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. 

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).

01712--Cambridge School Portal English work year 7 Cambridge School, A Midsummer Night's Dream

1.       Amazon Queen = Hippolyta

2.       Mischievous spirit who works for Oberon = Puck

3.       King of the fairies =  Oberon

4.       Wants to marry someone her father does not like = Hermia

5.       Raising a child whose mother died in childbirth = Titania 

6.       Young man whom Egeu wants to marry Egeus's daughter = Demetrius

7.       Queen of the fairies = Titania 

8.       Rejected by the man she loves = Helena

9.       Has an aunt who lives outside of Athens =

10.   He begs for his right as a father to decide what should happen to his daughter = Egeus

11.   Duke of Athens = Theseus

12.   Playing Pyramus in the play "Pyramus and Thisbe" but wants to play the lion too =  Nick Bottom

13.   Plans to tell Demetrius about Lysander's and Hermia's plans to run away = Helena

14.   Allows Demetrius to marry Helena and Lysander to marry Hermia = Theseus

15.   Flies off to find a magical flower = Puck

01711--Samuel Pepys

Samuel Pepys (1633–1703)

The Diary of Samuel Pepys contains firsthand accounts of some of the most important historical events of 17th-century England. Yet it is Pepys’s candor in recording the minutiae of his private life— what he ate for dinner, a squabble with his wife, his childlike excitement over a new watch—that prompted his biographer Claire Tomalin to declare him “both the most ordinary and the most extraordinary writer you will ever meet.”

An Insatiable Curiosity 

Pepys had an insatiable curiosity and attempted to learn all that he could about every subject. It was undoubtedly this fascination with life that inspired him, at the age of 26, to begin keeping a diary in which he would eventually set down more than 1.2 million words. At the age of 35, he abandoned his diary, fearing it was straining his eyes so much that he might go blind.

“The Right Hand of the Navy”

Shortly after starting his diary, Pepys became a clerk in the Royal Navy office and worked hard at rooting out corruption and streamlining management. Acknowledged as “the right hand of the Navy,” in 1684 he was appointed the secretary of the admiralty. In that capacity, he doubled the number of battleships and restored the Royal Navy as a major sea power.

 A Confidante of Kings

During his years of public service, Pepys enjoyed a close relationship with King Charles II and his successor, James II. However, Pepys also made enemies in his rise to power. In 1678, some of his adversaries tried unsuccessfully to ruin his reputation, falsely accusing him of murder and treason. Although Pepys was imprisoned briefly, the intervention of Charles II kept him from further punishment.

A Scholarly Retirement

Pepys lived in retirement for the last 14 years of his life. He spent his time amassing a large personal library, corresponding with various artists and scholars, and collecting material for a history of the navy, which he never completed. He bequeathed his large library, including his diary, to Cambridge University.

Postponed Publication

Written in shorthand, the diary was not transcribed until the early 19th century. An abridged version—with his romantic dalliances and other details that “could not possibly be printed” removed—was published in 1825. The full, uncensored version did not appear until 1970.

01710--Write a short note on Fanny Burney

Fanny Burney

1752–1840

In the robust world of the Age of Johnson, where novel writing was not considered a suitable occupation for a lady, Fanny Burney succeeded like no other woman. Small in stature, shy, and entirely selfeducated, she had neither family money nor social status. Yet she carved out a respectable place for herself in society with her popular novels and secured her place in history with her richly detailed diary, first published a few years after her death. Critics today tend to view her as Jane Austen’s predecessor and not exactly her literary equal, but Burney’s novels outsold Austen’s in their day, and Burney herself had a much more worldly and varied life. She counted Samuel Johnson and other members of his influential Literary Club among her friends. She also knew the king and queen of England personally, once chatted with the French king Louis XVIII, and even got a glimpse of Napoleon himself.  

Out of Her Father’s Shadow

She was born Frances Burney, the middle child in a large, close family. Both of her parents were musicians, and her father had a doctorate in music from Oxford. After the death of her mother, she devoted herself to her father’s career, acting as his secretary and helping him write his ambitious history of music. Dr. Burney’s growing reputation first brought her into contact with leading artists and intellectuals. With the spotlight on her father, Burney wrote for herself in secret and published all four of her novels anonymously. Even her father didn’t know she was writing until after the runaway success of her first novel, Evelina (1778).

Literary Celebrity

The popularity of Fanny Burney’s novels didn’t make her rich, but it did enhance her social standing. She became a fixture in literary circles and gained an appointment at the court of George III. In 1793, she met a group of liberal French émigrés, among them a handsome officer named D’Arblay (därPblAQ) who won her heart. The couple had only a modest income, but the marriage was a happy one and produced a son. D’Arblay supported his wife’s career by serving as her secretary, sometimes even copying manuscript pages for her. Burney lived 87 years, an unusually long life for the time. She survived cancer, exile in France during the Napoleonic Wars, and the deaths of both her husband and her son.

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'. 

01697--carpe diem

Carpe diem is a quotation from Horace's Odes (I, xi) meaning 'seize the day', in other words 'make the best of the present moment'. A common theme or  motif in European  lyric poetry, in which the speaker of a poem argues (often to a hesitant virgin) that since life is short, pleasure should be enjoyed while there is still time. The most celebrated examples in English are Marvell's To His Coy Mistress' (1681) and Herrick's To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time' (1648), which begins 'Gather ye rosebuds while ye may'. In some Christian poems and sermons, the carpe diem motif warns us to prepare our souls for death, rather than our bodies for bed.

01696--Caroline

Caroline means belonging to the period 1625-49, when Charles I reigned as king of England, Scotland, and Ireland. This period includes the later metaphysical poets, the early work of Milton, and the so-called 'cavalier poets' Thomas Carew, Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, and Sir John Suckling.

01695--carol

Carol is a song of religious rejoicing, usually associated with Christmas or Easter in the Christian calendar. In the Middle Ages, however, a carol could be a purely secular song of love or satire. A carol in this earlier sense is a song appropriate for a round dance, composed in regular rhyming stanzas with a refrain or burden: a common form was the four-line stanza rhyming aaab with a two-line burden rhyming bb.

01694--carnivalization

Carnivalization is the liberating and subversive influence of popular humour on the literary tradition, according to the theory propounded by the Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin in his works Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929) and Rabelais and Us World (1965). Bakhtin argued that the overturning of hierarchies in popular carnival—its mingling of the sacred with the profane, the sublime with the ridiculous—lies behind the most 'open'  literary genres, notably menippean satire and the novel, especially since the renaissance. Carnivalized literary forms allow alternative voices to dethrone the authority of official culture: Rabelais, for example, subverts the asceticism of the medieval Church by giving free rein to the bodily profanity of folk festivities. 

01693--canzone

Canzone (plural -oni), a term covering various kinds of medieval Provencal and Italian  lyric poem. The most influential form was the petrarchan canzone, which has five or six stanzas and a shorter concluding envoi (or half-stanza); the lengths of the stanzas (equal in each poem) ranged from seven to twenty lines. 

01692--canto

Canto is a subdivision of an  epic or other narrative poem, equivalent to a chapter in a prose work.

01691--canon

Canon is a body of writings recognized by authority. Those books of holy scripture which religious leaders accept as genuine are canonical, as are those works of a literary author which scholars regard as authentic. The canon of a national literature is a body of writings especially approved by critics or anthologists and deemed suitable for academic study. Canonicity is the quality of being canonical. Verb: canonize. 

01690--campus novel

Campus novel is a novel, usually comic or satirical, in which the action is set within the enclosed world of a university (or similar seat of learning) and highlights the follies of academic life. Many novels have presented nostalgic evocations of college days, but the campus novel in the usual modern sense dates from the 1950s: Mary McCarthy's The Groves of Academe (1952) and Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954) began a significant tradition in modern fiction including John Earth's Giles GoatBoy (1966), David Lodge's Changing Places (1975), and Robertson Davies's The Rebel Angels (1982).

01689--Cambridge school

Cambridge school is the name sometimes given to an influential group of English critics associated with the University of Cambridge in the 1920s and 1930s. The leading figures were I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, Q. D. Leavis, and William Empson. Influenced by the critical writings of Coleridge and of T. S. Eliot, they rejected the prevalent biographical and historical modes of criticism in favour of the 'close reading' of texts. They saw poetry in terms of the reintegration of thought and feeling, and sought to demonstrate its subtlety and complexity, notably in Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930). The Leavises achieved great influence through the journal Scrutiny (1932-53), judging literary works according to their moral seriousness and 'lifeenhancing' tendency. 

01688--caesura

Caesura  is a pause in a line of verse, often coinciding with a break between clauses or sentences. It is usually placed in the middle of the line ('medial caesura'), but may appear near the beginning ('initial') or towards the end ('terminal'). 

01687--cadence

Cadence is the rising and falling rhythm of speech, especially that of the balanced phrases in free verse or in prose, as distinct from the stricter rhythms of verse  metre. Also the fall or rise in pitch at the end of a phrase or sentence. Adjective: cadent.

01686--cacophony

Cacophony means harshness or discordancy of sound.  It's the opposite of euphony. Usually the result of awkward alliteration as in tongue-twisters, it is sometimes used by poets for deliberate effect, as in these lines from Robert Browning's 'Caliban upon Setebos':

And squared and stuck there squares of soft white chalk, And, with a fish-tooth, scratched a moon on each, And set up endwise certain spikes of tree, And crowned the whole with a sloth's skull a-top.

01685--Byronic

Byronic means belonging to or derived from Lord Byron (1788-1824) or his works. The Byronic hero is a character-type found in his celebrated narrative poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812-18), his verse drama Manfred (1817), and other works; he is a boldly defiant but bitterly self-tormenting outcast, proudly contemptuous of social norms but suffering for some unnamed sin. 

01684--Burns stanza or Burns metre

Burns stanza or Burns metre is a six-line stanza rhyming aaabab, the first three lines and the fifth having four stresses, and the fourth and sixth having two stresses. Although it was used much earlier in medieval English romances and Provencal poetry, it is named after the Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759-96), who used it frequently, as in 'A Poet's Welcome to his love-begotten Daughter':

Welcome! My bonie, sweet, wee dochter!

Though ye come here a wee unsought for;

And though your comin I hae fought for, Baith Kirk and Queir;

Yet by my faith, ye're no unwrought for, That I shall swear!

01683--burlesque

Burlesque is a kind of parody that ridicules some serious literary work either by treating its solemn subject in an undignified style, or by applying its elevated style to a trivial subject, as in Pope's mock-epic poem 'The Rape of the Lock' (1712-14). Often used in the theatre, burlesque appears in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. 

01682--burden

Burden is the refrain or chorus of a song; or the main theme of a song, poem, or other literary work. A burden is sometimes distinguished from a refrain in that it starts the song or poem, and stands separate from the stanzas whereas a refrain usually appears as the final part of each stanza.

01681--bucolic poetry or bucolics

Bucolic poetry or Bucolics is another term for pastoral poetry, especially for Virgil's Eclogues (42-37 BCE) and later imitations. More loosely, any verse on rustic subjects. 

01680--broken rhyme

broken rhyme is the splitting of a word at the end of a verse line, to allow a rhyme on a syllable other than the final one, which is transferred to the following line. It is a liberty taken for comic effect in light verse, and more rarely used in serious works. Hopkins employed it frequently: the first line of The Windhover' ends with the first syllable of 'king/dom' to rhyme with 'wing' in line four.

01679--broadside

Broadside is a large sheet of paper printed on one side only, often containing a song or ballad, and sold by wandering pedlars in Britain from the 16th century until the beginning of the 20th century, when they were superseded by mass-circulation newspapers; they also appeared in the USA in the late 19th century. The broadside ballads were intended to be sung to a well-known tune; often they related topical events, and some were adopted as folk songs. Broadsides are sometimes called broadsheets.

01678--bricolage

Bricolage is a French term for improvisation or a piece of makeshift handiwork. It is sometimes applied to artistic works in a sense similar to collage: an assemblage improvised from materials ready to hand, or the practice of transforming 'found' materials by incorporating them in a new work.