LITERARY CRITICISM TERMS TO KNOW SET 1 Literary

LITERARY CRITICISM TERMS TO KNOW SET 1 (Literary Terms)

COMEDY OF MORALS A term applied to comedy that uses ridicule to correct abuses, hence a form of dramatic satire, aimed at the moral state of a people or a special class of people.

COMEDY OF HUMOURS A type of realistic comedy that was developed in the latter part of the 16 th century by Ben Johnson and George Chapman and that derives its comic interest largely from the exhibition of characters whose conduct is controlled by one characteristic. Some single psychophysiological humour or exaggerated trait of character gave the important figures in the action a definite bias of disposition and supplied the chief motive for their actions. Thus, in Johnsons’ Every Man in His Humour, all the words and acts of Kitely are controlled by an overpowering suspicion that his wife is unfaithful; George Downright, a country squire, must be “frank” above all things.

AGRARIANS Literally people living in an agricultural society, or espousing the merits of such a society, as the Physiocrats did. In this sense most espousers of pastoral traditions are ____. Thomas Jefferson was a noted early American ______. N literary history and criticism however, the term is usually applied to a group of Southern American writers who published in Nashville, TN, between 1922 -1925, The Fugitive, a little magazine of poetry and some criticism championing agrarian regionalism but attacking “the old high-casted Brahmins of the Old South. ”

ABECEDARIUS An acrostic, the initial letters of whose successive lines form the alphabet. Strictly speaking, each word from a line should begin with the same letter, although this task is difficult and seldom attempted.

ANTHROPOMORPHISM The ascription of human characteristics to nonhuman objects. In some mythologies the gods are described as having human form and attributes. Whereas _______ is the conceptual presentation of some nonhuman entity in human form, PERSONIFICATION is the much more limited rhetorical presentation of some nonhuman entity in figuratively human form or with figuratively human qualities. To represent Zeus as an “all-father” with human qualities and features is ______; to represent “Father Time” carrying a scythe and an hourglass is PERSONIFICATION.

APRON STAGE The apron is the portion of a stage that extends in front of the proscenium arch. If all or most of the stage is in front of any devices that could give it a frame, the stage is called an _______. The Elizabethan stage, which was a raised platform with the audience on three sides, is the outstanding example.

CATCHWORD A word so often repeated that it is identified with a person or object. In printing, ______ has two meanings. The current usage of the term is as the name for a word printed at the top of a column or a page to indicate the first or last word on that page. At the bottom of each page, under the last word or segment on the last line, early printers customarily printed the first word of the next age. This was called a ______.

COLLAGE In the pictorial arts, the technique by which materials not usually associated with one another, such as newspaper clippings, labels, cloth, wood, bottle tops, or theater tickets, are assembled and pasted together on a single surface. By analogy, ______ is applied in literature to works incorporating quotations, allusions, foreign expressions, and nonverbal elements. James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound use the device extensively, as do writers of the antinovel. The closing section of Eliot’s The Waste Land is an example of the use of _______.

BOMBAST Originally, any sort of ornamental but unnecessary padding; pleonasm. Now, mostly limited to ranting, insincere and extravagant language, and outlandish grandiloquence. Elizabethan tragedy, especially early Senecan plays, contains much of this style, marked by extravagant imagery.

APOTHEGM An unusually terse, pithy, witty saying, even more concise and pointed than an APHORISM. One of the best known, attributed by Francis Bacon to Queen Elizabeth I, is “Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper. ”

KIT-CAT CLUB A club believed to have existed in London between 1703 and 1733, founded by Whigs and dedicated in part to ensuring a Protestant succession to the throne. Among is members were Addison, Steele, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Marlborough. It met at the “Cat and Fiddle” pastry shop, kept by Christopher Cat, from whom it seems to have taken its name. Sometimes it met in a room with a very low ceiling at the home of the publisher Jacob Tonson. When Sir Godfrey Kneller painted the portraits of the members to hang in this room, he was forced to use small canvases, 36 x 28 inches, dimensions later called “kit-cat” size.

METAPLASM The movement of any element in a piece of language from its customary place. ______ applies to written letters and spoken sounds as well as to words and larger units. It has also been used as a general term for almost any alteration of words or patterns, including APOCOPE, SYNCOPE, synaloepha (merging a final vowel with the initial vowel of the succeeding word, as in “they’re” for “they are”), prosthesis (adding at the beginning of a word, epenthesis (adding in the middle), PARAGOGE, APHAERSIS, AND METATHESIS.

METACRITICISM A process or method whose primary subject is the critical examination of the nomenclature, premises, principles, or structure of the criticism itself. For example, if a writer asserts that War and Peace is a better novel than Nicholas Nickleby, we get a work of criticism. If another sets out to explore the basis on which the judgment that one novel is better than another can be made we get a piece of _______. The metacriticizes criticism, and the metacritic’s major efforts are devoted to the analysis of meaning and logical appraisal of critical reasoning.

LOW COMEDY Has been called “elemental comedy, ” in that it lacks seriousness of purpose or subtlety of manner and has little intellectual appeal. Some features are: quarreling, fighting, noisy singing, boisterous conduct in general, boasting, burlesque, trickery, buffoonery, clownishness, drunkenness, coarse jesting, wordplay, and scolding. In English dramatic history, it appears first as an incidental expansion of the action, often originated by the actors themselves, who speak “more than is set down for them. ” Thus, in medieval religious drama Noah’s stubborn wife has to be taken into the ark by force, or Pilate or Herod engage in uncalled-for-ranting. It is much more pronounced, with antics of vice.

LAKE POETS Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southney – three poets who at the beginning of the nineteenth century were living in the Lake District (Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire). The pejorative “lakers” is credited to the Edinburgh Review, which for several years behaved contemptuously toward the poets. Although there was no “school” in the sense of the three all working for common objectives, Coleridge and Wordsworth had certain convictions in common and on occasion worked together.

AMPHIBRACH A metrical foot consisting of three syllables, the first and last unaccented, the second (middle) accented. An exampled is the word “arrangement. ”

AMPHIMACER A metrical foot consisting of three syllables, the first and last accented, the second (middle) unaccented. An example is the word “nevermore. ”

AMPHIGORY Verse that sounds good, but contains little or no sense or meaning; either NONSENSE VERSE, such as Edward Lear’s, or nonsensical PARODY, such as Swinburne’s self-mockery in “Nephelidia, ” which begins: “From the depth of the dreamy decline of the dawn through a notable nimbus of nebulous noonshine, ” or more general PARODY, such as “Moon milk and soft curds of milky way/ Mingle in the intricacies of my equation, ? O Calculus in calculable!”

ANA Miscellaneous sayings, anecdotes, gossip, and scraps of information about a particular person, place, or event; or a book that records such sayings and anecdotes. Englishmen in the seventeenth century were much devoted to this type of writing, The table Talk of John Seldon (1689) being typical. The term also exists as a suffix, as in “Goldsmithiana. ”

ANACOLUTHON The failure, accidental or deliberate, to complete a sentence according to the structural plan on which it was started. I may be a mistake, as in a sentence that loses its way: “The police arrested the man whom they thought was an escaped convict. ” Here “whom” begins as a potential object, as its case-ending requires, but becomes the subject of a subordinate clause. In literary practice, however, the device can work as a powerful index of anxiety or disturbed coherence.

ANACRUSIS A term denoting one or more extra unaccented syllables at the beginning of a verse before the regular rhythm of the line makes its appearance. Literally, an upward or back beat.

ANADIPLOSIS A kind of repetition in which the last word or phrase of one sentence or line is repeated at the beginning of the next. Ex. Bartholomew Griffin’s Fidessa: For I have loved long, I crave reward Reward me not unkindly: think of kindness, Kindness becommeth those of high regard Regard with clemency a poor man’s blindness.

ANAGRAM A word or phrase made by transposing the letters of another. Ex: “cask” can be made from “sack. ”

ANALECTA Literary gleanings, fragments, or passages from the writings of an author or authors; also the title for a collection of choice extracts, for example, Analects of Confucius.

ANALEPSIS In the terminology of Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, a type of vision or trance in which something from the past or the unconscious mind is restored to vivid life in the present or conscious mind. Generally, _____ means any recovery or restoration; a poem by W. H. Auden includes the witty phrase “analeptic swig. ”

THE LITERARY CLUB (Doctor Johnson’s Circle) A club formed in London in 1764 at the suggestion of Dr. Joshua Reynolds and with the cooperation of Samuel Johnson. Among the charter members were Edmund Burke and Oliver Goldsmith. Famous men also admitted to membership included Bishop Percy, David Garrick, Edward Gibbon, Adam Smith, and James Boswell. Their meetings fostered free and spirited discussion of books and writers, classic and contemporary, Johnson frequently dominating the conversation; becoming a sort of literary dictator, and the Club itself exercised a formidable power. Later membership included 15 prime ministers and authors Scott, Macaulay, Hallam, and Tennyson.

TEXTUAL CRITICISM A scholarly activity that attempts to establish the authoritative text of a work. According to Fredson Bowers, the four basic functions of the textual critic are (1) to analyze the characteristics of an extant manuscript, (2) to recover the characteristics of the lost manuscript that served as a copy for a printed text, (30 to study the transmission of a printed text, and (4) to represent an established and edited text tot eh public.

TRAGICOMEDY A play that employs a plot suitable to tragedy but ends happily, like a comedy. The action seems to be leading to a tragic catastrophe until an unexpected turn in events, often in the form of a dues ex machina, brings about the happy denouement. In English dramatic history the term is usually employed to designate that kind of play, developed by Beaumont and Fletcher about 1610, of which Philaster is typical. Fletcher’s own definition is useful: “A _______ is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy, which must be a representation of familiar people with trouble. ”

TROCHEE A foot consisting of an accented an unaccented syllable, as in the word “happy. ” ______ are generally unpopular for sustained writing, because they soon degenerate into rocking rhythm. Long rhymed trochaic poems are extremely rare, because all the rhymes would have to be feminine, and such rhymes are relatively few and can be monotonous. Long unrhymed trochaic poems are less rare than the rhymed. Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha” is in unrhymed trochaic tetrameter.

SERPENTINE VERSE A line of poetry that begins and ends with the same word.

SENTIMENTAL COMEDY Reformed Comedy, sprang up in the early years of the eighteenth century in response to a growing reaction against the tone of Restoration plays. Because of the violence of its reaction, it has become very weak dramatically, lacking humor, reality, spice, and lightness of touch. The characters were either so good or so bad that they became caricatures, and plots were violently handled so that virtue would triumph. The dramatists restored shamelessly to sentimental emotion in their effort to interest and move the spectators. This sacrificed dramatic reality in its effort to instruct through an appeal to the heart.

SCHOOL OF NIGHT A group of Elizabethan dramatists, poets, and scholars, with, perhaps, some of the nobility. Its leader was Sir Walter Raleigh, and its members included Christopher Marlowe, George Chapman, and the mathematician Thomas Herriot. They studied the natural sciences, philosophy, and religion, and were suspected of being atheists. Shakespeare seems to condemn them in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” in the lines: “…Black is the badge of hell, The hue of dungeons and the School of Night. ”

SATANIC SCHOOL A phrase used by Southey in the preface to his Vision of Judgment (1821) to designate the members of the literary group made up of Byron, Shelley, Hunt, and others, whose irregular lives and radical ideas – defiantly flaunted in their writings – suggested the term. They were contrasted with the “pious” group of the Lake School – Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. More recent writers who have attacked conventional morality sometimes have been spoken of as belonging to this group.

ROMANTIC COMEDY A comedy in which serious love is the chief concern and source of interest, especially the type of comedy developed on the early Elizabethan stage by such writers as Robert Greene and Shakespeare. Greene’s James the Fourth, which represents the ______ as Shakespeare found it, is supposed to have influenced Shakespeare in his Two Gentlemen of Verona. Characteristics commonly found include: love as chief motive; much out-of-door action; an idealized heroine (who usually masks as a man); love subjected to great difficulties; poetic justice often violated; balancing of characters; easy reconciliations; happy ending.

ROCOCO In European architecture this period appears between the Baroque and the neoclassic periods, mainly the 18 th century. The style arose in France, flourishing there, but made little headway in England. It was marked by a wealth of decorative detail suggestive of grace, intimacy, and playfulness. The fashion spread to furniture. It avoided grandiose effects. Because the style was often regarded as decadent, the term has been employed in a derogatory sense to suggest the over-decorative. Swinburne uses the term as the title of one of his love lyrics – in which the lover implores his three-day mistress not to forget their ardent but brief love.

RHYME ROYAL A seven-line IAMBIC PENTAMETER STANZA rhyming ababbcc, sometimes with an ALEXANDRINE (hexameter) seventh line. The name is said to be derived from its sue by Scottish King James I; but it was extensively used by James and Chaucer previous to this. The idea of the pleasingly various tonalities available in______ can be had by comparing Auden’s Letter to Lord Byron and “The Shield of Achilles” (in part) with Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence. ” It has become the only stanza used by all three poets recognized as the greatest in English – Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton – as well as by Wordsworth and Auden.

REALISTIC NOVEL A type of novel that emphasizes truthful representation of the actual.

REALISTIC COMEDY Any comedy employing the methods of realism but particularly that developed by Johnson, Chapman, Middleton, and other Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists. Opposing romantic comedy, it reflects the general reaction in the late 1590 s against extravagance as well as an effort to produce an English comedy like the classical. This comedy deals with London life, is strongly satirical and sometimes cynical, is interested in both individuals and types, and rests on observation of life. The appeal is intellectual and the texture is coarse. This comedy became especially popular in the reign of James I.

PYRRHIC A foot of two unaccented syllables. As an occasional phenomenon, the ______ foot is unavoidable in English, with its large population of unstressed syllables and combinations of slight prepositions and articles; but it is virtually inconceivable that a whole poem could be written in this foot. ______ feet occur most often as variants of in iambic verse; it is not unusual to find one or two ______ in most lines of blank verse read with normal emphasis.

POULTER’S MEASURE A couplet, now rarely used, with a first line in iambic hexameter and a second line in iambic heptameter. It seems to be an adaptation of SHORT MEASURE. ______ reduces short measure’s four lines to two and eliminates one of the rhymes. The term is said to have originated from a custom of the London poulters of giving customers twelve eggs in their first dozen and fourteen in the second (similar to the “baker’s dozen, ” 13, which was given to make up for breakage). Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Nicholas Googe, and Arthur Brook are some of the poets who have used this form. Popular around 1575.

POLYPTOTON The repetition in close proximity of words that have the same roots. ______ may involve the use of the same word but in a different grammatical case; more commonly there is a basic difference in the words, although they share common rots. Shakespeare gives three examples in two lines of Troilus and Cressida (1, 1): “The Greeks are strong and skillful in their strength, Fierce to their skill, and to their fierceness valiant. ” ______ is present in “strong-strength, ” and “fierce-fierceness. ”

POETASTER An incompetent poet.

POE`TE MAUDIT The doomed or damned poet; a figure coming out of France in the second half of the nineteenth century. Typically brilliant, moody, morbid, consumptive, alcoholic, self-destructive, sometimes even selfdestroyed; once a serious term (for the likes of Poe and Bauldelaire) but now largely a cliché.

PHILOLOGY In its general sense, ______ means the scientific study of both language and literature. Thus, there are clubs and journals devoted to linguistic and literary research. ______ was at one time used in a narrower sense to mean the scientific and historical study of language. Today, however, the systematic study of language by scientific principles is usually called LINGUISTICS, with ______ confined to the historical study of language.

PHENOMENOLOGY A philosophical system that provides the basis for the contemporary school of criticism. ______ is a method that inspects the data of consciousness without presuppositions about epistemology or ontology. (Epistemology is theory of the nature of knowledge, ontology that of the nature of being. ) Any object, although it has existence in time and space, achieves meaning or intelligibility only through the active use of a consciousness in which the object registers. ______ finds reality not in a noumenal realm – in cause or material being – but in the psychical realm of awareness, to which it applies exhaustive analysis and description.

PETRARCHAN CONCEIT This kind of CONCEIT used by Petrarch in his love sonnets and widely imitated or ridiculed by Renaissance English sonneteers. It rests on exaggerated comparisons expressing beauty, cruelty, and charm of the beloved and the suffering of the forlorn lover. Hyperbolic analogies to ships at sea, marble tombs, wars, and alarms are used oxymoron is common.

PAEON A song of praise or joy. Originally restricted to odes sung by a Greek chorus in honor of Apollo, the term was later broadened to include praise of other deities. Homer indicated, too, that ______ were frequently sung on military occasions: before an attack, after a victory, when a fleet sail. The wor now means any song of joy.

OXFORD REFORMERS A group of humanist scholars whose association began at Oxford in the early Renaissance, particularly John Colet, Sir Thomas More, and the Dutch scholar Erasmus. Though Erasmus, who had come to Oxford to study Greek, was the most famous of the group and More the best loved, Colet seems to have been the real leader. The group was interested in affecting certain reforms in Church and State based on humanist ideas. Moral training and reform were to be accomplished through reason rather than emotion. Humanity should be uplifted through education and the improvement of individual character. The Church should be purged of corrupt practices.

NOBLE SAVAGE The idea that primitive human beings are naturally good and that whatever evil they develop is the product of the corrupting action of civilization.

NEOLOGISM A new word introduced into a language, especially for enhancing style.

ANAPEST A metrical foot consisting of three syllables, with two unaccented syllables followed by an accented one. The following lines from Shelley’s “The Cloud” are representative of this style: “Like a child from the womb, Like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and unbuild it again. ”

ANAPHONE The acoustic counterpart of the ANAGRAM. In an ______, the sounds composing one word or phrase are rearranged to make another word or phrase. In Laura (Riding) Jackson’s line “Thus is a universe very soon, ” in can be heard (though not seen) that the sounds of “very soon” are nearly the same as those of “universe. ” Some ______ are ANAGRAMS, and vice versa, but such equivalence is not always the case; “ocean” and “canoe” are perfect anagrams, but do not sound much alike,

ANISOBARIC A meteorological term having to do with unequal weight or atmospheric pressure, also used in prosody for rhyming syllables that bear significantly different levels of accent, as in the rhyme of “appear” and “reindeer” in Clement Moore’s “A Visit from Saint Nicholas. ” Other ______ rhyme-pairs are “se-change” and “strange” (Shakespeare), “abide” and “noontide” (Hardy), “show” and “scarecrow” (Yeats), “seem” and “ice-cream” (Stevens), and “footfall” and “all” (Ransom).

ANTIBACCHIUS A metrical foot of three syllables, of which the first two are stressed and the third unstressed (accentual), or the first two are long and the third is short (quantitative). An example is: Climb down the / high mountains.

ANTIMASQUE A grotesque, usually humorous dance interspersed among the beautiful and serious actions and dances of a masque. Often performed by professionals actors and dancers, it served as a foil ot the masque proper, performed by courtly amateurs. The development and possibly the origin of the ______ are due to Ben Johnson.

ANTIMERIA A species of enallage, using one part of speech for another, as in “But me no buts. ” “But, ” a conjunction, is used here as first a verb and then a noun. Shakespeare used _______ often, as in “His complexion is perfect gallows” (The Tempest, 1, 1) and “The thunder would not peace at my bidding” (King Lear, 4, 6). Another practitioner of conspicuous ______, Gerard Manley Hopkins, used the nouns “self” and “justice” as verbs, and the verb “achieve” as a noun (in the phrase “The achieve of, the mastery of the thing. ”).

ANTIPHON The VERSE or VERSES of a PSALM, traditional passage, or portion of the liturgy, changed or sung by alternating choirs during Divine Office in the Roman Catholic church. DRAMA grew from additions to antiphonal chants in the liturgy. Originally ______ and ANTHEM were synonymous.

APHAERSIS The omission of an initial, unstressed syllable at the beginning of a word as in “ ‘mid” for “amid, ” or “ ‘neath” for “beneath. ”

APOPHASIS A rhetorical figure in which one makes an assertion while seeming or pretending to suppress or deny it. “Were I not aware of your high reputation for honesty, I should say that I believe you connived at the fraud yourself. ”

APOPHRADES In the ancient Greek calendar, unlucky or unclean days that fell toward the end of a month; the last two days of the Flower Festival in the month of Anthesterion were thought to be a gloomy and forbidden time when the dead visited their old houses. Recently the term has been appropriated in Harold Bloom’s criticism as the name of a “revisionary ration” in which a dead precursor returns.

APORIA A difficulty, impasse, or point of doubt and indecision. Used to describe a species of irony in which a speaker expresses uncertainty, but really intends none, as in this sentence: “I don’t know what scares me more – your stupidity or your dishonesty. ” ______ has also been used by recent critics to indicate a point of undecidability, which locates the site at which the text mot obviously undermines its on rhetorical structure, dismantles, or deconstructs itself.

APOSIOPESIS The intentional failure to complete a sentence. The form may be used to convey extreme exasperation or to imply a threat, as, “If you do that, why, I’ll ----. ”

AUTOTELIC A term applied to a non-didactic work; that is, one whose end lies within itself and is not dependent on the achievement of objectives outside the work.

BLACK MOUNTAIN SCHOOL A label applied to certain writers – Charles Olson, Robert Creely, and Robert Duncan among them – associated with Black Mountain College, an experimental school in North Carolina. They published the Black Mountain Review, which was highly influential in the projective verse movements. The school itself was a bold experiment in aesthetic education, which included architecture and the graphic arts as well as literature; in its idealism and spirit, the school resembled the Brook Farm enterprise. Members of the group went on to other and different callings, but the energy of the ______ continued to make itself felt long after its closing.

CATACHRESIS Strictly, any misuse or misapplication of a word. Limited by Quintilian to cases (such as “leg of a table” in which there is a figurative name but no literal expression. Sometimes used for a mixed figure, such as “lind mouths! That scarce themselves know how to hold / A Sheep-hook” in Milton’s “Lycidas. ”

ANTIPHRASIS IRONY, the satirical or humorous use of a word or phrase to convey an idea exactly opposite to its real significance. Thus, in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Antony repeatedly and ironically refers to Caesar’s murderers as “honourable men. ” ______ informs a good deal of casual speech, such as “bad” meaning “good” and “I could care less” for “I could not care less. ”

CANSO A Provencial love song, usually in stanzas, sung by the troubadours. Compare with the variant form canzo, which is peculiar to northern France.

CAMERA EYE NARRATION A kind of storytelling, resembling the “Camera Eye” sections of John Dos Passos’ U. S. A. (1936), in which the writing gives the appearance or impression of being thoroughly objective, realistic, and anatomical.

BLOOMSBURY GROUP A group of writers and thinkers, many of whom lived in Bloomsbury, a residential district near central London. These writers, with Virginia Woolf as the unofficial leader, began meeting early in the twentieth century and became a powerful force in British literary and intellectual life in the 1920 s and 1930 s. Their philosophy was derived from G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica, which asserts that “the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects” are the rational ends of social progress. Among the members of the group were John Maynard Keyes, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, E. M. Forster, Duncan Grant, and David Garnett

CANTICLE Originally, a prose chant or hymn taken verbatim from a Biblical text; later applied to any chant, such as Edith Sitwell’s “Canticle of the Rose, ” with its explicit genesis in the rhythms and symbols of religion, and a song by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel called “Canticle. ” Canticle is also used to translated the Italian cantia (plural cantiche), which indicates a grouping of cantos, as in Dante’s Divine Comedy (the Inferno, for example, is one of the three cantiche or canticles of the poem. )

CHANTEY (SHANTY) A sailors’ song marked by strong rhythm and, in the days of sail, used to accompany certain forms of repetitious hard labor (such as weighing anchor) performed by seamen working in a group. The leader of the singing was referred to as the “chantey man, ” his responsibility being to sing a line or two introductory to a refrain joined in by the whole group.

CHICAGO CRITICS A group of critics, associated with the University of Chicago, who in 1952 published Critics and Criticism; also used to mean the followers of the group. They have theories about the history of criticism and about the practical criticism of literary texts. As historians, they are pluralists, who attempt to value critical systems in terms of their assumptions about literature and their contributions to our understanding of literature. As critics they were concerned with the practical criticism of individual works of literature. Among the Chicago Critics are Ronald S. Crane, Elder Olson, Richard Mc. Keon, Wayne Booth, Norman Maclean, W. Rea Keast, and Austin W. Wright.

CHOLIAMBUS The most important variety of scazon because ti has to do with the iambic rhythm that is the most important in English. There are subtle refinements in the use of this device by the ancients; in English all that matters is that the last foot in a prevalently iambic line is not an iamb, anapest, amphibrach, or spondee, but a trochee or dactyl. In the commonest form, the fifth foot of a line that is basically iambic pentameter is supplanted by a trochee. Such double frustration of the ears expectation can be deeply unsettling. It differs from radically from the common feminine line-ending, which means that the final iamb is replaced by an amphibrach or is simply augmented by one or more unaccented syllables.

CHORIAMBUS A foot in which two accented syllables flank two unaccented syllables. This foot is sometimes used in a verse form called choriambics, in which the line consists of a trochee, three choriambics, and an iambus. Swinburne used the form as did Rupert Brooke, whose line: “I have / tended and loved / year upon year, / I in the sol / ituded” illustrates the choriambic line.

CLINAMEN A trope, meaning a “swerving away, ” latterly adopted in Harold Bloom’s criticism to describe the inaugural gesture of a typical “strong” post-Enlightenment lyric.

COCKNEY SCHOOL A derogatory title applied to a group of nineteenthcentury writers including Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and Keats, because of their alleged poor taste in such matters as diction and rhyme. The offending rhymes included name-time and vista-sister, which, the suggestion was, could rhyme only to a cockney ear. One sentence from the denunciation in Blackwood’s Magazine will illustrate the whole spirit of the attack” “They are by far the vilest vermin that ever dared to creep upon the hem of the majestic garment of the English muse. ” The attack reflected the Tory belief that those of “low” breeding would inevitably embrace cockney politics and produce cockney verse.

COMEDY OF INTRIGUE (Comedy of Situation) A comedy in which the manipulation of the action by one or more characters to their own ends is of more importance than the characters themselves.

COMEDY OF MANNERS A term designating the realistic, often satirical, comedy of the Restoration, as practiced by Congreve and others. It is also used for the revival, in as for another revival late in the nineteenth century. In the stricter sense of the term, the type concerns the manners and conventions of an artificial, highly sophisticated society. The stylized fashions and manners of this group dominate the surface and determine the pace and tone of this sort of comedy. Characters are more likely to be types than individuals. Plot, though often involving a clever handling f situation and intrigue, is less important than atmosphere, dialogue, and satire. The dialogue is witty and finished, sometimes brilliant.

COMITATUS The Latin name for the band of military adherents and dependents around a king, hero, or other leader, to whom they are bound by mutual ties of fidelity and allegiance. Originally a warrior group, the ______ was transformed, in the late Middle Ages, into a court of supporters. The concept of fellowship makes the ______ an important element in early Germanic culture as recorded in Tacitus’ Germania) and its literature, including Beowulf.

CONSPECTUS A survey, summary, or outline. An article by Northrop Frye is entitled “A Conspectus of Dramatic Genres. ”

COTHURNUS The buskin, a thick-soled, laced boot worn by actors in Greek tragedy.

COURT COMEDY Comedy written to be performed at a royal court. Characteristics include: artificial plot; little action; much use of mythology; pageantry; elaborate costuming and scenery; prominence of music, especially songs; lightness of tone; numerous and often cleverness, quaint imagery; puns, prose dialogue; witty and saucy pages; eccentric characters such as braggarts, witches, and alchemists; much farcical action; and allegorical meanings sometimes in characters and action. It, in the seventeenth century, retained many of the Lylian traits keeping its peratic tone and spectacular presentation.

DACTYL A foot consisting of one accented syllable followed by two unaccented, as in mannikin.

FORMAL CRITICISM Criticism that examines a work in terms of the type of genre to which it belongs.

IAM (IAMBUS) A foot consisting of an unaccented syllable and an accented. The most common rhythm in English verse.

MYTHIC CRITICISM Criticism that explores the nature and significance of the archetypes and archetypal patterns in a work of art.

MORAL CRITICISM Criticism that judges art according to ethical principles.

JUDICIAL CRITICISM The type of criticism which examines the work by certain standards established throughout multiple works.

EPICUREANISM A philosophy similar to that of the Grek Epicurus, who saw philosophy as the art of making life happy, with pleasure the highest goal, and pain and emotional disturbance the greatest evils. But Epicurus was not a simple hedonist; for him pleasure came not primarily from sensual delights but from serenity Thus, intellectual processes were, he held, superior to bodily pleasures. He rejected the belief in an afterlife and the influence of the gods in human affairs, strongly asserted human freedom, and accepted the atomic theory of Democritus. He emphasized honesty, prudence, and justice, but chiefly as means through which one encounters the least trouble from society.

SPONDEE A foot composed of two unaccented syllables. The ideal form is rare in English, because most of our polysyllabic words carry one primary accent. ______ in our poetry are usually composed of two monosyllabic words as in “all joy. ” Poe, in writings of the subject, found only three or four instances (one of which is “football”) in English where real ______ occurred in a single word. Untermeyer finds a longer list and cites “heartbreak, childhood, bright-eyed, bookcase, wineglass, and Mayday. ” Despite the paucity of perfect ______, English contains thousands of usable approximations involving pairs of syllables with some degree of stress. It cannot be serioulyl used as the only foot in a poem.

KNICKERBOCKER GROUP A group writing in and about New York during the first half of the nineteenth century. The name was made famous by Washington Irving in Knickerbocker’s History of New York. Journalism, editorship, the frontier, poetry, novels, songs, and, in the case of Bryant at least, translation from the classics were what claimed the attention of these writers. Their association was one of geography and chance rather than of close organization. Some members of the school were: Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, William Cullen Bryant, Joseph Rodman drake, Fitz-Greene Halleck, John Howard Payne, and Samuel Woodworth.

IMPRESSIONISTIC CRITICISM Criticism that attempts to communicate what the critic subjectively feels in the presence of a work of art. Anatole France called this “the adventures of a sensitive soul among masterpieces. ”

HUBRIS Overwhelming pride or insolence that results in the misfortune of the protagonist of a tragedy. ______ leads the protagonist to break a moral law, attempt vainly to transcend normal limitations, or ignore a divine warning with calamitous results.

HISTORICAL CRITICISM Criticism that approaches work in terms of the social, cultural, and historical context in which it was produced. The historical critic attempts to recreate the meaning and values of the work for its own time; the critic’s objective is to to elucidate the meaning of the work for the present so much as it is to lead the reader into a responsive awareness of the meaning the work had for its own age.

PAEAN Pure or serious comedy. It appeals to the intellect and arouses thoughtful laughter by exhibiting the inconsistencies and incongruities of human nature and by displaying the follies of social manners. The purpose is not consciously didactic or ethical, though serious purpose is often implicit in the satire that is frequent in ______. Emotion, especially sentimentality, is avoided. If people make themselves ridiculous by their vanity or ineffective by their stupid conduct or blind adherence to tradition, this laughs at them. It offers plenty of superficial laughter that the average person can enjoy, its higher enjoyment requires detachment.

GRAVEYARD SCHOOL A group of eighteenth-century poets who wrote long poems on death and immortality. The “graveyard” poetry was related to early stages of the English romantic movement. The poets so called tried to get the atmosphere of pleasing gloom by efforts to call up not only the horrors of death but the very “odor of the charnel house. ” Its members: Thomas Parnell, Robert Blair, Edward Young, Gray, and Americans Philip Freneau, and William Cullen Bryant were philosophically contemplating immortality, the lasting effect of their poetry has been one element in the gothic aspect of romanticism.

GENEVA SCHOOL OF CRITICISM A group of critics, including Georges Poulet, Marcel Raymond, Albert Beguin, and the early J. Hillis Miller, who see a literary work as series of existential expressions of the author’s individual consciousness. Although they vary in method and emphasis – Poulet, for example, seeing the author’s consciousness displayed in temporal and spatial coordinates and Miller in the expression of an immanent reality – the group is consistent in placing the highest value on individual consciousness and in seeing literature as the expression of that consciousness revealed in the act of reading.

FABLIAU A humorous tale popular in medieval France. The conventional verse form of the ______ was the eightsyllable couplet. ______ were stories of various types, but one point was uppermost – humorous, sly satire. These stories, often bawdy, dealt familiarly with the clergy, ridiculed womanhood, and were pitched in a key that made them readily understandable to anybody. The form was also present in English literature, Chaucer especially leaving examples of ______ in the tales of the Miller, Reeve, Merchant, and Shipman. Although ______ may have ostensible “morals” appended, they lack the serious intention of the fable.

THE END This concludes the first of two installments of “Terms to Know” for UIL Literary Criticism.