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 ✵ A Glossary of Literary Terms ELEVENTH EDITION M. H. ABRAMS...

 ✵ A Glossary of Literary Terms ELEVENTH EDITION M. H. ABRAMS Cornell University GEOFFREY GALT HARPHAM National Humanities Center Australia Brazil Mexico Singapore United Kingdom United States Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  This is an electronic version of the print textbook. Due to electronic rights restrictions, some third party content may be suppressed. Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. The publisher reserves the right to remove content from this title at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. For valuable information on pricing, previous editions, changes to current editions, and alternate formats, please visit www.cengage.com/highered to search by ISBN#, author, title, or keyword for materials in your areas of interest. Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  A Glossary of Literary Terms, © 2015, 2012, 2009 Cengage Learning Eleventh Edition WCN: 02-200-208 M. H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced, transmitted, stored, or used Product Director: Monica Eckman in any form or by any means graphic, electronic, or mechanical, Product Manager: Kate Derrick including but not limited to photocopying, recording, scanning, Content Developer: Rebecca digitizing, taping, Web distribution, information networks, or Donahue information storage and retrieval systems, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, Content Coordinator: Erin Bosco without the prior written permission of the publisher. 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Locate your local office at international.cengage.com/region Cengage Learning products are represented in Canada by Nelson Education, Ltd. For your course and learning solutions, visit www.cengage.com Purchase any of our products at your local college store or at our preferred online store www.cengagebrain.com Instructors: Please visit login.cengage.com and log in to access instructor-specific resources. Printed in the United States of America 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 17 16 15 14 13 Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  ✵ 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 Courtesy of M. H. Abrams 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 Photo by Ron Jautz, courtesy of National Humanities Center 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. iii Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  ✵ Contents PREFACE v ii ACK NOWL E DG MEN T S xi HO W TO U SE THI S G LO S SA RY xi i LIT E RARY TERMS 1 IND E X O F AU T HO R S 421 v Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  ✵ Preface I 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 Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  viii PREFACE 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. Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  PREFACE ix 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. Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  ✵ Acknowledgments T 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. xi Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  ✵ 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 ı pin a pat  o Pope ä father  o pot e meet oo food e get  u cut ı pine 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 Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  ✵ A Glossary of Literary Terms Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  ✵ Literary Terms A 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. 1 Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  2 ABSURD, LITERATURE OF THE 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 plays of Tom Stoppard, such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) and Travesties (1974), exploit the devices of absurdist theater more for comic than 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 World 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 register social and political protest. See, for example, Largo Desolato (1987) by Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  ACADEMIC NOVEL, UNIVERSITY NOVEL, OR CAMPUS NOVEL 3 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’s House (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 Britain, 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 Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  4 ACCENT 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 (ak0 side): 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. Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  AESTHETICISM 5 adjunct novel: 4. adversarius (adversär0 ıus): 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 (1795), which describes a process of education that would eventually produce an “Aesthetic State,” a concept 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 Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  6 AESTHETICISM 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 “pleases for its own sake,” without reference to reality or to the “external” ends of utility or morality. As a self-conscious movement, how- ever, French Aestheticism is often 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’s claim (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 doctrine 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—has been important in the writings of prominent twentieth-century authors such as W. B. Yeats, T. E. Hulme, and T. S. Eliot, as well as in the literary theory 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 Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  AGE OF SENSIBILITY 7 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. Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  8 AGE OF TRANSCENDENTALISM Age of Transcendentalism: 274. Agrarians: 277. agroikos (agroi0 k os): 377. alazon (al0 az on): 377; 185. Alexandrine (alexan0 drın): 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 Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  ALLEGORY 9 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’s name 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, Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  10 ALLEGORY 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. Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  ALLEGORY 11 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 Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  12 ALLITERATION 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, and w consonants in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30: 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 woes 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.”1 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 time…. 1 Lines from “O Where are you going,” by W.H. Auden, from Collected Poems of W.H. Auden by W.H. Auden. Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  ALLUSION 13 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,2 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 2 Lines from “The Waste Land” from Collected Poems 1909–1962 by T. S. Eliot. Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  14 AMBIANCE 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 (am0 beäns): 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’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.” James Joyce exploited this device—the fusion of two or more existing words Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  ANNALS 15 —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 (anak0 r onism): 300. o0 rısıs): 296; 406. anagnorisis (anagn anapestic (anapes0 tik): 219. anaphora (ana0 fora): 344. anastrophe: 344. anatomy (in satire): 353. anecdote: 364; 139. Anglo-Norman Period: 280. anglophone authors: 285. Anglo-Saxon Period: 279. annals: 53. Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  16 ANTAGONIST 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 (antıp0 athy): 107. antistrophe (antıs0 tr of e): 262. antithesis (antı0 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. An example is Alexander Pope’s description of Atticus in his “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” (1735), “Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike.” In the antithesis in the second line of Pope’s description of the Baron’s designs against Belinda, in The Rape of Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  ARCHAISM 17 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 0 o rism): 113. ok0 rıfa): 43. apocrypha (ap apologue: 10. o0 rea): 83. aporia (ap os0 tr apostrophe (ap of e): 345. apothegm (ap0 othem): 113. applied criticism: 71. appropriation (in reading): 247. approximate rhyme: 349. Arcadia (arka0 dia): 269. archaism: The literary use of words and expressions that have become obsolete in the common speech of an era. Spenser in The Faerie Queene (1590–96) deliberately employed archaisms (many of them derived from Chaucer’s medieval English) 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.” Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  18 ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM Archaism has been a standard resort for poetic diction. Through the nineteenth century, for example, many poets continued to use “I ween,” “methought,” “steed,” “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” in 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. Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM 19 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’s Fiction (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 Krieger, 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 other entries, see pages 77, 141, 150. Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  20 ARCHETYPE archetype (ar0 ketıp): 18; 322. argument (in narrative forms): 111. art for art’s sake: 6; 73. article: 116. aside, the: 369; 64, 66. assonance (a0 s onans): 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. o bäd0 ): 229. aubade ( us0 tan): 282. Augustan Age (awg 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 Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.  AUTHOR AND AUTHORSHIP 21 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 inherent 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 n