The routledge dictionary of literary terms

x List of terms Dộnouement Deviation Dialogic structure Diction Diffộrance Difference Differend Dirge Disbelief Discourse Dissemination Dissociation of sensibility Documentary Dominant Double irony Drama Dramatic irony Ecocriticism ẫcriture Effect Eiron Elegy Emblem Epic Epic theatre Epistle Essay Essentialism Ethical criticism Euphony Eurocentrism Evaluation Existentialism Explication Expressionism Fable Fabula Fabulation Fancy Fantastic Farce Feeling Feminist criticism Fiction Figure Foot 52 52 52 54 54 55 56 57 57 57 61 62 63 63 63 63 64 65 66 66 67 67 68 68 70 72 72 73 74 75 75 77 78 80 80 82 82 82 82 82 84 85 85 88 90 90 Foregrounding Form Formalism Free verse Gender Generative poetics Genre Globalization Gothic Grammar Grotesque Hegemony Heresy of paraphrase Hermeneutics Hero Heroic couplet Historical novel Historicism Homophony Humanism Humours Hybridity Hyperbole Ideology Illocutionary act Image Imagination Imagism Imitation Implied author Intention Interior monologue Interpretant Interpretation Intertextuality Irony Katharsis Kinetic Lament Language Lexis Lisible Literary mode of production Literature Logocentrism Lyric 90 91 93 94 96 97 97 98 99 101 101 102 103 103 105 107 107 108 110 110 111 112 113 114 115 115 116 118 120 120 120 121 121 121 121 123 125 125 126 126 128 128 128 129 131 132 List of terms xi Magical realism Mannerism Manners Marxist criticism Mask Metafiction Metaphor Metaphysical Metre Mimesis Mirror Stage, the Mock-epic Modernism Monody Motif Myth Mythos Narrative Narrative structure Narratology Nationalism and ethnicity studies Naturalism Nộgritude Neo-Aristotelianism Neo-classicism Neo-Platonism New criticism Novel Objective correlative Obscurity Ode Onomatopoeia Oral composition Organic Orientalism Originality Ostranenie Other, the Paradox Paraphrase Parody Pastiche Pastoral Pathetic fallacy Performativity Peripeteia 134 135 136 136 138 138 138 140 141 143 143 144 145 146 146 146 147 148 150 151 152 154 154 155 155 155 155 157 160 160 160 162 162 162 162 164 164 164 166 166 166 167 168 169 169 170 Persona Phallologocentrism Phenomenology Picaresque Plagiarism Platonism Pleasure Plot Pluralism Poetic diction Poetic licence Poetics Poetry Point of view Polyphony Polysemy Pornography Postcolonialism Postmodernism Post-structuralism Practical criticism Presence Prose Protagonist Psychogogia Psychology and psychoanalysis Queer theory Reader Realism Reason Reception Refrain Refunctioning Representation Response Revisionary writing Rhetoric Rhizome Rhyme Rhythm Ritual Romance Romanticism Satire Scansion Scheme 170 171 172 174 175 175 176 177 178 178 178 179 181 182 182 182 182 183 185 187 188 188 189 190 190 190 195 196 198 200 200 200 201 202 202 202 204 205 207 208 208 208 209 211 212 212 xii List of terms Scriptible Semiotics Sensibility Sexuality Short fiction Sign Simile Sincerity Skaz Society Soliloquy Sonnet Sound Speech Speech act Stasis Story Stream of consciousness Stress Structuralism Structure Style Subaltern Subject Surfiction Surrealism Suspension of disbelief Symbol Synonym Syntax 212 212 214 216 217 218 218 219 220 220 221 222 223 224 224 224 224 224 225 225 227 228 230 231 231 231 232 232 233 233 Syuzhet Taste Technique Tenor Tension Text Texture Theme Threnody Topos Tradition Tragedy Translations Travesty Typicality Uncanny, the Undecidability Value Variation Vehicle Verbal irony Verisimilitude Vers libre Verse Verse epistle Voice Wit Womanist Writing 235 236 236 236 236 237 238 239 240 240 240 241 243 244 244 245 246 248 248 249 249 249 249 249 249 250 251 252 253 A Absurd The theatre of the absurd was a term, derived from Camus and popularized by Martin Esslins book The Theatre of the Absurd (1961), applied to a group of dramatists whose work emerged during the early 1950s (though Becketts Waiting for Godot and Ionescos The Bald Prima Donna were actually written in the late 1940s). In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) Camus defined the absurd as the tension which emerges from the individuals determination to discover purpose and order in a world which steadfastly refuses to evidence either. To writers like Ionesco and Beckett this paradox leaves human actions, aspirations and emotions merely ironical. The redeeming message no longer comes from God but is delivered by a deaf mute to a collection of empty chairs (The Chairs, 1952); human qualities, such as perseverance and courage, no longer function except as derisory comments on the individuals impotence (Happy Days, 1961); basic instincts and responses, the motor forces of the individual, become the source of misery (Act Without Words, 1957). Camus himself could see a limited transcendence in the ability to recognize and even exalt in the absurd (The Outsider, 1942) or in the minimal consolation of stoicism (Cross Purpose, 1944). But he came to feel that absurdity implied a world which appeared to sanction Nazi brutality as easily as it did individual acts of violence. From an examination of the nature of absurdity, therefore, he moved towards liberal humanism: The end of the movement of absurdity, of rebellion, etc. . . . is compassion . . . that is to say, in the last analysis, love. For writers like Beckett and Ionesco such a dialectical shift was simply faith. For to the absurd dramatist it is axiomatic that humans live in an entropic world in which communication is impossible and illusion preferred to reality. The individual has no genuine scope for action (Hamm sits lame and blind in Endgame, 1958; Winnie is buried to the neck in sand in Happy Days; the protagonist of Ionescos The New Tenant (written 1953, produced 1957) is submerged beneath proliferating furniture); individuals are the victims of their metaphysical situation. Logically, the plays abandon linear plot, plausible character development and rational language. In contrast to Camuss work their style directly reflects their subject. The term absurd drama, applied by Esslin to dramatists as diverse as Beckett, Ionesco, Adamov, Genet, Arrabal and Simpson, is something of a blunt weapon. Esslin had a disturbing if understandable tendency to trace the origins of the absurd in an incredible array of writers some of whom do not properly belong in a theatre which is convinced of the unbridgeable gulf between aspiration and fulfilment, the impossibility of communication or the futility of human relationships. In other words he is not always completely scrupulous in distinguishing between style and content. In his revised edition of his book, however, he has shown a commendable desire to underline the deficiencies of a term which, while proving a useful means of approaching dramatists intent on forging new drama, was never intended as a substitute for stringent analysis of the work of individual writers. 2 Action See Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (2004); J. L. Styan, Modern Drama in Theory and Practice: Symbolism, Surrealism and the Absurd (1983). CWEB Action Actor See DRAMA. See DRAMA. Aestheticism A sensibility, a philosophy of life and of art, and an English literary and artistic movement, culminating in the 1890s, with Oscar Wilde as its most extravagant exponent and Walter Pater its acknowledged philosopher. Other names commonly associated are those of the members of the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood, Swinburne, Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Andrew Lang, William Sharp, John Addington Symonds and the early Yeats. Aubrey Beardsley and J. McNeill Whistler are representative of the same trend in the fine arts. For the Aesthete whose creed is to be derived from Paters conclusion to The Renaissance (1873), reality amounts to sharp, fleeting impressions, images and sensations arrested by the creative individual from an experience in constant flux. The life of art, or the art of life, which the Aesthete wishes to equate, is ideally a form of purified ecstasy that flourishes only when removed from the roughness of the stereotyped world of actuality and the orthodoxy of philosophical systems and fixed points of view. The quest for unadulterated beauty is recommended as the finest occupation individuals can find for themselves during the indefinite reprieve from death which their lives are. Paters phrase, the love of art for its own sake, a version of the French lart pour lart, has served the Aesthetes as a slogan, implying the repudiation of the heresy of instruction (Baudelaires lhộrộsie de lenseignement). Art, Whistler wrote in his Ten oclock lecture (1885), is selfishly occupied with her own perfection only and has no desire to teach. As a fashionable fad, English Aestheticism was brought to a halt with the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1896. Aestheticism, as a stage in the development of Romanticism, is not limited to England. Profoundly a movement of reaction and protest, it reflects the growing apprehension of the nineteenth-century artist at the vulgarization of values and commercialization of art accompanying the rise of the middle class and the spread of democracy (a new class, who discovered the cheap, and foresaw fortune in the facture of the sham Whistler). The hostility of an alienated minority towards bourgeois Religion of Progress (Industry and Progress, Baudelaire wrote, those despotic enemies of all poetry) prompted an indulgence in the decadent, the archaic and the morbid. The Death of God, as proclaimed by Nietzsche among others, turned the Aesthete towards the occult and the transcendental in an attempt to make a thoroughly spiritualized art substitute for the old faith. The fin-de-siốcle witnesses the proclamation of an elitist new hedonism determined, in the words of Oscar Wilde, never to accept any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience. Philosophy provides the theoretical mainstay of the prevalent moods. Kants postulate (Critique of Judgement, 1790) of the disinterestedness of the aesthetical judgement, and the irrelevance of concepts to the intuitions of the imagination, is taken up and carried further by Schopenhauer. In the latters thought, an absolute Art removes the mind from a despicable life and frees it from its bondage to the will. Since music is the Aesthetics 3 most immaterial art, as well as the most removed from quotidian reality, it becomes the ideal. Schopenhauer declares that to become like music is the aspiration of all arts, which is echoed by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872), by Verlaine in de la musique avant toute chose, and by Pater in his equally famous All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music (The Renaissance, 1873). The ensuing cult of pure or essential form is as characteristic of symbolism and literary Impressionism as it is of the entire English 1890s. This, in turn, leads to the devaluation of the subject matter in favour of personal, innovatory techniques and the subtleties of exquisite execution. See Madeleine L. Cazamian, Le Roman et les idộes en Angleterre, vol. 2: LAntiintellectualisme et lesthộticisme (1880 1900) (1935); L. Eckhoff, The Aesthetic Movement in English Literature (1959); Graham Hough, The Last Romantics (1949); H. Jackson, The Eighteen-Nineties (1913); R. V. Johnson, Aestheticism (1969); Talia Schaffer and Kathy Alexis Psomiades (eds), Women and British Aestheticism (2000). NZ Aesthetics (The study of the beautiful.) A subject that has developed, especially in Germany, into a formidable one. Lack of space forbids any attempt to deal with its philosophical and psychological problems here; but some discrimination may be made to clarify and amplify its use as a critical term. First, aesthetic pleasure may be distinguished from other pleasures according to the Kantian definition now widely accepted as that which is disinterested, the result of perceiving something not as a means but as an end in itself, not as useful but as ornamental, not as instrument but as achievement. To perceive it so is to perceive its beauty (if it turns out to have any). Such beauty, being the counterpart to use or purpose, which largely depend on content, must spring from formal qualities, as must the special pleasures its perception gives rise to. Non-moral, nonutilitarian and non-acquisitive, this is the purest of the pleasures, the one least exposed to bias from areas outside the work of art (and therefore the one most appropriate for defining what art is; see ART). Second, aesthetic pleasure may be distinguished from aesthetic appreciation. The former emphasizes ones experience of the work, which may be mistaken, untutored or injudicious; the latter emphasizes the characteristics of the work, and implies a critical assessment of their beauty. Third, both presuppose aesthetic attention. Unless a work is regarded in the way indicated above for what it is, not for what it is up to its aesthetic qualities, if any, are likely to go unperceived. For this reason works where the subject, or manner, deeply involves the reader are less likely to give aesthetic pleasure or to prompt aesthetic appreciation than those that encourage aesthetic attention by formal devices that lend aesthetic distance. Finally, aesthetic merit should be distinguished from aesthetic qualities and reactions, for a work might possess genuine aesthetic qualities, properly provide for their appreciation, yet in fact be a poor specimen of its kind. Merit and pleasure, too, are not necessarily related. An untrained or naturally crude sensibility could clearly be aesthetically pleased by a crude work and so, in certain circumstances, could a trained and refined sensibility (though it would appreciate the work for what it was). Aesthesis (aesthetic perception) is normally a blend of aesthetic pleasure and