RBSE VU English Literature key terms

The regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables that gives a line of verse its rhythm, usually described by the type of foot and the number of feet per line.

The basic repeating unit of poetic rhythm, made of a fixed arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables, such as an iamb or a trochee.

A line of verse built from five iambs, that is, five unstressed-then-stressed pairs. It is the dominant English dramatic and narrative line from the Renaissance onward.

Unrhymed poetry written in a steady meter, almost always iambic pentameter. Its freedom from rhyme made it the standard medium of English verse drama and long reflective poems.

Poetry organised by line breaks, cadence, and image rather than by a fixed meter or rhyme scheme, though it may still use rhythm and sound patterning deliberately.

A pair of rhyming lines in iambic pentameter that usually forms a closed, self-contained unit of sense, favoured in Restoration and eighteenth-century satire and verse essay.

A fourteen-line poem, usually in iambic pentameter, shaped by a fixed rhyme scheme and a turn of argument or feeling, appearing in Petrarchan, Shakespearean, and other variants.

The turn or pivot in a sonnet where the argument shifts direction, often at line nine in the Petrarchan form or at the closing couplet in the Shakespearean form.

The running of a sentence past the end of a verse line without punctuation, so that syntax and line break pull against each other and meaning is held in suspense.

A pause or break inside a line of verse, marked or unmarked, often created by punctuation or by a shift in syntax, and used to control pace and emphasis.

A figure that describes one thing as if it were another, transferring qualities from a vehicle to a tenor without using words of comparison such as like or as.

A comparison between two unlike things introduced explicitly by words such as like, as, or than, so the resemblance is stated rather than implied.

An elaborate, intellectually ingenious comparison that yokes together remote or technical fields of knowledge, characteristic of seventeenth-century poets such as Donne and Herbert.

A figure in which an abstract idea, object, or animal is given human qualities, actions, or speech, often to make an argument vivid or to shape tone.

A direct address to someone absent, dead, or non-human, such as a personified abstraction, which turns the poem outward and often heightens emotional intensity.

A gap between what is said or expected and what is meant or actually happens, ranging from verbal irony in speech to dramatic irony in plot and situational irony in event.

A situation in drama where the audience knows more than a character does, so the character's words or actions carry a meaning they cannot perceive themselves.

A speech in which a character, alone on stage, voices private thoughts aloud, giving the audience access to motive and inner conflict without a listener present.

A brief remark spoken by a character that other characters on stage are not supposed to hear, often used for confidential commentary, comic effect, or conspiratorial intimacy.

A defect of character, judgement, or temperament in a tragic protagonist that contributes to the reversal of fortune, often called hamartia in discussions of Greek drama.

The purging or clarification of pity and fear that Aristotle attributes to tragic drama, describing the emotional effect of watching a serious action end in suffering.

The reversal of fortune in a plot, a change from one state of affairs to its opposite, which Aristotle ranks among the strongest sources of tragic effect.

The neoclassical rule that a play should observe unity of action, and preferably of time and place, so that the plot stays coherent and plausible within a single day and setting.

A comic drama that satirises the behaviour, wit, and sexual intrigue of a fashionable social class, relying on polished dialogue and exposure of hypocrisy rather than physical farce.

A mode that ridicules vice, folly, or institutions in order to correct or expose them, using irony, exaggeration, parody, or invective, and often mixing wit with moral purpose.

A narrative in which characters, settings, and events carry a sustained second level of meaning, often moral, religious, or political, beyond their literal sense.

An object, image, or action that suggests a larger meaning beyond itself, often through association and repetition rather than through a fixed one-to-one code.

The attribution of human feeling or response to nature, weather, or landscape, a device that can heighten atmosphere but may also seem sentimental if unearned.

A novel of formation that traces a protagonist's growth from youth into maturity through education, error, and experience, ending in some adjustment to the wider world.

The voice or agency that tells a story, whose knowledge, reliability, and position relative to events shape what readers can know and how they judge characters.

A technique that reports a character's thoughts in third-person narration while keeping the idiom and attitude of the character, blurring the line between narrator and figure.

A narrative mode that renders the continuous, associative flow of a character's inner life, often without logical transitions, as in the fiction of Joyce and Woolf.

Seventeenth-century English verse marked by intellectual wit, startling conceits, colloquial argument, and preoccupation with love, death, and religious doubt.

A late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century movement valuing imagination, individual feeling, nature, and the common language of people over neoclassical rules and urban sophistication.

An early twentieth-century movement in literature and the arts that broke with Victorian conventions, favouring formal experiment, fragmentation, mythic structure, and impersonal technique.

T. S. Eliot's term for a set of objects, situations, or events that evoke a particular emotion in the reader without the writer naming that emotion directly.

The critical error, argued by Wimsatt and Beardsley, of judging a literary work by the author's supposed intentions rather than by what the text itself achieves.

A mid-twentieth-century critical approach treating the poem or novel as a self-contained verbal object, analysing tension, paradox, and ambiguity rather than biography or history.

A critical practice, associated with Derrida, that shows how a text's meanings undermine the oppositions and hierarchies it seems to rely on, exposing instability in interpretation.