Tag: Literary Term

In Sausserian Linguistics, the two elements of a piece of language—the signifier being the relatively concrete and the signified the relatively abstract. In some situations, there are chains of signifiers: The written "road" signifies the spoken "road," which in turn signifies the idea of "road," which, in turn, in an ... Read More

The classic definition of a protagonist is the character who is the focus of the overall narrative and undergoes the most significant change. A literary protagonist is rarely ever considered to be morally “good.” Literary protagonists are complicated and will often challenge the reader’s concept of “good” and “bad.” Keep in ... 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

"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

A simple element that serves as a basis for expanded narrative; or, less strictly, a conventional situation, device, interest, or incident. In music and art, the term is used in various other senses, as for a recurring melodic phrase, a prevailing idea or design, or a subject for detailed sculptural ... 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

In Book X of his Republic, Plato may have given us the first volley of detailed and lengthy literary criticism. The dialog between Socrates and two of his associates shows the participants of this discussion concluding that art must play a limited and very strict role in the perfect Greek ... Read More

The most insistent and vigorous historicism through most of the twentieth century has been Marxism, based on the world of Karl Marx (1818-1883). Marxist criticism, like other historical critical methods in the nineteenth century, treated literature as a passive product of the culture, specifically of the economic aspect, and, therefore, ... Read More

The mind-body problem is the "problem of describing the relation between our mental lives and the physical aspects of our brains, bodies, and environments." (The Norton Introduction to Philosophy) ... Read More

In Book X of his Republic, Plato may have given us the first volley of detailed and lengthy literary criticism. The dialog between Socrates and two of his associates shows the participants of this discussion concluding that art must play a limited and very strict role in the perfect Greek ... Read More