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21 Qiossary of Literary Terms

S E V E N T H E D I T I O N

Si ÇCossary of Literary Verms

S E V E N T H E D I T I O N

M. H. ABRAMS C O R N E L L U N I V E R S I T Y

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4> Preface W

This book defines and discusses terms, critical theories, and points of view that are commonly used to classify, analyze, interpret, and write the history of works of literature. The individual entries, together with the guides to further reading included in most of them, are oriented especially toward undergradu- ate students of English, American, and other literatures. Over the decades, however, they have proved to be a useful work of reference also for advanced students, as well as for the general reader with literary interests.

The Glossary presents a series of succinct essays in the alphabetic order of the title word or phrase. Terms that are related but subsidiary, or that desig- nate subclasses, are treated under the title heading of the primary or generic term; also, words that are commonly used in conjunction or as mutually defining contraries (distance and involvement, empathy and sympathy, narrative and narratology) are discussed in the same entry. The alternative organization of a literary handbook as a dictionary of terms, defined singly, makes dull reading and requires excessive repitition and cross-indexing; it may also be misleading, because the use and application of many terms become clear only in the context of other concepts to which they are related, subordinated, or opposed. The essay form makes it feasible to supplement the definition of a term with indications of its changes in meaning over time and of its diversity in current usage, in order to help readers to steer their way through the shift- ing references and submerged ambiguities of its literary applications. In addi- tion, the discursive way of treating more or less technical terms provides the author with an opportunity to write entries that are readable as well as useful. In each entry, boldface indicates terms for which the entry provides the prin- cipal discussion; italics identify terms that occur in the entry but are discussed more fully elsewhere in the Glossary, on pages that are specified in the Index of Terms.

The purpose of this new edition is to keep the entries current with the rapid and incessant changes in the literary and critical scene, to take into ac- count new publications in literature, criticism, and scholarship, and to take advantage of suggestions for improvements and additions, some of them so- licited by the publisher but many generously volunteered by users of the Glos- sary. All the entries have been rewritten and a number have been drastically recast, especially those which describe the innovative and rapidly evolving critical theories of the last several decades. All of the revisions aim to make the expositions as lucid and precise as possible, and also to widen the range of

VIII PREFACE

examples and references, especially of writings by women and by cultural groups that have only recently become prominent. In each entry, the list of suggested readings has been brought up to the date of this revision. Books originally published in non-English languages are listed in their English trans- lations.

This edition discusses more than one-hundred new terms; and in re- sponse to requests by a number of users, each of the following items has been given a substantial new entry: alienation effect; antihero; author and authorship; Black Arts Movement; cultural studies; deism; edition; epic theater; golden age; haiku; Harlem Renaissance; metaphor, theories of; narration, grammar of; postcolo- nial studies; Pre-Raphaelites; queer theory; science fiction and fantasy; socialist real- ism; sublime; textual criticism; Victorian and Victorianism.

For the greater convenience of the user, the entries hitherto gathered in a special section, "Modern Theories of Literature and Criticism," have now been distributed into the alphabetic order of the other entries in the Glossary. A new entry, theories of criticism, current, lists the sequence of these move- ments, together with the approximate time when they became prominent in literary criticism, from Russian formalism in the 1920s and 30s to postcolonial studies and queer theory in the 1990s. An additional feature in this edition, re- quested by many users, is an Index of Authors, which precedes the Index of Terms at the end of the volume and lists all the significant references in the Glossary to authors and their writings.

How to Use the "Çtossary "

To find the exposition of a literary term or phrase, always look it up in the Index of Terms, which is printed at the end of the volume; to make this Index easy to find, the outside edges of its pages are colored black. Although the separate entries in the Glossary are in the alphabetical order of their title terms, the greater number of terms are defined and discussed within the text of these entries, and so must be located by referring to the Index. In the Index of Terms, readers will find, in boldface, the page number of the principal dis- cussion of the term; this is followed by the page numbers, in italics, of the oc- currences of the term in other entries that clarify its meaning and illustrate its functioning in critical usage. (Note that the term referred to by a secondary, italicized reference may be a modified form of the index term; the forms "par- odies" and "parodie," for example, refer to the entry on "parody.") Those terms, mainly of foreign origin, that are most likely to be mispronounced by a student are followed by simplified guides to pronunciation; the key to these guides is on the first page of the Index of Terms.

Some of the more general or inclusive items in the Index are supple- mented by a list of closely related terms. These references expedite for the student the fuller exploration of a topic, and also make it easier for a teacher to locate entries that serve the needs of a particular subject of study. For

PREFACE IX

example, supplementary references identify the separate entries that treat the particular types and movements of literary criticism, the terms most rele- vant to the analysis of style, the particular entries that define and exemplify the types of figurative language or of literary genres, and the many entries that deal with the forms, component features, history, and critical treatments of the drama, lyric, and novel.

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This edition, like earlier ones, has profited from the suggestions of teach- ers, and often also students, who proposed changes and additions that would enhance the usefulness of the Glossary to the broad range of courses in Amer- ican, English, and foreign literatures. I welcome this opportunity to thank Nate Johnson, who served as my research assistant during a postgraduate year at Cornell; his wide-ranging knowledge and critical acumen have led to many improvements in the substance and phrasing of this version of the Glossary. Dianne Ferriss has been of great assistance in preparing and correcting the text of this edition. I am especially grateful for the valuable suggestions by Sean M. Andrews and Francis-Noël Thomas and by my colleague Jonathan Culler. Claire Brantley, Acquisitions Editor, Camille Adkins, Developmental Editor, Louise Slominsky and Andrea Joy Wright, Project Editors at Harcourt Brace have, firmly but tactfully, instigated and supervised my work on this re- vision. All these advisers, friends, and co-workers have helped me come closer to the goal announced in the original edition: to write the kind of handbook that I would have found most valuable when, as an undergraduate, I was an eager but sometimes bewildered student of literature and criticism.

W A 9{pte to the Reader ^

To find a literary word or phrase, always look it up in the Index of Terms at the end of this volume; the outer edges of this Index are stained black. Although the individual entries in the Glossary are in the alphabetic order of their title terms, the larger number of terms are discussed within the text of these en- tries, so that the page numbers of these discussions must be located by refer- ring to the Index. For explanation of the typographical cues in the entries and in the Index, refer to the section of the Preface, above, entitled "How to Use the Glossary."

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& Contents ^

Preface vii

A Note to the Reader xiii

Literary Terms 1

Index of Authors 333

Index of Terms 349

21 Çtossary of Literary Terms

S E V E N T H E D I T I O N

^ Literary Verms ^

Absurd, Literature of the. The term is applied to a number of works in drama and prose fiction which have in common the sense that the human condition is essentially absurd, and that this condition can be adequately rep- resented 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, writ- ten in the 1920s, of Franz Kafka (The Trial, Metamorphosis). The current move- ment, however, emerged in France after the horrors of World War II, as a rebellion against essential beliefs and values of traditional culture and tradi- tional literature. This earlier tradition had included the assumptions that human beings are fairly rational creatures who live in an at least partially in- telligible 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 exis- tential philosophy of men of letters such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, to view a human being as an isolated existent who is cast into an alien uni- verse, to conceive the universe as possessing no inherent truth, value, or meaning, and to represent human life—in its fruitless search for purpose and meaning, as it moves from the nothingness whence it came toward the noth- ingness where it must end—as an existence which is both anguished and ab- surd. 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.

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 ac- tions 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

2 ACT AND SCENE

plays, such as Waiting for Godot (1954) and Endgame (1958), project the irra- tionalism, helplessness, and absurdity of life in dramatic forms that reject re- alistic 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 ap- pointment; as one of them remarks, "Nothing happens, nobody comes, no- body 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 nonconse- quential; it is a parody not only of the traditional assumptions of Western cul- ture, but of the conventions and generic forms of traditional drama, and even of its own inescapable 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 project the alienation and tragic anguish of human ex- istence. Beckett's prose fiction, such as Malone Dies (1958) and The Unnamable (1960), present 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 English- man Harold Pinter and the American Edward Albee are in a similar mode. The 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 the numerous recent works which exploit black comedy or black humor: bale- ful, 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 is an example of black comedy in the cinema. More recently, some playwrights living in totalitarian regimes have used absurdist techniques to register social and political protest. See, for example, Largo Desolato (1987) by the Czech Vaclav Havel and The Island (1973), a collaboration by the South African writers Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona.

See 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); and Enoch Brater and Ruby Cohn, eds., Around the Absurd: Essays on Modern and Postmodern Drama (1990).

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

AESTHETICISM 3

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 present century the most common form for 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 recent plays dispense with the division into acts and are structured as a sequence of scenes, or episodes.) In the conventional 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.

Aestheticism, or the Aesthetic Movement, was a European phenomenon during the latter nineteenth century that had its chief headquarters in France. In opposition to the dominance of scientific thinking, 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 de- veloped the view that a work of art is the supreme value among human prod- ucts 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 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 Ger- man 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, however, French Aestheticism is often said to date from Théophile Gautier's witty de- fense 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, with the artist represented as a priest who renounces the practical concerns of ordinary existence in the serv- ice of what Flaubert and others called "the religion of beauty."

The views of French Aestheticism were introduced into Victorian En- gland by Walter Pater, with his emphasis on high artifice and stylistic subtlety, his recommendation to crowd one's life with exquisite sensations, and his ad- vocacy 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.

4 AFFECTIVE FALLACY · ALIENATION EFFECT

The influence of ideas stressed in Aestheticism—especially the view of the "autonomy" (self-sufficiency) of a work of art, the emphasis on craft and artistry, and the concept of a poem or novel as an end in itself and 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 Crìtics.

For related developments, see decadence and ivory tower. Refer to: William Gaunt, The Aesthetic Adventure (1945, reprinted 1975); Frank Kermode, Ro- mantic Image (1957); Enid Starkie, From Gautier to Eliot (I960); R. V. Johnson, Aestheticism (1969). For the intellectual and social conditions during the eigh- teenth century that fostered the theory 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). Useful collections of writings in the Aesthetic Movement are Ian Small, ed., The Aes- thetes: A Sourcebook (1979), and Eric Warner and Graham Hough, eds., Strange- ness and Beauty: An Anthology of Aesthetic Criticism 1848-1910 (2 vols.; 1983). A useful descriptive guide to books on the subject is Linda C. Dowling, Aes- theticism and Decadence: A Selective Annotated Bibliography (1977).

Affective Fallacy. In an essay published in 1946, W. K. Wimsatt and Mon- roe 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 in- fluential Principles of Literary Criticism (1923), that the value of a poem can be measured by the psychological responses it incites in its readers. Beardsley has since modified the earlier claim by the admission that "it does not appear that critical evaluation can be done at all except in relation to certain types of ef- fect that aesthetic objects have upon their perceivers." So modified, the doc- trine 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 devel- opment 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.

Alienation Effect. In his epic theater of the 1920s and later, the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht adapted the Russian formalist concept of "defamiliariza- tion" into what he called the "alienation effect" (Verfremdungseffekt). The Ger- man term is also translated as estrangement effect or distancing effect; the last is closest to Brecht's notion, in that it avoids the connotation of jadedness,

ALLEGORY 5

incapacity to feel, and social apathy that the word "alienation" has acquired in English. This effect, Brecht said, is used to make familiar aspects of the present social reality seem strange, so as to prevent the emotional identification or in- volvement of the audience with the characters and their actions in a play. His aim 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 represented on the stage.

On Brecht, refer to Marxist criticism; for a related aesthetic concept, see distance and involvement.

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 signify a second, correlated order of signifi- cation.

We can distinguish two main types: (1) Historical and political allegory, in which the characters and actions that are signified literally in their turn represent, or "allegorize," historical personages and events. So in John Dry- den's Absalom and Achitophel (1681), King David represents Charles II, Absa- lom represents his natural son the Duke of Monmouth, and the biblical story of Absalom's rebellion against his father (2 Samuel 13-18) allegorizes the re- bellion 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 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 Pil- grim's Progress allegorizes the Christian doctrine of salvation by telling how the character named Christian, warned by Evangelist, flees the City of De- struction and makes his way laboriously to the Celestial City; enroute he en- counters 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 na- ture 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.

6 ALLEGORY

Works which are primarily nonallegorical may introduce allegorical im­ agery (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 Π Penseroso (1645). This device was exploited especially in the po­ etic 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 scientific 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 explicitly in the sec­ ond stanza, which represents autumn personified as a female figure amid the scenes and activities of the harvest season.

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, 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 Plow­ man. 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 present century, the stories and novels of Franz Kafka can be considered in­ stances of implicit allegory.

A variety of literary genres may be classified as species of allegory in that they all narrate one coherent set of circumstances which signify 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; usually, 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 famil­ iar 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 term "sour grapes" derives from this fable.) The beast fable is a very ancient form that existed in Egypt, India, and Greece. The

ALLEGORY

fables in Western cultures derive mainly from the stories attributed to Aesop, a Greek slave of the sixth century B.C. In the seventeenth century a French- man, 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 Joe 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 liter- ature of West Africa that feature a trickster like 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 North American Indian cultures are the beast fables that feature Coyote as the central trickster. James Thurber's Fables for Our Time (1940) is a recent set of short fables; and in Animal Farm (1945) George Orwell expanded the beast fable into a sustained satire on the political and social sit- uation in the mid-twentieth century.

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' fa- vorite 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 cum- bereth 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."

Recently Mark Turner, in a greatly extended use of the term, has used "para- ble" to signify any "projection of one story onto another," or onto many oth- ers, whether the projection is intentional or not. He proposes that, in this extended sense, parable 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 literary 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 exten- sive collections of exempla, some historical and some legendary, were prepared for use by preachers. In Chaucer's "The Pardoner's Tale," the Pardoner, preach- ing on the theme "Greed is the root of all evil," incorporates as exemplum the tale of the three drunken revelers who set out to find Death and find a heap of gold instead, only after all to find Death when they kill one another in the attempt to gain sole possession of the treasure. By extension the term "exem- plum" is also applied to tales used in a formal, though nonreligious, exhorta- tion. 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

8 ALLITERATION

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).

Many proverbs (short, pithy statements of widely accepted truths about everyday life) 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, ed. W. G. Smith and E P. Wilson (1970).

See didactic, symbol (for the distinction between allegory and symbol), and (on the fourfold allegorical interpretation of the Bible) interpretation: typo- logical 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); Rose- mund Tuve, Allegorical Imagery (1966); Michael Murrin, The Veil of Allegory (1969); Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory (1979).

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 re- current sound begins a word or a stressed syllable within a word. In Old En- glish 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 usu- ally 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, contin- ued to use and play variations upon the old alliterative 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 soft was the sónne . . . . In later English versification, however, alliteration is used only for special sty- listic effects, such as to reinforce the meaning, to link related words, or to pro- vide tone color and enhance the palpability of enunciating the words. An example is the repetitions of the s, th, and w consonants in Shakespeare's Son- net 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, "Ό where are you going?' said reader to rider," makes prominent use of this device; the last stanza reads:

ALLUSION 9

"Out of this house"—said rìder to reader, "Yours never will"—said farer to fearer, "They're looking for you" said hearer to honor, As he left them there, as he left them there.*

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....

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.

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,**

the ironic allusion, achieved by echoing Shakespeare's phrasing, is to Cleopa- tra's magnificent barge in Antony and Cleopatra (II. ii. 196 ff.):

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); and Edwin Stein, Wordsworth's Art of Allusion (1988).

*Lines from "O where are you going?" from W. H. Auden: Collected Poems 1927-1957 by W. H. Auden, ed. by Edward Mendelson. Copyright ©1934 and renewed 1962 by W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc., and Faber & Faber Ltd. **Lines from "The Waste Land" from Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1936 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., copyright © 1964,1963 by T. S. Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and Faber and Faber Ltd.

1 0 AMBIGUITY

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 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 pri- vate reading and experience, in the awareness that few if any readers will rec- ognize them prior to the detective work of scholarly annotators. The current term intertextuality includes literary echoes and allusions as one of the many ways in which any text is interlinked with other texts.

Ambiguity. In ordinary usage "ambiguity" is applied to a fault in style; that is, the use of a vague or equivocal expression when what is wanted is preci- sion 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 atti- tudes 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. 306 ff.),

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 it- self 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 "dis- patch"—"make haste" and "kill"—are equally relevant.

A special type of multiple meaning is conveyed by the portmanteau word. The term 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— in order to sustain the multiple levels of meaning throughout his long dream

ANTIHERO · ANTITHESIS 1 1

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 deconstructìon.)

William Empson (who, in analyzing poetic ambiguity, named and en- larged upon a literary phenomenon that had been noted by some earlier crit- ics) helped make current a mode of explication developed especially by exponents of the New Criticism, which greatly expanded the awareness by readers of the complexity and richness of poetic language. The risk, at times exemplified by Empson and other recent critics, is that the intensive quest for ambiguities will result in over-reading: ingenious, overdrawn, and some- times contradictory explications of a literary word or passage.

For related terms see connotation and denotation and pun. In addition to Empson, refer to Philip Wheelwright, The Burning Fountain (1954), especially chapter 4. For critiques of Empson's theory and practice, see John Crowe Ran- som, "Mr. Empson's Muddles," The Southern Review 4 (1938), and Elder Olson, "William Empson, Contemporary Criticism and Poetic Diction," in Critics and Criticism, ed. R. S. Crane (1952).

Antihero. The chief person in a modern novel or play whose character is widely discrepant from that which we associate with the traditional protago- nist or hero of a serious literary work. Instead of manifesting largeness, dignity, power, or heroism, the antihero is petty, ignominious, passive, ineffectual, or dishonest. The use of nonheroic 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 prostitute. The term "antihero," however, is usually applied to writings in the period of disillusion after the Second World War, beginning with such 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 Yos- sarian 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 antihero is especially conspicuous in dramatic tragedy, in which the protagonist had usually been of high estate, dignity, and courage (see tragedy). Extreme instances are the characters 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 protagonist in Endgame (1958). See literature of the absurd and black comedy, and refer to Ihab Hassan, "The Antihero in Mod- ern British and American Fiction," in Rumors of Change (1995).

Antithesis is a contrast or opposition in the meanings of contiguous 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

1 2 ARCHAISM · ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM

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 the Lock (1714), the parallelism in the syntax is made especially prominent by alliteration in the antithetic nouns:

Resolved to win, he meditates the way, By /orce to ravish, or by /raud betray.

In a sentence from Samuel Johnson's prose fiction Rasselas (1759), chapter 26, the antithesis is similarly heightened by the alliteration in the contrasted nouns: "Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures."

Archaism. The literary use of words and expressions that have become ob- solete in the common speech of an era. Spenser in The Faerie Queene (1590-96) deliberately employed archaisms (many of them derived from Chaucer's me- dieval English) in the attempt to achieve a poetic style appropriate to his re- vival 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 archaic revivals. Both Spenser and the King James Bible have in their turn been major sources of archaisms in Milton and many later authors. When Keats, for example, in his ode (1820) described the Grecian urn as "with hrede I Of marble men and maidens overwrought, " he used archaic words for "braid" and "worked [that is, ornamented] all over." Abraham Lincoln achieved solemnity by biblical archaisms in his "Gettysburg Address," which begins, "Fourscore and seven years ago." Archaism has been a standard resort for po- etic diction. Through the nineteenth century, for example, many poets contin- ued 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 re- current narrative designs, patterns of action, character-types, themes, and im- ages which are identifiable in a wide variety of works of literature, as well as in myths, dreams, and even social rituals. Such recurrent items are held to be the result of elemental and universal forms or patterns in the human psyche, whose effective embodiment in a literary work evokes a profound response from the attentive reader, because he or she shares the archetypes expressed by the au- thor. 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 common human experi- ence in the lives of our very ancient ancestors which, he maintained, survive in

ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM

the "collective unconscious" of the human race and are expressed in myths, re- ligion, dreams, and private fantasies, as well as in works of literature. See Jungian criticism, under psychoanalytic criticism.

Archetypal literary criticism was given impetus by Maud Bodkin's Arche- typal Patterns in Poetry (1934) and flourished especially during the 1950s and 1960s. Some archetypal critics have 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 crit- icism, in addition to Maud Bodkin, are G. Wilson Knight, Robert Graves, Philip Wheelwright, Richard Chase, Leslie Fiedler, and Joseph Campbell. These critics tend to emphasize the occurrence of mythical patterns in litera- ture, 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 is often said to be the archetype of archetypes, and is held to be grounded in the cycle of the seasons and the organic cycle of human life; this archetype, it has been claimed, occurs in primitive rituals of the king who is annually sacrificed, widespread myths of gods who die to be reborn, and a multitude 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 charac- ters that have been frequently traced in literature are the journey under- ground, the heavenly ascent, the search for the father, the Paradise-Hades image, the Promethean rebel-hero, the scapegoat, the earth goddess, and the fatal woman.

In his remarkable and 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 writings of the poet and painter William Blake (1757-1827)—into a radi- cal and comprehensive revision of traditional grounds both of the theory of lit- erature and the practice of literary criticism. Frye proposes that the totality of literary works constitute a "self-contained literary universe" which has been cre- ated over the ages by the human imagination so as to incorporate the alien and indifferent world of nature into archetypal forms that serve to satisfy enduring human desires and needs. In this literary universe, four radical mythoi (that is, plot forms, or organizing structural principles), correspondent to the four sea- sons 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 overarching archetypal mythos of each of these genres, individual works of literature also play variations upon a number of more limited arche- types—that is, conventional patterns and types that literature shares with social rituals as well as with theology, history, law, and, in fact, all "discursive verbal structures." Viewed archetypally, Frye asserts, literature turns out to play an es- sential role in refashioning the impersonal material universe into an alternative

1 4 ATMOSPHERE · AUTHOR AND AUTHORSHIP

verbal universe that is intelligible and viable, because it is adapted to essential and 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 the inclusion of many traditional critical con- cepts and procedures, and to apply it both to social practices and to the elucida- tion 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: CG. Jung, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetic Art" (1922), in Contributions to An- alytical Psychology (1928), and "Psychology and Literature," in Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933); G. Wilson Knight, The Starlit Dome (1941); Robert Graves, The White Goddess (rev., 1961); Richard Chase, The Quest for Myth (1949); Francis Fergusson, The Idea of a Theater (1949); Philip Wheelwright, The Burning Fountain (rev., 1968); Northrop Frye, "The Archetypes of Litera- ture," in Fables of Identity (1963); Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (2d ed., 1968). In the 1980s, feminist critics developed forms of arche- typal criticism that revised 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: Inter- disciplinary Re-Visions ofjungian Thought (1985).

For discussions and critiques of archetypal theory and practice, see H. M. Block, "Cultural Anthropology and Contemporary Literary Criticism," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 11 (1952); 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.

Atmosphere is the emotional tone pervading a section or the whole of a lit- erary work, which fosters in the reader expectations as to the course of events, whether happy or (more commonly) terrifying or disastrous. Shakespeare es- tablishes 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 an immense and brooding presence that reduces to pettiness and futil- ity the human struggle for happiness for which it is the setting. Alternative terms frequently used for atmosphere are mood and ambience.

Author and Authorship. The prevailing conception of a literary author might be summarized as follows: Authors are individuals who, by their intel- lectual and imaginative powers, purposefully create from the materials of their experience and reading a literary work which is distinctively their own. The work itself, as distinct from the individual written or printed texts that in- stantiate the work, remains solely a product accredited to the author as its originator, even if he or she turns over the rights to publish and profit from the printed texts of the work to someone else. And insofar as the literary work

AUTHOR AND AUTHORSHIP 1 5

turns out to be great and original, the author who has composed that work is deservedly accorded high cultural status and achieves enduring fame.

Since the 1960s this way of conceiving an author has been questioned 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 particular text, or else as a "site" wherein there converge, and are recorded, the cultural constructs, discursive formations, and configurations of power prevalent in a given cultural era. The author is said to be the product rather than the pro- ducer of a text, and is often redescribed as an "effect" or "function" engen- dered by the internal play of textual language. Famously, in 1968 Roland Barthes proclaimed and celebrated "The Death of the Author," whom he de- scribed as a figure invented by critical discourse in order to limit the inherent freeplay of the meanings in reading a literary text. (See under structuralist crit- icism and poststructuralism.)

In an influential essay "What Is an Author?" written in 1969, Michel Fou- cault 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—and specified inquiries such as "how the author became individualized," "what status he has been given," what "sys- tem of valorization" involves the author, and how the fundamental category of "'the-man-and-his-work criticism' began." Foucault's essay and example gave impetus to a number of historical studies which reject the notion that the prevailing concept of authorship (the set of attributes possessed by an au- thor) is either natural or necessitated by the way things are. Instead, his- toricists conceive authorship to be a "cultural construct" that emerged and changed, in accordance with changing economic conditions, social circum- stances, and institutional arrangements, over many centuries in the Western world. (See new historicism.)

Investigators have emphasized the important role of such historical de- velopments as:

(1) The shift from an oral to a literate culture. In the former, the identity of an author presumably was not inquired after, since the individual bard or minstrel improvised by reference to inherited subject-matter, forms, and literary formulae. (See oral formulaic poetry.) In a culture where at least a substantial segment of the population can read, the production of enduring texts in the form of written scrolls and man- uscripts generated increasing interest in the individual responsible for producing the work that was thus recorded. Many works in manu- script, however, circulated freely, and were often altered in transcrip- tions, with little regard to the intentions or formulations of the originator of the work.

(2) The shift, in the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from a primarily manuscript culture to a primarily print culture. The in- vention of printing greatly expedited the manufacture and dissemi- nation of printed texts, and so multiplied the number of producers of

1 6 AUTHOR AND AUTHORSHIP

literary works, and made financially important the establishment of the identity and ability of an individual writer, in order to invite sup- port for that individual by the contemporary system of aristocratic and noble patronage. Foucault, in addition, proposed the importance of a punitive function in fostering the concept of an author's responsibility in originating a work, which served the interests of the state in affixing the blame for trasgressive or subversive ideas on a single individual.

(3) The emphasis in recent research on the difficulties in establishing, in various periods, just who was the originator of what parts of an exist- ing literary text, which was often, in effect, the product of multiple collaborators, censors, editors, printers, and publishers, as well as of successive revisions by the reputed author. See textual criticism.