Terminology linked to form and genre

Allegory A story which seeks to demonstrate philosophical or religious beliefs. Each element in the story stands for an aspect of the belief that the story is seeking to explain. There could, for instance, be allegorical figures representing Truth, Goodness or Virtue. In Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, the central figure, Christian, is the Christian soul who sets out from the City of Destruction (man's fallen state) as a pilgrim travelling towards the Heavenly City (the eternal home of the redeemed).
Some works are very near to being allegory. The novels of William Golding have many allegorical elements. In the Lord of the Flies Simon is a Christ-like figure who is killed because the boys do not want to listen to the good news that he brings.

Audience Those who view a play, and, by extension, those for whom any work is written. When you are reading a play, you will have to put yourself in the position of being the audience. The best way to do this is to be aware of all the resources of the theatre - actors, staging, scenery, costume, lighting and music - and imagine how these could be used in the production of a play. Then you will be imaginatively close to the experiences of the audience.

Ballad A poem, usually of simple construction, that tells a story. Many English and Scottish ballads are quatrains, in which the first and third lines are longer than the second and fourth. Many of them are traditional and deal with love, war, travel and adventure. They are enjoyable because they are direct, fast moving and contain brief but telling details. For instance, the repeated line 'And no birds sing' from Keat's 'La Belle Dame sans Merci' is sufficient to convey the poem's terrible bleakness.

Black Comedy  Comedy that invites laughter at serious or painful aspects of life such as disease, pain, failure and death. Joe Orton's comedies can be described as black, and some moments in Shakespeare's problem plays - Measure for Measure, All's Well that Ends Well and Troilus and Cressida - come near to it.

Blank Verse Poetry that is written in lines of unrhymed iambic pentameters. It is very common in English and can be used for telling a story or thinking about ideas and feel- ings. It is worthwhile noticing how regular and insistent its rhythms are.
Shakespeare uses blank verse in his plays. There is usually no point in drawing attention to this, unless there are very interesting variations in the rhythm of a line. Such variations are usually the expression of deep emotion. For instance, Hamlet's order to his mother, 'Look here upon this picture, and on this', could be scanned in the usual way, but that would not reflect its emotional quality. To do that justice, the line should be scanned:

Loók heŕe upoń thiś pićtuře, anď ŏn thís…

It is also important to notice when Shakespeare uses verse which is not blank verse. For instance, the witches in Macbeth and the fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream speak in trochees rather than iambs. Trochees sound different, thus making the witches and fairies seem strange, non-human creatures. (See also Metre.)

Comedy and Tragedy     A comedy is a play in which the confusions of characters, often prompted by love and furthered by deception or misunderstanding, eventually work out so that the play closes happily. The action of comedy is usually amusing, and the plot intricate.
Tragedy is a play in which a character (often called the hero) falls from power, influence or happiness towards disaster and death. Often a hero is wilful and seems to bring destruction upon himself. This wilfulness is called hubris. The action arouses feelings of awe in the audience, who often leave the theatre with a renewed sense of the seriousness and significance of human life. The word catharsis is often used to describe the audience's feelings. It means the purging from the mind of the feelings of pity and fear the play has aroused.
You should be careful not to impose these, or any other definitions of comedy and tragedy, upon Shakespeare's plays. All definitions should be used as general guides and not as rules. Though comedy and tragedy usually apply to plays, the terms can be used of both poems and novels.

Farce   A branch of comedy in which the characters are reduced to stock figures, and the action is often frantic and even violent. Thus, in farce characters can be beaten or humiliated and the audience reacts with laughter, because it has not been invited to see the characters as having any sort of distinctive personality. Elements of farce creep into some plays.
For instance, the middle scenes of Dr Faustus can be said to be farce, and the innumerable beatings of servants in Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors introduce farce into a carefully constructed comic plot. (See also Tragedy and Comedy.)

Genre      A word taken from the French which means a literary type or kind. Comedy, tragedy and satire are genres, but nowadays it is also common to speak of poetry and the novel as genres, too.

Lyric      A poem, usually of no more than forty or fifty lines, and often much shorter, which expresses the thoughts and feelings of the poet or of an imagined speaker. The tones of such poems are varied, but they are often personal, reflective, and frequently deal with love or other powerful emotions. Sometimes writing that is smooth, fluent and intimate is described as lyrical. Most people's idea of poetry is lyrical. It is useful to remind yourself that poetry can be narrative, didactic and satiric as well. (See also Song.)

Masque     A highly elaborate entertainment in verse and song with lavish costumes and sets that was popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The characters are often gods or allegorical figures. Shakespeare's The Tempest contains a masque to celebrate the betrothal of Ferdinand and Miranda. Milton's Comus is also a masque. If you have to write about masques, you will have to imagine the visual impact that they make on stage. (See also Allegory.)

Narrative    A set of events that are related by an author to a reader or listener. Sometimes the term is used to cover the nature of fiction itself - what it is for a story to be told - and, by extension, it's also used of the kind of problems readers encounter in narratives. In these latter senses the emphasis is always on how the narrative is made.

Narrator     The narrator is one who tells a story. The narrator can, but need not, be the novelist. Narrators can tell their stories, or narratives, in the first or the third person. If the story is told in the first person, there is only access to the mind of the narrator. If, however, the story is narrated in the third person, it is possible to see into the minds of all the characters. When an author knows everything that goes on in characters' minds, he or she is called an omniscient (all-knowing) narrator. (See also Primary narrator and Retrospective narrator.)

Persona    A specially created voice or self in a poem, novel or short story. In most cases a persona speaks in the first person singular, though in some cases, particularly poems, this need not be so. Personas give works unity by showing the reader that everything in the work is the expression of a particular viewpoint. Because of this, it is wise to discuss personas in terms of tone and attitude. You should remember that a persona is not to be identified with the writer, and that a writer can adopt as many personas as he or she chooses.

Realism and Naturalism    Sometimes these terms are used interchangeably to refer to narratives that try to evoke the sense that what is being conveyed is a direct transcription of actual events. Historically, the terms have different origins; realism is any fiction that presents everyday, characters in their usual settings, whereas naturalism was a more philosophical kind of fiction that presented characters as solely the products of their biological inheritance and social circumstances. Since there aren't in English many novels that follow naturalistic presuppositions, realism is the more useful term.
Whenever you use the words 'realism' or 'realistic' you should remember three things : (i) most literature isn't realistic (Shakespeare, for instance) - in fact, it's a difficult term to use of literature written before the nineteenth century; (ii) realistic literature isn't, by virtue of being realistic, better than literature that isn't; (iii) although the aim is to reproduce the surface appearance of everyday life, realistic literature is itself a specially made form of art that depends upon a careful selection and arrangement of details.

Satire     The art of exposing folly or wickedness by mocking it. Sometimes a whole work is called a satire, but more often it is thought of as a quality or function of an author's writing. For instance, Dickens satirises the civil service in Little Dorrit by creating the Circumlocution Office - a massive department whose aim is to prevent anybody from doing anything. You should remember that satire is a moral art. That is to say, it does not merely poke fun at something but ridicules it in the name of important values.

Song       Either a lyrical poem which might be set to music or verses intended to be sung in a play. In the first case, you could ask yourself whether the rhythm and sounds of the poem are appropriately light or flowing. In the second, you should ask how it contributes to the mood or meaning of the play. When you are imagining what a play would be like on stage, you can ask yourself what kind of tune would be suitable. (See also Lyric.)

Sonnet.     A poem of fourteen lines. A number of forms have been created, but the two most popular are the one constructed in an octave (eight lines) and a sestet (six lines), and the one in three quatrains (four lines each) and a couplet (two lines). When you write about a sonnet, you should look for the tightness of the argument and the depth of the emotional range. It is worth noticing how they end: is the end artificial, or does it naturally arise out of the rest of the poem and satisfactorily conclude it?

View, Viewpoint   How an author regards and thereby invites the reader to regard the events of a narrative. The interesting questions to ask are the closeness of the author to the characters and events, the moral light in which they are regarded and any changes that occur in the author's perspective. Charlotte Brontë is very close to Jane Eyre but distant from most of the other characters; George Eliot views everything as a matter of moral concern but is always deeply understanding of human failure, and Dickens shifts the perspective in Great Expectations so that we are sometimes invited to look at things morally and at other times only as the material for comedy.

Villanelle   A verse form (originally from France) of five three-line stanzas and a final quatrain, in which the first and third line of the first stanza appear alternately in the following stanzas and form a couplet in the final one. A popular modem example is Dylan Thomas's 'Do not go gentle into that good night'.
When writing about villanelles, you should bring out the pleasure of finding that the recurring line has an appropriate place in the succeeding stanzas. Sometimes its new place brings out fresh meanings in the line. For instance, the line from Dylan Thomas is an order in the first stanza and a statement of fact in the second. In grammatical terms it changes from the imperative to the indicative mood.