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.
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Ballad:
Here's the definition of "ballad" in C. Hugh Holman's Handbook to Literature:
A form of verse to be sung or recited and characterized by its presentation of a dramatic or exciting episode in simple narrative form.... Though the ballad is a form still much written, the so-called popular ballad in most literatures belongs to the early periods before written literature was highly developed.... Certain common characteristics of these early ballads should be noted: the supernatural is likely to play an important part in events, physical courage and love are freqent themes, the incidents are usually such as happen to common people (as opposed to the nobility) and often have to do with domestic episodes, slight attention is paid to characterization or description, trasitions are abrupt, action is largely developed through dialogue, tragic situations are presented with the utmost simplicity, incremental repetition is common....
I'll finish with a passage from M. H. Abrams's definition of "ballad" in his Glossary of Literary Terms:The most common stanza form--called the ballad stanza--is a quatrain in alternate four- and three-stress iambic lines; usually only the second and fourth lines rhyme. This is the form of "Sir Patrick Spens"; the first stanza of this ballad also exemplifies the conventionally abrupt opening and the manner of proceeding by third-person narration, curtly sketched setting and action, sharp transition, and spare dialogue:
INDEXThe king sits in Dumerling towne,
....Drinking the blude-red wine:
"O Whar will I get a guid sailor,To sail this schip of mine?"
The collecting and printing of popular ballads began in England, then in Germany, during the eighteenth century. In 1765 Thomas Percy published his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, which, although most of the contents had been rewritten in the style of that time, did much to inaugurate widespread interest in folk literature....The ballad has had an enormous influence on the form and style of poetry, especially, in England, since Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads (1798). A literary ballad is a narrative poem written by a learned poet in deliberate imitation of the form and spirit of the popular ballad. Some of the greatest of these were composed in the Romantic period: Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (which, however, is much longer and more elaborately developed than the folk ballad), Scott's "Proud Maisie," and Keats's "La Belle Dame sans Merci." Wordsworth begins the narration in "We Are Seven" by introducing the narrator as an agent--"I met a little cottage girl"--which is probably one reason that he called it "a lyrical ballad." Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner," on the other hand, opens with the abrupt impersonal narration of the traditional ballad:
It is an ancient Mariner
And he stoppeth one of three.
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:
INDEXEpiphany 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.
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:
All Nature is but art, unknown to thee
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good:
And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.
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):
In all sustained spoken English we feel a rhythm, that is, a recognizable through variable pattern in the beat of the stresses in the stream of sound. If this rhythm of stresses is structured into a recurrence of regular--that is, approximately equivalent--units, we call it meter. Compositions written in meter are known as verse....
We attend, in reading verse, to the individual line, which is a separate entity on the printed page. The meter of a line is determined by the pattern of stronger and weaker stresses in its component syllables; often, the stronger stress is called the "stressed" and the weaker one the "unstressed" syllable.... There are three major factors that determine where the stresses (in the sense of the relatively stronger stresses, or "accents") will fall in a line of verse: (1) Most important is the "word accent" in polysyllabic words; in the noun "accent" itself, for example, the stress falls on the first syllable. (2) There are also many monosyllabic words in the language, and on which of these--in the sentence or a phrase--the stress will fall depends on the grammatical function of the word (we normally put stronger stress on nouns, verbs, and adjectives, for example, than on articles or prepositions), and also on the "rhetorical accent," or the emphasis we give a word because we want to enhance its importance in a particular utterance. (3) Another determinant of stress is the prevailing "metrical accent," which is an expected pulsation, in accordance with the stress pattern which was established earlier in the metrical line or passage.
Here are the major metrical feet, as given (with some changes by me) in Abrams:
(1) Iambic (the noun is "iamb"): an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable. Example: "The Póet, géntle Créature ás he ís" (Wordsworth, Prelude, 1.135).
(2) Trochaic (the noun is "trochee"): a stressed followed by an unstressed syllable. Example: "Thére they áre, my fífty mén and wómen" (Browning, "One Words More"). Note that most trochaic lines lack the final unstressed syllable; the technical term for such a line is "catalectic." Example: "Tíger! Tíger! búrning bríght/ Ín the fórest óf the níght" (Blake, "The Tiger").
(3) Anapestic (the noun is "anapest"): two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable. Example: "The Assy´rian came dówn like a wólf on the fóld" (Byron, "The Destruction of Sennacherib").
(4) Dactyllic (the noun is "dactyl"): a stressed syllable followed by two light syllables. Example: "Éve, with her básket, was/ Déep in the bélls and grass" (Ralph Hodgson, "Eve").
Two other feet, often distinguished, occur only as occasional variants from standard feet:
(5)Spondaic (the noun is "spondee"): two successive syllables with approximately equal strong stresses, as in the first two feet of this line: "Góod stróng thíck stúpefy´ing íncense smóke" (Browning, "The Bishop Orders His Tomb").
(6) Pyrrhic (the noun is also "pyrrhic"): two successive syllables with approximately equal light stresses, as in the second and fourth feet in this line: "My way is to begín with the begínning" (Byron, Don Juan). [Note: arguably, "way" in this line could well be considered a stressed syllable.]
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:
To scan a passage of verse is to go through it line by line, analyzing the component feet, and also indicating where any major pauses fall within a line. Here is a scansion... [with the stresses marked] of the first five lines from Keats's Endymion (1818); the passage was chosen because it exemplifies a flexible and variable rather than a highly regular metrical pattern.
(1)A thíng of beáuty ís a jóy for éver;
(2)Its lóveliness incréases; // ít will néver
(3)Páss into nóthingness, // but stíll will kéep
(4)A bówer quíet for us, // and a sléep
(5)Fúll of sweet dréams, and héalth, and quíet bréathing.The prevailing meter is clearly iambic, and the lines are iambic pentameter. As in all fluent verse, however, there are variations upon the basic iambic foot, which are sometimes called "substitutions":
(1) the closing feet of lines 1, 2, 5 end with an extra light syllable, and are said to have a feminine ending. Lines 3 and 4, in which the closing feet, since they are standard iambs, end with a stressed syllable, are said to have masculine endings.
(2) In lines 3 and 5, the opening iambic feet have been "inverted" to form trochees. (These initial positions are the most common place for such inversions in iambic verse.) [Note that, following a different rhetorical accent, one might also scan this line: Full of swéet dréams, and héalth, and quíet bréathing. Such a reading would still fall within the line's pentameter beat.]
(3) I have marked the second foot in line 2, and the third foot of line 3 and line 4, as pyrrhics (two light stresses); these help to give Keats's verses their rapid movement. This is a procedure in scansion with which competent readers often disagree: some will feel enough of a metric beat in all these feet to mark them as iambs; others will mark still other feet (for example, the third foot of line 1) as pyrrhics also.... Notice, however, that these are differences in nuance rather than in essentials: the analysts agree that the prevailing pulse of Keats's versification is iambic throughout.Two other elements are important in the metric movement of Keats's passage: (1) In lines 1 and 5, the pause in the reading--which occurs naturally at the end of a clause or other syntactic unit--coincides with the end of the line; such lines are called end-stopped. Lines 2 through 4, other hand, are called run-on lines (or in a French term, they exhibit enjambement--"a striding-over"), because the pressure of the incompleted syntactic unit toward closure carries on over the end of the verse-line. (2) When a strong phrasal pause falls within a line, as in lines 2, 3, 4, it is called a caesura--indicated in the quoted passage by the conventional symbol, //. The management of these internal pauses is important for giving variety and for providing expressive emphases in the long pentameter line.
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.
Pantheism:
C. Hugh Holman's A Handbook to Literature describes pantheism in the following way:
A philosophic-religious attitude which finds the spirit of God manifest in all things and which holds that whereas all things speak the glory of God it is equally true that the glory of God is made up of all things. Finite objects are at once both God and the manifestation of God. The term is impossible to define exactly since it is so personal a conviction as to be differently interpreted by different philosophers, but for its literary significance it is clearly enough described as an ardent faith in NATURE as both the revelation of deity and deity itself.... Wordsworth in England and Emerson in America may be selected from many as giving typical expression to the pantheistic conception. The following lines from Wordsworth's "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" express the idea clearly:
...a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. INDEX
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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Last Revised: December 2, 1998
Painting courtesy of
Carol L.
Gerten