Define the following terms.
I
1. Old English period (the Anglo-Saxon period): The Old English 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.
2.Alliteration: Alliteration is the repetition of a speech sound in a sequence of nearby
words. The term is usually applied only to consonants, and only when the recurrent
sound begins a word or a stressed syllable within a word.
3.Prose: Prose is an inclusive term for all discourse, spoken or written, which is not
patterned into the lines either of metric verse or free verse.
4. Courtly love: It is 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.
5. Morality play: Morality plays are medieval allegorical plays in which personified
human qualities acted and disputed, mostly coming from the 15th century. They
developed into the interludes, from which it is not always possible to distinguish them,
and hence had a considerable influence on the development of Elizabethan drama.
6. Couplet: A couplet is a pair of rhymed lines that are equal in length.
7. Meter: Meter is the recurrence, in regular units, of a prominent feature in the
sequence of speech-sounds of a language.
8. Foot: 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. (2) Anapestic (the noun is
"anapest"): two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable. (3) Trochaic
(the noun is "trochee"): a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. (4)
Dactylic (the noun is "dactyl"): a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed
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 heptameter: seven feet octameter: eight feet
9. Scottish Chaucerians: The name is traditionally given to a very diverse group of
15th- and 16th- century Scottish writers who show some influence from Chaucer,
although the debt is now regarded as negligible or indirect in most cases.
10. Ballad (Popular ballad): Ballad is also known as the folk ballad or traditional
ballad. It is a song, transmitted orally, which tells a story. Ballads are thus the
narrative species of folk songs, which originate, and are communicated orally, among
illiterate or only partly literate people.
11. 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 language had become
recognizably "modem English' , that is, similar to the language we speak and write
today.
12. Anglo-Norman period: 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.
13. Arthurian legend: It is a group of tales (in several languages) that developed in
the Middle Ages concerning Arthur L, semi-historical king of the Britons and his
knights. The legend is a complex weaving of ancient Celtic mythology with later
traditions around a core of possible historical authenticity.
14. Romance: It is a literary genre popular in the Middle Ages (5th century to 15th
century), dealing, in verse or prose, with legendary, supernatural, or amorous subjects
and characters. The name refers to Romance languages and originally denoted any
lengthy composition in one of those languages. Later the term was applied to tales
specifically concerned with knights, chivalry, and courtly love. The romance and the
epic are similar forms, but epics tend to be longer and less concerned with courtly
love. Romances were written by court musicians, clerics, scribes, and aristocrats for
the entertainment and moral edification of the nobility.
Popular subjects for
romances included the Macedonian King Alexander the Great, King Arthur of Britain
and the Knights of the Round Table, and the Frankish Emperor Charlemagne. Later
prose and verse narratives, particularly those in the 19th-century romantic tradition,
are also referred to as romances; set in distant or mythological places and times,
like most romances they stress adventure and supernatural elements.
II.
1. 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, both in Italy and other
countries of western Europe, through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In this
period the European arts of painting, sculpture, architecture, 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. It also has been described as the birth of the modem 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. The
innovations during this period were: (1) The new learning. Renaissance scholars
revived the knowledge of the Greek language, discovered and disseminated 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. (2) The new
religion. The reformation led by Martin Luther was a successful heresy which struck
at the very foundations of institutionalism of the Roman Catholic Church. (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'frustrated by the unexpected barrier of a new
continent. (4) The new cosmos. In 1543 Copernicus published his new hypothesis.
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.
2. Elizabethan period (Elizabethan age): Strictly speaking, it refers to 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,
maritime 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 of Sir
Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare, Sir Walter
Raleigh, Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, and many other extraordinary writers of prose
and of dramatic, lyric, and narrative poetry.
3. Drama: The form of composition designed for performance in the theater, in
which actors take the roles of the characters, perform the indicated action, 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
bland verse. Almost all the heroic dramas of the English Restoration Period,
however,
were
written
in heroic
couplets (iambic pentameter lines
rhyming 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.
4. Jacobean age: The reign of James I (in Latin, "Jacobus") (1603 ~ 1625),
which followed that of Queen Elizabeth. This was the period in prose writings of
Francis Bacon, John Donne's sermons, Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy,
and the King Jame's translation of the Bible. It was also the time of Shakespeare's
greatest tragedies and tragicomedies, and of major writings by other notable poets and
playwrights including John Donne, Ben Jonson, Michael Drayton, Lady Mary Wroth,
Sir Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, John Webster, George Chapman, Thomas
Middleton, Philip Massinger, and Elizabeth Cary, whose notable biblical drama The
Tragedy of Mariam, the Faire Queene of Jewry was the first long play by an
Englishwoman to be published.
5. Sonnet: A lyric poem consisting of a single stanza of fourteen iambic pentameter
lines linked by an intricate rhyme scheme. 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 . (2) The Earl of Surrey and other
English experimenters in the sixteenth century also developed a stanza form called the
English sonnet, or else the Shakespearean sonnet. This sonnet falls into three
quatrains and a concluding couplet: abab cdcd efef gg. There was one notable
variant, the Spenserian sonnet, in which Edmund Spenser linked each quatrain to
the next by a continuing rhyme: abab bcbc cdcd ee.
6. 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 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, or article, is relatively impersonal: the author
writes as an authority, or at least as highly knowledgeable, and expounds the subject
in an orderly way. 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.
7. 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.
8. Eclogue: It is a term for a short pastoral poem. The term eclogue, bucolic, and
idyll have been widely used as synonyms, except that grammarians have made an
effort to confine "eclogue" to poems in dialogue form.
9. Hymn: 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. In current usage it denotes a song
that celebrates God or expresses religious feelings and is intended primarily to be
sung as part of a religious service.
10. Spenserian stanza: It is a longer form devised by Edmund Spenser for The
Faerie Queene (1590- 1996)—nine lines, in which the first eight lines are iambic
pentameter and the last iambic hexameter, rhyming ababbcbcc.
11. Miracle play: 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" denotes only dramas based on saints' lives, and the term "mystery
play" is applied only to dramas based on the Bible.
12. Interlude: 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 dramas were preformed 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 longer play.
13 Euphuism: Euphuism takes its name from the moralistic prose romance Euphues
written by John Lyly in 1578. The style is sententious (that is, full of moral maxims),
relies persistently 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 habits of legendary animals.
14. Revenge tragedy: Revenge tragedy is a dramatic genre that flourished in the late
Elizabethan and Jacobean period, sometimes known as "the tragedy of blood".
Common ingredients include: the hero's quest for vengeance, often at the prompting
of the ghost of a murdered kinsman or loved one; scenes of real or feigned insanity; a
play-within-a-play; scenes in graveyards, severed limbs, scenes of carnage and
mutilation, etc. in revenge tragedy violence was not reported but took place on stage.
15. 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.
16. Dirge: Dirge is a versified expression of grief on the occasion of a particular
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.
17. Farce: Farce is a type of comedy designed to provoke the audience to simple,
hearty laughter—"belly laughs," in the parlance of the theater, lo do so it commonly
employs. highly exaggerated or caricatured types of characters, puts them into
improbable and ludicrous situations, and makes free use of sexual mix-ups, broad
verbal humor, and physical busde and horseplay. Farce was a component in the comic
episodes in medieval miracle plays. In the English drama, farce is usually an episode
in a more complex form of comedy.
18. 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) .
19. Tragicomedy:
A
type
of Elizabethan
and
Jacobean
drama
which intermingled both the standard characters and subject matter and the
standard plot-forms of tragedy and comedy.
Tragicomedy represented a serious
action which threatened a tragic disaster to the protagonist, yet, by an abrupt reversal
of circumstance, turned out happily. 20. History play: 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 and Antony and Cleopatra .
21. Caroline age: The reign of Charles I (1625 ~ 1649); 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 age also of the
religious poet George Herbert and of the prose writers Robert Burton and Sir Thomas
Browne.
III.
1. Elegy: In Greek and Roman times, the term elegy was used to refer to any poem
composed in elegiac meter. Since the 17th century, elegy has typically been used to
refer to reflective poems that lament the loss of something or someone, or loss or
death more generally, although in Elizabethan times it was also used to refer to certain
love poems. Elegies written in English frequently take the form of the pastoral elegy.
2. Pamphlet: Originally a pamphlet was a sort of treatise or tract. It then came to
mean a short work written on a topical subject on which an author feels
strongly.
Many outstanding writers have used the pamphlet to express
vigorous
political or religious views.
3. Assonance: Assonance is the repetition of identical or similar vowels— especially
in stressed syllables—in a sequence of nearby words.
4. Stanza: A stanza 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 length of the component
lines.
5. Folktale: 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 which have been picked up and repeatedly narrated by word of mouth
as well as in written form.
6. Hyperbole: It is bold overstatement, or the extravagant exaggeration of fact or
possibility.
7. Prose poems: Prose poems are densely compact, pronouncedly rhythmic, and
highly sonorous compositions which are written as a continuous sequence of
sentences without line breaks.
8. Conceit: From the Italian concetto (meaning idea or concept), it refers to an
unusually far-fetched or elaborate metaphor or simile presenting a surprisingly apt
parallel between two apparently dissimilar things or feelings. Poetic conceits are
prominent in Elizabethan love sonnets and metaphysical poetry. Conceits often
employ the devices of hyperbole, paradox and oxymoron.
9. Pastoral: The originator of the pastoral was the Greek poet Theocritus, who in the
third century B. C. wrote poems representing the life of Sicilian shepherds. ( Pastor is
Latin for " shepherd.") It is a deliberately conventional poem expressing an urban
poet's nostalgic image of the peace and simplicity of the life of shepherds and other
rural folk in an idealized natural setting.
10. Diction: The term diction signifies the types of words, phrases, and sentence
structures, and sometimes also of 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.
11. Epithalamion: Epithalamion, or in the Latin form epithalamium, is a poem
written to celebrate a marriage. The term in Greek means ' at the bridal chamber,"
since the verses were originally written 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.
12. Dream vision (Dream allegory): It is a mode of narrative 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.
13. Metaphysical poetry: A term that can be applied to any poetry that deals with
philosophical or spiritual matters but that is generally limited to works written by a
specific group of 17th century poets who wrote in the manner of the poet John Donne.
The metaphysical poets are linked by style and modes of poetic organization.
Common elements include the following: (1) an analytical approach to subject matter;
(2) colloquial language; (3) rhythmic patterns that are often rough or irregular, and (4)
the metaphysical conceit, a figurative device used to capture thought and emotion as
accurately as possible.
14. Fable: A fable is also called an apologue. It is a short narrative, in prose or verse,
which exemplifies an abstract moral thesis or principle of human behavior; usually, at
its conclusion, either the narrator or one of the characters states the moral in the form
of an epigram.
15. Parable: 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 narrator
is trying to bring home to his audience. The parable was one of Jesus' favorite devices
as a teacher.
16 Masques (or Masks): The masque was inaugurated in Renaissance Italy and
flourished in England during the reigns of Elizabeth I , James I , and Charles I . It was
an elaborate form of court entertainment that combined poetic drama, music, song,
dance, splendid costuming, 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.
IV.
1. Three unities: Principles of dramatic structure proposed by critics and dramatists
of the 16th and the 17th centuries, claiming the authority of Aristotle's Poetics. The
three unities are the unity of action (all the action the work must occur within one
continuous plot without extraneous plot) , the unity of time (all the action of the work
must occur within 24 hours, or one whole day) , and the unity of place (all the action
of the work must occur in one place or city) .
2. Didactic literature: Literary works that are designed to expound a branch of
knowledge, or else to embody, in imaginative or fictional form, a moral, religious,
or philosophical doctrine or theme. Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism and Edmund
Spencer's The Faerie Queene are good examples of didactic poetry.
3. Satire: A literary art of diminishing or derogating a subject by making it ridiculous
and evoking toward it attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn, or indignation.
Satire uses laughter as a weapon, and against a butt that exists outside the work
itself. That butt may be an individual, or a type of person, a class, an institution, a
nation or even the entire human race (as in much of Jonathan Swift's Gullivers
Travels ) .
4. Mock epic: A poem employing the lofty style and the conventions of epic poetry to
describe a trivial or undignified series of events; thus a kind of satire that mocks its
subject by treating it in an inappropriately grandiose manner, usually at some length.
The outstanding examples in English literature are Alexander Pope's The Rape of the
Lock and Dunciad.
5. Farce: A type of low comedy that employs improbable or otherwise ridiculous
situations and mix-ups, slapsticks and horseplay, and crude and even bawdy dialogue.
It smacks the audience full-force in the face, aiming simply to entertain and evoke
guffaws from the audience.
6. Burlesque: A burlesque imitates the manner (the form and style) or else the subject
matter of a serious literary work or a literary genre, in verse or in prose, but makes the
imitation amusing by a ridiculous disparity between the manner and the matter. There
are two distinctions: high burlesque and low burlesque, the former referring to works
with an inappropriately heightened style for an inconsequential subject and the latter
to works in which a lofty subject is degraded by an inappropriately base style.
7. Picaresque novel: Derived from the Spanish word picara, meaning " rogue" or
"rascal", the term generally refers to a basically realistic and often satiric work of
fiction chronicling the career of an engaging, lower-class rogue-hero, who takes to the
road for a series of loose, episodic adventures, sometimes in the company of a
sidekick. A well-known example of the picaresque novel is Cervantes' Don Quixote
(1605). Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is another classic
example.
8. Melodrama: Originally, any drama accompanied by music which was used to
enhance the emotional impact and mood of the performance. The term derived from
the Greek melos, which means " song". In early nineteenth-century London,
melodramas became increasingly popular, which came to emphasize the conflict
between pure good and evil. Its heroes and heroines were inevitably completely moral
and upright, but terrorized, harassed, or otherwise troubled by thoroughly despicable
villains. The chief concern of melodrama was to elicit the desired emotional response
from the audience.
9. Persona: The assumed identity or fictional "I" (literally a "mask") assumed by a
writer in a literary work; thus the speaker in a lyric poem, or the narrator in a fictional
narrative. Although the persona often serves as the "voice" of the writer, it
nonetheless should not be confused with the writer, for the persona may not
accurately reflect the writer's personal opinions, feelings, or perspectives on a subject.
10. 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, amatory, elegiac,
meditative, complimentary, anecdotal, or most often satiric.
11. Gothic novel: An alternative term is Gothic romance. It is a story of terror and
suspense, usually set in a gloomy old casde or monastery. Following the appearance
of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto ( 1764), the Gothic novel flourished in
Britain from the 1790s to the 1820s, dominated by Ann Radcliffe, whose The
Mysteries of Udolpho had many imitators.
12 Graveyard school of poetry: It refers to a group of eighteen-century English
poets who emphasized subjectivity, mystery, and melancholy. Death, mortality
( immortality), and gloom were frequent subjects or elements of their meditative
poems, which were often actually set in graveyards. Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in
a Country Churchyard" is the most famous example.
13 Neoclassicism: A style of Western literature that flourished from the
mid-seventeenth century until the end of the eighteenth century and the rise of
Romanticism. The neoclassicists looked to the great classical writers for inspiration
and guidance, considering them to have mastered the noblest literary forms, tragic
epic and the epic. Neoclassical writers shared several beliefs. They believed that
literature should both instruct and delight, and the proper subject of art was humanity.
Neoclassicism stressed rules, reason, harmony, balance, restraint, decorum, order,
serenity, realism, and form—above all, an appeal to the intellect rather than emotion.
The Restoration in 1660 marked the beginning of the Neoclassical Period in England,
whose writers included John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, etc.
14. Fiction: 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 in fact happened.
In a narrow sense, however, fiction denotes only narratives that are written in prose
(the novel and the short story).
15. Antihero: A protagonist in a modem work who does not exhibit the qualities of
the traditional hero. Instead of being a grand and admirable figure—brave, honest,
and magnanimous, for example:—an antihero is all too ordinary and may even be
petty or downright dishonest. The use of nonheroic protagonist occurs as early
as the picaresque novel of the sixteenth century, and the heroine of Defoe's Moll
Flanders is a thief and a prostitute.
16. Foreshadowing: The use of hints or clues in a narrative to suggest what will
happen later. Writlers use foreshadowing to create interest and to build suspense.
Sometimes foreshadowing also prepares the reader for the ending of the story.