English Literature Terms
1. Epic (or Heroic Poetry)
It is, originally an oral narrative poem, majestic both in theme and style. Epics deal with legendary or historical events of national or universal significance, involving action of broad sweep and grandeur. Most epics deal with the exploits of a single individual, thereby giving unity to the composition. Typically, an epic includes several features: the introduction of supernatural forces that shape the action; conflict in the form of battles or other physical combat; and stylistic conventions such as an invocation to the Muse, a formal statement of the theme, long lists of the protagonists involved, and set speeches couched in elevated language. Commonplace details of everyday life may appear, but they serve as background for the story and are described in the same lofty style as the rest of the poem. Epic poems are not merely entertaining stories of legendary or historical heroes; they summarize and express the nature or ideals of an entire nation at a significant or crucial period of its history. Examples include the ancient Greek epics by the poet Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey. The characteristics of the hero of an epic are national rather than individual, and the exercise of those traits in heroic deeds serves to gratify a sense of national pride. At other times epics may synthesize the ideals of a great religious or cultural movement. The Divine Comedy by the Italian poet Dan expresses the faith of medieval Christianity. The Faerie Queen by the English poet Edmund Spenser represents the spirit of the Renaissance in English and like Paradise Lost by the English poet John Milton, represents the ideals of Christian humanism.
2. Alliteration
A repeated initial consonant to successive words. In Old English verse, any vowel alliterates with any other, and alliteration is not an unusual or expressive phenomenon but a regularly recurring structural feature of the verse, occurring on the first and third, and often on the first, second, and third, primary-stressed syllables of the four-stressed line. Thus, from The Seafarer:
hreran mid hondum hrincaelde sae
(“to stir with his hand the rime-cold sea”)
In later English verse tradition, alliteration becomes expressive in a variety of ways. Spenser uses it decoratively, or to link adjective and noun, verb and object, as in the line:” much daunted with that dint, her sense was dased.”In the 18th and 19th centuries it becomes even less systematic and more “musical”.
3. Legend
A song or narrative handed down from the past, legend differ from myths on the basis of the elements of historical truth they contain. One speaks, for example, of Arthurian legend because there is some historical evidence of Arthur’s existence. In speaking the myth of Sysyphus, in contrast, one is aware that no such person actually existed.
4. Romance
It is a literary genre popular in the Middle Ages (5th century to 15th century), dealing in verse or prose, with legendary, supernatural, or amorous subjects and characters. The name refers to Romance languages and originally denoted any lengthy composition in one of those languages. Later the term was applied to tales specifically concerned with knights, chivalry, and courtly love. The romance and the epic are similar forms, but epics tend to be longer and less concerned with courtly love. Romances were written by court musicians, clerics, scribes and aristocrats for the entertainment and moral edification of the nobility. Popular subjects for romances include the Macedonian King Alexander the Great, King Arthur of Britain and the knights of the Round Table, and the Frankish Emperor Charlemagne. Later prose and verse narratives, particularly those in the 19th-century romantic tradition, are also referred to as romances; set in distant or mythological places and times, like most romances they stress adventure and supernatural elements.
5. Ballad
It is a lyric poem generally of three eight-line stanzas with a concluding stanza of four lines called envoy. With some variations, the lines of a ballad are iambic or anapestic tetrameter rhyming ababbcbC; the envoy, which forms a personal dedication to some person of importance or to a personification, rhymes bcbC. The last line (C) of the first stanza is repeated as a refrain throughout. Another pattern often employed consists of a ten-line stanza, in pentameters, rhyming ababbccdcD, with an envoy of five lines rhyming ccdcD. The ballad became popular in England in the late 14th century and was adopted by Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote several notable examples, including the Complaint…to His Empty Purse.
6. Sonnet
It is a lyric poem of 14 lines with a formal rhyme scheme, expressing different aspects of a single thought, mood, or feeling, sometimes resolved or summed up in the last lines of the poem. Originally short poems accompanied by mandolin or lute music, sonnets are generally composed in the standard meter of the language in which they were written-for example, iambic pentameter in English, and the Alexandrine in French. The two main forms of the sonnet are the Petrarchan, or Italian, and the English, or Shakespearean. The former probably developed from Italian folk song. The form reached its peak with the Italian poet Petrarch, whose Canzoniere includes 317 sonnts addressed to his beloved Laura. Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, are credited with introducing the sonnet into England with translations of Italian sonnets as well as with sonnets of their own. The Petrarchan sonnet consists of an octave, or eight-line stanza, and a sestet, or six-line stanza. The octave has two quatrains, rhyming a b b a, a b b a, but avoiding a couplet; the first quatrain presents the theme, the second develops it. The sestet is built on two or three different rhymes, arranged c d e c d e, or c d c d c d, or c d e d c e; the first three lines exemplify or reflect on the theme, and the last three lines bring the whole poem to a unified close. Excellent examples of the Petrarchan sonnet in the English language are found in the sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella by Sir Philip Sidney, which established the form in England. There, in the Elizabethan age, it reached the peak of its popularity. The English sonnet, exemplified by the work of William Shakespeare and by Spenser’s Amoretti, developed as an adaptation to a language less rich in rhymes than Italian. This form differs from the Petrarchan sonnet in being divided into three quatrains, each rhymed differently, with a final, independently rhymed couplet that makes an effective, unifying climax to the whole. The rhyme scheme is a b a b, c d c d, e f e f, g g.
7. Essay
The term refers to literary composition devoted to the presentation of the writer’s own ideas on a topic and generally addressing a particular aspect of the subject. Often brief in scope and informal in style, the essay differs from such formal expository forms as the thesis, dissertation, or treatise. The development of the form may be considered a result of the Renaissance emphasis on the individual, which fostered exploration of one's inner self in relation to the outside world. Montaigne’s Essays (as he called the brief personal meditations in prose that he began to publish in 1580) were created in a time of great intellectual and social reorientation - a time when Europeans were readjusting their visions and values with respect to a vast number of matters, including death and the possibility of an afterlife, travel and exploration, and social relationships. All of these remain major themes of the essay. The essay is a flexible form and can be developed at the writer’s will. It may be formal, as in Essays, or Counsels Civil and Moral(1597-1625) of the English philosopher and statesman Sir Francis Bacon, or casually conversational, as in “On the Pleasure of Hating”(1823) by the English critic William Hazlitt. It may be lyrical, as in Maine Woods (1864) by the American philosopher Henry David Thoreau, or oracular, as in the essays of another American transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson - for example “Fate” (1860). An essay may adopt the form of a letter, embodying whimsical comments on contemporary values, as in the works of the British writers Oliver Goldsmith (Citizen of the World, 1762) and C.S. Lewis (Screwtape Letters, 1942).
8. Renaissance
This word, meaning “rebirth” is commonly applied movement or period which marks the transition from the medieval to the modern world in Western Europe. In the usual sense of the word, Renaissance suggests especially the 14th, 15th, 16th, and early 17th centuries, the dates differing for different countries. Ti si best to regard the Renaissance as the result of a new emphasis upon and a new combination of tendencies and attitudes already existing, stimulated by a series of historical events. The new humanistic learning which resulted from the rediscovery of classical literature is frequently taken as the beginning of the Renaissance on its conscious, intellectual side, since it was to the treasures of classical culture and to the authority of classical writers that the people of the Renaissance turned for inspiration.
9. Tragedy
Tragedy is concerned with the harshness and apparent injustice of life. It usually recounts an important and causally related series of events in the life of a person of significance. The events would cumulate in trials and catastrophes of a hero, who falls down from power and whose eventual death leads to the downfall of others. Often the hero's fall from happiness is due to a weakness in his character, a weakness such as the excessive pride of Faustus, the overweening ambition of Macbeth, or the uncontrolled jealousy of Othello, which brings self destruction. The tragic action arouses feelings of awe in the audience, who often leave the theatre with a renewed sense of the seriousness and significance of human life. The word catharsis is often used to describe the audience's feelings. It means the purging from the mind of the feelings of pity and fear the play has aroused.
10. Comedy
Broadly it is any literary work designed to amuse. The term is usually reserved for plays whose tone is lighthearted and humorous, that are amusing, and that have a happy ending.
11. Satire
A literary mode painting a distorted verbal picture of part of the world in order to show its true moral, as opposed merely to its physical, nature. In this sense, Circe, the enchantress in Homer’s Odyssey who changed Odysseus’ men into pigs(because they made pigs of themselves while eating) and would have changed Odysseus into fox(for he was indeed foxy), was the first satirist. Originally the Latin word satire meant a kind of literary grab bag, or medley, and a satire
12. Metaphysical poetry
The term “metaphysical poetry” is commonly used to designate the works of the 17th-century writers who wrote under the influence of John Donne. Pressured by the harsh, uncomfortable, and curious age, the metaphysical poets sought to shat termyths and replace them with new philosophies, new sciences, new worlds and new poetry. Thus, with a rebellious spirit, they tried to break away from the conventional fashion of Elizabethan love poetry, in particular the Petrarchan tradition, which is full of refined language, polished rhyming schemes and eulogy to ideal love, and favored in poetry for a more colloquial language and tone, a tightness of expression and the single-minded working out of a theme or argument. Their tendency toward logical reasoning of the things, psychological analysis of the emotions of love and religion, their fondness of the novel and the shocking, their use of the metaphysical conceit, and their ignoring of the conventional metric devices resulted frequently in obscurity, rough verse, and strained imagery. Because of this, Samuel Johnson, who followed Dryden, applied the term “met a physical” to Donne and others in derogation of their excessive use of philosophy and deliberate show-off of their cleverness and learning. But actually Donne and other metaphysical poets wrote still in the main stream of English poetry. The difference is only in the style. The metaphysical poets prefer to use words which call the mind into play, rather than those that appeal to the senses or evoke an emotional response through memory. Their poetry is more realistic with daily-used language, with rough excess in poetic measure, and with paradox or contrast to avoid smoothness and plainness. The metaphysical poets also look for a connection between their emotion and mental concepts. The immediacy and intensity of the emotional appeal to the reader does not rule out intellectual subtlety. In fact, Donne and his followers present tough intellectual challenges as part of the staple content of their poems. Nor does the intellect stand apart from the emotional life: the two constantly enmesh and cohere. Since John Donne links up a wide range of ideas, explores a complex attitude of the mind, and uses his wit and ingenious conceits to put human experiences into poetry, he is generally regarded as the leading member of this school.
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