Glossary of Literary Terms
Victorian Literature
Between the first quarter of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century, a cultural movement emerged in England as a reaction to the Romantic movement. Its main features are an ingrained ideal of progress, a didactic, moralistic, and religious spirit, a taste for discovery and adventure, and a practical and utilitarian life.
Oriental Literatures
Oriental literatures are the oldest in the world. Three features define them: the oral nature of transmission, the religious and wisdom component expressed through symbolic resources (fables, parables, etc.), and a rich fantasy. Among these literatures, those of Persia, China, and India stand out.
Locus Amoenus
Locus amoenus (“pleasant place”) is a literary topic that usually refers to an idealized place of safety or comfort. A locus amoenus is usually a beautiful, shaded, open woodland, sometimes with connotations of Eden. Literature has made use of such imaginary places in Western literature since Homer.
Metaphor / Allegory
A metaphor is a figure of speech that establishes a total identity between two people, ideas, or concepts, so that one element of the metaphor is used to refer to another. It means comparing two items without using conjunctions. An allegory is a literary figure that claims to represent an abstract idea using human forms, animals, and everyday objects. It creates an extensive and subdivided metaphorical image that represents a more complex thought or a real human experience, and in that sense, it may constitute entire works.
Metatextuality
Metatextuality refers to the critical relationship that one text has with another. That is, the relationship one text has with the text it attacks or criticizes, for example, the relationship of some parts of Don Quixote de la Mancha by Cervantes with books of chivalry.
Italian Renaissance Metrics
The hendecasyllable verse is the key instrument of Italian metrics. The prevalence of rhyme, more cultured than assonance, is almost absolute. The most common poems and verses were the sonnet, the terza rima, the lira, the octave, the canzone, and the silva.
Mimesis
Derived from Aristotle, mimesis refers to the imitation of nature in classical art, considered essential. It is a Latin word from the Greek word translated as “imitation.”
Myth
A myth is a traditional tale of miraculous events, featuring extraordinary or supernatural beings such as gods, demigods, heroes, and monsters.
Interior Monologue or Stream of Consciousness
The interior monologue is a literary technique that aims to show the flow of real-world pressure and the inner world imagined by one of the protagonists. In interior monologues, writers try to express hidden feelings or repressed desires that characters cannot express in words or actions. They are “different worlds inside people,” which in most cases, are hidden fantasies and thoughts that can never be realized.
Novel of Manners
Novels of manners describe the atmosphere, everyday life, and forms of a particular social group: customs and typical characters. Within this type of novel, according to the style, realism and naturalism emerged.
Psychological Novel
A psychological novel is a work of prose fiction that emphasizes characterization. The characters’ motives, circumstances, and internal actions are born and developed from external action. The psychological novel focuses on describing the moods, passions, and psychological conflicts of the characters.
Sentimental Novel
The sentimental novel is a historical literary subgenre that developed between the pre-Renaissance of the fifteenth century and the Renaissance of the first half of the sixteenth century. It is a subgenre of the epic or narrative prose, sometimes in epistolary form, that has themes of love, often within the known laws of courtly love.
Novel-River
Novel-river usually refers to a series of novels, the story spun by a main character or a particular community, a family, a tribe, or a people. Each “volume” is a novel with its title and narrative approach, but by examining all the different volumes, one can see a certain unity. The most famous novel-river is certainly In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust.
Parable
A parable is a figurative tale that, by analogy or resemblance, derives a lesson on a topic that is not explicit. It is, in essence, a symbolic story or a comparison based on a credible observation. The parable has a didactic purpose, and we can find examples of it in the Christian gospels, where Jesus tells many parables and teachings to the people.
Petrarchism
Petrarchism is an aesthetic current that mimics the style, composition structures, topics, and imagery of the lyric poet Francesco Petrarca. It was a powerful stream of lyrical inspiration that spread throughout Europe with the Renaissance. This opera superimposed a new philosophy of love influenced by Platonism. Its influence extended into the early eighteenth century.
Prolepsis or Narrative Anticipation
Prolepsis is a narrative technique that involves jumping forward in the narrative, through which the reader learns plot elements in advance. Therefore, before finishing the novel, the reader knows or at least intuits what the end will be. An example of prolepsis would be Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez, a work where we know that the character of Santiago Nasar is going to die, but what really draws the reader in is finding out the circumstances and reasons for the murder.
Realism
Realism involves works that provide documentary evidence of the society and environments closest to the writer. The European realist novel became the epic of the bourgeois middle class that managed to establish itself in the nineteenth century as the ruling class in all aspects of life, including cultural and aesthetic.
Romanticism
Romanticism was a cultural and political movement that extended throughout Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century as a revolutionary reaction against the rationalism of the Enlightenment and Classicism. It gives precedence to feelings, and true freedom is its constant search. Its revolutionary feature is unquestionable.
Symbolism
Symbolism was an art movement of the late nineteenth century that literally has its origins in The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire. It was initially a literary reaction against Naturalism and Realism, anti-idealistic movements that extolled lived reality and placed it above the ideal. These movements triggered a backlash among Parisian youth, leading them to exalt spirituality, imagination, and dreams.
Symbol
A symbol is the representation of a detectable idea, with traits associated with a socially accepted convention. It is a sign without resemblance or contiguity, which only has a conventional link between its signifier and signified, in addition to being deliberate for a designated class.
Tempus Fugit
Tempus fugit is a Latin expression meaning “Time flies” or “Time is fleeting,” inviting us not to waste it. The term first appears in the Georgics of Virgil.
Topos or Motif
In literature, a topos is a common topic or theme that, by default (due to repeated use), is used as a resource by writers and poets. They are a series of thematic constants that have been repeated throughout the history of literature and, in the case of Western literature, mostly come from the classical (Greco-Roman) or biblical tradition.
Tragedy / Comedy
Tragedy is a dramatic form whose main characters are faced in mysterious, unassailable, and unavoidable ways against fate or the gods, almost always moving towards a fatal outcome. A blind force, fate, destiny, or fatum announced by oracles drives the tragedy. Comedy is a dramatic subgenre characterized by protagonists who face the difficulties of everyday life, motivated by their own flaws, with happy endings that mock human weakness. Comedy comes from the Greek world but developed throughout the medieval and modern eras, up to the present day.
Dramatic Unities
Derived from Aristotle’s Poetics, the rule of three unities pertained to tragedy: the unity of action (only one conflict should be developed), the unity of time (everything should happen in one day), and the unity of place (everything should be developed in a single place).
Vanguards
: A series of artistic movements from the early twentieth century that sought innovation in artistic production. Were noted for radical renewal in the form and content, exploring the relationship between art and life, and sought to reinvent the art confronting previous artistic movements.