Rashtrasant Tukadoji Maharaj Nagpur, University Nagpur

1. RashtrasantTukadojiMaharaj Nagpur, University Nagpur ShriSaibabaLokPrabodhan Arts College, Wadner Ta:- Hinganghat, Distt:- Wardha Subject: English Literature Class: B. A. I, Semester-I Presented By Asst. Prof. NiteshTelhande Head of English Department ShriSaibabaLokPrabodhan Arts College, Wadner

2. Literary Term Definition: Literary terms refer to the technique, style, and formatting used by writers and speakers to masterfully emphasize, embellish, or strengthen their compositions.

3. Allusion: Allusion is a passing reference, without explicit identification, to a literary or historical person, place, or event, or to another literary work or passage. In the Elizabethan, Thomas Nashe’s “Litany in Time of Plague” Brightness falls from the air, Queens have died young and fair, Dust hath closed Helen’s eye, The unidentified “Helen” in the last line alludes to Helen of Troy, Most allusions serve to illustrate or expand upon or enhance a subject, but some are used in order to undercut it ironically by the discrepancy between the subject and the allusion.

4. Blank Verse: Blank Verse consists of lines of iambic pentameter (five-stress iambic verse) which are unrhymed, hence the term “blank.” Of all English metrical forms it is closet to the natural rhythms of English speech, yet flexible and adaptive to diverse levels of discourse; as a result it has been more frequently and variously used than any other form of versification. Soon after Blank verse was introduced by the Earl of Surrey in his translations of Books 2 and 4 of Virgil’s The Aeneid, it became the standard meter for Elizabethan and later poetic drama; a free form of blank verse remained the medium in such twentieth- century verse plays as those by Maxwell Anderson and T. S. Eliot. John Milton used blank verse for his epic Paradise Lost , James Thomson for his descriptive and philosophical Seasons, William Wordsworth for his autobiographical Prelude and T. S. Eliot for much of ‘The Waste Land.

5. Conceit: Originally meaning a concept or image “conceit” came to be the term for figures of speech which establish a striking parallel, usually ingeniously elaborate, between two very dissimilar things or situations. English poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries adapted the term from the Italian “concetto.” Two types of conceit are often distinguished by specific names:

6. The Petrarchan Conceit: It is a type of figure used in love poems that had been novel and effective in the Italian poetry of Petrarch, but became hackneyed in some of his imitators among the Elizabethan Sonneteers. E.g. Sir Thomas Wyatt’s “My Galley Charged with Forgetfulness” that he translated from Petrarch, compares the lover’s state in detail to a ship labouring in a storm. 2) Metaphysical Conceit: It is a characteristic figure in the work of John Donne and other metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. It was described by Samuel Johnson, in a famed passage in his “Life if Cowley,” as “wit”.

7. Imagery: This term is one of the most common in criticism, and one of the most variable in meaning. Its applications range all the way from the “mental pictures” which, it is sometimes claimed, are experienced by the reader of a poem, to the totality of the components which make up a poem. Examples of this range of usage are the statements by the poet C. Day Lewis, in his Poetic Image, that an image “is a picture made out of words,” and that “a poem may itself be and image composed from a multiplicity of images” Three discriminable uses of the word, however, are especially frequent; in all these senses imagery is said to make poetry concrete, as opposed to abstract.

8. Irony: In Greek comedy the character called the eiron was a dissemble, who characteristically spoke in understatement and deliberately pretended to be less intelligent than he was, yet triumphed over the alazon the self-deceiving and stupid braggart. In most of the modern critical uses of the term “irony,” there remains the root sense of dissembling, or of hiding what is actually the case; not, however, in order to deceive, but to achieve special rhetorical or artistic effects. E.g. In canto IV of Alexander Pope’s ‘The Rape of the Lock’ after Sir Plume, egged on by the ladies, has stammered out his incoherent request for the return of the stolen lock of hair.

9. Metaphor: A word or expression that in literal usage denotes one kind of thing is applied to a distinctly different kind of thing, without asserting a comparison. For example, if Burns has said “O my love is a red, red rose” he would have uttered, technically speaking, a metaphor instead of a simile. Here is a more complex instance from the poet Stephen Spender, in which he applies several metaphoric terms to the eye as it scans a landscape: Eye, gazelle, delicate wanderer, Drinker of horizon’s fluid line.

10. Paradox: A paradox is a statement which seems on its face to be logically contradictory or absurd, yet turns out to be interpretable in a way that makes sense. An instance is the conclusion to John Donne’s sonnet “Death, Be Not Proud”: One short sleep past, we wake eternally And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

11. Symbol: In the broadest sense a symbol is anything which signifies something else; in this sense all words are symbols. In discussing literature, however, the term “symbol” is applied only to a word or phrase that signifies an object or event which in its turn signifies something, or suggests a range of reference, beyond itself. Some symbols are “conventional” or “public” thus “the Cross,” “the Red, White, and Blue,” and “the Good Shepherd” are terms that refer to symbolic objects of which the further significance is determinate within a particular culture.