Engl 382 Midterm

Front 1

gothic

Back 1

Germanic, medieval, uncivilized; a literary style of fiction prevalent in the late 18c and early 19c, characterized by the grotesque, mysterious, or desolate.

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elegy

Back 2

A reflective poem that laments the loss of something or someone (or loss or death more generally)

Front 3

ballad

Back 3

A narrative poem consisting of quatrains of iambic tetrameter alternating with iambic trimeter. In Ballad Meter, the first and third lines may rhyme, but the second and fourth lines must rhyme. Common traits of the ballad include simple or "folksy" language and often the theme is tragic. A ballad contains a refrain repeated several times.

Front 4

anachronism

Back 4

Greek: ana- , reversed, backwards + chronos, time). Placing an event, person, item, or verbal expression in the wrong historical period.

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frame narrative

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A frame narrative is a narrative in which an introductory main story is composed, at least in part, for the purpose of setting the stage for an ensuing narrative or set of shorter stories, each of which is a story within a story. Because it includes multiple narrators and plots, voices and stories, frame narratives lack a centralizing authorial voice and authority, forcing its readers to question whether they should trust a narrator as reliable.

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strophic

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Verse written in strophes or stanzas, like ballads or songs. From the Greek for "turn."

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stichic

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(from Greek stichos: "row," "line") describes verse written in a continuous run of isometric lines, that is, lines of the same length and meter.

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blank verse

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also called unrhymed iambic pentameter. Unrhymed lines of ten syllables each with the even-numbered syllables bearing the accents.

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epistolary novel

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any novel that takes the form of a series of letters--either written by one character or several characters. The form allows an author to dispense with an omniscent point of view, but still [to] switch between the viewpoints of several characters during the narrative.

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anaphora

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(Greek, "a carry back," "to carry again"): A rhetorical scheme that involves repetition of initial word or phrase at the beginning of successive lines in verse or clauses or sentences in prose). The opposite of anaphora is epistrophe, in which the writer repeats the concluding phrase over and over for effects.

Front 11

epic simile

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A formed and sustained simile. Like a regular simile, an epic simile makes a comparison between one object and another using "like" or "as." However, unlike a regular simile, which often appears in a single sentence, the epic simile appears in the genre of the epic or for mock-heroic purposes and it may be developed at great length, often up to fifty or a hundred lines

Front 12

zeugma

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{Greek "yoking" or "bonding"): Artfully using a single verb to refer to two different objects grammatically, or artfully using an adjective to refer to two separate nouns, even though the adjective would logically only be appropriate for one of the two.

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sensibility

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Sentiment. The literature of Sensibility values emotionalism over rationalism. This literature tends to perceive feelings as more reliable guides to morality and truth than abstract principles, and thus it tends to view human beings as essentially benevolent.

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enjambment

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{French, "straddling," in English also called "run-on line"): A line having no pause or end punctuation but habing uninterrupted grammatical meaning continuing into the next lines, as opposed to end-stopped lines, which end with a pause such as a period or semicolon.

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heroic couplet

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Two rhyming verses written in the "heroic" line, that is iambic pentameter (where the stressed syllables occur alternately, as ^/^/^/^/^/). There is genereally a pause of "caesura" in the middle of each line, often after the fourth or sixth syllable.