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| Question | Answer |
| kenning | A riddle-like metaphor. It tells us something about a thing's qualities without naming it directly. Must be metaphorical. Not all hyphenated things are kennings. Example: mead-hall is a literal phrase, so not a kenning. Sea-bird's bath is metaphorical so it is a kenning. |
| Irony | Qualities of language, events, character, which involves reversal of expectation, or paradoxical relation of opposites, or simply twist of idea of character. |
| Juxtaposition | Putting two things together without any overt connector, allowing them to comment on each other |
| contemptus mundi | A theme that despises both earthly pleasures and earthly troubles as sinful and wretched, and placing one's hope in the life to come. |
| dom | The Anglo-Saxon word for judgment. A theme from 8th Century Christianity that shows intense concern for human salvation. |
| litotes | The ironic negative: "There was no pleasant place" |
| Wyrd | Fate |
| fabliau | rude popular story such as in various stories in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales |
| romance | Popular before Chaucer's time, in 12th and 13th Century France: a long-versed narrative, highly stylized, featuring lots of adventures, some sex, little or no plot (episodes), monsters and magic, and a general context of good guys (knights of Christendom) vs bad guys (forces of evil, Saracens, what have you) |
| exempla | anecdotes or fables told in sermon to illustrate moral teaching (comment on Wife of Bath) |
| resoun | laws of rhetoric and form, governed by reason (Canterbury Tales) Doing everything by the book for the good listeners |
| condicioun | Canterbury Tales-state of being: both external circumstances and inner character |
| whiche | Canterbury Tales-physical characteristics |
| Degree | Canterbury Tales-rank, status, social class, profession |
| array | Canterbury Tales-dress |
| mystery plays | Dramatized Biblical episodes illustrating the mystery of redemption. OT episodes as types, NT episodes from life of Christ. Performed in cycles at various seasonal festivals on pageant wagons |
| Miracle Plays | deal with lives of saints and miracles. Comparable to mystery play but less farcicle. |
| mansions (hint: mystery plays) | fixed stage outdoors and scenes viewed simultaneously often representing Heaven and Hell. |
| rounds (hint: mystery plays) | raised ampitheatre and multiple stages |
| internal structure | arrangement of ideas and images in the plot. |
| plot | not the story, but the dramatist's arrangement of events in the story. Traditional parts: peripeteia, anagnoresis, protagonist, antagonist. |
| peripeteia | the reversal of fortune |
| anagnoresis | recognition/discovery (eg of self, of identity) |
| Character and plot | character both defines the plot and is defined by it. A character may make choices but they are bound by the chain of events that were forged by these free choices |
| tragedy | Concentrates on individual rather than on a group. Individual's fortune changes from good to bad. They begin integrated in society but end up isolated or dead. Action has seriousness and magnitude (Aristotle). Hero has greatness. Arouses emotions of pity and fear. Individual to some extent is responsible for their own fate. |
| comedy | Concentrates on group rather than individual. Fortune of main character changes from bad to good. Comic hero ends play re-integrated into society. Often ends in marriage, new order. Characters are usually ridiculous or low, though not usually the heroes. |
| Comedy and Tragedy | represent the two halves of life, and in the greatest drama they often overlap. |
| psychomachia | war within the soul: virtues and vices struggle for control of the soul. |
| allusiveness | refers to classical and European works, depending on the reader's knowledge |
| convention | modes; works are modelled on classical and European types, such as Petrarch’s sonnets. Other classical models: odes, epic, pastoral. How convention works: certain forms associated with certain kinds of subject–form itself governs arrangement of subject, highlights and connects images and ideas. Also, convention works by raising expectations and then either fulfilling them or moving away from them, surprising us in some way. The effect is created through the difference. A bit like language itself. |
| rhetoric | classical training in Renaissance emphasised rhetoric, the art of persuasion. Imagery, structure, based in this: Invention (finding, usually from a store of stock images); ordo (arrangement, rational structure); expression (speaking forth); effectiveness or application. |
| copia | delight in abundance of images, reflecting abundance of universe |
| conceit | an odd or unusual metaphor, often presented as an extended metaphor, which tells us something about its referent (tenor). |
| heroic | dealing with a larger ideal, usually highly conventionalized or stylized story and characters |
| allegorical | uses persons and events of a story to represent moral and spiritual principles. Layers of reference: political/contemporary; Biblical/theological; moral/psychological; archetypal. |
| Neo-Platonism | the real world is an imperfect shadow of an ideal world; poetry can “improve” nature through art, bring it closer to this ideal world. |
| External and Internal Structure in Poetry | all poetry has external structure (rhyme, rhythm, appearance) and internal structure (movement of ideas and images through the poem). These elements correspond, particularly obviously in the sonnet. |
| Italian Sonnet | - usually divided into 8 lines and 6 (structure determined by rhyme scheme–abba abba cd cd gg), with the final two lines as a concluding couplet, often with a twist or irony in the thought. - in movement from 8th to 9th line, frequently a sharp change of direction, a contrast word such as “But” or “Yet,” and then the development of a new thought or a change in the argument in the last 6 lines. - marked use of caesuras to break up line, create shifts and parallels in thought - Italian model predominated, even through to our own time (Sidney, Wroth, Donne) |
| -Shakespearean (or Elizabethan) sonnet: | Shakespearean (or Elizabethan) sonnet: -usually consists of three quatrains (regular set of 4 lines) followed by a couplet with a twist in it–sometimes printed with the final couplet indented or separated in some way. Rhyme scheme (abab cdcd efef gg). Example, Shakespeare # 73 (p. 1035) - follow movement of ideas from one quatrain to the other, followed by concluding couplet |
| poet as vates | prophet, seer; poetic language is visionary, sees through things to the divine principle beyond, language has divine power, speaks for the god |
| poet as maker | (Greek root of term); poet is not tied to world of immediate sense-experience, can create ideal world from imagination; this raises and ennobles the human spirit, provides the model for moral and social improvement; can recover, in the process, something of the perfection known to us before the fall |
| Sidney's definition of "arts" | (all human endeavour) |
| Sidney's definition of "sciences" | (disciplines of knowledge) |
| mimesis | art imitating nature |
| mirror versus lamp | Ren. concept of mimesis: poetry is not self-expression (lamp) but re-creation, imitation (mirror)...but not copying, rather, it imitates an ideal world available through the imagination, which poet sees through imagination. Lamp is expression, mirror is mimesis |
| blazon | generalizations of body parts; a form of literary fetishism |
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