12 terms
Ballad
The ballad is a short lyric-epic work with a tense, dramatic plot of fantastic, historical, or heroic content, in which the narrative outline is combined with emotional agitation and often a tragic resolution. The genre descends from the folk ballad-song; the literary ballad was established by the Romantics, who valued in it mysteriousness, a connection with folklore, and the otherworldly. Classic examples are Goethe's Erlkönig (The Erl-King) and the ballads of Friedrich Schiller and Adam Mickiewicz. In Ukrainian literature the Romantic ballad was inaugurated by Petro Hulak-Artemovsky (Tvardovsky, The Fisherman); unsurpassed romantic ballads were created by Taras Shevchenko (The Bewitched Woman, The Poplar, The Lily, The Drowned Maiden), drawing on folk demonology and motifs of a maiden's transformation into a plant.
Barbarism
A barbarism is a foreign word or turn of phrase not fully assimilated by the language and retaining an alien sound, and sometimes a foreign spelling: "alma mater," "tête-à-tête," "okay." Barbarisms stand at the periphery of the vocabulary, emphatically betraying their foreign origin. In literature they fulfil several functions: they reproduce the national colour of the depicted milieu, characterise a foreign personage or a person inclined to use fashionable foreign words, create an ironic or satirical effect. The accumulation of barbarisms in a character's speech often serves as a means of exposing them as affected or cut off from their native soil. Barbarisms border on exoticisms and borrowings and are an important subject of stylistics and the culture of language, which warns against the unwarranted cluttering of speech with foreign words.
Baroque
The Baroque is an artistic movement and style of European culture from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth century that replaced Renaissance harmony and was distinguished by dynamism, contrast, lavish ornateness, a joining of the earthly and the heavenly, and a penchant for allegory, emblematics, and intellectual play. Literary Baroque cultivated the complex metaphor (the conceit), antithesis, and paradox. World models are the poetry of Luis de Góngora, the dramas of Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and John Milton's Paradise Lost. Ukrainian Baroque (17th–18th century) is one of the summits of the national culture: the philosophical poetry and Garden of Divine Songs of Hryhorii Skovoroda, the verses of Ivan Velychkovsky, the polemical prose, drama, and school theater of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, and the Cossack chronicles. The Baroque style united bookish learning with the folk element.
Bibliography
Bibliography is a field of scholarly and practical activity consisting in the description, systematization, registration, and provision of information about printed (and manuscript) works, as well as a body of bibliographic indexes on a certain theme or author. The basic unit of bibliography is the bibliographic description, which gives unified information about an edition (author, title, place and year of publication, publisher, extent). One distinguishes registration bibliography (the accounting of the entire mass of editions), recommendatory, subject, personal, and critical bibliography, and the bibliography of bibliographies. Bibliography is the foundation of a philologist's scholarly work: without it, source heuristics and a historiographic survey are impossible. One of the founders of modern Ukrainian bibliography was Mykhailo Maksymovych; the most noted bibliographer of Western Ukraine was Ivan Levytsky; major bibliographic works were carried out by Ivan Kalynovych and, most notably, Yurii Mezhenko. The discipline that theoretically comprehends bibliography and the history of the book is bibliology.
Bildungsroman
The Bildungsroman (German for 'novel of formation') is a generic variety of the novel that traces the spiritual, psychological, and moral development of a hero from youth to maturity, his gradual entry into the world. The term was introduced by the German philologist Karl Morgenstern, and its canonical model became Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. At its center is the process of a personality's formation through trials, errors, and the acquisition of experience; the ending usually records the hero's attainment of inner maturity and reconciliation with the world. Close to the genre are Dickens's David Copperfield and Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In Ukrainian literature, features of the Bildungsroman appear in Valerian Pidmohylny's The City, which traces the formation and moral temptations of the young intellectual Stepan Radchenko.
Blank verse
Blank verse is verse with a clear metrical structure but without rhyme. Unlike free verse, blank verse preserves the foot organisation and a fixed measure (most often iambic pentameter), renouncing only the consonance of endings. The absence of rhyme brings it closer to natural speech and makes it suitable for dramatic and philosophical utterance, which is why the monologues of Shakespearean drama are written in blank iambic verse. In Ukrainian literature unrhymed iambic pentameter was used in dramatic poems and translations of classics, notably by masters of the Neoclassical school. Blank verse unites the rhythmic discipline of metre with freedom from the obligation of rhyme, yielding a restrained, noble intonation.
Book Miniature (Illumination)
A book miniature (illumination) is a hand-executed illustration or decorative composition in a manuscript book; a form of book art. The name derives from 'minium' — red lead, the red paint with which, in the Middle Ages, important parts of the text and drawings were highlighted. Miniatures are divided into narrative ones (illustration-'pictures,' including the frontispiece 'portraits' of commissioners or evangelists) and ornamental ones (headpieces, tailpieces, initials, frames). Miniatures were painted by illuminators with paints to which gold and silver were added. The book miniature is a valuable source for the history of art, daily life, costume, and iconography. Outstanding monuments of early Ukrainian miniature are the Ostromir Gospel (miniatures of the evangelists), the Izbornik of Sviatoslav of 1073 (with a group portrait of the princely family), and the richly illuminated Kyiv Psalter of 1397. With the advent of printing, the art of the miniature grew into the book engraving and illustration.
Bookbinding
A bookbinding is the hard or soft cover that fastens and protects the book block, as well as the art of making such a cover. In the manuscript and early printed book, the binding was usually made of boards (hence the expression 'to read from board to board'), covered with leather, cloth, or velvet. Leather bindings were decorated with tooling (blind or gold), metal corner-pieces, center-pieces, and clasps, while precious liturgical books had covers (oklads) of silver, gold, enamel, and gemstones. The binding is an important source for dating, localizing, and establishing the provenance of a book: from the technique, the ornamentation of the tooling, super-ex-libris, and owners' coats of arms, one can determine the workshop, time, and ownership of a copy. Sumptuously decorated bindings were had by Old Rus' altar Gospels and Ukrainian old prints. Bindings, as part of the material history of the book, are studied by codicology and bibliology; the restoration of historical bindings is a separate area of conservation.
Bu-Ba-Bu
Bu-Ba-Bu (an abbreviation of 'Burlesque — Balahan — Buffoonade') is a literary grouping of three poets, founded in 1985 in Lviv, which became the most vivid phenomenon of Ukrainian literary Postmodernism at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. Its members were Yurii Andrukhovych (the Patriarch), Viktor Neborak (the Procurator), and Oleksandr Irvanets (the Treasurer). The aesthetics of Bu-Ba-Bu rested on carnival, irony, play, parody, the lowering of pathos, the joining of the 'high' and the 'low', and the theatricalization of poetic performances (the legendary 'poeso-opera' Chrysler Imperial). The grouping freely and wittily ridiculed Soviet ideological clichés and returned to literature the freedom, play, and joy of the word. Bu-Ba-Bu exerted a significant influence on the further development of Ukrainian poetry, becoming a symbol of the liberation and renewal of national letters in the era of gaining independence.
Burlesque
Burlesque is a kind of comic literature based on a sharp incongruity between a subject and the style of its presentation: either a dignified, high subject is depicted in deliberately coarse, lowered language or, conversely, a trivial, everyday phenomenon is presented in a grandiloquent, "high" style. It is this stylistic incongruity that generates the comic effect. Burlesque is closely linked to travesty and parody and was widespread in European and Ukrainian literature of the 17th–18th centuries. In Ukrainian letters the burlesque-travesty tradition was vividly embodied in Ivan Kotliarevsky's "Aeneid," becoming a bridge to a new national literature built on the living folk language. Burlesque played an important role in the democratisation of literature, its rapprochement with folk life and language, and in the loosening of the outdated canons of "high" letters.
