Random Litcrit Terms And History

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The period between the formation of the national government and the "second Revolution" of Jacksonian Democracy, 1790-1830, is

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Federalist Age

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Every type of literature tends to develop characters whose nature readers do well to recognize so they can distinguish between individual characteristics and conventional traits, and characters of these types are known as

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Stock characters

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The technical term in film criticism that means mindless violence is

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fu

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A literary work, usually play, based on a romantic plot and developed sensationally without regard for motivation and an excessive appeal to the emotions of the audience is a

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melodrama

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A worthless or meaningless word is a

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vox nihil

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In English literature the beginning of the Romantic Period in 1798 was marked by the publication of Coleridge and Wordsworth's

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Lyrical Ballads

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The period in British literature that began in the latter portion of the reign of Queen Victoria, continued into the reign of Edward VII, and was led poetically by those interested in French forms was the

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Realistic

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Thomas Paine and James Madison were Americans who wrote polemical tracts during the period known as

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Revolutionary

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The part of the plot in which the entanglement caused by the conflict is developed is

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complication

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When one word is cut into two parts between which other words-one or more-are inserted, for example, "a whole nother thing" is called

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tmesis

Front 11

In Greek mythology the three sisters who controlled the thread of life are called, collectively,

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the Fates

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Humanist scholars such as Sir Thomas More and Erasmus who wanted to effect reforms in the Church using reason rather than emotions were

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Oxford Reformers

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A metrical foot consisting of three syllables, the first and last accented; the second unaccented as in nevermore is

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amphimacer

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A type of satire that deals with mental attitudes, uses plot loosely to present the world in controlled patterns, and loads up facts presented through intellectual principle is

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Menippean

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A stanza of fourteen lines that does not conform to one of the sonnet patterns is a

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quatorzain

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Eighteenth-century poets, who wrote long poems on death and immortality while attempting to attain an atmosphere of pleasing gloom as they contemplated immortality, as classified as the group known as the

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Graveyard School

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The period identified with Chaucer, the Peasant's Revolt, and the Black Death is known as

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Middle English

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A foot in which two accented syllables flank two unaccented syllables as in year upon year is called

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choriambus

Front 19

A group of writers in New York in the first third of the nineteenth century, whose association was one of geography and chance rather than of close organization, including Irving, Cooper, and Bryant, is called the

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Knickerbockers

Front 20

The quality in art and literature that inspires pity, tenderness, and sorrow, and is closely linked with the pity tragedy should evoke, is known as

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pathos

Front 21

The worship of material and mechanical prosperity and the disregard of culture, beauty, and spirit made popular by Matthew Arnold is

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Philistinism

Front 22

The term which originally meant "hidden or secret things" that came to denote books of the Bible not regarded as part of the sacred canon, or noncanonical books, is known as the

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apocrypha

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Named for some Dickens characters, but predating Dickens, an expression giving literal sense to a figurative expression such as "I'm delighted, as the firefly said when he backed into the fan" is a

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Wellerism

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The addition of an extra letter, syllable, or sound at the end of a word, as in "dearie" for "dear" is known as

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paragoge

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A statement that although seemingly contradictory or absurd may actually be true as in "When I am weak, then I am strong" from 2 Corinthians is known as a

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paradox

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The actor taking the part third in importance in a Greek Drama is called

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tritagonist

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A figure of speech that makes a brief reference to a historical or literary figure, event, or object is

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an allusion

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A group of Southern American writers who published The Fugitive, a little magazine of poetry and some criticism attacking "the old high-caste Brahmins of the Old South," are known as

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Agrarians

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A retort or sarcastic jest; hence a witty saying that is known as a

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quip

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Vernacular speech not accepted as suitable for highly formal usage, although much used in everyday conversation, is called (a)

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slang

Front 31

The late-twentieth to early twenty-first century Irish author of the poetry collections Door into the Dark, North, The Haw Lantern, District and Circle, and (his final collection) Human Chain is

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Seamus Heaney

Front 32

The form of extended metaphor in which objects, persons, places, and actions in a narrative are equated with meanings outside the narrative itself is a(n)

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allegory

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The twentieth-century American author whose novel The Shipping News and novella "Brokeback Mountain" have been made into successive movies is

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Annie Proulx

Front 34

The term applied to the group of twentieth-century writers in the American South who published The Fugitive and who founded the New Criticisms is (the)

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Agrarians

Front 35

The three-line stanza, purportedly devised by Dante, with the rhyme scheme aba bcb cdc ded and so forth is called a

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terza rima

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A work or manner that blends a censorious attitude with humor and with for improving human institutions or humanity in general is categorized as (an)

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satire

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A term originally applied to painting and now used in the criticism of various literary forms involving the contrast of light and darkness is

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chiaroscuro

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The instructiveness in a literary work, one purpose of which is to give guidance in moral, ethical, or religious matters, is known as

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didacticism

Front 39

The author of The Pearl, The Red Pony, The Winter of Our Discontent and recipient of the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Grapes of Wrath

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John Steinbeck

Front 40

An extended and vigorous verbal exchange, often found in Old English poetry, as well as Greek, Arabic, Celtic, Italian, and Provencal poetry is (the)

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flyting

Front 41

The ascription of human characteristics to nonhuman objects or the interpretation of nonhuman things or events

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anthropomorphism

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The term literally meaning 'mask' that is widely used to refer to a "second self" created by an author and through whom a narrative is told is

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persona

Front 43

A name frequently applied to the last half of the eighteenth century in England, resulting from historians' seeing the interval between 1750 and 1798 as a seed field for emerging Romantic qualities in literature, is the

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Age of Sensibility

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A narrator, like those in George Eliot's Adam Bede, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, and Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, whose explanatory, interpretative, and qualifying contributions interrupt the flow of the storytelling is a(n)

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intrusive narrator

Front 45

In its figurative sense, the special usage of words, often without the conscious knowledge of the author or reader, in which there is a change in the word's or words' basic meanings is

a. denotation

b. diction

c. digression

d. imagery

e. plain style

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d. imagery

Front 46

A sustained and formal poem setting forth meditations on death or another solemn theme is a(n)

a. aubade

b. chantey

c. elegy

d. encomium

e. eulogy

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c. elegy

Front 47

A term applied in general to things English and in particular to the English royal court during the second quarter of the seventeenth century, a term that can encompass both Cavalier and Puritan literary expression is

a. Augustine

b. Caroline

c. Edwardian

d. Jacobean

E. Victorian

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b. Caroline

Front 48

The term applied to women of pronounced intellectual interest that gained currency after 1750 as a result of its application to a London group of women of literary and intellectual tastes who held meetings to which literary men were invited is the

a. Bloomsbury Group

b. Bluestockings

c. Della Cruscans

d. Geneva School

e. Hermeneutic Circle

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b. Bluestockings

Front 49

The term that means literally a manifestation or showing forth that designates an event in which the essential nature of something-a person, a situation, an object-is suddenly perceived is

a. apostrophe

b. epiphany

c. locus classicus

d. nekuia

e. zeugma

Back 49

b. epiphany

Front 50

Not a form of poetry considered to be a pattern poem is the

a. altar poem

b. carmen figuratum

c. figure poem

d. rebus

e. shaped verse

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d. rebus

Front 51

The use of morbid and the absurd for darkly comic purposes by such modern writers as Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. , Harold Pinter and Edward Albee is known as

a. black humor

b. blood and thunder

c. fantasy

d. surrealism

e. travesty

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a. black humor

Front 52

The first English translation of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, the first history of the English people, Bede's Ecclesiastical History, adn the flourishing of the School of Caedmon represent the

a. Anglo-Norman Period

b. Early Tudor Age

c. Middle English Period

d. Neoclassic Period

e. Old English Period

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e. Old English Period