01660--bibliography

Bibliography is the description of books: (i) a systematic list of writings by a given author or on a given subject; (ii) the study of books as material objects, involving technical analysis of paper, printing methods, bindings, page-numbering, and publishing history.

A compiler of bibliographies or a student of bibliography is a bibliographer.

01659--bestiary

Bestiary is a description of animal life in verse or prose, in which the characteristics of real and fabulous beasts (like the phoenix or the unicorn) are given edifying religious meanings. This kind of allegory was popular in the Middle Ages, and survives in some later children's books. 

01658--belles-lettres

Belles-lettres is the French term for 'fine writing', originally used (as in 'fine art') to distinguish artistic literature from scientific or philosophical writing. Since the 19th century, though, the term has more often been used dismissively to denote a category of elegant essaywriting and lightweight literary chatter.  Adjective: belletristic.

01657--Beat writers

Beat writers is a group of American writers in the late 1950s, led by the poet Allen Ginsberg and the novelist Jack Kerouac. Writers of the 'beat generation' dropped out of middle-class society in search of 'beatific' ecstasy through drugs, sex, and Zen Buddhism. Their loose styles favour spontaneous self-expression and recitation to jazz accompaniment. The principal works of the group are Ginsberg's Howl (1956) and Kerouac's On the Road (1957). Significant contributions in poetry were Gregory Corso's Gasoline (1958) and Gary Snyder's Riprap (1959); while in prose, the group's mentor William S. Burroughs published The Naked Lunch in 1959. The poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti was another leading figure. The Beats had a strong influence on the 'counter-culture' of the 1960s.

01656--beast fable

Beast fable is the commonest type of  fable, in which animals and birds speak and behave like human beings in a short tale usually illustrating some moral point. The fables attributed to Aesop  and those written in verse by Jean de la Fontaine  are the best known.

01655--bathos

Bathos is a lapse into the ridiculous by a poet aiming at elevated expression. Whereas anticlimax can be a deliberate poetic effect, bathos is an unintended failure. Pope named this stylistic blemish from the Greek word for 'depth', in his Peri Bathous, or the Art of Sinking in Poetry (1727).

01654--baroque

Baroque means eccentric or lavishly ornate in style. The term is used more precisely in music and in art history than it is in literary history, where it usually refers to the most artificial poetic styles of the early 17th century, especially those known as Gongorism and Marinism after the Spanish poet Luis de Gongora and the Italian poet Giovanni Battista Marini. 

01653--bardolatry

Bardolatry means excessive veneration of Shakespeare. Ben Jonson said of Shakespeare, 'I loved the man, and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any.' A bardolater is one who goes even further in revering 'the Bard'. Adjective: bardolatrous.

01652--bard

Bard is a poet who was awarded privileged status in ancient Celtic cultures, and who was charged with the duty of celebrating the laws and heroic achievements of his people. In modern Welsh usage, a bard is a poet who has participated in the annual poetry festival known as the Eisteddfod. The nostalgic mythology of Romanticism tended to imagine the bards as solitary visionaries and prophets. Since the 18th century, the term has often been applied more loosely to any poet, and as a fanciful title for Shakespeare in particular. Adjective: bardic.

01651--ballad metre or ballad stanza

Ballad metre or ballad stanza is the usual form of the folk ballad and its literary imitations, consisting of a quatrain in which the first and third lines have four stresses while the second and fourth have three stresses. Usually only the second and fourth lines rhyme. The rhythm is basically iambic, but the number of unstressed syllables in a line may vary, as in this stanza from the traditional 'Lord Thomas and Fair Annet':

'O art thou blind, Lord Thomas?' she said, 'Or canst thou not very well see? Or dost thou not see my own heart's blood Runs trickling down my knee?'

01650--ballad

Ballad is a folk song or orally transmitted poem telling in a direct and dramatic manner some popular story usually derived from a tragic incident in local history or legend. The story is told simply, impersonally, and often with vivid dialogue. Ballads are normally composed in quatrains with alternating four-stress and three-stress lines, the second and fourth lines rhyming (see ballad metre); but some ballads are in couplet form, and some others have six-line stanzas. Appearing in many parts of Europe in the late Middle Ages, ballads nourished particularly strongly in Scotland from the 15th century onward. Since the 18th century, educated poets outside the folk-song tradition— notably Coleridge and Goethe—have written imitations of the popular ballad's form and style: Coleridge's 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner' (1798) is a celebrated example.

01649--avant-garde

Avant-garde is the French military and political term for the vanguard of an army or political movement, extended since the late 19th century to that body of artists and writers who are dedicated to the idea of art as experiment and revolt against tradition. Ezra Pound's view, that 'Artists are the antennae of the race', is a distinctly modern one, implying a duty to stay ahead of one's time through constant innovation in forms and subjects.

01648--auxesis

Auxesis is a figure of speech that lists a series of things in ascending order of importance, as in this line from Shakespeare's Richard II:

O'erthrows thy joys, friends, fortune, and thy state

01647--autotelic

Autotelic stands for having, as an artistic work, no end or purpose beyond its own existence. The term was used by T. S. Eliot in 1923 and adopted by new criticism to distinguish the self-referential nature of literary art from didactic, philosophical, critical, or biographical works that involve practical reference to things outside themselves: in the words of the American poet Archibald MacLeish, 'A poem should not mean / But be'. A similar idea is implied in the theory of the 'poetic function' put forward in Russian Formalism.

01646--automatic writing

Automatic writing is a method of composition that tries to dispense with conscious control or mental censorship, transcribing immediately the promptings of the unconscious mind. Some writers in the early days of  surrealism attempted it, notably Andre Breton and Philippe Soupault in their work Les Champs Magnetiques (1919).