In an aside a character expresses to the audience his or her thought or intention in a short speech which, by convention, is inaudible to the other characters on the stage. This device, common in Elizabethan and later drama, fell into disuse in the later nineteenth century.
Applied criticism, or practical criticism, concerns itself with the discussion of particular works and writers. In an applied critique, the theoretical principles controlling the mode of analysis, interpretation, and evaluation are often left implicit, or brought only in als the occasion ...
An argument is a statement by the narrator in which he invokes a muse or guiding spirit to inspire him in his great undertaking and then to address to the muse his epic question. Another phrase for argument is epic theme.
An aporia is an insuperable deadlock, or "double bind", of incompatible or contradictory meanings which are undecidable in that we lack any sufficient ground for choosing among them. According to Derrida, the result is that each text deconstructs itself, by undermining its own supposed grounds ...
Avant-garde is a prominent feature of modernism. It was a small, self-conscious group of artists and authirs who deliberately undertook "to make it new", in Ezra Pound's phrase. The group set out to create ever-new artistic forms and styles and introduced until then, neglected and sometimes ...
Antifoundationalism is the undermining of traditional claims for the existence of self-evident foundations that guarantee the validity of knowledge and truth, and establish the possibility of determinate communication. In its extreme forms, the (poststructural) claim is that the workings of ...
Anapestic: two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable. For instance The cur | few tolls | the knell | of par | ting day. | (Thomas Gray, "Elegy written in a Country Churchyard") . The noun is anapest.
An apologue is a short narrative, in prose or in verse, that exemplifies an abstract moral thesis or principle of human behaviour. It usually states at its conclusion by either the narrator or one of the characters the moral in the form of an epigram. Another word for apologue is fable. Most ...
