Literary Terms of E discusses several terms related to editions of books, types of poems, and literary movements/styles. It defines an edition as all copies of a book printed from the same typesetting. It also defines variorum editions, incunabula, elegy, dirge, pastoral elegy, empathy, sympathy, the Enlightenment, epic poems, epigrams, essays, euphemisms, euphony, cacophony, euphuism, expressionism, fabliau, the difference between fancy and imagination, and feminist criticism.

1. Literary Terms of E

2. Edition
-total copies of a book that are printed
from a single setting of type or other
mode of reproduction

3. Edition
variorum edition (cum notis variorum:"with the
annotations of various persons)
• an edition of a text that includes a selection of
annotations and commentaries on the text by
previous editors and critics
incunabula (the singular is "incunabulum")
• all books that were produced in the infancy of
printing

4. Elegy
-any poem written in elegiac meter (alternating
hexameter and pentameter line)
-subject matter :change and loss
expressed complaints about love
e.g.medieval poem The Pearl and Chaucer's
Book of the Duchess (elegies in the mode of
dream allegory)

5. Elegy
dirge
• a versified expression of grief on the occasion of a
particular person's death
• less formal, and is usually represented as a text to be sung
E.g. Shakespeare's "Full Fathom Five Thy Father Lies" and
William Collins' "A Song from Shakespeare's Cymbeline"
(174
pastoral elegy
• subtype of the elegy . Represents both the poet and the
one he mourns, who is usually also a poet, as shepherds
(the Latin word for shepherd is "pastor")
e.g. Spenser's "Astrophel," on the death of Sir Philip Sidney,
(1595), Milton's "Lycidas" (1638)

6. Empathy and Sympathy "Einfühlung"
("feeling into")
-"an involuntary projection of ourselves into an
object“
-"empathic"- a passage which evokes from the
reader this sense of participation with the pose,
movements, and physical sensations of the
object that the passage describes

7. • An example is Shakespeare's description, in
his narrative poem Venus and Adonis
(1593), of
the snail, whose tender horns being hit, Shrinks
backward in his shelly cave with pain.

8. • Sympathy - fellow-feeling; feeling-along-with
the mental state and emotions, of another
human being
• Empathy- feeling-into the physical state and
sensations

9. Enlightenment
-an intellectual movement and cultural ambiance
- "the liberation of mankind from his self-caused state
of minority” and the achievement of a state of maturity
which is exemplified in his "determination and courage
to use [his understanding] without the assistance of
another.“ (Kant's famous essay "What Is
Enlightenment?" written in 1784 )

10. Epic (heroic poem)
-it is a long verse narrative on a serious
subject, told in a formal and elevated style
-centered on a heroic figure on whose
actions depends the fate of a tribe, a
nation, or (in the instance of John Milton's
Paradise Lost) the human race

11. Traditional epics (also called "folk epics" or
"primary epics")
• versions of what had originally been oral
poems about a tribal or national hero during a
warlike age (the Iliad and Odyssey, the Anglo-
Saxon Beowulf)

12. Literary epics
• were composed by individual poetic craftsmen
in deliberate imitation of the traditional form
• narratives which differ in many respects from
this model but manifest the epic spirit and
grandeur in the scale, the scope, and the
profound human importance of their subjects

13. Literary epics
features:
• The hero is a figure of great national or even cosmic
importance
• The setting of the poem is ample in scale, and may be
worldwide, or even larger
• The action involves superhuman deeds in battle, such
as Achilles' feats in the Trojan War
• the gods and other supernatural beings take an interest
or an active part—the Olympian gods in Homer
• a ceremonial performance, and is narrated in a
ceremonial style

14. Epigram
-a statement, whether in verse or
prose, which is terse, pointed, and
witty

15. • In the same century, when the exiled Stuarts
were still pretenders to the English throne,
John Byrom proposed this epigrammatic toast:
God bless the King—I mean the Faith's
defender!
God bless (no harm in blessing) the Pretender!
But who pretender is or who is king—
God bless us all! that's quite another thing.

16. • apothegm- neat and witty statements in prose as
well as verse; an alternative name for the prose
epigram
• aphorism- a pithy and pointed statement of a
serious maxim, opinion, or general truth
• One of the best known of aphorisms is also one
of the shortest:
• ars longa, vita brevis est—"art is long, life is short

17. Epiphany
• means "a manifestation," or "showing forth,”
• sudden flare into revelation of an ordinary
object or scene.
• short poems which represent a moment of
revelation. (Wordsworth's "The Two April
Mornings" and "The Solitary Reaper”)

18. Epithalamion
-a poem written to celebrate a marriage
-The term in Greek means "at the bridal
chamber," since the verses were originally
written to be sung outside the bedroom of a
newly married couple

19. Epithet
-an adjective or adjectival phrase used to
define a distinctive quality of a person or
thing
-an example is: John Keats, "silver snarling
trumpets" in The Eve of St. Agnes

20. Homeric epithets
• adjectival terms—usually a compound of two
words—like those which Homer in his epic
poems used as recurrent formulas in referring
to a distinctive feature of someone or
something: "fleet-footed Achilles,"

21. Essay
-Short composition in prose that
undertakes to discuss a
matter, express a point of
view, persuade us to accept a thesis on
any subject, or simply entertain

22. Euphemism
-inoffensive expression used in place of a blunt one
that is felt to be disagreeable or embarrassing
-("to sleep with" instead of "to have sexual intercourse
with”)("comfort station" instead of
"toilet")

23. Euphony
term applied to language which
strikes the ear as
smooth, pleasant, and musical

24. • as in these lines from John Keats, The Eve of St
Agnes (1820),
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferred
From Fez; and spicèd dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon.

25. cacophony, or dissonance—language which is
perceived as harsh, rough, and unmusical—
• the discordancy is the effect not only of the
sound of the words, but also of their
significance, conjoined with the difficulty of
enunciating the sequence of the speech-
sounds

26. • for humor, as in Robert Browning's "Pied
Piper" (1842),
Rats!
They fought the dogs and killed the cats...
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men's Sunday hats

27. Euphuism
-conspicuously formal and elaborate prose style
-style: sententious (that is, full of moral maxims)
reinforces: structural parallels by heavy and elaborate
patterns of alliteration and assonance,
exploits: rhetorical question
addicted to: long similes
learned : allusions which are often drawn from
mythology and the habits of legendary animals

28. -Euphues
I see now that as the fish Scholopidus in the flood
Araris at the waxing of
the Moon is as white as the driven snow, and at the
waning as black as
the burnt coal, so Euphues, which at the first
encreasing of our familiarity,
was very zealous, is now at the last cast become
most faithless

29. Expressionism
-A German movement in literature and the
other arts (especially the visual arts)
-never a concerted or well-defined movement
-its central feature is a revolt against the artistic
and
literary tradition of realism, both in subject
matter and in style

30. • Drama was a prominent and widely influential
form of expressionist writing.
• Among the better-known German playwrights
were Georg Kaiser (Gas,From Morn to
Midnight)

31. Fabliau
-a short comic or satiric tale in verse dealing
realistically with middle-class or lower-class
characters and delighting in the ribald; its
favorite theme is the cuckolding of a stupid
husband
-e.g. "The Pardoner's Tale,“
“The Miller’s Tale”

32. Fancy and Imagination
• the fancy is a mechanical process which
receives the elementary images—the "fixities
and definite" which come to it ready-made
from the senses
• The imagination, however, which produces a
much higher kind of
poetry, dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order
to re-create... It is essentially vital, even as all
objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and
dead.

33. • Imagination- to "create" rather than merely
reassemble, by dissolving the fixities and
definites^-the mental pictures, or
images, received from the senses—and unifying
them into a new whole
• fancy- simply the faculty that produces a
lesser, lighter, or humorous kind of poetry, and to
make imagination the faculty that produces a
higher, more serious, and more passionate
poetry.

34. Feminist Criticism