* The following literary terms are listed alphabetically.

Allegory

An allegory is a narrative, whether in prose or verse, in which the agents and actions, and sometimes the setting as well, are contrived by the author to make coherent sense on the “literal,” or primary, level of signification, and at the same time to signify a second, correlated order of signification.

We can distinguish two main types: (1) Historical and political allegory, in which the characters and actions that are signified literally in their turn represent, or “allegorize,” historical personages and events. So in John Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel(1681), King David represents Charles II, Absalom represents his natural son the Duke of Monmouth, and the biblical story of Absalom’s rebellion againsthis father (2 Samuel 13-18) allegorizes the rebellion of Monmouth against King Charles. (2) The allegory of ideas, in which the literal characters represent concepts and the plot allegorizes an abstract doctrine or thesis. Both types of allegory may either be sustained throughout a work, as in Absalom and Achitophel and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), or else serve merely as an episode in a nonallegorical work. A famed example of episodic allegory is the encounter of Satan with his daughter Sin, as well as with Death—who is represented allegorically as the son born of their incestuous relationship—in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Book II (1667).

In the second type, the sustained allegory of ideas, the central device is the personification of abstract entities such as virtues, vices, states of mind, modes of life, and types of character. In explicit allegories, such reference is specified by the names given to characters and places. Thus Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress allegorizes the Christian doctrine of salvation by telling how the character named Christian, warned by Evangelist, flees the City of Destruction and makes his way laboriously to the Celestial City; enroute he encounters characters with names like Faithful, Hopeful, and the Giant Despair, and passes through places like the Slough of Despond, the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and Vanity Fair. A passage from this work indicates the nature of an explicit allegorical narrative:

Now as Christian was walking solitary by himself, he espied one afar off

come crossing over the field to meethim; and their hap was to meet just

as they were crossing the way of each other. The Gentleman’s name was

Mr. Worldly-Wiseman; he dwelt in the Town of Carnal-Policy a very

great Town, and also hard by from whence Christian came.

Analepsis

It is a form of anachrony by which some of the events of a story are related at a point in the narrative after later story-events have already been recounted. Commonl yreferred to as retrospection or flashback, analepsis enables a storyteller to fill in background information about characters and events. A narrative that begins in medias res will include an analeptic account of events preceding the point at which the tale began.

Analogy

It can be defined as an illustration of an idea by means of a more familiar idea that is similar or parallel to it in some significant features, and thus said to be analogous to it. Analogies are often presented in the form of an extended simile, as in Blake’s aphorism: ‘As the caterpillarchooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.’ In literary history, an analogues if another story or plotwhich is parallel or similar in some way to the story under discussion.

Antagonist

It is the most prominent of the characterswho oppose the protagonist or hero(ine) in a dramatic or narrative work. The antagonist is often a villain seeking to frustrate a heroine or hero; but in those works in which the protagonist is represented as evil, the antagonist will often be a virtuous or sympathetic character, as Macduff is in Macbeth.

Antihero

The chief person in a modern novel or play whose character is widely discrepant from that which we associate with the traditional protagonist or hero of a serious literary work. Instead of manifesting largeness, dignity, power, or heroism, the antihero is petty, ignominious, passive, ineffectual, or dishonest. The use of nonheroic protagonists occurs as early as the picaresque novel of the sixteenth century, and the heroine of Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) is a thief and a prostitute. The term “antihero,” however, is usually applied to writings in the period of disillusion after the Second World War, beginning with such protagonists as we find in John Wain’s Hurry on Down (1953) and Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim (1954). Notable later instances in the novel are Yossarian in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), Humbert Humbertin Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), and Tyrone Slothrop in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). The antihero is especially conspicuous in dramatic tragedy, in which the protagonist had usually been of high estate, dignity, and courage (see tragedy). Extreme instances are the characters who people a world stripped of certainties, values, or even meaning in Samuel Beckett’s dramas—the tramps Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot (1952) or the blind and paralyzed old man, Hamm, who is the protagonist in Endgame (1958). See literature of the absurd and blackcomedy, and refer to Ihab Hassan, “The Antihero in Modern British and American Fiction,” in Rumors of Change (1995).

Anti-novel

It is a form of experimental fiction that dispenses with certain traditional elements of novel-writing like the analysis of characters’ states of mind or the unfolding of a sequential plot. The term is usually associated with the French nouveau romanof Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Michel Butor in the 1950s, but has since been extended to include other kinds of fictional experiment that disrupt conventional narrative expectations, as in some works in English by Flann O’Brien, Vladimir Nabokov,B. S. Johnson, and Christine Brroke-Rose. Antecedents of the anti-novel can be found in the blank pages and comically self-defeating digressions of Stern’sTristram Shandy(1759-67) and in some of the innovations of modernism, like the absence of narration in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves(1931).

Bathos and Anticlimax

Bathos is Greek for “depth,” and it has been an indispensable term to critics since Alexander Pope, parodying the Greek Longinus’ famous essay On the Sublime (that is, “loftiness”), wrote in 1727 an essay On Bathos: Of the Art of Sinking in Poetry. With mock solemnity Pope assures his readers that he undertakes “to lead them as it were by the hand . . . the gentle down-hill way to Bathos; the bottom, the end, the central point, the non plus ultra, of true Modern Poesy!” The word ever since has been used for an unintentional descent in literature when, straining to be pathetic or passionate or elevated, the writer overshoots the mark and drops into the trivial or the ridiculous. Among his examples Pope cites “the modest request of two absent lovers” in a contemporary poem: Ye Gods! annihilate but Space and Time, And make two lovers happy. The slogan “For God, for Country,and for Yale!” is bathetic because it moves to intended climax (that is, anascending sequence of importance) in its rhetorical order, but to unintended descent in its reference—at least for someone who is not a Yale student. Even great poets sometimes fall unwittingly into the same rhetorical figure. In the early version of The Prelude (1805; Book IX), William Wordsworth, after recounting at length the tale of the starcrossed lovers Vaudracour and Julia, tells how Julia died, leaving Vaudracour to raise their infant son:

It consoled him here

To attend upon the Orphan and perform

The office of a Nurse to his young Child

Which after a short time by some mistake

Or indiscretion of the Father, died.

The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse, ed. D. B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee (rev. 1948), is a rich mine of unintended bathos.

Anticlimax is sometimes used as an equivalent of bathos; but in a more useful application, “anticlimax” is non-derogatory, and denotes a writer’s deliberate drop from the serious and elevated to the trivial and lowly, in order to achieve a comic or satiric effect. Thus Thomas Gray in his mock-heroic “Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat” (1748)—the cat had drowned when she tried to catch a goldfish—gravely inserts this moral observation:

What female heart can gold despise?

What cat’s averse to fish?

And in Don Juan (1819-24; I. ix.) Byron uses anticlimax to deflate the would-be gallantry of Juan’s father:

A better cavalier ne’er mounted horse,

Or, being mounted, e’er got down again.

Black Comedy

It is a kind of drama (or, by extension, a non-dramatic work) in which disturbing or sinister subjects like death, disease, or warfare, are treated with bitter amusement, usually in a manner calculated to offend and shock. Prominent in the theatre of the absurd, black comedy is also a feature of Joe Orton’s Loot (1965). A similar black humour is strongly evident in modern American fiction from Nathanael West’s A Cool Million (1934) to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).

Characterization

It is the representation of persons in narrative and dramatic works. This may include direct methods like the attribution of qualities from characters’ actions, speech, or appearance. Since E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927) a distinction has often been made between ‘flat’ and ‘two-dimensional’ characters, which are simple and unchanging, and ‘round’ character, which are complex, ‘dynamic’ (i.e. subject to development), and less predictable.

Dialogic

It is characterized or constituted by the interactive, responsive nature of dialogue rather than by the single-mindedness of monologue. The term is important in the writings of the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, whose book Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929) contrasts the dialogic or polyphonic interplay of various characters’ voices in Dostoevsky’s novels with the ‘monological’ subordination of characters to the single viewpoint of the author in Tolstoy’s. In the same year. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (probably by Bakhtin, although published under the name of V. N. Voloshinov) argued, against Saussure’s theory of la langue, that actual utterances are ‘dialogic’ in that they are embedded in a context of dialogue and thus respond to an interlocutor’s previous utterances and/or try to draw a particular response from a specific auditor.

Dream Vision

It is a kind of narrative (usually but not always in verse) in which the narrator falls asleep and dreams the events of the tale. The story is often a kind of allegory, and commonly consists of a tour of some marvellous realm, in which the dreamer is conducted and instructed by a guide, as Dante is led through hell by Virgil in his Divine Comedy (c. 1320)—the foremost example of the form. The dream vision was much favoured by medieval poets, most of them influenced by the 13th-century Roman de la rose by the French poets Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung. In English, Chaucer devoted much of his early work to dream visions, including The Parlement of Foules, while Langland wrote the more substantial Piers Plowman; another fine 14th-century example is the anonymous poem Pearl. Some later poets have adopted the conventions of the dream vision, as in Shelley’s The Triumph of Life (1824). Significant examples in prose include Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) and William Morris’s vision of socialism in News from Nowhere (1890).

Epiphany

It means “a manifestation,” or “showing forth,” and by Christian thinkers was used to signify a manifestation of God’s presence within the created world. In the early draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man entitled Stephen Hero (published posthumously in 1944), James Joyce adapted the term to secular experience, to signify a sudden sense of radiance and revelation that one may feel while perceiving a commonplace object. “By an epiphany [Stephen] meant a sudden spiritual manifestation.” “Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object. . .seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany.” Joyce’s short storiesand novels include a number of epiphanies; a climactic one is the revelation that Stephen experiences at the sight of the young girl wading on the shore of the sea in A Portrait of the Artist, chapter 4.

“Epiphany” has become the standard term for the description, frequent in modern poetry and prose fiction, of the sudden flare into revelation of an ordinary object or scene. Joyce, however, had merely substituted this word for what earlier authors had called the moment. Thus Shelley, in his Defense of Poetry (1821), described the “best and happiest moments . .. arising unforeseen and departing unbidden,” “visitations of the divinity,” which poetry “redeems from decay.” William Wordsworth was apre-eminent poet of what he called “moments,” or in more elaborate cases, “spots of time.” For examples of short poems which represent a moment of revelation, see Wordsworth’s “The Two April Mornings” and “The Solitary Reaper.” Wordsworth’s Prelude, like some of Joyce’s narratives, is constructed as a sequence of such visionary encounters. Thus in Book VIII, lines 543-54 (1850 ed.), Wordsworth describes the “moment” when he for the first time passed in a stagecoach over the “threshold” of London and the “trivial forms / Of houses, pavement, streets” suddenly assumed a profound power and significance:

‘twas a moment’s pause,—

All that took place within me came and went

As in a moment; yet with Time it dwells,

And grateful memory, as a thing divine.

See Irene H. Chayes, “Joyce’s Epiphanies,” reprinted in Joyce’s “Portrait”: Criticisms and Critiques, ed. Τ. Ε. Connolly (1962); Morris Beja, Epiphany in the Modern Novel (1971); Ashton Nichols, The Poetics of Epiphany (1987). On the history of the traditional “moment” in sacred and secular writings beginning with St. Augustine, and its conversion into the modern literary epiphany, see M. H. Abrams, Natural Supematuralism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (1971), chapters 7-8.

Fable

It is a brief tale in verse or prose that conveys a moral lesson, usually by giving human speech and manners to animals and inanimate things. Fables often conclude with a moral, delivered in the form of an epigram. A very old form of story related to folklore and proverbs, the fable in Europe descends from tales attributed to Aesop, a Greek slave in the 6th century bc: his fable of the fox and the grapes has given us the phrase ‘sour grapes’. An Indian collection, the Bidpai, dates back to about ad 300. The French fabulist La Fontaine revived the form in the 17th centurywith his witty verse adaptations of Greek fables. More recent examples are Kipling’s Just So Stories (1902), Thurber’s Fables of Our Time (1940), and Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945).

Fantasy

It is a general term for any kind of fictional work that is not primarily devoted to realistic representation of the known world. The category includes several literary genres (e.g. dream vision, fable, fairy tale, romance, science fiction) describing imagined worlds in which magical powers and other impossibilities are accepted. Recent theorists of fantasy have attempted to distinguish more precisely between the self-contained magical realms of the marvellous, the psychologically explicable delusions of the uncanny, and the inexplicable meeting of both in the fantastic.

Free Indirect Style/Discourse

It is a manner of presenting the thoughts or utterances of a fictional character as if from that character’s point of view by combining grammatical and other features of the character’s ‘direct speech’ with features of the narrator’s ‘indirect’ report. Direct discourse is used in the sentence She thought, ‘I will stay here tomorrow’, while the equivalent in indirect discourse would be She thought that she would stay there the next day. Free indirect, however, combines the person and tense of indirect discourse (‘she would stay’) with the indications of time and place appropriate to direct discourse (‘here tomorrow’), to form a different kind of sentence: She would stay here tomorrow. This form of statement allows a third-person narrative to exploit a first-person point of view, often with a subtle effect of irony, as in the novels of Jane Austen. Since Flaubert’s celebrated use of this technique (know in French as le style indirect libre) in his novel Madame Bovary (1857), it has been widely in modern fiction.

Gothic Novel

The word Gothic originally referred to the Goths, an early Germanic tribe, then came to signify “germanic,” then “medieval.” “Gothic architecture” now denotes the medieval type of architecture, characterized by the use of the high pointed arch and vault, flying buttresses, and intricate recesses, which spread through western Europe between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries.

The Gothic novel, orin an alternative term, Gothic romance, is a type of prose fiction which was inaugurated by Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764)—thes ubtitle refers to its setting in the middle ages—and flourished through the early nineteenth century. Some writers followed Walpole’s example by setting their stories in the medieval period; others set them in a Catholic country, especially Italy or Spain. The locale was often a gloomy castle furnished with dungeons, subterranean passages, and sliding panels; the typical story focused on the sufferings imposed on an innocent heroine by a cruel and lustful villain, and made bountiful use of ghosts, mysterious disappearances, and other sensational and supernatural occurrences (which in a number of novels turned out to have natural explanations). The principal aim of such novels was to evoke chilling terror by exploiting mystery and a variety of horrors. Many of them are now read mainly as period pieces, but the best opened up to fiction the realm of the irrational and of the perverse impulses and nightmarish terrors that lie beneath the orderly surface of the civilized mind. Examples of Gothic novels are William Beckford’s Vathek (1786)—the setting of which is both medieval and Oriental and the subject both erotic and sadistic—Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and other highly successful Gothic romances, and Matthew Gregory Lewis’ The Monk (1796), which exploited, with considerable literary skill, the shock-effects of a narrative involving rape, incest, murder, and diabolism. Jane Austen made good-humoredfun of the more decorous instances of the Gothic vogue in Northanger Abbey (written 1798, published 1818)

Hyperbole

It means exaggeration for the sake of emphasis in a figure of speech not meant literally. Hyperbolic expressions are common in the inflated style of dramatic speech know as bombast, as in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra when Cleopatra praises the dead Antony:

His legs bestrid the ocean; his reared arm

Crested the world.

Imagery

This term is one of the most common in criticism, and one of the most variable in meaning. Its applications range all the way from the “mental pictures” which, it is sometimes claimed, are experienced by the reader of a poem, to the totality of the components which make up a poem. Examples of this range of usage are C. DayLewis’ statements, in his Poetic Image (1948), pp. 17-18, that an image “is a picture made out of words,” and that “a poem may itself be an image composed from a multiplicity of images.” Three discriminable uses of the word, however, are especially frequent; in all these senses imagery is said to make poetry concrete, as opposed to abstract:

(1) “Imagery” (that is, “images” taken collectively) is used to signify all the objects and qualities of sense perception referred to in a poem or other work of literature, whether by literal description, by allusion, or in the vehicles (the secondary references) of its similes and metaphors. In William Wordsworth’s “SheDwelt among the Untrodden Ways” (1800), the imagery in this broad sense includes the literal objects the poem refers to (for example, “untrodden ways,”“springs,” “grave”), as well as the “violet” of the metaphor and the “star” of the simile in the second stanza. The term “image” should not be taken to imply a visual reproduction of the object referred to; some readers of the passage experience visual images and some do not; and among those who do, the explicitness and details of the pictures vary greatly. Also, “imagery” in this usage includes not only visual sense qualities, but also qualities that are auditory, tactile (touch), thermal (heat and cold), olfactory (smell),gustatory (taste), and kinesthetic (sensations of movement). In his In Memorìam (1850), No. 101, for example, Tennyson’s imagery encompasses not only things that are visible, but also qualities that are smelled or heard, together with a suggestion, in the adjective “summer,” of warmth:

Unloved, that beech will gather brown,...

And many arose-carnation feed

With summer spice the humming air....

(2) Imagery is used, more narrowly, to signify only specific descriptions of visible objects and scenes, especially ifthe description is vivid and particularized, as in this passage from Marianne Moore’s “The Steeple-Jack”:

a sea the purple of the peacock’s neck is*

paled to greenish azure as Dürer changed

the pine tree of the Tyrol to peacock blue and guinea grey.

(3) Commonly in recent usage, imagery signifies figurative language, especially the vehicles of metaphors and similes. Critics after the 1930s, and notably the New Critics, went far beyond earlier commentators in stressing imagery, in this sense, as the essential component in poetry, and as a major factor in poetic meaning, structure, and effect.

Implied author

The term is coined by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) to designate that source of a work’s design and meaning which is inferred by readers from the text, and imagined as a personality standing behind the work. As an imaginary entity, it is to be distinguished clearly from the real author, who may well have written other works implying a different kind of persona or implied author behind them. The implied author is also to be distinguished from the narrator, since the implied author stands at a remove from the narrative voice, as the personage assumed to be responsible for deciding what kind of narrator will be presented to thereader; in many works this distinction produces an effect of irony at the narrator’s expense.

Implied reader

The term is used by Wolfgang Iser and some other theorists of reader-response criticism to denote the hypothetical figure of the reader to whom a given work is designed to address itself. Any text maybe said to presuppose an ‘ideal’ reader who has the particular attitudes (moral, cultural, etc.) appropriate to that text in order for it to achieve its full effect. This implied reader is to be distinguished from actual readers, who may be unable or unwilling to occupy the position of the implied reader: thus, most religious poetry presupposes a god-fearing implied reader, but many actual readers today are atheists. The implied reader is also not the same thing as the narratee, who is a figure imagined within the text as listening to—or receiving a written narration from—the narrator (e.g. the wedding guest in Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’).

Intertextuality

The term coined by Julia Kristeva to designate the various relationships that a given text may have with other texts. These intertextual relationships include anagram, allusion, adaptation, translation, parody, pastiche, imitation, and other kinds of transformation. In literary theories of structuralism and post-structuralism, texts are seen to refer to other texts (or to themselves as texts) rather than to an external reality. The term intertext has been used variously for a text drawing on other texts, for a text thus drawn upon, and for the relationship between both.

Irony

In Greek comedy the character called the eiron was a dissembler, who characteristically spoke in understatement and deliberately pretended to be less intelligent than he was, yet triumphed over the alazon—the self-deceiving and stupid braggart (see in Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 1957). In most of the modern critical uses of the term “irony/’ there remains the root sense of dissembling or hiding what is actually the case; not, however, in order to deceive, but to achieve special rhetorical or artistic effects.

Verbal irony (which was traditionally classified as one of the tropes) is a statement in which the meaning that a speaker implies differs sharply from the meaning that is ostensibly expressed. The ironic statement usually involves the explicit expression of one attitude or evaluation, but with indications in the overall speech-situation that the speaker intends a very different, and often opposite, attitude or evaluation. Thus in Canto IV of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1714), after Sir Plume, egged on by the ladies, has stammered out his incoherent request for the return of the stolen lock of hair, the Baronanswers:

“It grieves me much,”replied the Peer again,

“Who speaks so well should ever speak in vain.”

This is a straightforward case of an ironic reversal of the surface statement (of which one effect is to give pleasure to the reader) because there are patent clues, in the circumstances established by the preceding narrative, that the Peer is not in the least aggrieved and does not think that poor Sir Plume has spoken at all well. A more complex instance of irony is the famed sentence with which Jane Austen opens Pride and Prejudice (1813): “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife”; part of the ironic implication (based on assumptions that Austen assumes the audience shares with her) is that a single woman is in want of a rich husband. Sometimes the use of irony by Pope and other masters is very complicated: the meaning and evaluations may be subtly qualified rather than simply reversed, and the clues to the ironic counter-meanings under the literal statement—or even to the fact that the author intends the statement to be understood ironically—may be oblique and unobtrusive. That is why recourse to irony by an author tends to convey an implicit compliment to the intelligenceof readers, who are invited to associate themselves with the author and the knowing minority who are not taken in by the ostensible meaning. That is also why many literary ironists are misinterpreted and sometimes (like Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift in the eighteenth century) get into serious trouble with the obtuse authorities. Following the intricate and shifting maneuvers of great ironists like Plato, Swift, Austen, or Henry James is a test of skill in reading between the lines.

Literariness

It is the sum of special linguistic and formal properties that distinguish literary texts from non-literary texts, according to the theories of Russian Formalism. The leading Formalist Roman Jakobson declared in 1919 that ‘the object of literary science is not literature but literariness, that is, what makes a given work a literary work’. Rather than seek abstract qualities like imagination as the basis of literariness, the Formalists set out to define the observable ‘devices’ by which literary texts—especially poems—foreground their own language, in metre, rhyme, and other patterns of sound and repetition. Literariness was understood in terms of defamiliarization, as a series of deviations from ‘ordinary’ language. It thus appears as a relation between different uses of language, in which the contrasted uses are liable to shift according to changed contexts.

Magic Realism

It is a kind of modern fiction in which fabulous and fantastical events are included in a narrative that otherwise maintains the ‘reliable’ tone of objective realistic report. The term was once applied to a trend in German fiction of the early 1950s, but is now associated chiefly with certain leading novelists of Central and South America, notably Miguel Angel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier, and Gabriel García Márquez. Theterm has also been extended to works from very different cultures, designating a tendency of the modern novel to reach beyond the confines of realism and draw upon the energies of fable, folktale and myth while retaining a strong contemporary social relevance.

Marvellous

It is a category of diction in which supernatural, magical, or other wondrous impossibilities are accepted as normal within an imagined world clearly separated from our own reality. The category includes fairy tales, many romances, and most science fiction, along with various other kinds of fantasy with ‘other-worldly’ setting, like J. R. R.Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings (1954-5). Modern theorists have distinguished marvellous tales from those of the uncanny in term of the explanations offered for strange events: in the marvellous, these are explained as magic, while in the uncanny they are given psychological causes.

Metaphor

It is the most important and widespread figure of speech, in which one thing, idea, or action is referred to by a wordor expression normally denoting another thing, idea, or action, so as to suggest some common quality shared by the two. In metaphor, this resemblance is assumed as an imaginary identity rather than directly stated as a comparison: referring to a man as that pig, or saying he is a pig is metaphorical, wherea she is like a pig is a simile. Metaphors may also appear as verbs (a talent may blossom) or as adjectives (a novice may be green), or in longer idiomatic phrases, e.g. to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Modern analysis of metaphors and similes distinguishes the primary literal term (called the ‘tenor’) from the secondary figurative term (the ‘vehicle’) applied to it: in the metaphor the road of life, the tenor is life, and the vehicle is the road.

Metonymy

It is a figure of speech that replaces the name of one thing with the name of something else closely associated with it, e.g. the bottle for alcoholic drink, the press forjournalism, skirt for woman, Mozart for Mozart’s music, the Oval Office for the US presidency. A well-known metonymic saying is the pen is mightier than the sword. An important kind of metonymy is synecdoche, in which the name of a part is substituted for that of a whole (e.g. hand for worker), or vice versa. Modern literary theory has often used metonymy in a wider sense, to designate the process of association by which metonymies are produced and understood: this involves establishing relationships of contiguity between two things, whereas metaphor establishes relationships of similarity between them. The metonym/metaphor distinction has been associated with the contrast between syntagm and paradigm.

Motif and Theme

A motif is a conspicuous element, such as a type of incident, device, reference, or formula, which occurs frequently in works of literature. The “loathly lady” who turns out to be a beautiful princess is a common motif in folklore, and the man fatally bewitched by a fairy lady is a motif adopted fromfolklore in Keats’ “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (1820). Common in lyric poems is the ubi sunt motif, the “where-are” formula for lamenting the vanished past (“Whereare the snows of yesteryear?”), and also the carpe diem motif, whose nature is sufficiently indicated by Robert Herrick’s title “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time.” An aubade—from the Old French “alba,” meaning dawn—is a nearly-morning song whose usual motif is an urgent request to a beloved to wake up. A familiar example is Shakespeare’s “Hark, hark, the lark at heaven’s gate sings.”

An older term for recurrent poetic concepts or formulas is the topos (Greek for “a commonplace”); Ernst R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1953), treats many of the ancient literary topoi. The term “motif,” or else the German leitmotif (a guiding motif), is also applied to the frequent repetition within a single work of a significant verbal or musical phrase, or set description, or complex of images, as in the operas of Richard Wagner or in novels by ThomasMann, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner. See imagery; and for a deconstructive treatment of recurrent elements or motifs in prosefiction, J. Hillis Miller, Repetition and Fiction (1982).

Theme is sometimes used interchangeably with “motif,” but the term is more usefully applied to a general concept or doctrine, whether implicit or asserted, which an imaginative work is designed to incorporate and make persuasive to the reader. John Milton states as the explicit theme of Paradise Lost to “assert Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men”; see didactic literature and fiction and truth. Some critics have claimed that all nontrivial works of literature, including lyric poems, involve an implicit theme which is embodied and dramatized in the evolving meanings and imagery; see, for example, Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (1947). And archetypalcritics trace such recurrent themes as that of the scapegoat, or the journey underground, through myths and social rituals, as well as literature. For a discussion of the overlapping applications of the critical terms “subject,”“theme,” and “thesis” see Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics (1958), pp.401-11.

Point of view

It is the position or vantage-point from which the events of a story seem to be observed and presented to us. The chief distinction usually made between points of view is that between third-personnarratives and first-person narratives. A third-person narrator may be omniscient, and therefore show an unrestricted knowledge of the story’s events from outside or ‘above’ them; but another kind of third-person narrator may confine our knowledge of events to whatever is observed by a single characteror small group of characters, this method being known as ‘limited point of view’.A first-person narrator’s point of view will normally be restricted to his or her partial knowledge and experience, and therefore will not give us access to other characters’ hidden thoughts. Many modern authors have also used ‘multiple point of view’, in which we are shown the events from the positions of two or more different characters.

Prolepsis

It is the Greek word for ‘anticipation’, used in three senses: (i) in a speech, the trick of answering an opponent’s objections before they are even made; (ii) as a figure of speech, the application of an epithet or description before it actually becomes applicable, e.g. the wounded Hamlet’s exclamation ‘I am dead, Horatio’; (iii) in narrative works, a ‘flash forward’ by which a future event is related as an interruption to the ‘present’ time of the narration, as in this passage from Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie(1961) about the schoolgirl Mary: ‘. . . Speech is silver but silence is golden. Mary, are you listening? What was I saying?’

Mary Macgregor, lumpy, with merely two eyes, a nose and a mouth like a snowman, who was later famous for being stupid and always to blame and who, at the age of twenty-three, lost her life in a hotel fire, ventured, ‘Golden.’ In this third sense, prolepsis is an anachrony which is the opposite of ‘flashback’or analepsis.

Satire

It can be described as the literary art of diminishing or derogating a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking toward it attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn, or indignation. It differs from the comic in that comedy evokes laughter mainly as an end in itself, while satire derides; that is, it uses laughter as a weapon, and against a butt that exists outside the work itself. That butt may be an individual (in “personal satire”), or a type of person, a class, an institution, a nation, or even (as in the Earl of Rochester’s “A Satyr against Mankind,” 1675, and much of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, 1726, especially Book IV) the entire human race. The distinction between the comic and the satiric, however, is sharp only at its extremes. Shakespeare’s Falstaff is a comic creation, presented primarily for our enjoyment; the puritanical Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is for the most part comic but has aspects of satire directed against the type of the fatuous and hypocritical Puritan; Ben Jonson’s Volpone (1607) clearly satirizes the type of person whose cleverness— or stupidity—is put at the service of his cupidity; and John Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe (1682), while representing a permanent type of the pretentious poetaster, satirized specifically the living author Thomas Shadwell.

Satire has usually been justified by those who practice it as a corrective of human vice and folly; Alexander Pope, for example, remarked that “those who are ashamed of nothing else are so of being ridiculous.” Its frequent claim (not always borne out inthe practice) has been to ridicule the failing rather than the individual, and to limit its ridicule to corrigible faults, excluding those for which a person is not responsible. As Swift said, speaking of himself in his ironic “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift” (1739):

Yet malice never was his aim;

He lashed the vice, but spared the name. . ..

His satire points at no defect,

But what all mortals may correct....

He spared a hump, or crooked nose,

Stream of Consciousness

The phrase is used by William James in his Principles of Psychology (1890) to describe the unbroken flow of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings in the waking mind; it has since been adopted to describe a narrative method in modern fiction. Long passages of introspection, in which the narrator records in detail what passes through a character’s awareness, are found in novelists from Samuel Richardson, through William James’ brother Henry James, to many novelists of the presentera. The long chapter 42 of James’ Portrait of a Lady, for example, is entirely given over to the narrator’s description of the process of Isabel’s memories, thoughts, and feelings. As early as 1888 a minor French writer, Edouard Du jardin, wrote a short novel Les Lauriers sont coupés (“The LaurelsHave Been Cut”) which is a rather crude but sustained attempt to represent the scenes and events of the story solely as they impinge upon the consciousness of the central character. As it has been refined since the 1920s, stream of consciousness is the name applied specifically to a mode of narration that undertakes to reproduce, without a narrator’s intervention, the full spectrum and continuous flow of a character’s mental process, in which sense perceptions mingle with conscious and half-conscious thoughts, memories, expectations, feelings, and random associations.

Symbol

It stands for or represents something else beyond it—usually an idea conventionally associated with it. Objects like flags and crosses can function symbolically; and words are also symbols. In the semiotics of C.S. Peirce, the term denotes a kind of sign that has no natural or resembling connection with its referent, only a conventional one: this is the case with words. In literary usage, however, a symbol is a specially evocative kind of image; that is, a word or phrase referring to a concrete object, scene, or action which also has some further significance associated with it: roses, mountains, birds, and voyages have all been used as common literary symbols.

Texture

The term is used in some modern criticism (especially in New Criticism) to designate those ‘concrete’ properties of a literary work that cannot be subjected to paraphrase, as distinct from its paraphrasable ‘structure’or abstract argument. The term is applied especially to the particular pattern of sounds used in a poem: its assonance, consonance, alliteration, euphony, andrelated effect. Often, though, the term also covers diction, imagery, metre, and rhyme.

Uncanny

It is a kind of disturbing strangeness evoked in some kinds of horror story and related fiction. In Tzvetan Todorov’s theory of the fantastic, the uncanny is an effect produced by stories in which the incredible events can be explained as the products of the narrator’s or protagonist’s dream, hallucination, or delusion. A clear case of this is Edgar Allen Poe’s tale ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ (1843), in which the narrator is clearly suffering from paranoid delusions. In tales of the marvellous, on the otherhand, no such psychological explanation is offered, and strange events are taken to be truly supernatural.

*Source:

Baldick,Chris. Oxford ConciseDictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.

M.H. Abrams. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Seventh Edition. Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing, 1997