文学术语

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, and at the same time flexible and adaptive to diverse levels of discourse; as a result it has been more frequently and variously used than any other type of versification.

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 with the continuity 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. 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.)

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.

American Renaissance：American Renaissance also called New England Renaissance。 Period from the 1830s roughly until the end of the American Civil War in which American literature, in the wake of the Romantic movement, came of age as an expression of a national spirit. 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; it should be noted, however, that the comic form, so defined, also occurs in prose fiction and narrative poetry.

Enlightenment :The name applied to an intellectual movement and cul- tural ambiance which developed in western Europe during the seventeenth century and reached its height in the eighteenth. The common element was a trust in human reason as adequate to solve the crucial problems and to estab- lish the essential norms in life, together with the belief that the application of reason was rapidly dissipating the darkness of superstition, prejudice, and bar- barity, 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 happiness. (See the idea of progress.) For some thinkers the model for "reason" was the inductive procedure of science,

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 with the continuity 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. 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.)

Genre：A term, French in origin, that denotes types or classes of literature. The genres into which literary 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 accordance 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 his characters