technically, any dramatic work produced in England during the period 1660-1688, but in literary criticism it refers to the peculiar characteristics of comedy and tragedy in the theater as it was re-es [..]

a narrative recounting travelers' adventures, strange customs, and concepts challenging to the travelers' home nations, a genre popular in the post-Columbian era when explorers' narrati [..]

a form of literary analysis which attempts to set out rules for successful literary performance, usually following Aristotle by preceding from generic definitions and holding successive contemporary a [..]

a kind of thought devoted to imagining an ideal human culture or place, a rational experiment in idealization of the human condition, named for More's book, whose title means either the &quot [..]

the rhetorical style which defeated the ornate style by advocating lean prose, pruned of ornaments, getting logically to its conclusions by the shortest number of premises and eschewing all digression [..]

try the University of Kentucky Classics Department's short list of commonly used terms from classical rhetoric: A Glossary of Literary Terms and A Handbook of Rhetorical Devices.  The authors we [..]

the ability to read and write a language.  In Medieval England, the term literatus distinguished those who could read (but not necessarily write) Latin.  There was no particular term for the &quot [..]

the literary quality of texts written to be read or sung aloud.  Middle and Early Modern English literature was almost entirely intended for oral performance.  Even solitary readers tended to read alo [..]

in modern literary criticism, especially Reader-Response Criticism, the reader's construction of a reading of the text by applying the language's grammar rules and a standardized lexicon of [..]

in modern literary criticism, the act of examining a text's meaning (see Hirsch, "sharable . . . verbal meaning") to determine its significance as an aesthetic, cultural, politi [..]