Glossary
Glossary
A glossary of literary terms — from metaphor to free verse.
Literature01Versification
Rhythm, metre, rhyme and the stanza.
44 termsOpen
Literature02Tropes & Figures
Metaphor, metonymy and rhetorical figures.
43 termsOpen
Literature03Stylistics
Language, register and stylistic devices.
52 termsOpen
Literature04Genres & Forms
Novel, novella, sonnet — genres and folk forms.
91 termsOpen
Literature05Movements
Baroque, romanticism, modernism, avant-garde.
38 termsOpen
Literature06Composition
Plot, fabula, conflict and structure.
50 termsOpen
Literature07Character & Image
Hero, character, lyric subject, archetype.
30 termsOpen
Literature08Theory & Criticism
Literary theory, criticism and book culture.
68 termsOpen
Movements
← All dimensions
Acmeism
Acmeism is a current in poetry of the early twentieth century that arose as a reaction against the misty polysemy of Symbolism and proclaim…
Avant-garde
The avant-garde (from the French for 'advance guard') is a generalizing name for the radical artistic currents of the first third of the tw…
Baroque
The Baroque is an artistic movement and style of European culture from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth century that replaced Renaissan…
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 beca…
Chimeric Prose
Chimeric prose (khymerna proza) is a stylistic current in Ukrainian literature from the late 1950s to the 1980s (flourishing in the 1970s a…
Classicism
Classicism is an artistic movement in European literature and art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that took ancient classics as…
Dadaism
Dadaism is a radical avant-garde movement that arose in 1916 in Zurich as a revolt against the meaninglessness of the First World War, bour…
Decadence
Decadence (from the French for 'decline') is a state of mind and a set of crisis phenomena in the culture of the late nineteenth and early…
Executed Renaissance
The Executed Renaissance is the conventional name for the brilliant generation of Ukrainian writers, artists, and cultural figures of the 1…
Existentialism (in literature)
Existentialism is a philosophical-literary movement of the mid-twentieth century that placed at its center the problem of the individual pe…
Expressionism
Expressionism is a Modernist movement of the early twentieth century (its flowering was in the 1910s and 1920s, above all in German-languag…
Futurism
Futurism is an avant-garde movement of the early twentieth century that proclaimed a decisive break with the classical tradition and the cu…
Gothic Literature
Gothic literature is a current of pre-Romanticism and Romanticism (late 18th–19th century) that cultivated an atmosphere of mystery, horror…
Impressionism (in literature)
Impressionism in literature is a Modernist stylistic current of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that, by analogy with the p…
La Pléiade
La Pléiade is a circle of seven French poets of the Renaissance (mid-sixteenth century) united by a program for the renewal of the national…
Lanka (MARS)
'Lanka' (later renamed MARS — the 'Workshop of the Revolutionary Word') is a literary grouping of Kyiv writers that operated in 1924–1929 a…
Magic Realism
Magic Realism is a movement in twentieth-century prose that organically combines the realistic depiction of everyday life with elements of…
Metaphysical Poetry
Metaphysical poetry is a current in English lyric of the seventeenth century, characterized by intellectual tension, the combination of fee…
Modernism
Modernism is the totality of artistic movements and the general aesthetic orientation of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentiet…
Moloda Muza
'Moloda Muza' (Young Muse) is a literary grouping of Ukrainian modernist writers that operated in Lviv from 1906 to 1909 and became one of…
Naturalism
Naturalism is a literary movement of the last third of the nineteenth century that developed and sharpened the principles of Realism, striv…
Neoclassicism (Ukrainian Neoclassicists)
Neoclassicism is a stylistic current in Ukrainian poetry of the 1920s, represented by the group known as the 'cluster of five' — Mykola Zer…
Neoromanticism
Neoromanticism is a stylistic current of early Modernism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that revived, on new ground, th…
New York Group
The New York Group is an association of Ukrainian émigré poets that formed in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the USA (mostly in New York…
Parnassianism
Parnassianism is a current in French poetry of the second half of the nineteenth century that opposed to romantic subjectivity the cult of…
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is the leading movement and worldview-stylistic situation in the culture and literature of the late twentieth and early twent…
Prague School (of Ukrainian poets)
The Prague School is the conventional name for a creative grouping of Ukrainian émigré poets of the interwar era (1920s–1930s), associated…
Realism
Realism is an artistic movement that took shape in the mid-nineteenth century and set as its aim the truthful, comprehensive depiction of r…
Renaissance Humanism
Humanism is the ideological and literary movement of the Renaissance (14th–16th centuries) that placed the human being — his dignity, reaso…
Romanticism
Romanticism is a powerful artistic movement of the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century that arose as a reaction agains…
Sentimentalism
Sentimentalism is a literary movement of the second half of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century that, in opposition…
Socialist Realism
Socialist Realism is the 'only correct' creative method officially imposed in the USSR from 1934, which demanded the depiction of reality i…
Surrealism
Surrealism is an avant-garde movement that arose in France in the 1920s (André Breton's manifesto, 1924) and proclaimed the liberation of c…
Symbolism
Symbolism is the first and most influential movement of Modernism, which arose in French poetry of the 1880s and proclaimed the symbol as t…
The Enlightenment
The Enlightenment is a broad ideological and cultural movement of the eighteenth century that proclaimed faith in reason, science, educatio…
The Sixtiers
The Sixtiers are a generation of Ukrainian writers, artists, and public figures who came into literature at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s…
Theatre of the Absurd
The Theatre of the Absurd (absurdist drama) is a movement in European dramaturgy of the 1950s and 1960s that depicted the meaninglessness a…
VAPLITE
VAPLITE (the Free Academy of Proletarian Literature) is a literary organization that operated in Kharkiv from 1926 to 1928 and united the m…
