect the fact that all the material on this site is copyright © Sydney University Library and the individual authors and copyright owners |
| maxim - saying | A saying is something that is said, notable in one respect or another, to be "a pithy expression of wisdom or truth." |
| interpretation | an analysis of a work to determine its meaning |
| medieval theatre | Medieval theatre refers to the theatre of Europe between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the beginning of the Renaissance |
| closed form | A form of verse with fixed stanza length, rhyme scheme, and other features. |
| innuendo | An innuendo is a baseless invention of thoughts or ideas |
| asyndeton | which omits conjunctions; zeugma and syllepsis, which use one word to serve for two; and aposiopesis, which omits a word or phrase at the end of a clause or sentence for effect. |
| simadan | the name given on Bonaire to what is known as seú elsewhere in the Dutch Antilles |
| romanticism | the late 18th-century, early 19th-century period of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and Byron. |
| alliosis | While presenting a reader with only two alternatives may result in the logical fallacy known as false dichotomy or either/or fallacy, creating a parallel sentence using two alternatives in parallel structure can be an effective device rhetorically and artistically |
| epilogue | (1) in fiction, a short section or chapter that comes after the conclusion, tying up loose ends and often describing what happens to the characters after the resolution of the conflict; (2) in drama, a short speech, often addressed directly to the audience, delivered by a character at the end of a play. |
| biography | The story of a person's life written by someone other than the subject of the work |
| characterization | The method a writer uses to reveal the personality of a character in a literary work: Methods may include (1) by what the character says about himself or herself; (2) by what others reveal about the character; and (3) by the character's own actions |
| foot | A basic unit of poetry, consisting of two or three stressed and / or unstressed syllablesMetre Recurrence of regular, approximately equal, units or feetScansion Analysis of stressed and unstressed syllables, to determine a line's division into metrical feet |
| extended metaphor | A metaphor which is drawn-out beyond the usual word or phrase to extend throughout a stanza or an entire poem, usually by using multiple comparisons between the unlike objects or ideas. |
| polysyndeton | Using many conjunctions to achieve an overwhelming effect in a sentence |
| line | A unit of verse whose length is prescribed by a criterion other than the right-hand margin of the page (e.g., a certain length in syllables, meeting a boundary rhyming word, completing a phrase). |
| virgule - slash | The slash is a sign, "/", used as a punctuation mark and for various other purposes |
| anastrophe | Chiasmus) |
| single | single thing (single room in a hotel, a ticket valid for an outward journey, pop record with one item on each side, game with only one person on each side), unmarried person |
| couplet | a rhymed pair of lines, which are usually of the same length |
| parody | a not-uncomplimentary send-up of another work, such as Geoffrey Chaucer's "Sir Thopas" in The Canterbury Tales |
| singular | singular word or form (as opposed to plural) |
| schism | A schism is a split or division in the church concerning religious belief or organizational structure--one in which a single church splits into two or more separate denominations--often hostile to each other |
| elision | Omission of words or parts of words. |
| scribe | A literate individual who reproduces the works of other authors by copying them from older texts or from a dictating author |
| historical novel | According to Encyclopædia Britannica, a historical novel is: "a novel that has as its setting a period of history and that attempts to convey the spirit, manners, and social conditions of a past age with realistic detail and fidelity (which is in some cases only apparent fidelity) to historical fact |
| ellesmere manuscript | Usually referred to as "the Ellesmere," this book is one of the most important surviving fifteenth-century manuscripts of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales |
| analogy | in Rhetoric |
| quantitative metre | A metrical system based on the length or 'weight' of syllables, rather than on stress |
| textuality | Textuality is a concept in linguistics and literary theory that refers to the attributes that distinguish the text (a technical term indicating any communicative content under analysis) as an object of study in those fields |
| apophasis | Denying one's intention to talk or write about a subject, but making the denial in such a way |
| assonance | Repetition of the same vowel sounds in words which follow each other, especially when the vowel is stressed, for example ‘Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud/The menacing scarred slope;’ (Attack by Siegfried Sassoon). |
| psychoanalytic theory | Psychoanalytic theory refers to the definition and dynamics of personality development which underlie and guide psychoanalytic and psychodynamic psychotherapy |
| falling action | During the falling action, or resolution, which is the moment of reversal after the climax, the conflict between the protagonist and the antagonist unravels, with the protagonist winning or losing against the antagonist |
| assonance | The repetition or a pattern of similar sounds, especially vowel sounds: “Thou still unravished bride of quietness,/Thou foster child of silence and slow time” (“Ode to a Grecian Urn,” John Keats). |
| couplet | Two lines--the second line immediately following the first--of the same metrical length that end in a rhyme to form a complete unit |
| onomatopoeia | An onomatopoeia or onomatopœia (Greek ὀνοματοποιία; ὄνομα for "name" and ποιέω for "I make", adjectival form: "onomatopoeic" or "onomatopoetic") is a word that imitates or suggests the source of the sound that it describes |
| gnomes | and proverbs |
| epilogue | A final section of a work which serves to conclude the whole. |
| voice | the personality or style of the writer or narrator that seems to come to life in the words |
| share-alike | a descriptive term used in the Creative Commons project for copyright licenses which include certain copyleft provisions |
| homily | A homily is a commentary that follows a reading of scripture |
| nonsense verse | Lines that read like word-salad, where individually the terms may be recognizable but in their order and grammatical relations make no sense, or where common words accompany neologisms in expressions intended to mystify and amuse |
| occupatio | a figure of rhetoric where a writer explains that he or she will not have time or space to say something but then goes on to say that thing anyway, possibly at length. |
| ode | Originated by Sappho and Pindar, and featuring elaborate stanza structures and stateliness in tone and style, plus lofty sentiments and thoughts |
| apostrophe | Words that are spoken to a person who is absent or imaginary, or to an object or abstract idea |
| anapodoton | Deliberately creating a sentence fragment by the omission of a clause: "If only you came with me!" If only students knew what anapodoton was! Good writers never use sentence fragments? Ah, but they can |
| antistrophe | Chiasmus, Hypallage) |
| chant royale | A complex French form of the ballade, having various forms. |
| homonym | Paronym, Synonym) |
| enjambment | The continuation of a complete idea (a sentence or clause) from one line or couplet of a poem to the next line or couplet without a pause |
| denotation | The minimal, strict definition of a word as found in a dictionary, disregarding any historical or emotional connotation |
| shao'er | Chinese earthenware whistle, often shaped like an animal |
| simulated glissandi | on some instruments (e.g., piano, harp), a bending of the tone or continuous sliding is not possible |
| sinhalese | also Singhalese, member of a Nothern Indian people now forming the majority of the population of Sri Lanka - also their language |
| analogy | The invocation of a similar but different instance to that which is being represented, in order to bring out its salient features through the comparison. |
| heroic verse | rhyming abababcc |
| trope | Trope has two meanings: (1) a rhetorical device or figure of speech involving shifts in the meaning of words--click on the tropes link for examples, (2) a short dialogue inserted into the church mass during the early Middle Ages as a sort of mini-drama. |
| end-stopped | Denoting a line of verse in which a logical or rhetorical pause occurs at the end of the line, usually marked with a period, comma, or semicolon. |
| gnomic poetry | Gnomic poetry consists of sententious maxims put into verse to aid the memory |
| tragicomedy | a play that combines the elements of tragedy and comedy |
| poetry | A form of speech or writing that harmonizes the music of its language with its subject |
| abecedarius | An abecedarius is an acrostic in which the first letter of every word, strophe or verse follows the order of the alphabet |
| imagery | but often applied to other elements, such as dramatic structure, rhythmic |
| elision | Omission of a consonant (e.g., "ere" for "ever") or a vowel (e.g., "tother" for "the other"), usually to achieve a metrical effect. |
| oulipo | Oulipo (French pronunciation: [ulipo], short for French: Ouvroir de littérature potentielle; roughly translated: "workshop of potential literature") is a loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians which seeks to create works using constrained writing techniques |
| onomatopoeia | The use of words or sounds which appear to resemble the sounds which they describe |
| macaronic language | Macaronic refers to text spoken or written using a mixture of languages, sometimes including bilingual puns, particularly when the languages are used in the same context (as opposed to different segments of a text being in different languages) |
| paralipsis | a figure of thought where less information is supplied than appears to be called for by the circumstances. |
| moral | a rule of conduct or a maxim for living (that is, a statement about how one should live or behave) communicated in a literary work |
| flat character | see character |
| pathetic fallacy | An expression that endows inanimate things with human feelings. |
| metafiction | a subgenre of works that playfully draw attention to their status as fiction in order to explore the nature of fiction and the role of authors and readers |
| conceit | An elaborate metaphor, artificially strained or far-fetched, in which the subject is compared with a simpler analogue usually chosen from nature or a familiar context |
| idealism | Imagism, Impressionism, Metaphysical, Realism, Romanticism, Symbolism) |
| euphony | Near Rhyme, Resonance, Sound Devices) (Compare Alliteration, Consonance, Modulation, Rhyme) |
| rhyme scheme | The pattern established by the arrangement of rhymes in a stanza or poem, generally described by using letters of the alphabet to denote the recurrence of rhyming lines, such as the ababbcc of the Rhyme Royal stanza form. |
| consonance | Consonance is the repetition of consonants or of a consonant pattern, especially at the ends of words. |
| unreliable narrator | see narrator |
| dieresis | The pronunciation of two adjacent vowels within a word as separate sounds rather than as a diphthong, as in coordinate; also, the mark indicating the separate pronunciation, as in naïve. |
| liturgical drama | Liturgical drama or religious drama, in its various Christian contexts, originates from the mass itself, and usually presents a relatively complex ritual that includes theatrical elements. |
| foot | Idiom: A word construction or verbal expression closely associated with a given language |
| shim sham | or sham, originally a particular tap dance routine, the dance is credited to Leonard Reed, who originally called it 'Goofus', or to Willie Bryant |
| couplet | A pair of successive rhyming lines, usually of the same length, termed "closed" when they form a bounded grammatical unit like a sentence, and termed "heroic" in 17th- and 18th-century verse when serious in subject, five-foot iambic in form, and holding a complete thought. |
| synonym | A synonym is a word that has the same or nearly the same meaning as another word in the language, such as joyful, elated, glad. |
| shoo fly | one of the big circle figures danced by all couples in one large circle facing the centre which are traditionally associated with square dancing |
| idealism | Imagism, Impressionism, Metaphysical, Objectivism, Realism, Symbolism) |
| periphrasis | some kennings are instances of metaphor |
| parallelism | two or more expressions that share traits, whether metrical, lexical, figurative, or grammatical, and can take the form of a list. |
| mosaic rhyme | A rhyme in which two or more words produce a multiple rhyme, either with two or more other words, as go for / no more, or with one longer word, as cop a plea / monopoly |
| didacticism | it is usually intended as a moral criticism directed against the injustice or social wrongs |
| syllabic verse | accentual-syllabic verse |
| light ending | Light ending may refer to: |
| letters - intellectual | An intellectual is a person who uses intelligence (thought and reason) and critical or analytical reasoning in either a professional or a personal capacity. |
| rhyme | A rhyme is a word that is identical to another in its terminal sound: 'while' is a rhyme for 'mile'. |
| deictic | words that point to particulars, as names and pronouns do for individual places and persons (such as Edwin Arlington Robinson's "Miniver Cheevy" and "Richard Cory"), and demonstrative-adjective-noun combinations (such as Benjamin Franklin King's "Here's that ten dollars that I owe" in "If I Should Die To-night") do for things. |
| shrew's fiddle | so-called because it was originally used in the 18th century as a way of punishing women who were caught bickering or fighting, it was found also in medieval Germany and Austria, where it was known as a Halsgeige (literally 'neck viola' or 'neck violin') originally made out of two pieces of wood fitted with a hinge and a lock at the front |
| meter | the more or less regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of poetry |
| rhetorical question | A rhetorical question is a figure of speech in the form of a question posed for its persuasive effect without the expectation of a reply (e.g.: "Why me?") Rhetorical questions encourage the listener to think about what the (often obvious) answer to the question must be |
| lost generation | The "Lost Generation" is a term used to refer to the generation that came of age during World War I |
| epithalamion | Lyric poem in praise of Hymen (the Greek god of marriage) or of a particular wedding, such as Edmund Spenser's "Epithalamion." |
| stress | a syllable uttered in a higher pitch than others |
| alliteration | Alliteration is the repetition of the same starting sound in several words of a sentence: Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper is an example of alliteration. |
| sierra | (Spanish f.) saw |
| shorthand | any system of rapid handwriting which can be used to transcribe the spoken word |
| epic | a long narrative poem, usually depicting the values of a culture through the adventures of a hero |
| elision | omission of a consonant (e.g., "ere" for "ever") or a vowel (e.g., "tother" for "the other"), usually to achieve a metrical effect. |
| trope | a general term for any figure of speech which alters the literal sense of a word or phrase: so metaphor, simile and allegory are all tropes, since they affect the meaning of words |
| stanza | 'A group of lines of verse (usually not less than four), arranged according to a definite scheme which regulates the number of lines, the metre, and (in rhymed poetry) the sequence of rhymes; normally forming a division of a song or poem consisting of a series of such groups constructed according to the same scheme' (OED) |
| chorus | (1) A group of singers who stand alongside or off stage from the principal performers in a dramatic or musical performance |
| monodrama | A monodrama (also Solospiel in German; "solo play") is a theatrical or operatic piece played by a single actor or singer, usually portraying one character. |
| trivium | In medieval universities, the trivium comprised the three subjects that were taught first: grammar, logic, and rhetoric |
| society verse | and verse with puns |
| abstract language | words which represent broad qualities or characteristics (e.g., interesting, good, fine, horrible, lovely) |
| simultaneity succession | in music and music theory a simultaneity succession is a series of different groups of pitches or pitch classes, each of which is played at the same time as the other pitches of its group |
| eponymous | having a name used in the title of a literary work |
| enjambment | When a sentence, phrase, or thought moves from one line to the next without stopping. |
| sistro | (Italian m.) or sistrum, an instrument invented in 17th-century Italy consisting of a series of small bells attached to a frame |
| terminus ad quem | The latest possible date that a literary work could have been written, a potential ending point for dating a manuscript or text |
| enjambment | A line ending in which the syntax, rhythm and thought are continued and completed in the next line, for example ‘With candles and with lanterns/throwing giant scorpion shadows/on the sun-baked walls/they searched for him’ (Night of the Scorpion by Nissem Ezekiel). |
| shibboleth | (Hebrew) a word that because of difficulties or variations in pronunciation may be used to distinguish or identify persons of different classes, districts, parties or sects |
| ambiguity | Applied to words and expressions, the state of being doubtful or indistinct in meaning or capable of being understood in more than one way, in the context in which it is used. |
| progymnasmata | Progymnasmata (Greek "fore-exercises", Latin praeexercitamina) are rhetorical exercises gradually leading the student to familiarity with the elements of rhetoric, in preparation for their own practice speeches (gymnasmata, "exercises") and ultimately their own orations. |
| atmosphere | the mood or pervasive feeling insinuated by a literary work. |
| reader-response criticism | Reader-response criticism is a school of literary theory that focuses on the reader (or "audience") and his or her experience of a literary work, in contrast to other schools and theories that focus attention primarily on the author or the content and form of the work. |
| caesura | A caesura is a distinct pause or break in the flow of a line of verse, usually towards the middle. |
| symbolic | and synesthetic |
| adverb | A word which qualifies or adds to the action of a verb: as in 'he ran quickly', or 'he ran fast' |
| tautology | A statement redundant in itself, such as "The stars, O astral bodies!" |
| haiku | The haiku is often described as a short non-rhyming poem, usually with a seasonal reference, with seventeen syllables, in three phrases of five, seven and five syllables. |
| epistrophe | Successive phrases, lines, or clauses that repeat the same word or words at their ends. |
| vulgate | The Vulgate is a late 4th-century Latin version of the Bible, and largely the result of the labors of St |
| sipsi | a wind instrument made out of bone, wood or reed |
| bowdlerize | Thomas Bowdler (pronounced /ˈbaʊdlər/) (11 July 1754 â€" 24 February 1825) was an English physician who published an expurgated edition of William Shakespeare's work, edited by his sister Harriet, intended to be more appropriate for 19th century women and children than the original. |
| anachronism | The placement of an event, person, or thing out of its proper chronological relationship, sometimes unintentional, but often deliberate as an exercise of poetic license. |
| sine wave | or 'sine tone', a signal put out by an oscillator in which the voltage or equivalent rises and fall smoothly and symmetrically, following the trigonometric formula for the sine function (i.e |
| plot summary | a brief recounting of the principal action of a work of fiction, drama, or narrative poetry, usually in the same order in which the action is recounted in the original work rather than in chronological order. |
| melic verse | usually irregular rather than uniform, generally of considerable length and sometimes continuous, sometimes divided in accordance with transitions of thought and mood in a complexity of stanzaic forms; it often has varying iambic line lengths with no fixed system of rhyme schemes and is always marked by the rich, intense expression of an elevated thought, often addressed to a praised person or object. |
| portmanteau word | Lewis Carroll's phrase for a neologism created by combining two existing words |
| sixteenth century dance | also called 'late Renaissance dance'; the sources for this period are English texts, formerly known as the 'Inns of Court manuscripts', and manuals of a number of Italian dancing masters |
| stress | A syllable uttered in a higher pitch than others |
| aufklärung | The German term for the philosophical movement called in English "the Enlightenment" or the Neoclassical movement |
| paraphrase | A brief restatement in one's own words of all or part of a literary or critical work, as opposed to quotation, in which one reproduces all or part of a literary or critical work word-for-word, exactly. |
| siter | a floor-standing plucked zither, smaller than the cemplung, each tuning, slendro and pelog, needing its own siter, which gives its name to a genre of Javanese traditional music called siteran |
| audience | An audience is a group of people who participate in a show or encounter a work of art, literature (in which they are called the "reader"), theatre, music or academics in any medium |
| tone | the attitude expressed by the writer toward the subject |