RBSE VU English Literature flashcards

31 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Iambic pentameter

A metrical line of five iambic feet, each an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one (u/), producing ten syllables. It is the dominant English meter for sonnets, blank verse, and much dramatic poetry.

Metonymy versus synecdoche

Metonymy names something by an associated thing (crown for monarchy, pen for writing). Synecdoche names a whole by its part or a part by its whole (hired hands, all hands). Synecdoche is often treated as a subtype of metonymy.

Dramatic irony

A structural discrepancy in which the audience or reader knows something a character does not, so that the character's words carry a meaning beyond their intention. It generates suspense, pathos, or tragic weight.

Hamartia and catharsis

In Aristotelian tragedy, hamartia is the protagonist's error or misjudgment that precipitates the fall, not necessarily a moral flaw. Catharsis is the purgation of pity and fear the audience experiences through the action.

Soliloquy versus aside

A soliloquy is a sustained speech delivered alone on stage, revealing a character's inward thought. An aside is a short remark spoken in others' presence, conventionally unheard by them. Both create audience intimacy.

Blank verse

Unrhymed iambic pentameter, the standard meter of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and of Milton's Paradise Lost. Its regularity gives dignity while allowing variation in stress, pause, and enjambment.

Petrarchan sonnet structure

A fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter divided into an eight-line octave rhyming abbaabba and a six-line sestet rhyming variously (cdecde, cdcdcd). The volta, or turn in argument, typically falls between octave and sestet.

Villanelle form

A nineteen-line French form of five tercets and a closing quatrain, using only two rhymes. Line one recurs as lines six, twelve, and eighteen; line three recurs as lines nine, fifteen, and nineteen.

Enjambment and caesura

Enjambment carries a sentence across a line break without terminal punctuation, speeding the reading forward. A caesura is a pause within a line, marked by punctuation or syntax, that can slow or dramatize it.

Conceit

An extended, elaborately developed metaphor, often linking apparently dissimilar domains. Metaphysical poets favored scientific, geographical, and geometric conceits, as in Donne's compass image in A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.

Objective correlative

T. S. Eliot's term for a set of objects, situations, or events that evoke a specific emotion in the reader without direct statement of feeling. It functions as an impersonal, dramatic substitute for emotional declaration.

Free indirect discourse

A third-person narrative mode that absorbs a character's idiom, judgments, and syntax without quotation marks or reporting clauses. It blurs narrator and character, producing irony and intimacy, as in Austen and Flaubert.

Stream of consciousness

A narrative technique rendering the continuous, associative flow of a character's thought, often without logical transitions. It appears in Joyce's Ulysses and Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, distinct from a formally organized interior monologue.

Flat and round characters

E. M. Forster's distinction: flat characters are built around a single trait and stay unchanged, while round characters are complex and capable of development or surprise. The terms describe construction, not moral worth.

Frame narrative

A story enclosed within another story, where an outer narrator sets up the telling of inner tales. Examples include Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Conrad's Heart of Darkness, where framing adds distance and interpretation.

Old English verse features

Old English poetry uses alliterative verse with four stressed positions per line, a caesura dividing the halves, and no end rhyme. Kennings, compressed compound metaphors such as whale-road for sea, are characteristic.

Metaphysical poetry

Seventeenth-century verse by Donne, Herbert, Marvell, and Vaughan, marked by intellectual wit, startling conceits, colloquial diction, and argumentative structure. It juxtaposes abstract thought with physical, often scientific, imagery.

Romanticism's 1798 marker

The publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads in 1798 conventionally begins English Romanticism. Its 1800 Preface argues for common language, spontaneous feeling, and the poet as a man speaking to men.

Victorian dramatic monologue

A poem spoken by a historical or invented character at a decisive moment, addressing a silent listener, revealing character unintentionally. Browning's My Last Duchess and Tennyson's Ulysses are canonical examples of the form.

Modernist impersonality

Eliot's doctrine that poetry should escape personality and emotion through tradition, allusion, and the objective correlative. It opposes Romantic expressivism and favors fragmentation, montage, and difficult, allusive surfaces.

New Criticism

A mid-twentieth-century Anglo-American method treating the poem as a self-sufficient verbal object. It practices close reading for tension, irony, and paradox, and warns against the intentional and affective fallacies.

Intentional fallacy

Wimsatt and Beardsley's term for the error of judging a work by the author's stated or inferred intention. Meaning resides in the text's public verbal structure, not in private authorial design.

Deconstruction

Derrida's post-structuralist practice of showing how a text's oppositions undermine themselves, meaning is deferred, and hierarchical terms reverse. It reads for contradiction, marginal terms, and instability rather than fixed authorial sense.

New Historicism

A critical approach treating literature as embedded in the power relations and discourses of its period. It reads literary and non-literary documents together, stressing ideology, circulation, and the historian's own position.

Rhetorical triangle

Aristotle's three means of persuasion: ethos, the speaker's credibility; pathos, the audience's emotion; logos, the argument's reasoning and evidence. Analysis should cite textual evidence for each appeal.

Periodic sentence

A sentence that suspends its main clause until the end, holding subordinate material first. The delay builds tension and emphasis, unlike a loose sentence, which states the main clause immediately and adds detail after.

Anaphora and epistrophe

Anaphora repeats a word or phrase at the beginnings of successive clauses; epistrophe repeats it at the ends. Symploce combines both. These schemes create rhythm, emphasis, and emotional intensification.

Denotation and connotation

Denotation is a word's literal, dictionary meaning; connotation is the associations and emotional coloring it carries. Style analysis distinguishes the two, since connotation drives tone and implied judgment.

Tragic flaw versus tragic error

A tragic flaw is a defect of character, such as pride; hamartia is more precisely an error or misjudgment, which may arise from ignorance. Aristotle's term does not require moral culpability, as Oedipus illustrates.

Well-made play

A nineteenth-century dramatic formula by Scribe and Sardou built on tight exposition, a secret, escalating complications, a climactic revelation, and a neat resolution. Ibsen inherited and transformed its machinery for social critique.

Pathos in rhetoric

The appeal to an audience's emotions, including pity, fear, anger, or patriotism, used to move judgment. It is analyzed by locating emotive diction, anecdote, imagery, and appeals to shared values in the text.