A glossary of literary terms

Fiction and Truth

In an inclusive sense, fiction is any literary narrative, whether in prose or verse, which is invented instead of being an account of events that actually happened.

Figurative Language(1)Figurative Language is a conspicuous

departure from what competent users of a language apprehend as the standard of words, or else the standard order of order to achieve some special meaning or effect.

A mixed metaphor conjoins two or more obviously diverse metaphoric vehicles.

A dead metaphor is one which, like the leg of a table or the heart of the matter, has been used so long and become so that its users have ceased to be aware of the discrepancy between vehicle and tenor.

Figurative Language(2)

In metonymy the literal term for one thing is applied to another with which it has become closely associated because of a recurrent relation in common experience.

In synecdoche, a part of something is used to signify the whole, or the whole is used to signify a part.

Folklore(1)Folklore, since the mid-nineteenth century,

has been the collective name applied to sayings, verbal compositions, and social rituals that have been handed down solely, or at least primarily, by word of mouth and example rather than in written form.

Folk drama originated in primitive rites of song and dance, especially in connection with agricultural activities, which centered on vegetational deities and goddesses of fertility.

Folklore(2)

Folk songs include love songs, Christmas carols, work songs, sea chanties, religious songs, drinking songs, children’s game-songs, and many other types of lyric, as well as the narrative song, or traditional ballad.

Form and structureForm is one of the most frequent terms in

literary criticism, but also one of the most diverse in its meanings.

FormalismA type of literary theory and analysis which

originated in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the second decade of the twentieth century.

Format of a Book

Format signifies the page size, shape and other physical features of a book.

Free Verse is sometimes referred to as open form verse, or by the French term vers libre.

Gender criticism Gender criticism, like the gender studies of

which it is a part, is based on the premise that, while sex is determined by anatomy, gender can be largely independent of anatomy, and is a social construction that is diverse, variable, and depaendent on historical circumstances.

GenresA term, French in origin, that denotes types or

classes of literatureGolden AgeThe term derives from the chronological primitivism

that was propounded in the Greek poet Hesiod’s Works and Days, as well as by many later Greek and Roman writers.

Gothic NovelThe word Gothic originally referred to the Goths, an

early Germanic tribe, then came to signify germanic, then medieval.

Great Chain of Being

The conception of the Great Chain of Being is grounded in ideas about the nature of God, or the First Cause, in the Greek philosophers Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus, and was developed by later thinkers into a comprehensive philosophy to account for the origin, types, and relationships of all living things in the universe.

Heroic Couplet(1)

Lines of iambic pentameter which rhyme in pairs: aa, bb, cc, and so on. The adjective heroic was applied in the later seventeenth century because of the frequent use of such couplets in heroic poems and plays.

Alexander Pope, used it almost to the exclusion of other meters.

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Heroic Couplet(2)In order to maximize the interrelation of the

component parts of the couplet, neoclassic often used an end-stopped first line.

Alexander Pope, the greatest master of the metrical, syntactical, and rhetorical possibilities of the closed heroic couplet.

Humanism(1)In the sixteenth century the word humanist

was coined to signify one who taught or worked in the studia humanitatis, or humanities that is, grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy, as distinguished from fields less concerned with the moral and imaginative aspects and activities of man, such as mathematics, natural philosophy, and theology.

Humanism(2)Renaissance humanism assumed the dignity

and central position of human beings in the universe; emphasized the importance of the study of classical imaginative and philosophical literature, although with emphasis on its moral and practical rather than its aesthetic values.

Humanism(3)Many humanists also stressed the need for a rounded development of an individual’s diverse powers.

The result was that they tended to emphasize the values achievable by human beings in this world, and to minimize the earlier Christian emphasis on innate corruption and on the ideals of asceticism and of withdrawal from this world in a preoccupation with the world hereafter.

Humanism(4)New Humanism, argued strongly for a return

to a primarily humanistic education, and for a conservative view of moral, political, and literary values that is grounded mainly on classical literature.

HymnIn current usage denotes a song that

celebrates God or expresses religious feelings and is primarily intended to be sung as part of a religious service

Hyperbole and Understatement(1)The figure of speech, or trope, called

hyperbole is bold overstatement, or the extravagant exaggeration of fact or of possibility; it may be used either for serious or ironic or comic effect.

The contrary figure is understatement, which deliberately represents something as much less in magnitude or importance than it really is, or is ordinarily considered to be.

Hyperbole and Understatement(2)Meiosis to the use in literature of a

simple, unemphatic statement to enhance the effect of a deeply pathetic or tragic event; an example is the line at the close of the narrative in Wordsworth’s Michael: And never lifted up a single stone.

Litotes, the assertion of an affirmative by negating its contrary: He’s not the brightest man in the world meaning He is stupid.

Harlem Renaissance

A period of remarkable creativity in literature, music, dance, painting, and sculpture by African-Americans, from the end of the First World War in 1917 through the 1920s.

Heroic Drama Was a form mainly specific to the Restoration

Period, though in stances continued to be written in the early eighteenth century.

See Bonamy Dobree, Restoration Tragedy(1929); Allardyce Nicoll, Restoration Drama(1955); Arthur C. Kirsch, Dryden’s Heroic Drama.