Gre Literary Terms

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Analogue

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A comparison between two similar things. In literature, a work which resembles another work either fully or in part. If a work resembles another because it is derived from the other, the original work is called the source, not an analogue of the later work.

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Apologue

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A moral fable, usually featuring personified animals or inanimate objects which act like people to allow the author to comment on the human condition. Often, the apologue highlights the irrationality of mankind. The beast fable, and the fables of Aesop are examples. Some critics have called Samuel Johnson's Rasselas an apologue rather than a novel because it is more concerned with moral philosophy than with character or plot. Examples:
George Orwell, Animal Farm
Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book

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Burlesque

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A work designed to ridicule a style, literary form, or subject matter either by treating the exalted in a trivial way or by discussing the trivial in exalted terms (that is, with mock dignity). Burlesque concentrates on derisive imitation, usually in exaggerated terms. Literary genres (like the tragic drama) can be burlesqued, as can styles of sculpture, philosophical movements, schools of art, and so forth. See Parody, Travesty.

John Gay, The Beggar's Opera (1728), burlesques Italian opera by trivializing it
Henry Fielding, Tom Thumb the Great (1730), burlesques heroic drama by trivializing it
Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1711-14), burlesques the eighteenth century upper crust social mores by treating them with the machinery of epic poetry

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Cacaphony/Euphony

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Cacaphony is an unpleasant combination of sounds. Euphony, the opposite, is a pleasant combination of sounds. These sound effects can be used intentionally to create an effect, or they may appear unintentionally. The cacaphony in Matthew Arnold's lines "And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know,/Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honor'd, self-secure,/Didst tread on earth unguess'd at," is probably unintentional.

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Classicism

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A movement or tendency in art, music, and literature to retain the characteristics found in work originating in classical Greece and Rome. It differs from Romanticism in that while Romanticism dwells on the emotional impact of a work, classicism concerns itself with form and discipline.

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Didactic Literature

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Literature disigned explicitly to instruct

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Dystopian novel

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An anti-utopian novel where, instead of a paradise, everything has gone wrong in the attempt to create a perfect society. See utopian novel. Examples:
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

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End-stopped

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A line that has a natural pause at the end

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Epic

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An extended narrative poem recounting actions, travels, adventures, and heroic episodes and written in a high style (with ennobled diction, for example). It may be written in hexameter verse, especially dactylic hexameter, and it may have twelve books or twenty four books. Characteristics of the classical epic include these:
The main character or protagonist is heroically larger than life, often the source and subject of legend or a national hero
The deeds of the hero are presented without favoritism, revealing his failings as well as his virtues
The action, often in battle, reveals the more-than-human strength of the heroes as they engage in acts of heroism and courage
The setting covers several nations, the whole world, or even the universe
The episodes, even though they may be fictional, provide an explanation for some of the circumstances or events in the history of a nation or people
The gods and lesser divinities play an active role in the outcome of actions
All of the various adventures

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Epic Conventions

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Poem begins with a statement of the theme ("Arms and the man I sing")
Invocation to the muse or other deity ("Sing, goddess, of the wrath of Achilles")
Story begins in medias res (in the middle of things)
Catalogs (of participants on each side, ships, sacrifices)
Histories and descriptions of significant items (who made a sword or shield, how it was decorated, who owned it from generation to generation)
Epic simile (a long simile where the image becomes an object of art in its own right as well as serving to clarify the subject).
Frequent use of epithets ("Aeneas the true"; "rosy-fingered Dawn"; "tall-masted ship")
Use of patronymics (calling son by father's name): "Anchises' son"
Long, formal speeches by important characters
Journey to the underworld
Use of the number three (attempts are made three times, etc.)
Previous episodes in the story are later recounted

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Epigram

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A short poem or verse that seeks to ridicule a thought or event, usually with witticism or sarcasm.

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Epigraph

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A brief quotation which appears at the beginning of a literary work.

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Epistolary novel

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A novel consisting of letters written by a character or several characters. The form allows for the use of multiple points of view toward the story and the ability to dispense with an omniscient narrator. Examples:
Samuel Richardson, Pamela
Samuel Richardson, Clarissa
Fanny Burney, Evelina
C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
Hannah W. Foster, The Coquette

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Euphuism

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A highly ornate style of writing popularized by John Lyly's Euphues, characterized by balanced sentence construction, rhetorical tropes, and multiplied similes and allusions.

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Existentialist novel

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A novel written from an existentialist viewpoint, often pointing out the absurdity and meaninglessness of existence. Example:

Albert Camus, The Stranger

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Poetic Feet

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Iamb: U /
Trochee: / U
Anapest: U U /
Dactyl: / U U
Spondee: / /
Pyrrhic: U U

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Gothic novel

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A novel in which supernatural horrors and an atmosphere of unknown terror pervades the action. The setting is often a dark, mysterious castle, where ghosts and sinister humans roam menacingly. Horace Walpole invented the genre with his Castle of Otranto. Gothic elements include these:
Ancient prophecy, especially mysterious, obscure, or hard to understand.
Mystery and suspense
High emotion, sentimentalism, but also pronounced anger, surprise, and especially terror
Supernatural events (e.g. a giant, a sighing portrait, ghosts or their apparent presence, a skeleton)
Omens, portents, dream visions
Fainting, frightened, screaming women
Women threatened by powerful, impetuous male
Setting in a castle, especially with secret passages
The metonymy of gloom and horror (wind, rain, doors grating on rusty hinges, howls in the distance, distant sighs, footsteps approaching, lights in abandoned rooms, gusts of wind blowing out lights or blowing suddenly, characters trapped in rooms or imprisoned)
The

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Horatian Satire

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In general, a gentler, more good humored and sympathetic kind of satire, somewhat tolerant of human folly even while laughing at it. Named after the poet Horace, whose satire epitomized it. Horatian satire tends to ridicule human folly in general or by type rather than attack specific persons.

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Humanism

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The new emphasis in the Renaissance on human culture, education and reason, sparked by a revival of interest in classical Greek and Roman literature, culture, and language. Human nature and the dignity of man were exalted and emphasis was placed on the present life as a worthy event in itself (as opposed to the medieval emphasis on the present life merely as preparation for a future life).

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Humours

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blood...air...hot and moist: sanguine, kind, happy, romantic
phlegm...water...cold and moist: phlegmatic, sedentary, sickly, fearful
yellow bile...fire...hot and dry: choleric, ill-tempered, impatient, stubborn
black bile...earth...cold and dry: melancholy, gluttonous, lazy, contemplative

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Invective

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Speech or writing that abuses, denounces, or attacks. It can be directed against a person, cause, idea, or system. It employs a heavy use of negative emotive language.

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Juvenalian Satire

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Harsher, more pointed, perhaps intolerant satire typified by the writings of Juvenal. Juvenalian satire often attacks particular people, sometimes thinly disguised as fictional characters. While laughter and ridicule are still weapons as with Horatian satire, the Juvenalian satirist also uses withering invective and a slashing attack. Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope are Juvenalian satirists.

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Metaphysical Poetry

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The term metaphysical was applied to a style of 17th Century poetry first by John Dryden and later by Dr. Samuel Johnson because of the highly intellectual and often abstruse imagery involved.

Chief among the metaphysical poets are John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Andrew Marvell, and Henry Vaughan.

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Metonymy

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A figure of speech in which a word represents something else which it suggests. For example in a herd of fifty cows, the herd might be referred to as fifty head of cattle.

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Novel of manners

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novel focusing on and describing in detail the social customs and habits of a particular social group. Usually these conventions function as shaping or even stifling controls over the behavior of the characters.

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Pathetic Fallacy

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A fallacy of reason in suggesting that nonhuman phenomena act from human feelings, as suggested by the word "pathetic" from the Greek pathos; a literary device wherein something nonhuman found in nature-a beast, plant, stream, natural force, etc.-performs as though from human feeling or motivation.

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Picaresque novel

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An episodic, often autobiographical novel about a rogue or picaro (a person of low social status) wandering around and living off his wits. The wandering hero provides the author with the opportunity to connect widely different pieces of plot, since the hero can wander into any situation. Picaresque novels tend to be satiric and filled with petty detail. Examples:
Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
Henry Fielding, Jonathan Wild

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Roman a clef

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[French for "novel with a key," pronounced roh MAHN ah CLAY] A novel in which historical events and actual people are written about under the pretense of being fiction. Examples:

Aphra Behn, Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

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Slant rhyme

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also known as near rhyme, half rhyme, off rhyme, imperfect rhyme, oblique rhyme, or pararhyme.

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Spenserian Stanza

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A nine-line stanza, with the first eight lines in iambic pentameter and the last line in iambic hexameter (called an Alexandrine). The rhyme scheme is A-B-A-B B-C-B-C C. Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene is written in Spenserian stanzas.

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Spondee

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A metrical pattern characterized by two or more successively-placed accented syllables.

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Synesthesia

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One sensory experience described in terms of another sensory experience.

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Travesty

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A work that treats a serious subject frivolously-- ridiculing the dignified. Often the tone is mock serious and heavy handed.

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Theatre of the Absurd

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A drama based on an absurd situation. In Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot," two characters spend the entire play waiting for someone named Godot, who is supposed to solve their problems, but who never appears. Instead, Godot's servant appears, but only to tell the two that Godot will not appear that day. The waiting commences again and is only broken by the occasional appearance of the servant who tells them that Godot will, once again, not appear that day.

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Unreliable narrator

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one who gives his or her own understanding of a story, instead of the explanation and interpretation the author wishes the audience to obtain.

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Versification

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Generally, the structural form of a verse, as revealed by scansion.

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A POSTERIORI

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In rhetoric, logic, and philosophy, a belief or proposition is said to be a posteriori if it can only be determined through observation

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A PRIORI

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In rhetoric, logic, and philosophy, an argument is said to be a priori if its truth can be known or inferred independently of any direct perception.

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ABBEY THEATRE

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The center of the Irish Dramatic movment founded in 1899 by W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, built with the express purpose of presenting Irish plays performed by Irish actors. It opened in 1904 and began showing plays by almost every Irish playwright of renown.

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AB OVO

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(Latin, "from the egg"): This phrase refers to a narrative that starts "at the beginning" of the plot, and then moves chronologically through a sequence of events to the tale's conclusion.

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Nominative Case

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Words in this case usually function as the subject of a sentence, or in some cases as a predicate nominative. For instance, "John arrives tonight" would require the word John to be in the nominative case since John functions as the subject of the clause. On the other hand, "It is I, Hamlet the Dane," would require both the word I and Hamlet to be in the nominative case also, since these are functioning as predicate nominatives for the subject it.

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Accusative Case

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Words in this case commonly function as the direct object of a verb, though often certain prepositions will require an object of the preposition to be in the accusative case. For instance, "Darth Maul struck Obi-Wan" would require the word Obi-Wan to be in the accusative, since that poor Jedi is the object directly affected by the verb struck.

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Genitive Case

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Words in this case are functioning in a possessive manner, though often certain prepositions or special verbs will require an object to be in the genitive. In English, we often show this relationship by either an apostrophe 's or we create it artificially by using the pronoun of. For instance, we might see either "This is Bob Miller's house," or we might see "This is the house of Bob Miller." Synthetic languages would convey the same idea by putting the name "Bob Miller" in the genitive case. More rarely, some Indo-European languages might use the genitive of material to indicate the material substance of an object. Thus, English speakers refer to Superman as "the man of steel" or architects speak of "a house of stone."

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Dative Case

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Words in this case are functioning as the indirect object or the recipient of a direct object, though often certain prepositions or special verbs will require an object to be in the dative. For example, in this sentence, "Carla gave Sandy a gift," the word Sandy would be the indirect object or recipient, and thus that word would be in the dative case.

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Ablative Case

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Words in this case typically indicate source, origin, separation, or causation, though certain prepositions or special verbs will require an object to be in the ablative. For instance, "He came from Mantua" would require the word Mantua to be in the ablative of origin. Likewise, "He left Mantua at 2:00 pm" would require the word Mantua to be in the ablative of separation. "Because of rain, he left," would require a synthetic speaker to use an ablative of causation for the word rain.

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Vocative Case

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Words in the case typically indicate that the word is being specifically addressed or spoken to. For instance, consider this sentence: "John, would you be a dear and take out the garbage?" In this example, the word John would be in the vocative case in a synthetic language.

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Locative Case

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Words in this case function to show location; for instance, "Joe went home." The word home would be in the locative case in a synthetic language. Many synthetic languages simply use the dative case here.

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Instrumental Case

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Words in this case are functioning to illustrate how or by what means an action was taken; for instance, "Joe smashed in the door with a hammer." The word hammer would be in the instrumental case in many languages to show what means Joe used to smash in the door.

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Interjective Case

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Words in the interjective case are outbursts or exclamations separate from the rest of the sentence's syntax. Examples in English might be, "Gee-whiz!" or "Yikes!" or "Golly" or "Damn!" or "Ah!" Some languages would put these interjections in their own separate case, but most simply use nondeclinable words for interjections.

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ABLAUT

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Jacob Grimm's term for the way in which Old English strong verbs formed their preterites by a vowel change. This is also called gradation. An example would be the principal parts of Old English strong verbs such as I sing, I sang, and I sung.

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ABOVE, THE

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Also called "the aloft" and sometimes used interchangeably with "the Heavens," this term refers to the gallery on the upper level of the frons scenae.

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ABSTRACT POEM

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Verse that makes little sense grammatically or syntactically but which relies on auditory patterns create its meaning or poetic effects

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ACATALECTIC

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A "normal" line of poetry with the expected number of syllables in each line, as opposed to a catalectic line, which is missing an expected syllable, or a hypercatalectic line, which has one or more extra syllables than would normally be expected, perhaps due to anacrusis

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ACEPHALOUS

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From Greek "headless," acephalous lines are lines in normal iambic pentameter that contain only nine syllables rather than the expected ten.

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ACROSTIC

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A poem in which the first or last letters of each line vertically form a word, phrase, or sentence. An acrostic that involves the sequential letters of the alphabet is said to be an abecedarius.

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ADEKAH

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The adekah is a section of Genesis including Genesis 22:1-19, of foundational importance in the three Abrahamic traditions of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism.

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ADDITIVE MONSTER

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a creature from mythology or legend that has an altered number of body parts rather than body parts from multiple animals added together

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ADVANCED PRONUNCIATION

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an early instance of a historical sound change in progress

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AESTHETIC DISTANCE

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An effect of tone, diction, and presentation in poetry creating a sense of an experience removed from irrelevant or accidental events.

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AFFRICATIVE

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A sound stop with a fricative release. The affricatives include two different sounds. The first sound is found in judge, gem, soldier, and spinach. The second affricative sound is that sound found in church, butcher, itch, niche, and cello.

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AGGLUTINATIVE

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In a now outdated linguistic classification, an agglutinative language was any language with complicated but (for the most part) regular derivational forms

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AGRARIAN IDEALISM

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The conviction that farming is an especially virtuous occupation in comparison with trade, craftsmanship, manufacturing, or other means of commerce.

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AIDED

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A tale in prose or mixed prose and poetry in which a hero, poet, or ruler suffers a violent death, often occurring at a liminal time or place. some thirty-five such tales explicitly labeled aideda survive from Old or Middle Irish between 650-1250 C.E.

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AIDOS

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The Greek term for the great shame felt by a hero after failure

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ALAZON

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A stock character in Greek drama, the alazon is a stupid braggart who is easily tricked by the clever eiron who tells the alazon what he wants to hear.

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ALBA

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A medieval lyric or morning serenade about the coming of dawn. The alba's refrain typically ends with the word "dawn."

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ALCAICS

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A stanza written in alcaics is written in the meter created by the Greek poet Alcaeus. This stanza-form was later used with slight changes by the poet Horace. An example in English appears in Tennyson's imitation.

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ALEXANDRINE

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A twelve-syllable line written in iambic hexameter. Alexandrines were especially popular in French poetry for drama between 1500-1800 CE, but their invention dates back to the late 1100s.

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ALLIOSIS

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While presenting a reader with only two alternatives may result in the logical fallacy known as false dichotomy or either/or fallacy, creating a parallel sentence using two alternatives in parallel structure can be an effective device rhetorically and artistically. Alliosis is the rhetorical use of any isocolon parallel sentence that presents two choices to the reader, e.g., "You can eat well, or you can sleep well."

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ALLITERATIVE PROSE

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Many texts of Old English and Middle English prose use the same techniques as alliterative verse. Aelfric (c. 955-1010 CE) and Wulfstan (d. 1023) wrote many treatises using skillful alliteration.

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ALLITERATIVE REVIVAL

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The general increase or surge in alliterative poetry composed in the second half of the 14th century in England. During this time, Piers Plowman, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and other important medieval poems were written using alliterative techniques.

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ALLOMORPH

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A different pronunciation of a morpheme. For instance, consider the -s plural morpheme. The standard /s/ sound (as in <elks>) becomes a /z/ sound in some allomorphs (such as <boxes>.) However, the same grapheme <s> is used to represent each sound.

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ALLOPHONE

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A predictable change in the articulation of a phoneme. For example, the letter t in the word top is aspirated, but the letter t in stop is unaspirated.

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ALTAIC

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A non-Indo-European language family including Turkish, Tungusic, and Mongolian

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AMALGAMATED COMPOUND

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A word originally formed from a compound, but whose form is no longer clearly connected to its origin, such as the word not--originally compounded from Anglo-Saxon na-wiht ("no whit").

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AMANUENSIS

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A servant, slave, secretary, or scribe who takes dictation for an author who speaks aloud.

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AMELIORATION

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A semantic change in which a word gains increasingly favorable connotation. For instance, the Middle English word knight used to mean "servant" (as German Knecht still does). The word grew through amelioration to mean "a servant of the king" and later "a minor nobleman."

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AMPHIBRACH

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In classical poetry, a three-syllable poetic foot consisting of a light stress, heavy stress, and a light stress--short on both ends.

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AMPHIMACER

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A three-syllable foot consisting of a heavy, light, and heavy stress.

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AMPHISBAENIC RHYME

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A poetic structure invented by Edmund Wilson in which final words in strategic lines do not rhyme in the traditional sense, but rather reverse their order of consonants and vowels to appear backwards.

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ANACREONTICS

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Poetry or song-verse modeled on the poetry of the Greek poet Anacreon--i.e., carpe diem poetry praising hedonistic pleasures of wine, women, and song, written in trochaic tetrameter.

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ANACRUSIS

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The addition of an extra unstressed syllable or two at the start of a line of verse--but these additions are not considered part of the regular metrical count.

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ANADIPLOSIS

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Repeating the last word of a clause at the beginning of the next clause. Extended anadiplosis is called gradatio.

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ANAGNORISIS

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A term used by Aristotle in the Poetics to describe the moment of tragic recognition in which the protagonist realizes some important fact or insight, especially a truth about himself, human nature, or his situation.

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ANALOGUE

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A story that contains similar characters, situations, settings, or verbal echoes to those found in a different story.

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ANALYTIC

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A language is analytic if it requires a certain word order to make grammatical sense--often this requires extensive use of prepositions and auxiliary verbs.

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ANAPHORA

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The intentional repetition of beginning clauses in order to create an artistic effect.

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ANAPODOTON

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Deliberately creating a sentence fragment by the omission of a clause

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ANAPTYXIS

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the appearance of an intrusive vowel sound between two consonants when that vowel is unexpected historically or when it shouldn't be there according to the normal rules of language development.

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ANASTROPHE

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Inverted order of words or events as a rhetorical scheme. Anastrophe is specifically a type of hyperbaton in which the adjective appears after the noun when we expect to find the adjective before the noun.

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ANATOLIAN

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A branch of Indo-European languages spoken in Asia Minor, including Hittite

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ANCHORHOLD

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In medieval times, an enclosure in the wall of a church where an anchorite or anchoress would be sealed up alive as a gesture of faith.

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ANTHIMERIA

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Artfully using a different part of speech to act as another in violation of the normal rules of grammar.

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ANTIHERO

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A protagonist who is a non-hero or the antithesis of a traditional hero. While the traditional hero may be dashing, strong, brave, resourceful, or handsome, the antihero may be incompetent, unlucky, clumsy, dumb, ugly, or clownish.

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ANTIMETABOLE

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A rhetorical scheme involving repetition in reverse order: "One should eat to live, not live to eat."

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APHAEARESIS

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Rhetorically deleting a syllable--unaccented or accented--from the beginning of a word to create a new term or phrasing.

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APHESIS

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the omission of an unaccented syllable from the front of a word.

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APOCOPE

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Deleting a syllable or letter from the end of a word.

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APOPHASIS

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Denying one's intention to talk or write about a subject, but making the denial in such a way that the subject is actually discussed.

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APORIA

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The deliberate act of talking about how one is unable to talk about something.

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APOSIOPESIS

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Breaking off as if unable to continue, stopping suddenly in the midst of a sentence, or leaving a statement unfinished at a dramatic moment.

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ARÊTE

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a humble and constant striving for perfection and self-improvement combined with a realistic awareness that such perfection cannot be reached.

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ARRAS

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In Renaissance drama, a hanging tapestry or a curtain that covered a part of the frons scenae.

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ARSIS

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Greeks referred to the stressed syllable in a metrical foot as a thesis, and the unstressed syllable in a metrical foot as an arsis. Unfortunately, the Roman analysts used the exact opposite terminology, with the thesis being their unstressed foot and the arsis being the stressed foot.

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ASCERTAINMENT

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The Enlightenment's desire for and obsession with standardization and regulation of the English language

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AUBADE

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A genre of poetry in which a short poem's subject is about the dawn or the coming of the dawn, or it is a piece of music meant to be sung or played outdoors at dawn.

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AUFKLÄRUNG

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The German term for the philosophical movement called in English "the Enlightenment" or the Neoclassical movement.

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AUGUSTAN

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any important or pivotal period of any national literature, especially eighteenth-century England and the "Augustan" writers: Pope, Swift, Addison, Johnson, and Goldsmith

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AUREATE DICTION
or
AUREATE TERMS

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An elevated rhetorical style of writing characterized by a large number of Latinate loanwords

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AUTO-DA-FÉ

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The late medieval church's ceremonial execution en masse of accused witches, Jews, heretics, or Muslims--often performed by burning at the stake.

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AUTO SACRAMENTAL

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A drama of one act symbolizing the sacrament of Eucharist in Spanish literature between 1200 and 1600 CE.

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AWDL

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The term in Welsh poetry has come to acquire several meanings.

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BABUIN

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A fanciful monster, silly creature, or a leering face drawn in the margins of a medieval manuscript.

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BACK-FORMATION

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The process of creating a new word when speakers (often mistakenly) remove an affix or other morpheme from a longer word.

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BATHOS

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a descent in literature in which a poet or writer--striving too hard to be passionate or elevated--falls into trivial or stupid imagery, phrasing, or ideas.

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BEL INCONNU

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A motif common to fairy tales, folklore and medieval Romance in which the protagonist's identity remains unknown until some suitably dramatic moment.

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BEOT

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A ritualized boast or vow made publicly by Anglo-Saxon warriors known as thegns before the hlaford in a mead-hall the night before a military engagement.

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BESTERMAN

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A typical protagonist or anti-hero from the science fiction stories of Alfred Bester. These complex characters embody traits of the Nietzchean ubermensch, and they combine both positive and negative qualities. They are rarely predictable, and they can alternately destroy or save the world, engage in heroic self-sacrifice or selfish rapine.

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BILDUNGSROMAN

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The German term for a coming-of-age story.

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BOB-AND-WHEEL

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The first short line of a group of rhyming lines is known as the "bob" and the subsequent four are a quatraine called the "wheel." The bob-and-wheel constitutes five lines rhyming in an ABABA pattern.

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BOETHIAN

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Having to do with the philosophy of Boethius, i.e., a philosophy of predestination suggesting all events appearing evil, misfortunate, disastrous, or accidental are none of these things.

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BOURGEOISIE

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The French term bourgeoisie is a noun referring to the non-aristocratic middle-class, while the word bourgeois is the adjective-form. Calling something bourgeois implies that something is middle-class in its tendencies or values.

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BOUSTROPHEDON

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A method of writing in which the text is read alternately from left to right on odd numbered lines and then read right to left in even numbered lines.

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BOWDLERIZATION

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A later editor's censorship of sexuality, profanity, and political sentiment of an earlier author's text.

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BRADSHAW SHIFT

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the Bradshaw Shift is a suggested alteration to the order of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, one which differs radically from the manuscript tradition.

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BREVE

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A mark in the shape of a bowl-like half circle that indicates a light stress or an unaccented syllable.

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BUSKINS

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a Renaissance term for the elegantly laced boots worn by actors in ancient Greek tragedy

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CACOPHONY

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The term in poetry refers to the use of words that combine sharp, harsh, hissing, or unmelodious sounds.

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CADEL

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A small addition or "extra" item added to an initial letter.

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CALQUE

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An expression formed by individually translating parts of a longer foreign expression and then combining them in a way that may or may not make literal sense in the new language.

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CANCEL

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A bibliographical term referring to a leaf which is substituted for one removed by the printers because of an error.

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CANTICLE

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A hymn or religious song using words from any part of the Bible except the Psalms.

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CANZONE

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It refers generally to the words of a Provençal or Italian song.

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CATACHRESIS

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A completely impossible figure of speech or an implied metaphor that results from combining other extreme figures of speech such as anthimeria, hyperbole, synaesthesia, and metonymy.

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CATALECTIC

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A truncated line in which one or more unstressed syllables have been dropped.

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CAUDATE RHYME

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Another term for tail-rhyme or rime couée.

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CELLERAGE

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The hollow area beneath a Renaissance stage

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CENOTAPH

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A carving on a tombstone or monument, often in the form of a verse poem, biblical passage, or literary allusion appearing after the deceased individual's name and date of birth/death.

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CHARACTONYM

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An evocative or symbolic name given to a character that conveys his or her inner psychology or allegorical nature.

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CHAUCERISM

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In the Renaissance, experimental revivals and new word formations that were consciously designed to imitate the sounds, the "feel," and verbal patterns from an older century--a verbal or grammatical anachronism.

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CHEKE SYSTEM

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a proposed method for indicating long vowels and standardizing spelling first suggested by Sir John Cheke in Renaissance orthography.

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CHIASMUS

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A literary scheme in which the author introduces words or concepts in a particular order, then later repeats those terms or similar ones in reversed or backwards order.

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CHORAGOS

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A sponsor or patron of a play in classical Greece.

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CHORIC FIGURE

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Any character in any type of narrative literature that serves the same purpose as a chorus

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CHTHONIC

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Related to the dead, the grave, the underworld, or the fertility of the earth.

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CLANG ASSOCIATION

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A semantic change caused because one word sounds similar to another.

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COLLOCATION

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The frequency or tendency some words have to combine with each other.

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COMMEDIA DELL'ARTE

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A genre of Italian farce from the sixteenth-century characterized by stock characters, stock situations, and spontaneous dialogue.

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COMMONIZATION

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The linguistic term for an eponym--a common word that is derived from the proper name of a person or place.

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COMPERT

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birth-tales in Old Irish literature that detail the conception and birth of a hero.

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COMPOSITE MONSTER

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The term is one mythologists use to describe the fantastical creatures in Assyrian, Babylonian, Greek, and medieval European legends in which the beast is composed of the body-parts of various animals.

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COMPURGATION

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the medieval law practice among Christianized Anglo-Saxon tribes to determine innocence

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CONFLATION

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a version of a play or narrative that later editors create by combining the text from more than one substantive edition

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CONTRAPASSIO

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A thematic principle involving situational irony in which a punishment's nature corresponds exactly to the nature of a crime.

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CROSSED RHYME

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In long couplets, especially hexameter lines, sufficient room in the line allows a poet to use rhymes in the middle of the line as well as at the end of each line.

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CYRILLIC

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The alphabet used to write Russian, Serbian, and Bulgarian.