01741--collective unconscious

Collective unconscious is the term given by the Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung to the inborn racial memory which he believed to be the primitive source of the archetypes or 'universal' symbols found in legends, poetry, and dreams. 

01739--collage

Collage is a work assembled wholly or partly from fragments of other writings, incorporating allusions, quotations, and foreign phrases. Originally applied to paintings with pasted-on elements, the term has been extended to an important kind of modernist poetry, of which the most significant examples are the Cantos of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. The collage technique can also be found sometimes in prose works. 

01738--cohesion

Cohesion is a term used in linguistic analyses of texts such as those undertaken in stylistics, in reference to the degrees and kinds of internal connection that link different parts of the same text. Cohesion between one sentence, stanza or other unit, and another may be established by sound-patterns such as metre, rhyme, and alliteration, or by pronominal back-reference (she, those, etc.), or by the use of similar syntactical constructions or by conjunctions and similar linking phrases (nor, however, consequently, etc.). 

01737--codex

Codex (plural codices) is a book consisting of ancient manuscripts. The study of codices is called codicology.

01736--code

Code is a shared set of rules or conventions by which signs can be combined to permit a message to be communicated from one person to another; it may consist of a language in the normal sense (e.g. English, Urdu) or of a smaller-scale 'language' such as the set of hand-signals, horns, grimaces, and flashing lights used by motorists. The code is one of the six essential elements in Roman Jakobson's influential theory of communication, and has an important place in  structuralist theories, which stress the extent to which messages (including literary works) call upon already coded meanings rather than fresh revelations of raw reality. An important work in this connection is Roland Barthes's S/Z (1970), in which a story by Balzac is broken down into five codes, ranging from the 'hermeneutic code' (which sets up a mystery and delays its solution) to the 'cultural code' (which refers to accepted prejudices, stereotypes, and values). 

01735--closure

Closure is the sense of completion or resolution at the end of a literary work or part of a work or, in literary criticism, the reduction of a work's meanings to a single and complete sense that excludes the claims of other interpretations. The contrast between 'closed' texts and 'open' texts has been a common topic of modern criticism, as in Roland Barthes's theory of the lisible.

01734--Closet drama

Closet drama is a literary composition written in the form of a play, but intended—or suited—only for reading in a closet rather than for stage performance. Senecan tragedy is thought to have been written for private recitation, and there are several important examples of closet drama in English, including Milton's Samson Agonistes, Byron's Manfred, Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, and Arnold's Empedocles on Etna.

01733--closed couplet

Closed couplet is two lines of metrical verse in which the syntax and sense come to a conclusion or a strong pause at the end of the second line, giving the couplet the quality of a self-contained epigram. The term is applied almost always to rhyming couplets, especially to the heroic couplet; but whereas the heroic couplets of Chaucer and Keats often allow the sense to run on over the end of the second line, those written by English poets in the late 17th century and in the 18th are usually end-stopped, and are thus closed couplets, as in these lines about men from Sarah Fyge Egerton's 'The Emulation' (1703):

They fear we should excel their sluggish parts, Should we attempt the sciences and arts; Pretend they were designed for them alone, So keep us fools to raise their own renown.

01732--climax

Climax is any moment of great intensity in a literary work, especially in drama. Also in rhetoric, a figure of speech in which a sequence of terms is linked by chain-like repetition through three or more clauses in ascending order of importance. A well-known example is Benjamin Franklin's cautionary maxim, 'For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; for want of a horse the rider was lost.' This figure uses a repetitive structure similar to that of anadiplosis. Adjective: climactic. 

01731--clerihew

Clerihew is a form of comic verse named after its inventor, Edmund Clerihew Bentley. It consists of two metrically awkward couplets, and usually presents a ludicrously uninformative 'biography' of some famous person whose name appears as one of the rhymed words in the first couplet:

Geoffrey Chaucer Could hardly have been coarser,

But this never harmed the sales Of his Canterbury Tales.

01730--clausula

Clausula is the closing words of a prose sentence, especially when characterized by a distinct rhythm or cadence, as in the Latin oratory of Cicero or his imitators.

01729--classicism

Classicism is an attitude to literature that is guided by admiration of the qualities of formal balance, proportion, decorum, and restraint attributed to the major works of ancient Greek and Roman literature ('the classics') in preference to the irregularities of later vernacular literatures, and especially (since about 1800) to the artistic liberties proclaimed by romanticism. A classic is a work of the highest class, and has also been taken to mean a work suitable for study in school classes. During and since the renaissance, these overlapping meanings came to be applied to the writings of major Greek and Roman authors from Homer to Juvenal, which were regarded as unsurpassed models of excellence. The adjective classical, usually applied to this body of writings, has since been extended to outstandingly creative periods of other literatures: the 17th century may be regarded as the classical age of French literature, and the 19th century the classical period of the Western novel, while the finest fiction of the United States in the mid-19th century from Cooper to Twain was referred to by D. H. Lawrence as Classic American Literature (despite the opposition between 'classical' and 'romantic' views of art, a romantic work can now still be a classic). A classical style or approach to literary composition is usually one that imitates Greek or Roman models in subject-matter (e.g. Greek legends) or in form (by the adoption of GENRES like TRAGEDY, EPic, ODE, or verse SATIRE), or both. As a literary doctrine, classicism holds that the writer must be governed by rules, models, or conventions, rather than by wayward inspiration: in its most strictly codified form in the 17th and 18th centuries (see neoclassicism), it required the observance of rules derived from Aristotle's Poetics (4th century BCE) and Horace's Ars Poetica (c.20 BCE), principally those of decorum and the dramatic unities. The dominant tendency of French literature in the 17th and 18th centuries, classicism in a weaker form also characterized the augustan age in England; the later German classicism of the late 18th and early 19th centuries was distinguished by its exclusive interest in Greek models, as opposed to the Roman bias of French and English classicisms. After the end of the 18th century, 'classical' came to be contrasted with 'romantic' in an opposition of increasingly generalized terms embracing moods and attitudes as well as characteristics of actual works. While partisans of Romanticism associated the classical with the rigidly artificial and the romantic with the freely creative, the classicists condemned romantic self-expression as eccentric self-indulgence, in the name of classical sanity and order. The great German writer]. W. von Goethe summarized his conversion to classical principles by defining the classical as healthy, the romantic as sickly. Since then, literary classicism has often been less a matter of imitating Greek and Roman models than of resisting the claims of Romanticism and all that it may be thought to stand for (Protestantism, liberalism, democracy, anarchy): the critical doctrines of Matthew Arnold and more especially of T. S. Eliot are classicist in this sense of reacting against the Romantic principle of unrestrained self expression. 

01728--claque

Claque ( pronunced as klahk) is the French word for a handclap, applied to a group of people hired by a theatre manager to applaud a performance, thus encouraging the paying audience to do likewise. The French writer Villiers de ITsle-Adam described this widespread corrupt practice in the theatres of 19th-century Paris as 'the avowed symbol of the Public's inability to distinguish by itself the worth of what it is listening to'.

01727--city comedy or citizen comedy

City comedy or citizen comedy is a kind of comic drama produced in the London theatres of the early 17th century, characterized by its contemporary urban subject-matter and its portrayal, often satirical, of middle-class life and manners. The principal examples are John Marston's The Dutch Courtezan, Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, and Thomas Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside.

01726--circumlocution

Circumlocution is the roundabout manner of referring to something at length rather than naming it briefly and directly, usually known in literary terminology as periphrasis.

01725--chronotope

Chronotope is a term employed by the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin to refer to the co-ordinates of time and space invoked by a given narrative; in other words to the 'setting', considered as a spatio-temporal whole.

01724--chronicle play

Chronicle play is a history play, especially of the kind written in England in the 1590s and based upon the revised 1587 edition of Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles. This group of plays includes Marlowe's Edward II (1592) and the three parts of Shakespeare's Henry VI (c.1590-2).

01723--chronicle

Chronicle is a written record of events presented in order of time, and

updated regularly over a prolonged period. The chroniclers of the Middle Ages, from the compilers of King Alfred's Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (9th to 12th centuries) onward, tended to mix legend and rumour with fact in their accounts. Significant chronicles in the later Middle Ages include those of Matthew Paris (St Albans, late 13th century) and the accounts of the wars against the English written by the French chronicler Jean Froissart (late 14th century). Raphael Holinshed and his collaborators published in 1577 the Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland which were adapted by Shakespeare and other dramatists in their chronicle plays.

01722--chrestomathy

Chrestomathy is a collection or anthology of passages in prose or verse, often selected for purposes of literary or linguistic study.

01721--chorus

Chorus is a group of singers distinct from the principal performers in a dramatic or musical performance; also the song or refrain that they sing. In classical Greek tragedy a chorus of twelve or fifteen masked performers would sing, with dancing movements, a commentary on the action of the play, interpreting its events from the standpoint of traditional wisdom. This practice appears to have been derived from the choral lyrics of religious festivals.