Literary Terms

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Aestheticism

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Art for art's sake--the idea that art exists not to solve any social problems, but just to be beautiful and contemplated as an end in itself

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Ballad

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A third-person narrative poem in ballad stanzas, with an abrupt beginning and no background information.

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Ballad stanza

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A quatrain of alternating three- and four-stress lines

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Bildungsroman

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A novel that describes the formation of the subject's mind and character from childhood to maturity, usually involving a spiritual crisis.

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Decadence

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A fin de siècle art movement characterized by high artifice, bizarre subject matter, and an avoidance of "natural" behaviour. The goal was "the systematic derangement of all the senses"

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Dramatic monologue

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A first person poem with a speaker who is patently not the poet and an implied audience, which reveals something about the character of the speaker. Usually set in a specific place at a specific time.

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Epic

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A long poem in a formal or elevated style on a serious subject, with a heroic or quasi-divine protagonist whose actions are of great importance.

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Epiphany

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A sudden realization brought on, in Romantic literature, by the sublime, and in modernist literature by an ordinary object or scene that suddenly becomes significant.

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Fin de siècle

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The period near the end of the 19th century characterized by decadence, aestheticism, ennui, and malaise about the coming changes of the 20th century

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Free verse

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Verse not bound by a regular rhyme scheme or metrical pattern

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Image

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A concise verbal representation of a brief, pungent sensory experience--not necessarily visual.

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Irish Literary Renaissance

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The period in the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries in which Irish authors aimed to create a distinctive national literature influenced by Irish history, legend, and folklore

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Jacobin

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Far-left supporters of the French Revolution, associated with the Reign of Terror

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Künstlerroman

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Like a bildungsroman, except centered on the life and development of an artist.

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Lyric

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A fairly short poem, uttered by a single speaker, who expresses a state of mind or a process of perception, thought, and feeling.

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Lyrical ballad

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A combination of the lyric and the ballad, which evokes emotions by way of narrative. The feeling gives importance to the action and vice versa

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Modernism

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A literary movement in the beginning of the 20th century characterized by a rejection of older literary conventions and traditions, and concerned with the avant-garde, and "making it new," in both subject matter and form.

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Negative capability

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A literary quality characterized by an impersonal or objective non-dogmatic author who maintains aesthetic distance, and the idea that subject matter, concepts, and characters are not subject to normal standards of truth, morality, or evidence when embodied in a beautiful artistic form.

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Novel of manners

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A realistic novel that focuses on the customs, conversation, and ways of thinking and valuing of the upper social class

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Ode

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A long lyric poem that is serious in subject and treatment and elevated in style. Odes were originally written to praise or glorify but in the Romantic period became meditations spurred by an encounter with something natural, usually involving a turning point or revelation that allows the speaker to return to the natural object with a new perspective.

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Pastoral

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A poem that expresses an idealized version of the peace and simplicity of natural or rustic life

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Primary/secondary imagination

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Coleridge's idea that there were two types of imagination--the primary, capable of acts of creation akin to divine creation, and the secondary, which acts upon pre-existing objects in the world, breaking apart, recombining, and enlivening them. The secondary imagination was most relevant to poetic creation

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Sonnet

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A 14-line lyric poem in iambic pentameter, either divided into an octave and a sestet (as in the Petrarchan sonnet) or three quatrains and a concluding couplet (as in the Shakespearean sonnet). The Petrarchan sonnet favours the statement of a problem in the octave and its solution in the sestet, while the Shakespearean sonnet usually presents a repetition-with-variation statement in each of the three quatrains, with an epigrammatic turn at the end.

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Sublime

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The Romantic characterization of a natural object as being both beautiful and terrifying, provoking an epiphany in the observer. The sublime object must have obscurity, immense power, and vastness of scope or quality, and the observer, though frightened, is always in a safe location.

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Terza rima

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A rhyme scheme composed of interlinked tercets--aba, bcb, cdc, and so on. When Shelley used it in "Ode to the West Wind," he added a concluding couplet after every four tercets.

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Volta

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The shift or point of dramatic change in a poem. In the Petrarchan sonnet, it usually appears after the octave; in the Shakespearean sonnet, just before the ending couplet.