Literary Terms and Definitions P

Literary Terms and Definitions: P

This page is under perpetual construction! It was last updated April 14, 2008.

This list is meant to assist, not intimidate. Use it as a touchstone for important concepts and vocabulary that we will cover during the term. Vocabulary terms are listed alphabetically.

[A] [B] [C] [D] [E] [F] [G] [H] [I] [J] [K] [L] [M]

[N] [O] [P] [Q] [R] [S] [T] [U] [V] [W] [X] [Y] [Z]

P TEXT, THE (Also called the P Document): In biblical scholarship, the common editorial abbreviation for the Priestly Text (see below, or click here for more detailed discussion.).

PAEAN: Among the earliest Greeks, the word paean signifies "a dance and hymn with a specific rhythm which is endued with an absolving in healing power" (Burkett 44). In later usage, any song of praise to a deity is called a paean.

PALATAL: In linguistics, any sound involving the hard palate--especially the tongue touching or moving toward the hard palate.

PALATAL DIPTHONGIZATION: A sound change in which either the ash or the /e/ sound in Old English words became a diphthong when preceded by palatal consonants. For instance, Modern English cheese comes from Old English ciese, wich is a cognate of Latin caseus. Scholars can tell the word in Old English must have been adopted after the time of palatal diphthongization--otherwise it would have a simple /e/ sound rather than the diphthong. Thus, palatal dipthongization is useful for philologists who wish to date a borrowed word in Old English.

PALATALIZATION: In linguistics, the process of making a sound more palatal--i.e., moving the blade of the tongue closer to the hard palate.

PALATOVELAR: In linguistics, a sound that is either palatal or velar.

PALINDROME: A word, sentence, or verse that reads the same way backward or foreward. Certain words in English naturally function as palindromes: for instance, civic, rotor, race car, radar, level and so on. However, when individuals seek to combine several words at once, the result becomes a sort of perverse art. Here are some longer English examples culled from J. A. Cuddon's Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory:

Madame, I'm Adam.
Sir, I'm Iris.
Able was I ere I saw Elba. (attributed apocryphally to Napoleon, who was exiled on Elba, though in historical fact he apparently spoke no English!)
A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!
Sex at noon taxes.
"Lewd did I live & evil I did dwel." (anonymous 18th-century gravestone)
Straw? No, too stupid a fad; I put soot on warts!
"Deliver desserts," demanded Nemesis--emended, named, stressed, reviled.
T. Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating, is sad. I'd assign it a name: "Gnat dirt upset on drab pot toilet." (W. H. Auden)
Stop Syrian! I start at rats in airy spots!

The tradition goes back a long ways. Cuddon notes several, including a Greek palindrome inscribed on a vial of holy water in Saint Sophia's church in Constantinople that translates as "Wash not only my face, but also my sins." A Latin example is the palindrome, "In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni" which means "We [moths] fly in circles by night and we will be consumed in fire." Probably the most excessive use of palindromes is the 1802 collection by Ambrose Pamperis, in which Pamperis writes 416 palindromic verses celebrating Catherine the Great's military campaigns (See Cuddon 673-74).

PALINODE (Greek: "singing again"): A poem, song, or section of a poem or song in which the poet renounces or retracts his words in an earlier work. Usually this is meant to apologize or counterbalance earlier material.

The first recorded use of the palinode is a lyric written by the Greek author Stesichorus (7th century BCE), in which he retracts his earlier statement claiming that the Trojan War was entirely Helen's fault. Ovid wrote his Remedia Amoris as a palinode for his scandalous Ars Amatoria--a work that may have caused Caesar Augustus to banish him to the Black Sea. As a theme, the palinode is especially common in religious poetry and love poetry. The use of the palinode became conventional in patristic and medieval writings--as evidenced in Augustine, Bede, Giraldus Cambrensis, Jean de Meun, Sir Lewis Clifford, and others.

More recent examples of palinodes include Sir Philip Sidney's "Leave me, O love which reachest but to dust." Here, his palinode renounces the poetry of sexual love for that of divine grace. Likewise, Chaucer's Legend of Good Women includes a palinode in which the author "takes back" what he said about unfaithful women like Criseyde in Troilus and Criseyde. At the end of the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer goes so far as to write a retraction for all his secular literature. See also retraction.

PANGLOSSIAN (Grk. pan "everything" + Lat. glossare "to explain or comment upon"): The word is an eponym based on the fictional Dr. Pangloss from Voltaire's satire, Candide. Dr. Pangloss is a naively optimistic pedant who upholds the doctrine that "all is for the best," and that "we live in the best of all possible worlds," claiming that a benevolent deity creates all things for positive purposes, and if we could only decipher cause/effect accurately, we would see this. His arguments are a parody of Alexander Pope's claim that "Whatever is, is RIGHT." Voltaire uses Pangloss as a straw-man in Candide, and Voltaire tries to show through the more inane Panglossian arguments that, in fact, the world is a highly flawed place and it does not live up to its ideal possibilities.

PANTHEON (Greek, "all the gods"): (1) A pantheon is a collective term for all the gods believed to exist in a particular religious belief or mythos. Thus, we can talk of the Hittite pantheon, the Greek pantheon, etc. (2) The Pantheon is a great temple in Rome dedicated to all the Olympian gods, not to be confused with the Parthenon, the great temple dedicatd to the virgin goddess Athena, which is situated on top of the Acropolis in Athens.

PAPAL INDULGENCE: See discussion under pardoner.

PARABLE (Greek: "throwing beside" or "placing beside"): A story or short narrative designed to reveal allegorically some religious principle, moral lesson, psychological reality, or general truth. Rather than using abstract discussion, a parable always teaches by comparison with real or literal occurrences--especially "homey" everyday occurrences a wide number of people can relate to. Well-known examples of parables include those found in the synoptic Gospels, such as "The Prodigal Son" and "The Good Samaritan." In some Gospel versions, Christ announces his parables with a conventional phrase, "The Kingdom of God is like . . . ." Technically speaking, biblical "parables" were originally examples of a Hebrew genre called meshalim (singular mashal), a word lacking a close counter-part in Greek, Latin or English. Meshalim in Hebrew refer to "mysterious speech," i.e., spiritual riddles or enigmas the speaker couches in story-form. Thus, in Matthew 13:11 and Mark 4:11-12, Christ states that he speaks in parables so that outsiders will not be able to understand his teachings. It is only late in the Greek New Testament that these meshalim are conflated with parables or allegorical readings designed for ease of understanding.

Non-religious works can be parables as well. For example, Melville's Billy Budd demonstrates that absolute good--such as the impressionable, naive young sailor--may not co-exist with absolute evil--the villain Claggart. Cf. fable, allegory, and symbolism, or click here for a PDF handout discussing the differences between these terms.

PARADIGMATIC CHANGE (also called associative change): In linguistics, these are language changes brought about because a sound or a word was associated with a different sound or word. Algeo provides the following example:

. . . The side of a ship on which it was laden (that is loaded) was called the ladeboard, but its opposite, starboard, influenced a change in pronunication to larboard. Then, because larboard was likely to be confused with starboard because of their similarity of sound, it was generally replaced by port. (11)

PARADOX (also called oxymoron): Using contradiction in a manner that oddly makes sense on a deeper level. Common paradoxes seem to reveal a deeper truth through their contradictions, such as noting that "without laws, we can have no freedom." Shakespeare's Julius Caesar also makes use of a famous paradox: "Cowards die many times before their deaths" (2.2.32). Richard Rolle uses an almost continuous string of paradoxes in his Middle English work, "Love is Love That Lasts For Aye." Oscar Wilde's "Ballad of Reading Gaol" notes "And all men kill the thing they love." The taoist master Lao-Tzu makes extraordinary use of paradox in the Tao-te Ching in his discussion of "the Way."

PARAGRAM: A sub-type of pun. See discussion under pun.

PARALANGUAGE: The non-verbal features that accompany speech and help convey meaning. For example, facial expression, gesticulation, body stance, and tone can help convey additional meaning to the spoken word; these are all examples of communication through paralanguage.

PARALLELISM: When the writer establishes similar patterns of grammatical structure and length. For instance, "King Alfred tried to make the law clear, precise, and equitable." The previous sentence has parallel structure in use of adjectives. However, the following sentence does not use parallelism: "King Alfred tried to make clear laws that had precision and were equitable."


PARARHYME: Wilfred Owen's term for a slant rhyme. An example appears in his poem, "Strange Meeting," in which Owen rhymes words like years / yours and tigress / progress.

PARATAXIS: Rhetorically juxtaposing two clauses without any connecting conjunction; i.e. a loose association of clauses as opposed to hypotaxis. A common form of parataxis is asyndeton, in which expected conjunctions fail to appear for artistic reasons. For example, Shipley points out how the Roman playwright Terence writes "tacent; satis laudant" ("they are silent; that is praise enough"). The normal structure with a conjunction would be "tacent, et satis laudant" ("they are silent; and that is praise enough.") See Shipley 422-23 for this discussion and a comparison among Greek and Latin and English writers. Paratactic style is typically short and simple--like Hemingway's writing.

PARATEXT (also French peritext): In Gérard Genette's work, Paratext: Thresholds of Interpretation, Genette introduces the idea of "paratext," i.e., anything external to the text itself that influences the way we read a text. These "paratexts" can be almost infinite in number, but they might include a list of other works the author has published listed on the front cover, the gender of the author as indicated by his or her name, reviews written about the book, and editorial commentary about the work. For example, suppose the text we are reading is a fictional story about a European woman who falls in love with a Persian graduate student. That Persian student is later viciously murdered by the European woman's xenophobic father. If we see the author's name is "Susan Jones" we might interpret the text differently than if we saw the author's name was "Achmed bin Jaffah," for instance. If the same author wrote a number of murder mysteries, we might be especially prone to read this new text as influenced by that early genre work, or even expect the current text to be (rightly or wrongly) yet another murder mystery. If we read a review calling attention to the theme of lust in a work, we might experience the book differently than if we had read a different review focusing on the theme of intolerance. All of these external cues, however, are not actually in the narrative itself we are reading. Thus, they are paratextual. A New Critic from the 1930s would probably argue that all paratexts are irrelevant to determining the meaning of literary art, and the paratextual should be ignored accordingly. Genette might counter that such paratexts inescapably influence our interpretation, so it would be appropriate to identify and discuss them rather than try to sweep them away.

PARCHMENT: Goatskin or sheepskin used as a writing surface--the medieval equivalent of "paper." A technical distinction is usually made between parchment and vellum, which is made from the hide of young calves. As Michelle P. Brown notes in Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts, the process for creating vellum or parchment is quite complicated:

To produce parchment or vellum, the animal skins were defleshed in a bath of lime, stretched on a frame, and scraped with a lunular knife while damp. they could then be treated with pumice, whitened with a substance such as chalk, and cut to size. Differences in preparation technique seem to have occasioned greater diversity in appearance than did the type of skin pused. Parchment supplanted papyrus as the most popular writing support material in the fourth century, although it was known earlier. Parchment was itself largely replaced by paper in the sixteenth century (with the rise of printing) but remained in use for certain high-grade books. (95)

PARDONER: An individual licensed by the medieval church to sell papal indulgences (i.e., "pardons"), official documents excusing the recipient from certain acts of penitence and alleviating the sinner's punishment while in purgatory. The Catholic Encyclopedia defines an indulgence as "the extra-sacramental remission of the temporal punishment due" to a sinner. Protestant students might wish to peruse the Catholic Encyclopedia's discussion of indulgences to avoid common misconceptions and distortions. The practice of selling these pardons as a means of fund-raising for the church or as a means of rewarding those who offered the church some service rose in prominence after the council of Clermont in 1095. There, Pope Urban II announced sweeping indulgences would be given to any individuals willing to go on Crusade. By the fourteenth century, the practice had developed extensively, and pardoners were lay officials authorized by the pope to sell indulgences in exchange for financial donations. Ecclesiastical abuses become commonplace problems. These abuses included unauthorized sales, the sale of forged pardons, extortion, and deliberate misrepresentation of the scope of an indulgence (i.e., treating the indulgence as a "get-out-of-hell-free" card). Chaucer's Pardoner in The Canterbury Tales represents the worst excesses of pardoners during this period.

PARDONS: Another term for papal indulgences. See discussion under pardoner.

PARODOS: In Greek tragedy, the ceremonial entrance of the chorus. Usually the chorus at this time chants a lyric relating to the main theme of the play.

PARODY (Greek: "beside, subsidiary, or mock song"): A parody imitates the serious manner and characteristic features of a particular literary work in order to make fun of those same features. The humorist achieves parody by exaggerating certain traits common to the work, much as a caricaturist creates a humorous depiction of a person by magnifying and calling attention to the person's most noticeable features. The term parody is often used synonymously with the more general term spoof, which makes fun of the general traits of a genre rather than one particular work or author. Often the subject-matter of a parody is comically inappropriate, such as using the elaborate, formal diction of an epic to describe something trivial like washing socks or cleaning a dusty attic.

Aristotle attributes the first Greek parody to Hegemon of Thasos in The Poetics, though other writings credit the playwright Hipponax with the first creation of theatrical parody. Aristophanes makes use of parody in The Frogs (in which he mocks the style of Euripides and Aeschylus). Plato also caricatures the style of various writers in the Symposium. In the Middle Ages, the first well-known English parody is Chaucer's "Sir Thopas," and Chaucer is himself the basis of parodies written by Alexander Pope and W. W. Skeat. Cervantes creates a parody of medieval romance in Don Quixote. Rabelais creates parodies of similar material in Gargantua and Pantagruel. Erasmus parodies medieval scholastic writings in Moriae Encomium. In Shamela (1741), Henry Fielding makes a parody of Samuel Richardson's novel Pamela by turning the virtuous serving girl into a spirited and sexually ambitious character who merely uses coyness and false chasteness as a tool for snagging a husband. In Joseph Andews (1742), Henry Fielding again parodies Samuel Richardson's novel Pamela, this time by replacing Richardson's sexually beleaguered heroine, Pamela, with a hearty male hero who must defend his virtue from the sexually voracious Lady Booby. In the Romantic period, Southey, Wordsworth, Browning, and Swinburne were the victims of far too many parodies in far too many works to list here. See also mock epic, satire, and spoof.

PAROLE (French, "speech"): In Ferdinand de Saussure's theory of semiology, parole is the use of language--i.e., manifestations of actual speech and writing. Parole contrasts with langue, the invisible underlying system of language that makes parole possible.

PART (Latin partum, "a piece"): An actor's role in a play, the character the actor portrays or pretends to be. The term comes from Renaissance drama. Since it was too expensive in Shakespeare's day to print playbooks for every single actor involved in a play, penny-pinching acting companies would only give each actor a roll of paper called a "part"; the part would list the dialogue for one character and all the cues belonging to that character (Greenblatt 1140). The term role, synonymous with "part," is similarly derived from such rolls of paper (ibidem).

PARTIBLE SUCCESSION: The opposite of primogeniture, partible succession is the practice in which all the children share equally in an inheritance. Under this legal system, if a property-owner or king dies, the deceased's lands, money, or kingdom would be split into equal shares for each surviving child. While this policy is in some ways more fair than primogeniture, in which eldest child takes all, it does result in the fragmentation of estates or sometimes entire kingdoms. In the late medieval period, primogeniture was the common practice in much of Europe and Britain, but in the early "dark ages," partible succession was notoriously common among some Celtic tribes in England and the Merovingian and Frankish tribes of France and Germany. This practice is behind King Lear's sycophantic games in the first act of King Lear, as the play is set in ancient Celtic times, though the subplot about Edgar involves the much later later practice of primogeniture.

PASSUS (Latin, "step"): William Langland uses the term passus to refer to each numbered subdivision of his poem, The Vision of Piers Plowman. The idea is each section is a "step" toward salvation or spiritual truth. Cf. canto and fit.

PASTORAL (Latin pastor, "shepherd"): An artistic composition dealing with the life of shepherds or with a simple, rural existence. It usually idealized shepherds' lives in order to create an image of peaceful and uncorrupted existence. More generally, pastoral describes the simplicity, charm, and serenity attributed to country life, or any literary convention that places kindly, rural people in nature-centered activities. The Greek Theocritus (316-260 BCE) first used the convention in his Idylls, though pastoral compositions also appear in Roman literature, in Shakespeare's plays, and in the writings of the Romantic poets. Typically, pastoral liturgy depicts beautiful scenery, carefree shepherds, seductive nymphs, and rural songs and dances. Conventional names for the shepherds and nymphs come from bastardized Latin nicknames such as Mopsy, Flopsy, and Dorcas (from Mopsius, Doricas, etc.). See also pastoral elegy under elegy.

PASTORAL ELEGY: See discussion under pastoral and elegy.

PATHOS (Greek, "emotion"): In its rhetorical sense, pathos is a writer or speaker's attempt to inspire an emotional reaction in an audience--usually a deep feeling of suffering, but sometimes joy, pride, anger, humor, patriotism, or any of a dozen other emotions. You can read more about rhetorical uses for pathos here. In its critical sense, pathos signifies a scene or passage designed to evoke the feeling of pity or sympathetic sorrow in a reader or viewer.

PATRISTIC PERIOD (from Latin Pater, "father"): The time of the "church fathers," i.e., the time of the early Church and the Church's first theologians, running through the last days of the apostles through the time of Saint Augustine's conversion and Saint Jerome's compilation of the Bible in the fourth and fifth centuries after Christ. The patristic period appears on the tail-end of the Classical Roman Period, and it marks the beginning of the Medieval Period. Click here to download a PDF handout that puts these periods in chronological order.

PATROLOGIA GRAECA: See discussion under Patrologia Latina, below.

PATROLOGIA LATINA: A famous (or perhaps infamous) scholarly collection of 228+ fat volumes of biblical and theological commentary that has been both a boon and bane to twentieth-century medieval scholarship. The Patrologia Graeca reproduces a series of Greek writings from the patristic and medieval Christian writers, while the Patrologia Latina covers the same sort of material in Latin sources. These works are often not available in print in any other texts. This collection, known familiarly as the PL or "the Migne" (after one of its French editors), includes vast quantities of theological interpretations, Biblical exegesis, typological and anti-typological discussion, medieval treatises on hagiography, medieval medicine, lapidary lore, and oodles of relevant materials necessary for students seeking to understand the medieval world and medieval literature. Unfortunately, the material is all in Latin, with facing French translations, which makes it less useful for English-speakers hindered by linguistic inabilities. Additionally, a series of editors compiled the volumes of the PL and they did not follow the same system of cataloging and organization as their predecessors. The result is a confusing mishmash that requires four volumes of indices and an additional index to the indices. Four generations of scholars have blessed the PL as an astonishing and ambitious collection of medieval lore, while simultaneously cursing it as a devilish, misorganized amalgam riddled with errors, typos, and blunders in pagination. The PL is being displaced from its throne by the Corpus Christianorum, an electronic collection superseding the older half-edited material. However, major research libraries at this time are more likely to have an old, dusty set of shelves devoted to the PL than to have an expensive, computerized copy of the Corpus Christianorum. For a student of medieval literature who can speak Latin, the best starting spot is the index to the indices, and from there work one's way backward. If any readers find a library that is about to throw away or sell its copies of the PL, please contact me at kip@hwaet.org. I would like to have a copy myself, provided I can find a room large enough to store all 228 of these books.

PATRON: See discussion under patronage, below.

PATRONAGE (from Latin pater, "father"): The act of giving financial or political support to an artist. A person who provides financial support for an artist is known as a patron regardless of his or her gender. Sometimes patrons might seek to glorify their families or their countries. For instance, the Emperor Augustus was a patron for Virgil. Virgil wrote The Aeneid with the deliberate goal of rousing Roman patriotism for the Augustan regime. Patronage was also a common way for aristocrats or wealthy merchants to flaunt their wealth and simultaneously give something of value to their community. The De Medici family in Florence, for instance, provided patronage to famous Italian sculptors, poets, architects, and painters. In England, John of Gaunt and Richard II both served as patrons for Chaucer at various points in his career. Many literary works are dedicated to a patron. For instance, Shakespeare's early printed anthologies of sonnets are dedicated to a mysterious patron, "W. H." In Renaissance drama, acting companies were required to have an important noble or royal family member as a patron, for actors not in the service of such illustrious individuals were punishable as vagabonds and tramps. Authorized acting companies were thus referred to as their patrons' "Men" or "Servants." For most of Shakespeare's dramatic career, his acting company was first known as the Lord Chamberlain's Men. After Queen Elizabeth died, the name was changed to the King's Men in 1603, when King James I ascended the throne and took up patronage of the company.

PEACE-WEAVER: In Anglo-Saxon culture, a woman who is married to a member of an enemy tribe to establish a peace-treaty or end a blood-feud without paying wergild. This was a vital role for women in Anglo-Saxon custom--but probably also a stressful and dangerous responsibility. Hildeburh and Freawaru in Beowulf and the speaker of "The Wife's Lament" are probably examples of characters in Old English literature who are peace-weavers.

PEASANTS' REVOLT: Also known as Wat Tyler's Rebellion, this uprising occurred in 1387 when lower-class Londoners and workers from the surrounding areas, fed up with repressive government measures such as the Labor Statutes of 1351, marched on London and incinerated the Savoy palace belonging to John of Gaunt and damaged property belonging to other noblemen, appealing directly to the young king, Richard II, for his intervention. The rebels burned unfavorable contracts and records of debt. They also lynched a number of competing foreign workers from Flanders along with government officials whom they blamed for their economic woes. According to legend, they chanted, "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?" (i.e., when Adam and Eve first existed, who was an aristocrat?) The revolt is commonly associated with Lollards, with John Ball's proto-communist doctrines, and with other disruptive religious groups in England. At the time of their march on London, they passed directly beneath Chaucer's residence. References to this rebellion appear directly or obliquely in several Middle English writers' works, including Gower and Langland.

PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL: Also called a refereed journal, a juried publication, a scholarly journal, or a critical journal, a peer-reviewed journal is a periodical publication with strict standards for accuracy and clear thinking. Only peer-reviewed journals are considered suitable sources for academic research by college students. Most are published two to four times a year. These publications are held in such high esteem because, when an article is submitted for publication, it is passed on to two or three other experts in the field; they in turn critique the author's thinking and check the article's claims and facts to make sure it is as accurate as possible and (theoretically) free from distorting political, religious, ideological bias; citation errors; logical fallacies; and misattributions. This contrasts with a book, in which only a copy-editor or two will check for typos, but nobody challenges the author's ideas, and it contrasts even more starkly with a web page like this one, in which no official structure is consistently available to ensure scholarly accuracy let alone find all the typos. Good college students learn to use peer-reviewed journals; they do not rely on Google and web-browsing for their primary information. Some of the most important peer-reviewed journals for medieval literature students in English include The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Medievalia et Humanistica, Medium Aevum, Arthuriana, Medieval Studies, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, the PMLA, Philological Quarterly, Reading Medieval Studies, Speculum, Chaucer Review, and Studies in the Age of Chaucer. The tell-tale signs of a scholarly journal are its typically copious footnotes, the absence of advertisements or glossy photographs, often its plain, unadorned cover, its guidelines in the back or front for scholarly submissions, and its pages, which are typically on expensive acid-free paper to ensure archival survival. Often libraries do have these journals available in electronic databases (such as JSTOR) that can be searched as easily and as efficiently as webpages, so students have no excuse for not using them. If you need help, contact your teacher or a reference librarian. Bribe this helper with chocolate.

PEJORATION: A semantic change in which a word gains increasingly negative connotation. For instance, the word lewd originally referred to laymen as opposed to priests. It underwent pejoration to mean "ignorant," then "base" and finally "obscene," which is the only surviving meaning in Modern English usage. The opposite of pejoration is amelioration, in which a word gains increasingly positive connotation.

PEN NAME: Another term for nom de plume. The word indicates a fictitious name that a writer employs to conceal his or her identity. For example, Samuel Clemens used the pen name "Mark Twain." William Sydney Porter wrote his short stories under the pen name "O. Henry." Mary Ann Cross used the pen name "George Eliot" to hide that she was a female writer, just as science-fiction writer Alice Bradley Sheldon used the pen name "James Tiptree, Junior." Ben Franklin used a variety of pen names such as "Silence Do-good," Jonathan Swift once used the name Lemuel Gulliver, and so on. Writers might choose to use a pen name as a way to keep a certain name associated with certain types of work, so that a writer might use one name for westerns and another name for science fiction novels. Other authors might seek to hide their identity to avoid negative repercussions (such as hate-mail, imprisonment, lynch-mobs, or even execution--all of these misfortunes can and do occur to authors, especially those writing in totalitarian regimes).

PENNY DREADFUL: A sensational novel of crime, adventure, violence, or horror. The term is an English archaism referring to cheaply printed books bound in paper at only a few pennies' cost. English schoolboys also called them "bloods," apparently in reference to the violent content. The equivalent term in American slang is "dime-novel," again referring to the cheap price, or "pulp fiction," referring to the cheap wood-pulp pressed to make the paper. My personal favorite penny dreadful from pre-1800 writing is Varney the Vampire: Or, The Feast of Blood! The title gives some indication of the content.

PENTAMETER: When poetry consists of five feet in each line, it is written in pentameter. Each foot has a set number of syllables. Iambs, spondees, and trochees are feet consisting of two syllables. Thus, iambic pentameter, spondaic pentameter, and trochaic pentameter lines would have a total of ten syllables. Anapests and dactyls are feet consisting of three syllables. Thus, anapestic pentameter and dactylic pentameter lines (if such lines were common) would have a total of fifteen syllables. See foot and meter. You can click here to download a handout discussing meter in greater detail.

PENTATEUCH: The first five books of the Hebrew Bible--i.e., Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

PERFECT RHYME: Another term for exact rhyme or true rhyme. See exact rhyme.

PERFORMATIVE LANGUAGE: See discussion under speech act theory.

PERICOPE (Grk, "section"; the last syllable rhymes with "dopey"): (1) In biblical studies, a story, brief passage, or selection from gospel narrative or passage found embedded inside another story, narrative, or passage. (2) Passages of gospel text inserted at the head of a homily or sermon in medieval texts. See frame narrative.

PERIOD: See discussion under periodization and periods of English literature.

PERIODIC ESSAY: The forefather of modern periodicals like magazines and literary journals, these publications contained essays appearing at regular intervals (monthly, quarterly, and so on). The subject-matter varied from current events, literary criticism, social commentary, fashion, geographic and architectural features of London, childhood memories, and whatever other reverie entered the author's head. The essays often began with a Latin epigraph as a rhetorical flourish illustrating the good taste and education of the "gentleman author," a practice that has fallen out of favor in more fiercely democratic and egalitarian times. The first literary periodicals were French. They included Journals des Scavans (1665). Italian ones followed such as Giornale de Letterati (1668). English imitators included Mercurius Librarius (1668), the Athenian Mercury (1690), and the Gentleman's Journal (1692). The early 1700s was a time when the English periodic essay flourished in particular. This time was especially important in the development of the modern periodical and in the growing acceptance of the essay as a valid genre. Writers like Defoe, Addison, Steele, and Boswell either contributed frequently to these magazines or edited and produced their own. The Tatler (1709), the Spectator (1711), and the Guardian (1731), all established by Addison and Steele, became profoundly influential in shaping the writing habits and publication customs of the modern world. Most of these publications ran for only two or three years before vanishing, but some lasted for decades. The Gentleman's Magazine first came out in 1731 and the last issue appeared in 1907, for instance, and the Quarterly Review (1809) was still being published as of 1991, when I last subscribed.

PERIODIC SENTENCE: A long sentence that is not grammatically complete (and hence not intelligible to the reader) until the reader reaches the final portion of the sentence. An example is this sentence by Bret Harte:

And pulseless and cold, with a Derringer by his side and a bullet in his heart, though still calm as in life, beneath the snow lay he who was at once the strongest and yet the weakest of the outcasts of Poker Flat.

The most common type of periodic sentence involves a long phrase in which the verb falls at the very end of the sentence after the direct object, indirect object and other grammatical necessities. For example, "For the queen, the lover, pleading always at the heart's door, patiently waits." In a non-periodic sentence, we would normally write, "Always pleading at the heart's door, the lover waits patiently for the queen." The non-periodic sentence is clearer in English. It tends to follow the subject-verb-object pattern we are accustomed to. The periodic sentence is more exotic and arguably more poetic, but initially confusing.

Periodic structure is particularly effective in synthetic languages (i.e. languages in which meaning does not depend on the order of words). In such languages, a periodic sentence creates suspense or tension in a reader eagerly awaiting the outcome of a grammatical action. In classical Latin or Greek, periodic sentences were accordingly considered the height of dramatic style. In English, however, the result can become confusing or comic if the writer loses control, as evidenced in the work of Victorian novelist George Bulwer-Lytton, which has been much mocked by modern readers. Milton's employs a periodic style in Paradise Lost because he seeks boldly to imitate the features of a classical epic--including the very grammatical structure of the original Latin and Greek works he loves and emulates. Compare to anastrophe.

PERIODIC STYLE: A style of writing in which the sentences tend to be periodic. See discussion under periodic sentence, above. Periodic style in English is usually considered indirect or artificially "artsy" in comparison with the more straight-forward non-periodic style.

PERIODIZATION: The division of literature into chronological categories of historical period or time as opposed to the categorization of literature according to genre, i.e., categories based on conventional features shared between works of similar type. For instance, if I were organizing my bookshelf, and I placed all the books from the early 1800s on one shelf, and all the books written in the Victorian period on the next shelf, and all the twentieth-century books on the last shelf, I have organized my literature by periodization. If, however, I placed all the books containing tragic drama together on one shelf, ands placed all my Western novels on another shelf, and put all the poetry collections on the last shelf, I have organized my books according to genre. (Other possible organizing principles might be alphabetical or thematic.) Periodization is not always clear. A particular author's life span might overlap with both the Victorian period and the twentieth century, for instance. Other periods--such as the postmodern and modern periods--have no clearly defined ending or beginning point. Still, the intellectual exercise can be useful for thinking about how particular literary artists fit (or don't fit) into an era and for thinking about the zeitgeist or "spirit-of-the-age" in which they live.

PERIODS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE: The common historical eras scholars use to divide literature into comprehensible sections through periodization. Dividing literature into these sometimes arbitrary periods allows us to better compare and contrast the writing, poetry, and drama produced in different ages, to more easily trace chains of influence from one writer to another, and to appreciate more readily the connection between historical events and intellectual trends. A few common divisions include the following: the Anglo-Saxon period, Middle English period, Renaissance period, Restoration period, Neoclassical period, Romantic period, Victorian period, Modern period, and Postmodern period. No universally accepted scheme exists for the divisions. For instance, some editors or anthologists might lump both the Anglo-Saxon and Middle English periods together as the Medieval period. Another might subdivide the Renaissance into the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, and so on. Click here for a PDF handout listing the periods in more detail.

PERIODS OF LITERATURE: See discussion under periods of English literature.

PERIPETEA: Another spelling of peripeteia. See below.

PERIPETEIA (Also spelled peripetea, Greek for "sudden change"): The sudden reversal of fortune in a story, play, or any narrative in which there is an observable change in direction. In tragedy, this is often a change from stability and happiness toward the destruction or downfall of the protagonist.

PERIPETY: Another term for peripeteia. See above. The word was particularly common in older English writing.

PERSONA (Plural, personae or personas; Latin,"mask"): An external representation of oneself which might or might not accurately reflect one's inner self, or an external representation of oneself that might be largely accurate, but involves exaggerating certain characteristics and minimizing others. One of the most famous personae is that of the speaker in Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal." Here, the Irish author Swift, outraged over Britain's economic exploitation of Ireland, creates a speaker who is a well-to-do English intellectual, getting on in years, who advocates raising and eating Irish children as a means of economic advancement. Another famous persona is Geoffrey Chaucer's narrator in The Canterbury Tales, who presents himself as poetically inept and somewhat dull. Contrast with alter ego and poetic speaker.

PERSONAL ENDING: In linguistics and grammar, a verb inflection that shows if the subject is first person, second person, or third person.

PERSONAL SYMBOL: Another term for a private symbol. See below.

PERSONIFICATION: A trope in which abstractions, animals, ideas, and inanimate objects are given human character, traits, abilities, or reactions. Personification is particularly common in poetry, but it appears in nearly all types of artful writing. Examples include Keat's treatment of the vase in "Ode on a Grecian Urn," in which the urn is treated as a "sylvan historian, who canst thus express / A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme," or Sylvia Plath's "The Moon and the Yew Tree," in which the moon "is a face in its own right, / White as a knuckle and terribly upset. / It drags the sea after it like a dark crime." When discussing the ways that animistic religions personify natural forces with human qualities, scientists refer to this process as "anthropomorphizing," sometimes with derogatory overtones. A special sub-type of personification is prosopopoeia, in which an inanimate object is given the ability of human speech. Apostrophe (not to be confused with the punctuation mark) is a special type of personification in which a speaker in a poem or rhetorical work pauses to address some abstraction that is not physically present in the room. See prosopopoeia below and apostrophe above.

PETRARCHAN CONCEIT: A conceit used by the Italian poet Petrarch or similar to those he used. In the Renaissance, English poets were quite taken with Petrarch's conceits and recycled them in their own poetry. Examples include comparing eyes to the stars or sun, hair to golden wires, lips to cherries, women to goddesses, and so on. His oxymora, such as freezing fire or burning ice, were also common.

PETRARCHAN SONNET: See discussion under sonnet.

PETRINE DOCTRINE: Roman Catholics (and pretty much all medieval Christians in western Europe) have traditionally believed the Petrine doctrine. The Petrine doctrine is the belief that Saint Peter was given special authority by Christ that has since passed on to each Pope. In the Gospel narratives, Matthew 16:18-19, Christ states, "You are Peter [petrus], the Rock [petros], and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. To you I will give the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven. What you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and what you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." (A similar verse is found in John 21:15-17.) Medieval and modern Catholics believed the Archbishop of Rome (i.e., the Pope) was in direct apostolic lineage back to Saint Peter. That means the Archbishop who anointed the Pope had been annointed by others all the way back to Saint Peter. Thus, the Pope inherited the same special authority Saint Peter had.

The Orthodox Greek church did not share this belief. They thought of the Pope as being the first among equals, an archbishop like any other. He did not have authority to command the whole church. The two halves of the medieval church in the West and the East argued about this, but that was the sum of the dispute for several centuries. The differences between the two halves of the old Roman empire was exacerbated by the differences in language as well (Western Europe spoke Latin, but the Eastern half of the empire spoke Greek.) See also schism.

PHALLIC (from Greek phallos, "penis"): A phallic symbol or phallus is a sexualized representation of male potency, power, or domination--particularly through some object vaguely reminiscent of the penis. Common phallic symbols include sticks, staves, swords, clubs, towers, trees, missiles, and rockets. Contrast with a yonic symbol. See also herm.

PHALLUS: See discussion under phallic.

PHATIC COMMUNICATION: Exchanges or conversation designed primarily not to transmit information, but rather to reinforce social bonds, signal the beginning or end of a conversation, or engage in ritual activities. For instance, if we pass a stranger in the hallway and say, "Hi, howya doing?" and pass on after a nod, the linguistic exchange was not an actual request for data, but merely a politeness acknowledging the other's presence. Similarly, "thanks for stopping by" or "you're welcome, come again" are all social lubricants to ease the transition to and from ritual activity rather than attempts at factual communication. Phatic communication is the term for this phenomenon.

PHILOSOPHY (Greek, "Love of wisdom"): The methodical and systematic exploration of what we know, how we know it, and why it is important that we know it. Too frequently, students use the term somewhat nebulously. They often mistakenly state, "My philosophy about X is . . ." when they really mean, "My opinion about X is . . ." or "My attitude toward X is . . ." Traditional areas of Western philosophic inquiry include the following areas.

logic: the use of critical thinking, particularly binary yes/no thinking and inductive/deductive reasoning, as a means of testing ideas and debate--logos.
epistemology: the study of how we know things with any certainty and what limitations there may be to our ability to think, perceive, and understand
ontology: the study of being and what constitutes objective and subjective existence, and what it means to exist
ethical forensics: the study of what is right and wrong, and why it is right or wrong, and whether a common basis for of absolute morality can be found outside the individual mind in the laws of nature or the community
aesthetic theory: the study of what makes some things seem beautiful that have no practical benefit and whether these things are necessary in some way
empirical thought: the practice of controlling observable phenomena to test hypotheses with repeatable experiments (an idea that has become profoundly important for scientific proof, though it is not, as many people mistakenly argue, the only basis for scientific proof)
metaphysics: speculative thought about matters outside the perceivable physical world

PHONEME: The smallest sound or part of a word that actually has meaning. For instance, in the word rerun, the phonemes are re- and run. However, the ru- or the r- by itself is not a meaningful sound.

PHONETICS: The study of phonemes.

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION: Written symbols that linguists use to represent speech sounds. One common transcription system is the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet). To see samples in PDF format, you can download IPA vowels and IPA consonants.

PHONOGRAM: A written symbol that indicates a spoken sound. Students should not confuse this term with a gramophone (an antique record-player).

PHONOLOGY: According to Algeo, "The units of sound (phonemes) of a language with their possible arrangements and varieties of vocal expression" (329). More generally, the study of sounds and sound-systems in a language.

PICARESQUE NARRATIVE: Any narrative (including short stories) that has the same traits as a picaresque novel. See discussion under picaresque novel.

PICARESQUE NOVEL (from Spanish picaro, a rogue or thief; also called the picaresque narrative and the Räuberroman in German): A humorous novel in which the plot consists of a young knave's misadventures and escapades narrated in comic or satiric scenes. This roguish protagonist--called a picaro--makes his (or sometimes her) way through cunning and trickery rather than through virtue or industry. The picaro frequently travels from place to place engaging in a variety of jobs for several masters and getting into mischief. The picaresque novel is usually episodic in nature and realistic in its presentation of the seamier aspects of society.

The genre first emerged in 1553 in the anonymous Spanish work Lazarillo de Tormes, and later Spanish authors like Mateo Aleman and Fracisco Quevedo produced other similar works. The first English specimen was Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller (1594). Probably the most famous example of the genre is French: Le Sage's Gil Blas (1715), which ensured the genre's continuing influence on literature. Other examples include Defoe's Moll Flanders, Henry Fielding's Jonathan Wild, Smollett's Roderick Random, Thomas Mann's unfinished Felix Krull, and Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March. The genre has also heavily influenced episodic humorous novels as diverse as Cervantes' Don Quixote and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

PICARO (Spanish "thief," also called picaroon): A knave or rascal who is the protagonist in picaresque novels. See discussion under picaresque novel, above.

PICTOGRAPH: See discussion under ideograph.

PIDGIN: A simplified, limited language combining features from many languages and used among persons who share no common language amongst themselves. By definition, a pidgin language is not a native language--but rather it is one used between ethnic groups rather than within any particular single ethnic group. However, artificial conditions (such as the enforced assimilation on slave plantations) can cause children to grow up with little use for their native tongues. This can cause the pidgin language to develop into a much richer creole.

PIECE-BIEN-FAIT: The French term for the dramatic genre called the "well-made play." See discussion under well-made play.

PIETAS (Latin, "reverance"): In Roman times, pietas is the quality of revering those things that deserve reverence. The word is the source for our modern English word piety and piousness (reverence toward the divine), but the Latin term is far more all-embracing--indicating not only devotion to the gods, but also devotion to one's gens (family) and patria (homeland or country). Thus, it also means patriotism and familial responsibility. In Virgil's Aeneid, one epithet frequently applied to Aeneas is pius Aeneas, implying that Aeneas particularly embodies this quality so valued by the Romans.

PILGRIMAGE: An act of spiritual devotion or penance in which an individual travels without material comforts to a distant holy place. The journey often has spiritual overtones--it may symbolize a journey to the celestial city of heaven or repeat the journey of a saint or biblical hero. Pilgrimage has become a prominent symbol in both Western Christian writings and Middle-Eastern Islamic writings. John Bunyon's Pilgrim's Progress and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales are two literary examples using the pilgrimage motif.

P'ING HUA: A Chinese yarn or tall tale. The genre typically involves a strong narrative presence and colloquial or idiomatic Chinese. The tone is realistic, but the content is typically fantastic or hyperbolic. Contrast with the Russian skaz.

PIT: In indoor theaters during the Renaissance, the most expensive and prestigious bench seating was the pit--an area directly in front of the stage. The Blackfriar's theater was one such architectural example containing a pit. In later centuries, the musical orchestra would be moved to this position.

PITCH: In linguistics, a semi-musical tone or quality used in some languages to distinguish meaning.

PLACE OF ARTICULATION: The point in the oral cavity where the position of speech organs (lips, teeth, tongue, etc.) is most important for a particular sound.

PLAGIARISM: Accidental or intentional intellectual theft in which a writer, poet, artist, scholar, or student steals an original idea, phrase, or section of writing from someone else and presents this material as his or her own work without indicating the source via appropriate explanation or citation. Click here for more information.

PLATONIC: In common usage, people often use the word "platonic" to mean "intellectual rather than physical." Thus, a Platonic love-affair is one in which the couple is attracted to each other for mental or psychological qualities rather than bodily attributes. More specifically, however, Platonic philosophy is Plato's idea that behind (or above or outside) the imperfect physical world, another intangible world of abstract ideas has its own existence. These abstract-but-perfect ideas (called Platonic forms) appear only as dim outlines (or shadows) in the physical world. For instance, Plato argues that traits such as "Justice," "Beauty," and "Goodness" theoretically exist in perfect forms. Material creatures, who cannot see or enjoy the abstract quality of Beauty itself, can only enjoy specific manifestations of Beauty--such as sunsets or starlight or silvery snow. What the unenlightened do not realize is that it is not these specific objects they should admire, but the quality of beauty behind them--the form of absolute Beauty that is eternal and unchanging even as specific sunsets fade and yearly snowfalls melt away. Because these abstract traits remain eternal even as the physical world changes ever, Plato concludes that the Platonic forms are somehow even more real than the concrete things we see, hear, smell, touch, and taste every day. His breathtaking, nearly mystical conclusion is that the physical world is the illusion or dream, and the world of the mind is closer to the "real" world of the eternal forms.

Platonic thinking profoundly influences Plotinus, Boethius, Saint Augustine, Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, Spenser's "Hymn in Honor of Beauty," Shelley's "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," and Wordsworth's Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.

PLATONIC FORM: The ideas, images, or patterns of which physical reality is but an imperfect or transitory symbol or expression. See discussion under Platonic.

PLATONISM: See discussion under Platonic.

PLAY: A specific piece of drama, usually enacted on a stage by diverse actors who often wear makeup or costumes to make them resemble the character they portray. See drama.

PLEONASM: A habit of speech or writing in which an idea repeats itself in a single sentence, i.e., a redundancy. For example, "tiny little town" is a pleonasm, as opposed to "tiny town" or "little town." Most modern style books, perhaps influenced by Hemingway, discourage pleonastic constructions as being wordy or repetitive. I also steer students away from them. However, pleonasms have been fashionable in other centuries. Geoffrey of Vinsauf favored them in his twelfth-century style manual, the Poetria Nova. The New Testament book of Mark happily used them, as David Smith points out (8). Consider Mark 13:33, "Blepete, agrupneite!" ("Watch out! Be aware!") in which the author emphasizes alertness by using a pleonasm.

PLOSIVE: In linguistics, another term for a stop.

PLOT: The structure and relationship of actions and events in a work of fiction. In order for a plot to begin, some sort of catalyst is necessary. While the temporal order of events in the work constitutes the "story," we are speaking of plot rather than story as soon as we look at how these events relate to one another and how they are rendered and organized so as to achieve their particular effects. Note that, while it is most common for events to unfold chronologically or ab ovo (in which the first event happens first, the second event happens second, and so on), many stories structure the plot in such a way that the reader encounters happenings out of order. A common technique along this line is to "begin" the story in the middle of the action, a technique called beginning in medias res (Latin for "in the middle[s] of things"). Some narratives involve several short episodic plots occurring one after the other (like chivalric romances), or they may involve multiple subplots taking place simultaneously with the main plot (as in many of Shakespeare's plays).

PLUCK BUFFET: Anthropologists suggest that pre-adolescent male children in a variety of cultures share the game of "pluck buffet." In this game, one child trades blows on the arm or chest with another to see who is "bravest" or "toughest." Alternatively, pluck buffet also refers to any game in which two individuals challenge each other to some contest (often archery) and the loser must receive a strike from the winner. For instance, the poem "Garland" depicts Richard the Lion-Hearted and Robin Hood having an archery contest, and the loser must "Beare a buffet on his hede." This becomes an important theme in ballads like Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne. Pluck buffet may also lie at the heart of a Celtic motif known as the "trade of blows" in which one warrior agrees to trade strikes with another; in the case of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, pluck buffet takes a potentially lethal turn when Gawain and the green elf-knight play the game using giant axes.

POETIC DICTION: Distinctive language used by poets, i.e., language that would not be common in their everyday speech. The most common signs of poetic diction include involve archaisms, neologisms, rhyme, and unusual figures of speech. Teachers often point to Spenser's use of words like gentil and tobraken, or Shakespeare's use of abysm and climature, or Emily Dickinson's use of thee and thine. When they ask students, "why did this poet write in such a way?" students often mistakenly reply, "Because that's the way people talked back then." On the contrary, in the 1500s, Spenser is resurrecting language that was common in Chaucer's day in the 1300s--not the language of his own time. The words abysm and climature are made-up words Shakespeare invented from abyss/chasm and climate/temperature, not words he would hear in everyday use on the London streets. Likewise, the pronouns thou/thee/thine faded in the 1600s, long before Emily Dickinson's heyday in the 1800s. These poets chose such language precisely because it is unusual for their time--because it is different from humdrum ordinary speech. (That's what makes it striking poetry, after all.)

The concept of literary decorum (and its requirement for certain genres and characters to use lofty, elevated language) also generated thick poetic diction. As M. H. Abrams notes in volume I of The Norton Anthology, the results were phrases such as "the finny tribe" for "fish" and the "the bleating kind" for "sheep" (2958). To modern poets, such phrasing might seem overblown. The point, however, is that poetic diction is vastly different from daily speech.

POETIC LICENSE: The freedom of a poet or other literary writer to depart from the norms of common discourse, literal reality, or historical truth in order to create a special effect in or for the reader. When applied to prose writers, the term is often called "artistic license." Contrast with verisimilitude.

POETIC JUSTICE: The phrase and the idea was coined by Thomas Rymer in the late 1600s. He claimed that a narrative or drama should distribute rewards and punishments proportionately to the virtues and villainies of each character in the story. Thus, when a particularly vicious character meets a despicable end appropriate for his crimes, we say it is "poetic justice." This formula for resolving plots has fallen into disfavor in later centuries, and no widely influential critics today advocate such a formula without qualifications.

POETIC SPEAKER: The narrative or elegiac voice in a poem (such as a sonnet, ode, or lyric) that speaks of his or her situation or feelings. It is a convention in poetry that the speaker is not the same individual as the historical author of the poem. For instance, consider the poet Lord Byron's mock epic Don Juan. Lord Byron wrote the poem as a young man in his late twenties. However, the speaker of the poem depicts himself as being an elderly man looking back cynically on the days of youth. Clearly, the "voice" talking and narrating the story is not identical with the author. In the same way, the speaker of the poem "My Last Duchess" characterizes himself through his words as a Renaissance nobleman in Italy who is cold-blooded--quite capable of murdering a wife who displeases him--but the author of the poem was actually Robert Browning, a mild-mannered English poet writing in the early nineteenth-century. Many students (and literary critics) attempt to decipher clues about the author's own attitudes, beliefs, feelings, or biographical details through the words in a poem. However, such an activity must always be done with caution. Shakespeare may write a sonnet in which the poetic speaker pours out his passion for a woman with bad breath and wiry black hair (Sonnet 130), but it does not necessarily mean that Shakespeare himself was attracted to halitosis, or that his wife had black hair, or that he had a fling with such a woman. In fact, it is a convention in some genres, such as the medieval visio or dream vision, that the poetic speaker is a dull, imperceptive caricature of the author. See also authorial voice and dream vision, above.

POETRY: A variable literary genre characterized by rhythmical patterns of language. These patterns typically consist of patterns of meter (regular patterns of high and low stress), syllabification (the number of syllables in each line of text), rhyme, alliteration, or combinations of these elements. The poem typically involves figurative language such as schemes and