The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

Peter Childs, Roger Fowler, Peter Childs, Roger Fowler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134234745
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

A twenty-first century version of Roger Fowler's 1973 Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms, this latest edition of The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms is the most up-to-date guide to critical and theoretical concepts available to students of literature at all levels.

With over forty newly commissioned entries, this essential reference book includes:

• an exhaustive range of entries, covering such topics as genre, form, cultural theory and literary technique
• new definitions of contemporary critical issues such as Cybercriticism and Globalization
• complete coverage of traditional and radical approaches to the study and production of literature
• thorough accounts of critical terminology and analyses of key academic debates
• full cross-referencing throughout and suggestions for further reading.

Covering both long-established terminology as well as the specialist vocabulary of modern theoretical schools, The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms is an indispensable guide to the principal terms and concepts encountered in debates over literary studies in the twenty-first century.

P

Paradox An apparently self-contradictory statement, though one which is essentially true. Two examples of paradox may help to demonstrate its special significance in modern thought (Schopenhauer, Shaw):

The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him. The man who listens to reason is lost: reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her.

The movement of twentieth-century philosophy away from causal modes of thought towards an acceptance of contrarieties and oppositions, seems to be reflected accurately in the present critical preoccupation with paradox in literature. An acceptance of the radical discontinuity between thought and existence prompts both Shaw and Schopenhauer to point to the futility of searching for solutions within the unity of thought. Modern criticism, beginning with the rehabilitation of the Metaphysical poets and continuing with the rediscovery of the Augustans, gradually progressed from the exploration of simple intellectual paradox associated with irony and satire, to a discovery of the paradox of wonder in the existential poetry of the Romantics. As Cleanth Brooks has shown (The Well Wrought Urn, 1947) the paradoxes upon which such poems as Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’ are built represent the basic structure of Romantic thought and are far removed from a trivial verbal exercise.

BCL

Paraphrase Depends on the possibility of synonymy: the availability of more than one expression for the same meaning. The theory of STYLE seems to demand belief in the possibility of paraphrase, and consequently in a model of language which distinguishes form and content, expression and meaning.

These assumptions were vigorously challenged by neo-Romantic critics, taking as their battle cry Shelley’s assault on ‘the vanity of translation’ and drawing support from the many linguists and linguistic philosophers who have denied the existence of synonyms or asserted that a word in context has a unique and unmatchable meaning. The most vocal advocate for the inseparability of form and content was Cleanth Brooks, who attacked what he called ‘The heresy of paraphrase’ (The Well Wrought Urn, ch. 11): ‘the imagery and the rhythm are not merely the instruments by which this fancied core-of- meaning-which-can-be-expressed in-a- paraphrase is directly rendered’. The alleged heresy is a belief that a poem reduces to an arbitrary conjunction of a ‘meaning’ (statement, theme, etc.) and a decorative surface. Brooks asserted that the surface is not merely decorative: we apprehend meaning by way of the ‘words on the page’, and changing the words may change our conception of the poem. Paraphrase is, willy-nilly, part of the critic’s normal procedure. See also CONTENT, FORM, STYLE, TEXTURE.

See David Lodge, Language of Fiction (1966), 18–26, which rehearses some of the literary arguments on this issue.

RGF

Parody One of the most calculated and analytic literary techniques: it searches out, by means of subversive mimicry, any weakness, pretension or lack of self-awareness in its original. This ‘original’ may be another work, or the collective style of a group of writers, but although parody is often talked of as a very clever and inbred literary joke, any distinctive and artful use of language – by, for example, journalists, politicians or priests – is susceptible of parodic impersonation. Although it is often deflationary and comic, its distinguishing characteristic is not deflation, but analytic mimicry. The systematic appropriation of the form and imagery of secular love poetry by the sacred lyric is an example of parody in this basic sense. It is one of the ways for a writer to explore and identify available techniques, and may focus on their unused potentialities as well as their limitations. As an internal check that literature keeps on itself, parody may be considered parasitic or creative, and is often both. Perhaps because parodic works are themselves highly critical, they are more frequently annotated than analysed; sometimes parodists are so self-conscious that they pre-empt their wouldbe critic, providing their own footnotes and explanatory comments (like Vladimir Nabokov in Pale Fire, 1962). The parodist addresses a highly ‘knowing’ and literate audience, for whom criticism is merely a part of literature, not a separate industry. The parodist is often an ironist, affecting admiration of the style borrowed and distorted (Pope ‘compliments’ Milton in this way in The Dunciad, 1728); sometimes explicitly and systematically undermining a rival mode (as Jane Austen does with the Gothic novel in Northanger Abbey, 1818); impersonation of the alien style is always the basic technique. In various periods, particularly in the eighteenth century, attempts were made to distinguish different kinds of parodic appropriation: ‘burlesque’ was said to be the kind where some new ‘low’ subject was treated incongruously in an old ‘high’ style, and ‘travesty’ the opposite (with Juno using the language of a fishwife). Such distinctions can seldom in practice be sustained, since one parodic work habitually exploits a whole range of incongruous juxtapositions, and the categories obscure the complex intermingling of par-odic effects. Both terms, however, are useful to indicate the kind of response a work appeals to: ‘travesty’ (as in its popular use) implies something savagely reductive, and ‘burlesque’ the comic immediacy of a theatrical ‘spoof’. A distinction can be made, however, between all forms of parodic imitation and ‘caricature’: the analogy between caricature in painting and parody in writing (established by Fielding in his parodic novel Joseph Andrews, 1742) is misleading. Parody attacks its butt indirectly, through style; it ‘quotes’ from and alludes to its original, abridging and inverting its characteristic devices. The caricaturist’s ‘original’ is not some other already existent style or work, whereas parody is a mirror of a mirror, a critique of a view of life already articulated in art. Parody is so common an element in literature precisely because it adds this extra level of critical comment which is lacking from caricature. See also PASTICHE, SATIRE.

See S. Dentith, Parody (2000); Linda Hutcheon, Theory of Parody (2000).

LS

Pastiche Whether applied to part of a work, or to the whole, implies that it is made up largely of phrases, motifs, images, episodes, etc. borrowed more or less unchanged from the work(s) of other author(s). The term is often used in a loosely derogatory way to describe the kind of helpless borrowing that makes an immature or unoriginal work read like a mosaic of quotations. More precisely, it has two main meanings, corresponding to two different deliberate uses of pastiche as a technique. There is a kind of pastiche which seeks to recreate in a more extreme and accessible form the manner of major writers. It tends to eliminate tensions, to produce a more highly coloured and polished effect, picking out and reiterating favourite stylistic mannerisms, and welding them into a new whole which has a superficial coherence and order. Unlike plagiarism, pastiche of this kind is not intended to deceive: it is literature frankly inspired by literature (as in Akenside’s poem ‘The pleasures of imagination’, 1744). The second main use of pastiche is not reverential and appreciative, but disrespectful and sometimes deflationary. Instead of ironing out ambiguities in its source(s) it highlights them. It cannot be distinguished absolutely from PARODY, but whereas the parodist need only allude to the original intermittently, the writer of pastiche industriously recreates it, often concocting a medley of borrowed styles like Flann O’Brien in At Swim-Two-Birds (1939). A closely synonymous term, nearly obsolete, ‘cento’ or ‘centonism’, is relevant here: in its original Latin form it meant a garment of patchwork and, applied to literature, a poem made up by joining scraps from various authors. Many of the specialized uses of pastiche are reminiscent of this literary game: it may give encyclopaedic scope to a work, including all previous styles (Joyce’s Ulysses); it is used by writers who wish to exemplify their ironic sense that language comes to them secondhand and stylized (George Herbert’s ‘Jordan I’). And a general air of pastiche is created by many writers who, for various reasons, refuse to evolve a style of their own, and who (like John Barth) employ other’s cast-off phrases with conscious scepticism.

Fredric Jameson argues that parody has been replaced by pastiche in postmodernism, where all the cultural styles of the past are open to cannibalization and appropriation: ‘Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter’.

See Barbara Barber, Pastiche (1997); Ingeborg Hoesterey, Pastiche: Cultural Memory in Art, Film, Literature (2001); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1992).

LS

Pastoral In classical and neo-classical definitions pastoral is a mode with conventional prescriptions about setting, characters and diction. In drama, poetry or prose it employs stylized properties and idealized Arcadian situations from rural life – ‘purling streams’, ‘embowering shades’; singing contests, mourning processions – as a deliberate disguise for the preoccupations of urban, sophisticated people. Pastoral focusses on the contrast between the lives of the people who write it and read it, and the lives of those country people it portrays (both ends of society often appear, as in Shakespearean comedy). It relies on conventions shared with the audience – traditional names (Corydon, Thyrsis, Adonais), inherited motifs (the flower catalogue), plots based on transparent disguises. It may be idyllic, but is more often (as in Spenser’s ‘Shepheardes Calender’ or Milton’s ‘Lycidas’) tinged with melancholy and satire; because of its dimension of reference to contemporary society, pastoral invites allegory and symbolism. The proliferation of stock features made it, in Greece, Augustan Rome and Renaissance Europe, an extremely precise medium for exploring the attitudes (rural nostalgia, narcissism, self-doubt) of consciously civilized and cultured people – poets particularly (N. B. the heightened self-consciousness of the pastoral ELEGY for a dead fellow-poet).

The artificiality of pastoral is not an evasion of realism: its rural setting is metaphorical, a means rather than an end. Like other conventions, it decays when the means cease to be viable, not because it is false (since it was never true). Many uses of the term are distorted by criteria adopted from realistic fiction. Documentary ‘truth to the object’ is irrelevant in pastoral, which is a mirror reflecting back its audience and writer rather than a transparent window. Pastoral is a product of pre- or anti-realistic world-views which stress imaginative projection (e.g. the PATHETIC FALLACY) rather than passive perception. Thus, it lost its credibility with the rise of empiricism (and of the novel) during the eighteenth century, and was partially reinstated in the twentieth by writers like the American poet Wallace Stevens who argued that ‘Life consists/Of propositions about life’. ‘Failed realism’, and ‘anything depicting country life’ are both uses of ‘pastoral’ based on unexamined realist assumptions.

Exploratory twentieth-century use of the term dated from William Empson’s Some Versions of Pastoral (1935). He pointed out that pastoral was not a bundle of conventional properties, but a particular structural relationship (‘putting the complex into the simple’) which survived and extended beyond the limits of the formal mode. Empson’s best example was Alice in Wonderland, where the heroine, like the ‘shepherd of sixteenth century pastoral, explores the anxieties and complacencies of her society’. While retaining its function as a label, ‘pastoral’ acquired an extended application which relates to the search for literary MYTHS and archetypes.

See Terry Gifford, Pastoral (1999).

LS

Pathetic fallacy Ruskin introduced this notion (Modern Painters, vol. 3, 1856) to account for the attribution to inanimate nature of animate, even human, characteristics. He gives ‘the cruel, crawling foam’ as an example. People, he claims, fall into four categories: those who see nature clearly because their emotions are too dull to interfere (non-poets), those whose emotions are too strong for their intellect (second-order poets), those who, having strong intellect and passions, achieve a balance between the two (first-order poets) and finally those who perceive realities too great for humanity to bear and who revert to expressions which reason no longer controls (prophets). The second and last make use of the pathetic fallacy, but only the former do so through weakness. Ruskin argues, moreover, that the poet who sees nature as having ‘an animation and pathos of its own’ (rather than borrowed from culture) does not commit the fallacy, but merely shows ‘an instinctive sense . . . of the Divine presence’. What constitutes a ‘pathetic fallacy’ must therefore vary with the dominant idea of the time: many have seen in such an ‘instinctive sense’ a fallacy rather than the perception of a truth.

AAAC

Performativity As understood and used in current critical studies, the theory of performativity was introduced by Judith Butler (1956–) in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990). In this book she argued that gender is performative, a mime of dominant characteristics conventionally attributed to gender, and related to the categorization of two different sexes. However, as Butler explains, even if one allows, for the sake of argument, that sexed bodies fall into two categories, ‘it does not follow that the construction of “men” will accrue exclusively to the bodies of males or that of “women” will interpret only female bodies’. Following the argument and method of the French philosopher, Michel Foucault (1926–84), Butler adopts a ‘genealogical critique’ of gender which investigates ‘the political stakes in designating as an origin and cause those identity categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices and discourses with multiple and diffuse points of origin’. However, the discussion of performativity in Gender Trouble has sometimes been misunderstood. It has been seen as the recommendation for the deliberate subversion of gender by performative acts, such as drag, for instance, which Butler had used in Gender Trouble as an example of perfomativity. As Butler explained in an important interview, published in the journal Radical Philosophy in 1994, drag is an example of, but not a paradigm for, performativity. While her thesis is that gender is culturally performed, and thus, a performance, performance is not the same as performativity. Performativity is not about voluntary or deliberate acts of performance and subversion – such as drag – but is rather, the analysis of ‘that aspect of discourse that has the capacity to produce what it names’ through repetition and recitation. Performance always ‘presumes a subject’ whereas performativity contests the very notion of a subject able to volunteer to act outside its own instalment by virtue of performativity, which is ‘the discursive mode through which ontological effects are installed’. Further, subversion cannot be so deliberate or have such calculable effects. What is recommended, however, is the sustained interrogation of the discursive and institutional conditions by which these cultural effects are taken as norms (the ‘historicity of norms’), constructing as they do, even the apprehension of material bodies. This Butler aimed to clarify in her next book, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1994). Here she returns to reconsider the category of sex (occluded to a large extent by her prior focus on gender) and the materiality of bodies. She questions the way in which certain biological differences, such as pregnancy, which will only ever constitute a relatively small portion of any woman’s life, have become the salient characteristics of sex and have been central to the reductive, binary sexing of the body. As she described in her Radical Philosophy interview in 1994, she ‘wanted to work out how a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Note On the Style of References
• List of Terms
• A
• B
• C
• D
• E
• F
• G
• H
• I
• K
• L
• M
• N
• O
• P
• Q
• R
• S
• T
• U
• V
• W
• Notes On Contributors