Entertainment / Literature Glossary

Asyndeton: The artistic elimination of conjunctions in a sentence to create a particular effect. See schemes for more information.

Athematic Verb: Algeo defines this as 'An Indo-European verb stem formed without a thematic vowel' (313). The letter m in Modern English verb am is a remnant of an Indo-European athematic verb ending.

Atmosphere: (Also called mood) The emotional feelings inspired by a work. The term is borrowed from meteorology to describe the dominant mood of a selection as it is created by diction, dialogue, settin . . . View Full Definition

Aubade: (also called a dawn song) A genre of poetry in which a short poem's subject is about the dawn or the coming of the dawn, or it is a piece of music meant to be sung or played outdoors at dawn . . . View Full Definition

Aube: A dawn-song or aubade, but specifically one sung by a friend watching over a pair of lovers until dawn to prevent any interruption to their love-making or to cover up the noise of the love-m . . . View Full Definition

Auctor - Auctoritas: The Latin word auctor is the source for the modern English word author, but the medieval word carries a special resonance and seriousness the modern word lacks. The terms differ in intellect . . . View Full Definition

Audience: The person(s) reading a text, listening to a speaker, or observing a performance.

Auditory Imagery: Descriptive language that evokes noise, music, or other sounds. See imagery.

Aufklärung: The German term for the philosophical movement called in English 'the Enlightenment' or the Neoclassical movement. See Enlightenment.

Augustan: This adjective has two meanings, the second of which is most pertinent to English students. (1) Classical Latin scholarship uses Augustan to refer to the time when Caesar Augustus ruled Rome . . . View Full Definition

Aureate Diction: (alias AUREATE TERMS) As Simon Horobin puts it, 'An elevated rhetorical style of writing characterized by a large number of Latinate loanwords' (192). The use of unusual words from Latin was . . . View Full Definition

Austronesian: A family of Pacific and Indian ocean languages separate from the Indo-European family. These include the native tongues of Madagascar, Hawaii, and thousands of Pacific islands. Malay and Pol . . . View Full Definition

Authorial Voice: The voices or speakers used by authors when they seemingly speak for themselves in a book. (In poetry, this might be called a poetic speaker). The use of this term makes it clear in critical . . . View Full Definition

Auto Sacramental: (Sacramental Act') A drama of one act symbolizing the sacrament of Eucharist in Spanish literature between 1200 and 1600 CE. The play might overtly involve religious, mythical, historical, o . . . View Full Definition

Auto-Da-Fé: (Portuguese, 'act of faith'--equivalent to Span. Auto-de-fe) The late medieval church's ceremonial execution en masse of accused witches, Jews, heretics, or Muslims--often performed by burni . . . View Full Definition

Autobiographical Novel: In contrast with the autobiography, an autobiographical novel is a semi-fictional narrative based in part on the author's life experience, but these experiences are often transposed onto a f . . . View Full Definition

Autobiography: A non-fictional account of a person's life--usually a celebrity, an important historical figure, or a writer--written by that actual person. Contrast with the autobiographical novel, above.

Autograph: While fans and collectors in pop culture uses the term to refer to a celebrity's signature of his or her name, literary scholars use the term more loosely to refer to any lines of text writt . . . View Full Definition

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