Literary Term Definition

更新时间：2004.4.17 10：00

Iambic pentameter is the most common English meter, in which each foot contains an unaccented syllable and an accented syllable.

Rhyme royal is a poetic pattern with seven iambic pentameters rhyming ababbcc, which pronounce a final short e, and often end in an 11^th, unstressed syllable.

Heroic couplet is the pentameter couplet with the important difference that when the final e disappeared from speech the couplet became one of strict pentameters.

Blank verse is a succession of unrhymed iambic pentameters primarily an English form and has been used in the loftiest epic and dramatic verse from Shakespeare and Milton to the present.

Sonnet is a poem of 14 lines, usually in iambic pentameter, restricted to a definite rhyme scheme. There are two prominent types: the Elizabethan, or Shakespearean sonnet.

Shakespearean sonnet consisting of three quatrains and a couplet (rhyming abab cdcd efef gg)

Italian or Petrarchan sonnet, composed of an octave and a sestet (rhyming abbaabba cdecde).

Rhyme, or time, the most prominent of the literary artifices used in versification. With the decline of the classical quantitative meters and the substitution of accentual meters, rhyme began to develop, especially in the sacred Latin poetry of the early Christian church.

end rhyme: rhyme at the end of a line

assonance: repetition of related vowel sounds

alliteration: repetition of consonants, particularly at the beginning of words

Alliteration and assonance are said to rhyme only today when the sound of the final accented syllable of one word (paced usually at the end of a line of verse) agrees with the final accented syllable of another word so placed.

When the vowels in the final accented syllables of the two rhyming words and the consonants (if any) succeeding the vowel have exactly the same sound, it is called perfect rhyme, e.g. shroud and cloud, mark and bark.

In imperfect or approximate rhymes, the rhymed vowels and even the consonants might be similar but not identical, e.g. groaned and ground.

Some rhymes, as wind (noun) and kind, are called eye-rhymes (words which are spelled alike but not pronounced alike) and have come into general use through “poetic license”.

Poetic license means such liberties a poet adopts as “approximate rhymes”, or “eye-rhymes” (words which are spelled alike but not pronounced alike)

Epiphany is an appearance or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something, which is adapted by James Joyce to describe the sudden revelation of whatness of a thing, the moment in which the soul of the commonest object seems to us radiant.

Psychological penetration is a writing device that involves such psychological elements as “id”, “ego”, and “superego” in the depiction of characters’ inner thinking or mental activities.

Sentimentalism is one of the important trends in English literature of the middle and later decades of the 18th century. It justly criticized the cruelty of the capitalist relations and the gross social injustices brought about by the bourgeois revolutions. It embraces a pessimistic outlook and blames reason and the Industrial Revolution, marked by a sincere sympathy for the poverty-stricken, expropriated peasants.

Romanticism is a profound shift in sensibility marked a violent reaction to the Enlightenment. It was inspired by the revolutions in America and France and popular wars of independence in Poland, Spain, Greece, and elsewhere and expressed an extreme assertion of the self and the value of individual experience, together with the sense of the infinite and transcendental. It championed progressive causes, though when these were frustrated it often produced a bitter, gloomy, and despairing outlook.

Symbolism works under the surface to tie the story's external action to the theme. It was often produced through allegory, giving the literal event and its allegorical counterpart a one-to-one correspondence.

Realism was a loosely used term meaning truth to the observed facts of life (especially when they are gloomy).

Realism in literature is an approach that attempts to describe life without idealization or romantic subjectivity.

Pessimism denotes an attitude of hopelessness towards life, a vague general opinion that pain and evil predominate in human affairs.

Naturalism is primarily a French movement in prose fiction and the drama during the final third of the 19th-century.It can be included in the concept realism when realism is in kits broader sense.

Modernism is often used to identify what are considered to be distinctive features in the concepts, sensibility, form, and style of literature and art since World War I.

Modernist literature is a literature of discontinuity, both historically, being based upon a sharp rejection of the procedures and values of the immediate past, to which it adopts an adversary stance; and aesthetically.

Neo-classicism imitated the characteristics of Roman writers, including Horace, Virgil. Cicero,  etc, in the days of Augustus. They tried to make English literature conform to rules and principles established by the great Roman and Greek classical writers. In writing plays, they used rhyme and couplet instead of blank verse, observed the trinity--- the unity of time, place and action.