A Glossary of Literary Terms

M. H. ABRAMS

Cornell University

GEOFFREY GALT HARPHAM

National Humanities Center

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About the Authors

M. H. Abrams, Class of 1916 Professor of English,

Emeritus, at Cornell University, is a distinguished

scholar who has written prize-winning books on eigh-

teenth- and nineteenth-century literature, literary the-

ory and criticism, European Romanticism, and

Western intellectual history. He inaugurated A Glossary

of Literary Terms in 1957 as a series of succinct essays on

the chief terms and concepts used in discussing lit-

erature, literary history and movements, and literary

criticism. Since its initial publication, the Glossary has

become an indispensable handbook for all students of

English and other literatures.

Geoffrey Galt Harpham has been a co-author of

the Glossary since the eighth edition in 2005. He is

president and director of the National Humanities

Center in North Carolina and has written extensively

in the fields of critical theory and intellectual history.

Among his books are The Character of Criticism,

Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society,

Language Alone: The Critical Fetish of Modernity, and

The Humanities and the Dream of America.

Courtesy of M. H. AbramsPhoto by Ron Jautz, courtesy of National Humanities Center

iii

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Contents

PREFACE vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi

HOW TO USE THIS GLOSSARY xii

LITERARY TERMS 1

INDEX OF AUTHORS 421

✵

Preface

n 1957, M. H. Abrams, a forty-three-year-old literary scholar at Cornell

University, already renowned for his magisterial study The Mirror and the Lamp

(1953), agreed to update a modest pamphlet originally published in 1941 by two

people then deceased, Dan S. Norton and J. Peters Rushton, called A Glossary of

Literary Terms. Abrams dedicated a summer to the task and produced a 105-page

volume, stapled in the middle, which included over 100 new terms, including

some that had gained in prominence in literary study in recent years: style, tension,

humanism, ambiguity, and the new criticism.

In the course of his work, Abrams found that it was easier, as well as more

likely to be informative and pleasant for the reader, to compose each entry as an

essay that incorporated in a single exposition not only the primary term but re-

lated terms as well. And, to aid the student interested to know more, he suggested

further readings. But, as he declared in the prefaces to several subsequent editions,

he retained the goal he announced in 1957: “to produce the kind of handbook

the author would have found most valuable when, as an undergraduate, he was

an eager but sometimes bewildered student of literature and literary criticism.”

For more than a half century, Abrams tracked the rapid growth and extension

of literary studies through successive editions of the Glossary. With each edition,

entries were deepened, extended, and refined, and the list of suggested readings

grew. The entry for irony in Abrams’s first edition begins in the mode of a

dictionary: “‘rhetorical’ or ‘verbal irony’ is a mode of speech in which …”; and

the suggested readings include three works, the most recent of which was Cleanth

Brooks’s The Well-Wrought Urn (1947). The same entry in the tenth edition begins,

“In Greek comedy the character called the eiron was a dissembler …” and the sug-

gested readings include texts ranging from Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony (1841)

to Claire Colebrook’s Irony (2003).

By that tenth edition, the book ran to 432 pages and covered 1,175 terms.

Some of the entries had become substantial and even definitive essays in them-

selves: Linguistics in Literary Criticism, Deconstruction, Interpretation

vii

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and Hermeneutics, Psychological and Psychoanalytic Criticism, Femi-

nist Criticism, Marxist Criticism, and Periods of English Literature—all

expounded with grace, fairness, and precision. Amid all the changes, however,

some passages demonstrated remarkable durability, as, for example, Norton and

Rushton’s ridiculously efficient account of the plot of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the

D’Urbervilles, in which “the heroine, having lost her virtue because of her inno-

cence, then loses her happiness because of her honesty, finds it again only by

murder, and having been briefly happy, is hanged”—on which Hardy, in a spirit

of cosmic irony, comments: “ The President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean

phrase, had ended his sport with Tess.”

A service-oriented book with a modest mission, the Glossary reflects the ex-

traordinary gifts of one of the great scholars in the history of the American academy.

As the example just cited suggests, among these gifts is an exuberant sense of

humor—see the entries for bathos, literature, bombast , and limerick. The

book can be read with and even for pleasure. It has often occurred to me that the

Glossary is composed with Sir Philip Sidney’s “Defence of Poesie” in mind: “For

he [the poet] doth not only show the way, but giveth so sweet a prospect to the

way, as will entice any man to enter into it. […] He beginneth not with obscure

definitions, which must blur the margin with interpretations, and load the memory

with doubtfulness, but he cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion.”

In 2003, Mike asked me to join him as he prepared the eighth edition. Over

the next nine years and three editions, we worked together. For the most part, we

allocated terms and worked separately, but on occasion we pooled our resources, as,

for example, in the entry on rap, a newcomer to the eighth edition. I had taken the

first crack and had sent my effort to Mike. To my dismay, it came back with many

questions: “Is it composed solely to be performed in public, or can it be written?

What musical instruments produce the beat—drums, guitar, piano, plucked bass?

(I’m guessing.) To what extent is it extemporized? Is the rap you describe as

‘misogynist’ also known as ‘gangsta rap’?” I conducted further research and

returned a revised version, which seemed to meet Mike’s approval. But when the

book appeared, I was amazed to see in this entry two passages I hadn’t written. The

first is not to be found in any of the standard accounts of rap: “There is an interesting

parallel between rap and the strong-stress meter and the performance of Old

English poetry; see under meter.” And—most

astonishing—Mike had sought to

qualify my suggestion that rap was misogynistic, homophobic, and sociopathic by

quoting a more positive verse from Queen Latifah.

In truth, both Mike and I—total age over 150—were freestyling when it

came to rap. And since there was an element of competition—I claimed that rap

was an acronym for “rhythm and poetry, ” and he insisted that “rap” was archaic

slang for “talk”—it would be accurate to say that this entry itself emerged from

competitive freestyling, or more precisely, battle-rapping. We did agree, how-

ever, that rap in general should be considered, along with poetry happenings

and poetry slams, as forms of performance poetry. In the end, we were so

pleased with the collaborative result that we put an image of this page on the

cover of the ninth edition.

viii PREFACE

After the tenth edition, Mike handed over the Glossary to me. (He did not

stop working, however; in the summer of 2012, he celebrated his 100th birthday

with a weekend of festivities at Cornell, marked with an exclamation point by

the publication of a new book, The Fourth Dimension of a Poem.) In preparing this

edition, I have tried to preserve all the qualities for which the book is justly cel-

ebrated. I have, however, also tried to bring the book into phase with itself and

with the present moment. As readers of the Glossary know, the book often in-

troduces an historical dimension into its definitions. But, having been composed

over the course of more than half a century, it has its own history of evolving

emphases, concerns, and understandings. Sometimes, in earlier editions, the in-

fluence of very different eras in a single essay resulted in a lack of clarity or even

coherence, as when a book published in 1940 was described as “recent.” For this

edition, I have, in addition to hunting down and extirpating most uses of recent,

current, and contemporary, added over twenty new terms, overhauled or edited

countless others, and tried to bring everything, the suggested readings in particu-

lar, up to date. I have extended some essays and cut some others in the interests

both of making the book useful to contemporary readers and preserving its char-

acter as what Mike called a “handbook” as opposed to a “desk book.”

Like its predecessors, this edition of the Glossary aspires to utility. But—and

this has dawned on me slowly, over the years—it also provides, without trying, a

response to the perennial question of what literary study is or ought to be. In the

Glossary, one learns, in addition to the definitions of monometer, morpheme,

and mummer’s play, that there is a discipline devoted to the study of literature;

that this discipline, like others, involves a specialized vocabulary; that the terms it

deploys, like stars in the night sky, anchor a series of conceptual constellations

specific to the field; and that knowledge of this field can be a source of enduring

interest and pleasure. Perhaps Mike’s greatest gift to the profession, and indeed to

the world, is the sturdy confidence, manifest in this and in all his books, that

literature is a thing well worth knowing, and that the effort invested in learning

it is repaid by a lifetime of rewards, no matter how long the lifetime might be.

PREFACE ix

Acknowledgments

his edition, like preceding ones, has profited greatly from the suggestions of

both teachers and students who proposed changes and additions that would

enhance the usefulness of the Glossary to the broad range of courses in American,

English, and other literatures. The following teachers, at the request of the pub-

lisher, made many useful proposals for improvements:

Carol L. Beran, Saint Mary’s College of California

Kimberly Coates, Bowling Green State University

Jennifer Jordan, Howard University

Dr. Stephen Souris, Texas Woman’s University

As in many earlier editions, Dianne Ferriss has been indispensable in prepar-

ing, correcting, and recording the text of the Glossary. Avery Slater was also a

valuable member of the team. Rebecca Donahue, Content Coordinator, was ex-

ceptionally helpful; and Michael Rosenberg, publisher at Cengage Learning,

continues to be an enthusiastic supporter of each new edition. Thanks must

also go to Prashanth Kamavarapu, our project manager at PreMediaGlobal.

✵

How to Use This Glossary

All the terms discussed in the Glossary appear in a single alphabetic sequence.

Each term that is not itself the subject of the entry it identifies is followed, in

boldface, by the number of the page in which it is defined and discussed. This

is then followed by the page numbers, in italics, of the occurrences of the term in

other entries, in contexts that serve to clarify its significance and illustrate how it

is used in critical discourse.

Some of the listed terms are supplemented by references to a number of

closely related terms. These references expedite for a student the fuller explora-

tion of a literary topic and make it easier for a teacher to locate entries that serve

the needs of a particular subject of study. For example, such supplementary re-

ferences list entries that identify the various types and movements of literary criti-

cism, the terms most relevant to the analysis of style, the entries that define and

exemplify the various literary genres, and the many entries that deal with the

forms, component features, history, and critical discussions of the drama, lyric,

and novel.

Those terms, mainly of foreign origin, that are most likely to be mispro-

nounced by a student are followed (in parentheses) by a simplified guide to pro-

nunciation. The following markings are used to signify the pronunciation of

vowels as in the sample words:

a fate

a pat

ä father

e meet

e get



ı pine



o Pope

o pot

oo food

u cut

Authors and their works that are discussed in the text of the Glossary are

listed in an “Index of Authors” at the end of the volume. To make it easy to

locate, the outer edges of this “Index” are colored gray.

xii

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A Glossary of Literary Terms

✵

Literary Terms

abstract (language): 62; 172.

absurd, literature of the: The term is applied to a number of works in drama

and prose fiction which have in common the view that the human condition

is essentially absurd, and that this condition can be adequately represented

only in works of literature that are themselves absurd. Both the mood and

dramaturgy of absurdity were anticipated as early as 1896 in Alfred Jarry’s

French play Ubu roi (Ubu the King). The literature has its roots also in the

movements of expressionism and surrealism, as well as in the fiction, written in

the 1920s, of Franz Kafka (The Trial, Metamorphosis). The current movement,

however, emerged in France after the horrors of World War II (1939–45) as a

rebellion against basic beliefs and values in traditional culture and literature.

This tradition had included the assumptions that human beings are fairly ratio-

nal creatures who live in an at least partially intelligible universe, that they are

part of an ordered social structure, and that they may be capable of heroism

and dignity even in defeat. After the 1940s, however, there was a widespread

tendency, especially prominent in the existential philosophy of men of letters

such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, to view a human being as an iso-

lated existent who is cast into an alien universe; to conceive the human world

as possessing no inherent truth, value, or meaning; and to represent human

life—in its fruitless search for purpose and significance as it moves from the

nothingness whence it came toward the nothingness where it must end—as

an existence which is both anguished and absurd. As Camus said in The Myth

of Sisyphus (1942),

In a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man

feels a stranger. His is an irremediable exile…. This divorce between

man and his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling

of absurdity.

✵

Or as Eugène Ionesco, French author of The Bald Soprano (1949), The Lesson

(1951), and other plays in the theater of the absurd, has put it: “Cut off

from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his

actions become senseless, absurd, useless.” Ionesco also said, in commenting

on the mixture of moods in the literature of the absurd: “People drowning

in meaninglessness can only be grotesque, their sufferings can only appear

tragic by derision.”

Samuel Beckett (1906–89), the most eminent and influential writer in this

mode, both in drama and in prose fiction, was an Irishman living in Paris who

often wrote in French and then translated his works into English. His plays,

such as Waiting for Godot (1954) and Endgame (1958), project the irrationalism,

helplessness, and absurdity of life in dramatic forms that reject realistic settings,

logical reasoning, or a coherently evolving plot. Waiting for Godot presents two

tramps in a waste place, fruitlessly and all but hopelessly waiting for an

unidentified person, Godot, who may or may not exist and with whom

they sometimes think they remember that they may have an appointment;

as one of them remarks, “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s

awful.” Like most works in this mode, the play is absurd in the double sense

that it is grotesquely comic and also irrational and nonconsequential; it is a

parody not only of the traditional assumptions of Western culture but of the

conventions and generic forms of traditional drama, and even of its own ines-

capable participation in the dramatic medium. The lucid but eddying and

pointless dialogue is often funny, and pratfalls and other modes of slapstick

are used to give a comic cast to the alienation and anguish of human exis-

tence. Beckett’s prose fiction, such as Malone Dies (1958) and The Unnamable

(1960), presents an antihero who plays out the absurd moves of the end game

of civilization in a nonwork which tends to undermine the coherence of its

medium, language itself. But typically Beckett’s characters carry on, even if in

a life without purpose, trying to make sense of the senseless and to communi-

cate the uncommunicable.

Another French playwright of the absurd was Jean Genet (who combined

absurdism and diabolism); some of the early dramatic works of the Englishman

Harold Pinter and the American Edward Albee are written in a similar

mode. The early pl ays of T om Sto ppard, such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

Are Dead (1966) and Travesties (1974), exploit the devices of absurdist theater

more for comic th an philosophical ends. There are also affinities with this

movement in many works that exploit black comedy or black humor:

baleful, naive, or inept characters in a fantastic or nightmarish modern world

play out their roles in what Ionesco called a “tragic farce,” in which the

events are often simultaneously comic, horrifying, and absurd. Examples are

Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), Thomas Pynchon’s V (1963), John Irving’s

The Wo rld According to Garp (1978), and some of the novels by the German

Günter Grass and the Americans Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and John Barth. Stanley

Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) is an example of black comedy in the cinema.

Some playwrights living in totalitarian regimes used absurdist techniques to

Desolato (1987) by

2 ABSURD, LITERATURE OF THE

the Czech Václav Havel and The Island (1973), a collaboration by the South

African writers Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona.

See also wit, humor, and the comic, and refer to: Martin Esslin, The Theatre

of the Absurd (rev. 1968); David Grossvogel, The Blasphemers: The Theatre of

Brecht, Ionesco, Beckett, Genet (1965); Arnold P. Hinchliffe, The Absurd (1969);

Max F. Schultz, Black Humor Fiction of the Sixties (1980); Enoch Brater and

Ruby Cohn, eds., Around the Absurd: Essays on Modern and Postmodern Drama

(1990); and Neil Cornwell, The Absurd in Literature (2006).

For references to the literature of the absurd in other entries, see pages 49,

187, 228.

absurd, theater of the: 2; 58, 120.

academic novel, university novel, or campus novel: A novel set primarily

in a college or university community in which the main characters are aca-

demics, often employed by the English department. Like detective stories or

murder mysteries, many of which are set in British country houses, academic

novels frequently exploit the fictional possibilities created by a closed environ-

ment in which a number of highly distinct, often idiosyncratic personalities

are thrown together. In the case of the murder mystery, the insularity of the

setting can produce a sense of heightened tension, but in the academic novel,

the sequestered character of the campus often results in an atmosphere of

comic inconsequentiality. Most academic novels are humorous, and many

explore the implications of the variously attributed maxim that academic

politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low. Even so, academic novels

have on occasion addressed more serious themes, including power, sex, class,

and banishment and exile.

The satirical portrayal of dreamily impractical thinkers is as old as

Aristophanes’ the Clouds, which depicts Socrates riding through the heavens in

a basket. And novels such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1874), Thomas Hardy’s

Jude the Obscure (1895), Willa Cather’s The Professor’sHouse(1925), and Dorothy

L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night (1935) dealt with academic settings or characters. But

the modern academic novel is generally thought to date from the mid-twentieth

century, with the beginning marked by the appearance, in Great B ritain, of

C. P. Snow’s The Masters (1951) and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954), and,

in the United States, of Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe (1951).

Among the most widely known British academic novels are Malcolm

Bradbury, The History Man (1975), and the trilogy by David Lodge: Changing

Places: A Tale of Two Campuses

(1975), Small

World: An Academic Romance

(1984), and Nice Work (1988). Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) is

considered a varsity novel, a predominantly British genre, generally set at

Oxford or Cambridge, in which the primary characters are undergraduates

rather than faculty.

Noteworthy American instances of the academic novel are Vladimir

Nabokov, Pnin (1957) and Pale Fire (1962); John Barth, Giles Goat-Boy

(1966), in which, through an elaborate allegory, the Universe is refigured as

ACADEMIC NOVEL, UNIVERSITY NOVEL, OR CAMPUS NOVEL 3

a University; Alison Lurie, The War Between the Tates (1974); Don DeLillo,

White Noise (1985); Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys (1995); Richard Russo,

Straight Man (1997); and Philip Roth, The Human Stain (2000).

Over the years, the academic novel has registered not only the currents of

the larger culture but also the changing nature of academic life. If many of the

earlier instances of the genre depicted the college or university community as

a pseudo-pastoral enclosure with its own quaint rules and conventions, more

recent novels have treated the same setting as a microcosm, a more tightly

focused or intensified version of the larger world, in which ideas and values

circulating through the broader culture emerge in high relief. The tone of the

academic novel in the first years of the twenty-first century darkened as the

working conditions of many teaching faculty deteriorated and the educational

mission of the university was superseded by the economic priorities of increas-

ingly corporatized institutions. For the adjunct novel, in which the primary

characters are marginalized, underpaid, and untenured faculty whose positions

expose them to uncertainty, deprivation, and anxiety rather than protecting

them from it, see Jeffrey J. Williams, “Unlucky Jim: The Rise of the Adjunct

Novel,” The Chronicle Review, 16 November 2012, B12–14.

See Ian Carter, Ancient Cultures of Conceit: British University Fiction in the

Post War Years (1990); and Elaine Showalter, Faculty Towers: The Academic

Novel and Its Discontents (2005).

accent (in meter): 218.

accentual meter: 218.

accentual-syllabic meter: 218.

accentual verse: 222.

accidie (ak

side): 363.

act and scene: An act is a major division in the action of a play. In England, this

division was introduced by Elizabethan dramatists who imitated ancient

Roman plays by structuring the action into five acts. Late in the nineteenth

century, a number of writers followed the example of Chekhov and Ibsen by

constructing plays in four acts. In the twentieth century, the most common

form for traditional nonmusical dramas has been three acts.

Acts are often subdivided into scenes, which in modern plays usually

consist of units of action in which there is no change of place or break in

the continuity of time. (Some more recent plays dispense with the division

into acts and are structured as a sequence of scenes, or episodes.) In the con-

ventional theater with a proscenium arch that frames the front of the stage,

the end of a scene is usually indicated by a dropped curtain or a dimming of

the lights, and the end of an act by a dropped curtain and an intermission.

action: 48.

4 ACCENT

adjunct novel: 4.

adversarius (adversär



us): 353.

aesthetic distance: 94; 235. See also empathy and sympathy.

Aesthetic ideology: “Aesthetic ideology” was a term applied by the deconstructive

theorist Paul de Man, in his later writings, to describe the “seductive” appeal of

aesthetic experience, in which, he claimed, form and meaning, perception and

understanding, and cognition and desire are misleadingly, and sometimes dan-

gerously, conflated. De Man traces the aesthetic ideology to Friedrich Schiller’s

Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1 795), which describes a pr ocess of

education that would eventua lly produ ce an “Aesthetic State,” aconcept

that, de Man argued, anticipated Joseph Goebbels’s concept of “the plastic

art of the state.” In de Man’s view, the concept of the aesthetic came to

stand for all organicist approaches not only to art but to politics and culture

as well. The experience of literature, he argued, minimizes the temptation of

aesthetic ideology to confuse sensory experience with understanding, since

literature represents the world in such a way that neither meaning nor sense-

experience is directly perceptible. See de Man, Aesthetic Ideology (1996); and

Marc Redfield, Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman (1996).

In The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), the Marxist theorist Terry Eagleton

provided both a history and critique of “the aesthetic,” noting the many “ideo-

logical” perversions and distortions in the history of the concept but, in con-

trast to de Man, also identifying an “emancipatory” potential in a concept that

had, Eagleton pointed out, originally been articulated in terms of freedom and

pleasure. (See ideology under Marxist criticism, and for essays on this subject,

refer to George Levine, ed., Aesthetics and Ideology, 1994.)

aesthetic movement: 5.

Aestheticism: In his Latin treatise entitled Aesthetica (1750), the German philos-

opher Alexander Baumgarten applied the term “aesthetica” to the arts, of

which “the aesthetic end is the perfection of sensuous cognition, as such;

this is beauty.” In present usage,

aesthetics (from

the Greek, “pertaining to

sense perception”) designates the systematic study of all the fine arts, as well as

of the nature of beauty in any object, whether natural or artificial.

Aestheticism, or alternatively the aesthetic movement, was a

European phenomenon during the latter part of the nineteenth century that

had its chief headquarters in France. In opposition to the dominance of sci-

ence, and in defiance of the widespread indifference or hostility of the

middle-class society of their time to any art that was not useful or did not

teach moral values, French writers developed the view that a work of art is

the supreme value among human products precisely because it is self-sufficient

and has no use or moral aim outside its own being. The end of a work of

art is simply to exist in its formal perfection; that is, to be beautiful and to

AESTHETICISM 5

be contemplated as an end in itself. A rallying cry of Aestheticism became the

phrase “l’art pour l’art”—art for art’s sake.

The historical roots of Aestheticism are in the views proposed by the

German philosopher Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgment (1790), that the

“pure” aesthetic experience consists of a “disinterested” contemplation of an

object that “pleasesforitsownsake,” without reference to realit y or to t he

“external” ends of utility o r morality. As a self-conscious movement, how-

ever, French Aestheticism is o ften said to date from Théophile Gautier’s

witty defense of his assertion that art is useless (preface to Mademoiselle de

Maupin, 1835). Aestheticism was developed by Baudelaire, who was greatly

influenced by Edgar Allan Poe’sclaim(in“The Poetic Principle,” 1850) that

the supreme work is a “poem per se,” a “poem written solely for the poem’s

sake”; it was later taken up by Flaubert, Mallarmé, and many other writers. In

its extreme form, the aesthetic doctrine of art for art’s sake veered into the

moral and quasi-religious doctrin e of life for art’s sake, or of life conducted

as a work of art, with the artist represented as a priest who renounces the

practical concerns of worldly existence in the service of what Flaubert and

others called “the religion of beauty.”

The views of French Aestheticism were introduced into Victorian England

by Walter Pater, with his emphasis on the value in art of high artifice and

stylistic subtlety, his recommendation to crowd one ’s life with exquisite sen-

sations, and his advocacy of the supreme value of beauty and of “the love of

art for its own sake.” (See his Conclusion to The Renaissance, 1873.) The

artistic and moral views of Aestheticism were also expressed by Algernon

Charles Swinburne and by English writers of the 1890s such as Oscar Wilde,

Arthur Symons, and Lionel Johnson, as well as by the artists J. M. Whistler

and Aubrey Beardsley. The influence of ideas stressed in Aestheticism—

especially the view of the “autonomy” (self-sufficiency) of a work of art, the

emphasis on the importance of craft and artistry, and the concept of a poem

or novel as an end in itself, or as invested with “intrinsic” values

—ha

s been

important in the writings of prominent twentieth-century authors such as

W.B.Yeats,T.E.Hulme,andT.S.Eliot,aswellasintheliterarytheory

of the New Critics.

For related developments, see aesthetic ideology, decadence, fine arts, and ivory

tower. Refer to William Gaunt, The Aesthetic Adventure (1945, reprinted 1975);

Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (1957); Enid Starkie, From Gautier to Eliot

(1960); R. V. Johnson, Aestheticism (1969). For the intellectual and social con-

ditions during the eighteenth century that fostered the theory, derived from

theology, that a work of art is an end in itself, see M. H. Abrams, “Art-

as-Such: The Sociology of Modern Aesthetics,” in Doing Things with Texts:

Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory (1989). An influential treatise on philo-

sophical aesthetics was Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects (2nd ed., 1980).

Useful collections of writings in the Aesthetic Movement are Eric Warner and

Graham Hough, eds., Strangeness and Beauty: An Anthology of Aesthetic Criticism

1848–1910 (2 vols., 1983); Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst, eds., The

Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History, c. 1880–1900 (2000). A useful

6 AESTHETICISM

descriptive guide to books on the subject is Linda C. Dowling, Aestheticism

and Decadence: A Selective Annotated Bibliography (1977). The concepts of the

aesthetic and beauty have been revisited, often in a spirit of renewed appre-

ciation, by philosophers and literary critics alike. See George Levine, ed.,

Aesthetics and Ideology (1994); Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (1999);

Arthur C. Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art

(2003); Denis Donoghue, Speaking of Beauty (2003); John Armstrong,

The Secret Power of Beauty (2004); Jonathan Loesberg, A Return to Aesthetics:

Autonomy, Indifference, and Postmodernism (2005); and Susan Stewart, The

Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics (2005). Berys Gaut and Dominic

McIver Lopes, eds., The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics (2nd ed., 2005) is

a useful collection of historical and descriptive essays on the aesthetic. A

comprehensive reference work is Michael Kelly, ed., Encyclopedia of Aesthetics,

4 vols. (1998).

aesthetics: 5.

affective fallacy: In an essay published in 1946, W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C.

Beardsley defined the affective fallacy as the error of evaluating a poem by its

effects—especially its emotional effects—upon the reader. As a result of this

fallacy “the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgment, tends to

disappear,” so that criticism “ends in impressionism and relativism.” The two

critics wrote in direct reaction to the view of I. A. Richards, in his influential

Principles of Literary Criticism (1923), that the value of a poem can be measured

by the psychological responses it incites in its readers. Beardsley later modified

the earlier claim by the admission that “it does not appear that critical evalua-

tion can be done at all except in relation to certain types of effect that aes-

thetic objects have upon their perceivers.” So altered, the doctrine becomes a

claim for objective criticism, in which the critic, instead of describing the effects

of a work, focuses on the features, devices, and form of the work by which

such effects are achieved. An extreme reaction against the doctrine of the

affective fallacy was manifested during the 1970s in the development of

reader-response criticism.

Refer to Wimsatt and Beardsley, “The Affective Fallacy,” reprinted in

W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon (1954); and Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics:

Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (1958), p. 491 and chapter 11. See also

Wimsatt and Beardsley’s related concept of the intentional fallacy.

affective stylistics: 331.

African-American writers: 273. See also Black Arts Movement; Harlem Renais-

sance; performance poetry; slave narratives; spirituals.

Age of Johnson: 283.

Age of Sensibility: 283.

AGE OF SENSIBILITY 7

Age of Transcendentalism: 274.

Agrarians: 277.

agroikos (agroi

kos): 377.

alazon (al

azon): 377; 185.

Alexandrine (alexan



n): 220.

alienation effect: In his epic theater of the 1920s and later, the German dramatist

Bertolt Brecht adapted the Russian formalist concept of “defamiliarization” into

what he called the “alienation effect” (Verfremdungseffekt). The German term is

also translated as estrangement effect or distancing effect; the last is closest

to Brecht’s notion, in that it avoids the negative connotations of jadedness,

incapacity to feel, and social apathy that the word “alienation” has acquired

in English. This effect, Brecht said, is used by the dramatist to make familiar

aspects of the present social reality seem strange, so as to prevent the emo-

tional identification or involvement of the audience with the characters and

their actions in a play. His own aim in drama was instead to evoke a critical

distance and attitude in the spectators, in order to arouse them to take action

against, rather than simply to accept, the state of society and behavior repre-

sented on the stage.

On Brecht, refer to Marxist criticism; for a related aesthetic concept, see

distance and involvement.

allegorical imagery: 9.

allegorical interpretation (of the Bible): 183.

allegory: An “allegory” is a narrative, whether in prose or verse, in which the

agents and actions, and sometimes the setting as well, are contrived by the

author to make coherent sense on the “literal,” or primary, level of significa-

tion and at the same time to communicate a second, correlated order of

signification.

We can distinguish two main types: (1) Historical and political allegory,

in which the characters and actions that are signified literally in their turn rep-

resent, or “allegorize,” historical personages and events. So in John Dryden’s

Absalom and Achitophel (1681), the biblical King David represents Charles II of

England, Absalom represents his natural son the Duke of Monmouth, and the

biblical story of Absalom’s rebellion against his father (2 Samuel 13–18) alle-

gorizes the rebellion of Monmouth against King Charles. (2) The allegory of

ideas, in which the literal characters represent concepts and the plot allegorizes

an abstract doctrine or thesis. Both types of allegory may either be sustained

throughout a work, as in Absalom and Achitophel and John Bunyan’s The

Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), or else serve merely as an episode in a nonallegorical

8 AGE OF TRANSCENDENTALISM

work. A famed example of episodic allegory is the encounter of Satan with his

daughter Sin, as well as with Death—who is represented allegorically as the

son born of their incestuous relationship—in John Milton’s Paradise Lost,

Book II (1667).

In the second type, the sustained allegory of ideas, the central device is

the personification of abstract entities such as virtues, vices, states of mind,

modes of life, and types of character. In explicit allegories, such reference is

specified by the names given to characters and places. Thus Bunyan’s The

Pilgrim’s Progress allegorizes the Christian doctrine of salvation by telling how

the character named Christian, warned by Evangelist, flees the City of

Destruction and makes his way laboriously to the Celestial City; en route he

encounters characters with names like Faithful, Hopeful, and the Giant

Despair, and passes through places like the Slough of Despond, the Valley of

the Shadow of Death, and Vanity Fair. A passage from this work indicates the

nature of an explicit allegorical narrative:

Now as Christian was walking solitary by himself, he espied one afar off

come crossing over the field to meet him; and their hap was to meet just

as they were crossing the way of each other. The Gentleman’sname

was Mr. Worldly-Wiseman; he dwelt in the Town of Carnal-Policy,

a very great Town, and also hard by from whence Christian came.

Works that are primarily nonallegorical may introduce allegorical imagery

(the personification of abstract entities who perform a brief allegorical action) in

short passages. Familiar instances are the opening lines of Milton’s L’Allegro and Il

Penseroso (1645). This device was exploited especially in the poetic diction of

authors in the mid-eighteenth century. An example—so brief that it presents

an allegoric tableau rather than an action—is the passage in Thomas Gray’s

“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751):

Can Honour’s voice provoke the silent dust,

Or Flatt’ry soothe the dull cold ear of Death?

Allegory is a narrative strategy, which may be employed in any literary

form or genre. The early sixteenth-century Everyman is an allegory in the

form of a morality play. The Pilgrim’s Progress is a moral and religious allegory

in a prose narrative; Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590–96) fuses

moral, religious, historical, and political allegory in a verse romance; the third

book of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, the voyage to Laputa and Lagado

(1726), is an allegorical satire directed mainly against philosophical and scien-

tific pedantry; and William Collins

’“Ode

on the Poetical Character” (1747) is

a lyric poem, which allegorizes a topic in literary criticism—the nature,

sources, and power of the poet’s creative imagination. John Keats makes a

subtle use of allegory throughout his ode “To Autumn” (1820), most explic-

itly in the second stanza, which personifies the autumnal season as a female

figure amid the scenes and activities of the harvest.

Sustained allegory was a favorite form in the Middle Ages, when it pro-

duced masterpieces, especially in the verse-narrative mode of the dream vision,

ALLEGORY 9

in which the narrator falls asleep and experiences an allegoric dream; this

mode includes, in the fourteenth century, Dante’s Divine Comedy, the French

Roman de la Rose, Chaucer’s House of Fame, and William Langland’s Piers

Plowman. But sustained allegory has been written in all literary periods and is

the form of such major nineteenth-century dramas in verse as Goethe’s Faust,

Part II; Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound; and Thomas Hardy ’s The Dynasts. In the

twentieth century, the stories and novels of Franz Kafka can be considered

instances of implicit allegory.

Allegory was on the whole devalued during the twentieth century but

was invested with positive value by some theorists in the last quarter of the

twentieth century. The critic Fredric Jameson uses the term to signify the

relation of a literary text to its historical subtext, its “political unconscious.”

(See Jameson, under Marxist criticism.) And Paul de Man elevates allegory,

because it candidly manifests its artifice, over what he calls the more “mysti-

fied” concept of the symbol, which he claims seems to promise, falsely, a unity

of form and content, thought and expression. (See de Man, under deconstruc-

tion and aesthetic ideology.)

A variety of literary genres may be classified as species of allegory in that

they all narrate one coherent set of circumstances which are intended to sig-

nify a second order of correlated meanings:

A fable (also called an apologue) is a short narrative, in prose or verse,

that exemplifies an abstract moral thesis or principle of human behavior; usu-

ally, at its conclusion, either the narrator or one of the characters states the

moral in the form of an epigram. Most common is the beast fable, in which

animals talk and act like the human types they represent. In the familiar fable

of the fox and the grapes, the fox —after exerting all his wiles to get the grapes

hanging beyond his reach, but in vain—concludes that they are probably sour

anyway: the express moral is that human beings belittle what they cannot get.

(The modern expression “sour grapes” derives from this fable.) The beast fable

is a very ancient form that existed in Egypt, India, and Greece. The fables in

Western cultures derive mainly from the stories that were, probably mistak-

enly, attributed to Aesop, a Greek slave of the sixth century BC. In the sev-

enteenth century a Frenchman, Jean de la Fontaine, wrote a set of witty

fables in verse, which are the classics of this literary kind. Chaucer’s “The

Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” the story of the cock and the fox, is a beast fable.

The American Joel Chandler Harris wrote many Uncle Remus stories that

are beast fables, told in southern African-American dialect, whose origins

have been traced to folktales in the oral literature of West Africa that feature

a trickster similar to Uncle Remus

’ Brer

Rabbit. (A trickster is a character in

a story who persistently uses his wiliness and gift of gab to achieve his ends by

outmaneuvering or outwitting other characters.) A counterpart in many

Native American cultures are the beast fables that feature Coyote as the cen-

tral trickster. In 1940, James Thurber produced a set of short fables under the

title Fables for Our Time, and in Animal Farm (1945), George Orwell expanded

the beast fable into a sustained satire on Russian totalitarianism under Stalin in

the mid-twentieth century.

10 ALLEGORY

A parable is a very short narrative about human beings presented so as to

stress the tacit analogy, or parallel, with a general thesis or lesson that the nar-

rator is trying to bring home to his audience. The parable was one of Jesus’

favorite devices as a teacher; examples are his parables of the good Samaritan

and of the prodigal son. Here is his terse parable of the fig tree, Luke 13:6–9:

He spake also this parable: A certain man had a fig tree planted in his

vineyard; and he came and sought fruit thereon, and found none.

Then said he unto the dresser of his vineyard, “Behold, these three years

I come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and find none: cut it down; why

cumbereth it the ground?” And he answering said unto him, “Lord, let

it alone this year also, till I shall dig about it, and dung it. And if it bears

fruit, well: and if not, then after that thou shalt cut it down.”

Mark Turner, in a greatly extended use, employs “parable” to signify any

“projection of one story onto another,” or onto many others, whether the

projection is intentional or not. He proposes that, in this extended sense, par-

able is not merely a literary or didactic device but “a basic cognitive principle”

that comes into play in interpreting “every level of our experience” and that

“shows up everywhere, from simple actions like telling time to complex liter-

ary creations like Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu.” (Mark Turner, The

Literary Mind, New York, 1996.)

An exemplum is a story told as a particular instance of the general theme

in a religious sermon. The device was popular in the Middle Ages, when

extensive collections of exempla, some historical and some legendary, were

prepared for use by preachers. In Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale,” the Par-

doner, preaching on the theme, “Greed is the root of all evil,” incorporates as

an exemplum the tale of the three drunken revelers who set out to find and

defy Death and find a heap of gold instead, only to find Death after all when

they kill one another in the attempt to gain sole possession of the treasure. By

extension the term “exemplum” is also applied to tales used in a formal,

though nonreligious, exhortation. Thus Chaucer’s Chanticleer, in “The

Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” borrows the preacher’s technique in the ten exempla

he tells in a vain effort to persuade his skeptical wife, Dame Pertelote the

hen, that bad dreams forebode disaster. See G. R. Owst, Literature and the

Pulpit in Medieval England (2nd ed., 1961), chapter 4.

Proverbs are short, pithy statements of widely accepted truths about

everyday life. Many proverbs are allegorical, in that the explicit statement is

meant

to have, by analogy or by extended reference, a general application: “a

stitch in time saves nine”; “people in glass houses should not throw stones.”

Refer to The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, eds. W. G. Smith and

F. P. Wilson (1970).

See didactic, symbol (for the distinction between allegory and symbol), and

(on the fourfold allegorical interpretation of the Bible) interpretation: typological

and allegorical . On allegory in general, consult C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love

(1936), chapter 2; Edwin Honig, Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory (1959);

Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (1964); Rosemund

ALLEGORY 11

Tuve, Allegorical Imagery (1966); Michael Murrin, The Veil of Allegory (1969);

Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory (1979); Jon Whitman, Allegory

(1987).

For references to allegory in other entries, see pages 90, 97, 225.

alliteration: “Alliteration” is the repetition of a speech sound in a sequence of

nearby words. Usually the term is applied only to consonants, and only when

the recurrent sound is made emphatic because it begins a word or a stressed

syllable within a word. In Old English alliterative meter, alliteration is the

principal organizing device of the verse line: the verse is unrhymed; each line

is divided into two half-lines of two strong stresses by a decisive pause, or

caesura; and at least one, and usually both, of the two stressed syllables in the

first half-line alliterate with the first stressed syllable of the second half-line. (In

this type of versification a vowel was considered to alliterate with any other

vowel.) A number of Middle English poems, such as William Langland’s Piers

Plowman and the romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, both written in the

fourteenth century, continued to use and play variations upon the old alliter-

ative meter. (See strong-stress meters.) In the opening line of Piers Plowman, for

example, all four of the stressed syllables alliterate:

In a sómer séson, when sóft was the sónne….

In later English versification, however, alliteration is used only for special stylis-

tic effects, such as to reinforce the meaning, to link related words, or to provide

tone color and enhance the palpability of enunciating the words. An example is

the repetition of the s, th,andw consonants in Shakespeare’sSonnet30:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

I summon up remembrance of things past,

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought

And with old w oes new wail my dear time’s waste….

Various other repetitions of speech sounds are identified by special terms:

Consonance is

the repetition of a sequence of two or more consonants,

but with a change in the intervening vowel: live-love, lean-alone, pitter-

patter. W. H. Auden’s poem of the 1930s, “‘O where are you going?’ said

reader to rider,” makes prominent use of this device, with successive lines

ending in “rider to reader,”“farer to fearer,” and “hearer to horror.”

Assonance is the repetition of identical or similar vowels—especially in

stressed syllables—in a sequence of nearby words. Note the recurrent long i in

the opening lines of Keats’“Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1820):

Thou still unravished bride of quietness,

Thou foster child of silence and slow ti me….

Lines from “O Where are you going,” by W.H. Auden, from Collected Poems of W.H. Auden by W.H. Auden.

12 ALLITERATION

The richly assonantal effect at the beginning of William Collins’“Ode to

Evening” (1747) is achieved by a patterned sequence of changing vowels:

If aught of oaten stop or pastoral song,

May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy pensive ear….

For a special case of the repetition of vowels and consonants in combina-

tion, see rhyme.

alliterative meter: 13.

allusion: “Allusion” is a passing reference, without explicit identification, to a

literary or historical person, place, or event, or to another literary work or

passage. In the Elizabethan Thomas Nashe’s “Litany in Time of Plague,”

Brightness falls from the air,

Queens have died young and fair,

Dust hath closed Helen’s eye,

the unidentified “Helen” in the last line alludes to Helen of Troy. Most allu-

sions serve to illustrate or expand upon or enhance a subject but some are

used in order to undercut it ironically by the discrepancy between the subject

and the allusion. In the lines from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) describ-

ing a woman at her modern dressing table,

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,

Glowed on the marble,

the ironic allusion, achieved by echoing Shakespeare’s phrasing, is to the descrip-

tion of Cleopatra’s magnificent barge in Antony and Cleopatra (II. ii. 196ff.):

The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,

Burn’d on the water.

For discussion of a poet who makes persistent and complex use of this

device, see Reuben A. Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (1959);

see also John Hollander, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and

After (1981); Christopher Ricks, Allusion to the Poets (2002), and True Friend-

ship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell Under the Sign of Eliot and

Pound (2010).

Since allusions are not explicitly identified, they imply a fund of knowl-

edge that is shared by an author and the audience for whom the author

writes. Most literary allusions are intended to be recognized by the generally

educated readers of the author’s time but some are aimed at a special coterie.

For example, in Astrophel and Stella, the Elizabethan sonnet sequence, Sir Philip

Sidney’s punning allusions to Lord Robert Rich, who had married the Stella

Lines from “The Waste Land” from Collected Poems 1909–1962 by T. S. Eliot.

ALLUSION

of the sonnets, were identifiable only by intimates of the people concerned.

(See Sonnets 24 and 37.) Some modern authors, including Joyce, Pound, and

Eliot, include allusions that are very specialized, or else drawn from the

author’s private reading and experience, in the awareness that few, if any,

readers will recognize them prior to the detective work of scholarly annota-

tors. The current term intertextuality includes literary echoes and allusions as

one of the many ways in which any text is interwoven with other texts. See

Joseph Pucci, The Full-Knowing Reader: Allusion and the Power of the Reader in

Western Literary Tradition (1998); and Gregory Machacek, “Allusion,” PMLA,

Vol. 122 (2007).

ambiance (am

beäns): 20.

ambiguity: In ordinary usage “ambiguity” is applied to a fault in style; that is,

the use of a vague or equivocal term or expression when what is wanted is

precision and particularity of reference. Since William Empson published

Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), however, the term has been widely used in

criticism to identify a deliberate poetic device: the use of a single word or

expression to signify two or more distinct references, or to express two or

more diverse attitudes or feelings. Multiple meaning and plurisignation

are alternative terms for this use of language; they have the advantage of

avoiding the pejorative association with the word “ambiguity.”

When Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, exciting the asp to a frenzy, says (Antony

and Cleopatra , V. ii. 306ff.),

Come, thou mortal wretch,

With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate

Of life at once untie. Poor venomous fool,

Be angry, and dispatch,

her speech is richly multiple in significance. For example, “mortal” means

“fatal” or “death-dealing,” and at the same time may signify that the asp is

itself mortal, or subject to death. “Wretch” in this context serves to express

both contempt and pity (Cleopatra goes on to refer to the asp as “my baby

at my breast, / That sucks the nurse asleep”). And the two meanings of

“dispatch”—“make haste” and “kill”—are equally relevant.

A special type of multiple meaning is conveyed by the portmanteau

word. “Portmanteau” designates a large suitcase that opens into two equal

compartments and was introduced into literary criticism by Humpty Dumpty,

the expert on semantics in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (1871).

He is explicating to Alice the meaning of the opening lines of “ Jabberwocky”:

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.

“Slithy,” Humpty Dumpty explained, “means ‘lithe and slimy’…. You see it’

a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.”

James Joyce exploited this device—the fusion of two or more existing words

14 AMBIANCE

—in order to sustain the multiple levels of meaning throughout his long

dream narrative Finnegans Wake (1939). An example is his comment on girls

who are “yung and easily freudened”; “freudened” combines “frightened”

and “Freud,” while “yung” combines “young” and Sigmund Freud’s rival in

depth psychology, Carl Jung. (Compare pun.) “Différance,” a key analytic

term of the philosopher of language Jacques Derrida, is a portmanteau noun

which he describes as combining two diverse meanings of the French verb

“différer”: “to differ” and “to defer.” (See deconstruction.)

By his analysis of ambiguity, William Empson helped make current a

mode of explication developed especially by exponents of the New Criticism,

which greatly expanded awareness of the complexity and richness of poetic

language. The risk is that the quest for ambiguities will result in over-

reading: excessively ingenious, overdrawn, and sometimes contradictory

explications of a literary word or passage.

For related terms see connotation and denotation and pun. For a warmly

appreciative assessment of Empson’s contribution, see Christopher Norris

and Nigel Mapp, eds., William Empson: The Critical Achievement (1993). For a

critique of Empson’s theory and practice, refer to Elder Olson, “William

Empson, Contemporary Criticism and Poetic Diction,” in Critics and Criticism,

ed. R. S. Crane (1952).

American literature, periods of: 273.

American Renaissance: 274.

anachronism (anak

ronism): 300.

anagnorisis (anagno



s): 296; 406.

anapestic (anapes

tik): 219.

anaphora (ana

fora): 344.

anastrophe: 344.

anatomy (in satire): 353.

anecdote: 364; 139.

Anglo-Norman Period: 280.

anglophone authors: 285.

Anglo-Saxon Period: 279.

annals: 53.

ANNALS 15

antagonist (in a plot): 294.

anthropocentric: 99.

anticlimax: 28.

antifoundationalism: 308.

antihero: The chief person in a modern novel or play whose character is widely

discrepant from that of the traditional protagonist, or hero, of a serious literary

work. Instead of manifesting largeness, dignity, power, or heroism, the anti-

hero is petty, ignominious, passive, clownish, or dishonest. The use of non-

heroic protagonists occurs as early as the picaresque novel of the sixteenth

century, and the heroine of Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) is a thief and a pros-

titute. The term “antihero,” however, is usually applied to writings in the

period of disillusion after the Second World War, beginning with such

lowly protagonists as we find in John Wain’s Hurry on Down (1953) and

Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim (1954). Notable later instances in the novel are

Yossarian in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), Humbert Humbert in Vladimir

Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), and Tyrone Slothrop in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s

Rainbow (1973). The use of an antihero is especially conspicuous in dramatic

tragedy, in which the traditional protagonist had usually been of high estate,

possessing dignity and courage (see tragedy). Extreme instances are the charac-

ters who people a world stripped of certainties, values, or even meaning in

Samuel Beckett’s dramas—the tramps Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for

Godot (1952) or the blind and paralyzed old man, Hamm, who is the protag-

onist in Endgame (1958).

See literature of the absurd and black comedy, and refer to David Simmons,

The Anti-Hero in the American Novel: From Joseph Heller to Kurt Vonnegut (2008).

For references to antihero in other entries, see page 2.

antimasque: 211.

antinovel: 258.

antipathy (ant



athy): 107.

antistrophe (ant



trof e): 262.

antithesis (ant



thesis): A contrast or opposition in the meanings of contigu-

ous phrases or clauses that manifest parallelism—that is, a similar word

order and structure—in their syntax.AnexampleisAlexanderPope’s

description of Atticus in his “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” (1735), “Willing

to wound, and yet afraid to strike.” In the antithesis in the secon d line of

Pope’s description of the Baron’s designs against Belinda, in TheRapeof

16 ANTAGONIST

the Lock (1714), the parallelism in the syntax is made prominent by allitera-

tion in the antithetic nouns:

Resolved to win, he meditates the way,

By force to ravish, or by fraud betray.

In a sentence from Samuel Johnson’s prose fiction Rasselas (1759), chapter 26,

the antithesis is similarly heightened by alliteration in the contrasted nouns:

“Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.”

antithetical criticism: 176.

antitype: 182.

anxiety of influence: 176.

aphorism (af

orism): 113.

apocrypha (apok



fa): 43.

apologue: 10.

aporia (apo

rea): 83.

apostrophe (apos

trof e): 345.

apothegm (ap

othem): 113.

applied criticism: 71.

appropriation (in reading): 247.

approximate rhyme: 349.

Arcadia (arka

dia): 269.

archaism: The literary use of words and expressions that have become obsolete in

thecommonspeechofanera.SpenserinThe Faerie Queene (1590–96) deliberately

employed archaisms (many of them derived from Chaucer’smedievalEnglish)in

order to achieve a poetic style appropriate to his revival of the medieval chivalric

romance. The translators of the King James Version of the Bible (1611) gave

weight, dignity, and sonority to their prose by a sustained use of archaic revivals.

Both Spenser and the King James Bible have in their turn been major sources of

archaisms for Milton and many later authors. When Keats, for example, in his ode

(1820) described the Grecian urn as “with brede / Of marble men and maidens

overwrought,” he used archaic words for “braid” and “worked [that is, ornamen-

ted] all over.” Abraham Lincoln achieved a ritual solemnity by biblical archaisms

in his “Gettysburg Address,” which begins, “Fourscore and seven years ago.”

ARCHAISM 17

Archaism has been a standard resort for poetic diction. Through the nineteenth

century, for example, many poets continued to use “I ween,”“methought,”

“ste ed,”“taper” (for candle), and “morn,” but only in their verses, not their

everyday speech.

archetypal criticism: In literary criticism, the term archetype denotes narra-

tive designs, patterns of action, character types, themes, and images that recur

in a wide variety of works of literature, as well as in myths, dreams, and even

social rituals. Such recurrent items are often claimed to be the result of ele-

mental and universal patterns in the human psyche, whose effective embodi-

ment in a literary work evokes a profound response from the attentive reader

because he or she shares the psychic archetypes expressed by the author. An

important antecedent of the literary theory of the archetype was the treatment

of myth by a group of comparative anthropologists at Cambridge University,

especially James G. Frazer, whose The Golden Bough (1890–1915) identified

elemental patterns of myth and ritual that, he claimed, recur in the legends

and ceremonials of diverse and far-flung cultures and religions. An even

more important antecedent was the depth psychology of Carl G. Jung

(1875–1961) who applied the term “archetype” to what he called “primordial

images,” the “psychic residue” of repeated patterns of experience in our very

ancient ancestors, which, he maintained, survive in the collective unconscious of

the human race and are expressed in myths, religion, dreams, and private fan-

tasies, as well as in works of literature. See Jungian criticism, under psychoanalytic

criticism.

Archetypal literary criticism was given impetus by Maud Bodkin’s

Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (1934) and flourished especially during the 1950s

and 1960s. Some archetypal critics dropped Jung’s theory of the collective

unconscious as the deep source of these patterns; in the words of Northrop

Frye, this theory is “an unnecessary hypothesis, ” and the recurrent archetypes

are simply there, “however they got there.”

Among the prominent practitioners of various modes of archetypal criti-

cism, in addition to Maud Bodkin, were G. Wilson Knight, Robert Graves,

Philip Wheelwright, Richard Chase, Leslie Fiedler, and Joseph Campbell.

These critics tended to emphasize the persistence of mythical patterns in liter-

ature, on the assumption that myths are closer to the elemental archetype than

the artful manipulations of sophisticated writers (see myth critics). The death/

rebirth theme was often said to be the archetype of archetypes and was held to

be grounded in the cycle of the seasons and the organic cycle of human life; this

archetype, it was claimed, occurs in primitive rituals of the king who is annually

sacrificed, in widespread myths of gods who die to be reborn, and in a multi-

tude of diverse texts, including the Bible, Dante’s Divine Comedy in the early

fourteenth century, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient

Mariner

” i

n 1798. Among the other archetypal themes, images, and characters

frequently traced in literature were the journey underground, the heavenly

ascent, the search for the father, the Paradise/Hades dichotomy, the Promethean

rebel-hero, the scapegoat, the earth goddess, and the fatal woman.

18 ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM

In his influential book Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Northrop Frye

developed the archetypal approach—which he combined with the typological

interpretation of the Bible and the conception of the imagination in the writ-

ings of the poet and painter William Blake (1757–1827)—into a radical and

comprehensive revision of the foundational concepts of both the theory of

literature and the practice of literary criticism. Frye proposed that the totality

of literary works constitute a “self-contained literary universe,” which has

been created over the ages by the human imagination so as to assimilate the

alien and indifferent world of nature into archetypal forms that satisfy endur-

ing human desires and needs. In this literary universe, four radical mythoi

(that is, plot forms, or organizing structural principles), correspondent to the

four seasons in the cycle of the natural world, are incorporated in the four

major genres of comedy (spring), romance (summer), tragedy (autumn), and

satire (winter). Within the archetypal mythos of each of these genres, individ-

ual works of literature also play variations upon a number of more limited

archetypes—that is, conventional patterns and types that literature shares

with social rituals as well as with theology, history, law, and, in fact, all “dis-

cursive verbal structures.” Viewed archetypally, Frye asserted, literature turns

out to play an essential role in refashioning the impersonal material universe

into an alternative verbal universe that is humanly intelligible and viable

because it is adapted to universal human needs and concerns. Frye continued,

in a long series of later writings, to expand his archetypal theory, to make a

place in its overall scope and on different levels for including many traditional

critical concepts and procedures, and to apply the theory both to everyday

social practices and to the elucidation of writings ranging from the Bible to

contemporary poets and novelists. See A. C. Hamilton, Northrop Frye: Anatomy

of His Criticism (1990).

In addition to the works mentioned above, consult C. G. Jung, “On the

Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetic Art” (1922), in Contributions to

Analytical Psychology (1928), and “Psychology and Literature,” in Modern Man

in Search of a Soul (1933); G. Wilson Knight, The Starlit Dome (1941); Richard

Chase, The Quest for Myth (1949); Francis Fergusson, The Idea of a Theater

(1949); Robert Graves, The White Goddess (rev. 1961); Northrop Frye, “The

Archetypes of Literature,” in Fables of Identity (1963); Philip Wheelwright, The

Burning Fountain (rev. 1968); Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

(2nd ed., 1968). In the 1980s, feminist critics developed forms of archetypal criti-

cism that undertook to revise the male bases and biases of Jung and other arche-

typists. See Annis Pratt, Archetypal Patterns in Woman’sFiction(1981), and Estella

Lauter and Carol Schreier Rupprecht, Feminist Archetypal Theory: Interdisciplinary

Re-Visions of Jungian Thought (1985). Some forms of Darwinian criticism might be

seen as adaptations of archetypal criticism to the premises of evolutionary thinking.

For discussions and critiques of archetypal theory and practice, see Murray

ieger, ed., Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism (1966); Robert Denham, Northrop

Frye and Critical Method (1978); Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (1980),

chapter 1. For references to archetypal criticism in othe r entries, see pages 77,

141, 150.

ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM 19

archetype (ar

ket



ıp): 18; 322.

argument (in narrative forms): 111.

art for art’s sake: 6; 73.

article: 116.

aside, the: 369; 64, 66.

assonance (a

sonans): 12.

atmosphere: “Atmosphere” is the emotional tone pervading a section or the

whole of a literary work, which fosters in the reader expectations as to the

course of events, whether happy or (more commonly) terrifying or disastrous.

Shakespeare establishes the tense and fearful atmosphere at the beginning of

Hamlet by the terse and nervous dialogue of the sentinels as they anticipate a

reappearance of the ghost; Coleridge engenders a compound of religious and

superstitious terror by his description of the initial scene in the narrative poem

Christabel (1816); and Hardy in his novel The Return of the Native (1878) makes

Egdon Heath a brooding presence that reduces to pettiness and futility the

human struggle for happiness for which it is the setting. Alternative terms fre-

quently used for atmosphere are mood and the French word ambiance.

For references to atmosphere in other entries, see page 152.

aubade (o bäd

): 229.

Augustan Age (awgus

tan): 282.

author and authorship: The conception of an author in ordinary literary dis-

course can be summarized as follows: authors are individuals who, by their

intellectual and imaginative powers, purposefully create from their experience

and reading a literary work which is distinctively their own. The work itself, as

distinguished from the written or printed texts that instantiate the work, remains

a product accredited to the author as its originator, even if he or she turns over

the rights to publish and profit from the texts to someone else. And insofar as the

literary work turns out to be great and original, the author who has composed

that work is deservedly accorded high cultural status and achieves lasting fame.

Since the 1960s, this way of conceiving an author has been put to radical

question by a number of structural and poststructural theorists, who posit the

human subject not as an originator and shaper of a work but as a “ space” in

which conventions, codes, and circulating locutions precipitate into a particu-

lar text, or else as a “site” wherein there converge, and are recorded, the cul-

tural constructs, discursive formations, and configurations of power prevalent

in a given cultural era. The author is said to be the product, rather than the

20 ARCHETYPE

producer, of a text or is redescribed as an “effect” or “function” engendered

by the internal play of textual language. Famously, in 1968 Roland Barthes pro-

claimed and celebrated “The Death of the Author,” whom he described as a

figure invented by critical discourse in order to set limits to the inhe rent free

play of the meanings in reading a literary text. See under structuralist criticism and

poststructuralism.

In an influential essay, “What Is an Author?” written in 1969, Michel

Foucault raised the question of the historical “coming into being of the notion

of ‘author’”—that is, of the emergence and evolution of the “author function”

within the discourse of our culture. The investigation would include such

inquiries as “how the author became individualized,”“what status he has been

given,” what “system of valorization” involves the author, and how the funda-

mental category of “‘the-man-and-his-work criticism’ began.” Foucault’s essay

and example gave impetus to a number of studies, which reject the notion that

the prevailing concept of authorship (the set of attributes possessed by an

author) is either natural or necessitated by the way things are. Instead, histori-

cists conceive authorship to be a cultural construct that emerged and changed dras-

tically, in accordance with changing economic conditions, social circumstances,

and institutional arrangements for the writing and distribution of books, over

many centuries in the Western world. See new historicism.

Cultural historians have emphasized the important role, in constructing

and reconstructing the concept of an author, of such historical developments

as the following:

1. The shift from an oral to a literate culture. In the former, the identity of

an author presumably was not inquired after, since the individual bard or

minstrel improvised by reference to inherited subject matter, forms, and

literary formulae. (See oral poetry.) In a culture where at least a substantial

segment of the population can read, the production of enduring texts in

the form of written scrolls and manuscripts generated increasing interest

in the individual responsible for producing the work that was thus

recorded. Many works in manuscript, however, were circulated freely

and were often altered in transcriptions, with little regard to the inten-

tions or formulations of the originator of the work.

2. The shift, in the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from a

primarily manuscript culture to a primarily print culture. (See book .) The

invention of printing greatly expedited the manufacture and dissemina-

tion of printed texts and so multiplied the number of producers of literary

works, and made financially important the specification of the identity

and ability of an individual writer, in order to invite support for that indi-

vidual by the contemporary system of aristocratic and noble patronage.

Foucault, in addition, proposed the importance of a punitive function in

fostering the concept of an author’s responsibility in originating a work,

which served the interests of the state in affixing on a particular individual

the blame for transgressive or subversive ideas.

AUTHOR AND AUTHORSHIP 21

3. The emphasis in more recent research on the difficulties in establishing, in

various periods, just who was the originator of what parts of an existing

literary text, which was often, in effect, the product of multiple collabora-

tors, censors, editors, printers, and publishers, as well as of successive revi-

sions by the reputed author. See multiple authorship under textual criticism.

4. The proliferation of middle-class readers in the late seventeenth and eigh-

teenth centuries, and the attendant explosion in the number of literary

titles printed and in the number of writers required to supply this market.

Both Foucault and Barthes, in the essays cited earlier, emphasized that the

modern concept of an author as an individual who is the intellectual

owner of his or her literary product was the result of the ideology engen-

dered by the emerging capitalist economy in this era. Other scholars have

stressed the importance of the shift during the eighteenth century, first in

England and then in other European countries, from a reliance by writers

on literary patrons to that of support by payments from publishers and

booksellers. A result of the booming literary market was the increasingly

successful appeal by writers for copyright laws that would invest them,

instead of the publisher, with the ownership of the works that they com-

posed for public sale. These conditions of the literary marketplace fos-

tered the claims by writers that they possessed originality, creativity, and

genius and so were able to produce literary works that were entirely new.

They made such claims in order to establish their legal rights, as authors,

to ownership of such productions as their “intellectual property,” in addi-

tion to their rights (which they could sell to others) to the printed texts of

their works as “material property.” Historians of authorship point out that

the most emphatic claims about the genius, creativity, and originality of

authors, which occurred in the Romantic Period, coincided with, and were

interactive with, the success of authors in achieving some form of copy-

right protection of an author’s proprietary rights to the literary work as

the unique product of his or her native powers. See Mark Rose, Authors

and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (1993); Martha Woodmansee, The

Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics (1994); and

the essays by various scholars in The Construction of Authorship: Textual

Appropriation in Law and Literature, eds. Martha Woodmansee and Peter

Jaszi (1994). Paulina Kewes’ Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the

Stage in England, 1660–1710 (1998) is a study of the cultural and eco-

nomic factors that determined the status of an author in the late seven-

teenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Historicist scholars of authorship have succeeded in demonstrating that

there has been a sustained interplay between the economic circumstances

and institutional arrangements for producing and marketing literary texts and

some aspects of the conception of authorship, or of ideas associated with

authorship. The radical further claim, however, that the modern figure and

functions assigned to an author are in their essentials a recent formation,

resulting from the distinctive conditions of the literary marketplace after the

22 AUTHOR AND AUTHORSHIP

seventeenth century, does not jibe with historical evidence. Some 2,000 years

ago, for example, the Roman poet Horace wrote his verse-epistle, the

Ars Poetica, at a time when books consisted of texts copied by hand in rolls

of papyrus. (See the entry book.) Horace adverts to a number of individuals

from Homer to his friend Virgil who, he makes clear, are individuals who

conceived and brought their works into being and thus are responsible for

having achieved their specific content, form, and quality. A competent literary

author—Horace refers to him variously as scriptor (writer), poeta (maker), and

carminis auctor (originator of a poem)—must possess a natural talent or genius

(ingenium) as well as an acquired art; this author purposefully designs and

orders his poema in such a way as to evoke the emotions of his audience.

The bookseller, Horace indicates, advertises his commodities locally and also

ships them abroad. And if a published work succeeds in instructing and giving

pleasure to a great many readers, it is a book that not only “makes money for

the bookseller” but also “crosses the sea and spreads to a distant age the fame

of its author.” Clearly, Horace distinguishes between material and authorial,

or intellectual, ownership, in that the author, even if he retains no proprietary

interest in a published book, retains the sole responsibility and credit for hav-

ing accomplished the work that the text incorporates. (See M. H. Abrams,

“What Is a Humanistic Criticism?” in The Fourth Dimension of a Poem, 2012.)

Another revealing instance is provided by the publication of the First

Folio of Shakespeare ’s plays in 1623. As writings intended for the commercial

theater, Shakespeare’s plays were a collaborative enterprise in which textual

changes and insertions could be made by various hands at all stages of produc-

tion; the resulting products were not Shakespeare’s property but that of his

theatrical company. Furthermore, as Stephen Greenblatt remarks in the Intro-

duction to The Norton Shakespeare (1997), there is no evidence that Shakespeare

himself wanted to have his plays printed, that he took any “interest in asserting

authorial rights over a script,” or that he had any legal standing from which to

claim such rights. Nonetheless, as Greenblatt points out, seven years after

Shakespeare’s death his friends and fellow actors Heminges and Condell

were confi dent that they could sell their expensive folio collection of his

plays by virtue of the fact, as they claimed in a preface, that their pri nted

texts were exactly “as he conceived them” and represented what he himself

had “thought” and “uttered.” The identity of the concei ver of the pla ys,

serving to attest to the authenticity of the printed versions, is graphically

represented by an engraved portrait of Shakespeare by Ma rtin Droeshout

in the front matter. T he First F olio al so inclu ded a poem by Ben Jonson,

Shakespeare’s friend and dramatic rival, “To the Memory of My Beloved,

The Author Mr. William Shakespeare.” In it Jonson appraised Shakespeare

as the equal of the Greek tragic dramatists Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles;

auded him as not only “The applause! delight! the wonder of our stage!” but

also as an individual who, by the products of his innate abilities (“nature”) even

more than his “art,” was “not of an age, but for all time!”; and asserted that his

“well-turned” lines reflect the “mind, and manners” of the poet who had

fathered them. It would seem that, in broad outline, the figure and functions

AUTHOR AND AUTHORSHIP 23

of Horace’s “auctor” and of Jonson’s “author” were essentially what they are at

the present time in ordinary critical discourse.

See also the entries on sociology of literature and hypertext. In addition to the

items listed above, refer to Frederick G. Kenyon, Books and Readers in Ancient

Rome (1951); A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship (1984); Wendy Wall,

The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance

(1993). Roger Chartier, in “Figures of the Author,” The Order of Books

(1994), describes the diverse functions assigned to an individual author from

the late Middle Ages through the eighteenth century.

authoritative (narration): 301.

authorship: 24.

autobiography: 30.

automatic writing: 227; 391.

avant-garde (a

von-gard

): 227.

24 AUTHORITATIVE

ballad: A short definition of the popular ballad (also called the folk ballad or

traditional ballad)isthatitisasong,transmittedorally,whichtellsastory.

Ballads are thus the narrative species of folk songs, which originate, and are com-

municated orally, among illiterate or only partly literate people. In all probability

the initial version of a ballad was composed by a single author, but he or she is

unknown; and since each singer who learns and repeats an oral ballad is apt to

introduce changes in both the text and the tune, it exists in many variant forms.

Typically, the popular ballad is dramatic, condensed, and impersonal: the narra-

torbeginswiththeclimacticepisode,tellsthestoryterselyinactionanddialogue

(sometimes by means of dialogue alone), and tells it without self-reference or the

expression of personal attitudes or feelings.

The most common stanza form—called the ballad stanza—is a quatrain

in alternate four- and three-stress lines; usually only the second and fourth

lines rhyme. This is the form of “Sir Patrick Spens”; the first stanza also exem-

plifies the abrupt opening of the typical ballad and the manner of proceeding

by third-person narration, curtly sketched setting and action, sharp transition,

and spare dialogue:

The king sits in Dumferling towne,

Drinking the blude-red wine:

“O whar will I get a guid sailor,

To sail this schip of mine?”

Many ballads employ set formulas (which helped the singer remember the

course of the song) including (1) stock descriptive phrases like “blood-red

wine” and “milk-white steed,” (2) a refrain in each stanza (“Edward,”“Lord

Randall”), and (3) incremental repetition, in which a line or stanza is

repeated, but with an addition that advances the story (“Lord Randall,”

“Child Waters”). See oral poetry.

Although many traditional ballads probably originated in the later Middle

Ages, they were not collected and printed until the eighteenth century, first in

England, then in Germany. In 1765, Thomas Percy published his Reliques of

Ancient English Poetry, which, although most of the contents had been revised

in the style of Percy’s era, did much to inaugurate widespread interest in folk

literature. The basic modern collection is Francis J. Child’s English and Scottish

Popular Ballads (1882–98), which includes 305 ballads, many of them in vari-

ant versions. Bertrand H. Bronson has edited The Traditional Tunes of the Child

Ballads (4 vols., 1959–72). Popular ballads are still being sung in the British

Isles and in remote rural areas of the United States. To the songs that early

settlers brought with them from Great Britain, America has added native

forms of the ballad, such as those sung by lumberjacks, cowboys, laborers,

and social protesters. A number of twentieth-century folk singers, including

Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Simon and Garfunkel, adapted

or even composed ballads; most of these, however, such as “

The Ballad of

BALLAD 25

Bonnie and Clyde” (about a notorious gangster and his moll), are closer to the

journalistic “broadside ballad” than to the archaic and heroic mode of the

popular ballads in the Child collection.

A broadside ballad is a ballad that was printed on one side of a single

sheet (called a “broadside”), dealt with a current event or person or issue, and

was sung to a well-known tune. Beginning with the sixteenth century, these

broadsides were hawked in the streets or at country fairs in Great Britain.

The traditional ballad has greatly influenced the form and style of lyric poetry

in general. It has also engendered the literary ballad, which is a narrative poem

written in deliberate imitation of the form, language, and spirit of the traditional

ballad. In Germany, some major literary ballads were composed in the latter eigh-

teenth century, including G. A. Bürger’s very popular “Lenore ” (1774)—which

soon became widely read and influential in an English translation—and Goethe’s

“Erl könig” (1782). In England, some of the best literary ballads were composed

in the Romantic Period:Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (which, how-

ever, is much longer and has a much more elaborate plot than the folk ballad),

Walter Scott’s “Proud Maisie,” and Keats’“La Belle Dame sans Merci.” In his

Lyrical Ballad s of 1798, Wordsworth begins “We Are Seven” by introducing a

narrator as an agent and first-person teller of the story—“I met a little cottage

girl”—which is probably one reason he called the collection “lyrical ballads.”

Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner,” on the other hand, of which the first version

also appeared in Lyrical Ballads, opens with the abrupt and impersonal third-

person narration of the traditional ballad:

It is an ancient Mariner

And he stoppeth one of three….

See John A. and Alan Lomax, American Ballads and Folk Songs (1934);

W. J. Entwistle, European Balladry (rev. ed., 1951); M. J. C. Hodgart,

The

Ballads (2nd

ed., 1962); D. C. Fowler, A Literary History of the Popular Ballad

(1968). For the broadside ballad see The Common Muse, eds. V. de Sola Pinto

and Allan E. Rodway (1957).

ballad stanza: 25.

bard: A term of Gaelic provenance, appearing in English in the mid-fifteenth cen-

tury as a name for the professional poets who operated in the Celtic societies of

Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany, often in the employ of a

noble patron for whose achievements they provided poetic commemoration.

In Ireland, bards constituted a learned, professional, and hereditary class charged

with maintaining an oral history from generation to generation. The bardic tra-

dition ended in the thirteenth century in Wales, the mid-seventeenth century

in Ireland, and the mid-eighteenth century in Scotland. The concept of the

bard reappeared, however, in the context of various Celtic revival movements,

where it was often associated with the doomed romantic protest of an ancient

culture facing a conquering power. Thomas Gray’s “The Bard. A Pindaric

Ode” (1757) is composed in the passionate and heroic language of a Welsh

26 BALLAD STANZA

poet condemning the Norman king Edward I, the conqueror of Wales; the

poem ends with the bard leaping to his death from a mountaintop.

Over time, the term has been applied to any poet of special distinction.

Thus, Shakespeare has been described as “ the Bard of Avon,” Wordsworth as

“the Bard of Rydal Mount,” and Robert Burns as “the Bard of Ayrshire.”

See Donald Wesling, “Difficulties of the Bardic: Literature and the

Human Voice,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 8:1 (1981), pp. 69–81; and James

Mulholland, “ Gray’s Ambition: Printed Voices and Performing Bards in the

Later Poetry,” English Literary History, Vol. 75:1 (2008), pp. 109– 34.

baroque (ba rok

): A term applied by art historians (at first derogatorily, but now

merely descriptively) to a style of architecture, sculpture, and painting that

emerged in Italy at the beginning of the seventeenth century and then spread

to Germany and other countries in Europe. The style employs the classical

forms of the Renaissance but breaks them up and intermingles them to achieve

elaborate, grandiose, energetic, and highly dramatic effects. Major examples of

baroque art are the sculptures of Bernini and the architecture of St. Peter’s

cathedral in Rome.

The term has been adopted with reference to literature, with a variety

of applications. It may signify any elaborately formal and magniloquent

style in verse or prose—for example, some verse passages in Milton’s Paradise

Lost (1667) and Thomas De Quincey’s prose descriptions of his dreams in

Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822) have both been called baroque.

Occasionally—though oftener on the Continent than in England—it serves as a

period term for post-Renaissance literature in the seventeenth century. More

frequently it is applied specifically to the elaborate verses and extravagant conceits

of the late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century poets Giambattista

Marino in Italy and Luis de Góngora in Spain. In English literature, the meta-

physical poems of John Donne are sometimes described as baroque; but the term

is more often, and more appropriately, applied to the elaborate style, fantastic

conceits, and extreme religious emotionalism of the poet Richard Crashaw

(1612–49); see under metaphysical conceit. Refer to René Wellek, “The Concept

of Baroque in Literary Scholarship,” in Concepts of Criticism (1963).

The term “baroque” is derived from the Spanish and Portuguese name

for a pearl that is rough and irregular in shape.

bathos and anticlimax: Bathos is Greek for “depth,” and it has been an indis-

pensable term to critics since Alexander Pope, parodying the Greek Longinus’

famous essay On the Sublime (that is, “loftiness”), wrote in 1727 an essay On

Bathos: Of the Art of Sinking in Poetry. With mock solemnity, Pope assures his

readers that he undertakes “to lead them as it were by the hand … the gentle

downhill way to Bathos; the bottom, the end, the central point, the non plus

ultra, of true Modern Poesy!” The word ever since has been used for an unin-

tentional descent in literature when, straining to be pathetic or passionate or

elevated, the writer overshoots the mark and drops into the trivial or the

BATHOS AND ANTICLIMAX 27

ridiculous. Among his examples Pope cites “the modest request of two absent

lovers” in a contemporary poem:

Ye Gods! annihilate but Space and Time,

And make two lovers happy.

The slogan “For God, for Country, and for Yale!” is bathetic because it

moves to intended climax (that is, an ascending sequence of importance) in

its rhetorical order but to unintended descent in its reference—at least for

someone who is not a Yale graduate. Even major poets sometimes fall unwit-

tingly into the same rhetorical figure. In the early version of The Prelude

(1805; Book IX), William Wordsworth, after recounting at length the tale

of the star-crossed lovers Vaudracour and Julia, tells how Julia died, leaving

Vaudracour to raise their infant son:

It consoled him here

To attend upon the Orphan and perform

The office of a Nurse to his young Child

Which after a short time by some mistake

Or indiscretion of the Father, died.

The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse, eds. D. B. Wyndham Lewis and

Charles Lee (rev. 1948), is a rich mine of unintended bathos.

Anticlimax is sometimes employed as an equivalent of bathos; but in a

more useful application, “anticlimax” is nonderogatory and denotes a writer’s

deliberate drop from the serious and elevated to the trivial and lowly in order

to achieve a comic or satiric effect. Thus, Thomas Gray in his mock-heroic

“Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat” (1748)—the cat had drowned when

she tried to catch a goldfish—gravely inserts this moral observation:

What female heart can gold despise?

What cat’s averse to fish?

And in Don Juan (1819–24; I. ix.) Byron uses anticlimax to deflate the would-

be gallantry of Juan’s father:

A better cavalier ne’er mounted horse,

Or, being mounted, e’er got down again.

battle rapping: 272.

beast fable: 10.

Beat writers: “Beat writers” identifies a loose-knit group of poets and novelists,

in the second half of the 1950s and early 1960s, who shared a set of social

attitudes—antiestablishment, antipolitical, anti-intellectual, opposed to the

prevailing cultural, literary, and moral values, and in favor of unfettered

self-realization and self-expression. The Beat writers often performed in

coffeehouses and other public places, to the accompaniment of drums or jazz

28 BATTLE RAPPING

music. (See performance poetry.) “Beat” was used to signify both “beaten down”

(that is, by the oppressive culture of the time) and “beatific” (many of the

Beat writers cultivated ecstatic states by way of Buddhism, Jewish and

Christian mysticism, and/or drugs that induced visionary experiences). The

group included such diverse figures as the poets Allen Ginsberg, Gregory

Corso, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the novelists William Burroughs and

Jack Kerouac. Ginsberg’s Howl (1956) is a central Beat achievement in its

breathless, chanted celebration of the down-and-out and the subculture of

drug users, social misfits, and compulsive wanderers, as well as in representing

the derangement of the intellect and the senses effected by sexual abandon,

drugged hallucinations, and religious ecstasies. (Compare the vogue of decadence

in the late nineteenth century.) A representative and influential novel of the

movement is Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1958). While the Beat movement

was short-lived, it left its imprint on the subjects and forms of many writers of

the 1960s and 1970s; see counterculture,underPeriods of American Literature.

Notwithstanding the desire of the Beat writers to be considered rebel-

lious, obscene, and anarchic, a considerable body of scholarship now argues

for their canonical status. Refer to Lawrence Lipton, The Holy Barbarians

(1959, reprinted 2010); Ann Charters, ed., The Portable Beat Reader (1992);

Brenda Knight, ed., Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and

Muses at the Heart of a Revolution (1996); Jennie Skerl, ed., Reconstructing the

Beats (2004); Jonah Raskin, American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the

Making of the Beat Generation (2004); Kurt Hemmer, ed., Encyclopedia of Beat

Literature (2006); and Nancy Grace, Jack Kerouac and the Literary Imagination

(2009). Holly George-Warren has edited a collection of essays, reviews, mem-

oirs, and interviews: Rolling Stone Book of the Beats: The Beat Generation and

American Culture (1999).

For references to Beat Writers in other entries, see page 80.

beginning (of a plot): 295.

beliefs (in reading literature): 132.

bibliography: 34.

Bildungsroman (b



ungsromän

): 255; 167.

binary opposition: 82; 100, 328.

biography: Late in the seventeenth century, John Dryden defined biography

neatly as “the history of particular men’s lives.” The name now connotes a

relatively full account of a particular person’s life, involving the attempt to

set forth character, temperament, and milieu, as well as the subject’s activities

and experiences.

Both the ancient Greeks and Romans produced short, formal lives of

individuals. The most famed surviving example is the Parallel Lives of Greek

BIOGRAPHY 29

and Roman notables by the Greek writer Plutarch, c. AD 46–120; in the

translation by Sir Thomas North in 1579, it was the source of Shakespeare’s

plays on Roman subjects. Medieval authors wrote generalized chronicles of

the deeds of a king, as well as hagiographies: the stylized lives of Christian

saints, often based more on pious legends than on fact. In England, the fairly

detailed secular biography appeared in the seventeenth century; the most dis-

tinguished instance is Izaak Walton’s Lives (including short biographies of the

poets John Donne and George Herbert), written between 1640 and 1678.

The eighteenth century in England is the age of the emergence of the

full-scale biography and also of the theory of biography as a special literary

genre. It was the century of Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets (1779–

81) and of the best known of all English biographies, James Boswell’ s Life of

Samuel Johnson (1791). In our own time, biographies of notable women and

men have become one of the most popular of literary forms, and usually there

is at least one biographical title high on the best seller list.

Autobiography is a biography written by the subject about himself or

herself. It is to be distinguished from the memoir, in which the emphasis is

not on the author’s developing self but on the people and events that the

author has known or witnessed, and also from the private diary or journal,

which is a day-to-day record of the events in one’s life, written for personal

use and satisfaction, with little or no thought of publication. Examples of the

latter type are the seventeenth-century diaries of Samuel Pepys and John

Evelyn, the eighteenth-century journals of James Boswell and Fanny Burney,

and Dorothy Wordsworth’s remarkable Journals, written 1798–1828 but not

published until long after her death. The first fully developed autobiography

is also the most influential: the Confessions of St. Augustine, written in the

fourth century. The design of this profound and subtle spiritual autobiog-

raphy centers on what became the crucial experience in Christian autobiog-

raphy: the author’s anguished mental crisis, and a recovery and conversion in

which he discovers his Christian identity and religious vocation.

Michel de Montaigne’s Essays, published in 1580 and in later expansions,

constitute in their sum the first great instance of autobiographical self-

revelation that is presented for its inherent interest rather than for religious

or didactic purposes. Among later distinguished achievements in secular auto-

biography are Rousseau’s Confessions (written 1764–70), Goethe’s Dichtung

und Wahrheit (“Poetry and Truth,” written 1810–31), the autobiographies of

Benjamin Franklin, Henry Adams, Sean O’Casey, Lillian Hellman, and

Gertrude Stein (published in 1933 under the title

The Autobiography of Alice B.

Toklas),

and The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964). Many spiritual histories of

the self, however, like John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners

(1666), followed Augustine’s example of religious self-revelation centering on

a crisis and conversion. An important offshoot of this type are secular autobiog-

raphies that represent a spiritual crisis which is resolved by the author’s dis-

covery of his identity and vocation, not as a Christian, but as a poet or artist;

examples are Wordsworth’s autobiography in verse, The Prelude (completed

1805, published in revised form 1850), or the partly autobiographical works

30 BIOGRAPHY

of prose fiction such as Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913– 27),

James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1915), and Ralph Ellison’s

Invisible Man (1965). In a development associated with postmodernism, the dis-

tinction between autobiography and fiction has become more and more

blurred, as authors include themselves under their own names in novels, write

autobiographies in the asserted mode of fiction, or (as in Maxine Hong King-

ston’s The Woman Warrior, 1975) mingle fiction and personal experience as a

way to get at one’s essential life story (see the entry novel).

On biography: Leon Edel, Literary Biography (1957); Richard D. Altick, Lives

andLetters:AHistoryofLiteraryBiographyinEnglandandAmerica(1965); David

Novarr, The Lines of Life: Theories of Biography, 1880–1970 (1986); Linda

Wagner-Martin, Telling Women’sLives:TheNewBiography(1994). Catherine

N. Parke, Biography: Writing Lives (1996), includes a chapter on “Minority

Biography.” On autobiography: Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography

(1960);EstelleC.Jelinek,ed.,Women’sAutobiography:EssaysinCriticism(1980),

and The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography from Antiquity to the Present (1986).

The importance of autobiography in the Victorian period in England is discussed

in Avron Fleishman, Figures of Autobiography (1983); Jerome H. Buckley, The

Turning Key: Autobiography and the Subjective Impulse since 1800 (1984); and

Linda H. Peterson, Victorian Autobiography (1986). For an extended discussion of

Augustine, Rousseau, and Beckett, see James Olney, Memory and Narrative: The

Weave of Life-Writing (2001).M.H.Abrams,inNatural Supernaturalism (1971),

describes the wide ramifications of spiritual autobiography in historical and philo-

sophical as well as literary forms. In a highly influential essay on “The Autobiog-

raphical Pact” (1974), Philippe Lejeune argues for an historical view of the self

as expressed in autobiography; reprinted in Paul John Eakin, ed., On Autobiog-

raphy (1989). Paul John Eakin’s How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves

(1999) is an account of autobiography that draws on cognitive science, memory

studies, and developmental psychology; see also Eakin’s

Living Autobiographically:

How

We Create Identity in Narrative (2008). For autobiography in literatures other

than English, see Pey-Yi Wu, The Confucian’s Progress: Autobiographical Writings in

Traditional China (1990); and Dwight F. Reynolds, Interpreting the Self: Autobiog-

raphy in the Arabic Literary Tradition (2001).

Black Aesthetic: 32.

Black Arts Movement: The “Black Arts Movement” designates a number of

African-American writers whose work was shaped by the social and political

turbulence of the 1960s—the decade of massive protests against the Vietnam

War, demands for the rights of African-Americans that led to repeated and

sometimes violent confrontations, and the riots and burnings in Los Angeles,

Detroit, New York, Newark, and other major cities. The literary movement

was associated with the Black Power movement in politics, whose spokesmen,

including Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X, opposed the proponents of

integration and instead advocated black separatism, black pride, and black soli-

darity. Representatives of the Black Arts put their literary writings at the

BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT 31

service of these social and political aims. As Larry Neal put it in his essay “The

Black Arts Movement” (1968): “ Black Art is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of

the Black Power Concept. As such it envisions an art that speaks directly to the

needs and aspirations of Black America” and “to the Afro-American desire for

self-determination and nationhood.”

The Black Aesthetic that was voiced or supported by writers in the

movement rejected, as aspects of domination by white culture, the “high

art” and modernist forms advocated by Ralph Ellison and other African-

American writers in the 1950s. Instead, the black aesthetic called for the

exploitation of the energy and freshness of the black vernacular, in rhythms

and moods emulating jazz and the blues, dealing especially with the lives

and concerns of lower-class blacks, and addressed to a black mass audience.

The most notable and influential practitioner of the Black Arts was Imamu

Amiri Baraka (born LeRoi Jones) who, after an early period in Greenwich

Village as an associate of Allen Ginsberg and other Beat writers, moved to

Harlem, where he founded the Black Arts Repertory Theater/School in

1965. Baraka was distinguished as a poet, a dramatist (his play Dutchman is

often considered an exemplary product of the Black Arts achievement), a

political essayist, and a critic both of literature and of jazz music. Among

other writers of the movement were the poets Etheredge Knight, Sonia

Sanchez, Haki Madhubuti, and Nikki Giovanni; the authors of prose fiction

John Alfred Williams, Eldridge Cleaver, and James Alan McPherson; and the

playwrights Paul Carter Harrison and Ed Bullins.

The revolutionary impetus of the Black Arts Movement had diminished by

the 1970s, and some of its pronouncements and achievements now seem undis-

ciplined and crudely propagandistic. But its best writings survive, and their

critical rationale and subject matter have served as models not only to later

African-American writers but also to Native American, Latino, Asian, and

other ethnic writers in America. For a later emergence, on the popular level, of

antiestablishment poetry by African-Americans, see rap under performance poetry.

The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle (1971), includes essays that were

important in establishing this mode of criticism by Ron Karenga, Don L.

Lee, and Larry Neal, as well as by Gayle himself. See also Imamu Amiri

Baraka, Home: Social Essays (1966), and editor with Larry Neal of Black Fire:

An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (1968); Stephen Henderson, Understanding

the New Black Poetry (1973); and the text, biographies, and bibliographies for

“The Black Arts Movement: 1960–1970” in The Norton Anthology of African

American Literature, eds. H. L. Gates, Nellie Y. McKay, and others, 1997.

black comedy: 2.

black humor: 2; 354 .

Black Mountain poets: 277.

Black writers: 273. See also African-American writers.

32 BLACK COMEDY

blank verse: “Blank verse” consists of lines of iambic pentameter (five-stress iambic

verse) which are unrhymed—hence the term “blank.” Of all English metrical

forms it is closest to the natural rhythms of English speech, yet flexible and adap-

tive to diverse levels of discourse; as a result it has been more frequently and vari-

ously used than any other form of versification. Soon after blank verse was

introduced by the Earl of Surrey in his translations of Books 2 and 4 of Virgil’s

The Aeneid (about 1540), it became the standard meter for Elizabethan and later

poetic drama; a free form of blank verse remained the medium in such twentieth-

century verse plays as those by Maxwell Anderson and T. S. Eliot. John Milton

used blank verse for his epic Paradise Lost (1667), James Thomson for his descrip-

tive and philosophical Seasons (1726–30), William Wordsworth for his autobio-

graphical Prelude (1805), Alfred, Lord Tennyson for the narrative Idylls of the King

(1891), Robert Browning for TheRingandtheBook(1868–69) and many dra-

matic monologues, and T. S. Eliot for much of The Waste Land (1922). A large

number of meditative lyrics, from the Romantic Period to the present, have also been

writteninblankverse,includingColeridge’s “Frost at Midnight,” Wordsworth’s

“Ti ntern Abbey,” Tennyson’s “Tears, Idle Tears” (in which the blank verse is

divided into five-line stanzas), and Wallace Stevens’“Sunday Morning.”

Divisions in blank verse poems, used to set off a sustained passage, are

called verse paragraphs. See, for example, the great verse paragraph of

twenty-six lines which initiates Milton’s Paradise Lost, beginning with “Of

man’s first disobedience” and ending with “And justify the ways of God to

men”; also, the opening verse paragraph of twenty-two lines in Wordsworth’ s

“Tintern Abbey” (1798), which begins:

Five years have past; five summers, with the length

Of five long winters! and again I hear

These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs

With a soft inland murmur.

For references to

blank verse in

other entries, see pages 66, 145.

Bloomsbury Group: “Bloomsbury Group” is the name applied to an informal

associationofwriters,artists,andintellectuals,manyofwhomlivedinBloomsbury,

a residential district in central London. This group of friends began to meet

around 1905 for conversations about the arts and issues in philosophy. Its mem-

bers, who opposed the narrow post-Victorian restrictions in both the arts and

morality, included the novelists Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, the painters

Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell (Virginia Woolf’s sister), the influential art critics

Clive Bell and Roger Frye, the iconoclastic biographer of Victorian personages

Lytton Strachey, and the famed economist John Maynard Keynes. Some mem-

bers were linked not only by common interests and viewpoints but also by com-

plicated erotic liaisons, both heterosexual and homosexual. The Bloomsbury

Group had an important influence on innovative literary, artistic, and intellectual

developments in the two decades after the First World War, which ended in

1918. A memoir by the son of Clive Bell and Vanessa Stephen is Quentin Bell,

Bloomsbury Recalled (1997). See Leon Edel, Bloomsbury: A House of Lions (1979);

BLOOMSBURY GROUP 33

S. P. Rosenbaum, ed., A Bloomsbury Group Reader (1993); and Rosenbaum, ed.,

The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs and Commentary (1995).

bombast: “Bombast” denotes a wordy and inflated diction that is patently dis-

proportionate to the matter that it signifies. The magniloquence of even so

fine a poet as Christopher Marlowe is at times inappropriate to its sense, as

when Faustus declares (Doctor Faustus, 1604; III. i. 47ff.):

Now by the kingdoms of infernal rule,

Of Styx, Acheron, and the fiery lake

Of ever-burning Phlegethon I swear

That I do long to see the monuments

And situation of bright-splendent Rome;…

which is to say: “By Hades, I’d like to see Rome!” Bombast is a frequent

component in the heroic drama of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth

centuries. The pompous language of that drama is parodied in Henry Fielding’s

Tom Thumb the Great (1731), as in the noted opening of Act II. v., in which the

diminutive male lover cries:

Oh! Huncamunca, Huncamunca, oh!

Thy pouting breasts, like kettle-drums of brass,

Beat everlasting loud alarms of joy;

As bright as brass they are, and oh! as hard;

Oh! Huncamunca, Huncamunca, oh!

Fielding points out in a note that this passage was specifically a parody of James

Thomson’s bombastic lines in The Tragedy of Sophonisba (1730):

Oh! Sophonisba, Sophonisba, oh!

Oh! Narva, Narva, oh!

“Bombast” originally meant “cotton stuffing” and in Elizabethan times

came to be used as a metaphor for an over-elaborate style. For references to

bombast in other entries, see page 161.

bomolochos (bomol

okos): 377.

book: In its inclusive sense, the term designates any written or printed docu-

ment which is of considerable length, yet is light and durable enough to be

easily portable. Studies devoted to the identification of the authorship, dates

of issue, editions, and physical properties of books are called bibliography.

In ancient Greece and Rome the standard form of the book was the dou-

ble papyrus roll. Papyrus, which had been developed in Egypt, was made

from the papyrus reed, which grows profusely in the Nile delta; the stems of

the reed were cut into strips, soaked, and impregnated with paste. The texts

were manuscripts (that is, written by hand), and were inscribed in columns;

as the reader went along, he unwound the papyrus from the right-hand roll

and wound it on the left-hand roll.

34 BOMBAST

In a very important change in the form of the book during the fifth century

of the Middle Ages, papyrus rolls were superseded by the parchment or vellum

codex. Parchment was made from the skins of sheep, goats, or calves, which

were stretched and scraped clean to serve as a material for writing. Vellum is

sometimes used interchangeably with “parchment” but is more useful as a

term for an especially fine type of parchment that was prepared from the delicate

skin of a calf or a kid. To make a codex (the plural is “codices”), the parchment

was cut into leaves; as in the modern printed book, the leaves were stitched

together on one side and then bound. The great advantages of the codex over

the roll were that the codex could be opened at any point; the text could be

inscribed on both sides of a leaf; and the resulting book was able to contain a

much longer text than a manuscript roll. In its early era, the codex was used

primarily for biblical texts—a single volume could contain all four Gospels,

where a roll had been able to encompass only a single Gospel.

In the course of the Middle Ages, many monasteries had scriptoria—

rooms in which scribes copied out texts; often, a number of scribes copied

texts that were dictated by a reader, in an early form of the mass production of

books. To make especially fine codices—at first for religious, and later for secu-

lar texts, including works of literature—the manuscripts were illuminated; that

is, they were adorned by artists with bright-colored miniature paintings and

ornamental scrolls. Since all kinds of parchment were expensive, written sur-

faces were sometimes scraped off, then used for a new text. Such parchments

are called palimpsests (Greek for “scraped clean”); often, the original text, or

in some cases multiple layers of texts, remain visible under an ultraviolet light.

Paper, invented by the Chinese as early as the first century AD, was intro-

duced to Europe by the Arabs in the eighth century, after which it increasingly

replaced parchment. Early paper was made from linen and cotton rags; later,

technology was invented for making paper from the pulp of wood and other

vegetable fibers. The use of paper was essential for the invention of printing.

The Chinese had been printing from carved wood blocks since the sixth cen-

tury; but in 1440–50, Johannes Gutenberg introduced in Germany a new craft

of printing from movable metal type, with ink, on paper, by means of a press

that was tightened by turning a levered screw. Within the next half century, this

cheap method of making many uniform copies of a book had spread through-

out Europe, with enormous consequences for the growth of literacy and learn-

ing and for the widespread development of the experimental sciences. See

Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications

and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols., 1979.

The term incunabula (



kyoonab

yoola; the singular is incunabulum)

designates books that were produced in the infancy of printing, during the

half century before 1500. “Incunabula” is Latin for “swaddling clothes” or

“cradle.”

From the mid-seventeenth century on, there was a great increase in liter-

acy and in the demand by the general public for literary and all other types of

books. The accessibility and affordability of books was greatly expedited,

beginning in the nineteenth century, by the invention of machines—powered

BOOK 35

first by steam, then by electricity—for producing paper and type, printing and

binding books, and reproducing illustrations. In the twentieth century, and

even more in the present era, the primacy of the printed book for recording

and disseminating all forms of information has been challenged by the inven-

tion and rapid proliferation of electronic media for processing texts and

images.

Refer to the entries on book editions, book format, book history studies, and

textual studies. For the history of the book trade from classical Greece through

the twentieth century, see F. A. Mumby, Publishing and Bookselling: From the

Earliest Times to 1870 (5th ed., 1974), and Ian Norrie, Mumby’s Publishing and

Bookselling in the Twentieth Century (1982). On the making, format, and history

of printed books, see Ronald B. McKerrow, An Introduction to Bibliography for

Literary Students (rev. 1994).

book editions: In present usage, edition designates the total copies of a book

that are printed from a single setting of type or other mode of reproduction.

The various “printings” or “reprints” of an edition—sometimes with some

minor changes in the text—may be spaced over a period of years. We now

identify as a “new edition” a printing in which substantial changes have been

made in the text. A text may be revised and reprinted in this way many times,

hence the terms “second edition,”“third edition,” etc.

A variorum edition designates either (1) an edition of a work that lists

the textual variants in an author’s manuscripts and in revisions of the printed

text; an example is The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, eds. Peter

Allt and Russell K. Alspach (1957); or else (2) an edition of a text that

includes a selection of annotations and commentaries on the text by previous

editors and critics. (The term “variorum ” is a short form of the Latin cum notis

variorum: “with the annotations of various persons.”) The New Variorum Edition

of Shakespeare is a variorum edition in both senses of the word.

See book, and refer to Fredson Bowers, Principles of Bibliographical Descrip-

tion (1949); Ronald B. McKerrow, An Introduction to Bibliography (rev. 1965);

Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (1972).

book format: Format signifies the page size, shape, and other physical features

of a book. The printer begins with a large “sheet

”;

if the sheet is folded once

so as to form two “leaves” of four pages, the book is a folio (the Latin word

for “leaf”). When we refer to “the first Shakespeare folio,” for example, we

mean a volume published in 1623, the first edition of Shakespeare’s collected

plays, the leaves of which were made by a single folding of the printer’s

sheets. A sheet folded twice into four leaves makes a quarto; a sheet folded

a third time into eight leaves makes an octavo.Inaduodecimo volume, a

sheet is folded so as to make twelve leaves. The more leaves into which a

single sheet is divided, the smaller the leaf, so that these terms indicate the

dimensions of a book, but only approximately because the size of the full

sheet varies, especially in modern printing. It can be said, however, that a

folio is a very large book; a quarto is the next in size, with a leaf that is nearly

36 BOOK EDITIONS

square. The third in size, the octavo, is the most frequently used in modern

printing.

As this book is open in front of you, the page on the right is called a

recto (Latin for “on the right”), and the page on the left is called a verso

(Latin for “turned”).

The colophon in older books was a note at the end stating such facts as

the title, author, printer, and date of issue. In modern books the colophon is

ordinarily in the front, on the title page. With reference to modern books,

“colophon” has come to mean, usually, the publisher’s emblem, such as a

torch (Harper), an owl (Holt), or a ship (Viking).

book history studies: Investigations of all the factors involved in the produc-

tion, distribution, and reception of recorded texts. Separate stages in this pro-

cess—especially with reference to literary texts—had for many centuries been

subjects of inquiry; but as a defined, systematic, and widely recognized study

of the overall process, book history did not emerge until the 1980s. Within a

few decades, this area became the subject of special journals, books, and

learned conferences and is increasingly being taught in university courses.

Traditionally, the production and dissemination of recorded texts had

been conceived mainly as a self-contained and one-way process, in which

the author conceives and inscribes a text, the publisher and printer reproduce

the text in multiple copies, and the competent reader interprets the text in

order to reconstitute the author’s originating conception. From this age-old

view, the current discipline of book history differs in three principal ways:

1. Traditional dealings with each stage in the production and dissemination

of literary texts had been normative and evaluative. That is, literary

authors were judged to be good or bad, major or minor; bibliographers

set out to establish a single valid text, free from what were called “corrup-

tions” by agents other than the originating author (see textual criticism);

and interpretations of the text by readers were judged to be right or

wrong, good or bad, sensitive or insensitive. In contrast, current expo-

nents of book history tend to be objective and nonjudgmental. All con-

tributions to a recorded text, whether by the author or other agents, and

whether intentional or accidental, are taken into account; literary books,

together with all other texts, are regarded as “commodities” that are

marketed to readers, their “ consumers,” in order to make a profit; and

the diverse responses to the text by different classes and groups, whether

elite readers or mass audiences, are paid equal and neutral attention.

2. The book historian does not view the making and distribution of a book as a

one-way process from author through publisher and printer to reader.

Instead, Robert Darnton—an important early formulator of the point of

view and procedures of book history—proposed in 1982 that historians

view the “life cycle” of a book as a “communications circuit” that runs

from the author through the publisher, printer, and distributors to the reader,

and back to the author, in a process within which the reader “influences the

BOOK HISTORY STUDIES 37

author both before and after the act of composition.” (“What Is the History

of Books?” in The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections on Cultural History,1990.)In

accordance with this perspective, book historians conceive all stages of the life

cycle of a book to be interactive. The author, for example, is subject to the

demands of the publisher who estimates the market demands of readers,

while the readers also directly influence the author who, in composing a

work, anticipates the preferences of a potential audience.

3. In defining the overall “communications circuit,” Robert Darnton

emphasized also that book history deals with “each phase of this process

… in all its relations with other systems, economic, social, political, and

cultural, in the surrounding environment.” D. F. McKenzie, who, like

Darnton, was influential in describing and exemplifying the emerging

practice of book history, described the new development in bibliography

as “a sociology of texts” that considers “the human motives and interac-

tions” at each point in “the production, transmission, and consumption of

texts.” (“The Book as an Expressive Form,” in Bibliography and the Sociol-

ogy of Texts, 1986; rev. 1999.) Book history, that is, deals with the forma-

tion and dissemination of a text, not as a self-contained process but as one

that at every stage is affected by, and in turn may influence, the eco-

nomic, social, and cultural circumstances of its time and place.

Applied to the long-term development of ways of recording and commu-

nicating information, book history deals with the sequence of revolutionary

changes that occurred when an oral culture was succeeded by a manuscript cul-

ture; when the era of written texts in turn gave way, in the mid-fifteenth

century, to a primarily print culture; and when, as the result of new technol-

ogies that began in the twentieth century, printed books and materials were

increasingly supplemented—and to some extent displaced—by film, televi-

sion, the computer, and the World Wide Web. (See oral poetry and book .)

An influential work that deals with the impact on Western civilization, sci-

ence, and the arts by the change from script to print is Elizabeth Eisenstein,

The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (2 vols., 1979).

The major focus by book historians has been on the era of print, and

especially on the diverse circumstances that affect each stage of the produc-

tion, distribution, and reception of the printed book. To cite a few prominent

examples:

D. F. McKenzie has emphasized the contributions to the book not only

by the author, the author’s literary advisers, and copyeditors but also by the

book designer and the printer who—often with little or no consultation with

an author—determine the typography, spatial layout, illustrations, paper, and

binding of a book. All such nonverbal, material features of a book, McKenzie

insists, are not neutral vehicles for the printed word but have an “expressi ve func-

tion” and contribute to the meaning of the verbal text. (See D. F. McKenzie,

Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, 1986; also, for similar views about

the signifying function of the material features of a book, Jerome McGann,

The Textual Condition, 1991.)

38 BOOK HISTORY STUDIES

A prolific and influential contributor to book history is the French scholar

Roger Chartier, especially in his emphasis on recorded facts about the differ-

ing ways in which diverse readers have received and responded to printed

texts. He has, for example, studied the literacy rates of various classes and

groups of people at different times and places. He has chronicled the shift

from the public to the private reading of texts, and in private reading, the

change from reading to oneself aloud to reading in silence; this last practice,

according to Chartier, “fostered a solitary and private relation between the

reader and his book,”“radically transformed intellectual work,” and greatly

expanded the reader’s “inner life.” Chartier also analyzed the degree to

which people in particular localities, employing diverse “social and cultural

practices” in their reading, created a diversity of interpretations of a single

text. (Roger Chartier, The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early

Modern Europe, 1989; and Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audi-

ences from Codex to Computer, 1995.) Other scholars have chronicled the emer-

gence of mass audiences for printed books and journals and have compared

the literary preferences and responses of a mass audience with those of elite

readers and critics. (Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social His-

tory of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900, 1957, rev. 1998; Jonathan Rose,

“Rereading the English Common Reader,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol.

53, 1992.) There are also numerous studies of the variety of factors that affect

the reception, interpretation, and evaluation of literary books. Jane Tompkins,

for example, investigated the importance of an influential coterie of friends,

reviewers, and magazine editors in establishing and sustaining the reputation

of a novelist. (Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–

1860, 1985.) And in A Feeling for Books, 1997, Janice Radway shows that the

panelists in the Book-of-the-Month Club—founded in the 1920s and still

flourishing—have made their selections not in accordance with a general

criterion of literary excellence but by matching books to the tastes and

preferences of specific groups of readers in the literary marketplace.

For studies of individual stages in the production and reception of literary

books that have contributed to book history, see the latter-day developm ents

described in the entries on author and authorship, reader-response criticism, reception-

theory, sociology of literature,andtextual criticism. All the researchers mentioned in

this entry on book history studies are represented in the anthology The Book

History Reader, edited by David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (2002). Influ-

ential works, in addition to those already referred to, are Marshall McLuhan, The

Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962); Robert Darnton, The

Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800

(1979); Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word

(1982); John Sutherland, Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers (1995);

Geoffrey Nunberg, ed., The Future of the Book (1996); Adrian Johns,

The Nature

the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (1998). The American history of

the book is treated in five volumes in David D. Hall, ed., A History of the Book in

America (2007–09). In The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making

(1998), Adrian Johns argues for a close relationship between early print culture

BOOK HISTORY STUDIES 39

and new forms of scientific knowledge. See also Leah Price and Seth Lerer, eds.,

“The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature,” Special Issue of PMLA

126.1 (2006). In The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (2009), Robert

Darnton argues for the continuing value of books in the digital age. See also

the journal Book History (1998–).

bourgeois epic (boor

zwä): 111.

bourgeois tragedy: 407.

bowdlerize: To delete from an edition of a literary work passages considered by

the editor to be indecent or indelicate. The word derives from the Reverend

Thomas Bowdler, who tidied up his Family Shakespeare in 1818 by omitting,

as he put it, “whatever is unfit to be read by a gentleman in a company of

ladies.” Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and The Arabian Nights,as

well as Shakespeare’s plays, are often bowdlerized in editions intended for

the young; and until the 1920s, at which time the standards of literary pro-

priety were drastically liberalized, some compilers of anthologies for college

students availed themselves of Bowdler’s prerogative in editing Chaucer.

Breton lay: 192.

broadside ballad: 26.

bucolic poetry (byookol

ik): 268.

burlesque: “Burlesque” has been succinctly defined as “an incongruous imita-

tion”; that is, it imitates the manner (the form and style) or else the subject

matter of a serious literary work or a literary genre but makes the imitation

amusing by a ridiculous disparity between the manner and the matter. The

burlesque may be written for the sheer fun of it; usually, however, it is a

form of satire. The butt of the satiric ridicule may be the particular work or

the genre that is being imitated, or else the subject matter to which the imi-

tation is incongruously applied, or (often) both of these together.

“Burlesque,”“parody,” and “travesty” are sometimes applied interchange-

ably; simply to equate these terms, however, is to surrender useful critical distinc-

tions. It is better to follow the critics who use “burlesque” as the generic name and

use the other terms to discriminate species of burlesque; we must keep in mind,

however, that a single instance of burlesque may exploit a variety of techniques.

The application of these terms will be clearer if we make two preliminary distinc-

tions: (1) In a burlesque imitation, the form and style may be either lower or

higher in level and dignity than the subject to which it is incongruously applied.

(See the discussion of levels under style.) If the form and style are high and digni-

fiedbutthesubjectislowortrivial,wehave“high burlesque”;ifthesubjectis

high in status and dignity but the style and manner of treatment are low and

undignified, we have “low burlesque.” (2) A burlesque may also be distinguished

40 BOURGEOIS EPIC

according to whether it imitates a general literary type or genre, or else a particular

work or author. Applying these two distinctions, we get the following species of

burlesque.

I. Varieties of high burlesque:

A. A parody imitates the seri ous manner and characteristic features of a

particular literary work, the distinctive style of a particular author, or

the typical stylistic and other features of a serious literary genre, and

deflates the original by applying the imitation to a lowly or comically

inappropriate subject. John Phillips’“The Splendid Shilling” (1705) par-

odied the epic style of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) by exaggerat-

ing its high formality and applying it to the description of a tattered poet

composing in a drafty attic. Henry Fielding in Joseph Andrews (1742)

parodied Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela (1740–41) by putting a

hearty male hero in place of Richardson’s sexually beleaguered heroine,

and later on Jane Austen poked good-natured fun at the genre of the

gothic novel in Northanger Abbey (1818). Here is Hartley Coleridge’spar-

ody of the first stanza of William Wordsworth’s “She Dwelt among the

Untrodden Ways,” which he applies to Wordsworth himself:

He lived amidst th’ untrodden ways

To Rydal Lake that lead,

A bard whom there were none to praise,

And very few to read.

From the early nineteenth century to the present, parody has been the

favorite form of burlesque. Among the gifted parodists of the past cen-

tury in England were Max Beerbohm (see A Christmas Garland, 1912)

and Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm, 1936), and in America, James

Thurber, Phyllis McGinley, and E. B. White. The novel Possession

(1990), by the English writer A. S. Byatt, exemplifies a serious literary

form that includes straight-faced parodies of Victorian poetry and

prose, as well as of academic scholarly writings.

B. A mock epic or mock-heroic poem is that type of parody which

imitates, in a sustained way, both the elaborate form and the ceremo-

nious style of the epic genre but applies it to narrate a commonplace

or trivial subject matter. In a masterpiece of this type, The Rape of the

Lock (1714), Alexander Pope views through the grandiose epic per-

spective a quarrel between the belles and elegants of his day over the

theft of a lady’s curl. The story includes such elements of traditional

epic protocol as supernatural machinery, a voyage on board ship, a visit

to the underworld, and a heroically scaled battle between the sexes—

although with metaphors, hatpins, and snuff for weapons. The term

mock-heroic is often applied to other dignified poetic forms which are

purposely mismatched to a lowly subject; for example, to Thomas

Gray’s comic “ Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat” (1748); see

under bathos and anticlimax

BURLESQUE 41

II. Varieties of low burlesque:

A. The Hudibrastic poem takes its name from Samuel Butler’s

Hudibras (1663), which satirized rigid Puritanism by describing the

adventures of a Puritan knight, Sir Hudibras. Instead of the doughty

deeds and dignified style of the traditional genre of the chivalric

romance, however, we find the knightly hero experiencing mundane

and humiliating misadventures, which are described in doggerel verses

and a ludicrously colloquial idiom.

B. The travesty mocks a particular work by treating its lofty subject in a

grotesquely undignified manner and style. As Boileau put it, describing

a travesty of Virgil’s Aeneid, “Dido and Aeneas are made to speak like

fishwives and ruffians.” The New Yorker once published a travesty of

Ernest Hemingway’snovelAcross the River and Into the Trees (1950)

with the title Across the Street and Into the Bar, and the film Young

Frankenstein is a travesty of Mary Shelley’snovelFrankenstein.

Another form of burlesque is the lampoon: a short satirical work, or a

passage in a longer work, which describes the appearance and character of a

particular person in a way that makes that person ridiculous. It typically

employs caricature, which in a verbal description (as in graphic art) exagge-

rates or distorts, for comic effect, a person’s distinctive physical features or per-

sonality traits. John Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel (1681) includes a famed

twenty-five-line lampoon of Zimri (Dryden’s contemporary, the Duke of

Buckingham), which begins:

In the first rank of these did Zimri stand;

A man so various, that he seemed to be

Not one, but all mankind’s epitome:

Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong;

Was everything by starts, and nothing long….

The modern sense of “burlesque” as a theater form derives, historically,

from plays which mocked serious types of drama by an incongruous imitation.

John Gay’s Beggar’sOpera(1728)—whichinturnbecamethemodelforthe

German Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill (1928)—was a

high burlesque of Italian opera, applying its dignified formulas to a company of

beggars and thieves. A number of the comic musical plays by Gilbert and Sullivan

in the Victorian era also include elements of high burlesque of grand opera.

See George Kitchin, A Survey of Burlesque and Parody in English (1931);

Richmond P. Bond, English Burlesque Poetry, 1700

–17

50 (1932). On parody,

see Margaret A. Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-Modern (1993). Anthol-

ogies: Walter Jerrold and R. M. Leonard, eds., A Century of Parody and Imitation

(1913); Robert P. Falk, ed., The Antic Muse: American Writers in Parody (1955);

Dwight MacDonald, ed., Parodies: An Anthology (1960); John Gross, ed., The

Oxford Book of Parodies (2010). See also Louis Menand, “Parodies Lost: The

Art of Making Fun,” The New Yorker (20 September 2010).

42 BURLESQUE

cacophony (kakof

one): 117.

caesura (sezyoor

a): 221; 160.

campus novel: 3.

canon of literature: The Greek word “kanon,” signifying a measuring rod or a

rule, was extended to denote a list or catalogue, then came to be applied to

the list of books in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, which were des-

ignated by church authorities to be the genuine Holy Scriptures. A number of

writings related to those in the Scriptures, but not admitted into the authoritative

canon, are called apocrypha; eleven books which have been incl uded in the

Roman Catholic biblical canon are considered apocryphal by Protestants.

The term “canon” was later used to signify the list of secular works

accepted by expert s as genuinely written by a particular author. We speak

thus of “the Chaucer canon” and “the Shakespeare can on” and refer to

other works that have sometimes been attributed to an author, but on evi-

dence that many editors judge to be inadequ ate or invalid, as “apocryphal.”

At the end of the twentieth century, the phrase literary canon came to

designate—in world literature, or in European literature, but most fre-

quently in a nationa l literature—those authors who, by a cumulative con-

sensus of critics, scholars, and teachers, have come to be widely recognized

as “major,” and as having written works often hailed as literary classics.The

literary works by canonical authors are the ones that, at a given time, are

most kept in print, most frequently and fully discussed by litera ry critics

and historians, and—in the present era—most likely to be included in

anthologies and in the syllabi of coll ege c ourses with titl es such as “World

Masterpieces,”“Major English Authors,” or “Great American Writers.”

The use of the term “canon” with reference both to the books of the Bible

and to secular literature obscures important differences in the two applications. The

biblical canon has been established by church authorities vested with the power to

make such a decision; is enforced by authorities with the power to impose religious

sanctions; is explicit in the books that it lists; and is closed, permittin g neither dele-

tions nor additions. (See the entry “Canon” in The Oxford Companion to the Bible,

1993.) The canon of literature, on the other hand, is the product of a wavering and

unofficial consensus; it is tacit rather than explicit, loose in its boundaries, and

always subject to changes in the works that it includes.

The social process by which an author or a literary work comes to be

widely, although tacitly, recognized as canonical has come to be called

“canon

formation.” The

factors in this formative process are complex and disputed.

It seems clear, however, that the process involves, among other conditions, a

broad concurrence of critics, scholars, and authors with diverse viewpoints and

sensibilities; the persistent influence of, and reference to, an author in the

CANON OF LITERATURE 43

work of other authors; the frequent reference to an author or work within the

discourse of a cultural community; and the widespread assignment of an

author or text in school and college curricula. Such factors are of course

mutually interactive, and they need to be sustained over a period of time. In

his “Preface to Shakespeare” (1765) Samuel Johnson said that a century is “the

term commonly fixed as a test of literary merit.” Some authors of the

past century such as Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, and James

Joyce—probably even Vladimir Nabokov and Milan Kundera—have

achieved the prestige, influence, assignment in college courses, and persistence

of reference in literary discourse to establish them in the European canon;

others, including Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ralph

Ellison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo Calvino, Iris Murdoch, and A. S. Byatt,

are secure in their national canons, at least.

At any time, the boundaries of a literary canon remain indefin ite and

disputable, while in side those boundaries some autho rs are central and others

marginal.Occasionally,anearlierauthorwhowasforlongonthefringeof

the canon, or even outside it, gets transferred to a position of eminence.

A conspicuous example is John Donne, who fro m th e eigh teenth century

on was regarded mainly as an interestingly eccentric poet. T. S. Elio t, fo l-

lowedbyCleanthBrooksandotherNew Critics in the 1930s and later, made

Donne’s writings the very paradi gm of the s elf-ironic and pa radoxical poetry

they most admired and so helped elevate him to a high place within the

English canon. (See metaphysical poets.) Since then, Donne’s reputation h as

diminished, but h e remai ns p romin ent in the canon. (On Donne’saltering

re putation, see Ben Saunders, Desiring Donne: Poetry, Sexuality, Interpretation,

2006.) Once firmly established, an author shows considerable resistance to

being disestablish ed by adverse criticism and changing literary preferences.

For example, many New Critics, together with the influential F. R. Leavis

in England, while l auding Don ne, vigoro usly attacked the Romantic poet

Shelley as embodying poetic qual ities they strongly condemned; but

although a considerable number of critics joined in this derogation o f

Shelley, the long-term effect was to aggrandize the critical attention and dis-

cussion that helps sustain an author’splaceinthecanon,sothat,whendecon-

struction emerged in the 1970s, the debate with traditional criticism could be

focused through competing assessments of Shelley. See Harold Bloom et al.,

Deconstruction and Criticism (1979).

In the last decades of the twentieth century, the nature of canon formation,

and opposition to established literary canons, has become a leading concern

among critics of diverse theoretical viewpoints, whether deconstructive, femi-

nist, Marxist, postcolonial, or new historicist (see poststructuralism). The debate

often focuses on the practical issue of what books to assign in college curricula,

especially in required “core courses” in the humanities and in Western civiliza-

tion. A widespread charge is that the standard canon of great books, not only in

literature but in all areas of humanistic study, has been determined less by artistic

excellence than by the politics of power; that is, the canon has been formed in

accordance with the ideology, political interests, and values of a dominant class

44 CANON OF LITERATURE

that was white, male, and European. As a result, it is frequently claimed that the

canon consists mainly of works that convey and sustain racism, patriarchy,and

imperialism and understate or exclude interests and accomplishments of blacks,

Hispanics, and other ethnic minorities and also the achievements of women, the

working class, popular culture, homosexuals, and non-European civilizations.

The demand is to “open the canon” so as to make it multicultural instead of

“Eurocentric.” (As applied to literary scholarship, “multicultural” designates the

movement to redress what are asserted to be the errors and injustices of a history

dominated by Europe-centered historians, so as to make it represent adequately

the cultural contributions of races and groups that have been hitherto marginal-

ized or ignored.) Another demand frequently voiced is that the standard canon

be stripped of its elitism and its “hierarchism ”—that is, its built-in discriminations

between high art and lower art—in order to include such cultural products as

Hollywood films, television serials, popular songs, and fiction written for a mass

audience. A radical wing of revisionist theorists, to further their political aim to

transform the existing power structures, demand not merely the opening but the

abolition of the standard canon and its replacement by currently marginal and

excluded groups and texts. In another extreme form of multicultural thinking,

adherents claim that culture constructs its own social reality, so that any assertions

of knowledge, truth, or value are relative—that is, the claims are valid only

within that particular culture. (Refer to cultural constructs in the entry on new his-

toricism,andrelativism in the entry on poststructuralism.) See Satya Mohanty, Literary

Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics

(1997); and James Trotman, ed., Multiculturalism: Roots and Realities (2002).

The views of defenders of the standard canon, like those of its opponents,

range from moderate to extreme. The position of many moderate defenders

might be summarized as follows: Whatever has been the influence of class, gen-

der, race, and other special interests and prejudices in forming the existing

canon, this is far from the whole story. The canon is the result of the concur-

rence of a great many (often unexpressed) norms and standards, and among

these, one crucial factor has been the high intellectual and artistic quality of

the canonical works themselves and their attested power to enlighten, give

delight, and appeal to widely shared human concerns and values. (See humanism.)

Moderate defenders agree to the desirability of enlarging the canon of texts

that are assigned frequently in academic courses in order to make the canon

more broadly representative of diverse cultures, ethnic groups, classes, and inter-

ests; they point out, however, that such changes would not be a drastic innova-

tion, since the educational canon has always been subject to deletions and

additions. They emphasize also that the existing Western, English, and American

canons include notable examples of skepticism, of political radicalism, and

of the toleration of dissent—features of the accepted canon of which the pro-

ponents of radical change are, clearly, the inheritors and beneficiaries. And

however a canon is enlarged to represent other cultures and classes, moderate

defenders insist on the need to maintain a continuing study of and dialogue

with the diverse and long-lasting works of intellect and imagination that have

shaped Western civilization and constitute much of Western culture. They

CANON OF LITERATURE 45

point to the enduring primacy, over many centuries, of such Western authors

as Homer, Plato, Dante, and Shakespeare. They also remark that many theorists

who challenge the traditional English canon, when they turn from theory

to applied criticism, attend preponderantly to established authors—not only

Shakespeare, but also Spenser, Milton, Jane Austen, Wordsworth, George Eliot,

Whitman, Henry James, and many others—and so recognize and confirm in

practice the literary canon that they in theory oppose.

For discussions of the nature and formation of the literary canon, see the

collection of essays edited by Robert von Hallberg, Canons (1984); see also

John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation

(1993). Questioners or opponents of the traditional canon: Leslie A. Fiedler

and Houston A. Baker, Jr., eds., English Literature: Opening Up the Canon

(1981); Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fic-

tion, 1790–1860 (1985); and Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value:

Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (1988). Defenses of the traditional

canon: Frank Kermode, “Prologue” to An Appetite for Poetry (1989); the essays

in The Changing Culture of the University, a special issue of Partisan Review

(Spring 1991); Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (1994).

For references to canon of literature in other entries, see pages 75, 126, 306.

canto: 376.

cardinal sins: 363.

caricature: 42.

carnivalesque: 88.

Caroline Age: 281.

carpe diem (car

pede

em): A Latin phrase, meaning “seize the day,” from one

of Horace’s Odes (I. xi.), which has become the name for a very common liter-

ary motif,especiallyinlyricpoetry.Thespeakerinacarpediempoemempha-

sizes that life is short and time is fleeting in order to urge his auditor—who is

often represented as a virgin reluctant to change her condition—to make the

most of present pleasures. A frequent emblem of the brevity of physical beauty

and the finality of death is the rose, as in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene,

1590–96 (II. xii. 74–75; “Gather therefore the Rose, whilst yet is prime”), and,

in the seventeenth century, Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Much

of Time ” (“Gather ye rosebuds, while ye may”), and Edmund Waller’s “ Go,

Lovely Rose.” The more comp lex poems of this type communicate the

poignant sadness—or else desperation—of the pursuit of pleasures under the

sentence of inevitable death; for example, Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy

Mistress” (1681) and the sustained set of variations on the carpe diem motif

in The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, translated by the Victorian poet Edward

FitzGerald. In 1747, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote “The Lover: A Ballad,”

46 CANTO

a brilliant counter to the carpe diem poems written by male poets; in it, the

woman explains to her importunate suitor why she finds him utterly resistible.

catalectic(katalek



k), or catalexis: 219.

catastrophe (in a plot) (katas

trofe): 296; 406.

catharsis (kathär



s): 405.

Cavalier poets: 281.

Celtic Revival: The “Celtic Revival,” also known as the Irish Literary

Renaissance, the Gaelic Revival, and the Celtic Twilight , identifies the

remarkably creative period in Irish literature from about 1880 to the death

of William Butler Yeats in 1939. The aim of Yeats and other early leaders

of the movement was to create a distinctive national literature by going back

to Irish history, legend, and folklore, as well as to native literary models. The

major writers, however, wrote not in the native Irish (one of the Celtic lan-

guages) but in English, and under the influence of various non-Irish literary

forms. A number of them also turned increasingly for their subject matter to

modern Irish life rather than to the ancient past.

Notable poets in addition to Yeats were AE (George Russell) and Oliver

St. John Gogarty. The dramatists included Yeats himself, as well as Lady Gregory

(who was also an important patron and publicist for the movement), John

Millington Synge, and later Sean O’Casey. Among the novelists were George

Moore and James Stephens, as well as James Joyce, who, although he

abandoned Ireland for Europe and ridiculed the excesses of the nationalist

writers, adverted to Irish subject matter and characters in all his writings.

As these names indicate, the Celtic Revival produced some of the greatest

poetry, drama, and prose fiction written in English during the first four

decades of the twentieth century.

See Phillip L. Marcus, Yeats and the Beginning of the Irish Renaissance

(1970), and “The Celtic Revival: Literature and the Theater,” in The Irish

World: The History and Cultural Achievements of the Irish People (1977). Declan

Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (1996), deals with the Irish writers as exemplary mod-

ernists. For the influence of anthropology on Irish revivalists, see Gregory

Castle, Modernism and the Celtic Revival (2001).

character and characterization:

1. The character is the name of a literary genre; it is a short, and usually

witty, sketch in prose of a distinctive type of person. The genre was inau-

gurated by Theophrastus, a Greek author of the second century BC, who

wrote a lively book entitled Characters. This literary form had a great

vogue in the early seventeenth century; the books of characters then

written by Joseph Hall, Sir Thomas Overbury, and John Earle influenced

later writers of essays, history, and fiction. The titles of some of

CHARACTER AND CHARACTERIZATION 47

Overbury’s sketches will indicate the nature of the form: “A Courtier,”

“A Wise Man,”“A Fair and Happy Milkmaid.” See Richard Aldington’s

anthology A Book of “Characters ” (1924).

2. Characters are the persons represented in a dramatic or narrative work,

who are interpreted by the reader as possessing particular moral, intellec-

tual, and emotional qualities by inferences from what the persons say and

their distinctive ways of saying it—the dialogue—and from what they

do—the action. The grounds in the characters’ temperament, desires,

and moral nature for their speech and actions are called their motivation.

A character may remain essentially “stable,” or unchanged in outlook and

disposition, from beginning to end of a work (Prospero in Shakespeare’s

The Tempest, Mr. Micawber in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield,1849–

50), or may undergo a radical change, either through a gradual process of

development (the title character in Jane Austen’s Emma, 1816) or as the

result of a crisis (Shakespeare’s King Lear, Pip in Dickens’ Great Expectations).

Whether a character remains stable or changes, the reader of a traditional

and realistic work expects “consistency”—the character should not sud-

denly b reak off and act in a way not plausibly grou nded in his or her

temperamentaswehavealreadycometoknowit.

E. M. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel (1927), introduced new terms for an old

distinction by discriminating between flat and round characters. A flat character

(also called a type,or“two-dimensional”), Forster says, is built around “asingle

idea or quality” and is presented without much individualizing detail, and there-

fore can be described adequately in a single phrase or sentence. A round

character is complex in temperament and motivation and is represented with

subtle particularity; such a character therefore is as difficult to describe with any

adequacy as a person in real life and, like real persons, is capable of surprising us.

A humours character, such as Ben Jonson’

s “Sir

Epicure Mammon,” is a flat charac-

ter who has a name which says it all, in contrast to the roundness of character in

Shakespeare’s multifaceted Falstaff. Almost all dramas and narratives, properly

enough, have some characters who serve merely as functionaries and are not

characterized at all, as well as other characters who are left relatively flat: there

is no need, in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I, for Mistress Quickly to be as

globular as Falstaff. The degree to which, to be regarded as artistically successful,

characters need to be three-dimensional depends on their function in the plot; in

many types of narrative, such as the detective story, adventure novel, or farce

comedy, even the protagonist is usually two-dimensional. Sherlock Holmes and

Long John Silver do not require, for their excellent literary roles, the roundness

of a Hamlet, a Becky Sharp, or a Jay Gatsby. In his Anatomy of Criticism (1957),

Northrop Frye has proposed that even lifelike characters are identifiable variants,

more or less individualized, of stock two-dimensional types in old literary genres,

such as the self-deprecating “eiron,” the boastful “alazon,” and the “senex iratus,”

or choleric old father in classical comedy. See stock characters.

A broad distinction is frequently made between alternative methods for

characterizing (that is, establishing the distinctive characters of) the persons

48 CHARACTER AND CHARACTERIZATION

in a narrative: showing and telling. In showing (also called “the dramatic

method”), the author simply presents the characters talking and acting, and

leaves it entirely up to the reader to infer the motives and dispositions that

lie behind what they say and do. The author may show not only external

speech and actions but also a character’s inner thoughts, feelings, and respon-

siveness to events; for a highly developed mode of such inner showing, see

stream of consciousness .Intelling, the author intervenes authoritatively in

order to describe, and often to evaluate, the motives and dispositional qualities

of the characters. For example, in the terse opening chapter of Pride and

Prejudice (1813), Jane Austen first shows us Mr. and Mrs. Bennet as they talk to

one another about the young man who has just rented Netherfield Park, then

(in the quotation below) tells us about them, and so confirms and expands the

inferences that we have begun to make from what has been shown.

Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour,

reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years

had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character. Her

mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean

understanding, little information, and uncertain temper.

Especially since the novelistic theory and practice of Flaubert and Henry

James, a critical tendency has been to consider “telling” a violation of artistry

and to recommend only the technique of “showing” characters; authors, it is

said, should totally efface themselves in order to write “objectively, ”“imper-

sonally,” or “dramatically.” Such judgments, however, privilege a modern

artistic limitation suited to particular novelistic effects and decry an alternative

method of characterization which a number of novelists have employed to

produce masterpieces. See point of view.

Innovative writers in the twentieth century—including novelists from

James Joyce to French writers of the new novel, and authors of the dramas and

novels of the absurd and various experimental forms—often presented the per-

sons in their works in ways that ran counter to the earlier mode of representing

lifelike characters who manifest a consistent substructure of individuality. Struc-

turalist critics undertook to dissolve even the lifelike characters of traditional

novels into a system of literary conventions and codes which are naturalized by

the readers; that is, readers are said to project lifelikeness upon codified literary

representations by assimilating them into their own prior stereotypes of indivi-

duals in real life. See structuralist criticism and text and writing (écriture), and refer to

Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (1975), chapter 9, “Poetics of the Novel.”

See plot and narrative and narratology . For the traditional problems and

methods of characterization, including discussions of showing and telling, see

in addition to E. M. Forster (above), Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction

(1926); Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), especially chapters

1–

4; and W. J. Harvey, Character

and the Novel (1965). On problems in deter-

mining dramatic character, see Bert O. States, The Pleasure of the Play (1994);

and on the disappearance of traditional characterization in postmodern drama,

Elinor Fuchs, The Death of Character (1996). On the formal distinction

CHARACTER AND CHARACTERIZATION 49

between primary characters (protagonists) and minor characters, see Alex

Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist

in the Novel (2003). In The Economy of Character (1998), Deidre S. Lynch

describes the shift, especially in the second half of the eighteenth century,

from external signs and actions to subjective states, as indicators of character.

character, the (a literary form): 47.

characterizing: 48. See also distance and involvement; empathy and sympathy.

chiasmus (k



ıaz

mus): 345.

Chicago School (of criticism): 141.

chivalric romance: “Chivalric romance” (or medieval romance) is a type of

narrative that developed in twelfth-century France, spread to the literatures of

other countries, and displaced the earlier epic and heroic forms. (“Romance”

originally signified a work written in the French language, which evolved

from a dialect of the Roman language, Latin.) Romances were at first written

in verse but later in prose as well. The romance is distinguished from the

epic in that it does not represent a heroic age of tribal wars but a courtly

and chivalric age, often one of highly developed manners and civility. Its stan-

dard plot is that of a quest undertaken by a single knight in order to gain a

lady’s favor; frequently its central interest is courtly love, together with tourna-

ments fought and dragons and monsters slain for the damsel’s sake; it stresses

the chivalric ideals of courage, loyalty, honor, mercifulness to an opponent,

and elaborate manners; and it delights in wonders and marvels. Supernatural

events in the epic usually were attributed to the will and actions of the gods;

romance shifts the supernatural to this world and makes much of the mysteri-

ous effect of magic, spells, and enchantments.

The recurrent materials of medieval chivalric romances have been divided

by scholars into four classes of subjects: (1) “The Matter of Britain” (Celtic

subject matter, especially stories centering on the court of King Arthur);

(2) “The Matter of Rome” (the history and legends of classical antiquity,

including the exploits of Alexander the Great and of the heroes of the Trojan

War); Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde belongs to this class; (3) “The

Matter of France” (Charlemagne and his knights); and (4) “The Matter of

England” (heroes such as King Horn and Guy of Warwick). The cycle of

tales that developed around the pseudohistorical British King Arthur produced

many of the finest romances, some of them (stories of Sir Perceval and the

quest for the Holy Grail) with a religious instead of a purely secular content.

Chrétien de Troyes, the great twelfth-century French poet, wrote Arthurian

romances; German examples are Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival and

Gottfried von Straßburg’s Tristan und Isolde, both written early in the thirteenth

century. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,composedinfourteenth-century

England, is a metrical romance (that is, a romance written in verse) about

50 CHARACTER, THE

an Arthurian knight; and Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (fifteenth century) is

an English version in prose of the cycle of earlier metrical romances about

Arthur and various of his Knights of the Round Table.

See prose romance, Gothic romance, romantic comedy, and romance novel. Refer

to the anthology Medieval Romances, eds. R. S. and L. H. Loomis (1957); L. A.

Hibbard, Medieval Romance in England (rev. 1961); R. S. Loomis, The Develop-

ment of Arthurian Romance (1963) and The Grail (1963); and The Cambridge

Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. Roberta L. Krueger (2000). For the his-

tory of the term “romance” and modern extensions of the genre of romance,

see Gillian Beer, The Romance (1970); and for Northrop Frye’s theory of the

mythical basis of the romance genre, see the entry in this Glossary on myth.

For references to chivalric romance in other entries, see pages 42, 67.

choral character: 52.

chorus: Among the ancient Greeks the “chorus” was a group of people, wearing

masks, who sang or chanted verses while performing dancelike movements at

religious festivals. A similar chorus played a part in Greek tragedies, where (in

the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles) they served mainly as commentators on

the dramatic actions and events who expressed traditional moral, religious, and

social attitudes; beginning with Euripides, however, the chorus assumed primarily

a lyrical function. The Greek ode, as developed by Pindar, was also chanted by a

chorus; see ode.InThe Birth of Tragedy (1872) the German classicist and philoso-

pher Friedrich Nietzsche speculated that, at the origin of Greek tragedy, the

chorus—consisting of goat-like satyrs—were the only figures on the stage. They

were presented as attendants and witnesses of the suffering, death, and self-

transformation of their master, the god Dionysus. Later, in Nietzsche’sview,

actors were introduced to enact the event that had originally been represented

only symbolically, and the chorus was reduced to the role of commentator.

Roman playwrights such as Seneca took over the chorus from the

Greeks, and in the mid-sixteenth century some English dramatists (for exam-

ple, Norton and Sackville in Gorboduc) imitated the Senecan chorus. The clas-

sical type of chorus was never widely adopted by English dramatic writers.

John Milton, however, included a chorus in Samson Agonistes (1671), as did

Shelley in Prometheus Unbound (1820) and Thomas Hardy in The Dynasts

(1904–

8); T. S. Eliot also made effective use of the classical chorus in his reli-

gious

tragedy Murder in the Cathedral (1935). The use in drama of a chorus of

singers and dancers survives also in operas and in musical comedies.

During the Elizabethan Age, the term “chorus” was applied also to a single

person who, in some plays, spoke the prologue and epilogue and sometimes

introduced each act as well. This character served as the author’svehiclefor

commentary on the play, as well as for exposition of its subject, time, and setting

and the description of events happening offstage; examples are in Christopher

Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare’s Henry V.InShakespeare’s Winter’s

Tale,thefifthactbeginswith“Time, the Chorus,” who requests the audience

that they “impute it not a crime / To me or my swift passage that I slide / O’er

CHORUS 51

sixteen years” since the preceding events, then summarizes what has happened

during those years and announces that the setting for this present act is Bohemia.

A modern and extended use of a single character with a choral function is the

Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938).

Modern scholars use the term choral character to refer to a person within

the play itself who stands apart from the action and by his or her comments

provides the audience with a special perspective (often an ironic perspective)

through which to view the other characters and events. Examples in Shakespeare

are the Fool in King Lear,EnobarbusinAntony and Cleopatra, and Thersites in

Troilus and Cressida; a modern instance is Seth Beckwith in O’Neill’s Mourning

Becomes Electra (1931). “Choral character” is sometimes applied also to one or

more persons in a novel who represent the point of view of a community or of

a cultural group, and so provide norms by which to judge the other characters

and what they do; instances are Thomas Hardy’s peasants and the old black

women in some of William Faulkner’s novels.

For the alternative use of the term “chorus” to signify a recurrent stanza

in a song, see refrain.

chorus (in a song): 337.

Christian humanism: 164.

chronicle plays: “Chronicle plays” were dramatic works based on the historical

materials in the English Chronicles by Raphael Holinshed and others; see Chronicles.

They achieved high popularity late in the sixteenth century, when the patriotic

fervor following the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 fostered a demand

for plays dealing with English history. The early chronicle plays presented a

loosely knit series of events during the reign of an English king and depended

for effect mainly on a bustle of stage battles, pageantry, and spectacle. Christopher

Marlowe, however, in his Edward II (1592) selected and rearranged materials from

Holinshed’s Chronicles to compose a unified drama of character, and Shakespeare’s

series of chronicle plays, encompassing the succession of English kings from

Richard II to Henry VIII, include such major artistic achievements as Richard II,

1HenryIV, 2HenryIV,andHenry V.

The Elizabethan chronicle plays are sometimes called history plays. This

latter term, however, is often applied more broadly to any drama based mainly

on historical materials, such as Shakespeare’s Roman plays

Julius Caesar an

Antony and Cleopatra, and including such modern examples as Arthur Miller’s

The Crucible (1953), which treats the Salem witch trials of 1692; Robert Bolt’s

A Man for All Seasons (1962), about the sixteenth-century judge, author, and

martyr Sir Thomas More; and Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen (2000), which

invents details of a fateful meeting between the physicists Werner Heisenberg

and Niels Bohr in 1941. G. B. Shaw titled one of his plays, which dealt with

historical matters, St. Joan: A Chronicle Play in Six Scenes (1923).

E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays (1946); Lily B. Campbell,

Shakespeare’s “Histories” (1947); Max M. Reese, The Cease of Majesty: A Study

52 CHORUS

of Shakespeare’s History Plays (1962); Irving Ribner, The English History Play in

the Age of Shakespeare (rev. 1965). For a new-historicist treatment of Shakespeare’s

history plays Henry IV, 1 and 2,andHenry V, see Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible

Bullets,” in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, eds. Jonathan

Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (1985).

chronicles: “Chronicles,” the predecessors of modern histories, were written

accounts, in prose or verse, of national or worldwide events over a consider-

able period of time. If the chronicles deal with events year by year, they are

often called annals. Unlike the modern historian, most chroniclers tended to

take their information as they found it, making little attempt to separate fact

from legend. The most important English examples are the Anglo-Saxon

Chronicle, started by King Alfred in the ninth century and continued until

the twelfth century, and the Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland

(1577–87) by Raphael Holinshed and other writers. The latter documents

were important sources of materials for the chronicle plays of Shakespeare and

other Elizabethan dramatists.

chronological primitivism: 315.

classic, a: 236; 43.

classical: 236.

cliché: “Cliché” is French for “stereotype”—that is, a metal plate with a raised

surface of type, used for printing. In its literary application, “cliché” signifies

an expression that deviates enough from ordinary usage to call attention to

itself and has been used so often that it is felt to be hackneyed or cloying. “I

beg your pardon” or “sincerely yours” are standard usages that do not call

attention to themselves; but “point with pride, ”“the eternal verities,”

“a whole new ballgame,” and “lock, stock, and barrel” are accounted as

clichés; so are indiscriminate uses in ordinary talk of terms taken from special-

ized vocabularies such as “interface,”“paradigm,

”“bandwidth” (referring

mental capacity), or “process” (used as a verb). Some clichés are foreign

phrases that are used as an arch or elegant equivalent for a common English

term (“aqua pura,”“au courant,”“terra firma”); others are overused literary

echoes. “The cup that cheers” is an inaccurate quotation from William Cowper’s

The Task (1785), referring to tea—“the cups / That cheer but not inebriate.” In

his Essay on Criticism (II. 11. 350ff.), Alexander Pope comments satirically on

some clichés that early eighteenth-century poetasters (untalented pretenders

to the poetic art) used in order to eke out their rhymes:

Where’er you find “the cooling western breeze,”

In the next line, it “whispers through the trees”;

If crystal streams “with pleasing murmurs creep,”

The reader’s threatened (not in vain) with “sleep.”

CLICHÉ 53

See Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Clichés (4th ed., 1950), and Christine

Ammer, Have a Nice Day—No Problem! A Dictionary of Clichés (1992).

climax (in a plot): 296.

climax (rhetorical): 28.

close reading: 243; 83.

closed couplet: 160.

closet drama: 95.

codex: 35.

cogito: 290; 310.

cognitive literary studies: “Cognitive literary studies,” also known as cognitive

poetics, is an approach to literature from the viewpoint of cognitive science,

which is associated with the fields of artificial intelligence, computer science,

cognitive and evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and ling uistics. Cogni-

tive science seeks to understand the workings of the human brain and expl ains

language and other forms of communication in terms of mental states and the

mental processes of cognition. Cognitive literary study, accordingly, approaches

literature as a function of the brain rather than as a means of representation or

expression. In this respect, cognitive literary study sets itself apart from both

literary formalism and the New Criticism, which treat the literary work as inde-

pendent of the author ’s thoughts or intentions, and critical approaches such

as new historicism and cultural studies, which assume that literature is largely

determined by factors in the external environment.

A rough distinction can be made between cognitive studies that use liter-

ature as a source of information about the brain and those that use research

about the brain as a way to understand literature better.

1. In the first type, the object of study is literary language, especially stylistic fea-

tures, such as metaphor and analogy, that involve complex mental processes.

Literary language is treated as a rich body of evidence for human cognitive

capacities such as the ability to register impressions, form concepts, process

information, communicate intentional states, use symbols, and produce narra-

tives. The idea of conceptual metaphor, initially developed by George

Lakoff and Mark Johnson, has been particularly influential. The fact that a

number of metaphors occur in numerous languages (e.g., “the river of time,”

or “life is a journey”) supports, they claim, the hypothesis that the mapping, in

these cases, between conceptual domains corresponds to neural mappings

in the brain. (See the cognitive view in the entry metaphor, theories of;also

refer to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, MetaphorsWeLiveBy, updated

ed. 2003, and Lakoff and Mark Turner, More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide

54 CLIMAX

to Poetic Metaphor, 1989.) Some work in this area uses imaging technology to

observe the brain’s responses to literary stimuli, including rhythm and rhetorical

figures, especially metaphor.

2. In the second type, cognitive studies undertakes to illuminate literature by

reference to properties of the brain. One way to do so is to refer to stud-

ies that demonstrate the human capacity to construct imagined worlds, to

track multiple sources of information, or to apply a “theory of mind”—

that is, the ability to understand the mental states of other people—and

then to use these studies to explain the cognitive motivation of such fea-

tures of literature as free indirect discourse (in which the thoughts of fictional

characters are represented in the voice of the narrator) or the ways in

which literature enlists the emotional responses of the reader, such as con-

cern or sympathy for fictional characters.

Cognitive literary study often allies itself with Darwinian literary studies by

arguing that the literary processes of the brain reveal adaptive qualities of

human existence that have served the evolutionary interests of the human

species, including the capacity for empathy and sympathy and other social emo-

tions. On this subject, see Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care about Literary

Characters? (2010). In its concern for character, plot , theme , and the emotional

and intellectual engagement of the reader, cognitive literary studies represents

a science-based form of a return to humanism.

For cognitive literary studies, see Elena Semino and Jonathan Culpeper,

eds., Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis (2002); and

Joanna Gavins and Gerard Steen, eds., Cognitive Poetics in Practice (2003).

Peter Stockwell’s Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction (2002) attempts to construct

a bridge between linguistic analysis and accounts of the reading experience. In

Literature and the Brain (2009), Norman Holland surveys empirical work that

illuminates the brain’s response to verbal, dramatic, and cinematic art. In

Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science (1991),

Mark Turner argues that the human mind is inherently linguistic and literary,

with a unique capacity for “conceptual blending.” For an example of the way

neuropsychologists approach narrative, see R. A. Mar, “The Neuropsychol-

ogy of Narrative: Story Comprehension, Story Production and Their Interre-

lation,” Neuropsychologia 42 (2004): 1414–34. In Dreaming by the Book (1999),

Elaine Scarry offers a suggestive but idiosyncratic account of the ways in

which literary language is transformed by the brain into a series of mental

images that carry the force of representations of reality. For an example of

the use of imaging technology in studying the response to literary language,

see Philip Davis, “Syntax and Pathways,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 2008

(33.4), 265–77. For the “theory of mind”

approach, see Lisa Zunshine, Why

Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (2006); and Kay Young, Imagin-

ing Minds: The Neuro-Aesthetics of Austen, Eliot, and Hardy (2010). Bruce

McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart, eds., Performance and Cognition: Theatre

Studies and the Cognitive Turn (2006) gathers a number of essays that apply

the cognitive approach to drama.

COGNITIVE LITERARY STUDIES 55

cognitive poetics: 54.

cognitive rhetoric: 342.

collective unconscious: 322; 18.

Colonial Period: 273; 190.

colophon (kol

ofon): 37.

comedy: In the most common literary application, a “comedy” is a fictional work

in which the materials are selected and managed primarily in order to interest

and amuse us: the characters and their discomfitures engage our pleasurable

attention rather than our profound concern, we are made to feel confident

that no great disaster will occur, and usually the action turns out happily for

the chief characters. The term “comedy” is customarily applied only to plays

for the stage or to motion pictures and television dramas; it should be noted,

however, that the comic form of plot, as just defined, also occurs in prose fiction

and narrative poetry.

Within the very broad spectrum of dramatic comedy, the following types

are frequently distinguished:

1. Romantic comedy was developed by Elizabethan dramatists on the

model of contemporary prose romances such as Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde

(1590), the source of Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1599). Such comedy

represents a love affair that involves a beautiful and engaging heroine

(sometimes disguised as a man); the course of this love does not run

smooth yet overcomes all difficulties to end in a happy union. Many of

the boy-meets-girl plots of later writers are instances of romantic comedy,

as are romance novels and many motion pictures, from The Philadelphia

Story to Sleepless in Seattle.InAnatomy of Criticism (1957), Northrop Frye

points out that some of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies manifest a

movement from the normal world of conflict and trouble into “the

green world”—the Forest of Arden in As You Like It, or the fairy-

haunted wood of A Midsummer Night’s Dream—in which the problems

and injustices of the ordinary world are dissolved, enemies reconciled,

and true lovers united. Frye regards that phenomenon (together with

other aspects of these comedies, such as their frequent conclusion in the

social ritual of a wedding, a feast, or a dance) as evidence that comic plots

derive from primitive myths and rituals that celebrated the victory of

spring over winter. (See archetypal criticism.) Linda Bamber’s Comic

Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare (1982)

undertakes to account for the fact that in Shakespeare ’s romantic come-

dies, the women are often superior to the men, while in his tragedies he

“creates such nightmare female figures as Goneril, Regan, Lady Macbeth,

and Volumnia.” See also gender criticism.

56 COGNITIVE POETICS

2. Satiric comedy ridicules political policies or philosophical doctrines, or

else attacks deviations from the accepted social order by making ridicu-

lous the violators of its standards of morals or manners. (See satire.) The

early master of satiric comedy was the Greek Aristophanes, c. 450–c.

385

BC, whose plays mocked political, philosophical, and literary matters

of his age. Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson wrote satiric or (as it

is sometimes called) “corrective comedy.” In his Volpone and The Alchemist,

for example, the greed and ingenuity of one or more intelligent but rascally

swindlers, and the equal greed and stupid gullibility of their victims, are

made grotesquely or repulsively ludicrous rather than lightly amusing.

3. The comedy of manners originated in the New Comedy of the Greek

Menander, c. 342–292

BC (as distinguished from the Old Comedy

represented by Aristophanes, c. 450–c. 385

BC) and was developed by

the Roman dramatists Plautus and Terence in the third and second cen-

turies BC. Their plays dealt with the vicissitudes of young lovers and

included what became the stock characters of much later comedy, such as

the clever servant, old and stodgy parents, and the wealthy rival. The

English comedy of manners was early exemplified by Shakespeare’s

Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado about Nothing and was given a high

polish in Restoration comedy (1660–1700). The Restoration form

owes much to the brilliant dramas of the French writer Molière (1622–

73). It deals with the relations and intrigues of men and women living in

a sophisticated upper-class society and relies for comic effect in large part

on the wit and sparkle of the dialogue—often in the form of repartee,a

witty conversational give-and-take, which constitutes a kind of verbal

fencing match—as well as on the violations of social standards and deco-

rum by would-be wits, jealous husbands, conniving rivals, and foppish

dandies. Excellent examples are William Congreve’s The Way of the

World and William Wycherley’s The Country Wife. (See The Cambridge

Companion to English Restoration Theatre, ed. Deborah Payne Fisk, 2000.)

A middle-class reaction against what had come to be considered the

immorality of situation and indecency of dialogue in the courtly Restora-

tion comedy resulted in the sentimental comedy of the eighteenth century.

In the latter part of that century, however, Oliver Goldsmith (She Stoops

to Conquer) and his contemporary Richard Brinsley Sheridan (The Rivals

and A School for Scandal) revived the wit and gaiety, while deleting the

indecency, of Restoration comedy. The comedy of manners lapsed in

the early nineteenth century but was revived by many skillful dramatists,

from A. W. Pinero and Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest,

1895), through George Bernard Shaw and Noel Coward, to Neil

Simon, Alan Ayckbourn, and Wendy Wasserstein. Many of these come-

dies have also been adapted for the cinema. See David L. Hirst, Comedy of

Manners (1979).

4. Farce is a type of comedy designed to provoke the audience to simple,

hearty laughter—“belly laughs,” in the parlance of the theater. To do so

COMEDY 57

it commonly employs highly exaggerated or caricatured types of charac-

ters, puts them into improbable and ludicrous situations, and often makes

free use of sexual mix-ups, broad verbal humor, and physical bustle and

horseplay. Farce was a component in the comic episodes in medieval mir-

acle plays, such as the Wakefield plays Noah and the Second Shepherd’s Play,

and constituted the matter of the Italian commedia dell’arte in the Renais-

sance. In the English drama that has best stood the test of time, farce is

usually an episode in a more complex form of comedy—examples are the

knockabout scenes in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and The

Merry Wives of Windsor. The plays of the French playwright Georges

Feydeau (1862–1921), relying in great part on sexual humor and innu-

endo, are true farce throughout, as is Brandon Thomas’ Charley’s Aunt,

an American play of 1892 which has often been revived, and also some

of the current plays of Tom Stoppard. Many of the movies by such

comedians as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, W. C. Fields, the Marx

brothers, and Woody Allen are excellent farce, as are the Monty Python

films and television episodes. Farce is often employed in single scenes of

musical revues and is the standard fare of television “situation comedies.”

It should be noted that the term “farce,” or sometimes “farce comedy,” is

applied also to plays—a supreme example is Oscar Wilde’s The Importance

of Being Earnest (1895)—in which exaggerated character types find them-

selves in ludicrous situations in the course of an improbable plot, but

which achieve their comic effects not by broad humor and bustling action

but by the sustained brilliance and wit of the dialogue. Farce is also a fre-

quent comic tactic in the theater of the absurd . Refer to Leo Hughes, A

Century of English Farce (1956); and for the history of farce and low com-

edy from the Greeks to the present, Anthony Caputi, Buffo: The Genius of

Vulgar Comedy (1978), and Albert Bermel, Farce: A History from Aristo-

phanes to Woody Allen (1990).

A distinction is often made between high and low comedy. High comedy,

as described by George Meredith in a classic essay The Idea of Comedy (1877 ),

evokes “intellectual laughter”—thoughtful laughter from spectators who remain

emotionally detached from the action—at the spectacle of folly, pretentiousness,

and incongruity in human behavior. Meredith finds its highest form within the

comedy of manners, in the combats of wit (sometimes identified now as the

“love duels”) between such intelligent, highly verbal, and well-matched lovers

as Benedick and Beatrice in Shakespeare

’s Mu

ch Ado about Nothing (1598–99)

and Mirabell and Millamant in Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700).

Low comedy, at the other extreme, has little or no intellectual appeal but

undertakes to arouse laughter by jokes, or “gags,” and by slapstick humor and

boisterous or clownish physical activity; it is, therefore, one of the common

components of farce.

See also comedy of humours, tragicomedy,andwit, humor, and the comic.Oncom-

edyanditsvarieties:G.E.Duckworth,TheNatureofRomanComedy(1952);

Elder Olson, The Theory of Comedy (1968); Andrew Stott, Comedy (2005). On

58 COMEDY

therelationofcomedytomythandritual:NorthropFrye,Anatomy of Criticism

(1957), pp. 163–86;C.L.Barber,Shakespeare’sFestiveComedy(1959).

comedy of humours: A type of comedy developed by Ben Jonson, the

Elizabethan playwright, based on the ancient physiological theory of the “four

humours” that was still current in Jonson’stime.Thehumours were held to

be the four primary fluids—blood, phlegm, choler (or yellow bile), and melan-

choly (or black bile)—whose “temperament” (mixture) was held to determine a

person’s both physical condition and type of character. An imbalance of one or

another humour in a temperament was said to produce four kinds of disposition

whosenameshavesurvivedtheunderlying theory: sanguine (from the Latin

“sanguis, ” blood), phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic. In Jonson’scomedy

of humours each of the major characters has a preponderant humour that gives

him a characteristic distortion or eccentricity of disposition. Jonson expounds his

theory in the “Induction” to his play Every Man Out of His Humour (1600) and

exemplifies the mode in his later comedies; often he identifies the ruling dispo-

sition of a humours character by his or her name: “Zeal-of-the-land Busy,”

“Dame Purecraft,”“Wellbred.” The Jonsonian type of humours character

appears in plays by other Elizabethans and remained influential in the comedies

of manners by William Wycherley, Sir George Etheredge, William Congreve,

and other dramatists of the English Restoration, 1660–1700.

comedy of manners: 57.

comedy, sentimental: 360.

comic, the: 417; 352.

comic relief: “Comic relief” is the introduction of comic characters, speeches,

or scenes in a serious or tragic work, especially a drama. Such elements were

almost universal in Elizabethan tragedy. Sometimes they occur merely as epi-

sodes of dialogue or horseplay for purposes of alleviating tension and adding

variety. In more carefully wrought plays, however, they are integrated with

the plot in a way that counterpoints and enhances the serious or tragic signif-

icance. Examples of such complex uses of comic elements are the gravediggers

in Hamlet (V. i.), the scene of the drunken porter after the murder of the king

in Macbeth (II. iii.), the Falstaff scenes in Henry IV Part 1, and the roles of

Mercutio and the old nurse in Romeo

and Juliet.

See Thomas De Quincey’s famed essay “On the Knocking at the Gate in

Macbeth” (1823).

commedia dell’arte: “Commedia dell’arte” was a form of comic drama devel-

oped about the mid-sixteenth century by guilds of professional Italian actors.

Playing stock characters, the actors largely improvised the dialogue around a given

scenario—a term that still denotes a brief outline of a drama, indicating merely

the entrances of the main characters and the general course of the action. In a

COMMEDIA DELL’ ARTE 59

typical play, a pair of young lovers outwit a rich old father (“Pantaloon”), aided

by a clever and intriguing servant (“Harlequin”), in a plot enlivened by the

buffoonery of “Punch” and other clowns. Wandering Italian troupes played in

all the large cities of Renaissance Europe and influenced writers of comedies in

Elizabethan England and later in France. Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew,

Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, and Molière’s The Misanthrope drew on conven-

tions of the commedia. The modern puppet shows of Punch and Judy are des-

cendants of this old Italian comedy, emphasizing its components of farce and

buffoonery.

See Kathleen M. Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, 1560–1620 (2 vols., 1934);

Domenico Pietropaolo, ed., The Science of Buffoonery: Theory and History of the

Commedia dell’Arte (1989); Martin Green and John Swan, The Triumph of

Pierrot (rev. 1993), which traces the influence of Pierrot from 1860 to 1930

and beyond. See also two books by Robert F. Storey: Pierrot: A Critical History

of a Mask (1978) and Pierrots on the Stage of Desire (1985), which track the per-

sistence of Pierrot in nineteenth-century French literature and pantomime.

common measure (in meter): 374.

Commonwealth Period: 281.

competence (linguistic): 195.

complication (in a plot): 296.

conceit: Originally meaning a concept or image, “conceit” came to be the term

for figures of speech which establish a striking parallel, usually ingeniously

elaborate, between two very dissimilar things or situations. (See figurative lan-

guage.) English poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries adapted the

term from the Italian “concetto.” Two types of conceit are often distin-

guished by specific names:

1. The Petrarchan conceit is a type of figure used in love poems that had

been novel and effective in the Italian poetry of Petrarch but became

hackneyed in some of his imitators among the Elizabethan sonneteers.

(See the entry sonnet.) The figure consists of detailed, ingenious, and

often exaggerated comparisons applied to the disdainful mistress, as cold

and cruel as she is beautiful, and to the distresses and despair of her wor-

shipful lover. (See courtly love.) Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–42), for example,

in the sonnet “My Galley Chargèd with Forgetfulness

” that

he translated

from Petrarch, compares the lover’s state in detail to a ship laboring in a

storm. Another sonnet of Petrarch’s translated by Wyatt begins with an

oxymoron describing the opposing passions experienced by a courtly suf-

ferer from the disease of love:

I find no peace; and all my war is done;

I fear and hope; I burn and freeze in ice.

60 COMMON MEASURE

Shakespeare (who at times employed this type of conceit himself) parodied

some standard comparisons by Petrarchan sonneteers in his Sonnet 130,

beginning

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips’ red:

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

2. The metaphysical conceit is a characteristic figure in the work of John

Donne (1572–1631) and other metaphysical poets of the seventeenth cen-

tury. It was described by Samuel Johnson (1709–84), in a famed passage

in his “Life of Cowley,” as “wit” which

is a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or

discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike….

The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.

The metaphysical poets exploited all knowledge—commonplace or

esoteric, practical, theological, or philosophical, true or fabulous—for the

vehicles of these figures; and their comparisons, whether succinct or

expanded, were often novel and witty, and at their best startlingly effective.

In sharp contrast to both the concepts and figures of conventional Petrar-

chism is John Donne’s “The Flea,” a poem that uses a flea who has bitten

both lovers as the basic reference for the lyric speaker’s argument against a

lady’s resistance to his advances. In Donne’s “The Canonization,” as the

poetic argument develops, the comparisons for the relationship between

lovers move from the area of commerce and business, through actual and

mythical birds and diverse forms of historical memorials, to a climax which

equates the sexual acts and the moral status of worldly lovers with the

ascetic life and heavenly destination of unworldly saints. The best known

sustained conceit is Donne’sparallel(in“A Valediction: Forbidding

Mourning”) between the continuing relationship of his and his lady’s soul

during their physical parting, and the coordinated movements of the two

feet of a draftsman’s compass. An oft-cited instance of the chilly ingenuity

of the metaphysical conceit when it is overdriven is Richard Crashaw’s

description, in his mid-seventeenth-century poem “Saint Mary Magdalene,”

of the tearful eyes of the repentant Magdalene as

two faithful fountains

Two walking baths, two weeping motions,

Portable and compendious oceans.

The metaphysical conceit fell out of favor in the eighteenth century, when

it came to be regarded as strained and unnatural. But with the strong revival of

interest in the metaphysical poets during the early decades of the twentieth

century, a number of modern poets exploited this type of figure. Examples

CONCEIT 61

areT.S.Eliot’s comparison of the evening to “a patient etherized upon a table”

at the beginning of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and the series of

startling figurative vehicles in Dylan Thomas’“In Memory of Ann Jones.” The

vogue for such conceits extended even to popular love songs, in the 1920s and

later, by well-educated composers such as Cole Porter:

You’re the top!

You’re the Coliseum.

You’re the top!

You’re the Louvre Museum.

You’re a melody from a symphony by Strauss.

You’re a Bendel bonnet,

A Shakespeare sonnet,

You’re Mickey Mouse.

Refer to Rosemod Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (1947), and

K. K. Ruthven, The Conceit (1969).

conceptual metaphor: 54.

concrete and abstract: In standard philosophical usage a “concrete term” is a

word that denotes a particular person or physical object, and an “abstract term”

denotes either a class of things or else (as in “brightness,”“beauty,”“evil,”

“despair ”) qualities that exist only as attributes of particular persons or things.

A sentence, accordingly, is said to be concrete if it makes an assertion about a

particular subject (T. S. Eliot’s “Grishkin is nice….”), and abstract if it makes an

assertion about an abstract subject (Alexander Pope’s “Hope springs eternal in

the human breast”). Critics of literature, however, often use these terms in an

extended way: a passage is called abstract if it represents its subject matter in gen-

eral or nonsensuous words or with only a thin realization of its experienced

qualities; it is called concrete if it represents its subject matter with striking par-

ticularity and sensuous detail. In his “Ode to Psyche” (1820) John Keats’

Mid hush’d, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed,

Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian

is a concrete description of a locale which interinvolves qualities that are per-

ceived

by four different senses: hearing, touch, sight, and smell. And in the

opening of his “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats communicates concretely, by

a combination of literal and figurative language, how it feels, physically, to

experience the full-throated song of the nightingale:

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains….

It is frequently asserted that “poetry is concrete,” or, as John Crowe

Ransom put it in The World’sBody(1938), that its proper subject is “the rich,

contingent materiality of things.” Most poetry is certainly more concrete than

62 CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR

other modes of language, especially in its use of imagery. It should be kept in

mind, however, that poets do not hesitate to use abstract language when the

area of reference or artistic purpose calls for it. Keats, though he was one of

the most concrete of poets, began Endymion with a sentence composed of

abstract terms:

A thing of beauty is a joy forever:

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness;…

And some of the most moving and memorable passages in poetry are not con-

crete; for example, the statement about God in Dante’s Paradiso, “In His will

is our peace,” or the bleak comment by Edgar in the last act of King Lear,

Men must endure

Their going hence, even as their coming hither;

Ripeness is all.

See John Crowe Ransom, The World’s Body (1938); Richard H. Fogle,

Imagery of Keats and Shelley (1949), chapter 5.

concrete poetry: A recent term for an ancient poetic type, called pattern poems

or shaped verse, that experiments with the visual shape in which a text is pre-

sented on the page. Some Greek poets, beginning in the third century

BC,

shaped a text in the form of the object that the poem describes or suggests. In

the Renaissance and seventeenth century, a number of poets composed such

patternedformsinwhichthelinesvaryinlengthinsuchawaythattheirprinted

shape outlines the subject of the poem; familiar examples in English are George

Herbert’s “Easter Wings” and “The Altar.” Prominent later experiments with

pictorial or suggestive typographyincludeStéphaneMallarmé’s Un Coup de dés

(“A Throw of Dice,” 1897) and Guillaume Apollinaire’s Calligrammes (1918); in

the latter publication, for example, Apollinaire printed the poem “Il pleut” (“It

rains”) so that the component letters trickle down the page.

The vogue of concrete poetry is a worldwide movement that was largely

inaugurated in 1953 by the Swiss poet Eugen Gomringer. The practice of such

poetry varies widely, but the common feature is the use of a radically reduced

language, typed or printed in such a way as to force the visible text on the

reader’s attention as a physical object and not simply as a transparent carrier of

its meanings. Many concrete poems, in fact, cannot be read at all in the con-

ventional way, since they consist of a single word or phrase which is subjected

to systematic alterations in the order and position of the component letters, or

else are composed of fragments of words, of nonsense syllables, or even of single

letters, numbers, and marks of punctuation. In their shaped patterns, concrete

poets often use a variety of type fonts and sizes and different colors of type and

sometimes supplement the text with drawings or photographs, while some of

their shapes, called “kinetic,” evolve as we turn the pages.

America had its own tradition of pattern poetry in the typographical

experiments of Ezra Pound and especially e. e. cummings; see, for example,

CONCRETE POETRY 63

cummings’“r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” in which, to represent the way we at first

perceive vaguely, then identify, the leaping insect, scrambled sequences of let-

ters gradually order themselves into the word “grasshopper.” Prominent prac-

titioners of pattern poems in the shape of the things that they describe or

meditate upon are May Swenson (Iconographs, 1970) and John Hollander

(Types of Shape, 1991). Other Americans who have been influenced by the

international vogue for concrete poetry include Emmett Williams, Jonathan

Williams, and Mary Ellen Solt.

Collections of concrete poems in a variety of languages are Emmett

Williams, ed., An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (1967); Mary Ellen Solt, ed.

(with a useful historical introduction), Concrete Poetry: A World View (1968);

see also Dick Higgins, Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature (1987).

For a noted early eighteenth-century attack on pattern poems, see Addison’s

comments on “false wit” in the Spectator, Nos. 58 and 63.

concretize (in reading): 289.

confessional poetry: “Confessional poetry” designates a type of narrative and

lyric verse, given impetus by the American Robert Lowell’s Life Studies

(1959), which deals with the facts and intimate mental and physical experi-

ences of the poet’s own life. Much confessional poetry was written in rebel-

lion against the demand for impersonality by T. S. Eliot and the New Critics.

By its secular subject matter, it differs from religious spiritual autobiography in

the lineage of Augustine’s Confessions (c. AD 400). It differs also from poems

of the Romantic Period representing the poet’s own circumstances, experiences,

and feelings, such as William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” and Samuel

Taylor Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode,” in the candor and sometimes star-

tling detail with which the confessional poet reveals private or clinical matters

about himself or herself, including sexual experiences, mental anguish and ill-

ness, experiments with drugs, and suicidal impulses. Confessional poems were

written by Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, and

other American poets. See Diane Middlebrook, Anne Sexton: A Biography

(1991); “What Was Confessional Poetry?” in The Columbia History of American

Poetry, ed. Jay Parini (1993); Adam Kirsch, The Wounded Surgeon (2005).

confidant: A

“confidant” (the

feminine form is “confidante”) is a character in a

drama or novel who plays only a minor role in the action but serves the pro-

tagonist as a trusted friend to whom he or she confesses intimate thoughts,

problems, and feelings. In drama, the confidant provides the playwright with

a plausible device for communicating to the audience the knowledge, state of

mind, and intentions of a principal character without the use of stage devices

such as the soliloquy or the aside; examples are Hamlet’s friend Horatio in

Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Cleopatra’s maid Charmian in his Antony and Cleopatra.

In prose fiction, a famed confidant is Dr. Watson in Arthur Conan Doyle’s

stories about Sherlock Holmes (1887 and following). The device is particularly

64 CONCRETIZE

useful to those modern writers who, like Henry James, have largely renounced

the novelist’s earlier privileges of having access to a character’s state of mind

and of intruding into the narrative in order to communicate such information

to the reader. (See point of view.) James applied to the confidant the term

ficelle, French for the string by which the puppeteer manages his puppets.

Discussing Maria Gostrey, Strether’s confidante in The Ambassadors, James

remarks that she is a “ficelle” who is not, “in essence, Strether’sfriend.Sheis

the reader’s friend much rather” (James, The Art of the Novel, ed. R. P. Blackmur,

1934, pp. 321–22).

See W. J. Harvey, Character and the Novel (1965).

conflict (in a plot): 294.

connotation and denotation: In a widespread literary usage, the denotation

of a word is its primary signification or reference; its connotation is the range of

secondary or associated significations and feelings which it commonly suggests

or implies. Thus “home” denotes the house where one lives but connotes

privacy, intimacy, and coziness; that is the reason real estate agents like to use

“home” instead of “house” in their advertisements. “Horse” and “steed” denote

the same quadruped, but “steed” has a different connotation that derives from

the chivalric or romantic narratives in which this word was often used.

The connotation of a word is only a potential range of secondary signifi-

cations; which parts of these connotations are evoked depends on the way the

word is used in a particular context. Poems typically establish contexts that

bring into play some part of the connotative as well as the denotative meaning

of words. In his poem “Virtue” George Herbert wrote,

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,

The bridal of the earth and sky….

The denotation of “bridal”—a union between human beings—serves as part of

the ground for applying the word as a metaphor to the union of earth and sky,

but the specific context in which the word occurs also evokes such connota-

ions of “bridal” as sacred, joyous, and ceremonial. (Note that “marriage,”

although metrically and denotatively equivalent to “bridal,” would have been

less richly significant in this context because more commonplace in its

connotation.) Even the way a word is spelled may alter its connotation. John

Keats, in a passage of his “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819), altered his original

spelling of “fairy” to the old form “faery” in order to evoke the connotations

of antiquity, as well as of the magic world of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.

Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam

Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn….

consonance: 12.

constative: 371.

constructs (cultural, discursive, social): 245; 328.

CONSTRUCTS 65

contextual criticism: 243.

conventions:

1. In one sense of the term, conventions (derived from the Latin term for

“coming together”) are necessary, or at least convenient, devices accepted

by tacit agreement between author and audience for solving the problems

in representing reality that are posed by a particular artistic medium. In

watching a modern production of a Shakespearean play, for example,

the audience accepts without question the convention by which a prosce-

nium stage with three walls (or if it is a theater in the round, with no

walls) represents a room with four walls. It also accepts the convention of

characters speaking in blank verse instead of prose and uttering their private

thoughts in soliloquies and asides, as well as the convention by which

actions presented on a single stage in less than three hours may represent

events that take place in a great variety of places and over a span of many

years.

2. In a second sense of the term, conventions are conspicuous features of

subject matter, form, or technique that occur repeatedly in works of lit-

erature. Conventions in this sense may be recurrent types of character,

turns of plot, forms of versification, or kinds of diction and style. Stock

characters such as the Elizabethan braggart soldier, the languishing and

fainting heroine of Victorian fiction, or the sad young men of the lost-

generation novels of the 1920s were among the conventions of their lit-

erary eras. The abrupt reform of the villain at the end of the last act was a

common convention of melodrama. Euphuism in prose, and the Petrarchan

and metaphysical conceits in verse, were conventional devices of style. It is

now just as much a literary convention to be outspoken on sexual matters

as it was to be reticent in the age of Charles Dickens and George Eliot.

3. In the most inclusive sense, common in structuralist criticism, all literary

works, no matter how seemingly realistic, are held to be entirely consti-

tuted by literary conventions, or “codes”—of genre, plot, character, lan-

guage, and so on—which a reader naturalizes, by assimilating these

conventions into the world of discourse and experience that, in the reader’s

time and place, are regarded as real, or “natural. ” (See structuralist criticism

and character and characterization.)

Invention was originally a term used in theories of rhetoric,andlaterin

literary criticism, to signify the “finding ” of the subject matter by an orator

or a poet; it then came to signify innovative elements in a work, in contrast

to the deliberate “imitation” of the forms and subjects of prior literary mod-

els. (See imitation.) At the present time, “invention” is often opposed to

“convention” (in sense 2, above) to signify the inauguration by a writer of

an unprecedented subject or theme or form or style, a nd the resulting work

is said to possess originality. Repeatedly in the history of literature, inno-

vative writers such as John Donne, Walt Whitman, James Jo yce, or Virginia

66 CONTEXTUAL CRITICISM

Woolf rebel against reigning conventions of their time to pro duce highly

original works, only to have their inventions imitated by other writers,

who thereby convert literary innovations into an additional set of literary

conventions. (For a discussion of the history and uses of the concept of origi-

nality, see Thomas McFarland, Originality and Imagination , 1985.)

There is nothing either good or bad in the extent or obviousness of con-

formity to pre-existing conventions; all depends on the effectiveness of the

use an individual writer makes of them. The pastoral elegy, for example, is

one of the most conspicuously convention-bound of literary forms, yet in

“Lycidas” (1638) John Milton achieved what, by wide critical agreement,

ranks as one of the greatest lyrics in the language. He did this by employing

the ancient pastoral rituals with freshness and power so as to absorb an indivi-

dual’s death into the universal human experience of mortality and to add to

his voice the resonance of earlier pastoral laments for a poet who died young.

See M. C. Bradbrook, Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy

(1935); Harry Levin, “Notes on Convention,” in Perspectives of Criticism

(1950); Graham Hough, Reflections on a Literary Revolution (1960); and the

issues On Convention in New Literary History, Vols. 13–14 (1981 and 1983).

For references to conventions in other entries, see pages 67, 104, 111.

conversion: 30.

Copernican theory (kopur



kan): 340.

copy-text: 399.

correspondences: 395.

cosmic irony: 188.

counterculture: 277; 80.

country house poem: 404.

couplet: 374.

courtesy books: 338.

courtly love: A doctrine of love, together with an elaborate code governing the

relations between aristocratic lovers, which was widely represented in the lyric

poems and chivalric romances of western Europe during the Middle Ages. The

development of the conventions of courtly love is usually attributed to the

troubadours (poets of Provence, in southern France) in the period from

the late eleventh century through the twelfth century. An influential book,

written in Latin in the latter twelfth century, was Andreas Capellanus’ De

arte honeste amandi, translated into English as The Art of Courtly Love. In the

COURTLY LOVE 67

conventional doctrine, love between the sexes, with its erotic and physical

aspects spiritualized, is regarded as the noblest passion this side of heaven.

The courtly lover idealizes and idolizes his beloved and subjects himself to

her every whim. (This love is often that of a bachelor knight for another

man’s wife, as in the stories of Tristan and Isolde or of Lancelot and Guinevere;

it must be remembered that marriage among the upper classes in medieval

Europe was usually not a relationship of love but a kind of business contract

for economic and political purposes.) The lover suffers agonies of body and

spirit as he is put to the test by his imperious sweetheart, but remains devoted

to her, manifesting his honor by his fidelity and his adherence to a rigorous

code of behavior, both in knightly battles and in the complex ceremonies of

courtly speech and conduct.

The origins of courtly love have been traced to a number of sources: a

serious reading of the Roman poet Ovid’s mock-serious book The Remedies of

Love; an imitation in lovers’ relations of the politics of feudalism (the lover is a

vassal, and both his lady and the god of love are his lords); and especially an

importation into amatory situations of Christian concepts and ritual and the

veneration of the Virgin Mary. Thus, the lady is exalted and worshiped; the

lover sins and repents; and if his faith stays steadfast, he may be admitted at last

into the lover’s heaven through his lady’s “gift of grace.”

From southern France the doctrines of courtly love spread to Chrétien

de T royes (who fl ourished from 1170–90) an d other poets and romance

writers in northern France; to Dante ( La Vita Nuova, 1290–94), Petrarch,

and other writers in fourteenth-century Italy; and to the love poets of

Germany and northern Europe. F or a reader of E nglish literature the con-

ventions of courtly love are best known by their occurrence in the medieval

romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,inChaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,

and l ater in the Petrarchan subject matter and the Petrarchan conceits of the

Elizabethan sonneteers.

“Courtly love” is a modern term that does not occur in medieval texts,

and there has long been a debate whether courtly love was limited to medie-

val literature and to elegant conversation at courts, or whether to some degree

it reflected the actual sentiments and conduct in aristocratic life of the time.

What is clear is that its views about the intensity and the ennobling power of

love as “the grand passion,” of the special sensibility and high spiritual status of

women, and of the complex decorum governing relations between the sexes

have profoundly affected not only the literature of love but also the actual

experience of “being in love” in the Western world, through the nineteenth

century and (to a diminished extent) even into our own day of sexual candor,

freedom, and the feminist movement for equivalence in the relations between

the sexes. Some feminists attack the medieval doctrine of courtly love, as well

as later tendencies to spiritualize and idealize women, as in fact demeaning to

them and as a covert device to ensure their social, political, and economic

subordination to men. See feminist criticism.

Refer to C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (1936); A. J. Denomy, The

Heresy of Courtly Love (1947); F. X. Newman, ed., The Meaning of Courtly

68 COURTLY LOVE

Love (1968); Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World (rev. 1974);

Roger Boase, The Origin and Meaning of Courtly Love: A Critical Study of Euro-

pean Scholarship (1977); David Burnley, Courtliness and Literature in Medieval

England (1998). For skeptical views of some commonly held opinions, see

D. W. Robertson, “Some Medieval Doctrines of Love,” in A Preface to Chaucer:

Studies in Medieval Perspectives (1962); Peter Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise

of European Love-Lyric (1965–66); E. Talbot Donaldson, “The Myth of Courtly

Love,” in Speaking of Chaucer (1970). For reappraisals of the role of women in

the tradition, see Andrée Kahn Blumstein, Misogyny and Idealization in the

Courtly Romance (1977); R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention

of Western Romantic Love (1991); Slavoj Žižek, “Courtly Love, or Woman as

Thing,” in Metastases of Enjoyment (1994).

For references to courtly love in other entries, see page 50.

Cowleyan Ode: 263.

crime fiction, detective story, murder mystery, mystery novel, and

police novel: These terms all describe narratives that center on criminal acts

and especially on the investigation, either by an amateur or a professional

detective, of a serious crime, generally a murder. Typically, the crime is com-

mitted in a closed environment that limits the number of possible suspects.

This type of plot was given its standard form by the short stories of Edgar

Allan Poe (“Murders in the Rue Morgue,” 1841, and “The Purloined Letter,”

1845), and later by the most widely known of all detective fiction, the short

stories and novels about Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle, published

mainly in the 1890s.

The 1920s and 1930s was the period of many major detective stories by

four Englishwomen: Agatha Christie (author of more than eighty novels and

creator of the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and of the doughty amateur

investigator Miss Jane Marple), Dorothy Sayers (creator of Lord Peter Wimsey),

Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham. Since that time women have continued

to be the primary authors of detective novels, including the prolific Americans

Mary Roberts Rinehart and Patricia Highsmith and the British authors P. D.

James and Ruth Rendell.

Through the first two decades of the last century, the typical detective

story involved well-mannered upper-class characters in a well-to-do milieu

such as a country house. In the 1920s, male writers in America inaugurated

the hard-boiled detective story, set in mean urban environments and fea-

turing violent actions in the pursuit of gangsters and other vicious criminals by

a “private eye,” notably Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Dashiell

Hammett’s Sam Spade. Detective stories have been favored recreational read-

ing, and the subject of critical writings, by a number of eminent literary fig-

ures, including T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Jacques Barzun.

Mystery novels (or mysteries,

or whodunits)

are a large class that

includes detective stories in addition to any other novels that focus on the

solution of a problem or of the source of a series of ominous events. Notable

CRIME FICTION 69

early examples are Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic romance The Mysteries of Udolpho

(1794) and the Victorian novel by Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868),

about the mystifying disappearance of a very valuable diamond.

The thriller designates any novel that features a rapid sequence of sensa-

tional events; often, such novels represent hairbreadth escapes of a protagonist

from relentless and terrifying pursuit by sinister enemies. This type of fiction

was inaugurated by William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), in which the

hero flees malignant persecution by an employer whose guilty secret he has

discovered. The term “thriller” was first applied to fiction in pulp magazines

and is now most frequently used for such popular writings, with formulaic

plots and thin characterization, as the spy stories by Ian Fleming about James

Bond. The term “thriller,” however, is sometimes extended to apply to the

much more complex and sophisticated spy fiction by authors such as John le

Carré and Anthony Price, as well as to Alfred Hitchcock’s cinematic master-

pieces of suspense and terror, including Rear Window and Vertigo. Detective

stories, mysteries, and thrillers constitute a major proportion of motion pic-

tures and of television dramas.

See the ground-breaking “Introduction” by Dorothy Sayers to her

anthology, The Omnibus of Crime (2nd ed., 1931); Jacques Barzun and

Wendell Hertig Taylor, A Catalogue of Crime (rev. and enl. ed., 1989); Julian

Symons, Bloody Murder (3rd ed., 1993); Charles J. Rzepka, Detective Fiction

(2005); and P. D. James, Talking about Detective Fiction (2009). Often hair-

raising in its subject matter, this genre has attracted a number of critical “com-

panions”: Ian Ousby, The Crime and Mystery Book: A Reader’s Companion

(1997); Rosemary Herbert, ed., The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery

Writing (1999); and Charles J. Rzepka and Lee Horsley, A Companion to

Crime Fiction (2010). For the police novel, see Leroy Panek, The American

Police Novel: A History (2003).

crisis (in a plot): 296.

criteria (in criticism): 70.

criticism: “Criticism,” or more specifically literary criticism, is the overall

term for studies concerned with defining, classifying, a nalyzing, interpreting,

and evaluating works of literature. Theoretical criticism proposes an

explicit theory of literature, in the sense of general principles, together

with a set of terms, distinctions, and categories, to be applied to identifying

and analyzing works of literature, as well as the criteria

(the standards or

norms)

by which these works and their writersaretobeevaluated.Theear-

liest, and enduringly important, treatise of theoretical criticism was Aristotle’s

Poetics (fourth century BC). Among the most influential theoretical critics in

the following centuries were Longinus in Greece; Horace in Rome; Boileau

and Sainte-Beuve in France; Baumgarten and Goethe in Germany; Samuel

Johnson, Coleridge, and Matthew Arnold in England; and Poe and Emerson

in America. Landmarks of theoretical criticism in the first half of the twentieth

70 CRISIS

century are I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (1924); R. S. Crane, ed.,

Critics and Criticism (1952); Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form

(1941, rev. 1957); Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957); and Erich

Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (trans.

1953, r eissued 2003).

Since the 1970s there have been a large number of publications—

Continental, American, and English—proposing diverse radical forms of criti-

cal theory. These are listed and dated in the entry theories and movements in

criticism; each theory in that list is also given a separate entry in this Glossary.

For a discussion of the special uses of the term “theory” in these critical

movements, see poststructuralism.

Practical criticism,orapplied criticism, concerns itself with particular

works and writers; in an applied critique, the theoretical principles controlling

the analysis, interpretation, and evaluation are often left implicit or brought in

only as the occasion demands. Among the more influential works of applied

criticism in England and America are the literary essays of Dryden in the

Restoration;Dr.Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets (1779–81); Coleridge’schapters

on the poetry of Wordsworth in Biographia Literaria (1817) and his lectures on

Shakespeare; William Hazlitt’s lectures on Shakespeare and the English poets

in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century; Matthew Arnold’s

Essays in Criticism (1865 and following); I. A. Richards’ Practical Criticism (1930);

T. S. Eliot’s Selected Essays (1932); and the many critical essays by Virginia

Woolf, F. R. Leavis, and Lionel Trilling. Cleanth Brooks’ The Well Wrought

Urn (1947) exemplifies the “close reading” of single texts which was the typical

mode of practical criticism in the American New Criticism. For an example of

practical criticism applied to a single poetic text, see Stanley Fish, Surprised by

Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (2nd ed., 1998).

In practical criticism, a frequent distinction is made between impression-

istic and judicial criticism:

Impressionistic criticism attempts to represent in words the felt qualities

of a particular passage or work and to express the responses (the “impression”)

that the work directly evokes from the critic. As William Hazlitt put it in his

essay “On Genius and Common Sense” (1824): “You decide from feeling, and

not from reason; that is, from the impression of a number of things on the mind

… t

hough you may not be able to analyze or account for it in the several

particulars.” And Walter Pater later said that in criticism “the first step toward

seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is,

to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly,” and posed as the basic question, “What

is this song or picture … to me?” (preface to Studies in the History of the Renais-

sance, 1873). At its extreme this mode of criticism becomes, in Anatole France’s

phrase, “the adventures of a sensitive soul among masterpieces.”

Judicial criticism, on the other hand, attempts not merely to commu-

nicate but to analyze and explain the effects of a work by reference to its sub-

ject, organization, techniques, and style, and to base the critic ’s individual

judgments on specified criteria of literary excellence.

CRITICISM 71

Rarely are these two modes of criticism sharply distinct in practice, but

good examples of primarily impressionistic commentary can be found in the

Greek Longinus (see the characterization of the Odyssey in his treatise On the

Sublime), Hazlitt, Walter Pater (the locus classicus of impressionism is his

description of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa in The Renaissance, 1873), and some of

the twentieth-century critical essays of E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf.

Types of traditional critical theories and of applied criticism can be use-

fully distinguished by their orientation—that is, according to whether, in

defining, explaining, and judging a work of literature, they refer the work

primarily to the outer world, to the reader, or to the author or else treat the

work as an independent entity:

1. Mimetic criticism views the literary work as an imitation, reflection, or

representation of the world and human life, and the primary criterion

applied to a work is the “truth” and “adequacy ” of its representation to

the matter that it represents or should represent. This mode of criticism,

which first appeared in Plato and (in a qualified way) in Aristotle, remains

characteristic of modern theories of literary realism. The notion that the

form of a work could itself be mimetic, either of the world or of the

writer’s intentional state, was attacked by the New Criticism. See imitation.

2. Pragmatic criticism views the work as something which is constructed

in order to achieve certain effects on the audience (effects such as aesthetic

pleasure, instruction, or kinds of emotion), and it tends to judge the value

of the work according to its success in achieving that aim. This approach,

which largely dominated literary discussion from the versified Art of Poetry

by the Roman Horace (first century BC) through the eighteenth century,

has been revived in rhetorical criticism, which emphasizes the artistic strategies

by which an author engages and influences the responses of readers to the

matters represented in a literary work. The pragmatic approach has also

been adopted by some structuralists who analyze a literary text as a system-

atic play of codes that produce the interpretative responses of a reader.

3. Expressive criticism treats a literary work primarily in relation to its

author. It defines poetry as an expression, or overflow, or utterance of

feelings or as the product of the poet’s imagination operating on his or

her perceptions, thoughts, and feelings; it tends to judge the work by its

sincerity, or its adequacy to the poet’s individual vision or state of mind;

and it often seeks in the work evidences of the particular temperament

and experiences of the author who, deliberately or unconsciously, has

revealed himself or herself in it. Such views were developed mainly by

romantic critics in the early nineteenth century and remain current in

our own time, especially in the writings of psychological and psychoanalytic

critics and in critics of consciousness such as Georges Poulet and the Geneva

School. For a reading of literary criticism itself as involving self-

expression, see Geoffrey Galt Harpham, The Character of Criticism, 2006.

72 CRITICISM

4. Objective criticism deals with a work of literature as something which

stands free from what is often called an “extrinsic” relationship to the poet,

to the audience, or to the environing world. Instead it describes the literary

product as a self-sufficient and autonomous object, or else as a world-

in-itself,whichistobecontemplatedasitsownendandtobeanalyzed

and judged solely by “intrinsic” criteria such as its complexity, coherence,

equilibrium, integrity, and the interrelations of its component elements.

The conception of the self-sufficiency of an aesthetic object was proposed

in Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790)—see distance and involvement—was taken

up by proponents of art for art’ssakein the latter part of the nineteenth cen-

tury, and has been elaborated in detailed modes of applied criticism by a

number of important critics since the 1920s, including the New Critics,the

Chicago School, and proponents of European formalism.

An essential critical enterprise that the ordinary reader takes for granted is

to establish a valid text for a literary work; see the entry textual criticism. Also,

criticism is often classified into types which bring to bear upon literature vari-

ous areas of knowledge in an attempt to identify the conditions and influences

that determine the particular characteristics and values of a literary work.

Accordingly, we have “historical criticism,”“biographical criticism,”“socio-

logical criticism” (see sociology of literature and Marxist criticism), psychological criti-

cism (a subspecies is psychoanalytic criticism), and archetypal or myth criticism

(which undertakes to explain the formation of types of literature by reference

to the views about myth and ritual in modern cultural anthropology).

For a detailed discussion of the classification of traditional theories that is

represented in this essay, see M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953),

chapter 1, and “Types and Orientations of Critical Theories” in Doing Things

with Texts: Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory (1989). On types of critical

approaches, refer also to René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature

(rev. 1970). Histories of criticism: René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism,

1750–1950 (7 vols., 1955ff.); Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism

in the Italian Renaissance (2 vols., 1963); Classical Criticism, ed. George A.

Kennedy (1989); The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism (multiple vols.,

1989–2013). On criticism in the earlier nineteenth century, see Abrams,

The

Mirror

and the Lamp; on twentieth-century criticism, refer to S. E. Hyman, The

Armed Vision (1948); Murray Krieger, The New Apologists for Poetry (1956);

Grant Webster, The Republic of Letters: A History of Postwar American Literary

Opinion (1979); Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (1980); Chris Baldick,

Criticism and Literary Theory, 1890 to the Present (1996); Jonathan Culler, Structuralist

Poetics (1975) and Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (1997).

Convenient anthologies of literary criticism are A. H. Gilbert, ed., Literary

Criticism, Plato to Croce (1962); Lionel Trilling, ed., Literary Criticism: An Intro-

ductory Reader (1970); Hazard Adams, ed., Critical Theory since Plato (2nd ed.,

1993). Anthologies that focus on theoretical criticism include Hazard Adams

and Leroy Searle, eds., Critical Theory since 1965 (1986); Vassilis Lambropoulos

and David Neal Miller, eds., Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: An Introductory

CRITICISM 73

Anthology (1987); David Lodge, ed., Modern Criticism and Theory (1988);

Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, Contemporary Literary Criticism (rev.

1989); and the most inclusive, Vincent Leitch and others, eds., The Norton

Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2001). Suggested readings in current types

of critical theory are included in the entry of this Glossary for each type.

For collections of essays on topics in late twentieth-century theory and

criticism, see Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth, eds., The Johns Hopkins

Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (1994); Frank Lentricchia and Thomas

McLaughlin, eds., Critical Terms for Literary Study (2nd ed., 1995).

For the many types of critical theory and practice, see archetypal criticism;

art for art’s sake; Chicago School; cognitive literary studies; contextual criticism; critics of

consciousness; Darwinian literary studies; deconstruction; dialogic criticism; ecocriticism;

feminist criticism; gender criticism; linguistics in modern criticism; Marxist criticism; New

Criticism; new historicism; phenomenology and criticism; postcolonial studies; psycholog-

ical and psychoanalytic criticism; queer theory; reader-response criticism; reception theory;

rhetorical criticism; Russian formalism; semiotics; sociological criticism; speech-act theory;

structuralist criticism; stylistics ; theories and movements in recent criticism.

criticism, theories and movements in recent: 402.

critics of consciousness: 290; 72.

critique: “Critique” is often used to designate an especially robust and searching

kind of criticism; it suggests a rational analysis of an intellectual position, or of

a work incorporating that position, with a sharp eye especially for errors, con-

fusions, or harmful implications. The term glances back to the German phi-

losopher

Immanuel Kant, who wrote three Critiques (of Pure Reason,

Practical Reason, and Judgment), published 1781–90. The fact that Kant’s

use of “critique” suggests a rigorous reliance on reason, implies confidence

in human autonomy, and is associated with Kant’s looking forward to

human emancipation (see Enlightenment) has made the term especially conge-

nial to Marxist thinkers. The use of “critique” is associated particularly with

the writings on “critical social theory” of the Frankfurt School, a group of

neo-Marxists that included Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor

Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Jürgen Habermas (see under Marxist criticism).

For brief and influential position statements, see Horkheimer, “Traditional

and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory (1992); and Adorno, “Resignation,”

in The Culture Industry (2001).

cultural constructs: 245; 21, 328.

cultural materialism: 250.

cultural poetics: 249.

cultural primitivism: 315.

74 CRITICISM, THEORIES AND MOVEMENTS IN RECENT

cultural studies: “Cultural studies” designates a cross-disciplinary enterprise for

analyzing the conditions that affect the production, reception, and cultural

significance of all types of institutions, practices, and products; among these,

literature is accounted as merely one of many forms of cultural “signifying

practices.” A chief concern is to specify the functioning of the social, eco-

nomic, and political forces and power structures that are said to produce the

diverse forms of cultural phenomena and to endow them with their social

“meanings,” their acceptance as “truth,” the modes of discourse in which

they are discussed, and their relative value and status.

One precursor of modern cultural studies was Roland Barthes, who in

Mythologies (1957, trans. 1972) analyzed the social conventions and “codes”

that confer meanings in such diverse social practices as women’s fashions and

professional wrestling. (See Barthes under semiotics and structuralism.) Another

was the British school of neo-Marxist studies of literature and art—especially

in their popular and working-class modes—as an integral part of the general

culture. This movement was inaugurated by Raymond Williams’ Culture and

Society (1958) and by Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1958, reprinted

1992), and it became institutionalized in the influential Birmingham Centre

for Contemporary Cultural Studies, founded by Hoggart in 1964. In the

United States, the vogue for cultural studies had its roots mainly in the mode

of literary and cultural criticism known as the “new historicism,” with its ante-

cedents both in poststructural theorists such as Louis Althusser and Michel

Foucault and in the treatment of culture as a set of signifying systems by

Clifford Geertz and other cultural anthropologists. (See under new historicism.)

A prominent endeavor in cultural studies is to subvert the distinctions in

traditional criticism between “high literature” and “high art” and what were

considered the lower forms that appeal to a much larger body of consumers.

Typically, cultural studies pay less attention to works in the established literary

canon than to popular fiction, best-selling romances (that is, love stories), jour-

nalism, and advertising, together with other arts that have mass appeal such as

cartoon comics, film, television “soap operas,” and rock and rap music. And

within the areas of literature and the more traditional arts, a frequent under-

taking is to move to the center of cultural study those works that, it is

claimed, have been marginalized or excluded by the aesthetic ideology of

white European and American males, and particularly the works of women,

minority ethnic groups, and colonial and postcolonial writers. Radical expo-

nents of cultural studies subordinate literary studies and criticism to political

activism; they orient their writings and teaching toward the explicit end of

reforming existing power structures and relations, which they consider to be

dominated by a privileged gender, race, or class. For the contributions of

Stuart Hall—a leader in British cultural studies—

to discussions of culture, race,

and

ethnicity, see David MorleyandKuan-HsingChen,eds.,Stuart Hall: Critical

Dialogues in Cultural Studies (1996).

Many cultural studies are devoted to the analysis and interpretation of

objects and social practices outside the realm of literature and the other arts;

these phenomena are viewed as endowed with meanings that are the product

CULTURAL STUDIES 75

of social forces and conventions and that may either express or oppose

the dominant structures of power in a culture. In theory, there is no limit to

the kinds of things and patterns of behavior to which such an analysis of

cultural “texts” may be applied; current studies deal with a spectrum ranging

from the vogue of bodybuilding through urban street fashions, and from

cross-dressing to the social gesture of smoking a cigarette.

See the journal Cultural Studies, 1987–; also Catherine Belsey, Critical

Practice (1980); Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectual and Popular Culture

(1989); Anthony Easthope, Literary into Cultural Studies (1991); Lawrence

Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies (1992);

Richard Klein, Cigarettes Are Sublime (1993); Valda Blundell, John Shepherd,

and Ian Taylor, eds., Relocating Cultural Studies: Developments in Theory and

Research (1993); Terry Lovell, ed., Feminist Cultural Studies (2 vols., 1995);

Houston A. Baker, Jr., Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg, eds.,

Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader (1996); Mieke Bal, The Practice of Cul-

tural Analysis (1997); Simon During, ed., The Cultural Studies Reader (2nd ed.,

1999); Simon During, Cultural Studies: A Critical Introduction (2005); Andrew

Edgar and Peter Sedgwick, eds., Cultural Theory: The Key Thinkers (2nd ed.,

2007). M. Jessica Munns and Gita Rajan, eds., A Cultural Studies Reader: History,

Theory, Practice (1995), traces cultural studies as far back as Matthew Arnold

in the Victorian era, then through the structural anthropology of Claude

Lévi-Strauss to many current practitioners. For references to cultural studies in

other entries, see page 54.

cyberfiction: 170.

cyberpunk: 356.

76 CYBERFICTION

dactylic (dakt



k): 219.

Dadaism: 390.

Darwinian literary studies: The application to literature of Charles Darwin’s

theory of evolution, especially the evolutionary concepts of the struggle for

existence and the survival of those individuals and groups best adapted to

their environment. The movement was begun in the mid-1990s by scholars

who argued for a wholesale refashioning of literary studies to bring them into

conformity with the findings of biological science, especially the theory of

evolution. Darwinian literary studies were one of several new areas of investi-

gation that were developed simultaneously with, or soon after, Edward O.

Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975), which proposed that evolu-

tionary pressures and results play a significant role not only in animal societies

but also in human culture. These investigations applied evolutionary principles

to the fields of psychology, anthropology, and epistemology (the study of

how human beings acquire knowledge).

The first major publication in Darwinian literary studies was Joseph

Carroll’s Evolution and Literary Theory (1995), written in express opposition

to the various modes of poststructuralist criticism, with their exclu sive focus

on textual or linguistic features and their treatment of culture in indepen-

dence from biolo gy. Carroll proposed, instead, that literary w orks shou ld

be studied as articulations of the vital needsandinterestsofhumanbeings,

viewed as adaptively evolved organisms. This approach, he claimed, would

enable critics to discover in works of literature, beneath their myriad details

of character and pl ot, a structure of motives, cognitive predispositions, and

behavior that, as the result of an age-old process of evolution, is specific to

the human species.

Many Darwinian studies focus on the analysis of themes in literature, espe-

cially those that deal with human reproductive behavior in sexual competition

and the selection of mates, and with the formation of social alliances and of

family relationships. When applied even to such unlikely seeming works as

those of Jane Austen, for example, such an approach stresses the fact that they

typically involve men who compete for women in their socioeconomic attri-

butes of money and rank, and women who compete for men in their attributes

of youth and beauty. When applied to the Homeric epics, the Darwinian

approach views these works as a series of stories in which men—Paris, for

example, who abducted Helen of Troy from Agamemnon—compete with

one another, fundamentally, not for power, status, or wealth but for the most

desirable sexual mates. In this respect, Darwinian criticism represents a variant of

archetypal criticism, and in its opposition to technical or linguistically oriented

forms of criticism and its emphasis on plot and character, it—like cognitive literary

studies—represents an updated form of humanism.

DARWINIAN LITERARY STUDIES 77

The kind of thematic analyses initially advanced by Darwinian literary

studies have been criticized as reductive and incapable of accounting for such

basic features of literature as tone, point of view, or the reliability of the nar-

rator. Another, more theoretical approach has emerged within the Darwinian

movement that is concerned less with literary analysis as such than in the ways

that literature in general represents the elemental features of human life. A key

work was Robert F. Storey’s Mimesis and the Human Animal (1996), which

proposed a “biogrammar” of the human species that stressed such aspects of

literature as its representation of human sociality and of elemental human

motives and mental functions. Storey then applied his biogrammar to an

analysis of the major genres of narrative, tragedy, and comedy, which he trea-

ted as highly developed forms of evolved and adaptive—or, in tragedy, of

maladaptive—responses to evolutionary pressures; each genre, he claimed,

had its distinctive kind of “phylogenetic” history of adaptive evolution.

Another type of Darwinian approach to literature is the study of how the

basic activities of writing and reading literary works contribute to the adaptive

fitness for survival of the human organism by developing useful patterns of

response, mapping out social relations, depicting intimate kin relationships,

clarifying our understanding of our fundamental nature, and in general help-

ing us to make sense of the environing world. Among the adaptive capacities

cultivated by literature is the ability to experience empathy and sympathy,

which provide the bases for altruism and collaboration. Some studies in this

area of literary investigation use methods, such as statistical analyses, which

ally them with the social sciences rather than the humanities.

For an overview of Darwinian literary studies and of their relation to

other fields such as evolutionary philosophy and ecocriticism, see two works

by Joseph Carroll: Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature

(2004); and Reading Human Nature: Literary Darwinism in Theory and Practice

(2011). The initial anthology of Darwinian approaches to literature was Jonathan

Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson, eds., The Literary Animal: Evolution and the

Nature of Narrative (2005). This book was the subject of an important essay

by Steven Pinker, “Toward a Consilient Theory of Literature,” Philosophy

and Literature 31 (2007): 162–78. Among other relevant studies are Marcus

Nordlund, Shakespeare and the Nature of Love: Literature, Culture, Evolution

(2007); Jonathan Gottschall, The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the

World of Homer (2008); Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cogni-

tion, and Fiction (2009); and Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure,

and Human Evolution (2009). For instances of a more nuanced approach that

incorporates Darwinian thinking, see William Flesch, Comeuppance: Costly Sig-

naling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction (2008);

and Nancy Easterlin, A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation

(2012), both of which, while receptive to evolutionary arguments, contend

that cultural products, and literature in particular, cannot be adequately

explained simply by reference to evolutionary drives. For controversies in

which Darwinian critics have been engaged, see the special double issue of

Style 42.2–3 (2008); and Jonathan Kramnick, “Against Literary Darwinism,”

78 DARWINIAN LITERARY STUDIES

Critical Inquiry 37 (Winter 2011): pp. 315–47; for responses to this essay, see

Critical Inquiry 38 (Winter 2012). For references to Darwinian literary studies in

other entries, see page 55.

dead metaphor: 134.

death of the author: 310.

Decadence, the: In the latter part of the nineteenth century, some French propo-

nents of the doctrines of Aestheticism, especially Charles Baudelaire, also espoused

views and values that developed into a movement called “the Decadence.” The

term (not regarded by its exponents as derogatory) was based on qualities attrib-

uted to the literature of Hellenistic Greece in the last three centuries BC and to

Roman literature after the death of the Emperor Augustus in AD 14. These

literatures were said to possess the high refinement and subtle beauties of a

culture and art that had passed their vigorous prime but manifested a special

savor of incipient decay. Such was also held to be the state of European civiliza-

tion, especially in France, as it approached the end of the nineteenth century.

Many of the precepts of the Decadence were voiced by Théophile Gautier

in the “Notice,” describing Baudelaire’s poetry, which he prefixed to an edition

of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (“Flowers of Evil”) in 1868. Central to the

Decadent movement was the view that art is totally opposed to “nature,” in

the sense both of biological nature and of the standard, or “natural,” norms of

morality and sexual behavior. The thoroughgoing Decadent writer cultivates

high artifice in style and, often, the bizarre in subject matter, recoils from the

fecundity and exuberance of the organic and instinctual life of nature, prefers

elaborate dress over the living human form and cosmetics over the natural

hue, and sometimes sets out to violate what is commonly held to be “natural”

in human experience by resorting to drugs, deviancy from standard norms of

behavior, and sexual experimentation in the attempt to achieve (in a phrase

echoed from the French poet Arthur Rimbaud) “the systematic derangement

of all the senses.” The movement reached its height in the last two decades of

the nineteenth century; extreme products were the novel À rebours (“Against

the Grain”), written by J-K. Huysmans in 1884, and some of the paintings of

Gustave Moreau. This period is also known as the fin de siècle (end of the

century); the phrase connotes the lassitude, satiety, and ennui expressed by

many writers of the Decadence.

In England, the ideas, moods, and behavior of the Decadence were mani-

fested, beginning in the 1860s, in the poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne,

and in the 1890s by writers such as Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson,

and Lionel Johnson; the notable artist of the English Decadence was Aubrey

Beardsley. In the search for strange sensations, a number of English Decadents

of the 1890s experimented with drugs and espoused what were conventionally

held to be extranatural modes of sexual experience; several of them died young.

Representative literary productions are Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray

(1891), his play Salomé (1893), and many of the poems of Ernest Dowson.

DECADENCE, THE 79

The emphases of the Decadence on drugged perception, sexual experi-

mentation, and the deliberate inversion of conventional moral, social, and

artistic norms reappeared, with modern variations, in the Beat poets and nove-

lists of the 1950s and in the counterculture of the decades that followed.

See Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony (1933); A. E. Carter, The Idea of Dec-

adence in French Literature, 1830–1900 (1958); Karl Beckson, ed., Aesthetes and

Decadents of the 1890s (1966); Richard Gilman, Decadence: The Strange Life of an

Epithet (1979); Ian Fletcher, ed., Decadence and the 1890s (1979); G. H. Pittock

Murray, Spectrum of Decadence: The Literature of the 1890s (1993); and Jane

Desmarais, A Cultural History of Decadence (2008). A useful descriptive guide

to books on the subject is Linda C. Dowling, Aestheticism and Decadence: A

Selective Annotated Bibliography (1977).

decasyllabic couplet (dek



la



k): 374.

deconstruction: “Deconstruction,” as applied in the criticism of literature, desig-

nates a theory and practice of reading that questions and claims to “subvert” or

“undermine” the assumption that the system of language is based on grounds

that are adequate to establish the boundaries, the coherence or unity, and the

determinate meanings of a literary text. Typically, a deconstructive reading sets

out to show that conflicting forces within the text itself serve to dissipate the

seeming definiteness of its structure and meanings into an indefinite array of

incompatible and undecidable possibilities.

The originator and namer of deconstruction is the French thinker Jacques

Derrida, among whose precursors were Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) and

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)—German philosophers who put to radical

question fundamental philosophical concepts such as “knowledge,”“truth,”

and “identity”—as well as Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), whose psychoanalysis

violated traditional concepts of a coherent individual consciousness and a uni-

tary self. Derrida presented his basic views in three books, all published in

1967, entitled Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Speech and Phenom-

ena; after that date he reiterated, expanded, and applied those views in a rapid

sequence of publications.

Derrida’s writings are complex and elusive, and the summary here can only

indicate some of their main tendencies. His vantage point is what h e calls, in

Of Grammatology, “the axial proposition that th ere is no outside-the-text”

(“il n’ya rien hors du texte,” or alternatively “il n’y a pas de hors-texte”).

Like all Derrida’s key terms and statements, this has multiple significations,

but a primary one is th at a reader can not get beyond verbal signs to any

things-in-themselves, which, because they exist independently of the system

of langua ge, might serve to an chor a determinable meaning.

Derrida’s reiterated claim is that not only all Western philosophies and

theories of language but all Western uses of language, hence all Western cul-

ture, are logocentric; that is, they are centered or grounded on a “logos”

(which in Greek signified both “word” and “rationality”) or, in a phrase he

adopts from Heidegger, they rely on “the

metaphysics of presence.” They are

80 DECASYLLABIC COUPLET

logocentric, according to Derrida, in part because they are phonocentric;

that is, they grant, implicitly or explicitly, logical “priority,” or “privilege,”

to speech over writing as the model for analyzing all discourse. By logos, or

presence, Derrida signifies what he also calls an “ultimate referent”— a self-

certifying and self-sufficient ground, or foundation, available to us totally out-

side the play of language itself, that is directly present to our awareness and

serves to “center” (that is, to anchor, organize, and guarantee) the structure

of the linguistic system, and as a result suffices to fix the bounds, coherence,

and determinate meanings of any spoken or written utterance within that sys-

tem. (On Derrida’s “decentering” of structuralism, see poststructuralism.) His-

torical instances of such claimed foundations for language are God as the

guarantor of its validity, or a Platonic form of the true reference of a general

term, or a Hegelian “telos” or goal toward which all process strives, or an

intention to signify something determinate that is directly present to the

awareness of the person who initiates an utterance. Derrida undertakes to

show that these and all other attempts by Western philosophy to establish an

absolute ground in presence, and all implicit reliance on such a ground in

using language, are bound to fail. Especially, he directs his skeptical exposition

against the phonocentric assumption—which he regards as central in Western

theories of language—that at the instant of speaking, the “ intention” of a

speaker to mean something determinate by an utterance is immediately and

fully present in the speaker’s consciousness and is also communicable to an

auditor. (See intention, under interpretation and hermeneutics.) In Derrida’s view,

we cannot help but say more, and other, than we intend to say.

Derrida expresses his alternative conception, that the play of linguistic

meanings is “undecidable,” in terms derived from Saussure’sviewthatina

sign system, both the signifiers (the material elements of a language, whether

spoken or written) and the signifieds (their conceptual meanings) owe their

seeming identities not to their own “positive” or inherent features but to their

“differences” from other speech sounds, written marks, or conceptual significa-

tions. (See Saussure, in linguistics in modern criticism and in semiotics.) From this

view Derrida evolves his radical claim that the features that, in any particular

utterance, would serve to establish the signified meaning of a word are never

“present

” t

o us in their own positive identity, since both these features and their

significations are nothing other than a network of differences. On the other

hand, neither can these identifying features be said to be strictly “absent”;

instead, in any spoken or written utterance, the apparent meaning is the result

only of a “self-effacing” trace—self-effacing in that one is not aware of it—

which consists of all the nonpresent differences from other elements in the lan-

guage system that invest the utterance with its “effect” of having a meaning in

its own right. The consequence, in Derrida’s view, is that we can never, in any

instance of speech or writing, have a demonstrably fixed and decidable present

meaning. He concedes that the differential play (jeu)oflanguagemayproduce

the “effects” of decidable meanings in an utterance or text but asserts that these

are merely effects, and they lack a ground that would justify certainty in

interpretation.

DECONSTRUCTION 81

In a characteristic move, Derrida coins the portmanteau term différance,

in which, he says, he uses the spelling “-ance” instead of “-ence” to indicate a

fusion of two senses of the French verb “différer”: to be different, and to

defer. This double sense points to the phenomenon that, on the one hand, a

text proffers the “effect” of having a significance that is the product of its dif-

ference, but that on the other hand, since this proffered significance can never

come to rest in an actual “presence”—or in a language-independent reality

Derrida calls a transcendental signified—its determinate specification is

deferred from one linguistic interpretation to another in a movement or

“play,” as Derrida puts it, en abîme—that is, in an endless regress. To Derrida’s

view, then, it is difference that makes possible the meaning whose possibility

(as a decidable meaning) it necessarily baffles. As Derrida says in another of his

coinages, the meaning of any spoken or written utterance, by the action of

opposing internal linguistic forces, is ineluctably disseminated—a term

which includes, among its deliberately contradictory significations, that of

having an effect of meaning (a “semantic” effect), of dispersing meanings

among innumerable alternatives, and of negating any specific meaning. There

is thus no ground, in the incessant play of difference that constitutes any

language, for attributing a decidable meaning, or even a finite set of determi-

nately multiple meanings (which he calls “polysemy”), to any utterance that

we speak or write. (What Derrida calls “polysemy” is what William Empson

called “ambiguity”;seeambiguity.) As Derrida puts it in Writing and Difference:

“The absence of a transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of

signification infinitely” (p. 280).

Several of Derrida’s diverse skeptical procedures have been especially influ-

ential in deconstructive literary criticism. A cardinal procedure is to subvert the

innumerable binary oppositions—such as speech/writing, nature/culture,

truth/error, male/female—which are essential structural elements in logocentric

language. Derrida shows that such oppositions constitute a tacit hierarchy, in

which the first term functions as privileged and superior and the second term

as derivative and inferior. Derrida’s procedure is to invert the hierarchy by

showing that the primary term can be made out to be derivative from, or a

special case of, the secondary term; but instead of stopping at this reversal, he

goes on to destabilize both hierarchies, leaving them in a condition of undecid-

ability. (Among deconstructive literary critics, one such demonstration is to take

the standard hierarchical opposition of literature/criticism, to invert it so as to

make criticism primary and literature secondary, and then to represent, as an

decidable set of oppositions, the assertions that criticism is a species of litera-

ture and that literature is a species of criticism.) A second operation influential in

literary criticism is Derrida’s deconstruction of any attempt to establish a

securely determinate bound, or limit, or margin, to a textual work so as to dif-

ferentiate what is “inside” from what is “outside” the work. A third operation is

his analysis of the inherent nonlogicality, or “rhetoricity”—that is, the inescap-

able reliance on rhetorical figures and figurative language—in all uses of language,

including in what philosophers have traditionally claimed to be the strictly lit-

eral and logical arguments of philosophy. Derrida, for example, emphasizes the

82 DECONSTRUCTION

indispensable reliance in all modes of discourse on metaphors that are assumed

to be merely convenient substitutes for literal,or“proper” meanings; then he

undertakes to show, on the one hand, that metaphors cannot be reduced to

literal meanings but, on the other hand, that supposedly literal terms are them-

selves metaphors whose metaphoric nature has been forgotten.

Derrida’s characteristic way of proceeding is not to lay out his deconstructive

concepts and operations in a systematic exposition but to allow them to emerge

in a sequence of exemplary close readings of passages from writings that range

from Plato through Jean-Jacques Rousseau to the present era—wri tings that, by

standard classification, are mainly philosophical, although occasionally literary. He

describes his procedure as a “double reading.” Initially, that is, he interprets a text

as, in the standard fashion, “lisible” (readable or intelligible) since it engenders

“effe cts” of having determinate meanings. But this reading, Derrida says, is only

“provi sional,” as a stage toward a second, or deconstructive “critical reading,”

which disseminates the provisional meaning into an indefinite range of significa-

tions that, he claims, always involve (in a term taken from logic) an aporia—an

insuperable deadlock, or “double bind,” of incompatible or contradictory mean-

ings which are “undecidable” in that we lack any sufficient ground for choosing

among them. The result, in Derrida’s rendering, is that each text deconstructs

itself by undermining its own supposed grounds and dispersing itself into inco-

herent meanings in a way, he claims, that the deconstructive reader neither initi-

ates nor produces; deconstruction is something that simply “happens” in a critical

reading. Derrida asserts, furthermore, that he has no option except to attempt to

communicate his deconstructive readings in the prevailing logocentric language,

hence that his own interpretive texts deconstruct themselves in the very act of

deconstructing the texts to which they are applied. He insists, however, that

“deconstruction has nothing to do with destruction” and that the standard uses

of language will inevitably go on; what he undertakes, he says, is merely to

“situat e” or “reinscribe” any text in a system of difference which shows the insta-

bility of the effects to which the text owes its seeming intelligibility.

Derrida did not propose deconstruction as a mode of literary criticism but

as a way of reading all kinds of texts so as to reveal and subvert the tacit meta-

physical presuppositions of Western thought. His views and procedures, how-

ever, have been taken up by literary critics, especially in America, who have

adapted Derrida’s “critical reading” to the kind of close reading of particular

literary texts which had earlier been the familiar procedure of the New Criti-

cism; they do so, however, Paul de Man has said, in a way which reveals that

new-critical close readings “

were not nearly close enough.” The

end results of

the two kinds of close reading are utterly diverse. New-critical explications of

texts had undertaken to show that a great literary work, in the tight internal

relations of its figurative and paradoxical meanings, constitutes a freestanding,

bounded, and organic entity of multiplex yet determinate meanings. On the

contrary, a radically deconstructive close reading undertakes to show that a

literary text lacks a “totalized” boundary that makes it an entity, much less

an organic unity; also that the text, by a play of internal counterforces, disse-

minates into an indefinite range of self-conflicting significations. Some

DECONSTRUCTION 83

deconstructive critics claim that a literary text is superior to nonliterary texts

but only because, by its self-reference, it shows itself to be more aware of

features that all texts inescapably share; that is, its fictionality, its lack of a gen-

uine ground, and especially its patent “rhetoricity,” or use of figurative proce-

dures—features that make any “right reading” or “correct reading” of a text

impossible. Derrida himself has described literature as “the most interesting

thing in the world, maybe more interesting than the world” in that it includes

both the actual and the possible. See Derrida, “This Strange Institution Called

Literature,” in Acts of Literature , ed. Derek Attridge (1992), pp. 43–70.

Paul de Man was the most innovative and influential of the critics who

applied deconstruction to the reading of literary texts. In de Man’s later writ-

ings, he represented the basic conflicting forces within a text under the headings

of “grammar” (the code or rules of language) as opposed to “rhetoric” (the

unruly play of figures and tropes), and aligned these with other opposed forces,

such as the “constative” versus “performative” linguistic functions that had been

distinguished by John Austin (see speech-act theory). In its grammatical aspect, lan-

guage persistently aspires to determinate, referential, and logically ordered asser-

tions, which are persistently dispersed by its rhetorical aspect into an open set of

nonreferential and illogical possibilities. A literary text, then, of inner necessity

says one thing and performs another, or as de Man alternatively puts the matter,

atext“simultaneously asserts and denies the authority of its own rhetorical

mode” (Allegories of Reading, 1979, p. 17). The inevitable result, for a critical

reading, is an aporia of “vertiginous possibilities.”

Barbara Johnson, once a student of de Man’s, applied deconstructive

readings not only to literary texts but to the writings of other critics, including

Derrida himself. Her succinct statement of the aim and methods of a

deconstructive reading is often cited:

Deconstruction is not synonymous with destruction…. The deconstruction

of a text does not proceed by random doubt or arbitrary subversion,

but by the careful teasing out of warring forces of signification within

the text itself. If anything is destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is

not the text, but the claim to unequivocal domination of one mode of

signifying over another. (The Critical Difference, 1980, p. 5.)

J. Hillis Miller, formerly the leading American representative of the

Geneva School of consciousness-criticism, later became one of the most promi-

nent of deconstructors, known especially for his application of this type of

critical reading to prose fiction. Miller’s statement of his critical practice indi-

cates how drastic the result may be of applying to works of literature the con-

cepts and procedures that Derrida had developed for deconstructing the

foundations of Western metaphysics:

construction as a mode of interpretation works by a careful and

circumspect entering of each textual labyrinth.… The deconstructive

critic seeks to find, by this process of retracing, the element in the

system studied which is alogical, the thread in the text in question

84 DECONSTRUCTION

which will unravel it all, or the loose stone which will pull down the

whole building. The deconstruction, rather, annihilates the ground on

which the building stands by showing that the text has already anni-

hilated the ground, knowingly or unknowingly. Deconstruction is not

a dismantling of the structure of a text but a demonstration that it has

already dismantled itself. (Stevens’“Rock and Criticism as Cure, II,” in

Miller, Theory Then and Now, 1991, p. 126.)

For other aspects of Derrida’sviews,seepoststructuralism and refer to Geoffrey

Bennington, Jacques Derrida (1993). A useful anthology of selections from Derrida

is A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (1991). Acts of Literature,

ed. Derek Attridge (1992), is a selection of Derrida’s discussions of literary texts.

An accessible introductiontoDerrida’s views is the edition by Gerald Graff of

Derrida’s noted dispute with John R. Searle about the speech-act theory of

John Austin, entitled Limited Inc. (1988); on this dispute see also Jonathan Culler,

“Meani ng and Iterability,” in On Deconstruction (1982), and Geoffrey Galt

Harpham, “Derrida and the Ethics of Criticism,” in Shadows of Ethics: Criticism

and the Just Society (1999). Books exemplifying types of deconstructive literary

criticism: Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (1971), and Allegories of Reading

(1979); Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric

of Reading (1980), and A World of Difference (1987); J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and

Repetition: Seven English Novels (1982), The Linguistic Moment: From Wordsworth to

Stevens (1985), and Theory Then and Now (1991); Cynthia Chase, Decomposing

Figures: Rhetorical Readings in the Romantic Tradition (1986). Expositions of Derrida’s

deconstruction and of its applications to literary criticism: Geoffrey Hartman,

Saving the Text (1981); Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction (1982); Richard Rorty,

“Phil osophy as a Kind of Writing,” in Consequences of Pragmatism (1982); Michael

Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction (1982); Christopher Norris, Paul de Man (1988).

For the range of deconstructive literary criticism, refer to Martin McQuillan, ed.,

Deconstruction: A Reader (2001); for a positive assessment of this criticism, see

Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (3rd ed., 2002).

Among the many critiques of Derrida and of various practitioners of

deconstructive

literary criticism are Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism

(1984); M. H. Abrams, “The Deconstructive Angel,”“How to Do Things

with Texts,” and “Construing and Deconstructing,” in Doing Things with

Texts (1989); John M. Ellis, Against Deconstruction (1989); Wendell V. Harris,

ed., Beyond Poststructuralism (1996). Essays that oppose the theory and practice

of deconstruction are collected in The Emperor Redressed: Critiquing Critical

Theory, ed. Dwight Eddins (1995), and Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of

Dissent, eds. Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral (2005).

For references to deconstruction in other entries, see pages 5, 165, 331, 398.

décor (dakor): 363.

decorum: “Decorum,” as a term in literary criticism, designates the view that

there should be propriety, or fitness, in the way that a literary genre, its subject

DECORUM 85

matter, its characters and actions, and the style of its narration and dialogue are

matched to one another. The doctrine has its roots in classical theory, espe-

cially in the versified essay Art of Poetry by the Roman Horace in the first

century BC. It achieved an elaborate form in the criticism and composition

of literature in the Renaissance and the Neoclassic age, when (as John Milton

put it in his essay Of Education, 1644) decorum became “the grand master-

piece to observe.” In its most rigid application, literary forms, characters, and

style were each ordered in hierarchies, or “levels,” from high through middle

to low, and all these elements had to be matched to one another. Thus, com-

edy must not be mixed with tragedy, and the highest and most serious genres

(epic and tragedy) must represent characters of the highest social classes (kings

and nobility) acting in a way appropriate to their status and speaking in the

high style. A number of critics in this period, however, especially in England,

maintained the theory of decorum in only limited ways. Thomas Rymer

(1641–1713) was an English proponent, and Samuel Johnson (1709–84) was

a notable opponent of the strict form of literary decorum.

See neoclassic and romantic, poetic diction,andstyle, and refer to Vernon Hall,

Renaissance Literary Criticism: A Study of Its Social Content (1945). Erich Auerbach’s

Mimesis (trans. 1953, reprinted 2003) describes the sustained conflict in post-

classical Europe between the reigning doctrines of literary decorum and the

example of the Bible, in which t he highest matters, i ncluding the sublime

tragedy of the l ife and passion of Christ, are intermingled with base characters

and humble narrative detail and are treated with what seemed to a clas sical

taste a blatant indecorum of style. For Wordsworth’s deliberate inversion of

traditional decorum at the beginning of the nineteenth century, by investing

the common, the lowly, and the trivial with high dignity and sublimity, see

M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (1971), pp . 390–408. For references to

decorum in other entries, see pages 23 8, 298, 3 83.

deep structure (linguistic): 199.

defamiliarize: 142.

deictic (d



ık



k): 233.

deism: A widespread mode of religious thought that manifested the faith in the

supremacy of human reason during the European Enlightenment in the latter

part of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. Deism has been suc-

cinctly described as “religion without revelation.” The thoroughgoing deist

renounced, as violating reason, all “revealed religion”—that is, all religions,

including Christianity, which are based on faith in the truths revealed in spe-

cial scriptures at a certain time and place and therefore available to only par-

ticular individuals or groups. The deist instead relied on those truths which, it

was claimed, prove their accord with universal human reason by the fact that

they are to be found in all religions, everywhere, at all times. Accordingly, the

basic tenets of deism—for example, that there is a deity, discoverable by

86 DEEP STRUCTURE

reasoning from the creation to the creator, who deserves our worship and

sanctions all moral values—were, in theory, the elements shared by all partic-

ular, or “positive,” religions. Many thinkers assimilated aspects of deism while

remaining professing Christians. Alexander Pope, without renouncing his

Catholicism, expressed succinctly the basic tenets of deism in his poem “The

Universal Prayer” (1738), which begins

Father of all! in every age,

In every clime adored,

By saint, by savage, and by sage,

Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!

deliberative oratory: 342.

demotic style (demot

ik): 383.

denotation: 65.

dénouement (da noo män

): 296.

descriptive-meditative lyric: 404.

detective story: 69; 3, 48.

deus ex machina (da

us ex mak



na): Latin for “a god from a machine.” It

designates the practice of some Greek playwrights (especially Euripides) to end

a drama with a god, lowered to the stage by a mechanical apparatus, who by his

judgment and commands resolves the dilemmas of the human characters. The

phrase is now used for any forced and improbable device—a telltale birthmark,

an unexpected inheritance, the discovery of a lost will or letter—by which a

hard-pressed author resolves a plot. Conspicuous examples occur even in

major novels like Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1837–38) and Thomas Hardy’s

Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891). The German playwright Bertolt Brecht parodied

such devices in the madcap conclusion of his Threepenny Opera (1928). See plot.

diachronic (d



ıakron

ik): 194.

dialects: 197 .

dialogic criticism: “Dialogic criticism” is modeled on the theory and critical

procedures of the Soviet critic Mikhail Bakhtin who, although he published

his major works in the 1920s and 1930s, remained virtually unknown to the

West until the 1980s, when translations of his writings gave him a wide and

rapidly increasing influence. To Bakhtin a literary work is not (as in various

poststructural theories) a text whose meanings are produced by the play of

impersonal linguistic or economic or cultural forces but a site for the dialogic

interaction of multiple voices, or modes of discourse, each of which is not

DIALOGIC CRITICISM 87

merely a verbal but a social phenomenon, and as such is the product of mani-

fold determinants that are specific to a class, social group, and speech commu-

nity. A person’s speech does not express a preexistent and autonomous

individuality; instead, his or her character emerges in the course of the dia-

logue and is composed of languages from diverse social contexts. Each utter-

ance, furthermore, whether in actual life or as represented in literature, owes

its precise inflection and meaning to a number of attendant factors—the spe-

cific social situation in which it is spoken, the relation of its speaker to an

actual or anticipated listener, and the relation of the utterance to the prior

utterances to which it is (explicitly or implicitly) a response.

Bakhtin’s prime interest was in the novel, and especially in the ways that

the multiple voices that constitute the text of any novel disrupt the authority

of the author’s single voice. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929, trans. by

Caryl Emerson, 1984), he contrasts the monologic novels of writers such as

Leo Tolstoy—which undertake to subordinate the voices of all the characters

to the authoritative discourse and controlling purposes of the author—to the

dialogic form (or “polyphonic form”) of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novels, in

which the characters are liberated to speak “a plurality of independent and

unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid

voices.” In Bakhtin’s view, however, a novel can never be totally monologic,

since the narrator’s reports of the utterances of another character are inescap-

ably “double-voiced” (in that we can distinguish therein the author’s own

accent and inflection) and also dialogic (in that the author’s discourse contin-

ually reinforces, alters, or contests with the types of speech that it reports).

In Rabelais and His World (trans. 1984), Bakhtin proposed his widely cited

concept of the carnivalesque in certain works of literature. This literary mode

parallels the flouting of authority and temporary inversion of social hierarchies

that, in many cultures, are permitted during a season of carnival. The literary

work does so by introducing a mingling of voices from diverse social levels

that are free to mock and subvert authority, to flout social norms by ribaldry,

and to exhibit various ways of profaning what is ordinarily regarded as sacro-

sanct. Bakhtin traces the occurrence of the carnivalesque in ancient, medieval,

and Renaissance writers (especially in Rabelais); he also asserts that the mode

recurs later, especially in the play of irreverent, parodic, and subversive voices

in the novels of Dostoevsky—novels that are both dialogic and carnivalesque.

In an essay on “Discourse in the Novel” (1934–35), Bakhtin develops his

view that the novel is constituted by a multiplicity of divergent and contending

social voices that achieve their full significance only in the process of their dia-

logic interaction both with each other and with the voice of the narrator.

Bakhtin explicitly sets his theory against A ristotle’ s Poetics, whi ch proposed

that the primary component in narrative forms is a plot that evolves coherently

from its beginning to an end in which all complications are resolved (see plot).

Instead, Bakhtin elevates discourse (equivalent to Aristotle’

s subordinate element

of di

ction) into the primary component of a narrative work, and he describes

discourse as a medley of voices, social attitudes, and values that are not only

opposed but irreconcilable, with the result that the work remains unresolved and

88 DIALOGIC CRITICISM

open-ended. Although he wrote during the Stalinist regime in Russia, Bakhtin’s

libertarian and open concept of the literary narrative is obviously, although tac-

itly, opposed to the Soviet version of Marxist criticism, which stresses the way a

novel either reflects or distorts the true social reality, or expresses only a single

dominant ideology, or should exemplify a “social realism” that accords with an

authoritarian party line. See Marxist criticism, and for a discussion of the complex

issue of Bakhtin’srelationtoMarxismandSovietliterary criticism, see Simon

Dentith, Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader (1995), pp. 8–21.

Bakhtin’s views have been, in some part and in diverse ways, incorpo-

rated by representatives of various types of critical theory and practice,

whether traditional or poststructural. Among current students of literature,

those who are identified specifically as “dialogic critics” follow Bakhtin’s

example by proposing that the primary component in the constitution of nar-

rative works, or of literature generally—and of general culture as well—is a

plurality of contending and mutually qualifying social voices, with no possi-

bility of a decisive resolution into a monologic truth. Self-reflexively, a thor-

oughgoing dialogic critic, in accordance with Bakhtin’s views, considers his or

her own critical writings to be simply one voice among many in the conten-

tion of critical theories and practices which coexist in a sustained tension of

opposition and mutual definition. As Don Bialostosky, a chief spokesman for

dialogic criticism, voiced its rationale and ideal:

As a self-conscious practice, dialogic criticism turns its inescapable

involvement with some other voices into a program of articulating itself

with all the other voices of the discipline, the culture, or the world of

cultures to which it makes itself responsible…. Neither a live-

and-let-live relativism nor a settle-it-once-and-for-all authoritarianism

but a strenuous and open-ended dialogism would keep them talking to

themselves and to one another, discovering their affinities without

resting in them and clarifying their differences without resolving them.

(“Dialogic Criticism,” in Contemporary Literary Theory,eds.G.Douglas

Atkins and Laura Morrow, 1989, pp. 223–24.)

See the related critical enterprise called discourse analysis; and in addition to

the writings mentioned above, refer to Mikhail Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination,

ed. Michael Holquist (1981), and Speech Genres and Other Late Essays,eds.Caryl

Emerson and Michael Holquist (1986). For Bakhtin’s life and intellectual views,

with attention to the problem of identifying writings that Bakhtin published

under the names of various of his colleagues, see Katerina Clark and Michael

Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (1984), and Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson,

Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Poetics (1990). An influential early exposition that

publicized Bakhtin’s ideas in the West was Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin:

The Dialogical Principle (1984). A later book describing the wide dissemination of

these ideas is David Lodge’s After Bakhtin (1990). For an application of dialogic

criticism, see Don H. Bialostosky,

Wordsworth, Dialogics, and the Practice of Criticism

(1992).

For a critical view of Bakhtin’s claims, see René Wellek, AHistoryof

Modern Criticism, 1750–1950, Vol. 7 (1991), pp. 354–71.

DIALOGIC CRITICISM 89

dialogic form: 88.

dialogue: 48.

diary: 30.

diction: 297; 88.

didactic literature: The adjective “didactic,” which means “intended to give

instruction,” is applied to works of literature that are designed to expound a branch

of knowledge or else to embody, in imaginative or fictional form, a moral, reli-

gious, or philosophical doctrine or theme.(Seetheentryliterature.) Such works are

commonly distinguished from essentially imaginative works (sometimes called

“mimetic” or “representational”) in which the materials are organized and ren-

dered, not in order to expound and enhance the appeal of the doctrine they

embody, but in order to enhance the intrinsic interest of the materials themselves

and their capacity to move and give artistic pleasure to an audience. In the first

century BC, the Roman Lucretius wrote his didactic poem De Rerum Natura

(“On the Nature of Things”) to expound and make persuasive and appealing his

naturalistic philosophy and ethics, and in the same era Virgil wrote his Georgics,in

which the poetic elements add aesthetic appeal to a laudation of rural life and infor-

mation about the practical management of a farm. Most medieval and much

Renaissance literature was didactic in intention. In the eighteenth century, a num-

ber of poets wrote georgics (on the model of Virgil), describing in verse such

utilitarian arts as sheepherding, running a sugar plantation, and mak ing cider.

Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism and his Essay on Man are eighteenth-century

didactic poems on the subjects of literary criticism and of moral philosophy.

Such works for the most part directly describe the principles and proce-

dures of a branch of knowledge or a craft, or else argue an explicit doctrine by

proofs and examples. Didactic literature, however, may also take on the attri-

butes of imaginative works by embodying the doctrine in a fictional narrative

or dramatic form that is intended to enhance the doctrine’s human interest

and persuasive force, as well as to add a dimension of pleasure in the artistry

of the representation. In the various forms of allegory, for example, including

Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’ s Progress,

the purpose of enhancing and adding force to the incorporated doctrines is a

primary determinant of the choice and presentation of the allegoric characters,

the evolution of the plot, and the invention of fictional details. The diverse

types of satire are didactic in that they are designed, by various devices of ridi-

cule, to alter the reader’s attitudes toward certain types of people, institutions,

products, and modes of conduct. Dante’s

Letter to Can Grande tells

us that he

planned his fourteenth-century Divine Comedy to represent, in the mode of a

visionary narrative, the major Christian truths and the way to avoid damna-

tion and achieve salvation. And John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) can also be

called didactic to the extent that the narrative is in fact organized, as Milton

claimed in his opening invocation, around his “great argument” to “assert

Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men.”

90 DIALOGIC FORM

It will be seen from these examples that “didactic literature,” as here

defined, is an analytical distinction and not a derogatory term; also that the dis-

tinction is not absolute but a matter of relative emphasis on instructing and per-

suading an audience, as against rendering a subject in such a way as to maximize

its power to move and give artistic delight in its own right. The plays of

Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht manifest a fine balance of didactic intention,

imaginative invention, and artistic enhancement. And some literary masterpieces

are primarily didactic, while others (Shakespeare’s King Lear, Jane Austen’s

Emma, James Joyce’s Ulysses)—even though their plots involve moral concerns

and imply criteria for moral judgments—are primarily, to adopt a phrase by

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, works “of pure imagination.”

The term propagandist literature is sometimes used as the equivalent

of didactic literature, but it is more useful to reserve the term for that type

of didactic work which is obviously organized and rendered to induce the

reader to assume a specific attitude toward, or to take direct action on, a press-

ing social, political, or religious issue of the time at which the work is written.

Prominent and effective examples of such works are Harriet Beecher Stowe’s

Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852, attacking slavery in the South), Upton Sinclair’s The

Jungle (1906, on the horrors of the unregulated slaughtering and meatpacking

industry in Chicago), and Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty (1935, a play

directed against the strong-arm tactics used to suppress a taxicab drivers’

union). The socialist realism that was the official critical doctrine of the former

Soviet Union espoused what was essentially a propagandist mode of literature.

See fiction, and refer to John Chalker, The English Georgic: A Study in the

Development of a Form (1969). On a useful way to distinguish between primarily

didactic and primarily imaginative, or “mimetic,” literature, see R. S. Crane,

ed., Critics and Criticism (1952), especially pp. 63–68 and 589–94.

différance (d



aräns

): 82.

difference (in linguistics): 197; 357.

dimeter (d



eter): 220.

dirge: 104.

discourse: 311; 88.

discourse analysis: Traditional linguists and philosophers of language, as well as

literary students of style and stylistics, have typically focused their analyses on

isolated units of language—the sentence, or even single words, phrases, and

figures—in abstraction from the specific circumstances of an utterance. Dis-

course analysis, on the other hand, as developed in the 1970s, concerns itself

with the use of language in a running discourse, continued over a number of

sentences, and involving the interaction of speaker (or writer) and auditor (or

reader) in a specific situational context and within a particular framework of

social and cultural conventions.

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS 91

Emphasis on the meaning of a discourse as dependent on specific cultural

conditions and particular circumstances derives from a number of investigators

and areas of research, including the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer in hermeneutics,

the concern of Michel Foucault with the institutional conditions and power

structures that serve to make given statements accepted as authoritative or true,

and the work of Clifford Geertz and other cultural anthropologists on the root-

edness of linguistic and other meanings in the social forms and practices specific to

a cultural community. (See the above writers, under interpretation and hermeneutics

and new historicism.) The current use of discourse analysis in literary studies was

given special impetus by the speech-act philosopher H. P. Grice, who in 1975

coined the term implicature to account for indirection in discourse; for exam-

ple, to explain how we are able to identify the illocutionary force of an utterance

that lacks an explicit indicator of its illocutionary intention. (See speech-act theory.)

Thus, how can we explain the fact that the utterance, “Can you pass the salt?”

although it is in the syntactical form of a question of possibility, can be used by

the speaker, and correctly understood by the hearer, as a polite form of request?

(H. P. Grice, “Logic and Conversation,” 1975, reprinted in his Studies in the Way

of Words, 1989.) Grice proposed that users of a language share a set of implicit

expectations, which he calls the “communicative presumption”—for example,

that an utterance is intended by a speaker to be true, clear, and above all relevant.

If an utterance seems purposely to violate these expectations, we seek to make

sense of it by transferring it to a context in which it is clearly appropriate. Other

language theorists have continued Grice’s analysis of the underlying collective

assumptions that help to make utterances meaningful and intelligible, and serve

also to make a sustained discourse a coherent development of signification instead

of a mere collocation of independent sentences. One such assumption is that the

hearer shares with the speaker (or the reader shares with the writer) a large body of

nonlinguistic knowledge and experience; another is that the speaker is using lan-

guage in a way that is intentional, purposive, and in accordance with the accepted

linguistic and cultural conventions; a third is that there is a shared knowledge of

the complex ways in which the meaning of a locution varies with the particular

situation, as well as with the type of discourse, in which it is uttered.

Some proponents of stylistics include discourse analysis within their area of

investigation. (See stylistics.) And since the late 1970s, a number of critics have

adapted discourse analysis to the examination of the dialogue in novels and

dramas. A chief aim is to explain how the characters represented in a literary

work, and also the readers of that work, are constantly able to infer correctly

the meanings that are not asserted or specified in a conversational interchange.

The claim is that such inferences are “rule-governed” in that they depend on

tacit sets of assumptions, shared by users and interpreters of discourse, that come

into play to establish meanings and, furthermore, that these meanings vary

systematically, in accordance with whether the rule-guided expectations are

fulfilled or intentionally violated. Such explorations of conversational discourse

in literature often extend to the reanalysis of point of view and other traditional

topics in the criticism of literary narratives. (Compare the entry on dialogic

criticism.)

92 DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

See Malcolm Coulthard, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (1977);

Gillian Brown and George Yule, Discourse Analysis (1983); Teun A. van Dijk

and Walter Kintsch, Strategies of Discourse Comprehension (1983); Dan Sperber

and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition (1986); Wendell

V. Harris, Interpretive Acts (1988), chapter 2; Sara Mills, Discourse (2nd ed.,

2009). A relevant collection of writings is Adam Jaworski and Nicholas

Coupland, eds., The Discourse Reader (1999). For references to discourse analysis

in other entries, see page 88.

discovery (in a plot): 296.

discussion play: 317.

disposition (in rhetoric): 342.

disseminate (in deconstruction): 82.

dissociation of sensibility: “Dissociation of sensibility” was a phrase intro-

duced by T. S. Eliot in his essay “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921). Eliot’s

claim was that John Donne and the other metaphysical poets of the earlier sev-

enteenth century, like the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, “possessed a

mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience.” They

manifested “a direct sensuous apprehension of thought,” and felt “ their

thought as immediately as the odour of a rose.” But “in the seventeenth cen-

tury a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered.”

This dissociation of intellection from emotion and sensuous perception,

according to Eliot, was greatly aggravated by the influence of John Milton

and John Dryden, and most of the later poets writing in English either

thought or felt, but did not think and feel as an act of unified sensibility.

Eliot’s vaguely defined distinction had a great vogue, especially among

American New Critics. The dissociation of sensibility was said to be the feature

that weakened most poetry between Milton and the later writings of W. B.

Yeats and was attributed particularly to the development, in the seventeenth

century, of the scientific conception of reality as a material universe stripped

of human values and feeling. (See, for example, Basil Willey, The Seventeenth

Century Background, 1934.) Especially after 1950, however, Eliot’s conception

of a sudden but persisting dissociation of sensibility came in for strong criti-

cism on the ground that it is an invalid historical claim that was contrived to

support Eliot’s disapproval (as a political and social conservative) of the course

of English intellectual, political, and religious history after the Civil War of

1642, as well as to rationalize Eliot ’s particular poetic preferences.

See T. S. Eliot, “Milton II,

” in On

Poetry and Poets (1957); and “The

Metaphysical Poets,” in Selected Essays (2nd ed., 1960). Attacks on the validity

of the doctrine are Leonard Unger, Donne’s Poetry and Modern Criticism (1950),

and Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (1957), chapter 8. For references to disso-

ciation of sensibility, see page 359.

DISSOCIATION OF SENSIBILITY 93

dissonance (d



onans): 117.

distance and involvement: In his Critique of Judgment (1790), Immanuel Kant

analyzed the experience of an aesthetic object as an act of “contemplation”

which is “disinterest ed” (that is, independent of one’s personal interests and

desires) and free from reference to the object’sreality,moraleffect,orutility.

(See aesthetics and aestheticism.) Various philosophers of art developed this concept

into attempts to distinguish “aesthet ic experience” from all other kinds of expe-

rience on the basis of the impersonality and disinterestedness with which we con-

template an aesthetic object or work of art. Writing in 1912, Edward Bullough

introduced the term “distance” into this type of theory. He points, for example,

to the difference between our ordinary experience of a dense fog at sea—with its

strains, anxiety, and fear of invisible dangers—and an aesthetic experience, in

which we attend with delight to the “objective” features and sensuous qualities

of the fog itself. This aesthetic mode of experiencing the fog is, Bullough affirms,

the effect of “psychical distance,” which “is obtained by separating the object and

its appeal from one’s own self, by putting it out of gear with practical needs and

ends.” The degree of this psychical distance varies according to the nature of the

artistic object that we contemplate and also in accordance with an “individual’s

capacity for maintaining a greater or lesser degree” of such distance.

In more recent literary criticism, the term aesthetic distance, or simply

distance, is often used not only to define the nature of literary and aesthetic

experience in general but also to analyze the many devices by which authors

control the degree of a reader’s distance, or “detachment”—which is in

inverse relationship to the degree of a reader’s involvement,or“con-

cern”—with the actions and fortunes of one or another character represented

within a work of literature. See, for example, Wayne C. Booth’s detailed

analysis of the control of distance in Jane Austen’s

Emma,i

nThe Rhetoric of

Fiction (rev. 1983), chapter 9.

Edward Bullough’s innovative essay on “Psychical Distance as a Factor in

Art and an Aesthetic Principle,” British Journal of Psychology 5 (1912), is rep-

rinted in Melvin Rader, ed., A Modern Book of Aesthetics (rev. 1952). A useful

review of theories of the aesthetic attitude and of aesthetic distance is Jerome

Stolnitz, Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art Criticism (1960), chapter 2. For the

view that such theories are mistaken, see George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic

(1974), chapters 4 and 5.

See empathy and sympathy.

distancing effect: 8.

documentary drama: 257.

documentary fiction: 257.

doggerel: A term applied to rough, heavy-footed, and jerky versification, and also

to verses that are monotonously regular in meter and tritely conventional in

94 DISSONANCE

sentiment. Doggerel is usually the product of ineptitude on the part of the

versifier but is sometimes deliberately employed by poets for satiric, comic,

or rollicking effect. John Skelton (1460?–1529) wrote short lines of two or

three stresses, intentionally rough and variable in meter, which have come to

be called Skeltonics, as he both described and exemplified his versification in

Colin Clout:

For though my rhyme be ragged,

Tattered and jagged,

Rudely rain-beaten,

Rusty and moth-eaten,

If ye take well therewith,

It hath in it some pith.

The tumbling, broken, and comically grotesque octosyllabic couplet—often

using double, triple, and imperfect rhymes—developed by Samuel Butler for

his satiric poem Hudibras (1663–78) is a form of deliberate doggerel that has

come to be called Hudibrastic verse:

Besides, he was a shrewd philosopher,

And had read every text and gloss over;

Whate’er the crabbed’st author hath,

He understood b’implicit faith.

See meter. For references to doggerel in other entries, see page 42.

domestic tragedy: 407.

double plot: 295.

double rhyme: 348.

drama: The form of composition designed for performance in the theater, in

which actors take the roles of the characters, perform the indicated actions,

and utter the written dialogue. (The common alternative name for a dramatic

composition is a play.) In poetic drama the dialogue is written in verse,

which in English is usually blank verse and in French is the twelve-syllable line

called an alexandrine.Almostalltheheroic dramas of the English Restoration

Period, however, were written in heroic couplets (iambic pentameter lines rhym-

ing in pairs). A closet drama is written in dramatic form, with dialogue,

indicated settings, and stage directions, but is intended by the author to be

read rather than to be performed; examples are Milton’s Samson Agonistes

(1671), Byron’s Manfred (1817), Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820), and

Hardy’s The Dynasts (1904–08).

For types of drama, see absurd, literature of the;

chronicle plays; comedy; comedy

humours; commedia dell’arte; drama of sensibility; epic theater; expressionism; folk

drama; heroic drama; masque; melodrama; miracle plays, morality plays, and interludes;

mummer’s play; pantomime and dumb show; pastoral; problem play; satire; sentimental

DRAMA 95

comedy; tragedy ; tragicomedy. For features of drama, see act; atmosphere; character

and characterization; deus ex machina; plot; proscenium arch; setting; theater in the

round; three unities.

drama of sensibility: 360.

dramatic irony: 187; 294.

dramatic lyric: 96; 202.

dramatic monologue: A monologue is a lengthy speech by a single person. In

a play, when a character utters a monologue that expresses his or her private

thoughts, it is called a soliloquy. Dramatic monologue, however, does not

designate a component in a play but a type of lyric poem that was perfected by

Robert Browning. In its fullest form, as represented in Browning’s “My Last

Duchess,”“The Bishop Orders His Tomb,”“Andrea del Sarto,” and many

other poems, the dramatic monologue has the following features: (1) A single

person, who is patently not the poet, utters the speech that makes up the whole

of the poem, in a specific situation at a critical moment: the Duke is negotiating

with an emissary for a second wife; the Bishop lies dying; Andrea once more

attempts wistfully to believe his wife’s lies. (2) This person addresses and inter-

acts with one or more other people; but we know of the auditors’ presence,

and what they say and do, only from clues in the discourse of the single

speaker. (3) The main principle controlling the poet’s choice and formulation

of what the lyric speaker says is to reveal to the reader, in a way that enhances

its interest, the speaker’s temperament and character.

In monologues such as “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” and “Caliban

upon Setebos,” Browning omits the second feature, the presence of a silent

auditor; but features 1 and 3 are the necessary conditions of a dramatic mono-

logue. The third feature—the focus on self-revelation—serves to distinguish a

dramatic monologue from its near relation, the dramatic lyric, which is also

a monologue uttered in an identifiable situation at a dramatic moment. John

Donne’

s “The

Canonization” and “The Flea ” (1613), for example, are dra-

matic lyrics that lack only one feature of the dramatic monologue: the focus

of interest is primarily on the speaker’s elaborately ingenious argument rather

than on the character he inadvertently reveals in the course of arguing. And

although Wordsworth’s “ Tintern Abbey” (1798) is spoken by one person to a

silent auditor (his sister) in a specific situation at a significant moment in his

life, it is not a dramatic monologue proper, both because we are invited to

identify the speaker with the poet himself, and because the organizing princi-

ple and focus of interest is not the revelation of the speaker’s distinctive tem-

perament, but the evolution of his observations, memories, and thoughts

toward the resolution of an emotional problem.

Tennyson wrote “Ulysses” (1842) and other dramatic monologues, and

the form has been used by H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Amy Lowell, Robert

Frost, E. A. Robinson, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, and other poets of the

96 DRAMA OF SENSIBILITY

twentieth century. The best-known modern instance is T. S. Eliot’s “The

Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915).

See Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in

Modern Literary Tradition (1957); Adena Rosmarin, The Power of Genre (1985),

chapter 2, “The Dramatic Monologue”; Elisabeth A. Howe, The Dramatic

Monologue (1996).

dramatis personae (dräm

at



s pérso

ne): 286.

dream allegory: 97.

dream vision: “Dream vision” (also called dream allegory) is a mode of nar-

rative widely employed by medieval poets: the narrator falls asleep, usually in a

spring landscape, and dreams the events he goes on to relate; often he is led by

a guide, human or animal, and the events which he dreams are at least in part

an allegory. A very influential example is the thirteenth-century French poem

Roman de la Rose; the greatest of medieval poems, Dante’s Divine Comedy,is

also a dream vision. In fourteenth-century England, it is the narrative mode of

the fine elegy Pearl, of Langland’s Piers Plowman, and of Chaucer’s The Book of

the Duchess and The House of Fame. After the Middle Ages, the vogue of the

dream allegory diminished, but it never died out, as Bunyan’s prose narrative

The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) and Keats’ verse narrative The Fall of Hyperion: A

Dream (1819) bear witness. Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

(1865) is in the form of a dream vision, and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

(1939) consists of an immense cosmic dream on the part of an archetypal

dreamer.

See C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (1936); and Howard Rollin Patch,

The Other World according to Descriptions in Medieval Literature (1950, reprinted

1970). For references to dream vision in other entries, see page 9.

dumb show: 266.

duodecimo (doo

odes



mo): 36.

dystopia (d



sto

pea): 413.

DYSTOPIA 97

Early Modern (period): 337.

Early National Period (in American literature): 274.

echoism: 263.

eclectic text: 400.

eclogue (ek

log): 268.

ecocentrism: 100.

ecocriticism: “Ecocriticism” was a term coined in the late 1970s by combining

“criticism” with a shortened form of “ecology”—the science that investigates

the interrelations of all forms of plant and animal life with each other

and with their physical habitats. “Ecocriticism” (or by alternative names,

environmental criticism and green studies) designates the critical writings

that explore the relations between literature and the biological and physical

environment, conducted with an acute awareness of the damage being

wrought on that environment by human activities.

Representations of the natural environment are as old as recorded liter-

ature and were prominent in the account of the Garden of Eden in the

Hebrew Bible, as well as in the pastoral form ina ugurated by the Greek

Theocritus in the third century BC and later imitated by the Roman poet

Virgil—an idealized d epiction of ru ral life, viewed as a survival of the sim-

plicity, peace, and harmony that had been lost by a complex and urban

society. The nostalgic view of a return to unspoiled nature in order to

restore a lost simpli city a nd concord remained evident in James Thomson’s

long poem in blank verse The Seasons (1726–30), and in the widely practiced

genre called nature writing: the intimate, realistic, and detailed description

in prose of th e natural environment, rendered as it appears to the distinctive

sensibility of the author. This literary form was largely initiated in England

by Gilbert White’s enormously popular Natural History and Antiquities of

Selborne (1789)—his cl ose and affectiona te observations of wildlife and the

natural setting in a particular area of rural England. In America, an early

instance of nature writing was Will iam Bertram’s Travels through the

Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida (1791); among its successors was a classic of

this genre, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854). By the mid-nineteenth

century, Thoreau an d other writers in America and England were already

drawing attention to the threats to t he environment by urbanization and

industrialization. Later in the century, increasing alarm at the rapidity

and extent of the human despoliation of nature led to what came to be

called the “environmental movement” to preserve what remained of the

98 EARLY MODERN

American wilderness; the most noted advocates were the American writers John

Burroughs (1837–1921) and John Muir (1838–1914).

In the twentieth century the warnings by scientists and conservationists

increased; two especially influential books were Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County

Almanac (1949), drawing attention to the ominous degradation of the environ-

ment, and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), concerning the devastation

inflicted by newly developed chemical pesticides on wildlife, both on land

and in water. By the latter part of the century there was widespread concern

that the earth was in an environmental crisis brought on by the industrial and

chemical pollution of the “biosphere” (the thin layer of earth, water, and air

essential to life), the depletion of forests and of natural resources, the relentless

extinction of plant and animal species, and the explosion of the human popula-

tion that threatened to exceed the capacity of the earth to sustain it.

It was in this climate of crisis that ecocriticism was inaugurated. By the

1990s it had become a recognized and rapidly growing field of literary

study, with its own organization (ASLE: Association for the Study of

Literature and E nvironment), its own journal (ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies

in Literature and Environment), numerous articles in literary and critical per-

iodicals, a proliferation of college courses, and a series of conferences

whose concern with the literature of the environment enco mpassed all

continents. As in earlier insurgent mo des such as feminist criticism and queer

theory, many ecocritical writings continue to be oriented toward heighten-

ing their readers ’ awareness, and even toward inciting them to social and

political action; but while the other movements in criticism are directed

toward achi eving social and political justice, a number of ecocritics are

impelled by the conviction that wh at is at stake in their enterprise is not

only the well-being but, u ltimatel y, the survival of human life.

Ecocritics do not share a single theoretical perspective or procedure; instead,

their engagements with environmental literature manifest a wide range of tradi-

tional, poststructural,andpostcolonial points of view and modes of analysis. Within

this diversity, however, certain issues and concerns are recurrent:

1. It is claimed that the reigning religions and philosophies of Western civili-

zation are deeply anthropocentric; that is, they are oriented to the inter-

ests of human beings, who are viewed as opposed to and superior to

nature, and as free to exploit natural resources and animal species for their

own purposes. This viewpoint is grounded in the biblical account of the

creation, in which God gave man “dominion over the fish of the sea, and

over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth” (Genesis

1:26). A similar conception is manifested elsewhere in the Bible, dominated

Greek and Roman philosophy, was the prevailing view in Christianity, and

underlay the emergence of modern science in the Renaissance, the human-

ism of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and the triumphs of what has

been called “the scientific-technological-industrial complex” in the nine-

teenth and twentieth centuries. A present-day countermovement, some-

times named “deep ecology,” maintains that attempts to reform particular

ECOCRITICISM 99

instances of the spoliation of the natural world deal with symptoms rather

than the root cause, and that the only real hope is to replace anthropocen-

trism by ecocentrism: the view that all living things and their earthly

environment, no less than the human species, possess importance, value,

and even moral and political rights.

2. Prominent in ecocriticism is a critique of binaries such as man/nature or

culture/nature, viewed as mutually exclusive oppositions. It is pointed

out, instead, that these entities are interconnected and also mutually con-

stitutive. As Wendell Berry wrote in The Unsettling of America (1977),

“[W]e and our country create one another, depend upon one another,

are literally part of one another…. Our culture and our place are images

of each other, and inseparable from each other.” Our identities, or sense

of self, for example, are informed by the particular place in which we live

and in which we feel that we belong and are at home. On the other side,

human experience of the natural environment is not a replication of the

thing itself but is always mediated by the culture of a particular time and

place, and its representation in a work of literature is inescapably shaped

by human feelings and the human imagination. A striking example is the

radical shift in the conception of the wilderness in America, from the

Puritan view of it as a dark and ominous thing, possibly the abode of

demons, which needs to be overcome, appropriated, and cultivated by

human beings, to the view expressed by Thoreau two centuries later

that “[i]n wildness is the preservation of the world” (“Walking,” in Excursions,

1863). Or as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in England some

twenty years later, in “Inversnaid”:

What would the world be, once bereft

Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,

O let them be left, wildness and wet;

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

3. Many ecocritics recommend, and themselves exemplify, the extension of

“green reading” (that is, analysis of the implications of a text for environ-

mental concerns and toward political action) to all literary genres, includ-

ing prose fiction and poetry, and also to writings in the natural and social

sciences. Within the literary domain, the endeavor is to elevate the status,

or to include within the major canon of literature, the hitherto undervalued

forms of nature writing and of local color or regional fiction by authors

such as Thomas Hardy, Mark Twain, and Sarah Orne Jewett.

4. A conspicuous feature in ecocriticism is the analysis of the differences in

attitudes toward the environment that are attributable to a writer’s race,

ethnicity, social class, and gender. The writings of Annette Kolodny gave

impetus to what has come to be called ecofeminism—the analysis of the

role attributed to women in fantasies of the natural environment by male

authors, as well as the study of specifically feminine conceptions of

the environment in the neglected nature writings by female authors. In

100 ECOCRITICISM

The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and

Letters (1975), Kolodny stresses, in male-authored literature, the predomi-

nant gendering of the land as female, and the accordant tendency to

resort to nature for pastoral repose, recuperation, and gratification. She

also proposes a parallel between the domination and subjugation of

women and the exploitation and spoliation of the land. (For an instance

in which the devastation of a natural scene is figured in detail as the rape

of a virgin, refer to Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem “Nutting,”

1800.) In a later book, The Land before Her: Fantasy and Experiences of the

American Frontiers, 1680–1860 (1984), Kolodny details the difference

between the traditional representations of the frontier by male authors

and the counterview—domestic, and oriented to gardening and family

concerns—in neglected narratives about the frontier by women. Other

critics have pointed out that the prominent American form called the

wilderness romance—represented by such major works as James Fenimore

Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick,and

Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn—projects distinctively male imaginings

of escape to an unspoiled natural environment, free of women a nd of

an effete, woman-dominated civilization, in which the protagonist under-

goes a test of his character and virility. See for example Nina Baym,

“Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction

Exclude Women Writers” (1981), in Feminism and American Literary History

(1992); also Vera Norwood, Made from This Earth: American Women and

Nature (1993).

5. There is a growing interest in the animistic religions of so-called primitive

cultures, as well as in Hindu, Buddhist, and other religions and civiliza-

tions that lack the Western opposition between humanity and nature and

do not assign to human beings dominion over the nonhuman world.

Ecocritics in the United States concern themselves especially with the

oral traditions of Native Americans and with the exposition of these

cultures by contemporary Native American writers such as N. Scott

Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko. The common view in such tradi-

tions, it is pointed out, envisions the natural world as a living, sacred

thing, in which each individual feels intimately bonded to a particular

physical “place,” and where human beings live in interdependence and

reciprocity with other living things. See Joni Adamson, American Indian

Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism: The Middle Place (2001),

and Donelle N. Dreese, Ecocriticism: Creating Self and Place in Environmental

and American Indian Literatures (2002). Refer to primitivism.

Some radical environmental critics maintain that the ecological crisis can

be resolved only by the rejection, in the West, of the Judeo-Christian religion

and culture, with its anthropocentric view that human beings, because they

possess souls, transcend nature and are inherently masters of the nonhuman

world, and by adopting instead an ecocentric religion that promulgates the

sacredness of nature and a reverence for all forms of life as intrinsically

ECOCRITICISM 101

equivalent. (See, for example, the influential essay by the intellectual historian

Lynn White, Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” in The Ecocentric

Reader, listed below.) Other environmentalists insist, on the contrary, that

the hope for radical reform lies not in trying to assimilate an outmoded or alien

religion but in identifying and developing those strands in the human-centered

religion, philosophy, and ethics of the West that maintain that the human rela-

tionship to the nonhuman world is not one of mastery but of stewardship, and

that recognize the deep human need for the natural world as something to be

enjoyed for its own sake, as well as the moral responsibility of human beings to

maintain and transmit a livable, diverse, and enjoyable world to their posterity.

(See the book by the Australian philosopher John Passmore, Man’s Responsibility

for Nature: Ecological Problems and Western Traditions, 1974. This work includes a

useful survey not only of the predominantly antienvironmental religion and

metaphysics of the West but also of the recurrent counterviews that emphasize

human responsibility for the natural environment and nonhuman forms of life.)

Despite such disagreements, ecocritics concur that science-based knowledge of

impending ecological disaster is not enough because knowledge can lead to

effective political and social action only when informed and impelled, as it is in

literature, by imagination and feeling.

There are many anthologies of nature writing, including The Norton Book

of Nature Writing , eds. Robert Finch and John Elder (1990); American Nature

Writers, ed. John Elder (2 vols., 1996); and Literature of Nature: An International

Sourcebook (1998). The Romantic Period of the early nineteenth century was the

turning point in the long Western tradition of human transcendence and

domination over nature. The central view in innovative Romantic literature

and philosophy, in England and Germany, was that the root of the modern

human malaise is its separation, or “alienation,” from its original unity with

nature, and that the cure for this disease of civilization lies in a reunion

between humanity and nature that will restore concreteness and values to a

natural world in which we can once more feel thoroughly at home, in con-

sonance and reciprocity with all living things. (See M. H. Abrams, Natural

Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971, chapters

3–5, 8; also his essay “Coleridge and the Romantic Vision of the World,”

1974, included in The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism,

1984.) Jonathan Bate, in Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental

Tradition (1991), details the emergence, in Wordsworth and his English

contemporaries and successors, of an environmental consciousness, the result

of noting the destruction of forest and farm lands by urban sprawl, and of

recognizing what Wordsworth, in the eighth book of The Excursion (1814),

called “the outrage done to nature” by newly established factories that foul

the air and pollute the waterways. See also Karl Kroeber, Ecological Literary

Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind (1994); and James C.

McKusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (2000).

Books that were important in the founding and development of ecocriti-

cism, in addition to those already mentioned, include Leo Marx, The Machine in

the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964); Donald Worster,

Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (1977); Roderick Frazier Nash,

102 ECOCRITICISM

Wilderness and the American Mind (1967; 3rd ed., 1982); John Elder, Imagining the

Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature (1985); Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The

Shadow of Civilization (1992); Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (1995); and

two books by Lawrence Buell: The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature

Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (1995); and Writing for an Endangered

World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond (2001).

The anthology The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, eds.

Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (1996), did much, by its Introduction

and selections, to give definition and impetus to the ecocritical movement.

The following collections of essays indicate the scope and diversity of ecocritical

writings: Sisters of the Earth: Women’s Prose and Poetry about Nature, ed. Lorraine

Anderson (1991); Being in the World: An Environmental Reader for Writers, eds.

Scott H. Slovic and Terrell F. Dixon (1993); Karl Kroeber, Ecological Literary

Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind (1994); Lawrence Coupe,

ed., The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism (2000); Steven

Rosendale, ed., The Greening of Literary Scholarship: Literature, Theory, and the

Environment (2002); Glen A. Love, Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and

the Environment (2003); Ursula K. Heise, “Greening English: Recent Introduc-

tions to Ecocriticism,” Contemporary Literature 47.2 (2006); and Bill McKibben,

ed., American Earth: Environmental Writing since Thoreau (2008). Greg Garrard

outlines the theory and practice of the movement in Ecocriticism (2004).

ecofeminism: 100.

écriture (a



tyoor

): 397; 311.

écriture féminine: 128.

edition: 36.

Edwardian Period: 284.

ego: 321.

eiron (



ron): 377; 185.

electronic literature: 170.

elegiac meter (elej



ak): 103.

elegy: In Greek and Roman times, “eleg y” denoted any poem written in elegiac

meter (alternating hexameter and pentameter lines). The term was also used, how-

ever, to refer to the subject matter of change and loss frequently expressed in the

elegiac verse form, especially in complaints about love. In accordance with this

latter usage, “The Wanderer,”“The Seafarer,” and other poems in Old English

on the transience of all worldly things are even now called elegies. In Europe

and England, the word continued to have a variable application through the

ELEGY 103

Renaissance. John Donne’s elegies, written in the late sixteenth and early seven-

teenth centuries, are love poems, although they relate to the sense of elegy as

lament, in that many of them emphasize mutability and loss. In the seventeenth

century, the term elegy began to be limited to its most common present usage:

a formal and sustaine d lame nt in verse for the death of a particular person,

usually ending in a consolation. Examples are the medieval poem Pearl and

Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess (elegiesinthemodeofdream allegory); Alfred,

Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850), on the death of Arthur Hallam; and

W. H. Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (1940). Occasionally the term is

used in its older and broader sense, for somber meditations on mortality such as

Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1757), and the

Duino Elegies (1912–22) of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke on the tran-

sience both of poets and of the earthly objects they write poems about.

The dirge is also a versified expression of grief on the occasion of a partic-

ular person’s death but differs from the elegy in that it is short, is less formal, and

is usually represented as a text to be sung; examples are Shakespeare’s “Full

Fathom Five Thy Father Lies” and William Collins’“A Song from Shakespeare’s

Cymbeline” (1749). Threnody is now used mainly as an equivalent for “dirge,”

and monody for an elegy or dirge, which is presented as the utterance of a

single person. John Milton describes his “Lycidas” (1638) in the subtitle as a

“monody” in which “the Author bewails a learned Friend,” and Matthew

Arnold called his elegy on A. H. Clough “Thyrsis: A Monody” (1866).

An important subtype is the pastoral elegy, which represents both the poet

andtheonehemourns—who is usually also a poet—as shepherds (the Latin

word for shepherd is

“pastor”).

This poetic form was originated by the Sicilian

Greek poet Theocritus, was continued by the Roman Virgil, was developed in

various European countries during the Renaissance, and remained current in

English poetry through the nineteenth century. Notable English pastoral elegies

are Spenser’s “Astrophel,” on the death of Sir Philip Sidney (1595); Milton’s

“Lycidas” (1638); Shelley’s “Adonais” (1821); and in the Victorian age, Arnold’s

“Thyrsis.” The pastoral elegists, from the Greeks through the Renaissance,

developed a set of elaborate conventions, which are illustrated here by reference to

“Lycidas.” In addition to the fictional representation of both mourner and sub-

ject as shepherds tending their flocks (lines 23–36 and elsewhere), we often find

the following conventional features:

1. The lyric speaker begins by invoking the muses and goes on to make fre-

quent reference to other figures from classical mythology (lines 15–22, and

later).

2. All nature joins in mourning the shepherd’s death (lines 37–49). (Critics

who stress the mythic and ritual origins of poetic genres claim that this

feature is a survival from primitive laments for the death of Thammuz,

Adonis, or other vegetational deities who died in the autumn to be

reborn in the spring. See myth critics.)

3. The mourner charges with negligence the nymphs or other guardians of

the dead shepherd (lines 50–63).

104 ELEGY

4. There is a procession of appropriate mourners (lines 88–111).

5. The poet raises questions about the justice of fate, or else of Providence,

and adverts to the corrupt conditions of his own times (lines 64–84, 113–

31). Such passages, though sometimes called “digressions,” are integral to

the evolution of the mourner’s thought in “Lycidas.”

6. Post-Renaissance elegies often include an elaborate passage in which

appropriate flowers are brought to deck the hearse (lines 133–51).

7. There is a closing consolation. In Christian elegies, the lyric reversal from

grief and despair to joy and assurance typically occurs when the elegist

comes to realize that death in this world is the entry to a higher life (lines

165–85).

In his “Life of Milton” (1779), Samuel Johnson, w ho disapproved both

of pastoralism and mythology in modern poetry, decried “Lyci das” for “its

inher ent improb ability,” but in the eleg ies by Milton an d other major poets

the ancient rituals provide a structu ral fr ame on which they play variati ons

with o riginality and power. Some of the pastor al conventions, although

adapted to an industrial age and a non-Chr istian worldview, survive sti ll in

Walt Whitman’s elegy on Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Doory ard

Bloom’d” (1866).

In the last two decades of the twentieth century, there was a strong revival

of the elegy, especially in America, to mourn the devastation and death

wrought by AIDS among talented young intellectuals, poets, and artists; see

Michael Klein, ed., Poets for Life: Seventy-six Poets Respond to AIDS (1989).

See conventions and pastoral. On the elegy, refer to T. P. Harrison, Jr., and

H. J. Leon, eds., The Pastoral Elegy: An Anthology (1939); Peter Sacks, The

English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (1985). On “Lycidas”:

C. A. Patrides, ed., Milton’s “Lycidas”: The Tradition and the Poem (rev. 1983),

which includes a number of recent critical essays; and Scott Elledge, ed.,

Milton’s “Lycidas” (1966), which reprints classical and Renaissance pastoral

elegies and other texts as background to Milton’s poem. For both traditional

and modern forms of elegy, see the introductory materials and the poems re-

printed in Sandra M. Gilbert, ed., Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies

(2001); and for a wide range of analyses and critical discussion, refer to The

Oxford Companion to the Elegy

(2010).

Elizabethan

Age: 281.

emblem: 392.

emotive language: 131.

empathy and sympathy: German theorists in the nineteenth century devel-

oped the concept of “Einfühlung” (“feeling into”), which has been translated

as empathy. It signifies an identification of oneself with an observed person

EMPATHY AND SYMPATHY 105

or object, which is so close that one seems to participate in the posture,

motion, and sensations that one observes. Empathy is often described as “an

involuntary projection of ourselves into an object” and is commonly

explained as the result of an “inner mimicry”; that is, the observation of an

object evokes incipient muscular movements which are not experienced as

one’s own sensations but as though they were attributes of the outer object.

The object may be human, nonhuman, or even inanimate. In thoroughly

absorbed contemplation we seem empathically to pirouette with a ballet

dancer, soar with a hawk, bend with the movements of a tree in the wind,

and even to participate in the strength, ease, and grace with which a well-

proportioned arch appears to support a bridge. When John Keats wrote in a

letter that he becomes “a part of all I see,” and that “if a sparrow comes before

my window I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel,” he was

describing a habitual experience of his intensely empathic temperament long

before the word was coined.

In literature we call “empathic” a passage which conspicuously evokes from

the reader this sense of participation with the pose, movements, and physical

sensations of the object that the passage describes. An example is Shakespeare’s

description, in his narrative poem Venus and Adonis (1593), of

the snail, whose tender horns being hit,

Shrinks backward in his shelly cave with pain.

Another is the description of the motion of a wave in Keats’ Endymion (1818),

when heav’d anew

Old ocean rolls a lengthen ’d wave to the shore,

Down whose green back the short-liv’d foam, all hoar,

Bursts gradual, with a wayward indolence.

Also empathic is the description of a wave—experienced from the point of view

of Penelope awaiting the long-delayed return of her husband Odysseus—by

H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), in her poem, “At Ithaca”:

Over and back,

the long waves crawl

and track the sand with foam;

night darkens and the sea

takes on that desperate tone

of dark that wives put on

when all their love is done.

Sympathy, as distinguished from empathy, denotes fellow-feeling; that

is, not feeling-into the physical state and sensations but feeling-along-with

the mental state and emotions, of another human being or of nonhuman

Doolittle. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and Carcanet Press Limited.

106 EMPATHY AND SYMPATHY

beings to whom we attribute human emotions. (See personification.) We “sym-

pathize,” for example, with the emotional experience of a child in his first

attempt to recite a piece in public; we may also “empathize” as he falters in

his speaking or makes an awkward gesture. Robert Burns’“To a Mouse”

(1786) is an engaging expression of his quick sympathy with the terror of

the “wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie ” whose nest he has turned up

with his plow.

The engagement and control of a reader’s sympathy with certain charac-

ters, and the establishment of antipathy toward others, is essential to the tra-

ditional literary artist. In King Lear, Shakespeare undertakes to make us

sympathize with Cordelia, for example, and progressively with King Lear,

but to make us feel horror and antipathy toward his “pelican daughters,”

Goneril and Regan. Our attitude in the same play toward the villainous

Edmund, the bastard son of Gloucester, as managed by Shakespeare, is

complex—antipathetic, yet with some element of sympathetic understanding

of his distorted personality. (See distance and involvement.) Bertolt Brecht’s alien-

ation effect was designed to inhibit the sympathy of an audience with the pro-

tagonists of his plays in order to encourage a critical attitude to the actions and

social and economic realities that the plays represent.

The most influential and directly pertinent source for the understanding

of sympathy in English-language literary culture is Adam Smith’s The Theory

of Moral Sentiments (1759), where the ability and desire to experience the

emotions of others is described both as a natural law and as the foundation

of morality. Smith wrote just before the emergence of the modern concept

of literature, one of the most essential features of which, according to some,

is the cultivation of the reader’s ability to enter into the mental states of others

(see cognitive literary studies).

In the late twentieth century, a number of theorists stressed the need to

read against one’s acquiescence to the sympathetic identifications that may

have been intended by an author. In The Resisting Reader (1978), for example,

Judith Fetterly proposed that women should learn to read in opposition to the

sympathy with male protagonists and the derogation of women characters that

is written into the work of many male authors. (See under feminist criticism.)

The British Marxist theorist Terry Eagleton has argued that empathy can

sometimes serve politically dubious ends (see “TheRiseofEnglish,” in Literary

Theory: An Introduction). And a tendency in the new historicism, as well as in

postcolonial criticism, is to recommend that the reader, even if against an

author

’s

intention, shift his or her sympathy from the dominant to the subver-

sive characters in a literary work—from the magus Prospero, for example, in

Shakespeare’s The Tempest, to his brutish and rebellious slave Caliban, who is

taken to represent the natives of the New World who were oppressed and

enslaved by English and European invaders. (Some critics have claimed that,

whatever Shakespeare’s intentions, Caliban, as he is represented, is sympa-

thetic, and that Prospero, as he is represented, is not; also that the sympathetic

admiration for Prospero in the nineteenth century depended on a willful eva-

sion of certain aspects of the play.)

EMPATHY AND SYMPATHY 107

For a theory of literature grounded in concepts of empathy and sympa-

thy, see Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge (1992) and Poetic Justice

(1996). For detailed analyses of empathic passages in literature, see Richard

H. Fogle, The Imagery of Keats and Shelley (1949), chapter 4. See also the

entry sensibility, literature of.

encomiastic (enkom



as

tik): 263.

end (of a plot): 295.

end rhymes: 347.

end-stopped lines: 221.

English literature, periods of: 278.

English sonnet: 369.

enjambment (enjamb

ment): 221.

Enlightenment: The name applied to an intellectual movement and cultural

ambiance that developed in Western Europe during the seventeenth cen-

tury and reached its height in the eighteenth. The common element was a

trust in universal and uniform human reason as adequate to solve the crucial

problems and to establish the essential norms in life, together with the belief

that the application of such reason was rapidly dissipating the darkness of

superstition, prejudice, and barbarity; was freeing humanity from its earlier

reliance on mere authority and unexamined tradition; and had opened the

prospect of progress toward a life in this world of universal peace and happi-

ness. (See the idea of progress.) For some thinkers the model for “reason” was

the inductive procedure of science, which proceeds by reasoning from the

particular facts of experience to universal laws; for others (especially Descartes

and his followers), the model for “reason” was primarily geometrical—the

deduction of particular truths from clear and distinct ideas which are universal

and known intuitively by “the light of reason. ” Many thinkers relied on rea-

son in both these senses.

In England the thought and the world outlook of the Enlightenment are

usually traced from Francis Bacon (1561–1626) through John Locke (1632–

1704) to late eighteenth-century thinkers such as William Godwin (1756–

1836); in France, from Descartes (1596 –1650) through Voltaire (1694–1778)

to Diderot and other editors of the great twenty-volume Encyclopédie (1751–

72); in Germany, from Leibniz (1646–1716) to what is often said to be the

highest product of the Enlightenment, the “critical philosophy” of Immanuel

Kant (1724–1804). Kant’s famous essay “What Is Enlightenment?” written in

1784 defines it as “the liberation of mankind from his self-caused state of

minority” and the achievement of a state of maturity that is exemplified

108 ENCOMIASTIC

in his “determination and courage to use [his understanding] without the

assistance of another.” On the British Enlightenment refer to Roy Porter,

The Enlightenment (2001).

In America, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson represented the

principles of the French and English Enlightenment, which also helped

shape the founding documents of the United States: the Declaration of Inde-

pendence and the Constitution.

In recent years, the Enlightenment has been the subject of vigorous reas-

sessment and debate. See Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ed., Race and the Enlight-

enment: A Reader (1997), for an anthology of Enlightenment texts, many of

them, from the point of view of the present, strikingly unenlightened about

race. For a positive assessment of the Enlightenment’s contribution to modern

political and scientific attitudes, see Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment:

Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (2001).

The Enlightenment category of the universal, which was central to

eighteenth-century thinkers who sought to transcend national, linguistic, or

other divisions, has been both praised as an indispensable tool of a radical social

critique and derogated as the conceptual means by which local differences such as

race, sex, ethnicity, and class are elided in the name of a dubious universality. A

crucial text in the latter reassessment was Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlighten-

ment?” in The Foucault Reader, ed., Paul Rabinow (1984), pp. 32–50. See also

James Schmidt, ed., What Is Enlightenment? (1996); Geoffrey Galt Harpham,

“So … What Is Enlightenment?” in Shadows of Ethics (1999), pp. 67–98. For

an anthology of Enlightenment writings, see Peter Gay, ed., The Enlightenment:

A Comprehensive Anthology (1973). Gay has also written The Enlightenment: An

Interpretation (2 vols., 1995, 1996); see also Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the

Enlightenment (1968). Refer to the entry neoclassic and romantic. For references to

Enlightenment in other entries, see pages 86, 340.

environmental criticism: 98.

envoy (in a poem): 376.

epic: In its strict sense, the term epic or heroic poem is applied to a work that

meets at least the following criteria: it is a long verse narrative on a serious

subject, told in a formal and elevated style, and centered on a heroic

or quasi-divine figure on whose actions depends the fate of a tribe, a nation, or

(in the instance of John Milton’s Paradise Lost) the human race.

There is a standard distinction between traditional and literary epics.

“Traditional epics” (also called “folk epics” or “primary epics

”)

were written

versions of what had originally been oral poems about a tribal or national hero

during a warlike age. (See oral poetry.) Among these are the Iliad and Odyssey that

the Greeks ascribed to Homer; the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf;theFrenchChanson de

Roland and the Spanish Poema del Cid in the twelfth century; and the thirteenth-

century German epic Nibelungenlied. “Literary epics” were composed by individ-

ual poetic craftsmen in deliberate imitation of the traditional form. Of this kind

EPIC 109

is Virgil’sLatinpoemtheAeneid, which later served as the chief model for

Milton’sliteraryepicParadise Lost (1667). Paradise Lost inturnbecame,inthe

Romantic Period, a model for John Keats’ fragmentary epic Hyperion,aswellas

for William Blake’s several epics, or “prophetic books” (The Four Zoas, Milton,

Jerusalem), which translated into Blake’s own mythic terms the biblical narrative

that had been Milton’ssubject.

The epic was ranked by Aristotle as second only to tragedy and by many

Renaissance critics as the highest of all genres. The literary epic is certainly the

most ambitious of poetic enterprises, making immense demands on a poet’s

knowledge, invention, and skill to sustain the scope, grandeur, and authority

of a poem that tends to encompass the world of its day and a large portion of

its learning. Despite numerous attempts in many languages over nearly 3,000

years, we possess no more than a half-dozen such poems of indubitable great-

ness. Literary epics are highly conventional compositions which usually share

the following features, derived by way of the Aeneid from the traditional epics

of Homer:

1. The hero is a figure of great national or even cosmic importance. In the

Iliad, he is the Greek warrior Achilles, who is the son of the sea nymph

Thetis; Virgil’s Aeneas is the son of the goddess Aphrodite. In Paradise

Lost, Adam and Eve are the progenitors of the entire human race, or if

we regard Christ as the protagonist, He is both God and man. Blake’s

primal figure is “the Universal Man” Albion, who incorporates, before

his fall, humanity and God and the cosmos as well.

2. The setting of the poem is ample in scale and may be worldwide or even

larger. Odysseus wanders over the Mediterranean basin (the whole of the

world known at the time), and in Book XI he descends into the under-

world (as does Virgil’s Aeneas). The scope of Paradise Lost is the entire

universe, for it takes place in heaven, on earth, in hell, and in the cosmic

space between. (See Ptolemaic universe.)

3. The action involves extraordinary deeds in battle, such as Achilles’ feats in

the Trojan War, or a long, arduous, and dangerous journey intrepidly

accomplished, such as the wanderings of Odysseus on his way back to his

homeland in the face of opposition by some of the gods. Paradise Lost

includes the revolt in heaven by the rebel angels against God, the journey

of Satan through chaos to discover the newly created world, and his des-

perately audacious attempt to outwit God by corrupting mankind, in

which his success is ultimately frustrated by the sacrificial action of Christ.

4. In these great actions the gods and other supernatural beings take an

interest or an active part—the Olympian gods in Homer, and Jehovah,

Christ, and the angels in Paradise Lost. These supernatural agents were in

the Neoclassic Age called the machinery, in the sense that they were part

of the literary contrivances of the epic.

5. An epic poem is a ceremonial performance and is narrated in a ceremo-

nial style, which is deliberately distanced from ordinary speech and

110 EPIC

proportioned to the grandeur and formality of the heroic subject and

architecture. Hence Milton’s grand style—his formal diction and elabo-

rate, stylized syntax, which are in large part modeled on Latin poetry, his

sonorous lists of names and wide-ranging allusions, and his imitation of

Homer’s epic similes and epithets.

There are also widely used epic conventions, or formulas, in the choice and

ordering of episodes; prominent among them are these features, as exempli-

fied in Paradise Lost:

1. The narrator begins by stating that his argument, or epic theme, invokes

a muse or guiding spirit to inspire him in his great undertaking, then

addresses to the muse the epic question, the answer to which inaugu-

rates the narrative proper ( Paradise Lost,I.1–49).

2. The narrative starts in medias res (“in the middle of things”), at a critical

point in the action. Paradise Lost opens with the fallen angels in hell, gath-

ering their scattered forces and determining on revenge. Not until Books

V–VII does the angel Raphael narrate to Adam the events in heaven

which led to this situation; while in Books XI–XII, after the fall, Michael

foretells to Adam future events up to Christ’s second coming. Thus

Milton’s epic, although its action focuses on the temptation and fall of

man, encompasses all time from the creation to the end of the world.

3. There are catalogues of some of the principal characters, introduced in

formal detail, as in Milton’s description of the procession of fallen angels

in Book I of Paradise Lost. These characters are often given set speeches

that reveal their diverse temperaments and moral attitudes; an example is

the debate in Pandemonium, Book II.

The term “epic” is often applied, by extension, to narratives which differ

in many respects from this model but manifest the epic spirit and grandeur in

the scale, the scope, and the profound human importance of their subjects. In

this broad sense, Dante’s fourteenth-century Divine Comedy and Edmund

Spenser’s late sixteenth-century The Faerie Queene (1590–96) are often called

epics, as are conspicuously large-scale and wide-ranging works of prose fiction

such as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace

(1869), and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922); this last work achieves epic scope in

representing the events of an ordinary day in Dublin (16 June 1904) by

modeling them on the episodes of Homer’s Odyssey.

In a still more extended

application, the Marxist critic Georg Lukács used the term bourgeois epic

for all novels, which, in his view, reflect the social reality of their capitalist

age on a broad scale. In a famed sentence, Lukács said that “the novel is the

epic of a world that has been abandoned by God” (Theory of the Novel, trans.

Anna Bostock, 1971). See Lukács under Marxist criticism.

See mock epic, and refer to W. W. Lawrence, Beowulf and Epic Tradition

(1928); C. S. Lewis, A Preface to “Paradise Lost” (1942); C. M. Bowra, From

Virgil to Milton (1945), and Heroic Poetry (1952); Brian Wilkie, Romantic Poets

and Epic Tradition (1965); Paul Merchant, The Epic (1971); Michael Murrin,

EPIC 111

The Allegorical Epic (1980); David Quint, Epic and Empire (1993). In Epic: Britain’s

Heroic Muse, 1790–1910 (2008), Herbert F. Tucker reveals how very widely

the epic form continued to be composed long after it was held to have been

displaced by the prose novel. For an archetypal conception of the epic, see

Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957), pp. 315–26. For references to epic

in other entries, see pages 41,149,160,161.See also heroic drama.

epic question: 111.

epic similes: “Epic similes,” also called Homeric similes , are formal, sustained

similes in which the secondary subject, or vehicle, is elaborated far beyond its

points of close parallel to the primary subject, or tenor (see under figurative lan-

guage). This figure was imitated from Homer by Virgil, Milton, and other wri-

ters of literary epics, who employed it to enhance the ceremonial quality and

wide-ranging reference of the narrative style. In the epic simile in Paradise Lost

(I. 768ff ), Milton describes his primary subject, the fallen angels thronging

toward their new-built palace of Pandemonium, by an elaborate comparison

to the swarming of bees:

As Bees

In spring time, when the Sun with Taurus rides,

Pour forth their populous youth about the Hive

In clusters; they among fresh dews and flowers

Fly to and fro, or on the smoothèd Plank,

The suburb of their Straw-built Citadel,

New rubb’d with Balm, expatiate and confer

Their State affairs. So thick the aery crowd

Swarm’d and were strait’n’d;…

epic theater: “Epic theater” is a term that the German playwright Bertolt

Brecht, in the 1920s, applied to his plays. By the word “epic,” Brecht signified

primarily his attempt to emulate on the stage the objectivity of the narration

in Homeric epic. By employing a detached narrator and other devices to

achieve alienation effects, Brecht aimed to subvert the sympathy of the audience

with the actors, and the identification of the actor with his role, that were

features of the theater of bourgeois realism. His hope was to encourage his

audience to criticize and oppose, rather than passively to accept, the social

conditions and modes of behavior that the plays represent. Brecht’s dramatic

works continue to be produced frequently, and his epic theater has had an

important influence on such playwrights as Edward Bond and Caryl Churchill

in England and Tony Kushner in America.

See Bertolt Brecht under Marxist criticism, and refer to John Willett, ed.,

Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (1964); and Janelle Reinelt,

After Brecht: British Epic Theater (1994).

epideictic oratory (

ep





ık

tik): 342.

112 EPIC QUESTION

epigram: The term is now used for a statement, whether in verse or prose,

which is terse, pointed, and witty. The epigram may be on any subject and

in any mode: amatory, elegiac, meditative, complimentary, anecdotal, or

(most often) satiric. Martial, the Roman epigrammatist, established the endur-

ing model for the caustically satiric epigram in verse.

The verse epigram was much cultivated in England in the late sixteenth

and seventeenth centuries by such poets as John Donne, Ben Jonson, and

Robert Herrick. The form flourished especially in the eighteenth century, the

time that Austin Dobson described as the age “of wit, of polish, and of Pope.”

Matthew Prior is a highly accomplished writer of epigrams, and many closed

couplets by Alexander Pope and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu are detachable

epigrams. In the same century, when the exiled Stuarts were still pretenders to

the English throne, John Byrom proposed this epigrammatic toast:

God bless the King—I mean the Faith’s defender!

God bless (no harm in blessing) the Pretender!

But who pretender is or who is king—

God bless us all! that’s quite another thing.

And here is one of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s epigrams, to show that

Romanticism did not preclude wit:

On a Volunteer Singer

Swans sing before they die—’twere no bad thing

Should certain people die before they sing!

Many of the short poems of Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864) were

fine examples of the nonsatirical epigram. Boileau and Voltaire excelled in

the epigram in France, as did Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller in Germany; and

in America, a number of the short poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson and

Emily Dickinson may be accounted epigrams. The form continued to be

cultivated by Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Ogden Nash, Phyllis McGinley,

Dorothy Parker, A. R. Ammons, Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, and other

poets in the twentieth century.

“Epigram” came to be applied, after the eighteenth century, to neat and

witty statements in prose as well as verse; an alternative name for the prose

epigram is the apothegm. (For examples, see wit, humor, and the comic.)

Such terse and witty prose statements are to be distinguished from the apho-

rism: a pithy and pointed statement of a serious maxim, opinion, or general

truth. One of the best known aphorisms is also one of the shortest: ars longa,

vita brevis est—“art is long, life is short.” It occurs first in a work attributed to

the Greek physician Hippocrates entitled Aphorisms, which consisted of tersely

worded precepts on the practice of medicine. (See John Gross, ed., The

Oxford Book of Aphorisms, 1983.) A related prose form is the proverb; see

under allegory.

Refer to Kingsley Amis, ed., The New Oxford Book of Light Verse (1986);

Russell Baker, ed., The Norton Book of Light Verse (1986). For references to

epigram in other entries, see page 10.

EPIGRAM 113

epiphany: “Epiphany” means “a manifestation,” or “showing forth,” and by

Christian thinkers was used to signify a manifestation of God’s presence within

the created world. In the early draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

entitled Stephen Hero (published posthumously in 1944), James Joyce adapted

the term to secular experience, to signify the sense of a sudden radiance and

revelation that occurs during the perception of a commonplace object. “By an

epiphany [Stephen] meant a sudden spiritual manifestation.”“Its soul, its what-

ness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the common-

est object … seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany.” Joyce’s

short stories and novels include a number of epiphanies; a climactic one is the

revelation that Stephen experiences at the sight of the young girl wading on the

shore of the sea in A Portrait of the Artist, chapter 4. “Epiphany” has become the

standard term for the description, recurrent in modern poetry and prose fiction,

of the sudden flare into revelation of an ordinary object or scene. Joyce, how-

ever, had merely substituted this word for what earlier authors had called the

“moment.” Thus Shelley, in his Defence 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 pre-eminent poet of what he called “moments,” or in more elaborate

instances, “spots of time.” For examples of short poems that represent a

moment of revelation, see Wordsworth’s “The Two April Mornings” and

“The Solitary Reaper.” Wordsworth’s Prelude,likesomeofJoyce’snarratives,

is constructed as a sequence of such visionary encounters. Thus in Book VIII,

lines 543–54 (1850 ed.), Wordsworth describes the “moment” when he for the

first time passed in a stagecoach over the “th

reshold” of London and the “trivial

forms / Of houses, pavement, streets” suddenly assumed 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,

And grateful memory, as a thing divine.

See Irene H. Chayes, “Joyce’s Epiphanies,” reprinted in Joyce’s “Portrait ”:

Criticisms and Critiques, ed. T. E. Connolly (1962); Morris Beja, Epiphany in the

Modern Novel (1971); Ashton Nichols, The Poetics of Epiphany: Nineteenth-Century

Origins of the Modern Literary Moment (1987). On the history of the traditional

“moment” in sacred writings, beginning with St. Augustine, and its conversion

intothemodernliteraryepiphany,seeM.H.Abrams,Natural Supernaturalism:

Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (1971), chapters 7–8.

episodic (plot): 253.

epistolary novel (ep



toler

e): 254.

epithalamion: “Epithalamion,” or in the Latin form “epithalamium,” is a poem

written to celebrate a marriage. Among its classical practitioners were the

114 EPIPHANY

Greeks Sappho and Theocritus and the Romans Ovid and Catullus. The term

in Greek means “at the bridal chamber,” since the verses were originally writ-

ten to be sung outside the bedroom of a newly married couple. The form

flourished among the Neo-Latin poets of the Renaissance, who established

the model that was followed by writers in the European vernacular languages.

Sir Philip Sidney wrote the first English instance in about 1580, and fifteen

years later Edmund Spenser wrote his great lyric “Epithalamion,” a celebra-

tion of his own marriage that he composed as a wedding gift to his bride.

Spenser’s poem follows, in elaborately contrived numbers of stanzas and

lines, the sequence of the hours during his wedding day and night and com-

bines, with unfailing ease and dignity, Christian ritual and beliefs, pagan topics

and mythology, and the local Irish setting. John Donne, Ben Jonson, Robert

Herrick, and many other Renaissance poets composed wedding poems that

were solemn or ribald, according to the intended audience and the poet’s

own temperament.

Sir John Suckling’s “A Ballad upon a Wedding” is a good-humored parody

of this upper-class poetic form, which he applies to a lower-class wedding. The

tradition persists. Shelley composed an “Epithalamium”;Tennyson’s In Memoriam,

although it opens with a funeral, closes with an epithalamion; A. E. Housman

spoke in the antique idiom of the bridal song in “He Is Here, Urania’s Son.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote an “Epithalamion” in 1888 (published in 1918),

as did e. e. cummings in 1923 and W. H. Auden in 1939.

See Robert H. Case, English Epithalamies (1896); Virginia J. Tufte, The

Poetry of Marriage (1970); and (on the elaborate construction of the stanzas and

lines in Spenser’s “Epithalamion” to correspond with the passage of time on his

wedding day) A. Kent Hieatt, Short Time’s Endless Monument (1960).

epithet: As a term in criticism, epithet denotes an adjective or adjectival phrase

used to describe a distinctive quality of a person or thing; an example is “silver

snarling trumpets” in John Keats’ The Eve of St. Agnes. The term is also applied

to an identifying phrase that stands in place of a noun; thus, Alexander Pope’s

“the glittering forfex ” is an ironically inflated epithet for the scissors with which

the Baron performs his heinous act in The Rape of the Lock (1714). The fre-

quent use of derogatory adjectives and phrases in invective has led to the mis-

taken notion that an “epithet” is

always uncomplimentary.

Homeric epithets are adjectival terms—usually a compound of two

words—like those which Homer in his epic poems used as recurrent formulas

in referring to a distinctive feature of someone or something: “fleet-footed

Achilles,”“bolthurling Zeus,”“the wine-dark sea.” Buck Mulligan in James

Joyce’s Ulysses parodied the formula in his reference to “the snot-green sea.”

We often use “conventional epithets” in identifying historical or legendary

figures, as in Charles the Great, Lorenzo the Magnificent, Patient Griselda.

epoché (ep

oke): 289.

epode (e

pod): 262.

EPODE 115

equivoque (ek



vok): 325.

Erziehungsroman (ertse

ungsromän

): 255.

eschatology (es

katol

oje): 183.

essay: Any short composition in prose that undertakes to discuss a matter, express a

point of view, persuade us to accept a thesis on any subject, or simply entertain.

The essay differs from a “treatis e” or “dissertation” in its lack of pretension to be

a systematic and complete exposition and in being addressed to a general rather

than a specialized audience; as a consequence, the essay discusses its subject in

nontechnical fashion and often with a liberal use of such devices as anecdote,

striking illustration, and humor to augment its appeal.

A useful distinction is that between the formal and informal essay. The

formal essay,orarticle, is relatively impersonal: the author writes as an

authority, or at least as highly knowledgeable, and expounds the subject in

an orderly way. Examples will be found in scholarly journals, as well as

among the serious articles on current topics and issues in any of the magazines

addressed to a thoughtful audience—Harper’s, Scientific American, The New York

Review of Books, and so on. In the informal essay (or “familiar” or “personal

essay”), the author assumes a tone of intimacy with his audience, tends to deal

with everyday things rather than with public affairs or specialized topics, and

writes in a relaxed, self-revelatory, and sometimes whimsical fashion. Modern

examples are to be found in any issue of The New Yorker.

The Greeks Theophrastus and Plutarch and the Romans Cicero and Seneca

wrote essays long before the genre was given what became its standard name by

Montaigne’sFrenchEssais in 1580. The title signifies “attempts” and was meant

to indicate the tentative and unsystematic nature of Montaigne’s commentary on

topics such as “Of Illness” and “Of Sleeping,” in contrast to formal and technical

treatises on the same subjects. Francis Bacon, late in the sixteenth century, inau-

gurated the English use of the term in his own Essays; most of them are short

discussions such as “Of Truth,”“Of Adversity,”“OfMarriageandtheSingle

Life.” Alexander Pope adopted the term for his expository compositions in

verse, the Essay on Criticism (1711) and the Essay on Man (1733), but the verse

essay has had few important exponents after the eighteenth century; the verse

essays by the American poet R obert Pinsky are a rare exception. In the early

eighteenth century Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele’s Tatler and Spectator,

with

their many successors, gave to the essay written in prose its standard mod-

ern vehicle, the literary periodical (earlier essays had been published in books).

In the early nineteenth century the founding of new types of magazines,

and their steady proliferation, gave great impetus to the writing of essays and

made them a major department of literature. This was the age when William

Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey, Charles Lamb, and, later in the century, Robert

Louis Stevenson brought the English essay—and especially the personal

essay—to a level that has not been surpassed. Major American essayists in the

nineteenth century include Washington Irving, Emerson, Thoreau, James

Russell Lowell, and Mark Twain. Most modern essays are formal in type,

116 EQUIVOQUE

but Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, E. M. Forster, James Thurber, E. B. White,

James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Adam Gopnik, Joan Didion, and Oliver Sacks

are notable practitioners of the informal essay.

See Robert Scholes and Carl H. Klaus, Elements of the Essay (1969); John

Gross, ed., The Oxford Book of Essays (1991); Wendy Martin, ed., Essays by

Contemporary American Women (1996). For a suggestive view of the tacit phil-

osophical assumptions underlying the essay form, see Georg Lukács, “On the

Nature and Form of the Essay,” in Soul and Form (1911; trans. with an intro-

duction by Judith Butler, 2010).

essentialism: 165.

estrange: 142.

estrangement effect: 8.

ethnic writers: 278.

ethos (e

thos): 270.

euphemism: An inoffensive expression used in place of a blunt one that is felt

to be disagreeable or embarrassing. Euphemisms occur frequently with refer-

ence to such subjects as religion (“Gosh darn!” for “God damn!”), death (“pass

away” instead of “die”), bodily functions (“comfort station” instead of “toi-

let”), and sex (“to sleep with” instead of “to have sexual intercourse with”).

On the extraordinary number and variety of sexual euphemisms in

Shakespeare’s plays, see Eric Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy (1960).

euphony and cacophony: Euphony is a term applied to language which

strikes the ear as smooth, pleasant, and musical, as in these lines from John

Keats, The Eve of St. Agnes (1820),

And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;

Manna and dates, in argosy transferred

From Fez; and spicèd dainties, every one,

From silken Samarcand to cedar’d Lebanon.

Analysis of the passage, however, will show that what seems to be a purely

auditory agreeableness is due more to the significance of the words, conjoined

with the ease and pleasure of the physical act of enunciating the sequence of

the speech sounds, than to the inherent melodiousness of the speech sounds

themselves. The American critic John Crowe Ransom illustrated the impor-

tance of significance to euphony by altering Tennyson’s “The murmur of

innumerable bees” to “The murder of innumerable beeves”; the euphony is

destroyed not by changing one speech sound and inserting others but by the

change in reference.

Similarly, in cacophony,ordissonance—language which is perceived

as harsh, rough, and unmusical—the discordancy is the effect not only of the

EUPHONY AND CACOPHONY 117

sound of the words but also of their significance, conjoined with the difficulty

of enunciating the sequence of the speech sounds. Cacophony may be inad-

vertent, through a lapse in the writer’s attention or skill, as in the unfortunate

line of Matthew Arnold’s fine poem “ Dover Beach ” (1867), “Lay like the

folds of a bright girdle furled.” But cacophony may also be deliberate and

functional: for humor, as in Robert Browning’s “Pied Piper” (1842),

Rats!

They fought the dogs and killed the cats …

Split open the kegs of salted sprats,

Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats[;]

or else for other purposes, as in Thomas Hardy’s attempt, in his poem “In

Tenebris I,” to mimic, as well as describe, dogged endurance by the difficulty

of negotiating the transition in speech sounds from each stressed monosyllable

to the next:

I shall not lose old strength

In the lone frost’s black length.

Strength long since fled!

For other sound effects, see alliteration and onomatopoeia. Refer to G. R. Stewart,

The Technique of English Verse (1930), and Northrop Frye, ed., Sound and Poetry

(1957).

euphuism: A conspicuously formal and elaborate prose style which had a vogue

in the 1580s in drama, prose fiction, and probably also in the conversation of

English court circles. It takes its name from the moralistic prose romance

Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, which John Lyly wrote in 1578. In the dialo-

gues of this work and of Euphues and His England (1580), as well as in his stage

comedies, Lyly exaggerated and used persistently a stylized prose which other

writers had developed earlier. The style is sententious (that is, full of moral

maxims), relies on syntactical balance and antithesis , reinforces the structural

parallels by heavy and elaborate patterns of alliteration and assonance, exploits

the rhetorical question, and is addicted to long similes and learned allusions,

which are often drawn from mythology and the supposed characteristics and

habits of legendary animals. Here is a brief example from Euphues; the charac-

ter Philautus is speaking:

I see now that as the fish Scholopidus in the flood Araris at the waxing

of the Moon is as white as the driven snow, and at the waning as

black as the burnt coal, so Euphues, which at the first encreasing of

our familiarity, was very zealous, is now at the last cast become most

faithless.

Shakespeare good-humoredly parodied this self-consciously elegant style in

Love’s Labour’ s Lost and other plays; nonetheless, he, like other authors of the

time, profited from Lyly’s explorations of the formal and rhetorical possibilities

of English prose.

118 EUPHUISM

See style; also Jonas A. Barish, “The Prose Style of John Lyly,” English

Literary History 23 (1956), and G. K. Hunter, John Lyly (1962).

exegesis (exeje

sis): 178.

exemplum (exem

plum): 11.

existential philosophy: 180; 1.

explication: 243; 15.

explication de texte: 243.

exposition (in a plot): 295.

expressionism: A German movement in literature and the other arts (especially

the visual arts) which was at its height between 1910 and 1925—that is, in the

period just before, during, and after World War I, when many of the “isms”

that flourished in the era of modernism appeared, often blending into each

other. Its chief precursors were artists and writers who had in various ways

departed from realistic depictions of life and the world by incorporating into

their art visionary or powerfully emotional states of mind that are expressed

and transmitted by means of distorted representations of the outer world.

Among these precursors in painting were Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin,

and the Norwegian Edvard Munch—Munch’s lithograph The Cry (1894)

depicting, against a bleak and stylized background, a tense figure with a con-

torted face uttering a scream of pure horror, is often taken to epitomize what

became the expressionist mode. Prominent among the literary precursors

of the movement in the nineteenth century were the French poets Charles

Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky,

the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and above all the Swedish dra-

matist August Strindberg.

Expressionism itself was not a concerted or well-defined movement. It

can be said, however, that its central feature is a revolt against the artistic

and literary tradition of realism, both in subject matter and in style. The

expressionist artist or writer undertakes to express a personal vision—usually

a troubled or tensely emotional vision—of human life and human society.

This is done by exaggerating and distorting what, according to the norms of

artistic realism, are objective features of the world, and by embodying violent

extremes of mood and feeling. Often the work implies that what is depicted

or described represents the experience of an individual standing alone and

afraid in an industrial, technological, and urban society which is disintegrating

into chaos. Those expressionists who were radical in their politics also pro-

jected utopian views of a future community in a regenerated world.

Expressionist painters tended to use jagged lines to depict contorted

objects and forms, as well as to substitute arbitrary, often lurid colors, for

EXPRESSIONISM 119

natural hues; among these painters were Emil Nolde, Franz Marc, Oskar

Kokoschka, and, for a time, Wassily Kandinsky. Expressionist poets (including

the Germans Gottfried Benn and Georg Trakl) departed from standard meter,

syntax, and poetic structure to organize their works around symbolic images.

Expressionist writers of prose narratives (most eminently Franz Kafka) aban-

doned standard modes of characterization and plot for symbolic figures

involved in an obsessive world of nightmarish events.

Drama was a prominent and widely influential form of expressionist writ-

ing. Among the better-known German playwrights were Georg Kaiser (Gas,

From Morn to Midnight), Ernst Toller (Mass Man), and, in his earlier produc-

tions, Bertolt Brecht. Expressionist dramatists often represented anonymous

human types instead of individualized characters, replaced plot with episodic

renderings of intense and rapidly oscillating emotional states, fragmented the

dialogue into exclamatory and seemingly incoherent sentences or phrases, and

employed masks and abstract or lopsided and sprawling stage sets. The pro-

ducer Max Reinhardt, although not himself in the movement, directed a

number of plays by Strindberg and by German expressionists; in them he

inaugurated such modern devices as the revolving stage and special effects in

lighting and sound. This mode of German drama had an important influence

on the American theater. Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1920) pro-

jected, in a sequence of symbolic episodes, the individual and racial memories

of a terrified African-American protagonist, and Elmer Rice’s The Adding

Machine (1923) used nonrealistic means to represent a mechanical, sterile, and

frightening world as experienced by Mr. Zero, a tiny and helpless cog in the

impersonal system of big business. The flexible possibilities of the medium

made the motion picture an important vehicle of German expressionism.

Robert Wiene’s early expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)—

representing, in ominously distorted settings, the machinations of the satanic

head of an insane asylum—as well as Friedrich Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926)—are often shown in current revivals of films.

Expressionism had begun to flag by 1925 and was finally suppressed in

Germany by the Nazis in the early 1930s, but it has continued to exert influ-

ence on English and American, as well as European, art and literature. We

recognize its effects, direct or indirect, on the writing and staging of such

plays as Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth and Arthur Miller’s Death

of a Salesman, as well as on the theater of the absurd; on the poetry of Allen

Ginsberg and other Beat writers; on the prose fiction of Samuel Beckett,

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Joseph Heller, and Thomas Pynchon; and on a number

of films that exhibit the distorted perceptions and fantasies of disturbed

characters, by such directors as Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and

Michelangelo Antonioni.

See Richard Samuel and R. H. Thomas, Expressionism in German Life,

Literature and the Theater, 1910–1924 (1939); Walter H. Sokel, The Writer in

Extremis: Expressionism in Twentieth-Century German Literature (1959); John

Willett, Expressionism (1970); Donald E. Gordon, Expressionism: Art and

Idea (1987); Neil H. Donahue, ed., A Companion to the Literature of German

120 EXPRESSIONISM

Expressionism (2005). On the expressionist cinema: Siegfried Kracauer, From

Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947); Lotte Eisner,

The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max

Reinhardt (1969).

expressive criticism: 72; 175, 381.

expressive form: 141.

eye rhymes: 349.

EYE RHYMES 121

fable: 10.

fabliau (fab

leo): The “medieval fabliau” was a short comic or satiric tale in

verse dealing realistically with middle-class or lower-class characters and

delighting in the ribald; one of its favorite themes was the cuckolding of a

stupid husband. (Professor Douglas Bush neatly described the type as “ a

short story broader than it is long.”) The fabliau flourished in France in the

twelfth and thirteenth centuries and became popular in England during the

fourteenth century. Chaucer, who wrote one of the greatest serious short

stories in verse, the account of Death and the rioters in “The Pardoner’s

Tale,” also wrote one of the best fabliaux, the hilarious “Miller’s Tale.”

See Joseph Bédier, Les Fabliaux (5th ed., 1928); Fabliaux: Ribald Tales from the

Old French, trans. Robert Hellman and Richard O’Gorman (1976); Howard Bloch,

The Scandal of the Fabliaux (1986); John Hines, The Fabliau in English (1993).

fabula: 234.

fabulation: 258.

fairy tale: 139.

fallible narrator: 304; 187.

falling action: 296.

false wit: 417.

family resemblances: 151.

fancy and imagination: The distinction between fancy and imagination was a

key element in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s theory of poetry, as well as in his gen-

eral theory of the mental processes. In earlier discussions, “fancy” and “imagina-

tion” had for the most part been used synonymously to denote a faculty of the

mind which is distinguished from “reason,”“judgment,” and “memory” in that

it receives “images” from the senses and reorders them into new combinations.

In the thirteenth chapter of Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge attributes this

reordering function of the sensory images to the lower faculty he calls fancy:

“Fancy … has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The

Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order

of time and space.” To

Coleridge, the fancy is a mechanical process which receives

the elementary images—the “fixities and definites” that come to it ready-made

from the senses—and, without altering the parts, reassembles them into a differ-

ent spatial and temporal order from that in which they were originally perceived.

The imagination, however, which produces a much higher kind of poetry,

dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this pro-

cess is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize

122 FABLE

and unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are

essentially fixed and dead.

Unlike the fancy, Coleridge’s imagination is able to “create” rather than

merely reassemble, by dissolving the fixities and definites—the mental pic-

tures, or images, received from the senses—and unifying them into a new

whole. And while the fancy is merely mechanical, the imagination is “vital ”;

that is, it is an organic faculty which operates not like a sorting machine but

like a living and growing plant. As Coleridge says elsewhere, the imagination

“generates and produces a form of its own,” while its rules are “the very

powers of growth and production.” And in the fourteenth chapter of the

Biographia, Coleridge adds his famous statement that the “synthetic” power

which is the “imagination … reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of

opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general,

with the concrete; the idea, with the image….” The faculty of imagination, in

other words, assimilates and synthesizes the most disparate elements into an

organic whole—that is, a newly generated unity, constituted by an interde-

pendence of parts whose identity cannot survive their removal from the

whole. (See organic form.)

Most critics after Coleridge who distinguished fancy from imagination

tended to make fancy simply the faculty that produces a lesser, lighter, or

humorous kind of poetry and to make imagination the faculty that produces a

higher, more serious, and more passionate poetry. And the concept of “imagi-

nation” itself is as various as the modes of psychology that critics have adopted

(associationist, Gestalt, Freudian, Jungian), while its processes vary according to

the way in which a critic conceives of the nature of a poem (as essentially real-

istic or essentially visionary, as a verbal construction or as “myth,” as “pure

poetry” or as a work designed to produce effects on an audience).

See I. A. Richards, Coleridge on Imagination (1934); M. H. Abrams, The

Mirror and the Lamp (1953), chapter 7; Thomas McFarland, “The Origin and

Significance of Coleridge’s Theory of Secondary Imagination,” in Geoffrey

Hartman, ed., New Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth (1972); John S.

Hill,

Imagination in Coleridge (1978);

James Engell, The Creative Imagination:

Enlightenment to Romanticism (1981).

fantastic literature: 305.

fantasy: 355.

farce: 57; 48, 60.

feminine ending: 221.

feminine rhyme: 348.

feminist criticism: As a distinctive and concerted approach to literature, femi-

nist criticism was not inaugurated until late in the 1960s. Behind it, however,

FEMINIST CRITICISM 123

lie two centuries of struggle for the recognition of women’s cultural roles and

achievements and for women’s social and political rights, marked by such

books as Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792),

John Stuart Mill ’s The Subjection of Women (1869), and the American Margaret

Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). Much of feminist literary criti-

cism continues in our time to be interrelated with the movement by political

feminists for social, legal, and cultural freedom and equality.

An important precursor in feminist criticism was Virginia Woolf, who,

in addition to her fiction, wrote A Room of One ’sOwn(1929) and numerous

other essays on women authors and on the cultural, economic, and educa-

tional disabilities within what she called a “patriarchal” society, dominated

by men, that have hin dered or prevented women from realizing their

productive and creative possibilities. (See the collection of her essays,

M. Barrett, ed., Women and Writing, 1979.) A much more radical critical

mode, sometimes called “second-wave feminism,” was launched in France

by Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), a wi de-ranging critique of

the cultural identification of women as merely the negative object, or

“Other,” to man as the dominating “Subject” who is assumed to represent

humanity in general; the book dealt al so with the “great collective myth s”

of women in the works of many male writers.

In America, modern feminist criticism was inaugurated by Mary

Ellmann’s d eft and witty discussion, in Thinking about Women (1968),

about the derogatory stereotypes of womeninliteraturewrittenbymen,

and also about alternative and subversiv e repres entatio ns that occur in

some writings by women. Even more influential was Kate Millett’shard-

hitting Sexual Politics, published the following year. By “politics” Millett

signifies the mechanisms that express and enforce the relationships of

power in s ociety; she analyzes many Western social arrangements and insti-

tutionsascovertwaysofmanipulating power so as to establish and perpet-

uate the d ominance of men a nd the subordination of women. In her book,

she attacks the male bias in Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and also analyzes

selected passages b y D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and

Jean Genet as revealing the ways in which the authors, in their fictional

fantasies, aggrandiz e their aggressive phallic selves and degrade women as

submissive sexual objects.

In the years after 1969, there was an explosion of feminist writings with-

out parallel in previous critical innovations, in a movement that in its earlier

stages, as Elaine Showalter remarked, displayed the urgency and excitement of

a religious awakening. Current feminist criticism in America, England, France,

and other countries is not a unitary theory or procedure. It manifests, among

those who practice it, a great variety of critical vantage points and procedures,

including

adaptations of psychoanalytic, Marxist, and diverse poststructuralist the-

ories, and its vitality is signalized by the vigor (sometimes even rancor) of the

debates within the ranks of professed feminists themselves. The various femin-

isms, however, share certain assumptions and concepts that underlie the

diverse ways that individual critics explore the factor of sexual difference and

124 FEMINIST CRITICISM

privilege in the production, the form and content, the reception, and the criti-

cal analysis and evaluation of works of literature:

1. The basic view is that Western civilization is pervasively patriarchal

(ruled by the father)—that is, it is male-centered and -controlled and is

organized and conducted in such a way as to subordinate women to

men in all cultural domains: familial, religious, political, economic, social,

legal, and artistic. From the Hebrew Bible and Greek philosophic writ-

ings to the present, the female tends to be defined by negative reference

to the male as the human norm, hence as an Other, or non-man, by her

lack of the identifying male organ, of male capabilities, and of the male

character traits that are presumed, in the patriarchal view, to have

achieved the most important scientific and technical inventions and the

major works of civilization and culture. Women themselves are taught,

in the process of being socialized, to internalize the reigning patriarchal

ideology (that is, the conscious and unconscious presuppositions about

male superiority) and so are conditioned to derogate their own sex and

to cooperate in their own subordination.

2. It is widely held that while one’s sex as a man or woman is determined by

anatomy, the prevailing concepts of gender—of the traits that are con-

ceived to constitute what is masculine and what is feminine in tempera-

ment and behavior—are largely, if not entirely, social constructs that were

generated by the pervasive patriarchal biases of our civilization. As

Simone de Beauvoir put it, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a

woman…. It is civilization as a whole that produces this creature …

which is described as feminine.” By this cultural process, the masculine

in our culture has come to be widely identified as active, dominating,

adventurous, rational, creative; the feminine, by systematic opposition to

such traits, has come to be identified as passive, acquiescent, timid, emo-

tional, and conventional. (See gender criticism.)

3. The further claim is that this patriarchal (or “masculinist,” or “andro-

centric”) ideology pervades those writings which have been traditionally

considered great literature and which until recently have been written

mainly by men for men. Typically, the most highly regarded literary

works focus on male protagonists—Oedipus, Ulysses, Hamlet, Tom

Jones, Faust, the Three Musketeers, Captain Ahab, Huck Finn, Leopold

Bloom—who embody masculine traits and ways of feeling and pursue

masculine interests in masculine fields of action. To these males, the

female characters, when they play a role, are marginal and subordinate

and are represented either as complementary and subservient to, or in

opposition to, masculine desires and enterprises. Such works, lacking

autonomous female role models and implicitly addressed to male readers,

either leave the woman reader an alien outsider or else solicit her to

“identify against herself” by taking up the position of the male subject

and so assuming male values and ways of perceiving, feeling, and acting.

It is often held, in addition, that the traditional categories and criteria for

FEMINIST CRITICISM 125

analyzing and appraising literary works, although represented in standard

critical theory as objective, disinterested, and universal, are in fact infused

with masculine assumptions, interests, and ways of reasoning, so that

the standard selection and rankings, the prevailing canon, and the criti-

cal treatments of literary works have in fact been tacitly but thoroughly

gender-biased.

A major interest of feminist critics in English-speaking countries has been

to reconstitute the ways we deal with literature in order to do justice to

female points of view, concerns, and values. One emphasis has been to alter

the way a woman reads the literature of the past so as to make her not an

acquiescent, but (in the title of Judith Fetterley’s book published in 1978)

The Resisting Reader; that is, one who resists the author’s intentions and design

in order, by a “revisionary rereading,” to bring to light and to counter the

covert sexual biases written into a literary work. Another prominent proce-

dure has been to identify recurrent and distorting “images of women,” espe-

cially in novels and poems written by men. These images are often

represented as tending to fall into two antithetic patterns. On the one side

we find idealized projections of men’s desires (the Madonna, the Muses of

the arts, Dante’s Beatrice, the pure and innocent virgin, the “Angel in the

House” that was represented in the writings of the Victorian poet Coventry

Patmore). On the other side are demonic projections of men’s sexual resent-

ments and terrors (Eve and Pandora as the sources of all evil, destructive

sensual temptresses such as Delilah and Circe, the malign witch, the castrating

mother). While many feminist critics have decried the literature written by

men for its depiction of women as marginal, docile, and subservient to

men’s interests and emotional needs and fears, some of them have also identi-

fied male writers who, in their view, have managed to rise above the sexual

prejudices of their time sufficiently to understand and represent the cultural

pressures that have shaped the characters of women and forced upon them

their negative or subsidiary social roles. The latter class is said to include, in

selected works, such authors as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Samuel Richardson,

Henrik Ibsen, and George Bernard Shaw.

A number of feminists have concentrated not on the woman as reader but

on what Elaine Showalter named gynocriticism—that is, a criticism which

concerns itself with developing a specifically female framework for dealing

with works written by women, in all aspects of their production, motivation,

analysis, and interpretation and in all literary forms, including journals and let-

ters. Notable books in this mode include Patricia Meyer Spacks’ The Female

Imagination (1975), on English and American novels of the past three centu-

ries; Ellen Moers’ Literary Women (1976), on major women novelists and poets

in England, America, and France; Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own:

British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (1977); and Sandra Gilbert and

Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979; rev. 2000). This last book

stresses especially the psychodynamics of women writers in the nineteenth

century. Its authors propose that the “anxiety of authorship,” resulting from

126 FEMINIST CRITICISM

the stereotype that literary creativity is an exclusively male prerogative,

effected in women writers a psychological duplicity that projected a mon-

strous counterfigure to the idealized heroine, typified by Bertha Rochester,

the madwoman in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre; such a figure is “usually in

some sense the author’s double, an image of her own anxiety and rage.”

(Refer to influence and the anxiety of influence.)

One concern of gynocritics is to identify distinctively feminine subject

matters in literature written by women—the world of domesticity, for exam-

ple, or the special experiences of gestation, giving birth, and nurturing, or

mother–daughter and woman–woman relations—in which personal and

affectional issues, and not external activism, are the primary interest. Another

concern is to uncover in literary history a female tradition, incorporated in

subcommunities of women writers who were aware of, emulated, and found

support in earlier women writers and who in turn provide models and emo-

tional support to their own readers and successors. A third undertaking is to

show that there is a distinctive feminine mode of experience, or “subjectiv-

ity,” in thinking, feeling, valuing, and perceiving oneself and the outer world.

Related to this is the attempt (thus far, without much agreement about

details) to specify the traits of a “woman’s language,” or distinctively feminine

style of speech and writing, in sentence structure, types of relations between

the elements of a discourse, and characteristic figures of speech and imagery.

Some feminists have turned their critical attention to the great number of

women’s domestic and “sentimental” novels, which are noted perfunctorily

and in derogatory fashion in standard literary histories yet which dominated

the market for fiction in the nineteenth century and produced most of

the best sellers of the time; instances of this last critical enterprise are Elaine

Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own (1977) on British writers, and on American

writers, Nina Baym’s Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women

in America, 1820–1870 (1978); and Elaine Showalter, A Jury of Her Peers:

American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (2009). Sandra

Gilbert and Susan Gubar have described the later history of women’s writings

in No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century

(2 vols., 1988–89).

The often-asserted goal of feminist critics has been to enlarge and reorder,

or in radical instances entirely to displace, the literary canon—that is, the set of

works which, by a cumulative consensus, have come to be considered “major”

and to serve as the chief subjects of literary history, criticism, scholarship, and

teaching (see canon of literature). Feminist studies have succeeded in raising the

status of many female authors hitherto more or less scanted by scholars and

critics (including Anne Finch, George Sand, Elizabeth Barrett Browning,

izabeth Gaskell, Christina Rossetti, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Sidonie

Gabrielle Colette) and to bring into their purview other authors who have

been largely or entirely overlooked as subjects for serious consideration

(among them Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,

Joanna Baillie, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and a number of

African-American writers such as Zora Neale Hurston). Some feminists have

FEMINIST CRITICISM 127

devoted their critical attention especially to the literature written by lesbian

writers or that deals with lesbian relationships in a heterosexual culture. (See

queer theory.)

AmericanandEnglishcriticshaveforthemostpartengagedinempirical

and thematic studies of writings by and about women. The most prominent

feminist critics in France, however, have occupied themselves with the “theory”

of the role of gender in writing, conceptualized within various poststructural

frames of reference, and above all Jacques Lacan’s reworkings of Freudian psycho-

analysis in terms of Saussure’s linguistic theory. English-speaking feminists, for

example, have drawn attention to demonstrable evidences that a male bias is

encoded in our linguistic conventions; instances include the use of “man ” or

“mankind” for human beings in general, of “chairman” and “spokesman” for

people of either sex, and of the pronouns “he” and “his” to refer back to osten-

sibly gender-neutral nouns such as “God,”“human being,”“child,”“inventor,”

“author,” and “poet.” (See Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker, and Nelly

Furman, eds., Women and Language in Literature and Society, 1980; Deborah

Cameron, Feminism and Linguistic Theory (2nd ed., 1992); and Robin Tolmach

Lakoff et al., Language and Woman’s Place: Text and Commentaries, 2004; see also

the entry linguistics in literary criticism.)Theradicalclaimofsome French theorists,

on the other hand, is that all Western languages, in all their features, are utterly

and irredeemably male-engendered, male-constituted, and male-dominated.

Discourse, it is asserted, in a term proposed by Lacan, is phallogocentric;that

is, it is centered and organized throughout by implicit recourse to the phallus

(used in a symbolic sense) both as its supposed “lo gos,” or ground, and as its

prime signifier and power source. Phallogocentrism, it is claimed, manifests itself

in Western discourse not only in its vocabulary and syntax but also in its rigorous

rules of logic, its proclivity for fixed classifications and oppositions, and its criteria

for what is traditionally considered to be valid evidence and objective knowl-

edge. A basic problem for such theorists is to establish the very possibility of a

woman’s language that will not, when a woman writes, automatically be appro-

priated into this phallogocentric language since such appropriation is said to force

her into complicity with linguistic features that impose on females a condition of

marginality and subservience, or even of linguistic nonentity.

To evade this dilemma, Hélène Cixous posits the existence of an incipi-

ent “feminine

writing,” or écriture féminine, which has its source in the

mother, in the stage of the mother–child relation before the child acquires

the male-centered verbal language. Thereafter, in her view, this prelinguistic

and unconscious potentiality manifests itself in those written texts that, abolish-

ing all repressions, undermine and subvert the fixed signification, the logic,

and the “closure” of our phallocentric language and open out into a joyous

free play of meanings. Alternatively, Luce Irigaray posits a “woman’s writing”

that evades the male monopoly and the risk of appropriation into the existing

system by establishing as its generative principle, in place of the monolithic

phallus, the diversity, fluidity, and multiple possibilities inherent in the struc-

ture and erotic functioning of the female sexual organs and erogenous zones

and in the distinctive nature of female sexual experiences. Julia Kristeva posits

128 FEMINIST CRITICISM

a “chora,” or prelinguistic, pre-Oedipal, and unsystematized signifying pro-

cess, centered on the mother, that she labels “semiotic.” This process is

repressed as we acquire the father-controlled, syntactically ordered, and logical

language that she calls “symbolic.” The semiotic process, however, can break

out in a revolutionary way—her prime example is avant-garde poetry,

whether written by women or by men—as a “heterogeneous destructive cau-

sality” that disrupts and disperses the authoritarian “subject” and strikes free of

the oppressive order and rationality of our standard discourse, which, as the

product of the “law of the Father,” consigns women to a negative and mar-

ginal status.

Since the 1980s a number of feminist critics have used poststructuralist posi-

tions and techniques to challenge the category of “woman” and other found-

ing concepts of feminism itself. They point out the existence of differences

and adversarial strands within the supposedly monolithic history of patriarchal

discourse and emphasize the inherent linguistic instability in the basic concep-

tions of “woman” or “the feminine,” as well as the diversities within these

supposedly universal and uniform female identities that result from differences

in race, class, nationality, and historical situation. See Barbara Johnson,

A World of Difference (1987); Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist

Literature and Social Change (1989); and the essays in Linda J. Nicholson, ed.,

Feminism/Postmodernism (1990). Judith Butler, in two influential books, has

opposed the notion that the feminist movement requires the concept of a

feminine identity; that is, that there exist essential factors that define a

woman as a woman. Instead, she elaborates the view that the fundamental

features which define gender are social and cultural productions that produce

the illusory effect of being natural. Butler proposes also that we consider gen-

der as a “performative ”— that to be masculine or feminine or homosexual is

not something that one is, but a socially pre-established pattern of behavior

that one repeatedly enacts. (For the concept of “the performative,” refer to

speech-act theory.) See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion

of Identity (1990) and Bodies that Matter (1993).

Feminist theoretical and critical writings have grown to immense propor-

tions in volume, range, and impact. There exist a number of specialized femi-

nist journals and publishing houses; almost all colleges and universities now

have programs in women’s studies—the investigation of the status and

roles of women in history and in diverse institutions and activities—and

courses in women’s literature and feminist criticism; and ever-increasing

place is given to writings by and about women in anthologies, periodicals,

and conferences. Of the many critical and theoretical innovations since the

1970s,

the concern with the effects of sexual differences in the writing, inter-

pretation, analysis, and assessment of literature has had perhaps the most

enduring and wide-ranging effects on literary history, criticism, and academic

instruction, when conducted by men as well as by women. See ecofeminism

and gender studies.

In addition to the books mentioned above, the following works are espe-

cially useful. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, eds., The Norton Anthology of

FEMINIST CRITICISM 129

Literature by Women (3rd ed., 2007)—the editorial materials provide a concise his-

tory, as well as biographies and bibliographies, of female authors since the Middle

Ages. See also Jane Gallop, The Daughter’s Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis

(1982), and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics

(1987). Histories and critiques of feminist criticism: Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual

Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1985)—much of this book is devoted to feminist

theorists in France; Ruth Robbins, Literary Feminisms (2000); Shari Benstock,

Suzanne Ferriss, and Susanne Woods, eds., A Handbook of Literary Feminisms

(2002); Margaret Walters, Feminism: A Very Short Introduction (2005); Ellen

Rooney, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory (2006).

Collections of essays in feminist criticism: Elaine Showalter, ed., The New Femi-

nist Criticism (1985); Patrocinio P. Schweickart and Elizabeth A. Flynn, eds.,

Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts (1986); Margo

Hendricks and Patricia Parker, eds., Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early

Modern Period (1994); Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, eds., Femin-

isms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism (2nd ed., 1997). For critiques

of some feminist positions and views by women, see Nina Baym, “The

Madwoman and Her Languages: Why I Don’t Do Feminist Literary Theory,”

in Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship, ed. Shari Benstock (1987); Elizabeth

Fox-Genovese, Feminism without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism (1991);

Camille Paglia, Vamps & Tramps (1994); Susan Gubar, Critical Condition: Femi-

nism at the Turn of the Century (2000). Among the books by French feminist the-

orists available in English are Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic

Approach to Literature and Art (1980); Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other

Woman (1985) and This Sex Which Is Not One (1985); Hélène Cixous and

Catherine Clement, The Newly Born Woman (1986); Toril Moi, ed., The Kristeva

Reader (1986); and Toril Moi, What Is a Woman? And Other Essays (2001). On

feminist treatments of African-American women: Barbara Christian, Black Fem-

inist Criticism (1985); Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence

of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (1987); Henry L. Gates, Jr., Reading Black,

Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology (1990); Joy James and T. Denean Sharpley-

Whiting, eds., The Black Feminist Reader (2000). Feminist treatments of lesbian

and gay literature: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and

Male Homosocial Desire (1985) and Epistemology of the Closet (1990). Feminist

theater and film studies: Teresa de Lauretis,

Alice Doesn’t:

Feminism, Semiotics,

Cinema (1984); Sue-Ellen Case, Feminism and Theatre (1987); Constance Penley,

The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis (1989); Peggy Phelan

and Lynda Hart, eds., Acting Out: Feminist Performances (1993).

For references to feminist criticism in other entries, see pages 99, 323.

feminists: 124.

ficelle (f



sel

): 65.

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. In a narrower sense, however, fiction denotes only

130 FEMINISTS

narratives that are written in prose (the novel and short story) and sometimes is

used simply as a synonym for the novel. Literary prose narratives in which the

fiction is to a prominent degree based on biographical, historical, or contem-

porary facts are often referred to by compound names such as “fictional biog-

raphy,” the historical novel, and the nonfiction novel.

Both philosophers and literary critics have concerned themselves with

the logical analysis of the types of sentences that constitute a fictional text,

and especially with th e question of their truth, or what is sometimes called

their “truth-value”—that is, whether, or in just what way, they are subject

to the criterion of truth or falsity. Some thinkers have asserted that

“fictional sentences” should be regarded as referring to a special world,

“created” by the author, which is analogous to the real world but possesses

its own setting, beings, and mode of coherence. (See M. H. Abrams, The

Mirror and the Lamp, 1953, pp. 272–85, “The Po em as Heterocosm”;James

Phelan, Worlds from Words: A Theory of Language in Fiction, 1981.) Others,

most notably I . A. Richards, have held that fiction is a form of emotive

language composed of pseudostatements; and that whereas a statement

in “referential language” is “justified by its truth, that is, its correspondence

… with the fact to which it points,” a pseudostatement “is ju stified entirely

by its effect in releasing or organizing our attitudes” (I.A.Richards,Science

and Poetry, 1926). Most current theorists, however, present an elaborated

logical version of what Sir Philip Sidney long ago proposed in his Apology

for Poetry (published 1595), that a poet “no thing affirmes, therefore never

lyeth. For, as I take it, to lye is to affirm that to be true which i s false.”

Some versio ns of this view hold that fictive sentences are meaningful

according to the rules of ordinary, non fictional discourse but that, in accor-

dance with convention s implicitly shared by the author and reader of a

work of fiction, they are not put forward as assertions of fact and therefore

are not subject to the criterion of t ruth or falsity that applies to sentences in

nonfictional di scourse.

In speech-act theory, a related view takes the form that a writer of fiction

only “pretends” to make assertions, or “imitates” the making of assertions, and

so suspends the “normal illocutionary commitment” of the writer of such

utterances to the claim that what he asserts is true. See John R. Searle,

“The

Logical

Status of Fictional Discourse,” in Expression and Meaning: Studies in the

Theory of Speech Acts (1979, reprinted 1986). We find in a number of other

theorists the attempt to extend the concept of “fictive utterances” to include

all the genres of literature—poems, narratives, and dramas, as well as novels;

all these forms, it is proposed, are imitations, or fictive representations, of

some type of “natural” discourse. A novel, for example, not only is made up

of fictional utterances but is itself a fictive utterance, in that it “represents the

verbal action of a man [that is, the narrator] reporting, describing, and

referring.” See Richard Ohmann, “Speech Acts and the Definition of Litera-

ture,” Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 4 (1971); and Barbara Herrnstein Smith,

“Poetry as Fiction,” in Margins of Discourse (1978).

Most modern critics of prose fiction, whatever their persuasion, make

an important distinction between the fictional scenes, persons, events, and

FICTION AND TRUTH 131

dialogue that a narrator reports or describes and the narrator’s own assertions

about the world, about human life, or about the human situation; the central,

or controlling, generalizations of the latter sort are said to be the theme or

thesis of a work. These assertions by the narrator may be explicit (for exam-

ple, Thomas Hardy’s statement at the end of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, “The

President of the immortals had had his sport with Tess”; or Tolstoy’s philoso-

phy of history at the end of War and Peace). Many such claims, however, are

said to be merely “implied,”“suggested,” or “inferable” from the narrator’s

choice and control of the fictional characters and plot of the narrative itself.

It is often claimed that such generalizations by the narrator within a fictional

work, whether expressed or implied, function as assertions that claim to be

true about the world, and that they thereby relate the fictional narrative to

the factual and moral world of actual experience. See John Hospers, “Implied

Truths in Literature” (1960), reprinted in W. E. Kennick, ed., Art and Philosophy

(rev. 1979).

A much-discussed topic, related to the question of an author’s assertions

and truth-claims in narrative fiction, concerns the part played by the beliefs

of the reader. The problem raised is the extent to which a reader’s own moral,

religious, and social convictions, as they coincide with or diverge from those

asserted or implied in a work, determine the interpretation, acceptability, and

evaluation of that work by the reader. For the history and discussions of this

problem in literary criticism, see M. H. Abrams, editor and contributor, Liter-

ature and Belief (1957); Walter Benn Michaels, “Saving the Text: Reference

and Belief,” Modern Language Notes, Vol. 93 (1978). Many discussions of the

role of belief in fiction cite S. T. Coleridge’s description of the reader’s atti-

tude as a “willing suspension of disbelief.”

A review of theories concerning the relevance of the criterion of truth to

fiction is Monroe C. Beardsley’s Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism

(1958), pp. 409–19. In the writings of Jacques Derrida and his followers in

literary criticism, the binary opposition truth/falsity is one of the metaphysical

presuppositions of Western thought that they put to question; see deconstruction.

For a detailed treatment of the relationships of fiction to the real world, includ-

ing a survey of the diverse views about this problem, see Peter Lamarque and

Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective

(1994). For the role of the concept of fiction in literary history, see Catherine

Gallagher, “TheRiseofFictionality,” in Franco Moretti, ed.,

The Novel,V

ol.1

(2006). Refer also to narrative.

figural interpretation: 182.

figurative language: “Figurative language” is a conspicuous departure from

what competent users of a language apprehend as the standard meaning of

words, or else the standard order of words, in order to achieve some special

meaning or effect. Figures are sometimes described as primarily poetic, but

they are integral to the functioning of language and indispensable to all

modes of discourse.

132 FIGURAL INTERPRETATION

Most modern classifications and analyses are based on the treatment of

figurative language by Aristotle and later classical rhetoricians; the fullest and

most influential treatment is in the Roman Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory

(first century AD), Books VIII and IX. Since that time, figurative language

has often been divided into two classes: (1) Figures of thought,ortropes

(meaning “turns,”“conversions”), in which words or phrases are used in a

way that effects a conspicuous change in what we take to be their standard

meaning. The standard meaning, as opposed to its meaning in the figurative

use, is called the literal meaning . (2) Figures of speech,or“rhetorical fig-

ures,” or schemes (from the Greek word for “form”), in which the departure

from standard usage is not primarily in the meaning of the words but in the

order or syntactical pattern of the words. This distinction is not a sharp one,

nor do all critics agree on its application. For convenience of exposition, how-

ever, the most commonly identified tropes are treated here, and the most

commonly identified figures of speech are collected in the entry rhetorical

figures. For opposition to the basic distinction between the literal and the figu-

rative, see metaphor, theories of.

In a simile, a comparison between two distinctly different things is

explicitly indicated by the word “like” or “as.” A simple example is Robert

Burns, “O my love’s like a red, red rose.” The following simile from Samuel

Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” also specifies the

feature (“green”) in which icebergs are similar to emerald:

And ice, mast-high, came floating by,

As green as emerald.

For highly elaborated types of simile, see conceit and epic simile.

In a metaphor, a word or expression that in literal usage denotes one

kind of thing is applied to a distinctly different kind of thing, without asserting

a comparison. For example, if Burns had said “O my love is a red, red rose”

he would have uttered, technically speaking, a metaphor instead of a simile.

Here is a more complex instance from the poet Stephen Spender, in which he

applies several metaphoric terms to the eye as it scans a landscape:

Eye, gazelle, delicate wanderer,

Drinker of horizon’s fluid line.

For the distinction between metaphor and symbol, see symbol.

It should be noted that in these examples we can distinguish two ele-

ments, the metaphorical term and the subject to which it is applied. In a

widely adopted usage, I. A. Richards introduced the name tenor for the sub-

ject (“my love” in the altered line from Burns, and “eye” in Spender’s lines),

and the name vehicle for the metaphorical term itself (“rose” in Burns, and

the three words “gazelle,”“wanderer,” and “drinker” in Spender). In an

and renewed 1962 by Stephen Spender. Reprinted by permission.

FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE

133

implicit metaphor, the tenor is not itself specified, but only implied. If one

were to say, while discussing someone’s death, “That reed was too frail to

survive the storm of its sorrows,” the situational and verbal context of the

term “reed” indicates that it is the vehicle for an implicit tenor, a human

being, while “storm” is the vehicle for an aspect of a specified tenor,

“sorrows.” Those aspects, properties, or common associations of a vehicle

which, in a given context, apply to a tenor are called by Richards the

grounds of a metaphor. (See I. A. Richards, Philosophy of Rhetoric, 1936,

chapters 5–6.)

All the metaphoric terms, or vehicles, cited so far have been nouns, but

other parts of speech may also be used metaphorically. The metaphoric use of

a verb occurs in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, V. i. 54, “How sweet the

moonlight sleeps upon this bank”; and the metaphoric use of an adjective

occurs in Andrew Marvell’s “ The Garden” (1681):

Annihilating all that’s made

To a green thought in a green shade.

A mixed metaphor conjoins two or more obviously diverse metaphoric

vehicles. When used inadvertently, without sensitivity to the possible in-

congruity of the vehicles, the effect can be ludicrous: “Girding up his loins,

the chairman plowed through the mountainous agenda.” Densely figurative

poets such as Shakespeare, however, often mix metaphors in a functional

way. One example is Hamlet’s expression of his troubled state of mind in

his soliloquy (III. i. 59 –60), “to take arms against a sea of troubles, / And by

opposing end them”; another is the complex involvement of vehicle within

vehicle, applied to the process of aging, in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 65:

O, how shall summer’s honey breath hold out

Against the wrackful siege of battering days?

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 common that we have

ceased to be aware of the discrepancy between vehicle and tenor. Many

dead metaphors, however, are only moribund and can be brought back to

life. Someone asked Groucho Marx, “Are

you a man or a mouse?” He

answered, “Throw me a piece of cheese and you’ll find out.” The recorded

history of language indicates that a great many words that we now take to be

literal were, in the distant past, metaphors.

Metaphors are essential to the functioning of language and have been the

subject of copious analyses, and sharp disagreements, by rhetoricians, linguists,

literary critics, and philosophers of language. For a discussion of diverse views,

see the entry metaphor, theories of.

Some tropes, sometimes classified as species of metaphor, are more fre-

quently and usefully given names of their own:

In metonymy (Greek for “a change of name”), 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. Thus “the crown” or

134 FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE

“the scepter ” can be used to stand for a king and “Hollywood” for the film

industry; “Milton” can signify the writings of Milton (“I have read all of

Milton”); and typical attire can signify the male and female sexes: “doublet

and hose ought to show itself courageous to petticoat” (Shakespeare, As

You Like It, II. iv. 6). (For the influential distinction by the linguist Roman

Jakobson between the metaphoric, or “vertical,” and the metonymic, or

“horizontal,” dimension, in application to many aspects of the functioning of

language, see under linguistics in literary criticism.)

In synecdoche (Greek for “taking together”), a part of something is used

to signify the whole, or (more rarely) the whole is used to signify a part. We

use the term “ten hands” for ten workers, or “a hundred sails” for ships and, in

current slang, “wheels” to stand for an automobile. By a bold use of the figure,

Milton describes the corrupt and greedy clergy in “Lycidas” as “blind mouths.”

Another figure related to metaphor is personification, or in the Greek

term, prosopopoeia, in which either an inanimate object or an abstract

concept is spoken of as though it were endowed with life or with human

attributes or feelings (compare pathetic fallacy). Milton wrote in Paradise Lost

(IX. 1002–3), as Adam bit into the fatal apple,

Sky lowered, and muttering thunder, some sad drops

Wept at completing of the mortal sin.

The second stanza of Keats’“To Autumn” finely personifies the season,

autumn, as a woman carrying on the rural chores of that time of year; and in

Aurora Leigh (I. 251–52), Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote:

Then, land!—then, England! oh, the frosty cliffs

Looked cold upon me.

The personification of abstract terms was standard in eighteenth-century

poetic diction,

where it sometimes became a thoughtless formula. Coleridge

cited

an eighteenth-century ode celebrating the invention of inoculation

against smallpox that began with this apostrophe to the personified subject of

the poem:

Inoculation! heavenly Maid, descend!

See Steven Knapp, Personification and the Sublime (1985).

The term kenning denotes the recurrent use, in the Anglo-Saxon

Beowulf and poems written in other Old Germanic languages, of a descriptive

phrase in place of the ordinary name for something. This type of periphrasis,

which at times becomes a stereotyped expression, is an indication of the origin

of these poems in oral tradition (see oral poetry). Some kennings are instances

of metonymy (“the whale road” for the sea, and “ the ring-giver” for a king);

others of synecdoche (“the ringed prow” for a ship); still others describe salient

or picturesque features of the object referred to (“foamy-necked floater” for a

ship under sail, “storm of swords” for a battle).

Other departures from the standard use of words, often classified as tropes,

are treated elsewhere in this Glossary: aporia; conceit; epic simile; hyperbole; irony;

FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE 135

litotes; paradox; periphrasis; pun; understatement. Since the mid-twentieth century,

especially in the New Criticism, Russian formalism, and Harold Bloom’stheory

of the anxiety of influence, there has been a great interest in the analysis and

functioning of figurative language, which was once thought to be largely the

province of pedantic rhetoricians. In deconstructive criticism, especially in the

writings by Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, the analysis of figurative language

is one of the primary ways of establishing what they assert to be the uncertainty

and undecidability of meaning; see deconstruction.

Summaries of the classification of figures that was inherited from the clas-

sical past are Edward P. J. Corbett, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student (3rd

ed., 1990); and Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (2nd ed.,

1991). Arthur Quinn’s lucid and amusing booklet, Figures of Speech: 60 Ways

to Turn a Phrase (1993), treats mainly what this Glossary classifies as rhetorical

figures. René Wellek and Austin Warren, in Theory of Literature (rev. 1970),

summarize, with bibliography, diverse treatments of figurative language.

For references to figurative language in other entries, see pages 82, 173,

199, 342. See also rhetorical figures; style. Refer also to the following figures:

allusion; ambiguity; anaphora; antithesis; aporia; conceit; epic simile; epithet; hyperbole

and understatement; irony; kenning; litotes; paradox; pathetic fallacy; periphrasis; pun;

symbol; synesthesia. For figures of sound, see alliteration; onomatopoeia; rhyme.

figures of speech: 133.

figures of thought: 133.

fin de siècle (fan

desyek

l): 79.

fine arts: “Fine arts” in modern usage designates primarily the five arts of literature,

painting, sculpture, music, and architecture. Individual works of art in all these

modes are held to share a defining feature: they are objects that are to be

regarded with a close, exclusive, and pleasurable attention.

This grouping of the arts did not appear in the writings of philosophers

and critics until the latter part of the eighteenth century. During some 2,000

years before that time, each of these arts had been treated separately, or else

classified with such practical pursuits as agriculture and carpentry. When one

of the arts was compared to another, it was only in a limited way; poetry, for

example, was sometimes compared to painting, but only to make the point

that both represented features of the outer world, in different media. The clas-

sification of the five arts as “the fine arts” was the result, in the course of the

eighteenth century, of a drastic shift in the understructure of art theory. From

the ancient Greeks until the eighteenth century, theorists and critics had

assumed a maker’s perspective toward the product of an art, and had analyzed

its attributes in terms of a construction model. For example, they regarded a

work of art, such as a poem, as something that an artisan makes according (in

the Latin term) to an ars—that is, a craft. Each of the five arts, accordingly,

was held to require a special kind of skill for manipulating its specific

136 FIGURESOFSPEECH

medium—words, or paint, or marble, or musical sounds, or building materials—

into a product that its maker designed to have its own kind of use and to fulfill a

particular social function. In discussions of the art of literature—the most highly

developed area of art criticism—this assumption of the maker’s perspective

toward a literary work united such theorists, in other respects very diverse, as

Aristotle, Longinus, Horace, and the rhetoricians; all their writings were ori-

ented toward instructing a poet in how to make a good poem, as well as

toward helping a reader decide whether, and in what respects, the finished

poem is a good poem.

In the course of the eighteenth century, there occurred a radical shift in

the treatment of the arts—a shift from a maker’s perspective and a construc-

tion model to a perceiver’s perspective and a contemplation model. Under-

lying this change was a conspicuous social phenomenon in various major cities

of Europe: the establishment and rapid proliferation of institutional arrange-

ments for making each of the five diverse arts available—usually for pay—to

a large and rapidly expanding public. In literature, the change from private

patronage to the commercial manufacture and public sale of literary books

made poems and novels available to a large audience, who bought them to

read in isolation, for no purpose other than the interest and pleasure of

doing so. That period also saw the founding, for the first time, of great public

museums; in each museum, paintings and sculptures from various countries

and eras, and of all types, religious and secular, were extracted from their orig-

inal contexts and put together in one place and for a single purpose: as objects

to be contemplated and enjoyed. In that same period, public concerts were

inaugurated, where large audiences gathered in order to listen to and enjoy

all sorts of musical compositions, vocal and instrumental, sacred and secular.

The eighteenth century was also the era in which the phenomenon of tour-

ism developed; in England, for example, many thousands of middle-class

tourists visited cathedrals and great country estates for no other purpose than

to inspect and admire their architectural achievements.

Within a single century, then, the standard way of experiencing the hith-

erto diverse arts had become that of confronting their already-made products

as objects of pleasurable attention. In consonance with this large-scale change

in the mode of experiencing the arts, theorists shifted from the maker’s per-

spective and a construction model of art to an observer’s perspective and a

contemplation model. Immanuel Kant, for example, in his immensely influ-

ential Critique of Judgment (1790), defined the nor mativ e judgment of all

works of art as “purely contemplative,” and as “a pure disinterested delight”

in an object that “pleasesforitsownsake.” Theresultofthisparadigmshift

was to group together all five arts—patently different in their materials,

their required skills, and their social functions—into the single class of

“the fine arts,” consisting of objects whose reason for being was simply to

be read, or looked at, or listened to, for their own sake, simply for the plea-

sure of doing so.

Refer to the entry aestheticism. For the gradual emergence during the

eighteenth century of the conception of “the fine arts” as a single class, see

FINE ARTS 137

Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the His-

tory of Aesthetics,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 12 (1951), pp. 496–527,

and Vol. 13 (1952), pp. 17–46. On the social and institutional developments,

and the correlative conceptual changes, that led to this classification, see

M. H. Abrams, “Art-as-Such: The Sociology of Modern Aesthetics,” in

Doing Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory (1989).

first-person narrative: 301.

first-person points of view: 303.

flashback (in a plot): 296.

flat character: 48; 212.

focus of character: 302.

focus of narration: 302.

foil: 294.

folio: 36.

folk ballad: 25.

folk drama: 139.

folk songs: 139; 25.

folklore: “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. Folklore developed, and continues even now,

in communities where few if any people can read or write. It also continues

to flourish among literate populations in the form of oral jokes, stories, and

varieties of wordplay; see, for example, the collection of “urban folklore ” by

Alan Dundes and Carl R. Pagter, When You’re Up to Your Ass in Alligators:

More Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire (1987). Folklore includes

legends, superstitions, songs, tales, proverbs, riddles, spells, and nursery

rhymes; pseudoscientific lore about the weather, plants, and animals; custom-

ary activities at births, marriages, and deaths; and traditional dances and forms

of drama performed on holidays or at communal gatherings. Materials from

folklore have at all times been employed in sophisticated written literature.

For example, the choice among the three caskets in Shakespeare’s Merchant

of Venice (II. ix.) and the superstition about a maiden’s dream which is central

to Keats’ Eve of St. Agnes (1820) are both derived from folklore. Refer to

138 FIRST-PERSON NARRATIVE

A. H. Krappe, Science of Folklore (1930, reprinted 1974); Richard M. Dorson,

ed. Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction (1972).

The following forms of folklore have been of special importance for later

written literature:

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. Some scholars maintain that Greek tragedy devel-

oped from such rites, which celebrated the life, death, and rebirth of the

vegetational god Dionysus. Folk dramas survive in England in the forms of

the St. George play and the mummers’ play (a mummer is a masked

actor). Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (Book II, chapter 5) describes

the performance of a mummers’ play, and a form of this drama is still per-

formed in America in the Kentucky mountains. See Edmund K. Chambers,

The English Folk-Play (1933).

Folk songs include love songs, Christmas carols, work songs, sea chan-

ties, religious songs, drinking songs, children’s game songs, and many other

types of lyric, as well as the narrative song, or traditional ballad. (See oral

poetry.) All forms of folk song have been assiduously collected since the late

eighteenth century and have inspired many imitations by writers of lyric

poetry as well as by composers of popular songs in the twentieth century.

Robert Burns collected and edited Scottish folk songs, restored or rewrote

them, and imitated them in his own lyrics. His “A Red, Red Rose” and

“Auld Lang Syne,” for example, both derive from one or more folk songs,

and his “Green Grow the Rashes, O” is a tidied-up version of a bawdy folk

song. See J. C. Dick, The Songs of Robert Burns (1903); Cecil J. Sharp, Folk

Songs of England (5 vols., 1908–12); and Alan Lomax, The Folk Songs of North

America (1960).

The folktale, strictly defined, is a short narrative in prose of unknown

authorship which has been transmitted orally; many of these tales eventually

achieve written form. The term, however, is often extended to include stories

invented by a known author—such as “The Three Bears” by Robert Southey

(1774–1843) and Parson Mason L. Weems’ story of George Washington and

the cherry tree—which have been picked up and repeatedly narrated by word

of mouth as well as in written form. Folktales are found among peoples

everywhere in the world. They include myths, fables, tales of heroes (whether

historical like Johnny Appleseed or legendary like Paul Bunyan), and fairy

tales. Many so-called “fairy tales” (the German word Märchen

is frequently

used

for this type of folktale) are not stories of fairies but of various kinds of

marvels; examples are “Snow White” and “Jack and the Beanstalk.” Another

type of folktale, the set “joke”—that is, the comic (often bawdy) anecdote—is

the most abundant and persistent of all; new jokes, or new versions of old

jokes, continue to be a staple of social exchange, wherever people congregate

in a relaxed mood.

The same, or closely similar, oral stories have turned up in Europe,

Asia, and Africa and have been embodied in the narratives of many writers.

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales includes a number of folktales; “The Pardoner’s

FOLKLORE 139

Tale” of Death and the three rioters, for example, was of Eastern origin. See

Benjamin A. Botkin, A Treasury of American Folklore (1944); Vladimir Propp,

Morphology of the Folktale (1970); and Stith Thompson, The Folktale (1974).

The standard catalogue of recurrent motifs in folktales throughout the world

is Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (1932–37).

folktale: 139.

foot (in meter): 219.

forced rhyme: 348.

foregrounding: 142.

forensic oratory (foren



c): 342.

foreshadowing: Any means by which the reader of a literary work is alerted to

something that will occur later on in the work. In older literature, the means

of foreshadowing included various supernatural phenomena—omens, dreams,

prophecies, and oracles. In realistic works, foreshadowing is accomplished by

diverse naturalistic means—an apparently meaningless comment that turns out

to be prescient, a random detail whose significance is subsequently realized. In

a famous prescription by the Russian playwright and short story writer Anton

Chekov, “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the

following one it should be fired.” Foreshadowing contributes to the reader’s

sense of a work’s form and structure by providing evidence that the work con-

stitutes not a mere sequence but a formal design in which various elements

have been intentionally integrated.

form and structure: “Form” is one of the most frequent terms in literary criti-

cism but also one of the most diverse in its meanings. It is often used merely

to designate a genre or literary type (“the lyric form,”“the short story form”)

or for patterns of meter, lines, and rhymes (“ the verse form,”“the stanza

form”). It is also, however—in a sense descended from the Latin “forma,”

which was equivalent to the Greek “idea”—the term for a central critical

concept. In this application, the form of a work is the principle that deter-

mines how a work is ordered and organized; critics, however, differ greatly in

their analyses of this principle. All agree that “ form” is not simply a fixed con-

tainer, like a bottle, into which the “content” or “subject matter” of a work is

poured; but beyond this, the concept of form varies according to a critic’s

particular assumptions and theoretical orientation (see criticism).

Many neoclassic critics, for example, thought of the form of a work as a

combination of parts, matched to each other according to the principle of

decorum, or mutual fittingness. In the early nineteenth century, Samuel Taylor

Coleridge, following the lead of the German critic A. W. Schlegel, distin-

guished between mechanic form, which is a fixed, pre-existent shape such

140 FOLKTALE

as we impose on wet clay by a mold, and organic form, which, Coleridge

says, “is innate; it shapes as it develops itself from within, and the fullness of its

development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form.”

To Coleridge, in other words, as to other organicists in literary criticism, a

good poem is like a growing plant, which evolves, by an internal energy, into

the organic unity that constitutes its achieved form, in which the parts are

integral to and interdependent with the whole. (On organic criticism and

the concept of organic form, see M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp,

1953, chapters 7–8; and George Rousseau, Organic Form, 1972.) The notion

of organic form, also called imitative form or expressive form, was

attacked by the New Criticism under the name of the “fallacy of expressive

form,” a species of confusion that resulted, they said, from a failure to grasp

the objective character and true purpose of form. (See R. P. Blackmur, Form

and Value in Modern Poetry, 1957, pp. 253–85.) Many New Critics used the

word structure interchangeably with form and regarded it as primarily an

equilibrium, or interaction, or ironic and paradoxical tension, of diverse

words and images in an organized totality of “meanings.” Various exponents

of archetypal theory regard the form of a literary work as one of a limited

number of plot shapes, which it shares with myths, rituals, dreams, and other

elemental and recurrent patterns of human experience. And structuralist critics

conceive a literary structure on the model of the systematic way that a lan-

guage is structured; see structuralist criticism.

In an influential critical enterprise, R. S. Crane, a leader of the Chicago

School of criticism, revived and developed the concept of form in Aristotle’s

Poetics and made a distinction between “form” and “structure.” The form of a

literary work is (in the Greek term) the “dynamis,” the particular “working”

or “emotional power” that the composition is designed to effect, which func-

tions as its “shaping principle.” This formal principle controls and synthesizes

the “structure” of a work—that is, the order, emphasis, and rendering of all its

component subject matter and parts—into “

a beautiful and effective whole of

determinate kind.” See R. S. Crane, The Languages of Criticism and the Struc-

ture of Poetry (1953), chapters 1 and 4; also Wayne C. Booth, “Between Two

Generations: The Heritage of the Chicago School,” in Profession, Vol. 82

(Modern Language Association, 1982).

See formalism and refer to René Wellek, “Concepts of Form and Struc-

ture in Twentieth-Century Criticism,” in Concepts of Criticism (1963); Eugène

Vinaver, Form and Meaning in Medieval Romance (1966); Kenneth Burke, The

Philosophy of Literary Form (3rd ed., 1973); and Angela Leighton, On Form:

Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (2007). See also plot.

formal essay: 116.

formal satire: 352.

formalism: A type of literary theory and analysis that originated in Moscow and

St. Petersburg in the second decade of the twentieth century. At first,

FORMALISM 141

opponents of the movement of Russian Formalism applied the term “for-

malism” derogatorily because of its focus on the patterns and technical devices

of literature to the exclusion of its subject matter and social values; later, how-

ever, it became a neutral designation. Among the leading representatives of

the movement were Boris Eichenbaum, Viktor Shklovsky, and Roman

Jakobson. When this critical mode was suppressed by the Soviets in the early

1930s, the center of the formalist study of literature moved to Czechoslovakia,

where it was continued especially by members of the Prague Linguistic

Circle, which included Roman Jakobson (who had emigrated from Russia),

Jan Mukarovský, and René Wellek. Beginning in the 1940s, both Jakobson

and Wellek continued their influential work as professors at American

universities.

Formalism views literature primarily as a specialized use of language and

proposes a fundamental opposition between the literary (or poetical) use of

language and the ordinary, “practical” use of language. It proposes that the

central function of ordinary language is to communicate to auditors a message,

or information, by references to the world existing outside of language. In con-

trast, it conceives literary language to be self-focused, in that its function is not

to convey information by making extrinsic references but to offer the reader a

special mode of experience by drawing attention to its own “formal” features—

that is, to the qualities and internal relations of the linguistic signs themselves.

The linguistics of literature differs from the linguistics of practical discourse

because its laws are oriented toward producing the distinctive features that

formalists call literariness. As Roman Jakobson wrote in 1921: “The object

of study in literary science is not literature but ‘literariness,’ that is, what

makes a given work a literary work.” (See linguistics in modern criticism.)

The literariness of a work, as Jan Mukarovský, a member of the Prague

Circle, described it in the 1920s, consists “in the maximum of foregrounding

of the utterance,” that is, the foregrounding of “the act of expression, the

act of speech itself.” (To “foreground” is to bring something into promi-

nence, to make it dominant in perception.) By “backgrounding” the referen-

tial aspect and the logical connections in language, poetr y makes the words

themselves “palpable” as phonic signs . The primary aim of literature in thus

foregrounding its linguistic medium, as Viktor Shklovsky put it in an influen-

tial formu lation, is to estrange or defamiliarize; that is, by disrupting the

modes of ordinary linguistic discourse, literature “makes strange” the world

of everyday perception and renews the reader ’s lost capacity for fresh sensa-

tion. (In the Biographia Literaria, 1817, Samuel Taylor Coleridge had long

before described the

“prime

merit” of a litera ry genius to be the representa-

tion of “familiar objects” so as to evoke “freshness of sensation”; but whereas

the Romantic cr itic had stressed the author’s ability to express a fresh mode of

experiencing the world, the formalist stresses the function of purely literary

devices to produce the effect of freshness in the reader’s experience of a liter-

ary work.) The foregrounded properties, or “artistic devices,” that estrange

poetic language are often described as “deviations” from ordinary language.

Such deviations, which are analyzed most fully in the writings of Roman

142 FORMALISM

Jakobson, consi st primarily in setting up, and afterward violating, patterns in

the sound and syntax of poetic language—including patt erns in speech

sounds, grammatical constructions, rhythm, rhyme, and stanza forms—and

also in setting up prominent recurrences of key words or images.

Some of the most fruitful work of Jakobson and others, valid outside the

formalist perspective, has been in the analysis of meter and of the repetitions of

sounds in alliteration and rhyme. These features of poetry they regard not as

supplementary adornments of the meaning but as effecting a reorganization

of language on the semantic as well as the phonic and syntactic levels. Form-

alists have also made influential contributions to the theory of prose fiction.

With respect to this genre, the central formalist distinction is that between

the “story” (the simple enumeration of a chronological sequence of events)

and a plot. An author is said to transform the raw material of a story into a

literary plot by the use of a variety of devices that violate sequence and that

deform and defamiliarize the story elements; the effect is to foreground the

narrative medium and devices themselves, and in this way to disrupt and

refresh what had been our standard responses to the subject matter. (See

narrative and narratology.)

The standard treatment of the Russian movement is by Victor Erlich,

Russian Formalism: History, Doctrine (rev. 1981). See also R. L. Jackson and

S. Rudy, eds., Russian Formalism: A Retrospective Glance (1985). René Wellek

has described The Literary Theory and Aesthetics of the Prague School (1969).

Representative formalist writings are collected in P. L. Garvin, ed., A Prague

School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure and Style (1964); Lee T. Lemon and

Marion I. Reese, eds., Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (1965); Ladislav

Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska, eds., Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and

Structuralist Views (1971); and Peter Steiner, ed., The Prague School: Selected

Writings, 1929–1946 (1982). A comprehensive and influential formalist essay

by Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” is included in his Language in

Literature (1987). Samuel Levin’s Linguistic Structures in Poetry (1962) represents

an American application of formalist principles, and E. M. Thompson has

written Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism: A Comparative

Study (1971). For an early Marxist analysis of the curative power of aesthetic

form in a society characterized by alienation and isolation, see the Hungarian

Georg Lukács, Soul and Form (1911; trans. with an introduction by Judith

Butler, 2010).

American New Criticism, although it developed independently, is sometimes

called “formalist” because, like European formalism, it stresses the analysis of the

literary work as a self-sufficient verbal entity, constituted by internal relations

and independent of reference either to the state of mind of the author or

to the actualities of the “external” world. It also, like European formalism,

conceives poetry as a special mode of language whose distinctive features

are defined in terms of their systematic opposition to practical or scientific

language. Unlike the European formalists, however, the New Critics did not

apply the science of linguistics to poetry, and their emphasis was not on a

work as constituted by linguistic devices for achieving specifi cally literary

FORMALISM 143

effects but on the complex interplay within a work of ironic, paradoxical, and

metaphoric meanings around a humanly important “theme.” The main influence

of Russian and Czech formalism on American criticism has been on the develop-

ment of stylistics and of narratology. Roman Jakobson and Tzvetan Todorov have

also been influential in introducing formalist concepts and methods into French

structuralism.

Strong opposition to formalism, in both its European and American vari-

eties, has been voiced by some Marxist critics (who view it as the product of a

reactionary ideology), and by proponents of reader-response criticism, speech-act

theory, and new historicism; these last three types of criticism all reject the

view that there is a sharp and definable division between ordinary language

and literary language. In the 1990s, a number of critics called for a return to

a formalist mode of treating a work of literature primarily as literature, instead

of with persistent reference to its stand, whether explicit or covert, on politi-

cal, racial, or sexual issues. A notable instance is Frank Lentricchia’s “Last Will

and Testament of an Ex-literary Critic” (Lingua Franca, September/October,

1996), renouncing his earlier writings and teachings “about literature as a

political instrument,” in favor of the view “that literature is pleasurable and

important, as literature, and not as an illustration of something else.” (Refer

to objective criticism, under the entry in this Glossary on criticism .) See also

Harold Bloom’s advocacy of reading literature not to apply or confirm a polit-

ical or social theory but for the love of literature, in The Western Canon

(1994); and the essays in George Levine, ed., Aesthetics and Ideology (1994).

Toward the end of the last century, the formalist approach found a num-

ber of theoretical advocates. This return to formalism, building on a renewed

interest in metrics (see meter) and in aesthetics, at first was proposed primarily as

a reaction against the new historicism; but within a few years, what became

known as the new formalism proposed a positive program, undertaking to

connect the formal aspects of literature to the historical, political, and worldly

concerns in opposition to which the formalist movement had earlier defined

itself. A number of new formalists argue that the formal integrity of a work of

art is what protects it against ideology, idealization, and the routinizing effects

of everyday experience; others emphasize that the perception of aesthetic or

literary form is a necessary condition of critical thought. (The “new formal-

ism” in criticism is to be distinguished from the “new formalism” in the writ-

ing of poetry; see the entry free verse.)

The first major advocate of new formalism was Susan J. Wolfson in Formal

Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (1997). Wolfson and Marshall

Brown edited a collection of new-formalist essays, Reading for Form (2006). For

an exemplary instance of the new formalism, see also Robert Kaufman,“Ev

ery-

body Hates Kant: Blakean Formalism and the Symmetries of Laura Moriarty,”

Modern Language Quarterly 61 (1) (2000), pp. 131–55; and for an appreciative

overview of the new-formalist movement, Marjorie Levinson, “What Is New

Formalism?” PMLA, Vol. 122 (March 2007). The journal Representations

devoted a special issue to the question of form (no. 104; fall, 2008). For refer-

ences to formalism (in literary criticism) in other entries, see pages 54, 242.

144 FORMALISM

format (of a book): 36.

fourfold meaning: 183.

fourteener: 220.

frame-story: 365.

Frankfurt School: 206.

free indirect discourse: 233; 55.

free verse: “Free verse” is sometimes referred to as “open form” verse, or by the

French term vers libre. Like traditional verse, it is printed in short lines

instead of in continuous lines of prose, but it differs from such verse by the

fact that its rhythmic pattern is not organized into a regular metrical form—

that is, into feet, or recurrent units of weak- and strong-stressed syllables. (See

meter.) Most free verse also has irregular line lengths and either lacks rhyme or

else uses it only sporadically. (Blank verse differs from unrhymed free verse in

that it is metrically regular.)

Within these broad boundaries, there is a great diversity in the measures

that are labeled free verse. An approximation to one modern form occurs in

the King James translation of the biblical Psalms and Song of Solomon, which

imitates in English prose the parallelism and cadences of Hebrew poetry. In

the nineteenth century, William Blake, Matthew Arnold, and other poets in

England and America experimented with departures from regular meters; and

in 1855, Walt Whitman startled the literary world with his Leaves of Grass by

using verse lines of varying length, which depended for rhythmic effects not

on recurrent metric feet but on cadenced units and on the repetition, balance,

and variation of words, phrases, clauses, and lines. French Symbolist poets

in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and American and English poets

of the twentieth century, especially after World War I, began the present era

of the intensive use of free verse. It has been employed by Rainer Maria

Rilke, Jules Laforgue, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and

numberless contemporary poets in all the Western languages. Most of the

verse in English that is published today is nonmetrical.

Among the many modes of open versification in English, we can make a

broad distinction between the long-lined and often orotund verses of poets

like Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, of which a principal origin is the translated

poetry of the Hebrew Bible, and the shorter-lined, conversational, often

ironic forms employed by the majority of writers in free verse. In the latter

type, poets yield up the drive, beat, and song achievable by traditional meters

in order to exploit other rhythmic, as well as syntactical, possibilities.

In the following passage from Langston Hughes’ free-verse poem

“Mother to Son,” the second and sixth lines are metrically parallel (in that

both fall into fairly regular iambic pentameter) in order to enhance their

FREE VERSE 145

opposition in reference; while the single word “bare,” constituting a total

verse line, is rhymed with “stair” in the long line to which “bare” contrasts

starkly, in meaning as in line-length:

Mother to Son

Well, son, I’ll tell you:

Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

It’s had tacks in it,

And splinters,

And boards torn up,

And places with no carpet on the floor—

Bare.

A number of contemporary poets and critics have called—in a movement

sometimes labeled as the new formalism—for a return from free verse to the

meters, rhyme, and stanza forms of traditional English versification. For

discussions see Alan Shapiro, “The New Formalism,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 14

(1987); and Dana Gioia, “Notes on the New Formalism,” in Conversant

Essays, ed. James McCorkle (1990). For “new formalism” as applied to a

type of literary criticism, see the entry formalism.

See Walter Sutton, American Free Verse (1973); Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter

and Poetic Form (rev. 1979); Charles O. Hartman, Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody

(1980); H. T. Kirby-Smith, The Origins of Free Verse (1996). Timothy Steele’s

Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt against Meter (1990) is a history of

free verse by a writer who argues for a return to metrical versification. For

references to free verse in other entries, see page 174.

freestyling: 272.

Freudian criticism: See psychological and psychoanalytic criticism.

Freytag’s Pyramid: 296.

Fugitives: 277.

“Mother to Son,” from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF LANGSTON HUGHES by Langston Hughes, edited by

Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, Associate Editor.

146 FREESTYLING

Gaelic Revival: 47.

gangsta rap: 272.

gay studies: 327.

gender: 125.

gender criticism: “Gender criticism,” like the gender studies ofwhichitisa

part, is based on the premise that, while sex (a person’s identification as male or

female) is determined by anatomy, gender (masculinity or femininity in person-

ality traits and behavior) can be largely independent of anatomy and is a social

construction that is diverse, variable, and dependent on historical circumstances.

Gender criticism analyzes differing conceptions of gender and their role in the

writing, reception, subject matter, and evaluation of literary works.

Gender studies have an obvious (and sometimes contentious) overlap

with feminist criticism, gay studies,andlesbian studies; the distinguishing attri-

bute of gender studies has come to be their special attention to the roles of

males, and of varying conceptions of masculinity, in the course of social,

political, and artistic history. A field of scholarship known as men’sstud-

ies was established early in the 1980s on the model of the preexisting field

of women’sstudies. Proponents of men’s studies did not contest th e overall

fact of patriarchy—male privilege and domination over women throughout

the social history of the West—but undertook to complicate and subtilize

the opposition of oppressors and victims by stressing the variety of male roles,

or “masculinities,” the internal stresses within each concept of masculinity,

and the degree to which patriarchal dominance tended to distort the charac-

ters of men as well as women. Early on, a number of feminist scholars decried

men’s studies as in fact complicit with the patriarchy they ostensibly opposed,

and as reinforcing the predominant place of the male in scholarship and the

college curriculum. In the course of time, however, tensions have lessened,

while a number of courses in women’s studies have broadened their scope so

as to become, in effect, gender studies. (See Harry Brod, ed., The Making of

Masculinities: The New Men’s Studies, 1987; Alice Jardine and Paul Smith, eds.,

Men in Feminism, 1987; Judith Kegan Gardiner, ed., Masculinity Studies and

Feminist Theory: New Directions, 2002.)

Gender studies are indebted to the social historian Michel Foucault, who

analyzed all sexual identities, whether perceived to be normal or transgressive,

as constructed and reconstructed in various eras of social discourses under the

impulse of the power-drive and power-competition. In addition, two feminist

scholars wrote books that not only were important for gay/lesbian as well

as feminist studies but also helped to give impetus and shape to men’s studies

and to the analysis of the nature and plurality of masculinities. In 1985, Eve

Kosofsky Sedgwick published Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial

GENDER CRITICISM 147

Desire, which proposed that there is a large “homosocial spectrum” of male-

to-male bondings, ranging from fierce rivalry through a variety of relationships

within families, friendships, and all-male societies and organizations, to patently

erotic desires and intimacies; she also held that these relationships were crossed,

concealed, or distorted by a pervasive homophobia—the fear that one’s bondings

to other men, whatever its type, should appear to be homosexual, to oneself as

well as to other people. In 1990 Judith Butler published Gender Trouble: Feminism

and the Subversion of Identity. In it she argued that gender is not an innate or

essential identity but a contingent and variable construct that mandates a

“performance”—that is, a particular set of practices which an individual acquires

from the discourse of his or her social era and strives to enact. (Refer to the

comments on Foucault, Sedgwick, and Butler in the entries feminist criticism and

queer theory.)

The predomin ant emphasis on same-sex desires and on intersexual an d

intrasexual rivalri es in forming masculine and other gender categories has

been countered by a number of scholars who insist on the importance of

such nonsexual factors as race, ethnicity, economic arrangements, and social

class in establishing different types and ideals of manhoo d. David Leverenz,

for example, in Manhood and the American Renaissance (1989), attributes the

chief influence in fashioning American “ideologies of manhood” to altering

economic conditio ns and class structures. Leverenz stresses the primacy, from

the mid-nineteenth century into the present, of the economic era of com-

petitive individualism in establishing middle-class norms o f manhood that are

based on male rivalry in the worki ng arena, and poin ts out the p ervasive

effect of the struggle for dominance and status, not of men against women,

butofmenagainstothermen.JamesEliAdams’ Dandies and Desert Saints:

Styles of Victorian Masculinity (1995) analyzes the mu ltiplicity, the multiple

de termi nants, the surprising interr elationships, and the internal strains

and instabilities of diverse Victorian masculinities and ideals o f “manliness.”

He identifies shared interests that were dependent on social class, occupa-

tion, political allegiance, and religious beliefs, as well as same-sex desires and

object-choices, which bonded Victorian men into a diversity of tight-knit

groups an d sometimes secret communities, and describes the mixed feelings

of suspicion, fear, and allure exerted on outsiders by such closed male

fellowships, including those that did not have a homosexual component.

Scholars of gender, and particularly of masculinities, focus on eras when

rapid changes in social conditions have produced conspicuous strains and

alterations in gender norms. The Victorian period has been a favorite one

for these investigations. Another is the present era, in which the vogue of

gender studies has itself served to make even more uncertain, precarious, and

mutable the gender roles that such studies subject to analytic scrutiny.

Gender studies are interdisciplinary and are conducted by sociologists, cul-

tural anthropologists, and social historians, as well as by scholars of literature

and cinema. The following books indicate the range of these studies: Joseph

H. Pleck, The Myth of Masculinity (1981); Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly

Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (1985); Peter G. Filene,

148 GENDER CRITICISM

Him/Her/Self: Sex Roles in Modern America (rev. 1986); Teresa de Lauretis, Tech-

nologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (1987); Mary Poovey,

Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England

(1988); Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (1995). Consult also the essays in

Michael Roper and James Tosh, eds., Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain

since 1800 (1991); Rachel Adams and David Savran, eds., The Masculinity Studies

Reader (2002). See also Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Gender Criticism: What Isn’t

Gender,” in Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn, eds., Redrawing the Boundaries:

The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies (1992).

gender studies: 147.

generative linguistics: 199.

Geneva School (of criticism): 289.

genre: A term, French in origin, that denotes a type or class of literature. The genres

into which lit erary works have been grouped at different times are very

numerous, and the criteria on which the classifications have been based are

highly variable. Since the writings of Plato and Aristotle, however, there has

been an enduring division of the overall literary domain into three large classes,

in accor dance with who speaks in the work: lyric (uttered throughout in the

first person), epic or narrative (in which the narrator speaks in the first person,

then lets the characters speak for themselves); and drama (in which the charac-

ters do all the talking). A similar tripartite scheme, elaborated by German critics

in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was echoed by James

Joyce in his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), chapter 5, and functions

still in critical discourse and in the general distinction, in college catalogues,

between courses in poetry, prose ficti on, and drama.

Within this overarching division, Aristotle and other classical critics iden-

tified a number of more specific genres. Many of the ancient names, including

epic, tragedy, comedy, and satire, have remained current to the present day; to

them have been added, over the last three centuries, such relative newcomers

as biography, essay, and novel. A glance at the genres in prose and verse listed at

the end of this entry will indicate the crisscrossing diversity of the classes and

subclasses to which individual works of literature have been assigned.

Through the Renaissance and much of the eighteenth century, the recog-

nized genres—or poetic kinds as they were then called—were widely thought

to be fixed literary types, somewhat like species in the biological order of

nature. Many neoclassic critics insisted that each kind must remain “pure”

(there must, for example, be no “mixing” of tragedy and comedy), and also

proposed rules which specified the subject matter, structure, style, and emotional

effect proper to each kind. At that time the genres were also commonly ranked

in a hierarchy (related to the ranking of social classes, from royalty and the

nobility down to peasants—see decorum

), ranging from epic and tragedy at

the

top to the pastoral, short lyric, epigram, and other types—then considered

GENRE 149

to be minor genres—at the bottom. Shakespeare satirized the pedantic classifiers

of his era in Polonius’ catalogue (Hamlet, II. ii.) of types of drama: “tragedy,

comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical,

tragical-comical-historical-pastoral….”

In the course of the eighteenth century, the emergence of new types of

literary productions—such as the novel and the poem combining nature

description, philosophy, and narrative (James Thomson’s Seasons, 1726–30)—

helped weaken confidence in the fixity and stability of literary genres. And in

the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the extraordinary rise in

the prominence and prestige of the short lyric poem, and the concurrent

shift in the basis of critical theory to an expressive orientation (see the entry

criticism), effected a drastic alteration in both the conception and ranking of

literary genres, with the lyric displacing epic and tragedy as the quintessentially

poetic type. From the Romantic Period on, a decreasing emphasis on the

generic conception of literature was indicated by the widespread use of crite-

ria for evaluating literature, which—unlike the criteria in neoclassic criticism,

which tended to be specific to a particular genre —were broadly applicable

to all literary works: criteria such as “sincerity,”“intensity,”“organic unity,”

and “high seriousness.” In the New Criticism of the mid-twentieth century,

with its ruling concept of the uniqueness of each literary work, genre ceased

to play more than a subordinate role in critical analysis and evaluation. For the

changes in the nineteenth century in the classification and ranking of the gen-

res, see M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953), especially chapters 1,

4, and 6; on the continuance, as well as changes, of writings in the traditional

genres during the Romantic Period, see Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British

Romanticism (1986).

After 1950 or so, an emphasis on generic types was revived by some criti-

cal theorists, although on varied principles of classification. R. S. Crane and

other Chicago critics have defended the utility for practical criticism of a re-

defined distinction among genres, based on Aristotle’s Poetics, in which works

are classified in accordance with the similarity in the principles by which

they are organized in order to achieve a particular kind of emotional effect;

see R. S. Crane, ed., Critics and Criticism (1952), pp. 12–24, 546–63, and refer

to the Chicago school in this Glossary. Northrop Frye has proposed an archetypal

theory in which the four major genres (comedy, romance, tragedy, and satire)

are held to manifest the enduring forms bodied forth by the human imagina-

tion, as represented in the archetypal myths correlated with the four seasons

(Anatomy of Criticism , 1957, pp. 158–239). Other current theorists conceive

genres as social formations on the model of social institutions, such as the

state or church, rather than on the model of biological species. By

structuralist

critics,

a genre is conceived as a set of constitutive conventions and codes, alter-

ing from age to age, but shared by a kind of implicit contract between writer

and reader. These codes make possible the writing of a particular literary text,

although the writer may play against, as well as with, the prevailing generic

conventions. In the reader, these conventions generate a set of expectations,

which may be controverted rather than satisfied, but enable the reader to

150 GENRE

make the work intelligible—that is, to naturalize it, by relating it to the world

as defined and ordered by codes in the prevailing culture.

Many current critics regard genres as more or less arbitrary modes of classifi-

cation, whose justification is their convenience in discussing literature. Some

critics have applied to generic classes the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s

concept of family resemblances. That is, they propose that, in the loosely

grouped family of works that make up a genre, there are no essential defining

features, but only a set of family resemblances; each member shares some of these

resemblances with some, but not all, of the other members of the genre. For a

description and discussion of Wittgenstein’s view, see Carlo Ginzburg, “Family

Resemblances and Family Trees: Two Cognitive Metaphors,” Critical Inquiry,

Vol. 30 (2004), pp. 537–56. There has also been interest in the role that generic

assumptions have played in shaping the work that an author composes, as well as

in establishing expectations that alter the way that a reader will interpret and

respond to a particular work. Whatever the present skepticism, however, about

the old belief that genres constitute inherent species in the realm of literature, the

fact that generic distinctions remain indispensable in literary discourse is attested

by the unceasing publication of books whose titles announce that they deal with

tragedy, the lyric, pastoral, the novel, or another of the many types and subtypes

into which literature has over the centuries been classified.

Reviews of traditional theories of genre are René Wellek and Austin

Warren, Theory of Literature (3rd ed., 1973), chapter 17, and the readable short

survey by Heather Dubrow, Genre (1982). See also Alastair Fowler, Kinds

of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (1982); Adena

Rosmarin, The Power of Genre (1985); and David Duff, ed., Modern Genre Theory

(2000). For a Marxist approach, see Fredric Jameson, “Magical Narratives: On

the Dialectical Use of Genre Criticism,” chapter 2 of The Political Unconscious:

Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981); for a deconstructive approach, see

Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” Critical Inquiry (Autumn 1980; reprinted

in W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., On Narrative, 1981); and for an approach indebted to

discourse analysis, see John Frow, Genre (2006). See the special issue of PMLA,

Vol. 122:5 (October 2007) on “Remapping Genre.”

For references to genre in other entries, see pages 10, 19, 40, 47, 78, 85,

98, 110. For prose genres, see autobiography ; biography; the character; drama; essay;

exemplum; fable; fantastic literature; nature writing; novel; parable;

satire; short

story.

For verse genres, see ballad; chivalric romance; drama; emblem poem; epic; epigram;

fable; fabliau; georgic; lai; light verse; lyric; occasional poem; pastoral; rap; satire.

Georgian period: 285.

Georgian poets: 285.

georgic (jor

jik): 90.

golden age: The term derives from the chronological primitivism that was

propounded in the Greek poet Hesiod’s Works and Days (eighth century BC),

GOLDEN AGE 151

as well as by many later Greek and Roman writers. The earliest period of human

history, regarded as a state of perfect felicity, was called “the golden age,” and the

continuous decline of human well-being through time was expressed by the

sequence “the silver age” and “the bronze age,” ending with the present sad con-

dition of humanity, “the iron age.” See primitivism and progress and, for renderings

of the golden age in the guise of a carefree rural existence, pastoral. Refer to Harry

Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance (1969).

Gothic: 152.

Gothic romance: 152.

Gothic novel: The word Gothic originally referred to the Goths, an early

Germanic tribe, then came to signify “germanic,” then “medieval.”“Gothic

architecture” now denotes the medieval form of architecture, characterized

by the use of the high pointed arch and vault, flying buttresses, and intricate

recesses, which spread through western Europe between the twelfth and six-

teenth centuries.

TheGothicnovel,orinanalternativeterm,Gothic romance,isatypeof

prose fiction which was inaugurated by Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: A

Gothic Story (1764)—the subtitle denotes its setting in the Middle Ages—and

flourished through the early nineteenth century. Some writers followed Wal-

pole’s example by setting their stories in the medieval period; others set them in

a Catholic country, especially Italy or Spain. The locale was often a gloomy castle

furnished with dungeons, subterranean passages, and sliding panels; the typical

story focused on the sufferings imposed on an innocent heroine by a cruel and

lustful villain, and made bountiful use of ghosts, mysterious disappearances, and

other sensational and supernatural occurrences (which in a number of novels

turned out to have natural explanations). The principal aim of such novels was

to evoke chilling terror by exploiting mystery and a variety of horrors. Many of

them are now read mainly as period pieces, but the best opened up to fiction the

realm of the irrational and of the perverse impulses and nightmarish terrors that lie

beneath the orderly surface of the civilized mind. Examples of Gothic novels are

William Beckford’s Vathek (1786)—the setting of which is both medieval and

Oriental and the subject both erotic and sadistic; Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of

Udolpho (1794) and other highly successful romances; and Matthew Gregory

Lewis’ The Monk (1796), which exploited, with considerable literary skill, the

shock effects of a narrative involving rape, incest, murder, and diabolism. Jane

Austen made good-humored fun of the more decorous instances of the Gothic

vogue

in Northanger Abbey (written 1798, published 1818).

The term “Gothic” has also been extended to a type of fiction which

lacks the exotic setting of the earlier romances but develops a brooding

atmosphere of gloom and terror, represents events that are uncanny or macabre

or melodramatically violent, and often deals with aberrant psychological states.

In this extended sense, the term “Gothic ” has been applied to William

Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), Mary Shelley’s remarkable and influential

152 GOTHIC

Frankenstein (1818), and the novels and tales of terror by the German E. T. A.

Hoffmann. Still more loosely, “Gothic” has been used to describe elements of

the macabre and terrifying that are included in such later works as Emily

Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens’

Bleak House (for example, chapters 11, 16, and 47) and Great Expectations (the

Miss Havisham episodes). Critics have also drawn attention to the many women

writers of Gothic fiction, and have explained features of the mode as the result

of the suppression of female sexuality, or else as a challenge to the gender hier-

archy and values of a male-dominated culture. See feminist criticism and refer to

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), and Juliann

E. Fleenor, ed., The Female Gothic (1983).

America, especially the American South, has been fertile in Gothic fiction in

the extended sense, from the novels of Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810)

and the terror tales of Edgar Allan Poe to William Faulkner’s Sanctuary and

Absalom, Absalom! and some of the fiction of Truman Capote. The nightmarish

realm of uncanny terror, violence, and cruelty opened by the Gothic novel

continued to be explored in novels such as Daphne du Maurier’spopularRebecca

(1938) and Iris Murdoch’s The Unicorn; it is also exploited by authors of horror

fiction such as H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, and by the writers and directors

of innumerable horror movies.

See G. R. Thompson, ed., The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Roman-

ticism (1974); Eugenia DeLamotte, Perils of the Night (1990); Anne Williams,

Art of Darkness (1995); David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of

Gothic Fiction from 1765 to the Present (1979; 2nd ed., 1996); Victor Sage and

Allan Lloyd Smith, eds., Modern Gothic: A Reader (1996); E. J. Clery and

Robert Miles, eds., Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook, 1700–1820 (2000). On

“American Gothic”—and especially the “southern Gothic”—see Chester

E. Eisinger, “The Gothic Spirit in the Forties,” Fiction in the Forties (1963).

See thriller, in the entry detective story.

grammar: 196; 381.

grammar of narration: 233.

grand style: 111.

graphic narrative:

“Graphic

narrative,” graphic nov el,andsequential art

aretermsfirstusedinthe1970stodescribeworks,intendedforadultsand

often nonfiction, in which extended narratives are told throu gh a series of

illustrations. The combined use of images with words is, however, much

older. Medieval tapestries or woodcut series often told stories, and illumi-

nated manuscripts often used pictures to imply, complement, or elaborate

on narrative sequences. Both William Hogarth (1697–1764) and William

Blake (1757–1826) produced forms of graphic narrative, and Blake’s The

GRAPHIC NARRATIVE 153

Marriage of Heaven and Hell is often cited as a precursor by contemporary

graphic narrative artists. The more direct graphic antecedent was, how-

ever, the comic book form as it emerged at the end of the nineteenth cen-

tury in the United States. In 1930, the American Milt Gross published He

Done Her Wrong, a 300-page narrative composed entirely of images in

comic-book style. Other “wordless n ovels” followed, and in the 1940s,

Classics Illustrated, a series that adapted well-known novels to the graphic

style of the comic bo ok, began to appear. In 197 6, Harvey Pekar began his

long-running autobiographical series American Splendor, illustrate d with

framed images by artists such as R. Crumb, whose pictorial style and

countercultural sensibility was imitated by many artists who produced

graphic narratives.

One of the first works to which the term “graphic novel” was applied

was Will Eisner’s A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories (1978), a

collection of linked g raphic narratives. The most significant graphic narrative

of the twentieth century was Art Spiegelman’stwo-volumeMaus: A Survi-

vor’sTale(1986, 1991), which recounted in the form of a fable the struggle

of Spiegelman’s father, a Polish Jew, to s urvive the Holo caust. Other graphic

narratives have also focused on traumatic events or episodes in the public

realm; see Alan M oore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (1986), Joe Sacco,

Palestine (199 6), and Marj ane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood

(2003).

The graphic narratives that began to appear in the 1990s often sought to

exploit the appeal of classic novels and popular literary forms by working in

the genres of spy fiction, mysteries, and autobiography; at the same time, the

formal experimentation of many graphic narratives align them with the prac-

tices of the artistic avant-garde.

One of the first books to develop a theory of graphic narrative was

Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics (1993). I n Adult Comics: An Introduc-

tion (1993, new ed., 2003), Roger Sabin discusses the history of comics,

stressing the British Victorian period, and Japanese and European traditions

of graphic narrative; see also Sabin’s Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels (1996).

Stephen Weiner’s Faster tha n a Speeding Bullet: The Rise of the Graphic Novel

(2003) focuses on comic art in the United States. O ne of the leading practi-

tioners of g raphic narrative, Will Eisn er, has written abo ut his craft in

Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative (2008); Hillary Chute, “Comics as

Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative,” PMLA 123:2 (2008); Stephen E.

Tabachnick, ed., Teaching the Graphic Novel (2009); and, for an account of

autobiographical graphic narratives by women, Hillary L. Chute, Graphic

Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (2010). S ee also two special

issues of journals devoted to graphic narratives: Modern Fiction Studies

52:4

006) and SubStance 40:1 (2011).

Graveyard Poets: A term applied to eighteenth-century poets who wrote

meditative poems, usually set in a graveyard, on the theme of human mor-

154 GRAVEYARD POETS

tality, in moo ds which range from elegiac pensiveness to profound gloom.

Examples are Thomas Parnell’s “Night-Piece on Death” (1721), Edward

Young’s long Night Thoughts (1742), and Robert Blair’s “The Grave”

(1743). The vogue resulted in one of the best-known English poems,

Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751). Th e

writing of graveyard poems spread from England to Continental literature

in the second part of the century and is represented in America by William

Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” (1817).

Great Chain of Being: The conception of the “Great Chain of Being” is

grounded in ideas about the nature of God, or (in metaphysical terms) 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. This

worldview was already prevalent in the Renaissance, but was refined and

greatly developed by the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz early in the

eighteenth century, and then adopted by a number of thinkers of the Enlight-

enment. In its comprehensive eighteenth-century form, the Great Chain of

Being was based on the concept that the essential “excellence ” of God con-

sists in His limitless creativity—that is, in an unstinting, unjealous overflow of

His own being into the fullest possible variety of other beings. From this

premise were deduced three consequences:

1. Plenitude. The universe is absolutely full of every possible kind and vari-

ety of life; no conceivable species of being remains unrealized.

2. Continuity. Each species differs from the next by the least possible

degree, and so merges all but imperceptibly into the species most nearly

related to it.

3. Gradation. The existing species exhibit a hierarchy of status, and so com-

pose a great chain, or ladder, of being, extending from the lowliest con-

dition of the merest existence up to God Himself. In this chain, human

beings occupy the middle position between the animal kinds and the

angels, who are purely spiritual beings.

On these concepts Leibniz and other thinkers also grounded what is

called philosophical optimism—theviewthatthisis“the best of all

possible worlds,” but only in the special sense that this is the best world

whose existence is logically possible. The reasoning underlying this cl aim is

that since God’s bountifulness consists in His creation of the greatest possible

variety of graded beings, aspects of created life that to our limited human

point of v iew seem to be d eficient or evil can be reco gnized, from an overall

cosmic viewpoint, to follow necessarily from the very excellence of the

divine nature. That is, God’s excellence logically entails that there must be a

progressive set o f limitations, hence increasing “evils,” as we move downward

along the chain of being. A s Voltaire ironically summarized this mode of

GREAT CHAIN OF BEING 155

optimism in his era, “This is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in

it is a necessary evil.”

With remarkable precision and economy, Alexander Pope compressed

the basic concepts that make up the Great Chain of Being into a half-dozen

or so heroic couplets, in Epistle I of his Essay on Man (1732–34):

Of systems possible, if ’tis confessed

That Wisdom Infinite must form the best,

Where all must full or not coherent be,

And all that rises rise in due degree;

Then in the scale of reasoning life, ’tis plain,

There must be, somewhere, such a rank as man….

See, through this air, this ocean, and this earth,

All matter quick, and bursting into birth….

Vast Chain of Being! which from God began,

Natures ethereal, human, angel, man,

Beast, bird, fish, insect, what no eye can see,

No glass can reach! from Infinite to thee,

From thee to nothing….

Philosophical optimism is one type of what is known as a theodicy.

This term, compounded of the Greek words for “God” and “right,” desig-

nates any system of thought which sets out to reconcile the assumption that

God is perfectly good with the fact that evil exists. Milton’s “great argument”

in Paradise Lost, by which he undertakes to “assert Eternal Providence / And

justify the ways of God to men” (I. 24–26), is an example of a traditional

Christian theodicy, explaining evil as the result of “man’s first disobedience”

in Eden to a perfectly just God, which “Brought death into the world, and all

our woe.”

See A. O. Lovejoy’s classic work in the history of ideas, The Great

Chain of Being (1936);alsoE.M.W.Tillyard,The Elizabethan World Picture

(1 943), chapters 4– 5, which deals with the prevalence of the conception in

Shakespeare’s lifetime.

green studies: 98.

grotesque: A term originally applied to a style of mosaic and fresco wall paint-

ings first used in ancient Rome and rediscovered in the late fifteenth century

during an excavation of the emperor Nero’s Golden House, or Domus Aurea.

The style combined arabesques with floral, animal, and human elements in a

whimsically ornamental mode. Because the rooms of the Golden House were,

at the time of excavation, underground and resembled grottoes, the artwork

was labeled “grottesca” (Italian for “of a grotto”

). The style was adopted and

extended

by Raphael and other painters of the Italian Renaissance, who used

it to fill marginal spaces such as borders of paintings, or to cover ceilings or

pilasters.

156 GREEN STUDIES

Facilitated by the rise of printing and the medium of engraving, the dis-

semination of “grottesca” designs continued throughout Europe from the six-

teenth to the eighteenth centuries. The term itself was increasingly used to

describe other artistic forms that combined incongruous elements; it was

applied, for example, to many forms of medieval Christian art and architec-

ture, including depictions of hell, the “temptations” of St. Anthony, the gar-

goyles and monsters of Romanesque and Gothic church architecture, and the

extravagant, even sometimes vulgar and comic designs surrounding devotional

texts in illuminated manuscripts. During the nineteenth century, the term was

used in discussions of painting, sculpture or stonework, architecture, literature,

and even music. In current uses, the concept of the grotesque has been

extended to refer to anything unnatural, strange, absurd, ludicrous, distorted,

wildly fantastic, or bizarre. In this context, it is worth recalling that the origi-

nal “ grottesca” was intended to be none of these, but simply delightful and

diverting.

The grotesque has been identified as a sign of decadence—as in the extrav-

agant proliferation of ornamental detail in baroque or rococo art—or else as the

free expression of primitive exuberance or spontaneity. In an influential

discussion of the “Grotes que Renaissance” in The Stones of Venice (1981, 2nd ed.,

2003), John Ruskin distinguished between the “no ble” or “terrible

grotesque,” which expressed “the repose or play of a serious mind” and the

“barbarous” or “ignoble” grotesque, which represented “the full exertion of a

frivolous one,” with Dante r epresenting the purest form of the first category

and “Hindoos” and “savages” the second.

The term “grotesque” is now widely applied to painters such a s

Hieronymous Bosch and Pieter Breughel the Elder; to elements in the

works of many writers, including Shakespeare (the characters Caliban and

Shylock), Dickens (F agin, and the Miss Havisham episodes in Great Expec-

tations), and Franz Kafka (“Metamorphosis ”). The term is also used to

describe macabre episodes in the films of Alfred Hitchcock (Psycho

and

Vertigo).

The

first influential academic study of the grotesque was Wolfgang

Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature (1957, trans. 1981), which

stressed the form’s darker or demonic attributes of estrangement and alien-

ation. In 1965, a translation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World

appeared, offering a completely different view of the grotesque as the

expression o f an energetic and irreverent popular culture organized around

pagan festivals. In On the Grotesque: S trategies of Contradiction in Art and Lit-

erature (2nd ed., 2006), Geoffrey Galt Harpham described the grotesque not

as a formal property of particular works but as a feature of the response to

those works —an interval of partial comprehension when, confronting an

incoherent object, the perceiver senses a hidden principle of unity or intelligi-

bility that he or she does not yet comprehend. For a collection of essays on

the grotesque in the work of various literary figures, see Harold Bloom, The

Grotesque (2009).

GROTESQUE 157

grounds (of a metaphor): 134; 65.

gull (in drama): 377 .

gynocriticism: 126.

158 GROUNDS

hagiography (hag

eog

rafe): 30.

haiku (sometimes spelled hokku): “Haiku” is a Japanese poetic form that repre-

sents—in seventeen syllables that are ordered into three lines of five, seven,

and five syllables—the poet’s emotional or spiritual response to a natural

object, scene, or season of the year. The strict form, which relies on the

short, uniform, and unstressed syllabic structure of the Japanese language, is

extremely difficult in English; most poets who attempt the haiku loosen the

rule for the number and pattern of the syllables. The haiku greatly influenced

Ezra Pound and other Imagists, who set out to reproduce both the brevity

and the precision of the image in the Japanese original. Ezra Pound’s “In a

Station of the Metro” is a well-known instance of the haiku in the loosened

English form; see this poem under imagism.

Earl R. Miner, The Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature

(1958); R. H. Blyth, A History of Haiku (2 vols., 1963–64); Bruce Ross, ed.,

Haiku Moment: An Anthology of Contemporary North American Haiku (1993).

hamartia (hämärte

a): 405.

hard-boiled detective story: 69.

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 to the early 1930s. In the course of the mass migrations

to the urban North in order to escape the legal segregation of the American

South—and also in order to take advantage of the jobs opened to

African-Americans at the beginning of the war—the population of the region

of Manhattan known as Harlem became almost exclusively black and

developed into the vital center of African-American culture in America.

Distinguished writers who were part of the movement included the poets

Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes (who also wrote novels and plays), Claude

McKay, and Sterling Brown; the novelists Jean Toomer (whose inventive Cane

[1923] included verse and drama as well as prose fiction), Jessie Fauset, and

Wallace Thurman; and many essayists, memoirists, and writers in diverse

modes such as James Weldon Johnson, Marcus Garvey, and Arna Bontemps.

The Great Depression of 1929 and the early 1930s brought the

period of buoyant Harlem culture—which had been fostered by prosper-

ity in t he publishing industry and the art world—effectivelytoanend.

Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (193 7) and

her other works, however, are widely accounted as late products of the

Harlem Renaissance.

See The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925), an anthology edited by Alain

Locke that did much to define the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance; Arna

HARLEM RENAISSANCE 159

Bontemps, ed., The Harlem Renaissance Remembered (1972); David Levering

Lewis, ed., The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader (1994); Steven Watson,

The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Culture, 1920–1930 (1995);

Cheryl Wall, Women of the Harlem Renaissance (1995); George Hutchinson,

The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (1995); David Levering Lewis,

When Harlem Was in Vogue (1997); Henry Louis Gates, et al., eds., The Norton

Anthology of African-American Literature (1997); William L. Andrews, Frances

Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris, eds., The Concise Oxford Companion to African

American Literature (2001).

Harlequin romances: 351.

hegemony (hejem

one): 208.

heptameter (heptam

eter): 220.

hermeneutic circle (her

menoo



k): 179.

hermeneutics: 178.

hermeneutics of suspicion: 312; 182.

hero / heroine (in a narrative): 293; 16.

heroic couplet: Lines of iambic pentameter (see meter) 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 (that is, epic)

poems and in heroic dramas. This verse form was introduced into English

poetry by Geoffrey Chaucer (in The Legend of Good Women and most of The

Canterbury Tales) and has been in constant use ever since. From the age of

John Dryden through that of Samuel Johnson, the heroic couplet was the

predominant English measure for all the poetic kinds; some poets, including

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

era, usually called the Neoclassic Period, the poets wrote closed couplets,in

which the end of each pair of lines tends to coincide with the end either of

a sentence or of a self-sufficient unit of syntax. The sustained employment

of the closed heroic couplet meant that two lines had to serve something of

the function of a stanza. In order to maximize the interrelationships of the

component parts of the couplet, neoclassic poets often used an end-stopped

first line (that is, made the end of the line coincide with a pause in the syntax),

and also broke many single lines into subunits by balancing the line around a

strong caesura, or medial pause in the syntax.

The following passage from John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill (which he

added in the version of 1655) is an early instance of the artful management

of the closed couplet that fascinated later neoclassic poets; they quoted it,

commented upon it again and again, and used it as a model for exploiting

160 HARLEQUIN ROMANCES

the potentialities of this verse form. (See the comment on Cooper’sHillunder

topographical poetry.) Note how Denham achieves divers ity within the straitness

of his couplets by shifts in the position of the caesuras, by the use of rhetorical

balance and antithesis between the single lines and between the two halves within

a single line, and by the variable positioning of the adjectives in the second

couplet. Note also the framing and the emphasis gained by inverting the iambic

foot that begins the first line and the last line, and by manipulating similar and

contrasting vowels and consonants. The poet is addressing the River Thames:

O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream

My great example, as it is my theme!

Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull;

Strong without rage, without o’erflowing full.

And here is a passage from Alexander Pope, the greatest master of the metrical,

syntactical, and rhetorical possibilities of the closed heroic couplet (“Of the

Characters of Women,” 1735, lines 243–48):

See how the world its veterans rewards!

A youth of frolics, an old age of cards;

Fair to no purpose, artful to no end,

Young without lovers, old without a friend;

A fop their passion, but their prize a sot;

Alive, ridiculous, and dead, forgot!

These closed neoclassic couplets contrast with the “open” pentameter

couplets quoted from Keats’Endymion (1818) in the entry on meter. In the lat-

ter, the pattern of stresses varies often from the iambic norm, the syntax is

unsymmetrical, and the couplets run on freely, with the rhyme serving to

color rather than to stop the verse.

See W. K. Wimsatt, “One Relation of Rhyme to Reason (Alexander

Pope),” in The Verbal Icon (1954); William Bowman Piper, The Heroic Couplet

(1969). For references to heroic couplet in other entries, see page 161.

heroic drama: “Heroic drama” was a form mainly specific to the Restoration

Period, though instances continued to be written in the early eighteenth cen-

tury. As John Dryden defined it: “An heroic play ought to be an imitation, in

little, of an heroic poem; and consequently … love and valour ought to be

the subject of it” (Preface to The Conquest of Granada, 1672). By “heroic

poem” he meant epic, and the plays attempted to emulate the epic by employ-

ing as protagonist a large-scale warrior whose actions involve the fate of an

empire, and by having all the characters speak in an elevated style, usually

cast in the epigrammatic form of the closed heroic couplet. A noble hero and

heroine are typically represented in a situation in which their passionate love

conflicts with the demands of honor and with the hero’s patriotic duty to his

country; if the conflict ends in disaster, the play is called an heroic tragedy.

Often the central dilemma is patently contrived and the characters seem

to modern readers to be statuesque and unconvincing, while the attempt to

HEROIC DRAMA 161

sustain a high epic style swells sometimes into bombast, as in this utterance

from Dryden’s Love Triumphant (1693): “What woods are these? I feel my

vital heat / Forsake my limbs, my curdled blood retreat.”

Dryden is the major writer of this dramatic form; The Conquest of Granada

is one of the better heroic tragedies, but Dryden’s most successful achieve-

ment is All for Love (1678), which is an adaptation to the heroic formula of

Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Other heroic dramatists were Nathaniel

Lee (The Rival Queens) and Thomas Otway, whose Venice Preserved is a fine

tragedy that transcends the limitations of the form. We also owe indirectly to

heroic tragedy two very amusing parodies of the type: the Duke of Buckingham’s

The Rehearsal (1672) and Henry Fielding’s The Tragedy of Tragedies, or the Life and

Death of Tom Thumb the Great (1731).

See Bonamy Dobrée, Restoration Tragedy (1929); Eugene M. Waith, Ideas

of Greatness: Heroic Drama in England (1971); Derek Hughes, English Drama,

1660–1700 (1996); John Douglas Canfield, Heroes and States: On the Ideology

of Restoration Tragedy (2000). For references to heroic drama in other entries,

see page 160.

heroic poem: 109.

heroic quatrain: 375.

heroic tragedy: 161; 407.

heroine (in a narrative): 293.

hexameter (hexam

eter): 220; 103.

hieratic style (h



erat



k): 383.

high burlesque: 41.

high comedy: 58.

high modernism: 226.

high style: 383; 86.

hip-hop: 272.

historical novel: 256.

history play: 52.

hokku: 159.

Homeric epithet: 115.

162 HEROIC POEM

Homeric simile: 112.

homonyms: 325.

homostrophic (ho

mostro



k): 263.

Horatian ode: 263.

Horatian satire: 353.

hubris (hyoo



s): 405.

Hudibrastic poem (hyoo



bras

tik): 42.

Hudibrastic verse: 95.

humanism: In the sixteenth century the word humanist was coined to signify

one who taught or wrote 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 activi-

ties of man, such as mathematics, natural philosophy, and theology. At that

time, these studies focused on classical, especially Roman, culture; and they

put great emphasis on learning to speak and write good Latin. Scholarly

humanists recovered, edited, and expounded many ancient texts in Greek

and Latin, and so contributed greatly to the store of materials and ideas in

the European Renaissance. These humanists also wrote many works concerned

with educational, moral, and political themes, based largely on classical writers

such as Aristotle, Plato, and above all, Cicero. In the nineteenth century, a

new word, humanism, came to be applied to the view of human nature,

the general values, and the educational ideas common to many Renaissance

humanists, as well as to a number of later writers in the same tradition.

Typically, Renaissance humanism assumed the dignity and central position

of human beings in the universe; emphasized the importance in education of

studying classical imaginative and philosophical literature, although with

emphasis on its moral and practical rather than its aesthetic values; and insisted

on the primacy, in ordering human life, of reason (considered the universal and

defining human faculty) as opposed to the instinctual appetites and the “animal”

passions. Many humanists also stressed the need, in education, for a rounded

development of an individual’s diverse powers—physical, mental, artistic, and

moral—as opposed to a merely technical or specialized kind of training.

In our time, the term “humanist” often connotes those thinkers who base

truth on human experience and reason and who base values on human nature

and culture, as distinguished from those who regard religious revelation as the

warrant for basic truth and values. With few exceptions, however, Renais-

sance humanists were pious Christians who incorporated the concepts and

ideals inherited from pagan antiquity into the frame of the Christian creed.

HUMANISM 163

The result was that they tended to emphasize the values achievable by human

beings in this world rather than in an afterlife and to minimize the earlier

Christian emphasis on the innate corruption of human beings and on the

ideals of asceticism and of withdrawal from this world in a preoccupation

with the world hereafter. It has become common to refer to this synthesis of

classical and Christian views, typical of writers such as Sir Philip Sidney,

Edmund Spenser, and John Milton, as Christian humanism.

The rapid advance in the achievements and prestige of the natural sciences

and technology after the Renaissance sharpened, in later heirs of the humanistic

tradition, the need to defend the role of the humanities in a liberal education

against the encroachments of the sciences and the practical arts. As Samuel

Johnson, the eighteenth-century humanist who had once been a schoolmaster,

wrote in his “Life of Milton” (1779):

The truth is, that the knowledge of external nature, and the sciences

which that knowledge requires or includes, are not the great or the

frequent business of the human mind…. We are perpetually moral-

ists, but we are geometricians only by chance…. Socrates was rather

of opinion that what we had to learn was, how to do good, and

avoid evil.

Matthew Arnold, a notable proponent of humanism in the Victorian Period,

strongly defended the central role of humane studies in general education.

Many of Arnold’s leading ideas are adaptations of the tenets of the older human-

ism—his view, for example, that culture is a perfection “of our humanity proper,

as distinguished from our animality,” and consists of “a harmonious expansion of

all the powers which make the beauty and worth of human nature”;hisempha-

sis on knowing “the best that is known and thought in the world,” with the

assumption that much of what is best is in the writings of classical a ntiquit y;

and his conception of poetry as essentially “a criticism of life.”

In the 1890s, the German philos opher Wilhelm Dilthey developed

a highly influential distinction between the natural sciences, which aim

at an abstract and reductive “explanation” of the world, and the “human

sciences” (the humanities), which aim to achieve an “understanding” of

the full, concrete world of a ctual experience—the lived human world, for

example, that is represented in works of literature. (See in the entry interpre-

tation and hermeneutics.)

In the last century, the American movement of 1910–33 known as the

New Humanism, under the leadership of Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer

More, argued for a return to a primarily humanistic education and for a very

conservative view of moral, political, and literary values that is grounded

mainly on classical literature. (See Irving Babbitt, Literature and the American

College, 1908; Norman Foerster, ed., Humanism and America, 1930; and Claes

G. Ryn, Will, Imagination, and Reason: Babbitt, Croce, and the Problem of Reality,

1997.) But in the present age of proliferating demands for specialists in the

sciences, technology, and the practical arts, the broad humanistic base for a

general education has been greatly eroded. In most colleges, the earlier

164 HUMANISM

humanistic view of the aims of a liberal education survives mainly in the

requirement that all students in the liberal arts must take at least one course

in the group called the humanities, which comprises literature, philosophy,

music, languages, and sometimes history.

It is notable that a number of structuralist and poststructuralist philosoph-

ical and critical theories were expressly antihumanistic, not only in the sense

that they undertook to subvert many of the values proposed by traditional

humanism but in the more radical sense that they undertook to “decenter,”

or to eliminate entirely, the focus on the human being, or “subject,” as the

major object of study and the major agency in effecting scientific, cultural,

and literary achievements. “Man,” as Michel Foucault put it in a widely

quoted affirmation, “is a simple fold in our language” who is destined to

“disappear as soon as that knowledge has found a new form.” In the realm

of literary and critical theory, some structuralists conceived of a human author

as simply a “space” in which linguistic and cultural codes come together to

effect a text; deconstructionists tended to reduce the human subject to one of

the “effects ” engendered by the differential play of language; and a number

of Marxist and new-historicist critics analyzed the subject as a construction that

is produced by the ideological “discursive formations,” particular to a time

and culture, which the author-as-subject acquires and transmits in his or her

literary productions. (See subject, under poststructuralism.)

Diverse poststructural and other opponents of humanism assert that

human-centered systems of norms and values are based on the fallacy of

essentialism—that is, the view (which antihumanists assume to be mistaken)

that there is an essential human nature, or set of defining human features,

which is innate, universal, and independent of historical and cultural differ-

ences. In response, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum has mounted a defense

of essentialism, insisting that we are able to formulate, from within our own

historical and cultural situation, a set of basic features, functions, and needs

that constitute the specifically human form of life and are shared by human

beings across all divisions of time, place, and culture. These common features

include the knowledge that we are mortal and have an instinctual aversion to

death; the fact that we live an embodied life, hence have nutritional, sexual,

and other needs and desires and a sensibility to pleasure and pain; the cogni-

tive ability to perceive, think, and imagine, together with the practical ability

to plan the means to achieve our aims; the capacity to experience emotions

such as grief, anger, fear, and love; and a sense of relatedness and affiliation to

other human beings. These common features, Nussbaum argues, provide ade-

quate and indeed indispensable grounds for establishing basic human norms

and values. See Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities

Approach (2000), especially chapter 1, “In Defense of Universal Values.”

The linguist and social philosopher Noam Chomsky also supports human

essentialism; not, like Nussbaum, on the basis of shared human capabilities, but

on the basis of a biologically determined “universal grammar,” fixed in the

human brain, which enables the “rule-bound creativity” of the production

and understanding of language. (See Chomsky under linguistics in literary

HUMANISM 165

criticism.) This universal genetic inheritance, in Chomsky’s view, constitutes the

very core of human nature. He maintains that the antiessentialist view of post-

structural theorists—that all human attitudes, beliefs, and norms are social con-

structions within particular cultures—abets efforts by dominant social and

political groups to shape such attitudes and norms to their own purposes.

Only the conviction that human beings have an innate and determinate

human nature can provide the grounds on which to resist such impositions on

human liberty. (See Chomsky, Reflections on Language,1975,andforevidence

drawn from diverse fields to support Chomsky’s genetic view of an essential

human nature, see Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of

Human Nature, 2002.)

A number of feminists, gay and lesbian critics, and proponents of ethnic

multiculturalism are adherents of “identity politics” and stake out a position

which differs from both the humanistic and poststructural views of the nature

and valid role of the human subject. Like traditional humanists, identity theorists

reject the extreme poststructural claims that the human subject is no more than a

social construction or textual effect, and reposition the subject—as a particular

sexual, gender-specific, or ethnic identity—at the center of the scene of writing,

interpretation, and political action. In opposition to traditional humanists, on

the other hand, identity theorists emphasize the identity of the subject as a repre-

sentative of one or another group rather than as a representative of universal

humanity. The term identity politics is often used pejoratively to signify the

subordination of objective study to political aims. (On current conflicts about

“identity” among advocates of political activism, see Jonathan Culler, Literary

Theory: A Very Short Introduction, 1997, chapter 8; also refer to the entries in this

Glossary on feminist criticism, postcolonial studies,andqueer theory.)

On the concept and history of humanism: P. O. Kristeller, The Classics

and Renaissance Thought (1955);R.S.Crane,The Idea of the Humanities

(2 vols., 1967); Tzvetan Todorov, Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism

(2002); Tony Davies, Humanism (2nd ed., 2008). For antihumanist critiques

or deconstruction of the human subject, see the references under post-

structuralism, deconstruction,andne w historicism. For opposition to such views

and defenses of the humanist position in authorship, interpretation , and

criticism, see Commission on the Humanities, The Humanities in American

Life: Report of the Commission on the Humanities (1980); Richard A. Etlin, In

Defense of Humanism: Value in Arts and Letters (1996); Alvin Kernan, ed.,

What’s Happened to the Humanities? (1997); David A. Hollinger, ed., The

Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion since World War II (2006); T ony

Davies, Humanism (2nd ed., 2008); M. H. Abrams, “What Is a Humanistic

Criticism?” in The

Fourth Dimension of a Poem (2012). In The Humanities a nd

the Dream of America (2011), Geoffrey Galt Harpham explores recurrent

claims of a “crisis in the humanities” and argues that the modern concept

of the humanities, while drawing on diverse traditions, crystallized in the

context of American thinking about mass l iberal education in the years

following World War II.

For references to humanism in other entries, see pages 55, 77, 237.

166 HUMANISM

humanist: 163; 44.

humanities, the: 165.

Human Rights Literature: A term applied to literary works that raise issues

connected with the concept of human rights —rights that one has simply by

virtue of being human, not as a consequence of citizenship or any political

arrangement—often by depicting the suffering inflicted by abuse or exploita-

tion. Human rights literature includes poetry, memoir, and testimony, but the

dominant form is the novel. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), John

Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird

(1960), J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), and Michael

Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2000) have been described in these terms. Kay

Schaffer and Sidonie Smith argue, in Human Rights and Narrated Lives (2004),

that life-narratives in particular promote an “ethics of recognition” by repre-

senting both suffering and moments of self-assertion by the victim.

But the argument has also been made that literature is not simply a means of

representing instances of abuse and resistance but is also, more importantly, an

agent in forming the cultural context in which “human rights” make sense. In

Inventing Human Rights (2007), Lynn Hunt argues that the new forms of fiction

that arose during the eighteenth century were crucial in disseminating the atti-

tudes and premises that underlie the concept of universal rights. By representing

the moral integrity and desire for autonomy of those who are not wealthy or

powerful, the novel, she contends, implicitly argued for certain kinds of equality;

and by taking the reader inside the mind of the protagonist (often, as in the novels

of Samuel Richardson, a victimized woman), the epistolary novel in particular pro-

moted the faculty of empathy.InHuman Rights Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative

Form, and International Law (2010), Joseph Slaughter argues for the importance

of the Bildungsroman in promoting the modern liberal notion that the individual

is entitled to the opportunity to a free and full development of his or her capaci-

ties, a notion on which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) was

also implicitly predicated. By serving as a “cultural surrogate” for the concept of

universal rights, the Bildungsroman, Slaughter contends, implicitly supports the

belief that there is an international consensus on human rights even in the face

of flagrant violation of such rights by states all over the world.

Refer to Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore, eds.,

Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature (2012).

humor: 418.

humours character: 59; 48.

humours, comedy of: 59.

hybridization (in literary cultures): 306

HYBRIDIZATION 167

hymn: In current usage “hymn” denotes a song that celebrates God or expresses

religious feelings and is intended primarily to be sung as part of a religious

service. (See lyric.) The term derives from the Greek hymnos, which originally

signified songs of praise that were for the most part addressed to the gods, but

in some instances to human heroes or to abstract concepts. The early Chris-

tian churches, following classical examples, introduced the singing of hymns as

part of the liturgy; some of these consisted of the texts or paraphrases of Old

Testament psalms, but others were composed as songs of worship by churchly

authors of the time. The writing of religious lyric poems set to music contin-

ued through the Middle Ages and into the Protestant Reformation; Martin

Luther (1483–1546) himself composed both the German words and the

music of hymns, including “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” which is now

sung by most Christian denominations.

The writing of religious hymns, some of them metrical versions of the

psalms and others original, continued through the Renaissance and was supple-

mented by a revival of “literary hymns” on secular or even pagan subjects—a

classical type which had been kept alive through t he Middle Ages by a num-

ber of Neo-Latin poets and was now composed to be read rather than sung.

Edmund Spenser’s Fowre Hymns (1596) are distinguished examples of such

literary hymns; the first two celebrate earthly love and beauty, and the sec-

ond two celebrate heavenly (that is, Christian) l ove and beauty. The tradi-

tion of writing hymns on secular subjects con tinued into the nineteenth

century and produced such examples as James Thomson’s “AHymnonthe

Seasons” (1730), Keats’“Hymn to Apollo,” and Shelley’s “Hymn of Apollo”

and “Hymn of Pan”; the last three of these hymns, it should be noted, like

many of the original Greek hymns, are addressed to pagan gods.

The secular hymns were often long and elaborate compositions that verged

closely upon another form of versified praise, the ode. These hymns, as well as

many religious instances such as the great “Hymn” that constitutes all but the

brief introduction of Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (1629),

were formal compositions that were intended only to be read. The other type

of hymn—the short religious lyric written for public singing—was revived, and

developed into its modern form, by the notable eighteenth-century hymnists of

personal religious emotions, including Isaac Watts, Charles and John Wesley,

and William Cowper; a successor in the next century was John Hen ry

Newman, author of “Lead, Kindly Light.” In America the poets John Greenleaf

Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote

hymns, but the greatest and best-known American devotiona l songs are the

anonymous African-American type that we call

spirituals,s

uchas“Swing

Low, Sweet Chariot” and “Go Down, Moses.” (James Weldon Johnson and

J. Rosamond Johnson, Book of American Negro Spirituals,1925–26.)

See the anthology, New Oxford Book of Christian Verse, ed. Donald Davie

(1982); and refer to C. S. Phillipe, Hymnody Past and Present (1937); Louis F.

Benson, The English Hymn (1962); P. S. Diehl, The Medieval European Religious

Lyric (1985); and the article “Hymn ” in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of

Poetry and Poetics (1993).

168 HYMN

hyperbaton: 345.

hyperbole and understatement: The figure of speech, or trope, called

hyperbole (h



ıpur

b ole

: Greek for “overshooting”) is bold overstatement,

or the extravagant exaggeration of fact or of possibility. It may be used

either for serious or ironic or comic e ffect. Iago says glo atingly of Othello

(III. iii. 33 0ff.):

Not poppy nor mandragora,

Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world,

Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep

Which thou ow’dst yesterday.

Famed examples in the seventeenth century are Ben Jonson’s gallantly

hyperbolic compliments to his lady in “Drink to me only with thine eyes,”

and the ironic hyperboles in “To His Coy Mistress,” by which Andrew

Marvell attests how infinitely slowly his “vegetable love should grow”—if

he had “but world enough and time.” The “tall talk” or tall tale of the

American West is a form of mainly comic hyperbole. There is the story of a

cowboy in an eastern restaurant who ordered a steak well done. “Do you call

this well done?” he roared at the server. “I’ve seen critters hurt worse than

that recover!”

The contrary figure is understatement (the Greek term is meiosis,

“lessening”), which deliberately represents something as very much less in

magnitude or importance than it really is or is ordinarily considered to be.

The effect is usually ironic. It is savagely (and complexly) ironic in Jonathan

Swift’s A Tale of a Tub (1704), in which the narrator asserts the “superiority”

of “that Wisdom, which converses about the surface” to “that pretended Phi-

losophy which enters into the Depth of Things,” giving as example that “last

week I saw a Woman flay’d, and you will hardly believe how much it altered

her Person for the worse.” The understatement is comically ironic in Mark

Twain’s comment, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” Some

critics extend “

meiosis” to

the use in literature of a simple, unemphatic state-

ment to enhance the effect of a deeply pathetic or tragic event; an example is

the line at the close of the narrative in William Wordsworth’s “Michael”

(1800): “And never lifted up a single stone.”

A special form of understatement is litotes (Greek for “plain” or

“simple”), the assertion of an affirmative by negating its contrary: “He’s

not the brightest man in the world” meaning “He is stupid.” The figure

is frequent in Anglo -Saxon poetry, where the effect is usual ly one of grim

irony. In Beowulf, after Hrothgar has described the ghastly mere where the

monster Grendel dwells, he comments, “Th at is not a pleasant place.”

hyperreading: 170.

hypertext: A kind of text that enables and encourages the reader to branch off

into other texts at will, making the experience of reading nonlinear, open,

HYPERTEXT 169

and variable. Coined in the 1960s, the term is now applied exclusively to

texts viewed on a computer, in which browsers and hyperlinks permit the

reader to move from one document, file, or data source to another. (This

Glossary can be accounted a noncomputerized form of hypertext in that the

italicized terms invite readers to suspend forward progress while they look

ahead or back in order to consult other relevant entries.)

Narratives that use embedded hyperlinks to enable the reader to navigate

freely, deviating from the main narrative to explore details of plot, character,

or setting, or to create their own sequences of events, are called hypertext

fiction, cyberfiction,orelectronic literature. Early examples are Michael

Joyce, Afternoon, a story (1990), and Stuart Moulthrop, Victory Garden (1992),

whose title refers obliquely to “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941) by

Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, a short story that anticipates, before the

invention of the computer, the organizational principles of hypertext fiction.

In such works, readers make choices that are, in traditional works of literature,

made by the author, and these choices, combined with the addition of sound,

graphics, or video, constitute a specific kind of reading, or hyperreading.

Some critics believe that hypertext and hyperreading—fluid, heterogeneous,

and technology-driven—signal a new “posthuman” orientation of the subject

to culture, technology, and knowledge. See N. Katherine Hayles, How We

Became Posthuman (1999); and How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary

Technogenesis (2012).

See George P. Landow, ed., Hyper/Text/Theory (1994), and Hypertext 3.0

(2006).

hypertext fiction: 170.

hypotactic style (h



potak

tik): 384.

170 HYPERTEXT FICTION

iambic (



ıam

bik): 219.

icon (in semiotics) (



ı kon): 357.

iconography (



ıkono

grafe): 184.

id: 321.

Idealism: “Idealism” is the name for a philosophical doctrine, arising at the end of

the eighteenth century, that was transformed over the course of the nineteenth

century into an important concept for literature as well. Idealism was founded on

the distinction drawn by Immanuel Kant between the realms of freedom (reason,

imagination, morality, and aesthetics) and necessity (material objects, nature,

the world of science). For subsequent thinkers, including Hölderlin, Schiller,

Novalis, Schlegel, Hegel, and, in England, S. T. Coleridge, the idea of freedom

was realized most fully in the creation and appreciation of beauty, understood as

the unification of truth and goodness. In Schiller’streatiseonNaive and Sentimental

Poetry, Idealism was articulated as a utopian program, at the center of which is the

image of a harmonious human being perfectly at home in the world.

According to the tenets of Idealism, it was the task of art, and poetry in

particular, to help realize this revolutionary vision of freedom and harmony.

But by the middle of the nineteenth century, Idealism had hardened into a set

of implicit public expectations about the proper moral role of art. The 1857

public trials of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary for blasphemy and Baudelaire’s Les

fleurs du mal for obscenity demonstrated the consequences for works of art

that did not conform to the Idealist aesthetic. Literary modernism began,

according to Toril Moi, as a series of revolts against an Idealism that had

become suffocating rather than liberating. Realism, naturalism, aestheticism,

and modernist formalism all had, she argues, a common enemy in the Idealist

principle that art should inspire, uplift, and console. See Toril Moi, Henrik

Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy (2006). For an impor-

tant discussion of the French novelist George Sand in the context of Idealism,

see Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (1987).

identity politics: 166.

identity theorists: 166.

ideology (



ıdeol

oje): 204; 44, 125.

idyll: 268.

illocutionary act (



okyoo

shunary): 371.

ILLOCUTIONARY ACT 171

illuminated (books): 35.

image clusters: 173.

imagery: This term is one of the most common in criticism, and one of the

most variable in meaning. Its applications range all the way from the “mental

pictures,” which, it is sometimes claimed, are experienced by the reader of a

poem, to the totality of the components which make up a poem. Examples of

this range of usage are the statements by the poet C. Day Lewis, in his Poetic

Image (1948, pp. 17–18), that an image “is a picture made out of words,” and

that “a poem may itself be an image composed from a multiplicity of images.”

Three discriminable uses of the word, however, are especially frequent; in all

these senses imagery is said to make poetry concrete, as opposed to abstract:

1. “Imagery” (that is, “images” taken collectively) is used to signify all the

objects and qualities of sense perception referred to in a poem or other

work of literature, whether by literal description, by allusion, or in the

vehicles (the secondary references) of its similes and metaphors. In William

Wordsworth’s “She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways” (1800), the

imagery in this broad sense includes the literal objects the poem refers

to (for example, “untrodden ways,”“springs,”“grave”), as well as the

“violet” of the metaphor and the “star” of the simile in the second stanza.

The term “image” should not be taken to imply a visual reproduction of

the object denoted; some readers of the passage experience visual images

and some do not; and among those who do, the explicitness and details of

the pictures vary greatly. Also, “imagery” in this usage includes not only

visual sense qualities but also qualities that are auditory, tactile (touch),

thermal (heat and cold), olfactory (smell), gustatory (taste), and kinesthetic

(sensations of movement). In his In Memoriam (1850), No. 101, for exam-

ple, Tennyson’s imagery encompasses not only things that are visible but

also qualities that are smelled, tasted, or heard, together with a suggestion,

in the adjective “summer,” of warmth:

Unloved, that beech will gather brown,

…

And

many a rose-carnation feed

With summer spice the humming air….

2. Imagery is used, more narrowly, to signify only specific descriptions of

visible objects and scenes, especially if the description is vivid and partic-

ularized, as in this passage from Marianne Moore’s “The Steeple-Jack”:

a sea the purple of the peacock’s neck is

paled to greenish azure as Dürer changed

the pine tree of the Tyrol to peacock blue and guinea grey.

Lines from “The Steeplejack” by Marianne Moore, from The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore.

172 ILLUMINATED

3. In many usages, “imagery” signifies figurative language,especiallythevehicles

of metaphors and similes. Critics after the 1930s, and notably the New

Critics, went far beyond earlier commentators in stressing imagery, in this

sense, as the essential component in poetry and as a major factor in poetic

meaning, structure, and effect.

Using the term in this third sense, Caroline Spurgeon, in Shakespeare’s

Imagery and What It Tells Us (1935), made statistical counts of the referents of

the figurative vehicles in Shakespeare and used the results as clues to

Shakespeare’s personal experiences, interests, and temperament. Following

the lead of several earlier critics, she also pointed out the frequent occurrence

in Shakespeare’s plays of image clusters (recurrent groupings of seemingly

unrelated metaphors and similes). She also presented evidence that a number

of the individual plays have characteristic image motifs (for example, animal

imagery in King Lear, and the figures of disease, corruption, and death in

Hamlet); her view was that these elements established the overall tonality or

atmosphere of a play. Many critics in the next few decades joined Spurgeon in

the search for images, image clusters, and “thematic imagery” in works of liter-

ature. Some New Critics held that the implicit interactions of the imagery—in

distinction from explicit statements by the author or the overt speeches and

actions of the characters—were the way that the controlling literary subject,

or theme, worked itself out in many plays, poems, and novels. See, for example,

the critical writings of G. Wilson Knight; and Cleanth Brooks on Macbeth in

The Well Wrought Urn (1947), chapter 2.

See also Richard H. Fogle, The Imagery of Keats and Shelley (1949); Norman

Friedman, “Imagery: From Sensation to Symbol,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art

Criticism, Vol. 12 (1953); Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (1957). For references

to imagery in other entries, see page 63.

imaginary (in Lacanian criticism): 323.

imagination: 122.

Imagism: “Imagism” was a poetic vogue that flourished in England, and even

more vigorously in America, approximately between the years 1912 and

1917. It was planned and exemplified by a group of English and American

writers in London, partly under the influence of the poetic theory of

T. E. Hulme, as a revolt against what Ezra Pound called the “rather blurry,

messy … sentimentalistic mannerish” poetry at the turn of the century.

Pound, the first leader of the movement, was soon succeeded by Amy

Lowell; after that Pound sometimes referred to the movement, slightingly,

as “Amygism.” O

therleadingparticipants,foratime,wereH.D.(Hilda

Doolittle), D. H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, John Gould Fletcher,

and Richard Aldington. The Imagist proposals, as voiced by Amy Lowell

in her preface to the first of three anthologies called Some Imagist Poets

(1915–17), were for a poetry which, abandoning conventional limits on

IMAGISM 173

poetic materials and versification, is free to choose any subject and to create

its own rhythms, uses common speech, and presents an “image” (vivid sen-

sory description) that is hard, clear, and concentrated. (See imagery.)

The typical Imagist poem is written in free verse and undertakes to render as

precisely, vividly, and tersely as possible, and without comment or generalization,

the writer’s impression of a visual object or scene; often the impression is

rendered by means of metaphor, or by juxtaposing, without indicating a relation-

ship, the description of one object with that of a second and diverse object. This

famed example by Ezra Pound exceeds other Imagist poems in the degree of its

concentration:

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd,

Petals on a wet, black bough.

In this poem Pound, like a number of other Imagists, was influenced by the

Japanese haiku.

Imagism was too restrictive to endure long as a concerted movement, but it

served to inaugurate a distinctive feature of modernist poetry. Almost every major

poet from the 1920s through the middle of the twentieth century, including

W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens, manifests some influence by

the Imagist experiments with the presentation of precise, clear images that are

juxtaposed without specifying their interrelationships.

See T. E. Hulme, Speculations, ed. Herbert Read (1924); William Pratt, ed.,

The Imagist Poem (1963); Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (1971); Glenn Hughes,

Imagism and the Imagists: A Study in Modern Poetry (1973); J. B. Harmer,

Victory in Limbo: Imagism, 1908–1917 (1975); Andrew Thacker, The Imagist

Poets (2008).

imitation: In literary criticism the word imitation has two frequent but diverse

applications: (1) to define the nature of literature and the other arts, and (2) to

indicate the relationship of one literary work to another literary work which

served as its model.

1. In his Poetics , Aristotle defines poetry as an imitation (in Greek, mimesis)

of human actions. (See criticism.) By “imitation” he means something like

“representation,” in its root sense: the poem imitates by taking an

instance of human action and re-presenting it in a new “medium”—that

of words. By distinguishing differences in the artistic media, in the kind of

actions imitated, and in the manner of imitation (for example, dramatic or

narrative), Aristotle first distinguishes poetry from other arts, and then

makes distinctions between the various poetic kinds, such as drama and

epic, tragedy and comedy. From the sixteenth through the eighteenth

centuries, the term “imitation” was a central term in discussing the nature

of poetry. Critics differed radically, however, in their concept of the

Lines from “In a Station of the Metro ” from Personae by Ezra Pound.

174 IMITATION

nature of the mimetic relationship and of the kinds of things in the exter-

nal world that works of literature imitate, or ought to imitate, so that

theories of imitation varied in the kind of art they recommended, from

a strict realism to a remote idealism. With the emergence in the early

nineteenth century of an expressive criticism (the view that poetry is essen-

tially an expression of the poet’s feelings or imaginative process), imitation

tended to be displaced from its central position in literary theory (see

criticism). In the last half century, however, the use of the term has been

revived, especially by R. S. Crane and other Chicago critics, who ground

their theory on the analytic method and basic distinctions of Aristotle’s

Poetics. Many Marxist critics also propose a view of literature as an imita-

tion, or, in their preferred term, “reflection,” of social reality.

2. Greek and Roman rhetoricians and critics often recommended that a

poet should “imitate” the established models in a particular literary genre.

The notion that the proper procedure for poets, with the rare exception

of an “original genius,” was to imitate the normative forms and styles of

the Greek and Roman masters continued to be influential through the

eighteenth century. All the major critics, however, also insisted that

mere copying was not enough—that a good literary work must imitate

the form and spirit rather than the detail of the classic models, and that

success can be achieved only by a poet who possesses an innate poetic

talent. (See neoclassic.)

In a specialized use of the term in this second sense, “imitation” was also

used to describe a literary work which deliberately echoed an older work but

adapted it to subject matter in the writer’s own age, usually in a satirical fash-

ion. In the poems that Alexander Pope called Imitations of Horace (1733 and

following), for example, an important part of the intended effects depend on

the reader’s recognition of the resourcefulness and wit with which Pope

accommodated to contemporary circumstances the structure, details, and

even the wording of one or another of Horace’s Roman satires.

On “imitation” as a term used to define literature, see R. S. Crane, ed.,

Critics and Criticism (1952); M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953),

chapters 1–2; and Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (trans. 1953, reprinted 2003). On

Pope’s “imitations” of Hor ace and other ancient masters, see R. A. Brower,

Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (1959). For denials, on various

grounds, that literature can be claimed to be an imitation of reality, see

Russian formalism, structuralist criticism, deconstruction, new historicism, and text

and writing

(éc

riture). Among modern defenses of the view that literature is

mimetic, in the broad sense that it has reference beyond the text to the

world of human experience, see Gerald Graff, Literature against Itself (1979);

A. D. Nuttall, A New Mimesis: Shakespeare and the Representation of Reality

(1983); and Robert Alter, “Mimesis and the Motives for Fiction,” in his

Motives for Fiction (1984).

For references to imitation in other entries, see page 341.

IMITATION 175

imitative form: 141.

imperfect rhyme: 349.

impersonal (narrator): 301.

implicature: 92.

implicit metaphor: 134.

implied auditor: 287.

implied author: 288.

implied reader: 330.

impressionistic criticism: 71.

in medias res (in ma

deäs ras

): 111.

incidents (in a plot): 295.

incremental repetition: 25.

incunabula (



kyoonab

yoola): 35.

index (in semiotics): 357.

indexicals: 233.

indirect satire: 353.

influence and the anxiety of influence: Critics and historians of literature

have for many centuries discussed what was called the influence of an author,

or of a literary tradition, upon a later author, who was said to adopt, and at

the same time to alter, aspects of the subject matter, form, or style of the

earlier writer or writers. Among traditional topics for discussion, for example,

have been the influence of Homer on Virgil, of Virgil on Milton, of Milton

on Wordsworth, or of Wordsworth on Wallace Stevens. The anxiety of

influence is a phrase used by the critic Harold Bloom to identify his radical

revision of this standard theory that influence consists in a direct “borrowing,”

or assimilation, of the materials and features found in earlier writers. Bloom’s

own view is that in the composition of any poem, influence is inescapable,

but that it evokes in the author an anxiety that compels a drastic distortion

of the work of a predecessor. He applies this concept of anxiety to the reading

as well as the writing of poetry. Since Bloom conceives that “every poem is a

176 IMITATIVE FORM

misinterpretation of a parent poem,” he recommends that literary critics

boldly practice what he calls antithetical criticism —that is, that they learn

“to read any poem as its poet’s deliberate misinterpretation, as a poet, of a pre-

cursor poem or of poetry in general. ”

As Bloom points out, a precursor of his views was Walter Jackson Bate’s

The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (1970), which described the struggles

by poets, since 1660, to overcome the inhibitive effect of fear that their

predecessors might have exhausted all the possibilities of writing great and orig-

inal poems. Bloom presented his own theory of reading and writing poetry in

The Anxiety of Influence (1973), then elaborated the theory, and demonstrated its

application to diverse poetic texts, in three rapidly successive books, AMapof

Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), and Poetry and Repression (1976),

as well as in a number of writings concerned with individual poets. See also the

collection of Bloom’s writings, John Hollander, ed., Poetics of Influence (1988).

For analyses and critiques of this theory of literature, see Frank Lentricchia,

After the New Criticism (1980), chapter 9; David Fite, Harold Bloom: The Rhetoric

of Romantic Vision (1985); M. H. Abrams, “How to Do Things with Texts,” in

Doing Things with Texts (1989). Bloom proposed his theory, it will have been

noted, with respect to male poets; for an application of the concept of anxiety

of influence to women writers, see Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The

Madwoman in the Attic (rev. 2000), discussed in the entry feminist criticism.

informal essay: 116.

intention (in interpretation): 180.

intention (in phenomenology): 289.

intentional fallacy: “Intentional fallacy” signifies what is claimed to be the

error of interpreting and evaluating a literary work by reference to evidence,

outside the text itself, for the intention— the design and purposes—of its

author. The term was proposed by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley

in “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946), reprinted in Wimsatt’s The Verbal Icon

(1954). They asserted that an author’s intended aims and meanings in writing

a literary work —whether these are asserted by the author or merely inferred

from our knowledge of the author’s life and opinions—are irrelevant to the

literary critic because the meaning, structure, and value of a text are inherent

within the finished, freestanding, and public work of literature itself. Refer-

ence to the author’s supposed purposes, or else to the author

’s

personal situa-

tion and state of mind in writing a text, is held to be a harmful mistake

because it diverts our attention to such “external” matters as the author’s

biography, or psychological condition, or creative process, which we substi-

tute for the proper critical concern with the “internal” constitution and inher-

ent value of the literary product. (See objective criticism, under criticism.)

This claim, which was central in the New Criticism, has been strenuously

debated and was reformulated by both of its original proponents. (See Wimsatt,

INTENTIONAL FALLACY 177

“Genesis: An Argument Resumed,” in Day of the Leopards, 1976; and Beardsley,

Aesthetics,1958,pp.457–61, and The Possibility of Criticism, 1970, pp. 16–37.)

A view acceptable to many traditional critics (but not to structuralist and post-

structuralist theorists) is that in the exceptional instances—for example, in

Henry James’ prefaces to his novels—where we possess an author’s express

statement about his artistic intentions in a literary work, that statement should

constitute evidence for an interpretive hypothesis but should not in itself be

determinative. If the author’s stated intentions do not accord with the text,

they should be qualified or rejected in favor of an alternative interpretation

that conforms more closely to the shared, or “public,” linguistic and literary

conventions that the text itself incorporates.

Compare affective fallacy. For diverse views of the role of authorial intentions

in establishing a text and in interpreting the meanings of a text, see interpretation

and hermeneut ics and textual criticism. A detailed objection to Wimsatt and

Beardsley’s original essay is E. D. Hirsch’s “Objective Interpretation” (1960),

reprinted as an appendix to his Validity in Interpretation (1967). An anthology

of discussions of this topic in literary criticism is David Newton-De Molina,

On Literary Intention (1976). Ronald Dworkin discusses parallels between the

role of intention in legal interpretation and literary interpretation in “Law as

Interpretation,” in The Politics of Interpretation, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (1983).

For references to intentional fallacy in other entries, see page 181.

interior monologue: 379.

interlude (in drama): 224.

internal rhyme: 347.

interpellation: 208 .

interpretation and hermeneutics: In the narrow sense, to interpret a work of

literature is to specify the meanings of its language by analysis, paraphrase, and

commentary; usually such interpretation focuses on especially obscure,

ambiguous, or figurative passages. In a broader sense, to interpret a work of

literature is to make clear the artistic features and purport in the overall work

of which language serves as the medium. Interpretation in this sense includes

the analysis of such matters as the work’s genre, component elements, form

and structure, theme, and effects (see

criticism).

The

term hermeneutics originally designated the formulation of princi-

ples of interpretation that apply specifically to the Bible; the principles incor-

porated both the rules governing a valid reading of the biblical text and

exegesis, or commentary on the application of the meanings expressed in

the text. Since the nineteenth century, however, “hermeneutics” has come

to designate the theory of interpretation in general—that is, a formulation of

the principles and methods involved in getting at the meaning of all written

texts, including legal, historical, and literary as well as biblical texts.

178 INTERIOR MONOLOGUE

The German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, in a series of lectures

in 1819, was the first to frame a theory of “general hermeneutics” as “the art

of understanding” texts of every kind. Schleiermacher’s views were developed

in the 1890s by the influential philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911),

who proposed a science of hermeneutics designed to serve as the basis for

interpreting all forms of writing in the “human sciences”; that is, in the

humanities and the social sciences, as distinguished from the natural sciences.

Dilthey regarded the human sciences as ways of dealing with the temporal,

concrete, “lived experience” of human beings. He proposed that whereas

the aim of the natural sciences is to achieve “explanation” by means of static,

reductive categories, the aim of hermeneutics is to establish a general theory

of “understanding.” The understanding of a verbal text consists in “the inter-

pretation of works, works in which the texture of inner life comes fully to

expression.” And in literature above all, “the inner life of man finds its com-

plex, exhaustive, and objectively intelligible expression.” (See humanism.)

In formulating the way in which we come to understand the meaning of

a text, Dilthey gave the name the hermeneutic circle to a procedure

Schleiermacher had earlier described. That is, in order to understand the

determinate meanings of the verbal parts of any linguistic whole, we must

approach the parts with a prior sense of the meaning of the whole; yet we

can know the meaning of the whole only by knowing the meanings of its

constituent parts. This circularity of the interpretive process applies to the

interrelations between the single words within any sentence and the sentence

as a whole, as well as to interrelations between all the sentences and the work

as a whole. Dilthey maintained that the hermeneutic circle is not a vicious

circle, in that we can achieve a valid interpretation by a mutually qualifying

interplay between our evolving sense of the whole and our retrospective

understanding of its component parts.

Interest in the theory of interpretation revived strongly in the 1950s and

1960s, concurrently with the turn of Western philosophy to focus on the uses

and meanings of language, and the turn of literary criticism—exemplified by

the New Criticism in America—to the conception of a literary work as a lin-

guistic object and to the view that the primary task of criticism is to interpret

its verbal meanings and their interrelations. During this time, there were two

main lines of development in hermeneutic theory:

1. One development, represented notably by the Italian theorist Emilio

Betti and the American E. D. Hirsch, takes off from Dilthey’s claim that

a reader is able to achieve an objective interpretation of an author’s

expressed meaning. In his Validity in Interpretation (1967), followed by

The Aims of Interpretation (1976), Hirsch asserts that “a text means what

its author meant,” specifies that this meaning is “the verbal meaning

which an author intends,”

and undertakes to show that such verbal

meaning

is in principle determinate (even if in some instances determi-

nately ambiguous, or multiply significant), that it remains stable through

the passage of time, and that it is in principle reproducible by each

INTERPRETATION AND HERMENEUTICS 179

competent reader. An account of the author’s verbal intention need not

confine itself to the author’s state of consciousness at the time of writing

but can also include the general conventions and norms of a language, as

well as all relevant aspects of the author’s cultural milieu and personal

prepossessions and the literary conventions available to the author when

the work was composed. The most a reader can achieve, according to

Hirsch, is an understanding of the most probable meaning of a text, but

this, he insists, is adequate to yield objective knowledge, confirmable by

other competent readers, concerning the determinate and stable meanings

of the literary text.

Hirsch follows traditional hermeneutics in making an essential dis-

tinction between verbal meaning and significance. The significance of

a text to a reader is the relation of its verbal meaning to other matters,

such as the personal situation, beliefs, and responses of the individual

reader; the prevailing cultural milieu of the reader’s own era; or a partic-

ular set of concepts or values, and so on. The verbal meaning of a text,

Hirsch asserts—the meaning intended by the writer—is determinate and

stable; its significance, however—what makes the text alive and resonant

for diverse readers in diverse times—is indeterminate and ever-changing.

Verbal meaning is the particular concern of hermeneutics; textual signifi-

cance, in its many aspects, is one of the concerns of literary criticism.

2. The second line of development in hermeneutical theory takes off from

Dilthey’s view that the genuine understanding of literary and other

humanistic texts consists in the reader’s re-experience of the “inner life”

that the texts express. A primary thinker in this development is Martin

Heidegger, whose Being and Time (1927, trans. 1962) incorporated the

act of interpretation into an existential philosophy—that is, a philoso-

phy centered on “Dasein,” or what it is to-be-in-the-world. Heidegger’s

student Hans Georg Gadamer adapted Heidegger’s philosophy into

an influential theory of textual interpretation, Truth and Method

(1960, trans. 1975). The philosophical premise is that temporality and

historicality—a situation in one’s present that looks back to the past and

anticipates the future—is inseparably a part of each individual’s being; that

the process of understanding something, involving an act of interpreta-

tion, goes on not only in reading verbal texts but in all aspects of

human experience; and that language, like temporality, pervades all

aspects of that experience. In applying these philosophical assumptions

to the understanding of a literary text, Gadamer translates the traditional

hermeneutic circle into the metaphors of dialogue and fusion. Readers

bring to a text a “pre-understanding,” which is constituted by their own

temporal and personal “horizons.” They should not, as “subjects,”

attempt to analyze and dissect the text as an autonomous “object.”

Instead the reader, as an “I,” situated

in his or her present time, addresses

questions to the text as a “Thou,” but with a receptive openness that

simply allows the matter of the text—by means of their shared heritage

180 INTERPRETATION AND HERMENEUTICS

of language—to speak in responsive dialogue and to readdress its own

questions to the reader. The understood meaning of the text is an event

which is always the product of a “fusion of the horizons” that a reader

brings to the text and that the text brings to the reader.

Gadamer insists that (unlike most theories of interpretation) this

hermeneutics is not an attempt to establish norms or rules for a correct

interpretation but an attempt simply to describe how we, in fact, succeed

in understanding texts. Nonetheless, his theory has the consequence that

the search for a determinate meaning of a text which remains stable

through the passage of time becomes a will-o’-the-wisp. Since the mean-

ing of a text “is always codetermined” by the particular temporal and

personal horizon of the individual reader, there cannot be one stable

“right interpretation”; the meaning of a text is always to an important

extent its meaning that it has here, now, for me.

Traditional literary critics had tacitly assumed that to interpret a text

correctly is to approximate the meaning intended by its author, long before

theorists such as Hirsch undertook to define and justify this view. Even the

New Critics took for granted that the meaning of a text is the meaning that

the author intended; what some of these critics called the intentional fallacy

merely designates the supposed error, in interpreting a text, of employing

clues concerning an author’s intention, which are “external” to the “internal”

actualization of that intention in the language of the text itself. Most tradi-

tional philosophers, including “ordinary language philosophers,” have also

held that to understand an utterance involves reference to the writer’s inten-

tion, which we infer from our awareness of the writer’s linguistic assumptions.

H. P. Grice, for example, proposed in the 1950s an influential account of

verbal meaning as a speaker’s intention in an utterance to produce a specific

effect in a hearer by means of the hearer’s recognition of the speaker’s inten-

tion in making that utterance. (See under discourse analysis.) In Speech Acts

(1970), John Searle accepted this description, with the qualification that the

speaker can express, and so enable the hearer to recognize, his or her inten-

tion only insofar as the expression conforms to the conventions or rules of

their common language. In a later refinement of this view, Searle makes a

distinction between the speaker’s intention, which determines the kind and

meaning of a speech act, and the speaker’s intention to communicate

that meaning to a hearer; see his Intentionality (1983), chapter 6. On this

issue in ordinary-language philosophy, see also P. F. Strawson, “Intention

and Convention in Speech Acts,” in Jay F. Rosenberg and Charles Travis,

eds., Readings in the Philosophy of Language (1971).

A radical departure from the tradition al author- oriented views of a

determinate intended meaning occurs in a number of structural and post-

structural theories. (See author and authorship.) Some theorists, rejecting any

control of interpretation by reference to an author, or subject,

and his or

her intention, insist that the meanings of a text are rendered “undecidable ”

by the self-conflicting workings of language itself, or alternatively that

INTERPRETATION AND HERMENEUTICS 181

meanings are en tirely relative to the particular interpretive strategy that is

broughtintoplaybythereader.(Seedeconstruction and reader-response criticism.)

Other theorists, while admitting that the manifest meanings are determined

by the intentions of the author, regard such meanings merely as disguises, or

displacements, of the real m eanings, which are the unconscious motives

and needs of the author, or else the suppressed political realities and power-

relationships of the social structure of an historical era. (See psychoanalytic

criticism, Marxist criticism, new historicism.) The French philosopher Pau l

Ricoeur labeled such modes of reading, exemplified by Marx, Nietzsche,

and Freud, the hermeneutics of suspicion,inthattheyapproachatextasaveiled

or mystified set of representations, whose real meaning, or subtext, needs to

be deciphered by the knowing reader.

In addition to the titles listed above, r efer to Richard E. Palmer, Herme-

neutics: Interpreta tion Theory in Schlei ermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer

(1969), an informative review of the history and conf licting th eories of

interpretation from the standpoint of an adherent to Gadamer’s theory.

See also Phillip Damo n, ed., Literary Criticism and Historical Understanding

(1967); The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics (1974) by the

French phi losopher Paul Ri coeur; the antho logy of essays Hermeneutics:

Questions and Prospects by Gary Shapiro and Alan Sica (1984); Wendell V.

Harris, Interpretive Acts: I n Search of Meaning (1988); Francis-Noël Thomas,

The Writer Writing (1992), chapter 2, “‘Intentions’ and ‘Purposes,’” in

Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (1991). Jack Stillinger

points out that reference to authorial inten tion in order to determine mean-

ing is complicated by the fact that often a number of persons collaborate in

producing a literary or other published text; see under textual criticism.John

R. Searle distinguishes three different meanings of “intention” in diverse

discussions of the interpretation of literary texts, in “ Literary Theory and

Its Discontents,” The Emperor Redressed, ed. Dwight Eddins (1995).

interpretation, typological and allegorical: The typological (or figural)

mode of interpreting the Bible was inaugurated by St. Paul and developed

by the early Church Fathers as a way of reconciling the history, prophecy,

and laws of the Hebrew Scriptures with the narratives and teachings of

the Christian Scriptures. As St. Augustine expressed its principle: “In the Old

Testament the New Testament is concealed; in the New Testament the Old

Testament is revealed.” In typological theory, that is, the key persons, actions,

and events in the Old Testament are viewed as “figurae” (Latin for “figures” )

that were historical realities but also “prefigure

” those

persons, actions, and

events in the New Testament that are similar to them in some aspect, func-

tion, or relationship. Often the Old Testament figures are called types and

their later correlatives in the New Testament are called antitypes. The Old

Testament figure or type is held to be a prophecy or promise of the higher

truth that is “fulfilled” in the New Testament, according to a plan which is

eternally present in the mind of God but manifests itself to human beings only

in the two scriptural revelations separated by a span of time.

182 INTERPRETATION, TYPOLOGICAL AND ALLEGORICAL

To cite a few of the very many instances of typological interpretation:

Adam was said to be a figure (or in alternative terms, a “type,”“image, ” or

“shadow”) of Christ. One of the analogies cited between prefiguration and

fulfillment was that between the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib and the

flow of blood from the side of the crucified Christ; another was the analogy

between the tree that bore the fruit occasioning Adam’s original sin and

the cross which bore as its fruit Christ, the Redeemer of that sin. In a similar

fashion, the manna provided to the children of Israel in the wilderness (Exo-

dus 16) was held to prefigure the Eucharist, and the relationship between the

Egyptian servant girl Hagar and Sarah (Genesis 16) was held to prefigure

the relationship between the earthly Jerusalem of the Old Testament and the

heavenly Jerusalem of the New Testament. By some interpreters, elements of

New Testament history were represented as in their turn prefiguring the

events that will come to be fulfilled in “the last days” of Christ’s Second

Coming and Last Judgment.

The allegorical interpretation of the Bible had its roots in Greek and

Roman thinkers who treated classical myths as allegorical representations

of abstract cosmological, philosophical, or moral truths. The method was

applied to narratives in the Hebrew Scriptures by the Jewish philosopher

Philo (died AD 50) and was adapted to Christian interpretation by Origen

in the third century. The fundamental distinction in the allegorical interpreta-

tion of the Bible is between the “literal” (or “historical” or “carnal”) meaning

of the text—the historical truth that it specifically signifies—and the additional

“spiritual” or “mystical” or “allegoric” meaning that it signifies by analogy.

(Refer to the entry allegory.)

The spiritual aspect of a text’s literal meaning was often in turn subdivided

into two or more levels; some interpreters specified as many as seven or even

twelve levels. By the twelfth century, however, biblical interpreters widely

agreed in finding a fourfold meaning in many biblical passages. A typical

set of distinctions, as proposed by St. Thomas Aquinas and others, specifies

(1) the literal or historical meaning, which is a narrative of what in fact

happened; (2) the allegorical meaning proper, which is the New Testament

truth, or else the prophetic reference to the Christian Church, that is signified

by a passage in the Old Testament; (3) the tropological meaning, which is the

moral truth or doctrine signified by the same passage; and (4) the anagogical

meaning, or reference of the passage to Christian eschatology, that is, the

events that are to come in “the last days” of Christ’s judgment and the life

after death of individual souls.

We can distinguish between the typological and allegorical mode of

interpretation by saying that typology is horizontal, in that it relates items in

two texts (the Old and New Testaments) that are separated in time, while

allegorical interpretation is vertical, in that it uncovers multiple layers of

significance in a single textual item. The two interpretive methods, however,

were often applied simultaneously, and in many instances fused, by biblical

exegetes. Both methods flourished into the eighteenth century and recur

recognizably in later periods. They were employed in sermons and in a great

INTERPRETATION, TYPOLOGICAL AND ALLEGORICAL 183

variety of writings on religious matters and were adapted to iconography—that

is, representations of biblical and nonbiblical persons and events intended to have

allegoric or symbolic significance—in painting and sculpture. Medieval and later

poets sometimes adopted the typological and allegorical principles—originally

developed for interpreting the Bible—in composing their own writings on reli-

gious subjects. Dante, for example, in a letter written in 1319 to his friend and

patron Can Grande della Scala, announced that he composed his Divine Comedy

to signify a double subject, literal and allegorical, and that the allegorical subject

can in turn be subdivided into allegorical, moral, and anagogical meanings.

Scholars have analyzed the adaptation of typological and allegorical procedures

by many later poets who wrote on religious themes, including Edmund Spenser,

George Herbert, John Milton, and (in a late and highly individual revival of

the mode) William Blake.

The American scholar D. W. Robertson and others have proposed that

not only writings on religious subjects but also many seemingly secular poems

of the Middle Ages—including the Roman de la Rose, the works of Chaucer

and Chrétien de Troyes, and medieval love lyrics—were expressly written

to incorporate typological and allegorical modes of theological and moral

references. The validity, however, of extending these interpretive modes to

secular literature is strongly disputed; see the suggested readings below. In

The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (1979), the British critic

Frank Kermode adapted the ancient interpretive distinction between carnal

and spiritual meanings to his analysis of levels of meaning in modern works

of prose fiction.

On the various modes of biblical interpretation, see F. W. Farrar, History

of Interpretation (1886); Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages

(rev. 1952); and the notable study by Henri de Lubac, Exégèse Médiévale:

les quatre sens de l’écriture (4 vols., 1959–74; rev. 1993). A classic discussion

of typological, or figural, interpretation is Erich Auerbach’s “Figura” in his

Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (1959). Philip Rollinson, in

Classical Theories of Allegory and Christian Culture (1981), relates early medieval

interpretation of the Bible to modes of literary interpretation in classical

times. An American application in the eighteenth century of the old inter-

pretive modes is Jonathan Edwards’ Images or Shadows of Divine Things, ed.

Perry Miller (1948). For uses of typological and allegoric materials by various

literary authors, see Rosemund Tuve, A Reading of George Herbert (1952) and

Allegorical Imagery (1966); J. H. Hagstrum, William Blake: Poet and Painter

(1964); P. J. Alpers, The Poetry of “The Faerie Queene” (1967); and the essays

on a number of authors in Literary Uses of Typology, ed. Paul Miner (1977).

For the extension of typological and allegoric methods to the analysis of

secular medieval poems, see D. W. Robertson, Jr., “Historical Criticism,”

in English Institute Essays, 1950, ed. A. S. Downer (1951), and APreface

to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (1962). The validity of such an extension

is attacked by several scholars in Critical Approaches to Medieval Literature,ed.

Dorothy Bethurum (1960), and by R. S. Crane, “On Hypotheses in ‘

Historical

iticism,’” in The Idea of the Humanities (1967, Vol. 2, pp. 236–60). On the

184 INTERPRETATION, TYPOLOGICAL AND ALLEGORICAL

application of biblical allegorization to later literary forms see, in addition to

Kermode (above), Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature

(1982); and Stephen Prickett, ed., Reading the Text: Biblical Criticism and Literary

Theory (1991).

interpretive communities: 332.

intertextuality: 398.

intonation: 198; 222.

intrigue: 294.

introspection: 378.

intrusive (narrator): 301.

invective: The denunciation of a person by the use of derogatory epithets. Thus

Prince Hal, in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, calls the corpulent Falstaff “this

sanguine coward, this bedpresser, this horseback-breaker, this huge hill of

flesh.” (In context, there is in this instance of invective an affectionate undertone,

as often when friends, secure in an intimacy that ensures they will not be taken

literally, resort to derogatory name-calling in the exuberance of their affection.)

In his Discourse Concerning Satire (1693), John Dryden described the differ-

ence in efficacy, as a put-down, between the directness of invective and the indi-

rectness of irony, in which a speaker maintains the advantage of cool detachment

by leaving it to the circumstances to convert bland compliments into insults:

How easy is it to call rogue and villain, and that wittily! But how hard

to make a man appear a fool, a blockhead, or a knave, without using

any of those opprobrious terms….Thereis… avastdifferencebetween

the slovenly butchering of a man, and the fineness of a stroke that

separates the head from the body, and leaves it standing in its place.

invention (in rhetoric): 66; 342.

invocation: 345.

involuted novel: 258; 188, 304.

involvement (of a reader): 94.

Irish Literary Renaissance: 47.

irony: In Greek comedy the character called the eiron was a dissembler, who

characteristically spoke in understatement and pretended to be less intelligent

than he was, yet triumphed over the alazon—the self-deceiving and stupid

IRONY 185

braggart. (See in Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 1957.) In most modern

critical uses of the term “irony,” there remains the root sense of dissembling,

or of hiding what is actually the case—not, however, in order to deceive, but

to achieve special rhetorical or artistic effects.

Verbal irony (which was traditionally classified as one of the tropes)isa

statement in which the meaning that a speaker implies differs sharply from the

meaning that is ostensibly expressed. The ironic statement usually involves

the explicit expression of one attitude or evaluation, but with indications

in the overall speech-situation that the speaker intends a very different, and

often opposite, attitude or evaluation. Thus in Canto IV of Alexander

Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1714), after Sir Plume, egged on by the ladies,

has stammered out his incoherent request for the return of the stolen lock of

hair, the Baron answers:

“It grieves me much,” replied the Peer again,

“Who speaks so well should ever speak in vain.”

This is a straightforward case of an ironic reversal of the surface statement (of

which one effect is to give pleasure to the reader) because there are patent

clues, established by the preceding narrative, that the Peer is not in the least

aggrieved and does not think that poor Sir Plume has spoken at all well.

A more complex instance of irony is the famed sentence with which Jane

Austen opens Pride and Prejudice (1813): “It is a truth universally acknowl-

edged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of

a wife”; part of the ironic implication (based on assumptions that Austen

assumes the audience shares with her) is that a single woman is in want of a

rich husband. Sometimes the use of irony by Pope and other masters is very

complicated: the meaning and evaluations may be subtly qualified rather than

simply reversed, and the clues to the ironic counter-meanings under the literal

statement—or even to the fact that the author intends the statement to be

understood ironically—may be oblique and unobtrusive. That is why recourse

to irony by an author tends to convey an implicit compliment to the intelli-

gence of readers, who are invited to associate themselves with the author and

the knowing minority who are not taken in by the ostensible meaning. That

is also why many literary ironists are misinterpreted and sometimes (like

Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift in the eighteenth century) get into serious

trouble with the obtuse authorities. Following the intricate and shifting man-

euvers of great ironists like Plato, Swift, Voltaire, Austen, or Henry James is a

test of skill in reading between the lines.

Some literary works exhibit structural irony; that is, the author, instead of

using an occasional verbal irony, introduces a structural feature that serves to

sustain a duplex meaning and evaluation throughout the work. One common

literary device of this sort is the invention of a naïve hero, or else a naive

narrator or spokesman, whose invincible simplicity or obtuseness leads him to

persist in putting an interpretation on affairs which the knowing reader—who

penetrates to, and shares, the implied point of view of the authorial presence

behind the naive persona—just as persistently is called on to alter and correct.

186 IRONY

(Note that verbal irony depends on knowledge of the ironic intention of the

fictional speaker, which is shared by both the speaker and the reader; struc-

tural irony depends on a knowledge of the ironic intention of the author,

which is shared by the reader but is not the intention of the fictional

speaker.) One example of the naive spokesman is Swift’s well-meaning

but insanely rational and morally obtuse economist who writes the “Modest

Proposal” (1729) to convert the excess children of the oppressed and poverty-

stricken Irish into a financial and gastronomical asset. Other examples are

Swift’s stubbornly credulous Gulliver, the self-deceiving and paranoid mono-

loguist in Browning’s “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” (1842), and the

insane editor, Kinbote, in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962). A related

structural device for sustaining ironic qualification is the use of the fallible

narrator, in which the teller of the story is a participant in it. Although such a

narrator may be neither stupid, credulous, nor demented, he nevertheless

manifests a failure of insight by viewing and appraising his own motives, and

the motives and actions of other characters, through what the reader is

intended to recognize as the distorting perspective of the narrator’s own pre-

judices and interests. (See point of view.)

In A Rhetoric of Irony (1974), Wayne Booth identifies as stable irony that

in which the speaker or author makes available to the reader an assertion

or position, which, whether explicit or implied, serves as a firm ground for

ironically qualifying or subverting the surface meaning. Unstable irony,on

the other hand, offers no fixed standpoint which is not itself undercut by

further ironies. The literature of the absurd typically presents such a regression

of ironies. At an extreme, as in Samuel Beckett’s drama Waiting for Godot

(1955) or his novel The Unnamable (1960), there is an endless regress of ironic

undercuttings. Such works suggest a denial that there is any secure evaluative

standpoint, or even any determinable rationale, in the human situation.

Sarcasm in common parlance is sometimes used as an equivalent for irony,

but it is far more useful to restrict it only to the crude and taunting use of

apparent praise for dispraise: “Oh, you’re God’s great gift to women, you are!”

The difference in application of the two terms is indicated by the difference

in their etymologies; whereas “irony” derives from “eiron,” a “dissembler,”

“sarcasm” derives from the Greek verb “sarkazein,”“to tear flesh.” An added

clue to sarcasm is the exaggerated inflection of the speaker’

svoice.

The

term “irony,” qualified by an adjective, is used to identify various

literary devices and modes of organization:

Socratic irony takes its name from the fact that, as he is represented in

Plato’s dialogues (fourth century BC), the philosopher Socrates usually dis-

sembles by assuming a pose of ignorance, an eagerness to be instructed, and

a modest readiness to entertain opinions proposed by others, although these

opinions, upon his continued questioning, turn out to be ill-grounded or to

lead to absurd consequences.

Dramatic irony involves a situation in a play or a narrative in which

the audience or reader shares with the author knowledge of present or future

circumstances of which a character is ignorant; in that situation, the literary

IRONY 187

character unknowingly acts in a way we recognize to be grossly inappropriate

to the actual circumstances, or expects the opposite of what we know that fate

holds in store, or says something that anticipates the actual outcome, but

not at all in the way that the character intends. Writers of Greek tragedy,

who based their plots on legends whose outcome was already known to

their audience, made frequent use of this device. Sophocles’ Oedipus the

King, for example, represents a very complex instance of tragic irony, for

the king (“I, Oedipus, whom all men call great”) engages in a hunt for the

incestuous father-murderer who has brought a plague upon Thebes; the

object of the hunt turns out (as the audience, but not Oedipus, has known

right along) to be the hunter himself; and the king, having achieved a vision

of the terrible truth, blinds himself. Dramatic irony occurs also in comedy. An

example is the scene in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (II. v.) in which Malvolio

struts and preens in anticipation of a good fortune that the audience knows is

based on a fake letter; the dramatic irony is heightened for the audience by

Malvolio’s ignorance of the presence of the hidden hoaxers, who gleefully

comment on his incongruously complacent speech and actions.

Cosmic irony (or “the irony of fate”) is attributed to literary works in

which a deity, or else fate, is represented as though deliberately manipulating

events so as to lead the protagonist to false hopes, only to frustrate and mock

them. This is a favorite structural device of Thomas Hardy. In his Tess of the

D’Urbervilles (1891), the heroine, having lost her virtue because of her inno-

cence, then loses her happiness because of her honesty, finds it again only by

murder, and, having been briefly happy, is hanged. Hardy concludes: “The

President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with

Tess.”

Romantic irony is a term introduced by Friedrich Schlegel and other

German writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to desig-

nate a mode of dramatic or narrative writing in which the author builds up

the illusion of representing reality, only to shatter the illusion by revealing that

the author, as artist, is the creator and arbitrary manipulator of the characters

and their actions. The concept owes much to Laurence Sterne ’s presentation

of a self-conscious and willful narrator in his Tristram Shandy (1759–67).

Byron’s great narrative poem Don Juan (1819–24) persistently uses this device

for ironic and comic effect, letting the reader into the narrator’s confidence,

and so revealing the latter to be nothing more than a fabricator of fiction who

is often at a loss for matter to sustain his story and undecided about how to

continue it. (See Anne Mellor, English Romantic Irony, 1980.) This type of

irony, involving a self-conscious narrator, has become a recurrent mode in

the modern form of involuted fiction.

A number of writers associated with the New Criticism used “irony,”

although in a greatly extended sense, as a general criterion of literary value.

This use is based largely on two literary theorists. T. S. Eliot praised a kind of

“wit” (characteristic, in his view, of seventeenth-century metaphysical poets but

absent in the Romantic poets), which is an “internal equilibrium” that implies

the “

recognition,” in

dealing with any one kind of experience, “of other kinds

188 IRONY

of experience which are possible” (“Andrew Marvell,” 1921, in Selected Essays,

1960). And I. A. Richards defined irony in poetry as an equilibrium of oppos-

ing attitudes and evaluations (Principles of Literary Criticism, 1924, chapter 32):

Irony in this sense consists in the bringing in of the opposite, the

complementary impulses; that is why poetry which is exposed to it is

not of the highest order, and why irony itself is so constantly a

characteristic of poetry which is.

Such observations were developed by Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks,

and other New Critics into the claim that poems in which the writer commits

himself or herself unreservedly to a single attitude or outlook, such as love or

admiration or idealism, are of an inferior order because they are vulnerable to

the reader’s ironic skepticism; the greatest poems, on the other hand, are

invulnerable to external irony because they already incorporate the poet’s

own “ironic” awareness of opposite and complementary attitudes. See Robert

Penn Warren, “Pure and Impure Poetry” (1943), in Critiques and Essays

in Criticism, ed. Robert W. Stallman (1949); Cleanth Brooks, “Irony as a

Principle of Structure” (1949), in Literary Opinion in America, ed. M. D.

Zabel (3rd ed., 1962).

See Wayne C. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (1974); Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s

Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (1995); Claire Colebrook, Irony (2003).

A suggestive and wide-ranging earlier exploration of the mode is Søren

Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony (1841; trans. Lee M. Capel, 1965). For

references to irony in other entries, see page 52.

irregular ode: 263.

Italian sonnet: 369.

ivory tower: A phrase taken from the biblical Song of Songs 7:4, in which the

lover says to the beloved woman, “Thy neck is as a tower of ivory.” In

the 1830s, the French critic Sainte-Beuve applied the phrase “tour d’ivoire”

to the stance of the poet Alfred de Vigny, to signify his isolation from every-

day life and his exaltation of art above all practical concerns. Since then “ivory

tower” is often used (usually in a derogatory way) to signify an attitude or

a way of life that is isolated from the everyday world and indifferent or hostile

to practical affairs; more specifically, it is used to signify a theory and practice

of art that insulates it from moral, political, and social concerns or effects.

(See aestheticism.)

IVORY TOWER 189

Jacobean Age: 281.

jeremiad: A term derived from the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, who in the

seventh century BC attributed the calamities of Israel to its violation of the cov-

enant with Jehovah and return to pagan idolatry, denounced with gloomy elo-

quence its religious and moral iniquities, and called on the people to repent and

reform in order that Jehovah might restore them to His favor and renew the

ancient covenant. As a literary term, jeremiad is applied to any work which,

with a magniloquence like that of the Old Testament prophet (although it may

be in secular rather than religious terms), accounts for the misfortunes of an era

as a just penalty for its social and moral wrongdoings, but usually holds open

the possibility for reforms that will bring a happier future.

In the Romantic Period, powerful passages in William Blake’s “prophetic

poems” constitute short jeremiads, and the term is often applied to those of

Thomas Carlyle ’s writings in which he uses a resonant biblical idiom to

denounce the social and economic misdeeds of the Victorian Period and

to call for drastic reforms. The jeremiad, in its original religious mode, was a

familiar genre in the sermons and writings of the Colonial Period in America,

at a time when it was a commonplace that the colonies in New England

were the “New Israel” with which God had covenanted a glorious future.

The misfortunes of the colonists, accordingly, were attributed to deviations

from the divine commands and described as punishments inflicted by God

on His chosen people for their own ultimate benefit. In the words of Increase

Mather, “God does not punish … other Nations until they have filled up the

Measure of their sins, and then he utterly destroyeth them; but if our Nation

forsake the God of their Fathers never so little,” He punishes us in order “that

so he may prevent our destruction” (The Day of Trouble Is Near, 1674). Since

that era, the prophetic stance and denunciatory rhetoric of the jeremiad has been

manifested by many orators and writers, religious and secular, into the present

time. See Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (1978), and George P.

Landow, Elegant Jeremiahs: The Sage from Carlyle to Mailer (1986).

journal: 30.

judicial criticism: 71.

juncture (in linguistics): 198.

Jungian criticism: 322.

Juvenalian satire: 353.

190 JACOBEAN AGE

kenning: 135 .

kinds (of literature): 149.

Künstlerroman (kunst

leromän

): 255.

KÜNSTLERROMAN 191

Lacanian literary criticism: 323.

lai: A n ame originally applied to a variety of poems by medieval French writers

in the latter part of the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries. Some lais were

lyric,butmostwereshortnarrativeswritteninoctosyllabic couplets.Mariede

France, who wrote in the French language although probably in England at

the court of King Henry II, composed a number of notable poems of this

sort; they are called “Breton lais ” because most of their narratives are drawn

from Arthurian and other Celtic legends. (“Breton” refers to Brittany, which

was a Celtic part of France; see chivalric romance.) The An glicized t erm

Breton lay was applied in the fourteenth century to English poems written

on the m odel of the narratives of Marie de France; they included Sir Orfeo,

the Lay of Launfal,andChaucer’s “The Franklin’sTale.” Later still, lay was

used by English poets simply as a synonym for song or as an archaic w ord for

a fairly short narrative poem—for example, by Sir Walter Scott in his Lay of

the Last Minstrel (1805).

See Roger S. Loomis, ed., Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages (1959);

and the Foreword by Charles W. Dunn to Lays of Courtly Love, trans. Patricia

Terry (1963).

lampoon: 42.

langue (in linguistics) (läng): 195; 310, 357, 380.

latent content: 320.

lay (song): 192.

Lebenswelt: 289.

legend: 231.

leitmotif (l



ıt

motef

): 229.

lesbian studies: 327.

light verse: “Light verse” is a term applied to a great variety of poems th at use

an ordinary speaking voice and a relaxed manner to treat their subjects gaily,

or playfully, or wittily, or with good-natured satire. The subject matter of

light verse need not be in itself petty or inconsequential; the defining q uality

is the tone of voice used and the attitude of the lyric or narrative speaker

toward the subject. Thomas Love Peacock’s “The War Song of Dinas

Vawr” (1829) begins

192 LACANIAN LITERARY CRITICISM

The mountain sheep are sweeter,

But the valley sheep are fatter;

We therefore deemed it meeter

To carry off the latter.

And it ends

We brought away from battle,

And much their land bemoaned them,

Two thousand head of cattle,

And the head of him who owned them:

Ednyfed, king of Dyfed,

His head was borne before us;

His wine and beasts supplied our feasts,

And his overthrow, our chorus.

The dispassionate attitude, brisk colloquialism, and pat rhymes convert what

could be a matter for epic or tragedy into a comic narrative that qualifies as

light verse.

Vers de société (society verse) is the very large subclass of light verse

that deals with the relationships, concerns, and doings of polite, upper-class

society. It is often satiric, but in the mode of badinage rather than severity;

and when it deals with love it does so as a sexual game, or flirtatiously, or in

the mode of elegant and witty compliment, rather than with passion or high

seriousness. The tone is usually urbane, the style deft, and the form polished

and sometimes contrived with technical virtuosity. Most poems using intricate

French stanza forms, such as the villanelle, are in this form. Many of the lyrics

written by Cole Porter for his popular songs qualify as society verse, such as:

Birds do it, bees do it

Even educated fleas do it

Let’s do it, let ’s fall in love.

See Carolyn Wells, ed., A Vers de Société Anthology, reprinted 1976.

Nursery rhymes and other children’s verses are another type of light

verse. Edward Lear (“The Jumblies” and “The Owl and the Pussy Cat”)and

Lewis Carroll (“Jabberwocky” and The Hunting of the Snark) made children’s

nonsense verses into a Victorian specialty. Lear is also notable for popularizing

the limerick, which is a largely oral form of light verse that everyone knows

and many of us have practiced. (See oral poetry.) The name is probably derived

from a convivial song with the refrain “Will you come up to Limerick?” (Limerick

is a county in Ireland.) It consists of a single five-line stanza in anapestic meter,

rhyming aabba, with the third and fourth lines shortened from three feet to two

feet. Some limericks are decorous, but many are ribald. Here is a limerick about

the limerick by the scholar and humorist Professor Morris Bishop, which is itself

decorous but indicates the form’s propensity toward the alternative mode:

The limerick is furtive and mean;

You must keep her in close quarantine,

LIGHT VERSE 193

Or she sneaks to the slums

And promptly becomes

Disorderly, drunk and obscene.

An accessible collection is The Penguin Book of Limericks, ed. E. O. Parrott

(1983). For scholarly editions of the ribald variety of the form, largely from

oral sources, refer to G. Legman’s two volumes, The Limerick: 1700 Examples,

with Notes, Variants, and Index (1969) and The New Limerick: 2750 Unpublished

Examples, American and British (1977).

Fine artificers of light and society verse are John Skelton (c. 1460–1529),

the Cavalier poets of the early seventeenth century, and John Dryden, Matthew

Prior, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Alexander Pope, W. S. Gilbert, and

Austin Dobson. Modern practitioners include Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden,

e. e. cummings, Ogden Nash, Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay,

Dorothy Parker, Phyllis McGinley, Morris Bishop, John Betjeman, A. R.

Ammons, Anthony Hecht, John Updike, and Ishmael Reed.

See epigram. Refer to The New Oxford Book of Light Verse, ed. Kingsley

Amis (1978); The Norton Book of Light Verse, ed. Russell Baker (1986).

limerick: 193.

limited point of view: 302.

line (of verse): 218.

linguistics in literary criticism: “Linguistics” is the systematic study of the

elements of language and the principles governing their combination and

organization. An older term for the scientific study of the constitution and

history of language was philology —a term that is still sometimes used as

synonymous with linguistics. Through the nineteenth century, philology was

mainly “comparative” (the analysis of similarities and differences within a

family of related languages) and “historical” (the analysis of the evolution of

a family of languages, or of changes within a particular language, over a long

course of time). This latter study of the changes in language over a span of

time has come to be called diachronic; the important developments in

twentieth-century linguistics came with the shift to the synchronic study of

the systematic interrelations of the components of a single language at a particular

time. A major contributor to modern synchronic linguistics was Ferdinand de

Saussure, a French-speaking Swiss whose lectures on language as a self-sufficient

system, delivered 1907–11, were published from students’ notes in 1916, three

years after Saussure’s death; these lectures have been translated as Course in General

Linguistics (1916). (See Saussure under semiotics.) Important contributions were

also made by American “descriptive” or “structural” linguists, notably Edward

division of Random House, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested

parties must apply directly to Random House, Inc. for permission.

194 LIMERICK

Sapir and Leonard Blo omfield, w ho set out to devise a linguistic theory

and vocabulary adequate to analyze, as modes of verbal “behavior,”

various Native American languages. Both Continental and American lin-

guistics have been applied to the ana lysis of the distinctive uses of language

in literary texts (see Russian formalism and stylistics), and Saussure’s concepts

and procedures in analyzing a language have been adopted as a model for

analyzing the forms and orga nization of large-scale literary structures (see

structuralist criticism).

As an empirical, fact-based study of language, philology has often

appealed to students of literature who seek to ground their enterprise on

hard evidence rather than what they consider to be subjective responses and

judgments. Several influential critics, including Paul de Man, Edward Said,

and the medievalist Lee Patterson, in articles all of which were coincidentally

titled “Return to Philology,” argued that literary criticism needed to recover

the discipline and rigor of traditional linguistic studies. Such calls for what is

often termed a new philology have been especially strong in disciplines such

as classics and medieval studies, where textual criticism has always been a cen-

tral concern. In these latter studies, the phrase “new philology” designates a

movement to reorient philological study away from its traditional focus on

establishing an authoritative text to a concern with the effect on the reader

of the material and verbal particularities of each manuscript text; refer to

book history studies.

On calls for a return to philology, see Paul de Man, “The Return to

Philology,” in The Resistance to Theory (1986); Jan Ziolkowski, On Philology

(1990); Lee Patterson, “The Return to Philology,” in The Past and Future of

Medieval Studies, ed. John van Engen (1994); Seth Lerer, ed., Literary History

and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach (1996); and Edward

Said, “The Return to Philology,” in Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004).

In “Roots, Races, and the Return to Philology,” in The Humanities and the

Dream of America (2011), Geoffrey Galt Harpham traces the connections

between the discipline of philology and racial theorizing in the nineteenth

and twentieth centuries. On the new philological movement in medieval

studies, see also Stephen Nichols, ed., “The New Philology,” a special issue

of the journal Speculum, Vol. 65 (1990).

The following linguistic terms and concepts are often employed by cur-

rent critics and theorists of literature:

Saussure introduced an important distinction between langue and parole.

A parole is any single meaningful utterance, spoken or written. The langue

is the implicit system of elements, of distinctions and oppositions, and of

principles of combination, which make it possible, within a language

community, for a speaker to produce and the auditor to understand a

particular parole. The linguist’s primary concern, in Saussure’s view, is to

establish the nature of the underlying linguistic system, the langue. The

American linguist Noam Chomsky has substituted for Saussure’s langue and

parole the distinction between competence (the

tacit knowledge possessed

by native speakers who have mastered, or “internalized, ” the implicit

LINGUISTICS IN LITERARY CRITICISM 195

conventions and rules of a language system that make possible the production

and understanding of well-formed and meaningful sentences) and

performance (the actual utterance of particular sentences). Competent

speakers know how to produce such sentences without being able to specify

the conventions and rules that enable them to do so; the function of the

linguist is to identify and make explicit the system of linguistic conventions

and rules that the speaker unknowingly puts into practice.

Modern linguists commo nly d istinguish three aspects that together

constitute the grammar—the compo nents, and th e prin ciples of ordering

the components—in any “natural language” (English, French, Japanese,

and so on): (1) phonology, the study of the elementary speech sounds;

(2) morphology, the study of the ordering of speech sou nds into the

smallest meaningful groups (morphemes andwords);and(3)syntax, the study

of the way that sequences of words are ord ered into phrases, clauses, and sen-

tences. Structural linguists usually represent these three aspects as manifesting

parallel principles of distinctions and ordering, although on successively

higher and more complex levels of organization. A fourth aspect of langua ge

sometimes included within the a rea o f linguistics is semantics , the study of

the meaning of words a nd of the combination of words in phrases, sentences,

and larger linguistic units. In the area of semantics, Saussure introduced the

terminology of the sign (a single word) as constituted by an inseparable

union of signifier (the speech sounds or written marks composing the sign)

and signified (the conceptual meaning of the sign).

1. One branch of phonology is phonetics, the physical description of the

elementary speech sounds in all known languages and the way they are

produced by the vocal apparatus. The “phonetic alphabet” is a standard-

ized set of symbols for representing in written form all these speech

sounds. Another branch is “phonemics,” which deals with phonemes:

the smallest units of speech sound, which, within any one natural lan-

guage, are functional—that is, which cannot vary without changing the

word of which they are a part into a different word. Thus in the English

word represented by the spelling “pin,” if we change only the initial

speech sound, we get three different words, pin–tin–din; if we change

only the medial sound, we get pin–pen–pun; if we change only the

final sound, we get pin–pit–pill. From the matrix of such changes, we

determine that each of the individual units represented by the spelling p,

t, d; i, e,

and n, t, l function as differentiating phonemes within the

English language. Each language has its own system of phonemes which

both overlaps with and diverges from the phonemic system of any other

language. The imperfect success that a native speaker of one language,

such as German or French, manifests in adapting his habitual pronuncia-

tions to the phonemic system of a different language, such as English, is a

major feature of what we identify as a “foreign accent.”

Even within a single language, however, a native speaker will vary

the pronunciation of a single phonemic unit within different combina-

196 LINGUISTICS IN LITERARY CRITICISM

tions of speech sounds, and will also vary the pronunciation from one

utterance to another. Even greater phonetic differences are apparent

between two native speakers, especially if they speak the dialects of

diverse regions or of diverse social groups. Saussure proposed the principle

that what we identify as “the same phoneme” within a language is not

determined by the physical features of the speech sound itself but by its

difference from all other phonemes in that language—that is, by the

differentiability, within a given language, between a particular speech

unit and all other functional speech units. Saussure’s important claim is

that the principle of difference, rather than any “positive” property, func-

tions to establish identity not only for phonemes but for units on all levels

of linguistic organization, including both signs and the concepts that the

signs signify. All these types of items, then, are systemic facts that achieve

an identity only within a particular language and vary between one lan-

guage and another. (This claim, that seeming identities are in fact consti-

tuted by networks of differences, has been adopted and generalized as a

central feature in structuralism, semiotics, and deconstruction.)

2. The next level of analysis, after phonology, is morphology— the combina-

tion of phonemes into morphemes and into words. A morpheme is the

smallest meaningful unit of speech sounds within any one language; that is,

a morphemic unit, composed of one or more phonemes, is a unit that

recurs in a language with the same, or at least similar, meaning. Some mor-

phemes, such as “man,”“open,” and “run” in English, constitute complete

words; others, however, occur only as parts of words. For example, the

noun “grace” is a word that is a single morpheme. If we prefix to the

root element, “ grace,” the morpheme “dis-,” it becomes a different word

with a sharply different meaning: “disgrace”; if we add to the root the

morphemic suffix “-ful,” the noun functions as an adjective, “graceful”;if

we add to these two morphemes the further suffix, “-ly,” the resulting

word functions as an adverb, “gracefully”; if we prefix to this form either

the morphemic “dis-” or “un-,”

we get the adverbial words, each

composed

of four morphemes, “disgracefully” and “ungracefully.”

We find also an interesting set of phoneme combinations which do

not constitute specific morphemes, yet are experienced by speakers of

English as having a common, though very loose-boundaried, area of

meaning. Examples are the initial sounds represented by “fl-” in the set

of words “flash, flare, flame, flicker, flimmer,” all of which signify a kind

of moving light; while in the set “fly, flip, flap, flop, flit, flutter,” the same

initial sounds all signify a kind of movement in air. The terminal sounds

represented by “-ash,” as they occur in the set “bash, crash, clash, dash,

flash, gash, mash, slash,” have an overlapping significance of sudden or

violent movement. Such combinations of phonemes are sometimes called

phonetic intensives, or else instances of sound-symbolism; they are

important components in the type of words, exploited especially by

poets, in which the sounds of the words seem peculiarly appropriate to

LINGUISTICS IN LITERARY CRITICISM 197

their significance. See onomatopoeia, and refer to Leonard Bloomfield,

Language (1933), pp. 244–46; I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric

(1936), pp. 57–65; Leanne Hinton, Johanna Nichols, and John J. Ohala,

eds., Sound Symbolism (1995).

Phonemes, morphemes, and words are all said to be “segments” of

the stream of speech sounds which constitute an utterance. Linguists also

distinguish suprasegmental features of language, consisting of stress,

juncture, and intonation, all of which function morphemically, in that

they alter the identity and significance of the segments in an utterance.

A shift in stress —that is, of relative forcefulness, or loudness, of a com-

ponent element in an utterance—from the first to the second syllable

converts the noun “ínvalid” into the adjective “inválid,” and the noun

“cónvict” into the verb “convíct.” Juncture denotes the transition in an

utterance between adjacent speech sounds, whether within a word,

between words, or between groups of words. Linguists distinguish various

functional classes of junctures in English utterances. Intonation is the

variation of pitch, the rise or fall of voice melody, in the course of an

utterance. We utter the assertion “He is going home” with a different

intonation from that of the question “Is he going home?”; and the use

of the question intonation (the rise in pitch), even with the assertive

sequence of words “He is going home?” will make the sentence function

to an auditor not as an assertion but as a question. Uttering the following

three words so as to alter the relative stress in the ways indicated, and at

the same time using a variety of intonational patterns and pauses, will

reveal the extent to which suprasegmental features can affect the signifi-

cance of a sentence constituted by the same words: “Í like you.”“I líke

you.”“I like yóu.”

3. The third level of analysis (after the level of phonemes and the level of

the combination of phonemes into morphemes and words) is syntax: the

combination of words into phrases, clauses, and sentences. Analysis of

speech performances (paroles) in any language reveals regularities in such

constructions, which are explained by postulating syntactic rules that are

operative within the linguistic system, or langue, which has been mas-

tered by competent speakers and auditors. (These purely “descriptive”

rules, or general regularities of syntax in common speech, are to be dis-

tinguished from the “prescriptive”

rules of grammar which are presented

school handbooks designed to teach the “correct usage” of upper-class

standard English.) A widely used distinction, developed by Roman

Jakobson, is that between the rules governing paradigmatic relations

(the “vertical” relations between any single word in a sentence and

other words that are phonologically, syntactically, or semantically similar,

and which can be substituted for it), and syntagmatic relations (the

“horizontal ” relations which determine the possibilities of putting words in

a sequence so as to make a well-formed syntactic unit). On the phonemic

and morphemic levels, a similar distinction is made between paradigmatic

198 LINGUISTICS IN LITERARY CRITICISM

relations among single elements and syntagmatic relations of sequences of

elements. This paradigmatic–syntagmatic distinction parallels the distinc-

tion made by Jakobson between metaphoric (vertical) and metonymic

(horizontal) relations in analyzing figurative language.

Noam Chomsky in S yntactic Structures (1957) initiated what is known as

transformational–generative grammar.Chomsky’s persistent emphasis is

onthecentralfeaturehecalls“creativity” in language—the fact that a com-

petent n ative speaker can produce a meaningful sentence which has no exact

precedent in the speaker’s earlier linguistic experience, as well as the fact that

competent auditors can understand the sentence immediately, although it is

equally new to them. To explain this “rule-bound creativity” of a language,

Chomsky proposed that native speakers’ and listeners ’ competence consists

in their mastery of a set of generative and t ransformational rules. This

mode of linguistics is called generative in that it undertakes to establish a

finite system of rules that will suffice to “generate”—in the sense that it will

adequately account for—the totality of syntactically “well-formed” sen-

tences that are possible in a given language. It is transformational in tha t

it postulates, in the deep structure of a language system, a set of “kernel

sentences” (such as “John is building a house ”), which, in accordance with

diverse rules of transformation, serve to produce a great variety of sentences

on the surface structure of a language system (for example, the passive

form “The house is being built by John” and the question fo rm “Is John

building a house?” as well as a large number of more complex derivatives

from the simple kernel sentence). Debates concerning Chomsky’sviews

are i ncluded in Chomsky and His Critics, Louise M. Antony and Norbert

Hornstein, eds. (2003).

For diverse applications of the concepts and methods of modern linguistics

to the criticism of literature, see deconstruction, Russian formalism, semiotics,

structuralism, and stylistics. For Saussure

’s

theories, refer to Ferdinand de Saussure,

Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (2012), and the concise analysis

by Jonathan Culler, Ferdinand de Saussure (rev. 1986). For American linguistics:

Zellig S. Harris, Structural Linguistics (2nd ed., 1960); Leonard Bloomfield,

Language (1994). On transformational –generative grammar: Jerry A. Fodor

and Jerrold J. Katz, eds., The Structure of Language (1964); John Lyons, Noam

Chomsky (1970); Noam Chomsky, Selected Readings, eds. J. P. B. Allen and

Paul Van Buren (1971). Useful reviews of Continental and American linguistics

and of their applications in literary criticism are included in William H. Youngren,

Semantics, Linguistics, and Criticism (1972); Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs

(1981); Nigel Fabb and others, eds., The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments between

Language and Literature (1987); Jan Ziolkowski, ed., On Philology (1990); Roger

Fowler, Linguistic Criticism (2nd ed., 1996). A comprehensive account of the

concept of language’s role in literary theory is Geoffrey Galt Harpham,

Language Alone: The Critical Fetish of Modernity (2002). See also Roman Jakobson’s

influential essay “Linguistics and Poetics,” in his Language in Literature (1987),

and the expansion of Jakobson’s basic distinction between the horizontal and

LINGUISTICS IN LITERARY CRITICISM 199

vertical dimensions of language in David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing:

Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature (1977).

Issues of gender and language are addressed in Barrie Thorne, Cheris

Kramerae, and Nancy Henley, eds., Language, Gender, and Society (1983);

Dale Spender, Man Made Language (2nd ed., 1985); Joyce Penfield, ed.,

Women and Language in Transition (1987); Deborah Cameron, Feminism and

Linguistic Theory (2nd ed., 1992); Sally Johnson and Ulrike Hanna Meinhof,

eds., Language and Masculinity (1997). (Refer to feminist criticism and gender

criticism.) For references to linguistics in other entries, see page 357.

literal meaning: 133; 83.

literariness: 142.

literary ballad: 26.

literary canon: 43; 75, 126, 306.

literary criticism: 70.

literature (from the Latin litteraturae, “writings”): “Literature” has been com-

monly used since the eighteenth century, equivalently with the French belles

lettres (“fine letters”), to designate fictional and imaginative writings—poetry,

prose fiction, and drama. (See genres.) In an expanded use, it designates also

any other writings (including philosophy, history, and even scientific works

addressed to a general audience) that are especially distinguished in form,

expression, and emotional power. It is in this larger sense of the term that

we call “literary” the philosophical writings of Plato and William James, the

historical writings of Edward Gibbon, the scientific essays of Thomas Henry

Huxley, and the psychoanalytic lectures of Sigmund Freud, and include them

in the reading lists of some courses in literature. Confusingly, however, “liter-

ature” is sometimes applied also, in a sense close to the Latin original, to all

written works, whatever their kind or quality. This all-inclusive use is espe-

cially frequent with reference to the sum of works that deal with a particular

subject matter. At a major American university that includes a College of

Agriculture, the chairman of the Division of Literature once received this let-

ter: “Dear Sir, Kindly send me all your literature concerning the use of cow

manure as a fertilizer.”

In its application to imaginative writing, “literature” has an evaluative as

well as descriptive function, so that its proper use has become a matter of

contention. Modern critical movements, aiming to correct what are seen as

historical injustices, stress the strong but covert role played by gender, race,

and class in establishing what has, in various eras, been accounted as literature,

or in forming the ostensibly timeless criteria of great and canonical literature, or

in distinguishing between

“high

literature” and the literature addressed to a

mass audience. See, for example, the entries on cultural studies, feminist criticism,

200 LITERAL MEANING

gender criticism, Marxist criticism, and new historicism; refer also to Jonathan

Culler, The Literary in Theory (2007). For the historical development of the

concept of a work of literature as a fine art that is autonomous, and to be

enjoyed for its own sake, see M. H. Abrams, “Art-as-Such: The Sociology

of Modern Aesthetics,” in Doing Things with Texts (1984); and Pierre

Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (1995).

For references to literature in other entries, see pages 142, 149, 205, 320.

literature of fact: 257.

literature of sensibility: 359.

literature of the absurd: 1; 49, 187, 228.

litotes (l



totez): 169.

local color: The detailed representation in prose fiction of the setting, dialect,

customs, dress, and ways of thinking and feeling which are distinctive of a

particular region, such as Thomas Hardy’s “Wessex” or Rudyard Kipling’s

India. After the Civil War a number of American writers exploited the literary

possibilities of local color in various parts of America; for example, the West

(Bret Harte), the Mississippi region (Mark Twain), the South (George

Washington Cable), the Midwest (E. W. Howe, Hamlin Garland), and New

England (Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman). The term “local

color fiction” is often applied to works which, like O. Henry’s or Damon

Runyon’s stories set in New York City, rely for their interest mainly on a

sentimental or comic representation of the surface particularities of a region;

the term “regional fiction” is then used to distinguish those works which deal

with more deep-seated, complex, and general human characteristics and

problems. On the use of material objects, or “things,” in establishing local

color, see Bill Brown, “Regional Artifacts,” in A Sense of Things: The Object

Matter of American Literature (2003). See regional novel.

local poetry: 403.

logocentric (logosen

trik): 80.

loose sentence: 384.

Lost Generation: 276.

low burlesque: 42.

low comedy: 58.

low style: 383.

LOW STYLE 201

lyric: In the most common use of the term, a lyric is any fairly short poem

uttered by a single speaker, who expresses a state of mind or a process of per-

ception, thought, and feeling. Many lyric speakers are represented as musing

in solitude, while in dramatic lyrics, the speaker typically addresses an absent

person; instances are John Donne’s “Canonization” and William Wordsworth’s

“Tintern Abbey.” (See apostrophe.) In dramatic lyrics, the speaker seeks to pro-

duce, often through hyperbole, certain effects on the person being addressed,

by praising, blaming, or making assertions of value. Lyric speech is generally

charged with emotion and often has the character of an epiphany.

Although the lyric is uttered in the first person, the “I” in the poem need

not be the poet who wrote it. In some lyrics, such as John Milton’s sonnet

“When I consider how my light is spent” and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s

“Frost at Midnight,” the references to the known circumstances of the

author’s life make it clear that we are to read the poem as a personal expres-

sion. Even in such personal lyrics, however, both the character and utter-

ance of the speaker may be formalized and altered by the author in a way that

is conducive to the desired artistic effect. In a number of lyrics, the speaker is a

conventional period-figure, such as the long-suffering suitor in the Petrarchan

sonnet (see Petrarchan conceit) or the courtly, witty lover of the Cavalier poems.

And in some types of lyrics, the speaker is obviously an invented figure

remote from the poet in character and circumstance. (See persona, confessional

poetry, and dramatic monologue for distinctions between personal and invented

lyric speakers.)

The lyric genre comprehends a great variety of utterances. Some, like

Ben Jonson’s “To the Memory of … William Shakespeare” and Walt

Whitman’s ode on the death of Abraham Lincoln, “O Captain, My Captain,”

are ceremonial poems uttered in a public voice on a public occasion. Among

the lyrics in a more private mode, some are simply a brief, intense expression

of a mood or state of feeling; for example, Shelley’s “To Night,” or Emily

Dickinson’s “Wild Nights, Wild Nights,

” or

this fine medieval elegiac song:

Fowles in the frith,

The fisshes in the flood,

And I mon waxe wood:

Much sorwe I walke with

For best of bone and blood.

But the genre also includes extended expressions of a complex evolution of

feelingful thought, as in the long elegy and the meditative ode. And within a

lyric, the process of observation, thought, memory, and feeling is organized in

a variety of ways. For example, in “love lyrics,” the speaker may simply

express an enamored state of mind in an ordered form, as in Robert Burns’

“O my love’s like a red, red rose,” and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How

do I love thee? Let me count the ways”; or may gallantly elaborate a compli-

ment (Ben Jonson’s “Drink to me only with thine eyes”); or may deploy an

argument to take advantage of fleeting youth and opportunity (Andrew

Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” or Shakespeare’s first seventeen sonnets

202 LYRIC

addressed to a male youth); or may express a cool response to an importunate

lover (Christina Rossetti’s “No, thank you, John”). In other kinds of lyrics,

the speaker manifests and celebrates a particular disposition and set of values

(John Milton’s “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso”); or expresses a sustained

process of observation and meditation in the attempt to resolve an emotional

problem (Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” and Arnold’s

“Dover Beach”); or is exhibited as making and justifying the choice of a

way of life (Yeats’“Sailing to Byzantium”).

Many lyrics invite the reader to imagine the speaker as a fictional character

who is seeking to express inner thoughts or produce certain effects. But lyric

speech, whether addressed to an absent person or represented as inner mono-

logue, is best appreciated and understood not through the categories or con-

ventions of fiction but as a form of poetry with a strong connection to very

ancient forms of utterance: for the Romantics and indeed for many through-

out the nineteenth century, the lyric was regarded as the paradigmatic form of

poetry and even of speech itself. As J. S. Mill put it in “The Two Kinds of

Poetry” (1833), lyric poetry is “more eminently and peculiarly poetry than

any other.” (On the lyric as “poetic norm,” see M. H. Abrams, The Mirror

and the Lamp, 1953, pp. 84–88). In the original Greek, “lyric” signified a

song rendered to the accompaniment of a lyre. In some current usages, lyric

still retains the sense of a poem written to be set to music; the hymn, for

example, is a lyric on a religious subject that is intended to be sung. The

adjectival form “lyrical” is sometimes applied to an expressive, song-like pas-

sage in a narrative poem, such as Eve’s declaration of love to Adam, “With

thee conversing I forget all time,” in Milton’s Paradise Lost, IV, 639–56. John

Updike alluded to the musical overtones of lyric when, in a tribute to the

baseball great Ted Williams, he described Boston’s Fenway Park as a “lyric

little bandbox.

”

See genre for

the broad distinction between the three major poetic classes

of drama, narrative (or epic), and lyric, and also for the sudden elevation of

lyric, in the Romantic period, to the status of the quintessentially poetic

mode. Refer to Norman Maclean, “From Action to Image: Theories of the

Lyric in the 18th Century,” in Critics and Criticism, ed. R. S. Crane (1952);

Maurice Bowra, Mediaeval Love-Song (1961); Chaviva Hošek and Patricia

Parker, eds., Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism (1985); David Lindley, Lyric

(1985); Helen Vendler, The Music of What Happens (1988), and Invisible Listeners:

Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery (2007).

For references to lyric in other entries, see pages 96, 149. For types of lyric,

see aubade; dramatic monologue; elegy; epithalamion; haiku; hymn; ode; sonnet.

LYRIC 203

machinery (in an epic): 110.

magazines: 365.

magic realism: 258; 333.

malapropism: “Malapropism” is that type of solecism (the conspicuous and

unintended violation of standard diction or grammar) which mistakenly uses

a word in place of another that it resembles; the effect is usually comic. The

term derives from Mrs. Malaprop in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s comedy The

Rivals (1775), who in the attempt to display a copious vocabulary said things

such as “a progeny of learning,”“as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of

the Nile,” and “he is the very pineapple of politeness.” In an early radio com-

edy “The Easy Aces,” Jane Ace, an inveterate malapropist, remarked: “He got

so excited, he ran around like a chicken with its hat off.”

manifest content: 320.

manifesto: 238.

manuscripts: 34.

Märchen (mer

shen): 139 .

Marxist criticism: “Marxist criticism,” in its diverse forms, grounds its theory

and practice on the economic and cultural theory of Karl Marx (1818–83) and

his fellow thinker Friedrich Engels (1820–95), and especially on the following

claims:

1. In the last analysis, the evolving history of humankind, of its social group-

ings and interrelations, of its institutions, and of its ways of thinking are

largely determined by the changing mode of its “material production ”—

that is, of its overall economic organization for producing and distributing

material goods.

2. Changes in the fundamental mode of material production effect changes

in the class structure of a society, establishing in each era dominant and

subordinate classes that engage in a struggle for economic, political, and

social advantage.

3. Human consciousness is constituted by an ideology—that is, the beliefs,

values, and ways of thinking and feeling through which human beings

perceive, and by recourse to which they explain, what they take to be

reality. An ideology is, in complex ways, the product of the position

and interests of a particular class. In any historical era, the dominant

204 MACHINERY

ideology embodies, and serves to legitimize and perpetuate, the interests

of the dominant economic and social class.

Ideology was not much discussed by Marx and Engels after The German

Ideology, which they wrote jointly in 1845–46, but it has become a key con-

cept in Marxist criticism of literature and the other arts. Marx inherited the

term from French philosophers of the late eighteenth century, who used it

to designate the study of the way that all general concepts develop from par-

ticular sense perceptions. In the present era, “ideology” is used in a variety of

non-Marxist ways, ranging from a derogatory name for any set of political

ideas that are held dogmatically and applied inflexibly to a neutral name for

ways of perceiving and thinking that are specific to an individual’s race, sex,

nationality, education, or ethnic group. In its distinctively Marxist use, the

reigning ideology in any era is conceived to be, ultimately, the product of

its economic structure and the resulting class relations and class interests. In a

famed architectural metaphor, Marx represented ideology as a “superstruc-

ture” of which the concurrent socioeconomic system is the “base.” Friedrich

Engels described ideology as “a false consciousness, ” and many later Marxists

consider it to be constituted largely by unconscious prepossessions that are

illusory, in contrast to the “scientific” (that is, Marxist) knowledge of the eco-

nomic determinants, historical evolution, and present constitution of the social

world. A further claim is that, in the era of capitalist economic organization

that emerged in the West during the eighteenth century, the reigning ideol-

ogy incorporates the interests of the dominant and exploitative class, the

“bourgeoisie,” who own the means of production and distribution, as

opposed to the “proletariat,” or wage-earning working class. This ideology,

it is claimed, to those who live in and with it, seems a natural and inevitable

way of seeing, explaining, and dealing with the environing world but in fact

has the hidden function of legitimizing and maintaining the position, power,

and economic interests of the ruling class. Bourgeois ideology is regarded as

both producing and permeating the social and cultural institutions, beliefs, and

practices of the present era—including religion, morality, philosophy, politics,

and the legal system, as well as (although in an indirect and complex way)

literature and the other arts.

In accordance with some version of the views just outlined, a Marxist

critic typically undertakes to explain the literature in any historical era not as

works created in accordance with timeless artistic criteria but as “products” of

the economic and ideological determinants specific to that era. What some

Marxist critics themselves decried as “vulgar Marxism” analyzed a “bourgeois”

literary work as in direct correlation with the present stage of the class struggle

and demanded that such works be replaced by a “social realism” that would

represent the true reality and progressive forces of our time; in practice, this

usually turned out to be the demand that literature conform to an official

party line. More flexible Marxists, on the other hand, building upon scattered

comments on literature in Marx and Engels themselves, grant that traditional

literary works possess a degree of autonomy that enables some of them to

MARXIST CRITICISM 205

transcend the prevailing bourgeois ideology sufficiently to represent (or in the

frequent Marxist equivalent, to reflect) aspects of the “objective” reality of

their time. (See imitation.)

The Hungarian thinker Georg Lukács, one of the most widely influential

of Marxist critics, represents such a flexible view of the role of ideology. He

proposed that each great work of literature creates “its own world,” which is

unique and seemingly distinct from “everyday reality.” But masters of realism in

the novel such as Balzac or Tolstoy, by “bringing to life the greatest possible

richness of the objective conditions of life,” and by creating “typical” characters

who manifest the essential tendencies and determinants of their epoch, succeed—

often “in opposition to [the author’s] own conscious ideology”—in producing

a fictional world which is a “reflection of life in the greatest concreteness and

clarity and with all its motivating contradictions.” That is, the fictional world of

such great writers accords with the Marxist conception of the real world as con-

stituted by class conflict, economic and social “contradictions,” and the alienation

of the individual under capitalism. (See bourgeois epic, under epic,andreferto

Georg Lukács, WriterandCriticandOtherEssays,trans.1970;thevolumealso

includes Lukács’ useful review of the foundational tenets of Marxist criticism, in

“Marx and Engels on Aesthetics.”)

While praising nineteenth-century literary realism, Lukács attacked mod-

ernist experimental writing for its “decadent” concern with the alienated and

fragmented modes of subjectivity characteristic of our late stage of capitalism.

(See modernism.) He thereby inaugurated a vigorous debate among Marxist

critics about the political standing of formal innovators in twentieth-century

literature. In opposition to Lukács, the Frankfurt School of German Marx-

ists, especially Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, lauded modernist wri-

ters such as James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Samuel Beckett, proposing that

their formal experiments, by the very fact that they fragment and disrupt the

life they “reflect,” establish a distance and detachment that serve as an implicit

critique—or yield a “negative knowledge”—of the dehumanizing institutions

and processes of society under capitalism. Adorno and Horkheimer attempted,

after World War II, to explain “why humanity, instead of entering into a

truly human condition”

(as Marxists had predicted) “is

sinking into a new

kind of barbarism.” See the entry critique, and refer to The Essential Frankfurt

School Reader, eds. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (1982), and for an

authoritative history of the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay, The Dialectical

Imagination (1996).

Two rather maverick German Marxists, Bertolt Brecht and Walter

Benjamin, who supported modernist and nonrealistic art, have had consider-

able influence on non-Marxist as well as Marxist criticism. In his critical the-

ory, and in his own dramatic writings (see epic theater), Bertolt Brecht rejected

what he called the “Aristotelian ” concept that a tragic play is an imitation of

reality, with a unified plot and a universal theme that establishes an identifica-

tion of the audience with the hero and produces a catharsis of the spectator’s

emotions. (See Aristotle, under tragedy and plot.) Brecht proposes instead that

the illusion of reality should be deliberately shattered by an episodic plot, by

206 MARXIST CRITICISM

protagonists who do not attract the audience’s sympathy, by a striking theat-

ricality in staging and acting, and by other ways of baring the artifice of drama

so as to produce an “alienation effect” (see under distance and involvement).The

result of such alienation, Brecht asserts, will be to jar audiences out of their

passive acceptance of modern capitalist society as a natural way of life, into

an attitude not only (as in Adorno) of critical understanding of capitalist short-

comings but of active cooperation with the forces of change.

Another notable critic, Walter Benjamin, was both an admirer of Brecht

and briefly an associate of the Frankfurt School. Particularly influential was

Benjamin’s attention to the effects of changing material conditions in the pro-

duction of the arts, especially the recent developments of the mass media that

have promoted, he said, “a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of

art.” In his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”

Benjamin proposes that modern technical innovations such as photography,

the phonograph, the radio, and especially the cinema, have transformed

the very concept and status of a work of art. Formerly an artist or author

produced a work which was a single object, regarded as the special preserve

of the bourgeois elite, around which developed a quasi-religious “aura” of

uniqueness, autonomy, and aesthetic value independent of any social function—

an aura which invited in the spectator a passive attitude of absorbed contem-

plationintheobjectitself.(Seeaestheticism and fine arts.) The new media

not only make possible the infinite and precise reproducibility of the objects

of art but effect the production of works which, like the motion pictures, are

specifically designed to be reproduced in multiple copies. Such modes of art,

Benjamin argues, by destroying the mystique of the unique work of art as a

subject for pure contemplation, make possible a radical role for works of art

byopeningthewayto“the formulation of revolutionary demands in the pol-

itics of art.” (Benjamin’swritingsareavailableinWalterBenjamin,Selected

Writings, 4 vols., 2002–4. Useful collections of essays by the M arxist critics

Lukács, Brecht, Adorno, and Horkh eimer are R. Taylor, ed., Aesthetics and

Politics, 1977; and Roger S. Gottlieb, ed., An Anthology of Western Marxism:

From Lukács and Gramsci to Socialist-Feminism, 1989.)

The second half of the twentieth century witnessed a resurgence of

Marxist criticism, marked by an openness, on some level of literary analysis,

to other current critical perspectives; a degree of flexibility which acknowl-

edges that Marxist critical theory is itself, at least in some part, an evolving

historical process; a subtilizing of the concept of ideology as applied to literary

content; and a tendency to grant an increased role to nonideological and dis-

tinctively artistic determinants of literary structures and values.

In the 1960s, the influential French Marxist Louis Althusser assimilated the

structuralism then current into his view that the structure of society is not a mono-

lithic whole but is constituted by a diversity of “nonsynchronous” social forma-

tions, or “ideological state apparatuses,” including religious, legal, political, and

literary institutions. Each of these possesses a “relative autonomy”; only “in the

last instance” is the ideology of a particular institution determined by its material

base in contemporary economic production. In an influential reconsideration of

MARXIST CRITICISM 207

the general nature of ideology, Althusser opposes its definition as simply “false

consciousness.” He declares instead that the ideology of each mode of state appa-

ratus is different, and operates by means of a discourse which interpellates (calls

upon) the individual to take up a pre-established “subject position”—that is, a

positionasapersonwithcertainviewsandvalues,which,however,inevery

instance serve the ultimate interests of the ruling class. (See discourse,andsubject

under poststructuralism.) Althusser affirms, furthermore, that a great work of litera-

ture is not a mere product of ideology because its fiction establishes for the reader

a distance from which to recognize, hence expose, “the ideology from which it is

born … fromwhichitdetachesitselfasart,andtowhichitalludes.” Pierre

Macherey, in A Theory of Literary Production (1966, trans. 1978), stressed the sup-

plementary claim that a literary text not only distances itself from its ideology by

its fiction and form but also exposes the “contradictions” that are inherent in that

ideology by its “silences” or “gaps”—that is, by what the text fails to say because

itsinherentideologymakesitimpossible to say it. Combining Marxism and

Freudianism, Macherey asserts that such textual “absences” are symptoms of ideo-

logical repressions of the contents in the text’sown“unconscious.” The aim of

Marxist criticism, Macherey asserts, is to make these silences “speak” and so to

reveal, behind what an author consciously intended to say, the text’s unconscious

content—that is, its repressed awareness of the flaws, stresses, and incoherence in

the very ideology that it incorporates. (See hermeneutics of suspicion.)

Between 1929 and 1935, the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, while

imprisoned by the fascist government, wrote approximately thirty documents

on political, social, and cultural subjects, known as the “prison notebooks.”

Gramsci maintains the original Marxist distinction between the economic

base and the cultural superstructure, but replaces the claim that culture is a

disguised “reflection” of the material base with the concept that the relation-

ship between the two is one of “reciprocity,” or interactive influence.

Gramsci places special emphasis on the popular, as opposed to the elite, ele-

ments of culture, ranging from folklore and popular music to the cinema.

Gramsci’

s most widely echoed concept is that of hegemony:

that a social

class achieves a predominant influence and power not by direct and overt

means but by succeeding in making its ideological views so pervasive that

the subordinate classes unwittingly accept and participate in their own oppres-

sion. The concept of hegemony, unlike the classical Marxist conception of

ideology, implies an openness to negotiation and exchange, as well as conflict,

between classes, and so refashions Marxist categories to fit a modern, post-

industrial society in which diverse concepts and ideas, apart from “modes of

production,” play a leading role. Another appealing feature of Gramsci’s

thought to those who discovered him when his writings were translated into

English beginning in 1971 was his emphasis on the role of intellectuals and

opinion makers in helping people understand how they can effect their own

transformation. Gramsci’s prison writings have had a strong influence on liter-

ary and social critics such as Terry Eagleton in England and Fredric Jameson

and Edward Said in America, who argue for the power of literary culture to

intervene in and transform existing economic and political arrangements and

208 MARXIST CRITICISM

activities. (See Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, trans. William

Boelhower, 1985; Chantal Mouffe, ed., Gramsci and Marxist Theory, 1979; David

Forgacs, ed., The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916–1935 , 2000.)

Gramsci’s writings also inspired a number of post-Marxist thinkers, who

sought to adapt Marxism to poststructural discourse. Among these was a leader

of the British cultural studies movement, Stuart Hall. (See cultural studies, also

cultural materialism under the entry new historicism.) Hall insisted that ideology

must not be considered a “false consciousness” or kind of concealment but

rather as a multifaceted force in the struggle for cultural power, carried on in

the mode of the production of meaning. All “meaning,” Hall said, “is always

a social production, a practice. The world has to be made to mean.” (See Hall,

“The Recovery of ‘Ideology,’”in Culture, Society and the Media, eds., Michael

Gurevitch and others, 1982.)

Also strongly influenced by Gramsci were Ernesto Laclau and Chantal

Mouffe, who in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985) argued for an under-

standing of society grounded not in economic determinism but in the nature

of language. Adapting the linguistic view of Ferdinand de Saussure that the

identity of a sign and of its significance was not intrinsic but determined by

its position in a differential system, they argued that such “unfixity” was “the

condition of every social identity,” so that the place of power in a society can

be legitimately occupied by anyone or any group. With the aid of Sausserian

language theory, Laclau and Mouffe propose a view of society that, instead of

being strictly determined by modes of production and the laws of economics,

is open to innovation, transformation, and self-invention. (For Saussure’s

linguistic theory, see under linguistics in literary criticism and semiotics. For post-

Marxist theory in general, refer to Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Language Alone:

The Critical Fetish of Modernity, 2002, pp. 70–141.)

In England, the many social and critical writings of Raymond Williams

manifest an adaptation of Marxist concepts to his humanistic concern with

the overall texture of an individual’s “lived experience.” A leading theorist

of Marxist criticism in England is Terry Eagleton, who expanded and elabo-

rated the concepts of Althusser and Macherey into his view that a literary text

is a special kind of production in which ideological discourse—described as

any system of mental representations of lived experience—is reworked into a

specifically literary discourse. In subsequent writings Eagleton became increas-

ingly

hospitable to the tactical use, for dealing with ideology in literature, of

concepts derived from deconstruction and from Lacan’s version of Freudian

psychoanalysis. Eagleton views such poststructuralist analyses as useful to Marxist

critics of literary texts insofar as they serve to undermine reigning beliefs and cer-

tainties, but solely as preliminary to the properly Marxist enterprise of exposing

their ideological motivation and to the application of the criticism of literature

toward politically desirable ends.

The most prominent American theorist, Fredric Jameson, is also the most

eclectic of Marxist critics. In The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially

Symbolic Act (1981), Jameson expressly adapts to his critical enterprise such

seemingly incompatible viewpoints as the medieval theory of fourfold levels

MARXIST CRITICISM 209

of meaning in the allegorical interpretation of the Bible, the archetypal criticism of

Northrop Frye, structuralist criticism, Lacan’s reinterpretations of Freud, semiotics,

and deconstruction. These modes of criticism, Jameson asserts, are applicable at

various stages of the critical interpretation of a literary work; but Marxist crit-

icism, he contends, “subsumes” all the other “interpretive modes,” by retain-

ing their positive findings within a “political interpretation of literary texts”

which stands as the “final” or “absolute horizon of all reading and all

interpretation.” This last-analysis “political interpretation” of a literary text

involves an exposure of the hidden role of the “political unconscious”—a

concept which Jameson describes as his “collective,” or “political,” adaptation

of the Freudian concept that each individual’s unconscious is a repository of

repressed desires. (See psychological and psychoanalytic criticism.) In a mode similar

to Macherey, Jameson affirms that in any literary product of our late capitalist

era, the “rifts and discontinuities” in the text, and especially those elements

which, in the French phrase, are its “non-dit” (its not-said), are symptoms of

the repression by a predominant ideology of the contradictions of “History”

into the depths of the political unconscious; and the content of this repressed

History, Jameson asserts, is the revolutionary process of “the collective strug-

gle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity.” In the final stage,

or last analysis, of an interpretation, Jameson holds, the Marxist critic “rewrites,”

in the mode of “allegory,” the literary text “in such a way that the [text] may

be seen as the … reconstruction of a prior historical or ideological subtext”—

that is, of the text

’s

unspoken, because repressed and unconscious, awareness

of the ways it is determined not only by current ideology but also by the

long-term process of true “History.” (See allegory.)

Refer to sociology of literature, and for the Marxist wing of the new histori-

cism, see cultural materialism under the entry new historicism .Usefulintroductions

to Marxist criticism in general are the essays in Maynard Solomon, ed., Marxism

and Art: Essays Classic and Contemporary (1979); Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne,

eds., Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader (1996). In addition to the writings listed

above, refer to Georg Lukács , Studies in European Realism (1950); Raymond

Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (1960) and Marxism and Literature

(1977); Peter Demetz, Marx, Engels and the Poets: Origins of Marxist Literary

Criticism (1967); Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (trans. 1968); Louis Althusser,

Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays (1969, trans. 1971), and For Marx (1996);

Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (1971), and Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Per-

sistence of the Dialectic (1996); Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski, eds., Marx and

Engels on Literature and Art (1973); Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (1976)

and Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976); Chris Bullock and David Peck, eds.,

Guide to Marxist Literary Criticism (1980); Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruc-

tion (1982); J. J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology (1983); J. G. Merquior, Western

Marxism (1986). Various essays by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak assimilate Marxist

concepts both to deconstruction and to the viewpoint of feminist criticism; see, for

example, her “Displacement and the Discourse of Women,” in Displacement:

Derrida and After, ed. Mark Krupnick (1983). For Derrida’s “reading” of Marx,

see his Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New

210 MARXIST CRITICISM

International (1994). For a sharp critique of Marxist criticism, see Frederick

Crews, “Dialectical Immaterialism,” in Skeptical Engagements (1986); also

Richard Levin, “The New Interdisciplinarity in Literary Criticism,” in After

Poststructuralism: Interdisciplinarity and Literary Theory, eds. Nancy Easterlin and

Barbara Riebling (1993). Marxist concerns also serve to form the new formalism

in literary criticism; see Robert Kaufman, “Red Kant, or the Persistence of the

Third Critique in Adorno and Jameson,” Critical Inquiry,Vol.26(2000).

For references to Marxist criticism in other entries, see pages 124, 144, 165.

masculine ending: 221.

masculine rhyme: 348.

masque: The “masque” (a variant spelling of “mask”) was inaugurated in Renais-

sance Italy and flourished in England during the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I,

and Charles I. In its full development, it was an elaborate form of court enter-

tainment that combined poetic drama, music, song, dance, splendid costum-

ing, and stage spectacle. A plot—often slight, and mainly mythological and

allegorical—served to hold together these diverse elements. The speaking

characters, who wore masks (hence the title), were often played by amateurs

who belonged to courtly society. The play concluded with a dance in which

the players doffed their masks and were joined by the audience.

In the early seventeenth century in England the masque drew upon the

finest artistic talents of the day, including Ben Jonson for the poetic script (for

example, The Masque of Blacknesse and The Masque of Queens) and Inigo Jones,

the architect, for the elaborate sets, costumes, and stage machinery. Each lavish

production cost a fortune; it was literally the sport of kings and queens, until

both court and drama were abruptly ended by the Puritan triumph of 1642.

The two examples best known to modern readers are the masque-

within-a-play in the fourth act of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and Milton’s

sage and serious revival of the form, Comus, with songs by the composer

Henry Lawes, which was presented at Ludlow Castle in 1634. The jubilant

fourth act which Shelley added to his poetic drama Prometheus Unbound (1819)

was modeled on the Renaissance masque, as are two dramas by the American

poet Robert Frost: A Masque of Reason (1945) and AMasqueofMercy(1947).

Edgar Allen Poe’sluridtale,“The Masque of the Red Death,” depicts not a

dramatic masque but a masquerade ball, conducted by a medieval prince and

his courtiers in defiance of a lethal plague that was ravishing the land. At this

ball, a ghastly masked intruder turns out to be the Red Death itself.

The antimasque was a form developed by Ben Jonson. In it the charac-

ters were grotesque and unruly, the action ludicrous, and the humor broad; it

served as a foil and countertype to the elegance, order, and ceremony of the

masque proper, which preceded it in a performance.

See

Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power (1975). Stephen Orgel and Roy

Strong, in Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court (2 vols., 1973), discuss

Jones’ contributions to the masque, with copious illustrations.

MASQUE 211

mechanic form: 140.

medieval romance: 50.

medieval tragedy: 406.

meiosis (m



ıo



s): 169.

melodrama: “Melos” is Greek for song, and the term “melodrama” was origi-

nally applied to all musical plays, including opera. In early nineteenth-century

London, many plays were produced with a musical accompaniment that (as in

modern motion pictures) served simply to fortify the emotional tone of the

various scenes; the procedure was developed in part to circumvent the Licensing

Act (1737), which allowed “legitimate” plays only as a monopoly of the Drury

Lane and Covent Garden theaters but permitted musical entertainments

elsewhere. The term “melodrama” is now often applied to some of the typical

plays, especially during the Victorian Period, that were written to be produced to

musical accompaniment.

The Victorian melodrama can be said to bear the relation to tragedy that

farce does to comedy. Typically, the protagonists are flat types: the hero is

greathearted, the heroine pure, and the villain a monster of malignity. (The

sharply contrasted good guys and bad guys of the movie western and some

television dramas are modern derivatives from standard types in the old

melodramas.) The plot revolves around malevolent intrigue and violent

action, while the credibility of both character and plot is often sacrificed for

violent effect and emotional opportunism. Nineteenth-century melodramas

such as Under the Gaslight (1867) and the temperance play Ten Nights in a

Barroom (1858) are still sometimes produced—less for thrills, however, than

for laughs. The composer Stephen Sondheim converted George Dibdin

Pitt’s Victorian thriller Sweeney Todd, the Barber of Fleet Street (1842) into a

highly effective musical drama.

The terms “melodrama” and “melodramatic” are also, in an extended

sense, applied to any literary work or episode, whether in drama or prose fic-

tion, that relies on implausible events and sensational action. Melodrama, in

this sense, was standard fare in cowboy-and-Indian and cops-and-robber

types of silent films, and remains alive and flourishing in current cinematic

and television productions.

SeeM.W.Disher,Blood and Thunder: Mid-Victorian Melodrama and

Its Origins (1949) and Plots That Thrilled (1954); Frank Rahill, The World

of Melodrama (1967); R. B. Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama (1968);

Bruce McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society,

1820–1870 (1992).

memoir: 30.

Menippean satire (men



ean): 353.

212 MECHANIC FORM

men’s studies: 147.

metafiction: 258.

metaphor: 133; 55, 65.

metaphor, theories of: When someone says, discussing John’s eating habits,

“John is a pig,” and when Coleridge writes in “The Ancient Mariner”

The moonlight steeped in silentness

The steady weathercock,

we recognize that the noun “pig” and the verb “steeped” are metaphors, and

have no trouble understanding them. (See metaphor under figurative language.)

But after twenty-five centuries of discussions of metaphor by rhetoricians,

grammarians, and literary critics—in which during the second half of the

twentieth century they were joined by many philosophers—there is no gen-

eral agreement about the way we identify metaphors, how we are able to

understand them, and what (if anything) they serve to tell us. Following is a

brief summary of the most prominent among competing theories of

metaphor:

1. The similarity view. This was the traditional way of analyzing metaphors

from the time that Aristotle introduced it in the fourth century BC until

the recent past. It holds that a metaphor is a departure from the literal

(that is, what a competent speaker experiences as the standard) use of lan-

guage which serves as a condensed or elliptical simile, in that it involves an

implicit comparison between two disparate things. (The two things in the

examples cited above are John’s eating habits and those of a pig, and the

event of something being steeped—soaked in a liquid—and the appear-

ance of the moonlit landscape.) This view usually assumes that the fea-

tures being compared pre-existed the use of the metaphor; that the

metaphor can be translated into a statement of literal similarity without

loss of cognitive content (that is, of the information it conveys); and also

that a metaphor serves mainly to enhance the rhetorical force and stylistic

vividness and pleasantness of a discourse.

2. The interaction view. In The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936) I. A. Richards

introduced the terms vehicle for the metaphorical word (in the two exam-

ples, “pig” and “steeped”)andtenor for the subject to which the metaphor-

ical word is applied (John’s eating habits and the moonlit landscape). In

place of the similarity view, he proposed that a metaphor works by bring-

ing together the disparate “thoughts” of the vehicle and tenor so as to

effect a meaning that “is a resultant of their interaction” and that cannot

be duplicated by literal assertions of a similarity between the two elements.

He also asserted that metaphor cannot be viewed simply as a rhetorical or

poetic departure from ordinary usage, in that it permeates all language and

affects the ways we perceive and conceive the world. Almost twenty years

METAPHOR, THEORIES OF 213

later, in an influential essay entitled “Metaphor” (1954–55), the philoso-

pher Max Black refined and greatly expanded Richards’ treatment. Black

proposed that each of the two elements in a metaphor has a “system of

associated commonplaces,” consisting of the properties and relations that

we commonly attach to the object, person, or event. When we understand

a metaphor, the system of commonplaces associated with the “subsidiary

subject” (equivalent to I. A. Richards’“vehicle”) interacts with the system

associated with the “principal subject” (Richards’“tenor”)soasto“filter”

or “screen” that system, and thus effects a new way of perceiving and con-

ceiving the principal subject. This process, by which one complex set of

associations serves to select and reorganize a second set, Black claims, is a

“distinctive intellectual operation.” He also claims that, in place of saying

that metaphors simply formulate a pre-existing similarity between the two

subjects, “it would be more illuminating in some of these cases to say that

the metaphor creates the similarity.”

Before Max Black’s essay, philosophers had paid only passing atten-

tion to metaphor. The reigning assumption had been that the main func-

tion of language is to communicate truths, and that truths can be clearly

communicated only in literal language. For the most part, accordingly,

philosophers had adverted to metaphor only to warn against its intrusion

into rational discourse, as opposed to poetry and oratory, on the ground

that figurative language, as John Locke had said in his Essay Concerning

Human Understanding (1690), serves only “to insinuate wrong ideas,

move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment.” Black’s essay,

however, helped inaugurate a philosophical concern with metaphor

which, since the 1960s, has resulted in a flood of publications. Many of

these writings restate, with various qualifications, refinements, and expan-

sions, either the similarity or interaction views of metaphor. Within these

contributions, however, one can identify two additional views, both of

which have been influential in literary theory as well as in philosophy:

3. The pragmatic view. In an essay entitled “What Metaphors Mean”

(1978), Donald Davidson mounted a challenge to the standard assump-

tion that there is a metaphorical meaning as distinct from a literal mean-

ing. “Metaphors,” he claims, “mean what the words, in their most literal

interpretation, mean, and nothing more.” The question of metaphor is

pragmatic, not semantic; that is, it is the use of a literal statement in

such a way as to “suggest,”

or “intimate,” or “lead

us to notice” what

we might otherwise overlook. In a chapter on “Metaphor” in Expression

and Meaning (1979), John Searle also rejected the similarity and interaction

views, on the grounds that at best they serve to explain, and that only in

part and in a misleading way, how some metaphors come to be used and

understood. In consonance with his overall speech-act theory, Searle pro-

posed that to explain metaphor we must distinguish between “word, or

sentence meaning” (what the word or sentence means literally) and a par-

ticular speaker’s “utterance meaning” (the metaphorical meaning that a

214 METAPHOR, THEORIES OF

speaker uses the literal word or sentence meaning to express). Searle goes

on to propose a set of implicit principles, shared by the speaker and inter-

preter, to explain how a speaker can use a sentence with a literal meaning

to say something with a very different metaphorical meaning, as well as to

clarify how a hearer recognizes and proceeds to interpret a literal sentence

that is used metaphorically.

4. The cognitive (or conceptual) view. This treatment of metaphor, promi-

nent since about 1980, begins by rejecting the assumption in many earlier

theories that the ordinary, normal use of language is literal, from which

metaphor is a deviation for special rhetorical and poetic purposes. Instead

it claims that the ordinary use of language is pervasively and indispensably

metaphorical, and that metaphor persistently and profoundly structures

the ways human beings perceive, what they know, and how they think.

George Lakoff and Mark Turner in More than Cool Reason (1979) pro-

vide a short and accessible introduction to this cognitive view, with special

attention to its relevance for the analysis of metaphors in poetry. They

conceive metaphor to be a projection and mapping across what they call

“conceptual domains”; that is, its use is basically a cognitive mental process,

of which the metaphorical word, phrase, or sentence is only the linguistic

aspect and expression. To identify the two elements that compose a meta-

phor, the authors replace “ve hicle” and “tenor,” or “primary” and “second-

ary,” with the terms “source domain” and “target domain.” In using and

understanding a metaphor, part of the conceptual structure of the source

domain is “mapped” onto the conceptual structureofthetargetdomain,ina

one-way “transaction” (as distinct from an “interaction”)whichmayalter

and reorganize the way we perceive or think about the latter element.

A distinctive procedure in this view is to identify a number of “basic

conceptual metaphors” that pervade discourse in our Western culture but

are so common and operate so automatically that for the most part we use

them without noticing them. Some of the most common basic metaphors

are Purposes Are Destinations; Time Moves; Time Is a Reaper; Life Is a

Journey; Life Is a Play; People Are Plants. Such metaphors establish cross-

conceptual mappings that manifest themselves in our ordinary speech as

well as in the greatest poetry. People Are Plants, for example, is a type of

cognitive mapping that underlies such everyday expressions as “She’sin

the flower of youth,”“She’s a late bloomer,” and “He’s withering fast,”

no less than it does King Lear’s “Ripeness is all.” The difference between

trivially conventional and innovatively poetic uses of a basic metaphor, by

this analysis, is a difference not in cognitive kind but in the range and

diversity

of application and in the skill manifested in its verbal expression.

And in all uses (including in the language of the sciences), cross-domain

metaphors play an ineradicable part in determining what we know, how

we reason, what values we assign, and the ways we conduct our lives.

Vigorous debates about metaphor continue apace. A plausible conclusion

is that the diverse accounts of metaphor listed above need not be mutually

METAPHOR, THEORIES OF 215

exclusive, in that each is directed especially to a particular one of many kinds

of metaphor or functions of metaphor, or focuses on a different moment in

the process of recognizing and understanding a metaphor, or is adapted to the

perspective of a preferred mode of philosophy.

Mark Johnson, ed., Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor (1981), includes,

among others, the writings on metaphor (mentioned above) by Richards,

Black, Davidson, and Searle; Sheldon Sacks, ed., On Metaphor (1987), contains

essays by both philosophers and literary critics; and Andrew Ortony, ed.,

Metaphor and Thought (2nd ed., 1993), includes an essay by George Lakoff

that summarizes the cognitive treatments of metaphor. On the cognitive

view, see also George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By

(1980); and Mark Turner, Death Is the Mother of Beauty (1987). For earlier

treatments of the pervasive cognitive function of metaphors, see Stephen C.

Pepper, World Hypotheses (1942), on the “root metaphors” that generate the

major philosophical worldviews; and M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp

(1953), on the diverse “constitutive metaphors” that provide the structure and

categories of divergent theories of literature and the other arts. See also Paul

Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor (1977), and for an influential essay on metaphor

by a deconstructive theorist, Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology,” in Margins of

Discourse (1982).

metaphysical conceit: 61.

metaphysical poets: John Dryden said in his Discourse Concerning Satire (1693)

that John Donne in his poetry “affects the metaphysics,” meaning that Donne

employs the terminology and abstruse arguments of the medieval Scholastic

philosophers. In 1779, Samuel Johnson extended the term “metaphysical”

from Donne to a school of poets, in the acute and balanced critique which

he incorporated in his “Life of Cowley.” The name is now applied to a

group of seventeenth-century poets who, whether or not directly influenced

by Donne, employ similar poetic procedures and imagery, both in secular

poetry (Cleveland, Marvell, and Cowley) and in religious poetry (Herbert,

Vaughan, Crashaw, and Traherne).

Attempts have been made to demonstrate that these poets had in com-

mon a philosophical worldview. The term “metaphysical,” however, fits

these very diverse writers only if it is used, as Johnson used it, to indicate a

common poetic style, use of figurative language, and way of organizing the

meditative process or the poetic argument. Donne set the metaphysical

mode by writing poems which are sharply opposed to the rich mellifluousness

and the idealized view of human nature and of sexual love which had con-

stituted a central tradition in Elizabethan poetry, especially in Spenser and

the writers of Petrarchan sonnets; Donne’s poems are opposed also to the fluid,

regular versification of Donne’s contemporaries, the Cavalier poets. Instead,

Donne wrote in a diction and meter modeled on the rough give-and-take

of actual speech, and often organized his poems as an urgent or heated

argument—with a reluctant mistress, or an intruding friend, or God, or

216 METAPHYSICAL CONCEIT

death, or with himself. He employed a subtle and often deliberately outrageous

logic; he was realistic, ironic, and sometimes cynical in his treatment of the

complexity of human motives, especially in the sexual relationship; and

whether playful or serious, and whether writing the poetry of love or of

intense religious experience, he was above all “witty,” making ingenious use

of paradox, pun, and startling parallels in simile and metaphor (see metaphysical

conceit and wit). The beginnings of four of Donne’s poems will illustrate the

shock tactic, the dramatic form of direct address, the rough idiom, and the

rhythms of the living voice that are characteristic of his metaphysical style:

Go and catch a falling star,

Get with child a mandrake root …

For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love.

Busy old fool, unruly sun …

Batter my heart, three-personed God….

Some, not all, of Donne’s poetic procedures have parallels in each of his

contemporaries and successors whom literary historians usually group as meta-

physical poets.

These poets have had admirers in every age, but beginning with the

Neoclassic Period of the later seventeenth century, they were by most critics

and readers regarded as interesting but perversely ingenious and obscure expo-

nents of false wit, until a drastic revaluation after World War I elevated Donne,

and to a lesser extent Herbert and Marvell, high in the hierarchy of English

poets (see canon of literature). This reversal owed much to H. J. C. Grierson’s

Introduction to Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century (1912),

was given strong impetus by T. S. Eliot’s essays “The Metaphysical Poets” and

“Andrew Marvell” (1921), and was continued by a great number of commen-

tators, including F. R. Leavis in England and especially the American New

Critics, who tended to elevate the metaphysical style into the model of their

ideal poetry of irony, paradox, and “unified sensibility.” (See dissociation of

sensibility.) While Donne has lost this exemplary status, he continues to

occupy a firm position as a prominent poet in the English canon.

See F. R. Leavis, Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry

(1936); Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939); Rosemund

Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (1947); J. E. Duncan, The Revival

of Metaphysical Poetry (1959); Helen Gardner, ed., John Donne: A Collection of

Critical Essays (1962). F. J. Warnke, European Metaphysical Poetry (1961), treats

the Continental vogue of this style. For references to metaphysical poets in other

entries, see pages 61, 93, 417.

meter: “

Meter” i

s the recurrence, in regular units, of a prominent feature in the

sequence of speech sounds of a language. There are four main types of meter in

European languages: (1) In classical Greek and Latin, the meter was quantitative;

that is, it was established by the relative duration of the utterance of a syllable, and

METER 217

consisted of recurrent patterns of long and short syllables. (2) In French and many

other Romance languages, the meter is syllabic, depending on the number of

syllables within a line of verse, without regard to the fall of the stresses. (3) In the

older Germanic languages, including Old English, the meter is accentual,

depending on the number of stressed syllables within a line, without regard to

the number of intervening unstressed syllables. (4) The fourth type of meter,

combining the features of the two preceding types, is accentual-syllabic,in

which the metric units consist of a recurrent pattern of stresses on a recurrent

number of syllables. The stress-and-syllable type has been the predominant

meter of English poetry since the fourteenth century.

The study of the theory and practice of meter is called metrics. There is

considerable dispute about the most valid or useful way to analyze and classify

English meters. This entry will begin by presenting a traditional accentual-

syllabic analysis which has the virtues of being simple, widely used, and appli-

cable to by far the greater part of English poetry from Chaucer to the present.

Major departures from this stress-and-syllable meter will be described in the

latter part of the entry.

In all sustained spoken English we sense a rhythm; that is, a recognizable

although varying pattern in the beat of the stresses,oraccents (the more

forcefully uttered, hence louder syllables) in the stream of speech sounds. In

meter, this rhythm is structured into a recurrence of regular—that is, approxi-

mately equivalent—units of stress pattern. Compositions written in meter are

also known as verse.

We attend, in reading verse, to the individual line, which is a sequence of

words printed as a separate entity on the page. The meter is determined by

the pattern of stronger and weaker stresses on the syllables composing the

words in the verse line; the stronger is called the “stressed” syllable and all

the weaker ones the “unstressed” syllables. (What the ear perceives as a strong

stress is not an absolute quantity but is relative to the degree of stress in the

adjacent syllables.) Three major factors 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 words of more than one syllable;

in the noun “áccent” 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 a sentence or a phrase—the stress will fall depends on the grammat-

ical function of the word (we normally put stronger stress on nouns, verbs, and

adjectives, for example, than on articles or prepositions) and depends 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

perceived stress is the prevailing “metrical accent,” which is the beat that we

have come to expect, in accordance with the stress pattern that was established

earlier in the metrical composition.

If the prevailing stress pattern enforces a drastic alteration of the normal

word accent, we get a wrenched accent. Wrenching may be the result of a

lack of metrical skill; it was, however, conventional in the folk ballad (for

example, “fair ladíe,”“far countrée

”),

and is sometimes deliberately used for

218 METER

comic effects, as in Lord Byron’s Don Juan (1819–24) and in the verses of

Ogden Nash.

It is possible to distinguish a number of degrees of syllabic stress in English

speech, but the most common and generally useful fashion of analyzing and

classifying the standard English meters is “binary.” That is, we distinguish only

two categories—strong stress and weak stress—and group the syllables into

metric feet according to the patterning of these two degrees. A foot is the

combination of a strong stress and the associated weak stress or stresses

which make up the recurrent metric unit of a line. The relatively stronger-

stressed syllable is called, for short, “stressed”; the relatively weaker-stressed

syllables are called “light,” or most commonly, “unstressed.”

The four standard feet distinguished in English are:

1. Iambic (the noun is “iamb”): an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed

syllable.

The cúr | few tólls | the knéll | of pár | t



ng dáy. |

(Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”)

2. Anapestic (the noun is “anapest”): two unstressed syllables followed by a

stressed syllable.

The



As sýr | ian came dówn | l



ke a wólf | on the fóld. |

(Lord Byron, “The Destruction of Sennacherib”)

3. Trochaic (the noun is “trochee”): a stressed followed by an unstressed

syllable.

(Robert Browning, “One Word More”)

Most trochaic lines lack the final unstressed syllable. In the technical

term, such lines, or any verse lines that lack the final syllable (or, less

commonly, the first), are catalectic. So in Blake’s “The Tyger”:

Tý ger! | týger! | búrn



ng | bríght |

Ín the | fó rest | óf the | níght. |

4. Dactylic (the noun is “dactyl”): a stressed syllable followed by two

unstressed syllables.

Éve, w



th her | bás ket, was |

Déep



nthe | bélls and grass. |

(Ralph Hodgson, “Eve”)

Iambs and anapests, since the strong stress is at the end, are called “rising

meter”; trochees and dactyls, with the strong stress at the beginning, are called

“falling meter.” Iambs and trochees, having two syllables, are called “duple

meter”; anapests and dactyls, having three syllables, are called “triple meter.”

It should be noted that the iamb is by far the commonest English foot; some

METER 219

metric theorists treat other types of stress patterns as variants of the iamb. (For

the development of the iambic line in English, see John Thompson, The

Founding of English Metre, 1961.)

Two other feet are often distinguished by special names, although they

occur in English meter only as occasional variants from standard feet:

Spondaic (the noun is “spondee”): two successive syllables with approxi-

mately equal strong stresses, as in each of the first two feet of this line:

Góod stróng | thíck stú | pefý|



ng ín | cense smóke. |

(R. Browning, “The Bishop Orders His Tomb”)

Pyrrhic (the noun is also “pyrrhic”): a foot composed of two successive

syllables with approximately equal light stresses, as in the second and

fourth feet in this line:

Mý way |



sto|be gín | w



th the|be gín n



ng |

(Byron, Don Juan)

This latter term is used only infrequently. Some traditional metrists deny

the existence of a true pyrrhic, on the grounds that the prevailing metrical

accent—in the above instance, iambic—always imposes a slightly stronger

stress on one of the two syllables.

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 (an Alexandrine is a line of six iambic feet)

heptameter: seven feet (a fourteener is another term for a line of seven

iambic feet—hence, of fourteen syllables; it tends to break

into a unit of four feet followed by a unit of three feet)

octameter: eight feet

To describe the meter of a line we name (1) the predominant foot and

(2) the number of feet it contains. In the illustrations above, for example, the

line from Gray’s “Elegy” is “iambic pentameter, ” and the line from Byron’s

“The Destruction of Sennacherib” is “anapestic tetrameter.”

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 in the phrasing

fall within a line. Here is a scansion, signified by conventional symbols, of

the first five lines from John Keats’ Endymion (1818). The passage was chosen

220 METER

because it exemplifies a flexible and variable rather than a highly regular met-

rical pattern.





Its lóve | l



ness |



n créas | es; // ít | w



ll név er |

3. Páss



n|to nóth |



ng ness, | // but stíll | w



ll kéep |



5. Fúll of | sweet dréams, | and héalth, | and quí | et bréath



ng. |

The prevailing meter is iambic pentameter. As in all fluent verse, how-

ever, there are many variations upon the basic iambic foot; these are some-

times called “substitutions.” Thus:

1. The closing feet of lines 1, 2, and 5 end with an extra unstressed syllable,

and are said to have a feminine ending. In lines 3 and 4, the closing

feet, because they are standard iambs, end with a stressed syllable and are

said to have masculine endings.

2. In lines 3 and 5, the opening iambic feet have been “inverted” to form

trochees. (This initial position is the most common place for inversions in

iambic verse.)

3. I have marked the second foot in line 2, and the third foot of line 3 and

line 4, as pyrrhics (two unstressed syllables); these help to give Keats’

verses their rapid movement. This is a procedure in scansion about

which metric analysts disagree: some will feel enough of a metric beat

to mark all these feet as iambs; others will mark still other feet (for exam-

ple, the third foot of line 1) as pyrrhics also. And some metrists prefer to

use symbols measuring two degrees of strong stress, and will indicate a

difference in the feet, as follows:



Its lo˝ve | l



néss |



n cre˝as | es.

Notice, however, that these are differences only in nuance; analysts agree

that the prevailing pulse of Keats’ versification is iambic throughout, and

that despite many variations, the felt norm is of five stresses in the verse

line.

Two other elements are important in the metric movement of Keats’ pas-

sage: (1) In lines 1 and 5, the pause in the reading—which occurs naturally at the

end of a sentence, clause, or other syntactic unit—coincides with the end of the

line; such lines are called end-stopped. Lines 2 through 4, on the other hand,

are called run-on lines (or in a term derived from the French, they exhibit

enjambment—“a striding-over”) because the pressure of the incompleted syn-

tactic unit toward closure carries on over the end of the verse line. (2) When a

strongphrasalpausefallswithinaline,asinlines2,3,and4,itiscalled

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.

METER 221

To understand the use and limitations of an analysis such as this, we must

realize that a prevailing metric pattern (iambic pentameter, in the passage from

Keats) establishes itself as a perceived norm which controls the reader’s expec-

tations, even though the number of lines that deviate from the norm may

exceed the number that fit the norm exactly. In addition, scansion is an

abstract scheme which deliberately omits notation of many aspects of the

actual reading of a poem that contribute importantly to its pace, rhythm,

and total impression. It does not specify, for example, whether the compo-

nent words in a metric line are short words or long words, or whether the

strong stresses fall on short vowels or long vowels; it does not give any indi-

cation of the intonation—the overall rise and fall in the pitch and loudness of

the voice, and the rhetorical emphases—which we use to bring out the mean-

ing and effect of these poetic lines. It also does not indicate the interplay of

the metric stresses with the phrasal rhythms—the anticipation, suspension,

and closure of the syntactic and semantic phrases—within a sustained verse

passage. Such details are omitted in order to lay bare the essential metric skel-

eton; that is, the pattern of the stronger and weaker stresses in the syllabic

sequence of a verse line. Moreover, an actual reading of a poem, if it is a

skillful reading, will not accord mechanically with the scansion. There is

a marked difference between the scansion, as an abstract metrical norm,

and a skilled and expressive oral reading, or performance, of a poem; and

no two competent readers will perform the same lines in precisely the same

way. But in a performance, the metric norm indicated by the scansion is

sensed as an implicit understructure of pulses; in fact, the interplay of an

expressive performance, with its intonational and phrasal patterns operating

sometimes with and sometimes against this underlying metric pulse, gives ten-

sion and vitality to our experience of verse.

We need to note, finally, that some kinds of versification which occur in

English poetry differ from the syllable-and-stress type already described:

1. Strong-stress meters or accentual verse. In this meter, native to

English and other Germanic languages, only the beat of the strong stresses

counts in the scanning, while the number of intervening light syllables is

highly variable. Usually there are four strong-stressed syllables in a line,

whose beat is emphasized by alliteration. This was the meter of Old

English poetry and continued to be the meter of many Middle English

poems until Chaucer and others popularized the syllable-and-stress

meter. In the opening passage, for example, of Piers Plowman (later

fourteenth century) the four strong stresses (always divided by a medial

caesura) are for the most part reinforced by alliteration (see alliterative

meter); the light syllables, which vary in number, are recessive and do

not assert their individual presence:

In a sómer séson, // whan sóft was the sónne,

I shópe me in shróudes, // as Í a shépe were,

In hábits like an héremite, // unhóly of wórkes,

Went wýde in this wórld, // wónders to hére.

222 METER

Strong-stress meter survives in some folk poetry and in traditional

children’s rhymes such as “Hickory, dickory, dock.” It was revived as an

artful literary meter by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Christabel (1816), in

which each line has four strong stresses but the number of syllables within

a line varies from four to twelve. Strong-stress meter, with four stresses to

a line, is also the basic metric structure in the modern types of perfor-

mance poetry called rap.

What G. M. Hopkins in the later nineteenth century called his

sprung rhythm is a variant of strong-stress meter: each foot, as he

describes it, begins with a stressed syllable, which may either stand alone

or be associated with from one to three (occasionally even more)

light syllables. Two six-stress lines from Hopkins’“The Wreck of the

Deutschland” indicate the variety of the rhythms in this meter and also

exemplify its most striking feature: the great weight of the strong stresses,

and the frequent juxtaposition of strong stresses (spondees) at any point in

the line. The stresses in the second line were marked in a manuscript by

Hopkins himself; they indicate that in complex instances, his metric deci-

sions may seem arbitrary:

Our | héarts’ chárity’s | héarth’s | f íre, our | thóughts’

chivalry’s | thróng’s | Lórd. |

(See Marcella M. Holloway, The Prosodic Theory of Gerard Manley Hopkins,

1947.) A number of modern metrists, including T. S. Eliot and Ezra

Pound, skillfully interweave both strong-stress and syllable-and-stress

meters in some of their versification.

2. Quantitative meters in English are written in imitation of classical Greek and

Latin versification, in which the metrical pattern is not determined by the

stress but by the “quantity” (duration of pronunciation) of a syllable, and

the foot consists of a combination of “long” and “short” syllables. Sir Philip

Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Thomas Campion, and other Elizabethan poets

experimented with this meter in English, as did Coleridge, Tennyson,

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Robert Bridges later on. The strong

accentual character of English, however, as well as the indeterminateness

of the duration of a syllable in the English language, makes it impossible

to sustain a quantitative meter for any length. See Derek Attridge, Well-

Weighted Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Meters (1974).

3. In free verse (discussed in a separate entry), the component lines have no

(or only occasional) metric feet, or uniform stress patterns.

George Saintsbury, Historical Manual of English Prosody (1910), is a well-

illustrated treatment of traditional syllable-and-stress metrics. For later discus-

sions of this and alternative metric theories see Seymour Chatman, A Theory of

Meter (1965); and W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Concept

of Meter” (1959). This last essay is reprinted in W. K. Wimsatt, Hateful

Contraries (1965), and in Harvey Gross, ed., The Structure of Verse (1966)—an

METER 223

anthology that reprints other useful essays, including Northrop Frye, “The

Rhythm of Recurrence,” and Yvor Winters, “The Audible Reading of

Poetry.” SeealsoW.K.Wimsatt,ed.,Versification: Major Language Types (1972);

Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (rev. 1979); John Hollander, Rhyme’s

Reason: A Guide to English Verse (1981);T.V.F.Brogan,English Versification,

1570–1980 (1981); Amittai Aviram, Telling Rhythm: Body and Meaning in Poetry

(1994); Derek Attridge, Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (1995); Robert Pinsky,

The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide (1998); Thomas Carper and Derek Attridge,

Meter and Meaning: An Introduction to Rhythm in Poetry (2003). For responses by

contemporary poets to David Baker’s contention that there are only iambic feet

in English, see David Baker, ed., Meter in English: A Critical Engagement (1996).

See also alliterative meter; blank verse; doggerel; free verse.

metonymy (meton



me): 134.

metrical romance: 50.

metrics: 218.

middle (of a plot): 295.

Middle English: 280.

Middle English period: 280.

middle style: 383.

miles gloriosus (me

las gloreo

sus): 377.

mime (m



ım): 266.

mimesis (m



me



s): 174.

mimetic criticism (m



met



k): 72; 381.

miracle plays, morality plays, and interludes: These are all types of late-

medieval drama, written in a variety of verse forms.

The miracle play had as its subject either a story from the Bible or else the

life and martyrdom of a saint. In the usage of some historians, however, “miracle

play” denotesonlydramasbasedonsaints’ lives, and the term mystery play is

applied to dramas based on the Bible. “Mystery” is used in the archaic sense

(probably derived from the Latin ministerium, “work,”“occupation”)ofthe

“trade ” conducted by each of the medieval guilds which sponsored these plays.

The plays representing biblical narratives originated within the church in about

the tenth century, in dramatizations of brief parts of the Latin liturgical service,

called tropes, especially the “Quem quaeritis” (“Whom are you seeking”)trope

224 METONYMY

portraying the visit of the three Marys to the tomb of Christ. Gradually these

evolved into complete plays which were written in English instead of in Latin, pro-

duced under the auspices of the various trade guilds, and acted on stages set outside

the church. The miracle plays written in England are of unknown authorship. In

the fourteenth century there developed in cities such as York and Chester the prac-

tice, on the feast of Corpus Christi (sixty days after Easter), of putting on great

“cycles” of such plays, representing crucial events in the biblical history of mankind

from the Creation and Fall of man, through the Nativity, Crucifixion, and Resur-

rection of Christ, to the Last Judgment. The precise way that the plays were staged

is a matter of scholarly debate, but it is widely agreed that each scene was played on

a separate “pageant wagon” which was drawn, in sequence, to one after another

fixed station in a city, at each of which some parts of the cycle were enacted. The

biblical texts were greatly expanded in these plays, and the unknown authors added

scenes, comic as well as serious, of their own invention. For examples of the variety,

vitality, and power of these dramas, see the Wakefield “Noah” and “Second

Shepherd’sPlay,” and the Brome “Abraham and Isaac.”

Morality plays were dramatized allegories of a representative Christian life

in the plot form of a quest for salvation, in which the crucial events are temp-

tations, sinning, and the climactic confrontation with death. The usual pro-

tagonist represents Mankind, or Everyman; among the other characters are

personifications of virtues, vices, and Death, as well as angels and demons

who contest for the prize of the soul of Mankind. A character known as the

Vice often played the role of the tempter in a fashion both sinister and comic;

he is regarded by some literary historians as a precursor both of the cynical,

ironic villain and of some of the comic figures in Elizabethan drama, including

Shakespeare’s Falstaff. The best-known morality play is the fifteenth-century

Everyman, which is still given an occasional performance; other notable exam-

ples, written in the same century, are The Castle of Perseverance and Mankind .

Interlude (Latin, “between the play”) is a term applied to a variety of short

stage entertainments, such as secular farces and witty dialogues with a religious or

political point. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, these little dra-

mas were performed by bands of professional actors; it is believed that they

were often put on between the courses of a feast or between the acts of a lon-

ger play. Among the better-known interludes are John Heywood’sfarcesofthe

first half of the sixteenth century, especially The Four PP (that is, the Palmer, the

Pardoner, the ’Pothecary, and the Peddler, who engage in a lying contest), and

Johan Johan the Husband, Tyb His Wife, and Sir John the Priest.

Until the middle of the twentieth century, concern with medieval drama

was scholarly rather than critical. Since that time a number of studies have

dealt with the relationships of the texts to the religious and secular culture of

medieval Europe and have stressed the artistic excellence and power of the

plays themselves. See Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church (2 vols.,

1933); Arnold Williams, The Drama of Medieval England (1961); T. W. Craik,

The Tudor Interlude (1962); David M. Bevington, From Mankind to Marlowe

(1962); V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (1966); Rosemary

Woolf,

The English Mystery Plays (1972);

Jerome Taylor and Alar Nelson,

MIRACLE PLAYS, MORALITY PLAYS, AND INTERLUDES 225

eds., Medieval English Drama: Essays Critical and Contextual (1972); Robert

Potter, The English Morality Play (1975); Christine Richardson and Jackie

Johnston, Medieval Drama (1991). For references to miracle play in other

entries, see pages 9, 58, 406, 408.

mirror stage: 323.

mise en scène (me

zän sen

): 363.

mixed metaphor: 134.

mock epic: 41.

mock heroic poem: 41.

Modern Period: 284.

modernism and postmodernism: The term modernism is widely used to

identify new and distinctive features in the subjects, forms, concepts, and styles

of literature and the other arts in the early decades of the twentieth century,

but especially after World War I (1914–18). The specific features signified by

“modernism” (or by the adjective modernist) vary with the user, but many

critics agree that it involves a deliberate and radical break with some of the

traditional bases not only of Western art but of Western culture in general.

Important intellectual precursors of modernism, in this sense, are thinkers

who had questioned the certainties that had supported traditional modes of

social organization, religion, and morality, and also traditional ways of con-

ceiving the human self—thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900),

Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and James G. Frazer, whose twelve-volume The

Golden Bough (1890–1915) stressed the correspondence between central

Christian tenets and pagan, often barbaric, myths and rituals.

Some literary historians locate the beginning of the modernist revolt as far

back as the 1890s, but most agree that what is called high modernism,

marked by an unexampled scope and rapidity of change, came after the First

World War. The year 1922 alone was signalized by the appearance of such

monuments of modernist innovation as James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s

The Waste Land, and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, as well as many other

experimental works of literature. The catastrophe of the war had shaken

faith in the moral basis, coherence, and durability of Western civilization and

raised doubts about the adequacy of traditional literary modes to represent the

harsh and dissonant realities of the postwar world.

T. S. Eliot wrote in a review of Joyce’s Ulysses in 1923 that the inherited

mode of ordering a literary work, which assumed a relatively coherent and

stable social order, could not accord with “the immense panorama of futility

and anarchy which is contemporary history.” Like Joyce and like Ezra Pound

in his Cantos, Eliot experimented with new forms and a new style that would

226 MIRROR STAGE

render contemporary disorder, often contrasting it to a lost order and integra-

tion that, he claimed, had been based on the religion and myths of the cultural

past. In The Waste Land (1922), for example, Eliot replaced the standard syn-

tactic flow of poetic language by fragmented utterances, and substituted for the

traditional type of coherent poetic structure a deliberate dislocation of parts, in

which very diverse components are related by connections that are left to the

reader to discover, or invent. Major works of modernist fiction, following

Joyce’s Ulysses and his even more radical Finnegans Wake (1939), subvert the

basic conventions of earlier prose fiction by breaking up the narrative continu-

ity, departing from the standard ways of representing characters, and violating

the traditional syntax and coherence of narrative language by the use of stream of

consciousness and other innovative modes of narration. Gertrude Stein—often

linked with Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and Woolf as a trail-blazing modernist—

experimented with automatic writing (writing that has been freed from con-

trol by the conscious, purposive mind) and other modes of language that

achieved their effects by violating the norms of standard English syntax and sen-

tence structure. Among other European and American writers who are central

representatives of modernism are the novelists Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann,

André Gide, Franz Kafka, Dorothy Richardson, and William Faulkner; the

poets Stéphane Mallarmé, William Butler Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, Marianne

Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens; and the dramatists

August Strindberg, Luigi Pirandello, Eugene O’Neill, and Bertolt Brecht.

Their new forms of literary construction and rendering had obvious parallels

in the break away from representational conventions in the artistic movements

of expressionism and surrealism, in the modernist paintings and sculpture of

Cubism, Futurism, and Abstract Expressionism, and in the violations of standard

conventions of melody, harmony, and rhythm by the modernist musical

composers Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and their radical followers.

A prominent feature of modernism is the phenomenon called the avant-

garde (a French military metaphor: “advance-guard”); that is, a small, self-

conscious group of artists and authors who deliberately undertake, in Ezra

Pound’sphrase,to“make it new.” By violating the accepted conventions and

proprieties not only of art but of social discourse, they set out to create ever-

new artistic forms and styles and to introduce hitherto neglected, and sometimes

forbidden, subject matter. Frequently, avant-garde artists represent themselves as

“alienated” from the established order, against which they assert their own

autonomy; a prominent aim is to shock the sensibilities of the conventional

reader and to challenge the norms and pieties of the dominant bourgeois cul-

ture. See Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde (1968). Peter Bürger’s

Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984) is a neo-Marxist analysis both of modernism

and of its distinctive cultural formation, the avant-garde.

The term postmodernism is often applied to the literature and art after

World War II (1939–45), when the effects on Western morale of the First

World War were greatly exacerbated by the experience of Nazi totalitarianism

and mass extermination, the threat of total destruction by the atomic bomb, the

progressive devastation of the natural environment, and the ominous fact of

MODERNISM AND POSTMODERNISM 227

overpopulation. Postmodernism involves not only a continuation, sometimes

carried to an extreme, of the countertraditional experiments of modernism but

also diverse attempts to break away from modernist forms which had, inevit-

ably, become in their turn conventional, as well as to overthrow the elitism of

modernist “high art” by recourse for models to the “mass culture” of film,

television, newspaper cartoons, and popular music. Many of the works of post-

modern literature—by Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov,

Thomas Pynchon, Roland Barthes, and many others—so blend literary genres,

cultural and stylistic levels, the serious and the playful, that they resist classifica-

tion according to traditional literary rubrics. And these literary anomalies are

paralleled in other arts by phenomena like pop art, op art, the musical composi-

tions of John Cage, and the films of Jean-Luc Godard and other directors.

An undertaking in some postmodernist writings—prominently in Samuel

Beckett and other authors of the literature of the absurd—is to subvert the

foundations of our accepted modes of thought and experience so as to reveal

the meaninglessness of existence and the underlying “abyss,” or “void,” or

“nothingness” on which any supposed security is conceived to be precariously

suspended. Postmodernism in literature and the arts has parallels with the move-

ment known as poststructuralism in linguistic and literary theory; poststructur-

alists undertake to subvert the foundations of language in order to demonstrate

that its seeming meaningfulness dissipates, for a rigorous inquirer, into a play of

conflicting indeterminacies, or else undertake to show that all forms of cultural

discourse are manifestations of the reigning ideology, or of the relations and

constructions of power, in contemporary society. (See poststructuralism.)

For some postmodernist developments in literature, see literature of the

absurd; antihero; antinovel; Beat writers; concrete poetry; metafiction; new novel; perfor-

mance poetry. On modernism, refer to Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson,

eds., The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature (1965); Irving Howe,

ed., The Idea of the Modern in Literature and the Arts (1967); Lionel Trilling, Beyond

Culture (1968); Paul de Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” in

Blindness and Insight (1971); Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (1971); David Perkins,

A History of Modern Poetry: From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode (1976);

Malcolm Bradbury and James Walter McFarlane, eds., Modernism: 1890–1930

(1991); Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music, and Painting in

Europe, 1900–1916 (1994); Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide

(1995);

Michael

North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century

Literature (1998); Michael Levenson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Modernism

(1999); David Ayers, Modernism: A Short Introduction (2004). See also the journal

Modernism/Modernity .

On postmodernism, see Clement Greenberg, The Notion of Post-Modern

(1980); J. F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (trans. 1984); Andreas Huyssen,

After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (1986); David

Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural

Change (1989); John McGowan, Postmodernism and Its Critics (1991); Fredric

Jameson, Postmodernism (1991); Ingeborg Hoesterey, ed., Zeitgeist in Babel:

The Postmodernist Controversy (1991); Stuart Sim, ed., The Routledge Companion

228 MODERNISM AND POSTMODERNISM

to Postmodernism (2001); Victor E. Taylor and Charles E. Winquist, eds.,

Encyclopedia of Postmodernism (2003).

On the massive impact on culture and literature of the two World Wars,

see Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War

(1989), and The Great War and Modern Memory (2000).

On modern and postmodern drama: Austin Quigley, The Modern Stage

and Other Worlds (1985); William B. Worthen, Modern Drama and the Rhetoric

of Theater (1992); Debora Geis, Postmodern Theatric(k)s (1993). For references to

modernism in other entries, see page 171.

modernist: 226; 119.

monody: 104.

monologic: 88.

monologue: 96.

monometer (monom

e ter): 220.

mood: 20.

morality play: 224.

morpheme: 197 .

morphology: 196.

motif and theme: A motif is a conspicuous element, such as a type of event,

device, reference, or formula, which occurs frequently in works of literature.

The “loathly lady” who turns out to be a beautiful princess is a common

motif in folklore, and the man fatally bewitched by a fairy lady is a motif

adopted from folklore in Keats’“La Belle Dame sans Merci” (1820). Com-

mon in lyric poems is the ubi sunt motif, the “where-are” formula for

lamenting the vanished past (“Where are the snows of yesteryear?”), and also

the carpe diem motif, whose nature is sufficiently indicated by Robert Herrick’s

title “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time.” An aubade—from the Old

French “alba,” meaning dawn—is an early-morning song whose usual motif is

an urgent request to a beloved to wake up. A familiar example is

Shakespeare’s “Hark, hark, the lark at heaven’s gate sings.” An older term

for recurrent poetic concepts or formulas is the topos (Greek for “a com-

monplace”); Ernst R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages

(trans. 1953), treats many of the ancient literary topoi. The term “motif,” or

else the German leitmotif (a guiding motif), is also applied to the frequent

repetition, within a single work, of a significant verbal or musical phrase, or

set description, or complex of images, as in the operas of Richard Wagner or

MOTIF AND THEME 229

in novels by Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William

Faulkner. See imagery; and for a deconstructive treatment of recurrent elements

or motifs in prose fiction, see J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition (1982).

Theme is sometimes used interchangeably with “motif,” but the term is

more usefully applied to a general concept or doctrine, whether implicit or

asserted, which an imaginative work is designed to involve and make persua-

sive to the reader. John Milton states as the explicit theme of Paradise Lost to

“assert Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men”; see didactic

literature and fiction and truth. Some critics have claimed that all nontrivial

works of literature, including lyric poems, involve an implicit theme which

is embodied and dramatized in the evolving meanings and imagery; see, for

example, Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (1947). And archetypal critics

trace such recurrent themes as that of the scapegoat, or the journey under-

ground, through myths and social rituals, as well as literature. For a discussion

of the overlapping applications of the critical terms “subject,”“theme,” and

“thesis” see Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics (1958, pp. 401–11).

motivation: 48 .

movements in recent criticism: 402.

multiculturalism: 45.

multiple authorship: 401.

multiple meaning: 14.

mummers’ play: 139.

murder mystery: 69; 3.

mysteries: 69.

mystery novels: 69.

mystery play: 224.

myth: In classical Greek, “mythos” signified any story or plot, whether true or

invented. In its central modern significance, however, a myth is one story in a

mythology—a system of hereditary stories of ancient origin which were

once believed to be true by a particular cultural group, and which served

to explain (in terms of the intentions and actions of deities and other super-

natural beings) why the world is as it is and things happen as they do, to

provide a rationale for social customs and observances, and to establish the

sanctions for the rules by which people conduct their lives. Most myths are

related to social rituals—set forms and procedures in sacred ceremonies —but

230 MOTIVATION

anthropologists disagree as to whether rituals generated myths or myths

generated rituals. If the protagonist is a human being rather than a supernatural

being, the traditional story is usually called not a myth but a legend.Ifthe

hereditary story concerns supernatural beings who are not gods, and the story

is not part of a systematic mythology, it is usually classified as a folktale.

The French structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss departed from the traditional

views just described to treat the myths within each culture as signifying sys-

tems whose true meanings are unknown to their proponents. He analyzes the

myths of a particular culture as composed of signs which are to be identified

and interpreted by the cultural anthropologist on the model of the linguistic

theory of Ferdinand de Saussure. See Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of

Myth,” in Structural Anthropology (1968), and refer to structuralist criticism

and semiotics. Another influential contribution to the theory of myths is the

German intellectual historian Hans Blumenberg’s Work on Myth (1979, trans.

1985). Among other things, Blumenberg proposes that the function of myth

is to help human beings cope with the inexorability of reality and the course

of events—a need that is not outmoded by scientific advances and rationality;

that myths evolve according to a “Darwinism of words,” in which those

forms and variations survive that cope most effectively with the changing

social environment; and that myth is best conceived not as a collection of

fixed and final stories but as a “work”—an ongoing and ever-changing

process that is expressed in oral and written narratives and involves the diverse

ways in which these narratives are received and appropriated.

It can be said that a mythology is a religion which we do not believe.

Poets, however, after having ceased to believe them, have persisted in using

the myths of Jupiter, Venus, Prometheus, Wotan, Adam and Eve, and Jonah

for their plots, episodes, or allusions; as Coleridge said, “Still doth the old

instinct bring back the old names.” The term “myth” has also been extended

to denote supernatural tales that are deliberately invented by their authors.

Plato in the fourth century BC used such invented myths in order to project

philosophical speculation beyond the point at which certain knowledge is

possible; see, for example, his “Myth of Er” in Book X of The Republic. The

German Romantic authors F. W. J. Schelling and Friedrich Schlegel proposed

that to write great literature, modern poets must develop a new unifying

mythology which will synthesize the insights of the myths of the Western

past with the new discoveries of philosophy and the physical sciences. In the

same period in England William Blake, who felt “I must create a system or be

enslaved by another man’s,” incorporated in his poems a system of mythology

he had himself created by fusing hereditary myths, biblical history and pro-

phecy, and his own intuitions, visions, and intellection. A number of modern

writers have also asserted that an integrative mythology, whether inherited or

invented, is essential to literature. James Joyce in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake,

T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land, Eugene O’Neill in Mourning Becomes Electra,

and many other writers have deliberately woven their modern materials on

the pattern of ancient myths, while W. B. Yeats, like his admired predecessor

Blake, undertook to construct his own systematic mythology, which he

MYTH 231

expounded in A Vision (1926) and embodied in a number of remarkable lyric

poems such as “The Second Coming” and “Byzantium. ”

Around the middle of the twentieth century, “myth” became a prominent

term in literary analysis. A large group of writers, the myth critics—including

Robert Graves, Francis Fergusson, Maud Bodkin, Richard Chase, and (the most

influential) Northrop Frye—viewed the genres and individual plot patterns of

many works of literature, including what on the surface are highly sophisticated

and realistic works, as recurrences of basic mythic formulas. As Northrop Frye

put it, “[T]he typical forms of myth become the conventions and genres of

literature. ” According to Frye’s theory, there are four main narrative genres—

comedy,romance,tragedy,andirony(satire)—and these are “displaced” modes

of the four elemental forms of myth that are associated with the seasonal cycle of

spring, summer, autumn, and winter. (See archetypal criticism and genre.)

A reader needs to be alert to the bewildering variety of applications of the

term “myth” in contemporary criticism. In addition to those already described,

its uses range all the way from signifying any widely held fallacy (“the myth of

progress,”“the American success myth”) to denoting the solidly and detailedly

imagined realm within which a fictional narrative is enacted (“Faulkner’smyth

of Yoknapatawpha County,”“the mythical world of Moby-Dick”).

For classical mythology see H. J. Rose, A Handbook of Greek Mythology

(1939), and on the use of classical myths in English literature, Douglas Bush,

Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (rev. 1963) and

Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (rev. 1969). Among stud-

ies of myths especially influential for modern literature and criticism are James

G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (rev. 1911); Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to

Romance (1920); Jane E. Harrison, Themis (2nd ed., 1927). On “myth critics”

see William Righter, Myth and Literature (1975); and for instances of the the-

ory and practice of myth criticism, Richard Chase, Quest for Myth (1949);

Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960); John B. Vickery,

ed., Myth

and Literature (1966); Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957) and

“Literature and Myth” in Relations of Literary Study, ed. James Thorpe (1967).

This last essay has a useful bibliography of the theory and history of myths, as

well as of major exponents of myth criticism. (See archetypal criticism; folklore.)

myth critics: 232.

mythoi (m



oy): 19.

mythology: 230.

mythos: 293.

232 MYTH CRITICS

naive hero: 186.

narratee: 234.

narration, grammar of: The “grammar of narration” is the analysis of special

and distinctive grammatical usages that occur in fictional narratives. Its system-

atic study was begun by Käte Hamburger in The Logic of Literature (1957, trans.

1973). One focus of such analysis is the special play of deictics, also known as

indexicals or shifters—that is, words and phrases such as “now,”“then,”

“here,”“there,”“today,”“last week,” as well as personal pronouns (“I,”

“you”) and some tenses of verbs—whose reference depends on the particular

speaker and his or her position in place and time. In many narratives, usually

in a way not explicitly noticed by the reader, the references of such terms

constantly shift or merge, as the narration moves from the narrator, by

whom the events are told in the past tense (for example, then and there), to

a character in the narration, for whom the action is present (for example, here

and now). Another notable grammatical usage in narration has been called

free indirect discourse (equivalent to the French “style indirect libre”), or

“represented speech and thought.” These terms refer to the way, in many

narratives, that the reports of what a character says and thinks shift in pro-

nouns, adverbs, tense, and grammatical mode, as we move—or sometimes

hover—between the direct narrated representation of these events as they

occur to the character and the indirect representation of such events by the

narrator of the story. Thus, a direct representation, “He thought, ‘I will see

her home now, and may then stop at my mother’s,’”might shift, in an “indi-

rect representation,” to “ He thought that he would see her home and then

maybe stop at his mother’ s.” In a further shift to “free indirect representation”

the sentence might change to “He would see her home, and might afterward

stop at his mother’s.

” Refer

to narrative and narratology, and see Roy Pascal,

The Dual Voice: Free Indirect Speech and Its Functioning in the Nineteenth-

Century European Novel (1977); Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative

Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (1978); Ann Banfield, Unspeakable

Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction (1982).

narrative and narratology: A “narrative” is a story, whether told in prose or

verse, involving events, characters, and what the characters say and do. Some

literary forms such as the novel and short story in prose, and the epic and

romance in verse, are explicit narratives that are told by a narrator. In drama,

the narrative is not told but evolves by means of the direct presentation on

stage of the actions and speeches of the characters. (Refer to genres.) It should

be noted that there is an implicit narrative element even in many lyric poems.

In William Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper,” for example, we infer from

what the lyric speaker says that, coming unexpectedly in the Scottish

NARRATIVE AND NARRATOLOGY 233

Highlands upon a girl reaping and singing, he stops, attends, meditates, and

then resumes his climb up the hill.

Narratology denotes a concern, which became prominent in the mid-

twentieth century, with the general theory and practice of narrative in all

literary forms. It deals especially with types of narrators, the identification of

structural elements in narratives and their diverse modes of combination,

recurrent narrative devices, and the analysis of the kinds of discourse by which

a narrative gets told, as well as with the narratee—that is, the explicit or

implied person or audience to whom the narrator addresses the narrative.

Narratology does not, in general, seek to produce new meanings for literary

works but aims to describe the structures that enable such works to have the

meanings they do. Narratological theory in the latter part of the twentieth

century dealt with many of the same problems as traditional treatments of

narrative, but did so using concepts and analytic procedures that derived

from developments in Russian formalism and especially in French structuralism.

Narratology of this kind did not treat a narrative as a fictional representation

of life and the world but as a purely formal construction. A primary interest

of structural narratologists is in the way that narrative discourse fashions a

story—a mere sequence of events in time—into the organized and meaning-

ful structure of a literary plot. (The Russian formalists had made a parallel

distinction between the fabula—the elemental materials of a story—and the

syuzhet, the concrete representation used to convey the story.) The general

undertaking is to determine the rules, or codes of composition, that are man-

ifested by the diverse forms of plot, and also to formulate the “grammar” of

narrative in terms of structures and narrative formulas that recur in many

stories, whatever the differences in the narrated subject matters. In Narrative

Discourse (1980), followed by Figures of Literary Discourse (1982), the French

structuralist critic Gérard Genette presented influential analyses of the com-

plex interrelationships between a story and the types of discourse in which

the story is narrated, and greatly subtilized the treatment of point of view in

narrative fiction.

In the 1970s, the historian Hayden White set out to demonstrate that the

narratives written by historians are not simple representations of a sequence of

facts nor the revelation of a design inherent in events themselves. Instead,

White analyzes historical narratives as shaped by the imposition on events of

cultural patterns similar to the narratological, archetypal, and other structural

concepts that had been applied in the criticism of literature; see his Metahistory

(1973) and The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(1987). The philosopher W. B. Gallie wrote an influential book on the kind

of explanation and understanding that, in the writing of history, is achieved

by narration instead of propositional statements and logical arguments; see

W. B. Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (1964); also Arthur

C. Danto, Narration and Knowledge (1985).

A book which did much to inaugurate modern narratology was The

Morphology of the Folktale by the Russian formalist Vladimir Propp (trans.

1970). For later developments in narrative theory see, in addition to Genette

234 NARRATIVE AND NARRATOLOGY

(above), Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose (trans. 1977); Seymour

Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (1978);

Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (1981); Gerald Prince, A Dictionary

of Narratology (1987); Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (3 vols., 1984–88);

Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narration in Fiction and

Film (1990); Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative

(1992); Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (rev.

1997). For a version of narratology centered not on form but on the function

of stories in human cognition and sociality, see Monika Fludernik, Toward a

“Natural” Narratology (1996). See also David Herman et al., eds., Routledge

Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (2005); and the journal Storyworlds: A Journal

of Narrative Studies. Some cognitive psychologists and literary theorists have

proposed that narrative, or the telling of diverse “stories” about how one

thing leads to another, is the basic means by which we make sense of the

world, provide meaning to our experiences, and organize our lives. See

Jerome Bruner, Actual Worlds, Possible Minds (1986), and Acts of Meaning

(1990); and Mark Turner, The Literary Mind (1996). For some narratological

contributions to older analyses of how a story gets told, see point of view.

narratology: 234.

narrator: 301.

natural geniuses: 237.

naturalism: 334.

Naturalistic Period: 275.

naturalize (in reading): 398; 49, 66, 151, 247.

nature writing: 98.

negative capability: The poet John Keats introduced this term in a letter writ-

ten in December 1817 to define a literary quality “which Shakespeare pos-

sessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when man is

capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable

reaching after fact and reason.” Keats contrasted to this quality the writings

of Coleridge, who “would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude … from

being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge,” and went on to

express the general principle “that with a great poet the sense of beauty over-

comes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration. ”

The

elusive

term has entered critical circulation and has accumulated a large body

of commentary. When conjoined with observations in other letters by Keats,

“negative capability” can be taken (1) to characterize an impersonal, or objec-

tive, author who maintains aesthetic distance, as opposed to a subjective author

NEGATIVE CAPABILITY 235

who is personally involved with the characters and actions represented in a

work of literature, and as opposed also to an author who uses a literary

work to present and to make persuasive his or her personal beliefs; and

(2) to suggest that, when embodied in a beautiful artistic form, the literary

subject matter, concepts, and characters are not subject to the ordinary stan-

dards of evidence, truth, and morality, as we apply these standards in the

course of our everyday experience. Refer to distance and involvement and objec-

tive and subjective. On the diverse interpretations of Keats’“negative capabil-

ity,” see Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (1963).

neoclassic and romantic: The simplest use of these extremely variable terms

is as noncommittal names for periods of literature. In this application, the

“Neoclassic Period” in England spans the 140 years or so after the Restoration

(1660), and the “Romantic Period” is usually taken to extend approximately

from the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789—or alternatively, from

the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798—through the first three decades of

the nineteenth century. With reference to American literature, the term

“neoclassic” is rarely applied to eighteenth-century writers; on the other

hand, 1830–65, the era of Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne,

is sometimes called “the American Romantic Period.” (See periods of English

literature and periods of American literature.) “Neoclassic” and “romantic” are

frequently applied also to periods of German, French, and other Continental

literatures, but with differences in the historical spans they identify.

Historians have often tried to “define” neoclassicism or romanticism, as

though each term denoted an essential feature which was shared, to varying

degrees, by all the major writings of an age. But the multiplex course of liter-

ary events has not formed itself around such simple entities, and the numerous

and conflicting single definitions of neoclassicism and romanticism are either

so vague as to be next to meaningless or so specific as to fall far short of equat-

ing with the great range and variety of the literary phenomena. A more useful

undertaking is simply to specify some salient attributes of literary theory and

practice that were shared by a number of prominent writers in the Neoclassic

Period in England and that serve to distinguish them from many outstanding

writers of the Romantic Period. The following list of ideas and characteristics

that were shared, between 1660 and the late 1700s, by authors such as John

Dryden, Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson,

Oliver Goldsmith, and Edmund Burke, may serve as an introductory sketch

of some prominent features of neoclassic literature:

1. These authors exhibited a strong traditionalism, which was often joined

to a distrust of radical innovation and was evidenced above all in their

great respect for classical writers—that is, the writers of ancient Greece

and Rome—who were thought to have achieved excellence, and estab-

lished the enduring models, in all the major literary genres. Hence the

term “neoclassic.” (It is from this high estimate of the literary achieve-

ments of classical antiquity that the term “a classic

” has

come to be

236 NEOCLASSIC AND ROMANTIC

applied to any later literary work that is widely agreed to have achieved

excellence and to have set a standard in its kind. Refer to the entry canon

of literature, and see T. S. Eliot, What Is a Classic?, 1945, and Frank

Kermode, The Classic, 1975.)

2. Literature was conceived to be primarily an “art ”; that is, a set of skills

which, although it requires innate talents, must be perfected by long

study and practice and consists mainly in the deliberate adaptation of

known and tested means to the achievement of foreseen ends upon the

audience of readers. (See pragmatic criticism, under criticism.) The neoclassic

ideal, founded especially on Horace’s Roman Ars Poetica (first century

BC), is the craftsman’s ideal, demanding finish, correction, and attention

to detail. Special allowances were often made for the unerring and inno-

vative freedom of what were called natural geniuses, and also for felici-

tous strokes, available even to some less gifted poets, which occur without

premeditation and achieve, as Alexander Pope said (in his deft and com-

prehensive summary of neoclassic principles An Essay on Criticism, 1711),

“a grace beyond the reach of art.” But the prevailing view was that a

natural genius such as Homer or Shakespeare is extremely rare and prob-

ably a thing of the past, and that to even the best of artful poets, literary

“graces” come only occasionally. The representative neoclassic writer

commonly strove, therefore, for “correctness,” was careful to observe

the complex demands of stylistic decorum, and for the most part respected

the established “rules ” of his art. The neoclassic rules of poetry were, in

theory, the essential properties of the various genres (such as epic, tragedy,

comedy, pastoral) that have been abstracted from classical works whose

long survival has proved their excellence. Such properties, many critics

believed, must be embodied in modern works if these too are to be

excellent and to survive through the ages. In England, however, many

critics were dubious about some of the rules accepted by Italian and

French critics and opposed the strict application of rules such as the three

unities in drama.

3. Human beings, and especially human beings as an integral part of a social

organization, were regarded as the primary subject matter of the major

forms of literature. Poetry was held to be an imitation of human life—in a

common phrase, “a mirror held up to nature.” And by the human actions

it imitates, and the artistic form it gives to the imitation, poetry is

designed to yield both instruction and pleasure to the people who read

it. Not art for art’s sake, but art for humanity’s sake, was a central ideal

of neoclassic humanism.

4. In both the subject matter and the appeal of art, emphasis was placed on

what human beings possess in common—representative characteristics

and widely shared experiences, thoughts, feelings, and tastes.

“True

wit,” Pope

said in a much-quoted passage of his Essay on Criticism ,is

“what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed.” That is, a primary

aim of poetry is to give new and consummate expression to the great

NEOCLASSIC AND ROMANTIC 237

commonplaces of human wisdom, whose universal acceptance and dura-

bility are the best warrant of their importance and truth. Some critics also

insisted, it should be noted, on the need to balance or enhance the gen-

eral, typical, and familiar with the opposing qualities of novelty, particu-

larity, and invention. Samuel Johnson substituted for Pope’s definition of

true wit the statement that wit “is at once natural and new” and praised

Shakespeare because, while his characters are species, they are all “dis-

criminated” and “distinct.” But there was wide agreement that the gen-

eral nature and the shared values of humanity are the basic source and test

of art, and also that the fact of universal human agreement, everywhere

and always, is the best test of moral and religious truths, as well as of artis-

tic values. (Compare deism.)

5. Neoclassic writers, like the major philosophers of the time, viewed

human beings as limited agents who ought to set themselves only accessi-

ble goals. Many of the great works of the period, satiric and didactic,

attack human “pride”—interpreted as presumption beyond the natural

limits of the species—and enforce the lesson of the golden mean (the

avoidance of extremes) and of humanity’s need to submit to its restricted

position in the cosmic order—an order sometimes envisioned as a natural

hierarchy, or Great Chain of Being. In art, as in life, what was for the most

part praised was the law of measure and the acceptance of limits upon

one’s freedom. The poets admired extremely the great genres of epic

and tragedy but wrote their own masterpieces in admittedly lesser and

less demanding forms such as the essay in verse and prose, the comedy

of manners, and especially satire, in which they felt they had more chance

to equal or surpass their classical and English predecessors. They submitted

to at least some “rules” and other limiting conventions in literary subjects,

structure, and diction. Typical was their choice, in many poems, to write

within the extremely tight limits of the closed couplet. But a distinctive

quality of the urbane poetry of the Neoclassic Period was, in the phrase

often quoted from Horace, “the art that hides art”; that is, the seeming

freedom and ease with which, at its best, it meets the challenge set by

traditional and highly restrictive patterns.

Here are some aspects in which romantic aims and achievements, as

manifested by many prominent and innovative writers during the late eigh-

teenth and early nineteenth centuries, differ most conspicuously from their

neoclassic precursors:

1. The prevailing attitude favored innovation over traditionalism in the

materials, forms, and style of literature. Wordsworth’s preface to the sec-

ond edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1800 was written as a poetic manifesto,

or statement of revolutionary aims, in which he denounced the upper-

class subjects and the poetic diction of the preceding century and proposed

to deal with materials from “common life” in “a selection of language

really used by men.” Wordsworth’s serious or tragic treatment of lowly

subjects in common language violated the neoclassic rule of

decorum,

238 NEOCLASSIC AND ROMANTIC

which asserted that the serious genres should deal only with the momen-

tous actions of royal or aristocratic characters in an appropriately elevated

style. Other innovations in the period were the exploitation by Samuel

Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and others of the realm of the supernatural

and of “the far away and the long ago”; the assumption by William

Blake, William Wordsworth, and Percy Bysshe Shelley of the persona of

a poet-prophet who writes a visionary mode of poetry; and the use of

poetic symbolism (especially by Blake and Shelley) deriving from a world-

view in which objects are charged with a significance beyond their phys-

ical qualities. “I always seek in what I see,” as Shelley said, “the likeness

of something beyond the present and tangible object.”

2. In his preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth repeatedly declared that

good poetry is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Accord-

ing to this view, poetry is not primarily a mirror of men in action; on the

contrary, its essential component is the poet’s own feelings, while the

process of composition, since it is “spontaneous,” is the opposite of the

artful manipulation of means to foreseen ends stressed by the neoclassic

critics. (See expressive criticism.) Wordsworth carefully qualified this radical

doctrine by describing his poetry as “ emotion recollected in tranquility,”

by specifying that a poet’s spontaneity is the result of a prior process of

deep reflection, and by granting that it may be followed by second

thoughts and revisions. But the immediate act of composition, if a poem

is to be genuine, must be spontaneous—that is, unforced, and free of

what Wordsworth decried as the “artificial” rules and conventions of his

neoclassic predecessors. “If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a

tree,” Keats wrote, “it had better not come at all.” The philosophically

minded Coleridge substituted for neoclassic “rules,” which he describes

as imposed on the poem from without, the concept of inherent organic

“laws”; that is, he conceives that each poetic work, like a growing plant,

evolves according to its own internal principles into its final organic form.

3. To a remarkable degree external nature—the landscape, together with its

flora and fauna—became a persistent subject of poetry and was described

with an accuracy and sensuous nuance unprecedented in earlier writers. It

is a mistake, however, to describe the romantic poets as simply “nature

poets.” (See nature writing, under ecocriticism.) While many major poems

by Wordsworth and Coleridge—and to a great extent by Shelley and

Keats—set

out from and return to an aspect or change of aspect in the

landscape, the outer scene is not presented for its own sake but as a stim-

ulus for the poet to engage in the most characteristic human activity, that

of thinking. Representative Romantic works are in fact poems of feeling-

ful meditation which, although often stimulated by a natural pheno-

menon, are concerned with central human experiences and problems.

Wordsworth asserted, in what he called a “Prospectus” to his major

poems, that it is “the Mind of Man” which is “my haunt, and the main

region of my song.”

NEOCLASSIC AND ROMANTIC 239

4. Neoclassic poetry was about other people, but many Romantic poems,

long and short, invited the reader to identify the protagonists with the

poets themselves, either directly, as in Wordsworth’s Prelude (1805, rev.

1850) and a number of lyric poems (see lyric), or in altered but recognizable

form,asinLordByron’s Childe Harold (1812–18). In prose we find a par-

allel vogue in the revealingly personal essays of Charles Lamb and William

Hazlitt and in a number of spiritual and intellectual autobiographies:

Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822),

Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817), and Thomas Carlyle’s fictionalized

self-representation in Sartor Resartus (1833–34). And whether Romantic

subjects were the poets themselves or other people, they were no longer

represented as part of an organized society but, typically, as solitary figures

engaged in a long, and sometimes infinitely elusive, quest; often they were

also social nonconformists or outcasts. Many important Romantic works

had as protagonist the isolated rebel, whether for good or ill: Prometheus,

Cain, the Wandering Jew, the Satanic hero-villain, or the great outlaw.

5. What seemed to a number of political liberals the infinite social promise of

the French Revolution in the early 1790s fostered the sense in Romantic

writers that theirs was a great age of new beginnings and high possibilities.

Many writers viewed a human being as endowed with limitless aspiration

toward an infinite good envisioned by the faculty of imagination. “Our

destiny,” Wordsworth says in a visionary moment in The Prelude, “our

being’s heart and home, / Is with infinitude, and only there,” and our

desire is for “something evermore about to be.”“Less than everything,”

Blake announced, “cannot satisfy man.” Humanity’s undaunted aspirations

beyond its assigned limits, which to the neoclassic moralist had been its

tragic error of generic “pride,” now became humanity’s glory and a mode

of triumph, even in failure, over the pettiness of circumstance. In a parallel

way, the typical neoclassic judgment that the highest art is the perfect

achievement of limited aims gave way to dissatisfaction with rules and

inherited restrictions. According to a number of Romantic writers, the

highest art consists in an endeavor beyond finite human possibility; as a

result, neoclassical satisfaction in the perfectly accomplished, because

limited, enterprise was replaced in writers such as Blake, Wordsworth,

Coleridge, and Shelley by a preference for the glory of the imperfect, in

which the artist’s very failure attests the grandeur of his aim. Also, Roman-

tic writers once more entered into competition with their greatest prede-

cessors in audacious long poems in the most exacting genres: Wordsworth’s

Prelude (a rerendering, at epic length and in the form of a spiritual auto-

biography, of central themes of John Milton’s Paradise Lost); Blake’s vision-

ary and prophetic epics; Shelley’

s P

rometheus Unbound (emulating Greek

drama); Keats’ Miltonic epic Hyperion; and Byron’s ironic conspectus of

contemporary European civilization, Don Juan.

See Enlightenment, and refer to A. O. Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas

(1948); James Sutherland, A Preface to Eighteenth Century Poetry (1948); Walter

240 NEOCLASSIC AND ROMANTIC

Jackson Bate, From Classic to Romantic (1948); Harold Bloom, The Visionary

Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (1961); René Wellek, “The

Concept of Romanticism in Literary History” and “Romanticism

Re-examined,” in Concepts of Criticism (1963); Northrop Frye, ed., Romanticism

Reconsidered (1963), and A Study of English Romanticism (1968); R. S. Crane,

“Neoclassical Criticism,” in Dictionary of World Literature, ed. Joseph T. Shipley

(rev. 1970); M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the

Critical Tradition (1953), and Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in

Romantic Literature (1971); Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of

Ruin (1981); Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English

Literature and Its Background 1760–1830 (1982); Jerome McGann, The Romantic

Ideology (1983); Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary

Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism (trans. 1988); two

books by Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History

of Ideas (1990), and The Roots of Romanticism (2001; transcripts of lectures origi-

nally given, 1965); and Michael Ferber, Romanticism: A Very Short Introduction

(2nd ed., 2011). See also Stuart Curran, ed., The Cambridge Companion to British

Romanticism (1993); An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture

1776–1832 (2001); and Christopher Murray, Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era

(2004). Hugh Honour, in his books on Neo-classicism (1969) and on Romanticism

(1979), stresses the visual arts, while Charles Rosen, in The Romantic Generation

(1995), focuses on music. For a history of the era in Europe, see Tim Blanning,

The Romantic Revolution: A History (2011). In Poetic Form and British Romanticism

(1986), Stuart Curran stresses the relationship of innovative Romantic forms to

the traditional poetic genres.

See also closed couplet; decorum; deism; Enlightenment; Great Chain of Being;

humanism; primitivism; satire .

Neoclassic Period: 282; 160.

neoclassic poetic diction: 298

Neoplatonism (neoplat

onism): 292.

New Comedy: 57.

New Criticism: This term, made current by the publication of John Crowe

Ransom’s The New Criticism in 1941, came to be applied to a theory and prac-

tice that remained prominent in American literary criticism until late in the

1960s. The movement derived in considerable part from elements in

I. A. Richards ’ Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and Practical Criticism

(1929) and from the critical essays of T. S. Eliot. It opposed a prevailing inter-

est of scholars, critics, and teachers of that era in the biographies of authors, in

the social context of literature, and in literary history by insisting that the

proper concern of literary criticism is not with the external circumstances or

effects or historical position of a work but with a detailed consideration of the

NEW CRITICISM 241

work itself as an independent entity. Notable critics in this mode were the

southerners Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, whose textbooks

Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943) did much to

make the New Criticism the predominant method of teaching literature in

American colleges, and even in high schools, for the next two or three

decades. Other prominent writers of that time —in addition to Ransom,

Brooks, and Warren—who are often identified as New Critics are Allen

Tate, R. P. Blackmur, and William K. Wimsatt.

An influential English critic, F. R. Leavis, in turning his attention from

background, sources, and biography to the detailed analysis of “literary texts

themselves,” shared some of the concepts of the New Critics and their ana-

lytic focus on what he called “the words on the page.” He differed from his

American counterparts, however, in his insistence that great literary works are

a concrete and life-affirming enactment of moral and cultural values; he

stressed also the essential role in education of what he called “the Great

Tradition” of English literature in advancing the values of culture and “civil-

ization” against the antagonistic forces in modern life. See F. R. Leavis, Reval-

uation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (1936); Education and the

University (1943, 2nd ed. 1948); The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry

James, Joseph Conrad (1948); also Anne Sampson, F. R. Leavis (1992).

The New Critics differed from one another in many ways, but the fol-

lowing points of view and procedures were shared by many of them:

1. A poem should be treated as such —in Eliot’s words, “primarily as poetry

and not another thing ”— and should therefore be regarded as an indepen-

dent and self-sufficient verbal object. The first law of criticism, John

Crowe Ransom said, “is that it shall be objective, shall cite the nature

of the object” and shall recognize “the autonomy of the work itself as

existing for its own sake.” (See objective criticism.) New Critics warn the

reader against critical practices which divert attention from the poem itself

(see intentional fallacy and affective fallacy). In analyzing and evaluating a par-

ticular work, they eschew reference to the biography and temperament

and personal experiences of the author, to the social conditions at the

time of its production, or to its psychological and moral effects on the

reader; they also tend to minimize recourse to the place of the work in

the history of literary forms and subject matter. Because of its focus

on the literary work in isolation from its attendant circumstances and

effects, the New Criticism is often classified as a type of critical formalism.

2. The principles of the New Criticism are basically verbal. That is, literature

is conceived to be a special kind of language whose attributes are defined

by systematic opposition to the language of science and of practical and

logical discourse, and the explicative procedure is to analyze the meanings

and interactions of words, figures of speech, and symbols. The emphasis is on

the “organic unity,” in a successful literary work, of its overall structure

with its verbal meanings, and we are warned against separating the two by

what Cleanth Brooks called “the

heresy of paraphrase.”

242 NEW CRITICISM

3. The distinctive procedure for a New Critic is explication,orclose

reading: the detailed analysis of the complex interrelationships and ambi-

guities (multiple meanings) of the verbal and figurative components within

a work. Explication de texte (stressing all kinds of information, whether

internal or external, relevant to the full understanding of a word or pas-

sage) had long been a formal procedure for teaching literature in French

schools, but the explicative analysis of internal verbal interactions charac-

teristic of the New Criticism derives from such books as I. A. Richards’

Practical Criticism (1929) and William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity

(1930).

4. The distinction between literary genres, although acknowledged, does not

play an essential role in the New Criticism. The essential components of

any work of literature, whether lyric, narrative, or dramatic, are con-

ceived to be words, images, and symbols rather than character, thought,

and plot. These linguistic elements, whatever the genre, are often said to

be organized around a central and humanly significant theme, and to man-

ifest high literary value to the degree that they manifest “tension,”“irony,”

and “paradox” in achieving a “reconciliation of diverse impulses” or an

“equilibrium of opposed forces.” The form of a work, whether or not it

has characters and plot, is said to be primarily a “structure of meanings,”

which evolve into an integral and freestanding unity mainly through a

play and counterplay of “thematic imagery” and “symbolic action.”

The basic orientation and modes of analysis in the New Criticism were

adapted to the contextual criticism of Eliseo Vivas and Murray Krieger.

Krieger defined contextualism as “the claim that the poem is a tight, compel-

ling, finally closed context,” which prevents “our escape to the world of ref-

erence and action beyond,” and requires that we “judge the work’s efficacy as

an aesthetic object.” (See Murray Krieger, The New Apologists for Poetry, 1956,

and Theory of Criticism, 1976.) The revolutionary thrust of the mode had lost

much of its force by the 1960s, when it gave way to various newer theories of

criticism, but it has left a deep and enduring mark on the criticism and teach-

ing of literature, in its primary emphasis on the individual work and in the

variety and subtlety of the devices that it made available for analyzing its inter-

nal relations. Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, eds. Chaviva Hošek and

Patricia Parker (1985), is a collection of structuralist

, poststructuralist ,

and other

essays which—often in express opposition to the New Criticism—exemplify

the diverse newer modes of “close reading”; some of these essays claim that

competing forces within the language of a lyric poem preclude the possibility

of the unified meaning that was a central tenet of the New Critics.

Central instances of the theory and practice of New Criticism are Cleanth

Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (1947), and W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon

(1954). The enterprises of New Criticism are privileged over alternative

approaches to literature in René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature

(3rd ed., 1964), which became a standard reference book in the graduate study

of literature. Robert W. Stallman’s Critiques and Essays in Criticism, 1920–1948

NEW CRITICISM 243

(1949) is a convenient collection of essays in this critical mode. See also Joseph

M. Kuntz, ed., Poetry Explication: A Checklist of Interpretation since 1924 of

British and American Poems Past and Present (3rd ed., 1980). Additionally, see

W. K. Wimsatt, ed., Explication as Criticism (1963); the review of the movement

by René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, Vol. 6 (1986); and the spirited

retrospective defense of New Criticism by its chief exponent, Cleanth Brooks,

“In Search of the New Criticism” (1983), reprinted in Brooks, Community,

Religion, and Literature (1995). For critiques of the theory and methods of the

New Criticism, see R. S. Crane, ed., Critics and Criticism, Ancient and Modern

(1952), and The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (1953); Gerald

Graff, Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma (1970); Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory:

An Introduction (1993); Susan Wolfson, Formal Charges (1997). For references to

New Criticism in other entries, see pages 54, 143, 150, 179. See also affective

fallacy; ambiguity; form and structure; intentional fallacy; tension.

new formalism (in literary criticism): 144.

new formalism (in writing poetry): 146.

new historicism: Emerging in the 1980s, “new historicism” became the

accepted name for a mode of literary study that its proponents opposed to

the formalism they attributed both to the New Criticism and to the critical decon-

struction that followed it. Instead of dealing with a text in isolation from its

historical context, new historicists attended primarily to the historical and cul-

tural conditions of its production, its meanings, its effects, and also of its later

critical interpretations and evaluations. This is not simply a return to an earlier

kind of literary scholarship, for the views and practices of the new historicists

differed markedly from those of earlier scholars who had adverted to social

and intellectual history as a “background” against which to set a work of lit-

erature as an independent entity, or had viewed literature as a “reflection” of

the worldview characteristic of a period. Instead, new historicists conceived of

a literary text as “situated” within the totality of the institutions, social prac-

tices, and discourses that constitute the culture of a particular time and place,

and with which the literary text interacts as both a product and a producer of

cultural energies and codes.

What is most distinctive in this mode of historical study is mainly the

result of concepts and practices of literary analysis and interpretation that

have been assimilated from various recent poststructural theorists (see post-

structuralism). Especially prominent are the following: (1) The views of the

revisionist Marxist thinker Louis Althusser that ideology manifests itself in

different ways in the discourse of each of the semi-autonomous institutions

of an era, including literature, and also that ideology operates covertly to

form and position the users of language as the “subjects”

in a discourse, in a

way

that in fact “subjects” them—that is, subordinates them—to the interests

of the ruling classes; see ideology under Marxist criticism, and subject under post-

structuralism. (2) Michel Foucault’s view that the discourse of an era, instead of

244 NEW FORMALISM

reflecting pre-existing entities and orders, brings into being the concepts,

oppositions, and hierarchies of which it speaks; that these elements are both

products and propagators of “power,” or social forces; and that as a result, the

particular discursive formations of an era determine what is at the time

accounted to be “knowledge” and “truth,” as well as what is considered to

be humanly normal as against what is considered to be criminal, or insane,

or sexually deviant; see Foucault under poststructuralism. (3) The central con-

cept in deconstructive criticism that all texts involve modes of signification that

war against each other, merged with Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the dia-

logic nature of many literary texts, in the sense that they incorporate a num-

ber of conflicting voices that represent diverse social classes and interests; see

dialogic criticism. (4) Developments in cultural anthropology, especially Clifford

Geertz’s view that a culture is constituted by distinctive sets of signifying sys-

tems, and his use of what he calls thick descriptions—the close analysis, or

“reading,” of a particular social production or event so as to recover the

meanings it has for the people involved in it, as well as to discover, within

the overall cultural system, the network of conventions, codes, and modes of

thinking with which the particular item is implicated and which invest the

item with those meanings.

In an oft-quoted phrase, Louis Montrose described the new historicism as

“a reciprocal concern with the historicity of texts and the textuality of

history.” That is, history is conceived to be not a set of fixed, objective facts

but, like the literature with which it interacts, a text that itself needs to be

interpreted. Any text, on the other hand, is conceived as a discourse which,

although it may seem to present, or reflect, an external reality, in fact consists

of what are called representations—that is, verbal formations which are the

“ideological products” or cultural constructs of the historical conditions

specific to an era. A number of historicists claim also that these cultural and

ideological representations in texts serve mainly to reproduce, confirm, and

propagate the complex power structures of domination and subordination

which characterize a given society.

Despite their common perspective on literary writings as mutually impli-

cative with all other components of a culture, we find considerable diversity

and disagreements among individual exponents of the new historicism. The

following proposals, however, occur frequently in their writings, sometimes

in an extreme and sometimes in a qualified form. All of them are formulated

in opposition to views that, according to new historicists, were central ideo-

logical constructs in traditional literary criticism. Many historicists assign the

formative period of some basic constructs to the early era of capitalism in

the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

1. Literature does not occupy a “trans-historical” aesthetic realm which is inde-

pendent of the economic, social, and political conditions specific to an era,

nor is literature subject to timeless criteria of artistic value. Instead, a literary

text is simply one of many kinds of texts—religious, philosophical, legal,

scientific, and so on—all of which are formed and structured by the

NEW HISTORICISM 245

particular conditions of a time and place, and among which the literary text

has neither unique status nor special privilege. A related fallacy of main-

stream criticism, according to new historicists, was to view a literary text

as an autonomous body of fixed meanings that cohere to form an organic

whole in which all conflicts are artistically resolved. (See, for example, New

Criticism.) On the contrary, it is claimed, many literary texts consist of a

diversity of dissonant voices, and these voices express not only the ortho-

dox but also the subordinated and subversive forces of the era in which the

text was produced. Furthermore, what may seem to be the artistic resolu-

tion of a literary plot, yielding pleasure to the reader, is in fact deceptive,

for it is an effect that serves to cover over the unresolved conflicts of

power, class, gender, and diverse social groups that make up the tensions

that underlie the surface meanings of a literary text.

Some new historicists nonetheless maintain the distinction between

literary and nonliterary works, as well as between major and lesser

works of literary artistry. As Stephen Greenblatt has said, “Major works

of art remain centrally important, but they are jostled now by an array

of other texts and images.” The confrontation of such works with

minor or nonliterary works, he claims, in fact serves to explain what it

means to be major and indicates why it is that works that are major

have outlasted the others.

2. History is not a homogeneous and stable pattern of facts and events which

serve as the “background” to the literature of an era, or which literature

can be said simply to reflect, or which can be adverted to (as in early

Marxist criticism)asthe“material” conditions that, in a unilateral way, deter-

mine the particularities of a literary text. In contrast to such views, a literary

text is said by new historicists to be thoroughly “embedded” in its context

and in a constant interaction and interchange with other components inside

the network of institutions, beliefs, and cultural power relationships, prac-

tices, and products that, in their ensemble, constitute what we call history.

New historicists commonly regard even the conceptual “boundaries” by

which we currently discriminate between literature and nonliterary texts to

be a construct of post-Renaissance ideological formations. They continue

to make use of such discriminations, but only for tactical convenience in

conducting critical discussion, and stress that one must view all boundaries

between types of discourse as entirely permeable to interchanges of diverse

elements and forces. Favored terms for such interchanges—whether among

the modes of discourse within a single literary text, or among diverse kinds

of texts, or between a text and its institutional and cultural context—are

“negotiation,”“commerce,”“exchange,”“transaction,” and “circulation.”

Such metaphors are intended not only to denote the two-way, oscillatory

relationships among literary and other components of a culture but also to

indicate, by their obvious origin in the monetary discourse of the market-

place, the degree to which the operations and values of modern consumer

capitalism saturate the literary and aesthetic, as well as all other institutions

246 NEW HISTORICISM

and relations. As Stephen Greenblatt expressed such a view, the “negotia-

tion” that results in the production and circulation of a work of art involves

a “mutually profitable exchange”—including “a return normally measured

in pleasure and interest”—in which “the society’s dominant currencies,

money and prestige, are invariably involved.” (“Toward a Poetics of

Culture,” in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser, 1989.)

3. The humanistic concept of an essential human nature that is shared by the

author of a literary work, the characters within the work, and the audi-

ence the author writes for is another of the widely held ideological illu-

sions that, according to many new historicists, were generated primarily

by a capitalist culture. They also attribute to this “bourgeois” and “essen-

tialist humanism” the view that a literary work is the imaginative creation

of a free, or “autonomous,” author who possesses a unified, unique, and

enduring personal identity. (See essentialism in the entry humanism, also

author and authorship.) In the epilogue to Renaissance Self-Fashioning

(1980), Stephen Greenblatt says that, in the course of writing the book,

he lost his initial confidence in “the role of human autonomy,” for “the

human subject itself began to seem remarkably unfree, the ideological

product of the relations of power in a particular society.” An area of con-

test among new historicists is the extent to which an author, despite being

a subject who is constructed and positioned by the play of power and ide-

ology within the discourse of a particular era, may retain some scope for

individual initiative and “agency.” A number of historicists who ascribe a

degree of freedom and initiative to an individual author do so, however,

not as in traditional criticism, in order to account for an author’s literary

invention and distinctive artistry, but in order to keep open the theoreti-

cal possibility that an individual author can intervene so as to inaugurate

radical changes in the social power structure of which that individual’s

own “subjectivity” and function are themselves a product.

4. Like the authors who produce literary texts, their readers are subjects

who are constructed and positioned by the conditions and ideological

formations of their own era. All claims, therefore, for the possibility of a

disinterested and objective interpretation and evaluation of a literary text—

such as Matthew Arnold’s behest that we see a work “as in itself it really

”—are

among the illusions of a humanistic idealism. Insofar as the ide-

ology of readers conforms to the ideology of the writer of a literary text,

the readers will tend to naturalize the text—that is, interpret its culture-

specific and time-bound representations as though they were the features

of universal and permanent human nature and experience. On the other

hand, insofar as the readers’ ideology differs from that of the writer, they

will tend to appropriate the text—that is, interpret it so as to make it

conform to their own cultural prepossessions.

New historicists acknowledge that they themselves, like all authors, are

“subjectivities” that have been shaped and informed by the circumstances

and discourses specific to their era, hence that their own critical writings in

NEW HISTORICISM 247

great part construct, rather than discover ready-made, the textual meanings

they describe and the literary and cultural histories they narrate. To mitigate

the risk that they will unquestioningly appropriate texts that were written

in the past, they stress that the course of history between the past and present

is not coherent but exhibits discontinuities, breaks, and ruptures; by doing so,

they hope to “distance” and “estrange” an earlier text and so sharpen their

ability to detect its differences from their present ideological assumptions.

Some historicists present their readings of texts written in the past as (in their

favored metaphor) “negotiations” between past and present. In this two-way

relationship, the features of a cultural product, which are identifiable only rel-

ative to their differences from the historicist’s subject-position, in return make

possible some degree of insight into the forces and configurations of power —

especially with respect to class, gender, race, and ethnicity—that prevail in the

historicist’s present culture and serve to shape the historicist’s own ideology

and interpretations.

The concepts, themes, and procedures of new historicist criticism took

shape in the late 1970s and early 1980s, most prominently in writings by

scholars of the English Renaissance. They directed their attention especially

to literary forms such as the pastoral and masque, and above all drama; empha-

sized the role in shaping a text of social and economic conditions such as

literary patronage, censorship, and the control of access to printing; analyzed

texts as discursive “sites” which enacted and reproduced the interests and

power of the Tudor monarchy; but were alert to detect within such texts

the voices of the oppressed, the marginalized, and the dispossessed. At almost

the same time, students of the English Romantic period developed parallel

conceptions of the intertextuality of literature and history and similar views

that the “representations” in literary texts are not reflectors of reality but

“concretized” forms of ideology. Historicists of Romantic literature, however,

in distinction from most Renaissance historicists, often name their critical pro-

cedures political readings of a literary text—readings in which they stress

quasi-Freudian mechanisms such as “suppression,”“displacement,” and “sub-

stitution” by which, they assert, a writer’s political ideology (in a process of

which the writer remains largely or entirely unaware) inevitably disguises, or

entirely elides into silence and “absence,” the circumstances and contradic-

tions of contemporary history. The primary aim of a political reader of a liter-

ary text is to undo these ideological disguises and suppressions in order to

uncover its subtext of historical and political conflicts and oppressions which

are the text’s true, although covert or unmentioned, subject matter. (On

such textual “silences,” see Pierre Macherey and Fredric Jameson, under

Marxist criticism.)

In the course of the 1980s, the characteristic viewpoints and practices of

new historicism spread rapidly to all periods of literary study and were increas-

ingly represented, described, and debated in conferences, books, and periodi-

cal essays. The interpretive procedures of this critical mode have interacted

with the earlier concern of feminist

critics, who stressed the role of male

power

structures in forming dominant ideological and cultural constructs.

248 NEW HISTORICISM

New historicist procedures also have parallels in the critics of African-American

and other ethnic literatures, who stress the role of culture formations domi-

nated by white Europeans in suppressing, marginalizing, or distorting the

achievements of nonwhite and non-European peoples. In the 1990s, various

forms of new historicism, and related types of criticism that stress the embed-

dedness of literature in historical circumstances replaced deconstruction as the

reigning mode of avant-garde critical theory and practice.

Stephen Greenblatt inaugurated the currency of the label “new historicism”

in his Introduction to a special issue of Genre, Vol. 15 (1982). He prefers, how-

ever,tocallhisowncriticalenterprisecultural poetics,inordertohighlighthis

concern with literature and the arts as integral with other social practices that, in

their complex interactions, make up the general culture of an era. Greenblatt’s

essay entitled “Invisible Bullets” in Shakespearean Negotiations (1988) serves to

exemplify the interpretive procedures of the leading exponent of this mode of

criticism, who often inaugurates a commentary on a work of literature with an

unexpected historical anecdote, or with a “luminous” interpretive detail in a

marginal literary text, or in a nonliterary text. In this essay, Greenblatt begins

by reading a selection from Thomas Harriot’s A Brief and True Report of the

New Found Land of Virginia, written in 1588, as a representative discourse of

the English colonizers of America which, without its author’s awareness, serves

to confirm “the Machiavellian hypothesis of the origin of princely power in

force and fraud” but nonetheless draws its “audience irresistibly toward the cele-

bration of that power.” Greenblatt also asserts that Harriot tests the English

power structure that he attests by recording in his Report the countervoices of

theNativeAmericanswhoarebeingappropriated and oppressed by that

power. Greenblatt then identifies parallel modes of power discourse and coun-

terdiscourse in the dialogues in Shakespeare’s Tempest between Prospero, the

imperialist appropriator, and Caliban, the expropriated native of his island, and

goes on to find similar discursive configurations in the texts of Shakespeare ’s

Henry IV, 1 and 2,andHenry V.InGreenblatt’s reading, the dialogue and events

of the Henry plays reveal the degree to which princely power is based on pre-

dation, calculati on, deceit, and hypocrisy; at the same time, the plays do not

scruple to record the dissonant and subversive voices of Falstaff and various

other representatives of Elizabethan subcultures. These counterestablishment dis-

courses in Shakespeare’splays,however,infactaresomanagedastomaneuver

their audience to accept and even glorify the power structure to which that

audience is itself subordinated. Greenblatt applies to these plays a conceptual pat-

tern, the subversion–containment dialectic, which has been a central con-

cern of new historicist critics of Renaissance

literature. The thesis is that, in

order to sustain its power, any durable political and cultural order not only to

some degree allows but also actively fosters “subversive” elements and forces, yet

in such a way as more effectively to “contai n” such challenges to the existing

order. (Foucault had established such a conception by his claim that, under a

dominating “regimen of truth,” all attempts at opposition to power cannot

help but be “complicitous” with it.) This view of the general triumph of con-

tainment over the forces of subversion has been criticized as “pessimistic” and

NEW HISTORICISM 249

“quietist” by the group of new historicists known as “cultural materialists,” who

insist on the capacity of subversive ideas and practices —such as those manifested

in their own critical writings—to effect drastic social changes.

Cultural materialism is a term, employed by the British neo-Marxist

critic Raymond Williams, which has been adopted by a number of other British

scholars, especially those concerned with the literature of the Renaissance,

to indicate the Marxist orientation of their mode of new historicism—Marxist

in that they retain a version of Marx’ s view of cultural phenomena as a

“superstructure” which, in the last analysis, is determined by the “material”

(that is, economic) “base.” (See Marxist criticism.) They insist that, whatever

the “textuality” of history, a culture and its literary products are always to an

important degree conditioned by the true, material forces and relations of

production in their historical era. They are particularly interested in the polit-

ical significance, and especially the subversive aspects and effects, of a literary

text, not only in its own time but also in later versions that have been revised

for the theater and the cinema. Cultural materialists stress that their criticism is

itself oriented toward political “intervention” in their own era, in an express

“commitment,” as Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield have put it, “to the

transformation of a social order which exploits people on grounds of race,

gender, and class.” (Foreword to Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural

Materialism, 1985. See also the comment on Stuart Hall, in the entry Marxist

criticism.) Similar views are expressed by those American exponents of the new

literary history who are political activists; indeed, some of them claim that if

new historicists limit themselves to analyzing examples of class dominance and

exploitation in literary texts, but stop short of a commitment to reform the

present social order, they have been co-opted into “complicity” with the for-

malist literary criticism that they set out to displace. For the connections

between North American forms of historicism and British cultural material-

ism, see Kiernan Ryan, ed., New Historicism and Cultural Materialism: A Reader

(1996), and John Brannigan, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (1998).

See cultural studies, which is closely related to the new historicism. For

writers especially influential in forming the concepts and practices of the

new historicism, see Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays

(1969, trans. 1971); and Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an

Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). The

New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (1989), is a useful collection of essays

by Louis Montrose, Stephen Greenblatt, and other prominent historicists

who focus on the Renaissance; see also Veeser’s

The New Historicism Reader

(1994);

the essays in Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry J. Reynolds, eds., New Historical

Literary Study (1993); Stephen Greenblatt, ed., Representing the English Renais-

sance (1988), and his Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (1990).

See also Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Histori-

cism (2000). For a feminist application of new historicism, refer to Margaret

W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers, eds., Rewriting the

Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (1986).

Treatments of Romantic literature that exemplify a new historicist orientation

250 NEW HISTORICISM

include Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation

(1983); Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems (1986); Clifford

Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (1988); Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The

Sense of History (1989); and Marjorie Levinson and others, Rethinking Histori-

cism: Critical Readings in Romantic History (1989). For new historicist criticism

focused on literature after the Romantic period, see Catherine Gallagher, The

Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form,

1832–1867 (1985), and Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the

Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (1987). Refer

also to the journal Representations.In“What Is New Formalism?” (PMLA,

Vol. 122, 2007), Marjorie Levinson stresses the connection between new his-

toricism and the revival of critical interest in questions of literary form; see new

formalism.

Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield present writings by British cultural

materialists in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (1985), as

does John Drakakis in Alternative Shakespeares (1985); see also Terry Eagleton,

Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976), and Raymond Williams, Marxism and

Literature (1977). Walter Cohen, “Political Criticism of Shakespeare,” in Jean

E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor, eds., Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text

in History and Ideology (1987), interrogates new historicism from a Marxist

point of view; while J. Hillis Miller, in his presidential address to the Modern

Language Association on “The Triumph of Theory” (PMLA, Vol. 102, 1987,

pp. 281–91), does so from the point of view of deconstructive criticism.

Feminist critiques of new historicism are Lynda Boose, “The Family in

Shakespeare Studies,” Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 40 (1987); and Carol

Thomas Neely, “Constructing the Subject: Feminist Practice and the New

Renaissance Discourse,” English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 18 (1988). Critiques

of some forms of new historicism from more traditional critical positions are

Edward Pechter, “The New Historicism and Its Discontents,” PMLA,

Vol. 102 (1987); M. H. Abrams, “On Political Readings of Lyrical Ballads,”

in Doing Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory (1989);

Richard Levin, “Unthinkable

Thoughts in the New Historicizing of English

Renaissance Drama,” New Literary History, Vol. 21 (1989–90), pp. 433–47;

and Brook Thomas, The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics

(1991). For tendencies in the writing of general history closely parallel to the

new historicism in literary studies, see Dominick La Capra, History and

Criticism (1985); and Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (1989). For

references to new historicism in other entries, see pages 54, 107, 165, 312, 408.

New Humanism: 164.

new novel: 258; 49.

new philology: 195.

new philosophy: 340.

NEW PHILOSOPHY 251

new pragmatism: 313.

new science, the: 340.

New York Intellectuals: 277.

New York Poets: 277.

Noble Savage: 315.

nom de plume: 271.

nonfiction novel: 257.

nonperiodic sentence: 384.

nonsense verses: 193.

nouveau roman (noovo

romän

): 258.

novel: The term “novel” is applied to a great variety of writings that have in

common only the attribute of being extended works of fiction written in

prose. As an extended narrative, the novel is distinguished from the short

story and from the work of middle length called the novelette; its magnitude

permits a greater variety of characters, greater complication of plot (or plots),

ampler development of milieu, and more sustained exploration of character

and motives than do the shorter, more concentrated modes. As a narrative

written in prose, the novel is distinguished from the long narratives in verse

of Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton which, beginning

with the eighteenth century, the novel has increasingly supplanted. Within

these limits the novel includes such diverse works as Samuel Richardson’s

Pamela and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy; Jane Austen’s Emma and Virginia

Woolf’s Orlando; Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers and Henry James’ The Wings

of the Dove; Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Franz Kafka’s The Trial;Ernest

Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake;DorisLes-

sing’s The Golden Notebook and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.

The term for the novel in most European languages is roman, which is

derived from the medieval term, the romance. The English name for the form,

on the other hand, is derived from the Italian novella (literally, “a little new

thing”), which was a short tale in prose. In fourteenth-century Italy, there was

a vogue for collections of such tales, some serious and some scandalous; the

best known of these collections is Boccaccio’s Decameron, which is still avail-

able in English translation at any well-stocked bookstore. Currently the term

“novella” (or in the German form, Novelle) is often used as an equivalent for

novelette: a prose fiction of middle length, such as Joseph Conrad

’s Heart

Darkness or Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. (See under short story.)

252 NEW PRAGMATISM

Long narrative romances in prose were written by Greek writers as early as

the second and third centuries AD. Typical ly they dealt with separated lovers

who, after perilous adventures and hairbreadth escapes, are happily reunited at

the end. The best known of these Greek romances, influential in later European

literature, were the Aethiopica by Heliodorus and the charming pastoral narra-

tive Daphnis and Chloe by Longus. Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde (the model for

Shakespeare’s As You Like It) and Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia were Elizabethan con-

tinuations of the pastoral romance of the ancient Greeks. See romance and pastoral.

Another important predecessor of the novel was the picaresque narra-

tive, which emerged in sixteenth-century Spain; see Michael Alpert, trans.,

Lazarillo de Tormes and The Swindler (2003), and Giancarlo Maiorino, At the

Margins of the Renaissance: Lazarillo de Tormes and the Picaresque Art of Survival

(2003). The most popular instance, however, Gil Blas (1715), was written by

the Frenchman Lesage. “Picaro” is Spanish for “rogue,” and a typical story

concerns the escapades of an insouciant rascal who lives by his wits and

shows little if any alteration of character through a long succession of adven-

tures. Picaresque fiction is realistic in manner, episodic in structure (that is,

composed of a sequence of events held together largely because they hap-

pened to one person), and often satiric in aim. The first, and very lively,

English example was Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (1594). We

recognize the survival of the picaresque type in many later novels such as

Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Saul Bellow’s The Adven-

tures of Augie March (1953), and Thomas Mann’s The Confessions of Felix Krull

(1954). The development of the novel owes much to prose works which, like

the picaresque story, were written to deflate romantic or idealized fictional

forms. Cervantes’ great quasi-picaresque narrative Don Quixote (1605) was

the single most important progenitor of the modern novel; in it, an engaging

madman who tries to live by the ideals of chivalric romance in the everyday

world is used to explore the relationships of illusion and reality in human life.

After these precedents and many others—including the seventeenth-

century character (a brief sketch of a typical personality or way of life) and

Madame de La Fayette’s psychologically complex study of character, La

Princesse de Clèves (1678)—what is recognizably the novel as we now think

of it appeared in England in the early eighteenth century. In 1719, Daniel

Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe and in 1722, Moll Flanders

. Both of these are

still

picaresque in type, in the sense that their structure is episodic rather

than in the organized form of a plot; while Moll is herself a colorful female

version of the old picaro—“twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof

once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported

Felon in Virginia,” as the title page resoundingly informs us. But Robinson

Crusoe is given an enforced unity of action by its focus on the problem of

surviving on an uninhabited island, and both stories present so convincing a

central character, set in so solid and detailedly realized a world, that Defoe is

often credited with writing the first novel of incident.

The credit for having written the first English novel of character,or

“psychological novel,” is almost unanimously given to Samuel Richardson

NOVEL 253

for his Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740). Pamela is the story of a sentimental

but shrewd young woman who, by prudently safeguarding her beleaguered

chastity, succeeds in becoming the wife of a wild young gentleman instead

of his debauched servant girl. The distinction between the novel of incident

and the novel of character cannot be drawn sharply; but in the novel of inci-

dent, the greater interest is in what the protagonist will do next and on how

the story will turn out; in the novel of character, it is on the protagonist’s

motives for what he or she does, and on how the protagonist as a person

will turn out. On twentieth-century developments in the novel of character

see Leon Edel, The Modern Psychological Novel (rev. 1965). For an account, in

the mode of cultural studies , of the genesis of the conception of character in the

novel, see Deidre S. Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture,

and the Business of Inner Meaning (1998).

Pamela, like its greater and tragic successor, Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–48),

is an epistolary novel; that is, the narrative is conveyed entirely by an

exchange of letters. Later novelists have preferred alternative devices for limiting

the narrative point of view to one or another single character, but the epistolary

technique is still occasionally revived—for example, in Mark Harris’ hilarious

novel Wake Up, Stupid (1959) and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982). See

Linda Kauffman, Special Delivery: Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction (1992).

Novels may have any kind of plot form—tragic, comic, satiric, or roman-

tic. A common distinction—which was described by Hawthorne, in his preface

to The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and elsewhere, and has been adopted

and expanded by a number of critics—is that between two basic types of

prose fiction: the realistic novel (which is the novel proper) and the romance.

The realistic novel can be described as the fictional attempt to give the effect

of realism by representing complex characters with mixed motives who are

rooted in a social class, operate in a developed social structure, interact with

many other characters, and undergo plausible, everyday modes of experience.

This novelistic mode, rooted in such eighteenth-century writers as Defoe and

Fielding, achieved a high development in the master novelists of the nineteenth

century, including Jane Austen, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, William

Dean Howells, and Henry James in England and America; Stendhal, George

Sand, Balzac, and Flaubert in France; and Turgenev and Tolstoy in Russia. If,

as in the writings of Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, and John P. Marquand, a

realistic novel focuses on the customs, conversation, and ways of thinking and

valuing of the upper social class, it is often called a novel of manners.The

prose romance, on the other hand, has as its precursors the chivalric romance

of the Middle Ages and the Gothic novel of the later eighteenth century. It

usually deploys characters who are sharply discriminated as heroes or villains,

masters or victims; its protagonist is often solitary and relatively isolated from a

social context; it tends to be set in the historical past, and the atmosphere is such

as to suspend the reader’s expectations that are based on everyday experience.

The plot of the prose romance emphasizes adventure and is frequently cast in

the form of the quest for an ideal or the pursuit of an enemy; and the nonreal-

istic and occasionally melodramatic events are claimed by some critics to project

254 NOVEL

in symbolic form the primal desires, hopes, and terrors in the depths of the

human mind and to be therefore analogous to the materials of dream, myth,

ritual, and folklore. Examples of romance novels are Walter Scott’s Rob Roy

(1817), Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers (1844–45), Emily Brontë’s

Wuthering Heights (1847), and an important line of American narratives which

extends from Edgar Allan Poe, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne,

and Herman Melville to the writings of William Faulkner and Saul Bellow.

Martin Green, in Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (1979), distinguishes a

special type of romance, “the adventure novel,” which deals with masculine

adventures in the newly colonized non-European world. Defoe’s Robinson

Crusoe (1719) is an early prototype; some later instances are Robert Louis

Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines

(1886), and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901).

Refer to Laurie Langbauer, Women and Romance: The Consolations of

Gender in the English Novel (1990); Deborah Ross, The Excellence of Falsehood:

Romance, Realism, and Women’s Contribution to the Novel (1991). On the realis-

tic novel in the nineteenth century see Harry Levin, The Gates of Horn: A

Study of Five French Realists (1963). On the prose romance in America, see

Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957); Northrop Frye,

“The Mythos of Summer: Romance,” in Anatomy of Criticism (1957); Joel

Porte, The Romance in America (1969); Michael D. Bell, The Development of

American Romance (1980); and for a skeptical view of the usual division

between novel and romance, Nina Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers:

Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America (1984).

Other often identified subclasses of the novel are based on differences in

subject matter, emphasis, and artistic purpose:

Bildungsroman and Erziehungsroman are German terms signifying

“novel of formation” or “ novel of education.” The subject of these novels is

the development of the protagonist’s mind and character in the passage from

childhood through varied experiences—and often through a spiritual crisis—

into maturity; this process usually involves recognition of one’

s identity and

role

in the world. The mode began in Germany with K. P. Moritz’s Anton

Reiser (1785–90) and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–96); it

includes Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), George Eliot’s The Mill on the

Floss (1860), Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1861), Somerset Maugham’s

Of Human Bondage (1915), and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924). A

significant early critical discussion was Karl Morgenstern, “On the Nature of

the Bildungsroman” (1820, trans., Tobias Boes, PMLA, Vol. 124, March,

2009). An important subtype of the Bildungsroman is the Künstlerroman

(“artist-novel”), which represents the development of a novelist or other artist

from childhood into the stage of maturity that signalizes the recognition of

the protagonist’s artistic destiny and mastery of an artistic craft. Dickens’

David Copperfield (1849–50) can be considered an early instance of this type;

later and more developed examples include some major novels of the twenti-

eth century: Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (1913–27), James

Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914–15), Thomas Mann’s

NOVEL 255

Tonio Kröger (1903) and Dr. Faustus (1947), and André Gide’s The Counterfei-

ters (1926). See Lionel Trilling, “The Princess Casamassima,” in The Liberal

Imagination (1950); Maurice Beebe, Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts: The Artist

as Hero in Fiction (1964); Jerome H. Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsro-

man from Dickens to Golding (1974); Martin Swales, The German Bildungsroman

from Wieland to Hesse (1978); Thomas L. Jeffers, Apprenticeships: The Bildungsro-

man from Goethe to Santayana (2005). In Unbecoming Women: British Women

Writers and the Novel of Development (1993), Susan Fraiman analyzes novels

about “growing up female”; she proposes that they put to question the

“enabling fiction” that the Bildungsroman is a “progressive development”

toward “masterful selfhood.”

The social novel emphasizes the influence of the social and economic

conditions of an era on shaping characters and determining events; if it also

embodies an implicit or explicit thesis recommending political and social

reform, it is often called a sociological novel. Examples of social novels are

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852); Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle

(1906); John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939); and Nadine Gordimer’s

Burger’s Daughter (1979). A Marxist version of the social novel, representing

the hardships suffered by the oppressed working class, and usually written to

incite the reader to radical political action, is called the proletarian novel

(see Marxist criticism). Proletarian fiction flourished especially during the great

economic depression of the 1930s. An English example is Walter Green-

wood’s Love on the Dole (1933); American examples are Robert Cantwell’s

Laugh and Lie Down (1931), about the harshness of life in a lumber mill city

in the Northwest, and Grace Lumpkin’s To Make My Bread (1932), about a

mill strike in North Carolina.

Some realistic novels, including George Eliot’s Middlemarch

and Tolstoy’s

War

and Peace, make use of events and personages from the historical past to

add interest and credibility to the narrative, but in them, the principal focus is

on the fictional protagonists. What we usually specify as the historical novel

proper began in the nineteenth century with Sir Walter Scott. The historical

novel not only takes its setting and some characters and events from history

but makes the historical events and issues crucial for the central characters

(who may themselves be historical personages) and for the course of the nar-

rative. Some of the greatest historical novels also use the protagonists and

actions to reveal what the author regards as the deep forces that impel the

historical process. Examples of historical novels are Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819), set

in the period of Norman domination of the Saxons at the time of Richard I;

Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (1859), set in Paris and London during the

French Revolution; George Eliot’s Romola (1863), in Florence during the

Renaissance; and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936), in Georgia

during the Civil War and Reconstruction. An influential treatment of the

form was by the Marxist scholar and critic Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel

(1937, trans. 1962); a comprehensive later commentary is by Harry E. Shaw,

The Forms of Historical Fiction: Sir Walter Scott and His Successors (1983).

256 NOVEL

One twentieth-century variant of the historical novel is known as

documentary fiction, which not only incorporates historical characters and

events but also reports of everyday happenings in contemporary newspapers:

John Dos Passos, USA (1938); E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime (1975) and Billy

Bathgate (1989). Another offshoot is the form that one of its innovators,

Truman Capote, named the nonfiction novel. This uses a variety of novel-

istic techniques, such as deviations from the temporal sequence of events and

descriptions of a participant’s state of mind, to give a graphic rendering of

recent people and happenings, and is based not only on historical records but

often on personal interviews with the chief agents. Truman Capote’s In Cold

Blood (1965) and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (1979) are instances

of this mode; both offer a detailed rendering of the life, personality, and actions

of murderers, based on a sustained ser ies of prison interviews with t he pro-

tagonists themselves. Other examples of this form are the writings of

John McPhee, which t he author calls literature of fact;seehisLevels of

the Game (1969) and The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed (1973). A third v ariant is

the fabulative historical novel that interweaves history with fantasized, even

fantastic events: John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960, rev. 1967); Thomas

Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). See John Hollowell, Fa ct and Fiction:

The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel (1977); Barbara Foley, Telling

the Truth: The Theory and Practice of Documentary Fiction (1986); and Barbara

Lounsberry, The Art of Fact: Contemporary Artistic Nonfiction (1990). Cushing

Strout, in The V eracious Imagination (1981), studies such developments in

modern novels, as well as the related form called documentary dram a in

theater, film, and television, which combines fiction with history, journalistic

reports, and biography.

The regional novel emphasizes the setting, speech, and social structure

and customs of a particular locality, not merely as local color , but as important

conditions affecting the temperament of the characters and their ways of

thinking, feeling, and interacting. Instances of such localities are “Wessex” in

Thomas Hardy’s novels and “Yoknapatawpha County,” Mississippi, in

Faulkner’s. Stella Gibbons wrote a witty parody of the regional novel in Cold

Comfort Farm (1936). For a discussion of regionalism centered on the Maine

author Sarah Orne Jewett, see chapter 4 in Bill Brown, ASenseofThings(2003).

Beginning with the second half of the nineteenth century, the novel dis-

placed

all other literary forms in popularity. The theory as well as the practice

of the novelistic art has received the devoted attention of some of the greatest

masters of modern literature—Flaubert, Henry James, Proust, Mann, Joyce,

and Virginia Woolf. (Henry James’ prefaces, gathered into one volume as

The Art of the Novel, ed. R. P. Blackmur, 1934, exemplify the care and sub-

tlety that have been lavished on this craft.) There has been constant experi-

mentation with new fictional methods, such as management of the point of

view to minimize or eliminate the apparent role of the author-narrator or, at

the opposite extreme, to foreground the role of the author as the inventor

and controller of the fiction; the use of symbolist and expressionist techniques

NOVEL 257

and of devices adopted from the art of the cinema; the dislocation of time

sequence; the adaptation of forms and motifs from myths and dreams; and

the exploitation of stream of consciousness narration in a way that converts the

story of outer action and events into a drama of the life of the mind.

Such experimentation reached a radical extreme in the second half of the

twentieth century (see postmodernism). Vladimir Nabokov was a supreme tech-

nician who wrote involuted novels (a work whose subject incorporates an

account of its own genesis and development—for example, his Pale Fire);

employed multilingual puns and jokes; incorporated esoteric data about but-

terflies (a subject in which he was an accomplished scientist); adopted strate-

gies from chess, crossword puzzles, and other games; parodied other novels

(and his own as well); and set elaborate traps for the unwary reader. This

was also the era of what is sometimes called the antinovel—that is, a work

which is deliberately constructed in a negative fashion, relying for its effects

on the deletion of standard elements, on violating traditional norms, and on

playing against the expectations established in the reader by the novelistic

methods and conventions of the past. Thus Alain Robbe-Grillet, a leader

among the exponents of the nouveau roman (the new novel) in France,

wrote Jealousy (1957), in which he left out such standard elements as plot,

characterization, descriptions of states of mind, locations in time and space,

and frame of reference to the world in which the work is set. We are simply

presented in this novel with a sequence of perceptions, mainly visual, which

we may naturalize (that is, make intelligible in the mode of standard narrative

procedures) by postulating that we are occupying the physical space and shar-

ing the hyperacute observations of a jealous husband, from which we may

infer also the tortured state of his disintegrating mind. Other new novelists

are Nathalie Sarraute and Philippe Sollers. See Roland Barthes, Writing Degree

Zero (trans. 1967), and Stephen Heath, The Nouveau Roman: A Study in the

Practice of Writing (1972).

The term magic realism, originally applied in the 1920s to a school of

surrealist German painters, was later used to describe the prose fiction of Jorge

Luis Borges in Argentina, as well as the work of writers such as Gabriel García

Márquez in Colombia, Isabel Allende in Chile, Günter Grass in Germany,

Italo Calvino in Italy, and John Fowles and Salman Rushdie in England.

These writers weave, in an ever-shifting pattern, a sharply etched realism in

representing ordinary events and details together with fantastic and dreamlike

elements, as well as with materials derived from myth and fairy tales. See, for

example, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967).

Robert Scholes popularized metafiction (an alternative is surfiction)asan

overall term for the growing class of novels which depart from realism and

foreground the roles of the author in inventing the fiction and of the reader

in receiving the fiction. Scholes has also popularized the term fabulation for

a current mode of freewheeling narrative invention. Fabulative novels violate,

in various ways, standard novelistic expectations by drastic—and sometimes

258 NOVEL

highly effective—experiments with subject matter, form, style, temporal

sequence, and fusions of the everyday, the fantastic, the mythical, and the

nightmarish, in renderings that blur traditional distinctions between what is

serious or trivial, horrible or ludicrous, tragic or comic. Fabulators active in

the second half of the twentieth century include Thomas Pynchon, John

Barth, Donald Barthelme, William Gass, Robert Coover, and Ishmael Reed.

See Raymond Federman, Surfiction (1975); Robert Scholes, Fabulation and

Metafiction (1979)—an expansion of his The Fabulators (1967); James

M. Mellard, The Exploded Form: The Modernist Novel in America (1980); and

Patricia Waugh, Metafiction (1984). For an account of metafiction from a

feminist viewpoint, see Joan Douglas Peters, Feminist Metafiction and the Evolution

of the British Novel (2002). Refer also to the entries in this Glossary on the litera-

ture of the absurd and black humor.

See fiction and narrative and narratology. Histories of the novel: E. A. Baker,

History of the English Novel (12 vols., 1924ff.); Arnold Kettle’s Marxist survey,

An Introduction to the English Novel (2 vols., 1951); Dorothy Van Ghent, The

English Novel: Form and Function (1953); Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (1957);

Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740 (1987; 2nd ed.,

2002); J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-

Century English Fiction (1990); Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction:

A Political History of the Novel (1990); Emory Elliott, ed., The Columbia History

of the American Novel (1991); and John Richetti, ed., The Columbia History of

the British Novel (1994). The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti (2 vols., 2006), consists

of essays by many critics on the history, forms, and themes of the novel as an

international literary type. Michael McKeon, ed., Theory of the Novel: A

Historical Approach (2000), gathers essays in literary criticism of the novel,

from its beginnings to the present. On the art of the novel: Percy Lubbock,

The Craft of Fiction (1921); E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927); and three

later influential books—Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (1968);

Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (rev. 1983); and David Lodge, The

Art of Fiction (1992). The Theory of the Novel, ed. Philip Stevick (1967), is a

collection of influential essays by various critics. The Czech émigré writer

Milan Kundera has written three notable meditations on the novel in Europe:

Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts (1995), The Art of the Novel (2003),

and

The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts (2006).

For a stimulating discussion of

the elements of fiction such as realism, metaphor, sympathy, character, and point of

view, see James Wood, How Fiction Works (2008).

For additional types of the novel, see absurd, literature of the; detective story;

fantastic literature; Gothic novel; graphic novel; magic realism; novel of sensibility; nov-

elette; realism and naturalism; romance novel; science fiction; utopias and dystopias. For

features of the novel, see atmosphere; character and characterization; confidant; dis-

tance and involvement; frame story; local color; narration, grammar of; persona, tone,

and voice; plot; point of view; realism and naturalism; setting; stock character; stock

situations; stream of consciousness.

NOVEL 259

novel of character: 253.

novel of incident: 253.

novel of manners: 254.

novel of sensibility: 360.

novelette: 365; 252.

novella (novel

a): 252; 365.

Novelle (novel

e): 365.

260 NOVEL OF CHARACTER

objective and subjective: John Ruskin complained in 1856 that “German

dullness and English affectation have of late much multiplied among us the

use of two of the most objectionable words that were ever coined by the

troublesomeness of metaphysicians—namely, ‘objective’ and ‘subjective.’”

Ruskin was at least in part right: the words were imported into English criti-

cism from the post-Kantian German critics of the late eighteenth and early

nineteenth centuries, and they have certainly been troublesome. Amid the

great variety of ways in which the opposition has been applied to literature,

one is sufficiently widespread to be worth specifying. A subjective work is

one in which the author incorporates personal experiences or projects into

the narrative his or her personal disposition, judgments, values, and feelings.

An objective work is one in which the author presents the invented situation

or the fictional characters and their thoughts, feelings, and actions and under-

takes to remain detached and noncommittal. Thus, a subjective lyric is one in

which we are invited to associate the “I,” or lyric speaker, with the poet

(Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight,” Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” Shelley’s

“Ode to the West Wind,” Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy”); in an objective lyric the

speaker is obviously an invented character, or else is simply a lyric voice with-

out specific characteristics (Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,”

T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Wallace Stevens’“Sunday

Morning”). A subjective novel is one in which the author (or at any rate the

narrator) intervenes to comment and deliver judgments about the characters

and actions represented; an objective novel is one in which the author is self-

effacing and tries to create the effect that the story tells itself. Critics agree,

however, that the difference between a subjective and an objective literary

work is not absolute, but a matter of degree. See confessional poetry; distance

and involvement; negative capability; persona; and point of view.

On the introduction of the terms “objective” and “subjective”

into English

riticism and the variousness of their application, see M. H. Abrams, The Mirror

and the Lamp (1953), pp. 235–44. For their uses in modern criticism of the

novel, see Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (rev. 1983), chapter 3.

objective correlative: This term, which had been coined by the American

painter and poet Washington Allston (1779–1843), was introduced by

T. S. Eliot, rather casually, into his essay “Hamlet and His Problems” (1919);

its subsequent vogue in literary criticism, Eliot said, astonished him. “The only

way of expressing emotion, ” Eliot wrote, “is by finding an ‘objective correla-

tive’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall

be the formula of that particular emotion,” and which will evoke the same

emotion from the reader. Eliot’s formulation has been often criticized for fal-

sifying the way a poet actually composes, on the ground that no object or

situation is in itself a “formula” for an emotion but depends for its emotional

significance and effect on the way it is rendered and used by a particular poet.

OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE 261

The vogue of Eliot’s concept of an outer correlative for inner feelings was due

in part to its accord with the campaign of the New Criticism against vagueness

of description and the direct statement of feelings in poetry—an oft-cited

example was Shelley’s “Indian Serenade”: “I die, I faint, I fail”—and in

favor of definiteness, impersonality, and descriptive concreteness. See Eliseo

Vivas, “The Objective Correlative of T. S. Eliot,” reprinted in Critiques and

Essays in Criticism, ed. Robert W. Stallman (1949).

objective criticism: 72; 7

objective (narrator): 301.

occasional poems: “Occasional poems” are written to celebrate or memorialize a

particular occasion, such as a birthday, a marriage, a death, a military engagement

or victory, the dedication of a public building, or the opening performance of a

play. Edmund Spenser’s “Epithalamion,” on the occasion of his own marriage;

John Milton’s “Lycidas, ” on the death of the young poet Edward King; Andrew

Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland”;and

Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “TheChargeoftheLightBrigade” are all poems that

have long survived their original occasions, and W. B. Yeats’“Easter, 1916” and

W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” are notable later examples. England’spoet

laureate is often called on to meet the emergency of royal anniversaries and

important public events with an appropriate occasional poem.

octameter (oktam

eter): 220.

octave (ok

tav): 369.

octavo (oktav

o): 36.

octosyllabic couplet (ok

tos



lab

ik): 374; 95.

ode: In its traditional application, “ode” denotes a long lyric poem that is serious in

subject and treatment, elevated in style, and elaborate in its stanzaic structure.

Norman Maclean said that the term now calls to mind a lyric which is “massive,

public in its proclamations, and Pindaric in its classical prototype” (“From Action

to Image,” in Critics and Criticism, ed. R. S. Crane, 1952). The prototype was

established by the Greek poet Pindar, whose odes were modeled on the songs

by the chorus in Greek drama. His complex stanzas were patterned in sets of

three: moving in a dance rhythm to the left, the chorus chanted the strophe;

moving to the right, the antistrophe; then, standing still, the epode.

The regular or Pindaric ode in English is a close imitation of Pindar’s

form, with all the strophes and antistrophes written in one stanza pattern, and

all the epodes in another. This form was introduced into England by Ben

Jonson’s ode “To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of That Noble Pair,

Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison” (1629); the typical construction can be

262 OBJECTIVE CRITICISM

conveniently studied in this poem or in Thomas Gray’s “The Progress of

Poesy” (1757). The irregular ode, also called the Cowleyan Ode, was

introduced in 1656 by Abraham Cowley, who imitated the Pindaric style

and matter but disregarded the recurrent stanzaic pattern in each strophic

triad; instead, he allowed each stanza to establish its own pattern of varying

line lengths, number of lines, and rhyme scheme. This type of irregular

stanzaic structure, which is free to alter in accordance with shifts in subject

and mood, has been the most common for the English ode ever since;

Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (1807) is representative.

Pindar’s odes were encomiastic; that is, they were written to praise and

glorify someone—in the instance of Pindar, the ode celebrated a victorious

athlete in the Olympic games. (See epideictic, under rhetoric.) The earlier

English odes, and many later ones, were also written to eulogize something,

such as a person (John Dryden’s “Anne Killigrew”), or the arts of music or poetry

(Dryden’s “Alexander’sFeast”), or a time of day (Collins’“Ode to Evening”), or

abstract concepts (Gray’s “Hymn to Adversity” and Wordsworth’s “Ode to

Duty”). Romantic poets perfected the personal ode of description and passionate

meditation, which is stimulated by (and sometimes at its close reverts to) an aspect

of the outer scene and turns on the attempt to solve either a personal emotional

problem or a generally human one (Wordsworth’s “Intimations” ode, Coler-

idge’s “Dejection: An Ode,” Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”). More recent

examples of this latter type are Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead” and

Wallace Stevens’“The Idea of Order at Key West.

” (S

ee descriptive-meditative lyric,

in the entry topographical poetry.)

The Horatian ode was originally modeled on the matter, tone, and form

of the odes of the Roman Horace. In contrast to the passion, visionary bold-

ness, and formal language of Pindar’s odes, many Horatian odes are calm,

meditative, and colloquial; they are also usually homostrophic (that is, writ-

ten in a single repeated stanza form) and shorter than the Pindaric ode. Exam-

ples are Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland”

(1650) and Keats’ ode “To Autumn” (1820).

See G. N. Shuster, The English Ode from Milton to Keats (1940, reprinted

1964); Carol Maddison, Apollo and the Nine: A History of the Ode (1960—se e the

discussion of the odes of Pindar and Horace in chapter 2); John Heath-Stubbs, The

Ode (1969); Paul H. Fry, The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode (1980).

Oedipus complex: 321.

Old Comedy: 57.

Old English Period: 279.

omniscient point of view: 301.

onomatopoeia (on

oma

tope

a): “Onomatopoeia,” sometimes called echoism,

is used both in a narrow and in a broad sense.

ONOMATOPOEIA 263

1. In the narrow and most common use, onomatopoeia designates a word,

or a combination of words, whose sound seems to duplicate the sound it

denotes: “hiss, ”“buzz,”“rattle,”“bang.” There is no exact duplication,

however, of nonverbal by verbal sounds; the perceived similarity is due as

much to the meaning and to the sensation of articulating the words as to

their sounds. Two lines of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Come Down, O

Maid” (1847) are often cited as a skillful instance of onomatopoeia:

The moan of doves in immemorial elms,

And murmuring of innumerable bees.

The American critic John Crowe Ransom remarked that by making only

two changes in the speech sounds of the last line, we lose the echoic

effect because we change the meaning drastically: “And murdering of

innumerable beeves.”

The sounds seemingly mimicked by onomatopoeic words need not

be pleasant ones. Robert Browning liked to represent squishy and scrat-

chy sounds, as in “Meeting at Night ” (1845):

As I gain the cove with pushing prow,

And quench its speed i’ the slushy sand.

A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch

And blue spurt of a lighted match….

Compare euphony and cacophony.

2. In the broad sense, “onomatopoeia” is applied to words or passages which

seem to correspond to, or to strongly suggest, what they denote in any

way whatever—in size, movement, tactile feel, duration, or force, as well

as sound (see sound symbolism). Alexander Pope recommends such extended

verbal mim icry in hi s Essay on Criticism (1711) when he says that “the

sound should seem an echo of the sense, ” and goes on to illustrate his

maximbymimickingtwodifferentkindsofactionormotionbythe

metrical movement and by the difficulty or ease of utterance, in con-

junction with the signification, of the poetic lines that describe them:

When Ajax strives some rock’s vast weight to throw,

The line too labors, and the words move slow;

Not so when swift Camilla scours the plain,

Flies o’er th’ unbending corn, and skims along the main.

opsis (op



s): 362.

oral poetry: “Oral poetry”,or“oral formulaic poetry,” is composed and trans-

mitted by singers or reciters; in its older instances, the recitations were often

accompanied by a harp or a drum, or by other musical instruments. Its origins

are prehistoric, yet it continues to flourish even now among populations

which for the most part cannot read or write. Oral poetry includes both nar-

rative forms (see epic and ballad) and lyric forms (see folk songs). There is no

264 OPSIS

fixed version of an oral composition, since each performer tends to render it

differently, and sometimes introduces differences between one performance

and the next. Such poems, however, typically incorporate verbal formulas—

set words, word patterns, refrains, and set-pieces of description—which help a

performer to improvise a narrative or song on a given theme and also to recall

and repeat, although often with variations, a poem that has been learned from

someone else. (For examples of such formulas, see ballad, epic, and refrain.)

Oral ballads and songs have been collected and published ever since the

eighteenth century. The systematic analysis of oral formulaic poetry in its origins

and early renderings, however, was beguninthe1930sbytheAmericanscholar

Milman Parry on field trips to Yugoslavia, the last place in Europe where the

custom of composing and transmitting oral poetry, especially heroic narratives

of warfare, still survived. Albert B. Lord and other successors continued Parry’s

work and also applied the principles of this contemporary oral poetry retrospec-

tively to an analysis of the constitution of the Homeric epics, the Anglo-Saxon

Beowulf, the Old French Chanson de Roland, and other epic poems which,

although they survive only in a written form, had originated and evolved as

oral formulaic poetry. Research into oral literary performances is also being car-

ried on in Africa, Asia, and other parts of the world where the ancient tradition

maintains its vitality. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the

Word (1982),analyzestheeffectsonliterarycompositionsoftheshiftfromanoral

to a print culture. For current modes of primarily oral poetry within a print

culture, see limerick (under light verse)andrap poetry (under performance poetry).

A description of Milman Parry’s work is in Serbocroatian Heroic Songs,by

Milman Parry, Albert B. Lord, Béla Bartók, and David E. Bynum, Vol. 1

(1954); see also Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (1960, 2nd ed., 2000);

Adam Parry, ed., The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman

Parry (1971); Ruth Finnegan, Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance and Social

Context (1977); and J. M. Foley, Oral Traditional Literature (1981).

organic form: 141; 239.

organicist: 141.

orientalism: 306 .

originality: 67.

ottava rima (otäv

are

ma): 375.

over-reading: 15.

oxymoron (ox



mo

ron): 267.

OXYMORON 265

palimpsest: 35.

palindrome: A word, phrase, or other sequence (including musical notes) that

reads the same in both directions, generally with differences in spacing and

punctuation. Some palindromes are brief and direct: “Dammit, I’m mad. ”

Others can achieve an extraordinary extension; but in all cases, the effect of

the palindrome is humor achieved through the improbability that such

a mechanical or constrained procedure can produce meaningful sentences:

“A Toyota! Race fast, safe car: a Toyota”; “Doc Note: I dissent. A fast

never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod”; “No, it never propagates if I set a

gap or prevention”; and “Sums are not set as a test on Erasmus.” Perhaps

the most famous palindrome is “A man, a plan, a canal: Panama.”

palinode: “Palinode,” from the Greek for “song again,” is a poem or poetic pas-

sage in which the poet renounces or retracts an earlier poem, or an earlier type

of subject matter. An elaborate and charming example is the Prologue to The

Legend of Good Women in which Geoffrey Chaucer, contrite after being charged

by the God of Love with having slandered women lovers in Troilus and Criseyde

and in his translation of the Romance of the Rose, does penance by writing this

poem on women who were saints in their fidelity to the creed of love. (Refer

to courtly love.) Palinodes are especially common in love poetry. The Elizabethan

sonnet by Sir Philip Sidney, “Leave me, O love which reachest but to dust,” is

a palinode renouncing the poetry of sexual love for that of heavenly love.

panegyric: 342.

pantomime and dumb show: Pantomime is acting on the stage without

speech, using only posture, gesture, bodily movement, and exaggerated facial

expression to mime (“mimic”) a character’s actions and to express a charac-

ter’s feelings. Elaborate pantomimes, halfway between drama and dance, were

put on in ancient Greece and Rome, and the form was revived, often for

comic effect, in Renaissance Europe. Mimed dramas enjoyed a vogue in

eighteenth-century England, and in the twentieth century the silent movies

encouraged a brief revival of the art and produced a superlative pantomimist

in Charlie Chaplin. Miming survived well into the twentieth century with

French masters such as Marcel Marceau in the theater and Jacques Tati in

the cinema. England still retains the institution of the Christmas pantomime,

which enacts children’s nursery rhymes or familiar children ’s stories such as

“Puss in Boots,” in a blend of miming, music, and dialogue. In America and

many other countries, circus clowns are expert pantomimists, and miming has

recently been revived in the theater for the deaf.

A dumb show is an episode of pantomime introduced into a spoken

play. It was a common device in Elizabethan drama, in imitation of its use

266 PALIMPSEST

by Seneca, the Roman writer of tragedies. Two well-known dumb shows are

the preliminary episode, summarizing the action to come, of the play-

within-a-play in Hamlet (III. ii.), and the miming of the banishment of the

Duchess and her family in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (III. iv.).

See R. J. Broadbent, A History of Pantomime (1901).

papyrus: 34 .

parable: 11.

paradigmatic (in linguistics): 198.

paradox: A “paradox” is a statement that seems on its face to be logically contra-

dictory or absurd, yet turns out to be interpretable in a way that makes sense.

An instance is the conclusion to John Donne’s sonnet “Death, Be Not Proud”:

One short sleep past, we wake eternally

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

The paradox is used occasionally by almost all poets but was a persistent and

central device in seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry, in both its religious

and secular forms. Donne, who wrote a prose collection titled Problems and

Paradoxes, exploited the figure constantly in his poetry. “The Canonization,”

for example, is organized as an extended proof, full of local paradoxes, of the

paradoxical thesis that sexual lovers are saints. Paradox is also a frequent com-

ponent in verbal wit.

If the paradoxical utterance conjoins two terms that in ordinary usage are

contraries, it is called an oxymoron; an example is Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s

“O Death in life, the days that are no more.” The oxymoron was a familiar

type of Petrarchan conceit in Elizabethan love poetry, in phrases like “pleasing

pains,”“I burn and freeze,”“loving hate.” It is also a frequent figure in devo-

tional prose and religious poetry as a way of expressing the Christian myster-

ies, which transcend human sense and logic. So John Milton describes the

appearance of God, in Paradise Lost (III, 380):

Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appear.

Paradox was a prominent concern of many New Critics, who extended

the term from its limited application to a type of figurative language so as to

encompass all surprising deviations from, or qualifications of, common per-

ceptions or commonplace opinions. It is in this expanded sense that Cleanth

Brooks is able to claim, with some plausibility, that “the language of poetry is

the language of paradox,” in The Well Wrought Urn (1947). See also deconstruc-

tion for

the claim that all uses of language disseminate themselves into the

unresolvable paradox called an aporia.

PARADOX 267

paralipsis (paral



s): 346.

parallelism: 16.

paranomasia (paranoma

zya): 325.

pararhyme: 349.

paratactic style: 384.

parchment: 35.

parody: 41; 115, 118 .

parole (in linguistics): 195; 310, 357.

partial rhyme: 349.

pastoral: The originator of the pastoral was the Greek poet Theocritus who in

the third century BC wrote poems representing the life of Sicilian shepherds.

(“Pastor” is Latin for “shepherd.”) Virgil later imitated Theocritus in his Latin

Eclogues, and in doing so established the enduring model for the traditional

pastoral (pas’ toral): a deliberately conventional poem expressing an urban

poet’s nostalgic image of the supposed peace and simplicity of the life of shep-

herds and other rural folk in an idealized natural setting. The conventions that

hundreds of later poets imitated from Virgil’s imitations of Theocritus include

a shepherd reclining under a spreading beech tree and meditating on the rural

muse, or piping as though he would ne’er grow old, or engaging in a friendly

singing contest, or expressing his good or bad fortune in a love affair, or griev-

ing over the death of a fellow shepherd. From this last type developed the

pastoral elegy, which persisted long after the other traditional types had lost

their popularity. Other terms often used synonymously with pastoral are

idyll, from the title of Theocritus’ pastorals; eclogue (literally, “a selection”),

from the title of Virgil’s pastorals; and bucolic poetry, from the Greek word

for “herdsman.”

Classical poets often described the pastoral life as possessing features of the

mythical golden age. Christian pastoralists conjoined the golden age of pagan

fable with the Garden of Eden in the Bible and also exploited the religious

symbolism of “shepherd” (applied to the ecclesiastical or parish “pastor” and

to the figure of Christ as the Good Shepherd) to give many pastoral poems a

Christian range of reference. In the Renaissance, the traditional pastoral was

also adapted to diverse satirical and allegorical uses. Edmund Spenser’s Shepherd

’s

lendar (1579), which popularized the mode in English poetry, included most

of the varieties of pastoral poems current in that period.

Such was the attraction of the pastoral dream that Renaissance writers

incorporated it into various other literary forms. Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia

(1581–84) was a long pastoral romance written in an elaborately artful prose.

268 PARALIPSIS

(Arcadia was a mountainous region of Greece which Virgil substituted for

Theocritus’ Sicily as his idealized pastoral milieu.) There was also the pastoral

lyric (Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”) and the

pastoral drama. John Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess is an example of this last

type, and Shakespeare’s As You Like It, based on the contemporary pastoral

romance Rosalynde by Thomas Lodge, is set in the forest of Arden, a green

refuge from the troubles and complications of ordinary life where enmities are

reconciled, problems resolved, and the course of true love made to run smooth.

The last important series of traditional pastorals, and an extreme instance

of their calculated and graceful display of high artifice, was Alexander Pope’s

Pastorals (1709). Five years later John Gay, in his Shepherd’s Week, wrote a

parody of the type by applying its elegant formulas to the crudity of actual

rustic manners and language; by doing so, he inadvertently showed later

poets the way to the seriously realistic treatment of rural life. In 1783, George

Crabbe published The Village specifically in order to

paint the cot

As Truth will paint it and as bards will not.

How far the term then lost its traditional application to a poetry of aristocratic

artifice is indicated by Wordsworth’s title for his realistic rendering of a rural

tragedy in 1800: Michael, A Pastoral Poem.

In Some Versions of Pastoral (1935), William Empson identified as pastoral

any work that opposes simple to complicated life, to the advantage of the for-

mer: the simple life may be that of the shepherd, the child, or the working

man. In Empson’s view this literary mode serves as an oblique way to criticize

the values and hierarchical class structure of the society of its time. Empson

accordingly applies the term to works ranging from Andrew Marvell’s

seventeenth-century poem “The Garden” to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland

and the modern proletarian novel. Other critics apply the term “pastoral” to any

work which represents a withdrawal to a place apart that is close to the elemen-

tal rhythms of nature, where the protagonist gains a new perspective on the

complexities, frustrations, and conflicts of the social world. On the continuation

of the pastoral strain in “nature writers,” see ecocriticism.

W. W. Greg, Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama: A Literary Inquiry, with Special

Reference to the Pre-Restoration Stage in England (1906); the Introduction to English

Pastoral Poetry from the Beginnings to Marvell, ed. Frank Kermode (1952); Thomas

G. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric

(1969); Andrew V. Ettin, Literature and the Pastoral (1985); Annabel Patterson,

Pastoral and Ideology, Virgil to Valéry

(1987); Paul Alpers, What

Is Pastoral? (1996);

Terry Gifford, Pastoral (2008).

pastoral elegy: 104; 67.

pathetic fallacy: A phrase invented by John Ruskin in 1856 to signify any repre-

sentation of inanimate natural objects that ascribes to them human capabilities,

sensations, and emotions (Modern Painters, Vol. 3, chapter 12); see pathos.

As used by Ruskin—for whom “truth” was a primary criterion of art—the

PATHETIC FALLACY 269

term was derogatory; for, he claimed, such descriptions do not represent the

“true appearances of things to us” but “the extraordinary, or false appearances,

when we are under the influence of emotion, or contemplative fancy.” Two of

Ruskin’sexamplesarethelines

The spendthrift crocus, bursting through the mould

Naked and shivering, with his cup of gold,

and Coleridge’s description in “Christabel” of

The one red leaf, the last of its clan,

That dances as often as dance it can.

These passages, Ruskin says, however beautiful, are false and “morbid.” Only

in the greatest poets is the use of the pathetic fallacy valid, and then only at

those rare times when it would be inhuman to resist the pressure of powerful

feelings to humanize the perceived fact. Ruskin’s contention would make just

about all poets, including Shakespeare, “morbid.”“Pathetic fallacy” is now

used mainly as a neutral name for a procedure in which human traits are

ascribed to natural objects in a way that is less formal and more indirect than

in the figure called personification.

See Josephine Miles, Pathetic Fallacy in the Nineteenth Century (1942);

Harold Bloom, ed., The Literary Criticism of John Ruskin (1965), Introduction

and pp. 62–78.

pathos: “Pathos” in Greek meant the passions, or suffering, or deep feeling gener-

ally, as distinguished from ethos,aperson’s overall disposition or character. In

modern criticism, however, pathos is applied in a much more limited way to a

scene or passage that is designed to evoke the feelings of tenderness, pity, or

sympathetic sorrow from the audience. In the Victorian era some prominent wri-

ters exploited pathos beyond the endurance of many readers today—examples

are the rendering of the death of Little Nell in Charles Dickens’ The Old Curios-

ity Shop and of the death of Little Eva in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s

Cabin.(Seesentimentalism.) To many modern readers, the greatest passages of

pathos do not dwell on the details of suffering but achieve their effect by under-

statement and suggestion. Examples are the speech of King Lear when he is

briefly reunited with Cordelia (IV. vii. 59ff.), beginning

Pray, do not mock me.

I am a very foolish fond old man,

and William Wordsworth’s terse and indirect revelation of the grief of the old

father for the loss of his son in Michael (1800), ll. 465–66:

Many and many a day he thither went,

And

never lifted up a single stone.

patriarchal: 125; 147.

pattern poem: 63.

270 PATHOS

pen name,ornom de plume: A name used by an author that is different from

his or her real name. Many famous authors have used pen names, including

Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Charles Lutwidge Dodson (Lewis Carroll),

Emily Brontë (Ellis Bell), Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), Joyce Carol

Oates (Rosamond Smith, Lauren Kelly), Pearl Gray (Zane Grey), Karen

Blixen (Isak Dinesen), Eric Blair (George Orwell), Joe Klein (Anonymous),

and Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket). Some series are written by many

authors who write under a single name: the Nancy Drew mysteries were pub-

lished under the name of Carolyn Keene, and the Hardy Boys books were

issued under the name of Franklin W. Dixon, although both series were writ-

ten by several authors. The motives for distancing the work from the author

vary widely and can include the desire to protect the author from controversy,

to enable the author to write in different modes than his or her audience

expects, to avoid burdening the work with the reputation—or, in the case

of Mary Ann Evans and Emily Brontë, the sex—of the author.

pentameter (pentam

eter): 220; 103.

perfect rhyme: 348.

performance (in linguistics): 196.

performance (of a poem): 222.

performance poetry: Since the seventeenth century, poetry—like other forms

of literature—has been composed primarily for printing. In recent years, how-

ever, the ancient tradition of composing poetry specifically for oral performance

before an audience has been revived in a number of modes, some of which

involve extemporizing the poem during the performance itself. Taken together,

these compositions can be accounted the first widespread and sustained revival

of oral poetry since the beginning of the print culture in the fifteenth century.

(See oral poetry; also printing,underRenaissance.) During the rebellious 1960s, for

example, poetry happenings (public recitations, often to musical accompani-

ment) were an integral part of the countercultural scene. Later, other marginal-

ized groups produced similar performances, usually in urban settings and before

audiences who regarded poetry in print as academic and elitist. The poetry

slam emerged in the 1980s as competitions in which rival poets were set a

time limit, then scored for their oral productions by members of the audience;

the poetry at such events was marked by emphatic rhythms, succinctness, clar-

ity, and hipness. For essays by various inquirers about the public performance

of printed poems, as well as about contemporary poems composed for public

performance, see Charles Bernstein, ed., Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed

Word (1998). The anthology Poetry Nation,eds.RegieCabico,ToddSwift,and

Bob Holman (1998), traces the genealogy of various modes of “alternative”

poetry that fuse oral and printed traditions to the performances of the Beat

Generation, especially Allen Ginsberg. (See under Beat Writers.)

PERFORMANCE POETRY 271

The most widely known and practiced performance poetry is rap, an ele-

ment in hip-hop; the latter term since the 1980s has come to designate a

cultural movement among urban African-American youths that originated in

New York and was marked by distinctive clothing, graffiti, break dancing,

and music, especially rap. Both the music and verse form of rap had complex

origins in African, African-American, and West Indian musical traditions. The

verbal component, technically speaking, consists of a hard-driving four-stress

line, with a variable number of intervening syllables and a varying number of

mainly sequential rhymes, in which there is a frequent use of partial and forced

rhymes (see meter and rhyme). “To rap” is slang for “to talk,” and rap verse is

spoken, in a heavily stressed beat, over an accompaniment of bass, percussion,

and sometimes other musical instruments. (There is an interesting parallel

between rap and the strong-stress meter and the performance of Old English

poetry; see under meter.) Often in rap the accompaniment is punctuated by

“scratching” (the sounds made by rotating a phonograph record to and fro

on a turntable so that the needle moves back and forth in the groove) and

by “sampling” (the insertion of fragments of recorded music). In the mode

known as freestyling,orbattle-rapping, rap verses are improvised during

performance, often in competitions between rival rappers. A rapper’s distinc-

tive style, in versification, pace, and voice quality, is called his or her “flow.”

In its early years rap usually conveyed a self-aggrandizing, contentious,

and antiestablishment message, and in the 1980s the genre came to be domi-

nated by the highly aggressive form, originating on the West Coast, called

gangsta rap (“gangster rap”), which flaunted (sometimes in a self-mocking

way) its transgressive stance against propriety, law, and conventional morality

by celebrating violence, misogyny, homophobia, and a candid desire for

material goods and sex. Soon, however, rap became less iconoclastic, and as

women rappers and white rappers entered the field that was originally the

preserve of urban African-American males, it became common for rap to

voice moderate and even mainstream values. In recent years rap has achieved

a remarkable and wide-ranging popularity. The lyrics are composed in many

languages, and the form attracts enthusiastic audiences—in personal, recorded,

and televised performances—in most countries of the world.

See Gregory Nagy, Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond (1996);

Nelson George, Hip Hop America (2nd ed., 1999); Lesley Wheeler, Voicing

American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present (2008);

Adam Bradley, Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip-Hop (2009). The Anthology

of Rap, eds. Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois (2010), brings together over

three hundred rap lyrics, the earliest dating from the late 1970s. For a discus-

sion of rap in relation to other African-American modes of expression, refer to

Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America

(1994).

performative (in speech-act theory): 371; 328.

performative (in constructionist/deconstructionist theory):

372.

272 PERFORMATIVE

periodic sentence: 383.

periods of American literature: The division of American literature into

convenient historical segments, or “periods,” lacks the consensus among liter-

ary scholars that we find with reference to English literature; see Periods of

English Literature. The many syllabi of college surveys reprinted in Reconstructing

American Literature, ed. Paul Lauter (1983), and the essays in Redefining

American Literary History , eds. A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff and Jerry W. Ward

(1990), demonstrate how variable are the temporal divisions and their names,

especially since the beginning of efforts to do justice to literature written by

women and by ethnic minorities. Some historians, anthologists, and teachers

of American literature simply divide their survey into dated sections without

affixing period names. A prominent tendency, however, is to recognize the

importance of major wars in marking significant changes in literature. This

tendency, as the scholar Cushing Strout has remarked, “suggests that there is

an order in American political history more visible and compelling than that

indicated by specifically literary or intellectual categories.”

The following divisions of American literary history recognize the impor-

tance assigned by many literary historians to the Revolutionary War (1775 –

81), the Civil War (1861–65), World War I (1914–18), and World War II

(1939–45). Under these broad divisions are listed some of the more widely

used terms to distinguish periods and subperiods of American literature.

These terms, it will be noted, are diverse in kind; they may signify a span of

time, or a type of political organization, or a prominent intellectual or imagi-

native mode, or a predominant literary form.

1607–1775. This era, from the founding of the first settlement at

Jamestown to the outbreak of the American Revolution, is often called the

Colonial Period. Writings were for the most part religious, practical, or his-

torical. Notable among the seventeenth-century writers of journals and narra-

tives about the founding and early history of some of the colonies were

William Bradford, John Winthrop, and the theologian Cotton Mather. In

the following century Jonathan Edwards was a major philosopher as well as

theologian, and Benjamin Franklin an early American master of lucid and

cogent prose. Not until 1937, when Edward Taylor’s writings were first pub-

lished from manuscript, was Taylor discovered to have been an able religious

poet in the metaphysical style of the English devotional poets Herbert and

Crashaw. Anne Bradstreet was the chief Colonial poet of secular and domestic

as well as religious subjects.

The publication in 1773 of Poems on Various Subjects by Phillis Wheatley, then

a nineteen-year-old slave who had been born in Africa, inaugurated the long and

distinguished, but for many years neglected, line of black writers (or by what has

come to be the preferred name, African-American writers)inAmerica.The

complexity and diversity of the African-American cultural heritage—both Western

and African, oral and written, slave and free, Judeo-Christian and pagan, plantation

and urban, integrationist and black nationalist—have effected tensions and fusions

that, over the course of time, have produced a highly innovative and distinctive

PERIODS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 273

literature, as well as musical forms that have come to be considered America’s

most important contribution to the Western musical tradition. See J. Saunders

Redding, To Make a Poet Black (1939; reissued 1986); Houston A. Baker, Jr.,

Black Literature in America (1971); Bernard W. Bell, The Afro-American Novel and

Its Tradition (1987); Henry L. Gates, Jr., ed., Black Literature and Literary Theory

(1984), and Figures in Black (1987); also Henry L. Gates, Jr., Nellie Y. McKay,

and others, eds., The Norton Anthology of African-American Literature (1997).

The period between the Stamp Act of 1765 and 1790 is sometimes dis-

tinguished as the Revolutionary Age. It was the time of Thomas Paine’s

influential revolutionary tracts; of Thomas Jefferson’s “Statute of Virginia for

Religious Freedom,”“Declaration of Independence,” and many other writ-

ings; of The Federalist Papers in support of the Constitution, most notably those

by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison; and of the patriotic and satiric

poems by Philip Freneau and Joel Barlow.

1775–1865. The years 1775–1828, the Early National Period ending

with the triumph of Jacksonian democracy in 1828, signalized the emergence

of a national imaginative literature, including the first American stage comedy

(Royall Tyler’s The Contrast, 1787), the earliest American novel (William Hill

Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, 1789), and the establishment in 1815 of the

first enduring American magazine, The North American Review. Washington

Irving achieved international fame with his essays and stories; Charles

Brockden Brown wrote distinctively American versions of the Gothic novel of

mystery and terror; the career of James Fenimore Cooper, the first major

American novelist, was well launched; and William Cullen Bryant and Edgar

Allan Poe wrote poetry that was relatively independent of English precursors.

In the year 1760 was published the first of a long series of slave narratives

and autobiographies written by African-American slaves who had escaped or

been freed. Most of these were published between 1830 and 1865, including

Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and Harriet

Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861).

The span 1828–65 from the Jacksonian era to the Civil War, often iden-

tified as the Romantic Period in America (see neoclassic and romantic), marks

the full coming of age of a distinctively American literature. This period is

sometimes known as the American Renaissance,thetitleofF.O.Matthiessen’s

influential book (1941) about its outstanding writers, Ralph Waldo

Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman M elville, and

Nathaniel Hawthorne (see also symbolism); it is also sometimes called the

Age of Transcendentalism,

after the philosophical and literary move-

ment, centered on Emerson, that was domin ant in New England (see

Transcendentalism). In all the major genres except drama, writers produced

works of an originality and excellence not exceeded in later American

literature. Emerson, Thoreau, and the early femin ist Margaret Fuller shaped

the ideas, ideals, and literary aims of many contemporary and later

American writers. It was t he age not only of contin uing writings by

William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper

but also of the novels and short stories of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville,

274 PERIODS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE

Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the southern novelist William Gilmore Simms;

of the poetry of Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Emerson, Henry Wadsworth

Longfellow, and the most innovative and influential of all American poets,

Walt Whitman; and of the beginning of distinguished American criticism in

the essays of Poe, Simms, and James Russell Lowell. The tradition of African-

American poetry by women was continued by Francis Ellen Watkins Harper,

and the African-American novel was inaugurated by William Wells Brown’s

Clotel (1853) and by Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig (1859).

1865–1914. The cataclysm of the bloody Civil War and Reconstruction,

followed by a burgeoning industrialism and urbanization in the North, pro-

foundly altered American self-awareness and also American literary modes.

The years 1865–1900 are often known as the Realistic Period, by reference

to the novels by Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Henry James, as

well as by John W. DeForest, Harold Frederic, and the African-American novelist

Charles W. Chesnutt. These works, though diverse, are often labeled “realistic”

in contrast to the “romances” of their predecessors in prose fiction: Poe,

Hawthorne, and Melville (see prose romance and realism). Some realistic authors

grounded their fiction in a regional milieu; these include (in addition to Mark

Twain’s novels on the Mississippi River region) Bret Harte in California, Sarah

Orne Jewett in Maine, Mary Wilkins Freeman in Massachusetts, and George

W. Cable and Kate Chopin in Louisiana. (See regional novel.) Chopin has

become prominent as an early and major feminist novelist. Whitman continued

writing poetry up to the last decade of the century, and (unknown to him and

almost everyone else) was joined by Emily Dickinson; although only seven of

Dickinson’s more than a thousand short poems were published in her lifetime,

she is now recognized as one of the most distinctive and eminent of American

poets. Sidney Lanier published his experiments in versification based on the

meters of music; the African-American author Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote

both poems and novels between 1893 and 1905; and in the 1890s Stephen

Crane, although he was only twenty-nine when he died, published short

poems in free verse that anticipate the experiments of Ezra Pound and the

Imagists, and wrote also the brilliantly innovative short stories an d short

novels that look forward t o two later narrative modes: naturalism and

impressionism. The y ears 1900–1914—although James, Howells, and Mark

Twain were still writing, and Edith Wharton was publishing her earlier

novels—are sometimes discriminated as the Naturalistic Period,inrecog-

nition of the powerful although sometimes crudely wrought novels b y

Frank N orris, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser, which typically represent

characters who are joint victims of their instinctual drives and of external

sociological forces; see naturalism , under realism and naturalism.

1914–39. The era between the two world wars, marked by the trauma of

the great economic depression beginning in 1929, was that of the emergence of

what is still known as “modern literature,” which in America reached an emi-

nence rivaling that of the American Renaissance of the mid-nineteenth century;

unlike most of the authors of that earlier period, however, the American

modernists also achieved widespread international recognition and influence.

PERIODS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 275

(See modernism.) Poetry magazine, founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe in

1912, published many innovative authors. Among the notable poets were

Edgar Lee Masters, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg,

Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Robinson Jeffers,

Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and e. e. cummings—

authors who wrote in an unexampled variety of poetic modes. These included

the Imagism of Amy Lowell, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), and others; the metric

poems by Frost and the free-verse poems by Williams in the American vernac-

ular; the formal and typographic experiments of cummings; the poetic natural-

ism of Jeffers; and the assimilation to their own distinctive uses by Pound and

Eliot of the forms and procedures of French symbolism, merged with the intel-

lectual and figurative methods of the English metaphysical poets. Among the

major writers of prose fiction were Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, Ellen

Glasgow, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos,

F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and

John Steinbeck. America produced in this period its first great dramatist in

Eugene O’Neill, as well as a group of distinguished literary critics that included

Van Wyck Brooks, Malcolm Cowley, T. S. Eliot, Edmund Wilson, and the

irreverent and caustic H. L. Mencken.

The literary productions of this era are often subclassified in a variety of

ways. The flamboyant and pleasure-seeking 1920s are sometimes referred to as

“the Jazz Age,” a title popularized by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tales of the Jazz Age

(1922). The same decade was also the period of the Harlem Renaissance,

which produced major writings in all the literary forms by Countee Cullen,

Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, and

many other African-American writers. (See Harlem Renaissance.)

Many prominent American writers of the decade following the end of

World War I, disillusioned by their war experiences and alienated by what

they perceived as the crassness of American culture and its “puritanical” repres-

sions, are often tagged (in a term first applied by Gertrude Stein to young

Frenchmen of the time) as the Lost Generation. A number of these writers

became expatriates, moving either to London or to Paris in their quest for a

richer literary and artistic milieu and a freer way of life. Ezra Pound, Gertrude

Stein, and T. S. Eliot lived out their lives abroad, but most of the younger

“exiles,” as Malcolm Cowley called them (Exile’s Return, 1934), came back to

America in the 1930s. Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Fitzgerald’s Tender

Is the Night are novels that represent the mood and way of life of two groups of

American expatriates. In “the radical ’30s,” the period of the Great Depression

and of the economic and social reforms in the New Deal inaugurated by

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, some authors joined radical political

movements, and many others dealt in their literary works with pressing social

issues of the time—including, in the novel, William Faulkner, John Dos Passos,

James T. Farrell, Thomas Wolfe, and John Steinbeck and in the drama, Eugene

O’Neill, Clifford Odets, and Maxwell Anderson. See Peter Conn, The American

1930s: A Literary History (2009), and Morris Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark:

A Cultural History of the Great Depression (2009).

276 PERIODS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE

1939–mid-1960s,orPostwar Period. World War II, and especially the

disillusionment with Soviet communism consequent upon the Moscow trials

for alleged treason and Stalin’s signing of the Russo-German pact with Hitler

in 1939, largely ended the literary radicalism of the 1930s. A final blow to the

very few writers who had maintained intellectual allegiance to Soviet Russia

came in 1991 with the collapse of Russian communism and the dissolution of

the Soviet Union. For several decades the New Criticism—dominated by con-

servative southern writers, the Agrarians, who in the 1930s had championed

a return from an industrial to an agricultural economy—typified the prevailing

critical tendency to isolate literature from the life of the author and from soci-

ety and to conceive a work of literature, in formal terms, as an organic and

autonomous entity. The Agrarians were often linked with the scholars and

poets known as the Fugitives through a common bond with Vanderbilt

University. Many of these writers published essays in I’ll Take My Stand: The

South and the Agrarian Tradition, by Twelve Southerners (1930; reprinted

2006). See also John L. Stewart, The Burden of Time: The Fugitives and

Agrarians (1965). The eminent and influential critics Edmund Wilson and

Lionel Trilling, however—as well as other critics grouped with them as the

New York Intellectuals, including Philip Rahv, Alfred Kazin, Dwight

McDonald, and Irving Howe—continued through the 1960s to deal with a

work of literature humanistically and historically; in the context of its author’s

life, temperament, and social milieu; and in terms of the work’s moral and

imaginative qualities and its consequences for society. See Alexander Bloom,

Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals & Their World (1986); V. B. Leitch,

American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eighties (1988), chapter 4.

The 1950s, while often regarded in retrospect as a period of cultural confor-

mity and complacency, was marked by the emergence of vigorous antiestab-

lishment and antitraditional literary movements: the Beat writers such as Allen

Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac; the American exemplars of the literature of the

absurd; the Black Mountain Poets, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and

Robert Duncan; and the New York Poets, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch,

and John Ashbery. It was also a time of confessional poetry and the literature of

extreme sexual candor, marked by the emergence of Henry Miller as a nota-

ble author (his autobiographical and fictional works, begun in the 1930s, had

earlier been available only under the counter) and the writings of Norman

Mailer, William Burroughs, and Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita was published in

1955). The counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s continued some

of these modes, but in a fashion made extreme and fevered by the rebellious

youth movement and the vehement and sometimes violent opposition to the

war in Vietnam; for an approving treatment of this movement, see Theodore

Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture (1969), and for a later retrospective,

Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (1978). See

modernism and postmodernism, and for radical developments of this era in

African-American literature, see Black Arts Movement.

Important American writers whose careers fell primarily within this

period include, in prose fiction, Vladimir Nabokov (who emigrated to

PERIODS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 277

America in 1940), Eudora Welty, James Gould Cozzens, Flannery O’Connor,

Mary McCarthy, Bernard Malamud, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Truman

Capote, Richard Wright, Edward Albee, Norman Mailer, Harper Lee, Kurt

Vonnegut, Robert Penn Warren, John Cheever; in poetry, Marianne Moore,

Robert Penn Warren, Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard

Wilbur, J. D. Salinger, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia

Plath, and A. R. Ammons; and in drama, Thornton Wilder, Lillian Hellman,

Arthur Miller, Lorraine Hansberry, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee.

The period from the 1960s to the present can be considered the Post-

modern Period, in which modernist experimentation in linguistic and nar-

rative technique was pushed to new extremes by authors such as John Barth,

David Foster Wallace, E. L. Doctorow, Don De Lillo, Thomas Pynchon,

Philip Roth, and Cormac McCarthy. (See postmodernism.) Leading voices in

drama include Sam Shepard, David Mamet, Tony Kushner, and Wendy

Wasserstein; in poetry, W. S. Merwin, Edward Hirsch, Mary Kinzie, Robert

Pinsky, Robert Hass, Mark Strand, Linda Gregerson, and Frank Bidart. But it

is also a period that has seen the return of more traditional realistic forms

of prose narrative by such authors as Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates,

Cynthia Ozick, Marilynne Robinson, and Jonathan Franzen. (See Realism

and Naturalism.) Many of the most distinguished literary works of this period

have been written by writers who are often identified as belonging to one or

another “minority,” or ethnic literary group. (An “ethnic group” consists of

individuals who are distinguishable, within a majority cultural and social sys-

tem, by shared characteristics such as race, religion, language, cultural modes,

and national origin.) There is, however, much contention, both within and

outside these groups, whether it is more just and enlightened to consider

such writers simply as part of the American mainstream or to stress what is

called the identity of each writer as a participant in an ethnic culture with its

distinctive subject matter, themes, and formal features. (See identity theorists,

under humanism .) This is the era of a number of notable African-American

writers such as novelist Toni Morrison; poets Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker,

Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones, b. 1934), Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks,

and Rita Dove; and dramatist August Wilson. (For some developments in

popular modes of versification, see performance poetry.) It is also the era of the

emergence of such prominent minority novelists as Leslie Marmon Silko

(Native American), Oscar Hijuelos and Sandra Cisneros (Hispanic), Jhumpa

Lahiri (East Indian), and Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan (Chinese-

American). See Houston A. Baker, ed., Three American Literatures: Essays in

Chicano, Native American, and Asian-American Literature for Teachers of American

Literature (1982); Alpana Sharma Knippling, New Immigrant Literatures in the

United States: A Sourcebook to Our Multicultural Literary Heritage (1996); and

Emmanuel S. Nelson, Asian American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical

Sourcebook (2000).

periods of English literature: For convenience of discussion, historians divide

the continuity of English literature into segments of time that are called

278 PERIODS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

“periods.” The exact number, dates, and names of these periods vary, but the

list below conforms to widespread practice. The list is followed by a brief

comment on each period, in chronological order.

450–1066 Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) Period

1066–1500 Middle English Period

1500–1660 The Renaissance (or Early Modern)

1558–1603 Elizabethan Age

1603–1625 Jacobean Age

1625–1649 Caroline Age

1649–1660 Commonwealth Period (or Puritan Interregnum)

1660–1785 The Neoclassical Period

1660–1700 The Restoration

1700–1745 The Augustan Age

1745–1785 The Age of Sensibility (or Age of Johnson)

1785–1832 The Romantic Period

1832–1901 The Victorian Period

1848–1860 The Pre-Raphaelites

1880–1901 Aestheticism and Decadence

1901–1945 The Modern Period

1901–1914 The Edwardian Period

1914–1939 The Georgian Period

1945–1970 The Postwar Period

1970– The Postmodern Period

The Old English Period, or the Anglo-Saxon Period, extended from

the invasion of Celtic England by Germanic tribes (the Angles, Saxons, and

Jutes) in the first half of the fifth century to the conquest of England in

1066 by the Norman French under the leadership of William the Conqueror.

Only after they had been converted to Christianity in the seventh century did

the Anglo-Saxons, whose earlier literature had been oral, begin to develop a

written literature. (See oral poetry.) A high level of culture and learning was

soon achieved in various monasteries; the eighth-century churchmen Bede

and Alcuin were major scholars who wrote in Latin, the standard language

of international scholarship. The poetry written in the vernacular Anglo-

Saxon, known also as Old English, included Beowulf (eighth century), the

greatest of Germanic epic poems, and such lyric laments as “The Wanderer,”

“The Seafarer,” and “Deor,” all of which, although composed by Christian

writers, reflect the conditions of life in the pagan past. Caedmon and

Cynewulf were poets who wrote on biblical and religious themes, and there

survive a number of Old English lives of saints, sermons, and paraphrases of

PERIODSOFENGLISHLITERATURE 279

books of the Bible. Alfred the Great, a West Saxon king (871–99) who for a

time united all the kingdoms of southern England against a new wave of

Germanic invaders, the Vikings, was no less important as a patron of literature

than as a warrior. He himself translated into Old English various books of

Latin prose, supervised translations by other hands, and instituted the Anglo-

Saxon Chronicle, a continuous record, year by year, of important events in

England.

See S. B. Greenfield, A Critical History of Old English Literature (1965);

C. L. Wrenn, A Study of Old English Literature (1966).

Middle English Period. The four and a half centuries between the

Norman Conquest in 1066, which effected radical changes in the language,

life, and culture of England, and about 1500, when the standard literary lan-

guage (deriving from the dialect of the London area) had become recogniz-

ably “modern English”—that is, close enough to the language we speak and

write to be intelligible to a present-day reader.

The span from 1100 to 1350 is sometimes discriminated as the Anglo-

Norman Period because the non-Latin literature of that time was written

mainly in Anglo-Norman, the French dialect spoken by the invaders, who

had established themselves as the ruling class of England, and who shared a

literary culture with French-speaking areas of mainland Europe. Among the

important and influential works from this period are Marie de France’s Lais

(c. 1180—which may have been written while Marie was at the royal court

in England), Guillaume de Lorris’ and Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose

(1225?–75?), and Chrétien de Troyes’ Erec et Enide (the first Arthurian romance,

c. 1165) and Yvain (c. 1177–81). When the native vernacular—descended from

Anglo-Saxon, but with extensive lexical and syntactic elements assimilated

from Anglo-Norman, and known as Middle English—came into general

literary use, it was at first mainly the vehicle for religious and h omiletic writ-

ings. The first great age of p rimarily secular literature—rooted in the Anglo-

Norman, French, Irish, and Welsh, as well as the native English literature—

was the second half of the fourteenth century. This was the a ge of Chaucer

and John Gower, of William Langland’s great religious and satirical poem

Piers Plowman, and of the anonymous master who wro te four major poems

in complex alliterative meter, including Pearl (an elegy) and Sir Gawain and the

Green Knight. This last work is the most accomplished of the English chivalric

romances in verse; the most notable prose romance was Thomas Malory’s Morte

d’Arthur, written a century later. The outstanding poets of the fifteenth century

were the “Scottish Chaucerians,” who included King James I of Scotland

and Robert Henryson. The fifteenth century was more important for popular

literature than for the artful literature addressed to the upper classes: it was the

age of many excellent songs, secular and religious, and of diverse folk ballads,as

well as the flowering time of the miracle

and morality

plays, which were written

and produced for the general public.

See H. S. Bennett, Chaucer and the Fifteenth Century (1947);W.L.Renwick

and H. Orton, The Beginnings of English Literature to Skelton (rev. 1952); Edward

Vasta, ed., Middle English Survey: Critical Essays (1965).

280 PERIODS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

The Renaissance, 1500–1660. See the entry Renaissance. There is an

increasing use by historians of the term early modern to denote this era.

Elizabethan Age. Strictly speaking, the period of the reign of Elizabeth I

(1558–1603); the term “Elizabethan,” however, is often used loosely to refer

to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, even after the death of

Elizabeth. This was a time of rapid development in English commerce, mari-

time power, and nationalist feeling—the defeat of the Spanish Armada occurred

in 1588. It was a great (in drama the greatest) age of English literature—the

age o f Sir Philip Sidn ey, Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, William

Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, and many

other extraordinary writers of prose and of dramatic, lyric, and narrative poetry.

A number of scholars have looked back on this era as one of intellectual

coherence and social order; an influen tial e xample was E. M. W. Tillyard’s

The Elizabethan World Picture (1943). Some historical critics, however, have

emphasized its intellectual uncertainties and political and social conflicts; see

new historicism.

Jacobean Age. The reign of James I (in Latin, “Jacobus”), 1603–25,

which followed that of Queen Elizabeth. This was the period in prose writ-

ings of Bacon, John Donne’s sermons, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy,

and the King James translation of the Bible. It was also the time of Shakespeare’s

greatest tragedies and tragicomedies and of major writings by other n otable

poets a nd playwrights including Donne, Ben Jonson, Michael Drayton, Lady

Mary Wroth, Sir Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, John Webster,

George Ch apman, Thomas Middleton, Philip Massinger, and Elizabeth

Cary, whose notable biblical drama The Tragedy of Mariam, the Faire Queene

of Jewry was th e first l ong play by an Englishwoma n to be published.

See Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background (1934); Douglas Bush,

English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century (1945);C.V.Wedgwood,

Seventeenth Century English Literature (1950).

Caroline Age. The reign of Charles I, 1625–49; the name is derived

from “Carolus,” the Latin version of “ Charles.” This was the time of the

English Civil War fought between the supporters of the king (known as

“Cavaliers”) and the supporters of Parliament (known as “Roundheads,”

from their custom of wearing their hair cut short). John Milton began his

writing during this period; it was the time also of the religious poet George

Herbert and of the prose writers Robert Burton and Sir Thomas Browne.

Associated with the court were the Cavalier poets, writers of witty and

polished lyrics of courtship and gallantry. The group included Richard

Lovelace, Sir John Suckling, and Thomas Carew. Robert Herrick, although

country parson, is often classified with the Cavalier poets because, like them,

he was a Son of Ben—that is, an admirer and follower of Ben Jonson—in

many of his lyrics of love and gallant compliment.

See Robin Skelton, Cavalier Poets (1960).

The Commonwealth Period, also known as the Puritan Interregnum,

extends from the end of the Civil War and the execution of Charles I in 1649

to the restoration of the Stuart monarchy under Charles II in 1660. In this

PERIODSOFENGLISHLITERATURE 281

period, England was ruled by Parliament under the Puritan leader Oliver

Cromwell; his death in 1658 marked the dissolution of the Commonwealth.

Drama almost disappeared for eighteen years after the Puritans closed the public

theaters in September 1642, not only on moral and religious grounds but also

to prevent public assemblies that might foment civil disorder. It was the age of

Milton’s political pamphlets, of Hobbes’ political treatise Leviathan (1651), of the

prose writers Sir Thomas Browne, Thomas Fuller, Jeremy Taylor, and Izaak

Walton, and of the poets Henry Vaughan, Edmund Waller, Abraham Cowley,

Sir William Davenant, and Andrew Marvell.

The Neoclassical Period,1660–1785; see the entry neoclassic and romantic.

Restoration. This period takes its name from the restoration of the Stuart

line (Charles II) to the English throne in 1660, at the end of the Common-

wealth; it is specified as lasting until 1700. The urbanity, wit, and licentiousness

of the life centering on the court, in sharp contrast to the seriousness and sobri-

ety of the earlier Puritan regime, is reflected in much of the literature of this

age. The theaters came back to vigorous life after the revocation of the ban

placed on them by the Puritans in 1642, although they became more exclu-

sively oriented toward the aristocratic classes than they had been earlier. Sir

George Etherege, William Wycherley, William Congreve, and John Dryden

developed the distinctive comedy of manners called Restoration comedy,and

Dryden, Thomas Otway, and other playwrights developed the distinctive

form of tragedy called heroic drama. Dryden was the major poet and critic, as

well as one of the major dramatists. Other poets were the satirists Samuel Butler

and the Earl of Rochester; notable writers in prose, in addition to the masterly

Dryden, were Samuel Pepys, Sir William Temple, the religious writer in ver-

nacular English John Bunyan, and the philosopher John Locke. Aphra Behn,

the first Englishwoman to earn her living by her pen and one of the most

inventive and versatile authors of the age, wrote poems, highly successful

plays, and Oroonoko, the tragic story of a noble African slave, an important pre-

cursor of the novel.

See L. I. Bredvold, The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden (1932); and Basil

Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background (1934).

Augustan Age. The original Augustan Age was the brilliant literary

period of Virgil, Horace, and Ovid under the Roman emperor Augustus (27

BC–AD 14). In the eighteenth century and later, however, the term was fre-

quently applied also to the literary period in England from approximately

1700 to 1745. The leading writers of the time (such as Alexander Pope,

Jonathan Swift, and Joseph Addison) themselves drew the parallel to the

Roman Augustans and deliberately imitated their literary forms and subjects,

their emphasis on social concerns, and their ideals of moderation, decorum, and

urbanity. (See neoclassicism.) A major representative of popular, rather than

classical, writing in this period was the novelist, journalist, and pamphleteer

Daniel Defoe. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was a brilliant letter writer in a

greateraofletterwriting;shealsowrotepoemsofwitandcandorthatvio-

lated the conventiona l mo ral and intellectual roles assigned to wo men i n the

Augustan era.

282 PERIODS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Age of Sensibility. The period between the death of Alexander Pope in

1744, and 1785, which was one year after the death of Samuel Johnson and

one year before Robert Burns’ Poems, Chiefly in Scottish Dialect. (Alternative

dates frequently proposed for the end of this period are 1789 and 1798; see

Romantic Period.) An older name for this half century, the Age of Johnson,

stresses the dominant position of Samuel Johnson (1709–84) and his literary

and intellectual circle, which included Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke,

James Boswell, Edward Gibbon, and Hester Lynch Thrale. These authors on

the whole represented a culmination of the literary and critical modes of neo-

classicism and the worldview of the Enlightenment. The more recent name,

“Age of Sensibility,” puts its stress on the emergence, in other writers of the

1740s and later, of new cultural attitudes, theories of literature, and types

of poetry; we find in this period, for example, a growing sympathy for the

Middle Ages, a vogue of cultural primitivism, an awakening interest in ballads

and other folk literature, a turn from neoclassic “correctness” and its emphasis

on judgment and restraint to an emphasis on instinct and feeling, the devel-

opment of a literature of sensibility , and above all the exaltation by some critics

of “original genius” and a “bardic” poetry of the sublime and visionary imag-

ination. Thomas Gray expressed this anti-neoclassic sensibility and set of

values in his “Stanzas to Mr. Bentley” (1752):

But not to one in this benighted age

Is that diviner inspiration given,

That burns in Shakespeare’s or in Milton’s page,

The pomp and prodigality of Heaven.

Other poets who showed similar shifts in thought and taste were William

Collins and Joseph and Thomas Warton (poets who, together with Gray,

began in the 1740s the vogue for what Samuel Johnson slightingly referred

to as “ode, and elegy, and sonnet”), Christopher Smart, and William Cowper.

Thomas Percy published his influential Reliques of Ancient English Poetry

(1765), which included many folk ballads and a few medieval metrical

romances, and James Macpherson in the same decade published his greatly

altered (and in considerable part fabricated) versions of the poems of the

Gaelic bard Ossian (Oisin) which were enormously popular throughout

Europe. This was also the period of the great novelists, some realistic and

satiric and some “sentimental”: Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobias

Smollett, and Laurence Sterne.

See Northrop Frye, “Toward Defining an Age of Sensibility,” in Fables of

Identity (1963), and ed., Romanticism Reconsidered (1965); F. W. Hilles and

Harold Bloom, eds., From Sensibility to Romanticism (1965).

Romantic Period. The Romantic Period in English literature is dated as

beginning in 1785 (see Age of Sensibility)—or alternatively in 1789 (the out-

break of the French Revolution), or in 1798 (the publication of William

Wordsworth’

s and Samuel Taylor Coleridge ’s Lyrical

Ballads)—and as ending

either in 1830 or else in 1832, the year in which Sir Walter Scott died and the

passage of the Reform Bill signaled the political preoccupations of the

PERIODSOFENGLISHLITERATURE 283

Victorian era. For some prominent characteristics of the thought and writings

of this remarkable and diverse literary period, as well as for a list of suggested

readings, see neoclassic and romantic. The term is often applied also to literary

movements in European countries and America; see periods of American litera-

ture. Romantic characteristics are usually said to have been manifested first in

Germany and England in the 1790s and not to have become prominent in

France and America until two or three decades after that time. Major English

writers of the period, in addition to Wordsworth and Coleridge, were the

poets Robert Burns, William Blake, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John

Keats, and Walter Savage Landor; the prose writers Charles Lamb, William

Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Leigh Hunt; and

the novelists Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, and Mary Shelley. The span

between 1786 and the close of the eighteenth century was that of the Gothic

romances by William Beckford, Matthew Gregory Lewis, William Godwin,

and, above all, Ann Radcliffe.

Victorian Period. The beginning of the Victorian Period is frequently

dated 1830, or alternatively 1832 (the passage of the first Reform Bill), and

sometimes 1837 (the accession of Queen Victoria); it extends to the death of

Victoria in 1901. Historians often subdivide the long period into three phases:

Early Victorian (to 1848), Mid-Victorian (1848–70), and Late Victorian

(1870–1901). Much writing of the period, whether imaginative or didactic,

in verse or in prose, dealt with or reflected the pressing social, economic, reli-

gious, and intellectual issues and problems of that era. (For a summary of these

issues, and also for the derogatory use of the term “Victorian,” see Victorian

and Victorianism.) Among the notable poets were Alfred, Lord Tennyson,

Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Matthew

Arnold, and Gerard Manley Hopkins (whose remarkably innovative poems,

however, did not become known until they were published, long after his

death, in 1918). The most prominent essayists were Thomas Carlyle, John

Ruskin, Arnold, and Walter Pater; the most distinguished of many excellent

novelists (this was a great age of English prose fiction) were Charlotte and

Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Elizabeth

Gaskell, George Eliot, George Meredith, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy,

and Samuel Butler.

For prominent literary movements during the Victorian era, see the

entries on Pre-Raphaelites, Aestheticism, and Decadence.

What is commonly known as the Modern Period (1901–45) can itself

be divided into several eras. The Edwardian Period, spanning the period

between the death of Victoria (1901) and the beginning of World War I in

1914, is named for King Edward VII, who reigned from 1901 to 1910. Poets

writing at the time included Thomas Hardy (who gave up novels for poetry

at the beginning of the century), Alfred Noyes, William Butler Yeats, and

Rudyard Kipling; dramatists included Henry Arthur Jones, Arthur Wing Pinero,

James Barrie, John Galsworthy, George Bernard Shaw, and the playwrights of

the Celtic Revival such as Lady Gregory, Yeats, and John M. Synge. Many

of the major achievements were in prose fiction—works by Thomas Hardy,

284 PERIODS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, John Galsworthy, H. G. Wells, Rudyard

Kipling, and Henry James, who published his major final novels, The Wings of

the Dove, The Ambassadors,andThe Golden Bowl, between 1902 and 1904.

The Georgian Period is a term applied both to the reigns in England of

the four successive Georges (1714–1830) and (more frequently) to the reign

of George V (1910–36). The term Georgian poets usually designates a

group of writers in the latter era who loomed large in four anthologies enti-

tled Georgian Poetry, which were published by Edward Marsh between 1912

and 1922. Marsh favored writers we now tend to regard as relatively minor

poets such as Rupert Brooke, Walter de la Mare, Ralph Hodgson, W. H.

Davies, and John Masefield. “Georgian poetry” has come to connote verse

which is mainly rural in subject matter, deft and delicate rather than bold

and passionate in manner, and traditional rather than experimental in tech-

nique and form.

Much of the most influential literature of the years between the world

wars was marked by persistent and multidimensional experimentation in subject

matter, form, and style in all the literary genres. Among the notable writers

are, in addition to those a lready mentioned, Wilfred Owen, T. S. Eliot,

W. H. Auden, Robert Graves, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia

Woolf, E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene, and George O rwell

and the dramatists G. B. Shaw, Sean O’Casey, and Noel Coward. The modern

period was also an important era for literary criticism; among the innovative

and influential English critics were T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, Virginia Woolf,

F. R. Leavis, and William Empson. (See New Criticism.)

The character of the Postwar Period, 1945–70, was largely determined

by the economic devastation left by the war and the loss of national prestige

following the collapse of British imperial power. Leading writers included, in

prose fiction, Samuel Beckett, Anthony Burgess, Iris Murdoch, Kingsley

Amis, and William Golding; in poetry, Dylan Thomas and Philip Larkin;

and in drama, Harold Pinter and John Osborne. The Postmodern Period,

after 1970, identifies the era when such writers as Caryl Churchill, A. S. Byatt,

Seamus Heaney, David Lodge, Jeanette Winterson, Ted Hughes, and Martin

Amis emerged. See modernism and postmodernism and, for innovations in critical

theory and practice, poststructuralism. Refer also to periods of American literature.

This entry has followed what has been the widespread practice of includ-

ing under “English literature” the works of anglophone authors—that is,

authors who speak and write in the English language—in all the British Isles.

A number of the writers listed above were in fact natives of Ireland, Scotland,

and Wales. Of the Modern Period especially it can be said that much of the

greatest “English” literature was written by the Irish writers Yeats, Shaw,

Joyce, O’Casey, Beckett, Iris Murdoch, and Seamus Heaney. In the twentieth

century, much of the greatest “English” literature was written by the Irish

writers Yeats, Shaw, Joyce, O’Casey, Beckett, Murdoch, Heaney, and Paul

Muldoon; the Welshman Dylan Thomas, the Scotsman Hugh McDiarmid,

and the Polish-born Joseph Conrad. In more recent decades, some of the

most notable achievements in the English language have been produced by

PERIODSOFENGLISHLITERATURE 285

authors who are natives or residents of liberated English colonies. They are

often referred to as postcolonial authors, and include Jamaica Kincaid

(Antigua); George Lamming (Barbados); Doris Lessing (Rhodesia); Nadine

Gordimer, Athol Fugard, and J. M. Coetzee (South Africa); V. S. Naipaul

and Derek Walcott (West Indies); Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka

(Nigeria); and R. K. Narayan, Amitav Ghosh, Anita Desai, and Sa lman

Rushdie (India). See Terry Eagleton, Exiles and Emigrés (1975), and refer to

postcolonial studies.

peripety (per



ete): 296; 406.

periphrasis (per



ras



s): 298.

perlocutionary act: 372.

persona, tone, and voice: These terms reflect the critical tendency to think of

narrative and lyric works of literature as a mode of speech, or in what is now a

favored term, as discourse. To conceive a work as an utterance suggests that

there is a speaker who has determinate personal qualities and who expresses

attitudes both toward the characters and materials within the work and

toward the audience to whom the work is addressed. In his Rhetoric (fourth

century BC), Aristotle, followed by other Greek and Roman rhetoricians,

pointed out that an orator projects in the course of his oration an ethos, that

is, a personal character, which itself functions as a means of persuasion. For

example, if the impression a speaker projects is that of a person of rectitude,

intelligence, and goodwill, the audience is instinctively inclined to give cre-

dence to such a speaker’s arguments. The current concern with the nature and

function of the author’s presence in a work of imaginative literature is related

to this traditional concept, and is part of the rhetorical emphasis in modern

criticism. (See rhetoric, rhetorical criticism, and speech-act theory.) Specific applica-

tions of the terms “persona,”“tone,” and “voice” vary greatly and involve

difficult concepts in philosophy and social psychology—concepts such as

“the self,”“personal identity,”“role-playing,” and “sincerity.” This essay

will merely sketch some central uses of these terms that have proved helpful

in analyzing diverse works of literature.

Persona was the Latin word for the mask worn by actors in the classical

theater, from which was derived the term dramatis personae for the list of

characters who play a role in a drama, and ultimately the English word “per-

son,” a particular individual. On occasion, “persona” is applied to the first-

person speaker who tells the story in a narrative poem or novel, or whose

voice we hear in a lyric poem. Examples of personae, in this broad applica-

tion, are the visionary first-person narrator of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (who

in the opening passages of various books of that epic discourses at some length

about himself); the Gulliver who tells us about his misadventures in Gulliver’s

Travels; the “I” who carries on most of the conversation in Alexander Pope’s

satiric dialogue Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot; the genial narrator of Henry Fielding’s

286 PERIPETY

Tom Jones, who pauses frequently for leisurely discourse with his reader; the

speaker who talks first to himself, then to his sister, in William Wordsworth’s

“Tintern Abbey”; the Duke who tells the emissary about his former wife in

Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess”; and the fantastic “biographer” who

narrates Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Calling such diverse speakers “personae”

indicates that they are all, to some degree, adapted to the generic and formal

requirements and the artistic aims of a particular literary work. We need,

however, to go on to make distinctions between such speakers as Jonathan

Swift’s Gulliver and Browning’s Duke, who are entirely fictional characters

very different from their authors; the narrators in Pope’s Epistle and Fielding’s

Tom Jones, who are presented as closer to their authors, although clearly

shaped to fit the roles they are designed to play in those works; and the speak-

ers in the autobiographical passages in Paradise Lost,in“Tintern Abbey,” and

in “Ode to a Nightingale,” where we are invited to attribute the voice we

hear, and the sentiments it utters, to the poet in his own person.

In an influential discussion, I. A. Richards defined tone as the expression

of a literary speaker’s “attitude to his listener. ”“The tone of his utterance

reflects … his sense of how he stands toward those he is addressing” (Practical

Criticism, 1929, chapters 1 and 3). In a more complex definition, the Soviet

critic Mikhail Bakhtin said that tone, or “intonation,” is “oriented in two direc-

tions: with respect to the listener as ally or witness and with respect to the

object of the utterance as the third, living participant whom the intonation

scolds or caresses, denigrates or magnifies.” (“Discourse in Life and Discourse

in Art,” in Bakhtin’s Freudianism: A Marxist Critique, trans. 1976.) The sense in

which the term is used in critical discourse is suggested by the phrase “tone of

voice,” as

applied to nonliterary speech. The way we speak reveals, by subtle

clues, our conception of, and attitude toward, the things we are talking about,

our personal relationship to our auditor, and also our assumptions about the

social level, intelligence, and sensitivity of that auditor. The tone of a speech

can be described as critical or approving, formal or intimate, outspoken or

reticent, solemn or playful, arrogant or prayerful, angry or loving, serious or

ironic, condescending or obsequious, and so on through numberless possible

nuances of relationship and attitude both to object and to auditor. In a literary

narrative, the narratee (the person or persons to whom the narrator addresses

the story) is sometimes explicitly identified, but at other times remains an

implied auditor, revealed only by what the narrator implicitly takes for

granted as needing or not needing explanation or justification, and by the

tone of the narrator’s address. Feminist critics, for example, point out that

much of the literature by male authors assumes a readership of males who

share the narrator’s views, interests, and values. See Judith Fetterley, The

Resisting Reader (1978); see also empathy and sympathy.

Some current critical uses of “tone” are broader, and coincide in refer-

ence with what other critics prefer to call “voice.”

Voice has come to signify the equivalent in imaginative literature to

Aristotle’s “ethos ” in a speech of persuasive rhetoric, and suggests also the tra-

ditional rhetorician’s concern with the importance of the physical voice in an

PERSONA, TONE, AND VOICE 287

oration. The term in criticism points to the fact that we are aware of a voice

beyond the fictional voices that speak in a work, and of a persona behind all

the dramatic personae, and behind even the first-person narrator. We have the

sense, that is, of a pervasive authorial presence, a determinate intelligence and

moral sensibility, who has invented, ordered, and rendered all these literary

characters and materials in just this way. The particular qualities of the

author’s ethos, or voice, in Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones (1749) manifest

themselves, among other things, in the fact that he has chosen to create the

wise, ironic, and worldly persona who ostensibly tells the story and talks to

the reader about it. The sense of a distinctive authorial presence is no less evi-

dent in the work of writers who, unlike Fielding, pursue a strict policy of

authorial noninterference and, by effacing themselves, try to give the impres-

sion that the story tells itself (see point of view). There is great diversity in the

quality of the authorial mind, temperament, and sensibility which, by invent-

ing, controlling, and rendering the particular fiction, pervades works—all of

them “objective” or impersonal in narrative technique—such as James Joyce’s

Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Ernest Hemingway’s “The Killers,”

and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. For a particular emphasis on

the importance of the author’s implicit presence as this is sustained from work

to work, see critics of consciousness. For a discussion of the relation between a

poet’s speaking voice in real life and the qualities of his or her poem, refer to

Francis Berry, Poetry and the Physical Voice (1962); on the importance of

speech in producing the experience of poetry, see M. H. Abrams, The Fourth

Dimension of a Poem (2012).

Of the critics listed below who deal with this concept, Wayne C. Booth

prefers the term implied author over “voice,” in order better to indicate that

the reader of a work of fiction has the sense not only of the timbre and tone

of a supervisory speaking voice but of a total human presence. All agree, how-

ever, that the overall sense of a convincing authorial voice and presence,

whose values, beliefs, and moral vision serve implicitly as controlling forces

throughout a work, helps to sway the reader to yield the imaginative consent

without which a poem or novel would remain an elaborate verbal game.

Refer to Bakhtin’s view of the multiplex voices in narrative fiction, in the

entry dialogic criticism. See Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks

(1948), which discusses Yeats’ theory of a poet’s “masks” or “personae, ” in

both his life and his art; Reuben Brower, “ The Speaking Voice,” in

Fields of

Light (1951);

Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (rev. 1983), chapter 3;

W. J. Ong, The Barbarian Within (1962); J. O. Perry, ed., Approaches to the

Poem (1965)—in which section 3, “Tone, Voice, Sensibility,” includes selec-

tions from I. A. Richards, Reuben Brower, and W. J. Ong; Walter J. Slatoff,

With Respect to Readers (1970); Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (1972);

and Robert C. Elliott, The Literary Persona (1982).

personal lyrics: 202.

personification: 135; 9. See also invocation; pathetic fallacy.

288 PERSONAL LYRICS

Petrarchan conceit (peträr

kan): 60; 68.

Petrarchan sonnet: 369.

phallogocentric (falog

osen

trik): 128.

phenomenological criticism: 289.

phenomenology and criticism: The philosophical perspective and method

called phenomenology was established by the German thinker Edmund

Husserl (1859–1938). Husserl set out to analyze human consciousness—that is,

to describe the concrete Lebenswelt (lived world), as this is experienced inde-

pendently of any prior suppositions, whether these suppositions come from phi-

losophy or from common sense. He proposes that consciousness is a unified

intentional act. By “intentional” he does not mean that it is deliberately

willed, but that it is always directed to an “object”; in other words, to be

conscious is always to be conscious of something. Husserl’s claim is that in this

unitary act of consciousness, the thinking subject and the object it “intends,” or

is aware of, are interinvolved and reciprocally implicative. In order to free itself

of prior conceptions, the phenomenological analysis of consciousness begins

with an epoché (suspension) of all presuppositions about the nature of experi-

ence, and this suspension involves “bracketing” (holding in abeyance) the ques-

tion whether or not the object of consciousness is real—that is, whether or not

the object exists outside the consciousness which “intends” it.

Phenomenology had widespread philosophical influence after it was put

forward by Husserl in 1900 and later, and was diversely developed by Martin

Heidegger in Germany and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in France. It greatly

influenced Hans-Georg Gadamer and other theorists concerned with analyz-

ing the conscious activity of understanding language (see interpretation and

hermeneutics), and, directly or indirectly, affected the way in which many critics

analyze the experience of literature. In the 1930s, the Polish theorist Roman

Ingarden (1893–1970), who wrote his books in both Polish and German,

adapted the phenomenological viewpoint and concepts to an innovative for-

mulation of the way we understand and respond to a work of literature.

In what Ingarden calls an “active reading,” the reader “fills out” the places

of indeterminacy in a text, and in so doing, concretizes the work, becoming a

“co-creator” with the author. See Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art

(1931, trans. 1973), and The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art (1937, trans.

1973); also, the exposition in Eugene Falk, The Poetics of Roman Ingarden

(1981). For German critics strongly influenced by Ingarden, see Wolfgang Iser

under reader-response criticism, and Hans Robert Jauss under reception theory.

The term phenomenological criticism is often applied specifically to

the theory and practice of the Geneva School of critics, most of whose

members taught at the University of Geneva, and all of whom were joined

by friendship, interinfluence, and their general approach to literature. The

older

members of the Geneva School were Marcel Raymond and Albert

PHENOMENOLOGY AND CRITICISM 289

Beguin; later members were Jean Rousset, Jean-Pierre Richard, and, most

prominently, Georges Poulet. J. Hillis Miller, who for six years was a col-

league of Poulet’s at Johns Hopkins University, was in his earlier career

(before turning to deconstructive criticism) the leading American representative

of the Geneva School of criticism, and applied this critical mode to the analy-

sis of a variety of American and English authors.

Geneva critics regard each work of literature as a fictional world that is cre-

ated out of the Lebenswelt of its author and embodies the author’s unique mode

of consciousness. In its approach to literature as primarily subjective, this criticism

is opposed to the objective approach of formalism,bothinitsEuropeanvariety

and in American New Criticism. Its roots instead go back through the nineteenth

century to that type of romantic expressive criticism which regarded a literary work

as the revelation of the personality of its author, and also proposed that the

awareness of this personality is the chief aim and value of reading literature. (As

early as 1778, for example, the German critic Johann Gottfried Herder wrote:

“This living reading, this divination into the soul of the author, is the sole mode

of reading, and the most profound means of self-development.”)Inthecourse

of time, however, Geneva critics assimilated a number of the concepts and

methods of Husserl, Heidegger, and other phenomenologists. In the view of

the Geneva critics the cogito, or distinctive formations of consciousness, of the

individual author—related to, but not identical with, the author’s “empirical,” or

biographical, self—pervades a work of literature, manifesting itself as the subjec-

tive correlate of the “contents” of the work; that is, of the objects, characters,

imagery, and style into which the author’s personal mode of awareness and feel-

ing imaginatively projects itself. (For a related critical concept see voice; refer also

to objective and subjective.) By “bracketing” their own prepossessions and particu-

larities, the readers of a literary work make themselves purely and passively

receptive, and so are capable of achieving participation, or even identity, with

the immanent consciousness of its author. Their undertaking to read a work so

as to experience the mode of consciousness of its author, and then to reproject

this consciousness in their own critical writing about that work, underlies the

frequent application to the Geneva School of the term critics of conscious-

ness, and the description of their aim in a critical reading of works of literature

as “consci ousness of the consciousness of another.” As Georges Poulet put it in

“Phen omenology of Reading” (1969): “When I read as I ought … with the

total commitment required of any reader,” then “I am thinking the thoughts

of another…. But I think it as my very own…

. My consciousness behaves as

though

it were the consciousness of another.” (It should be noted that whereas

the philosopher Husserl’s aim in phenomenology was to describe the essential

features of consciousness which are shared by all human beings, the Geneva

critics’ quite different aim is to identify—andalsotoidentifyoneselfwith—the

unique consciousness of each individual author.)

Within this framework, critics of consciousness differ in the extent to

which they attend to specific elements in the “external” contents, formal

structure, and style of a text, on their way toward isolating its author’s “inter-

ior” mode of consciousness. George Poulet extended this project, attempting

290 PHENOMENOLOGY AND CRITICISM

to identify “for each epoch a consciousness common to all contemporary

minds,” claiming that within this shared period-consciousness, the conscious-

ness of each author also manifests its own uniqueness. The influence of the

criticism of consciousness reached its height in the 1950s and 1960s, then

gave way to the explicitly opposed critical modes of structuralism and deconstruc-

tion. Many of its concepts and procedures, however, survive in some forms of

reader-response criticism and reception aesthetic.

Robert R. Magliola, Phenomenology and Literature (1977), deals with vari-

ous types of phenomenological poetics and criticism in the context of an

exposition of Husserl, Heidegger, and other phenomenological philosophers.

Brief introductions to the Geneva School of criticism are Georges Poulet,

“Phenomenology of Reading,” New Literary History 1 (1969–70), and J. Hillis

Miller, “The Geneva School…,” in Modern French Criticism, ed. J. K. Simon

(1972). In “Geneva or Paris? The Recent Work of Georges Poulet,” Univer-

sity of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. 39 (1970), Miller indicates his own transition

from the criticism of consciousness to the very different critical mode of

deconstruction. Among the writings of Geneva critics and other critics of

consciousness available in English are Georges Poulet, Studies in Human Time

(1949), The Interior Distance (1952), and The Metamorphoses of the Circle (1961);

Jean Starobinski, The Invention of Liberty, 1700–1789 (1964); Gaston Bachelard,

Subversive Humanist: Texts and Reading, ed. Mary M. Jones (1991); J. Hillis

Miller, Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (1959), The Disappearance of

God (1963), and Poets of Reality (1965). Other critical works influenced by phe-

nomenology are Paul Brodtkorb, Ishmael’s White World: A Phenomenological

Reading of Moby Dick (1965); David Halliburton, Edgar Allan Poe: A Phenomeno-

logical View (1973); and Bruce Johnson, True Correspondence: A Phenomenology of

Thomas Hardy’sNovels(1983).

philology: 194.

philosophical optimism: 155.

phoneme (f o

nem): 196.

phonetic intensives: 197.

phonetics (f onet



ks): 196.

phonocentric (fonosen



k): 81.

phonology: 196.

phrasal rhythms (in verse): 222.

picaresque narrative (p



aresk

): 253.

PICARESQUE NARRATIVE 291

Pindaric ode: 262.

pitch: 198.

Platonic love: In Plato’s Symposium 210–12, Socrates recounts the doctrine

about Eros (love) that, he modestly says, has been imparted to him by the

wise woman Diotima. She bids us not to linger in the love evoked by the

beauty in a single human body but to mount up as by a stair, “from one

going on to two, and from two to all fair forms,” then up from the beauty

of the body to the beauty of the mind, until we arrive at a final contemplation

of the Idea, or Form, of “beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting.”

From this beauty, existing in its own realm of Ideas, the human soul is in

exile; and of this ideal beauty, the beauties of the body and of the world per-

ceived by the senses are only distant, distorted, and impermanent reflections.

Plotinus and other Neoplatonists (the “new Platonists,” a school of Platonic

philosophers of the third to the fifth century) developed the view that all

beauty in the sensible world—as well as all goodness and truth—is an “ema-

nation” (radiation) from the One or Absolute, which is the essence and source

of all being and all value. Christian thinkers of the Italian Renaissance, merg-

ing this impersonal Absolute with the personal God of the Bible, developed

the theory that genuine beauty of the body is only the outer manifestation of

a moral and spiritual beauty of the soul, which in turn is rayed out from the

absolute beauty of the one God Himself. The Platonic lover is irresistibly

attracted to the bodily beauty of a beloved person, but reveres it as a sign of

the spiritual beauty that it shares with all other beautiful bodies, and at the

same time regards it as merely the lowest rung on a ladder that leads up

from sensual desire to the pure contemplation of Heavenly Beauty in God.

Highly elaborated versions of this conception of Platonic love are to be

found in Dante, Petrarch, and other writers of the thirteenth and fourteenth

centuries and in many Italian, French, and English authors of sonnets and

other love poems during the Renaissance. See, for example, the exposition

in Book IV of Castiglione’s The Courtier (1528), and in Edmund Spenser’s

“An Hymn in Honour of Beauty.” As Spenser wrote in one of the sonnets

he called Amoretti (1595):

Men call you fayre, and you doe credit it….

But only that is permanent and free

From frayle corruption, that doth flesh ensew.

That is true beautie: that doth argue you

To be divine and borne of heavenly seed:

Derived from that fayre spirit, from whom al true

And perfect beauty did at first proceed.

From this complex religious and philosophical doctrine, the modern notion

that Platonic love is simply love that stops short of sexual gratification is a

drastic reduction.

292 PINDARIC ODE

The concept of Platonic love fascinated many later poets, especially Shelley;

an example is his poem “Epipsychidion” (1821). But his friend Byron took a

skeptical view of such lofty claims for the human Eros-impulse. “Oh Plato!

Plato!” Byron sighed,

you have paved the way,

With your confounded fantasies, to more

Immoral conduct by the fancied sway

Your system feigns o’er the controlless core

Of human hearts, than all the long array

Of poets and romancers….

(Don Juan, I. cxvi)

See Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus. For a cognitive and moral assessment of

Plato’s doctrines of love and desire, see Martha Craven Nussbaum, Love’sKnowl-

edge:EssaysonPhilosophyandLiterature(1990), especially chapter 3. Refer to

George Santayana, “Platonic Love in Some Italian Poets,” in Selected Critical

Writings, ed. Norman Henfrey (2 vols., 1968), I, pp. 41–59. See courtly love.

play (drama): 95.

plot: The “plot” (which Aristotle termed the mythos) in a dramatic or narrative

work is constituted by its events and actions, as these are rendered and ordered

toward achieving particular artistic and emotional effects. This description is

deceptively simple because the actions (including verbal discourse as well as

physical actions) are performed by particular characters in a work and are the

means by which they exhibit their moral and dispositional qualities. Plot and

character are therefore interdependent critical concepts—as Henry James has

said, “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident

but the illustration of character?” (See character and characterization.) Notice also

that a plot is distinguishable from the story—that is, a bare synopsis of the tem-

poral order of what happens. When we summarize the story in a literary work,

we say that first this happens, then that, then that, and so on. It is only when

we specify how this is related to that by causes and motivations, and in what

ways all these matters are rendered, ordered, and organized so as to achieve

their particular effects, that a synopsis begins to be adequate to the plot. (On

the distinction between story and plot see narrative and narratology.)

There are a great variety of plot forms. For example, some plots are

designed to achieve tragic effects, and others to achieve the effects of comedy,

romance, satire, or of some other genre. Each of these types in turn exhibits

diverse plot patterns and may be represented in the mode either of drama

or of narrative, and either in verse or in prose. The following terms, widely

current in traditional criticism, are useful in distinguishing the component

elements of plots and in helping to discriminate types of plots, and of the

characters appropriate to them, in both narrative and dramatic literature.

The chief character in a plot, on whom our interest centers, is called the

protagonist (or alternatively, the hero or heroine

), and if the plot is such that

PLOT 293

he or she is pitted against an important opponent, that character is called the

antagonist. Elizabeth Bennet is the protagonist, or heroine, of Jane Austen’s

Pride and Prejudice (1813); Hamlet is the protagonist and King Claudius the

antagonist in Shakespeare’s play, and the relation between them is one of con-

flict. If the antagonist is evil, or capable of cruel and criminal actions, he or she

is called the villain. Many, but far from all, plots deal with a conflict; Thornton

Wilder’s play Our Town (1938), for example, does not. In addition to the con-

flict between individuals, there may be the conflict of a protagonist against fate,

or against the circumstances that stand between him and a goal he has set him-

self; and in some works (as in Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady) the chief conflict

is between opposing desires or values in the protagonist’s own temperament.

For the employment of an antitraditional protagonist, see antihero.

A character in a work who, by sharp contrast, serves to stress and high-

light the distinctive temperament of the protagonist is termed a foil. Thus

Laertes the man of action is a foil to the dilatory Hamlet; the firebrand Hotspur

is a foil to the cool and calculating Prince Hal in Shakespeare’s 1HenryIV;and

in Pride and Prejudice, the gentle and compliant Jane Bennet serves as a foil to

her strong-willed sister Elizabeth. (“Foil” originally signi fied “leaf,” and

came to be applied to the thin sheet of bright metal placed under a jewel

to enhance its brilliance.)

If a character initiates a scheme which depends for its success on the igno-

rance or gullibility of the person or persons against whom it is directed, it is

called an intrigue. Iago is a villain who intrigues against Othello and Cassio

in Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello. A number of comedies, including Ben

Jonson’s Volpone (1607) and many Restoration plays (for example, William

Congreve’s The Way of the World and William Wycherley’s The Country

Wife), have plots which turn largely on the success or failure of an intrigue.

As a plot evolves it arouses expectations in the audience or reader about

the future course of events and actions and how characters will respond to

them. A lack of certainty on the part of a concerned reader about what is

going to happen, especially to characters with whom the reader has estab-

lished a bond of sympathy, is known as suspense. If what in fact happens

violates the expectations we have formed, it is known as surprise. The inter-

play of suspense and surprise is a prime source of vitality in a traditional plot.

The most effective surprise, especially in realistic narratives, is one which turns

out, in retrospect, to have been grounded in what has gone before, even

though we have hitherto made the wrong inference from the given facts of

circumstance and character. As E. M. Forster put it, the shock of the un-

expected, “followed by the feeling, ‘oh, that’s all right

’ is

a sign that all is

well with the plot.” A “surprise ending,” in the pejorative sense, is one in

which the author resolves the plot without adequate earlier grounds in char-

acterization or events, often by the use of highly unlikely coincidence; there

are numerous examples in the short stories of O. Henry. (For one type of

manipulated ending, see deus ex machina.) Dramatic irony is a special kind of

suspenseful expectation, when the audience or readers foresee the oncoming

disaster or triumph but the character does not.

294 PLOT

A plot is commonly said to have unity of action (or to be “an artistic

whole”) if it is apprehended by the reader or auditor as a complete and

ordered structure of actions, directed toward the intended effect, in which

none of the prominent component parts, or incidents, is nonfunctional; as

Aristotle put this concept (Poetics, section 8), all the parts are “so closely con-

nected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one of them will disjoint and

dislocate the whole.” Aristotle claimed that it does not constitute a unified

plot to present a series of episodes which are strung together simply because

they happen to a single character. Many picaresque narratives, nevertheless, such

as Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), have held the interest of readers for

centuries with such an episodic plot structure; while even so tightly integrated

a plot as that of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) introduces, for variety’s

sake, a long story by the Man of the Hill, which is related to the main plot

only by parallels and contrasts.

A successful later development which Aristotle did not foresee is the type

of structural unity that can be achieved with double plots, familiar in Eliza-

bethan drama. In this form, a subplot—a second story that is complete and

interesting in its own right—is introduced into the play; when skillfully

invented and managed, the subplot serves to broaden our perspective on the

main plot and to enhance rather than diffuse the overall effect. The integral

subplot may have the relation of analogy to the main plot (the Gloucester

story in King Lear), or else of counterpoint against it (the comic subplot

involving Falstaff in 1 Henry IV).

Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590–96) is an instance of a narra-

tive romance which interweaves main plot and a multiplicity of subplots into

an intricately interrelated structure, in a way that the critic C. S. Lewis com-

pares to the polyphonic art of contemporary Elizabethan music, in which

two or more diverse melodies are carried on simultaneously.

The order of a unified plot, Aristotle pointed out, is a continuous

sequence of beginning, middle, and end. The beginning initiates the main

action in a way which makes us look forward to something more; the middle

presumes what has gone before and requires something to follow; and the

end follows from what has gone before but requires nothing more; we feel

satisfied that the plot is complete. The structural beginning (sometimes also

called the “initiating action,” or “point of attack”) need not be the initial

stage of the action that is brought to a climax in the narrative or play. The

epic, for example, plunges in medias res, “in the middle of things” (see epic

many

short stories begin at the point of the climax itself, and the writer of a

drama often captures our attention in the opening scene with a representative

incident, related to and closely preceding the event which precipitates the

central situation or conflict. Thus Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet opens with

a street fight between the servants of two great houses, and his Hamlet with

the apparition of a ghost; the exposition of essential prior matters—the feud

between the Capulets and Montagues, or the posture of affairs in the Royal

House of Denmark—Shakespeare weaves rapidly and skillfully into the

dialogue of these startling initial scenes. In the novel, the modern drama,

PLOT 295

and especially the motion picture, such exposition is sometimes managed by

flashbacks: interpolated narratives or scenes (often justified, or naturalized,as

a memory, a reverie, or a confession by one of the characters) which represent

events that happened before the time at which the work opened. Arthur

Miller’s play Death of a Salesman (1949) and Ingmar Bergman’s film Wild

Strawberries (1957) make persistent and skillful use of this device.

The German critic Gustav Freytag, in Technique of the Drama (1863),

introduced an analysis of plot that is known as Freytag’ s Pyramid.He

described the typical plot of a five-act play as a pyramidal shape, consisting

of a rising action, climax, and falling action. Although the total pattern that

Freytag described applies to only a limited number of plays, various of his

terms are frequently echoed by critics of prose fiction as well as drama. As

applied to Hamlet, for example, the rising action (a section that Aristotle

had called the complication) begins, after the opening scene and exposition,

with the ghost’s telling Hamlet that he has been murdered by his brother

Claudius; it continues with the developing conflict between Hamlet and

Claudius, in which Hamlet, despite setbacks, succeeds in controlling the

course of events. The rising action reaches the climax of the hero’s fortunes

with his proof of the King’s guilt by the device of the play within a play (III.

ii). Then comes the crisis, the reversal or “turning point” of the fortunes of

the protagonist, in his failure to kill the King while he is at prayer. This inau-

gurates the falling action; from now on the antagonist, Claudius, largely

controls the course of events, until the catastrophe, or outcome, which is

decided by the death of the hero, as well as of Claudius, the Queen, and

Laertes. “Catastrophe” is usually applied to tragedy only; a more general

term for this precipitating final scene, which is applied to both comedy and

tragedy, is the dénouement (French for “unknotting”): the action or intrigue

ends in success or failure for the protagonist, the conflicts are settled, the mys-

tery is solved, or the misunderstanding cleared away. A frequently used alter-

native term for the outcome of a plot is the resolution.

In many plots the dénouement involves a reversal, or in Aristotle’s

Greek term, peripety, in the protagonist’s fortunes, whether to the protago-

nist’s failure or destruction, as in tragedy, or success, as in comic plots. The

reversal frequently depends on a discovery (in Aristotle’s term, anagnorisis).

This is the recognition by the protagonist of something of great importance

hitherto unknown to him or to her: Cesario reveals to the Duke at the end of

Shakespeare’s Twelfth

Night that he is really Viola; the fact of Iago’s lying

treachery dawns upon Othello; Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, in his comic

novel by that name (1742), discovers on the evidence of a birthmark—“as

fine a strawberry as ever grew in a garden”—that he is in reality the son of

Mr. and Mrs. Wilson.

Since the 1920s, a number of writers of prose fiction and drama—building

on the example of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, as early as 1759–67—have

deliberately designed their works to frustrate the expectations of chronological

order, coherence, reliable narration, and resolution that the reader or auditor

has formed by habituation to traditional plots; some writers have even

296 PLOT

attempted to dispense altogether with a recognizable plot. (See, for example,

literature of the absurd; modernism and postmodernism; antinovel; new novel.) Also,

various types of critical theory have altered or supplemented many traditional

concepts in the classification and analysis of plots. The archetypal critic Northrop

Frye reduced all plots to four types that, he claims, reflect the myths corre-

sponding to the four seasons of the year. Structuralist critics, who conceive

diverse plots as sets of alternative conventions and codes for constructing a fic-

tional narrative, analyze and classify these conventional plot forms on the model

of linguistic theory. (See structuralist criticism and narratology, and the discussion of

plots in Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics, 1975, pp. 205–24.) And some post-

structuralist critical theorists have undertaken to explode entirely the traditional

treatments of plots, on the ground that any notion of the “unity” of a plot and

of its “teleological” progress toward a resolution are illusory, or else that the

resolution itself is only a façade to mask the irreconcilable conflicts and contra-

dictions (whether psychological or social) that are the basic components of any

literary text. See under poststructuralism.

For developments in the concept of plot, see narrative and narratology.

Refer to Aristotle, Poetics ; E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927);

R. S. Crane, “The Concept of Plot and the Plot of Tom Jones,” in Critics

and Criticism, ed. Crane (1952); Elder Olson, Tragedy and the Theory of Drama

(1966); Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (1966);

Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction

(1967); Eric S. Rabkin, Narrative Suspense (1974); Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics

of Prose (trans. 1977); Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure

in Fiction and Film (1980); Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (rev. 1983);

Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Invention in Narrative (1984). For

references to plot in other entries, see pages 56, 69.

plurisignation: 14.

poetaster (po

etas

ter): 53.

poetic diction: The term diction signifies the kinds of words, phrases, and sen-

tence structures, and sometimes also figurative language, that constitute any

work of literature. A writer’s diction can be analyzed under a great variety

of categories, such as the degree to which the vocabulary and phrasing is

abstract or concrete, Latin or Anglo-Saxon in origin, colloquial or formal,

technical or common. See style.

Many poets in all ages have used a distinctive language, a “poetic dic-

tion,” which includes words, phrasing, and figures not current in the ordinary

discourse of the time. (See poetic license.) In modern discussion, however, the

term poetic diction is applied especially to poets who, like Edmund Spenser

in the Elizabethan age or G. M. Hopkins in the Victorian age, deliberately

employed a diction that deviated markedly not only from common speech

but even from the writings of other poets of their era. And in a frequent

use, “poetic diction” is narrowed to specify the special style developed by

POETIC DICTION 297

neoclassic writers of the eighteenth century who, like Thomas Gray, believed

that “the language of the age is never the language of poetry” (letter to

Richard West, 1742). This neoclassic poetic diction was in large part

derived from the characteristic usage of admired earlier poets such as the

Roman Virgil, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton and was based primarily

on the reigning principle of decorum, according to which a poet must

adapt the “level” and type of his diction to the mode and status of a

particular genre (see style). Formal satire, such as Alexander Pope’s “Epistle

to Dr. Arbuthnot” (1735), because it represented a poet’s direct commentary

on everyday matters, permitted—indeed required—the use of language really

spoken by urbane and cultivated people of the time. But what were ranked as

the higher genres, such as epic, tragedy, and ode, required a refined and ele-

vated poetic diction to raise the style to the level of the form. On the other

hand, pastoral and descriptive poems, which involved references to lowly

materials, used a special diction to invest such materials with the dignity and

elegance that were considered appropriate to poetry.

Prominent characteristics of this eighteenth-century poetic diction were its

archaism and its use of recurrent epithets; its preference for resounding words

derived from Latin (“refulgent,”“irriguous,”“umbrageous”); the frequent invo-

cations to, and personifications of, abstractions and inanimate objects; and above

all, the persistent use of periphrasis (a roundabout, elaborate way of saying

something) to avoid what were regarded as low, technical, or commonplace

terms by means of a substitute phrase that was thought to be of higher dignity

and decorum. Among the many periphrases in James Thomson’s The Seasons

(1726–30) are “the finny tribe” for “fish,”“the bleating kind” for “sheep,”

and “from the snowy leg … the inverted silk she drew” instead of “she took

off her silk stocking.” The following stanza from Thomas Gray’s excellent

period piece, “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College

” (1

747), manifests

all these devices of neoclassic poetic diction. Contemporary readers took special

pleasure in the ingenuity of the periphrases by which Gray, to achieve the sty-

listic elevation appropriate to an ode, managed to describe schoolboys at play

while evading the use of common—hence what were considered to be

unpoetic—words such a s “swim,”“cage,”“boys,”“hoop,” and “bat”:

Say, Father Thames, for thou hast seen

Full many a sprightly race

Disporting on thy margent green

The paths of pleasure trace;

Who foremost now delight to cleave

With pliant arm thy glassy wave?

The captive linnet which enthrall?

What idle progeny succeed

To chase the rolling circle’s speed,

Or urge the flying ball?

In William Wordsworth’s famed attack on the neoclassic doctrine of a

special language for poetry, in his preface of 1800 to Lyrical Ballads, he claimed

298 POETIC DICTION

that there is no “essential difference between the language of prose and metri-

cal composition” ; decried the poetic diction of eighteenth-century writers as

“artificial,”“vicious,” and “unnatural”; set up as the criterion for a valid

poetic language that it be not a matter of artful contrivance but the “sponta-

neous overflow of powerful feelings”; and, by a drastic reversal of the class

hierarchy of linguistic decorum, claimed that the best model for the natural

expression of feeling is not an idealized version of upper-class speech but the

actual speech of “humble and rustic life.”

See J. Arthos, The Language of Natural Description in Eighteenth-Century

Poetry (1949); M. H. Abrams, “ Wordsworth and Coleridge on Diction and

Figures,” in The Correspondent Breeze (1984). For general treatments of the

diverse vocabularies of poets, refer to Winifred Novotny, The Language Poets

Use (1962); Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction (rev. 1973); Emerson R. Marks,

Taming the Chaos: English Poetic Diction Theory since the Renaissance (1998).

For references to poetic diction in other entries, see pages 9, 18, 299.

poetic drama: 95.

poetic justice: “Poetic justice” was a term coined by Thomas Rymer, an English

critic of the later seventeenth century, to signify the distribution, at the end of a

literary work, of earthly rewards and punishments in proportion to the virtue or

vice of the various characters. Rymer’s view was that a poem (in a sense that

includes dramatic tragedy) is an ideal realm of its own and should be governed

by ideal principles of decorum and morality and not by the random way things

often work out in the actual world. No important critics or literary writers since

Rymer’s day have acceded, in any but a highly qualified way, to his rigid rec-

ommendation of poetic justice; it would, for example, destroy the possibility of

tragic suffering, which exceeds what the protagonist has deserved because of his

or her tragic flaw, or error of judgment.

See “Introduction” to The Critical Works of Thomas Rymer, ed. Curt A.

Zimansky (1956); M. A. Quinlan, Poetic Justice in the Drama (1912); Martha

C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (1995).

poetic license: John Dryden in the late seventeenth century defined “ poetic

license” as “the liberty which poets have assumed to themselves, in all ages,

of speaking things in verse which are beyond the severity of prose.” In its

most common use the term is confined to

poetic diction alone,

to justify the

poet’s departure from the rules and conventions of standard spoken and writ-

ten prose in matters such as syntax, word order, the use of archaic or newly

coined words, and the conventional use of eye-rhymes (wind–bind, daughter –

laughter). The degree and kinds of linguistic freedom assumed by poets have

varied according to the conventions of each age, but in every case the justifi-

cation of the freedom lies in the success of the effect. The sustained opening

sentence of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), for example, departs radically, but

with eminent success, from the colloquial language of his time in the choice

and order of words, in idiom and figurative construction, and in syntax, to

POETIC LICENSE 299

achieve a distinction of language and grandeur of announcement commensu-

rate with Milton’s high subject and the tradition of the epic form.

In a broader sense “poetic license” is applied not only to diction but to all

the ways in which poets and other literary authors are held to be free to vio-

late, for special effects, the ordinary norms not only of common discourse but

also of literal and historical truth, including the devices of meter and rhyme,

the recourse to literary conventions, and the representation of fictional characters

and events. In Henry IV, Part 1, for example, Shakespeare follows Samuel

Daniel’s history in verse of the Wars of the Roses by making the valiant

Hotspur much younger than he was in fact, in order to serve as a more effective

foil to the apparently dissolute Prince Hal. A special case is anachronism—the

placing of an event or person or thing outside of its historical era. Shakespeare

described his Cleopatra as wearing Elizabethan corsets; and in Julius Caesar,

which is set in ancient Rome, he introduced a clock that strikes the hour.

The term “poetic license” is sometimes extended to a poet’s violation of fact

from ignorance, as well as by design. It need not diminish our enjoyment of

the work that Shakespeare attributed a seacoast to landlocked Bohemia in The

Winter’sTale, or that Keats, in writing “On First Looking into Chapman’s

Homer” (1816), mistakenly made Cortez instead of Balboa the discoverer of

the Pacific Ocean.

See Geoffrey N. Leech, A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry (1969), chapter

3, “Varieties of Poetic License.” For the view by Russian Formalists that varieties

of poetic license are used to freshen our perceptions both of literary language

and of the world it represents, see Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism (1965).

poetry happenings: 271.

poetry slam: 271.

point of view: “Point of view” signifies the way a story gets told—the mode

(or modes) established by an author by means of which the reader is presented

with the characters, dialogue, actions, setting, and events which constitute the

narrative in a work of fiction. The question of point of view has always been a

practical concern of the novelist, and there have been scattered observations

on the matter in critical writings since the emergence of the modern novel in

the eighteenth century. Henry James’ prefaces to his various novels, however

—collected as The Art of the Novel in 1934—and Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of

Fiction (1926), which codified and expanded upon James’ comments, made

point of view one of the most prominent and persistent concerns in modern

treatments of the art of prose fiction.

Authors have developed many different ways to present a story, and many

single works exhibit a diversity of methods. The simplified classification

below,

however, is widely recognized and can serve as a preliminary frame

of reference for analyzing traditional types of narration and for determining

the predominant type in mixed narrative modes. It deals first with by far the

most widely used modes, first-person and third-person narration. It establishes

300 POETRY HAPPENINGS

a broad distinction between these two modes, then divides third-person nar-

ratives into subclasses according to the degree and kind of freedom or limita-

tion which the author assumes in getting the story across to the reader. It then

goes on to deal briefly with the rarely used mode of second-person narration.

In a third-person narrative,thenarrator is someone outside the story

proper who refers to all the characters in the story by name, or as “he,”“she,”

“they.” Thus Jane Austen’s Emma begins: “Emma Woodhouse, handsome,

clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to

unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one

yearsintheworldwithverylittletodistressorvexher.” In a first-person

narrative, the narrator speaks as “I” andistoagreaterorlesserdegreeapartici-

pant in the story, or else is the protagonist of the story. J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher

in the Rye (1951), an instance of the latter type, begins: “If you really want to

hear about it, the first thing you’ll really want to know is where I was born, and

what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all

beforetheyhadme,andallthatDavidCopperfieldkindofcrap….”

I. Third-person points of view

A. The omniscient point of view . This is a common term for the

many and varied works of fiction written in accord with the conven-

tion that the narrator knows everything that needs to be known

about the agents, actions, and events and has privileged access to the

characters’ thoughts, feelings, and motives; also that the narrator is

free to move at will in time and place, to shift from character to char-

acter, and to report (or conceal) their speech, doings, and states of

consciousness.

Within this mode, the intrusive narrator is one who not only

reports but also comments on and evaluates the actions and motives

of the characters and sometimes expresses personal views about

human life. Most works are written according to the convention

that the omniscient narrator’s reports and judgments are to be taken

as authoritative by the reader, and so serve to establish what counts

as the true facts and values within the fictional world. This is

the fashion in which many of the greatest novelists have written,

including Henry Fielding, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, William

Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Fyodor

Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy. (In Fielding’s Tom Jones, 1749, and

Tolstoy’s War and Peace, 1869, the intrusive narrator goes so far as

to interpolate commentary, or short essays suggested by the subject

matter of the novels.) On the other hand, the omniscient narrator

may choose to be unintrusive (alternative terms are impersonal

or objective). Flaubert in

Madame Bovary (1857),

for example, for

the most part describes, reports, or “shows” the action in dramatic

scenes without introducing his own comments or judgments. More

radical instances of the unintrusive narrator, who gives up even the

privilege of access to inner feelings and motives, are to be found in

POINT OF VIEW 301

a number of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories; for example, “The

Killers” and “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” (See showing and telling,

under character.) For an extreme use of impersonal representation, see

the comment on Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy, under novel.

Gérard Genette subtilized in various ways the analysis of third-

person point of view. For example, he distinguishes between focus

of narration (who tells the story) and focus of character (who

perceives what is narrated in one or another section of the story). In

Henry James’ What Maisie Knew, for example, the focus of narration

is an adult who tells the story, but his focus is on events as they are

perceived and interpreted by the character Maisie, a child. Both the

focus of narration and the focus of character (that is, of perception) in

a single story may shift rapidly from the narrator to a character in the

story, and from one character to another. In To the Lighthouse, Virginia

Woolf shifts the focus of cha racter in turn to each of the principal

participants in the story; and Hemingway’s short story, “The Short

Happy L ife of Francis Macomber,” is a third-person narrative in

which the focus of perception is, in various passages, the narrator,

the hunter Wilson, Mrs. Macomber, Mr. Macomber, and even,

briefly, the hunted lion. See Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse:

An Essay in Method (1972, trans. 1980). For an analysis of the

grammatical shift in pronouns, indicato rs of time and place, an d

the tenses o f verbs as the focus and the mode of narration shifts

within a story, see free indirect discourse,undernarration, grammar of.

B. The limited point of view. The narrator tells the story in the third

person but stays inside the confines of what is perceived, thought,

remembered, and felt by a single character (or at most by very few char-

acters) within the story. Henry James, who refined this narrative mode,

described such a selected character as his “focus,” or “mirror,” or “cen-

ter of consciousness.” In a number of James’ later works all the events

and actions are represented as they unfold before, and filter to the reader

through, the particular perceptions, awareness, and responses of only

one character; for example, Strether in The Ambassadors (1903). A short

and artfully sustained example of this limited point of view in narration

is Katherine Mansfield’sstory“Bliss” (1920). Later writers developed

this technique into stream-of-consciousness narration, in which we are pre-

sented with outer perceptions only as they impinge on the continuous

current of thought, memory, feelings, and associations which constitute

aparticularobserver

’s

total awareness. The limitation of point of view

represented both by James’“center of consciousness ” narration and by

the “stream-of-consciousness” narration sometimes used by James Joyce,

Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and others, is often said to exemplify

the “self-effacing author,” or “objective narration,” more effectively

than does the use of an unintrusive but omniscient narrator. In the latter

instance, it is said, the reader remains aware that someone, or some out-

side voice, is telling us about what is going on; the alternative mode, in

302 POINT OF VIEW

which the point of view is limited to the consciousness of a character

within the story itself, gives readers the illusion of experiencing events

that evolve before their own eyes. For a revealing analysis, however, of

the way even an author who restricts the narrative center of conscious-

ness to a single character nonetheless communicates authorial judgments

on people and events, and also controls the judgments evoked from the

reader, see Ian Watt, “The First Paragraph of The Ambassadors:An

Explication,” reprinted in David Lodge, ed., Twentieth Century Literary

Criticism: A Reader (1972). See also persona, tone, and voice.

II. First-person points of view

This mode, insofar as it is consistently carried out, limits the matter of the nar-

rative to what the first-person narrator knows, experiences, infers, or finds out

by talking to other characters. We distinguish between the narrative “I” who is

only a fortuitous witness and auditor of the matters he relates (Marlow in Heart

of Darkness and other works by Joseph Conrad); or who is a participant, but

only a minor or peripheral one, in the story (Ishmael in Herman Melville’s

Moby-Dick,NickinF.ScottFitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby); or who is himself

or herself the central character in the story (Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders,

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Villette, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations,

Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,J.D.Salinger’s The Catcher

in the Rye). Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man manifests a complex narrative mode

in which the protagonist is the first-person narrator, whose focus of character is

on the perceptions of a third party—white America—to whose eyes the pro-

tagonist, because he is black, is “invisible.” For a special type of first-person

narrative, see epistolary novel, under novel.

III. Second-person points of view

This name has been given to a mode in which the story gets told solely, or

at least primarily, as an address by the narrator to someone he calls by the

second-person pronoun “you,” who is represented as experiencing that

which is narrated. This form of narration occurred in occasional passages of

traditional fiction but has been exploited in a sustained way only since the

latter part of the twentieth century and then only rarely; the effect is of a

virtuo

so performance. The French novelist Michel Butor in La Modification

(1957, trans. as Second Thoughts in 1981), the Italian novelist Italo Calvino in

If on a Winter’sNightaTraveler(trans. 1981), and the American novelist Jay

McInerney in Bright Lights, Big City (1984), all tell their story with “you” as

the narratee.McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, for example, begins:

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at

this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say

that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, though the details are fuzzy.

You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The

club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge.

This second person may turn out to be a specific fictional character, or the

reader of the story, or even the narrator himself or herself, or not clearly or

POINT OF VIEW 303

consistently the one or the other; and the story may unfold by shifting

between telling the narratee what he or she is now doing, has done in the

past, or will or is commanded to do in the future. Italo Calvino uses the

form to achieve a complex and comic form of involuted fiction, by involving

“you,” the reader, in the fabrication of the narrative itself. His novel opens:

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a

winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate…. Best to close the door,

the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away,

“No, I don’t want to watch TV!”…Or if you prefer, don’t say

anything; just hope they’ll leave you alone.

Refer to Bruce Morrissette, “Narrative ‘You’ in Contemporary Literature,”

Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 2 (1965); Brian Richardson, “The Poetics and

Politics of Second-Person Narrative,” Genre, Vol. 24 (1991); Monika Fludernick,

“Second-Person Narrative as a Test Case for Narratology,” Style, Vol. 28 (1994);

and “Second-Person Narrative: A Bibliography,” Style, Vol. 28 (1994).

Two other frequently discussed narrative tactics are relevant to a consid-

eration of points of view:

The self-conscious narrator shatters any illusion that he or she is telling

something that has actually happened by revealing to the reader that the nar-

ration is a work of fictional art, or by flaunting the discrepancies between its

patent fictionality and the reality it seems to represent. This can be done

either seriously (Henry Fielding’s narrator in Tom Jones and Marcel in Marcel

Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, 1913–27) or for primarily comic purposes

(Tristram in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, 1759–67, and the narrator of

Lord Byron’s versified Don Juan, 1819–24), or for purposes which are both

serious and comic (Thomas Carlyle’ s Sartor Resartus, 1833–34). See Robert

Alter, Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre

(1975), and refer to

romantic

irony, under the entry irony.

One variety of self-conscious narrative exploited particularly in postmodern

fiction is called the self-reflexive novel, or the involuted novel, which incor-

porates into its narration reference to the process of composing the fictional

story itself. An early modern version, André Gide’s The Counterfeiters (1926), is

also one of the most intricate. As the critic Harry Levin summarized its self-

involution: it is “the diary of a novelist who is writing a novel [to be called

The Counterfeiters] about a novelist who is keeping a diary about the novel he

is writing”; the nest of Chinese boxes was further multiplied by Gide’s publi-

cation, also in 1926, of his own Journal of the Counterfeiters, kept while he was

composing the novel. Vladimir Nabokov was a particularly ingenious

exploiter of involuted fiction; for example, in Pale Fire (1962). See metafiction

under the entry novel.

We ordinarily accept what a narrator tells us as authoritative. The fallible

or unreliable narrator, on the other hand, is one whose perception, inter-

pretation, and evaluation of the matters he or she narrates do not coincide

with the opinions and norms implied by the author, which the author expects

the alert reader to share. (See the commentary on reliable and unreliable

304 POINT OF VIEW

narrators in Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, rev. 1983.) Henry James

made repeated use of the narrator whose excessive innocence, or over-

sophistication, or moral obtuseness, makes him a flawed and distorting “ center

of consciousness” in the work; the result is an elaborate structure of ironies.

(See irony.) Examples of James’ use of a fallible narrator are his short stories

“The Aspern Papers” and “The Liar.” The Sacred Fount and The Turn of the

Screw are works by James in which, according to some critics, the clues for

correcting the views of the fallible narrator are inadequate, so that what we

are meant to take as factual within the story, and the evaluations intended

by the author, remain problematic. See, for example, the remarkably diverse

critical interpretations collected in A Casebook on Henry James’“The Turn of the

Screw,” ed. Gerald Willen (1960), and in The Turn of the Screw, eds. Deborah

Esch and Jonathan Warren (2nd ed., 1999). The critic Tzvetan Todorov, on

the other hand, has classified The Turn of the Screw as an instance of fantastic

literature, which he defines as deliberately designed by the author to leave

the reader in a state of uncertainty whether the events are to be explained

by reference to natural causes (as hallucinations caused by the protagonist’s

repressed sexuality) or to supernatural causes. See Todorov’s The Fantastic: A

Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (trans. Richard Howard, 1973); also Eric

S. Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature (1976).

Drastic experimentation in postmodern prose fiction complicated in many

ways traditional renderings of point of view, not only in second-person but also

in first- and third-person narratives; see fiction; persona, tone, and voice;andpost-

modernism. On point of view, in addition to the writings mentioned above, refer

to Susan Lanser, The Narrative Act: Point of View in Fiction (1981); Wayne C.

Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (rev. 1983); Franz Stanzel, A Theory of Narrative

(1979, trans. 1984).

police novel: 69.

political readings: 248.

polyphonic: 295.

popular ballad: 25.

portmanteau word (portman to

): 14; 82.

positivism: 416.

postcolonial authors: 286.

postcolonial studies: The critical analysis of the history, culture, literature, and

modes of discourse that are specific to the former colonies of England, Spain,

France, and other European imperial powers. These studies have focused espe-

cially on the Third World countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean islands, and

POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES 305

South America. Some scholars, however, extend the scope of such analyses also

to the discourse and cultural productions of countries such as Australia, Canada,

and New Zealand, which achieved independence much earlier than the Third

World countries. Postcolonial studies sometimes also encompass aspects of Brit-

ish literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, viewed through a per-

spective that reveals the ways in which the social and economic life represented

in that literature was tacitly underwritten by colonial exploitation.

An important text in establishing the theory and practice in this field of

study was Orientalism (1978) by the Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said,

which applied a revised form of Michel Foucault’s historicist critique of discourse

(see under new historicism) to analyze what he called “cultural imperialism.” This

mode of imperialism imposed its power not by force but by the effective means

of disseminating in subjugated colonies a Eurocentric discourse that assumed the

normality and preeminence of everything “occidental,” correlatively with its

representations of the “oriental” as an exotic and inferior other. The term

orientalism is n ow sometimes applied to cultural imperialism by means of

the control of discourse not only in the orient but anywhere in the world.

Since the 1980s, such analysis has been supplemented by other theoretical

principles and procedures, including Althusser’s redefinition of the Marxist

theory of ideology and the deconstructive theory of Derrida. The field of postco-

lonial studies, as a result, is not a unified movement with a distinctive meth-

odology. One can, however, identify several central and recurrent issues:

1. The rejection of the “master narrative” of Western imperialism—in

which the colonial “other” is not only subordinated and marginalized

but in effect deleted as a cultural agency—and its replacement by a

counter-narrative in which the colonial cultures fight their way back

into a world history written by Europeans. In the influential book The

Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (2nd

ed., 2002), Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin stress what

they term the hybridization of colonial languages and cultures, in

which imperialist importations are superimposed on indigenous traditions;

they also draw attention to a number of postcolonial countertexts to the

hegemonic texts that present a Eurocentric version of colonial history.

2. An abiding concern with the construction, within Western discursive prac-

tices, of the colonial and postcolonial “subject,” as well as of the categories

by means of which this subject conceives itself and perceives the world

within which it lives and acts. (See social constructs and subject, under poststruc-

turalism.) The subaltern has become a standard way to designate the colonial

subject that has been constructed by European discourse and internalized

by colonial peoples who employ this discourse; “subaltern” is a British

word for someone of inferior military rank, and combines the Latin terms

for “under

” (su

b)and“other” (alter). A recurrent topic of debate is how,

and to what extent, a subaltern subject, writing in a European language,

can manage to serve as an agent of resistance against, rather than of com-

pliance with, the very discourse that has created its subordinate identity.

306 POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES

3. A major element in the postcolonial agendaistodisestablishEurocentric

norms of literary and artistic values and to expand the literary canon to

include colonial and postcolonial writers. In the United States and Britain,

there is an increasingly successful movement to include, in the standard aca-

demic curricula, the brilliant and innovative novels, poems, and plays by

such postcolonial writers in the English language as the Africans Chinua

Achebe and Wole Soyinka, the Caribbean islanders V. S. Naipaul and

Derek Walcott, and the authors from the Indian subcontinent G. V. Desani

and Salman Rushdie. Compare ethnic writers under periods of American litera-

ture,andseeHomiBhabha,The Location of Culture (1994). For a survey of

the large and growing body of anglophone literature by postcolonial writers

throughout the world, see Martin Coyle and others, Encyclopedia of Literature

and Criticism (1990), pp. 1113–1236; and Gaurav Desai and S upriya Nair,

Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism (2005).

Postcolonial scholarship also studies forms of imperialism other than Euro-

pean, including the domination of some southern-hemisphere groups or nations

by other southern-hemisphere groups or nations. This rethinking of empire has

brought the United States into focu s as an object of postcolonial scholarship,

both as a contemporary empire and as itself a postcolonial nation. See Amy

Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (1993).

Scholars in postcolonial studies have turned their attention to identities in a glob-

alized world where large groups of people have, for various reasons, left their

homelands, producing diasporas, population flows, and émigré groups. See Rey

Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (1993)

and The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2002); and Arjun Appadurai,

Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996). Ania Loomba pro-

vides an overview of the field in Colonialism/ Postcolonialism (2nd ed., 2008).

Comprehensive anthologies: Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray, eds., A

Companion to Postcolonial Studies (2000); David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson,

eds., Relocating Postcolonialism (2002); Bill Ashcroft and others, eds., The Post-

Colonial Studies Reader (2nd ed., 2006); and Robert P. Marzec, Postcolonial Literary

Studies: The First Thirty Years (2012). In addition to titles listed above, refer also to

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (trans. 1963), and Black Skin, White Masks

(trans. 1967); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other W orlds (1987), and Ranajit

Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies (1988);

Christopher L. Miller, Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology

in Africa (1990); Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (1990); Aijaz

Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (1992);EdwardW.Said,Culture

and Imperialism (1993); Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory

(2nd ed., 1997); Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction

(2001); and Neil Lazarus, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary

Studies (2004). For a useful introduction, see Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths,

and Helen Tiffin, Po

st-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (2nd ed., 2008).

Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat, eds., Dangerous Liaisons:

Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives (1997), stress the convergence of

POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES 307

postcolonial studies and feminism. Much postcolonial inquiry takes its point of

departure from theories of nationalism; often cited are Benedict Anderson,

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (rev.

1991), and Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World

(1993). See also Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. For

references to postcolonial studies in other entries, see pages 75, 99, 107.

post-Marxism: 209.

Postmodern Period (American): 278.

Postmodern Period (English): 285.

postmodernism: 227.

poststructuralism: “Poststructuralism” designates a broad variety of critical per-

spectives and procedures that in the 1970s displaced structuralism from its

prominence as the radically innovative way of dealing with language and

other signifying systems. A conspicuous announcement to American scholars

of the poststructural point of view was Jacques Derrida’s paper on “Structure,

Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” delivered in 1966 to

an International Colloquium at Johns Hopkins University. (The paper is

included in Derrida’s Writing and Difference, 1978.) Derrida attacked the sys-

tematic, quasi-scientific pretensions of the strict form of structuralism—

derived from Saussure’s concept of the structure of language and represented

by the cultural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss—by asserting that the

notion of a systemic structure, whether linguistic or other, presupposes a fixed

“center” that serves to organize and regulate the structure yet itself “escapes

structurality.” In Saussure’s theory of language, for example, this center is

assigned the function of controlling the endless differential play of internal rela-

tionships, while remaining itself outside of, and immune from, that play. (See

structuralism.) As Derrida’s other writings made clear, he regarded this incoherent

and unrealizable notion of an ever-active yet always absent center as only one

of the many ways in which all of Western thinking is “logocentric,” or depen-

dent on the notion of a self-certifying foundation, or absolute, or essence, or

ground, which is ever-needed but never present. See deconstruction.

Other contemporary thinkers, including Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan,

and (in his later phase) Roland Barthes, although in diverse ways, also under-

took to “decenter” or “undermine” or “subvert” traditional claims for the

existence of self-evident foundations that guarantee the validity of all knowl-

edge and truth, and establish the possibility of determinate communication.

This antifoundationalism in philosophy, conjoined with skepticism about

traditional conceptions of meaning, knowledge, truth, value, and the subject

or “self,

” is

evident in some (although not all) current exponents of diverse

modes of literary studies, including feminist, new historicist, and reader-response

criticism. In its extreme forms, the poststructural claim is that the workings

308 POST-MARXISM

of language inescapably undermine meanings in the very process of making

such meanings possible, or else that every mode of discourse “constructs,” or

constitutes, the very facts or truths or knowledge that it claims to discover.

“Postmodern” is sometimes used in place of, or interchangeably with,

“poststructural.” It is more useful, however, to follow the example of those

who apply “ postmodern” to developments in literature and other arts, and

reserve “poststructural” for theories of criticism and of intellectual inquiries

in general. (See modernism and postmodernism.)

Salient features or themes that are shared by diverse types of poststructural

thought and criticism include the following:

1. The primacy of theory. Since Plato and Aristotle, discourse about poetry

or literature has involved a “theory,” in the traditional sense of a concep-

tual scheme, or set of principles, distinctions, and categories —sometimes

explicit, but often only implied in critical practice—for identifying, classi-

fying, analyzing, and evaluating works of literature. (See criticism.) In post-

structural criticism what is called “theory” came to be foregrounded, so

that many critics felt it necessary to “theorize” their individual positions

and practices. The nature of theory, however, was conceived in a new

and very inclusive way; for the word theory, standing without qualifica-

tion, often designated an account of the general conditions of signification

that determine meaning and interpretation in all domains of human

action, production, and intellection. In most cases, this account was held

to apply not only to verbal language, but also to psychosexual and socio-

cultural “signifying systems.” As a consequence, the pursuit of literary

criticism was conceived to be integral with all the other pursuits tradition-

ally classified as the “human sciences,” and to be inseparable from consid-

eration of the general nature of human “subjectivity,” and also from

reference to all forms of social and cultural phenomena. Often the theory

of signification was granted primacy in the additional sense that, when

common experience in the use or interpretation of language does not

accord with what the theory entails, such experience is rejected as unjus-

tified and illusory, or else is accounted an ideologically imposed conceal-

ment of the actual operation of the signifying system.

A prominent aspect of poststructural theories is that they are posed in

opposition to inherited ways of thinking in all provinces of knowledge.

That is, they expressly “challenge” and undertake to “destabilize,” and in

many instances to “undermine” and “subvert,” what they identify as the

foundational assumptions, concepts, procedures, and findings in tradi-

tional

modes of discourse in Western civilization (including literary criti-

cism). In a number of politically oriented critics, this questioning of

established ways of thinking and of formulating knowledge is joined to

an adversarial stance toward established institutions, class structures, and

practices of economic and political power and social organization.

2. The decentering of the subject. The oppositional stance of many post-

structural critics is manifested in a sharp critique of what they call

POSTSTRUCTURALISM 309

“humanism”; that is, of the traditional view that the human being or

human author is a coherent identity, endowed with purpose and initia-

tive, whose design and intentions effectuate the form and meaning of a

literary or other product. (See humanism.) For such traditional terms as

“human being” or “individual” or “self,” poststructuralists tend to substi-

tute “subject” because this word is divested of the connotation that it has

originating or controlling power and instead suggests that the human

being is “subjected to” the play of external forces; and also because the

word suggests the grammatical term, the “subject” of a sentence, which is

an empty slot, to be filled by whoever happens to be speaking at a partic-

ular time and place. Structuralism had already tended to divest the subject

of operative initiative and control, evacuating the purposive human agent

into a mere location, or “space,” wherein the differential elements and

codes of a systematic langue precipitate into a particular parole, or signifying

product. Derrida, however, by deleting the structural linguistic “center,”

had thereby also eliminated the possibility of a controlling agency in lan-

guage, leaving the use of language an unregulatable and undecidable play

of purely relational elements. In the view of many deconstructive critics,

the subject or author or narrator of a text becomes itself a purely linguistic

product—as Paul de Man has put it in Allegories of Reading (1979), we

“rightfully reduce” the subject “to the status of a mere grammatical

pronoun.” Alternatively, the subject-author is granted at most the function

of trying (although always vainly) to “master” the incessant freeplay of the

decentered signifiers. For a collection of essays on “the subject” in writings

on politics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and history, see Eduardo Cadava,

Peter Connor, Jean-Luc Nancy, eds., Who Comes After the Subject? (1991).

Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes both signalized the evacuation

of the traditional conception of the subject who is an author by announc-

ing the “disappearance of the author,” or even more melodramatically,

“the death of the author.” (Foucault, “What Is an Author,” 1969, in

Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 1977; Barthes,

“The

Death of the

Author,” 1968, in Image, Music, Text, 1977.) They did not mean to

deny that a human individual is a necessary link in the chain of events

that results in a parole or text. What they denied was the validity of the

“function,” or “role,” hitherto assigned in Western discourse to a

uniquely individual and purposive author, who is conceived as the cogito,

or origin of all knowledge; as the initiator, purposive planner, and (by his

or her intentions) the determiner of the form and meanings of a text; and

as the “center,” or organizing principle, of the matters treated in tradi-

tional literary criticism and literary history. In addition, a number of cur-

rent forms of psychoanalytic, Marxist, and new historicist criticism manifest a

similar tendency to decenter, and in extreme cases to delete, what is often

called the “agency” of the author as a self-coherent, purposive, and deter-

minative human being. Instead, the human agent is said to be a disunified

subject that is the product of diverse psychosexual conditions and sub-

jected to the uncontrollable workings of unconscious compulsions.

310 POSTSTRUCTURALISM

Alternatively, the subject is held to be no more than a “construction” by

current forms of ideology, or a “site” traversed by the cultural constructs and

the discursive formations engendered by the conceptual and power con-

figurations in a given era. (See author and authorship.)

3. Reading, texts, and writing. The decentering or deletion of the author

leaves the reader, or interpreter, as the focal figure in poststructural

accounts of signifying practices. This figure, however, like the author, is

stripped of the traditional attributes of purposiveness and initiative and

converted into an impersonal process called “reading.” What this reading

engages is no longer called a literary “work” (since this traditional term

implies a purposive human maker of the product); instead, reading

engages a “text”—that is, a structure of signifiers regarded merely as a

given for the reading process. Texts in their turn (especially in

deconstructive criticism) lose their individuality and are often represented

as manifestations of écriture—that is, of an all-inclusive “textuality,” or

writing-in-general, in which the traditional “boundaries” between liter-

ary, philosophical, historical, legal, and other classes of texts are consid-

ered to be both artificial and superficial. See text and writing (écriture).

A distinctive poststructural view is that no text can mean what it

seems to say. To a deconstructive critic, for example, a text is a chain of

signifiers whose seeming determinacy of meaning, and seeming reference

to an extra-textual world, are no more than “effects” produced by the

differential play of conflicting internal forces which, on closer analysis,

turn out to deconstruct the text into an undecidable scatter of opposed

significations. In the representation of Roland Barthes, the “death” of

the author frees the reader to enter the literary text in whatever way he

or she chooses, and the intensity of pleasure yielded by the text becomes

proportionate to the reader’s abandonment of limits on its signifying pos-

sibilities. In Stanley Fish’s version of reader-response criticism, all the mean-

ings and formal features seemingly found in a text are projected into the

printed marks by each individual reader; any agreement about meaning

between two individuals is contingent upon their happening to belong

to a single one among many diverse “interpretive communities.”

4. The concept of discourse. Literary critics had long made casual use of the

term “discourse,” especially in application to passages representing conversa-

tions between characters in a literary work, and in the 1970s there developed

a critical practice called discourse analysis which focuses on such conversational

exchanges. This type of criticism (as well as the dialogic criticism inaugurated by

Mikhail Bakhtin) deals with literary discourse as conducted by human char-

acters whose voices engage in a dynamic interchange of beliefs, attitudes,

sentiments, and other expressions of states of consciousness.

poststructural criticism, discourse has become a very prominent

term, supplementing (and in some cases displacing) “text” as the name for

the verbal material which is the primary concern of literary criticism. In

poststructural usage, however, the term is not confined to conversational

POSTSTRUCTURALISM 311

passages but, like “writing,” designates all verbal constructions and implies

the superficiality of the boundaries between literary and nonliterary modes

of signification. Most conspicuously, discourse has become the focal term

among critics who oppose the deconstructive concept of a “general text”

that functions independently of particular historical conditions. Instead,

they conceive of discourse as social parlance, or language-in-use, and con-

sider it to be both the product and manifestation not of a timeless linguistic

system but of particular social conditions, class structures, and power rela-

tionships that alter drastically in the course of history. In Michel Foucault,

discourse-as-such is the central subject of analytic concern. Foucault con-

ceives that “discourse” is to be analyzed as totally anonymous, in that it is

simply “situated at the level of the ‘it is said’ (on dit).” (The Archaeology of

Knowledge, 1972, pp. 55, 122.) For example, new historicists (for whom, in

this respect, Foucault serves as a model) may attend to all Renaissance

references to usury as part of an anonymous “discourse,” which circulates

through legal, religious, philosophical, and economic writings of the era; it

circulates also through those literary writings, such as Shakespeare’s sonnets

or The Merchant of Venice, in which usury is alluded to, whether literally or

figuratively. Any allusion to usury is conceived to be better understood if it

is referred to the total body of discourse on that topic, as well as to the

social forces and institutions that have produced the conception of usury

at that time and in that place.

5. Many socially oriented analysts of discourse share with other poststructural-

ists the conviction (or at any rate the strong suspicion) that no text means

what it seems to say, or what its writer intended to say. But whereas

deconstructive critics attribute the subversion of the apparent meaning to

the unstable and self-conflicting nature of language itself, social analysts of

discourse—and also psychoanalytic critics—view the surface, or “manifest,”

meanings of a text as a disguise, or substitution, for underlying meanings

which cannot be overtly said because they are suppressed by psychic, or

ideological, or discursive necessities. By some critics, the covert meanings

are regarded as having been suppressed by all three of these forces together.

Both the social and psychoanalytic critics of discourse therefore interpret

the manifest meanings of a text as a distortion, displacement, or total

“occlusion” of its real meanings; and these real meanings, in accordance

with a particular critic’s theoretical orientation, turn out to be either the

writer’s psychic and psycholinguistic compulsions, or the material realities

of history, or the social power structures of domination, subordination,

and marginalization that obtained when the text was written. The wide-

spread poststructural view that the surface or overt meanings of a literary

or other text serve as a “disguise” or “mask” of its real meanings, or

subtext, has been called, in a phrase taken from the French philosopher

of language Paul Ricoeur, a hermeneutics of suspicion.

6. Many poststructural theorists propose or assume an extreme form of both

cognitive and evaluative relativism. The claim is that, in the absence of

312 POSTSTRUCTURALISM

an absolute and atemporal standard or foundation or center, all asserted

truths and values and cultural norms are relative to the predominant cul-

ture at a given time and place; or else to the ideology of a particular eco-

nomic, social, ethnic, or interpretive class; or else to the subjective

conditions of a particular individual or type of individuals. A general rela-

tivism is affirmed even by some theorists who are also political activists,

and advocate (by explicit or implicit appeal to social justice as a funda-

mental and universal value) emancipation and equality for sexual, racial,

ethnic, or other oppressed, marginalized, or excluded minorities.

The primacy of “theory” in poststructural criticism has evoked counter-

theoretical challenges, most prominently in an essay “Against Theory” by

Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels (1982). Defining theory (in conso-

nance with the widespread poststructural use of the term) as “the attempt to

govern interpretations of particular texts by appealing to an account of inter-

pretation in general,” the two authors claim that this is an impossible

endeavor “to stand outside practice in order to govern practice from with-

out,” assert that accounts of interpretation in general entail no consequences

for the actual practice of interpretation, and conclude that all theory “should

therefore come to an end.” Such a conclusion is supported by a number of

writers, including Stanley Fish and the influential philosophical pragmatist

Richard Rorty, who (despite disagreements in their supporting arguments) agree

that no general account of interpretation entails particular consequences for the

actual practice of literary interpretation and criticism. (See W. J. T. Mitchell,

ed., Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism, 1985, which

includes the initiating essay plus a supplementary essay by Knapp and

Michaels, together with essays and critiques by Fish, Rorty, E. D. Hirsch, and

others.) The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard has also mounted an

influential attack against “theory,” which he regards as an attempt to impose

a common vocabulary and set of principles in order illegitimately to control

and constrain the many independent “language-games” that constitute dis-

course; see his The Postmodern Condition (1984). One response to this skepti-

cism about the efficacy of theory on practice (a skepticism that is often labeled

the new pragmatism) is that, while no general theory of meaning entails

consequences for the practice of interpretation (in the strict logical sense of

“entails”), it is a matter of common observation that diverse current theories

have in actual fact served both to foster and to corroborate diverse and novel

interpretive practices by literary critics. For a view of both the inescapability

and practical functioning of literary and artistic theory in traditional criticism,

see M. H. Abrams, “What’s the Use of Theorizing about the Arts?” (1972,

reprinted in Doing Things with Texts, 1989).

Jonathan Culler’s Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (2nd ed., 2011)

analyzes the issues and debates that cut across the boundaries of diverse post-

structural theories. See also Anthony Easthope, British Poststructuralism since

1968 (1988). Anthologies that include important poststructural essays and

selections: David Lodge, ed., Modern Criticism and Theory (1988); Robert

POSTSTRUCTURALISM 313

Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, eds., Contemporary Literary Criticism (rev.

1989). The most inclusive collection, with extensive bibliographies, is Vincent

Leitch, ed., The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2001). For discussions

and critiques of poststructuralist theories and practices from diverse points of

view: Fredric Jameson, Poststructuralism; or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

(1991); John McGowan, Postmodernism and Its Critics (1991); Jonathan Arac

and Barbara Johnson, eds., Consequences of Theory (1991); Dwight Eddin, ed.,

The Emperor Redressed: Critiquing Critical Theory (1995); Wendell V. Harris,

ed., Beyond Structuralism (1996); Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral, eds.,

Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of Dissent (2005).

For references to poststructuralism in other entries, see pages 77, 99, 124.

Postwar Period (American): 277.

Postwar Period (English): 285.

practical criticism: 71.

pragmatic criticism: 72; 343.

Prague Linguistic Circle: 142.

Pre-Raphaelites: In 1848 a group of English artists, including Dante Gabriel

Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Millais, organized the Pre-

Raphaelite Brotherhood. Their aim was to replace the reigning academic

style of painting by a return to the truthfulness, simplicity, and spirit of devo-

tion which they attributed to Italian painting before the time of Raphael

(1483–1520) and the other painters of the high Italian Renaissance. The ideals

of this group of painters were taken over by a literary movement which

included Dante Gabriel Rossetti himself (who was a poet as well as a painter),

his sister Christina Rossetti, William Morris, and Algernon Swinburne. Dante

Gabriel Rossetti’s poem “The Blessed Damozel” typifies the medievalism, the

pictorial realism with symbolic overtones, and the union of flesh and spirit,

sensuousness and religiousness, associated with the earlier writings of this

school. Other examples are Christina Rossetti’s remarkable poem “Goblin

Market” (1862) and William Morris’ narrative in verse The Earthly Paradise

(1868–70). See Graham Hough, The Last Romantics (1949); T. J. Barringer,

Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (1999); Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nun, Pre-

Raphaelite Women Artists (1999); Christopher Wood, The Pre-Raphaelites (2nd

ed., 2001); Elizabeth Helsinger, Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts: William

Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (2007).

presence (in deconstruction): 81.

primitivism and progress: A primitivist is someone who prefers what is

“natural” (in the sense of that which exists prior to or independently of

human culture, reasoning, and contrivance) to what is

“artificial” (in

the

314 POSTWAR PERIOD (AMERICAN)

sense of what human beings achieve by thought, activities, laws and conven-

tions, and the complex arrangements of a civilized society). A useful, although

not mutually exclusive, distinction has been made between two manifestations

of primitivism:

1. Cultural primitivism is the preference for what is conceived to be

“nature” and “the natural” over “art” and “the artificial” in any area of

human culture and values. As the intellectual historian A. O. Lovejoy has

neatly summarized it, the “natural” is “a thing you reach by going back

and leaving out.” For example, in ethics a cultural primitivist lauds the

natural (that is, the innate) instincts and passions over the dictates of rea-

son and prudential forethought. In social philosophy, the ideal is the sim-

ple and natural forms of social and political order in place of the anxieties

and frustrations engendered by a complex and highly developed social

organization. In milieu, a primitivist prefers outdoor “nature,” unmodi-

fied by human intervention, to cities or artful gardens. And in literature

and the other arts, the primitivist lauds spontaneity, the free expression of

emotion, and the intuitive productions of “natural genius,” as against a

calculated adaptation of artistic means to foreseen ends and a conformity

to “artificial” forms, rules, and conventions. Typically, the cultural primi-

tivist asserts that in the modern world, the life, activities, and products of

“primitive” people—who are considered to live in a way more accordant

to “nature” because they are isolated from civilization—are at least in

some ways preferable to the life, activities, and products of people living

in a highly developed society, especially in cities. The eighteenth-century

cult of the Noble Savage—who was conceived to be “naturally” intelli-

gent, moral, and possessed of high dignity in thought and deed—and the

concurrent vogue of “natural” poetry written by supposedly uneducated

peasants or working folk, were both aspects of primitivism. Cultural

primitivism has played an especially prominent and persistent role in

American thought and literature, where the “new world” was early con-

ceived in terms of both the classical golden age of the distant past and the

Christian millennium of the future. The American Indian was sometimes

identified with the legendary Noble Savage, and the American pioneer

was often represented as a new Adam who had cut free from the artifice

and corruptions of European civilization in order to reassume a “natural”

life of freedom, innocence, and simplicity. See Henry Nash Smith, Virgin

Land (1950),

and R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam (1955).

2. Chronological primitivism designates the belief that the ideal era of

humanity’s way of life lay in the very distant past, when men and

women lived naturally, simply, and freely, and that the process of history

has been a gradual “decline” from that happy stage into an increasing

degree of artifice, complexity, inhibitions, prohibitions, and consequent

anxieties and discontents in the psychological, social, and cultural realms.

In its extreme form, the ideal era is postulated as having existed in “the

state of nature,” before social organization and civilization had even

begun; more commonly, it is placed at some later stage of development,

PRIMITIVISM AND PROGRESS 315

and sometimes as late as the era of classical Greece. Many, but not all,

cultural primitivists are also chronological primitivists.

A historical concept that is antithetic to chronological primitivism

emerged in the seventeenth century and reached its height in the nine-

teenth century. This is the idea of progress: the doctrine that—by virtue

of the development and exploitation of art, science, and technology, and

by the application of human rationality—the course of history represents

an overall improvement in the life, morality, and happiness of human

beings from early barbarity to the present stage of civilization. Sometimes

it is also claimed that this historical progress of humanity will continue

indefinitely, possibly to end in a final stage of social, rational, and moral

perfection. (See Enlightenment and utopia .)

Primitivism is as old as humanity’s recorded intellection and imaginings

and is reflected in myths of a vanished age of gold and a lost Garden of

Eden. It achieved a special vogue, however, in the eighteenth century, by

way of reaction to the prevailing stress on artfulness and the refinements of

civilization during the Neoclassic Period, in a European movement in which

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) was a central figure. D. H. Lawrence

(1885–1930) is a later example of a broadly primitivistic thinker, in his lauda-

tion of the spontaneous instinctual life; his belief in an ancient, vanished

condition of humanity’s personal and social wholeness; his high regard for

“primitive” modes of life that still survive outside the bounds of sophisticated

societies; and his attacks on the disintegrative effects of modern science and

technology and on the economy and culture that science and technology

have generated. There are also strains of cultural primitivism in, for example,

James Fenimore Cooper’s Leather-Stocking Tales, in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry

Finn, and in the outlook and lifestyle of dropouts and various kinds of sub-

cultures in our own time, as well as in the establishment of communes whose

ideal is a radically simplified individual and social life close to the soil. (Refer

to ecocriticism.) But most men and women, and many writers of literature, are

primitivists in some moods, longing to escape from the complexities, fever,

anxieties, and “alienation” of modern civilization into what are taken to be

the elemental simplicities of a lost natural life. That imagined life may be

identified with the individual’s own childhood, or with the prehistoric or clas-

sical or medieval past, or may be conceived as existing still in some primitive,

carefree, faraway place on earth.

See H. N. Fairchild, The Noble Savage (1928); J. B. Bury, The Idea of Prog-

ress (1932); Lois Whitney, Primitivism and the Idea of Progress (1934); A. O.

Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas (1948); A. O. Lovejoy and George

Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (1948); Clifford Geertz, Local

Knowledge (1983). Marianna Torgovnick’s Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects,

Modern Lives (1990) argues that modern Western culture has been formed in

dialectical opposition to presumably nonmodern or premodern cultures.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals (1887) and Sigmund Freud’s

Civilization and Its Discontents (1949; see psychoanalysis

) involve aspects of

cultural

primitivism in their stress on the compelling needs of the body and

316 PRIMITIVISM AND PROGRESS

of the natural human instincts, especially sexuality, which require a complex

and perhaps impossible reconciliation with the repressions and inhibitions that

are inescapable in a civilized society. A work of radical cultural primitivism

that was influential on the rebellious youth movements of the 1960s and

1970s is Norman O. Brown’s Life against Death (1959); refer to Beat writers,

and to the contemporary period, under periods of American literature.

printing: 338.

problem play: A type of drama that was popularized by the Norwegian play-

wright Henrik Ibsen. In problem plays, the situation faced by the protagonist

is put forward by the author as a representative instance of a contemporary

social problem; often the dramatist manages—by the use of a character who

speaks for the author, or by the evolution of the plot, or both—to propose a

solution to the problem which is at odds with prevailing opinion. The issue

may be the inadequate autonomy, scope, and dignity allotted to women in

the middle-class nineteenth-century family (Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, 1879); or

the morality of prostitution, regarded as a typical product of the economic

system in a capitalist society (George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession,

1898); or the crisis in racial and ethnic relations in present-day America (in

numerous current dramas and films). Compare social novel.

A subtype of the modern problem play is the discussion play, in which

the social issue is not incorporated into a plot but expounded in the give-

and-take of a sustained debate among the characters. See Shaw’s Getting

Married, and Act III of his Man and Superman; also his book on Ibsen’s plays,

The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891).

In a specialized application, the term problem plays is sometimes applied

to a group of Shakespeare’splays,alsocalled“bitter comedies”—especially

Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure,andAll’sWellThatEndsWell—which

explore ignoble aspects of human nature, and in which the resolution of the

plot seems to some readers to be problematic, in that it does not settle or

solve, except superficially, the moral problems raised in the play. By extension,

the term came to be applied also to other Shakespearean plays which explore

the dark side of human nature or which seem to leave unresolved the issues that

arise in the course of the action. See A. P. Rossiter, “The Problem Plays,” in

Shakespeare: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Leonard F. Dean (rev. 1967).

progress, idea of: 316.

proletarian novel: 256.

propagandist literature: 91.

properties (stage): 363

proscenium

arch (prosen

eum): 4; 66.

PROSCENIUM ARCH 317

prose: “Prose” is an inclusive term for all discourse, spoken or written, which is

not patterned into the lines either of metric verse or of free verse. (See meter.)

It is possible to discriminate a great variety of nonmetric types of discourse,

which can be placed along a spectrum according to the degree to which

they exploit, and make prominent, modes of formal organization. At one

end is the irregular, and only occasionally formal, prose of ordinary conversa-

tion. Distinguished written discourse, in what John Dryden called “ that other

harmony of prose,” is no less an art than distinguished verse; in all literatures,

in fact, artfully written prose seems to have developed later than written verse.

As written prose gets more “literary”—whether its function is descriptive,

expository, narrative, or expressive—it exhibits more patent, though highly

diverse, modes of rhythm and other formal features. The prose translations

of the poetic books of the Old Testament in the King James Bible, for exam-

ple, have a repetition, balance, and contrast of clauses which approximate the

form that in the nineteenth century was named “the prose poem.” Prose

poems are compact, rhythmic, and usually sonorous compositions which

exploit the poetic resources of language for poetic ends but are written as a

continuous sequence of sentences without line breaks. Early examples of prose

poems are, in French, Charles Baudelaire’s Little Poems in Prose (1869) and

Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations (1886), and in English, excerptible passages in

Walter Pater’s prose essays, such as his famous meditation on Leonardo da

Vinci’s painting the Mona Lisa,inThe Renaissance (1873). John Ashbery’s

Three Poems (1972) are prose poems, in that they are printed continuously,

without broken lines. Farther still along the formal spectrum, we leave the

domain of prose by the use of line breaks and the controlled rhythms, pauses,

syntactical suspensions, and cadences that identify free verse. At the far end of

the spectrum we get the regular, recurrent units of weaker and stronger

stressed syllables that constitute the meters of English verse.

See style (including the list of readings), and for a special form of elabo-

rately formal prose, euphuism. Refer to George Saintsbury, A History of English

Prose Rhythm (1912). E. D. Hirsch discusses the development of English prose

in The Philosophy of Composition (1977), pp. 51–72. See also Richard A. Lanham,

Analyzing Prose (2nd ed., 2003). On the prose poem, refer to Jonathan Monroe,

A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre (1987); and David

Lehman, ed., Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (2003). For

forms of literature written in prose, see the references under genre.

prose poem: 318.

prose romance: 254; 56.

prosody: “Prosody”

signifies the systematic study of versification in

poetry;

that is, the principles and practice of meter, rhyme, and stanza forms. Sometimes

the term “prosody” is extended to include also the study of speech-sound

patterns and effects such as alliteration, assonance, euphony, and onomatopoeia.

318 PROSE

prosopopoeia (proso

pope

a): 135.

prospect poem: 403.

protagonist: 293.

proverbs: 11.

pseudostatements: 131.

psychoanalytic criticism: 320; 124.

psychobiography: 322.

psychological and psychoanalytic criticism: Psychological criticism deals

with a work of literature primarily as an expression, in an indirect and fictional

form, of the state of mind and the structure of personality of the individual

author. This approach emerged in the early decades of the nineteenth century,

as part of the romantic replacement of earlier mimetic and pragmatic views by

an expressive view of the nature of literature; see criticism. By 1827, Thomas

Carlyle could say that the usual question “with the best of our own critics at

present” is one “mainly of a psychological sort, to be answered by discovering

and delineating the peculiar nature of the poet from his poetry.” During the

Romantic Period, we find widely practiced all three types of the critical proce-

dures (still current today) that are based on the assumption that the details and

form of a work of literature are correlated with its author’s distinctive mental

and emotional traits: (1) reference to the author’s personality in order to explain

and interpret a literary work; (2) reference to literary works in order to establish,

biographically, the personality of the author; and (3) the mode of reading a lit-

erary work specifically in order to experience the distinctive subjectivity, or

consciousness, of its author (see critics of consciousness). We even find that John

Keble, in a series of Latin lectures On the Healing Power of Poetry—published in

1844, but delivered more than ten years earlier—proposed a thoroughgoing

proto-Freudian literary theory. “Poetry,” Keble claimed, “is the indirect expres-

sion … of some overpowering emotion, or ruling taste, or feeling, the direct

indulgence whereof is somehow repressed.” This repression is imposed by the

author’s sentiments of “reticence” and “shame”; the conflict between the need

for expression and the compulsion to repress such self-revelation is resolved by

the poet’s ability to give “healing relief to secret mental emotion, yet without

detriment to modest reserve” by a literary “art which under certain veils and

disguises … reveals the fervent emotions of the mind.” This disguised mode of

self-expression, Keble also asserts, serves as “a safety valve, preserving men from

madness.

” (

The emergence and the varieties of romantic psychological criticism

are described in M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 1953, chapters 6 and

9.) In the present era many critics make at least passing references to the

PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM 319

psychology of an author in discussing works of literature, with the notable

exception of those whose critical premises invalidate such reference: mainly

proponents of formalism, New Criticism, structuralism,anddeconstruction.

Since the 1920s, a widespread type of psychological literary criticism has

come to be called psychoanalytic criticism, whose premises and procedures

were established by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). Freud had developed the

dynamic form of psychology that he called “psychoanalysis” as a procedure

for the analysis and therapy of neuroses, but soon expanded it to account for

many developments and practices in the history of civilization, including war-

fare, mythology, and religion, as well as literature and the other arts. Freud’s

brief comment on the workings of the artist’s imagination at the end of the

twenty-third lecture of his Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1920), supplemented

by relevant passages in the other lectures in that book, set forth the theoretical

framework of what is sometimes called “classical” psychoanalytic criticism.

Freud proposes that literature and the other arts, like dreams and neurotic

symptoms, consist of the imagined, or fantasied, fulfillment of wishes that are

either denied by reality or prohibited by the social standards of morality and

propriety. The forbidden, mainly sexual (“libidinal”) wishes come into con-

flict with the “censor” (the internalized representative within each individual

of a society’s standards of morality and propriety) and are repressed by the

censor into the unconscious realm of the artist’s mind, but are permitted to

achieve a fantasied satisfaction in distorted forms that serve to disguise their

real motives and objects from the conscious mind. The chief mechanisms

that effect these disguises of unconscious wishes are (1) “condensation” (the

omission of parts of the unconscious material and the fusion of several uncon-

scious elements into a single entity); (2) “displacement” (the substitution for

an unconscious object of desire by one that is acceptable to the conscious

mind); and (3) “symbolism” (the representation of repressed, mainly sexual,

objects of desire by nonsexual objects which resemble them or are associated

with them in prior experience). The disguised fantasies that are available to

consciousness are called by Freud the manifest content of a dream or work

of literature; the unconscious wishes that find a semblance of satisfaction in

this disguised expression he calls the latent content.

Also present in the unconscious of every individual, according to Freud,

are residual traces of prior stages of psychosexual development, from earliest

infancy onward, which have been outgrown, but remain as “fixations” in the

unconscious of the adult. When triggered by some later event in adult life, a

repressed wish is revived and motivates a fantasy, in disguised form, of a satis-

faction that is modeled on the way that the wish had been gratified in infancy

or early childhood. The chief enterprise of the psychoanalytic critic, in a way

that parallels the enterprise of the psychoanalyst as a therapist, is to decipher

the true content, and thereby to explain the emotional effects on the reader of

a literary work by translating its manifest elements into the latent, unconscious

determinants and fixations that constitute their real but suppressed meanings.

Freud also asserts, however, that artists possess special abilities that differ-

entiate them radically from the patently neurotic type of personality. The

320 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM

artistic person, for example, possesses to an especially high degree the power

to sublimate (that is, to shift the instinctual drives from their original sexual

goals to nonsexual “higher” goals, including the goal of becoming proficient

as an artist); the ability to elaborate fantasied wish fulfillments into the mani-

fest features of a work of art in a way that conceals or deletes their merely

personal elements, and so makes them capable of satisfying the unconscious

desires that other people share with the individual artist; and the “puzzling”

ability—which Freud elsewhere says is a power of “genius” that psychoanaly-

sis cannot explain—to mold an artistic medium into “a faithful image of the

creatures of his imagination,” as well as into a satisfying artistic form. The

result is a fantasied wish fulfillment of a complex and artfully shaped sort

that not only allows the artist to overcome, at least partially and temporarily,

personal conflicts and repressions but also makes it possible for the artist’s

audience “to obtain solace and consolation from their own unconscious

sources of gratification which had become inaccessible” to them. Literature

and art, therefore, unlike dreams and neuroses, may serve the artist as a

mode of fantasy that opens “the way back to reality.”

This outline of Freud’s theory of art in 1920 was elaborated and refined,

but not radically altered, by later developments in his theory of mental struc-

tures, dynamics, and processes. Prominent among these developments was

Freud’s model of the mind as having three functional aspects: the id (which

incorporates libidinal and other innate desires), the superego (the internaliza-

tion of social standards of morality and propriety), and the ego (which tries as

best it can to negotiate the conflicts between the insatiable demands of the id,

the impossibly stringent requirements of the superego, and the limited possi-

bilities of gratification offered by reality). Freud has himself summarized for a

general audience his later theoretical innovations, with his notable power for

clear and dramatic exposition, in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

(1933) and An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1939).

Freud asserted that many of his views had been anticipated by insightful

authors in Western literature, and he himself applied psychoanalysis to brief

discussions of the latent content in the manifest characters or events of literary

works, including Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream,

and King Lear. He also wrote a brilliant analysis of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The

Brothers Karamazov and a full-length psychoanalytic study, Delusion and Dream

(1917), of the novel Gradiva by the Danish writer Wilhelm Jensen. Especially

after the 1930s, a number of writers produced critical analyses, modeled on

classical Freudian theory, of the lives of authors and of the content of their

literary works. One of the best-known books in this mode is Hamlet and Oedi-

pus (1949) by the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones. Building on earlier suggestions

by Freud himself, Jones explained Hamlet ’s inability to make up his mind to

kill his uncle by reference to his Oedipus

complex—that is, the repressed

but continuing presence in the adult’s unconscious of the male infant’s desire

to possess his mother and to have his rival, the father, out of the way. (Freud

derived the term from Sophocles’ Greek tragedy Oedipus the King, whose

protagonist has unknowingly killed his father and married his mother.)

PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM 321

Jones proposes that Hamlet ’s conflict is “an echo of a similar one in Shake-

speare himself,” and goes on to account for the audience’s powerful and con-

tinued response to the play, over many centuries, as a result of the repressed

Oedipal conflict that is shared by all men.

In the decades following World War II, some Freudian critics empha-

sized, in a mode suggested by Freud’s later writings, the role of “ego psychol-

ogy” in elaborating the manifest content and artistic form of a work of

literature; that is, on the way that the ego, in contriving the work, consciously

manages to mediate between the conflicting demands of the id, the superego,

and the limits imposed by reality. On such developments see Frederick C.

Crews, “Literature and Psychology,” in Relations of Literary Study, ed. James

Thorpe (1967), and the issue on “Psychology and Literature: Some Contem-

porary Directions,” in New Literary History, Vol. 12 (1980).

The term psychobiography designates an account of the life of an

author (see biography) that focuses on the subject’s psychological development,

relying for evidence both on external sources and on the author’s own writ-

ings. It stresses the role of unconscious and disguised motives in forming the

author’s personality and is usually written in accordance with a version, or a

revision, of the Freudian theory of the stages of psychosexual development.

A major exemplar of the mode was Erik H. Erikson’s Young Man Luther

(1958), in which Erikson stressed the importance of Luther’s adolescent

“identity crisis.” Other notable instances of literary psychobiography are

Leon Edel, Henry James (5 vols., 1953–72); Justin Kaplan, Mark Twain and His

World (1974); and Bernard C. Meyer, Joseph Conrad: A Psychoanalytic Biography

(1967). Prominent and diverse examples of Freudian literary criticism can be

found in the collections listed below. It should be noted, in addition, that

many modern literary critics, like many modern authors, owe some debt to

Freud; such major critics, for example, as Kenneth Burke, Edmund Wilson,

and Lionel Trilling assimila ted central Freudian concepts into their overall

critical views and procedures.

Carl G. Jung is sometimes called a psychoanalyst, but although he began as

a disciple of Freud, his mature version of depth psychology is very different

from that of his predecessor, and what we call Jungian criticism of literature

departs radically from psychoanalytic criticism. Jung’s emphasis is not on the

individual unconscious but on what he calls the collective unconscious,

shared by all individuals in all cultures, which he regards as the repository of

“racial memories” and of primordial images and patterns of experience that he

calls archetypes. He does not, like Freud, view literature as a disguised form of

libidinal wish fulfillment that to a large extent parallels the fantasies of a neurotic

personality. Instead, Jung regards great literature as, like the myths whose pat-

terns recur in diverse cultures, an expression of the archetypes of the collective

racial unconscious. A great author possesses, and provides for readers, access to

he archetypal images buried in the racial memory and so succeeds in revitaliz-

ing aspects of the psyche which are essential both to individual self-integration

and to the mental and emotional well-being of the human race. Jung’s theory

of literature has been a cardinal formative influence on archetypal criticism and

322 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM

myth criticism. See Jung, Contributions to Analytic Psychology (1928) and Modern

Man in Search of a Soul (1933); also Edward Glover, Freud or Jung (1950).

Since the development of structural and poststructural theories in the latter

half of the twentieth century, there has been a strong revival of Freudian the-

ories, although in diverse reformulations of the classical Freudian scheme. The

French Marxist Pierre Macherey, for example, argues that the task of the critic

is to produce the text’s “unconscious” by identifying and giving voice to the

text’s symptomatic repressions, evasions, or revealing silences, in which the

text’s relation to history is, he contended, exposed. (See Macherey, A Theory

of Literary Production, 1966, trans. 1978). Close attention to Freud’s writings,

and frequently the assimilation of some version of Freud’s ideas to their own

views and procedures, are features of the criticism of many current writers,

whether they are Marxist, Foucauldian, or Derridean in theoretical commit-

ment or primary focus. Harold Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence spe-

cifically adapts to the composition and reading of poetry, Freud’s concepts of

the Oedipus complex, and of the distorting operation of defense mechanisms

in dreams. A number of feminist critics have attacked the male-centered nature

of Freud’s theory—especially evident in such crucial conceptions as the Oedi-

pus complex and the notion of “penis envy” on the part of the female child;

but many feminists have also adapted a revised version of Freudian concepts

and mental mechanisms to their analyses of the writing and reading of literary

texts. See Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1975); Mary Jacobus,

Reading Woman (1986); Nancy Chodorow, Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory

(1990); Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Freud on Women: A Reader (1992); Rosalind

Minsky, ed., Psychoanalysis and Gender: An Introductory Reader (1996).

Jacques Lacan, “the French Freud,” developed a semiotic version of Freud,

converting the basic concepts of psychoanalysis into formulations derived

from the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure, and applying these con-

cepts not to the mental processes of human individuals but to the operations

of the process of signification. (See under linguistics in literary criticism.) Typical

is Lacan’s oft-quoted dictum, “The unconscious is structured like a language.”

His procedure is to recast Freud’s key concepts and mechanisms into the lin-

guistic mode, viewing the human mind not as pre-existent to, but as consti-

tuted by, the language we use. In Lacan’s revision, for example, both gender

and desire are not producers but products of the signifying system. Especially

important

in Lacanian literary criticism is Lacan’s reformulation of Freud’s

concepts of the early stages of psychosexual development, and of the forma-

tion of the Oedipus complex, into the distinction between a prelinguistic

stage of development that he calls the imaginary and the stage after the

acquisition of language that he calls the symbolic. In the imaginary stage,

there is no clear distinction between the subject and an object, or between

the individual self and other selves. Intervening between these two stages is

what Lacan calls the mirror stage, the moment when the infant learns to

identify with his or her image in a mirror, and so begins to develop a sense

of a separate self, and an (illusory) understanding of oneself as an autonomous

subject, that is later enhanced by what is reflected back to it from encounters

PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM 323

with other people. When it enters the symbolic, or linguistic, stage, the infant

subject assimilates the inherited system of linguistic differences, hence is con-

stituted by the symbolic, as it learns to accept its predetermined “position” in

such linguistic oppositions as male/female, father/son, mother/daughter. This

symbolic realm of language, in Lacan’s theory, is the realm of the law of the

father, in which the “phallus” (used in a symbolic sense to stand for male

privilege and authority) is “the privileged signifier” that serves to establish

the mode for all other signifiers. In a parallel fashion, Lacan translates Freud’s

views of the mental workings of dream formation into textual terms of the

play of signifiers, converting Freud’s distorting defense mechanisms into lin-

guistic figures of speech. And according to Lacan, all processes of linguistic

expression and interpretation, driven by “desire” for a lost and unachievable

object, move incessantly (as in Derrida’s theory of deconstruction) along a chain

of unstable signifiers, without any possibility of coming to rest on a fixed

signified, o r presence. ( See Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, 1977; The

Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1998; and The Seminar of Jacques

Lacan: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–60 , 1997. See also Lacan’smuch

discussed reading of Edgar Allan Poe’sshortstoryThe Purloined Letter as an

allegory of the workings of the linguistic signifier, in Yale French Studies, Vol. 48,

1972; and Malcolm Bowie, Lacan, 1991.) Lacan’s notions of the in alienable

split, or “difference,” that in habits the self, and of the endless chain of dis-

placements in the quest for meaning, have made him a pro minent reference

in poststructural theorists. And his distinction between the p re-Oedipal, mater-

nal stage of the prelinguistic imaginary and the “ph allocentric ” stage of sym-

bolic language has been exploited at length by a number of French feminists;

see Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva under feminist criticism.

See Jerome Neu, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Freud (1991). Many of

Freud’s psychoanalytic writings on literature and the arts have been collected

by Benjamin Nelson, ed., Sigmund Freud on Creativity and the Unconscious

(1958). For an anthology of psychoanalytic criticism by various authors, see

Leonard and Eleanor Manheim, eds., Hidden Patterns: Studies in Psychoanalytic

Criticism (1966). Useful discussions and developments of Freudian literary the-

ory are Frederick J. Hoffman, Freudianism and the Literary Mind (rev. 1957),

which also describes Freud’s

wide influence on writers and critics; Norman

N. Holland, Holland’s Guide to Psychoanalytic Psychology and Literature-

and-Psychology (1990); and Peter Brooks, Psychoanalysis and Storytelling (1994).

Elizabeth Wright, Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice (1984), reviews

various developments in psychoanalytic theories and their applications to lit-

erary criticism. For two major traditional critics who have to an important

extent adapted Freudian concepts to their general enterprise, see Edmund

Wilson, The Wound and the Bow (1941), and Lionel Trilling, “Freud and

Literature,” in The Liberal Imagination (1950). Frederick C. Crews, who in

1966 wrote an exemplary Freudian critical study, The Sins of the Fathers:

Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes, later retracted his Freudian commitment; see

his Skeptical Engagements (1986). For feminist views and adaptations of Jacques

Lacan, see Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (1985); Shoshana Felman, Jacques Lacan

324 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM

and the Adventure of Insight (1987); and Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist

Introduction (1990). The psychoanalytically trained philosopher Slavoj Žižek has

argued for the primacy of Lacan as an ethical and political thinker. See The

Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) and Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques

Lacan through Popular Culture (1991).

Ptolemaic universe (tol

ema

ik): 339.

pun: “Pun” (which traditional rhetoricians call paranomasia) denotes a play on

words that are either identical in sound (homonyms) or very similar in sound

but are sharply diverse in significance; an example is the last word in the title

of Oscar Wilde’s comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Puns have

often had serious literary uses. The authority of the Pope in Roman Catholi-

cism goes back to the Greek pun uttered by Jesus in Matthew 16:18, “Thou

art Peter [Petros] and upon this rock [petra] I will build my church.” Shake-

speare and other writers used puns seriously as well as for comic purposes. In

Romeo and Juliet (III. i. 101) Mercutio, bleeding to death, says grimly, “Ask for

me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man”; and John Donne’s solemn

“Hymn to God the Father” (1633) puns throughout on his own name and

the past participle “done.” Milton was an inveterate inventor of serious puns

in Paradise Lost. In the eighteenth century and thereafter, however, the literary

use of the pun has been almost exclusively comic. A major exception is James

Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), which exploits puns throughout in order to

help sustain its complex effect, at once serious and comic, of multiple levels

of meaning; see portmanteau word.

A special type of pun, known as the equivoque, is the use of a single word

or phrase which has two disparate meanings, in a context which makes both

meanings equally relevant. An example is the phrase “come to dust” in a song

from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline: “Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney

sweepers, come to dust.” An epitaph suggested for a bank teller contains a series

of equivocal phrases:

He checked his cash, cashed in his checks,

And left his window. Who is next?

And an epigram by Hilaire Belloc (1870– 1953) ends in an equivoque:

When I am done, I hope it can be said:

His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

Refer to Jonathan Culler, ed., On Puns: The Foundation of Letters (1988).

Puritan Interregnum: 281.

purple patch: A translation of Horace’s Latin phrase “purpureus … pannus” in

his versified Ars

Poetica (first century BC). It signifies a marked heightening of

style in rhythm, diction, repetitions, and figurative language that makes a pas-

sage of verse or prose—especially a descriptive passage—stand out from its

PURPLE PATCH 325

context. The term is sometimes applied without derogation to a set piece,

separable and quotable, in which an author rises to an occasion. An example

is the eulogy of England by the dying John of Gaunt in Shakespeare’s Richard

II (II. i. 40ff.), beginning:

This royal throne of kings, this scept’red isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi-paradise….

Other famed examples are Lord Byron’s depiction of the Duchess of

Richmond’s ball on the eve of Waterloo in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto

III, xxi–xxviii (1816), and Walter Pater’s prose description of the Mona Lisa in

his essay on Leonardo da Vinci in The Renaissance (1873). Usually, however,

“purple passage” connotes disparagement, implying that one has self-

consciously girded oneself to perform a piece of fine writing. In Stella

Gibbons’ satiric novel, Cold Comfort Farm, the fictional narrator is proud of

her purple descriptive passages and follows the example of Baedeker’s guide-

books by marking them with varying numbers of asterisks: “Dawn crept over

the Downs like a sinister white animal, followed by the snarling cries of the

wind eating its way between the black boughs of the thorns.”

pyrrhic (p



k): 220.

326 PYRRHIC

quantitative meter: 217.

quarto: 36.

quatrain: 374 .

queer reading: 328.

queer theory: “Queer theory” is often used to designate the combined area of

gay and lesbian studies, together with the theoretical and critical writings about

all modes of variance—such as cross-dressing, bisexuality, and transsexuality—

from society’s normative model of sexual identity, orientation, and activities.

The term “queer” was originally derogatory, used to stigmatize male and female

same-sex love as deviant and unnatural; since the early 1990s, however, it has

been adopted by gays and lesbians themselves as a noninvidious term to identify

a way of life and an area for scholarly inquiry. See Teresa de Lauretis, Queer

Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities (1991); and Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory:

An Introduction (1996).

Both lesbian studies and gay studies began as “liberation movements”—in

parallel with the movements for African-American and feminist liberation—during

the anti–Vietnam War, antiestablishment, and countercultural ferment of the late

1960s and 1970s. Since that time these studies have maintained a close relation to

the activists who strive to achieve, for gays and lesbians, political, legal, and eco-

nomic rights equal to those of the heterosexual majority. Through the 1970s, the

two movements were primarily separatist: gays often thought of themselves as

quintessentially male, while many lesbians, aligning themselves with the feminist

movement, characterized the gay movement as sharing the antifemale attitudes

of the reigning patriarchal culture. Therehas,however,beenagrowingrecogni-

tion (signalized by the adoption of the joint term “queer”)ofthedegreetowhich

the two groups share a history as a suppressed minority and possess common polit-

ical and social aims.

In the 1970s, researchers for the most part assumed that there was a fixed,

unitary identity as a gay man or as a lesbian that has remained stable through

human history. A major endeavor was to identify and reclaim the works of

nonheterosexual writers from Plato to Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Marcel

Proust, Andre Gide, W. H. Auden, and James Baldwin, and from the Greek

poet Sappho of Lesbos to Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde.

The list included writers (William Shakespeare and Christina Rossetti are

examples) who represented in their literary works homoerotic subject matter

but whose own sexuality the available biographical evidence leaves uncertain.

(See Claude J. Summers, The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage: A Reader’s

Companion to the Writers and Their Works, from Antiquity to the Present, 1995.)

In the 1980s and 1990s, however—in large part because of the assimilation of the

QUEER THEORY 327

viewpoints and analytic methods of Derrida, Foucault, and other poststructuralists—

the earl ier assumptions about a unitary and stable gay or lesbian identity were

frequently put to question, and historical and critical analyses of sexual differences

became increasingly subtle and complex.

A number of queer theorists, for example, adopted the deconstructive

mode of dismantling the key binary oppositions of Western culture, such as

male/female, heterosexual/homosexual, and natural/unnatural, by which a

spectrum of diverse things is forced into only two categories, and in which

the first category is assigned privilege, power, and centrality, while the second

is derogated, subordinated, and marginalized. (See under deconstruction.) In an

important essay of 1980, “Compulsive Heterosexuality and Lesbian Exis-

tence,” Adrienne Rich posited what she called the “lesbian continuum” as a

way of stressing how far-ranging and diverse is the spectrum of love and

bonding among women, including female friendship, the family relationship

between mother and daughter, and women’s partnerships and social groups, as

well as overtly physical same-sex relations. Later theorists such as Eve Sedgwick

and Judith Butler undertook to invert the standard hierarchical opposition by

which homosexuality is marginalized and made unnatural, by stressing the

extent to which the ostensible normativity of heterosexuality is based on the

suppression and denial of same-sex desires and relationships. Queer reading

has become the term for interpretive activities that undertake to subvert and

confound the established verbal and cultural oppositions and boundaries

between male/female, homosexual/heterosexual, and normal/abnormal.

Another prominent theoretical procedure has been to undo the “essen-

tialist” assumption that heterosexual and homosexual are universal and trans-

historical types of human subjects, or identities, by historicizing these

categories—that is, by proposing that they are cultural constructs that emerged

under special ideological conditions in a particular culture at a particular time.

(See essentialism under humanism.) A central text is the first volume of Michel

Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1976), which claims that, while there had long

been a social category of sodomy as a transgressive human act, the “homo-

sexual,” as a special type of human subject or identity, was a construction by

the medical and legal discourse that developed in the latter part of the

nineteenth century. In a further expansion of cultural-constructionist theory,

Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990),

described the categories of gender and of sexuality as performative, in the sense

that the features which a cultural discourse institutes as masculine or feminine,

heterosexual or homosexual, the discourse also makes happen, by establishing

an identity that the socialized individual assimilates and the patterns of

behavior that he or she proceeds to enact. Homosexuality, by this view, is

not a particular identity that effects a pattern of action but a socially pre-

established pattern of action that produces the effect of originating in a

particular identity. A fundamental constructionist text, frequently cited in the

arguments against essentialism, is “One Is Not Born a Woman” (1981) by

Monique Wittig, in The Straight Mind and Other Essays (1992).

328 QUEER THEORY

The constructionist view has been elaborated by considering the cross-

influences of race and of economic class in producing the identities and

modes of behavior of gender and sexuality. (See, for example, Barbara

Smith, “ Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” 1977, reprinted in Within the

Circle: An Anthology of African-American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renais-

sance to the Present, ed. Angelyn Mitchell, 1994; and Ann Allen Stickley, “The

Black Lesbian in American Literature: An Overview,” in Conditions: Five Two,

1979.) Sustained debate among queer theorists concerns the risk of a radical

constructionism, which would dissolve a lesbian or gay identity into a linguis-

tic and discursive product specific to a particular culture, as against the need to

affirm a special and enduring type of human identity, in order to signalize and

celebrate it, as well as to establish a basis for concerted political action.

A number of journals are now devoted to queer theory and to lesbian,

gay, and transgender studies and criticism; the field has also become the sub-

ject of regularly scheduled learned conferences and has been established in the

curriculum of the humanities and social sciences in a great many colleges and

universities. Anthologies: Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow, eds., Lesbian Texts

and Contexts: Radical Revisions (1990); Diana Fuss, ed., Inside/Out: Lesbian

Theories, Gay Theories (1991); and Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and

David M. Halperin, eds., The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (1993), which

includes selections by almost all the theorists and critics mentioned in this

entry. Out Takes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film, ed. Ellis Hanson (1999),

is a collection of essays in queer criticism devoted to a variety of motion pic-

tures. There is a large and rapidly growing body of books on these subjects. In

addition to the texts listed above, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men:

English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) and Epistemology of the

Closet (1990); Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference

(1989); Richard Dyer, Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film (1990);

Gregory W. Bredbeck, Sodomy and Interpretation, Marlowe to Milton (1991);

Susan J. Wolfe and Julia Penelope, eds., New Lesbian Criticism: Literary and

Cultural Readings (1992); Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (1993); Michael

Warner, ed., Fear of a Queer Planet (1993); Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays

in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (1994); Gregory Woods, A History of Gay

Literature: The Male Tradition (1998). See also the readings listed under feminist

criticism and gender studies. For references to queer theory in other entries, see

page 99.

quest (romance): 50.

QUEST (ROMANCE) 329

rap: 272.

reader-response criticism: Reader-response criticism does not designate any

one critical theory but rather a focus on the process of reading a literary text

that is shared by many of the critical modes, American and European, which

have come into prominence since the 1960s. Reader-response critics turn

from the traditional conception that a text embodies an achieved set of mean-

ings, and focus instead on the ongoing mental operations and responses of

readers as their eyes follow a text on the page before them. In the more dras-

tic forms of such criticism, matters that had been considered by critics to be

objective features of the literary work itself (including narrator, plot, charac-

ters, style, and structure, as well as meanings) are dissolved into an evolving

process, consisting primarily of diverse expectations, and the violations, defer-

ments, satisfactions, and restructurings of expectations, in the flow of a reader’s

experience. Reader-response critics of all theoretical persuasions agree that, at

least to some considerable degree, the meanings of a text are the “production”

or “creation” of the individual reader, hence that there is no one correct

meaning for all readers either of the linguistic parts or of the artistic whole

of a text. Where these critics importantly differ is (1) in their view of the pri-

mary factors that shape a reader’s responses; (2) in the place at which they

draw the line between what is “objectively” given in a text and the “subjec-

tive” responses of an individual reader; and as a result of this difference, (3) in

their conclusion about the extent, if any, to which a text controls, or at least

“constrains,” a reader’s responses, so as to justify the rejection of at least some

readings as misreadings, even if, as most reader-response critics assert, we are

unable to demonstrate that any single reading is the correct reading.

The following is a brief survey of the more prominent forms of reader-

response criticism:

The German critic Wolfgang Iser developed the phenomenological analysis

of the reading process proposed by Roman Ingarden, but whereas Ingarden had

limited himself to a description of reading in general, Iser applied his theory to

the analysis of many individual works of literature, especially prose fiction. (For

a discussion of Ingarden’sviews,seephenomenology and criticism.) In Iser’sview

the literary text, as a product of the writer’s intentional acts, in part controls the

reader’s responses but always contains (to a degree that has greatly increased in

many modern literary texts) a number of “gaps” or “indeterminate elements.”

These the reader must fill in by a creative participation with what is given in

the text before him. The experience of reading is an evolving process of antici-

pation, frustration, retrospection, reconstruction, and satisfaction. Iser distin-

guishes between the implied reader, who is established by a particular text

itself as someone who is expected to respond in specific ways to the

“response-inviting structures” of the text, and the “actual reader,” whose

responses are inevitably colored by his or her accumulated private experiences.

330 RAP

In both cases, however, the process of the reader’s consciousness serves to

constitute both the partial patterns (which we ordinarily attribute to objective

features of the work itself) and the coherence, or unity, of the work as a whole.

As a consequence, literary texts always permit a varied range of possible mean-

ings. The fact, however, that the author’s intentional acts establish limits, as well

as incentives, to the reader’s creative additions to a text allows us to reject some

readings as misreadings. (For an application of phenomenological analysis to the

history, from era to era, of ever-altering reader responses to a given text, see

reception theory.)

French structuralist criticism, as Jonathan Culler said in Structuralist Poetics

(1975), “is essentially a theory of reading” that aims to “specify how we go

about making sense of texts” (pp. viii, 128). As practiced by critics such as

Culler in the course of his book, this mode of criticism stresses literary con-

ventions, codes, and rules that, having been assimilated by competent readers,

serve to structure their reading experience and so make possible, at the same

time as they impose constraints on, the partially creative activity of interpreta-

tion. The structuralist Roland Barthes, however, in his later theory encour-

aged a mode of reading that opens the text to an endless play of alternative

meanings. And the poststructuralist movement of deconstruction is a theory of

reading that specifically subverts the structuralist view that interpretation is in

some part controlled by linguistic and literary codes and instead proposes a

“creative” reading of any text as a play of “differences” that generate innu-

merable, mutually contradictory, and “undecidable” meanings.

American proponents of reader-response types of interpretive theory

often begin by rejecting the claim of the American New Criticism that a literary

work is a self-sufficient object invested with publicly available meanings,

whose internal features and structure should be analyzed without “external”

reference to the responses of its readers (see affective fallacy ). In radical opposi-

tion to this view, these critics—including David Bleich, Norman Holland,

and Harold Bloom—turn their attention exclusively from the verbal text to

the reader’s responses; they differ greatly, however, in the factors to which

they attribute the formation of these responses.

One form of reader-response criticism that achieved considerable influence

was what its originator, Stanley Fish, called affective stylistics. In his earlier

writings, Fish represented the activity of reading as one that converts the spatial

sequence of printed words on a page into a temporal flow of experience in a

reader who has acquired a “literary competence.” In following the printed text

with his eye, the reader makes sense of what he has so far read by anticipating

what is still to come. These anticipations may be fulfilled by what follows in the

text; often, however, they will turn out to have been mistaken. But since,

according to Fish, “the meaning of an utterance” is the reader’s “experience—

all of it,” and the reader

’sm

istakesare“part of the experience provided by the

author’slanguage,” these mistakes are an integral part of the meaning of a text.

(See “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics,” published in 1970 and rep-

rinted with slight changes in Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth

Century Literature, 1974, and in Is There a Text in This Class? 1980.) Fish’sanalyses

READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM 331

of large-scale literary works were designed to show a coherence in the kinds of

mistakes, constitutive of specific types of meaning-experience, which are effected

in the reader by the text of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and by various essayists

and poets of the seventeenth century.

Fish’s early claim was that he was describing a universal process in all com-

petent readings of literary texts. In later publications, however, he introduced

the concept of interpretive communities,eachofwhichiscomposedof

members who share a particular reading “strategy,” or “set of community

assumptions.” Fish, in consequence, now presented his own affective stylistics

as only one of many alternative modes of interpretation, which his earlier

writings were covertly attempting to persuade his readers to adopt. He also

proposed that each communal strategy in effect “creates” all the seemingly

objective features of the text itself, as well as the “intentions, speakers, and

authors” that we may infer from the text. The result is that there can be no

universal “right reading” of any text; the validity of any reading, however obvi-

ous it may seem to a reader, will always depend on the assumptions and strategy

of reading that he or she happens to share with other members of a particular

interpretive community. Fish’s claim is that all values, as well as meanings, of a

text are relative to the concept or scheme of a particular interpretive community;

furthermore, that such conceptual schemes are “incommensurable,” in that

there is no available standpoint, outside of all interpretive communities, for

translating the discourse of one community into that of another, or for mediat-

ing between them. (See Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of

Interpretive Communities,1980.)Inalaterbook,Doing What Comes Naturally:

Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (1989),

Fish analyzes, and defends, the role of the professional “interpretive commu-

nity” of academic critics in literary studies; he also extends his views of literary

interpretation into the domain of legal interpretation.

After the early 1980s, as part of a widespread tendency to stress changing

cultural and political factors in the study of literature, reader-response critics

undertook to “situate” a particular reading of a text in its historical setting, in

the attempt to show the extent to which the responses that constitute both

the interpretation and evaluation of literature have been determined by a

reader’s ideology and by built-in biases about race, class, or gender. See Peter

J. Rabinowitz, Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation

(1987); and for feminist emphasis on the male biases that affect the responses of

readers, Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader (1978); and Elizabeth A. Flynn

and Patrocinio Schweikart, eds., Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts,

and Contexts (1986).

A survey of a number of reader-response theories of criticism is included

in Steven Mailloux’s own contribution to this mode in Interpretive Conventions

(1982); a different survey, from the point of view of deconstructive theory, is

Elizabeth Freund, The

Return of the Reader: Reader-Response Criticism (1987).

Anthologies of diverse reader-response essays: Susan Suleiman and Inge

Crossman, eds., The Reader in the Text (1980);JaneP.Tompkins,ed.,Reader-

Response Criticism (1980). Important early instances of a criticism that is

332 READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM

focused on the reader: Walter J. Slatoff, With Respect to Readers (1970); Louise

Rosenblatt, The Reader, the Text, the Poem (1978); Umberto Eco, The Role of the

Reader (trans. 1979).

In addition to the titles mentioned in this essay, the following are prominent

exemplars of reader-response criticism: Stanley Fish, SurprisedbySin:TheReader

in “Paradise Lost” (1967); Norman Holland, The Dynam ics of Literary Response

(1968) and Five Readers Reading (1975); Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader

(1974) and The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (1978). For critiques

of Fish’s “affective stylistics”: Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs (1981); Eugene

Goodheart, The Skeptic Disposition in Contemporary Criticism (1984); M. H. Abrams,

“How to Do Things with Texts,” in Doing Things with Te xts (1989). For

references to reader-response criticism in other entries, see pages 311, 335, 344.

realism and naturalism: Realism is applied by literary critics in two diverse

ways: (1) to identify a movement in the writing of novels during the nine-

teenth century that included Honoré de Balzac in France, George Eliot in

England, and William Dean Howells in America (see realistic novel, under

novel), and (2) to designate a recurrent mode, in various eras and literary

forms, of representing human life and experience in literature.

Realistic fiction is often opposed to romantic fiction. The romance is said

to present life as we would have it be—more picturesque, fantastic, adventur-

ous, or heroic than actuality; realism, on the other hand, is said to represent

life as it really is. This distinction in terms solely of subject matter, while rele-

vant, is clearly inadequate. Casanova, T. E. Lawrence, and Winston Churchill

were people in real life, but their biographies demonstrate that truth can be

stranger than literary realism. It is more useful to identify realism in terms of

the intended effect on the reader: realistic fiction is written to give the effect

that it represents life and the social world as it seems to the common reader,

evoking the sense that its characters might in fact exist and that such things

might well happen. To achieve such effects, the novelists we identify as realists

may or may not be selective in subject matter—although most of them prefer

the commonplace and the everyday, represented in minute detail, over rarer

aspects of life—but they must render their materials in ways that make them

seem to their readers the very stuff of ordinary experience. For example,

Daniel Defoe in the early eighteenth century dealt with the extraordinary

adventures of a shipwrecked mariner named Robinson Crusoe and with the

extraordinary misadventures of a woman named Moll Flanders; but he made

his novels seem to readers a mirror held up to reality by his reportorial manner

of rendering all the events, whether ordinary or extraordinary, in the same

circumstantial, matter-of-fact, and seemingly unselective way. Both the fic-

tions of Franz Kafka and the present-day novels of magic realism achieve their

effects in large part by exploiting a realistic manner in rendering events that

are in themselves fantastic, absurd, or flatly impossible.

Russian formalists, followed more systematically by structuralist critics, pro-

posed that both the selection of subject matter and the techniques of render-

ing it in a realistic novel depend on their accordance with literary convention

REALISM AND NATURALISM 333

and codes which the reader has learned to interpret, or naturalize, in a way

that makes the text seem a reflection of everyday reality. (See Jonathan Culler,

Structuralist Poetics, 1975, chapter 7, “Convention and Naturalization”; and

Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in French Literary Theory Today, ed.

Tzvetan Todorov, 1982.) Some theorists draw the conclusion that, since all

literary representations are constituted by arbitrary conventions, there is no

valid ground for holding any one kind of fiction to be more realistic than

any other. It is a matter of common experience, however, that some novels

in fact produce on the reader the effect of representing the ordinary course of

events. Skepticism about the possibility of fictional realism is not an empirical

doctrine which is based on the widespread experience of readers of literature

but a metaphysical doctrine that denies the existence of any objective reality

that is independent of altering human conventions and cultural formations.

(For philosophical discussions of conventionality and reality, see the essays by

Hilary Putnam, Nelson Goodman, and Menachem Brinker in New Literary

History, Vol. 13, 1981, and Vol. 14, 1983.)

Naturalism is sometimes claimed to give an even more accurate depiction

of life than realism. But naturalism is not only, like realism, a special selection of

subject matter and a special way of rendering those materials; it is a mode of

fiction that was developed by a school of writers in accordance with a particular

philosophical thesis. This thesis, a product of post-Darwinian biology in the

nineteenth century, held that a human being exists entirely in the order of

nature and does not have a soul nor any access to a religious or spiritual world

beyond the natural world; and therefore, that such a being is merely a higher-

order animal whose character and behavior are entirely determined by two

kinds of forces: heredity and environment. Each person inherits compulsive

instincts—especial ly hunger, the drive to accumulate possessions, and sexuality—

and is then subjected to the social and economic forces in the family, the class,

and the milieu into which that person is born. The French novelist Émile Zola,

beginning in the 1870s, did much to develop this theory in what he called “le

roman expérimental” (that is, the novel organized in the mode of a scientific

experiment on the behavior, under given conditions, of the characters it

depicts). Zola and later naturalistic writers, such as the Americans Frank Norris,

Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser, try to present their subjects with scien-

tific objectivity and with elaborate documentation, sometimes including an

almost medical frankness about activities and bodily functions usually unmen-

tioned in earlier literature. They tend to choose characters who exhibit strong

animal drives such as greed and sexual desire, and who are helpless victims both

of glandular secretions within and of sociological pressures without. The end of

the naturalistic novel is usually “tragic,” but not, as in classical and Elizabethan

tragedy, because of a heroic but losing struggle of the individual mind and will

against gods, enemies, and circumstances. Instead the protagonist of the natural-

istic plot, a pawn to multiple compulsions, usually disintegrates or is wiped out.

Aspects of the naturalistic selection and management of subject matter

and its austere or harsh manner of rendering its materials are apparent in

many modern novels and dramas, such as Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, 1895

334 REALISM AND NATURALISM

(although Hardy largely substituted a cosmic determinism for biological and

environmental determinism), various plays by Eugene O’Neill in the 1920s,

and Norman Mailer’s novel of World War II, The Naked and the Dead.An

enlightening exercise is to distinguish the diverse ways in which the relation-

ship between the sexes is represented in a romance (Richard Blackmore’s

Lorna Doone, 1869), an ironic comedy of manners (Jane Austen’s Pride and

Prejudice, 1813), a realistic novel (William Dean Howells’ A Modern Instance,

1882), and a naturalistic novel (Émile Zola’s Nana, 1880, or Theodore

Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, 1925). Movements originally opposed to both

nineteenth-century realism and naturalism (although some modern works,

such as Joyce’s Ulysses, 1922, combine aspects of these and other novelistic

modes) are expressionism and symbolism (see Symbolist Movement).

See socialist realism, and refer to Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (1957);

Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion (1960); Harry Levin, The Gates of Horn: A

Study of Five French Realists (1963); René Wellek, “The Concept of Realism

in Literary Scholarship,” in Concepts of Criticism (1963); J. P. Stern, On Realism

(1973); Ioan Williams, The Realist Novel in England (1975); Donald Pizer,

Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (rev. 1984);

Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (1987);

James Nagel and Thomas Quirk, eds., The Portable American Realism Reader

(1997); Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Liter-

ature (reprinted 2003); Pam Morris, Realism (2003); and Phillip J. Barrish, The

Cambridge Introduction to American Literary Realism (2012).

realistic novel: 254.

Realistic Period (in American literature): 275.

reception aesthetic: 336.

reception history: 336.

reception theory: Reception theory is the application to literary history of

a form of reader-response theory that was proposed by Hans Robert Jauss in

“Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory” (in

New Literary History,

Vol.

2, 1970–71). Like other reader-response criticism, it focuses on the read-

er’s reception of a text; its prime interest, however, is not on the response of a

single reader at a given time but on the altering responses, interpretive and

evaluative, of the general reading public over the course of time. Jauss pro-

poses that although a text has no “objective meaning,” it does contain a vari-

ety of objectively describable features. The response of a particular reader,

which constitutes for that reader the meaning and aesthetic qualities of a

text, is the joint product of the reader’s own “horizon of expectations” and

the confirmations, disappointments, refutations, and reformulations of these

expectations when they are “challenged” by the features of the text itself.

Since the linguistic and aesthetic expectations of the general population of

RECEPTION THEORY 335

readers change over the course of time, and since later readers and critics have

access not only to the literary text but also to the published responses of earlier

readers, there develops an evolving historical “tradition” of critical interpreta-

tions and evaluations of a given literary work. Following concepts proposed

by Hans-Georg Gadamer (see under interpretation and hermeneutics), Jauss repre-

sents this tradition as a continuing “dialectic,” or “ dialogue, ” between a text

and the ever-altering horizons of successive readers; in itself, a literary text

possesses no fixed and final meanings or value.

This mode of studying literary reception as a dialogue, or “fusion” of hor-

izons, has a double aspect. As a reception aesthetic,it“defines” the meaning

and aesthetic qualities of any individual text as a set of implicit semantic and

aesthetic “potentialities” which become manifest only as they are realized by

the cumulative responses of readers over the course of time. In its other aspect

as a reception history, this mode of study also transforms the history of

literature—traditionally conceived as an account of the successive production

of a variety of works with relatively fixed meanings and values—by making it

a history that requires an “ever-necessary retelling,” sinceitnarratesthechang-

ing yet cumulative way that selected texts are interpreted and assessed, as the

horizons of successive generations of readers alter over the passage of time.

See Hans Robert Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception (1982), and The

Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics (1982); and for a history and

discussion of this viewpoint, Robert C. Holub, Reception Theory: A Critical

Introduction (1984).

recto: 37.

recuperation (in reading): 398.

reflection (in Marxist criticism): 206.

Reformation: 339.

refrain: A line, or part of a line, or a group of lines, which is repeated in the

course of a poem, sometimes with slight changes, and usually at the end of

each stanza. The refrain occurs in many ballads andworkpoemsandisafre-

quent element in Elizabethan songs, where it may be merely a nonverbal carrier

of the melodic line, as in Shakespeare’s “It Was a Lover and His Lass”: “With a

hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino.” A famous refrain is that which closes each

stanza in Edmund Spenser’s “Epithalamion

” (1

594)—“The woods shall to me

answer, and my echo ring”—in which sequential changes indicate the altering

sounds during the successive hours of the poet’s wedding day. The refrain in

Spenser’s “Prothalamion”—“Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song”—

is echoed ironically in Part III of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), where it is

applied to the Thames in the modern age of polluted rivers.

A refrain may consist of only a single word—“Nevermore,” as in Poe’s

“The Raven” (1845)—or of an entire stanza. If the stanza refrain occurs in a

336 RECTO

song, which all the auditors join in singing, it is called the chorus, for exam-

ple in “Auld Lang Syne” and many other songs by Robert Burns in the late

eighteenth century.

regional novel: 257.

regular ode: 262.

relativism: 312.

Renaissance: “Renaissance” (“rebirth”) is the name commonly applied to the

period of European history following the Middle Ages; it is usually said to

have begun in Italy in the late fourteenth century and to have continued, in

Italy and other countries of Western Europe, through the fifteenth and six-

teenth centuries. In this period the European arts of painting, sculpture, archi-

tecture, and literature reached an eminence not exceeded in any age. The

development came late to England in the sixteenth century and did not

have its flowering until the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods; sometimes, in

fact, John Milton (1608–74) is described as the last great Renaissance poet.

(See periods of English literature.)

Many attempts have been made to define “the Renaissance” in a brief state-

ment, as though a single essence underlay the complex features of the intellectual

and cultural life of a great variety of European countries over several hundred

years. It has, for example, been described as the birth of the modern world out

of the ashes of the Dark Ages; as the discovery of the world and the discovery of

man; and as the era of the emergence of untrammeled individualism in life,

thought, religion, and art. Some historians, finding that attributes similar to

thesewerepresentinvariouspeopleandplacesintheMiddleAges,andalso

that many elements long held to be medieval survived into the Renaissance,

have denied that the Renaissance ever existed. This skeptical opinion serves as

a reminder that history is a continuous process, and that “periods” are not intrin-

sic in history but are invented by historians. Nonetheless, the division of the

temporal continuum into named segments is an all but indispensable conve-

nience in discussing history. Furthermore, durin g the span of time called “the

Renaissance,” it is possible to identify a number of events and discoveries

which, beginning approximately in the fifteenth century, clearly effected distinc-

tive changes in the beliefs, productions, and manner of life of many people in

various countries, especially those in the upper and the intellectual classes.

Beginning in the 1940s, a number of historians have replaced (or else sup-

plemented) the term “Renaissance” with early modern to designate the span

from the end of the Middle Ages until late in the seventeenth century. The

latter term looks forward rather than back, emphasizing the degree to which

the time, instead of being mainly a rebirth of the classical past, can be viewed,

in its innovations and intellectual concerns, as a precursor of our present time.

(See Leah S. Marcus, “Renaissance/Early Modern Studies,” in Redrawing the

Boundaries, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn, 1992.)

RENAISSANCE 337

The innovations during this period may be regarded as putting a strain on the

relatively closed and stable world of the great civilization of the later Middle Ages,

when most of the essential and permanent truths about God, man, and the uni-

verse were considered to be adequately known. The full impact of many devel-

opments in the Renaissance did not make itself felt until the Enlightenment in the

later seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, but the fact that they occurred in

this period indicates the vitality, the restless curiosity, and the imaginative audacity

of many people of the era, whether scholars, thinkers, artists, or adventurers.

Prominent among these developments were the following:

1. The new learning. Renaissance scholars of the classics, called humanists,

revived the knowledge of the Greek language, discovered and dissemi-

nated a great number of Greek manuscripts, and added considerably to

the number of Roman authors and works which had been known during

the Middle Ages. The result was to open up a sense of the vastness of the

historical past, as well as to enlarge immensely the stock of ideas, materi-

als, literary forms, and styles available to Renaissance writers. In the mid-

fifteenth century the invention of printing on paper from movable type

(for which Johann Gutenberg of Mainz, Germany, is usually given credit,

although the Chinese had developed a similar mode of printing several

centuries earlier) made books for the first time cheap and plentiful, and

floods of publications, ancient and modern, poured from the presses of

Europe to satisfy the demands of the expanding population who had

learned to read. The rapidity and range of the spread of ideas, discoveries,

and types of literature in the Renaissance was made possible by this new

technology of printing. (See book and book history studies.) The technology

reached England in 1476, when William Caxton set up a press at

Westminster, where he published, among many other books, Chaucer’s

Canterbury Tales and Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur.

The humanistic revival sometimes resulted in pedantic scholarship,

sterile imitations of ancient works and styles, and a rigidly authoritarian

rhetoric and literary criticism. It also bred, however, the gracious and

tolerant humanity of an Erasmus, and the high concept of a cultivated

Renaissance aristocracy expressed in Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano

(“The Courtier”), published in 1528. This was the most admired and

widely translated of the many Renaissance courtesy books, or books

on the character, obligations, and training of the man of the court. It

sets up the ideal of the completely rounded or Renaissance man, devel-

oped in all his faculties and skills—physical, intellectual, and artistic. He is

especially trained to be a warrior and statesman but is capable also as ath-

lete, philosopher, artist, conversationalist, and man of society. The cour-

tier’s relationships to women, and women’s to men, are represented in

accordance with the quasi-religious code of Platonic love, and his activities

and productions are crowned by the grace of sprezzatura—the Italian

term for the seeming spontaneity and casual ease with which a trained

person may meet the requirements of complex and exacting rules.

338 RENAISSANCE

Leonardo da Vinci in Italy and Sir Philip Sidney in England are often

represented as embodying the many aspects of the courtly ideal.

2. The new religion. The Reformation led by Martin Luther (1483–1546)

was a successful heresy which struck at the very foundations of the insti-

tutionalism of the Roman Catholic Church. This early Protestantism was

grounded on each individual’s inner experience of spiritual struggle and

salvation. Faith (based on the word of the Bible) alone was thought suffi-

cient to save, and salvation itself was regarded as a direct transaction with

God in the theater of the individual soul, without the need of intermedi-

ation by church, priest, or sacrament. For this reason Protestantism is

sometimes said to have been an extreme manifestation of “Renaissance

individualism” in northern Europe; it soon, however, developed its own

type of institutionalism in the theocracy proposed by John Calvin (1509–

64) and his Puritan followers. Although England officially broke with the

Catholic Church during the reign of Henry VIII, the new religious estab-

lishment (the Anglican Church), headed by the monarch, retained many

of the characteristics of the old church while embracing selected Protes-

tant theological principles. The result was a political and theological com-

promise that remained the subject of heated debate for centuries.

3. The new world. In 1492 Christopher Columbus, acting on the persisting

and widespread belief in the old Greek idea that the world is a globe,

sailed west to find a new commercial route to the East, only to be frus-

trated by the unexpected barrier of a new continent. The succeeding

explorations of this continent and its native populations, and its settlement

by Europeans, gave new materials to the literary imagination. The magic

world of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, for example, as well as the treatment

of its native inhabitants by Prospero and others, is based on a contempo-

rary account of a shipwreck on Bermuda and other writings about

voyages to the New World. More important for English literature, how-

ever, was the fact that economic exploitation of the new world—often

cruel, oppressive, and devastating to the native peoples—put England at

the center, rather than as heretofore at the edge, of the chief trade routes,

and so helped establish the commercial prosperity that in England, as in

Italy earlier, was a necessary though not sufficient condition for the devel-

opment of a vigorous intellectual and artistic life.

4. The new cosmos. The cosmos of medieval astronomy and of medieval

Christian theology was Ptolemaic (that is, based on the Greek astrono-

mer Ptolemy, second century) and pictured a stationary earth around

which rotated the successive spheres of the moon, the various planets,

and then the fixed stars. Heaven, or the Empyrean, was thought to be

situated above the spheres, and Hell to be situated either at the center

of the earth (as in Dante’s Inferno) or else below the system of the spheres

(as in John Milton’s Paradise Lost). In 1543, Copernicus published his new

hypothesis concerning the astronomic system; this gave a much simpler

and more coherent explanation of accumulating observations of the actual

RENAISSANCE 339

movements of the heavenly bodies, which had led to ever greater

complications within the scheme of the Ptolemaic world picture. The

Copernican theory proposed a system in which the center is the sun,

not the earth, and in which the earth is not stationary, but only one

planet among many planets, all of which revolve around the sun.

5. Investigations have not borne out the earlier assumption by historians that

the world picture of Copernicus and of the scientists who followed him

(sometimes referred to as the new philosophy ) delivered an immediate

and profound shock to the theological and secular beliefs of thinking

people. For example in 1611, when Donne wrote in “The First Anniver-

sary” that “new Philosophy calls all in doubt,” for “the Sun is lost, and th’

earth,” he did so only to support the ancient theme, or literary topos,of

the world’s decay, and to enforce a traditional Christian “contemptus

mundi” (contempt for the worldly). Still later, Milton in Paradise Lost

(1667) expressed a suspension of judgment between the Ptolemaic and

Copernican theories; he adopted, however, the older Ptolemaic scheme

as the cosmic setting for his poem because it was more firmly traditional

and better adapted to his narrative purposes.

6. Much more important, in the long run, was the effect on opinion of the

general principles and methods of the new science developed by the great

successors of Copernicus in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centu-

ries, such as the physicists Johannes Kepler and Galileo and the English

physician and physiologist William Harvey. Even after Copernicus, the

cosmos of many writers in the Elizabethan era (exemplified in a number

of Shakespeare’s plays) not only remained Ptolemaic, it also remained an

animate cosmos that was invested with occult powers and inhabited by

demons and spirits, and was widely believed to control men’s lives by stellar

influences and to be itself subject to control by the powers of witchcraft

and of magic. The universe that emerged in the course of the seventeenth

century, as a product of the scientific procedure of posing hypotheses that

could be tested by precisely measured observations, was the physical one

propounded by the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650).

“Give me extension and motion,” Descartes wrote, “and I will construct

the universe.” The universe of Descartes and the new science consisted of

extended particles of matter which moved in space according to fixed

mathematical laws, free from interference by angels, demons, human

prayer, or occult magical powers. This universe was, however, subject to

the manipulations of experimental scientists who set out in this way to dis-

cover the laws of nature, and who, in the phrase of the English thinker

Francis Bacon, had learned to obey nature in order to be her master. In

Descartes and other philosophers, the working hypotheses of the scientists

about the physical world were converted into a philosophical worldview,

which was made current by popular expositions, and—together with

the methodological principle that a controlled observation is the criterion

of truth in many areas of knowledge—helped constitute the climate of

eighteenth-century opinion known as the Enlightenment.

340 RENAISSANCE

Joan Kelly inaugurated a spirited debate among feminist and other scholars

with her essay, published in 1977, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” (in

Women, History and Theory, 1984). Her own answer to the question, based

primarily on evidence from central Italy, was that women did not. For a

book by a feminist scholar who counters this claim, by reference to women’s

changing roles in the family, in the church, and in positions of political and

cultural power, see Margaret L. King, Women of the Renaissance (1991).

Refer to J. Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (first pub-

lished in 1860); E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science

(rev. 1932); C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the 16th Century (1954); Marjorie

Nicolson, Science and Imagination (1956); Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican

Revolution (1957); Paul O. Kristeller, Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholas-

tic, and Humanistic Strains (rev. 1961); John R. Hale, The Civilization of Europe

in the Renaissance (1993); Jerry Brotton, The Renaissance (2006).

Renaissance (historical period): 281; 163 .

Renaissance, American: 274.

Renaissance, Harlem: 159.

Renaissance, Irish Literary: 47.

Renaissance man: 338.

repartee (rep

ärte

): 418; 57.

representation (in new historicism): 245.

resolution (of a plot): 296.

Restoration (historical period): 282.

Restoration comedy: 57; 418.

revenge tragedy: 406.

reversal (in a plot): 296; 364.

Revolutionary Age (in American literature): 274.

rhetoric: In his Poetics, the Greek philosopher Aristotle defined poetry as a

mode of imitation—a fictional representation in a verbal medium of human

beings thinking, feeling, acting, and interacting—and focused his discussion

on elements such as plot, character, thought, and diction within the work

itself. In his Rhetoric, on the other hand, Aristotle defined rhetorical discourse

as the art of “discovering all the available means of persuasion in any given

case,” and focused his discussion on the means and devices that an orator

RHETORIC 341

uses in order to achieve the intellectual and emotional effects on an audience

that will persuade them to accede to the orator’s point of view. Most of the

later rhetoricians of the classical era concurred in the view that the concern of

rhetoric is with the type of discourse whose chief aim is to persuade an audi-

ence to think and feel or act in a particular way. (A notable exception is the

major Roman rhetorician Quintilian who, in the first century, gave rhetoric a

moral basis by defining it as the art “of a good man skilled in speaking.”)Ina

broad sense, then, rhetoric can be described as the study of language in its

practical uses, focusing on the persuasive and other effects of language, and

on the means by which one can achieve those effects on auditors or readers.

Following Aristotle’s lead, classical theorists analyzed an effective rhetori-

cal discourse as consisting of three components: invention (the finding of argu-

ments or proofs), disposition (the arrangement of such materials), and style

(the choice of words, verbal patterns, and rhythms that will most effectively

express and convey these materials). This last topic of “style” came to include

extensive classifications and analyses of figurative language. Rhetoricians also dis-

criminated three main classes of oratory, each of which uses characteristic

devices to achieve its distinctive type of persuasive effect:

1. Deliberative—to persuade an audience (such as a legislative assembly) to

approve or disapprove of a matter of public policy and to act accordingly.

2. Forensic—to achieve (for example, in a judicial trial) either the condem-

nation or approval of some person’s actions.

3. Epideictic—“display rhetoric,” used on appropriate, usually ceremonial,

occasions to enlarge upon the praiseworthiness (or sometimes, the blame-

worthiness) of a person or group of persons, and in so doing, to display the

orator’s own talents and skill in rising to the rhetorical demands of the occa-

sion. Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” is a famed instance of epi-

deictic oratory. In America, it remains traditional for a chosen speaker to

meet the challenge of the Fourth of July or other dates of national significance

by appropriately ceremonious oratory. The ode is a poetic form often used for

epideicticpurposes.Acompositioninproseorapublicspeechinsustained

and elaborate praise of a person, group, or deed is called a panegyric.

Figurative language, although dealt with at length in classical and later traditional

rhetorics, had been considered as only one element of style and, often, as subordi-

nated to the overall aim of persuasion. Within the past century, however, the anal-

ysis of the types and functions of figurative language has been increasingly excerpted

from this rhetorical context and made an independent and central concern not only

by critics of literature but also by language theorists and by philosophers. (See met-

aphor, theories of.) Some theorists regard all modes of discourse to be constituted by

“rhetorical” and figurative elements which are inherently nonreferential and

counterlogical and therefore subvert attempts to speak or write in ways that

have decidable meanings, or logical coherence, or reference to a world beyond

language. (See deconstruction.) Other theorists undertake to develop a cognitive

rhetoric, from the viewpoint of “cognitive science”—that is, representations of

342 RHETORIC

the most general operations of the mind and brain (based in part on the workings

of high-level computers), which cut across the standard distinctions between lit-

erary and nonliterary and between rhetorical and nonrhetorical mental and lin-

guistic processes. See Mark Turner, Reading Minds: The Study of English in the

Age of Cognitive Science (1991) and The Literary Mind (1996).

Refer to ethos (the rhetorical concept of a speaker’s projected character that

functions as a means of persuasion) under persona, tone, and voice;alsorhetorical criti-

cism. See Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory; M. L. Clarke,

Rhetoric at Rome: A Historical Survey (1953); George A. Kennedy, The Art of

Persuasion in Greece (1963); George A. Kennedy, ed., Aristotle on Rhetoric (1991);

Edward P. J. Corbett, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student (4th ed., 1998);

Thomas O. Sloane, ed., Encyclopedia of Rhetoric (2001). For a brief history of rhet-

oric, from the Greeks to the revived interest among contemporary theorists, see

Renato Barilli, Rhetoric (trans. 1989). Walter J. Ong, in Orality and Literacy: The

Technologizing of the Word (1982), discusses the central and pervasive role of rheto-

ric in Western education through the eighteenth century, and the attendant view

that the oral rather than the written mode is the paradigmatic use of language.

For references to rhetoric in other entries, see pages 66, 388.

rhetorical criticism: The Roman Horace in his versified Art of Poetry (first cen-

tury BC) declared that the aim of a poet is to either instruct or delight a reader,

and preferably to do both. This view, by making poetry a calculated means to

achieve effects on its audience, breaks down Aristotle’s distinction between imi-

tative poetry and persuasive rhetoric (see rhetoric). Such pragmatic criticism became

the dominant form of literary theory from late classical times through the eigh-

teenth century. Discussions of poetry in that long span of time absorbed and

expanded upon the analytic terms that had been developed in traditional rhet-

oric, and represented a poem mainly as a deployment of established artistic

means for achieving foreseen effects upon its readers. The triumph in the early

nineteenth century of expressive theories of literature (which conceive a work

primarily as the expression of the feelings, temperament, and mental powers

of the author), followed by the prominence, beginning in the 1920s, of objective

theories of literature (which maintain that a work should be considered as an

object in itself, independently of the attributes and intentions of the author

and the responses of a reader), served to diminish, and sometimes to eliminate,

rhetorical considerations in literary criticism. See under criticism.

After the 1950s, however, there was a strong revival of interest in literature as a

mode of communication between author and reader, and this led to the develop-

ment of a rhetorical criticism which, without departing from a primary focus on

the literary work itself, understood to identify and analyze those elements within a

poem or a prose narrative which are there primarily in order to effect certain

responses in a reader. As Wayne Booth said in the preface to his influential book

The Rhetoric of Fiction (rev. 1983), his subject is “the rhetorical resources available to

the writer of epic, novel, or short story as he tries, consciously or unconsciously, to

impose his fictional world upon the reader.” Many critics of prose fiction and of

narrative and non-narrative poems have emphasized the author’s use of a variety of

RHETORICAL CRITICISM 343

means—in cluding the authorial presence or “voice” that he or she projects—in

order to engage the interest and guide the imaginative and emotional responses

of the readers to whom, whether consciously or not, the literary work is addressed.

(See persona, tone, and voice.) After the 1960s, there also emerged a form of reader-

response criticism that focuses on a reader’s interpretive responses to the sequence of

words in a literary text. Most of its representatives, however, either ignored or

rejected the rhetorical view that such responses are effected by devices that, for

the most part, are contrived for that purpose by the author.

For examples of the rhetorical criticism of poetry and fiction see (in addi-

tion to Wayne Booth) Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (1955); and Brian

Vickers, Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry (2nd ed., 1989). For references to

rhetorical criticism in other entries, see page 72.

rhetorical figures: It is convenient to list under this heading some common

“figures of speech” which depart from what is experienced by competent

users as the standard, or “literal,” use of language mainly by the arrangement

of their words to achieve special effects, and not, like metaphors and other

tropes, by a radical change in the meaning of the words themselves. (See figu-

rative language.) Many theorists, however, reject the distinction between figures

of speech and tropes; some reject even the general distinction between literal

and figurative language. (See metaphor, theories of.)

Anaphora (Greek for “repetition”) is the deliberate repetition of a word

or phrase at the beginning of each one of a sequence of sentences, paragraphs,

lines of verse, or stanzas. “A Song” by the seventeenth-century English poet

Thomas Carew begins:

Ask me no more where Jove bestows,

When June is past the fading rose….

Each of the remaining four stanzas also begins with the words “Ask me no

more.” Anaphora is frequent in the Bible and in verse or prose strongly influ-

enced by the Bible, such as Walt Whitman ’s poems or sermons by eloquent

black preachers. In the powerful address to civil rights marchers by the Rev-

erend Martin Luther King, Jr., in front of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, five

successive sentences begin, “I have a dream,” and six later sentences begin,

“Let freedom ring.”

Anastrophe is a figure of speech in which the normal word order,

often involving an adjective a nd a n oun, is reversed or inverted with the

intention, or at least the effect, of emphasizing a certain word, as in Henry

Wadsworth Longfellow’sfamouslinefromEvangel ine , “This is the forest

primeval.” Joh

n Milton uses the figure frequentl y in Paradise Lost,aswhen

he descri bes Hell as

A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round

As one great Furnace flam’ d, yet from those flames

No light, but rather darkness visible

Serv’d onely to discover sights of woe…. (Book 1, II. 61–64)

344 RHETORICAL FIGURES

A related figure of speech is hyperbaton, which refers more generally to fig-

ures of speech in which words normally grouped together are separated, as in

the opening line of Virgil’s Aeneid: “Arms and the man I sing.” Some exam-

ples have become so habitual in common speech that the effect of inversion is

largely lost, as in “Right you are.”

An apostrophe is a direct and explicit address either to an absent person or

to an abstract or nonhuman entity. Often the effect is of high formality, or else

of a sudden emotional impetus. Many odes are constituted throughout in the

mode of such an address to a listener who is not literally able to listen. So

John Keats begins his “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1820) by apostrophizing the

Urn—“Thou still unravished bride of quietness”—and directs the entirety of

the poem to the Urn and to the figures represented on it. Samuel Taylor

Coleridge’sfinelyric“Recollections of Love” (1817) is an apostrophe addressed

to an absent woman; at the end of the poem, Coleridge, while speaking still to

his beloved, turns by a sudden impulse to apostrophize also the River Greta:

But when those meek eyes first did seem

To tell me, Love within you wrought—

O Greta, dear domestic stream!

Has not, since then, Love’s prompture deep,

Has not Love’s whisper evermore

Been ceaseless, as thy gentle roar?

Sole voice, when other voices sleep,

Dear under-song in clamor’s hour.

Many apostrophes, as in these examples from Keats and Coleridge, imply a

personification of the nonhuman object that is addressed. (See Jonathan Culler,

“Apostrophe,” in The Pursuit of Signs, 1981.)

If such an address is to a god or muse or other supernatural being to assist

the poet in his composition, it is called an invocation. An invocation often

serves to establish the authoritative or prophetic identity of the poetic voice;

thus John Milton invokes divine guidance at the opening of Paradise Lost:

And chiefly Thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer

Before all temples th’ upright heart and pure,

Instruct me….

Chiasmus (derived from the Greek term for the letter X, or for a cross-

over) is a sequence of two phrases or clauses which are parallel in syntax, but

which reverse the order of the corresponding words. So in this line from

Pope, the verb first precedes, then follows, the adverbial phrase:

Works without show, and without pomp presides.

The crossover is sometimes reinforced by alliteration and other similarities in

the length and component sounds of words, as in Pope’s summary of the

common fate of coquettes after marriage:

A fop their passion, but their prize a

sot.

RHETORICAL FIGURES 345

In Yeats’“An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” (1919), the chiasmus consists

in a reversal of the position of an entire phrase:

The years to come seemed waste of breath,

A waste of breath the years behind.

And as a reminder that all figures of speech occur in prose as well as in verse,

here is an instance of chiasmus in the position of the two adjectives in Shelley’s

Defence of Poetry (1821): “Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments

of the happiest and best minds.”

In paralipsis someone says that he need not, or will not, say something,

then proceeds to do so. The most familiar use of the figure is on public occa-

sions in which an introducer says that a speaker needs no introduction, then

goes on to introduce him or her, often at considerable length. The classic

literary example is Mark Antony’s funeral oration, in the third act of

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, which is constructed around the repeated and dev-

astatingly ironic use of this figure. The speech begins, for example, with the

statement “I came to bury Caesar, not to praise him,” then proceeds to eulo-

gize Caesar and to incite his auditors against the “honorable men” who have

assassinated him.

A rhetorical question is a sentence in the grammatical form of a question

which is not asked in order to request information or to invite a reply but to

achieve a greater expressive force than a direct assertion. In everyday discourse,

for example, if we utter the rhetorical question “Isn’titashame?” it functions as

a forceful alternative to the assertion “It’sashame.” (In terms of modern speech-

act theory,its“illocutionary force” is not to question but to assert.) The figure is

often used in persuasive discourse and tends to impart an oratorical tone to an

utterance, whether in prose or verse. When “fierce Thalestris” in Alexander

Pope’s TheRapeoftheLock(1714) asks Belinda,

Gods! Shall the ravisher display your hair,

While the fops envy, and the ladies stare?

she does not stay for an answer, which she obviously thinks should be “No!”

(A common form of rhetorical question is one that won’t take “Yes” for an

answer.) Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” (1820) closes with the most

famous rhetorical question in English:

O, Wind,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

This figure was a favorite of W. B. Yeats. A well-known instance is “Among

School Children,” which ends with the rhetorical question,

“How

can

Lines from “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” from The Poems of W. B. Yeats: A New Edition, edited by Richard J.

Finneran.

346 RHETORICAL FIGURES

we know the dancer from the dance?” In this instance the poetic context

indicates that the question is left hanging because it is unanswerable, posing

a problem for which there is no certain solution. In a deconstructive reading

of this and other examples in his Allegories of Reading (1979), Paul de Man

proposed that it is impossible to decide, not only what the answer is to the

question, but also whether it is or is not a question.

Zeugma in Greek means “yoking”; in the most common present usage,

it is applied to expressions in which a single word stands in the same gram-

matical relation to two or more other words, but with an obvious shift in its

significance. Sometimes the word is literal in one relation and metaphorical in

the other. Here are two examples of zeugma in Pope:

Or stain her honour, or her new brocade.

Obliged by hunger, and request of friends.

Byron uses zeugma for grimly comic effects in his description of a shipwreck

in Don Juan (1819– 24), Canto 2:

And the waves oozing through the port-hole made

His berth a little damp, and him afraid.

The loud tempests raise

The waters, and repentance for past sinning.

To achieve the maximum of concentrated verbal effects within the tight

limits of the closed couplet, Pope in the early eighteenth century exploited all

the language patterns described in this entry with supreme virtuosity. He is an

English master of the rhetorical figures, as Shakespeare is of tropes.

Other linguistic patterns or “schemes” that are sometimes classified as rhe-

torical figures are treated elsewhere in this Glossary; see antithesis; alliteration;

assonance; rhetorical climax (under bathos); and parallelism. For concise defini-

tions and examples of additional figures of speech which are less commonly

referred to in literary analyses, refer to Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of

Rhetorical Terms (2nd ed., 1991); Edward P. J. Corbett, Classical Rhetoric for

the Modern Student (4th ed., 1998); and Arthur Quinn’s entertaining and infor-

mative Figures of Speech: Sixty Ways to Turn a Phrase (1993). See references

under figurative language.

rhetorical question: 346.

rhyme: In English versification, standard rhyme consists of the repetition, in the

rhyming words, of the last stressed vowel and of all the speech sounds follow-

ing that vowel: láte–fáte; fóllow–hóllow.

End rhymes, by far the most frequent type, occur at the end of a verse

line. Internal rhymes occur within a verse line, as in the Victorian poet

Algernon Swinburne’s

Sister, my sister, O fleet sweet swallow.

RHYME 347

A stanza from Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” illustrates the

patterned use both of internal rhymes (within lines 1 and 3) and of an end

rhyme (lines 2 and 4):

In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,

It perched for vespers nine;

Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,

Glimmered the white moon-shine.

The numbered lines in the following stanza of Wordsworth’s “The Solitary

Reaper” (1807) are followed by a column which, in the conventional way,

marks the terminal rhyme elements by a corresponding sequence and repeti-

tion of the letters of the alphabet:

1. Whate’er her theme, the maiden sang a

2. As if her song could have no ending; b

3. I saw her singing at her work c

4. And o’er the sickle bending— b

5. I listened, motionless and still; d

6. And as I mounted up the hill, d

7. The music in my heart I bore, e

8. Long after it was heard no more. e

Lines 1 and 3 do not rhyme with any other line. Both in lines 5 and 6 and

in lines 7 and 8 the rhyme consists of a single stressed syllable, and is called a

masculine rhyme: stíll–híll, bóre–móre. In lines 2 and 4, the rhyme consists of

a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable, and is called a feminine

rhyme: énding–bénding.

A feminine rhyme, since it involves the repetition of two syllables, is also

known as a double rhyme. A rhyme involving three syllables is called a

triple rhyme; such rhymes, since they coincide with surprising patness, usu-

ally have a comic quality. In Don Juan (1819–24), Byron often uses triple

rhymes such as comparison–garrison, and sometimes intensifies the comic

effect by permitting the pressure of the rhyme to force a distortion of the

pronunciation. This maltreatment of words, called forced rhyme, in which

the poet gives the effect of seeming to surrender helplessly to the exigencies of

a difficult rhyme, has been comically exploited by the poet Ogden Nash:

Farewell, farewell, you old rhinocerous,

I’

ll stare at something less prepocerous.

If the correspondence of the rhymed sounds is exact, it is called perfect

rhyme, or else “full” or “true rhyme.” Until the twentieth century almost all

Ogden Nash. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. and Carlton Publishing Group.

348 RHYME

English writers of serious poems have limited themselves to perfect rhymes,

except for an occasional poetic license such as eye rhymes: words whose end-

ings are spelled alike, and in most instances were once pronounced alike, but

have in the course of time acquired a different pronunciation: prove–love,

daughter–laughter. Many modern poets, however, deliberately supplement

perfect rhyme with imperfect rhyme (also known as partial rhyme,or

else as approximate rhyme, slant rhyme,orpararhyme ). This effect is

fairly common in folk songs such as children’s verses, and it was employed

occasionally by various writers of art lyrics such as Henry Vaughan in the sev-

enteenth, William Blake in the late eighteenth, and very frequently by Emily

Dickinson in the nineteenth century. Later, Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. B.

Yeats, Wilfred Owen, and other poets systematically exploited partial rhymes,

in which the vowels are only approximate or else quite different, and occa-

sionally even the rhymed consonants are similar rather than identical. Wilfred

Owen, in 1917–18, wrote the following six-line stanza using only two sets of

partial rhymes, established at the ends of the first two lines:

The centuries will burn rich loads

With which we groaned,

Whose warmth shall lull their dreamy lids,

While songs are crooned.

But they will not dream of us poor lads,

Lost in the ground.

In his poem “The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower”

(1933), Dylan Thomas uses, very effectively, such distantly approximate

rhymes as (with masculine endings) trees–rose, rocks–wax, tomb–worm, and

(with feminine endings) flower–destroyer–fever.

Rime riche (French for “rich rhyme”) is the repetition of the consonant

that precedes, as well as the one that follows, the last stressed vowel; the

resulting pair of words are pronounced alike but have different meanings:

stare–stair, night–knight. The device is common in French poetry and was

adopted by Geoffrey Chaucer. Early in the General Prologue to The Canterbury

Tales, for example, he rhymes “seke,” which has two diverse meanings, “seek”

and “sick.” The pilgrims go to Canterbury

the holy blissful martyr for to seke

That hem hath holpen whan they were seke.

The use of rime riche is very rare in English poetry after Chaucer.

The passages quoted above will illustrate some of the many effects that

can be achieved by the device that has been called “making ends meet in

verse”—the pleasure of the expected yet varying chime; the reinforcement

of syntax and rhetorical emphasis when a strong masculine rhyme concurs

Ltd. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

RHYME

349

with the end of a clause, sentence, or stanza; the sudden grace of movement

that may be lent by a feminine rhyme; the broadening of the comic by a pat

coincidence of sound; the haunting effect of the limited consonance in partial

rhymes. Cunning artificers in verse make rhyme more than an auxiliary sound

effect; they use it to enhance, or contribute to, or counterpoint the signifi-

cance of the words. When Pope in the early eighteenth century satirized

two contemporary pedants in the lines

Yet ne’er one sprig of laurel graced these ribalds,

From slashing Bentley down to piddling Tibalds,

the rhyme of “Tibalds,” as W. K. Wimsatt has said, demonstrates “what it

means to have a name like that,” with its implication that the scholar is as

graceless as his appellation. And in one of its important functions, rhyme ties

individual lines into the larger pattern of a stanza.

See George Saintsbury, History of English Prosody (3 vols., 1906–10);

W. K. Wimsatt, “On Relation of Rhyme to Reason,” in The Verbal Icon

(1954); John Hollander, Rhyme’s Reason: A Guide to English Verse (1981).

For an analysis of the complex interrelations between sound repetitions and

meaning, see Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in his Language

and Literature (1987). For references to rhyme in other entries, see page 143.

rhythm: 218.

rime riche: 349.

rime royal: 375.

rising action: 296.

rituals: 230.

roman (the genre) (romän

): 252.

roman à clef (French for “novel with a key”): A work of prose fiction in which

the author expects the knowing reader to identify, despite their altered names,

actual people of the time. The mode was begun in seventeenth-century France

with novels such as Madeleine de Scudéry’s Le Grand Cyrus (1649–53). An

English example is Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey (1818), whose

characters are entertaining caricatures of such contemporary literary figures as

Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley. A later instance is Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter

Point (1928), which represents, under fictional names, well-known English

personages of the 1920s such as the novelist D. H. Lawrence, the critic John

Middleton Murry, and the right-wing political extremist Oswald Mosely.

romance, the: 50.Seealsoprose romance; chivalric romance; Gothic romance; romantic

comedy; wilderness romance.

350 RHYTHM

romance novels: Love stories that focus on the heroine rather than the hero, in

which, after diverse obstacles have been overcome, the plots end happily with

the betrothal or marriage of the lovers. This narrative form was exemplified

early in such classic novels as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and in all six

of Jane Austen’s novels, published between 1811 and 1818. The term

“romance novel,” however, is usually applied specifically to works published

since the 1950s and aimed at a mass market. Chief among them are the

Harlequin romances published by Harlequin Enterprises, which is head-

quartered in Canada and employs over thirteen hundred authors, most of

them women, who produce thousands of new titles each year in twenty-

nine languages and on six continents. Such novels are sold in supermarkets

and newsstands, rather than in traditional bookstores, and in annual sales far

exceed all other novelistic types, including detective stories and science fiction.

The history and analysis of this novelistic form has increasingly become

the subject of scholarly investigation; it now has its own literary periodical, the

Journal of Popular Romance Studies, begun in 2010. Refer to Carol Thurston,

The Romance Revolution (1987); Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women,

Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (1991); and Pamela Regis, A Natural History of

the Romance Novel (2003). For references to romance novels in other entries, see

page 56.

romantic (ideas and aims): 238.

romantic comedy: 56.

romantic irony: 188.

Romantic Period: 283; 150.

Romantic Period in America: 274.

round character: 48.

rules (linguistic): 198.

rules (neoclassic): 237; 149.

run-on lines: 221.

Russian formalism: 142; 234. See also formalism.

RUSSIAN FORMALISM 351

sarcasm: 187.

satire: “Satire” can be described as the literary art of diminishing or derogating a

subject by making it ridiculous and evoking toward it attitudes of amusement,

contempt, scorn, or indignation. It differs from the comic in that comedy evokes

laughter mainly as an end in itself, while satire derides; that is, it uses laughter as

a weapon, and against a butt that exists outside the work itself. That butt may

be an individual (in “personal satire”), a type of person, a class, an institution, a

nation, or even (as in the Earl of Rochester’s “A Satyr against Mankind,” 1675,

and much of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’sTravels, 1726, especially Book IV) the

entire human race. The distinction between the comic and the satiric, however,

is sharp only at its extremes. Shakespeare’s Falstaff is mainly a comic creation,

presented primarily for our enjoyment; the puritanical Malvolio in Shakespeare’s

Twelfth Night is for the most part comic but has aspects of satire directed against

the type of the fatuous and hypocritical Puritan; Ben Jonson’s Volpone (1607)

clearly satirizes the type of person whose cleverness—or stupidity—is put at

the service of his cupidity; and John Dryden’s MacFlecknoe (1682), while repre-

senting a permanent type of the pretentious poetaster, satirized specifically the

living author Thomas Shadwell.

Satire has usually been justified, by those who practice it, as a corrective

of human vice and folly; Alexander Pope, for example, remarked that “those

who are ashamed of nothing else are so of being ridiculous.” Its frequent

claim (not always borne out in the practice) has been to ridicule the failing

rather than the individual and to limit its ridicule to corrigible faults, exclud-

ing those for which a person is not responsible. As Swift said, speaking of

himself in his ironic “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift” (1739):

Yet malice never was his aim;

He lashed the vice, but spared the name….

His satire points at no defect,

But what all mortals may correct….

He spared a hump, or crooked nose,

Whose owners set not up for beaux.

Satire occurs as an incidental element within many works whose overall

mode is not satiric—in a certain character or situation, or in an interpolated

passage of ironic commentary on some aspect of the human condition or of

contemporary society. But for some literary writings, verse or prose, the

attempt to diminish a subject by ridicule is the organizing principle of

the whole, and these works constitute the formal genre labeled “satires.” In

discussing such writings the following distinctions are useful:

1. Critics make a broad division between formal (or “direct”

) satire and

indirect

satire. In formal satire the satiric persona speaks out in the first

352 SARCASM

person. This “I” may address either the reader (as in Pope’s Moral Essays,

1731–35) or else a character within the work itself, who is called the

adversarius and whose major artistic function is to elicit and add credi-

bility to the satiric speaker’s comments. (In Pope’s “Epistle to

Dr. Arbuthnot,” 1735, Arbuthnot serves as adversarius.) Two types of

formal satire are commonly distinguished, taking their names from

the great Roman satirists Horace and Juvenal. The types are defined by

the character of the persona whom the author presents as the first-person

satiric speaker and also by the attitude and tone that such a persona

manifests toward both the subject matter and the readers of the work.

In Horatian satire the speaker is an urbane, witty, and tolerant man

of the world, who is moved more to wry amusement than to indignation

at the spectacle of human folly, pretentiousness, and hypocrisy, and who

uses a relaxed and informal language to evoke from readers a wry smile at

human failings and absurdities—sometimes including his own. Horace

himself described his aim as “to laugh people out of their vices and

follies.” Pope’s Moral Essays and other formal satires for the most part sus-

tain a Horatian stance.

In Juvenalian satire, the speaker is a serious moralist who uses a

dignified and public utterance to decry modes of vice and error which are

no less dangerous because they are ridiculous, and who undertakes to

evoke from readers contempt, moral indignation, or an unillusioned sadness

at the aberrations of humanity. Samuel Johnson’s “London” (1738) and

“The Vanity of Human Wishes” (1749) are distinguished instances of

Juvenalian satire. In its most denunciatory instances, this mode of satire

resembles the jeremiad, whose model is not Roman but Hebraic.

2. Indirect satire is cast in some other literary form than that of direct

address to the reader. The most common indirect form is that of a fic-

tional narrative in which the objects of the satire are characters who

make themselves and their opinions ridiculous or obnoxious by what

they think, say, and do, and are sometimes made even more ridiculous

by the author’s comments and narrative style.

One type of indirect satire is Menippean satire, modeled on a Greek

form developed by the Cynic philosopher Menippus. It is sometimes

called Varronian satire, after a Roman imitator, Varro; Northrop Frye,

in Anatomy of Criticism,pp.308–12, suggests an alternative name, the

anatomy, after a major English instance of the type, Burton’s Anatomy of

Melancholy (1621). Such satires are written in prose, usually with interpola-

tions of verse, and constitute a miscellaneous form often held together by a

loosely constructed narrative. A prominent feature is a series of extended

dialogues and debates (often conducted at a banquet or party) in which a

group of loquacious eccentrics, pedants, literary people, and representatives

of various professions or philosophical points of view serve to make ludi-

crous the attitudes and viewpoints they typify by the arguments they urge

in their support. Examples are Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel

(1564),

SATIRE 353

Voltaire’s Candide (1759), Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey (1818)

and other satiric fiction, and Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point (1928); in

this last novel, as in those of Peacock, the central satiric scenes are discus-

sions and disputes during a weekend at an English country manor. Frye

also classifies Lewis Carroll’s two books about Alice in Wonderland as

“perfect Menippean satires.”

It should be noted that any narrative or other literary vehicle can be

adapted to the purposes of indirect satire. John Dryden’s Absalom and

Achitophel turns Old Testament history into a satiric allegory on Restoration

political maneuverings. In Gulliver’sTravels, Swift converts to satiric use the

early eighteenth-century accounts of voyage and discovery, and his Modest

Proposal is written in the form of a project in political economy. Many of

Joseph Addison’s Spectator papers are satiric essays; Byron’s Don Juan is a

versified satiric form of the old episodic picaresque fiction; Ben Jonson’s

The Alchemist,Molière’s The Misanthrope, Wycherley’s The Country Wife,

and Shaw’s Arms and the Man are satiric plays; and Gilbert and Sullivan’s

Patience, and other works such as John Gay’s eighteenth-century Beggar’s

Opera and its modern adaptation by Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera

(1928), are satiric operettas. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) employs

motifs from myth in a work which can be considered by and large as a

verse satire directed against what Eliot perceives as the spiritual dearth in

twentieth-century life. The greatest number of modern satires, however,

are written in prose, and especially in novelistic form; for example Evelyn

Waugh’s The Loved One,JosephHeller’s Catch-22, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s

Player Piano and Cat

’s

Cradle. Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) and

The Great Dictator (1940) are classic instances of dramatic satire in the cin-

ema. Much of the satiric thrust in black humor is directed against what the

author conceives to be the widespread contemporary condition of social

cruelty, inanity, or chaos.

Effective English satire has been written in every period beginning with

the Middle Ages. Pieces in the English Punch and the American New Yorker

demonstrate that formal essayistic satire, like satiric novels, plays, and cinema,

still commands a wide audience; and W. H. Auden is a twentieth-century

author who wrote superb satiric poems. The proportioning of the examples

in this article, however, indicates how large the Restoration and eighteenth

century loom in satiric achievement: the century and a half that included

Dryden, the Earl of Rochester, Samuel Butler, Wycherley, Aphra Behn,

Addison, Pope, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Swift, Gay, Fielding, Johnson,

Oliver Goldsmith, and late in the period (it should not be overlooked) the

Robert Burns of “The Holy Fair” and “Holy Willie’s Prayer” and the

William Blake of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. This same span of time

was also in France the period of such major satirists as Boileau, La Fontaine,

and Voltaire, as well as Molière, the most eminent of all satirists in drama. In

the nineteenth century, American satire broke free of English domination

with the light satiric touch of Washington Irving’s Sketch Book, the deft satiric

354 SATIRE

essays of Oliver Wendell Holmes (The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table), and

above all the satiric essays and novels of Mark Twain.

See also light verse. The articles on burlesque,onirony, and on wit, humor,

and the comic describe some of the derogatory modes and devices available to

satirists. Consult Gilbert Highet, The Anatomy of Satire (1962); Alvin B.

Kernan, The Plot of Satire (1965); Charles Sanders, The Scope of Satire (1971);

Michael Seidel, Satiric Inheritance, Rabelais to Sterne (1979); Dustin Griffin,

Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (1994); Fredric V. Bogel, The Difference Satire

Makes: Rhetoric and Reading from Jonson to Byron (2001). Anthologies: Ronald

Paulson, ed., Satire: Modern Essays in Criticism (1971); Ashley Brown and John

L. Kimmey, eds., Satire: An Anthology (1977), which includes both satiric writ-

ings and critical essays on satire; Ruben Quintero, ed., A Companion to Satire

(2006). For references to satire in other entries, see pages 40, 90, 419.

satiric comedy: 57.

scan: 220.

scansion (skan

shun): 220.

scenario: 59 .

scene (in drama): 4.

schemes (figures of speech): 133.

science fiction and fantasy: These terms encompass novels and short stories

that represent an imagined reality that is radically different in its nature and

functioning from the world of our ordinary experience. Often the setting is

another planet, or this earth projected into the future, or an imagined parallel

universe. The two terms are not sharply discriminated, but by and large the

term science fiction is applied to those narratives in which—unlike in pure

fantasy—an explicit attempt is made to render plausible the fictional world

by reference to known or imagined scientific principles, or to a projected

advance in technology, or to a drastic change in the organization of society.

Mary Shelley’sremarkableFrankenstein (1818) is often considered a precursor

of science fiction, but the basing of fictional worlds on explicit and coherently

developed scientific principles did not occur until later in the nineteenth century,

in such writings as Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth andH.G.Wells’

The War of the Worlds. More recent important authors of science fiction include

Isaac Asimov, Arthur Clarke, Ray Bradbury, J. G. Ballard, and Doris Lessing.

Science fiction is also frequently represented in television and film; a notable

and immensely popular instance is the Star Trek series.

Fantasy is as old as the fictional utopias, and its satiric forms have an impor-

tant precursor in the extraordinary countries portrayed in Jonathan Swift’s

Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Among the notable twentieth-century writers of

SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY 355

fantasy are C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien (The Hobbit, The Lord of the

Rings), whose works incorporate materials from classical, biblical, and medie-

val sources. Ursula Le Guin is a major author of both science fiction and

works of fantasy.

Some instances of science fiction and fantasy project a future utopia

(Le Guin’s The Dispossessed), or else attack an aspect of current science or

society by imagining their dystopian conclusion (George Orwell’s Nineteen

Eighty-Four, 1949, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, 1986); and

many writers use their imaginary settings, as Swift had in Gulliver’s Travels,

for political and social satire (Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and much of

Kurt Vonnegut’s prose fiction). See utopia and dystopia and satire.

Cyberpunk emerged in the early 1980s as a postmodern form of science

fiction in which the events take place partially or entirely within the “virtual

reality” formed by computers or computer networks, in which the characters

may be humans, or aliens, or artificial intelligences. Many cyberpunk works

adapt elements from the detective novel and film noir in their description of

the dystopian features of an electronic or posthuman society. Well-known

instances are William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984), and the Matrix

films (1999, 2003). See the essays in Larry McCaffery, ed., Storming the Reality

Studio (1991), and Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative, eds.

George Slusser and Tom Shippey (1992).

For other novelistic forms that depart radically from the world of ordinary

experience, see magic realism and metafiction, under novel. Refer to Kingsley

Amis, New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction (1960); Robert Scholes

and Eric S. Rabkin, Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision (1977); H. Bruce

Franklin, Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Century (rev.

1978); Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and

Science Fiction (1979); Gary K. Wolfe, Critical Terms for Science Fiction and

Fantasy (1986); Jane Donawerth, Frankenstein’s Daughters: Women Writing

Science Fiction

(1997); Adam Roberts, Science

Fiction (2nd ed., 2006).

scriptoria: 35.

second-person points of view: 303 .

self-conscious narrator: 304.

self-reflexive novel: 304.

semantics: 196.

semiology: 357.

semiotics: At the end of the nineteenth century Charles Sanders Peirce, the

American philosopher, proposed and described a study that he called “semiotic,”

and in his Course in General Linguistics (1915) the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de

356 SCRIPTORIA

Saussure independently proposed a science that he called “semiology.” Since

then semiotics and semiology have become alternative names for the system-

atic study of signs as these function in all areas of human experience. The con-

sideration of signs (conveyors of meaning) is not limited to the realm of

language.Morsecode,trafficsignsandsignals,andagreatdiversityofother

human activities and productions—our bodily postures and gestures, the social

rituals we perform, the kinds of clothes we wear, the meals we serve, the build-

ings we inhabit, the objects we deal with—also convey common meanings to

members who participate in a particular culture and so can be analyzed as signs

which function in diverse modes of signifying systems. Although the study of

language (the use of specifically verbal signs) is technically regarded as only one

branch of the general science of semiotics, linguistics, the highly developed sci-

ence of language, in fact has for the most part supplied the basic concepts and

methods that a semiotician applies to the study of nonlinguistic sign systems.

C. S. Peirce distinguished three classes of signs, defined in terms of the

kind of relation that exists between a signifying item and that which it sig-

nifies: (1) An icon functions as a sign by means of inherent similarities, or

shared features, with what it signifies; examples are the similarity of a portrait

to the person it depicts or the similarity of a map to the geographical area it

stands for. (2) An index is a sign which bears a natural relation of cause or

effect to what it signifies; thus, smoke is a sign indicating fire, and a pointing

weathervane indicates the direction of the wind. (3) In the symbol (or in a

less ambiguous term, the “sign proper”), the relation between the signifying

item and what it signifies is not a natural one but is entirely a matter of social

convention. The gesture of shaking hands, for example, in some cultures is a

conventional sign of greeting or parting, and a red traffic light conventionally

signifies “Stop!” The major and most complex examples of this third type of

purely conventional sign, however, are the words that constitute a language.

Ferdinand de Saussure introduced many of the terms and concepts

exploited by current semioticians; see Saussure under linguistics in modern criti-

cism. Most important are the following: (1) A sign consists of two inseparable

components or aspects, the signifier (in language, a set of speech sounds, or of

marks on a page) and the signified (the concept, or idea, which is the meaning

of the sign). (2) A verbal sign, in Saussure’s term, is “arbitrary.” That is, with

the minor exception of onomatopoeia (words which we perceive as similar to

the sounds they signify), there is no inherent, or natural, connection between

a verbal signifier and what it signifies. (3) The identity of all elements of a

language, including its words, their component speech sounds, and the con-

cepts the words signify, are not determined by “positive qualities,” or objec-

tive features in these elements themselves but by differences, or a network of

relationships, consisting of distinctions and oppositions from other speech

sounds, other words, and other signifieds that obtain only within a particular

linguistic system. (4) The aim of linguistics, or of any other semiotic enter-

prise, is to regard the parole (a single verbal utterance, or a particular use of a

sign or set of signs) as only a manifestation of the langue (that is, the general

system of implicit differentiations and rules of combination which underlie

SEMIOTICS 357

and make possible a particular use of signs). The focus of semiotic interest,

accordingly, is not in interpreting a particular instance of signification but in

establishing the general signifying system that each particular instance relies

upon.

Modern semiotics, like structuralism, has developed in France under the

aegis of Saussure, so that many semioticians are also structuralists. They deal

with any set of social phenomena or social productions as texts; that is, as con-

stituted by self-sufficient, self-ordering, hierarchical structures of differentially

determined signs, codes, and rules of combination and transformation which

make significant materials “ meaningful” to members of a particular society

who are competent in that signifying system. (See structuralist criticism.) Claude

Lévi-Strauss, in the 1960s and later, inaugurated the application of semiotics

to cultural anthropology, and also established the foundations of French struc-

turalism in general, by using Saussure’s linguistics as a model for analyzing, in

primitive societies, a great variety of phenomena and practices, which he trea-

ted as quasi-languages that manifest the structures of an underlying signifying

system. These include kinship systems, totemic systems, ways of preparing

food, myths, and prelogical modes of interpreting the world. Jacques Lacan

has applied semiotics to Freudian psychoanalysis—interpreting the uncon-

scious, for example, as (like language) a structure of signs (see Lacan under

psychological and psychoanalytic criticism). Michel Foucault developed a mode

of semiotic analysis to deal with the changing medical interpretations of

symptoms of disease; the diverse ways of identifying, classifying, and treating

insanity; and the altering conceptions of human sexuality (see under

poststructuralism). Roland Barthes, explicitly applying Saussurean principles

and methods, has written semiotic analyses of the constituents and codes of

the sign systems in advertisements which describe and promote women’s fash-

ions, as well as analyses of many “bourgeois myths” about the world which,

he claims, are exemplified in such social sign systems as professional wrestling

matches, children’s toys, cookery, and the striptease. (See his Mythologies, trans.

1972.) In his earlier writings Barthes was also a major exponent of structuralist

criticism, which deals with a literary text as “a second-order semiotic system” ;

that is, it views a literary text as employing the first-order semiotic system of

language to form a secondary semiotic structure, in accordance with a specifi-

cally literary system of conventions and codes.

For a related field of study, which can be characterized as the semiotics of

culture, see cultural studies. Introductions to the elements of semiotic theory

are included in Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (1977); Robert

Scholes, Semiotics and Interpretation (1982); also in the anthologies Thomas A.

Sebeok, ed., The Tell-Tale Sign: A Survey of Semiotics (1975); and Robert E.

Innis, ed., Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology (1985). See also Roland Barthes,

Elements of Semiology (trans. 1967); Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (1976).

Among the semiotic analyses of diverse social phenomena available in English

are Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (1966) and Structural Anthro-

pology (1968); Jacques Lacan, The Language of the Self: The Function of Language

in Psychoanalysis (1968); Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization (1965),

358 SEMIOTICS

The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), and The Birth of the Clinic (1973); and

Roland Barthes, Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag (1983). On semiotics and

literary analysis, see Maria Corti, An Introduction to Literary Semiotics (1978);

Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (1978); and, in application to dramatic

literature, Marvin Carlson, Theatre Semiotics: Signs of Life (1990). For a critical

view of semiotics, see J. G. Merquior, From Prague to Paris (1986).

For references to semiotics in other entries, see pages 197, 323.

Senecan tragedy: 406.

sensibility: 359.

Sensibility, Age of: 283.

sensibility, drama of: 360.

sensibility, literature of: When a contemporary critic talks of a poet’s sensibility,

the reference is to a characteristic way of responding, in perception, thought, and

feeling, to experience; and when T. S. Eliot claimed that a dissociation of sensibility

set in with the poetry of John Milton and John Dryden, he signified that there

occurred at that time a division between a poet’s sensuous, intellectual, and

emotional modes of experience. When a literary historian, however, talks of

the literature of sensibility, the reference is to a particular cultural phenome-

non of the eighteenth century. This type of literature was fostered by the

moral philosophy that had developed as a reaction against seventeenth-

century Stoicism (which emphasized reason and the unemotional will as

the s ole motives to virtue), and even more importantly, as a reaction against

Thomas Hobbes’ claims, in Leviathan (1651), that a human being is innately

selfish and that the mainsprings of human behavior are self-interest and

the drive for power and status. In opposition to such views, many sermons,

philosophical writings, and popular tracts and essays proclaimed that

“benevolence”—wishing other persons well—is an innate human sentiment

and motive, and that the central elements in all morality are the feelings of

sympathy and “sensibility”—that is, a hair-trigger responsiveness to another per-

son’s distresses and joys. (See empathy and sympathy.) “Sensibility” also connoted,

in the eighteenth century, an intense emotional responsiveness to beauty and

sublimity, whether in nature or in art, and such responsiveness was often repre-

sented as an index to a person’s gentility—thatis,toone’s upper-class status.

Emphasis on the human capability for sympathy and wishing others

well—an important contribution was Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral

Sentiments (1759)—

helped to develop social consciousness and a sense of com-

munal

responsibility in an era of expanding commercialism and of a market

economy based on self-interest. (For an application of Smith’s Theory of the

Moral Sentiments to literature, see Martha Craven Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge,

1990, chapter 14.) Highly exaggerated forms of sympathy and manifestations

of benevolence, however, became prominent in eighteenth-century culture

SENSIBILITY, LITERATURE OF 359

and literature. It was a commonplace in widespread views of morality that

readiness to shed a sympathetic tear, quite apart from moral actions, is the

sign both of polite breeding and a virtuous heart; and such a view was often

accompanied by the observation that sympathy with another’s grief, unlike

personal grief, is a pleasurable emotion, hence to be sought as a value in itself.

Common phrases in the cult of sensibility were the oxymorons “the luxury of

grief,”“pleasurable sorrows,” and “the sadly pleasing tear.” A late eighteenth-

century mortuary inscription in Dorchester Abbey reads:

Reader! If thou hast a Heart fam’d for Tenderness and Pity,

Contemplate this Spot. In which are deposited the Remains of a

Young Lady…. When Nerves were too delicately spun to bear the

rude Shakes and Jostlings which we meet with in this transitory world,

Nature gave way; She sunk and died a Martyr to Excessive Sensibility.

It is clear that much of what in that age was called, with approval,

“sensibility” we now call, with disapproval, sentimentalism.

In literature these ideas and tendencies were reflected in the drama of

sensibility,orsentimental comedy, which were representations of middle-

class life that replaced the tough amorality and the comic or satiric representa-

tion of aristocratic sexual license in Restoration comedy. In the contemporary

plays of sensibility, Oliver Goldsmith remarked in his “Comparison between

Sentimental and Laughing Comedy” (1773), “the virtues of private life are

exhibited rather than the vices exposed, and the distresses rather than the faults

of mankind make our interest in the piece”; the characters, “though they want

humor, have abundance of sentiment and feeling”; with the result, he added,

that the audience “sit at a play as gloomy as at the tabernacle.” Plays such as

Richard Steele’s The Conscious Lovers (1722) and Richard Cumberland’s The

West Indian (1771) present monumentally benevolent heroes and heroines of

the middle class, whose dialogue abounds with elevated moral sentiments and

who, prior to the manipulated happy ending, suffer tribulations designed to

evoke from the audience the maximum of pleasurable tears.

The novel of sensibility,orsentimental novel, of the latter part of the

eighteenth century similarly emphasized the tearful distresses of the virtuous,

either at their own sorrows or at those of their friends; some of them represented

in addition a sensitivity to beauty or sublimity in natural phenomena which also

expressed itself in tears. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740)

exploits sensibility in some of its scenes; and Laurence Sterne, in Tristram Shandy

and A Sentimental Journey, published in the 1760s, gives us his own inimitable

compound of sensibility, self-irony, and innuendo. The vogue of sensibility was

international. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’

s novel Julie,

or the New Héloise (1761) dealt

with lovers who manifest sensibility, and in his autobiography, The Confessions

(written 1764–70), Rousseau represented himself, in some circumstances and

moods, as a man of extravagant sensibility. Goethe’snovelThe Sorrows of Young

Werther (1774) was an enormously popular presentation of the aesthetic sensitivi-

ties and finespun emotional tribulations of a young man who, frustrated in his

love for a woman betrothed to another and in general unable to adapt his

sensibility to the demands of ordinary life, finally shoots himself.

360 SENSIBILITY, LITERATURE OF

An extreme English instance of the sentimental novel is Henry Mackenzie’s

The Man of Feeling (1771), which represents a hero of such exquisite sensibility

that he goes into a decline from excess of pent-up tenderness toward a young

lady, and dies in the perturbation of finally declaring to her his emotion. “If all

his tears had been tears of blood,” declares an editor of the novel, Hamish

Miles, “the poor man could hardly have been more debile.” Jane Austen’s

gently satiric treatment of a young woman of sensibility in Sense and Sensibility

(begun 1797, published 1811) marks the decline of the fashion, but the exploi-

tation of the mode of literary sensibility survives in such later novelistic episodes

as the death of Little Nell in Charles Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop (1841) and the

death of Little Eva in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).

Sentimentality was exploited also in Victorian melodramas,aswellasinmany

movies that Hollywood labeled “tearjerkers.”

In The Politics of Sensibility (1996), Markman Ellis departs from the usual

derogatory treatment of the sentimental novels of the later eighteenth century

by arguing that they contributed to movements for social reform, including

opposition to slavery, criticism of the questionable morality involved in

some commercial and business practices, and the movement for the reforma-

tion and relief of prostitutes.

In America, sentimental novels were referred to as “woman’s fiction” or

“domestic novels” and often involved the story of a young girl who must

make her way in the world unprotected. See Nina Baym, Woman’s Fiction:

A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–70 (2nd ed., 1993).

According to Jane Tompkins, many novels denigrated by sophisticated readers

as overly sentimental or merely popular in fact represented attempts to reor-

ganize culture from the women’s point of view, and in some cases achieved

devastating critiques of American society. See “Sentimental Power: Uncle

Tom’s Cabin and the Politics of Literary History,” chapter 5 in Sensational

Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (1985).

See Age of Sensibility under periods of English literature. Refer to R. S. Crane,

“Suggestions toward a Genealogy of the ‘Man of Feeling,’”in The Idea of the

Humanities (2 vols., 1967); Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction

(1986);

ohn Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth

Century (1988); G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society

in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1992); Claude Rawson, Satire and Sentiment

1660–1830 (1994); Jerome McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility (1996); Paul

Goring, Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture (2005).

sententious: 118.

sentimental comedy: 360.

sentimental novel: 360.

sentimentalism: “Sentimentalism” is now a derogatory term applied to what is

perceived to be an excess of emotion to an occasion, and especially to an

overindulgence in the “tender” emotions of pathos and sympathy. Since what

SENTIMENTALISM 361

constitutes emotional excess or overindulgence is relative both to the judg-

ment of the individual a nd to large-scale historical changes in culture and

in literary fashion, what to the common reader of one age i s a normal and

laudable expression of humane feeling may seem sentimental to many later

readers. The emotional responses of a lover that Shelley expresses and tries

to evoke from the reader in his “Epipsychidion” (1821) seemed sentimental

to the New Critics of the 1930s and later, who insisted on the need for an

ironic counterpoise to intense feeling in poetry. Most readers now find both

the drama of sensibility and the novel of sensibility of the eighteenth century

ludicrously sentimental, and respond with jeers instead of tears to once cele-

brated episodes of pathos, such as man y of the death scenes, especially those

of children, in some Victorian novels and dramas. A staple in current antho l-

ogies of b ad poetry are sentimental poems which were doubtless written,

and by some people read, with deep and sincere feeling. A useful distinction

between sentimental and nonsentimental is one which does not depend on

the intensity and type of the feeling expressed or evoked, but labels as senti-

mental a work or pa ssage in which the feeling is rendered in commonplaces

and clichés, instead of being freshly verbalized a nd sharply realized in the

details of the representation.

See pathos,andsensibility, literature of, and refer to I. A. Richards, Practical

Criticism (1929), chapter 6; and the discussion of sentimentality by Monroe C.

Beardsley, “Bad Poetry,” in The Possibility of Criticism (1970). Suzanne Clark has

written a feminist reconsideration of sentimentalism in literature, Sentimental

Modernism and the Revolution of the Word (1991), and Shirley Samuels has edited

a collection of essays on Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in

Nineteenth-Century America (1992).

sequential art: 153.

sestet: 369.

sestina (seste

na): 376.

setting: The overall “setting” of a narrative or dramatic work is the general locale,

historical time, and social circumstances in which its action occurs; the setting of

a single episode or scene within the work is the particular physical location in

which it takes place. The overall setting of Macbeth, for example, is medieval

Scotland, and the setting for the particular scene in which Macbeth comes

upon the witches is a blasted heath. The overall setting of James Joyce’s Ulysses

is Dublin on June 16, 1904, and its opening episode is set in the Martello

Tower overlooking Dublin Bay. In works by writers such as Edgar Allan Poe,

Thomas Hardy, and William Faulkner, both the overall and individual settings

are important elements in generating the atmosphere of their works. The

Greek term opsis (“scene,” or “spectacle”) is now occasionally used to denote

a particular visible or picturable setting in any work of literature, including a

lyric poem.

362 SEQUENTIAL ART

When applied to a theatrical production, “setting” is synonymous with

décor, which is a French term denoting both the scenery and the properties,

or movable pieces of furniture, on the stage. The French mise en scène

(“placing on stage”) is sometimes used in English as another synonym for

“setting”; it is more useful, however, to apply the term more broadly, as the

French do, to signify a director’s overall conception, staging, and directing of

a theatrical performance.

seven cardinal virtues: 363.

seven deadly sins: In medieval and later Christian theology these sins were usu-

ally identified as Pride, Covetousness, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Anger, and Sloth.

They were called “deadly” because they were considered to put the soul of

anyone manifesting them in peril of eternal perdition; such sins could be expi-

ated only by absolute penitence. Among them, Pride was often considered pri-

mary, since it was believed to have motivated the original fall of Satan in

heaven. Sloth was accounted a deadly sin because it signified not simply lazi-

ness but a torpid and despondent spiritual condition that threatened to make a

person despair of any chance of achieving divine Grace. Alternative names for

sloth were accidie, “dejection,” and “spiritual dryness”; it was probably a con-

dition close to that which present-day psychiatrists diagnose as acute depression.

The seven deadly sins (or in an alternative term, cardinal sins)were

defined and discussed at length by such major theologians as Gregory the

Great and Thomas Aquinas, and served as the topic of countless sermons.

They also played an important role in many works of medieval and Renaissance

literature—sometimes in elaborately developed personifications—including

William Langland’s Piers Plowman (B, Passus 5), Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Parson’s

Tale,” William Dunbar’s “The Dance of the Sevin Deidly Synnis,”

and Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (Book I, Canto 4). See Morton W.

Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins (1952).

The seven deadly or cardinal sins were balanced by the seven cardinal

virtues. Three of these, called the “theological virtues” because they were

stressed in the New Testament, were Faith, Hope, and Charity (that is,

Love)—

see St. Paul’s I

Corinthians 13:13: “And now abideth faith, hope, and

charity, these three.” The other four, the “natural virtues,” were derived from

the moral philosophy of the ancient Greeks: justice, prudence, temperance,

and fortitude.

Refer to Robert W. Ackerman, Backgrounds to Medieval English Literature

(1966). For essays on the seven deadly sins written in 1962 by eminent

English authors, see W. H. Auden, Cyril Connolly, Patrick Leigh-Fermor,

Edith Sitwell, Christopher Sykes, Evelyn Waugh, and Angus Wilson, Seven

Deadly Sins: Common Reader Edition (2002).

Shakespearean sonnet: 369.

shaped verse: 63.

SHAPED VERSE 363

shifters (in grammar): 233.

short short story: 365.

short story: A “short story” is a brief work of prose fiction, and most of the

terms for analyzing the component elements, the types, and the narrative

techniques of the novel are applicable to the short story as well. The short

story differs from the anecdote—the unelaborated narration of a single

incident—in that, like the novel, it organizes the action, thought, and

dialogue of its characters into the artful pattern of a plot, directed toward

particular effects on an audience. (See narrative and narratology.) And as in the

novel, the plot form may be comic, tragic, romantic, or satiric; the story is

presented to us from one of many available points of view; and it may be

written in the mode of fantasy, realism, or naturalism.

In the tale,or“story of incident,” the focus of interest is primarily on the

course and outcome of the events, as in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold Bug”

(1843) and other tales of detection, in many of the stories of O. Henry (1862–

1910), and in the stock but sometimes well-contrived western, detective, and

adventure stories in popular magazines. “Stories of character” focus instead on

the state of mind and motivation, or on the psychological and moral qualities,

of the protagonists. In some of the stories of character by Anton Chekhov

(1860–1904), the Russian master of the form, nothing more happens than

an encounter and conversation between two people. Ernest Hemingway’s

classic “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” consists only of a curt dialogue

between two waiters about an old man who each day gets drunk and stays

on in the café until it closes, followed by a brief meditation on the part of

one of the waiters. In some stories there is a balance of interest between exter-

nal action and character. Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis

Macomber” is as violent in its packed events as any sensational adventure

tale, but every particular of the action and dialogue is contrived to test and

reveal, with a surprising set of reversals, the moral quality of all three

protagonists.

The short story differs from the novel in the dimension that Aristotle

called “magnitude,” and this limitation of length imposes differences both in

the effects that the story can achieve and in the choice and elaboration of the

elements to achieve those effects. Edgar Allan Poe, who is sometimes called

the originator of the short story as an established genre , was at any rate its first

critical theorist. He defined what he called “the prose tale” as a narrative

which can be read at one sitting of from half an hour to two hours, and is

limited to “

a certain unique or single effect” to

which every detail is subordi-

nate (see his review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales, 1842). Poe’s

comment applies to many short stories and points to the economy of manage-

ment which the tightness of the form always imposes in some degree. We can

say that, by and large, the short story writer introduces a limited number of

persons, cannot afford the space for a leisurely analysis and sustained develop-

ment of character, and cannot develop as dense and detailed a social milieu as

364 SHIFTERS

does the novelist. The author often begins the story close to, or even on the

verge of, the climax, minimizes both prior exposition and the details of

the setting, keeps the complications down, and clears up the dénouement

quickly—sometimes in a few sentences. (See plot.) The central incident is

often selected to manifest as much as possible of the protagonist’s life and

character, and the details are devised to carry maximum import for the devel-

opment of the plot. This spareness in the narrative often gives the artistry in a

good short story higher visibility than the artistry in the more capacious and

loosely structured novel.

Many distinguished short stories depart from this paradigm in various

ways. It must be remembered that the name covers a great diversity of prose

fiction, all the way from the short short story, which is a slightly elaborated

anecdote of perhaps five hundred words, to such long and complex forms as

Herman Melville’s Billy Budd (c. 1890), Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw

(1898), Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), and Thomas Mann’s Mario

and the Magician (1930). In such works, the status of middle length between

the tautness of the short story and the expansiveness of the novel is sometimes

indicated by the name novelette,ornovella. This form has been especially

exploited in Germany (where it is called the Novelle) after it was introduced

by Goethe in 1795 and carried on by Heinrich von Kleist and many other

writers; it has been the subject of special critical attention by German

theorists.

The short narrative, in both verse and prose, is one of the oldest and most

widespread of literary forms; the Hebrew Bible, for example, includes the

stories of Jonah, Ruth, and Esther. Some of the narrative types which pre-

ceded the modern short story, treated elsewhere in this Glossary, are the

fable, the exemplum , the folktale, the fabliau, and the parable. Early in its history,

there developed the device of the frame-story: a preliminary narrative

within which one or more of the characters proceeds to tell a series of short

narratives. This device was widespread in the oral and written literature of the

East and Middle East, as in the collection of stories called The Arabian Nights

(see the Introduction to The Arabian Nights, trans. Husain Haddawy, 1990).

This device was used by a number of other writers, including Boccaccio for

his prose Decameron (1353) and by Chaucer for his versified Canterbury Tales

(c. 1387). In the latter instance, Chaucer developed the frame-story of the

journey, dialogue, and interactions of the Canterbury pilgrims to such a

degree that the frame itself approximated the form of an organized plot.

Within Chaucer’s frame-plot, each story constitutes a complete and rounded

narrative, yet functions also both as a means of characterizing the teller and as

a vehicle for the quarrels and topics of argument en route. In its more modern

forms, the frame-story may enclose either a single narrative (Henry James’ The

Turn of the Screw) or a sequence of narratives (Joel Chandler Harris’ stories as

told by Uncle Remus, 1881 and later; see under beast fable).

The type of prose narrative which approximates the present concept of

the short story was developed, beginning in the early nineteenth century, in

order to satisfy the need for short fiction by the many magazines

(periodical

SHORT STORY 365

collections of diverse materials, including essays, reviews, verses, and prose

stories) that were inaugurated at that time. Among the early practitioners

were Washington Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe in America; Sir Walter Scott

and Mary Shelley in England; E. T. A. Hoffmann in Germany; Balzac in

France; and Gogol, Pushkin, and Turgenev in Russia. Since then, almost all

the major novelists in all the European languages have also written notable

short stories. The form has flourished especially in America; Frank O’Connor

has called it “the national art form, ” and its American masters include (in

addition to the writers mentioned above) Mark Twain, William Faulkner,

Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, John O’Hara,

J. F. Powers, John Cheever, and J. D. Salinger.

See Sean O’Faolain, The Short Story (1948, reprinted 1964); R. L. Pattee,

The Development of the American Short Story (rev. 1966); Ian Reid, The Short

Story (1977); Malcolm Bradbury, ed., The Penguin Book of Modern British

Short Stories (1987); Julie Brown, ed., American Women Short Story Writers

(1995). On the novella: Ronald Paulson, The Novelette Before 1900 (1968);

Mary Doyle Springer, Forms of the Modern Novella (1976); Martin Swales, The

German Novelle (1977).

showing (in narrative): 49.

sign: 357; 196.

sign proper (in semiotics): 357.

significance (in interpretation): 180.

signified (in linguistics): 196; 357.

signifier: 196; 324, 357.

simile (s



le): 133; 213.

Skeltonics: 95.

slam (poetry): 271.

slant rhyme: 349.

slave narratives: 274.

sloth: 363.

social novel: 256.

social theory of textual criticism: 400.

366 SHOWING

Socialist Realism: “Socialist Realism” was a term used by Marxist critics for

novels which, they claimed, reflected social reality—that is, novels that

accorded with the Marxist view that the struggle between economic classes

is the essential dynamic of society. After the 1930s, Socialist Realism was the

officially sanctioned artistic mode for communist writers until the dissolution

of the Soviet Union in 1991. In its crude version, it served as a term of

approval for novels that adhered to the party line by stressing the oppression

of workers by bourgeois capitalists, the virtues of the proletariat, and the felic-

ities of life under a communist regime. A flexible Marxist critic such as Georg

Lukács, on the other hand, applied complex criteria of narrative realism to

analyze and laud the traditional classics of European realistic fiction.

See Marxist criticism, proletarian novel, and realism, and refer to Georg

Lukács, Studies in European Realism (trans. 1964); Mark Slonim, Soviet Russian

Literature (1967); and George Bisztray, Marxist Models of Literary Realism

(1978).

society verse: 193.

sociological novel: 256.

sociology of literature: Most literary historians and critics have taken some

account of the relation of individual authors to the circumstances of the social

and cultural era in which they live and write, as well as of the relation of a

literary work to the segment of society that its fiction represents or to the

audience toward which the work is addressed. (For major exceptions, see

Russian formalism, New Criticism, structuralism, deconstruction.) The term “sociol-

ogy of literature,” however, is applied only to the writings of those historians

and critics whose primary, and sometimes exclusive, interest is in the ways

that the subject matter and form of a literary work are affected by such cir-

cumstances as its author’s class status, gender, and political and other interests;

the ways of thinking and feeling characteristic of its era; the economic condi-

tions of the writer’s profession and of the publication and distribution of

books; and the social class, conceptions, and values of the audience to which

an author addresses the literary product. Sociological critics treat a work of

literature as inescapably conditioned—in the choice and development of its

subject matter, the ways of thinking it incorporates, its evaluations of the

modes of life it renders, and even in its formal qualities—by the social, politi-

cal, and economic organization and forces of its age. Such critics also tend to

view the interpretation and assessment of a literary work by a reading public

as shaped by the circumstances specific to that public’s time and place. The

French historian Hippolyte Taine is sometimes considered the first modern

sociologist of literature in his History of English Literature (1863), which

analyzed a work as determined by three factors: its author’s “race,” its geo-

graphical and social “milieu,” and its historical “moment.”

For prominent sociological emphases in critical approaches to literature,

see feminist criticism—which emphasizes the role of male interests and

SOCIOLOGY OF LITERATURE 367

assumptions as determinants of the content, values, and interpretations of the

standard literary canon—and also Marxist criticism. For an influential Marxist ver-

sion, see Lucien Goldmann, Essays on Method in the Sociology of Literature

(1980). For approaches by the Frankfurt School of Marxist criticism, see two

essays by Leo Lowenthal, both titled “On Sociology of Literature” (1932,

1948, reprinted in Literature and Mass Culture, 1984). It should be noted that

Marx’s views of the economic basis of social organization, class ideologies, and

class conflict have influenced the work of many critics who, although not

committed to Marxist doctrine, stress the sociological context and content of

works of literature. The most thoroughgoing treatments of literary works as

cultural products that are embedded in the circumstances and discourses of a

time and place are by advocates of the current modes of criticism called the

new historicism. For late developments in the sociology of literary texts, see book

history studies.

See the readings listed under authors and authorship, book history studies, fem-

inist criticism , Marxist criticism, and new historicism. Refer also to the pioneering

study by Alexandre Beljame, Men of Letters and the English Public—that is, in

the eighteenth century (1883, trans. 1948); Levin Schücking, The Sociology of

Literary Taste (rev. 1941); Hugh Dalziel Duncan, Language and Literature in

Society, with a Bibliographical Guide to the Sociology of Literature (1953); Pierre

Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays in Art and Literature (1996).

Bourdieu’s views have been applied to the formation of the canon of litera-

ture by John Guillory in Cultural Capital (1995). See also two books on the

sociology of the production of popular literature and its audience by Janice

Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and

Middle-Class Desire (1997), and Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy,

and Popular Literature (1991). Collections of essays in sociological criticism

include Joseph P. Strelka, ed., Literary Criticism and Sociology (1973); Elizabeth

and Tom Burns, eds., Sociology of Literature and Drama: Selected Readings (1973);

and the issue of Critical Inquiry devoted to the sociology of literature, Vol. 14

(Spring 1988).

Socratic irony: 187.

solecism (sol

es



sm): 204.

soliloquy: Soliloquy is the act of talking to oneself, whether silently or aloud. In

drama it denotes the convention by which a character, alone on the stage, utters

his or her thoughts aloud. Playwrights have used this device as a convenient

way to convey information about a character’s motives and state of mind, or

for purposes of exposition, and sometimes in order to guide the judgments

and responses of the audience. Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (first per-

formed in 1594) opens with a long expository soliloquy and concludes with

another which expresses Faustus’ frantic mental and emotional state during his

belated attempts to evade damnation. The best-known of dramatic soliloquies

is Hamlet ’s speech which begins “To be or not to be.” Compare monologue.

368 SOCRATIC IRONY

A related stage device is the aside , in which a character expresses to the

audience his or her thought or intention in a short speech which, by conven-

tion, is inaudible to the other characters on the stage. Both devices, common

in Elizabethan and later drama, were largely rejected by dramatists in the later

nineteenth century, when the increasing requirement that plays convey the

illusion of real life impelled writers to exploit indirect means for revealing a

character’s state of mind, and for conveying exposition and guidance to the

audience. Eugene O’Neill, however, revived and extended the soliloquy and

aside and made them basic devices throughout his play Strange Interlude (1928).

For references to soliloquy in other entries, see pages 64, 66, 96.

Son of Ben: 281.

sonnet: A lyric poem consisting of a single stanza of fourteen iambic pentameter

lines linked by an intricate rhyme scheme. (Refer to meter and rhyme.) There

are two major patterns of rhyme in sonnets written in the English language:

1. The Italian or Petrarchan sonnet (named after the fourteenth-century

Italian poet Petrarch) falls into two main parts: an octave (eight lines)

rhyming abbaabba followed by a sestet (six lines) rhyming cdecde or some

variant, such as cdccdc. Petrarch’s sonnets were first imitated in England, in

both their stanza form and their standard subject—the hopes and pains of

an adoring male lover—by Sir Thomas Wyatt in the early sixteenth cen-

tury. (See Petrarchan conceit.) The Petrarchan form was later used, for a

great variety of subjects, by Milton, Wordsworth, Christina Rossetti,

D. G. Rossetti, and other sonneteers, who sometimes made it technically

easier in English (which does not have as many rhyming possibilities as

Italian) by introducing a new pair of rhymes in the second four lines of

the octave.

2. The Earl of Surrey and other English experimenters in the sixteenth cen-

tury also developed a stanza form called the English sonnet, or else the

Shakespearean sonnet, after its greatest practitioner. This sonnet falls

into three quatrains and a concluding couplet: abab cdcd efef gg. There was

a notable variant, the Spenserian sonnet, in which Spenser linked each

quatrain to the next by a continuing rhyme: abab bcbc cdcd ee.

John Donne shifted from the hitherto primary subject, sexual love, to a

variety of religious themes in his Holy Sonnets, written early in the seventeenth

century; and Milton, in the latter part of that century, expanded the range of the

sonnet to other matters of serious concern. Except for a lap se in the English

Neoclassic Period, the sonnet has remained a popular form to the present day

and includes among its distinguished practitioners, in the nineteenth century,

Wordsworth, Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Dante

Gabriel Rossetti, and in the twentieth century, Edwin Arlington Robinson,

EdnaSt.VincentMillay,W.B.Yeats,RobertFrost,W.H.Auden,andDylan

Thomas. The stanza is just long enough to permit a fairly complex lyric devel-

opment, yet so short, and so exigent in its rhymes, as to pose a standing

SONNET 369

challenge to the ingenuity and artistry of the poet. The rhyme pattern of the

Petrarchan sonnet has on the whole favored a statement of a problem, situation,

or incident in the octave, with a resolution in the sestet. The English form

sometimes uses a similar division of material but often presents instead a

repetition-with-variation of a statement in each of the three quatrains; in either

case, the final couplet in the English sonnet usually imposes an epigrammatic turn

at the end. In Drayton’s fine Elizabethan sonnet in the English form “Since

there’snohelp,comeletuskissandpart,” the lover brusquely declares in the

first quatrain, then reiterates in the second,thatheisgladthattheaffairiscleanly

ended, then hesitates at the finality of the parting in the third quatrain, and in

the concluding couplet suddenly drops his swagger to make one last plea. Here

are the third quatrain and couplet:

Now at the last gasp of love’s latest breath,

When, his pulse failing, passion speechless lies,

When faith is kneeling by his bed of death,

And innocence is closing up his eyes;

Now if thou wouldst, when all have given him over,

From death to life thou mightst him yet recover.

Following Petrarch’s early example, a number of Elizabethan authors

arranged their poems into sonnet sequences,orsonnet cycles,inwhicha

series of sonnets are linked together by exploring the varied aspects of a relation-

ship between lovers, or else by indicating a development in the relationship that

constitutes a kind of implicit plot. Shakespeare ordered his sonnets in a sequence,

as did Sidney in Astrophel and Stella (1580) and Spenser in Amoretti (1595). Later

examples of the sonnet sequence on various subjects are Wordsworth’s The River

Duddon,D.G.Rossetti’s House of Life,ElizabethBarrettBrowning’s Sonnets from

the Portuguese, and the American poet William Ellery Leonard’s Two Lives.Dylan

Thomas’ Altarwise by Owl-light (1936) is a sequence of ten sonnets that are

abstruse meditations on the poet’s own life. George Meredith’s Modern Love

(1862), which concerns a bitterly unhappy marriage, is sometimes called a sonnet

sequence, even though its component poems consist not of fourteen but of six-

teen lines.

On the early history of the sonnet and its development in England through

Milton, see Michael R. G. Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction

(1992). See also Michael R. G. Spiller, The Sonnet Sequence: A Study of the

Strategies (1997); Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’sSonnets(1997); Stephen

Burt and David Mikics, The Art of the Sonnet (2010).

sonnet cycle: 370.

sonnet sequence: 370.

sound symbolism: 197.

370 SONNET CYCLE

speech-act theory: “Speech-act theory,” developed by the philosopher John

Austin, was described most fully in his posthumous book How to Do Things

with Words (1962) and was explored and expanded by other “ordinary-

language philosophers,” including John Searle and H. P. Grice. Austin’s the-

ory is directed against traditional tendencies of philosophers (1) to analyze the

meaning of isolated sentences, abstracted from the context of a discourse and

from the attendant circumstances in which a sentence is uttered; and (2) to

assume, in what Austin calls a “logical obsession,” that the standard sentence—

of which other types are merely variants— is a statement that describes a sit-

uation or asserts a fact, and is to be judged as either true or false. John

Searle’s ado ption an d elabora tion of Austin’s speech-act theory opposes to

these views the claim that when we attend to the overall linguistic and situa-

tional context—including the institutional conditions that govern many uses

of language—we find that in speaking or writing we perform simultaneously

three, and sometimes four, distinguishable kinds of speech acts: (1) We utter

a sentence; Austin called this act a “locution.” (2) We refer to an object and

predicate something about that object. (3) We perform an illocutionary act.

(4) Often, we also perform a perlocutionary act.

The illocutionary act performed by a locution may indeed be the one

stressed by traditional philosophy and logic, to assert that something is true;

but it may instead be one of very many other possible speech acts, such as

questioning, commanding, promising, warning, praising, thanking, and so

on. A sentence consisting of the same words in the same grammatical form,

such as “I will leave you tomorrow,” may in a particular verbal and situational

context turn out to have the “ illocutionary force” either of an assertion, or of

a promise, or of a threat. In an illocutionary act that is not an assertion, the

prime criterion (although the utterance makes reference to some state of

affairs) is not its truth or falsity but whether or not the act has been performed

successfully, or in Austin’s term, “felicitously.” A felicitous performance of a

particular illocutionary act depends on its meeting “appropriateness condi-

tions” which obtain for that type of act; these conditions are tacit linguistic

and social (or institutional) conventions, or rules, that are shared by competent

speakers and interpreters of a language. For example, the “felicitous,” or suc-

cessful, performance of an illocutionary act of promising, such as “I will come

to see you tomorrow,” depends on its meeting its special set of appropriate-

ness conditions: the speaker must be capable of fulfilling his promise, must

intend to do so, and must believe that the listener wants him to do so. Failing

the last condition, for example, the same verbal utterance might have the illo-

cutionary force of a threat.

In How to Do Things with Words, John Austin established an initial distinc-

tion between two broad types of locutions: constatives (sentences that assert

something about a fact or state of affairs and are adjudged to be true or false)

d performatives (sentences that are speech acts that accomplish something,

such as questioning, promising, praising, and so on). As he continued his subtle

analysis, however, Austin showed that this initial division of utterances into two

sharply exclusive classes does not hold, in that many performatives also involve

SPEECH-ACT THEORY 371

reference to a state of affairs, while constatives also perform an illocutionary act.

Austin, however, drew special attention to the “explicit performative,” which is

a sentence whose utterance itself, when executed under appropriate institutional

and other conditions, brings about the state of affairs that it signifies. Examples

are “I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth”; “Iapologize”; “Icallthismeeting

to order”; “Let spades be trumps.”

If an illocutionary act has an effect on the actions or state of mind of the

hearer which goes beyond merely understanding what has been said, it is also

a perlocutionary act. Thus, the utterance “I am going to leave you,” with

the illocutionary force of a warning, not only may be understood as such but

may have (or fail to have) the additional perlocutionary effect of frightening

the hearer. Similarly, by the illocutionary act of promising to do something,

one may please (or else anger) the hearer; and by asserting something, one

may have the effect either of enlightening, or of inspiring, or of intimidating

the hearer. Some perlocutionary effects are intended by the speaker; others

occur without the speaker’s intention, and even against that intention. For a

useful exploration of the relations, in diverse cases, of illocutionary and perlo-

cutionary speech acts, see Ted Cohen, “ Illocutions and Perlocutions,” in

Foundations of Language, Vol. 9 (1973).

A number of deconstructive theorists have proposed that the use of lan-

guage in fictional literature (which Austin had excluded from his consider-

ation of what he called “seriously” intended speech acts) is in fact a prime

instance of the performative, in that it does not refer to a pre-existing state

of affairs but brings about, or brings into being, the characters, action, and

world that it describes. On the other hand, since performative linguistic acts

cannot avoid recourse to statement and assertion, some deconstructive theor-

ists convert Austin’s constative/performative distinction into an undecidable

deadlock, or oscillation, of irreconcilable oppositions. See deconstruction and

refer to Barbara Johnson, “Poetry and Performative Language: Mallarmé and

Austin,” in The Critical Difference (1980); Sandra Petrey, Speech Acts and Literary

Theory (1990); Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (2nd

ed., 2011), chapter 7, “Performative Language.” Judith Butler has proposed

that the terms we use to identify a person’s gender and sexuality are modes

of performative language, in that the reiterated application of such terms to

persons, in accordance with the linguistic conventions that govern their use,

in fact bring about (or cause persons to “perform”) the identities and the

modes of behavior that they purport to describe. See Judith Butler, Gender

Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Excitable Speech

(1997); refer also to queer theory.

Since 1970, speech-act theory has influenced in conspicuous and varied

ways

the practice of literary criticism. When applied to the analysis of direct

discourse by a character within a literary work, it provides a systematic but

sometimes cumbersome framework for identifying the unspoken presupposi-

tions, implications, and effects of speech acts which competent readers and

critics have always taken into account, subtly though unsystematically. (See

discourse analysis.) Speech-act theory has also been used in a more radical

372 SPEECH-ACT THEORY

way, however, as a model on which to recast the theory of literature in

general, and especially the theory of prose narratives (see fiction and truth).

What the author of a fictional work—or else what the author’s invented

narrator—narrates is held to constitute a “pretended” set of assertions, which

are intended by the author, and understood by the competent reader, to be

free from a speaker’s ordinary commitment to the truth of what he or she

asserts. Within the frame of the fictional world that the narrative thus estab-

lishes, however, the utterances of the fictional characters—whether these are

assertions or promises or marital vows—are held to be responsible to ordinary

illocutionary commitments. Alternatively, some speech-act theorists propose a

new version of mimetic theory (see imitation). Traditional mimetic critics had

claimed that literature imitates reality by representing in a verbal medium the

setting, actions, utterances, and interactions of human beings. Some speech-

act theorists, on the other hand, propose that all literature is simply “mimetic

discourse.” A lyric, for example, is said to be an imitation of that form of

ordinary discourse in which we express our feelings about something, and a

novel is an imitation of a particular form of written discourse, such as biogra-

phy (Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, 1749), or autobiography

(Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, 1849–50), or even a scholar’s annotated

edition of a poetic text (Nabokov’s Pale Fire, 1962).

For basic philosophical treatments of speech acts, see J. L. Austin, How to

Do Things with Words (1962); John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the

Philosophy of Language (1970); and H. P. Grice, “Logic and Conversation,” in

Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 3 (1975). On the application of speech-act theory

to metaphor and to literary dialogue, see metaphor, theories of, and discourse anal-

ysis. Among the attempts to model the general theory of literature, or at least

of prose fiction, on the theory of speech acts are John R. Searle, “The Logical

Status of Fictional Discourse,” in his Expression and Meaning (1979), chapter 3;

refer also to the entry fiction and truth. A detailed application to literary theory

is Mary Louise Pratt’s Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (1977).

For views of the limitations of speech-act theory when applied in literary

criticism, see Stanley Fish, “How to Do Things with Austin and Searle:

Speech-Act Theory and Literary Criticism,” in Is There a Text in This Class?

(1980). For Jacques Derrida’

s deconstructive analysis of Austin’s

views and

John Searle’s reply, see under deconstruction. For references to speech-act theory

in other entries, see pages 131, 346.

Spenserian sonnet: 369.

Spenserian stanza: 376.

spiritual autobiography: 30.

spirituals (African-American): 168.

spondaic (sponda



k): 220.

SPONDAIC 373

sprezzatura (sprets

atoo

ra): 338.

sprung rhythm: 223.

stable irony: 187.

stanza: A “stanza” (Italian for “stopping place”) is a grouping of the verse lines

in a poem, often set off by a space in the printed text. Usually the stanzas of a

given poem are marked by a recurrent pattern of rhyme and are also uniform

in the number and lengths of the component lines. Some unrhymed poems,

however, are divided into stanzaic units (for example, William Collins’“Ode

to Evening,” 1747), and some rhymed poems are composed of stanzas that

vary in their component lines (for example, the irregular ode).

Of the great diversity of English stanza forms, many lack specific names and

must be described by specifying the number of lines, the type and number of

metric feet in each line, and the pattern of the rhyme. Certain stanzas, however,

are used so often that they have been given the convenience of a name.

A couplet is a pair of rhymed lines that are equal in length. The

octosyllabic couplet has lines of eight syllables, usually consisting of four

iambic feet, as in Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” (1681):

The grave’s a fine and private place,

But none, I think, do there embrace.

Iambic pentameter lines rhyming in pairs are called decasyllabic ( “ten-syllable”)

couplets or “heroic couplets.” (For examples, see the entry heroic couplet.)

The tercet,ortriplet, is a stanza of three lines, usually with a single

rhyme. The lines may be the same length (as in Robert Herrick’s “Upon

Julia’s Clothes,” 1648, written in tercets of iambic tetrameter), or else of vary-

ing lengths. In Richard Crashaw’s “Wishes to His Supposed Mistress” (1646),

the lines of each tercet are successively in iambic dimeter, trimeter, and tetrameter:

Who e’

er she be

That

not impossible she

That shall command my heart and me.

Terza rima is composed of tercets which are interlinked, in that each is

joined to the one following by a common rhyme: aba, bcb, cdc, and so on. Dante

composed his Divine Comedy (early fourteenth century) in terza rima; but although

Sir Thomas Wyatt introduced the form early in the sixteenth century, it has not

been a common meter in English, in which rhymes are much harder to find than

in Italian. Shelley, however, used it brilliantly in “Ode to the West Wind” (1820),

and it occurs also in the poetry of Milton, Browning, and T. S. Eliot.

The quatrain, or four-line stanza, is the most common in English

versification and is employed with various meters and rhyme schemes. The

ballad stanza (in alternating four- and three-foot lines rhyming abcb, or less

frequently abab) is one common quatrain; when this same stanza occurs in

hymns, it is called common measure. Emily Dickinson is the most subtle,

374 SPREZZATURA

varied, and persistent of all users of this type of quatrain; her frequent resort to

partial rhyme prevents monotony:

Purple—is fashionable twice—

This season of the year,

And when a soul perceives itself

To be an Emperor.

The heroic quatrain, in iambic pentameter rhyming abab, is the stanza of

Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751):

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea,

The plowman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness, and to me.

Rime royal was introduced by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde (the latter

1380s) and other narrative poems; it is believed to take its name, however,

from its later use by “the Scottish Chaucerian,” King James I of Scotland, in

his poem The Kingis Quair (“ The King’s Book”), written about 1424. It is a

seven-line, iambic pentameter stanza rhyming ababbcc. This form was quite

widely used by Elizabethan poets, including Shakespeare in “A Lover’s

Complaint” and The Rape of Lucrece, which begins:

From the besieged Ardea all in post

Borne by the trustless wings of false desire,

Lust-breathèd Tarquin leaves the Roman host

And to Collatium bears the lightless fire

Which, in pale embers hid, lurks to aspire

And girdle with embracing flames the waist

Of Collatine’s fair love, Lucrece the chaste.

Ottava rima, as the Italian name indicates, has eight lines; it rhymes aba-

babcc. Like terza rima and the sonnet, it was brought from Italian into English by

Sir Thomas Wyatt in the first half of the sixteenth century. Although employed

by a number of earlier poets, it is notable especially as the stanza which helped

Byron discover what he was born to write, the satiric poem Don Juan (1819–24).

Note the comic effect of the forced rhyme in the concluding couplet:

Juan was taught from out the best edition,

Expurgated by learned men, who place,

Judiciously, from out the schoolboy ’s vision,

The grosser parts; but, fearful to deface

Too much their modest bard by this omission,

Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from THE POEMS OF EMILY

DICKINSON: VARIORUM EDITION, edited by Ralph W. Franklin, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of

1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

STANZA

375

And pitying sore his mutilated case,

They only add them all in an appendix,

Which saves, in fact, the trouble of an index.

Spenserian stanza is a still longer form devised by Edmund Spenser for

The Faerie Queene (1590–96)—nine lines, in which the first eight lines are

iambic pentameter and the last iambic hexameter (an Alexandrine), rhyming

ababbcbcc. Enchanted by Spenser’s gracious movement and music, many poets

have attempted this stanza in spite of its difficulties. Its greatest successes have

been in poems which, like The Faerie Queene, evolve in a leisurely way, with

ample time for unrolling the richly textured stanzas; for example, James

Thomson’s “The Castle of Indolence” (1748), John Keats’“The Eve of

St. Agnes” (1820), Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Adonais” (1821), and the narrative

section of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters” (1832). The following

is a stanza from Spenser’s Faerie Queene 1.1.41:

And more, to lulle him in his slumber soft,

A trickling streame from high rocke tumbling downe

And ever-drizling raine upon the loft

Mixt with a murmuring winde, much like the sowne

Of swarming Bees, did cast him in a swowne:

No other noyse, nor peoples troublous cryes,

As still are wont t’annoy the wallèd towne,

Might there be heard: but carelesse Quiet lyes,

Wrapt in eternall silence farre from enemyes.

There are also various elaborate stanza forms imported from France, such as the

rondeau, the villanelle, and the triolet, containing intricate repetitions, at set

intervals, both of rhymes and of entire lines; these stanzas have been used mainly,

but not exclusively, for light verse.TheirrevivalbyW.H.Auden,WilliamEmpson,

and other mid-twentieth-century poets was a sign of renewed interest in high

metrical artifice. Dylan Thomas’“Do not go gentle into that good night” is

a villanelle; that is, it consists of five tercets and a quatrain,allontworhymes,

and with systematic later repetitions of lines 1 and 3 of the first tercet.

One of the most intricate of poetic forms is the sestina:apoemofsixsix-

line stanzas in which the end words in the lines of the first stanza are repeated, in

a set order of variation, as the end words of the stanzas that follow. The sestina

concludes with a three-line envoy which incorporates, in the middle and at the

end of the lines, all six of these end words. (An envoy,or“send-off,” is a short

formal stanza which is appended to a poem by way of conclusion.) This form,

introduced in the twelfth century, was cultivated by Italian, Spanish, and French

poets. Despite its extreme difficulty, the sestina has also been managed with suc-

cess by the Elizabethan Sir Philip Sidney, the Victorian Algernon Swinburne,

andthemodernpoetsW.H.AudenandJohnAshbery.

section of a long poem or epic is commonly known as a canto. The

term is applied, for example, to Dante’s Divine Comedy or Lord Byron’s Don

Juan. Ezra Pound signaled his epic aspirations by the title he gave his immensely

long poem: The Cantos.

376 STANZA

See meter. Poetic stanzas and nonstanzaic forms of verse discussed elsewhere in

the Glossary are ballad stanza; blank verse; free verse; heroic couplet; limerick; sonnet.The

pattern and history of the various stanzas are described in Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter

and Poetic Form (rev. 1979). For references to stanza in other entries, see page 350.

stock characters: Stock characters are types of persons that occur repeatedly in a

particular literary genre, and so are recognizable as part of the conventions of the

form. The Old Comedy of the Greeks had three stock characters whose interac-

tions constituted the standard plot: the alazon, or impostor and self-deceiving

braggart; the eiron, or self-derogatory and understating character, whose contest

with the alazon is central to the comic plot; and the bomolochos, or buffoon,

whose antics add an extra comic element. (See Lane Cooper, An Aristotelian

Theory of Comedy, 1922.) In his Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Northrop Frye

revived these old terms, added a fourth, the agroikos—the rustic or easily

deceived character—and identified the persistence of these types (very broadly

defined) in comic plots up to our own time. The Italian commedia dell’arte

revolved around such stock characters as Pulcinella and Pantaloon; see commedia

dell’arte.

The plot of an Elizabethan romantic comedy, such as Shakespeare’ s As You

Like It and Twelfth Night, often turned on a heroine disguised as a handsome

young man; and a stock figure in the Elizabethan comedy of intrigue was the

clever servant who, like Mosca in Ben Jonson’ s Volpone, connives with his

master to fleece another stock character, the stupid gull. Nineteenth-century

comedy, on stage and in fiction, exploited the stock Englishman with a mon-

ocle, an exaggerated Oxford accent, and a defective sense of humor. Western

stories and films generated the tight-lipped sheriff who lets his gun do

the talking; while a familiar figure in more modern fiction was the stoical

Hemingway hero, unillusioned but faithful to his primal code of honor and

loyalty in a civilization grown effete and corrupt. The Beat or hipster or alien-

ated protagonist who, with or without the help of drugs, has opted out of the

establishment, was a stock figure in fiction of the 1950s.

In some literary forms, such as the morality play and Ben Jonson’

s comedy

humours, the artistic aim does not require more than type characters. (See also

flat character, under character and characterization.) But even in realistic literary

forms, the artistic success of a protagonist does not depend on whether or

not an author incorporates an established type but on how well the type is

re-created as a convincing individual who fulfills his or her function in the

overall plot. Two of Shakespeare’s greatest characters are patently conven-

tional. Falstaff is in part a re-rendering of the Vice, the comic tempter of the

medieval morality play, and in part of the familiar braggart soldier, or miles

gloriosus, of Roman and Renaissance comedy, whose ancestry goes back to

the Greek alazon; and Hamlet combines some stock attributes of the hero of

Elizabethan revenge tragedies with those of the Elizabethan melancholic man.

Jane Austen’s delightful Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (1813) can be

traced back through Restoration comedy to the type of intelligent, witty, and

dauntless heroines that enliven Shakespeare’s romantic comedies.

For references to stock character in other entries, see pages 57, 59.

STOCK CHARACTERS 377

stock response: A derogatory term for a reader’s reaction that is considered to

be habitual and stereotyped, in place of one which is genuinely and aptly

responsive to a given literary passage or text. The term is sometimes applied

to the response of authors themselves to characters, situations, or topics that

they set forth in a work; usually, however, it is used to describe standard and

inadequate responses of the readers of the work. I. A. Richards, in his Practical

Criticism (1929), chapter 5, gave currency to this term by citing and analyzing

stock responses by students and other respondents who wrote critiques of

unidentified poems presented for their interpretation and evaluation.

stock situations: “Stock situations” are the counterparts to stock characters; that

is, they are recurrent types of incidents or of sequences of actions in a drama

or narrative. Instances range from single situations or events—the eavesdrop-

per who is hidden behind a bush or in a closet, or the suddenly discovered

will or birthmark—to the overall pattern of a plot. The Horatio Alger books

for boys, in mid-nineteenth-century America, were all variations on the stock

plot of rags-to-riches-by-pluck-and-luck, and we recognize the standard boy-

meets-girl incident in the opening episode of much popular fiction and in

many motion pictures.

It has been argued that certain recurrent character types and elements of

plot, such as the sexually irresistible but fatal enchantress, the sacrificial scape-

goat, and the underground journey constitute “archetypal” components that

recur not simply because they are functional literary conventions but because,

like some dreams and myths, they express and appeal to universal human

impulses, anxieties, and needs. See archetype, and for structuralist analyses of

recurrent plot types, narrative and narratology.

story: 234.

stream of consciousness: A phrase used by William James in his Principles of

Psychology (1890) to describe the unbroken flow of perceptions, memories,

thoughts, and feelings in the waking mind; it has since been adopted to describe

a narrative method in modern fiction. Long passages of introspection,in

which the narrator records in detail what passes through a character’s awareness,

are found in novelists from Samuel Richardson, through William James’

brother Henry James, to many novelists of the present era. The long chapter 42

of James’ Portrait of a Lady, for example , is enti rely given over to the narrator’s

descri ption of the sustained process of Isabel’s memories, thoughts, and varying

feelings. As early as 1888, a minor French writer, Edouard Dujardin, wrote a

short novel Les Lauriers sont coupés (“The Laurels Have Been Cut”)which

undertakes to represent the scenes and events of the s tory solely as they

imp inge upon the consciousness of the central character. As it has been re fined

since the 1920s, “stream of consciousness” is the name appl ied specifically to a

mode of narration that undertakes to reproduce the full spectrum and contin-

uous flow of a character’s mental process, in which sense perceptions mingle

378 STOCK RESPONSE

with conscious and half-conscious thoughts, memories, expectations, feelings,

and random associations.

Some critics use “stream of consciousness” interchangeably with the term

interior monologue. It is useful, however, to follow the usage of critics who

use the former as the inclusive term, denoting all the diverse means employed

by authors to communicate the total state and process of consciousness in a

character. “Interior monologue” is then reserved for that species of stream of

consciousness which undertakes to present to the reader the course and

rhythm of consciousness precisely as it occurs in a character’s mind. In interior

monologue the author does not intervene, or at any rate intervenes mini-

mally, as describer, guide, or commentator, and does not tidy the vagaries of

the mental process into grammatical sentences or into a logical or coherent

order. The interior monologue, in its radical form, is sometimes described as

the exact presentation of the process of consciousness; but because sense per-

ceptions, mental images, feelings, and some aspects of thought itself are non-

verbal, it is clear that the author can present these elements only by

converting them into some sort of verbal equivalent. Much of this conversion

is a matter of narrative conventions rather than of unedited, point-for-point

reproduction, and each author puts his or her own imprint on the interior

monologues that are attributed to characters in the narrative. For the linguistic

techniques that have been used to render the states and flow of consciousness,

see Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness

in Fiction (1978).

James Joyce developed a variety of devices for stream-of-consciousness

narrative in Ulysses (1922). Here is a passage of interior monologue from the

“Lestrygonians” episode, in which Leopold Bloom saunters through Dublin,

observing and musing:

Pineapple rock, lemon platt, butter scotch. A sugar-sticky girl shov-

eling scoopfuls of creams for a christian brother. Some school treat.

Bad for their tummies. Lozenge and comfit manufacturer to His

Majesty the King. God. Save. Our. Sitting on his throne, sucking red

jujubes white.

Dorothy Richardson sustains a stream-of-consciousness mode of narrative,

focused exclusively on the mind and perceptions of her heroine, throughout

the twelve volumes of her novel Pilgrimage (1915–38); Virginia Woolf employs

the procedure as a prominent, although not exclusive, narrative mode in several

novels, including Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927); and

William Faulkner exploits it in the first three of the four parts of The Sound

and the Fury (1929).

Refer to narratology and point of view, and see Leon Edel, The Modern

Psychological Novel (1955, rev. 1964); Melvin Friedman, Stream of Consciousness:

A Study in Literary Method (1955). For a review of early and more recent

scientific writings on the stream of consciousness, see Oliver Sacks, “In the

River of Consciousness,” New York Review of Books, January 15, 2004.

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 379

stress (in linguistics): 198.

stress (in meter): 218.

strong-stress meter: 222.

strophe (stro

fe): 262.

structural irony: 186.

structuralism: 380; 165, 207, 234, 310.

structuralist criticism: Almost all literary theorists beginning with Aristotle

have emphasized the importance of structure, conceived in diverse ways, in

analyzing a work of literature. (See form and structure.) “Structuralist criticism,”

however, now designates the practice of critics who analyze literature on the

explicit model of structuralist linguistics. The class includes a number of

Russian formalists, especially Roman Jakobson, but consists most prominently

of a group of writers, with their headquarters in Paris, who applied to literature

the concepts and analytic distinctions developed by Ferdinand de Saussure in his

Course in General Linguistics (1915). This mode of criticism is part of a larger

movement, French structuralism, inaugurated in the 1950s by the cultural

anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who analyzed, on the model of Saussure’s

linguistics, such cultural phenomena as mythology, kinship relations, and modes

of preparing food. See linguistics in literary criticism.

In its early form, as employed by Lévi-Strauss and other writers in the

1950s and 1960s, structuralism cuts across the traditional disciplinary areas

within and between the humanities and social sciences by undertaking to pro-

vide an objective account of all social and cultural practices, in a range that

includes mythical narratives, literary texts, advertisements, fashions in clothes,

and patterns of social decorum. It views these practices as combinations of

signs that have a set significance for the members of a particular culture, and

undertakes to make explicit the rules and procedures by which the practices

have achieved their cultural significance, and to specify what that significance

is, by reference to an underlying system (analogous to Saussure’s langue, the

implicit system of a particular language) of the relationships among signifying

elements and their rules of combination. The elementary cultural phenomena,

like the elements of language in Saussure’s exposition, are not objective facts

identifiable by their inherent properties, but purely “relational” entities; that

is, their identity as signs is given to them by their relationships of differences

from, and binary oppositions to, other elements within the cultural system.

This system of internal relationships and of “codes” that determine significant

combinations has been mastered by each person competent within a given

culture, although he or she remains largely unaware of its nature and opera-

tions. The primary interest of the structuralist, like that of Saussure, is not

in the cultural parole but in the langue; that is, not in any particular cultural

380 STRESS

phenomenon or event except as it provides access to the structure, features,

and rules of the general system that engenders its significance.

As applied in literary studies, structuralist criticism conceives literature

to be a second-order signifying system that uses the first-order structural sys-

tem of language as its medium, and is itself to be analyzed primarily on the

model of linguistic theory. Structuralist critics often apply a variety of linguis-

tic concepts to the analysis of a literary text, such as the distinction between

phonemic and morphemic levels of organization, or between paradigmatic and

syntagmatic relationships; and some critics analyze the structure of a literary

text on the model of the syntax in a well-formed sentence. The undertaking

of a thoroughgoing literary structuralism, however, is to explain how it is that

a competent reader is able to make sense of a particular literary text by speci-

fying the underlying system of literary conventions and rules of combination

that has been unconsciously mastered by such a reader. The aim of classic lit-

erary structuralism, accordingly, is not (as in New Criticism) to provide the

interpretation of single texts, but to make explicit, in a quasi-scientific way,

the tacit grammar (the system of rules and codes) that governs the forms and

meanings of all literary productions. As Jonathan Culler put it in his lucid

exposition, the aim of structuralist criticism is “to construct a poetics which

stands to literature as linguistics stands to language” (Structuralist Poetics, 1975,

p. 257). Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, Julia Kristeva, and Tzvetan

Todorov were, at least in some part of their careers, prominent structuralist

critics of literature.

Structuralism is in explicit opposition to mimetic criticism (the view that

literature is primarily an imitation of reality), to expressive criticism (the view

that literature primarily expresses the feelings or temperament or creative

imagination of its author), and to any form of the view that literature is a

mode of communication between author and readers. More generally, in its

attempt to develop a science of literature and in many of its salient concepts,

the radical forms of structuralism depart from the assumptions and ruling ideas

of traditional humanistic criticism. (See humanism.) For example:

1. In the structuralist view, what had been called a literary “work” becomes

a text; that is, a mode of writing constituted by a play of internal elements

according to specifically literary conventions and codes. These factors may

generate an illusion of reality but have no truth-value, nor even any ref-

erence to a reality existing outside the literary system itself.

2. The individual author, or subject, is not assigned any initiative, expressive

intentions, or design as the “origin” or producer of a work. Instead the

conscious “self” is declared to be a construct that is itself the product of

the workings of the linguistic system, and the mind of an author is

described as an imputed “space” within which the impersonal, “always-

already” existing system of literary language, conventions, codes, and rules

of combination gets precipitated into a particular text. Roland Barthes

expressed, dramatically, this subversion of the traditional humanistic

view, “as institution, the author is dead” (“The Death of the Author,” in

STRUCTURALIST CRITICISM 381

Image-Music-Text, trans. 1977). See author and authorship and the subject,

under poststructuralism.

3. Structuralism replaces the author with the reader as the central agency in

criticism; but the traditional reader, as a conscious, purposeful, and feeling

individual, is replaced by the impersonal activity of “reading,” and what is

read is not a work imbued with meanings, but écriture, writing. The focus

of structuralist criticism, accordingly, is not on the sensibility of the reader

but on the impersonal process of reading which, by bringing into play the

requisite conventions, codes, and expectations makes literary sense of the

sequence of words, phrases, and sentences that constitute a text. See text

and writing (écriture).

In the late 1960s, the structuralist enterprise, in its rigorous form and

inclusive pretensions, ceded its central position to deconstruction and other

modes of poststructural theories, which subverted the scientific claims of

structuralism and its view that literary meanings are made determinate by a

system of invariant conventions and codes. (See poststructuralism.) This shift in

the prevailing point of view is exemplified by the changing emphases in the

lively and influential writings of the French critic and man of letters Roland

Barthes (1915–80). His early work developed the structuralist theory that was

based on the linguistics of Saussure—a theory that Barthes applied not only to

literature but also to decoding, by reference to an underlying signifying sys-

tem, many aspects of popular culture. (See Barthes’ Mythologies, 1957, trans.

1972, and refer to cultural studies.) In his later writings, Barthes abandoned

the scientific aspiration of structuralism and distinguished between the “read-

erly” text such as the realistic novel that tries to “close” interpretation by

insisting on specific meanings, and the “writerly” text that aims at the ideal

of “a galaxy of signifiers,” and so encourages the reader to be a producer of

his or her own meanings according not to one code but to a multiplicity of

codes. And in The Pleasure of the Text (1973) Barthes lauds, in contrast to the

comfortable pleasure offered by a traditional text that accords with cultural

codes and conventions, the “jouissance” (or orgasmic bliss) evoked by a text

that incites a hedonistic abandon to the uncontrolled play of its signifiers. See

Roland Barthes, in the entry text and writing (écriture).

Structuralist premises and procedures, however, continue to be deployed

in a number of current enterprises, and especially in the semiotic analysis of

cultural phenomena, in stylistics, and in the investigation of the formal struc-

tures that, in their combinations and variations, constitute the plots in novels.

See semiotics; cultural studies; stylistics; narrative and narratology.

A clear and comprehensive survey of the program and accomplishments of

structuralist literary criticism, in poetry as well as narrative prose, is Jonathan

Culler, Structuralist Poetics (1975); also Robert Scholes, Structuralism in Literature:

An Introduction (1974). For an introduction to the general movement of struc-

turalism see Peter Caws, Structuralism: The Art of the Intelligible (1960); Philip

Pettit, T

he Concept of Structuralism: A Critical Analysis (1975); and Terence

Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (1977). For critical views of structuralism

382 STRUCTURALIST CRITICISM

see Gerald Graff, Literature against Itself (1979); Frank Lentricchia, After the New

Criticism (1980), chapters 4–5; J. G. Merquior, From Prague to Paris: A Critique of

Structuralist and Post-Structuralist Thought (1986). Some collections of structuralist

writings: David Robey, ed., Structuralism: An Introduction (1973); see also

Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, eds., The Structuralist Controversy: The

Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (1970). Among the books of struc-

turalist literary criticism available in English translations are Roland Barthes,

Critical Essays (1964); Stephen Heath, The Nouveau Roman: A Study in the Prac-

tice of Writing (1972); Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose (trans. 1977) and

Introduction to Poetics (trans. 1981); Gérard Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse

(trans. 1984). Structuralist treatments of cinema are Peter Wollen, Signs and

Meaning in the Cinema (1969), and Christian Metz, Language of Film (1973).

For references to structuralist criticism in other entries, see pages 72, 150,

331, 397.

structure: 141. See also structuralism .

style: “Style” has traditionally been defined as the manner of linguistic expression

in prose or verse—as how speakers or writers say whatever it is that they say.

The style specific to a particular work or writer, or else distinctive of a type of

writings, has been analyzed in such diverse terms as the rhetorical situation and

aim (see rhetoric); the characteristic diction, or choice of words; the type of sen-

tence structure and syntax; and the density and kinds of figurative language.

In standard theories based on Cicero and other classical rhetoricians, styles

were usually classified into three main levels: the high (or “grand”), the middle

(or “mean”), and the low (or “plain”) style. The doctrine of decorum,which

was influential through the eighteenth century, required that the level of style

in a work be appropriate to the social class of the speaker, to the occasion on

which it is spoken, and to the dignity of its literary genre (see poetic diction). The

critic Northrop Frye introduced a variant of this long-persisting analysis of sty-

listic levels in literature. He made a primary differentiation between the

demotic style (which is modeled on the language, rhythms, and associations

of ordinary speech) and the hieratic style (which employs a variety of formal

elaborations that separate the literary language from ordinary speech). Frye then

proceeded to distinguish a high, middle, and low level in each of these classes.

e The Well-Tempered Critic (1963), chapter 2.

In analyzing style, two types of sentence structure are often distinguished:

The periodic sentence is one in which the component parts, or “mem-

bers,” are so composed that the close of its syntactic structure remains sus-

pended until the end of the sentence; the effect tends to be formal or

oratorical. An example is the eloquent opening sentence of James Boswell’s

Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), in which the structure of the syntax is not con-

cluded until we reach the final noun, “task”:

To write the life of him who excelled all mankind in writing the

lives of others, and who, whether we consider his extraordinary

STYLE 383

endowments, or his various works, has been equaled by few in any

age, is an arduous, and may be reckoned in me a presumptuous task.

In the nonperiodic (or loose) sentence—more relaxed and conversa-

tional in its effect—the component members are continuous, but so loosely

joined that the sentence would have been syntactically complete if a period

had been inserted at one or more places before the actual close. So the two

sentences in Joseph Addison’s Spectator 105, describing the limited topics in

the conversation of a “man-about-town,” or dilettante, could each have

closed at several points in the sequence of their component clauses:

He will tell you the names of the principal favourites, repeat the

shrewd sayings of a man of quality, whisper an intrigue that is not yet

blown upon by common fame; or, if the sphere of his observations is

a little larger than ordinary, will perhaps enter into all the incidents,

turns, and revolutions in a game of ombre. When he has gone thus

far he has shown you the whole circle of his accomplishments, his

parts are drained, and he is disabled from any farther conversation.

Another distinction often made in discussing prose style is that between

parataxis and hypotaxis:

A paratactic style is one in which the members within a sentence, or

else a sequence of complete sentences, are put one after the other without

any expression of their connection or relations except (at most) the noncom-

mittal connective “and.” An example is the passage just quoted from

Addison’s Spectator. Ernest Hemingway’s style is characteristically paratactic.

The members in this sentence from his novel The Sun Also Rises (1926) are

joined merely by “ands”: “It was dim and dark and the pillars went high up,

and there were people praying, and it smelt of incense, and there were some

wonderful big buildings.” The curt paratactic sentences in his short story

“Indian Camp” omit all connectives: “The sun was coming over the hills.

A bass jumped, making a circle in the water. Nick trailed his hand in the

water. It felt warm in the sharp chill of the morning.”

A hypotactic style is one in which the temporal, causal, logical, and

syntactic relations between members and sentences are specified by words

(such as “when,”“then,”“because,”“therefore”) or by phrases (such as “in

order to,”“as a result”) or by the use of subordinate phrases and clauses. The

style in this Glossary is mainly hypotactic.

A very large number of loosely descriptive terms have been used to charac-

terize kinds of style, such as “pure,

”“ornate,”“flor

id,”“gay,”“sober,”“simple,”

“elabor ate,” and so on. Styles are also classified according to a literary period or

tradition (“the metaphysical style,”“Restoration prose style”); according to an

influential text (“biblical style,” euphuism); according to an institutional use

(“ascientificstyle,”“journalese”); or according to the distinctive practice of an

individual author (the “Shakespearean” or “Miltonic style”; “Johnsonese”).

Historians of English prose style, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries, have distinguished between the vogue of the “Ciceronian style”

384 STYLE

(named after the characteristic practiceoftheRomanwriterCicero),whichis

elaborately constructed, highly periodic, and typically builds to a climax, and

the opposing vogue of the clipped, concise, pointed, and uniformly stressed sen-

tences in the “Attic” or “Senecan” styles (named after the practice of the Roman

Seneca). See George Williamson, The Senecan Amble: A Study in Prose Form from

Bacon to Collier (1951), and J. M. Patrick and others, eds., Style, Rhetoric, and

Rhythm:EssaysbyMorrisW.Croll(1966).

Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner, in Clear and Simple as the Truth

(1994), claim that standard treatments of style such as those described above

deal only with the surface features of writing. They propose instead a basic anal-

ysis of style in terms of a set of fundamental decisions or assumptions by an

author concerning “a series of relatio nships: What can be known? What can

be put into words? What is the relationship between thought and language?

Who is the writer addressing and why? What is the implied relationship between

writer and reader? What are the implied conditions of discourse?” An analysis

basedonalltheseelementsyieldsanindefinitenumberoftypes,or“famil ies,”

of styles, each with its own criteria of excellence. The authors focus on what

they call “the classic style” exemplified in writings like René Descartes’ Discourse

on Method (1637) or Thomas Jefferson’s “Declaration of Independence” (1776),

but identify and discuss briefly a number of other styles such as “plain style,”

“practical style,”“contemplative style,” and “prophetic style.”

For developments in the analysis of style based on modern linguistic theory

and philosophy of language, see stylist ics and discourse analysis. Among the more

traditional theorists and analysts of style are Herbert Read, English Prose Style

(1928); Bonamy Dobree, Modern Prose Style (1934); W. K. Wimsatt, The Prose

Style of Samuel Johnson (1941); P. F. Baum, The Other Harmony of Prose (1952);

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (trans.

1953, reissued 2003); Josephine Miles, Eras and Modes in English Poetry (1957);

Louis T. Milic, ed., Stylists on Style: A Handbook with Selections for Analysis (1969).

For references to style in other entries, see page 342. See also connotation

and denotation

; decorum; stream

of consciousness. For features of style, see ambigu-

ity; antithesis; archaism; bathos and anticlimax; bombast; cliché; conceit; concrete and

abstract; epithet; euphemism; euphony and cacophony; euphuism; figurative language;

grand style; imagery; purple patch.

stylistics: Since the 1950s the term “stylistics” has been applied to critical proce-

dures which undertake to replace what is claimed to be the subjectivity and

impressionism of standard analyses with an “objective” or “scientific” analysis of

the style of literary texts. Much of the impetus toward these analytic methods, as

well as models for their practical application, was provided by the writings of

Roman Jakobson and other Russian formalists,aswellasbyEuropeanstructuralists.

We can distinguish two main modes of stylistics, which differ both in

conception and in the scope of their application:

1. In the narrower mode of formal stylistics, style is identified, in the tradi-

tional way, by the distinction between what is said and how it is said, or

STYLISTICS 385

between the content and the form of a text. (See style.) The content is

now often denoted, however, by terms such as “information,”“message,”

or “propositional meaning,” while the style is defined as variations in the

presentation of this information that serve to alter its “aesthetic quality”

or the reader’s emotional response. The concepts of modern linguistics are

used to identify the stylistic features, or “formal properties,” which are

held to be distinctive of a particular work, or else of an author, a literary

tradition, or an era. These stylistic features may be phonological (patterns

of speech sounds, meter, or rhyme), or syntactic (types of sentence struc-

ture), or lexical (abstract vs. concrete words, the relative frequency of nouns,

verbs, adjectives), or rhetorical (the characteristic use of figurative language,

imagery, and so on). A basic problem, acknowledged by a number of stylis-

ticians, is to distinguish between the innumerable features and patterns of a

text which can be isolated by linguistic analysis, and those features which

are functionally stylistic—that is, features which make an actual difference

in the aesthetic and other effects on a competent reader. See, for example,

Michael Riffaterre’s objection to the elaborate stylistic analysis of Charles

Baudelaire’s sonnet “Les Chats” (The Cats) by Roman Jakobson and

Claude Lévi-Strauss, in Structuralism, ed. Jacques Ehrmann (1966).

Stylisticians who aim to either replace or supplement the qualitative

judgments of literary scholars by objectively determinable methods of

research exploit the ever-increasing technological resources of computers

in the service of what has come to be called stylometry: the quantitative

measurement of the features of an individual writer’s style. Literary

and Linguistic Computing is a journal devoted to the use of computers in

literary studies. See also B. H. Rudall and T. N. Corns, Computers and

Literature: A Practical Guide (1987). Other analysts of style who use non-

quantitative methods adopt concepts derived from language theory, such

as the distinction between paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations, or the dis-

tinction between surface structure and deep structure in transformational

linguistics, or the distinction between the propositional content and the

illocutionary force of an utterance in speech-act theory. For a stylistic analysis

of the ways a character’s speech and thought are represented in narratives,

refer to free indirect discourse, under point of view.

Sometimes the stylistic enterprise stops with the qualitative or quan-

titative determination, or “fingerprinting,” of the style of a single text or

class of texts. Often, however, the analyst tries also to relate distinctive

stylistic features to traits in an author’

s psyche; or to an author’s

character-

istic ways of perceiving the world and organizing experience (see Leo

Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History, 1948); or to the typical conceptual

frame and the attitude toward reality in an historical era (Erich Auerbach,

Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, reissued 2003);

or else to semantic, aesthetic, and emotional functions and effects in a

particular literary text (Michael Riffaterre and others).

Stanley Fish wrote a sharp critique of the scientific pretensions of for-

mal stylistics; he proposed that since, in his view, the meaning of a text

386 STYLISTICS

consists of a reader ’s total response to it, there is no valid way to make a

distinction in this spectrum of response between style and content (“What

Is Stylistics and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things about It?” in

Is There a Text in This Class? 1980; see also reader-response criticism). In Clear

and Simple as the Truth (1994), Francis-Nöel Thomas and Mark Turner

claim that standard stylistic analyses concern merely the surface features

of writing, and propose a set of more basic features by which to define

styles of writing; see under style. On the other side, the validity of

distinguishing between style and propositional meaning—not absolutely,

but on an appropriate level of analysis—is defended by E. D. Hirsch,

“Stylistics and Synonymity,” in The Aims of Interpretation (1976).

2. In the second mode of stylistics, which became prominent in the mid-

1960s, proponents greatly expanded the conception and scope of their

inquiry by defining stylistics as, in the words of one theorist, “the study

of the use of language in literature,” involving the entire range of the

“general characteristics of language … as a medium of literary

expression.” (Geoffrey N. Leech, A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry,

1969.) By this definition, stylistics is expanded so as to incorporate most

of the concerns of both traditional literary criticism and traditional rhetoric;

its distinction from these earlier pursuits is that it insists on the need to be

objective by focusing sharply on the text itself and by setting out to dis-

cover the “rules” governing the process by which linguistic elements and

patterns in a text accomplish their meanings and literary effects. The his-

torian of criticism René Wellek has described this tendency of stylistic

analysis to enlarge its territorial domain as “the imperialism of modern

stylistics.”

A comprehensive anthology is The Stylistics Reader from Roman Jakobson to

the Present, ed. Jean Jacques Weber (1996). On formal stylistics see Thomas A.

Sebeok, ed., Style in Language (1960); Seymour Chatman, ed., Literary Style:

A Symposium (1971).

In the practice of some critics, stylistics includes the area of study known

as discourse analysis, which is treated in a separate entry in this Glossary. For

inclusive views of the realm of stylistics, see M. A. K. Halliday, Explorations

in the Functions of Language (1973); G. N. Leech and M. H. Short, Style in

Fiction (1981); Roger Fowler, Linguistic Criticism (1986); Ronald Carter and

Paul Simpson, eds., Language, Discourse and Literature: An Introductory Reader

in Discourse Stylistics (1989).

stylometry (stilo

metre): 386.

subaltern: 306.

subject, the (in poststructural criticism): 309; 20.

subjective: 261.

SUBJECTIVE 387

sublimate: 321.

sublime: The concept was introduced into the criticism of literature and art by a

Greek treatise Peri hupsous (“On the sublime”), attributed in the manuscript to

Longinus and probably written in the first century AD. As defined by Longinus,

the sublime is a quality that can occur in any type of discourse, whether poetry

or prose. Whereas the effect of rhetoric on the hearer or reader of a discourse is

persuasion, the effect of the sublime is “transport” (ekstasis)—it is that quality of

a passage which “shatters the hearer’s composure,” exercises irresistible “domi-

nation” over him, and “scatters the subjects like a bolt of lightning.” The source

of the sublime, according to Longinus, lies in the capabilities of the speaker or

writer. Three of these—the use of figurative language, nobility of expression,

and elevated composition—are matters of art that can be acquired by practice;

but two other, and more important, capabilities, are largely innate: “loftiness of

thought” and “strong and inspired passion.” The ability to achieve sublimity is

in itself enough to prove the transcendent genius of a writer, and expresses the

nobility of the writer’scharacter:“sublimity is the ring of greatness in the soul.”

Longinus’ examples of sublime passages in poems range from the epics of

Homer through the tragedies of Aeschylus to a love lyric by Sappho; his exam-

ples in prose are taken from the writings of the philosopher Plato, the orator

Demosthenes, and the historian Herodotus. Especially notable is his quotation,

as a prime instance of sublimity, of the passage in the Book of Genesis written,

he says, by “the lawgiver of the Jews”: “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and

there was light, ‘Let there be land,’ and there was land.”

Longinus’ innovative treatise exerted a strong and persistent effect on liter-

ary criticism after it became widely known by way of a French translation by

Boileau in 1674; eventually, it helped establish the expressive theory of poetry

and also impressionistic criticism (see under criticism). In the eighteenth century,

an important tendency in critical theory was to shift the application of the

term “

the sublime” f

rom a quality of linguistic discourse that originates in the

powers of a writer’s mind, to a quality inherent in external objects and above all

in the scenes and occurrences of the natural world. Thus Edmund Burke’s

highly influential Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime

and Beautiful, published in 1757, attributes the source of the sublime to those

things which are “in any sort terrible”—thatis,towhateveris“fitted in any

sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger”—provided that the observer is in

a situation of safety from danger, and so is able to experience what would oth-

erwise be a painful terror as a “delightful horror.” (Compare distance and involve-

ment.) The features of objects which evoke sublime horror are obscurity,

immense power, and vastness in dimension or quantity. Burke’sexamplesof

the sublime include vast architectural structures, Milton’s description of Satan

in Paradise Lost, the description of the king’s army in Shakespeare’s 1Henry

IV, and natural phenomena; a sublime passion, he says, may be produced by

“the noise of vast cataracts, raging storms, thunder or artillery,” all of which

evoke “a great and awful sensation in the mind.”

388 SUBLIMATE

During the eighteenth century, tourists and landscape painters traveled to

the English Lake Country and to the Alps in search of sublime scenery that

was thrillingly vast, dark, wild, stormy, and ominous. Writers of what was

called “the sublime ode,” such as Thomas Gray and William Collins, sought

to achieve effects of wildness and obscurity in their descriptive style and

abrupt transitions, as well as to render the wildness, vastness, and obscurity

of the sublime objects they described. (See ode.) Authors of Gothic novels

exploited the sublimity of delightful horror in both the natural and architec-

tural settings of their narratives and in the actions and events that they nar-

rated. Samuel H. Monk, a pioneer historian of the concept of the sublime in

the eighteenth century, cites as the “apotheosis” of the natural sublime the

description of Simplon Pass in Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1805), 4.554ff.:

The immeasurable height

Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,

The stationary blasts of waterfalls,

And everywhere along the hollow rent

Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,

The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,

The rocks that muttered close upon our ears—

Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside

As if a voice were in them—the sick sight

And giddy prospect of the raving stream,

Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light….

(Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in Eighteenth-

Century England, 1935)

In an extended analysis of the sublime in his Critique of Judgment (1790),

the German philosopher Immanuel Kant divided the sublime objects specified

by Burke and other earlier theorists into two kinds: (1) the “mathematical

sublime” encompasses the sublime of magnitude—of vastness in size or seem-

ing limitlessness or infinitude in number. (2) The “dynamic sublime” encom-

passes the objects conducive to terror at our seeming helplessness before the

overwhelming power of nature, provided that the terror is rendered pleasur-

able by the safe situation of the observer. All of Kant’s examples of sublimity

are scenes and events in the natural world: “the immeasurable host” of starry

systems such as the Milky Way, “shapeless mountain masses towering one

above the other in wild disorder,”“volcanoes in all their violence of destruc-

tion, hurricanes leaving desolation in their track, the boundless ocean rising

with rebellious force, the high waterfall of some mighty river.” Kant main-

tains, however, that the sublimity resides “not in the Object of nature” itself,

but “ only in the mind of the judging Subject” who contemplates the object.

In a noted passage, he describes the experience of sublimity as a rapid

sequence of painful blockage and pleasurable release—“the feeling of a

momentary check to the vital forces followed at once by a discharge all the

more powerful.” In the mathematical sublime, the mind is checked by its

inadequacy to comprehend as a totality the boundlessness or seeming infinity

SUBLIME 389

of natural magnitudes, and in the dynamic sublime, it is checked by its help-

lessness before the seeming irresistibility of natural powers. But the mind then

goes on to feel exultation at the recognition of its inherent capacity to think a

totality in a way that transcends “every standard of sense,” or else at its discov-

ery within itself of a capacity for resistance which “gives us courage to be able

to measure ourselves against the seeming omnipotence of nature.” In Kant’s

view, the experience of the sublime manifests on the one hand the limitations

and weakness of finite humanity, but on the other hand its “pre-eminence

over nature,” even when confronted by the “immeasurability” of nature’s

magnitude and the “irresistibility” of its might.

In The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence

(1976), Thomas Weiskel undertook to translate Kant’s theory of the sublime,

and especially his analysis of blockage and release, into terms both of semiotic the-

ory and of psychoanalytic theory. See also the development of Kant’sviewsby

Neil Hertz, The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (1985).

Slavoj Žižek applied the concept of the sublime to a Lacanian interpretation of

ideology (see under Marxist criticism)inThe Sublime Object of Ideology (1989). For

the argument that eighteenth-century debates about the sublime illuminate

debates in modern literary theory, see Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime:

Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (1992).

Refer to Elder Olson, “The Argument of Longinus’ On the Sublime,” in

Critics and Criticism, Ancient and Modern, ed. R. S. Crane (1952); Marjorie

Nicholson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (1959); Steven Knapp, Personifi-

cation and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge (1985); Philip Shaw, The Sublime (2005).

subplot: 295.

subtext: 312; 248.

subversion-containment dialectic: 249.

superego: 321.

suprasegmental (in linguistics): 198.

surface structure (in linguistics): 199.

surfiction: 258.

surprise (in

a plot): 294.

surrealism (“superrealism”): Surrealism was launched as a concerted artistic

movement in France by André Breton’s Manifesto on Surrealism (1924). It was

a successor to the brief movement known as Dadaism, which emerged in

1916 out of disgust with the brutality and destructiveness of the First World

War, and set out, according to its manifestos, to engender a negative art and

390 SUBPLOT

literature that would shock and bewilder observers and serve to destroy the

false values of modern bourgeois society, including its rationality and the

kind of art and literature that rationality had fostered. Among the exponents

of Dadaism were, for a time, artists and writers such as Tristan Tzara, Marcel

Duchamp, Man Ray, and Max Ernst.

The expressed aim of surrealism was a revolt against all restraints on free

creativity, including logical reason, standard morality, social and artistic conven-

tions and norms, and all control over the artistic process by forethought and

intention. To ensure the unhampered operation of the “deep mind,” which

they regarded as the only source of valid knowledge as well as art, surrealists

turned to automatic writing (writing delivered over to the promptings of the

unconscious mind), and to exploiting the material of dreams, of states of mind

between sleep and waking, and of natural or drug-induced hallucinations.

Surrealism was a revolutionary movement in painting, sculpture, and the

other arts, as well as literature; and it often joined forces, although briefly,

with one or another revolutionary movement in the political and social

realm. The effects of surrealism extended far beyond the small group of its

professed adherents such as André Breton, Louis Aragon, and the painter

Salvador Dali. The influence, direct or indirect, of surrealist innovations can

be found in many modern writers of prose and verse who have broken with

conventional modes of artistic organization to experiment with free associa-

tion, a broken syntax, nonlogical and nonchronological order, dreamlike and

nightmarish sequences, and the juxtaposition of bizarre, shocking, or seem-

ingly unrelated images. In England and America, such effects can be found

in a wide range of writings, from the poetry of Dylan Thomas to the flights

of fantasy, hallucinative writing, startling inconsequences, and black humor in

the novels of Henry Miller, William Burroughs, and Thomas Pynchon.

For a precursor of some aspects of surrealism, see decadence; for later develop-

ments that continued some of the surrealist innovations, see literature of the

absurd; antinovel; magic realism;andpostmodernism. Refer to David Gascoyne,

A Short Survey of Surrealism (1935); A. E. Balakian, Literary Origins of Surrealism

(1947); Mary Ann Caws, The Poetry of Dada and Surrealism (1970);PaulC.Ray,

The Surrealist Movement in England (1971); Maurice Nadeau, History of Surrealism

(trans.1989);MaryAnnCaws,ed.,Surrealist Painters and Poets: An Anthology

(2001). In Dada Turns Red (1990), Helena Lewis explores the relations between

surrealists and communists from the 1920s to the 1950s. In Automatic Woman:

The Representation of Women in Surrealism (1996), Katharine Conley writes a femi-

nist analysis of the obsessive and complex concern of male surrealists with the

female body, which they often represented in a distorted or dissected form; she

also discusses the work of two female surrealists, Unica Zürn and Leonora

Carrington.

suspense (in a plot): 294.

syllabic meter: 218.

SYLLABIC METER 391

symbol: In the broadest sense a symbol is anything which signifies something else;

in this sense all words are symbols. In discussing literature, however, the term

“symbol” is applied only to a word or phrase that signifies an object or event

which in its turn signifies something, or suggests a range of reference, beyond

itself. Some symbols are “conventional” or “public”: thus “the Cross,”“the

Red, White, and Blue,” and “the Good Shepherd” are terms that refer to sym-

bolic objects of which the further significance is determinate within a particular

culture. Poets, like all of us, use such conventional symbols; many poets, how-

ever, also use “private” or “personal symbols.” Often they do so by exploiting

widely shared associations between an object or event or action and a particular

concept; for example, the general association of a peacock with pride and of an

eagle with heroic endeavor, or the rising sun with birth and the setting sun with

death, or climbing with effort or progress and descent with surrender or failure.

Some poets, however, repeatedly use symbols whose significance they largely

generate themselves, and these pose a more difficult problem in interpretation.

Take as an example the word “rose,” which in its literal use signifies a

species of flower. In Robert Burns’ line “O my love’s like a red, red rose,”

the word “rose” is used as a simile; and in the lines by Winthrop Mackworth

Praed (1802–39),

She was our queen, our rose, our star;

And then she danced—O Heaven, her dancing!

the word “rose” is used as a metaphor.InThe Romance of the Rose, a long medi-

eval dream vision , we read about a half-opened rose to which the dreamer’s

access is aided by a character called “Fair Welcome,” but impeded or for-

bidden by other characters called “Reason,”“Shame,” and “ Jealousy.” We

readily recognize that the whole narrative is a sustained allegory about an elab-

orate courtship, in which most of the agents are personified abstractions and

the

rose itself functions as an allegorical emblem (that is, an object whose

significance is made determinate by its qualities and by the role it plays in

the narrative) which represents both the lady’s love and her lovely body.

Then we read William Blake’s poem “The Sick Rose.”

O Rose, thou art sick.

The invisible worm

That flies in the night

In the howling storm

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy,

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

This rose is not the vehicle for a simile or metaphor because it lacks the paired

subject—“my love,” or the girl referred to as “she,” in the examples just

cited—which is an identifying feature of these figures. And it is not an allegori-

cal rose, since, unlike the flower in The Romance of the Rose, it is not part of an

obvious double order of correlated references, one literal and the second

392 SYMBOL

allegorical, in which the allegorical or emblematic reference of the rose is made

determinate by its role within the literal narrative. Blake’sroseis arose—yet it

is patently also something more than a rose: words such as “bed,”“joy,”

“love,” which do not comport literally with an actual flower, together with

the sinister tone, and the intensity of the lyric speaker’s feeling, press the reader

to infer that the described object has a further range of suggested but unspeci-

fied reference which makes it a symbol. But Blake’s rose is a personal symbol

and not—like the symbolic rose in the closing cantos of Dante’s fourteenth-

century Paradiso and other Christian poems—an element in a set of conven-

tional and widely known (hence “public”) religious symbols, in which concrete

objects of this passing world are used to signify, in a relatively determinate way,

the objects and truths of a higher and eternal realm. (See Barbara Seward, The

Symbolic Rose, 1960.) Only from the implicit suggestions in Blake’spoem

itself—the sexual connotations, in the realm of human experience, of “bed”

and “love,” especially in conjunction with “joy” and “worm”—supplemented

by our knowledge of similar elements and topics in his other poems, are we led

to infer that Blake’s lament for a crimson rose which has been entered and sick-

ened unto death by a dark and secret worm symbolizes, in the human realm,

the destruction wrought by furtiveness, deceit, and hypocrisy in what should be

a frank and joyous relationship of physical love. Various critics of the poem,

however, have proposed alternative interpretations of its symbolic significance.

It is an attribute of many private symbols—the White Whale in Melville’s

Moby-Dick (1851) is another famed example—as well as a reason why they are

an irreplaceable literary device, that they suggest a direction or a broad area of

significance rather than, like an emblem in an allegorical narrative, a relatively

determinate reference.

In the copious modern literature on the nature of the literary symbol,

reference is often made to two seminal passages, written early in the nine-

teenth century by Coleridge in England and Goethe in Germany, concerning

the difference between an allegory and a symbol. Coleridge is in fact describ-

ing what he believes to be the uniquely symbolic nature of the Bible as a

sacred text, but later commentators have assumed that he intended his com-

ment to apply also to the symbol in secular literature:

Now an allegory is but a translation of abstract notions into a picture-

language, which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of

the senses…. On the other hand a symbol … is characterized by a

translucence of the special [i.e., of the species] in the individual, or of

the general [i.e., of the genus] in the special, or of the universal in the

general; above all by the translucence of the eternal through and in

the temporal. It always partakes of the reality which it renders intel-

ligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part

in that unity of which it is the representative. [Allegories] are but

empty echoes which the fancy arbitrarily associates with apparitions

of matter …

(Coleridge, The

Statesman’s

Manual, 1816)

SYMBOL 393

Goethe had been meditating about the nature of the literary symbol in

secular writings since the 1790s but gave his concept its most specific formu-

lation in 1824:

There is a great difference, whether the poet seeks the particular for

the sake of the general or sees the general in the particular. From the

former procedure there ensues allegory, in which the particular serves

only as illustration, as example of the general. The latter procedure,

however, is genuinely the nature of poetry; it expresses something

particular, without thinking of the general or pointing to it.

Allegory transforms the phenomenon into a concept, the concept

into an image, but in such a way that the concept always remains

bounded in the image, and is entirely to be kept and held in it, and

to be expressed by it.

Symbolism [however] transforms the phenomenon into idea, the

idea into an image, and in such a way that the idea remains always

infinitely active and unapproachable in the image, and even if expressed

in all languages, still would remain inexpressible.

(Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, Nos. 279, 1112, 1113)

It will be noted that, whatever the differences between these two cryptic

passages, both Coleridge and Goethe stress that an allegory presents a pair of sub-

jects (an image and a concept) but a symbol only one (the image alone); that the

allegory is relatively specific in its reference, while the symbol remains indefinite

but richly—even boundlessly—suggestive in its significance; and also that for this

very reason, a symbol is the higher mode of expression. To these claims, charac-

teristic in the Romantic Period, most critics have agreed. The deconstructive theo-

rist Paul de Man, however, elevated allegory over symbol because, he claimed,

allegory is less “mystified” (confused and deceived) about its status as a purely

rhetorical device. See de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Interpretation:

Theory and Practice, ed. C. S. Singleton (1969), and Allegories of Reading (1979).

See also W. B. Yeats, “The Symbolism of Poetry” (1900), in Essays and

Introductions (1961); H. Flanders Dunbar, Symbolism in Medieval Thought (1929);

C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (1936); Elder

Olson, “A Dialogue on Symbolism,” in R. S. Crane, ed., Critics and Criticism

(1952); Michael Ferber, A Dictionary of Literary Symbols (1999). See Symbolist

Movement, and for references to a literary symbol in other entries, see page 0.

symbol (in semiotics): 357.

symbolic (in Lacanian criticism): 323.

symbolism: 395; 239.

Symbolist Movement: Various poets of the Romantic Period, including Novalis

and Hölderlin in Germany and Shelley in England, often used private symbols

in their poetry (see symbol). Shelley, for example, repeatedly made symbolic

394 SYMBOL

use of objects such as the morning and evening star, a boat moving upstream,

winding caves, and the conflict between a serpent and an eagle. William

Blake, however, exceeded all his romantic contemporaries in his recourse to

a persistent and sustained symbolism—that is, a coherent system composed

of a number of symbolic elements—in both his lyric poems and his long

“prophetic,” or epic poems. (See, for example, Northrop Frye, Fearful Symme-

try: A Study of William Blake, 1947.) In nineteenth-century America, a sym-

bolist procedure was a prominent element in the novels of Nathaniel

Hawthorne and Herman Melville, the prose of Emerson and Thoreau, and

the poetic theory and practice of Poe. (See Charles Feidelson, Jr., Symbolism

and American Literature, 1953.) These writers derived the mode in large

part from the native Puritan tradition of divine typology (see interpretation:

typological and allegorical) and also from the theory of “correspondences” of

the Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772).

In the usage of literary historians, however, Symbolist Movement

designates specifically a group of French writers beginning with Charles

Baudelaire (Fleurs du mal, 1857) and including such later poets as Arthur

Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Paul Valéry. Baudelaire

based the symbolic mode of his poems in part on the example of the American

Edgar Allan Poe, but especially on the ancient belief in correspondences—the

doctrine that there exist inherent and systematic analogies between the human

mind and the outer world, and also between the material and the spiritual

worlds. As Baudelaire put this doctrine: “Everything, form, movement, num-

ber, color, perfume, in the spiritual as in the natural world, is significative, recip-

rocal, converse, correspondent.” The techniques of the French Symbolists,who

exploited an order of private symbols in a poetry of rich suggestiveness rather

than explicit signification, had an immense influence throughout Europe, and

(especially in the 1890s and later) in England and America on poets such as

Arthur Symons and Ernest Dowson (see Decadence)aswellasW.B.Yeats,

Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, Hart Crane, e. e. cummings, and Wallace Stevens.

Major symbolist poets in Germany are Stefan George and Rainer Maria Rilke.

The Modern Period, in the decades after World War I, was a notable era of

symbolism in literature. Many of the major writers of the period exploit sym-

bols which are in part drawn from religious and esoteric traditions and in part

invented. Some of the works of the age are symbolist in their settings, their

agents, and their actions, as well as in the objects they refer to. Instances of a

persistently symbolic procedure occur in lyrics (Yeats’“Byzantium” poems,

Dylan Thomas’ series of sonnets Altarwise by Owl-light), in longer poems

(Hart Crane’s The Bridge, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Wallace Stevens’

“The Comedian as the Letter C”), and in novels (James Joyce’s Finnegans

Wake

, William Faulkner’s The

Sound and the Fury).

See Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899, reprinted

1958); Edmund Wilson, Axel’sCastle(1936); C. M. Bowra, TheHeritageof

Symbolism (1943); Anna Balakian, ed., The Symbo list Movement in the Literature

of European Languages (1982); and René Taupin, The Influence of French Symbolism

on Modern American Poetry (1920, trans. 1985).

SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 395

Symbolists: 395.

sympathy: 106.

synchronic (s



nkron



k): 194.

synecdoche (s



nek

doke): 135.

synesthesia: “Synesthesia,” in psychology, signifies the experience of two or more

modes of sensation when only one sense is being stimulated. In literature, the

term is applied to descriptions of one mode of sensation in terms of another; color

is attributed to sounds, odor to colors, sound to odors, and so on. We often, for

example, speak of loud colors, bright sounds, and sweet music. A complex literary

instance of synesthesia (which is sometimes also called “sense transference” or

“sense analogy”)isthispassagefromShelley’s “The Sensitive Plant” (1820):

And the hyacinth purple, and white, and blue,

Which flung from its bells a sweet peal anew

Of music so delicate, soft, and intense,

It was felt like an odor within the sense.

The varicolored, bell-shaped flowers of the hyacinth send out a peal of music

which effects a sensation as though it were (what in fact it is) the scent of the

flowers. Keats, in the “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819), calls for a draught of wine

Tasting of Flora and the country green,

Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth;

that is, he calls for a drink tasting of sight, color, motion, sound, and heat.

Occasional uses of synesthetic imagery have been made by poets ever

since Homer. Such imagery became much more frequent in the Romantic

Period and was especially exploited by the French Symbolists of the middle

and later nineteenth century; see Baudelaire’s sonnet “Correspondences,”

and Rimbaud’s sonnet on the color of vowel sounds “ A black, E white,

I red, U green, O blue.”

Refer to the detailed analyses of literary synesthesia in Richard H. Fogel,

The Imagery of Keats and Shelley (1949), chapter 3; also Simon Baron-Cohen,

Synaesthesia: Classic and Contemporary Readings (1996); and John E. Harrison,

Synaesthesia: The Strangest Thing (2001).

syntagmatic (s



tagmat



k): 198.

syntax: 196.

syuzhet (in Russian formalism): 234.

396 SYMBOLISTS

tale: 364.

tall tale: 169.

telling (in narrative): 49.

tenor (of a metaphor): 133; 213.

tension: “Tension” became a common descriptive and evaluative word in the

criticism of the 1930s and later, especially after Allen Tate, one of the New

Critics, proposed it as a term to be made by “lopping the prefixes off the logical

terms extension and intension.” In technical logic the “intension” of a word is

the set of abstract attributes which must be possessed by any object to which the

word can be literally applied, and the “extension” of a word is the class of

concrete objects to which the word applies. The meaning of good poetry,

according to Tate, “is its ‘tension,’ the full organized body of all the extension

and intension that we can find in it.” (“TensioninPoetry,” 1938, in On the

Limits of Poetry, 1948.) It would seem that by this statement Tate meant that a

good poem incorporates both the abstract and the concrete, the general idea

and the particular image, in an integral whole. See concrete and abstract.

Other critics use “tension” to characterize poetry that manifests an equi-

librium of the serious and the ironic, or “a pattern of resolved stresses,” or a

harmony of opponent tendencies, or any other mode of that stability-in-

opposition which was the favorite way in the New Criticism for conceiving

the organization of a good poem. And some critics, dubious perhaps about

the validity of Tate’s logical derivation of the term, simply apply “tension”

to any poem in which the elements seem tightly rather than loosely

interrelated.

tercet (tur

set): 374.

terza rima (ter

tsare

ma): 374.

tetrameter (tetram

eter): 220.

text and writing (écriture): Traditional critics conceived the object of their crit-

ical concern to be a literary “work”; that is, a human product whose form is

achieved by its author’s design and its meanings by the author’s intentional uses

of the verbal medium. French structuralist critics, on the other hand, depersona-

lized a literary product by conceiving it to be not a “work” but an impersonal

text, a manifestation of the social institution called écriture (writing). The

author is regarded as only an intermediary in whom the action of writing pre-

cipitates the elements and codes of the pre-existing linguistic and literary system

TEXT AND WRITING (ÉCRITURE) 397

into a particular text. The interpretation of this writing is effected by “lecture”

(in French, the process of reading) which, by bringing to bear expectations

formed by earlier exposure to the functioning of the linguistic system, invests

the marks on the page with what merely seem to be their inherent meanings

and references to an outer world. Structuralists differ about the degree to which

the activity of reading a text is constrained by the literary conventions and codes

that went into the writing; many deconstructive critics, however, propose that all

writing, by the internal play of opposing forces, necessarily disseminates into an

indefinite array of diverse and opposed meanings.

The system of linguistic and literary conventions that constitute a literary

text are said by structuralist and poststructuralist critics to be “naturalized” in the

activity of reading, in that the artifices of a nonreferential “textuality” are

made to seem vraisemblable (credible)—that is, made to give the illusion

of referring to reality—by being brought into accord with modes of discourse

and cultural stereotypes that are so familiar and habitual as to seem natural.

Naturalization (an alternative term is recuperation) takes place through

such habitual procedures in reading as assigning the text to a specific genre,

or taking a fictional text to be the speech of a credibly human narrator, or

interpreting its artifices as signifying characters, actions, and values that repre-

sent, or accord with, those in an extratextual world. To a thoroughgoing

structuralist or poststructuralist critic, however, not only is the text’s represen-

tation of the world no more than an illusory “effect” generated by the process

of reading, but the world is itself held to be in its turn a text; that is, simply a

structure of signs whose significance is constituted by the cultural conventions,

codes, and ideology that happen to be shared by members of a cultural com-

munity. The term intertextuality, popularized especially by Julia Kristeva, is

used to signify the multiple ways in which any one literary text is in fact made

up of other texts, by means of its open or covert citations and allusions, its

repetitions and transformations of the formal and substantive features of earlier

texts, or simply its unavoidable participation in the common stock of linguistic

and literary conventions and procedures that are “always-already” in place and

constitute the discourses into which we are born. In Kristeva ’s formulation,

accordingly, any text is in fact an “intertext”—the site of an intersection of

numberless other texts, and existing only through its relations to other texts.

Roland Barthes in S/Z (1970) proposed a distinction between a text which

is “lisible” (readable) and one which, although “scriptible” (writable) is “illisible”

(unreadable). Readable texts are traditional or “classical”

ones—such

as the real-

istic novels by Honoré Balzac and other nineteenth-century authors—which for

the most part conform to the prevailing codes and conventi ons, literary and

social, and so are readily and comfortably interpretable and naturalizable in the

process of reading. An “unreadable” text (such as James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake,

or the French new novel, or a poem by a highly experimental poet) is one which

largely violates, parodies, or innovates upon prevailing conventions, and thus

persistently shocks, baffles, and frustrates standard expectations. In Barthes’

view, an unreadable text, by drawing attention in this way to the pure conven-

tionality and artifice of literature, laudably destroys any illusion that it represents

398 TEXT AND WRITING (ÉCRITURE)

reality. In The Pleasure of the Text (published 1973), Barthes assigns to the read-

able text the response of mere “plaisir” (quasi-erotic pleasure), but to the

unreadable or unintelligible text the response of “jouissance” (orgasmic ecstasy).

For related matters and relevant bibliographic references, see hypertext; poststr u c-

turalism; semiotics; structuralist criticism.

textual criticism: “Textual criticism” expounds the principles and procedures

that will establish and validate the text of a literary or other work that an editor

prepares and publishes. The theory and practice of textual criticism goes back

many centuries. It was applied at first to biblical and classical texts, of which all

the surviving manuscripts had been written (and often altered, deliberately or

inadvertently) by scribes long after the death of the original writers. Later, tex-

tual criticism was adapted to apply to the early era of the printed book, then to

later times when editors had access to diverse editions of a printed text, and

sometimes to differing manuscripts written by the authors themselves, as well

as differing transcripts of such manuscripts by various people. (See book editions

and book format.) The ruling principle, whether explicit or tacit, of most modern

textual criticism has been that the invariable task of a scholarly editor is to estab-

lish, from all the available evidences in manuscript and print, the text that as

nearly as possible conforms to the text originally composed by its author.

In the mid-twentieth century, most scholarly editors subscribed to the

principles of the copy-text, as propounded in a highly influential paper by

the English bibliographer W. W. Greg. Greg formulated his views mainly

with reference to editing Shakespeare and other Renaissance authors, but

the principles he proposed were soon expanded and modified by Fredson

Bowers and others to apply also to later authors and modes of publication

and transmission. The Greg–Bowers theory (as it is often called) proposed, as

the goal of a scholarly edition, to establish a single “authoritative” or “defini-

tive” text that represented the “final intentions” of the author at the conclu-

sion of his or her process of composing and revising a work. Editors choose, as

the “copy-text,” that one of the existing texts judged to be closest to what the

author wrote or intended to write; usually the copy-text is the earliest printed

edition of a work (or in some cases, the author’s written manuscript of a

work), since this is considered to be closest to the author’s own intentions.

This base-text is emended by the editor to eliminate what are judged to be

inadvertent errors made by the author in writing out his composition, and also

to delete intrusive “substantive” changes (changes in wording) that are judged

to have been introduced by other people without the author’s

“authorization.” (Such nonauthorial intrusions and changes in the words of a

text, by copy editors, printers, and others, are often labeled “corruptions” or

“contaminations

” of

the original text.) The copy-text is further emended to

include any later deletions or additions that the editor judges, from the avail-

able evidence, to have been introduced or authorized by the author himself or

herself, and that therefore may be assumed to embody the author’s “final

intentions.” The resulting published document (often with copious editorial

footnotes and other materials to identify all these emendations and to record

TEXTUAL CRITICISM 399

the textual “variants” that the editor has rejected) is known as an eclectic

text, in that it accords with no single existing model but is constructed by

fitting together materials from a variety of texts—materials that are sometimes

supplemented by the editor’s own conjectures.

Beginning in the late 1920s, two developments helped to bring the copy-

text theory under increasing scrutiny and objection. One was the appearance of

scholarly publications that made available a multitude of diverse forms of a single

literary work, in drafts, manuscripts, transcriptions (sometimes with changes and

insertions) by family and friends, and corrected proof sheets, even before the

poem was originally publi shed. The many volumes of the Cornell Wordsworth,

for example, begun in 1975 under the general editorship of Stephen Parrish,

record all such variants; for a number of Wordsworth’s writings, they also print

“reading copies” of the full text at sequential stages in the author’s composition

and revision of a single work. There are being printed also a number of texts

from manuscripts that are versions of works by novelists that were rejected by

the author, or radically revised before the final text was published. An early

example was Stephen Hero, published in 1944, part of the first draft of APortrait

of the Artist, which James Joyce had published thirty years earlier; other examples

are uncut versions from manuscripts of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby,

Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, and Richard Wright’s Native Son.

Herman Melville’s Billy Budd exists only in this form, for it was left unfinished

at his death, and later editors have had not only to organize the text and present

it in coherent form but to determine what counts as “the text” in the first place.

Another development was the poststructural climate of critical opinion, which

brought into radical question the centrality of the “subject,” or author, and

denied the validity of appealing to the intention of a writer as determinative of

text or meaning. A number of poststructural theorists also stressed the role of

social factors in “constructing” the meanings of a text, or emphasized the vari-

ability in the reception and interpretation of a text over time. (See author and

authorship, poststructuralism,andreception theory.)

Scholarly endeavors at a single, eclectic, and definitive text of a literary

work are now often derogated as resulting in an “ideal” text that never in

fact existed, and is apt to incorporate the inclinations of the editor, labeled as

the intentions of the author. In a Critique of Modern Textual Criticism

(1983,

reissued

1992), Jerome McGann expounded his social theory of textual

criticism, in which he attributes “textual authority” to the cumulative social

history of the work, including the contributions not only of the author but

also of the editor, publisher, printer, and all others who have cooperated in

bringing into being and producing a book that is made available to the public;

all these components, in McGann’s view, are valid determinants of a text and

its meanings, considered as social constructions. (See social constructs, under new

historicism, and book history studies.) In later writings, McGann has stressed also

the material features of a book—including its typography, paper, format, and

even pricing and advertising—as cooperative with its verbal element in gener-

ating its total cultural significance. (See McGann, The Textual Condition, 1991;

refer also to D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and Sociology of Texts, 1986.)

400 TEXTUAL CRITICISM

Attempts to edit by reference to an author’s final intentions have been

brought into further question by the view that most published works are in

fact products of multiple authorship. See Jack Stillinger’s Multiple Authorship

and the Myth of Solitary Genius (1991), which demonstrates by many examples

that the printed text of a work is typically the joint product of a number of

participants, including friends, family members, transcribers, literary agents,

editors, and printers, in addition to the person who is ordinarily considered

to be its sole author.

Despite such critiques, the Greg–Bowers copy-text theory has continued

to be defended and applied, although with various modifications, by a num-

ber of scholars, most prominently by G. Thomas Tanselle (see his A Rationale

of Textual Criticism, 1989). Many editors now subscribe to some form of a

theory of textual versions, of which an early exponent was James Thorpe

in Principles of Textual Criticism (1972). The growing consensus is that the

composition of a literary work is a continuous process without a fixed termi-

nus or perfected state, and that each existing stage, or “version,” of the pro-

cess, whether in manuscript or print, has an equal right to be regarded as a

product intended by the author at its particular time. A scholarly editor

ought, therefore, to give up the hopeless aim to achieve a single definitive

master text of a literary work. Instead, the editor should select and edit that

textual “version” of a work that accords with the circumstances of the partic-

ular case, and also according to whether the editor’s purpose is to approximate

what the author wrote, or else to reproduce the printed text, however it came

about, as it existed for its readers when it was first published.

For a concise survey of the history of textual theory and criticism, see D. C.

Greetham, Textual Scholarship: An Introduction (1992). Greetham has also edited,

for the Modern Language Association of America, Scholarly Editing: A Guide to

Research (1995), which includes a survey, written by specialists, of the history

and types of scholarly editing applied to classical literature, the Bible, and a

number of foreign literatures, as well as to the various periods of English litera-

ture. See also, in addition to works cited above, Fredson Bowers, Bibliography

and Textual Criticism (1964); W. W. Greg, “The Rationale for Copy-Text,”

reprinted in his Collected Papers, ed. J. C. Maxwell (1966); and for subsequent

developments, Donald H. Reiman, Romantic Texts and Contexts (1982); Gary

Taylor and Michael Warren, eds., The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s

Two Versions of “King Lear” (1983); George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams,

eds., Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities (1993). Walter Gabler describes

briefly current modes of German and French textual theory and procedures in

The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, eds. Michael Groden

and Martin Kreiswirth (1994).

theater in the round: 66.

theater of the absurd: 2; 58, 120.

theme: 230.

THEME 401

theodicy (theod



se): 156.

theoretical criticism: 70.

theories and movements in recent criticism: The entry in this Glossary on

criticism describes traditional types of literary theory and of applied criticism

from Aristotle through the early twentieth century. Since World War I, and

especially since the 1960s, there have appeared a large number of innovative

literary theories and methods of critical analysis, including revised and ampli-

fied versions of the earlier forms of Marxist criticism and psychoanalytic criticism.

An entry on each of these latter-day critical modes is included in the Glossary,

according to the alphabetic order of its title. Following is a table of the

approximate time when these modes became prominent in literary criticism:

1920s–1930s Russian Formalism

1930s–1940s archetypal criticism

1940s–1950s New Criticism; phenomenological criticism

1960s modern forms of feminist criticism ; structuralist

criticism; stylistics

1970s theory of the anxiety of influence; deconstruction;

discourse analysis; various forms of reader-response

criticism; reception theory; semiotics; speech-act theory

1980s cultural studies; dialogic criticism; gender criticism ;

new historicism; queer theory

1990s Darwinian literary studies; ecocriticism; postcolonial

studies

2000ff cognitive literary studies

See the entry poststructuralism for current uses of the term “theory,” as well

as for a description of some critical perspectives and practices shared by a

number of theories that have appeared after the 1960s.

theory (in poststructuralism): 309.

theory (in traditional criticism): 70.

thesis (of a literary work): 132.

thick descriptions: 245.

third-person

narrative: 301.

402 THEODICY

third-person point of view: 301.

three unities: In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, critics of the drama in

Italy and France added to Aristotle’s unity of action, which he describes in his

Poetics, two other unities, to constitute one of the so-called rules of drama

known as “the three unities.” On the assumption that verisimilitude—the

achievement of an illusion of reality in the audience of a stage play—requires

that the action represented by a play approximate the actual conditions of the

staging of the play, these critics imposed the requirement of the “unity of

place” (that the action represented be limited to a single location) and the

requirement of the “unity of time” (that the time represented be limited to

the two or three hours it takes to act the play, or at most to a single day of

either twelve or twenty-four hours). In large part because of the potent exam-

ple of Shakespeare, many of whose plays represent frequent changes of place

and the passage of many years, the unities of place and time never dominated

English neoclassicism as they did criticism in Italy and France. A final blow was

the famous attack against them, and against the principle of dramatic verisimili-

tude on which they were based, in Samuel Johnson’s “Preface to Shakespeare”

(1765). Since then in England, the unities of place and time (as distinguished

from the unity of action) have been regarded as optional devices, available as

needed by the playwright to achieve special effects of dramatic concentration.

See René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism,Vol.1,The Later Eighteenth

Century (1955); Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian

Renaissance (1961).

threnody (thren

ode): 104.

thriller: 70.

tone: 287.

topographical poetry: Topographical poetry, also called local poetry,com-

bines the description of a specific natural scene with historical, political, or

moral reflections that are associated with the scene or are suggested by its

details. Samuel Johnson, in his “Life of John Denham” (1779), attributed its

origin to Denham’sfinepoemCooper’sHill, first written in 1642; as Johnson

defines the genre, “local poetry” is a species “of which the fundamental subject

is some particular landscape to be poetically described, with the addition of such

embellishments as may be supplied by historical retrospection or incidental

meditation.” See the analysis of a passage from Cooper’sHill,underheroic couplet.

This poetic type had an enormous vogue through the eighteenth century;

Robert Aubin, in Topographical Poetry in XVIII-Century England (1936), lists some

two thousand examples. Many of these, like “Cooper’s Hill,” are prospect

poems that describe the landscape that is visible from a high point of vantage; nota-

ble examples are John Dyer’s “Grongar Hill” (1726) and Thomas Gray’s “Ode on

a Distant Prospect of Eton College” (1747). Local poems were later developed into

TOPOGRAPHICAL POETRY 403

a major Romantic form, the descriptive-meditative lyric, which is characterized

by a sustained flow of consciousness; a subtle interweaving of perceptions,

thoughts, and feelings; and an integrated design. Early examples are Coleridge’s

“The Eolian Harp” (1796) and “FrostatMidnight” (1798), and Wordsworth’s

“Tintern Abbey” (1798); formal variants of the mode include Coleridge’s

“Dejection: An Ode” (1802) and Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortal-

ity” (1807). See M. H. Abrams, “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic

Lyric,” in The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism (1984).

Related to the topographical poem is the country house poem, which

had a brief vogue in the seventeenth century. This form describes and praises a

rural estate and its grounds, and uses the occasion, by sometimes ingenious

connections, to extol also its owner and the owner’s family and family history.

It was inaugurated by Aemilia Lanyer’s “The Description of Cooke-ham”

(1611) and Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” (1616). Andrew Marvell’s “Upon

Appleton House” (1651) is the longest (776 lines), the most intricately

wrought, and the wittiest of the country house poems.

topos (top

os): 229.

touchstone: A “ touchstone” is a hard stone used to determine, by the streak left

on it when rubbed by a piece of gold, whether the metal is pure gold, and if

not, the degree to which it contains an alloy. The word was introduced into

literary criticism by Matthew Arnold in “The Study of Poetry” (1880) to

denote short but distinctive passages, selected from the writings of the greatest

poets, which he used to determine the relative value of passages or poems

which are compared to them. Arnold proposed this method of evaluation as

a corrective for what he called the “fallacious” estimates of poems according

to their “historic” importance in the development of literature, or else accord-

ing to their “personal” appeal to an individual critic. As Arnold put it:

There can be no more useful help for discovering what poetry

belongs to the class of the truly excellent … than to have always in

one’s mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and to apply

them as a touchstone to other poetry.… If we have any tact we shall

find them … an infallible touchstone for detecting the presence or

absence of high poetic quality, and also the degree of this quality, in

all other poetry which we may place beside them.

The touchstones he proposed are passages from Homer, Dante, Shakespeare,

and Milton, ranging in length from one to four lines. Two of his best-known

touchstones are also the shortest: Dante’s “In la sua volontade è nostra pace”

(“In His will is our peace”; Paradiso, III. 85), and the close of Milton’sdescription

in Paradise Lost, IV, 271–2, of the loss to Ceres of her daughter Proserpine,

“… which cost Ceres all that pain / To seek her through the world.”

trace (in deconstruction): 81.

traditional ballad: 25.

404 TOPOS

tragedy: The term is broadly applied to literary, and especially to dramatic,

representations of serious actions which eventuate in a disastrous conclusion

for the protagonist (the chief character). More precise and detailed discussions

of the tragic form properly begin—although they should not end—with

Aristotle’s classic analysis in the Poetics (fourth century BC). Aristotle based

his theory by reference to the only examples available to him, the tragedies

of Greek dramatists such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. In the subse-

quent two thousand years and more, various new types of serious plots ending

in a catastrophe have been developed—types that Aristotle had no way of

foreseeing. The many attempts to stretch Aristotle ’s analysis to apply to later

tragic forms serve merely to blur his critical categories and to obscure impor-

tant differences among a diversity of plays, all of which have proved to be

dramatically effective. When flexibly managed, however, Aristotle’s discus-

sions apply in some part to many tragic plots, and his analytic concepts serve

as a suggestive starting point for identifying the distinctive attributes of various

non-Aristotelian modes of tragic construction.

Aristotle defined tragedy as “the imitation of an action that is serious

and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself,” in the medium of poetic

language and in the manner of dramatic rather than of narrative presentation,

involving “incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish the

catharsis of such emotions.” (See imitation; and for an enlightening discussion

of the emotions of pity and fear, refer to Martha C. Nussbaum, “Tragedy and

Self-Sufficiency: Plato and Aristotle on Fear and Pity,” Oxford Studies in

Ancient Philosophy, Vol. 10, 1992, pp. 107–59.) Precisely how to interpret

Aristotle’s catharsis—which in Greek signifies “purgation,” or “purification,”

or both—is much disputed. On two matters, however, many commentators

agree. Aristotle in the first place sets out to account for the undeniable,

though remarkable, fact that many tragic representations of suffering and

defeat leave an audience feeling not depressed but relieved, or even exalted.

In the second place, Aristotle uses this distinctive effect on the reader, which

he calls “the pleasure of pity and fear,” as the basic way to distinguish the

tragic from comic or other forms, and he regards the dramatist’s aim to pro-

duce this effect in the highest degree as the principle that determines the

choice and moral qualities of the tragic protagonist and the organization of

the tragic plot.

Accordingly, Aristotle says that the tragic hero will most effectively

evoke both our pity and terror if he is neither thoroughly good nor thor-

oughly bad but a mixture of both, and also that this tragic effect will be stron-

ger if the hero is “better than we are,” in the sense that he is of higher than

ordinary moral worth. Such a man is exhibited as suffering a change in for-

tune from happiness to misery because of his mistaken choice of an action, to

which he is led by his hamartia—his “error

” or “mistake

of judgment” or, as

it is often, although misleadingly and less literally translated, his tragic flaw.

(One common form of hamartia in Greek tragedies was hubris, that “pride”

or overweening self-confidence which leads a protagonist to disregard a divine

warning or to violate an important moral law.) The tragic hero, like Oedipus

TRAGEDY 405

in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, moves us to pity because, since he is not an

evil man, his misfortune is greater than he deserves; but he moves us also to

fear because we recognize similar possibilities of error in our own lesser and

fallible selves. Aristotle grounds his analysis of “the very structure and inci-

dents of the play” on the same principle; the plot, he says, which will most

effectively evoke “tragic pity and fear” is one in which the events develop

through complication to a catastrophe in which there occurs (often by an anag-

norisis, or discovery of facts hitherto unknown to the hero) a sudden peripeteia,

or reversal in his fortune from happiness to disaster. (See plot.)

Authors in the Middle Ages lacked direct knowledge either of classical

tragedies or of Aristotle’s Poetics. Medieval tragedies are simply the story of

a person of high status who, whether deservedly or not, is brought from pros-

perity to wretchedness by an unpredictable turn of the wheel of fortune. The

short narratives in “The Monk’s Tale” of The Canterbury Tales (late fourteenth

century) are all, in Chaucer’s own term, “tragedies” of this kind. With the

Elizabethan era came both the beginning and the acme of dramatic tragedy

in England. The tragedies of this period owed much to the native religious

drama, the miracle and morality plays, which had developed independently of

classical influence, but with a crucial contribution from the Roman writer

Seneca (first century), whose dramas got to be widely known earlier than

those of the Greek tragedians.

Senecan tragedy was written to be recited rather than acted; but to

English playwrights, who thought that these tragedies had been intended for

the stage, they provided the model for an organized five-act play with a com-

plex plot and an elaborately formal style of dialogue. Senecan drama, in the

Elizabethan Age, had two main lines of development. One of these consisted

of academic tragedies written in close imitation of the Senecan model, includ-

ing the use of a chorus, and usually constructed according to the rules of the

three unities, which had been elaborated by Italian critics of the sixteenth

century; the earliest English example was Thomas Sackville and Thomas

Norton’s Gorboduc (1562). The other and much more important development

was written for the popular stage and is called the revenge tragedy, or (in its

most sensational form) the tragedy of blood. This type of play derived from

Seneca’s favorite materials of murder, revenge, ghosts, mutilation, and car-

nage, but while Seneca had relegated such matters to long reports of offstage

actions by messengers, Elizabethan dramatists usually represented them on

stage to satisfy the appetite of the contemporary audience for violence and

horror. Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1586) established this popular

form; its subject is a murder and the quest for vengeance, and it includes a

ghost, insanity, suicide, a play-within-a-play, sensational incidents, and a grue-

somely bloody ending. Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (c. 1592) and

Shakespeare

’s

early play Titus Andronicus (c. 1590) are in this mode; and from

this lively but unlikely prototype came one of the greatest of tragedies,

Hamlet, as well as John Webster’s fine horror plays of 1612–13, The Duchess

of Malfi and The White Devil.

406 TRAGEDY

Many major tragedies in the flowering time between 1585 and 1625, by

Marlowe, Shakespeare, George Chapman, Webster, Sir Francis Beaumont and

John Fletcher, and Philip Massinger, deviate radically from the Aristotelian

norm. Shakespeare’s Othello is one of the few plays which accords closely with

Aristotle’s basic concepts of the tragic hero and plot. The hero of Macbeth,how-

ever, is not a good man who commits a tragic error but an ambitious man who

knowingly turns great gifts to evil purposes and therefore, although he retains

something of our sympathy by his courage and self-insight, deserves his destruc-

tion at the hands of his morally superior antagonists. Shakespeare’s Richard III

presents first the success, then the ruin, of a protagonist who is thoroughly

malign, yet arouses in us a reluctant admiration by his intelligence and imagina-

tive power and by the shameless candor with which he glories in his ambition

and malice. Most Shakespearean tragedies, like Elizabethan tragedies generally,

also depart radically from Aristotle’s paradigm by introducing humorous char-

acters, incidents, or scenes, called comic relief, which were in various ways and

degrees made relevant to the tragic plot and conducive to enriching the tragic

effect. There developed also in this age the mixed mode called tragicomedy,a

popular non-Aristotelian form which produced a number of artistic successes.

And later in the seventeenth century the Restoration Period produced the curi-

ous genre, a cross between epic and tragedy, called heroic tragedy.

Until the close of the seventeenth century almost all tragedies were writ-

ten in verse and had as protagonists men of high rank whose fate affected the

fortunes of a state. A few minor Elizabethan tragedies, such as A Yorkshire

Tragedy (of uncertain authorship), had as the chief character a man of the

lower class, but it remained for eighteenth-century writers to popularize the

bourgeois or domestic tragedy, which was written in prose and presented

a protagonist from the middle or lower social ranks who suffers a common-

place or domestic disaster. George Lillo’s The London Merchant: or, The History

of George Barnwell (1731)—about a merchant’s apprentice who succumbs to a

heartless courtesan and comes to a bad end by robbing his employer and mur-

dering his uncle—is still read, at least in college courses.

Since that time most of the successful tragedies have been in prose and rep-

resent middle-class, or occasionally even working-class, heroes and heroines.

The great and highly influential Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen wrote in

the latter part of the nineteenth century tragedies in prose, many of which (such

as ADoll’sHouse, Ghosts,andAn Enemy of the People) revolve around an issue of

general social or political significance. (See problem play.) One of the more nota-

ble modern tragedies, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), relies for its

tragic seriousness on the degree to which Willy Loman, in his bewildered defeat

by life, is representative of the ordinary man whose aspirations reflect the false

values of a commercial society; the effect on the audience is one of compassion-

ate understanding rather than of tragic pity and terror. The protagonists of some

modern tragedies are not heroic but antiheroic, in that they manifest a character

that is at an extreme from the dignity and courage of the protagonists in tradi-

tional dramas (see antihero); while in some modern works, tragic effects involve

TRAGEDY 407

elements that were once specific to the genre of farce (see literature of the

absurd and black comedy).

Tragedy since World War I has also been innovative in other ways, includ-

ing experimentation with new versions of ancient tragic forms. Eugene O’Neill’s

Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), for example, is an adaptation of Aeschylus’

Oresteia, with the locale shifted from Greece to New England, the poetry altered

to what is for the most part rather flat prose, and the tragedy of fate converted

into a tragedy of the psycholog ical compulsions of a family trapped in a tangle of

Freudian complexes (see psychoanalysis). T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral

(1935) is a tragic drama which, like Greek tragedy, is written in verse and has a

chorus, but it also incorporates elements of two early Christian forms, the medi-

eval miracle play (dealing with the martyrdom of a saint) and the medieval morality

play. A tendency associated with the new historicism has been to interpret tradi-

tional tragedies primarily in political terms, as incorporating in the problems and

catastrophe of the tragic individual an indirect representation of contemporary

social or ideological dilemmas and crises. See Froma I. Zeitlin and John J.

Winkler, eds., NothingtoDowithDionysos?Athenian Drama in Its Social Context

(1990), and Linda Kintz, The Subject’s Tragedy: Political Poetics, Feminist Theory,

and Drama (1992).

See genre, and refer to A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904); H. D. F.

Kitto, Greek Tragedy (rev. 1954); Elder Olson, Tragedy and the Theory of Drama

(1961); George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (1961); and Adrian Poole, Tragedy:

A Very Short Introduction (2005). For other theoretical treatments of tragedy, see

Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in

Shakespeare (1982); and Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and

Difference in Renaissance Drama (1985). Richard H. Palmer, Tragedy and Tragic

Theory: An Analytical Guide (1992), is a useful survey of contested issues in the

theory and criticism of tragedy, with many quotations by theorists from

the ancient Greeks to the present. For references to tragedy in other entries,

see pages 334, 408.Seealsoheroic drama; tragic irony; tragicomedy.

tragedy of blood: 406.

tragic flaw: 405; 299 .

tragic hero: 405.

tragic irony: 188.

tragicomedy: A type of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama which intermingled the

standard characters and subject matter and the typical plot forms of

tragedy and

comedy.

Thus, the important agents in tragicomedy included both people of

high degree and people of low degree, even though, according to the reign-

ing critical theory of that time, only upper-class characters were appropriate to

tragedy, while members of the middle and lower classes were the proper sub-

ject solely of comedy; see decorum. Also, tragicomedy represented a serious

408 TRAGEDY OF BLOOD

action which threatened a tragic disaster to the protagonist, yet, by an abrupt

reversal of circumstance, turned out happily. As John Fletcher wrote in his

preface to The Faithful Shepherdess (c. 1610), tragicomedy “wants [that is,

lacks] deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near

it, which is enough to make it no comedy, which must be a representation

of familiar people.… A god is as lawful in [tragicomedy] as in a tragedy, and

mean [that is, middle-class] people as in a comedy.” (See comedy and tragedy.)

Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice is by these criteria a tragicomedy because

it mingles people of the aristocracy with lower-class characters (such as the

Jewish merchant Shylock and the clown Launcelot Gobbo), and also because

the developing threat of death to Antonio is suddenly reversed at the end by

Portia’s ingenious casuistry in the trial scene. Francis Beaumont and John

Fletcher in Philaster, and numerous other plays on which they collaborated

from about 1606 to 1613, inaugurated a mode of tragicomedy that employs

a romantic and fast-moving plot of love, jealousy, treachery, intrigue, and dis-

guises, and ends in a melodramatic reversal of fortune for the protagonists,

who had hitherto seemed headed for a tragic catastrophe. Shakespeare wrote

his late plays Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale, between 1609 and 1611, in

this very popular mode of the tragicomic romance. The name “tragicomedy”

is sometimes also applied more loosely to plays with double plots, one serious

and the other comic; see double plots, under plot.

Refer to E. M. Waith, The Pattern of Tragicomedy in Beaumont and Fletcher

(1952); M. T. Herrick, Tragicomedy (1955).GordonMcMullanandJonathan

Hope have edited a collection of essays on The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare

and After (1992).

Transcendental Club: 409.

transcendental signified: 82.

Transcendentalism in America: A philosophical and literary movement,

centered in Concord and Boston, which was prominent in the intellectual and

cultural life of New England from 1836 until just before the Civil War. It was

inaugurated in 1836 by a Unitarian discussion group that came to be called the

Transcendental Club.Inthesevenyearsorsothatthegroupmetatvarious

houses, it included at one time or another Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson

Alcott,FrederickHenryHedge,W.E.ChanningandW.H.Channing,

Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, George Ripley,

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Thoreau, and Jones Very. A quarterly periodical

The Dial (1840–44) printed many of the early essays, poems, and reviews by the

Transcendentalists.

Transcendentalism was neither a systematic nor a sharply definable philos-

ophy, but rather an intellectual mode and emotional mood that was expressed

by diverse, and in some instances rather eccentric, voices. Modern historians

of the movement tend to take as its central exponents Emerson (especially

in Nature, “The American Scholar,” the Divinity School Address, “The

TRANSCENDENTALISM IN AMERICA 409

Over-Soul,” and “Self Reliance”) and Thoreau (especially in Walden and his

journals). The term “transcendental,” as Emerson pointed out in his lecture

“The Transcendentalist” (1841), was taken from the writings of the German

philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Kant had confined the expression

“transcendental knowledge” to the cognizance of those forms and categories—

such as space, time, quantity, causality—which, in his view, are imposed on

whatever we perceive by the constitution of the human mind. Emerson and

others, however, extended the concept of transcendental knowledge, in a way

whose validity Kant had specifically denied, to include an intuitive cognizance

of moral and other truths that transcend the limits of sense experience. The

intellectual antecedents of American Transcendentalism, in addition to Kant,

were many and diverse and included post-Kantian German Idealists, the English

thinkers Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle (themselves exponents

of forms of German Idealism), Plato and Neoplatonists, the occult Swedish

theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, and some varieties of Asian philosophy.

What the various Transcendentalists had in common was less what they

proposed than what they were reacting against. By and large, they were

opposed to rigid rationalism; to eighteenth-century empirical philosophy of

the school of John Locke, which derived all knowledge from sense impres-

sions; to highly formalized religion, especially the Calvinist orthodoxy of

New England; and to the social conformity, materialism, and commercialism

that they found increasingly dominant in American life. Among the counter-

views that were affirmed by Transcendentalists, especially Emerson, were con-

fidence in the validity of a mode of knowledge that is grounded in feeling and

intuition, and a consequent tendency to accept what, to logical reasoning, might

seem contradictions; an ethics of individualism that stressed self-trust, self-

reliance, and self-sufficiency; a turn away from modern society, with its getting

and spending, to the scenes and objects of the natural world, which were

regarded both as physical entities and as correspondences to aspects of the

human spirit (see correspondences); and, in place of a formal or doctrinal religion,

afaithinadivine“Principle,” or “Spirit,” or “Soul” (Emerson’s “Over-Soul”)

in which both humanity and the cosmos participate. This omnipresent Spirit,

Emerson said, constitutes the “Unity within which every man’sparticular

being is contained and made one with all other”; it manifests itself to human

consciousness as influxes of inspired insights; and it is the source of the profound-

est truths and the necessary condition of all moral and spiritual development.

Walden (1854) records how Thoreau tested his distinctive and radically

individualist version of Transcendental values by withdrawing from societal

complexities and distractions to a life of solitude and self-reliance in a natural

setting at Walden Pond. He simplified his material wants to those he could

satisfy by the bounty of the woods and lake or could provide by his own

labor, attended minutely to natural objects both for their inherent interest

and as correlatives to the mind of the observer, and devoted his leisure to

reading, meditation, and writing. In his nonconformity to any social and

legal requirements that violated his moral sense, he chose a day in jail rather

than pay his poll tax to a government that supported the Mexican War and

410 TRANSCENDENTALISM IN AMERICA

slavery. Brook Farm, on the other hand, was a short-lived experiment

(1841–47) by more community-oriented Transcendentalists who established

a commune on the professed principle of the equal sharing of work, pay,

and cultural benefits. Hawthorne, who lived there for a while, later wrote

about Brook Farm, with considerable skepticism about both its goals and

practices, in The Blithedale Romance (1852).

The Transcendental movement, with its optimism about the indwelling

divinity, self-sufficiency, and high potentialities of human nature, did not sur-

vive the crisis of the Civil War and its aftermath; and Herman Melville, like

Nathaniel Hawthorne, satirized aspects of Transcendentalism in his fiction.

Some of its basic concepts and values, however, were assimilated by Walt

Whitman, were later echoed in writings by Henry James and other major

American authors, and continue to re-emerge, in both liberal and radical

modes, in latter-day America. The voice of Thoreau, for example, however

distorted, can be recognized still in some doctrines of the counterculture of the

1960s and later.

See periods of American literature, and refer to F. O. Matthiessen, American

Renaissance (1941); the anthology edited, together with commentary, by

Perry Miller, The Transcendentalists (1950); Joel Porte, Emerson and Thoreau:

Transcendentalists in Conflict (1966); Lawrence Buell, Literary Transcendentalism:

Style and Vision in the American Renaissance (1973). For a collection of writings

on transcendentalism, see Perry Miller, ed., Transcendentalists: An Anthology

(1971), and Joel Myerson, ed., Transcendentalism: A Reader (2000). See also

Encyclopedia of Transcendentalism, ed. Wesley T. Mott (1996).

transformational linguistics: 199.

transformational-generative grammar: 199.

travesty: 42.

trickster: 10.

trimeter (tr



eter): 220.

triple rhyme: 348.

triplet: 374 .

trochaic (troka



k): 219.

trope (figurative) (trop): 133.

trope (liturgical): 224.

troubadour: 67.

TROUBADOUR 411

truth (in fiction): 131.

type (in biblical interpretation): 182.

type (in characters): 48.

typological interpretation: 182.

412 TRUTH

ubi sunt motif (oo

besunt motef

): 229.

understatement: 169.

unintrusive (narrator): 301.

unities, three: 403.

unity of action: 295.

university novel: 3.

unreliable narrator: 304.

unstable irony: 187.

utopias and dystopias: The term utopia designates the class of fictional writings

that represent an ideal, nonexistent political and social way of life. It derives

from Utopia (1515–16), a book written in Latin by the Renaissance humanist

Sir Thomas More, which describes a perfect commonwealth; More formed his

title by conflating the Greek words “eutopia” (good place) and “outopia” (no

place). The first and greatest instance of the literary type was Plato’s Republic

(later fourth century BC), which sets forth, in dialogue, the eternal Idea, or

Form, of a perfect commonwealth that can at best be merely approximated by

political organizations in the actual world. Most of the later utopias, like that of

Sir Thomas More, represent their ideal state in the fiction of a distant country

reached by a venturesome traveler. There have been many utopias written since

More gave impetus to the genre, some as mere Arcadian dreams, others

intended as blueprints for social and technological improvements in the actual

world. They include Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun (1623), Francis

Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888),

William Morris’ News from Nowhere (1891), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland

(1915), and James Hilton’s Lost Horizon (1934).

The utopia can be distinguished from literary representations of imaginary

places which, because they are either inordinately superior to the present

world or manifest exaggerated versions of some of its unsavory aspects, serve

primarily as vehicles for satire on contemporary human life and society;

notable examples are the fourth book of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and

Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872). Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759) presents the

“Happy Valley,” which functions as a gentle satire on humanity’s stubborn

but hopeless dream of a utopia. Not only does Rasselas discover that no

mode of life available in this world guarantees happiness; he also realizes that

the

utopian satisfaction of all human wishes in the Happy Valley merely

UTOPIAS AND DYSTOPIAS 413

replaces the unhappiness of frustrated desires with the unhappiness of bore-

dom; see chapters 1–3. The term dystopia (“bad place”) has come to be

applied to works of fiction, including science fiction, that represent a very

unpleasant imaginary world in which ominous tendencies of our present

social, political, and technological order are projected into a disastrous future

culmination. Examples are Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George

Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s

Tale (1986). Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), set in a bleak, post-

nuclear landscape, represents a dystopian extreme. Ursula K. Le Guin’s The

Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974) contains both utopian and dystopian

scenarios.

For utopias and dystopias based on future developments in science and

technology, see science fiction. Refer to Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia

(1934); Chad Walsh, From Utopia to Nightmare (1962); Nell Eurich, Science in

Utopia (1967); Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the

Western World (1979). For collections of Utopian writings, see Utopian Literature:

A Selection, ed. J. W. Johnson (1968), and The Utopia Reader, eds. Gregory

Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent (1999). Francis Bartkowski has analyzed

Feminist Utopias (1989), from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915) to the

present.

414 UTOPIAS AND DYSTOPIAS

variorum edition (var eor

um): 36.

Varronian satire (varo

nian): 353.

varsity novel: 3.

vehicle (of a metaphor): 133; 112, 213.

vellum: 35.

verbal irony: 186.

verbal meaning: 180.

verisimilitude (ver



tood): 403.

vers de société (ver

desosyata

): 193.

vers libre (ver le

br): 145.

verse: 218.

verse paragraph: 33.

versification: 318.

versions (of a text): 401.

verso (vur

so): 37.

Vice (the character): 225.

Victorian and Victorianism: In its value-neutral use, “Victorian” simply iden-

tifies the historical era in England roughly coincident with the reign of Queen

Victoria, 1837–1901. (See Victorian period,underperiods of English literature.) It was

a time of rapid and wrenching economic and social changes that had no parallel

in earlier history—changes that made small-scale England, in the course of the

nineteenth century, the leading industrial power, with an empire that occupied

more than a quarter of the earth’s surface. The pace and depth of such develop-

ments, while they fostered a mood of nationalist pride and optimism about

future progress, also produced social stresses, class conflicts, and widespread anxi-

ety about the ability of the nation and the individual to cope, socially, politically,

and psychologically, with the cumulative problems of the age. England was the

first nation to exploit the technological possibilities of steam power and steel, but

VICTORIAN AND VICTORIANISM 415

its unregulated industrializatio n, while it produced great wealth for an expanding

middle class, led also to the deterioration of rural England, a mushroom growth

of often shoddy urbanization, and massive poverty concentrated in slum neigh-

borhoods. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution (On the Origin of Species was

published in 1859), together with the extension into all intellectual areas of

positivism (the view that all valid knowledge must be based on the methods

of empirical investigation established by the natural sciences), engendered sectar-

ian controversy, doubts about the truth of religious beliefs, and in some instances

a reversion to strict biblical fundamentalism. Contributing to the social and

politicalunrestwaswhatwaslabeled“the woman question”; that is, the early

feminist agitation for equal status and rights.

The Victorian age, for all its conflicts and anxieties, was one of immense,

variegated, and often self-critical intellectual and literary activities. In our time,

the term “Victorian,” and still more Victorianism ,isfrequentlyusedina

derogatory way, to connote narrow-mindedness, sexual priggishness, the deter-

mination to maintain feminine “innocence” (that is, sexual ignorance), and an

emphasis on social respectability. Such views have a valid basis in attitudes and

values expressed (and sometimes exemplified) by many members of the expand-

ing middle class, with its roots in Puritanism and its insecurity about its newly

won status. Later criticism of such Victorian attitudes, however, merely echo the

vigorous attacks and devastating ridicule mounted against prevailing beliefs and

attitudes by a number of thinkers and literary authors in the Victorian age itself.

Refer to Jerome Buckley, The Victorian Temper (1951); W. E. Houghton, The

Victorian Frame of Mind (1957); R. D. Altick, Victorian People and Ideas: A Companion

for the Modern Reader of Victorian Literature (1974); G. M. Young, Victorian England:

Portrait of an Age (republished 1977); Antoinette Burton, ed., Politics and Empire in

Victorian Britain: A Reader (2001); A. N. Wilson, The Victorians (2002). Neo-

Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century (2011) Ann Heilmann and

Mark Llewellyn, eds., includes discussions of recent literary and cinematic interest

in the Victorian era. On Victorian attitudes to love and sexuality, see Peter Gay, The

Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud (Vol. 1, Education of the Senses, 1984; Vol. 2,

The Tender Passion, 1986); and on the undercover aspect of Victorian sexual life,

Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians (republished 1974).

Victorian Period: 284.

Victorianism: 416.

villain (in a plot): 294.

villanelle (v



anel

): 376.

voice (in a literary work): 287.

vraisemblable (vra

somblä

bl): 398.

416 VICTORIAN PERIOD

whodunits: 69.

wilderness romance: 101.

wit, humor, and the comic: At present both “wit” and “humor” designate

species of the comic; that is, any element in a work of literature, whether a

character, event, or utterance, which is designed to amuse or to excite mirth

in the reader or audience. The words “wit” and “humor,” however, had a

variety of meanings in earlier literary criticism, and a brief comment on their

history will help to clarify the differences between them in present usage.

The term “wit” once signified the human faculty of intelligence, inven-

tiveness, and mental acuity, a sense it still retains in the term “half-wit.” In the

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it came to be used also for ingenuity in

literary invention, and especially for the ability to develop brilliant, surprising,

and paradoxical figures of speech; hence “wit” was often applied to the figu-

rative language in what we now call metaphysical poetry. And in the eighteenth

century there were attempts to distinguish the false wit of Abraham Cowley

and other metaphysical stylists, who were said to aim at a merely superficial

dazzlement, and “true wit,” regarded as the apt rephrasing of truths whose

enduring validity is attested by the fact that they are universal commonplaces.

Thus Alexander Pope defined “true wit” in his Essay on Criticism (1711) as

“What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.” See neoclassic.

The most common present use of the term derives from its seventeenth-

century application to a brilliant and paradoxical style. Wit, that is, now

denotes a kind of verbal expression which is brief, deft, and intentionally

contrived to produce a shock of comic surprise; a typical form is that of the

epigram. The surprise is usually the result of a connection or distinction

between words or concepts which frustrates the listener’s expectation, only

to satisfy it in an unexpected way. Philip Guedalla wittily said: “History

repeats itself. Historians repeat each other.” Thus the trite comment about

history turns out to be unexpectedly appropriate, with an unlooked-for turn

of meaning, to the writers of history as well. The film actress Mae West once

remarked: “Too much of a good thing can be—wonderful.” The resulting

laughter, in a famous phrase of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant,

arises

“from

the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into noth-

ing”; it might be more precise to say, however, “from the sudden satisfaction

of an expectation, but in a way we did not expect.”

Mae West’sremarkiswhatthepsychoanalyst Sigmund Freud called “ha rmless

wit,” which evokes a laugh or smile that is without malice. What Freud distin-

guished as “tendency wit,” on the other hand, is aggressive: it is a derisive

and derogatory turn of phrase, directing the laugh at a particular person or butt.

“Mr . James Payn,” in Oscar Wilde’s barbed comment on a novelist of the

1890s, “hunts down the obvious with the enthusiasm of a short-sighted

WIT, HUMOR, AND THE COMIC 417

detective. As one turns over the pages, the suspense of the author becomes

almost unbearable.”

Repartee is a term taken from fencing to signify a contest of wit, in

which each person tries to cap the remark of the other, or to turn it to his

or her own advantage. Attacking his opponent Disraeli in Parliament,

Gladstone remarked that “the honorable gentleman will either end on the

gallows or die of some loathsome disease.” To which Disraeli rejoined:

“That depends on whether I embrace the honorable gentleman’s principles

or his mistresses.” Restoration comedies often included episodes of sustained

repartee; a classic example is the give-and-take in the discussion of their

coming marriage by the witty lovers Mirabel and Millamant in William

Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700), Act IV.

“Humor” is a term that goes back to the ancient theory that the particular

mixture of the four humours determines each type of personality, and from the

derivative application of the term “humorous” to one of the comically eccen-

tric characters in the Elizabethan comedy of humours. As we now use the word,

humor may be ascribed either to a comic utterance or to a comic appearance

or mode of behavior. In a useful distinction between the two terms, a humor-

ous utterance may be said to differ from a witty utterance in one or both of

two ways: (1) wit, as we saw, is always intended by the speaker to be comic,

but many utterances that we find comically humorous are intended by the

speakers themselves to be serious; and (2) a humorous saying is not cast in

the neatly epigrammatic form of a witty saying. For example, the chatter of

the old Nurse in Shakespeare ’s Romeo and Juliet is verbose, and humorous to

the audience, but not to the speaker; similarly, the discussion of the mode of

life of the goldfish in Central Park by the inarticulate and irascible taxi driver

in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) is unintentionally, but richly

humorous, and is not cast in the form of a witty turn of phrase.

More important still is the difference that wit refers only to the spoken or

written word, while humor has a much broader range of reference. We find

humor, for example, in the way Charlie Chaplin looks, dresses, and acts, and

also in the sometimes wordless cartoons in The New Yorker. In a thoroughly

humorous situation, the sources of the fun may be complex. In Act III, Scene

iv of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Malvolio’s appearance and actions, and his

utterances as well, are humorous, but all despite his own very solemn inten-

tions; and our comic enjoyment is increased by our knowledge of the sup-

pressed hilarity of the plotters who are hidden auditors onstage. The

greatness of a comic creation like Shakespeare’s Falstaff is that he exploits the

full gamut of comic possibilities. Falstaff is humorous in the way he looks and

in what he does; what he says is sometimes witty and at most other times

humorous; while his actions and speech are sometimes unintentionally

humorous, sometimes intentionally humorous, and not infrequently—as in

his whimsical account to his skeptical auditors of how heroically he bore him-

self in the highway robbery, in the second act of Henry IV, Part 1—they are

humorous even beyond his intention.

418 WIT, HUMOR, AND THE COMIC

One other point should be made about humor and the comic. In normal

use, the term “humor” refers to what is purely comic: it evokes, as it is some-

times said, sympathetic laughter, or else laughter which is an end in itself.

If we extend Freud’s distinction between harmless and tendency wit, we can

say that humor is a “harmless” form of the comic. There is, however, another

mode of the comic that might be called “tendency comedy,” in which we are

made to laugh at a person not merely because he is ridiculous but because he

is being ridiculed—the laughter is derisive, with some element of contempt or

malice, and serves as a weapon against its subject. Tendency comedy and ten-

dency wit, rather than humor, are among the devices that a writer most

exploits in satire, the literary art of derogating by deriding a subject.

On the alternative use of the term “comic” to define the formal features

of a type of dramatic or narrative plot, see comedy; on the form of humor-

in-horror in some present-day literature, see black humor. For diverse theories

of wit, humor, and the comic, together with copious examples, refer to

Sigmund Freud, Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious (1916); Max Eastman,

Enjoyment of Laughter (1936); Stuart M. Tave, The Amiable Humorist (1960);

Jerry Palmer, Taking Humor Seriously (1994).

women’s studies: 129.

wrenched accent: 218.

WRENCHED ACCENT 419

zeugma (zoog

ma): 347.

420 ZEUGMA

Index of Authors

Abrams, M. H., The Mirror and the Lamp

131, 141, 150, 216; Natural

Supernaturalism 31, 102.

Adams, James Eli, Dandies and Desert Saints

148.

Addison, Joseph, Tatler 116; Spectator 116,

384.

Adorno, Theodor, 206.

Albee, Edward, 2.

Allingham, Margery, 69.

Allston, Washington, 261.

Althusser, Louis, 207–209, 244, 306.

Apollinaire, Guillaume, Calligrammes 63.

Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 183.

Aristophanes, 57; The Clouds 3.

Aristotle, 110, 213, 341, 364; Poetics 70,

150, 174–75, 295–96, 405–407;

Rhetoric 286.

Arnold, Matthew, 145, 164, 247;

“Dover Beach” 118; “The Study of

Poetry” 404; “Thyrsis: A Monody”

104.

Auden, W. H., 12, 354; “In Memory of

W. B. Yeats” 104; “September 1,

1939” 262.

Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis 86.

Augustine, Saint, Confessions 30.

Austen, Jane, 351; Emma 301; Northanger

Abbey 41, 152; Pride and Prejudice 49,

186; Sense and Sensibility 361.

Austin, John, How to Do Things with Words

371–73.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X 30.

Babbitt, Irving, 164.

Bacon, Francis, 340; Essays 116.

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 87–89, 245, 311;

“Discourse in the Novel” 88;

Freudianism: A Marxist Critique 287;

Problems of Dostoyevsky’

s Poetics 88;

Rabelais

and His World 88, 157.

Baraka, Imamu Amiri (LeRoi Jones), 32.

Barth, John, 2.

Barthes, Roland, 22, 311, 331, 358; “The

Death of the Author” 21, 381;

Mythologies 75; The Pleasure of the Text

382, 399; S/Z 398.

Bate, Jonathan, Romantic Ecology 102.

Bate, Walter Jackson, The Burden of the Past

and the English Poet 177.

Baudelaire, Charles, 6, 79, 395; Les fleurs

du mal 171.

Baumgarten, Alexander, 5; Aesthetica 5.

Baym, Nina, Woman’s Fiction 127.

Beardsley, Monroe C., 7; “The Intentional

Fallacy” 177.

Beaumont, Francis, Philaster 409.

Beckett, Samuel, 2; Malone Dies 2; The

Unnamable 2, 187; Waiting for Godot

2, 187.

421

✵

Beckford, William, Vathek 152.

Belloc, Hilaire, 325.

Benjamin, Walter, 206; The Work of Age in

the Age of Mechanical Reproduction 207.

Beowulf 169.

Berry, Wendell, The Unsettling of America

100.

Bertram, William, Travels 98.

Betti, Emilio, 179.

Bialostosky, Don, 89.

Bishop, Morris, 193.

Black, Max, “Metaphor” 214.

Blackmur, R. P., Form and Value in Modern

Poetry 141.

Blake, William, 19, 110, 145, 190, 231;

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 154;

“The Sick Rose” 392–93; “The

Tyger” 219.

Bloom, Harold, 136, 176–77, 323.

Bloomfield, Leonard, 195.

Blumenberg, Hans, Work on Myth 231.

Bodkin, Maud, Archetypal Patterns in

Poetry 18.

Boileau, Nicholas Despréaux, 42.

Booth, Wayne C., 288; The Rhetoric of

Fiction 343, A Rhetoric of Irony 187.

Boswell, James, Life of Samuel Johnson 30,

383.

Bowdler, Reverend Thomas, Family

Shakespeare 40.

Bowers, Fredson, 399.

Bradstreet, Anne, 273.

Brecht, Bertolt, 8, 107, 112, 120, 206;

Threepenny Opera 42.

Breton, André, Manifesto on Surrealism 390.

Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre 127.

Brooks, Cleanth, 44; Understanding Poetry

and Understanding Fiction 242.

Brown, Charles Brockden, 274.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 135.

Browning, Robert, 96, 264; “The Bishop

Orders His Tomb” 220; “One Word

More” 219; “Pied Piper” 118;

“Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister”

187.

Bryant, William Cullen, 274.

Bullough, Edward, 94.

Bunyan, John, The Pilgrim’s Progress 8, 9,

90; Grace

Abounding to the Chief of

Sinners 30.

Bürger, G. A., “Lenore” 26.

Burke, Edmund, Philosophical Enquiry into

the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and

Beautiful 388.

Burns, Robert, 133; “To a Mouse” 107.

Butler, Judith, 129, 148; Excitable Speech

372; Gender Trouble 328, 372.

Butler, Samuel, Hudibras 42, 95.

Byatt, A. S., Possession 41.

Byrom, John, 113.

Byron, Lord George Gordon, Childe

Harold 240; “The Destruction of

Sennacherib” 219; Don Juan 28, 188,

219, 220, 293, 347, 375–76.

Calvino, Italo, If on a winter’s night a traveler

304.

Camus, Albert, The Myth of Sisyphus 1.

Capellanus, Andreas, The Art of Courtly

Love 68.

Capote, Truman, In Cold Blood 257.

Carlyle, Thomas, 190, 319; Sartor Resartus

240.

Carroll, Joseph, Evolution and Literary

Theory 77.

Carroll, Lewis, 193, 354; Through the

Looking Glass 14.

Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring 99.

Chandler, Raymond, 69.

Chartier, Roger, 39.

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 160, 222; The

Canterbury Tales 349, 365; Legend of

Good Women 266; “Miller’s Tale” 122;

“The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” 10, 11; “The

Pardoner’s Tale” 11, 122, 139;

Troilus

and

Criseyde 68, 375.

Chekov, Anton, 140, 364.

Child, Francis J., English and Scottish

Popular Ballads 25.

Chomsky, Noam, 165–66, 195; Syntactic

Structures 199.

Chopin, Kate, 275.

Christie, Dame Agatha, 69.

Cixous, Hélène, 128.

Coleridge, Hartley, 41.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 113, 122–23,

132–33, 140–42, 231, 235, 239;

Biographia Literaria 71, 240; Christabel

20, 223, 270; “Dejection: An Ode” 263;

422 INDEX OF AUTHORS

“Frost at Midnight” 202; “Recollec-

tions of Love” 345; “The Rime of the

Ancient Mariner" 26, 213, 348; The

Statesman’s Manual 393.

Collins, Wilkie, The Moonstone 70.

Collins, William, “Ode on the Poetical

Character” 9; “Ode to Evening” 13, 263.

Cooper, James Fenimore, 274.

Copernicus, 339–40.

Cowley, Abraham, 263, 417.

Cowper, William, The Task 53.

Crabbe, George, The Village 269.

Crane, R. S., 141, 150, 175.

Crane, Stephen, 275.

Crashaw, Richard, 27; “Saint Mary

Magdalene” 61; “Wishes to His

Supposed Mistress” 374.

Culler, Jonathan, Structuralist Poetics 331,

381.

cummings, e. e., “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r”

64.

Curran, Stuart, Poetic Form and British

Romanticism 150.

Curtius, Ernst R., European Literature and

the Latin Middle Ages 229.

Dante (Alighieri), 68; Divine Comedy 90,

97, 111; Letter to Can Grande 90;

Paradiso 63, 393.

Darnton, Robert, The Kiss of Lamourette

37–38.

Darwin, Charles, 77, 416.

Davidson, Donald, “What Metaphors

Mean” 214.

de Beauvoir, Simone, 124–25; The Second

Sex 124.

de France, Marie, Lais 280.

de la Fayette, Madame, La Princesse de

Clèves 253.

de la Fontaine, Jean, 10.

Man, Paul, 5, 10, 83–84, 136, 195, 394;

Allegories of Reading 310.

De Quincey, Thomas, Confessions of an

English Opium Eater 27, 240; “On the

Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth” 59.

de Troyes, Chrétien, 50, 68.

de Vigny, Alfred, 189.

Defoe, Daniel, 282, 333; Moll Flanders 16,

253; Robinson Crusoe 253.

Denham, John, Cooper’s Hill 160–61.

Derrida, Jacques, 80–84, 132, 136, 306,

310; Of Grammatology 80; “Structure,

Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the

Human Sciences” 308; “White

Mythology” 216.

Descartes, René, 340.

Dickens, Charles, A Tale of Two Cities 256.

Dickinson, Emily, 275, 374–75.

Dilthey, Wilhelm, 164, 179–80.

Disraeli, Benjamin, 418.

Dollimore, Jonathan, Political Shakespeare

250.

Donne, John, 44, 216–17, 340; “The

Canonization” 96, 202; “Death, Be

Not Proud” 267; “The Flea” 61, 96;

Holy Sonnets 369; “A Valediction:

Forbidding Mourning” 61.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 64, 69.

Drayton, Michael, “Since there’s no help,

come let us kiss and part” 370.

Dryden, John, 8, 29, 71, 160–62, 299,

318; Absalom and Achitophel 8, 42, 354;

“Alexander’s Feast” 263;

“Anne

Killigrew” 263; Discourse

Concerning

Satire 185, 216; MacFlecknoe 352.

Dujardin, Edouard, Les Lauriers sont coupés

378.

Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 275.

Eagleton, Terry, 5, 208– 209; The Ideology

of the Aesthetic 5; Literary Theory: An

Introduction 107.

Eakins, Paul John, How Our Lives Become

Stories 31.

Edwards, Jonathan, 273.

Eichenbaum, Boris, 142.

Eisner, Will, A Contract with God, and