Apposition: the repetition of elements serving an identical grammatical function in one sentence. Th e effect of this repetition is to arrest the flow of the sentence, but in doing so to add extra semantic nuance to repeated elements. This is an especially important feature of Ol d English poetic style. See, for example, Caedmon's Hym n (vol. 1, p. 24), where the phrases "heaven kingdom's guardian," "the Measurer's might," "his mind-plans," and "the work of the Glory-Father" each serve an identical syntactic function as the direct objects of "praise."
Hyperbaton (Greek "overstepping"): the rearrangement, or inversion, of the expected word order in a sentence or clause. Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," line 38: "If Memor y o'er their tomb no trophies raise" (vol. 1, p. 2867). Poets can suspend the expected syntax over many lines, as in the first sentences of the Canterbury Tales (vol. 1, p. 218) and of Paradise Lost (vol. 1, p. 1832).
Hypotaxis, or subordination (respectively Greek and Latin "orderingunder"): the subordination, by the use of subordinate clauses, of different elements of a sentence to a single main verb. Milton, Paradise Lost 9.513�15: "As when a ship by skillful steersman wrought / Nigh river's mouth or foreland, where the wind / Veers oft, as oft so steers, and shifts her sail; So varied he" (vol. 1, p. 1984). Th e contrary principle to parataxis.
Parataxis, or coordination (respectively Greek and Latin "ordering beside"):
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the coordination, by the use of coordinating conjunctions, of different main clauses in a single sentence. Malory, "Morte Darthur": "So Sir Lancelot departed and took his sword under his arm, and so he walked in his mantel, that noble knight, and put himself in great jeopardy" (see vol. 1, p. 442). Th e opposite principle to hypotaxis.
(vii) Point of View All of the many kinds of writing (see "B. Genre and Mode," below) involve a point of view from which a text is, or seems to he, generated. The presence of such a point of view may he powerful and explicit, as in many novels, or deliberately invisible, as in much drama. In some genres, such as the novel, the narrator does not necessarily tell the story from a position we can predict; that is, the needs of a particular story, not the conventions of the genre, determine the narrator's position. In other genres, the narrator's position is fixed by convention; in certain kinds of love poetry, for example, the narrating voice is always that of a suffering lover. Not only does the point of view significantly inform the style of a work, but it also informs the structure of that work. Most of the terms below are especially relevant to narrative in either verse or prose, but many also apply to other modes of writing.
Deixis (Greek "pointing"): Every work has, implicitly or explicitly, a "here" and a "now" from which it is narrated. Words that refer to or imply this point from which the voice of the work is projected (such as "here," "there," "this," "that," "now," "then") are examples of deixis, or "deictics." This technique is especially important in drama, where it is used to create a sense of the events happening as the spectator witnesses them.
First-person narration: a narrative in which the voice narrating refers to itself with forms of the first-person pronoun ("I," "me," "my," etc., or possibly "we," "us," "our"), and in which the narrative is determined by the limitations of that voice. Thus Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein.
Frame narrative: Som e narratives, particularly collections of narratives, involve a frame narrative that explains the genesis of, and/or gives a perspective on, the main narrative or narratives to follow. Thus Chaucer, Canterbury Tales; Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein; or Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
Free indirect style: a narratorial voice that manages, without explicit reference, to imply, and often implicitly to comment on, the voice of a character in the narrative itself. Virginia Woolf, "A Sketch of the Past," where the voice, although strictly that of the adult narrator, manages to convey the child's manner of perception: "�I begin: the first memory. This was of red and purple flowers on a black background�my mother's dress" (see vol. 2,
p. 2155). Omniscient narrator (Latin "all-knowing narrator"): a narrator who, in the fiction of the narrative, has complete access to both the deeds and the thoughts of all characters in the narrative. Thus Thomas Hardy, "On the Western Circuit" (see vol. 2, p. 1852).
Order: A story may be told in different orders. A narrator might use the sequence of events as they happened, and thereby follow what classical rhetoricians called the natural order; alternatively, the narrator might reorder the sequence of events, beginning the narration either in the middle or
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at the end of the sequence of events, thereby following an artificial order. If a narrator begins in the middle of events, he or she is said to begin in medias res (Latin "in the middle of the matter"). For a brief discussion of these concepts, see Spenser, Faerie Queene, "A Letter of the Authors" (vol. 1, p. 716). Modern narratology makes a related distinction, between histoire (French "story") for the natural order that readers mentally reconstruct, and discours (French, here "narration") for the narrative as presented.
Plot: the sequence of events in a story as narrated.
Stream of consciousness: usually a first-person narrative that seems to give the reader access to the narrator's min d as it perceives or reflects on events, prior to organizing those perceptions into a coherent narrative. Thu s (though generated from a third-person narrative) Joyce, Ulysses, "Lestrygonians" (see vol. 2, p. 2213).
Third-person narration: a narration in which the narrator recounts a narrative of characters referred to explicitly or implicitly by third-person pronouns ("he," she," etc.), without the limitation of a first-person narration. Thus Johnson, The History of Rasselas. Unities: According to a theory supposedly derived from Aristotle's Poetics, the events represented in a play should have unity of time, place, and action: that the play take up no more time than the time of the play, or at most a day; that the space of action should be within a single city; and that there should be no subplot. See Johnson, The Preface to Shakes-peare (vol. 1,
p. 2756). B. Genre and Mode The style, structure, and, often, length of a work, when cowpled with a certain subject matter, raise expectations that a literary work conforms to a certain genre (French "kind"). Good writers might upset these expectations, but they remain aware of the expectations and thwart them purposefully. Works in different genres may nevertheless participate in the same mode, a broader category designating the fundamental perspectives governing various genres of writing. For mode, see tragic, comic, satiric, and didactic modes. All the other terms in this list refer to more or less specific literary genres. Genres are fluid, sometimes very fluid (e.g., the novel); the word "usually" should he added to almost every statement!
Animal fable: a short narrative of speaking animals, followed by moralizing comment, written in a low style and gathered into a collection. Robert Henryson, "The Coc k and the Fox" (see vol. 1, p. 457).
Aubade (originally from Spanish "alba," dawn): a lover's dawn song or lyric bewailing the arrival of the day and the necessary separation of the lovers; Donne, "The Su n Rising" (see vol. 1, p. 1266). Larkin recasts the genre in "Aubade" (see vol. 2, p. 2573).