image--guide to literary terms

 

English 241: Survey of the Literature of England

A Guide to Literary Terms

 

Over the course of the Fall semester, this page will accrue a list of definitions for literary terms discussed in English 241: Survey of the Literature of England. I will attempt to add new terms as they are brought up in class, so that by the end of this semester the guide will provide a useful resource for students preparing for final papers and exams.


INDEX

B

ballad

blank verse

C

caesura

E

epiphany

H

heroic couplet

I

invocation

in medias res

M

meter

N

narration

P

pantheism

S

sublime


Ballad:

Here's the definition of "ballad" in C. Hugh Holman's Handbook to Literature:

I'll finish with a passage from M. H. Abrams's definition of "ballad" in his Glossary of Literary Terms: INDEX

Blank Verse:

This is a verse form commonly used in Elizabethan drama and in long narrative poems generally (the Prelude being our main example). The form consists of unrhymed iambic pentameter lines. "Of all English verse forms," writes M. H. Abrams in his A Glossary of Literary Terms, blank verse "is closest to the natural rhythms of English speech, yet the most flexible and adaptive to diverse levels of discourse; as a result it has been more frequently and variously used than any other type of verse." INDEX

Caesura:

Here's the definition from C. Hugh Holman's A Handbook to Literature: "A pause or break in the metrical or rhythmical progress of a line of verse.... Usually the caesura has been placed near the middle of a verse. Some poets, however, have sought diversity of rhythmical effect by placing the caesura anywhere from near the beginning of a line to near the end." The pause is often underlined through the use of some form of punctuation. See, for example, the heroic couplet below. INDEX

Epiphany:

The revelation of a god to a particular character. Athena, for example, often reveals herself to Odysseus throughout the Odyssey (though she often begins in disguise). This convention is connected to the convention of supernatural machinery in the traditional epic. The term gets re-worked by James Joyce who makes it apply to the quotidian world. Here's what M. H. Abrams says of "epiphany" in his Glossary of Literary Terms:

Epiphany means "a manifestation," and by Christian thinkers was used to signify a manifestation of God's presence in the created world. In the early draft of A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, entitled Stephen Hero (published posthumously in 1944), James Joyce adapted the term to secular experience, to signify a sense of a sudden radiance and revelation while observing a commonplace object. "By an epiphany [Stephen] meant a sudden spiritual manifestation." "Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object... seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany." Joyce's short stories and novels include a number of epiphanies....

"Epiphany" has become the standard term for the description, frequent in modern poetry and prose fiction, of the sudden flare into revelation of an ordinary object or scene. Joyce, however, merely substituted this word for what earlier authors had called "the moment." Thus Shelley, in his Defense of Poetry (1821), described the "best and happiest moments... arising unforeseen and departing unbidden," "visitations of the divinity" which poetry "redeems from decay." William Wordsworth was a preeminent poet of what he called "moments," or in more elaborate instances, "spots of time." For instances of his short poems which represent a moment of revelation, see Wordsworth's "The Two April Mornings" and "The Solitary Reaper." Wordsworth's Prelude, like Joyce's narratives, is constructed as a sequence of such visionary encounters. Thus in Book VIII, lines 539-59, Wordsworth describes the "moment" when he for the first time passed in a stagecoach over the "threshold" of London and the "trivial forms/ Of houses, pavement, streets" suddenly manifested a profound power and significance:

    'twas a moment's pause,--
    All that took place within me came and went
    As in a moment; yet with Time it dwells,
    Aned grateful memory, as a thing divine.
INDEX

Heroic Couplet:

This verse form consists of iambic pentameter lines with rhymed couplets. In the eighteenth century, when this verse form was most popular, poets tended also to write in closed couplets, which is to say that the end of each couplet, and even each line, tended to coincide with the end of a sentence or a self-sufficient unit of syntax. The form became the predominant English measure in the eighteenth century and is in some ways reflective of eighteenth-century ideals of order, balance, and closure. That sense of balance was also achieved by a strong caesura usually right in the center of each verse line. A good example is the last lines of the First Epistle of Alexander Pope's An Essay on Man:

INDEX

in medias res:

This is the technical term for the epic convention of beginning "in the middle of things," rather than at the very start of the story. In the Odyssey, for example, we first learn about Odysseus' journey when he is held captive on Calypso's island, even though, as we find out in Books IX through XII, the greater part of Odysseus' journey actually precedes that moment in the narrative. INDEX

Invocation:

An invocation is any address to a deity, usually for help of some sort. The epic traditionally begins with an invocation to the Muse (a request for help in the telling of the tale). In fact, in an oral culture, the storyteller or "rhapsode" is considered merely a vessel through which the gods (and particularly the Muses) speak. (This is the reason Plato makes fun of oral storytellers in Ion.) There are traditionally nine Muses, each presiding over a different genre of literature. The traditional Muse of epic poetry is Calliope, although Homer does not address her by name in his invocation at the beginning of the Odyssey. INDEX

Meter:

Here's an excerpt from M. H. Abrams' definition of "meter" in A Glossary of Literary Terms (fifth edition):

Here are the major metrical feet, as given (with some changes by me) in Abrams:

Two other feet, often distinguished, occur only as occasional variants from standard feet:

A metric line is named according to the number of feet composing it:

monometer:

one foot

dimeter:

two feet

trimeter:

three feet

tetrameter:

four feet

pentameter:

five feet

hexameter:

six feet

heptameter:

seven feet

octameter:

eight feet

Now back again to M. H. Abrams and his Glossary of Literary Terms:

INDEX

Narration:

Here is a strong definition of narration from The Harper Handbook to Literature, edited by Northrop Frye, Sheridan Baker, and George Perkins:

[Narrations] take their names from the grammatical stance employed by the narrator: first-person narration for a narrative perspective inside the story, third-person narration for one outside. The first-person narrator speaks as an "I" and may be identified in one of three roles; first person as protagonist, the hero or heroine of the story; first person as participant, a character in a subsidiary role; first person as observer, a character without essential function except to observe and record, sometimes developed fully as an individual with a name, history, and personality, sometimes almost nonexistent except for the "I" that appears occasionally as a reminder of the individual's personal relation to the story.... [A] third-person narrator... stands outside the story, speaking of those within it in the grammatical third person (he, she, they).... [One kind of third-person narration] is called THIRD-PERSON OMNISCIENCE, because the [third-person] narrator assumes the privileges of omniscience, moving about in time and space, entering freely into the unverbalized thoughts and motives of the characters.... All-knowing should not, however, be confused with all-revealing, in either traditional or modern tales.... [T]he third-person omniscient narrator will seldom reveal the mysteries and secret motives of the story before the moment of greatest effect. Knowing all, the story teller teases the reader with bits and pieces until all comes together at the end. [In other words, the story teller discursively re-orders the chronological events of the story.]

In THIRD-PERSON LIMITED OMNISCIENCE, the narrator frequently limits the revelation of thoughts to those of one character, presenting the other characters only externally. As a result, the reader's experience is conditioned by the mental state, the qualities of perception, ignorance, or bias of the filtering or reflecting mind.

INDEX

Pantheism:

C. Hugh Holman's A Handbook to Literature describes pantheism in the following way:

Sublime:

The sublime can be best distinguished in relationship to the beautiful. The beautiful is that in nature which can be admired calmly and appreciated for its surface appearance (color, depth, material, balance). The sublime is that in nature which is so much greater than man that its attraction actually includes a certain degree of fear and trepidation on the part of the beholder, although a fear not so immediate that it traumatizes. The stolen boat episode in Book I of the Prelude (starting at line 372) relates Wordsworth's first experience with this terrible, frightening, but nonetheless attractive, side to Nature's otherwise gentle and calming beauty. Natural landscapes that often evoke the sublime include mountains, chasms, Northern wastelands, massive waterfalls, etc.. Consider, for example, J. M. W. Turner's painting "The Passage of the St. Gothard" (1804) to the right of this text. (Note: if you click on the image, you will link to a larger reproduction of the same painting with slightly better resolution.) Here's the definition of the sublime in Hugh Holman's A Handbook to Literature:

Edmund Burke in 1756 wrote A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful . Kant followed Burke's line of thinking in his Criticique of Judgment (1790), where he linked beauty with the finite and the sublime with the infinite. Burke's doctrine of the sublime was powerfully influential on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers. He believed that a painful idea creates a sublime passion and thus concentrates the mind on that single facet of experience and produces a momentary suspension of rational activity, uncertainty, and self-consciousness. If the pain producing this effect is imaginary rather than real, a great aesthetic object is achieved. Thus, great mountains, storms at sea, ruined abbeys, crumbling castles, and charnel houses are appropriate subjects to produce the sublime. INDEX

 

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