Aestheticism, or the Aesthetic Movement, was a European phenomenon during the latter 19th century that had its chief headquarters in France. In opposition to the dominance of scientific thinking, and in defiance of the widespread indifference or hostility of the middle-clasas society of their time ...
An alazon is one of the four stock characters whose interactions constitutes a standard plot in a play, an impostor and self-deceiving braggart. The other stock characters are the bomolochus, the eiron and the agroikos.
An allegory is a narrative, whether in prose or in verse, in which the agents and actions, and sometimes the setting as well, are contrived by the author to make coherent sense on the "literal', or primary, level of signification, and at the same time to signify a second, correlated order of ...
Ambiguity is applied to a fault in style, that is, the use of a vague or equivocal experssion when what is wanted is precision and particularity of reference. Alternative terms for this use of language are multiple meaning and plurisignation.
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.
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 ...
An antihero is the chief person in a modern novel or play whose character is widely discrepant from that which we associate with the traditional protagonist or hero of a serious literary work. Instead of manifesting largeness, dignity, power, or heroism, the antihero is petty, ignominious, ...
Antimasque is sa form developed by Ben Jonson and in it the characters are grotesque and unruly, the action ludicrous, the humour broad. The term serves as a foil and is a countertype to the elegance, order and ceremony of masque, which in its full development is an elaborate form of court ...
