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narrative sequence. Thu s "The Wife's Lament" (see vol. 1, p. 113); Yeats, "The Wild Swans at Coole" (see vol. 2, p. 2033).
Masque: costly entertainments of the Stuart court, involving dance, song, speech, and elaborate stage effects, in which courtiers themselves participated. See Jonson, The Masque of Blackness (see vol. 1, p. 1327).
Myth: the narrative of protagonists with, or subject to, superhuman powers. A myth expresses some profound foundational truth, often by accounting for the origin of natural phenomena. T o be distinguished from legend. Thu s the "Arthurian legend" but the "myth of Proserpine."
Noveclass="underline" an extremely flexible genre in both form and subject matter. Usually in prose, giving high priority to narration of events, with a certain expectation of length, novels are preponderantly rooted in a specific, and often complex, social world; sensitive to the realities of material life; and often focused on one character or a small circle of central characters. By contrast with chivalric romance (the main European narrative genre prior to the novel), novels tend to eschew the marvelous in favor of a recognizable social world and credible action. Th e novel's openness allows it to participate in all modes, and to be co-opted for a huge variety of subgenres. In English literature the novel dates from the late seventeenth century and has been astonishingly successful in appealing to a huge readership, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Th e English and Irish tradition of the novel includes, for example, Fielding, Austen, the Bronte sisters, Dickens, George Eliot, Conrad, Woolf, Lawrence, Joyce, to name but a few very great exponents of the genre. Novella: a short novel, often characterized by imagistic intensity. Conrad, Heart of Darkness (see vol. 2, p. 1890). Ode (Greek "song"): a lyric poem in elevated, or high style (see register), often addressed to a natural force, a person, or an abstract quality. Th e Pindaric ode in English is made up of stanzas of unequal length, while the Horatian ode has stanzas of equal length. For examples of both types, see, respectively, Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" (vol. 2,
p. 306); and Marvell, "An Horatian Ode" (vol. 1, p. 1712), or Keats, "Ode on Melancholy" (vol. 2, p. 906). For a fuller discussion, see the headnote to Jonson's "Ode on Cary and Morison" (vol. 1, p. 1439). Panegyric: Demonstrative, or epideictic (Greek "showing"), rhetoric was a branch of classical rhetoric. Its own two main branches were the rhetoric of praise on the one hand and of vituperation on the other. Panegyric, or eulogy (Greek "sweet speaking"), or encomium (plural encomia), is the term used to describe the speeches or writings of praise.
Parable: a simple story designed to provoke, and often accompanied by, allegorical interpretation, most famously by Christ as reported in the Gospels.
Pastoral (from Latin "pastor," shepherd): Pastoral is set among shepherds, making often refined allusion to other apparently unconnected subjects (sometimes politics) from the potentially idyllic world of highly literary if illiterate shepherds. Pastoral is distinguished from georgic by representing recreational rural idleness, whereas the georgic offers instruction on how to manage rural labor. English writers had classical models in the Idylls of Theocritus in Greek and Virgil's Eclogues in Latin. Pastoral is also called bucolic (from the Greek word for "herdsman"). Thus Spenser, Shepheardes Calender (see vol. 1, p. 708).
Romance: From the twelfth to the sixteenth century, the main form of European narrative, in either verse or prose, was that of chivalric romance.
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Romance, like the later novel, is a very fluid genre, but romances are often characterized by (i) a tripartite structure of social integration, followed by disintegration, involving moral tests and often marvelous events, itself the prelude to reintegration in a happy ending, frequently of marriage; (ii) high- style diction; (iii) aristocratic social mileux. Thu s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (see vol. 1, p. 160); Spenser's (unfinished) Faerie Queene (vol. 1,
p. 713). Th e immensely popular, fertile genre was absorbed, in both domesticated and undomesticated form, by the novel. For an adaptation of romance, see Chaucer, Wife of Bath's Tale (vol. 1, p. 256). Satire: In Roma n literature (e.g., Juvenal), the communication, in the form of a letter between equals, complaining of the ills of contemporary society. Th e genre in this form is characterized by a first-person narrator exasperated by social ills; the letter form; a high frequency of contemporary reference; and the use of invective in low-style language. Pope practices the genre thus in the Epistle to Dr. Arhuthnot (see vol. 1, p. 2548). Wyatt's "Mine own John Poins" (see vol. 1, p. 604) draws ultimately on a gentler, Horatian model of the genre.
Satiric mode: Works in a very large variety of genres are devoted to the more or less savage attack on social ills. Thu s Swift's travel narrative Gulliver's Travels (see vol. 1, p. 2323), his essay "A Modest Proposal" (vol. 1,
p. 2462), Pope's mock-epic The Dunciad (vol. 1, p. 2559), and Gay's Beggar's Opera (vol. 1, p. 2613), to look no further than the eighteenth century, are all within a satiric mode. Short story: generically similar to, though shorter and more concentrated than, the novel; often published as part of a collection. Thus Mansfield, "The Daughters of the Late Colonel" (see vol. 2, p. 2333).
Topographical poem (Greek "place writing"): a poem devoted to the meditative description of particular places. Thu s Gray, "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College" (see vol. 1, p. 2863).
Tragedy: a dramatic representation of the fall of kings or nobles, beginning in happiness and ending in catastrophe. Later transferred to other social mileux. Th e opposite of comedy. Shakespeare, King Lear (see vol. 1,
p. 1139). Tragic mode: Man y genres (epic poetry, legendary chronicles, tragedy, the novel) either do or can participate in a tragic mode, by representing the fall of noble protagonists and the irreparable ravages of human society and history.
Tragicomedy: a play in which potentially tragic events turn out to have a happy, or comic, ending. Thu s Shakespeare, Measure for Measure.
C. Miscellaneous Act: the major subdivision of a play, usually divided into scenes.
Aesthetics (from Greek, "to feel, apprehend by the senses"): the philosophy of artistic meaning as a distinct mode of apprehending untranslatable truth, defined as an alternative to rational enquiry, which is purely abstract. Developed in the late eighteenth century by the Germa n philosopher Immanuel Kant especially.
Allusion: Literary allusion is a passing but illuminating reference within a
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literary text to another, well-known text (often biblical or classical). Topical allusions are also, of course, commo n in certain modes, especially
satire.
Anagnorisis (Greek "recognition"): the moment of protagonists' recognition in a narrative, which is also often the moment of moral understanding.
Apostrophe (from Greek "turning away"): an address, often to an absent person, a force, or a quality. For example, a poet makes an apostrophe to a Muse when invoking her for inspiration. Blazon: strictly, a heraldic shield; in rhetorical usage, a topos whereby the individual elements of a beloved's face and body are singled out for hyperbolic admiration. Spenser, Epithalamion, lines 167�84 (see vol. 1, p. 907). For an inversion of the topos, see Shakespeare, Sonnet 130 (vol. 1,