Some short Literary Terms

Comedy:  In the most common literary application, a 'comedy' is a fictional work in which the materials are selected and managed primarily in order to interest and amuse us: the characters and their discomfitures engage our pleasurable attention rather than our profound concern, we are made to feel confident that no great disaster will occur and usually the action turns out happily for the chief characters. The term "comedy" is customarily applied only to plays for the stage or to motion pictures and television dramas; it should be noted, however, that the comic form of the plot as just defined also occurs in prose fiction and narrative poetry. 


Paradox:  A paradox is a statement that seems on its face to be logically contradictory or absurd, yet turns out to be interpretable in a way that makes sense. The Paradox is used occasionally by almost all poets but was a persistent and central device in the seventeenth century in both its religious and secular forms.

Rhyme:  In English verification, standard rhyme consists of the repetition, in the rhyming words, of the last stressed vowel and of all the speech sounds following that vowel: late - fate.

Tension:  "Tension" became a common description and evaluative word in the criticism of the 1930s and later, especially after Allen Tale, one of the New Critics, proposed it as a term to be made by " looping the prefixes off the extension and intension of the logical term".In technical logic, the 'intension' of a word is the set of abstract attributes which must be possessed by any object to which the word can be literally applied, and the 'extension' of a word is a class of concrete objects to which the word applies. Other critics use 'tension' to characterize poetry that manifests an equilibrium of the serious and the ironic, or 'a pattern of resolve stresses', or harmony of opponent tendencies or any other mode of that stability in opposition which was the favourite way in the New Criticism for conceiving the organization of a good poem.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Introduction to The Romantic Period

Image
'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive' (William Wordsworth, The Prelude) The dates of the Romantic period of literature are not precise and the term 'romantic' was itself not widely used until after the period in question. Conventionally, the period begins in 1798, which saw the publication by Wordsworth and Coleridge of their Lyrical Ballads and ends in 1832 a year which saw the death of Sir Walter Scott and the enactment by the parliament of the First Reform Bill. These years link literary and political events. The Romantic period was an era in which a literary revolution took place alongside social and economic revolutions. In some histories of literature, the Romantic period is called the 'Age of Revolutions'. The Period was one of rapid change as the nation was transformed from an agricultural country to an industrial one. The laws of a free market, development by the economist Adam Smith in this book Wealth of Nations (1776), dominated peoples lives. At ...
Read more

Old English Religious Poetry

The first fragment of literature is known as Caedmon's Hymn. It dates from the late seventh century (around 670). The Story goes that Caedmon was a lay worker on the estate of the monastery of Whitby, in Northumbria. His hymn is, therefore, the first song of praise in English culture, and the first Christian religious poem in English, Although many Latin hymns were known at the time. It was preserved by monks of Whitby, and it is not certain whether the few lines which have survived through the ages are the complete hymn or not. Christian monks and nuns were, in effect, the guardians of culture, as they were virtually the only people who could read and write before the fourteenth century. It is interesting therefore the most of the native English culture they preserved is not in Latin, the language of the church, but in old English, the language of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. Christian monks and nuns were, in effect, the guardians of culture, as they were virtually the only peop...
Read more

Three Major Transition Historians

AGE OF TRANSITION HISTORIANS        David Hume   (1711 - 1776) :   Born  and educated at Edinburgh, Hume first distinguished himself as a philosopher,  publishing A treatise of Human Nature and Essays, Moral and Political. Later he turned historical works, writing The History of England, in six volumes. As a historian, Hume makes no pretence at profound research, so that his work has little permanent value as history. He possesses a clear and logical mind and a swift and brilliant narrative style. In the history of literature, his work is of importance as being first of the popular and literary histories of the country.       William Robertson (1721-1793) :    Robertson also was a Scot, being born in the country of Midlothian. After leaving university, he entered the Scottish church. He had an active and successful career as a historian, producing among other works The History of Scotland during the Reigns of Queen Mary ...
Read more