Gre Lit Terms

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Alexandrine

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A line of iambic Hexameter; The final line of a Spenserian Stanza is an alexandrine

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Alexandrine

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A line of iambic Hexameter; The final line of a Spenserian Stanza is an alexandrine

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Apostrophe

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"A speech addressed to someone not present or to an abstractions. ""History! You will remember me."" Tends to parody things."

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Bildungsroman

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A novel that follows the growth of a young person from inexperience into the adult world.

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Caesura

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A pause in the middle of a line of Old English.

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Decorum

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"A neoclassical principle of drama. A Character's speech should be appropriate to their character. Hicks don't suddenly lose their accents and quote Shakespeare.

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Doggerel

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A term used to insult badly written poetry of no, or little, literary value.

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Epithalium

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A work to celebrate the a wedding. Spenser writes an Epithalium.

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Euphuism

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Derived from a 16th century work by Lyly, Euphues, this term characterizes writing which is filled with elaborate terms of speech. Maxims. Popular in the late 16th century. For example: Brevity is the soul of wit.

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Feminine Rhyme

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"An end rhyme that rhymes the two last syllables. Unlike ""double rhyme"", the penultimate syllable is stress while the last is not."

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Georgic

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Not Pastoral. It deals with county living and farming, but it is not idealized like Pastoral work.

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Harmartia

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Has an underlying implication of fate, while a fatal flaw has to do with the hero's own personality. Ex: Hubris is a fatal flaw.

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Homeric Epithet

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The descriptive prefix to many nouns in Homer's writings. Ex: Bright-eyed Odysseus. Wine-dark sea.

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Hyperbole

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A deliberate exaggeration

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Litotes

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An understatement created through a negation of a negative: I am a Jew, from Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of NO ORDINARY CITY. (Caps refers to the example.)

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Masculine Rhyme

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Regular rhyme...

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Metonymy

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"A metaphorical reference to an object's or person's single most important feature. For example, A pen is used for writing, not combat, but to say it is ""mightier than the sword"" references its ability to create works of writing that far surpass the intrinsic use of a sword. Writing over Violence."

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Neoclassical Unities

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Unity of Place, Time, and Action. The Unity of Time says a work should occur in a day. Unity of Place confines the work to a single spot. Unity of action mean there is only one plot, without subplots. Aristotle's Poetics are the basis for this. Consider the unities in a play.

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Pastoral Elegy

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A lament for the dead, sung by a shepherd (who is the author). Consider Shelley's Adonais which laments John Keats' passing.

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Pastoral Literature

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Literature dealing with the lives of people in the country or in nature. Especially Shepherds. Marlowe's The Passionate Shepherd To His Love is the classic example.

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Pathetic Fallacy

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Coined by John Ruskin (19th Century). It ascribes emotions to inanimate objects.

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Picaresque

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A novel constructed from incident to incident around the adventures of a rogue. Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn is a prime example.

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Skeletonics

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A form of humorous poetry that uses very short, rhymed, lines and a pronounced rhythm. Popularized by John Skelton. The only difference between this and doggerel is that the quality is better.

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Sprung Rhythum

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Focuses on counting only the stressed syllables in a verse without regard to unstressed syllables. For Example: A line may have 5 stressed/8 unstressed syllables, while the next may have 5 stressed/ 12 unstressed.

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Synaesthesia

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A term refering to phrases that use a combination of senses: Hot Pink would refer both to the temperature and the color, touch and sight.

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Synecdoche

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A phrase describes a person or object by only one important characteristic. The pair of ragged claws scuttled across the seabed.

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Voice

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From which perspective the story is written: 1st person, 3rd Person. etc.

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Ballad

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"Similar to Sprung rhythm poetry and Old English, it relies only on stressed syllables and uses the rhyme scheme: abcb

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In Memoriam

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"Stanzas are composed of four lines of iambic tetrameter rhyming ""abba""

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Ottava Rima

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"Eight-line Stanza (usually Iambic pentameter) rhyming abababcc

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Rhyme Royal

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"Seven line iambic pentameter Stanza rhyming ababbcc

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Spenserian Stanza

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"<p>Nine line Stanzas. First eight lines are iambic pentameter. The last is an Alexandrine. The rhyme of these lines is ""ababbcbcc.""</p>

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Terza Rima

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"A pattern of 3-line stanzas that form an interstanza rhyme scheme: aba bcb cdc etc.

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Alliterative verse

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Verse tradition stemming from the Germanic lands and evidenced in Anglo-Saxon epics and Icelandic sagas. The alliterative line was normally written in two halves - with each half containing two strongly stressed syllables. Of the four stressed syllables two, three or even four would begin with the same sound. During the 14th century in England there was an alliterative revival which produced works such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Vision of Piers Plowman by William Langland.

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Aubade

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An aubade is a poem or song of or about lovers separating at dawn. Donne’s “The Sunne Rising” is a famous example.

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Blank verse

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a type of poetry, distinguished by having a regular meter, but no rhyme. In English, the meter most commonly used with blank verse has been iambic pentameter. It is widely associated with Shakespeare and Milton’s Paradise Lost. It was first used by the Earl of Surrey around 1540.

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bob and the wheel

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this is the mechanism used to end stanzas in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It consists of a short line (bob), followed by a trimeter quatrain (wheel).

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Breton Lay

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is a form of medieval French and English romance literature. Lais are short (typically 600-1000 lines), rhymed tales of love and chivalry, often involving supernatural and fairy-world Celtic motifs. “The Franklin's Tale” from the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer is an example

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chiasmus

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"a rhetorical construction in which the order of the words in the second of two paired phrases is the reverse of the order in the first. (""Pleasure's a sin, and sometimes sin's a pleasure"" –Byron)"

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conceit

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an extended metaphor with a complex logic that governs an entire poem or poetic passage. It is especially associated with the metaphysical poets.

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elegy

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a poem of mourning. Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is a good example. A subset of this classification is a pastoral elegy, in which the mourner is a shepherd. Milton’s Lycidas and Shelley’s Adonais are both examples of pastoral elegies.

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End-stopped line

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A line of verse which ends with a grammatical break such as a coma, colon, semi-colon or full stop etc. It is the opposite of enjambment.

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Enjambment

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the breaking of a syntactic unit (a phrase, clause, or sentence) by the end of a line or between two verses. Its opposite is end-stopping, where each linguistic unit corresponds with a single line.

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Eclogue

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An eclogue is a poem in a classical style on a pastoral subject. Poems in the genre are sometimes also called bucolics. See Virgil’s Ecologues and Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar.

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euphuistic prose

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Tending to or resembling euphuism; of the nature of euphuism; characterized by euphuism. Chiefly in inaccurate sense: Abounding in ‘highflown’ or affectedly refined expression. Highly associated with John Lyly whose popular prose romance, Euphues, or The Anatomy of Wit, set the fashion for the decade before Shakespeare started writing and is a moral romance distinguished by its elaborate style. Also, self-consciously laden with elaborate figures of speech—a popular form in the late 16th century.

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fabliau

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comic works that typical concern cuckolded husbands, rapacious clergy and foolish peasants. The form was popular in medieval times. Several appear in Chaucer’s Cantebury Tales.

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Free verse

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a term describing various styles of poetry that are not written using strict meter or rhyme, but that still are recognizable as 'poetry' by virtue of complex patterns of one sort or another that readers can perceive to be part of a coherent whole. Walt Whitman was a practitioner of free verse.

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Heroic couplets

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rhyming pairs of iambic pentameter lines. You should associate heroic couplets almost exclusively with Restoration verse. Example: Pope’s Rape of the Lock.

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Hudibrastic

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Hudibrastic is a type of English verse named for Samuel Butler's Hudibras of 1672. For the poem, Butler invented a mock-heroic verse structure. Instead of pentameter, the lines were written in iambic tetrameter. The rhyme scheme is the same as in heroic verse (aa, bb, cc, dd, etc.).

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Kunstlerroman

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a kind of Bildungsroman, a novel about an artist's growth to maturity. Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers are both examples.

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monody

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an ode sung by one voice (Arnold’s Thyrsis and parts of Milton’s Lycidas)

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Poetic inversions

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An inversion of the normal grammatical word order; it may range from a single word moved from its usual place to a pair of words inverted or to even more extremes (e.g. “chains adamantine” – Paradise Lost)

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Prosopopoeia

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rhetorical device in which a speaker or writer communicates to the audience by speaking as another person or object.

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roman à clef

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a novel describing real-life events behind a façade of fiction. Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance, Hemmingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, and Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar are all examples.

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Sestina

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consists of thirty-nine lines; six six-line stanzas, usually ending with a triplet. It is an uncommon verse form. “Ye Goatherd Gods” from Sidney’s Arcadia is the only example that comes to mind.

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Sturm und Drang

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a German literary movement which emphasized the volatile emotional life of the individual. This genre is especially associated with Goethe.

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Villanelle

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"The essence of the form is its distinctive pattern of rhyme and repetition, with only two rhyme-sounds (""a"" and ""b"") and two alternating refrains that resolve into a concluding couplet. Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” is a good example. Stephen Dedalus also writes one in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man."