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السلام عليكم
طبعا انا ندرس دراما وفى الامتحان بيكون فيه تعاريف وطلب الدكتور قبل التعاريف مقدمة خمس اسطر واحترت وش اكتب فدلونى الله يوفكم والتعاريف مثل magnitude,serious ,complete وتعاريف اخرى فساعدونى الله يوفكم.
(لكم منى دعوة في ظهر الغيب)

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Glossary of Drama Terms

This Glossary includes most of the terms used in Drama Study, which you will need as long as you are studying literature. The terms are in alphabetical order, and the example provided are mostly from whatever novels, poems, and plays you are studying or related to whatever you are studying.

 Abstract: Used as a noun, the term refers to a short summary or outline of a longer work. As an adjective applied to writing or literary works, abstract refers to words or phrases that name things not knowable through the five senses. Examples of abstracts include the ‘Cliffs Notes’ summaries of major literary works. Examples of abstract terms or concepts include ‘idea’, ‘guilt’, ‘honesty’, and ‘loyalty’.
 Accent is the emphasis or stress placed on a syllable in poetry. Traditional poetry commonly uses patterns of accented and unaccented syllables (known as feet) that create distinct rhythms. Much modern poetry uses less formal arrangements that create a sense of freedom and spontaneity.
 Act is a major section of a play. Acts are divided into varying numbers of shorter scenes. From ancient times to the nineteenth century plays were generally constructed of five acts, but modern works typically consist of one, two, or three acts. Examples of five-act plays include the works of Sophocles and Shakespeare, while the plays of Arthur Miller commonly have a three-act structure.
 Aestheticism is a literary and artistic movement of the nineteenth century. Followers of the movement believed that art should not be mixed with social, political, or moral teaching. The statement ‘art for art’s sake’ is a good summary of aestheticism. The movement had its roots in France, but it gained widespread importance in England in the last half of the nineteenth century, where it helped change the Victorian practice of including moral lessons in literature. Oscar Wilde is one of the best-known ‘aesthetes’ of the late 19th century.
 Affective Fallacy (Sympathetic Fallacy) is an error in judging the merits or faults of a work of literature. The ‘error’ results from stressing the importance of the work’s effect upon the reader — that is, how it makes a reader ‘feel’ emotionally, what it does as a literary work — instead of stressing its inner qualities as a created object, or what it ‘is’. The affective fallacy is evident in Aristotle’s precept from his Poetics that the purpose of tragedy is to evoke ‘fear and pity’ in its spectators.
 Age of Johnson (Age of Sensibility) is the period in English literature 1750-1798, named after the most prominent literary figure of the age, Samuel Johnson. Works written during this time are noted for their emphasis on ‘sensibility’, or emotional quality. These works formed a transition between the rational works of the ‘Age of Reason’, or ‘Neoclassical’ period, and the emphasis on individual feelings and responses of the ‘Romantic’ period. Significant writers during the ‘Age of Johnson’ included the dramatists Richard Sheridan and Oliver Goldsmith, and poets William Collins and Thomas Gray.
 Allegory is a narrative technique in which characters representing things or abstract ideas is used to convey a message or teach a lesson. Allegory is typically used to teach moral, ethical, or religious lessons but is sometimes used for satiric or political purposes. The most famous example in English is John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, in which the name of the central character, ‘Pilgrim’, epitomizes the book’s allegorical nature. Kay Boyle’s story, ‘Astronomer’s Wife’, contain allegorical elements.
 Alliteration is a poetic device where the first consonant sounds or any vowel sounds in words or syllables are repeated.
 Allusion is a reference to a familiar literary or historical person or event, used to make an idea more easily understood. For example, describing someone as Romeo is an allusion to William Shakespeare’s famous young lover in ‘Romeo and Juliet’.
 Analogy is a comparison of two things made to explain something unfamiliar through its similarities to something familiar, or to prove one point based on the acceptedness of another. Similes and metaphors are types of analogies. Analogies often take the form of an extended simile, as in William Blake’s aphorism: As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.
 Angry Young Men are a group of British writers of the 1950s whose work expressed bitterness and disillusionment with society. Common to their work is an anti-hero who rebels against a corrupt social order and strives for personal integrity. The term has been used to describe Kingsley Amis, John Osborne, Colin Wilson, John Wain, and others.
 Antagonist is a character or force against which another character struggles. He is the major character in a narrative or drama that works against the hero or protagonist. Creon is Antigone’s antagonist in Sophocles’ play ‘Antigone’; Teiresias is the antagonist of Oedipus in Sophocles’ ‘Oedipus the King’.
 Anthropomorphism (Personification) is the presentation of animals or objects in human shape or with human characteristics. The term is derived from the Greek word for ‘human form’. The Fables of Aesop, the animated films of Walt Disney, and Richard Adams’s ‘Water Ship Down’ feature anthropomorphic characters.
 Anti-hero is a central character in a work of literature that lacks traditional heroic qualities such as courage, physical prowess, and fortitude. Anti-heroes typically distrust conventional values and are unable to commit themselves to any ideals. They generally feel helpless in a world over which they have no control. Anti-heroes usually accept, and often celebrate, their positions as social outcasts.
 Anti-novel is a term coined by French critic Jean-Paul Sartre. It refers to any experimental work of fiction that avoids the familiar conventions of the novel. The anti-novel usually fragments and distorts the experience of its characters, forcing the reader to construct the reality of the story from a disordered narrative. The best-known anti-novelist is Alain Robbe-Grillet, author of ‘Le Voyeur’.
 Antithesis of something is its direct opposite. In literature, the use of antithesis as a figure of speech results in two statements that show a contrast through the balancing of two opposite ideas. Technically, it is the second portion of the statement that is defined as the ‘antithesis’; the first portion is the ‘thesis’. An example of antithesis is found in the following portion of Abraham Lincoln’s ‘Gettysburg Address’; notice the opposition between the verbs ‘remember’ and ‘forget’ and the phrases ‘what we say’ and ‘what they did’: ‘The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.’
 Apostrophe is a statement, question, or request addressed to an inanimate object or concept to a nonexistent or absent person.
 Argument of a work is the author’s subject matter or principal idea. Examples of defined ‘argument’ portions of works include John Milton’s Arguments to each of the books of ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Argument to Robert Herrick’s ‘Hesperides’.
 Aristotelian Criticism is specifically, the method of evaluating and analyzing tragedy formulated by the Greek philosopher Aristotle in his Poetics. More generally, the term indicates any form of criticism that follows Aristotle's views. Aristotelian criticism focuses on the form and logical structure of a work, apart from its historical or social context, in contrast to ‘Platonic Criticism’, which stresses the usefulness of art. Adherents of New Criticism including John Crowe Ransom and Cleanth Brooks utilize and value the basic ideas of Aristotelian criticism for textual analysis.
 Aside are words spoken by an actor directly to the audience, which are not ‘heard’ by the other characters on stage during a play. In Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’, Iago voices his inner thoughts a number of times as ‘asides’ for the play’s audience.
 Assonance is the repetition of similar vowel sounds in a sentence or a line of poetry or prose, as in ‘I rose and told him of my woe.’
 Aubade is a love lyric in which the speaker complains about the arrival of the dawn, when he must part from his lover. John Donne’s ‘The Sun Rising’ exemplifies this poetic genre.
 Audience is the people for whom a piece of literature is written. Authors usually write with a certain audience in mind, for example, children, members of a religious or ethnic group, or colleagues in a professional field.
 Autobiography is a connected narrative in which an individual tells his or her life story. Examples include Benjamin Franklin’s ‘Autobiography’ and Henry Adams’s ‘The Education of Henry Adams’.
 Avant-garde is a French term meaning ‘Vanguard’. It is used in literary criticism to describe new writing that rejects traditional approaches to literature in favor of innovations in style or content. Twentieth-century examples of the literary avant-garde include the ‘School of poets’, the ‘Bloomsbury Group’, and the ‘Beat Movement’.
 Ballad is a short narrative poem that tells a simple story and has a repeated refrain. It is written in four-line stanzas, characterized by swift action, and narrated in a direct style. Early ballads, known as ‘Folk Ballads’, were passed down through generations, so their authors are often unknown. Later ballads composed by known authors are called literary ballads. An example of an anonymous folk ballad is ‘Edward’, which dates from the Middle Ages. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and John Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ are examples of literary ballads.
 Baroque is a term used in literary criticism to describe literature that is complex or ornate in style or diction. Baroque works typically express tension, anxiety, and violent emotion. The term ‘Baroque Age’ designates a period in Western European literature beginning in the late sixteenth century and ending about one hundred years later. Works of this period often mirror the qualities of works more generally associated with the label ‘baroque’ and sometimes feature elaborate conceits. Examples of Baroque works include John Lyly’s ‘Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit’, Luis de Gongora’s ‘Soledads’, and William Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’.
 Bildungsroman (Apprenticeship Novel, Coming of Age Novel, Erziehungsroman, or Kunstlerroman) is a German word meaning ‘novel of development’. The bildungsroman is a study of the maturation of a youthful character, typically brought about through a series of social or sexual encounters that lead to self-awareness. Bildungsroman is used interchangeably with erziehungsroman, a novel of initiation and education. When a Bildungsroman is concerned with the development of an artist as in James Joyce’s ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, it is often termed a Kunstlerroman. Well-known Bildungsroman includes J. D. Salinger’s ‘The Catcher in the Rye’, Robert Newton Peck’s ‘A Day No Pigs Would Die’, and S. E. Hinton’s ‘The Outsiders’.
 Biography is a connected narrative that tells a person’s life story. Biographies typically aim to be objective and closely detailed. James Boswell’s ‘The Life of Samuel Johnson’ is a famous example of the form.
 Black Humor (Black Comedy) is a writing that places grotesque elements side by side with humorous ones in an attempt to shock the reader, forcing him or her to laugh at the horrifying reality of a disordered world.
Joseph Heller’s novel ‘Catch 22’ is considered a superb example of the use of black humor. Other well-known authors who use black humor include Kurt Vonnegut, Edward Albee, Eugene Ionesco, and Harold Pinter.
 Blank Verse is a line of unrhymed poetry or prose, such as unrhymed iambic pentameter. It is composed of lines of five two-syllable feet with the first syllable accented, the second unaccented. Blank verse has been used by poets since the Renaissance for its flexibility and its graceful, dignified tone. John Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ is in blank verse, as are most of William Shakespeare’s sonnets.
 Bloomsbury Group is a group of English writers, artists, and intellectuals who held informal artistic and philosophical discussions in Bloomsbury, a district of London, from around 1907 to the early 1930s. The Bloomsbury Group held no uniform philosophical beliefs but did commonly express an aversion to moral prudery and a desire for greater social tolerance. At various times the circle included Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, and John Maynard Keynes.
 Burlesque is any literary work that uses exaggeration to make its subject appear ridiculous, either by treating a trivial subject with profound seriousness or by treating a dignified subject frivolously. The word ‘burlesque’ may also be used as an adjective, as in ‘burlesque show’, to mean ‘striptease act’. Examples of literary burlesque include the comedies of Aristophanes, Miguel de Cervantes’s ‘Don Quixote’, Samuel Butler’s poem ‘Hudibras’, and John Gay’s play ‘The Beggar’s Opera’.
 Caesura is a strong pause within a line of verse, usually occurring near the middle. It typically corresponds to a break in the natural rhythm or sense of the line, but it is sometimes shifted to create special meanings or rhythmic effects. The opening line of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’ contains a caesura following ‘dreary’: ‘Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary…’
 Canzone is a short Italian or Provencal lyric poem, commonly about love and often set to music. The canzone has no set form but typically contains five or six stanzas made up of seven to twenty lines of eleven syllables each. A shorter, five- to ten-line ‘envoy’, or concluding stanza, completes the poem. Masters of the canzone form include Petrarch, Dante Alighieri, Torquato Tasso, and Guido Cavalcanti.
 Carpe Diem is a Latin term meaning, ‘seize the day’. This is a traditional theme of Poetry, especially lyrics. A carpe diem poem advises the reader or the person it addresses to live for today and enjoy the pleasures of the moment. Two celebrated carpe diem poems are Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ and Robert Herrick’s poem beginning ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may…’
 Catastrophe is the action at the end of a tragedy that initiates the denouement or falling action of a play. One example is the dueling scene in Act V of ‘Hamlet’ in which Hamlet dies, along with Laertes, King Claudius, and Queen Gertrude.
 Catharsis is the purging of the feelings of pity and fear that, according to Aristotle, occur in the audience of tragic drama. The audience experiences catharsis at the end of the play, following the catastrophe. The term was first used by the Greek philosopher Aristotle in his Poetics to refer to the desired effect of tragedy on spectators. A famous example of catharsis is realized in Sophocles’ ‘Oedipus Rex’, when Oedipus discovers that his wife, Jacosta, is his own mother and that the stranger he killed on the road was his own father.
 Character is an imaginary person that inhabits a literary work. Literary characters may be major or minor, static (unchanging) or dynamic (capable of change). The actions of characters are what constitute the plot of a story, novel, or poem. The term ‘character’ also refers to a form originated by the ancient Greek writer Theophrastus that later became popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is a short essay or sketch of a person who prominently displays a specific attribute or quality, such as miserliness or ambition. There are numerous types of characters, ranging from simple, stereotypical figures to intricate, multifaceted ones. In the techniques of Anthropomorphism and personification, animals — and even places or things — can assume aspects of character. In Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’, Desdemona is a major character, but one who is static, like the minor character Bianca. Othello is a major character who is dynamic, exhibiting an ability to change.
 Characterization is the process by which an author creates vivid, believable characters in a work of art. This may be done in a variety of ways, including (1) direct description of the character by the narrator; (2) the direct presentation of the speech, thoughts, or actions of the character; and (3) the responses of other characters to the character. Readers come to understand the character Miss Emily in Faulkner’s story ‘A Rose for Emily’ through what she says, how she lives, and what she does.
 Chorus is a group of characters in Greek tragedy and in later forms of drama, who comment on the action of a play without participation in it. Their leader is the choragos. Sophocles’ ‘Antigone’ and ‘Oedipus the King’ both contain an explicit chorus with a choragos. Tennessee Williams’ ‘Glass Menagerie’ contains a character that functions like a chorus.
 Chronicle is a record of events presented in chronological order. Although the scope and level of detail provided varies greatly among the chronicles surviving from ancient times, some, such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, feature vivid descriptions and a lively recounting of events. During the Elizabethan Age, many dramas — appropriately called ‘chronicle plays’ — were based on material from chronicles. Many of William Shakespeare’s dramas of ‘English History ‘as well as Christopher Marlowe’s ‘Edward II’ are based in part on Raphael Holinshed’s ‘Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland’.
 Classical refers to works of ancient Greek or Roman literature. The term may also be used to describe a literary work of recognized importance (a classic) from any period or literature that exhibits the traits of classicism. Classical authors from ancient Greek and Roman times include Juvenal and Homer. Examples of later works and authors now described as classical include French literature of the seventeenth century, Western novels of the nineteenth century, and American fiction of the mid-nineteenth century such as that written by James Fennimore Cooper and Mark Twain.
 Classicism is a term used in literary criticism to describe critical doctrines that have their roots in ancient Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, and art. Works associated with classicism typically exhibit restraint on the part of the author, unity of design and purpose, clarity, simplicity, logical organization, and respect for tradition. Examples of literary classicism include the dramas of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Poetry of John Dryden and Alexander Pope, and the writings of T. S. Eliot.
 Climax is the turning point of the action in the plot of a play or story. The climax represents the point of greatest tension in the work. Typically, the structure of stories, novels, and plays is one of rising action, in which tension builds to the climax, followed by falling action, in which tension lessens as the story moves to its conclusion. The climax in James Fennimore Cooper’s ‘The Last of the Mohicans’ occurs when Magua and his captive Cora are pursued to the edge of a cliff by Uncas. Magua kills Uncas, but he is subsequently killed by Hawkeye.
 Closed Form is a type of form or structure in poetry characterized by regularity and consistency in such elements as rhyme, line length, and metrical pattern. Frost’s ‘Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening’ provides one of many examples. A single stanza illustrates some of the features of closed form: Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though. He will not see me stopping here / To watch his woods fill up with snow.
 Colloquialism is a word, phrase, or form of pronunciation that is acceptable in casual conversation but not in formal, written communication. It is considered more acceptable than slang.
 Comedy is one of two major type of drama, the other being tragedy, in which the characters experience reversals of fortune, usually for the better. In comedy, things work out happily in the end. Comic drama may be romantic – characterized by a tone of tolerance and geniality – or satiric. Satiric works offer a darker vision of human nature, one that ridicules human folly. Shaw’s ‘Arms and the Man’ is a romantic comedy; Chekhov’s ‘Marriage Proposal’ is a satiric comedy.
 Comedy of Manners is play about the manners and conventions of an aristocratic highly sophisticated society. The characters are usually types rather than individualized personalities, and plot is less important than atmosphere. Such plays were an important aspect of late seventeenth-century English Comedy. The comedy of manners was revived in the eighteenth century by Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, enjoyed a second revival in the late nineteenth century, and has endured into the twentieth century. Example of comedies of manners is Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ in the nineteenth century.
 Comic Relief is the use of a comic scene or humor to lighten the mood of a serious or tragic story, especially in plays. The comedy of scenes offering comic relief typically parallels the tragic action that the scenes interrupt. Comic relief is lacking in Greek tragedy, but occurs regularly in Shakespeare’s tragedies. One example is the opening scene of Act V of ‘Hamlet’, in which a gravedigger banters with Hamlet.
 Complaint is a lyric poem, popular in the Renaissance, in which the speaker expresses sorrow about his or her condition. Typically, the speaker's sadness is caused by an unresponsive lover, but some complaints cite other sources of unhappiness, such as poverty or fate.
 Complication is an intensification of the conflict in a story or play. Complication builds up, accumulates, and develops the primary or central conflict in a literary work. Frank O’Connor’s story ‘Guests of the Nation’ provides a striking example, as does Ralph Ellison’s ‘Battle Royal’.
 Conceit is a clever and fanciful metaphor, usually expressed through elaborate and extended comparison that presents a striking parallel between two seemingly dissimilar things — for example, elaborately comparing a beautiful woman to an object like a garden or the sun. The conceit was a popular device throughout the Elizabethan Age and Baroque Age and was the principal technique of the seventeenth-century English metaphysical poets. This usage of the word conceit is unrelated to the best-known definition of conceit as an arrogant attitude or behavior. The conceit figures prominently in the works of John Donne, Emily Dickinson, and T. S. Eliot.
 Concrete Poetry is the poetry in which visual elements play a large part in the poetic effect. Concrete is the opposite of abstract, and refers to a thing that actually exists or a description that allows the reader to experience an object or concept with the senses. Henry David Thoreau’s ‘Walden’ contains much concrete description of nature and wildlife.
 Confessional Poetry is a form of Poetry in which the poet reveals very personal, intimate, sometimes shocking information about himself or herself. Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman wrote poetry in the confessional vein.
 Conflict is a struggle between opposing forces in a story or play, usually resolved by the end of the work. It usually occurs between two characters, the protagonist, and the antagonist, or between the protagonist and society or the protagonist and himself or herself. Lady Gregory’s one-act play ‘The Rising of the Moon’ exemplifies both types of conflict as the ‘Policeman’ wrestles with his conscience in an inner conflict and confronts an antagonist in the person of the ballad singer.
 Connotation is the impression that a word gives beyond its defined meaning. Connotations may be universally understood or may be significant only to a certain group. Both ‘horse’ and ‘steed’ denote the same animal, but ‘steed’ has a different connotation, deriving from the chivalrous or romantic narratives in which the word was once often used.
 Consonance (Half Rhyme or Slant Rhyme) occurs in Poetry when words appearing at the ends of two or more verses have similar final consonant sounds but have final vowel sounds that differ, as with ‘stuff’ and ‘off’. Consonance is found in ‘The curfew tolls the knells of parting day’ from Thomas Grey’s ‘An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard’.
 Convention is a customary feature of a literary work, such as the use of a chorus in Greek tragedy, the inclusion of an explicit moral in a fable, or the use of a particular rhyme scheme in a villanelle. Literary conventions are defining features of particular literary genres, such as novel, short story, ballad, sonnet, and play.
 Couplet is a pair of rhymed lines, often expressing a complete and self-contained thought, that may or may not constitute a separate stanza in a poem. Most Shakespeare’s sonnets end in rhymed couplets.
 Crime Literature is a genre of fiction that focuses on the environment, behavior, and psychology of criminals.
Prominent writers of crime novels include John Wainwright, Colin Watson, Nicolas Freeling, Ruth Rendell, Jessica Mann, Mickey Spillane, and Patricia Highsmith.
 Criticism is the systematic study and evaluation of literary works, usually based on a specific method or set of principles. An important part of literary studies since ancient times, the practice of criticism has given rise to numerous theories, methods, and ‘schools’, sometimes producing conflicting, even contradictory, interpretations of literature in general as well as of individual works. Even such basic issues as what constitutes a poem or a novel have been the subject of much criticism over the centuries.

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 Deconstruction is a method of literary criticism developed by Jacques Derrida and characterized by multiple conflicting interpretations of a given work. Deconstructionists consider the impact of the language of a work and suggest that the true meaning of the work is not necessarily the meaning that the author intended.
Jacques Derrida’s ‘De la Grammatologie’ is the seminal text on deconstructive strategies; among American practitioners of this method of criticism are Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller.
 Deduction is the process of reaching a conclusion through reasoning from general premises to a specific premise. An example of deduction is present in the following syllogism: Premise: All mammals are animals.
Premise: All whales are mammals. Conclusion: Therefore, all whales are animals.
 Denotation is the dictionary meaning of a word. Writers typically play off a word’s denotative meaning against its connotations, or suggested and implied associational implications. In the following lines from Peter Meinke’s ‘Advice to My Son’, the references to flowers and fruit, bread and wine denote specific things, but also suggest something beyond the literal, dictionary meanings of the words.
 Denouement (Falling Action) is the resolution of the plot of a literary work. The denouement of Hamlet takes place after the catastrophe, with the stage littered with corpses. During the denouement, Fortinbras makes an entrance and a speech, and Horatio speaks his sweet lines in praise of Hamlet.
 Descriptive writing is intended to allow a reader to picture the scene or setting in which the action of a story takes place. The form this description takes often evokes an intended emotional response — a dark, spooky graveyard will evoke fear, and a peaceful, sunny meadow will evoke calmness. An example of a descriptive story is Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Landor’s Cottage’, which offers a detailed depiction of a New York country estate.
 Detective Story is a narrative about the solution of a mystery or the identification of a criminal. The conventions of the detective story include the detective’s scrupulous use of logic in solving the mystery; incompetent or ineffectual police; a suspect who appears guilty at first but is later proved innocent; and the detective's friend or confidant — often the narrator — whose slowness in interpreting clues emphasizes by contrast the detective's brilliance. Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ is commonly regarded as the earliest example of this type of story. With this work, Poe established many of the conventions of the detective story genre, which are still in practice.
 Deus ex Machina is a god who resolves the entanglements of a play by supernatural intervention. The Latin phrase means, literally, ‘a god from the machine’. The phrase refers to the use of artificial means to resolve the plot of a play. By extension, the term refers to any artificial device or coincidence used to bring about a convenient and simple solution to a plot. This is a common device in melodramas and includes such fortunate circumstances as the sudden receipt of a legacy to save the family farm or a last-minute stay of execution.
 Dialogue is the conversation of characters in a literary work. In fiction, dialogue is typically enclosed within quotation marks. In plays, characters' speech is preceded by their names. As a specific literary genre, a ‘dialogue’ is a composition in which characters debate an issue or idea. The Greek philosopher Plato frequently expounded his theories in the form of dialogues.
 Diary is a personal written record of daily events and thoughts. As private documents, diaries are supposedly not intended for an audience, but some, such as those of Samuel Pepys and Anais Nin, are known for their high literary quality. The ‘Diary of Anne Frank’ is an example of a well-known diary discovered and published after the author’s death. Many writers have used the diary form as a deliberate literary device, as in Nikolai Gogol’s story ‘Diary of a Madman’.
 Diction is the selection and arrangement of words in a literary work. A work’s diction forms one of its centrally important literary elements, as writers use words to convey action, reveal character, imply attitudes, identify themes, and suggest values. There are four general types of diction: ‘formal’, used in scholarly or lofty writing; ‘informal’, used in relaxed but educated conversation; ‘colloquial’, used in everyday speech; and ‘slang’, containing newly coined words and other terms not accepted in formal usage. We can speak of the diction particular to a character, as in Iago’s and Desdemona’s very different ways of speaking in Othello. We can also refer to a poet’s diction as represented over the body of his or her work, as in Donne’s diction.
 Didactic is a term used to describe works of literature that aim to teach some moral, religious, political, or practical lesson. Although didactic elements are often found in artistically pleasing works, the term ‘didactic’ usually refers to literature in which the message is more important than the form. Examples of didactic literature include John Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’, Alexander Pope’s ‘Essay on Criticism’, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ‘Emile’.
 Documentary is a work that features a large amount of documentary material such as newspaper stories, trial transcripts, and legal reports. Such works can include fictionalized segments or may contain a fictional story in which the author incorporates real-life information or events; these are referred to as documentary novels. Examples of documentary novels include the works of Theodore Dreiser, Emile Zola, and James T. Farrell. An example of a nonfictional literary documentary is James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’.
 Doppelganger (The Double) is a literary technique by which a character is duplicated (usually in the form of an alter ego, though sometimes as a ghostly counterpart) or divided into two distinct, usually opposite personalities. The use of this character device is widespread in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, and indicates a growing awareness among authors that the ‘self’ is really a composite of many ‘selves’. A well-known story containing a doppelganger character is Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’, which dramatizes an internal struggle between good and evil.
 Draft is any preliminary version of a written work. An author may write dozens of drafts, which are revised to form the final work, or he or she may write only one, with few or no revisions. Dorothy Parker’s observation that ‘I can’t write five words but that I change seven’ humorously indicates the purpose of the draft.
 Drama is any work designed to be presented by actors on a stage. Similarly, drama denotes a broad literary genre that includes a variety of forms, from pageant and spectacle to tragedy and Comedy, as well as countless types and subtypes. More commonly in modern usage, however, a drama is a work that treats serious subjects and themes but does not aim at the grandeur of tragedy. This use of the term originated with the eighteenth-century French writer Denis Diderot, who used the word drame to designate his plays about middle-class life; thus ‘drama’ typically features characters of a less exalted stature than those of tragedy.
 Dramatic Irony occurs when the audience of a play or the reader of a work of literature knows something that a character in the work itself does not know. The irony is in the contrast between the intended meaning of the statements or actions of a character and the additional information understood by the audience. A celebrated example of dramatic irony is in Act V of William Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’, where two young lovers meet their end because of a tragic misunderstanding. Here, the audience has full knowledge that Juliet’s apparent ‘death’ is merely temporary; she will regain her senses when the mysterious ‘sleeping potion’ she has taken wears off. However, Romeo, mistaking Juliet’s drug-induced trance for true death, kills himself in grief. Upon awakening, Juliet discovers Romeo’s corpse and, in despair, slays herself.
 Dramatic Monologue is a type of poem in which a speaker addresses a silent listener. As readers, we overhear the speaker in a dramatic monologue. Robert Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ represents the epitome of the genre.
 Dramatic Poetry is any lyric work that employs elements of drama such as characterization, dialogue, or conflict, but excluding works that are intended for stage presentation.
 Dramatis Personae are Latin for the characters or persons in a play. Included among the dramatis personae of Miller’s ‘Death of a Salesman’ personae are Willy Loman, the salesman, his wife Linda, and his sons Biff and Happy.
 Dream Vision (Dream Allegory) is a literary convention, chiefly of the Middle Ages. In a dream vision, a story is presented as a literal dream of the narrator. This device was commonly used to teach moral and religious lessons. Important works of this type are ‘The Divine Comedy’ by Dante Alighieri, ‘Piers Plowman’ by William Langland, and ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ by John Bunyan.
 Elegy is a lyric poem that laments the dead. Robert Hayden’s ‘Those Winter Sundays’ is elegiac in tone. A more explicitly identified elegy is W.H. Auden’s ‘In Memory of William Butler Yeats’ and his ‘Funeral Blues’. John Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Adonais’ are two examples of this form.
 Elision is the omission of an unstressed vowel or syllable to preserve the meter of a line of poetry. Alexander uses elision in ‘Sound and Sense’, ‘Flies o’er th’ unbending corn…’
 Elizabethan Age is a period of great economic growth, religious controversy, and nationalism closely associated with the reign of Elizabeth I of England (1558-1603). The Elizabethan Age is considered a part of the general Renaissance — that is, the flowering of arts and literature — that took place in Europe during the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. The era is considered the golden age of English literature. The most important dramas in English and a great deal of lyric Poetry were produced during this period, and modern English criticism began around this time. The notable authors of the period — Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon, and John Donne — are among the best in all of English literature.
 Elizabethan Drama is English comic and tragic plays produced during the Renaissance, or more narrowly, those plays written during the last years of and few years after Queen Elizabeth’s reign. William Shakespeare is considered an Elizabethan dramatist in the broader sense, although most of his work was produced during the reign of James I. Examples of Elizabethan comedies include William Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night’ and ‘Antony and Cleopatra’.
 Empathy is a sense of shared experience, including emotional and physical feelings, with someone other than oneself. Empathy is often used to describe the response of a reader to a literary character.
 Enjambment is a run-on line of poetry in which logical and grammatical sense carries over from one line into the next. An enjambed line differs from an end-stopped line in which the grammatical and logical sense is completed within the line. Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ is structured as a series of enjambments, as in lines 11-12: My vegetable love should grow/Vaster than empires and more slow.
 Enlightenment is an eighteenth-century philosophical movement. It began in France but had a wide impact throughout Europe and America. Thinkers of the Enlightenment valued reason and believed that both the individual and society could achieve a state of perfection. Corresponding to this essentially humanist vision was a resistance to religious authority. Important figures of the Enlightenment were Denis Diderot and Voltaire in France, Edward Gibbon and David Hume in England, and Thomas Jefferson in the United States.
 Epic is a long narrative poem that records the adventures of a hero of great historic or legendary importance. The setting is vast and the action is often given cosmic significance through the intervention of supernatural forces such as gods, angels, or demons. Epics are typically written in a classical style of grand simplicity with elaborate Metaphors and allusions that enhance the symbolic importance of a hero's adventures. Some well-known epics are Homer’s ‘Iliad and Odyssey’, Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’, and John Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’.
 Epigram is a brief saying that makes the speaker’s point quickly and concisely. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote an epigram that neatly sums up the form: What is an Epigram? It is a concise poem dealing pointedly and often satirically with a single thought or event and often ending with an ingenious turn of thought.
 Epilogue is a concluding statement or section of a literary work. In dramas, particularly those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the epilogue is a closing speech, often in Verse, delivered by an actor at the end of a play and spoken directly to the audience. A famous epilogue is Puck’s speech at the end of William Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’.
 Epiphany is a sudden revelation of truth inspired by a seemingly trivial incident. The term was widely used by James Joyce in his critical writings, and the stories in Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’ are commonly called ‘epiphanies’.
 Episode is an incident that forms part of a story and is significantly related to it. Episodes may be either self-contained narratives or events that depend on a larger context for their sense and importance. Examples of episodes include the founding of Wilmington, ‘Delaware’ in Charles Reade’s ‘The Disinherited Heir’ and the individual events comprising the picaresque novels and medieval romances.
 Epistolary Novel is a novel in the form of letters. The form was particularly popular in the eighteenth century.
Samuel Richardson’s ‘Pamela’ is considered the first fully developed English epistolary novel.
 Epithalamion (Epithalamium) is a song or poem written to honor and commemorate a marriage ceremony. Famous examples include Edmund Spenser’s ‘Epithalamion’.
 Essay is a prose composition with a focused subject of discussion. The term was coined by Michel de Montaigne to describe his 1580 collection of brief, informal reflections on himself and on various topics relating to human nature. An essay can also be a long, systematic discourse. An example of a longer essay is John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
 Exemplum (Fable) is a tale with a moral message. This form of literary sermonizing flourished during the Middle Ages, when exempla appeared in collections known as ‘example-books’. The works of Geoffrey Chaucer are full of exempla.
 Expatriatism is the practice of leaving one’s country to live for an extended period in another country.
Literary expatriates include English poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats in Italy, Polish novelist Joseph Conrad in England, American writers Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway in France, and Trinidadian author Neil Bissondath in Canada.
 Exposition is the writing intended to explain the nature of an idea, thing, or theme. It is the first stage of a fictional or dramatic plot, in which necessary background information is provided. Ibsen’s ‘A Doll’s House’, for instance, begins with a conversation between the two central characters, a dialogue that fills the audience in on events that occurred before the action of the play begins, but which are important in the development of its plot. An example of dramatic exposition occurs in many nineteenth-century drawing-room comedies in which the butler and the maid open the play with relevant talk about their master and mistress; in composition, exposition relays information, as in encyclopedia entries.
 Expressionism is an indistinct literary term, originally used to describe an early twentieth-century school of German painting. The term applies to almost any mode of unconventional, highly subjective writing that distorts reality in some way.
 Fable is a brief story with an explicit moral provided by the author. Fables typically include animals as characters. Their most famous practitioner in the west is the ancient Greek writer Aesop, whose ‘The Dog and the Shadow’ and ‘The Wolf and the Mastiff’ are included in this book.
 Fairy Tales are short narratives featuring mythical beings such as fairies, elves, and sprites. These tales originally belonged to the folklore of a particular nation or region, such as those collected in Germany by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Two other celebrated writers of fairy tales are Hans Christian Andersen and Rudyard Kipling.
 Fantasy is a literary form related to mythology and folklore. Fantasy literature is typically set in non-existent realms and features supernatural beings. Notable example of fantasy literature is ‘The Lord of the Rings’ by J. R. R. Tolkien.
 Femme Fatale is a French phrase with the literal translation ‘fatal woman’. A femme fatale is a sensuous, alluring woman who often leads men into danger or trouble. A classic example of the femme fatale is the nameless character in Billy Wilder’s ‘The Seven Year Itch’, portrayed by Marilyn Monroe in the film adaptation.
 Fiction is any story that is the product of imagination rather than a documentation of fact, whether in prose, poetry, or drama. Ibsen’s ‘Nora’ is fictional, a ‘make-believe’ character in a play, as are ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Othello’. Of course, characters in stories and novels are fictional, though they, too, may be based, in some way, on real people. The important thing to remember is that writers embellish, embroider, and alter actual life when they use real life as the basis for their work. They fictionalize facts, and deviate from real-life situations as they ‘make things up’.
 Figurative Language is a form of language use in which writers and speakers convey something other than the literal meaning of their words. Examples include exaggeration, understatement, simile, and metaphor, which employ comparison, in which a part of a thing stands for the whole. This technique in writing in which the author temporarily interrupts the order, construction, or meaning of the writing for a particular effect. This interruption takes the form of one or more figures of speech such as irony, or simile. Figurative language is the opposite of literal language, in which every word is truthful, accurate, and free of exaggeration.
 Figures of Speech is a writing that differs from customary conventions for construction, meaning, order, or significance for the purpose of a special meaning or effect. There are two major types of figures of speech: ‘rhetorical figures’, which do not make changes in the meaning of the words, and ‘tropes’, which do. Types of figures of speech include simile, hyperbole, alliteration, and pun, among many others.
 Fin de Siècle is a French term meaning ‘of the century’. The term is used to denote the last decade of the nineteenth century, a transition period when writers and other artists abandoned old conventions and looked for new techniques and objectives. Two writers commonly associated with this genre are Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw.
 Flashback is a device used in literature to present action that occurred before the beginning of the story. Flashbacks are often introduced as the dreams or recollections of one or more characters. Flashback techniques are often used in films, where they are typically set off by a gradual changing of one picture to another. Flashback is an interruption of a work’s chronology to describe or present an incident that occurred prior to the main period of a work's action. Writers use flashbacks to complicate the sense of chronology in the plot of their works and to convey the richness of the experience of human time.
 Foil is a character in a work of literature whose physical or psychological qualities contrast strongly with, and therefore highlight, the corresponding qualities of another character. It contrasts and parallels the main character in a play or story. Laertes, in ‘Hamlet’, is a foil for the main character. In ‘Othello’, Emilia and Bianca are foils for Desdemona. In his Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle portrayed Dr. Watson as a man of normal habits and intelligence, making him a foil for the eccentric and wonderfully perceptive Sherlock Holmes.
 Folklore is the traditions and myths preserved in a culture or group of people. Typically, these are passed on by word of mouth in various forms — such as legends, songs, and proverbs — or preserved in customs and ceremonies. This term was first used by W. J. Thomas in 1846. Sir James Frazer’s ‘The Golden Bough’ is the record of English folklore; myths about the frontier and the Old South exemplify American folklore.
 Foot is the smallest unit of rhythm in a line of Poetry composed of stressed and unstressed syllables. In English-language poetry, a foot is typically one accented syllable combined with one or two unaccented syllables. There are many different types of feet. For example, an iamb or iambic foot is represented by ˘’, that is, an unaccented syllable followed by an accented one. Frost’s line ‘Whose woods these are I think I know’ contains four iambs, and is thus an iambic foot.
 Foreshadowing is a device used in literature to create expectation or to set up an explanation of later developments in the action of a play or a story. Ibsen’s ‘A Doll’s House’ includes foreshadowing as does Synge’s Riders to the Sea. In Charles Dickens’s ‘Great Expectations’, the graveyard encounter at the beginning of the novel between Pip and the escaped convict Magwitch foreshadows the baleful atmosphere and events that comprise much of the narrative.
 Form is the pattern or construction of a work, which identifies its genre and distinguishes it from other genres.
Examples of forms include the different genres, such as the lyric form or the short story form, and vario

[منول؟؟؟]

السلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته
مشكوووورة
بارك الله فيك وجزاك الله كل خير

[وقت السحر]

شكراً لك اخي الكريم

[سعودي هجرس]

اطلب منكم المساعدة أعضاء هيئة المنتدى عندي واجب ومااعرف احله والواجب كتالي:
The assignment is write an essay on George Bernard Shaw, mentioning some of his plays, and discussing the distinctive qualities of these literary genres.
ساعدوني الله يوفكم

[دمعة طفلة]

السلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته
اخوي اسف انا توني صغيرة وانا مسجلة هوون عشان اتعلم مو عشان ادرس

[~~~noof~~]

مشكور
بس شو الي اذاكره وشو الي اقراه

[anonymous-2007]

جزااااااااااااااااااااااك الله الفردوس الاعلى