Aureate
diction is a highly ornate ('gilded') poetic diction favoured by the Scottish
Chaucerians and some English poets in the 15th century, notably
JohnLydgate. The aureate style, perfected by William Dunbar, is notable for its
frequent use of internal rhyme and of coinages adapted from
Latin. Noun: aureation.
01644--Augustan Age
Augustan Age is the greatest period of Roman literature, adorned by the poets Virgil, Ovid,
Horace, and Propertius. It is named after the reign (27 BCE-14 CE) of the
emperor Augustus, but many literary historians prefer to date the literary
period from the death of Julius Caesar in 44 CE, thus including the early works
of Virgil and Horace. In English literary history, the term is usually applied
to the period from the accession of Queen Anne (1702) to the deaths of Pope and
Swift (1744-5), although John Diyden, whose major translation of Virgil's works
appeared in 1697, may also be regarded as part of the English phenomenon known
as Augustanism. The Augustans, led by Pope and Swift, wrote in conscious
emulation of the Romans, adopted their literary forms (notably the epistle
and the satire), and aimed to create a similarly sophisticated urban
literary milieu: a characteristic preference in Augustan literature, encouraged
by the periodicals of Addison and Steele.
01643--aubade
Aubade [oh-bahd]
is a song or lyric poem lamenting the arrival of dawn to separate two lovers.
The form, which has no fixed metrical pattern, flourished in the late Middle
Ages in France; it was adopted in Germany by Wolfram von Eschenbach and in
England by Chaucer, whose Troilus and Criseyde includes a fine aubade. Later
English examples include Donne's The Sunne Rising' and Act III scene v of
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
01642--Attic style or Atticism
Attic style
or Atticism is the style of oratory or prose writing associated with the
speeches of the great Attic (i.e. Athenian) orators of the 5th and 4th
centuries BCE, including Lysias and Demosthenes. Later Roman writers
distinguished the purity and simplicity of these Attic models from the
excessive artifice and ornamentation of the 'Asiatic' style that had since
developed among the Greeks in Asia Minor.
01641--asyndeton
Asyndeton (plural
-deta) is a form of verbal compression which consists of the omission of
connecting words (usually conjunctions) between clauses. The most common form
is the omission of'and', leaving only a sequence of phrases linked by commas,
as in these sentences from Conrad's Heart of Darkness: 'An empty stream, a
great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was thick, warm, heavy,
sluggish.' The most famous example is Julius Caesar's boast, Veni, vidi, via (
I came, I saw, I conquered'). Less common is the omission of pronouns, as in
Auden' s early poem "The Watershed': 'two there were / Cleaned out a
damaged shaft by hand'. Here the relative pronoun 'who' is omitted. Adjective:
asyndetic.
01640--assonance
Assonance is
the repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds in the stressed syllables (and
sometimes in the following unstressed syllables) of neighbouring words; itis
distinct from rhyme in that the consonants differ although the vowels or
diphthongs match: sweet dreams,
hit or miss.
01639--aside
Aside is a
short speech or remark spoken by a character in a drama, directed either to the
audience or to another character, which by convention is supposed to be
inaudible to the other characters on stage.
01638--Asclepiad
Asclepiad is a Greek poetic metre named after Asclepiades of Samos (c.300 BCE),
although it was used earlier in lyrics and tragedies. It consists
of two or three choriambs preceded by a spondee and
followed by an iamb. Employed frequently by Horace and later adopted by
the German poet Holderlin, it is rarely found in English. Adjective:
Asclepiadean.
01637--art for art's sake
Art for art's sake is the slogan of aestheticism
in the 19th century, often given in its French form as Vart pourl'art. The most
important early manifesto for the idea, Theophile Gautier's preface to his
novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), does not actually use the phrase itself,
which is a simplified expression of the principle adopted by many leading
French authors and by Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Arthur Symons in England.
01636--Aristotelian
Aristotelian
means belonging to or derived from the works of the Greek philosopher Aristotle
(384-322 BCE), the most important of all ancient philosophers in his influence
on medieval science and logic, and on literary theory since the renaissance.
In his Poetics, Aristotle saw poetry in terms of the imitation or mimesis
of human actions, and accordingly regarded the plot or mytlios as the
basic principle of coherence in any literary work, which must have a beginning,
a middle, and an end. Since the Renaissance, his name has been associated most
often with his concepts of tragic catharsis, anagnorisis, and
unity of action .
01635--argument
Argument, in the
specialized literary sense, is a brief summary of the plot or subject-matter of
a long poem (or other work), such as those prefixed to the books of Milton's
Paradise Lost; or, in a sense closer to everyday usage, the set of opinions
expounded in a work (especially in didactic works) and capable of
being paraphrased as a logical sequence
of propositions.
01634--architectonics
Architectonics
is the principle of structure and governing design in an artistic work, as
distinct from its texture or stylistic details of execution.
01633--archetype
Archetype is a symbol, theme, setting, or character-type that recurs in different times and places in myth, literature, folklore, dreams, and rituals so frequently or prominently as to suggest (to certain speculative psychologists and critics) that it embodies some essential element of 'universal' human experience.
01632--archaism
archaism is
the use of words or constructions that have passed out of the language before
the time of writing; or a particular example of such an obsolete word or
expression. A common feature of much English poetry from Spenser to Hardy, it
rarely appears in prose or in modern verse.
01631--Arcadia or Arcady
Arcadia or
Arcady is an isolated
mountainous region of Greece in the central Peloponnese, famed in the ancient
world for its sheep and as the home of the god Pan. It was imagined by Virgil
in his Eclogues (42-37 BCE), and by later writers of pastorals in the Renaissance, as an ideal world of rural
simplicity and tranquillity. The adjective Arcadian can be applied to any such
imagined pastoral setting.