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

Masque
Not to be confused with a masquerade, a masque is a type of elaborate court entertainment popular in

Maxim
A proverb, a short, pithy statement or aphorism believed to contain wisdom or insight into human nat

Mead Hall
A structure built by an Anglo-Saxon lord (hlaford or cyning) as a social center for his immediate co

Medieval
The period of time roughly a thousand years long between the fall of the Roman Empire and the emerge

Medieval Estates Satire
A medieval genre common among French poets in which the speaker lists various occupations among the

Medieval Romance
In medieval use, romance referred to episodic French and German poetry dealing with chivalry and the

Meditation
A thoughtful or contemplative essay, sermon, discussion, or treatise.

Meiosis
Understatement, the opposite of exaggeration

Melodrama
A dramatic form characterized by excessive sentiment, exaggerated emotion, sensational and thrilling

Meme
An idea or pattern of thought that 'replicates' like a virus by being passed along from one thinker

Memoir
An autobiographical sketch--especially one that focuses less on the author's personal life or psycho

Memoir-Novel
A novel purporting to be a factual or autobiographical account but which is completely or partially

Memorial Reconstruction
Renaissance actors reconstructing the text of a play from their own (sometimes faulty) memory. Actin

Memory Play
The term coined by Tennessee Williams to describe non-realistic dramas, such as The Glass Menagerie,

Mendicant Orders
Orders of wandering monks who lived by begging. In the Middle Ages, the clergy was divided into secu

Mercian
The dialect of Old English spoken in the region of Mercia.

Merging
In linguistics, another term for leveling.

Mesure
In French chivalric literature, the equivalent of Latin moderatio--the ability to follow a golden me

Metadrama
Drama in which the subject of the play is dramatic art itself, especially when such material breaks

Metafiction
Fiction in which the subject of the story is the act or art of storytelling of itself, especially wh

Metaliterature
Literary art focused on the subject of literary art itself. Often this term is further divided into

Metaphor
A comparison or analogy stated in such a way as to imply that one object is another one, figurativel

Metaphysical Poets
In his 1693 work, Discourse of Satire, John Dryden used the term metaphysical to describe the style

Metaplasmus
A type of neologism in which misspelling a word creates a rhetorical effect. To emphasize dialect, o

Metapoetry
Poetry about poetry, especially self-conscious poems that pun on objects or items associated with wr

Metathesis
The transposition of two sounds in speech or spelling. This tendency often catches students of Middl

Meter
A recognizable though varying pattern of stressed syllables alternating with syllables of less stres

Metonym
Any specific use or specific example of metonymy, or any symbol in which a specific physical object

Metonymy
Using a vaguely suggestive, physical object to embody a more general idea. The term metonym also app

Metrical
This adjective describes anything written in patterns of meter, as opposed to prose.

Metrical Romance
Any medieval romance written in verse or meter.

Metrical Substitution
A way of varying poetic meter by taking a single foot of the normal meter and replacing it with a fo

Mezozeugma
An alternative spelling of mesozeugma. See discussion under zeugma.

Miasma
Literally referring to a stench or bad smell, the Greek term also metaphorically indicates a sort of

Microcosm
The human body. Renaissance thinkers believed that the human body was a 'little universe' that refle

Mid Vowel
In linguistics, any vowel sound made with the jaw and tongue positioned between the normal articulat

Middle Comedy
Greek comedies written in the early 300s BCE, in which the exaggerated costumes and the chorus of th

Middle English
The version of English spoken after the Norman Conquest from 1066 but before 1450 or so. Before the

Middle Passage
The sea-voyage from Africa to the West Indies and/or the Americas commonly used by slave-traders. It

Miles Gloriosus
The braggart soldier, a stock character in classical Roman drama. The braggart soldier is cowardly b

Miltonic Imagery
Imagery made famous by Milton's poetry--especially Paradise Lost. Examples include the dark angels o

Mimesis
Mimesis is usually translated as 'imitation' or 'representation,' though the concept is much more co

Minimal Pair
Also called contrastive pairs, these are two words that differ by only a single sound, such as gin-p

Minne
The German term for fin amour, i.e., courtly love.

Minnes
Any German minstril who writes poems and songs about courtly love in the medieval period. He is usua

Minuscule
A small or lowercase letter, in contrast with majuscule, a large or capital letter. The invention of

Miracle Of The Virgin
A vita or a miracle play that dramatizes some aspect of humanity activity, and ends with the miracul

Miracle Play
Not to be confused with medieval morality plays, a miracle play is a medieval drama depicting either

Mirror Passage
A section of a story that might not contribute directly to the plot (i.e., it contains characters di

Mirror Scene
A scene in a play or novel that does not contribute directly to the plot (i.e., it contains characte

Mla
The acronym for the Modern Language Association. English students primarily know the MLA as the publ

Mock Epic
In contrast with an epic, a mock epic is a long, heroicomical poem that merely imitates features of

Mock Sermon
A medieval genre commonly known as 'une sermon joyeux' or 'une sermon jolie,' the conventions are th

Modern English
The English language as spoken between about 1450 and the modern day. The language you are speaking

Modern Romance
In contrast with medieval and Renaissance romance, the meaning of a modern romance has become more r

Modernism
A vague, amorphous term referring to the art, poetry, literature, architecture, and philosophy of Eu

Moira
Fate or the three fates in Greek mythology. Contrast with wyrd.

Monody
Any elegy or dirge represented as the utterance of a single speaker. Compare with dramatic monologue

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

Monologue
An interior monologue does not necessarily represent spoken words, but rather the internal or emotio

Monophthong
In linguistics, Algeo defines this as 'A simple vowel with a single, stable quality' (323) Simon Hor

Monophthongization
The tendency of diphthongs to turn into simple vowels over time, or the actual process by which diph

Monorhyme
A poem or section of a poem in which all the lines have the same end rhyme. The rhyming pattern woul

Monosyllabic
Having only one syllable.

Mood
(1) In literature, a feeling, emotional state, or disposition of mind--especially the predominating

Morality Play
A genre of medieval and early Renaissance drama that illustrates the way to live a pious life throug

Morpheme
Linguistically, the smallest collection of sounds or letters in a spoken or written word that has se

Morphology
The part of a language concerned with the structure of morphemes and how these morphemes combine. Li

Morphosyntax
In linguistics, morphosyntax is an impressive word scholars use when most people would simply say 'g

Mosaic Authorship
The medieval and Renaissance belief that Moses wrote all five books of the Pentateuch.

Motif
A conspicuous recurring element, such as a type of incident, a device, a reference, or verbal formul

Multiculturalism
In literature, multiculturalism is the belief that literary studies should include writings, poetry,

Music Of The Spheres
In medieval and Renaissance Europe, many scholars believed in a beautiful song created by the moveme

Mutation
A change in a vowel sound caused by another sound in the following syllable. In Old English and in C

Mystery Cult
Unlike the official 'public cults' dedicated to the Olympian gods in ancient Greece and Rome, a numb

Mystery Cycle
A collection of mystery plays in a single manuscript meant to be performed sequentially. See discusi

Mystery Novel
A novel focused on suspense and solving a mystery--especially a murder, theft, kidnapping, or some o

Mystery Play
A religious play performed outdoors in the medieval period that enacts an event from the Bible, such

Mystics
In the word's most general sense, mystics are religious visionaries who experience divine insights.

Myth
While common English usage often equates 'myth' with 'falsehood,' scholars use the term slightly dif

Mythography
The commentary, writings, and interpretations added to myths. Medieval writers, such as the four ano

Mythology
A system of stories about the gods, often explicitly religious in nature, that possibly were once be

Mythos
(1) Approaching the world through poetic narrative and traditional ritual rather than rational or lo

Nam-Shub
(1) An incantation, chant, poem, or speech thought to have magical power in Sumerian texts. The most

Narrative Narration
Narration is the act of telling a sequence of events, often in chronological order. Alternatively, t

Narrator
The 'voice' that speaks or tells a story. Some stories are written in a first-person point of view,

Narrow Transcription
In linguistics, phonetic transcription that shows minute details, i.e., highly accurate transcriptio

Nasal
In linguistics, any sound that involves movement of air through the nose.

Native Language
The first language or the preferred language of any particular speaker.

Natural Gender
The assignment of nouns to grammatical categories based on the gender or lack of gender in the signi

Naturalism
A literary movement seeking to depict life as accurately as possible, without artificial distortions

Nb
Gallnuts aren’t actually nuts. They are swellings that form in the bark of an oak tree after

Nb
Students using MLA format should remember that MLA format requires your papers to be written with a

Near Rhyme
Another term for inexact rhyme or slant rhyme.

Nebula Award
An annual award given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Association (SFFWA) for

Neo-Latin
Latin forms or words (especially scientific ones) invented after the medieval period, as opposed to

Neoclassic
An adjective referring to the Enlightenment. See Enlightenment for further discussion, or click here

Neoclassicism
The movement toward classical architecture, literature, drama, and design that took place during the

Neologism
A made-up word that is not a part of normal, everyday vocabulary. Often Shakespeare invented new wor

Nephilim
In ancient Hebrew tradition, the Nephilim (singular Naphil) were a race of giants referred to in Gen