Download the List of Textual and Literary Terms
A List of Terms
English 200 E
Textual Studies and Theory:
A text is the thing under scrutiny. Generally, when we say text in day-to-day activity we mean words, language. In textual studies, the text is the thing we're examining, meaning it has a much broader connotation than in our day-to-day activities. A text is a singular instance of any given “work.”
A work is the catchall word to mean a collection of any number of texts under one authority. That authority may be the writer or artist, or it may be a genre or style. To wit, when someone exclaims “that's the work of the devil!” what they're really saying is that what is happening is generically similar in style and purpose to what the devil does. That saying effectively makes the devil the author of all that work (i.e. evil) which each instance would be a text.
Version refers to a text (or collection of texts) that differs from any collection of other like-texts. Thus, The Lion King is a version of Shakespeare's Hamlet. But there are many versions of the Lion King,
An edition is a set number of printings under the same typeset, including minor typographical variations. Fredson Bowers wrote that an edition is “the whole number of copies printed at any time or times from substantially the same setting of type-pages,” including “all issues and variant states existing within its basic type-setting, as well as all impressions.”
Copytext is the version of a text chosen to be used as a basis for publication.
A proof is a text with corrections made to it, sometimes by editors, sometimes by the author or authors.
Editing, according to Peter Shillingsburg, "consists of collecting, selecting, and preparing texts for publication" (2).
Copyediting "is the imposition of consistent conventions for spelling and punctuation--sometimes called house styling" (2).
Commercial editing is "improvement in style and suggestions for changes in content as well as expression" for a given publication endeavor (2).
Scholarly editing is several types of distinct kinds of editing techniques. These include academic editing, when an editor merely reprints an edition, but adds his own introduction or foreword or contextual material, critical editing, which, according to Fredson Bowers, means creating "a text that derives from more than one source" (Shillingsburg 2), and scholarly editing, which attempts to make available works that are corrupt or not available by any other means - Shillingsburg would like to add that this last kind of editing might be redefined to only include texts that are made available as an artifact (3).
Artifact is a term that "subsumes the ideas of artistic construct and historic relic" (3).
In editing terms, modernization refers to the practice of normalizing words, spellings, or grammatical quirks that have since gone out of practice, usually under the authority of making the text more readable. This eliminates much of the historical resonances that had once been in the text.
A printing is a singular instance of setting type to paper or parchment. There may be multiple printings in an edition.
Emendation is a term used to describe something that has been added or changed in a text during that text's lifetime. It has a connotation of making that thing better, but rarely is used that way in textual studies. Emendations can be both authorial and non-authorial.
Palimsest refers to when one text has been overlayed (either purposefully or accidentally) on top of another text.
Something is contextual when it is editorial, historical or bibliographic evidence surrounding the creation and publication of the text - in the general sense, not the physical sense.
Paratext refers to anything physically included around the literary text. Something paratextual could be published objects that accompany the text, such as the author’s name, text’s title, preface, or illustrations.
A book is a the collection of inked, printed, or blank sheets into a (usually) bound form. Monograph is a more precise term used by library and information science.
A folio is a sheet of parchment folded once. A folio has two bifolia.
A quarto describes a sheet of parchment folded twice: once horizontally and once vertically.
Novel is the term used to describe a book-length work of fiction. Pale Fire, by Nabokov, is a Novel.
Novella is used to describe anything that is longer than a short story, but shorter than a novel. (It's vague.) The Pleasure of My Company, by Steve Martin, is a novella.
Utterance act was coined by John Searle in his expansion of John Austin's “speech-act theory,” refers to the simple instance of saying something. In textual studies, Peter Shillingsburg has extended this definition to include printed utterances - something stated or set down in print or by hand or through digial means. Shillingsburg refers to this as “script-act theory.”
“Speech-act theory,” developed by John R. Searle, distinguishes between two kinds of sentences. The first type, constantives, can be determined to be true or false and distinguished from the second type, performatives. do something, such as admonish, question, or plead.
Literary Terms:
Plot is the arrangement and interrelation of events in a narrative work.
Story is the narrative of events in chronological order.
Allegory is a narrative that uses characters that symbolize an emotion, type of personality, or represents many other people and that teaches a message or moral to the reader.
A Symbol is an object that represents an idea.
Their distinguishable characteristics are thus: Allegory is a narrative or story whereas a symbol is a part or object/character in that story.
Allegories contain many symbols, but symbols do not contain allegories-and allegory can be a symbol, however.
A simile is a comparison between two unlike things using “like” or “as.”
A metaphor is the direct comparison of two terms without the use of “like” or “as.”
Using a simile is to say that a thing (object, person, etc.) is similar to something else in a way that will be presented. Ex. Her eyes are like the sea. Eyes like sea explains that they are colored in the same way and can also denote that they possess a gentle flow of sorts. But using the metaphor: Her eyes are the sea. Does not mean that her eyes are made of water, but gives a more emotional description of how flowingly beautiful this person thinks her eyes are. It is not only more difficult to accomplish a metaphor, but also it makes any statement much more directed and meaningful. This is most likely why simile is an older term.
Metonymy is the substitution of one word or phrase for another related word that conveys the same message.
In a metaphor, the use of the comparison denotes likeness. In metonymy, the comparison comes from the concurrent meanings and denotations of different words. Ex. “He pushed in the petal and the beast roared” instead of “…the car engine roared.”
By substituting the beast for the car engine is as if using the metaphor, “the car engine is a beast” without the rounded and somewhat awkward sound. The difference is crucial because the substitution of metonymy denotes it’s real meaning, whereas the comparison of metaphor reinforces it’s meaning.
Vehicle and tenor are terms used to distinguish parts of a metaphor. The vehicle is how you understand the tenor, or thing being discribed. In the phrase “my love is like a red, red rose,” we understand the object “love” (tenor) by it being compared to a “red, red rose” (vehicle). The way I think of it is, the vehicle is how we “get to” the tenor.
A character is an individual personality within a novel. When someone says a certain person in a novel has character he or she is referring to the choices made and actions taken which define that person.
Characterization is how a character is described in prose (physical traits).
Theme is not simply the subject of a literary work, but rather a statement that the text seems to be making about that subject. A didactic them is a moral.
Motif is a unifying element in an artistic work, especially any recurrent image, symbol, theme, character, type, subject, or narrative detail.
Poetry Terms:
Alliteration is the repetition of consonant sounds, usually to create a startling effect or draw attention to the line. "Then God grew angry and irate against the multitude..." -Genesis A
Litotes is dramatic understatement. "He fashioned for the renegade a home - one in exile - as reward for his effort" - Genesis A. In this example, the idea of reward usually has positive connotations, but in this case it is used to understate the severity of the punishment. It doesn't usually mean that the thing understated is less important, but more important, because it's obvious.
Miscellaneous Terms:
Comitatus is a term used to describe the relationship in the medieval period between a lord and his retainer. The retainer, who might be a knight in the Post-conquest Period, or an atheling (or prince) in the Pre-conquest Period, is one who repayed his lord's benevolence and good rule with serving him strongly in battle. The "good retainer" motif is one where the retainer dies defending the honor or land of his lord.
A boast is often made in Old English poetry. A formal boast is social act when one declares what his intentions are and how he will accomplish his goals; essentially, the "hero" sets the bar for what he intends to do and how awesome he will be while doing it.
A kenning is a rhetorical device where the combination of two other, related words are used as a metaphor for another. "Into your dominion are the cattle consecrated and the wild beasts given and the living things which tread the land and the life-endowed species that swim the ocean along the whale's-track" Genesis A "Whale's-track" for sea.
Some definitions have been taken in part or in whole from The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms.
English 200 E
Textual Studies and Theory:
A text is the thing under scrutiny. Generally, when we say text in day-to-day activity we mean words, language. In textual studies, the text is the thing we're examining, meaning it has a much broader connotation than in our day-to-day activities. A text is a singular instance of any given “work.”
A work is the catchall word to mean a collection of any number of texts under one authority. That authority may be the writer or artist, or it may be a genre or style. To wit, when someone exclaims “that's the work of the devil!” what they're really saying is that what is happening is generically similar in style and purpose to what the devil does. That saying effectively makes the devil the author of all that work (i.e. evil) which each instance would be a text.
Version refers to a text (or collection of texts) that differs from any collection of other like-texts. Thus, The Lion King is a version of Shakespeare's Hamlet. But there are many versions of the Lion King,
An edition is a set number of printings under the same typeset, including minor typographical variations. Fredson Bowers wrote that an edition is “the whole number of copies printed at any time or times from substantially the same setting of type-pages,” including “all issues and variant states existing within its basic type-setting, as well as all impressions.”
Copytext is the version of a text chosen to be used as a basis for publication.
A proof is a text with corrections made to it, sometimes by editors, sometimes by the author or authors.
Editing, according to Peter Shillingsburg, "consists of collecting, selecting, and preparing texts for publication" (2).
Copyediting "is the imposition of consistent conventions for spelling and punctuation--sometimes called house styling" (2).
Commercial editing is "improvement in style and suggestions for changes in content as well as expression" for a given publication endeavor (2).
Scholarly editing is several types of distinct kinds of editing techniques. These include academic editing, when an editor merely reprints an edition, but adds his own introduction or foreword or contextual material, critical editing, which, according to Fredson Bowers, means creating "a text that derives from more than one source" (Shillingsburg 2), and scholarly editing, which attempts to make available works that are corrupt or not available by any other means - Shillingsburg would like to add that this last kind of editing might be redefined to only include texts that are made available as an artifact (3).
Artifact is a term that "subsumes the ideas of artistic construct and historic relic" (3).
In editing terms, modernization refers to the practice of normalizing words, spellings, or grammatical quirks that have since gone out of practice, usually under the authority of making the text more readable. This eliminates much of the historical resonances that had once been in the text.
A printing is a singular instance of setting type to paper or parchment. There may be multiple printings in an edition.
Emendation is a term used to describe something that has been added or changed in a text during that text's lifetime. It has a connotation of making that thing better, but rarely is used that way in textual studies. Emendations can be both authorial and non-authorial.
Palimsest refers to when one text has been overlayed (either purposefully or accidentally) on top of another text.
Something is contextual when it is editorial, historical or bibliographic evidence surrounding the creation and publication of the text - in the general sense, not the physical sense.
Paratext refers to anything physically included around the literary text. Something paratextual could be published objects that accompany the text, such as the author’s name, text’s title, preface, or illustrations.
A book is a the collection of inked, printed, or blank sheets into a (usually) bound form. Monograph is a more precise term used by library and information science.
A folio is a sheet of parchment folded once. A folio has two bifolia.
A quarto describes a sheet of parchment folded twice: once horizontally and once vertically.
Novel is the term used to describe a book-length work of fiction. Pale Fire, by Nabokov, is a Novel.
Novella is used to describe anything that is longer than a short story, but shorter than a novel. (It's vague.) The Pleasure of My Company, by Steve Martin, is a novella.
Utterance act was coined by John Searle in his expansion of John Austin's “speech-act theory,” refers to the simple instance of saying something. In textual studies, Peter Shillingsburg has extended this definition to include printed utterances - something stated or set down in print or by hand or through digial means. Shillingsburg refers to this as “script-act theory.”
“Speech-act theory,” developed by John R. Searle, distinguishes between two kinds of sentences. The first type, constantives, can be determined to be true or false and distinguished from the second type, performatives. do something, such as admonish, question, or plead.
Literary Terms:
Plot is the arrangement and interrelation of events in a narrative work.
Story is the narrative of events in chronological order.
Allegory is a narrative that uses characters that symbolize an emotion, type of personality, or represents many other people and that teaches a message or moral to the reader.
A Symbol is an object that represents an idea.
Their distinguishable characteristics are thus: Allegory is a narrative or story whereas a symbol is a part or object/character in that story.
Allegories contain many symbols, but symbols do not contain allegories-and allegory can be a symbol, however.
A simile is a comparison between two unlike things using “like” or “as.”
A metaphor is the direct comparison of two terms without the use of “like” or “as.”
Using a simile is to say that a thing (object, person, etc.) is similar to something else in a way that will be presented. Ex. Her eyes are like the sea. Eyes like sea explains that they are colored in the same way and can also denote that they possess a gentle flow of sorts. But using the metaphor: Her eyes are the sea. Does not mean that her eyes are made of water, but gives a more emotional description of how flowingly beautiful this person thinks her eyes are. It is not only more difficult to accomplish a metaphor, but also it makes any statement much more directed and meaningful. This is most likely why simile is an older term.
Metonymy is the substitution of one word or phrase for another related word that conveys the same message.
In a metaphor, the use of the comparison denotes likeness. In metonymy, the comparison comes from the concurrent meanings and denotations of different words. Ex. “He pushed in the petal and the beast roared” instead of “…the car engine roared.”
By substituting the beast for the car engine is as if using the metaphor, “the car engine is a beast” without the rounded and somewhat awkward sound. The difference is crucial because the substitution of metonymy denotes it’s real meaning, whereas the comparison of metaphor reinforces it’s meaning.
Vehicle and tenor are terms used to distinguish parts of a metaphor. The vehicle is how you understand the tenor, or thing being discribed. In the phrase “my love is like a red, red rose,” we understand the object “love” (tenor) by it being compared to a “red, red rose” (vehicle). The way I think of it is, the vehicle is how we “get to” the tenor.
A character is an individual personality within a novel. When someone says a certain person in a novel has character he or she is referring to the choices made and actions taken which define that person.
Characterization is how a character is described in prose (physical traits).
Theme is not simply the subject of a literary work, but rather a statement that the text seems to be making about that subject. A didactic them is a moral.
Motif is a unifying element in an artistic work, especially any recurrent image, symbol, theme, character, type, subject, or narrative detail.
Poetry Terms:
Alliteration is the repetition of consonant sounds, usually to create a startling effect or draw attention to the line. "Then God grew angry and irate against the multitude..." -Genesis A
Litotes is dramatic understatement. "He fashioned for the renegade a home - one in exile - as reward for his effort" - Genesis A. In this example, the idea of reward usually has positive connotations, but in this case it is used to understate the severity of the punishment. It doesn't usually mean that the thing understated is less important, but more important, because it's obvious.
Miscellaneous Terms:
Comitatus is a term used to describe the relationship in the medieval period between a lord and his retainer. The retainer, who might be a knight in the Post-conquest Period, or an atheling (or prince) in the Pre-conquest Period, is one who repayed his lord's benevolence and good rule with serving him strongly in battle. The "good retainer" motif is one where the retainer dies defending the honor or land of his lord.
A boast is often made in Old English poetry. A formal boast is social act when one declares what his intentions are and how he will accomplish his goals; essentially, the "hero" sets the bar for what he intends to do and how awesome he will be while doing it.
A kenning is a rhetorical device where the combination of two other, related words are used as a metaphor for another. "Into your dominion are the cattle consecrated and the wild beasts given and the living things which tread the land and the life-endowed species that swim the ocean along the whale's-track" Genesis A "Whale's-track" for sea.
Some definitions have been taken in part or in whole from The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms.