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The figure of speech, or trope, called hyperbole (Greek for "overshooting") is bold overstatement, or the extrava- gant exaggeration of...

Lines of iambic pentameter which rhyme in pairs: aa, bb, cc, and so on. The adjective "heroic" was applied in the later seventeenth...

A period of remarkable creativity in literature, music, dance, painting, and sculpture by African-Americans, from the end of the First...

Haiku (sometimes spelled hokku) Japanese poetic form that represents, in seventeen syllables. Ordered into three lines of five, seven,...

A term applied to eighteenth-century poets who wrote meditative poems, usually set in a graveyard, on the theme of human mortality, in...

The medieval fabliau was a short comic or satiric tale in verse dealing realistically with middle-class or lower-class characters. The...

Formal and elaborate prose style which had a vogue in the 1580s in drama, prose fiction, and probably also in the conversation of English...

As a term in criticism, epithet denotes a distinctive quality of a person or thing. Example is John Keats, "silver snarling trumpets" In...

Latin form "epithalamium" A poem written to celebrate a marriage. Among its classical practitioners were the Greeks Sappho and Theocritus...

Decorum, refers to the fitness, in the way that a literary genre, its subject matter, its characters and actions, and the style of its...

A term applied to rough, heavy-footed, and jerky versification, and also to verses that are monotonously regular in meter. Doggerel...

A phrase introduced by T. S. Eliot in his essay "The Metaphysical Poets" (1921). Eliot's claim was that John Donne and the other...

Latin for "a god from a machine." Describes the practice of some Greek playwrights (especially Euripides) to end a drama with a god,...

The feminine form is "confidante" It is a character in a drama or novel who plays only a minor role in the action, but serves the...

A type of narrative and lyric verse, given by Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1959), which deals with the facts and intimate mental and...

Introduction of comic characters, speeches, or scenes in a serious or tragic work, especially in dramas. Used in Elizabethan tragedy....

French for the stereotype used in printing. signifies an expression that deviates enough from ordinary usage to call attention to itself...

To delete the parts of the literary works which are considered as indescent. Thomas Bowdler was the person who edited or tidied the...

Blank verse ,as the name suggests that it is empty of something, so that is, the lack of rhymes. It consists of iambic pentameter i.e....