A kenning is a figure of speech in the type of circumlocution, a compound that employs figurative language in place of a more concrete single-word noun. Kennings are strongly associated with Old Norse-Icelandic and Old English poetry. They continued to be a feature of Icelandic poetry for centuries, together with the closely related heiti.
Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English, was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He composed three of the most famous poems in Latin literature: the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid. A number of minor poems, collected in the Appendix Vergiliana, were attributed to him in ancient times, but modern scholars consider his authorship of these poems to be dubious.
A figure of speech or rhetorical figure is a word or phrase that intentionally deviates from ordinary language use to produce a rhetorical effect. Figures of speech are traditionally classified into schemes, which vary the ordinary sequence of words, and tropes, where words carry a meaning other than what they ordinarily signify.
In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a narrative mode or method that attempts "to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind" of a narrator.
Stylistics, a branch of applied linguistics, is the study and interpretation of texts of all types and/or spoken language in regard to their linguistic and tonal style, where style is the particular variety of language used by different individuals and/or in different situations or settings. For example, the vernacular, or everyday language may be used among casual friends, whereas more formal language, with respect to grammar, pronunciation or accent, and lexicon or choice of words, is often used in a cover letter and résumé and while speaking during a job interview.
Diction, in its original meaning, is a writer's or speaker's distinctive vocabulary choices and style of expression in a poem or story. In its common meaning, it is the distinctiveness of speech: the art of speaking so that each word is clearly heard and understood to its fullest complexity and extremity, and concerns pronunciation and tone, rather than word choice and style. This is more precisely and commonly expressed with the term enunciation or with its synonym, articulation.
Russian formalism was a school of thought literary theory in Russia from the 1910s to the 1930s. It includes the work of a number of highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars such as Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Vladimir Propp, Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Boris Tomashevsky, Grigory Gukovsky who revolutionised literary criticism between 1914 and the 1930s by establishing the specificity and autonomy of poetic language and literature. Russian formalism exerted a major influence on thinkers like Mikhail Bakhtin and Juri Lotman, and on structuralism as a whole. The movement's members had a relevant influence on modern literary criticism, as it developed in the structuralist and post-structuralist periods. Under Stalin it became a pejorative term for elitist art.
New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object. The movement derived its name from John Crowe Ransom's 1941 book The New Criticism.
Utamakura is a rhetorical concept in Japanese poetry.
Intertextuality is the shaping of a text's meaning by another text, either through deliberate compositional strategies such as quotation, allusion, calque, plagiarism, translation, pastiche or parody, or by interconnections between similar or related works perceived by an audience or reader of the text. These references are sometimes made deliberately and depend on a reader's prior knowledge and understanding of the referent, but the effect of intertextuality is not always intentional and is sometimes inadvertent. Often associated with strategies employed by writers working in imaginative registers, intertextuality may now be understood as intrinsic to any text.
Titus Calpurnius Siculus was a Roman bucolic poet. Eleven eclogues have been handed down to us under his name, of which the last four, from metrical considerations and express manuscript testimony, are now generally attributed to Nemesianus, who lived in the time of the emperor Carus and his sons. The separate authorship of the eclogues of Calpurnius and Nemesianus was established by Haupt.
The Georgics is a poem by Latin poet Virgil, likely published in 29 BCE. As the name suggests the subject of the poem is agriculture; but far from being an example of peaceful rural poetry, it is a work characterized by tensions in both theme and purpose.
Sir Christopher Bruce Ricks is a British literary critic and scholar. He is the William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University (US), co-director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University, and was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford (UK) from 2004 to 2009. In 2008, he served as president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He is known as a champion of Victorian poetry; an enthusiast of Bob Dylan, whose lyrics he has analysed at book length; a trenchant reviewer of writers he considers pretentious ; and a warm reviewer of those he thinks humane or humorous. Hugh Kenner praised his "intent eloquence", and Geoffrey Hill his "unrivalled critical intelligence". W. H. Auden described Ricks as "exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding". John Carey calls him the "greatest living critic".
Western literature, also known as European literature, is the literature written in the context of Western culture in the languages of Europe, and is shaped by the periods in which they were conceived, with each period containing prominent western authors, poets, and pieces of literature.
Michel Riffaterre, known as Michael Riffaterre, was an influential French literary critic and theorist. He pursued a generally structuralist approach. He is well known in particular for his book Semiotics of Poetry, and his conceptions of hypogram and syllepsis. Kvas observes three phases in Riffaterre's work: stylistic, semiotic, and the intertextual phase. The most important is his intertextual phase in which he develops his understanding of intertextuality. For Riffaterre, "intertextuality is not a felicitous surplus, the privilege of a good memory or a classical education. The term indeed refers to an operation of the reader's mind, but it is an obligatory one, necessary to any textual decoding. Intertextuality necessarily complements our experience of textuality. It is the perception that our reading of the text cannot be complete or satisfactory without going through the intertext, that the text does not". According to the literary theorist Kornelije Kvas, "the key concept of Riffaterre's theory – intertextuality – is actually a method of text interpretation through which structures or poetic signs are recognized in the text that make the text literary. Intertextuality is a hermeneutic means of discovering the meaning of the poem, which strictly regulates the ways of the reader's perception of poetic signs. As in the case of the semiotic phase of his understanding of poetry, Riffaterre's intertextual phase is more like a theory of the interpretation of poetry than a theory of poetry itself".
Parallelism is a rhetorical device that compounds words or phrases that have equivalent meanings so as to create a definite pattern. This structure is particularly effective when "specifying or enumerating pairs or series of like things". A scheme of balance, parallelism represents "one of the basic principles of grammar and rhetoric".
This glossary of literary terms is a list of definitions of terms and concepts used in the discussion, classification, analysis, and criticism of all types of literature, such as poetry, novels, and picture books, as well as of grammar, syntax, and language techniques. For a more complete glossary of terms relating to poetry in particular, see Glossary of poetry terms.
Poetics is the theory of structure, form, and discourse within literature, and, in particular, within poetry.
Hermeneutics is the theory and methodology of interpretation. The tradition of Western hermeneutics starts in the writings of Aristotle and continues to the modern era.
The Alankara Shastra is a traditional Indian science of aesthetics that deals with the principles and techniques of literary composition and ornamentation. It is an important aspect of Indian literary criticism and aims to enhance the beauty and expressiveness of literary works. It is based on the concept that literary works should be pleasing and enjoyable to the reader, and it provides guidelines for the use of literary devices such as metaphor, simile and imagery, as well as rules for the arrangement of words and phrases to create pleasing and harmonious compositions.
