Allegory
A symbolic narrative in
which the surface details imply a secondary meaning. Allegory often takes the
form of a story in which the characters represent moral qualities. The most
famous example in English is John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, in which the
name of the central character, Pilgrim, epitomizes the book's allegorical
nature. Kay Boyle's story "Astronomer's Wife" and Christina
Rossetti's poem "Up-Hill" both contain allegorical elements.
Alliteration
The repetition of
consonant sounds, especially at the beginning of words. Example: "Fetched
fresh, as I suppose, off some sweet wood." Hopkins, "In the Valley of
the Elwy."
Anapest
Two unaccented syllables
followed by an accented one, as in com-pre-HEND or in-ter-VENE. An anapestic
meter rises to the accented beat as in Byron's lines from "The Destruction
of Sennacherib": "And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the
sea, / When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee."
Antagonist
A character or force
against which another character struggles. Creon is Antigone's antagonist in
Sophocles' play Antigone; Teiresias is the antagonist of Oedipus in Sophocles'
Oedipus the King.
Assonance
The repetition of similar
vowel sounds in a sentence or a line of poetry or prose, as in "I rose and
told him of my woe." Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd
Astronomer" contains assonantal "I's" in the following lines:
"How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, / Till rising and gliding
out I wander'd off by myself."
Aubade
A love lyric in which the
speaker complains about the arrival of the dawn, when he must part from his
lover. John Donne's "The Sun Rising" exemplifies this poetic genre.
Ballad
A narrative poem written
in four-line stanzas, characterized by swift action and narrated in a direct
style. The Anonymous medieval ballad, "Barbara Allan," exemplifies
the genre.
Blank verse
A line of poetry or prose
in unrhymed iambic pentameter. Shakespeare's sonnets, Milton's epic poem
Paradise Lost, and Robert Frost's meditative poems such as "Birches"
include many lines of blank verse. Here are the opening blank verse lines of
"Birches": When I see birches bend to left and right / Across the
lines of straighter darker trees, / I like to think some boy's been swinging
them.
Caesura
A strong pause within a
line of verse. The following stanza from Hardy's "The Man He Killed"
contains caesuras in the middle two lines:
He thought he'd 'list,
perhaps,
Off-hand-like--just as I--
Was out of work-had sold
his traps--
No other reason why.
Character
An imaginary person that
inhabits a literary work. Literary characters may be major or minor, static
(unchanging) or dynamic (capable of change). In Shakespeare's Othello,
Desdemona is a major character, but one who is static, like the minor character
Bianca. Othello is a major character who is dynamic, exhibiting an ability to
change.
Characterization
The means by which writers
present and reveal character. Although techniques of characterization are
complex, writers typically reveal characters through their speech, dress,
manner, and actions. Readers come to understand the character Miss Emily in
Faulkner's story "A Rose for Emily" through what she says, how she
lives, and what she does.
Climax
The turning point of the
action in the plot of a play or story. The climax represents the point of
greatest tension in the work. The climax of John Updike's "A&P,"
for example, occurs when Sammy quits his job as a cashier.
Closed form
A type of form or
structure in poetry characterized by regularity and consistency in such
elements as rhyme, line length, and metrical pattern. Frost's "Stopping By
Woods on a Snowy Evening" provides one of many examples. A single stanza
illustrates some of the features of closed form:
Whose woods these are I
think I know.
His house is in the
village though.
He will not see me
stopping here
To watch his woods fill up
with snow.
Complication
An intensification of the
conflict in a story or play. Complication builds up, accumulates, and develops
the primary or central conflict in a literary work. Frank O'Connor's story
"Guests of the Nation" provides a striking example, as does Ralph
Ellison's "Battle Royal."
Conflict
A struggle between
opposing forces in a story or play, usually resolved by the end of the work.
The conflict may occur within a character as well as between characters. Lady
Gregory's one-act play The Rising of the Moon exemplifies both types of
conflict as the Policeman wrestles with his conscience in an inner conflict and
confronts an antagonist in the person of the ballad singer.
Connotation
The associations called up
by a word that goes beyond its dictionary meaning. Poets, especially, tend to
use words rich in connotation. Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That
Good Night" includes intensely connotative language, as in these lines:
"Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright / Their frail deeds might
have danced in a green bay, / Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
Convention
A customary feature of a
literary work, such as the use of a chorus in Greek tragedy, the inclusion of
an explicit moral in a fable, or the use of a particular rhyme scheme in a
villanelle. Literary conventions are defining features of particular literary
genres, such as novel, short story, ballad, sonnet, and play.
Couplet
A pair of rhymed lines
that may or may not constitute a separate stanza in a poem. Shakespeare's
sonnets end in rhymed couplets, as in "For thy sweet love remembered such
wealth brings / That then I scorn to change my state with kings."
Dactyl
A stressed syllable
followed by two unstressed ones, as in FLUT-ter-ing or BLUE-ber-ry. The
following playful lines illustrate double dactyls, two dactyls per line:
Higgledy, piggledy,
Emily Dickinson
Gibbering, jabbering.
Denotation
The dictionary meaning of
a word. Writers typically play off a word's denotative meaning against its
connotations, or suggested and implied associational implications. In the
following lines from Peter Meinke's "Advice to My Son" the references
to flowers and fruit, bread and wine denote specific things, but also suggest
something beyond the literal, dictionary meanings of the words:
To be specific, between
the peony and rose
Plant squash and spinach,
turnips and tomatoes;
Beauty is nectar and
nectar, in a desert, saves--
and always serve bread
with your wine.
But, son, always serve
wine.
Denouement
The resolution of the plot
of a literary work. The denouement of Hamlet takes place after the catastrophe,
with the stage littered with corpses. During the denouement Fortinbras makes an
entrance and a speech, and Horatio speaks his sweet lines in praise of Hamlet.
Dialogue
The conversation of
characters in a literary work. In fiction, dialogue is typically enclosed
within quotation marks. In plays, characters' speech is preceded by their
names.
Diction
The selection of words in
a literary work. A work's diction forms one of its centrally important literary
elements, as writers use words to convey action, reveal character, imply
attitudes, identify themes, and suggest values. We can speak of the diction
particular to a character, as in Iago's and Desdemona's very different ways of
speaking in Othello. We can also refer to a poet's diction as represented over
the body of his or her work, as in Donne's or Hughes's diction.
Elegy
A lyric poem that laments
the dead. Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays" is elegiac in tone.
A more explicitly identified elegy is W.H. Auden's "In Memory of William
Butler Yeats" and his "Funeral Blues."
Elision
The omission of an
unstressed vowel or syllable to preserve the meter of a line of poetry.
Alexander uses elision in "Sound and Sense": "Flies o'er th'
unbending corn...."
Enjambment
A run-on line of poetry in
which logical and grammatical sense carries over from one line into the next.
An enjambed line differs from an end-stopped line in which the grammatical and
logical sense is completed within the line. In the opening lines of Robert
Browning's "My Last Duchess," for example, the first line is end-stopped
and the second enjambed:
That's my last Duchess
painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were
alive. I call
That piece a wonder,
now....
Epic
A long narrative poem that
records the adventures of a hero. Epics typically chronicle the origins of a
civilization and embody its central values. Examples from western literature
include Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, and Milton's Paradise Lost.
Epigram
A brief witty poem, often
satirical. Alexander Pope's "Epigram Engraved on the Collar of a Dog"
exemplifies the genre:
I am his Highness' dog at
Kew; Pray tell me,
sir, whose dog are you?
Exposition
The first stage of a
fictional or dramatic plot, in which necessary background information is
provided. Ibsen's A Doll's House, for instance, begins with a conversation
between the two central characters, a dialogue that fills the audience in on
events that occurred before the action of the play begins, but which are
important in the development of its plot.
Falling action
In the plot of a story or
play, the action following the climax of the work that moves it towards its
denouement or resolution. The falling action of Othello begins after Othello
realizes that Iago is responsible for plotting against him by spurring him on
to murder his wife, Desdemona.
Falling meter
Poetic meters such as
trochaic and dactylic that move or fall from a stressed to an unstressed
syllable. The nonsense line, "Higgledy, piggledy," is dactylic, with
the accent on the first syllable and the two syllables following falling off
from that accent in each word. Trochaic meter is represented by this line:
"Hip-hop, be-bop, treetop--freedom."
Fiction
An imagined story, whether
in prose, poetry, or drama. Ibsen's Nora is fictional, a
"make-believe" character in a play, as are Hamlet and Othello. Characters
like Robert Browning's Duke and Duchess from his poem "My Last
Duchess" are fictional as well, though they may be based on actual
historical individuals. And, of course, characters in stories and novels are
fictional, though they, too, may be based, in some way, on real people. The
important thing to remember is that writers embellish and embroider and alter
actual life when they use real life as the basis for their work. They
fictionalize facts, and deviate from real-life situations as they "make
things up."
Figurative language
A form of language use in
which writers and speakers convey something other than the literal meaning of
their words. Examples include hyperbole or exaggeration, litotes or
understatement, simile and metaphor, which employ comparison, and synecdoche
and metonymy, in which a part of a thing stands for the whole.
Flashback
An interruption of a
work's chronology to describe or present an incident that occurred prior to the
main time frame of a work's action. Writers use flashbacks to complicate the
sense of chronology in the plot of their works and to convey the richness of
the experience of human time. Faulkner's story "A Rose for Emily"
includes flashbacks.
Foil
A character who contrasts
and parallels the main character in a play or story. Laertes, in Hamlet, is a
foil for the main character; in Othello, Emilia and Bianca are foils for Desdemona.
Foot
A metrical unit composed
of stressed and unstressed syllables. For example, an iamb or iambic foot is
represented by ˘', that is, an unaccented syllable followed by an accented one.
Frost's line "Whose woods these are I think I know" contains four
iambs, and is thus an iambic foot.
Foreshadowing
Hints of what is to come
in the action of a play or a story. Ibsen's A Doll's House includes
foreshadowing as does Synge's Riders to the Sea. So, too, do Poe's "Cask
of Amontillado" and Chopin's "Story of an Hour."
Free verse
Poetry without a regular
pattern of meter or rhyme. The verse is "free" in not being bound by
earlier poetic conventions requiring poems to adhere to an explicit and
identifiable meter and rhyme scheme in a form such as the sonnet or ballad.
Modern and contemporary poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries often
employ free verse. Williams's "This Is Just to Say" is one of many
examples.
Hyperbole
A figure of speech
involving exaggeration. John Donne uses hyperbole in his poem: "Song: Go
and Catch a Falling Star."
Iamb
An unstressed syllable
followed by a stressed one, as in to-DAY. See Foot.
Image
A concrete representation
of a sense impression, a feeling, or an idea. Imagery refers to the pattern of
related details in a work. In some works one image predominates either by
recurring throughout the work or by appearing at a critical point in the plot.
Often writers use multiple images throughout a work to suggest states of
feeling and to convey implications of thought and action. Some modern poets,
such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, write poems that lack
discursive explanation entirely and include only images. Among the most famous
examples is Pound's poem "In a Station of the Metro":
The apparition of these
faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black
bough.
Imagery
The pattern of related
comparative aspects of language, particularly of images, in a literary work.
Imagery of light and darkness pervade James Joyce's stories "Araby,"
"The Boarding House," and "The Dead." So, too, does
religious imagery.
Irony
A contrast or discrepancy
between what is said and what is meant or between what happens and what is
expected to happen in life and in literature. In verbal irony, characters say
the opposite of what they mean. In irony of circumstance or situation, the
opposite of what is expected occurs. In dramatic irony, a character speaks in
ignorance of a situation or event known to the audience or to the other
characters. Flannery O'Connor's short stories employ all these forms of irony,
as does Poe's "Cask of Amontillado."
Literal language
A form of language in
which writers and speakers mean exactly what their words denote. See Figurative
language, Denotation, and Connotation.
Lyric poem
A type of poem
characterized by brevity, compression, and the expression of feeling. Most of
the poems in this book are lyrics. The anonymous "Western Wind"
epitomizes the genre:
Western wind, when will
thou blow,
The small rain down can
rain?
Christ, if my love were in
my arms
And I in my bed again!
Metaphor
A comparison between
essentially unlike things without an explicitly comparative word such as like
or as. An example is "My love is a red, red rose,"
From Burns's "A Red,
Red Rose." Langston Hughes's "Dream Deferred" is built entirely
of metaphors. Metaphor is one of the most important of literary uses of
language. Shakespeare employs a wide range of metaphor in his sonnets and his
plays, often in such density and profusion that readers are kept busy analyzing
and interpreting and unraveling them. Compare Simile.
Meter
The measured pattern of
rhythmic accents in poems. See Foot and Iamb.
Metonymy
A figure of speech in
which a closely related term is substituted for an object or idea. An example:
"We have always remained loyal to the crown." See Synecdoche.
Narrative poem
A poem that tells a story.
See Ballad.
Narrator
The voice and implied
speaker of a fictional work, to be distinguished from the actual living author.
For example, the narrator of Joyce's "Araby" is not James Joyce
himself, but a literary fictional character created expressly to tell the
story. Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" contains a communal narrator,
identified only as "we." See Point of view.
Octave
An eight-line unit, which
may constitute a stanza; or a section of a poem, as in the octave of a sonnet.
Ode
A long, stately poem in
stanzas of varied length, meter, and form. Usually a serious poem on an exalted
subject, such as Horace's "Eheu fugaces," but sometimes a more
lighthearted work, such as Neruda's "Ode to My Socks."
Onomatopoeia
The use of words to
imitate the sounds they describe. Words such as buzz and crack are
onomatopoetic. The following line from Pope's "Sound and Sense" onomatopoetically
imitates in sound what it describes:
When Ajax strives some
rock's vast weight to throw,
The line too labors, and
the words move slow.
Most often, however,
onomatopoeia refers to words and groups of words, such as Tennyson's
description of the "murmur of innumerable bees," which attempts to
capture the sound of a swarm of bees buzzing.
Open form
A type of structure or
form in poetry characterized by freedom from regularity and consistency in such
elements as rhyme, line length, metrical pattern, and overall poetic structure.
E.E. Cummings's "[Buffalo Bill's]" is one example. See also Free
verse.
Parody
A humorous, mocking
imitation of a literary work, sometimes sarcastic, but often playful and even
respectful in its playful imitation. Examples include Bob McKenty's parody of
Frost's "Dust of Snow" and Kenneth Koch's parody of Williams's
"This is Just to Say."
Personification
The endowment of inanimate
objects or abstract concepts with animate or living qualities. An example:
"The yellow leaves flaunted their color gaily in the breeze."
Wordsworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud" includes personification.
Plot
The unified structure of
incidents in a literary work. See Conflict, Climax, Denouement, andFlashback.
Point of view
The angle of vision from
which a story is narrated. See Narrator. A work's point of view can be: first
person, in which the narrator is a character or an observer, respectively;
objective, in which the narrator knows or appears to know no more than the reader;
omniscient, in which the narrator knows everything about the characters; and
limited omniscient, which allows the narrator to know some things about the
characters but not everything.
Protagonist
The main character of a
literary work--Hamlet and Othello in the plays named after them, Gregor Samsa
in Kafka's Metamorphosis, Paul in Lawrence's "Rocking-Horse Winner."
Pyrrhic
A metrical foot with two
unstressed syllables ("of the").
Quatrain
A four-line stanza in a
poem, the first four lines and the second four lines in a Petrachan sonnet. A
Shakespearean sonnet contains three quatrains followed by a couplet.
Recognition
The point at which a
character understands his or her situation as it really is. Sophocles' Oedipus
comes to this point near the end of Oedipus the King; Othello comes to a
similar understanding of his situation in Act V of Othello.
Resolution
The sorting out or
unraveling of a plot at the end of a play, novel, or story. See Plot.
Reversal
The point at which the
action of the plot turns in an unexpected direction for the protagonist.
Oedipus's and Othello's recognitions are also reversals. They learn what they
did not expect to learn. See Recognition and also Irony.
Rhyme
The matching of final
vowel or consonant sounds in two or more words. The following stanza of
"Richard Cory" employs alternate rhyme, with the third line rhyming
with the first and the fourth with the second:
Whenever Richard Cory went
down town,
We people on the pavement
looked at him;
He was a gentleman from
sole to crown
Clean favored and
imperially slim.
Rhythm
The recurrence of accent
or stress in lines of verse. In the following lines from "Same in
Blues" by Langston Hughes, the accented words and syllables are
underlined:
I said to my baby,
Baby take it slow....
Lulu said to Leonard
I want a diamond ring
Rising action
A set of conflicts and
crises that constitute the part of a play's or story's plot leading up to the
climax. See Climax, Denouement, and Plot.
Rising meter
Poetic meters such as
iambic and anapestic that move or ascend from an unstressed to a stressed
syllable. See Anapest, Iamb, and Falling meter.
Satire
A literary work that
criticizes human misconduct and ridicules vices, stupidities, and follies.
Swift's Gulliver's Travels is a famous example. Chekhov's Marriage Proposal and
O'Connor's "Everything That Rises Must Converge," have strong
satirical elements.
Sestet
A six-line unit of verse
constituting a stanza or section of a poem; the last six lines of an Italian
sonnet. Examples: Petrarch's "If it is not love, then what is it that I
feel," and Frost's "Design."
Sestina
A poem of thirty-nine
lines and written in iambic pentameter. Its six-line stanza repeat in an
intricate and prescribed order the final word in each of the first six lines.
After the sixth stanza, there is a three-line envoi, which uses the six
repeating words, two per line.
Setting
The time and place of a
literary work that establish its context. The stories of Sandra Cisneros are
set in the American southwest in the mid to late 20th century, those of James
Joyce in Dublin, Ireland in the early 20th century.
Simile
A figure of speech
involving a comparison between unlike things using like, as, or as though. An
example: "My love is like a red, red rose."
Sonnet
A fourteen-line poem in
iambic pentameter. The Shakespearean or English sonnet is arranged as three
quatrains and a final couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg. The Petrarchan or
Italian sonnet divides into two parts: an eight-line octave and a six-line
sestet, rhyming abba abba cde cde or abba abba cd cd cd.
Spondee
A metricalfoot represented
by two stressed syllables, such as KNICK-KNACK.
Stanza
A division or unit of a
poem that is repeated in the same form--either with similar or identical patterns
or rhyme and meter, or with variations from one stanza to another. The stanzas
of Gertrude Schnackenberg's "Signs" are regular; those of Rita Dove's
"Canary" are irregular.
Style
The way an author chooses
words, arranges them in sentences or in lines of dialogue or verse, and
develops ideas and actions with description, imagery, and other literary
techniques. See Connotation, Denotation, Diction, Figurative language, Image,
Imagery, Irony, Metaphor, Narrator, Point of view, Syntax, and Tone.
Subject
What a story or play is
about; to be distinguished from plot and theme. Faulkner's "A Rose for
Emily" is about the decline of a particular way of life endemic to the
American south before the civil war. Its plot concerns how Faulkner describes and
organizes the actions of the story's characters. Its theme is the overall
meaning Faulkner conveys.
Subplot
A subsidiary or
subordinate or parallel plot in a play or story that coexists with the main
plot. The story of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern forms a subplot with the
overall plot of Hamlet.
Symbol
An object or action in a
literary work that means more than itself, that stands for something beyond
itself. The glass unicorn in The Glass Menagerie, the rocking horse in
"The Rocking-Horse Winner," the road in Frost's "The Road Not
Taken"--all are symbols in this sense.
Synecdoche
A figure of speech in
which a part is substituted for the whole. An example: "Lend me a
hand." See Metonymy.
Syntax
The grammatical order of
words in a sentence or line of verse or dialogue. The organization of words and
phrases and clauses in sentences of prose, verse, and dialogue. In the
following example, normal syntax (subject, verb, object order) is inverted:
"Whose woods these
are I think I know."
Tercet
A three-line stanza, as
the stanzas in Frost's "Acquainted With the Night" and Shelley's
"Ode to the West Wind." The three-line stanzas or sections that
together constitute the sestet of a Petrarchan or Italian sonnet.
Theme
The idea of a literary
work abstracted from its details of language, character, and action, and cast
in the form of a generalization. See discussion of Dickinson's "Crumbling
is not an instant's Act."
Tone
The implied attitude of a
writer toward the subject and characters of a work, as, for example, Flannery
O'Connor's ironic tone in her "Good Country People." See Irony.
Trochee
An accented syllable
followed by an unaccented one, as in FOOT-ball.
Understatement
A figure of speech in
which a writer or speaker says less than what he or she means; the opposite of
exaggeration. The last line of Frost's "Birches" illustrates this
literary device: "One could do worse than be a swinger of birches."
Villanelle
A nineteen-line lyric poem
that relies heavily on repetition. The first and third lines alternate
throughout the poem, which is structured in six stanzas --five tercets and a
concluding quatrain. Examples include Bishop's "One Art," Roethke's
"The Waking," and Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good
Night."
