01720--choriamb or choriambus

Choriamb or Choriambus is a metrical unit combining one trochee  and one iamb into a single foot of four syllables, with two stressed syllables enclosing two unstressed syllables, as in the word hullabaloo. It was used frequently in Greek dramatic choruses and lyrics, and by the Roman poet Horace, and later in some German verse. 

01719--choral character

Choral character is a term sometimes applied to a character in a play who, while participating in the action to some degree, also provides the audience with an ironic commentary upon it, thus performing a function similar to that of the chorus in Greek tragedy. Two examples are Thersites in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida and Wong in Brecht's The Good Woman of Setzuan.

01718--chivalric romance

Chivalric romance is the principal kind of romance found in medieval Europe from the 12th century onwards, describing the adventures of legendary knights, and celebrating an idealized code of civilized behaviour that combines loyalty, honour, and courtly love.

01717--Chicago critics

Chicago critics is a group of critics associated with the University of Chicago, who contributed to the volume Critics and Criticisms: Ancient and Modern (1952) edited by the most prominent figure, R. S. Crane. Other members included W. R. Keast, Elder Olson, and Bernard Weinberg; Wayne C. Booth, the author of The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), was also associated with the group. The Chicago critics were concerned with accounting for the variety of critical approaches to literature in terms of assumptions about the nature of literary works. They also emphasized the larger structures of literary works, following the example of Aristotle, whom they admired for basing his Poetics on actual examples rather than on preconceptions. Their interest in plot and in the design of a work as a whole distinguishes them from the new critics, who concentrated on the study of metaphor and symbol in LYRIC verse. 

01716--chiasmus

Chiasmus is a figure of speech by which the order of the terms in the first of two parallel clauses is reversed in the second. This may involve a repetition of the same words, in which case the figure may be classified as antimetabole, or just a reversed parallel between two corresponding pairs of ideas, as in this line from Mary Leapor's 'Essay on Woman' (1751): Despised, if ugly; if she's fair, betrayed.

The figure is especially common in 18th-century English poetry, but is also found in prose of all periods. It is named after the Greek letter chi, indicating a 'criss-cross' arrangement of terms. 

01715--cheville

Cheville is the French word for a plug, applied to any word or phrase of little semantic importance which is used by a poet to make up the required number of syllables in a metrical verse line. Chaucer used chevilles with shameless frequency, often plugging his lines with 'eek', 'for sothe', 'ywis', 'I gesse', T trowe', and similar interjections.

01714--characterization

Characterization is the representation of persons in narrative and dramatic works. This may include direct methods like the attribution of qualities in description or commentary, and indirect (or 'dramatic') methods inviting readers to infer qualities from characters' actions, speech, or appearance. 

01713--character

Character is a personage in a narrative or dramatic work.  It's a kind of prose sketch briefly describing some recognizable type of person. As a minor literary genre, the character originates with the Characters of the Greek writer Theophrastus; it was revived in the 17th century, notably by Sir Thomas Overbury in his Characters (1614) and by La Bruyere in Les Caracteres (1688).

01709--chapbook

Chapbook is the name given since the 19th century to a kind of small, cheaply printed book or pamphlet hawked by chapmen from the 16th century to the early 19th century, and containing ballads, fairy-tales, old romances, accounts of famous criminals, and other popular entertainments.

01708--chant royal

Chant royal is a French verse form normally consisting of five stanzas of eleven 10-syllable lines rhyming ababccddede, followed by an  envoi (or half-stanza) rhyming ddede. The last line of the first stanza is repeated as a refrain at the end of the succeeding stanzas and of the envoi. The pattern is similar to that of the ballade, but even more demanding. Most chants royaux were allegories on dignified subjects. They appeared in France from the time of Eustache Deschamps (late 14th century) to that of Clement Marot (early 16th century), but very rarely in English.

01707--chanson de geste

Chanson de geste ('song of deeds') is a kind of shorter epic poem in Old French, composed between the late llth century and the early 14th century, celebrating the historical and legendary exploits of Charlemagne (late 8th century) and other Frankish nobles in holy wars against the Saracens or in internal rebellions. 

01706--chanson

Chanson is the French word for a song; also applied specifically to the kind of love song composed by the Provencal troubadours of the late Middle Ages. This usually has five or six matching stanzas and a concluding envoi (or half-stanza), and its subject is courtly love. The metres and rhyme schemes vary greatly, as the form was seen as a test of technical skills. 

01705--cenacle

Cenacle (say-nahkl) is a clique or coterie of writers that assembles around a leading figure. A characteristic of the hero-worshipping culture of romanticism, cmacles appeared in Paris from the 1820s onwards around Charles Nodier and, most famously, Victor Hugo.

01704--Celtic Revival

Celtic Revival is a term sometimes applied to the period of Irish literature in English (c.1885-1939) now more often referred to as the Irish Literary Revival or Renaissance. There are other similar terms: Celtic Renaissance, Celtic Dawn, and Celtic Twilight. These Celtic titles are misleading as descriptions of the broader Irish Revival, but they indicate a significant factor in the early phase of the movement: Celticism involves an idea of Irishness based on fanciful notions of innate racial character outlined by the English critic Matthew Arnold in On the Study of Celtic Literature (1866), in which Celtic traits are said to include delicacy, charm, spirituality, and ineffectual sentimentality. This image of Irishness was adopted in part by W. B. Yeats in his attempt to create a distinctively Irish literature with his dreamy early verse and with The Celtic Twilight (1893), a collection of stories based on Irish folklore and fairy-tales. 

01703--causerie

Causerie is the French word for a chat, sometimes used to denote an informal literary essay or article, after the Causeries du lundi—the famous weekly articles by the French literary critic Sainte-Beuve published in Parisian newspapers from 1849 to 1869.

01702--catharsis

Catharsis, the effect of'purgation' or 'purification' achieved by tragic drama, according to Aristotle's argument in his Poetics (4th century BCE). Aristotle wrote that a tragedy should succeed 'in arousing pity and fear in such a way as to accomplish a catharsis of such emotions'. There has been much dispute about his meaning, but Aristotle seems to be rejecting Plato's hostile view of poetry as an unhealthy emotional stimulant. His metaphor of emotional cleansing has been read as a solution to the puzzle of audiences' pleasure or relief in witnessing the disturbing events enacted in tragedies. Another interpretation is that it is the protagonist's guilt that is purged, rather than the audience's feeling of terror. Adjective: cathartic.

01701--catastrophe

Catastrophe is the final resolution or denouement of the plot in a tragedy, usually involving the death of the protagonist.

01700--catalogue verse

Catalogue verse is verse that records the names of several persons, places, or things in the form of a list. It is common in epic poetry, where the heroes involved in a battle are often enumerated. Other types of catalogue verse record genealogical or geographical information. Walt Whitman created a new kind of catalogue verse in his Song of Myself (1855), which celebrates the huge variety of peoples, places, and occupations in the United States in the form of long lists.

01699--catalectic

Catalectic is lacking the final syllable or syllables expected in the regular pattern of a metrical verse line. The term is most often used of the common English trochaic line in which the optional final unstressed syllable  is not used. Of these lines from Shelley's To a Skylark', the second and fourth are catalectic:

In the golden lightning Of the sunken sun,
O'er which clouds are bright'ning,
Thou dost float and run

01698--catachresis

Catachresis is the misapplication of a word (e.g. disinterested for 'uninterested'), or the extension of a word's meaning in a surprising but strictly illogical  metaphor. In the second sense, a wellknown example from Hamlet is To take arms against a sea of troubles'.