37 terms
Acmeism
Acmeism is a current in poetry of the early twentieth century that arose as a reaction against the misty polysemy of Symbolism and proclaimed a return to clarity, objectivity, precision of image, 'beautiful clarity', and mastery of craft. The Acmeists (from the Greek acme — summit) valued earthly, material concreteness, culture, and a connection with the world artistic tradition. The aesthetic orientation of Acmeism — precision of the word, plasticity, balance — is typologically kindred to the program of the Ukrainian Neoclassicists of the 1920s, who likewise defended clarity, perfection of form, and reliance on the classical heritage. This kinship attests to the pan-European character of the search for a 'new objectivity' and a culture of verse in the poetry of the modern era, when different national schools — the Ukrainian Neoclassicism led by Mykola Zerov among them — sought a counterweight to diffuse subjectivism in clear, harmonious form.
Acrostic
An acrostic is a poem in which the initial letters of the lines, read from top to bottom, form a word, name or whole phrase. The acrostic belongs to the visual-verbal forms in which the graphic arrangement of the text carries additional meaning beyond the verse content proper. Historically acrostics were used for a hidden authorial signature, a dedication to an addressee or the placing of a secret message, and also in the spiritual poetry of the Baroque. The difficulty of the form lies in a double constraint: the poet must at once create a full-fledged poem and observe the prescribed sequence of initial letters. Its varieties are the mesostich and telestich, where the key word is composed of the middle or final letters of the lines.
Adjacent rhyme
Adjacent (paired) rhyme is a way of joining lines in which neighbouring lines rhyme according to the scheme aabb. This is the simplest and most ancient type of rhyme scheme, characteristic of folk song, the duma, the fable and narrative genres, where each pair of lines forms a complete semantic and intonational unity. Adjacent rhyme lends the exposition smoothness and clarity and lends itself well to plot narration and aphoristic maxims. Combined with various metres, it forms distichs that readily unite into larger stanzaic structures. Alongside alternate and envelope rhyme, adjacent rhyme belongs to the three principal ways of organising rhyme within a stanza.
Adventure Novel
The adventure novel is a variety of the novel whose plot is built on a series of unusual, sharp, and often dangerous events — travels, adventures, trials, and mysteries — that succeed one another at a rapid pace and keep the reader in constant suspense. The genre is marked by a dynamic plot, an energetic hero, an exotic background, struggle, and unexpected turns. Classic world models are the novels of Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island), Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe), and Alexandre Dumas. In Ukrainian literature a vivid example of the adventure-psychological novel is Ivan Bahriany's The Hunters and the Hunted — an absorbing story of the young Hryhorii Mnohohrishny's escape from a Soviet prisoner train bound for the Far East and survival in the Ussuri taiga, in which dynamic adventure is combined with the affirmation of the unbreakability of the human spirit and national dignity. Elements of the adventure genre are also present in adventure-historical prose for youth.
Aesopian language
Aesopian language is a special system of indirect expression developed for concealing the true content from censorship, when the direct utterance of a thought is impossible because of political or social prohibitions. Named after the legendary ancient Greek fabulist Aesop, Aesopian language makes use of allegory, hint, irony, allusion, invented plots and "safe" images behind which a sharp critical meaning shows through, comprehensible to the initiated reader. This system flourished in censored literatures, in particular in Ukrainian under imperial and totalitarian oppression, where writers masked national and social ideas in fable, historical or allegorical images. Aesopian language is an important phenomenon of the history of literature, attesting to the capacity of the artistic word to resist prohibition through refined indirect expression.
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is the philosophical science of the beautiful, of the laws and forms of the artistic assimilation of the world, of the nature of art and of aesthetic perception. The term was introduced by Alexander Baumgarten (1735; developed in his 'Aesthetica,' 1750), who defined aesthetics as the 'science of sensory cognition.' The classic system of aesthetics was developed by Immanuel Kant ('Critique of the Power of Judgment,' with its doctrine of disinterested pleasure and the sublime) and Georg Hegel ('Lectures on Aesthetics,' with its conception of art as the sensory manifestation of the Idea). The main categories of aesthetics are the beautiful, the ugly, the sublime, the tragic, the comic, and harmony. For literary studies, aesthetics is a methodological foundation: it grounds the criteria of artistry, the specificity of figurative thinking, and the value orientations of interpretation. Ukrainian aesthetic thought is represented by Ivan Franko's 'From the Secrets of Poetic Creativity' (1898).
Allegory
Allegory is a trope and a mode of artistic representation in which an abstract concept or idea is embodied in a concrete image that has a fixed, generally understood figurative meaning: the fox embodies cunning, the lion strength, the scales justice. Unlike the polysemous symbol, allegory has an unambiguous, rationally "decipherable" interpretation fixed by cultural tradition. Allegory underlies the fable, the parable, the morality play and many emblematic genres of the Baroque. Extended allegory may organise an entire work in which each image corresponds to a particular idea. As a means of indirect expression, allegory allows abstract moral, philosophical or political concepts to be visualised, making them graphic and didactically expressive for the reader.
Alliteration
Alliteration is a stylistic device of sound-writing consisting in the repetition of identical or similar consonant sounds in adjacent words or lines for the sake of intensifying the expressiveness and musicality of poetic speech. The repetition of consonants creates an additional sound pattern that may imitate phenomena of reality (rustling, rumbling, ringing), emphasise semantically important words, lend the line intonational unity and emotional colouring. Alliteration is one of the most ancient means of organising verse — in Germanic poetry it even replaced rhyme as a structural principle. In Ukrainian poetry alliteration was masterfully applied by Pavlo Tychyna, who created sound imagery. Together with assonance, alliteration forms sound-writing (the instrumentation of verse) — an important level of the phonetic organisation of a literary text.
Allusion
Allusion is a stylistic device, a hint at a widely known historical, mythological, biblical or literary fact, event or personage, which enriches the text with additional meanings through association. Allusion does not quote the source directly but only refers to it, counting on the cultural awareness of the reader, capable of recognising the hint and unfolding its implicit content. Thus the author briefly introduces a whole layer of meanings into a work: by calling a hero "Don Quixote," the writer evokes the entire complex of notions of noble quixotism. Allusion is closely linked to reminiscence and intertextuality. It is an important means of a work's dialogue with cultural tradition and one of the key devices of poetics, especially in the literature of Modernism and Postmodernism.
Alternate rhyme
Alternate rhyme is a way of joining lines by the scheme abab, when lines rhyme through one: the first with the third, the second with the fourth. This is the most widespread type of rhyme scheme in literary lyric, since it creates a balanced, flexible quatrain structure and allows the alternation of different types of clausulae (for example, feminine and masculine rhymes). Alternate rhyme unites clarity with a certain rhythmic tension: the completion of the thought in the second line is "postponed" to the fourth, which holds the reader's attention. A vast number of Ukrainian classical and contemporary poems are written in alternate rhyme. Together with adjacent and envelope rhyme, it forms the canonical repertoire of stanzaic organisation.
