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, andhad 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 charactersspeak for themselves); and drama (in which the characters do all the talking). A similar tripartite scheme was 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), ter 5, and functions still in critical discourse and in the general distinction in college catalogues, between courses in poetry, prose fiction, and drama.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 type of architecture, characterized by the use of the high pointed arch and vault, flying buttresses, and intricate re-cesses, which spread through western Europe between the twelfth and six-teenth centuries.Heroic couplet：Lines of iambic pentameter which rhyme in pairs: aa, bb, cc, and so on. The adjective "heroic" was applied in the later sev- enteenth 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 o The Canterbury Tales), and has been in constant use ever since. From the age John Dryden through that of Samuel Johnson, the heroic couplet was the pre- dominant English measure for all the poetic kinds; some poets, including Alexander Pope, used it almost to the exclusion of other meters.Irony：In Greek comedy the character called the eiron was a dissembler, who characteristically spoke in understatement and deliberately pretended to be less intelligent than he was, yet triumphed over the alazon—the self-deceiving and stupid braggart (see in Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism 1957). In most of the modern critical uses of the term "irony/' there remains the root sense of dissembling or hiding what is actually the case; not, however, in order to deceive, but to achieve special rhetorical or artistic effects.Motif and theme;A motif is a conspicuous element, such as a type of incident, 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). Common 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 OldFrench "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."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.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 nanative 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 thematter in critical writings since the emergence of the modern novel in the eighteenth century. Pun:A play on words that are either identical in sound (homonyms) or very similar in sound, but are sharply diverse in meaning; 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.PuritanismRhyme:In English versification, standard rhyme consists of the repetition, in the rhyming words, of the last stressed vowel and of all the speech sounds following that vowelSetting: 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 such a work is the particular physical location in which it takes place.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'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 terms as the rhetorical situation and aim ; characteristic diction, or choice of words; type of sentence structure and syntax; and the density and kinds of figurative language.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. In the seven years or so that the group met at various houses, it included at one time or another Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Frederick Henry Hedge, W. E. Channing and W. 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.Enlightenment ：The name applied to an intellectual movement and cultural ambiance whichdeveloped 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 establish the essential norms in life, together with the belief that the application of 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 happiness. 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 Independence and the Constitution.GenreA term, French in origin , that denotes types or classes of literature. It is a type of category of literature marked by certain shared features or customs. The three broadest categories of genre include poetry, drama, and fiction. These general genres are often subdivided intomore specific genres and subgenres. For example, the poetry can be sub-classified as epic, elegy, lyric, and pastoral and so on.Gothic novelGothic novel is a story of terror and suspense usually set in a gloomy old castle and monastery. In an extended sense, many novels that do not have a medievalized setting, but which share a comparably sinister, grotesque, or claustrophobic atmosphere have been classed as Gothic. It contributed to the new emotional climate of romanticism.American renaissanceAmerican renaissance is also called New England Renaissance. It is a flourishing of distinctively American literature in the period from the 1830s roughly until the end of the civil war. The renaissance is led by Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau and stirred by the teaching of transcendentalism. It is regarded as the delayed manifestation of Romanticism especially in Emerson’s philosophy of transcendentalism.。