Author: The Editors

Join Eckleburg, Gargoyle and Boudin at AWP 2026 for an evening of readings, food and drink at The Lord Baltimore on Friday, March 6, 2026 from 6 to 9. Readers TBA ... Read More

Join Eckleburg, Gargoyle and Boudin at AWP 2026 for an evening of readings, food and drink at The Lord Baltimore on Friday, March 6, 2026 from 6 to 9. Readers TBA ... Read More

Eckleburg is pleased to announce the Gertrude Stein Award in Fiction winners and finalists. Thank you to all who submitted. It is always a difficult task choosing among such talented voices and storytelling.  Gertrude Stein Award: First Place "Frittura" by Judith Goode Second Place "Little Sister" by Jarrett Kaufman Third ... Read More

Why does his family piss him off so badly? No clue. All he knows is that he wants to scream. He nestles each fly into his tackle box. In the kitchen, his wife makes tuna-and-tomato sandwiches, their fish smell pervading the living room. She fills Ziploc bags with carrot sticks, ... Read More

Eight steps for developmentally editing characters. 1. Make a character list... 2. Identify frequency... 3. Code characters... 4. Amalgamate main characters... 5. Amalgamate secondary characters... 6. Give divine introductions... 7. Create character timelines... 8. Repeat ... Read More

 Being a good lit citizen means supporting lit pubs. Donate. Buy. I’m going to show some #AWP17 mags that you need to support…. @NoTokensJournal, @EckleburgReview, @open_letter. —Meakin Armstrong (Guernica) We are so sorry to announce that Eckleburg will not be attending AWP this year. We simply don't have the budget ... Read More

The study of rules that enable social phenomena, considered as signs, to have meaning. Hence, in literary criticism, semiotics is the analysis of literature in terms of language, conventions, and modes of discourse. (Handbook to Literature) ... Read More

The study of meaning; sometimes limited to linguistic meaning (study of the description, comparison and history of language); and sometimes used to discriminate between surface and substance. (Handbook to Literature) ... Read More

Setting is the time and place of the action in a work of fiction, poetry, or drama. The spatial setting is the place or places in which action unfolds, the temporal setting is the time. (Temporal setting is thus the same as plot time.) It is sometimes also helpful to distinguish between general setting—the general time and place ... Read More

Realism is, in the broadest literary sense, fidelity to actuality in its representation; a term loosely synonymous with verisimilitude; and in this sense it has been a significant element in almost every school ow writing. To give it more precise definition, however, one may limit it to the movement in ... Read More

The art of persuasion. It has to do with the presentation of ideas in clear, persuasive language. Rhetoric has had a long career in ancient and modern schools. The founder of rhetoric is believed to have been Corax of Syracuse, who in the fifth century B.C. stipulated fundamental principles for ... Read More

Reiteration of a word, sound, phrase, or idea," such as anaphora, alliteration, assonance and consonance. (A Handbook to Literature) ... Read More

The conventional notion of reading is that a writer or speaker has an "idea," encodes it that is, turns it into words—and the reader or listener decodes it, deriving, when successful, the writer or speaker's "idea." The reader-response critics assume, however, that such equivalency between sender and receiver is impossible ... Read More

A short short story is approximately 1,000 words or less. Often, expositional attributes are cut or shortened ... Read More

"A poem printed as prose, with both margins justified. Edgar Allan Poe used 'prose-poem' in 1842; in 1850 Charles Kingsley praised 'That great prose poem, the single epic of modern days, Thomas Carlyle's French Revolution.' Largely a modern phenomenon, the prose poem can be found in the works of Baudelaire, ... Read More

In its broadest sense the term is applied to all forms of written or spoken expression not having a regular rhythmic patter. Prose is most often meant to designate a consciously shaped writing, not merely a listing of ideas or a catalog of objects. And, although, good prose is like ... Read More

The use of more conjunctions than is normal. Often used by literary prose writers to form pattern and fluidity in language and syntax. (A Handbook to Literature) ... Read More

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. The point of view is said to be limited when we see things only from one ... Read More

"Poetry is 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, ... Read More

Gustav Freytag was a 19th century German novelist. He recognized patterns in many stories and developed a diagram as a basic schematic for storytelling and plot ... Read More

Post-colonial criticism is similar to cultural studies, but it assumes a unique perspective on literature and politics that warrants a separate discussion. Specifically, post-colonial critics are concerned with literature produced by colonial powers and works produced by those who were/are colonized. Post-colonial theory looks at issues of power, economics, politics, ... Read More

For the deconstructionist, language consists just in black marks on a page that repeat or differ from each other and the reader is the only author, one who can find whatever can be found in, or be made to appear in, those detached, isolated marks. The deconstructionist conception of literature ... Read More

"Nonfiction is a work or genre of prose works that describe actual, as opposed to imaginary or fictional, characters and events. Subgenres of nonfiction include biography, memoir, and the essay." (The Norton Anthology of World Literature: Literary Terms) ... Read More

The opening of any work should immediately immerse the reader into the narrative. An opening might focus primarily on character(s) and/or setting. Regardless of focus, there is a general rule of thumb when writing effective openings—in medias res—or to put it another way, just throw us right into the middle ... Read More

Such an arrangement [syntactic] that one element of equal importance with another is similarly developed and phrased. The principle of parallelism dictates that coordinate ideas should have coordinate presentation.... But a deliberate violation of parallelism can be highly dramatic. Consider the couplet in Houseman's "Hell Gate" in which coordinating conjunctions ... Read More

"Ontology is the study of being. Ontology seeks to clarify the sense (or senses) in which a thing may be said to be, or to exist, and to provide an account of the most basic categories of being. The ontology of a theory is the set of entities that exist ... Read More

A statement that although seemingly contradictory or absurd may actually be well founded or true. As we approach the conceptual limits of discourse—as commonly happens in philosophy and theology—language seems to rely increasingly on paradox. Incarnation, Immaculate Conception, Virgin Birth, and the Holy Trinity all involve some elements of paradox, ... Read More

A philosophical system that provides the basis for a contemporary school of criticism. Phenomenology is a method that inspects the data of consciousness without presuppositions about epistemology—the nature of knowledge—or ontology—the nature of being. To the phenomenologist any object, although it has existence in time and space, achieves meaning or ... Read More

Heavily influenced by film critique, neoformalism suggests that art and literature seek to defamiliarize the beholder so to defamiliarize the beholder/reader within the context of the work. (Handbook to Literature) ... Read More

Nihilism, in short, is "the loss of all sense of contact with anything that is ultimately true or meaningful." (The Canalization of Nihilism) ... Read More

This school, influenced by structuralist and post-structuralist theories, seeks to reconnect a work with the time period in which it was produced and identify it with the cultural and political movements of the time (Michel Foucault's concept of épistème). New Historicism assumes that every work is a product of the ... Read More

In a strict sense the term applies to the criticism practices by John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur, Robert Penn Warren, and Clench Brooks; it is derived from Ransom's book The New Criticism (1941), which discusses a movement in America in the 1930s that paralleled movements in England ... Read More

A story, whether fictional or true and in prose or verse, related by a narrator or narrators (rather than acted out onstage, as in drama). A frame narrative is a narrative that recounts the telling of another narrative or story that thus 'frames' the inner or framed narrative. An example ... Read More