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Superglossary - Literature Category: General > Literature Date & country: 11/12/2013, USA Words: 1716

Peasants Revolt
Also known as Wat Tyler's Rebellion, this uprising occurred in 1387 when lower-class Londoners and w

Peer-Reviewed Journal
Also called a refereed journal, a juried publication, a scholarly journal, or a critical journal, a

Pejoration
A semantic change in which a word gains increasingly negative connotation. For instance, the word le

Pen Name
Another term for nom de plume. The word indicates a fictitious name that a writer employs to conceal

Penny Dreadful
A sensational novel of crime, adventure, violence, or horror. The term is an English archaism referr

Pentameter
When poetry consists of five feet in each line, it is written in pentameter. Each foot has a set num

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.

Pericope
(1) In biblical studies, a story, brief passage, or selection from gospel narrative or passage found

Periodic Essay
The forefather of modern periodicals like magazines and literary journals, these publications contai

Periodic Sentence
A long sentence that is not grammatically complete (and hence not intelligible to the reader) until

Periodic Style
A style of writing in which the sentences tend to be periodic. See discussion under periodic sentenc

Periodization
The division of literature into chronological categories of historical period or time as opposed to

Periods Of English Literature
The common historical eras scholars use to divide literature into comprehensible sections through pe

Peripetea
Another spelling of peripeteia. See below.

Peripeteia
The sudden reversal of fortune in a story, play, or any narrative in which there is an observable ch

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

Persona
An external representation of oneself which might or might not accurately reflect one's inner self,

Personal Ending
In linguistics and grammar, a verb inflection that shows if the subject is first person, second pers

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, trai

Petrarchan Conceit
A conceit used by the Italian poet Petrarch or similar to those he used. In the Renaissance, English

Petrine Doctrine
Roman Catholics (and pretty much all medieval Christians in western Europe) have traditionally belie

Phallic
A phallic symbol or phallus is a sexualized representation of male potency, power, or domination--pa

Phatic Communication
Exchanges or conversation designed primarily not to transmit information, but rather to reinforce so

Philosophy
The methodical and systematic exploration of what we know, how we know it, and why it is important t

Phoneme
The smallest sound or part of a spoken word that serves as a building block in a larger syllable or

Phonetic Transcription
Written symbols that linguists use to represent speech sounds. One common transcription system is th

Phonetics
The study of phonemes, or units of sound in spoken language.

Phonogram
A written symbol that indicates a spoken sound. Students should not confuse this term with a gramoph

Phonology
According to Algeo, 'The units of sound (phonemes) of a language with their possible arrangements an

Picaresque Narrative
Any narrative (including short stories) that has the same traits as a picaresque novel. See discussi

Picaresque Novel
A humorous novel in which the plot consists of a young knave's misadventures and escapades narrated

Picaro
A knave or rascal who is the protagonist in picaresque novels. See discussion under picaresque novel

Pickup Syllable
Another term the unstressed syllable in anacrusis.

Pidgin
A simplified, limited language combining features from many languages and used among persons who sha

Piece-Bien-Fait
The French term for the dramatic genre called the 'well-made play.' See discussion under well-made p

Pietas
In Roman times, pietas is the quality of revering those things that deserve reverence. The word is t

Pilgrimage
An act of spiritual devotion or penance in which an individual travels without material comforts to

Ping Hua
A Chinese yarn or tall tale. The genre typically involves a strong narrative presence and colloquial

Pit
In indoor theaters during the Renaissance, the most expensive and prestigious bench seating was the

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

Plagiarism
Accidental or intentional intellectual theft in which a writer, poet, artist, scholar, or student st

Platonic
In common usage, people often use the word 'platonic' to mean 'intellectual rather than physical.' T

Platonic Form
The ideas, images, or patterns of which physical reality is but an imperfect or transitory symbol or

Play
A specific piece of drama, usually enacted on a stage by diverse actors who often wear makeup or cos

Pleonasm
A habit of speech or writing in which an idea repeats itself in a single sentence, i.e., a redundanc

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 be

Pluck Buffet
Anthropologists suggest that pre-adolescent male children in a variety of cultures share the game of

Poetic Diction
Distinctive language used by poets, i.e., language that would not be common in their everyday speech

Poetic Justice
The phrase and the idea was coined by Thomas Rymer in the late 1600s. He claimed that a narrative or

Poetic License
The freedom of a poet or other literary writer to depart from the norms of common discourse, literal

Poetic Speaker
The narrative or elegiac voice in a poem (such as a sonnet, ode, or lyric) that speaks of his or her

Poetry
A variable literary genre characterized by rhythmical patterns of language. These patterns typically

Point Of View
The way a story gets told and who tells it. It is the method of narration that determines the positi

Point Of View Character
The central figure in a limited point of view narration, the character through whom the reader exper

Polis
The Greek city-state, a small, independent government consisting of a single town and its immediate

Polygenesis
The theory that, if two similar stories, words, or images appear in two different geographic regions

Polysyllabic
Having more than one syllable.

Polysyndeton
Using many conjunctions to achieve an overwhelming effect in a sentence. For example, 'This term, I

Pomp
In classical Greco-Roman culture, many major festivals were marked by a pompé. A pompé was a c

Pooh-Pooh Hypothesis
In linguistics, the idea that language began as emotional outbursts or surprised exclamations, contr

Portmanteau Word
The French term for a linguistic blending.

Portrait En Creux
A rhetorical or literary device in which a writer mentions an absence to evoke the counterpart prese

Post-Structuralism
A collective and loose term for any of the literary theories appearing after the structuralist movem

Postmodernism
A general (and often hotly debated) label referring to the philosophical, artistic, and literary cha

Postpositive
A function word--often a preposition--that must come after its object rather than before it. By defi

Pre-Raphaelite
Pre-Raphaelitism, or the Pre-Raphaelite movement, begins in 1848 as a protest against conventional a

Prefix
A morpheme added to the beginning of a word. For instance, the prefix re- can be added to the word p

Prequel
A novel, play, film, or other narrative usually written after the popular success of an earlier work

Prescriptivist
A grammatical treatise or a lexicon is said to be prescriptivist if it has the goal of fashioning gu

Press Variant
Unlike a deliberately revised edition printed at a later date, a press variant is a minor and usuall

Priestly Text
In biblical scholarship, this refers to material in Genesis and the Hebrew Bible that probably appea

Primary Source
Literary scholars distinguish between primary sources, secondary sources, and educational resources.

Primogeniture
The late medieval custom of allowing the first born legitimate male child to inherit all of his fath

Printing Press
Chinese and Japanese inventors developed simple printing techniques centuries earlier in monasteries

Private Symbol
In contrast with an archetype (universal symbol), a private symbol is one that an individual artist

Problem Play
There are two common meanings to this term. (1) The most general usage refers to any play in which t

Procatalepsis
Procatalepsis is a rhetorical strategy in which the writer raises an objection and then immediately

Profanity Act Of 1606
This law passed under King James I required that any profanity in a publicly performed play or in pu

Prologue
(1) In original Greek tragedy, the prologue was either the action or a set of introductory speeches

Promptbook
A manuscript of a play adapted for performance by a theatrical company--usually with extra stage dir

Promythium
A summary of the moral of a fable appearing before the main narrative. If the summary is found at th

Pronunciation Spelling
A new spelling of an old word that more accurately reflects the current pronunciation than the origi

Propaganda
In its original use, the term referred to a committee of cardinals the Roman Catholic church founded

Proparalepsis
Proparalepses)

Props
Handheld objects, furniture and similar items on stage apart from costumes and the stage scenery its

Proscenium
An arch that frames a box set and holds the curtain, thus creating a sort of invisible boundary thro

Prose
Any material that is not written in a regular meter like poetry. Many modern genres such as short st

Proskenion
A raised stage constructed before the skene in classical Greek drama. The proskenion sharply divided

Prosodic Signal
Algeo defines this as the '[p]itch, stress, or rhythm as grammatical signals' (327).

Prosody
The mechanics of verse poetry--its sounds, rhythms, scansion and meter, stanzaic form, alliteration,

Prosopopoeia
A form of personification in which an inanimate object gains the ability to speak. For instance, in

Prosthesis
Adding an extra syllable or letters to the beginning of a word for poetic effect. Shakespeare writes

Protagonist
The main character in a work, on whom the author focuses most of the narrative attention. See charac

Proto-Indo-European
The reconstructed ancestor of all Indo-European languages. Many scholars use this term interchangeab

Providence
The theological doctrine stating God's sovereignty--especially his omniscience--allows complete divi

Prys
The French noun prys, meaning 'worthiness,' is a cognate with the English word 'price.' Prys was ric