The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

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fascination with authors is long-standing, going back at least to the eighteenth century when Samuel Johnson produced a classic of biographical criticism, The Lives of the English Poets (1779–81). ROMANTIC theory introduced the analogy between divine and literary creativity, and this theological aura around authorship was renewed by MODERNIST accounts of the impersonality of the great writer. Authors have become heroic figures in modern culture: whether as rebels or reactionaries; because they write books, authors are expected to have wise things to say about a whole range of political and personal dilemmas. But modern criticism has not simply underwritten the authority of authors. In a famous essay, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ (1954), the American critics Wimsatt and Beardsley issued a dictat forbidding critics to refer to authorial intentions in the analysis of literature: a literary work contained all the information necessary for its understanding in the words on the page, so appeals to authorial intention were at best irrelevant, at worst misleading. The argument is valuable in so far as it warns against replacing the interpretation of texts with an interpretation of the author’s life. It founders, however, for various reasons: the words on the page do not simply begin and end there, and understanding them requires reference to historical and social contexts, which are not so constant as Wimsatt and Beardsley believe. Nor can meaning be so readily divorced from intention. According to speech act theory, to understand the meaning of an utterance requires that we understand the intention of someone in uttering it. The problem with literary texts is identifying who that someone is, given the multiple displacements of the author into narrator, persona, characters, statements of traditional wisdom and other Author 13 forms of quotation. Where do we find Dostoevsky amid the multiple voices which make up Crime and Punishment? Where do we find Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales? The impossibility of answering these questions is the starting point for Roland Barthes’s polemical essay ‘The Death of the Author’. According to Barthes the author is an ideological construct whose purpose is to legitimate a practice of writing and reading which always pursues ‘the voice of a single, person, the author “confiding” in us’. Barthes proposes an alternative account: the text is irreducibly plural, a weave of voices or codes which cannot be tied to a single point of expressive origin in the author. Reading is not about the discovery of a single hidden voice or meaning, but a production working with the multiple codes that compose a text. Traditional assumptions about the origin and the unity of a text are reversed: The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the text is constituted. Barthes’s stress upon the anonymity of the reader recalls T. S. Eliot’s earlier account of the impersonality of the author in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919). Barthes shifts the terms of a Modernist poetics on to the side of the READER; the meaning of a text is volatile, varying according to the different occasions of reading and without reference to an authority which will fix meaning. Barthes’s paradoxical transformation of
14 Autobiography authors into readers liberates us from the oppressive reverence for authorial creativity and wisdom, but it excludes important questions from the critical agenda: what is it that brings a particular person at a particular time to write? What do we make of the phenomenon of originality or of the fact that literary works have stylistic signatures which enable us to distinguish the work of one author from another? Turning authors into cults is not going to answer these questions, but neither is banishing them altogether from the discourse of literary criticism. See also CREATION, DECONSTRUCTION, DIALOGIC STRUCTURE, DISCOURSE, READER. See J. Bayley, The Characters of Love (1960); R. Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’ in Image-Music-Text (trans. 1977) and S/Z (1970, trans. 1975); M. Foucault, ‘What is an author?’ (1969) in Language, Counter-Memory and Practice (1977); P. Parrinder, Authors and Authority (1977); Sean Burke, Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern – A Reader (1995). Autobiography See BIOGRAPHY. JC
Page 2 and 3: The Routledge Dictionary of Literar
Page 4 and 5: The Routledge Dictionary of Literar
Page 6: To Claire Philpott, with thanks
Page 9 and 10: Note on the style of references Cro
Page 11 and 12: x List of terms Dénouement 52 Devi
Page 13 and 14: xii List of terms Scriptible 212 Se
Page 15 and 16: 2 Action See Martin Esslin, The The
Page 17 and 18: 4 Affective fallacy appreciation, a
Page 19 and 20: 6 Ambiguity or beyond the Self as t
Page 21 and 22: 8 Analysis anything else; one can r
Page 23 and 24: 10 Aporia Final End as an image of
Page 25: 12 Author closely related in emotio
Page 29 and 30: 16 Baroque treating ‘collected’
Page 31 and 32: 18 Belief Belief Since I. A. Richar
Page 33 and 34: 20 Biography of self-realization un
Page 35 and 36: 22 Burlesque See Leon Edel, Literar
Page 37 and 38: 24 Character characters are not sim
Page 39 and 40: 26 Chorus The result is a remarkabl
Page 41 and 42: 28 Closure of English Classicism (1
Page 43 and 44: 30 Comparative literature granted w
Page 45 and 46: 32 Concrete poetry As these example
Page 47 and 48: 34 Contradiction What should be sub
Page 49 and 50: 36 Couplet the technical convention
Page 51 and 52: 38 Criticism device or convention m
Page 53 and 54: 40 Critique E. D. Hirsch, Jr, Valid
Page 55 and 56: 42 Cultural criticism Arnoldian sen
Page 57 and 58: 44 Culture of human nature, transce
Page 59 and 60: 46 Cybercriticism studies has also
Page 61 and 62: Dada Received its enigmatic name in
Page 63 and 64: 50 Deconstruction concept nor origi
Page 65 and 66: 52 Defamiliarization decorum but al
Page 67 and 68: 54 Diction Diction Aristotle’s lo
Page 69 and 70: 56 Differend creatures, each posses
Page 71 and 72: 58 Discourse boundaries of various
Page 73 and 74: 60 Discourse in a certain regularit
Page 75 and 76: 62 Dissociation of sensibility expe
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64 Dramatic irony quite other than
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66 Écriture when addressed to mate
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68 Emblem a style, as well as a poe
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70 Epic theatre The point about epi
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72 Epistle It has created a new aes
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74 Ethical criticism of different r
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76 Eurocentrism becomes part of ‘
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78 Existentialism granted. Descript
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80 Explication Kaufman (ed.), Exist
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Fable A short moral tale, in verse
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84 Farce the protagonist sets up un
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86 Feminist criticism feminism whic
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88 Fiction Fiction A complex term w
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90 Figure fabulation, which purport
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92 Form distinction than a technica
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94 Free verse perception is an aest
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Gender Frequently still used as a s
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98 Globalization it is removed to t
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100 Gothic the whole sub-world of t
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Hegemony The term hegemony as defin
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104 Hermeneutics This may sound sus
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106 Hero and portents. But when the
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108 Historicism merges with the nat
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110 Homophony Homophony See AMBIGUI
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112 Hybridity from reality (conside
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Ideology Traditionally, the word id
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116 Imagination flesh. What starts
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118 Imagism R. L. Brett, Fancy and
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120 Imitation Imitation The first r
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122 Intertextuality novel knows it
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124 Irony Verbal irony usually oper
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Lament See ELEGY. Language A concep
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128 Lexis structure, and ideologica
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130 Literature to action (so propag
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132 Lyric logos exists independentl
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Magical (magic) realism The term ma
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136 Manners poets are the archetypa
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138 Mask unproblematic term - as it
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140 Metaphysical thesis, argued for
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142 Metre typically, twelve define
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144 Mock-epic believed to have/be e
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146 Monody See M. Bradbury and J. M
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Narrative The recounting of a serie
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150 Narrative structure Introductio
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152 Nationalism and ethnicity studi
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154 Naturalism the Third World. Eth
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156 New criticism scientific termin
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158 Novel and that the term itself
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Objective correlative Popularized b
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162 Onomatopoeia Ode (1960); Robert
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164 Originality See Ngugi wa Thiong
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Paradox An apparently selfcontradic
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168 Pastoral a mosaic of quotations
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170 Peripeteia to gender, and relat
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172 Phenomenology the same as diffe
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174 Picaresque criticism but there
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176 Pleasure Platonism is the poets
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178 Pluralism necessary order of a
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180 Poetics a naïve reader or list
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182 Point of view a ‘poem’, and
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184 Postcolonialism ‘the West’
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186 Postmodernism championed an art
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188 Practical criticism Robert Youn
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190 Protagonist inevitability of co
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192 Psychology and psychoanalysis c
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194 Psychology and psychoanalysis a
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Reader Classical theory, seeing lit
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198 Realism Though Fish himself did
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200 Reason longed for the anonymity
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202 Representation were more concer
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204 Rhetoric See Antonio Gramsci, S
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206 Rhizome Schizophrenia (1980), a
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208 Rhythm which the aa pair outfla
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210 Romanticism this problem prepar
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212 Scansion use a variety of devic
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214 Sensibility strives to extend a
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216 Sexuality picture. This whole a
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218 Sign either the ‘whimper’ s
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220 Skaz Nature (1884) of the chara
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222 Sonnet The typical soliloquy is
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224 Speech simplified yet more radi
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226 Structuralism three most import
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228 Style they are also likely to e
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230 Subaltern Difference (1999). Re
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232 Suspension of disbelief inspire
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234 Syntax space-time ordering of a
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Taste See CLASSIC, CULTURE, EVALUAT
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238 Texture depend on the ambiguity
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240 Threnody (cf. PLOT). The thesis
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242 Tragedy plays. It is the unbear
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244 Travesty Translator’, in Illu
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246 Undecidability become alienated
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Value See EVALUATION, REFUNCTIONING
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250 Voice during the seventeenth ce
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252 Womanist a witty writer. His Ra
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New and revising contributors JA Ja
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Semiotics: The Basics Daniel Chandl
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The Routledge Companion to Feminism
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