Literary Terms:
Mock – Heroic:
· In this term we found there are two words ‘Mock’ and ‘Heroic’.
The word ‘Mock’ makes the whole difference. ‘Heroic’ means … fit for or like a hero.
· According to Oxford Dictionary
Mock means to redicule, scoff and treat with scorn or contempt.
The Mock-Heroic means the literature that is written in an ironically grand style that is comically incongruous with the ‘low’ or trivial subject treated.
Myth:
· Myth is an essential term for poetry. The word myth is derived from the Greek word ‘Mythos’ and the Latin word ‘Mythus’ the meaning of this Greek word is fable, tale, talk or speech.
· Myth is old conventional story.
· Myth means such a thing which is not fact.
Imagery:
“Imagery means, the work of one who makes images or visible representation of objects, imitation work; images in general or in mass.”
- Webster Dictionary
· Imagery is used by poets to decorate their language and to convey their meaning vividly and clearly.
Fancy and Imagination:
· Fancy is contraction of fantasy or phantcy. Greek phantasia used in late Greek for ghosty fancy being an abbreviation of fantacy.
Fancy is that thing which is not possible in the external world that thing in possibility in fancy.
· Imagination means “The ability to form new and exciting ideas.”
- Collings Dictionary
Oedipus complex:
· That is, the repressed but continuing presence in the adult’s unconscious of the male infant’s desire to possess his mother and to have his rival, the father, out of the way.
Parody:
· “Parody means an imitation of the style of a particular writer, artist or genre with deliberate exaggeration for comic effect.”
Soliloquy:
· Soliloquy is the act of talking to oneself, whether silently or aloud. In drama it denotes the convention by which a character, alone on the stage, utters his or her thoughts aloud.
For Example: The best-known of dramatic soliloquies is Hamlet’s speech which begins “To be or not to be.”
Stream of Consciousness:
· “The Stream of consciousness is recent literary technique which depicts thoughts and feelings that flows through the mind of a character in a literary work.”
Symbolism:
· A coherent system composed of a number of symbolic elements in both his lyric poems and his long “prophetic”, or epic poems.
Poetic Justice:
· Poetic justice was a term coined by Thomas Rymer, an English critic of the later seventeenth century, to signify the distribution, at the end of a literary work, of earthly rewards and punishments in proportion to the virtue or vice of the various characters.
Criticism:
· The word criticism is derived from the Greek word ‘Kritikos’ and it means ‘Judgment’. It means the art of judging and defining the qualities or merits of thing.
· ‘Criticism is the play of the mind on the aesthetic qualities of literature, having for its object an interpretation of literary values.
- Atkins
Practical/Applied Criticism:
· Practical criticism, or applied criticism, concerns itself with particular works and writers; in an applied critique, the theoretical principle controlling the analysis, interpretation, and evaluation are often left implicit, or brought in only as the occasion demands.
Impressionistic Criticism:
· It attempts to represent in words the felt qualities of a particular passage or work, and to express the responses that the work directly evokes from the critic.
Mimetic Criticism:
· Mimetic criticism views the literary work as an imitation, or reflection, or representation of the world and human life, and the primary criterion applied to a work is the “truth” and “adequacy” of its representation to the matter that it represents, or should represent.
Pragmatic Criticism:
· Pragmatic criticism views the work as something which is constructed in order to achieve certain effects on the audience, and it tends to judge the value of the work according to its success in achieving that aim.
Expressive Criticism:
· It treats a literary work primarily in relation to its author. It defines poetry as an expression, or overflow, or utterance of feelings, or as the product of the poet’s imagination operating on his or her perceptions, thoughts, and feelings.
Objective Criticism:
· Objective criticism deals with a work of literature as something which stands free from what is often called an “extrinsic” relationship to the poet, or to the audience, or to the environing world.
Deus Ex Machina:
· Deus ex machine is Latin for “a god from a Machine”. It designates the practice of some Greek playwrights to end a drama with a god, lowered to the stage by a mechanical apparatus, who by his judgment and commands resolved the dilemmas of the human characters.
Plot:
· The plot in a dramatic or narrative work is constituted by its events and actions, as these are rendered and ordered toward achieving particular artistic and emotional effects.
Character:
· The character is the name of a literary genre; it is a short, and usually witty, sketch in prose of a distinctive type of person. Character is the person represented in a dramatic or narrative work, who are interpreted by the reader as possessing particular moral, intellectual, and emotional qualities by inferences from what the persons say and their distinctive ways of saying it the Dialogue and from what they do the action.
Diction:
· The term diction signifies the kinds of words. Phrases, and sentence structure, and something also of figurative language, that constitute any work of literature.
Chorus:
· If the stanza refrain occurs in a song, which all the auditors join in singing, it is called the chorus.
Tragedy:
· “Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.”
Three Unities:
· In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, critics of the drama in Italy and France added to Aristotle’s unity of action, which he describes in his Poetics, two other unities, to constitute one of the so called rules of drama known as “the three Unities”
Tragic Hero:
· Tragic hero will most effectively evoke both our pity and terror if he is neither thoroughly good nor thoroughly bad but a mixture of both; and also that this tragic effect will be stronger if the hero is “better than we are”, in the sense that he is of higher than ordinary moral worth.
Hamartia:
· His “error” or “mistake of judgment” or, as it is often, although misleadingly and less literally translated, his tragic flow.
Catharsis:
· Catharsis is …. “Through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of this emotion.”
- Aristotle
Catharsis is function of tragedy and that emphasize upon two things “Pity” and “Fear”.
Modernism:
· The term modernism is widely used to identify new and distinctive features in the subjects, forms, concepts, and styles of literature and the other arts in the early decades of the twentieth century, but especially after World War I (1914-18).
Post Modernism:
· The term postmodernism is often applied to the literature and art after World War II (1939-45), when the effects on Western morale of the First World War were greatly exacerbated by the experience of Nazi totalitarianism and mass extermination, the ominous fact of overpopulation.
New Criticism:
· The term, made current by the publication of John Crowe Ransom’s The New Criticism in 1941, came to be applied to a theory and practice that remained prominent in American literary criticism until late in the 1960s.
Diaspora:
· A Diaspora is a scattered population whose origin lies within a smaller geographic locate. Diaspora can also refer to the movement of the population from its original homeland.
Postcolonial:
· The critical analysis of the history, culture, literature, and modes of discourse that is specific to the former colonies of England, Spain, France, and other European imperial powers.
Feminist Criticism:
· As a distinctive and concerted approach to literature, feminist criticism was not inaugurated until late in 1960s. Behind it, however, lie two centuries of struggle for the recognition of women’s cultural roles and achievements, and for women’s social and political rights.
· Much of feminist literary criticism continues in our time to be interrelated with the movement by political feminist for social, legal, and cultural freedom and equality.
Psychoanalytical Criticism:
· Psychoanalytical Criticism, whose premises and procedures were established by Sigmund Freud. Freud had developed the dynamic form of psychology that he called “psychoanalysis”.
New Historicism:
· New historicism, since the early 1980s, has been the accepted name for a mode of literary study that its proponents oppose to be formalism they attribute both to be the New Criticism and to the critical Deconstruction that followed it.
Eco-Criticism:
· Ecocriticism was a term coined in the late 1970s by combining “criticism” with a shortened from of “ecology”- the science that investigates the interrelations of all forms of plant and animal life with each other and with their physical habitats.
· “Ecocriticism” designates the critical writings which explore the relations between literature and the biological and physical environment, conducted with an acute awareness of the damage being wrought on that environment by human activities.
Queer Theory:
· Queer theory is often used to designate the combined area of gay and lesbian studies, together with the theoretical and critical writings about all modes of variance_ such as cross-dressing, bisexuality, and transsexuality - from society’s normative model of sexual identity
Structuralism:
· Structuralism replaces the author with the central agency in criticism; but the traditional reader, as a conscious, purposeful, and feeling individual, is replaced by the impersonal activity of “reading” and what is read is not a work imbued with meanings, but ecriture, writing.
Allegory:
· An allegory is a narrative, whether in prose or verse, in which the agents and actions, and sometimes the setting as well, are contrived by the author to make coherent sense on the “literal”, or primary, level of signification, and at the same time to communicate a second, correlated order of signification.
Eurocentrism:
· Eurocentrism is the assumption that the European ideals and experiences are the standard by which all other cultures are to be measured and judged inferior.
Cultural hegemony:
· Marxist, domination of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class, who manipulate the culture of that society.
Hegemony:
· Hegemony it means control of one state over others.
Hybridity:
· Hybridity is the quality of cultures that have characteristics of both the colonizers and the colonized. Marked by conflicts and tensions, they are continually changing and evolving.
· Mixture of two culture or races and blood.
Cultural Imperialism:
· Cultural Imperialism it means culture against colonial people.
Negritude:
· Negritude it means literary and ideological philosophy, it meant to be provocative, black people as art nigre.