30-Second Literature - Ella Berthoud

30-SECOND
LITERATURE
The 50 most important forms, genres and styles, each explained
in half a minute
Editor
Ella Berthoud
Contributors
Naomi Frisby
Lauren de Sá Naylor
Valerie O’Riordan
Charlotte Raby
Lucien Young
Illustrator
Nicky Ackland-Snow
CONTENTS
Introduction
History of Literature
GLOSSARY
The oral tradition
Early literature
Sanskrit literature
Medieval literature
Early modern literature
Modern literature
Profile: Hilda Doolittle
Modernist literature
Postcolonial literature
The Novel
GLOSSARY
The birth of the novel
Epistolary novel
Historical novel
Science fiction
Crime
Profile: Fyodor Dostoevsky
Horror
Utopia/Dystopia
Fantasy
Romance
Graphic novel
Young adult
LGBTQ+
Literary Prose
GLOSSARY
Short story
Diary
Autobiography & memoir
Profile: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Philosophical works
Religious texts
Poetry
GLOSSARY
Epic poem
Free verse
Sonnet
Ode
Profile: Hafez
Ballad
Haiku
Ghazal
Drama
GLOSSARY
Tragedy
Comedy
Profile: Aristophanes
Melodrama
Theatre of the absurd
Passion play
Political play
Literary Devices
GLOSSARY
Irony
Allegory
Profile: Jorge Luis Borges
Symbolism
Anthropomorphism
Personification
Foreshadow & flashback
Literary Styles
GLOSSARY
Narrative voice
Realism
Profile: Ali Smith
Satire
Gothic
Postmodernism
Stream of consciousness
Appendices
Resources
Notes on contributors
Index
Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION
Ella Berthoud
Literature is imagination in the form of words on paper, or simply memorized and

recited. It crosses borders, both physical and mental, allowing us to travel beyond our
limitations. A time machine that gives us instant access to the minds of writers from
thousands of years ago, it offers multiple alternative presents and numerous possible
futures. Through literature, as readers we gain insight into worlds we could never have
dreamt of, giving us the opportunity to understand other cultures, other ways of
thinking or being or living. We read to find ourselves, and we read to understand
others, to gain empathy and to enrich our minds and souls.
Since the birth of the novel we have been able to discover ourselves in books, realizing we are not
alone.
What makes written words literature rather than purely a mode of conveying
information is not universally agreed – shopping lists and instruction manuals are not
considered literature, but the borderline between practicality and poetry is hard to
define. In this volume, we suggest that literature is anything written or spoken that
tells a story, has a narrative, contains poetic or philosophical thought or tries in one
way or another to convey a poetic, metaphoric or philosophical truth. We have used
the term to apply to spoken or sung texts too, including theatre and performance
poetry.
It may seem strange to use the plural first-person pronoun when talking about
reading, as literature for the most part is a pursuit we experience alone. Including the
most intimate of artistic media, such as the poem and the novel, it still has the power
to glue us together as a community of readers, as the growth of reading groups and
websites like the hugely popular Goodreads have shown. The miracle of literature is
that one imagination is able to speak to another through the conduit of the written
word. Each work of literature is pregnant with infinite readings, and comes to readers
at unique moments in their individual lives, with the particular experiences, thoughts
and beliefs that each of us brings to bear. The words are the vessels that carry the
imagination; once carved in stone, then on clay, wood, bamboo; then written on
papyrus and tablets, then paper and now on screens. With their ever-evolving symbols
and our ever-evolving lives, these words are open to continuous new interpretations.
Illustration has long been a valuable companion of literature and manga is one of its most successful
modern manifestations.
This book gives an overview of the entire world of literature (as well as the
literature of the world), from its origins even before the birth of writing, to the
literature of the present and the future, too – though regrettably (but inevitably in a
book that allows for 50 topics and no more) some forms have had to be omitted.
Essays for instance do not appear; children’s literature, travel literature and erotica are
some of the forms that will have to be left for others to consider. Some literary
movements have also been omitted for want of space, with Dadaism, Oulipo, The
Black Arts Movement, Flarf and Alt Lit among many other topics we would like to
have explored. Throughout this book, it has been our aim to include examples from as
many literary cultures as we can, sometimes eschewing the most famous examples
from the established literary canon.
Literature today is at an exciting point in history, accessible almost instantly to
everyone, anywhere, and in the case of some books available in almost every known
language. In an age where ‘long form’ writing is perhaps under threat from the
immediate gratification of scattergun bursts of texts, snaps and tweets, this book aims
to celebrate the deep satisfaction literature can offer in all its myriad, protean forms.
How this book works

Each topic is broken down to make it accessible. The 30-second thesis gives the main
description, while the 3-second plot summarizes the topic at a glance. If you would
like to find out more, the 3-minute theme examines an intriguing aspect of the topic
and expands on it. The 3-second bibliographies list interesting texts of the period,
genre or device for you to explore further.
The History of Literature gives an overview of literary endeavour through the
ages. Then The Novel looks at one of the most popular forms of literature, which is
considered through its many genres. Literary Prose examines short stories,
autobiographies and memoirs, diaries, philosophical and religious works. Poetry
explores the longest epic poems to the tiniest haikus. Drama surveys the uses we have
made of the spoken word over millennia, using actors to explore the range of the
human condition through plays that show us the extremes of fate. Literary Devices
investigates the methods authors use to excite our imaginations and to intensify the
effect of the work in the mind of the reader or listener. Finally, Literary Styles studies
the different approaches to storytelling that grab the reader with playful, challenging
or disturbing techniques, persuading them for the time it takes to read the book to
suspend their disbelief and surrender to the vision that the writer has conjured in their
minds.
HISTORY OF LITERATURE
HISTORY OF LITERATURE
GLOSSARY
alienation The state or experience of feeling alienated, a condition that informs much of
modern literature, reflecting modern life since the Industrial Revolution, which entailed a
loss of faith and of close-knit rural communities.
allegory A story, poem or work of drama that can be seen to have a hidden meaning, which
is often religious or moral.
Aryan The name given to the Indo-European language speakers said to have migrated to
India during the Vedic period of Indian history (ca. 1500–ca. 500 BCE).
bawdy Humorously indecent, referring to sexual matters.
Creole A language created by mixing two different languages, often one colonizing
language and one colonized, particular to a specific region and born from a particular time
in history when two cultures and languages melded together. Many creole languages exist
in American and Indian Ocean colonies, as well as in Africa.
cuneiform An ancient system of writing developed by the Sumerians in 3500–3000 BCE.

The word comes from the Latin cuneus, which means ‘wedge’; the writing is wedge-
shaped from the stylus cutting into the clay.
epic narrative or verse A long story, usually about heroic deeds, intense bravery or
unusually impressive events.
fragmented narrative Fragmented narratives throw time into a kaleidoscope of jumbled

moments, worked together by the writer in a way that challenges the reader to make sense
of the story.
Gutenberg parenthesis The idea that the period in humanity’s history during which text is
of paramount importance is finite. Gutenberg invented the printing press between 1440 and
1450, and from that time until now writing has dominated human communication. People
who subscribe to this idea believe that text will gradually be taken over by speech once
more, with technology as an aid.
kāvya A term referring to a wide range of Sanskrit classical poetry, including both lyrical
and epic poetry.
memoir An extended piece of writing about oneself, published for a general readership.
mnemonic devices Techniques to help people remember things, including rhymes, music,
models and pictures. The Greeks would walk through the rooms of familiar buildings in
their minds and attach memories to architectural features. This would enable them to revisit
the imagined rooms and recall facts, passages of text, numbers and so on.
patois Informal speech, the dialect of a small geographical location, particularly one with
low status comparative to the standard language of that country.
psalm A holy song or hymn, used in Christian and Jewish worship, originally set to music.
Romanticism (or Romantics) A movement in literature that originated in Europe in the

late eighteenth century, flourishing from 1800 to 1850, which placed the individual at the
heart of the work and emphasized imagination, our connection with nature and the
overarching importance of emotion as paramount literary qualities.
Sanskrit The language of ancient India, one of the first Indo-Aryan languages and one of
the oldest-known languages.
shruti A Sanskrit word meaning ‘what is heard’ that refers to the most ancient body of
Hindu texts.
Sturm und Drang A literary movement of the late eighteenth century in Germany, in
which extreme emotions and subjective opinions are given precedence over rationalism.
Literally translated as ‘Storm and Drive’, it tends to be known as Storm and Stress in
English.
temple hymns The Sumerian temple hymns were written on clay tablets around 2600 BCE
and are considered the oldest literature in the world. The hymns addressed the temples
themselves as if they were living beings.
Vedic Relating to the language used in the Vedas, a large body of Hindu texts; also an early
form of Sanksrit.
Vorticism A short-lived literary and artistic movement founded by Wyndham Lewis –

satirical novelist, polemicist and painter – which fetishized industrial modernity. A
phenomenon lasting from 1912 to 1915, its place in modern cultural history is owed as
much to the ground-breaking Vorticist magazine Blast as to the works of any one member.
THE ORAL TRADITION
the 30-second thesis
Reading is a relatively recent development in human history, the first signs of literacy
dating back a mere 6,000 years, while oral storytelling is entrenched in human
consciousness. Literature evolved from oral histories handed down through successive
generations, such as the Vedic chants of Hinduism. In some cases, not just the content but
the style of delivery is preserved down to the inflections of voice as it is passed on from
person to person. The retention techniques of the deliverers of these Vedic chants and their
obsession with fidelity to the original, ensure that the work has remained virtually
unchanged over hundreds of years. In less closely guarded oral literature, improvization is
encouraged, to allow for individual interpretation and embellishments; and language is
heightened for dramatic effect. Poets of the oral tradition use repetition, mnemonic devices,
alliteration, assonance and proverbial sayings to aid memory. In recent years, spoken-word
performance poetry and storytelling has become a global phenomenon, with performers
such as Kate Tempest and Franny Choi revelling in their ability to provoke, subvert and
recast social reality with the power of personal charisma. Spoken-word poetry is closely
related to rap; as such it represents the voice of those who until now had been largely
unrepresented in literature.
3-SECOND PLOT
The oral tradition is a form of knowledge transmitted from one generation to another, through speech
and song, including folktales, verses, ballads, chants and epic narrative.
3-MINUTE THEME
Some academics suggest we are currently in a so-called Gutenberg Parenthesis, and that populations
which at present are literate will gradually return to an oral tradition. This can easily be imagined, as
developments in mobile technology see the younger generation recording voice messages and videos,
while the use of keyboards and especially the pen are slowly being dropped – the written word eschewed
in favour of an oral culture rooted in new technology.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
EARLY LITERATURE
EPIC POEM
BALLAD
3-SECOND BIBLIOGRAPHY
THE ILIAD
ca. 762 BCE
Homer
GRIMM’S FAIRY TALES

1812
Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm
‘WHAT I WILL’
2010
Suheir Hammad
‘BONES’
2017
Titlope Sonuga
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From the speeches of Cicero to the rhythm of rap, the spoken word compels us
to stop what we’re doing and listen.
EARLY LITERATURE
Shrouded in the mystery that surrounds ancient cultures, the earliest literature is in many
cases uncertain in authorship and date. Many kinds of literature were explored by ancient
writers, from epic narrative to spells designed to be read by the dead, and forms were
unfixed for many centuries. Religious literature was one of the first examples of writing;
the first people known to write were the Sumerians, around 2300 BCE, and the first named
writer was Enheduanna, the high priestess of the gods Inanna and Nanna. In cuneiform
script, she wrote temple hymns and intimate descriptions of her exile from and return to Ur.
Separate from this sacred tradition, many ancient forms described battles; Mesopatamia’s
earliest known work was the bellicose Epic of Gilgamesh, circa 2100 BCE, written on clay.
Literature that helped people to cross over into the afterlife was another early form, with
one of the oldest examples known being the Egyptian Book of the Dead – or, more
accurately, ‘Spells for Going Forth by Day’ – written initially on the walls of tombs and on
amulets for the elite dead, as a manual for the afterlife placed with the body in the
sarcophagus, and recorded eventually on the Papyrus of Ani around 1240–1250 BCE.
3-SECOND PLOT
Early literature refers to the very first writings known to humanity, including poems, epic tales and
ballads, often written on stone, clay or papyrus.
3-MINUTE THEME
Philosophical writing was one of the earliest kinds of literature, appearing in different forms around the
world. Laozi’s Tao Te Ching (fifth century BCE), written in a series of verses, was originally inscribed on one-
line bamboo strips tied together with silk thread, leaving its structure and meaning open to
interpretation. Plato’s Socratic dialogues (387–361 BCE), written in conversational form, became a
popular format for philosophical discussions, emulated by philosophers as diverse as Denis Diderot,
Jean- Francoise Revel and Iris Murdoch.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
SANSKRIT LITERATURE
RELIGIOUS TEXTS
EPIC POEM
THE UPANISHADS
ca. 800–ca. 500 BCE
THEOGONY
ca. 700 BCE
Hesiod
THE ART OF WAR

ca. fifth century BCE
Sun Tzu
THE AENEID
ca. 30–ca. 18 BCE
Virgil
30-SECOND TEXT
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Some of the earliest writing has survived for thousands of years in the
protected environments of Egyptian tombs.
SANSKRIT LITERATURE
Sanskrit literature was transmitted orally, and for centuries before being written down was
known as shruti or ‘what is heard’. Sanskrit writings began around 1500 BCE with the era
of the Vedic hymns, and its Classical era began around 500 BCE, overlapping the Vedic,
and ended around 1000 CE. The word Sanskrit means ‘perfected’ and was a linguistic
development of the Vedas, meaning knowledge. Sanskrit was the vehicle of expression for
the much debated Aryan people who are believed to have arrived in the Indian
subcontinent in 2000 BCE and gradually established themselves as the dominant cultural
force in the region. Almost all Sanskrit literature is in verse, with some in dialogue form,
beginning with the ten books of the Rig Veda Samhita (ca. 1200 BCE), the oldest Hindu
religious text composed of 1,028 hymns, some of which are still used today in ceremonies
such as weddings. Classical Sanskrit included a style of poetry known as kāvya, which was
popularized by writers such as Ashvaghosa, a Brahman philosopher and poet who wrote
the Buddhacarita, one of the most celebrated accounts of the life of the Buddha. Sanskrit
drama, which flourished around 400 CE, is founded on the works of the fifth-century poet
and dramatist Kālidāsa, who wrote a number of influential plays and poems that still
resonate across the world.
3-SECOND PLOT
Sanskrit literature refers to texts written in the Sanskrit language since the second millennium bce. It also
includes modern literature written in Sanskrit.
3-MINUTE THEME
Sanskrit is not generally spoken as a living language today, but is used by Hindu priests in religious
ceremonies and classified as one of the 22 official Indian languages. Modern Sanskrit writing is mainly
done as an academic exercise, though there are still some writers composing poems in Sanskrit. One of
the most famous modern Sanskrit authors is Satya Vrat Shastri who writes in various Sanskrit poetical
forms, including the Mahākāvya, similar to the epic poem.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
THE ORAL TRADITION
EARLY LITERATURE
RELIGIOUS TEXTS
PANCHATANTRA
ca. 300 BCE
SVAPNAVĀSAVADATTĀ
ca. third century CE
Bhãsa
UTTARARĀMACARITA
700–730 CE
Bhavabhūti
NAISHADHACARITA
1174 CE
Śrīharṣa
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Sanskrit verses are widely used in Hindu rituals, such as prayers from the Rig
Veda at dawn and dusk.
MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
Medieval literature is usually associated with religious texts at a time when the Church
dominated civic life, but the medieval period also saw the flourishing of profane literary
works, such as Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘The Miller’s Tale’ from The Canterbury Tales (ca.
1400), which is full of bawdy descriptions of sex. Nevertheless, across Europe,
individually produced Books of Hours – devotional works for prayer and the recitation of
psalms – highly illustrated and with full-page miniatures were widely owned among
wealthier households, though out of reach for the rural poor. Illustration had been a part of
literature since writing began but the medieval era was a time of lavish pictorial decoration.
Popular forms in medieval literature included: epic poems such as Beowulf (ca. 1000), the
oldest surviving work of Old English literature; religious and philosophical tracts such as
Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica (ca. 1274); or travel memoirs like Marco Polo’s
Book of the Marvels of the World (ca. 1300). Another popular form involved the
description of visions and dreams in the form of allegory, often told in the first person, such
as Pearl (late fourteenth century), a Middle English poem by the same man who composed
the chivalric romance Gawain and the Green Knight (late fourteenth century), whose story
is still retold by modern poets today.
3-SECOND PLOT
Medieval literature was that written from the fall of Rome in 476 CE to the late fifteenth century; it includes
both religious and secular writing.
3-MINUTE THEME
In medieval times, authorial ownership was considered less important than faithful rendition of the story.
Medieval authors were inclined to embellish classical stories with their own digressions and concoctions
rather than create something new. The border between fiction and non-fiction was far less guarded than
today; authors frequently declared historical accuracy, even if long passages of text were invented, as in
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain (1100–55).
RELATED TOPICS
See also
RELIGIOUS TEXTS
EPIC POEM
ALLEGORY
THE HERALD OF DIVINE LOVE
1289
Gertrude the Great
THE DIVINE COMEDY

1320
Dante Alighieri
THE LAND OF COCKAYGNE

ca. 1350
Anon
PIERS PLOWMAN
1365–90
William Langland
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Ella Berthoud
While religious texts were an important aspect of medieval literature, humour

and magic were also vital.
EARLY MODERN LITERATURE
Early modern literature covers the period between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, a
time during which the science and technology of Europe established both new ways of
understanding the material universe and the dominance of Europeans over increasingly
large swathes of the non-European world. With the printed book now an established fact,
the conditions existed for the emergence of popular narrative forms like the novel, which
first emerged in this period, as well as the fairytale, a new kind of didactic folktale
delivering salutary lessons for children, beginning with the tales of Charles Perrault
published in 1697. But perhaps the dominant form of literature throughout the era was the
stage play. Written for pure entertainment, this golden age of the theatre saw Shakespeare
and Marlowe in England; Molière, Racine and Corneille in France; and Pedro Calderón de
la Barca and Lope de Vega in Spain establish a body of plays that remain the core
repertoire of the modern theatre. Epic poetry such as John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667)
tackled both religious themes and social satire, while overtly satirical prose works, such as
Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), poked fun at other works or literary genres,
assuming that an increasingly literate public would get the joke.
3-SECOND PLOT
Early modern literature refers to European writing that coincided with the new scientific view of the world
that emerged between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.
3-MINUTE THEME
Although the term ‘early modern’ in literature relates mostly to developments in Europe, elsewhere in the
world writers experimented with different forms of love poetry. In Japan, Saikaku composed The Great
Mirror of Male Love (1687) comprising 40 short stories describing homosexual love; and when his beloved
wife died he composed a thousand-verse Hakai poem for her in just 12 hours. In Persia, Romantic verse
was also in the ascendant, frequently extolling the love of young men.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
THE BIRTH OF THE NOVEL
EPIC POEM
SATIRE
DR FAUSTUS
ca. 1589–92
Christopher Marlowe
TARTUFFE
1664
Molière
OROONOKO
1688
Aphra Behn
TALES AND STORIES OF THE PAST WITH MORALS

1695
Charles Perrault
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Despite the increasing spread of literacy, theatre was the most popular literary
form throughout this period.
MODERN LITERATURE
In late-eighteenth century Europe, the Sturm und Drang movement inspired Goethe to
write The Sorrows of Young Werther, which became a crucial influence on the Romantics.
In Britain, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, English Romantics such as William
Wordsworth and John Keats reacted to the mechanization of agriculture and the inhuman
conditions of the textile industry, as people moved away from the countryside into cities,
by memorializing the pastoral England being left behind and seeking a transcendental
alternative to the present. A more visionary approach was taken by William Blake, whose
prophetic poetry criticized slavery and child labour. Realism (and later Naturalism), which
emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, attempted to portray everyday life and rejected
Romanticism, beginning in France with Honoré de Balzac and Stendhal, and spreading
through Europe and America for the rest of the century and beyond through the work of
authors such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Émile Zola and Henry James. The realist
impulse in Russian literature gave rise to a new level of psychological depth in the novels,
plays and stories of Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov and Fyodor Dostoevsky, which in turn
provided the ground for the Modernist revolution that followed in the early twentieth
century.
3-SECOND PLOT
Modern literature refers to literature written from the late eighteenth century to the twenty-first. From
romanticism to realism to radicalism, modern literature has evolved dramatically.
3-MINUTE THEME
Children’s literature had not been a genre in its own right until the modern age, as fairytales were written
as much for adults as for children. It became a publishing phenomenon in the mid-nineteenth century
with the emergence of a new, more liberal attitude to childhood, an increase in the educated middle
classes, and the development of colour printing. John Newbury’s A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744) is now
widely considered the first modern children’s book.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
MODERNIST LITERATURE
REALISM
SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND OF EXPERIENCE
1794
William Blake
DEAD SOULS
1842
Nikolay Gogol
JANE EYRE
1847
Charlotte Brontë
THE HOUSE OF MIRTH

1905
Edith Wharton
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Ella Berthoud
William Wordsworth was a key voice in the Romantic movement, which

emerged during the Industrial Revolution.
HILDA DOOLITTLE
Born in 1886, Hilda Doolittle was a poet,

novelist and memoirist of the first half of the
twentieth century, who was largely forgotten
until the explosion of women’s poetry and
culture in the 1970s brought a new, avid
audience to her work.
She was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania,
her mother an artist and musician, and her
father an astronomer who disapproved of her
artistic aspirations. At fifteen, Hilda met Ezra
Pound and then William Carlos Williams; ten
years later, in 1911, she followed them to
Europe. In London, Pound worked with her on
her poetry, appending the word ‘Imagiste’ to
her work, a label that would stick with her for
the rest of her life. In the summer of 1912 she,
Pound and the poet Richard Aldington declared
themselves ‘the three Imagists’. Their
principles were to use no word that did not
contribute directly to the work; to directly treat
the ‘thing’, whether subjective or objective; and
‘to compose in the sequence of the musical
phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome’.
At first she swore never to marry and was openly bisexual, taking a series of lovers. But in 1913
she married Aldington and they moved to Cornwall, though they were later estranged. Her first
book, Sea Garden, was published in 1916. Three years later, Doolittle conceived a child, Perdita,
with Cecil Gray, a composer and friend of D.H. Lawrence, but by the time the child was born the
relationship had ended and Hilda had met Bryher, a female novelist from a wealthy family, who
became her lover, financial supporter and co-parent. Doolittle and Bryher travelled to Greece in
1919 where together they experienced profound shared hallucinations. Doolittle (or H.D., as she
became known) later spoke of what Bryher called the ‘jelly-fish’ experience of having a double
ego – she (Doolittle) felt she had a bell-jar or hemisphere of glass, like a diving bell, around her
head, with another appearing from her feet and encasing the first. This intense experience
formed the catalyst for H.D.’s Notes on Thought and Vision, now considered a classic of feminist
prose.
H.D. spent the rest of her life writing poetry, novels, and her greatest work, Helen in Egypt, a
uniquely personal account of Helen of Troy’s inner life during the aftermath of the Trojan War,
written in epic form and weaving the raw material of her own life into the bones of a cultural
myth. She died in 1961.
Ella Berthoud
10 September 1886
Born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
1911
Moves to London
1913
Marries Richard Aldington
1916–17
Literary editor of Egoist journal
1917
Becomes involved with D.H. Lawrence
1918
Moves in with Cecil Gray
ca. 1918
Becomes involved with Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman)
1919
Daughter Frances Perdita Aldington born
1921
Writes Paint it Today
(novel), not published until 1992
1921–22
Writes Asphodel (novel)
1926
Palimpsest (novel) published
1928
Hedylus (novel) published
1946
Moves to Switzerland after suffering a mental breakdown
1952–54
Helen in Egypt (poetry collection) published
1960
The Gift (memoir) published
1960
First woman to receive Poetry medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters
27 September 1961
Suffers a stroke in Zurich and dies
Modernist literature emerged from the horror of the First World War. A sense of despair,
loss and alienation from all that had gone before made discontinuity with the past the most
meaningful literary response to a present revealed to be godless, chaotic and brutal, with
Modernist writing characterized by disruptions to the integrity of character, place and time
that were the bedrock of nineteenth-century Realism. This feeling of abandonment,
confusion and uncertainty is perfectly portrayed in Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed
Youth’ (1917). Like Modernist novels of the period, the fragmented forms of Modernist
poems such as T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) reflected not only a loss of faith in
traditional belief systems but also a new understanding of the influence of the unconscious
mind on conscious actions, as examined in the work of Sigmund Freud. The new
psychological complexity was expressed in the stream-of-consciousness narratives of
William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930) and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925),
among other novels, as was a broken sense of historical continuity, with elements of
mythology and ancient literary history underpinning the structure and disturbing the
surface of those works of Joyce and Eliot, often through direct fragmentary quotations
from ancient text, like rents in the fabric of time.
3-SECOND PLOT
Modernist literature experiments with form – using stream of consciousness and fragmented narratives –
and critiquing its host culture’s traditional values, sometimes through a first-person narrator.
3-MINUTE THEME
Modernists Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound postulated in their Vorticist magazine Blast (1914) that there
is no such thing as absolute truth, that all things are relative and that the individual is sovereign. They
inferred that the world is created in the act of perceiving it, and that the individual’s view is paramount.
Hence narrative authority was now found in the voice of the protagonist rather than the illusory conceit of
an omniscient narrator.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
FREE VERSE
NARRATIVE VOICE
STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
THE CANTOS
1915–62
Ezra Pound
THE TRIAL
1925
Franz Kafka
TRILOGY: MOLLOY, MALONE DIES, THE UNNAMEBLE

1951–55
Samuel Beckett
BID ME TO LIVE
1960
Hilda Doolittle
30-SECOND TEXT
Ella Berthoud
After the monumental and pointless loss of life in the First World War, authors
turned to fragmented narratives.
POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE
Postcolonial literature is a term applied to work by non-European writers in continents

whose nations were once colonies of European empires, implying that these works have
been shaped primarily by the experience or historical legacy of colonialism. This is
certainly the case in novels by black African writers, such as Kenyan author Ngūgī wa
Thiong’o’s Devil on the Cross (1980), which investigates the social malaise inherited from
colonization and its concomitant capitalism, though the term applies equally to white,
settler writers in former colonies, such as J.M. Coetzee, whose novel Disgrace (1999)
explores the postcolonial trauma of a brutalized, post-apartheid South Africa. Like all such
labels, ‘postcolonial’ is both an historical fact – the narrator of Salman Rushdie’s magical-
realist novel Midnight’s Children (1981), for instance, is born at the moment of India’s
independence in 1947 – and an umbrella term that encompasses a huge variety of writers
and writing and a much wider frame of cultural reference than is implied by the term. St
Lucian writer Derek Walcott’s epic poem Omeros (1990), for example, retells Homer’s The
Iliad in a Caribbean setting, frequently using patois and Creole language, and appropriates
the ancient European story in a cultural echo of the original process of colonization itself.
3-SECOND PLOT
Postcolonial literature refers to literary works written since decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s by
writers from countries once colonized by former European empires.
3-MINUTE THEME
Colonial literature written by Europeans, such as Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’
(1899), often traded in crude racial attitudes – portraying the colonized as inferior to the colonizers – that
were vital to maintaining the illusion of the legitimacy of colonialism. Postcolonial literature gives the
colonized the voice denied to them, often in an amended version of the former colonial language, to
emphasize the message of self-determination to oppressor and oppressed alike.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
SHORT STORY
NARRATIVE VOICE
SATIRE
THINGS FALL APART
1958
Chinua Achebe
SEASON OF MIGRATION TO THE NORTH
1966
Tayeb Salih
A SMALL PLACE
1988
Jamaica Kincaid
A FINE BALANCE
1995
Rohinton Mistry
30-SECOND TEXT
Ella Berthoud
With the end of colonial rule, postcolonial writers could reclaim their histories
and create new futures.
THE NOVEL
THE NOVEL
GLOSSARY
bildungsroman Novels whose central focus is a protagonist’s psychological and moral

growth through youth and education into adulthood.
bodice ripper A sexually explicit romantic novel, a genre known today as erotic fiction.
flintlock A subgenre of fantasy fiction using the technology and aesthetic ideals of the
early Industrial Revolution. The term refers to the striking mechanism of a gun that uses a
flint in the hammer to strike a spark.
folklore Traditional stories and beliefs passed down by word of mouth, different in every
culture and in many cases dating back to preliterate times. Folklore is always particular to
the geographical region in which it is the local narrative tradition, its body of stories
referring to indigenous plants, rituals and customs as well as cultural figures.
grimdark Characterized by violent, dystopian and bleak subject matter, a subgenre of

fantasy fiction that sets out to disturb.
monologic/dialogic/polylogic Texts written in one voice are monologic; those in two

voices are dialogic; those in three or more voices are polylogic.
mytho-fantasy A genre combining mythological and fantastical themes, particularly

popular in India, but also significantly in Africa and China, and with many variations
worldwide.
mythology From the ancient Greek word mythos meaning speech, fiction, narrative or plot.
Mythology is a collection of stories and tales, often involving divine beings, from a single
culture or religion. Gods, demigods, humans with unusual powers and creation stories are
all typically part of a region’s mythology.
novella A narrative piece of prose fiction that is longer than a short story but shorter than a
novel, typically between 17,000 words and 40,000 words, deriving from the Italian word
novella (the feminine of novello), meaning ‘new’.
pansexual Those who are gender-blind and fall in love with people regardless of their sex
and sexuality.
progenitor An ancestor or parent, or a person who sets in motion an artistic, literary,

intellectual or other cultural movement.
pulp fiction Popular fiction written in the first half of the twentieth century for cheaply
produced periodicals known as ‘pulps’, as opposed to glossy magazines, known as ‘slicks’.
The word ‘pulp’ refers to the coarse wood pulp from which they were made. The term
came to be associated with the lurid subject matter of the stories, being either gory or
sexually explicit.
romance In popular fiction, romance novels are those based around love between men and
women. Generally this type of fiction is light and mass-market in tone.
Spanish Inquisition An organization within the Roman Catholic Church created to

discover and punish people whose religious beliefs differed from their own, characterized
by torture and extreme violence. In existence from 1478 to 1834, many of its victims were
executed.
speculative fiction Fiction in which the author looks to the future at possible directions in
which humanity might go. Potentially involving horror, fantasy, futurism and historical
overlaps, its key characteristic is in asking the question ‘What if?’
steampunk A subgenre of fantasy fiction that creates fantastical worlds with the attitudes,
settings and aesthetics of Victorian era Britain and technology inspired by nineteenth-
century steam-powered machinery.
Webtoons A type of digital comic published exclusively online, originating in South

Korea. These are now read on smartphones and as a result have reached an equal level of
readership with comics published offline in the same country; print sales have declined
while digital sales have increased.
zeitgeist The defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history, encapsulated in its
prevailing ideas, beliefs and mood.
Long fictional narratives describing human experiences on an intimate psychological basis,

the first works now regarded as novels emerged in Japan, with Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of
Genji (ca. 1010) and China, with novels such as Shi Nai’an’s Water Margin (fourteenth
century). The progenitors of the European novel included epic verse narratives, such as
Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (fourteenth century), and spiritual autobiographies,
such as that of Saint Teresa of Ávila (1565), with their intense focus on the inner life of the
narrator. Verse epics gradually gave way to prose as authors saw the benefits of combining
popular stories, previously written in verse, with serious histories, composed in prose, the
historical elements bringing an educational quality to what would otherwise be a mere
entertainment. Because of their length, novels were the first form of literature that allowed
space for in-depth character development, rather than simply being a record of their deeds.
The English word ‘novel’ derives from the Italian novella, meaning a short story about
‘something new’. At first there was some debate as to whether novels were the same as
romances; Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1615), frequently cited as the first modern novel, was
shaped by that debate.
3-SECOND PLOT
The earliest form to be concerned with the inner life of a character, the novel’s elastic length allows scope
for the character’s development over time.
3-MINUTE THEME
In the tenth century, ceramic movable characters developed in China for printing allowed for the
development of the novel in that region. In Europe it was not until 1450 that Johannes Gutenberg
developed movable individual letter blocks for roman script, allowing mass production of printed
material. Initially, large sheets of printed and folded paper, known as chapbooks, sold in millions across
Europe, but their popularity would later be eclipsed by the novel.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
EARLY LITERATURE
MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
EPIC POEM
THE GOLDEN ASS
ca. 150 CE
Lucius Apuleius
ROMANCE OF THE THREE KINGDOMS
fourteenth century
Luo Guanzhong
ROBINSON CRUSOE
1719
Daniel Defoe
TRISTRAM SHANDY
1759
Laurence Sterne
30-SECOND TEXT
Ella Berthoud
Gutenberg’s invention of movable type paved the way for novels like Robinson
Crusoe to be read globally.
EPISTOLARY NOVEL
A novel written in the form of letters allows for the expression of multiple intimate
viewpoints without interference from an authorial voice. One of the first kinds of novel, the
epistolary form emerged from the universal habit of writing letters, with Prison of Love
(ca. 1485) by Diego de San Pedro, in which a large number of letters create much of the
intensely romantic narrative, being the earliest-known example of the form. Epistolary
novels are of three basic types: monologic, where the letters are all from one person, such
as Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (2004); dialogic, with letters between two people, such as
Helene Hanff’s 84, Charing Cross Road (1970); and polylogic, with three or more letter-
writing characters, as in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). In the eighteenth century, the form
was lampooned for its heavy moralizing content, notably with Henry Fielding’s Shamela
(1741), a parody of Samuel Richardson’s widely read Pamela (1740), in which the narrator
is found scribbling letters under the most ridiculous circumstances; such mockery did not
diminish the popularity of similar novels of the time. More recently, authors have seized on
email, text and Post-it notes as rich new formats for epistolary exchange, as in Maria
Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette (2012).
3-SECOND PLOT
An epistolary novel is one in which the narrative is largely revealed in letters between two or more
characters or from one to another.
3-MINUTE THEME
Modern epistolary novels allow for unreliable narrators to share their intimate thoughts, leaving the
reader to guess who is telling the truth, as in Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin (2003); and to
show us the inner workings of a mind in a way that could not be revealed in linear and conventional
narrative, such as in Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead (2004).
RELATED TOPICS
See also
ROMANCE
NARRATIVE VOICE
THE COLOR PURPLE
1982
Alice Walker
BLACK BOX
1986
Amos Oz
THE HISTORIAN
2005
Elizabeth Kostova
THE WHITE TIGER

2008
Aravind Adiga
30-SECOND TEXT
Ella Berthoud
Fictionalized private thoughts addressed to others in letters have long been a

popular literary form with readers.
HISTORICAL NOVEL
As a rule, an historical novel should be set at least 50 years before it was written. The
world’s earliest literature was frequently based on historical episodes, having evolved from
oral histories of real and mythical events. Historical novels revel in their fidelity to details
of manners, social conditions and notable figures of the past. They have been popular since
the time of Sir Walter Scott and his Waverley novels (1814–24) and today include works
examining recent events which, though breaking the 50-year rule, are also regarded as
historical. Complete fidelity to real events is not always paramount; many historical novels
weave in fictional elements to complement the verifiable historical facts, attributing
imagined words and thoughts to characters who may or may not be historical figures, such
as the fictional Don Fabrizio in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard (1958),
through whose vivid inner life we view the Risorgimento of mid-nineteenth century Italy.
Another narrative tactic can be seen in Hilary Mantel’s novel Wolf Hall (2009), which
plunges us into the Tudor period through its use of the historic present tense, a storytelling
convention that lends a sense of immediacy. As with forward-looking fiction, for authors
writing historical fiction, the present is their cornerstone.
3-SECOND PLOT
Historical novels tell a tale from another era, bringing it to life for the present day.
3-MINUTE THEME
Children are often introduced to history via the historical novel, for instance, seventeenth-century France
in Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers (1844), the English Civil War in Frederick Marryat’s The
Children of the New Forest (1847) or the Nazi occupation of Denmark in Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars
(1989). By taking them back and revealing the lives of those who preceded us, children can develop
empathy with other times and cultures.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
NARRATIVE VOICE
THE ORAL TRADITION
WATER MARGIN
ca. 1589
Shi Nai’an
WAR AND PEACE

1869
Leo Tolstoy
THE RED TENT

1997
Anita Diamant
THE GLASS PALACE

2000
Amitav Ghosh
30-SECOND TEXT
Ella Berthoud
Works by Alexandre Dumas and Sir Walter Scott are still among the most
widely read historical novels.
SCIENCE FICTION
In science fiction more than any other genre, the author can be seen as a prophet, though in
1959 the classic American sci-fi writer Robert A. Heinlein described the form, more
modestly, as ‘Realistic speculation about possible future events’. Some authors insist the
genre should be firmly based in modern science and technology, while others, such as
Margaret Atwood suggest the term ‘speculative fiction’ is more appropriate. The Sumerian
Epic of Gilgamesh, written around 2100 BCE, could be regarded as the first work of science
fiction, with themes such as the search for immortality that are still common in sci-fi today.
The rise of the nineteenth-century novel coincided with great scientific leaps, giving
writers such as Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Begum Rokeya a chance to explore science,
politics and moral issues in full-length works. Sci-fi short stories, such as those of Philip K.
Dick, have also been popular, with some being turned into Hollywood films. Contemporary
science fiction is complex and multilayered, as in multi-volume sagas such as Quicksilver
(The Baroque Cycle) by Neal Stephenson (2003), while in Africa and India sci-fi writing is
closely connected with the popular subgenre of mytho-fantasy.
3-SECOND PLOT
Science fiction is a genre in which the author can predict and even influence the future.
3-MINUTE THEME
Science fiction has often been dismissed by the literary establishment as it is closely associated with pulp
fiction and low-budget movies. However, many of the greatest literary writers, from Mary Shelley to Kazuo
Ishiguro have written sci-fi, and some of the most challenging literary works come in this form, using the
dramatic potential of the future to ask fundamental questions about the human condition: where do we
come from, what are we and where are we going?
RELATED TOPICS
See also
UTOPIA/DYSTOPIA
FANTASY
SHORT STORY
WE
1920
Yevgeny Zamyatin
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY

1968
Arthur C. Clarke
ANT LIFE
2007
Wang Jinkang
ZOO CITY
2010
Lauren Beukes
30-SECOND TEXT
Ella Berthoud
In depicting the future, sci-fi writers extrapolate from the most modern
technology, though such stories can also date rapidly.
CRIME
In crime fiction authors explore the motives of criminals, their crimes and possible
retribution. Crime storytelling goes back to the Song Dynasty (960–1279) in China when
tales of government magistrates solving criminal cases were conveyed through oral
storytelling and puppetry. Though he may not have been the first, Edgar Allan Poe is
widely credited with creating detective fiction (a subgenre of crime) as it is known today,
through stories such as ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), featuring C. Auguste
Dupin, the first eccentric detective. In this character Poe combined the uncanny intellect of
the detective with a scientific detachment that became typical of fictional crime-solvers
thereafter, such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle is credited with
the remarkable popularity of ‘locked-room mysteries’, in which no perpetrator could
seemingly have left or entered the crime scene. This detective subgenre thrived from the
1840s to the 1950s through writers such as Agatha Christie and Akimitsu Takagi. Today,
crime subgenres like Scandi noir, such as Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy (2005–07),
courtroom dramas like Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent (1987) and forensic thrillers such
as Patricia Cornwell’s Body Farm (1994), have kept readers up all night with their doors
locked.
3-SECOND PLOT
A crime novel is one in which the laws of soceity are broken, the perpetrator is investigated and the crime
is explored.
3-MINUTE THEME
During the 1850s, translated versions of Poe’s short stories and their spin-offs were published cheaply in
Italy with yellow covers; these immensely popular works became known as libri gialli (yellow books). To
this day crime novels are called gialli in Italy. Gradually, an Italian elite emerged who subverted the genre,
deliberately leaving crimes unsolved and the reader hanging. Umberto Eco, Carlo Emilio Gadda and
Leonardo Sciascia were some of the greatest exponents of the genre.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
HORROR
FANTASY
PIETR LE LETTON
1931
Georges Simenon
DEAD WATER
1964
Ngaio Marsh
DEATH OF A RED HEROINE

2000
Qui Xiaolong
SACRED GAMES
2006
Vikram Chandra
30-SECOND TEXT
Ella Berthoud
Fingerprints and forensics are integral to many crime novels, as are wronged
innocents whose stories must be told.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
Dostoevsky has been described as the greatest

psychologist the world of literature has ever
known. He was born in 1821 in Moscow, where
he lived with his parents and siblings in the
grounds of a hospital for the poor. His
imagination was sparked by his nanny, Alena
Frolovna, who read him fairytales, Greek epics
and heroic tales by Cervantes and Sir Walter
Scott, as well as Russian classics.
When Fyodor was 15, his mother died of
tuberculosis and he was sent to a Military
Engineering Institute to prepare for a life in the
army. The young man’s bearing was markedly
unmilitary, and although he was brave he was
known mostly for his religious fervour, for
which he was given the nickname of Monk
Photius. He had always been aware of having what he called a ‘nervous condition’, which
revealed itself as epilepsy when his father died suddenly in 1839 and Fyodor had his first fit; the
novelist later described having more than one hundred such fits over his lifetime, and four
characters in his novels have epilepsy, Prince Myshkin in The Idiot (1868–69) being the most
powerfully drawn. Indeed, Dostoevsky’s descriptions of his seizures contributed to medical
understanding of the condition, with his particular ailment, known as ‘ecstatic epilepsy’, being
preceded by what he described as a happiness unimaginable to others – an experience quite
impossible in an ordinary state.
He published his first novel, Poor Folk, in 1845, to critical acclaim, though his next, The Double
(1846), was a failure at the time. He developed a gambling addiction, and fell in with a group of
intellectual socialists, the Petrashevsky Circle. In 1849 he was denounced for ‘anti-government’
activities, and was sentenced to death along with five other people. At the last minute he was
pardoned, but was sentenced instead to four years’ hard labour in Siberia, where he lived among
‘fleas, lice and black beetles’, with his hands and feet shackled. This experience formed the basis
for The House of the Dead (1861).
Soon after his release he married Maria Dimitrievna, a widow who later died in 1864. In 1867 he
married Anna Snitkina, with whom he lived in St Petersburg and had four children, two of whom
died very young. The Brothers Karamazov (1880), his final masterpiece, was published a year
before he died from a pulmonary haemorrhage. By then a towering figure in Russian letters, he
was mourned by thousands.
Ella Berthoud
11 November 1821
Born in Moscow, Russia
1837
Mother dies of tuberculosis
1839
Father dies
1845
First novel, Poor Folk, published
1846
The Double published
1849
Death sentence given and reprieved
1850
Sent to Siberian labour camp
1857
Marries Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva
1864
Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva dies; Notes from Underground published
1866
Crime and Punishment and The Gambler published
1867
Marries Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina and travels around Europe
1868–69
The Idiot published
1869
Daughter Lyubov born
1871-2
The Devils published
1871
Son Alexey born
1880
The Brothers Karamazov published
9 February 1881
Dies of a pulmonary haemorrhage in St. Petersburg
HORROR
Intended to shock, scare, frighten and repel, horror has its roots in many cultures; from the
vampire-like entity Emikku in ancient Sumerian literature, who inhabited the bodies of
those who had died violent deaths, giving us the seeds of vampirism, to the Spanish
Inquisition whose obsession with witchcraft gave rise to the first horror novels in European
literature, with themes of religious intolerance and ritual execution. Robert Louis
Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) explored the theme of the remorseless
psychopath at large in society; the book spawned a subgenre of horror (psychopathy) that
thrives to this day. Modern horror fiction often portrays a character suffering a personal
trauma or deteriorating mental health, as in Stephen King’s The Shining (1977), in which
an alcoholic descends into madness in an empty hotel. Strange houses and architectural
anomalies such as a home being larger on the inside than the outside or having a
bottomless basement provide fodder for stories such as Mark Danielewski’s House of
Leaves (2000) in which the house itself seems malevolent. The evil forces in horror fiction
are often metaphors for the fears of contemporary society in the same way as science
fiction explores our fears for the future.
3-SECOND PLOT
Horror novels tell gruesome, macabre and shocking tales that frighten and thrill, terrifying and reassuring
us at the same time.
3-MINUTE THEME
Contemporary horror novels explore themes that are common to films, such as malevolent forces that
lurk behind our digital screens. The novel Ring (1991), by Koji Suzuki, also a film, investigates a virus that
attacks viewers of a video, while Pulse (2001), by Kurosawa Kyoshi, has characters vanishing after meeting
ghosts on their computers. Friend Request (2017), by Laura Marshall, focuses on the evils of social media,
now a major theme in all literary genres.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
CRIME
FANTASY
GOTHIC
THE BLACK SPIDER
1842
Jeremias Gotthelf
‘THE CALL OF CTHULHU’
1926
H.P. Lovecraft
AMERICAN PSYCHO
1991
Brett Easton Ellis
MY SOUL TO KEEP
1997
Tananarive Due
30-SECOND TEXT
Ella Berthoud
Writers like Stephen King were too scared by their own stories to publish them
at first; readers beware!
UTOPIA/DYSTOPIA
Though utopian societies had been described before 1516 – for example, Plato’s Republic
(ca. 380 BCE) – the tradition of utopian fiction, which depicts a perfect society, began with
a single novel, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), from which the genre gets its name. In
More’s visionary book, property and food are equally distributed, there is a welfare state,
people learn agriculture and an essential trade, and there is no engagement with war.
Though often unrealistic and impractical – one person’s utopia is another’s dystopia –
utopias are nonetheless a means of exploring the possibility of fundamental social change,
as for example in Herland (1915) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which depicts a society run
by women. Dystopias, conversely, depict nightmare futures in which current social evils
are exaggerated to the extent that society is destroyed, in many cases leaving the
protagonist to fight for survival in a desolate country, as in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
(2006). In some dystopias, such as The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood, a
tyrannical leader segregates and oppresses sections of that society, creating a rigid
hierarchy maintained by violence. Common themes in dystopias include politics,
economics, family, feminism, religion, identity, violence, ecological destruction, science
and technology.
3-SECOND PLOT
Utopias are idealized places where everything is perfect. Dystopias are dehumanized societies, suggesting
the fate of our own if contemporary warnings go unheeded.
3-MINUTE THEME
The term ‘utopia’, as used by Sir Thomas More for the title of his 1516 novel, comes from the Greek
meaning ‘no place’, suggesting a non-existent society. The more recent, and homophonic, ‘eutopia’ comes
from the Greek for ‘good place’, denoting a positive society. Literary dystopias are more common,
however, perhaps showing that society’s fears for the future outweigh the prospect of any paradise we
might hope to see.
RELATED TOPIC
See also
SCIENCE FICTION
EREWHON
1872
Samuel Butler
NEWS FROM NOWHERE

1890
William Morris
SULTANA’S DREAM
1905
Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain
UTOPIA
2008
Ahmed Khaled Tawfik
THE POWER
2016
Naomi Alderman
BEFORE SHE SLEEPS

2018
Bina Shah
30-SECOND TEXT
Naomi Frisby
It is easier to imagine a bleak future than a bright one; hence the greater
number of dystopian stories.
FANTASY
Fantasy draws on folklore and mythology for inspiration. It allows readers to escape from
the everyday world into one where magic exists, while authors can explore a limitless
world of fairies, dragons and mythical creatures, where humans can fly, cheat death or
change form. Two Roman texts, Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 CE) and Apuleius’s The Golden
Ass (ca. 150 CE), in which humans change into animals and trees, have exerted a major
influence on the genre. Fantasy novels are often set in medieval times, a period which,
preceding industrialization and scientific discovery, affords imaginative licence for
dragons, witches and magic. It was one famous late Victorian medievalist, William Morris,
who created the modern genre with books like The Well at the World’s End (1896). In the
1920s, fantasy also entered the popular consciousness in the USA and Europe with
magazines such as Weird Tales, while in the mid-twentieth century J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle
Earth became a global phenomenon. Since then, fantasy literature – including subgenres
like grimdark, flintlock and steampunk – has morphed with the zeitgeist, reflecting the
social and moral concerns of our time; feminist fantasy is now popular in Europe, with
books like Madeleine Miller’s Circe (2018) retelling Greek myths from a female
perspective.
3-SECOND PLOT
In fantasy fiction the imaginary world can be completely invented, bearing no relation to the real world.
3-MINUTE THEME
Magic Realism is a close cousin of fantasy, with elements of magic seeping into real situations, though in
these instances the magic is a small element in an otherwise realistic world. The fantastical elements in
Magic Realism are often not regarded by the characters as anything unusual, but accepted
unquestioningly as part of life, as in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) when
Remedios the Beauty floats up to heaven.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
GRAPHIC NOVEL
YOUNG ADULT
THE WORM OUROBOROS
1922
E.R. Eddison
A GAME OF THRONES
1996
George R.R. Martin
PERDIDO STREET STATION

2000
China Miéville
THE NIGHT CIRCUS

2011
Erin Morgenstern
30-SECOND TEXT
Ella Berthoud
Fantasy comes from the Greek word meaning ‘the power of the imagination to
show or bring to light’.
ROMANCE
Romance is perhaps the oldest of the literary themes, with stories such as Daphnis and
Chloe dating back to the second century CE. But the romantic novel in its modern mass-
market form emerged in the 1930s when US publishing house Mills and Boon began to
create escapist, romantic fiction. Though far more sophisticated than these commercial
stories, the novels of Jane Austen, such as Pride and Prejudice (1813), are thought by
many to have sowed the seeds of the genre in Britain and beyond, but writers across
Europe, China and India were simultaneously writing similar tales. A romantic novel
describes the love of two people who, after various setbacks, come together. Once
exclusively heterosexual, the genre today more truthfully reflects society, with The
Doctor’s Discretion (2017) by E.E. Ottoman being a contemporary example of gay
romantic fiction. There are many subgenres catering to readers’ various romantic fantasies,
including the historical romance, such as those of Georgette Heyer, paranormal romance,
and the erotic, such as Kathleen Woodiwiss’s The Flame and the Flower (1972), the latter
genre having been disdainfully termed ‘bodice rippers’ by the literary establishment.
Characterized by sexual tension, desire and idealism, romantic books gratify the reader’s
deepest yearnings, not just for romance but for a happily-ever- after ending.
3-SECOND PLOT
A romantic novel depicts the course of romantic love between two people with an emotionally satisfying
and optimistic conclusion.
3-MINUTE THEME
Traditionally sexist and lacking in diversity, in the past, romantic novels tended to reinforce stereotypes,
supporting the view that women were the passive objects of men’s desire. But in recent years, romances
have brought in diverse characters – men and women of different races and sexual persuasions. Today a
thriving worldwide industry produces all kinds of romance, with empowered women taking their
romantic destiny and sexual agency into their own hands, challenging the very precepts of the genre.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
HISTORICAL NOVEL
LGBTQ+
THE BLACK MOTH
1921
Georgette Heyer
BRING ON THE BLESSINGS
2009
Beverly Jenkins
CAPTURING THE SILKEN THIEF

2012
Jeannie Lin
HATE TO WANT YOU

2017
Alisha Rai
30-SECOND TEXT
Ella Berthoud
Love in all its guises is the subject of the romantic novel.

GRAPHIC NOVEL
A graphic novel is usually made up of text and drawn images, though some, such as Shaun
Tan’s The Arrival (2006), tell a story with highly complex images but no words at all. The
term was first coined in 1964 by Richard Kyle, a bookseller and writer who later published
the first self-proclaimed graphic novel, George Metzger’s Beyond Time and Again (1976).
The term became widely accepted after Art Spiegelman’s Maus was published in 1986, as
this was perceived as a serious literary work in graphic novel form; and by 2001 graphic
novels had their own niche in bookshops. In the West the genre evolved from the first
comic novel, The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck (1837), by Rodolphe Töpffer, but
the tradition of stories told with pictures has existed since ancient Greek painters depicted
scenes from historical stories such as the Trojan War in horizontal narrative friezes on
vases. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was common for literary
novels to be illustrated – for example, Dickens’s novels were illustrated by George
Cruikshank. But the decisive influence on the form of the graphic novel itself was the
boom in American comics published by Marvel and DC Comics from the 1930s onwards.
3-SECOND PLOT
A graphic novel is a book, either fiction or non-fiction, using pictures and words in an extended narrative.
3-MINUTE THEME
Manga is a style of Japanese comic book and graphic novel originating from scrolls dating back to the
twelfth century, reading from right to left. In 1814, the woodcut artist Katsushika Hokusai coined the term
‘manga’ (translated as ‘pictures running wild’) which evolved from single- to multi-panel comics. Today,
manga graphic novels are read worldwide and have evolved into Webtoons in South Korea – visual novels
read in a continuous vertical stream online.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
SCIENCE FICTION
FANTASY
YOUNG ADULT
PERSEPOLIS
2000
Marjane Satrapi
FUN HOME
2006
Alison Bechdel
AMERICAN BORN CHINESE

2006
Gene Luen Yang
THE ARAB OF THE FUTURE

2015
Riad Sattouf
30-SECOND TEXT
Ella Berthoud
Graphic novels have increasingly found a place in mainstream bookshops over

the past 20 years.
YOUNG ADULT
The literary term ‘Young Adult’ was first created when S.E. Hinton wrote The Outsiders
(1967), a novel she began when she was 15 years old. When it was published three years
later, it was clear that the novel’s readers were mostly her own age. Publishers realized that
this group, aged 12 to 18, had their own preoccupations, and authors began to write for
them, sometimes with ‘problem novels’ depicting extreme situations, like drug addiction,
as a way to hook their interest. They placed a protagonist in their teens at the centre of the
story, using changes in circumstance and character to drive the plot. Authors like Judy
Blume realized that a large audience of young people was keen to read about taboo
subjects, such as sex and menstruation, which she addressed unflinchingly in titles like
Forever (1975) and Are You There God? It’s me, Margaret (1970). Among other topics the
genre explores are sexuality, first love, friendship, identity, mortality, eating disorders and
suicide. The demographic has also expanded, with adults increasingly keen readers of YA
fiction, in the case of cult hits such as the Harry Potter, Twilight and Hunger Games series,
while in recent decades YA fiction has become popular in Africa, India and China.
3-SECOND PLOT
Young Adult novels have an adolescent protagonist who faces challenges and, mostly, emerges from the
story a different, better person.
3-MINUTE THEME
The YA novel is not to be confused with the Coming-of-Age novel or Bildungsroman, which is about the
transition between childhood and adulthood, and is written primarily for adults. This stage of life
(becoming an adult) is particularly agonizing, illuminating and intense, and has thus inspired some of the
most rewarding fiction of all time, from Le Grand Meaulnes (1913) by Alain-Fournier to The Color Purple
(1982) by Alice Walker.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
FANTASY
GRAPHIC NOVEL
LGBTQ+
HOMECOMING
1981
Cynthia Voight
SOMEWHERE IN THE DARKNESS

1992
Walter Dean Myers
FACES IN THE WATER

2010
Ranjit Lal
THE HATE U GIVE

2017
Angie Thomas
30-SECOND TEXT
Ella Berthoud
This age group has a powerful voice in society; many authors now write stories
echoing their concerns.
LGBTQ+
Same-sex love has been celebrated in literature since the lesbian poetry of the enigmatic
Greek writer Sappho in the sixth century BCE, and later works like Petronius’ The
Satyricon (first century CE), among the earliest works of fiction to describe homosexual
love. But the tolerance of the ancient world was followed by many centuries of silence
during which homosexuality was taboo in most societies. In the nineteenth century, lesbian
writer Wu Tsao celebrated her love of women in songs that were sung all over China, but in
Europe queer literature – such as the erotic diaries of lesbian landowner Anne Lister – was
suppressed. During the Age of Enlightenment, authors used allusions to Classical Greece
and Rome as code for gay love, compelled by law to write allusively rather than explicitly
on the subject. Then the decriminalization of homosexuality across Europe and America in
the second half of the twentieth century led to an explosion of gay and lesbian writing. In
many countries, LGBTQ+ literature is still banned, despite books like Jamaican writer
Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014) and Iranian-American Abdi
Nazemian’s The Walk-in Closet (2014) holding out hope that one day this may change.
3-SECOND PLOT
LGBTQ+ literature celebrates lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, gender non-conforming, pansexual,
questioning, intersex, asexual or queer characters.
3-MINUTE THEME
One of the fastest-growing areas of LGBTQ+ fiction is Young Adult. Teens discover their sexuality and
identity at this age; where better to find role models and self-recognition than in novels and short stories?
Since I’ll Get There. It Better be Worth the Trip by John Donovan (1969) and Nancy Garden’s Annie on My
Mind (1982), YA novels have explored themes from transgender identity to bisexuality, asexuality and
pansexuality with increasing mainstream success.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
ROMANCE
YOUNG ADULT
DIARY
A YEAR IN ARCADIA: KYLLENION
1805
Augustus, Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg
FLOWER TALES
1916–24
Nobuko Yoshiya
THE PRICE OF SALT

1952
Patricia Highsmith
30-SECOND TEXT
Ella Berthoud
From Sappho to Stein to Armistead Maupin, the rainbow of sexual identities

has a long history in literature.
LITERARY PROSE
LITERARY PROSE
GLOSSARY
auto-fiction Meaning fictionalized autobiography, the term was first coined by Serge
Doubrovsky with reference to his novel Fils (1977). The form involves an autobiography
of the author interwoven with fictionalized elements. This concept in writing has become
increasingly popular in recent years with novel series such as Edward St Aubyn’s Melrose
books (1994–2012) and Karl Ove Knausgård’s multi-volume My Struggle (2009–11).
autonomous A person or character having the freedom to govern themselves and their own
affairs.
dissident A person who opposes, protests or challenges official policy, especially in an

authoritarian state.
existential Existentialism is a system of ideas encapsulated and named by Jean Paul Sartre
in the 1940s, in which he postulated that the world has no meaning, with each person
entirely alone, responsible for both their actions and their fate. Sartre’s novel Nausea
(1938) is held up as a narrative manifesto of the movement.
fable A short story in verse or prose featuring animals, plants, mythical creatures or
inanimate objects that are anthropomorphized in order to illustrate moral lessons.
flash fiction A very short story of 1,000 words or less.
framed tale This is a story within a story, with the framing story holding other stories
within it, as in Boccaccio’s Decameron, a fourteenth-century collection of novellas in
which a group of young aristocrats fleeing the Black Death spend their time telling stories
as they move through the countryside – the framing story in this case being the tale of their
escape.
microfiction A subset of flash fiction – typically 300 words or less and sometimes as little
as a handful of words.
philosophical novel Works of fiction in which a significant proportion of the novel is

devoted to questions about the nature of existence and the purpose of life.
short-short fiction In the 1920s, flash fiction was referred to as short-short fiction and
postcard fiction; the term denoted any story shorter than 1,000 words. Extremely short
stories come in a bewildering array of narrowly defined categories, including the six-word
story; the 280-character story designed for Twitter-length tweets, also known as
‘twitterature’; the ‘dribble’ at 50 words, also known as the ‘minisaga’; and the ‘drabble’ at
100 words, also known as ‘microfiction’. So-called ‘sudden fiction’ is around 750 words,
with flash fiction a little longer at 1,000 words.
travel diary A daily or regular commentary on places visited, events experienced and
people encountered while travelling.
Übermensch The Superman, a superior man whose existence justifies that of the human
race. The concept was defined by Friedrich Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–
91), who explained that the Übermensch would be effectively his own god, with a self-
determined scope for action that would supersede existing moral codes.
SHORT STORY
A fictional prose narrative that’s longer than a couple of pages, but recognizably shorter
than a novel (or, indeed, a novella), the short story is brief, concise and self-contained,
usually falling between 1,000 and 15,000 words. While its precursors include both the
fable and the ‘framed tale’, the short stand-alone story as we know it rose to prominence
across Europe, the USA and beyond during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in
part due to the spread of print periodicals and newspapers, with Russia’s Anton Chekhov,
India’s Rabindranath Tagore and New Zealand’s Katherine Mansfield all enjoying popular
and critical acclaim. This increase in popularity continued into the mid- twentieth century,
thanks to the rise of US university writing programmes and the widespread circulation of
literary journals like The New Yorker (as well as popular publications like Playboy). It’s not
all about distribution, though: in 1962, Ireland’s Frank O’Connor argued that the form
enjoys success because its heroes are typically not traditionally heroic, but odd, lonely,
mediocre people, and that its attraction to readers lies in its particular ability to express ‘an
intense awareness of human loneliness’ – all of which is evident in both Flannery
O’Connor’s Hulga (‘Good Country People’, 1955) and J.D. Salinger’s Seymour Glass (‘A
Perfect Day for Bananafish’, 1948).
3-SECOND PLOT
The short story is an autonomous prose narrative that clocks in, typically, at a length somewhere
between 1,000 and 15,000 words.
3-MINUTE THEME
If short stories can appear somewhat condensed, given that they must convey an entire narrative in a
matter of pages, they’re positively extensive compared to their abbreviated cousin: flash fiction (aka
microfiction or short-short fiction). Flash, at typically less than 1,000 words and an increasingly popular
online form, occupies the disputed territory between prose poem and short story; among its most
celebrated recent practitioners are American writer Lydia Davis and Egyptian Nobel winner, Naguib
Mahfouz.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
MODERN LITERATURE
SCIENCE FICTION
HORROR
A SPORTSMAN’S SKETCHES
1852
Ivan Turgenev
‘THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA’

1933
Franz Kafka
KRIK? KRAK!
1996
Edwidge Danticat
RUNAWAY
2004
Alice Munro
30-SECOND TEXT
Valerie O’Riordan
Rabindranath Tagore was a master of lyrical prose, who with great wisdom
captured the social panorama of Bengali life.
DIARY
Derived from the Latin diarium, meaning ‘daily allowance’, the diary is a durational
narrative telling what happened within a specific time frame; a record of events,
transactions or observations. Usually private, not necessarily written to be published, the
diary form allows its author to explore themselves intimately and reflect frankly upon their
life and times. Among the most well-known historical examples is The Diary of Anne
Frank. Travel diaries, such as that of nineteenth-century Swiss explorer Isabelle Eberhart,
are a common form of this most quotidian of genres. Much of Charles Darwin’s research
into the flora and fauna of the Galapagos Islands in 1835 was reflected upon in his travel
diary. The published diary, when it contains confessional or confidential material, may
shock the reader, like those of literary diarist Anaïs Nin and poet Lord Byron. Writers may
publish their diaries to expose concealed truths or otherwise to account for themselves,
provoking or generating empathy in their readers. With the internet came a democratization
of personal narrative; in the late 1990s, Open Diary and LiveJournal emerged as web-based
opportunities for self-publishing diaries, soon to be overtaken by blogging and social
media such as Instagram and Facebook, both popular contemporary forms of diaristic
narrative.
3-SECOND PLOT
Diary is a form of literary prose that organizes memories and experiences into a durational narrative of
the self, not usually intended to be published.
3-MINUTE THEME
Published diaries inspire curiosity in a readership desiring greater intimacy with public figures, celebrities
and creatives. Diaries from someone’s formative years can also provide fresh insight into historical players
and events, such as dissident icon Che Guevara and Benjamin Franklin Bache, a figure of revolutionary
and early America. Alexander Berkman’s The Bolshevik Myth was a reflection of the Russian Revolution
and its aftermath by a US anarchist revolutionary deported to Russia in 1917.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
EPISTOLARY NOVEL
AUTOBIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
THE DIARY OF SAMUEL PEPYS
1825
Samuel Pepys
THE SECRET DIARIES OF MISS ANNE LISTER (1791–1840)

1988
Anne Lister
THE DIARY OF FRIDA KAHLO

2006
Frida Kahlo
REBORN: JOURNALS AND NOTEBOOKS, 1947–63

2009
Susan Sontag
OCCUPATION DIARIES
2012
Raja Shehadeh
30-SECOND TEXT
Lauren de Sá Naylor
The diaries of both the famous and the obscure have always fascinated
readers.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
An autobiography is a written account of the author’s own life, intended to be understood

as non-fiction. The reader is provided with a series of real events, as well as insight into
how these events affected the writer intellectually and emotionally. A related, but distinct,
category is the memoir, which recalls a specific part of the writer’s life: their childhood, for
instance, or their career in politics. Politicians often write autobiographies and memoirs,
either to promote their beliefs, as in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925), or in an attempt to
manage their legacy, as in Margaret Thatcher’s The Downing Street Years (1993). Neither
genre should be confused with autobiographical fiction, which, though made up, draws
heavily on the author’s lived experience and features a protagonist modelled after them;
examples include Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850) and Gertrude Stein’s The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). Autobiography and memoir have a long history,
from Josephi Vita (ca. 99 CE), by the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, to Walden
(1854), Henry David Thoreau’s meditation on humanity and the natural world. Today,
celebrity autobiography is among the most consistently popular and widely accessible
forms of literature, though many are ghostwritten by another author.
3-SECOND PLOT
Literature that gives you the honest facts (depending on how honest the author is willing to be).
3-MINUTE THEME
In addition to autobiography and autobiographical fiction, there is also auto-fiction. This seemingly
paradoxical form blends autobiography and fiction, presenting a fictional first-person narrative by a
narrator with the same name as the author (for example, Catherine Millet’s 2001 memoir, The Sexual Life
of Catherine M.) Notable practitioners of the form include Karl Ove Knausgård, Hitomi Kanehara and
Charu Nivedita.
RELATED TOPIC
See also
DIARY
THE BOOK OF MARGERY KEMPE
ca. 1420
Margery Kempe
NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, AN AMERICAN SLAVE

1845
Frederick Douglass
MOAB IS MY WASHPOT
1997
Stephen Fry
READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN

2003
Azar Nafisi
THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING

2005
Joan Didion
30-SECOND TEXT
Lucien Young
Henry David Thoreau’s memoir of living in nature has inspired imitators of its
lifestyle and literary style.
CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is considered one

of the most vital and original writers of her
generation, and is now known as much for her
hugely influential TED talks and non-fiction as
for her novels. She was born one of six children
in Enugu, Nigeria, to Igbo parents. She lived
with her family in the house where the great
Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe once resided,
while her father worked as a professor of
statistics at the University of Nigeria.
Chimamanda studied medicine and pharmacy
there, and edited a magazine for medical
students called The Compass as a student.
She emigrated to the United States when
she was 19, and studied communication and
political science, eventually at Eastern
Connecticut State University. During her senior year she began working on her first novel, Purple
Hibiscus, which was published when she was only 26. She subsequently received an MA in African
Studies from Yale University, and has since gone on to teach creative writing in Nigeria and the
States, while continuing to write novels and short stories, and give public talks.
Her TED Talk ‘The Danger of a Single Story’ (2009) has been viewed by nearly 18 million
people; a subsequent speech at TEDx Euston, London in 2012, ‘We Should All Be Feminists’, has
also provoked fierce debate around the world. When this speech was sampled into a Beyoncé
song, ‘Flawless’, her views went global. The talk became so popular that it was adapted and
published as an essay by Fourth Estate in 2014. The Swedish Women’s Lobby pledged to give the
book to every 16-year-old in Sweden, as a springboard for debate about equality between the
sexes.
Her political statements are mirrored in her novels and essays, such as in her book Dear
Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions (2014), written initially as a letter to a
friend on how to raise her daughter as a feminist, outlining ideas about the roles of men and
women and the preconceptions that must be smashed in order to achieve fairness between the
sexes. Adichie’s novels are characterized by a deep love of Nigeria, which is the bedrock of the
narrative in Purple Hibiscus (2003) and Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). Americanah (2013) moves from
Nigeria to America and reflects upon the hopes and dreams of immigrants. Adichie continues to
teach, write and inspire globally.
Ella Berthoud
15 September 1977
Born in Nigeria
1995
Studies Medicine at the University of Nigeria
1996
Emigrates to USA to study Communications and Political Science at Drexel University,
Philadelphia, then Eastern Connecticut State University
2003
Creative Writing Master’s Degree at John Hopkins University
2003
Purple Hibiscus published and receives Commonwealth Writer’s Prize
2006
Half of a Yellow Sun published
2008
Awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant
2008
Master of Arts Degree in African Studies at Yale University
2009
TED Talk: ‘The Dangers of a Single Story’
2009
The Thing Around Your Neck published
2012
TED Talk: ‘We Should All Be Feminists’
2013
Americanah published
2014
We Should All Be Feminists published in book form
2017
Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions published
PHILOSOPHICAL WORKS
Derived from the Greek philosophia, meaning ‘love of knowledge’, philosophy is the
source of some of the oldest and most influential world literature. In the past, the term was
more generally applied to describe areas of intellectual endeavour that are now considered
discrete fields of study. For instance, Isaac Newton’s 1687 Mathematical Principles of
Natural Philosophy concerns what we would now call physics. Today, philosophy is
understood as an enquiry into the nature of knowledge, reality and existence. Philosophical
works have played a huge role in shaping human thought, from Plato’s The Republic (ca.
380 BCE) in the West, to Al-Ghazali’s The Revival of the Religious Sciences (twelfth
century BCE) in the Middle East. The writings of Confucius permeate Chinese culture,
while those of Karl Marx provided the basis for communism. The work of philosophers
Gautama Buddha and Guru Nanak became the foundations of major world religions
(Buddhism and Sikhism, respectively). All narrative fiction touches on philosophical
themes, but some major works are primarily about them. Friedrich Nietzsche’s
philosophical novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–91) propounds many of his theories,
including the concept of the Übermensch.
3-SECOND PLOT
Literature that grapples with the biggest and most fundamental questions in life. Who are we? How
should we behave? Is anything real?
3-MINUTE THEME
As systems of thought concerned with meaning and the nature of existence, philosophy and religion are
inextricably linked. The distinction between philosophy and theology is a relatively recent one, with
‘philosophy of religion’ becoming a field of study in the West during the nineteenth century. It investigates
religion and religious ideas from a philosophically neutral standpoint, as opposed to theology, which
proceeds from religious convictions.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
EARLY LITERATURE
RELIGIOUS TEXTS
SUMMA THEOLOGIAE
1265–74
St Thomas Aquinas
THE SOCIAL CONTRACT

1762
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON

1781
Immanuel Kant
ON LIBERTY
1859
John Stuart Mill
THE SECOND SEX

1949
Simone de Beauvoir
30-SECOND TEXT
Lucien Young
From Plato to Proust, literature is often a vehicle for philosophical ideas.

RELIGIOUS TEXTS
While a vast amount of literature is concerned with religion and the divine, only a few such
texts have become central to a religious tradition. These sacred texts serve a variety of
functions, from telling worshippers how to live a good life, to providing passages for
recitation during ceremonies and rituals. They may, as in the Bible or the Qur’an, present
narratives that explain the origins and destiny of humankind. Others, such as the Hindu
Upanishads or Buddhist Sutras, are less narrative- based but focus more on the philosophy
of that religion. Today, religious texts are more widely read and more influential than any
other form of literature. The Gutenberg Bible was the first book printed using movable
type, while the King James Version had an incalculable impact on the English language,
both written and spoken. Many common idioms derive from it, including ‘a fly in the
ointment’ and ‘to put words in (one’s) mouth’. Indeed, with the vast majority of writers in
the West, until very recently, being steeped in Biblical language from childhood, the
themes, stories and phrasing of the Bible can be found throughout the Western canon, from
Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) to Goethe’s Faust (1790) to Melville’s Moby Dick (1851).
3-SECOND PLOT
Texts to live your life by, whose instruction and insight into the human condition are fundamental to their
given faith.
3-MINUTE THEME
Naturally, authorship is a key issue in religious literature. Sacred texts are often held by those in the faith
to have been divinely revealed or inspired. Muslims believe that the Qur’an was orally conveyed by Allah
to the final prophet, Muhammad, through the archangel Gabriel (Jibril in Arabic). In Judaism, the Talmud
asserts that the Torah was written by Moses, except for the last eight verses of Deuteronomy, which
describe his death and burial.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
EARLY LITERATURE
MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
PHILOSOPHICAL WORKS
THE RIG VEDA
ca. 1500-1200 BCE
BODHICARYĀVATĀRA
ca. 700 CE
Shantideva
REVELATIONS OF DIVINE LOVE

late fourteenth century; published 1670
Julian of Norwich
30-SECOND TEXT
Lucien Young
At one time, almost every household had some form of religious literature,
texts that accompanied them through life.
POETRY
POETRY
GLOSSARY
Anon An abbreviation of anonymous. Used when a poet or writer is unknown, wishes to

remain unknown, or whose identity has been lost.
apostrophe A figure of speech in poetry in which the poet addresses a person or divine
being they are thinking of.
bibliomancy The art of telling fortunes by opening a special book at a random spot and
taking its meaning as significant.
cadence From the Latin cadentia, meaning ‘a falling’, cadence is the term that describes
the rhythmical effect in a written text.
Elizabethan era The period in English history of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (r.1558–
1603).
heroic couplet A pair of rhyming iambic pentameters. They were called heroic because
they appeared traditionally in long, epic poems that featured a hero. The couplets are self-
contained as a grammatical unit. Here is an example from John Dryden’s translation of
Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’ “Soon had their hosts in bloody battle join’d; But westward to the sea the
sun declin’d.”
Horatian ode A short lyric poem written in the manner of the Roman poet Horace from
the first century bce, composed in stanzas of two or four lines.
iambic pentameter A variety of metre which uses a line of verse with five metrical feet, in
which each foot has one short unstressed syllable followed by a long, stressed syllable. A
foot is a unit of verse that combines one stressed and at least one unstressed syllable, which
is then repeated in order to establish a metre (or rhythm). The most common metrical feet
in English poetry are the iamb (weak syllable followed by strong syllable e.g. guitar), the
trochee (strong syllable followed by weak syllable, e.g. hammer), the anapest (two weak
syllables followed by one strong e.g. understand) and dactyl (one strong syllable followed
by two weak, e.g. merrily)
instapoet A poet who uses Instagram as their main platform for publishing their verse,
often amassing huge numbers of followers.
kuhi Poem monuments in Japan, where haiku are carved into stone and placed around a
town to give inspiration, joy and reflection to passers-by.
libertine A person who freely indulges in sensual pleasures.
lyric poem A style of poem originally written to be accompanied by a musical instrument.

metre A syllabic pattern in verse, in which stressed and unstressed syllables are
deliberately weighted for effect. This provides the rhythm of the poetry.
register The register of a piece of writing refers to its level of formality.
renga A genre of Japanese collaborative poetry, written by more than one poet, and
consisting of at least two ku, or stanzas.
Restoration The historical period in Britain from 1660 to 1689, during which the
monarchy was restored, after the execution of King Charles I in 1649 and the subsequent
government of Britain by Parliament under the puritan Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell.
rhetorical devices Concerned with the art of rhetoric – impressive or persuasive speaking.
Rhetorical devices include repetition, hyperbole, metaphor and simile.
rhyme scheme A rhyme scheme is a method that poets use to give structure to their verse.
The last word of each line will rhyme either with the next line or one further down. So
ABAB means that the first and the third lines rhyme, as well as the second and fourth,
while ABBA would mean that the first and fourth lines rhyme, as do the second and third.
Romanticism A movement in literature that originated in Europe in the late eighteenth

century, which placed the individual at the heart of the work and emphasized imagination,
our connection with nature, and the overarching importance of emotion as paramount
literary qualities.
stanza A division in poetry of four or more lines which have a linking structural device
such as a fixed length, metre or rhyming scheme.
Tudor Court Referring to the innermost circle of the English royal court at the time of the
Tudor monarchs (1485–1063).
volta In a sonnet, the volta is the turning point of the poem where a section of the poem
‘answers’ the questions posed in the preceding ones – occurring in Shakespearean sonnets
before the final couplet and in Petrarchan or Italian sonnets between the octave (the first
eight lines) and the sestet (the last six lines).
EPIC POEM
In the beginning, there was the epic. These ultra-long narrative poems were first composed
by bards in preliterate societies, then passed down through the oral tradition. Using metre,
rhyme and rhetorical devices, bards were able to memorize vast amounts of information.
The oldest example recognized is the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh (ca. 2500–1400 BCE).
Centuries later, the ancient Greek Iliad and Odyssey, attributed to the poet Homer, laid the
foundations of Western literature. The epic would continue to flourish in written form,
from ancient Rome (Virgil’s Aeneid), to medieval Germany (the Nibelungenlied), and
Restoration England (William Davenant’s Gondibert). Epics generally focus on legendary
figures, who change the world through heroic actions and will often come into contact or
conflict with the supernatural (the Olympian Gods in the Iliad, Beowulf’s Grendel). The
epic dramatizes the creation of the context in which the poet and their audience exist, thus
helping them to better understand it. Not all epics are so serious: Lord Byron adapted the
form for Don Juan, a witty account of the famed libertine, which he described as an ‘epic
satire’. Epics are rarely composed in the modern day, though the contemporary Hindu
religious leader Jagadguru Rambhadracharya has written several in Sanskrit.
3-SECOND PLOT
Great in both length and scope, the epic tells a tale of the origins of the audience for whom it was written.
3-MINUTE THEME
The origin of the epic in the oral tradition poses questions about who wrote its earliest examples. Were
the Iliad and the Odyssey written by a single genius called Homer? Or are they the result of many bards
telling and retelling the stories, tweaking, refining and misremembering as they went? Many scholars
believe that ‘Homer’ is better understood as a catch-all term for a whole tradition.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
THE ORAL TRADITION
EARLY LITERATURE
SANSKRIT LITERATURE
METAMORPHOSES
8 CE
Ovid
Aurora Leigh
1856
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Sribhargavaraghaviyam
2002
Jagadguru Rambhadracharya
30-SECOND TEXT
Lucien Young
The epic form has been adapted by poets of many cultures, from Homer to
Byron to Walcott.
FREE VERSE
When you think of modern poetry, you’re probably thinking of free verse. Traditional
poetry, with its strict metrical rules and rhyming patterns, may be described as closed-form.
Free verse, on the other hand, is open-form: it allows the poet to determine factors like
syllable count and stanza length themselves, rather than having them imposed externally.
When a writer of free verse reaches a line break, it’s because they chose to put it there.
Historical precursors of the form include vers libre, an innovation of nineteenth-century
France, in which Symbolist poets like Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Laforgue relaxed the rules
of metre and rhyme. American free verse seems heavily influenced by the cadencing of the
Hebrew Psalms, and Walt Whitman’s long, irregular lines in Leaves of Grass echo the
rhythm and emphatic repetition of the King James Bible. In the early twentieth century,
modernist poets such as Ezra Pound and Marianne Moore alighted on free verse as a means
to express themselves succinctly and directly. Since then, free verse has been the dominant
form of published poetry. It is the form favoured by modern ‘Instapoets’, such as Rupi
Kaur, who have found huge audiences through sharing their verses on social media.
3-SECOND PLOT
Free verse is poetry without all the rules. The poet can use the cadences of natural speech, unconstrained
by metre or rhyme scheme.
3-MINUTE THEME
Is free verse really free? William Carlos Williams argues: ‘Being an art form, verse cannot be free in the
sense of having no limitations or guiding principles.’ It would be wrong to say that free verse doesn’t
follow any rules or conventions: take, for instance, its use of the poetic line. It can also be given structure
through repetition of phrases, images and internal patterns of sound.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
MODERN LITERATURE
POSTMODERNISM
‘THIS IS JUST TO SAY’
1934
William Carlos Williams
‘THIS IS MY NAME’
1970
Adonis
‘FLYING’
1971
Chinua Achebe
‘CHINATOWN DIPTYCH’
2018
Jenny Xie
30-SECOND TEXT
Lucien Young
Walt Whitman is known as ‘the father of free verse’; he revised his anthology
Leaves of Grass multiple times throughout his life.
SONNET
The sonnet was invented in thirteenth-century Italy, most likely developed from a type of
folk song (the word itself comes from the Italian sonetto, or ‘little song’). The greatest
early sonneteer was Petrarch, whose verses were written in iambic pentameter and
followed a rhyme scheme of ABBAABBA CDCDCD. As such, the Italian form is known
as the Petrarchan sonnet. During the sixteenth century, the sonnet was transplanted to
England by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard. Rhymes being less common in English,
the structure was adjusted to require fewer of them: the English (or Shakespearean) sonnet
goes ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. This version became immensely popular at the Tudor
Court, its formal constraints enabling poets to showcase their skills. The Elizabethan era
saw the creation of long sonnet ‘cycles’, such as Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella
and, most famously, Shakespeare’s. The English sonnet declined around the time of the
Restoration, but reemerged in the Romantic era and then the twentieth century, when many
examples were written worldwide. Modern poets often engage in sonnetry, playing with its
formal constraints and cultural cachet. Patience Agbabi, a British poet of Nigerian descent,
uses the form to explore sexuality, transnational identity and attitudes to the literary past.
3-SECOND PLOT
Fourteen lines of iambic pentameter in a strict rhyme scheme. Except when it’s not.
3-MINUTE THEME
A sonnet can be thought of as an argument in poetic form. The poet establishes their ‘problem’ in the
octet (first eight lines) and solves it during the sextet (the remaining six). Frequently, there is a twist or
change in tone after the eighth line. This is known as the volta (‘turn’) and marks the shift from
proposition to resolution. In Shakespearean sonnets, the heroic couplet (GG) enhances a sense of closure.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
BALLAD
‘SONNET 18’
1609
William Shakespeare
‘OZYMANDIAS’
1818
Percy Bysshe Shelley
‘REMEMBER’
1862
Christina Rossetti
‘I, BEING BORN A WOMAN AND DISTRESSED’

1923
Edna St Vincent Millay
30-SECOND TEXT
Lucien Young
Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets, published together in 1609, as well as six that
appear in his plays.
ODE
Dignified, rarefied and sincere, odes often address their subject directly (‘Hail to thee,
blithe Spirit!’). This is known as apostrophe and is not to be confused with the punctuation
mark. The ode has its roots in Classical antiquity, where it served a ceremonial purpose: to
celebrate public figures, such as statesmen or athletes. The word comes from the Greek
odein (‘to chant’). Classical odes comprise three stanzas, each the same length with the
same rhythm and rhyme scheme. The two main types are named Pindaric and Horatian,
after their inventors, the Greek Pindar and the Roman Horace. The earliest odes in English
are attributed to Edmund Spenser in the latter half of the sixteenth century. In the Romantic
era, the ode was commandeered to address not the great and the good, but rather art, the
natural world and human emotions. Poets such as Keats and Shelley found the form
conducive to conveying their passionate fervour for these subjects, dispensing with the
rigid stanza patterns of Pindar and Horace to create the irregular ode. By the twentieth
century, odes had fallen almost completely out of fashion, though modern poets will
sometimes employ the form’s heightened register to praise public figures (ironically or
otherwise).
3-SECOND PLOT
A lyric poem intended to extol and elevate the person or thing addressed (for example, a loved one,
solitude, a Grecian urn).
3-MINUTE THEME
Classical odes are structured in three parts: the strophe, the antistrophe and the epode. The strophe sets
out the subject and sings its praises. The antistrophe contradicts what’s come before or at least expresses
another view. In the epode, the poet draws together the two opposing thoughts or comes down on one
side. In this way, the classic ode resembles the dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
EARLY LITERATURE
‘ODE TO NEPTUNE’
1773
Phillis Wheatley
‘ODE ON ADVERSITY’
1791
Mary Robinson
‘DEJECTION: AN ODE’
1802
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
‘THIRTY LINES ABOUT THE ‘FRO’

2015
Allison Joseph
30-SECOND TEXT
Lucien Young
Romantic poets such as Shelley, Wordsworth and Keats wrote some of the best-
loved odes.
HAFEZ
The name Hafez means ‘memorizer’ or ‘safe-

keeper’, particularly of the teachings of the
Qur’an. The poet was given this pen name
because he memorized the holy book at a very
early age. He is reputed to have had a
phenomenal memory and learnt by heart the
works of Rumi, Saadi and Nizami Ganjavi. In
every Iranian home, even to this day, there are
two books guaranteed pride of place: the
Qur’an and The Divan of Hafez.
Despite being one of the most widely read
and influential poets of all time, very little is
known about his life. He is said to have
received the gift of poetry at birth from a gypsy
mystic scholar who appears very rarely to
mortals. Born in Shiraz in 1315, it is believed
that Hafez worked in a bakery as a young man,
and while delivering bread to a rich quarter of
the town, he saw Shakh-e Nabat, a woman of
rare beauty to whom some of his later poems
are addressed. His love for her was never requited, but it brought him to mystic states of
understanding, expressed in his poetry.
Around the same time, he met Hajji Zayn al-Attar, a Persian pharmacist who became his
patron, enabling him to concentrate solely on his poetry. A Shi’ite Sufi mystic, Hafez combined in
his poetry the oppressed passion of the Shi’ites and the ecstatic joie de vivre of the Sufis, forming
an exhilarating mix of personal and transcendental imagery. Hafez became a court poet and was
widely read in his own lifetime. Around 1368 he fell out of favour at court, for reasons that are
now unclear, and had to flee to Isfahan where he wrote about his beloved city of Shiraz; he was
later reconciled and returned to his hometown shortly before he died.
His poetry not only explores the divine, but celebrates earthly love, desire, food and wine. Its
appeal has meant that people use his writings as a resource in times of trouble, opening his
books at random for guidance and inspiration. Queen Victoria herself is said to have consulted
the Fal-e-Hafez, a collection of his writings that can be used as an oracle. His favoured poetic form
was the ghazal and the collection of ghazals that form his Divan is most widely used for
bibliomancy – the practice of telling the future from divine writings. Hafez died in Shiraz in 1390,
around the age of 69. His tomb is constantly visited, sometimes by crowds in their thousands.
Ella Berthoud
1315
Born Khwāja Šamsu d-Dīn Muḥammad Hāfez-e Šīrāzī in Shiraz, Iran
ca. 1329
Father dies
1368–9
Falls out of favour at court, is not reconciled until just before his death 20 years later
1390
Dies in Shiraz
1452
Small tomb built for him in Golgast-e Mosalla in Shiraz
1773
More substantial tomb built during the reign of Karim Khan Zand
1931
Extensive repairs and additions made to the tomb
BALLAD
While the epic deals with the world-shaping deeds of extraordinary figures, the ballad is
concerned with common folk. It often describes contemporary, local events, with street-
level observers recording the traditions and travails of the world they live in. These
narratives are conveyed through colloquial speech, frequently using slang and regional
dialects. The ballad’s down-to-earth approach stems from its origins. The word comes to
us, via French, from the late Latin ballare, meaning ‘to dance’. Wandering minstrels in
Medieval Europe would set their ballads to music, accompanying dances in town and
village. Given that these poets’ names have been forgotten, perhaps the greatest writer of
ballads is Anon. During the Romantic movement of the later eighteenth century, writers
such as Robert Burns, Walter Scott and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were inspired by the folk
ballad, producing their own ‘literary’ or ‘lyrical’ ballads. As Europeans colonized America
and Australia, the form travelled with them, becoming the basis of the cowboy and bush
ballads that flourished in the new lands. Its influence can also be seen in the nineteenth-
century mixing of Anglo- and Afro-American musical styles, which gave birth to present-
day popular music (and hence is why we talk about ‘pop’, ‘R&B’ and ‘power’ ballads).
3-SECOND PLOT
Whether a bawdy romp, a tale of supernatural horror or a political broadside, the ballad is the voice of the
people in poetic form.
3-MINUTE THEME
The question of attribution has led to debate among scholars of the ballad. There are ‘communalists’, who
argue that traditional ballads were the collaborative effort of whole communities, and ‘individualists’,
who think they were the work of individual poets. The original ballads would be transmitted in verbal
rather than written form, which inevitably led to them being recomposed, either through embellishment
or imperfect memory.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
THE ORAL TRADITION
MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
‘SIR PATRICK SPENS’
Anon
‘MY FATHER WAS A FARMER’

1784
Robert Burns
‘WALTZING MATILDA’
Banjo Paterson
‘STREETS OF LAREDO’
Francis Henry Maynard
30-SECOND TEXT
Lucien Young
Down-to-earth, musical and meant to entertain, ballads sang of life on the

land and those who lived it.
HAIKU
Super-short Japanese poems, which traditionally consist of seventeen on (roughly

equivalent to English syllables). These on are grouped into phrases of five, then seven, then
five. Most haiku focus on nature and the everyday world. By juxtaposing simple images,
they aim to grant the reader intimations of the profound. Here’s a translation of one by
master of the form Matsuo Bashō, written in 1686: old pond / frog leaps in / water’s sound.
The shortest major poetic form in the world, the haiku is discrete and complete, requiring
no wider context to be understood. An individual haiku has no title, as to give it one would
undermine the brevity and simplicity of the work. Haiku started off as introductory verses
to longer poems (renga). These set the tone for the whole composition, much like overtures
in opera. But by the seventeenth century, standalone haiku had become increasingly
common. Translations by R.H. Blyth inspired many English-language haiku in the period
after the Second World War, and the form remains internationally popular to this day. In
Japanese, haiku are traditionally printed in a single vertical line. In English, they usually
appear in three lines, to mirror the three phrases of the Japanese form.
3-SECOND PLOT
This tiny poem In seventeen syllables Creates a whole world
3-MINUTE THEME
For centuries, haiku have been incorporated into paintings called haiga, in which text features alongside
simple, elegant depictions of nature. Just as the haiku poet creates beauty with a minimum of syllables,
so the haiga painter tends to use as few brushstrokes as possible. A related form is kuhi, whereby famous
haiku are carved into natural rock, to create a sort of poetic monument. The city of Matsuyama boasts
over two hundred kuhi.
RELATED TOPIC
See also
SYMBOLISM
3-SECOND BIOGRAPHIES
Matsuo Bashō
1644–94
Elevated and popularized the haiku.
KOBAYASHI ISSA
1763–1828
Heir to Bashō who wrote over 20,000 haiku.
MASAOKA SHIKI
1867–1902
Modernized the haiku, bringing it into the twentieth century.
30-SECOND TEXT
Lucien Young
To achieve a feeling of lightness, Bashō abandoned the old form of poetry,

renga, in favour of hokku or haiku.
GHAZAL
A kind of love poem comparable to the Western sonnet or ode, the ghazal has a long and
rich history. It was first developed in seventh-century Arabia, deriving from the qasida, an
ancient, pre-Islamic poetic form. Qasidas were usually about subjects other than love, such
as kings or noblemen, but featured a prelude called a nasīb, which would often be romantic
in tenor. Eventually, poets began to write standalone nasībs, resulting in the ghazal. The
form blossomed during the Ummayad Caliphate (661–750 CE), dividing into such sub-
genres as udharî (concerned with courtly love), hissî (erotic love), mudhakkar (homoerotic
love) and tamhîdî (introducing a longer poem). In the following centuries, great poets such
as Rumi, Hafiz and Saadi Shirazi composed hundreds of ghazals, demonstrating the form’s
variety and allusive depth. Today, the ghazal is one of the most widely read poetic forms,
particularly in the Middle East and South Asia. Ghazal singers, such as Jagjit Singh, have
spread its influence to vast numbers of listeners. The form has also grown in popularity
among Western readers during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, with
notable poets in English, such as Adrienne Rich, having experimented with the ghazal,
often by relaxing its constraints.
3-SECOND PLOT
Roughly pronounced like the English ‘guzzle’, this poetic form originated in Arabic and concerns matters
of love and loss.
3-MINUTE THEME
The traditional ghazal obeys strict rules. It comprises a series of independent but thematically linked
couplets, commonly between five and fifteen in total. The two lines of the first couplet end with the same
word or phrase, which also concludes the second lines of all succeeding couplets (in a pattern known as
the radif). The maqtaa, or final couplet, must include a proper name, usually that of the poet.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
SONNET
ODE
‘WHERE DID THE HANDSOME BELOVED GO?’
thirteenth century
Jalal al-Din Rumi
‘NO, I WASN’T MEANT TO LOVE AND BE LOVED’

nineteenth century
Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib
‘TONIGHT’
2003
Agha Shahid Ali
‘MISCEGENATION’
2007
Natasha Trethewey
30-SECOND TEXT
Lucien Young
Speaking of such things as love and longing, these poets often leave the
gender of the subject ambiguous.
DRAMA
DRAMA
GLOSSARY
avant-garde A group of people who espouse startling new ideas in art, literature, music
and other forms of cultural activity, including politics.
catharsis From the Greek katharsis meaning ‘cleansing’ or ‘purification’, this means the
purification or cleansing of emotions through any art form – music, drama, literature or
visual art, particularly fear and pity, resulting in a feeling of renewal, rejuvenation and
restoration.
clowning Behaving in a playful or comic fashion, making fun of others, being silly, and in
drama often involving improvisation as well as the humiliation of the clown.
existential Existentialism is a system of ideas encapsulated and named by Jean Paul Sartre
in the 1940s, in which he postulated that the world has no meaning, with each person
entirely alone, responsible for both their actions and their fate. Sartre’s novel Nausea
(1938) is held up as a narrative manifesto of the movement.
farce A kind of drama in which comedy is induced through exaggerated situations,

stereotyped characters, horseplay and ridiculous circumstances born of serious ones.
flaw A literary device whereby a character has a trait that leads to his or her downfall;
often this is the key protagonist in a drama, and the audience observes in horror as they see
the hero or heroine causing their own downfall because of this flaw. Classic flaws include
hubris, excessive ambition, cowardice or greed.
guerrilla theatre Originating from politically motivated protest theatre, guerrilla theatre
aimed to highlight political issues through satire, protest and unexpected ‘happenings’.
Guerrilla theatre was often staged in public spaces not usually intended for the theatre. The
name comes from the idea of guerrilla fighters, so named by Che Guevara during the
Cuban Revolution; the intention was to destroy an unjust order, replacing an old order with
a new, better one. This intention was the same with guerrilla theatre.
invisible theatre Those exposed to this form of theatre will never know that they were, as
its goal is to provoke spontaneous responses while remaining unexposed as theatre. It is
performed in a public space but one that is not normally used for theatre, such as a
restaurant or street; bystanders will inevitably become involved, believing the theatrical
events to be real life. Actors remain in character no matter what happens around them.
mime The performance of a story through movements of the body, without the use of
speech.
morality play An allegorical piece of drama conveying a lesson about virtuous behaviour
and good character. Popular in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, these plays
often personified metaphysical or moral qualities, having developed from the more
religious tradition of mystery plays.
paradigm An outstandingly clear or typical example, an archetype.
placard A sign held up to give extra information about characters, written in a script that is
big enough for the audience to read even at the back of the theatre.
pratfalls A staged trip or fall for comedic purposes, often landing on the buttocks; a form
of slapstick or physical comedy.
tableau A moment on stage when all the characters freeze into pre-ordained positions,
creating a ‘tableau’ or still picture that will cause the audience to notice and ponder its
meaning; this effect also draws attention to the fact that the actors are indeed acting, in
doing so undermining any sense of realism.
vaudeville Light musical theatre interspersed with songs; thought to be a corruption of

Vaux-de-Vire, satirical songs in couplets sung to popular tunes in the fifteenth century in
the Val-de-Vire in Normandy, France.
Yoruba The name given to the Yoruba language, religion and people, whose homeland is
in present-day south-western Nigeria and the neighbouring parts of Benin and Togo,
collectively known as Yorubaland.
TRAGEDY
The Greeks (fifth century BCE) used tragedy to explore why humans suffer. The plays of
Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides ask whether this suffering was due to human flaws or
the malice of the gods. These stories partnered a royal protagonist or hero with a fatal flaw
that led them to make terrible mistakes, creating a potent plot in which they realize their
errors but cannot resist the impending catastrophe made inevitable by the fates, and the
irresistible trajectory of their flawed existence. Aristotle described the pleasure of
witnessing tragedy as a catharsis leading to purification, restoring the audience’s spirits.
After the Greeks, tragedy disappeared for nearly 2,000 years until 1561, when the first
English tragedy, Gorboduc by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, was performed for
Queen Elizabeth I. The plays of Shakespeare and Marlowe that followed created the
template for modern tragedy, where serious plays explore how humans create their own
misery, with the dynamics of power, sex, gender and culture taking the place of the fates.
Plays by Federico García Lorca, Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg focus on sexual
power, ending in blood and death, while Wole Soyinka uses colonial rather than divine
power in a tragedy caused by two forces at fatal odds.
3-SECOND PLOT
Tragedy is the enactment of the existential question: do we have volition or are we just pawns moved by
the hand of fate?
3-MINUTE THEME
Tragedy is not universal, as some claim the current rise of tragedy may reflect the perceived importance of
the individual in certain cultures, with the audience suffering alongside the protagonist as they struggle
against an impossible situation. In Death and the King’s Horseman (1975), Soyinka uses the chasm of
understanding between two cultures to reflect on free will and the meaning of death in a ritual context in
the life of a traditional Yoruba community.
RELATED TOPIC
See also
THEATRE OF THE ABSURD
Oedipus Rex
429 BCE
Sophocles
THE TRAGEDY OF MARIAM

1613
Elizabeth Cary
WOYZECK
1913
Georg Bűchner
PHAEDRA’S LOVE
1996
Sarah Kane
THE FERRYMAN
2017
Jez Butterworth
30-SECOND TEXT
Charlotte Raby
In ancient Greece there were three Fates: Clotho spun the thread of human
fate; Lachesis dispensed it; and Atropos cut it.
COMEDY
Be it actors wearing massive red leather phalluses, identical twins causing confusion,
gender mix-ups, pratfalls, the intricate timing of a bedroom farce or the joy at seeing a
recognizable figure being satirized, comedy is integral to theatre. In ancient Greece,
comedy was one of the three principal dramatic forms. Greek comedy included satire,
sexual innuendo and farce, as found in the surviving plays of Aristophanes. The
philosopher Aristotle believed that comedy was positive for society, inducing the ideal state
of happiness; to that end, for both ancient Greeks and Romans comedy was a stage-play
with a happy ending, a paradigm that also applies to the ten comedies of Shakespeare,
which all ‘end well’, often with a marriage. Perhaps because it reflects society and
performs a vital function in holding power to account, of all the comedic forms it is satire
which runs like a golden thread through the ages from the Greeks to present-day theatre.
The Romans divided satire into two types: Juvenalian which lashes out at its victims
without mercy, contemporary examples of which include Home, I’m Darling (2018) by
Laura Wade and David Adjmi’s 3C (2012); and Horatian, which is kinder, with George C.
Wolfe’s The Colored Museum (1986) a notable modern example.
3-SECOND PLOT
While exploiting the comic potential of others’ misfortunes or exposing the flaws of those in power,
comedy also helps an audience to laugh at itself.
3-MINUTE THEME
The philosopher Thomas Hobbes called laughter the ‘sudden glory’, which arises from recognizing our
own fallibility or seeing our goodness contrasted with another’s foolishness. In ancient Sanskrit drama
(from around 200 BCE) humour (hāsyam) is one of the nine principal emotions (rasas) that combine to
transport audiences to a parallel reality. In Sanskrit plays, humour bridges the chasm created by
opposition, lifting us beyond simply laughing at others’ misfortunes into laughing at the absurdity of life.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
SANSKRIT LITERATURE
SATIRE
MARRIAGE
1842
Nikolay Gogol
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST

1895
Oscar Wilde
THE BOOK OF LIZ

2002
Amy and David Sedaris
BURQAVAGANZA
2008
Shahid Nadeem
30-SECOND TEXT
Charlotte Raby
Visual japes are integral to theatrical comedy, the inventiveness of both

director and actors are as important as the script.
ARISTOPHANES
Born ca. 450 BCE in Athens, Aristophanes spent

his boyhood in the cultural centre of Greece. He
was born into a wealthy family and was well
read, with a good knowledge of Homer and the
Greek philosophers. His career as a dramatist
began when he was only a teenager, with a play
called The Banqueters (427 BCE; now lost), a
satire of contemporary morality. He won
second prize in the annual Athens dramatic
competition for this play, and the next year he
won first prize for The Babylonians, though this
play (426 BCE; also lost) caused controversy at
the time, and was called a slander against the
Athenian citizens by Cleon, a prominent
general in the army. In return, Aristophanes
lampooned Cleon in his next play, The Knights
(424 BCE).
Few people of note at the time escaped his
satire, including his fellow dramatists:
Sophocles was ridiculed in The Clouds (423
BCE), and Euripides in The Frogs (405 BCE).
Throughout his life, Aristophanes was also
much concerned with his country’s bellicose
activities. The plot in The Birds (414 BCE) was a fantastical conceit in which the birds built a city
suspended between heaven and earth, where they could have mastery over humans. It was seen
as a satire on the Athenians’ imperialistic dreams. Banging a similar drum with its themes of
pacifism and sexual rebellion, Lysistrata is now Aristophanes’ most regularly performed play,
written as an anti-war polemic in which one woman decides to end the Peloponnesian War by
persuading all the womenfolk in Athens to withhold sex from their husbands until they stop
fighting. It has been re-worked countless times and in 2015 was made into a film, Chiraq, by Spike
Lee, set in the ganglands of Chicago.
He is thought to have written 40 plays in total, of which 11 are extant. Full of puns, witticisms
and topical allusions, firmly rooted in their time and yet eternally appealing, they are the only
surviving examples of Old Comedy, which used burlesque, satire and an abundance of
scatological and sexual references. However, in 404 BCE, Athens was defeated by the Spartans,
and comedy became less openly satirical and outrageous. Aristophanes’ particular brand of
comedy fell out of favour, and Aristophanes had to hold his tongue. He died in his beloved Athens
ca. 386 BCE.
Ella Berthoud
ca. 450 BCE

Born in Cydathenae in Athens
423 BCE
The Clouds first performed
422 BCE
The Wasps first performed – it wins second place at the Lenaia competition.
421 BCE
Peace first performed (promising an end to the Peloponnesian War)
414 BCE
The Birds first performed
ca. 411 BCE

Thesmophoriazusae first performed
411 BCE
Lysistrata first performed
408 BCE
Plutus first performed
405 BCE
Frogs first performed and wins first place in Lenaia, a festival of Dionysus in Athens
388 BCE
Plutus revised and performed again in Athens
ca. 386 BCE

Dies
MELODRAMA
Melodrama is often a pejorative term describing morality tales of swooning virgins and
lascivious lotharios. Yet in its time it was critical in bringing theatre to the newly urbanized
middle classes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It emerged as a reaction to
dramatic social political change, namely, the American Revolutionary War and the French
Revolution. Plays such as Edward Fitzball’s John Bradford, or, The murder at the road-side
inn (1835) and Douglas Jerrold’s Black-eyed Susan (1829) drew vast audiences in theatres
that seated up to 4,000 people. The scale of these productions required a grand acting style
and the creation of fantastic stage effects for melodramatic moments such as lake rescues
or a train hurtling towards a heroine tied to the track – ideas that became staples of early
cinema. Melodrama may have originated in medieval morality plays, placing ordinary
people in extreme dilemmas, but the modernized eighteenth-century melodrama used
sexual assault by aristocrats upon young middle-class women as a metaphor for class
conflict. The melodramatic tropes and stereotypes were: the evil temptress, the fallen
woman, the single mother, orphans and a man struggling with the changing world around
him. Although there are few melodramas on stage now it persists today in television soap
operas around the world.
3-SECOND PLOT
Melodrama was synonymous with huge audiences, vast theatres, incredibly inventive sets and high moral
drama about good and evil – but always with a happy ending.
3-MINUTE THEME
Melodrama examined unsettling aspects of class conflict through the lens of the new morality. It had
transnational appeal. British melodramas travelled to America, Australia and throughout Europe. Plays
from America such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) were very successful in London
theatres. European melodramas such as Pixérécourt’s La Femme à deux maris (1802), often accompanied
by an orchestra, were also popular in the London theatres.
RELATED TOPIC
See also
ROMANCE
A TALE OF MYSTERY
1802
Thomas Holcroft
THE FACTORY LAD

1832
John Walker
A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE
1893
Oscar Wilde
BREAKER MORANT: A PLAY IN TWO ACTS

1978
Kenneth G. Ross
30-SECOND TEXT
Charlotte Raby
The extreme display of gesture and emotion in melodrama was developed to

entertain audiences in vast auditoria.
It should be no surprise that post-Second World War plays were full of anxiety, uncertainty
and existential dismay, yet much of the most avant-garde theatre was funny and irreverent
as well as provocative and unsettling. In 1961, in a book of the same name the producer
and dramatist Martin Esslin described a group of playwrights of the period whose work
exhibited these traits as constituting ‘the theatre of the absurd’. Absurdism, he insisted, had
‘renounced arguing about the absurdity of the human condition; it merely presents it in
being…’ Many of these dramatists lived in exile in Paris, and their bizarre, vaudevillesque
plays drew on a theatrical heritage including mime, clowning and nonsense verse. They
wrote about man’s estrangement from society (Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, 1959), life’s
futility (Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, 1957) and the alienation and the violence of language
(Harold Pinter’s Mountain Language, 1988). Plays such as Beckett’s Waiting for Godot
(1953) debuted in the tiny theatres of the Latin Quarter in Paris and were abhorred by the
critics. But Godot was soon recognized as a masterpiece on the futility of the human
condition. It has since been translated into many languages and performed across the globe.
3-SECOND PLOT
Absurdist theatre embraces absurdity in all its forms – philosophical, dramaturgical, existential and
emotional – in a context where nothing happens beyond the perplexing mundanity of life.
3-MINUTE THEME
After a world war in which humanity had shown both its best and worst side, absurdist theatre exposed
the central contradictions of the human condition. These intriguingly mirror one of the Four Noble Truths
of Buddhism, called Dukkha: that we crave and cling to impermanent things and for that reason are
incapable of achieving happiness. The characters in absurdist plays are ceaselessly searching for truth,
hope and meaning, yet remain trapped in cycles of ignorance.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
SHORT STORY
PHILISOPHICAL WORKS
THE SANDBOX
1959
Edward Albee
TANGO
1965
Sławomir Mrożek
THE BUS STOP

1981
Gao Xingjian
FUDDY MEERS
1999
David Lindsay-Abaire
30-SECOND TEXT
Charlotte Raby
The epidemic of rhinoceroses in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros (1959) was an allegory

for the rise of Nazism and Fascism in Europe.
PASSION PLAY
Passion plays are plays enacting the passion and transfiguration of religious figures. The
universal themes of pain, injustice and death, leading to forgiveness, redemption and hope
are central to any Passion play. Every Easter across the globe, Christian Passion plays re-
enact the final days of Jesus Christ. Originating from the Christian liturgy, these plays are
not without controversy: portrayals of Jews as villains have led to anti-Semitic violence
throughout history, even to the present day. The Ta’ziyeh is an Islamic Passion play; a
religious epic of Iranian origin, commemorating the martyrdom of the third Imam of the
Shi’ite Muslims, Ali Hussein, and his family in the desert of Kerbala. In Ta’ziyeh, actors
read or sing from their scripts, rather than act, preserving the spiritual truth of the text.
Originally performed outdoors, Ta’ziyeh are now staged in bespoke structures called
Takiyeh or Hussainiyeh. The Hindu epic, the Ramlila of Ramnagar, is another form of
passion play, telling the story of Rama’s defeat of evil. The play, performed annually in
Varanasi, India for the past 200 years, lasts 31 days, attracting audiences of up to a million.
All these plays channel the audience’s sorrows and desires as an expression of their faith;
actors and audience experience an emotional reaction similar to catharsis after watching
tragedy.
3-SECOND PLOT
Passion plays are religious plays acting out the pain and ecstasy of a religious figure facing death and
suffering in the cause of human redemption.
3-MINUTE THEME
The Oberammergau, which takes place in the village of that name in the Bavarian Alps, was written in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is famous for having been performed without fail every tenth year
since 1634, fulfilling a covenant with God made by the town in return for being spared the bubonic plague.
The 2,000 actors in the play are all town residents, with the eight-hour performance today drawing
audiences of 500,000.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
RELIGIOUS TEXTS
TRAGEDY
30-SECOND TEXT
Charlotte Raby
The epic passion play performed once every decade in Oberammergau,

Germany draws believers and non-believers alike.
POLITICAL PLAY
Since the mid-twentieth century, in seeking to challenge the power of existing elites,
political theatre in many forms has sought to be a theatre of, by and for the people. German
playwright Bertolt Brecht believed the climactic catharsis of most plays left the audience
complacent, which led him to develop the idea of ‘epic theatre’. These plays were staged in
such a way that the audience could not mistake the play for reality: harsh bright lights,
tableaux, explanatory placards and spoken stage directions deliberately estranged the
audience from the play, leaving them space to be self-reflective. Brecht saw his plays not as
‘his’ but as belonging to the ‘Brechtian collective’ of writers, composers, directors and
actors with whom he worked. His methods and ideas have influenced political playwrights
throughout the world. He inspired Brazilian theatre practitioner Augusto Boal’s ‘Theatre of
the Oppressed’, including techniques such as ‘forum theatre’, where spectators shape the
action by calling out suggestions for the actors to improvise; and ‘invisible theatre’, where
performances are staged in unusual places such as carparks or the street. These plays made
the audience integral to the play, bringing the political into everyday places and to
everyone, including those who would never normally go to the theatre.
3-SECOND PLOT
In many theatrical forms the audience is impotent, but political theatre is designed to involve the
audience and provoke them into action resulting in change.
3-MINUTE THEME
Both guerrilla theatre, which originated in San Francisco in 1965, and The Living Theatre – created by
Judith Malina and Julian Beck in 1947 – used public places for performances pushing overt political
messages against the Vietnam War, for example, or capitalism. In a similar way to Boal, they hoped to
shock unsuspecting audiences into action, preparing them mentally and emotionally for the revolution
needed to overthrow the existing political order.
RELATED TOPIC
See also
POSTMODERNISM
THE ROMANS IN BRITAIN
1980
Howard Brenton
FEN
1983
Caryl Churchill
DEATH AND THE MAIDEN
1990
Ariel Dorfman
AFTER INDEPENDENCE
2016
May Sumbwanyambe
AN EVENING AT THE OPERA

2016
Floy Quintos
THE JUNGLE
2017
Joe Murphy & Joe Robertson
30-SECOND TEXT
Charlotte Raby
Brecht highlighted the artifice of theatre so that audiences would not be

complacent.
LITERARY DEVICES
LITERARY DEVICES
GLOSSARY
anachrony A discrepancy between the true order of events and the order in which they are
represented in the plot of a narrative; refers to flashbacks and flashforwards, which are
often used in fragmented narratives.
analepsis A device in narrative in which a past event is narrated at a later point than its
chronological order; otherwise known as a flashback.
anthropomorphism The attribution of human characteristics to an object, animal or god; a

device favoured by writers of fables and allegories.
dramatic irony The use of language in a way that would normally signify the opposite of
what one intends to be understood; a technique in drama where the character is unaware of
something that the audience fully understands.
gijinka or gijinhō The humanization of any animal-like character in Japanese art, graphic
novels, comics and video art, used also to denote entities such as internet browsers. It is
anthropomorphism by another name.
humanism A philosophical and ethical stance that rejects superstition and unsubstantiated
faith in favour of critical thinking and evidence.
Panchatantra A collection of interrelated animal fables held within a frame story written
around 200 bce, based on an older oral tradition and written in Sanskrit verse and prose.
parable A simple story intended to illustrate a moral message, particularly in the New
Testament as told by Jesus Christ, but also common in most world religions and folklore
tales such as the near ubiquitous ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’. This form of story uses
simile and metaphor to demonstrate a moral lesson.
prolepsis A figure of speech in which a future act is represented as having already

occurred; also known as a flashforward.
rhetoric Language intended to have a persuasive or powerful effect, often without

meaningful content.
sarcasm The use of language to mock or undermine, frequently by saying the exact
opposite of what is meant in order to hurt or emotionally attack.
Shintoism Meaning ‘the way of the gods’, Shinto is the major religion in Japan alongside
Buddhism. It has no founder or dogma but its beliefs include the worship of invisible
spiritual forces within nature or of ancestors and guardians. It was the state religion of
Japan until 1945.
ultraists Ultraism was a literary movement born in Spain in 1919, launched by the poet
Guillermo de Torre. Ultraists rejected the previous movement of ‘Modernismo’, which was
ornate and sought beauty in the structure of language, and opted instead for free verse and
evocative imagery. The short-lived journal Ultra was the core of the Ultraism movement
and when it ceased printing in 1922 the movement declined, though Jorge Luis Borges took
the ideas of Ultraism with him to South America.
verbal irony A direct contradiction between what is meant and what is said, when words
express something contrary to the truth, or an actor on stage says the opposite of what they
really feel or mean; as opposed to dramatic irony, in which the audience sees something
that the actor is seemingly unaware of.
IRONY
A linguistic and literary term used to describe a discrepancy between what seems to be
going on and what’s actually going on, irony is often misunderstood as referring to a
simple contrast between expectations and reality, when it’s actually more to do with the
difference between the surface meaning of something and its underlying meaning. In
literature, it’s often used for comedic, dramatic or tragic ends, upending the character’s (or
the reader’s, or audience’s) prior assumptions: Henry VIII’s drawn-out pursuit of Anne
Boleyn in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2009) relies on dramatic irony to the extent that the
readers know what neither Henry, Anne nor Henry’s fixer, Thomas Cromwell, do: that
Anne is never going to bear Henry his longed-for male heir. This awareness lends the plot
an air of tragedy and menace that contrasts sharply with the characters’ self-satisfaction. In
Pygmalion (1913), George Bernard Shaw’s Professor Higgins puts on a grand display of
verbal irony by swearing angrily that he ‘never swears’. Sarcasm is a sub-set of verbal
irony: it’s always mean-spirited. Irony was used extensively in Ancient Greek writings, and
it has long been a key device in literary satire, used to highlight societal or political
contradictions and shortcomings.
3-SECOND PLOT
Verbal irony describes a contradiction between what’s said and what’s meant; dramatic irony reveals
incongruities between what’s expected to happen and what actually is happening.
3-MINUTE THEME
Britain’s First World War poets made use of verbal irony to highlight the discrepancy between what they
saw as the glorification of war in patriotic rhetoric, and the reality of the trenches. Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce
et Decorum Est’ (1917) describes the horror of a gas attack (‘Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud / Of vile,
incurable sores’) and contrasts this with Roman poet Horace’s then-popular dictum: ‘it is sweet and good
to die for your country’.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
TRAGEDY
COMEDY
SATIRE
‘THE GIFT OF THE MAGI’
1905
O. Henry
WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?
1991
Doris Dörrie
THE HOUSE GUN

1998
Nadine Gordimer
WAITING FOR THE WILD BEASTS TO VOTE

1998
Ahmadou Kourouma
30-SECOND TEXT
Valerie O’Riordan
In Shakespeare’s Othello, Desdemona’s supposed infidelity is represented by

her handkerchief.
ALLEGORY
An allegory is a story with both a literal and a figurative meaning. The origins of allegory
can be traced to Homer and his use of the gods Phobos and Deimos in the Iliad (eighth
century BCE), where Phobos personifies fear and panic, and Deimos dread and terror.
Allegory is also used extensively in The Bible – for example, the Parables of Jesus – and
was a vital element in medieval literature, including works such as Dante’s Divine Comedy
(1320). Characters and events in allegorical literature represent concepts or qualities with a
moral, religious or political meaning. Ideas that are often complex to understand or critical
in a way that would be unacceptable or even dangerous to communicate directly, such as
when writers use allegory to disapprove of a political regime, are often more effectively
communicated through allegory. The Master and Margarita (1967) by Mikhail Bulgakov is
an allegorical novel, a commentary on Stalin’s regime set in a chaotic version of Moscow
where people often disappear without explanation. There is a secret police force, groups are
known by acronyms, and lavish lifestyles are indulged in a society meant to be classless.
Allegory is used across genres and in contemporary literature is often to be found in
science fiction.
3-SECOND PLOT
An allegory is a story which uses characters and events to represent something else, often with a political,
religious or moral meaning.
3-MINUTE THEME
An allegory is an extended metaphor. A metaphor is when something is compared directly to something
else in order to provide clarity of meaning or to highlight similarities between two things. It is often used
in speeches and occurs in all forms of literature. In Paulo Coehlo’s The Alchemist (1988) the journey the
protagonist, Santiago, undertakes is a metaphor for life. It compares an actual journey to the Egyptian
pyramids to the search for destiny and meaning.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
SCIENCE FICTION
RELIGIOUS TEXTS
THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS
1678
John Bunyan
HINDS’ FEET ON HIGH PLACES
1955
Hannah Hunnard
A WRINKLE IN TIME
1962
Madeleine L’Engle
LIFE OF PI
2001
Yann Martel
30-SECOND TEXT
Naomi Frisby
The giant cat in The Master and Margarita is an allegory for the unpredictable
evils of Stalinist Moscow.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
Jorge Luis Borges has had a unique and

powerful influence on world literature. He
wrote across genres: philosophical essays,
poems, short stories and translations, even
literary forgeries. He is known for his
fantastical literary journeys and is credited
with being the inventor of Magic Realism.
Born in Argentina in 1899, Jorge Luis Borges
grew up speaking Spanish and English equally;
his father had a large library of books that
Borges later described as the key to his life.
With hereditary poor eyesight and a delicate
constitution, Borges spent his youth reading
and extemporizing on ideas with his family.
When he was 15, the family travelled to
Switzerland for a holiday, but were caught up
in the First World War and stayed in Europe for
the next seven years. In Madrid, the young
Borges was drawn to a new literary group
called the ‘ultraists’, who used free verse and
embraced new technology, rejecting
sentimentalism. It was through them that he
realized he did not need to adhere to any one
tradition or form in literature, but could call himself a free thinker.
Returning to Argentina in 1921, Borges was strongly influenced by his father’s friend, the poet
Macedonio Fernández, whose complex philosophical conceits and brilliant conversation
challenged Borges and drew out his own ideas. The young poet produced an ultraist magazine
called Prisma, then in 1923 published his first book of poems. He was employed in the public
library of Buenos Aires, but eventually left the job to become a lecturer in English and American
Literature at the university.
His first collection of short stories, The Garden of Forking Paths, was published in 1941. His
stories are famous for the use of intertextual references, self-reflection, notions of hyperreality
and various playful devices. He posed the conundrum: does the writer write the story, or does the
story write him? For many years he contributed to literary magazines and wrote film reviews –
until he lost his sight, aged 55. It was not until 1961 that his work came to international attention,
by which time the loss of his sight meant that he had to dictate his work to his mother, with
whom he lived until she died aged 99. Increasingly he turned to poetry, being still able to work on
a poem in his head. He died of liver cancer aged 86, having married his personal assistant, Maria
Kodama, not long before.
Ella Berthoud
24 August 1899
Born in Buenos Aires
1914
Travels with his family to Europe; becomes stranded in Switzerland
1921
Returns to Argentina
1937
Given job at the municipal library in Buenos Aires
1938
Suffers severe head wound and nearly dies
1941
The Garden of Forking Paths (short stories) published
1944
Fictions (short stories) published
1946
Fired from job at library, becomes lecturer in English and American Literature
1949
The Aleph and Other Stories published
1953
Becomes completely blind
1955
Appointed director of National Public Library
1957
The Book of Imaginary Beings published
1961
Receives Prix Formentor and comes to international attention
1962
Labyrinths (short stories) published
1971
Wins Jerusalem Prize
1975
The Book of Sand (short stories) published
14 June 1986
Dies in Geneva
SYMBOLISM
Authors use symbols to signify ideas or qualities, investing abstract meanings in all kinds
of objects, colours, animals or plants for the purposes of metaphor and thematic or
character development. For example, a ring can symbolize fidelity and eternity, a white
flower innocence. Across all cultures and millennia, authors reflecting the world they
describe have used symbols to convey the underlying meanings of their stories. Virgil’s fire
in The Aeneid (ca. 29–19 BCE) symbolizes unbridled energy for either good or ill – the fire
that might destroy Troy, the fire that burns in Dido’s veins; the Wife of Bath’s red stockings
in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1392) denote her lust; the love potion in Shakespeare’s A
Midsummer Night’s Dream (ca. 1595) is a symbol of the fickleness and unpredictability of
love. Writers deliberately repeat symbols so as to emphasize and augment the metaphorical
allusion they are making, as in Journey to the West by Wu Ch’eng En (ca. 1550), where
stone is used repeatedly as a symbol for fearlessness and attachment to earthly sentiments.
In some cases the whole of a work of literature can be a symbol, as in Chimamanda Ngozie
Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2003), in which the titular flower is a symbol for freedom from
oppression.
3-SECOND PLOT
Authors use symbols in the form of physical objects or sensory phenomena to represent ideas or qualities
integral to the meaning of the story.
3-MINUTE THEME
Symbolism has often been employed by writers living in oppressive regimes to express dissident
sentiments through metaphor, to avoid openly criticizing a dictatorial government. For example, in
Chinese writer Lu Xun’s short story Some Rabbits and a Cat (1922), the baby rabbits represent the
downtrodden common people, the cat is the oppressive political system in China at the time and the
mother of the bunnies is Mother China, portrayed as a failing matriarch.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
SONNET
ALLEGORY
WUTHERING HEIGHTS
1847
Emily Brontë
MOBY DICK
1851
Herman Melville
ANNA KARENINA
1877
Leo Tolstoy
THE BEAUTYFUL ONES ARE NOT YET BORN

1968
Aye Kwei Armah
LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA

1985
Gabriel García Márquez
30-SECOND TEXT
Ella Berthoud
Flowers are universal symbols of purity, innocence, love and desire.

ANTHROPOMORPHISM
The literary device whereby a writer ascribes human characteristics (physical and
psychological) and/or behaviours to non-humans – typically gods and animals, but
sometimes natural phenomena or objects – anthropomorphism comprises the Greek words
ánthrōpos (‘human’) and morphē (‘form’). Folk and childrens’ literatures are widely
populated with anthropomorphized creatures: from the ancient Sanskrit Panchatantra to
Harry Potter’s Dobby, the device is often invoked in a spirit of education or easy-to-digest
morality tales for younger readers. In the UK, the Renaissance turn to humanism caused
the temporary collapse of literary anthropomorphism, but it was revived by Anna Sewell’s
Black Beauty (1877), a book that drew critical attention to animal welfare. While many
writers have used the device to educate and/or entertain, others have used it as a way of
cloaking – or rendering more palatable – political messages via allegory or satire. The
Asante tales of Anansi the spider, which originated in seventeenth-century Ghana,
spreading subsequently to Côte d’Ivoire, Sierra Leone and beyond, used a series of comic
animal adventures to model a spirit of community and resistance for enslaved peoples.
Contemporary graphic fiction, too, has a strong anthropomorphic component, with Japan’s
webcomic Hetalia giving human form to nation-states.
3-SECOND PLOT
Anthropomorphism is a long-standing literary technique that aims to make its non-human object credibly
and consistently behave exactly as if it were human.
3-MINUTE THEME
While Judaism and Islam forbid representation of their deities, anthropomorphism featured heavily in
many ancient mythologies and religions, with the Mesopotamians, Canaanites/Ugaritics, ancient
Egyptians and Hittites all embodying their gods in human, or human-like, form. Japanese Shintoism has a
similarly strong animistic tradition, reflected in the continuing prevalence of gijinka or gijinhō in
contemporary Japanese literature. Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore (2002) highlighted this tradition
for international audiences.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
ALLEGORY
PERSONIFICATION
SATIRE
AESOP’S FABLES
collected 620–564 BCE
Aesop
JUST SO STORIES
1902
Rudyard Kipling
ANIMAL FARM
1945
George Orwell
THREE BAGS FULL

2007
Leonie Swann
30-SECOND TEXT
Valerie O’Riordan
Bestowing animals and objects with human qualities is an innate human

habit.
PERSONIFICATION
Personification helps the reader to visualize an object or idea by applying human qualities
and traits to it, such as emotions, desires, sensations, gestures and speech. Writers use
personification to create vivid imagery, drawing the reader into a deeper relationship with
the text. Assuming a shared understanding of what it is to be human, the poet imparts
human qualities to non-human phenomena – ideas or objects – lending them an immediacy
that dramatizes areas of experience the reader might otherwise view indifferently. The
image often contains multiple layers, particularly in poetry, leaving the reader to
contemplate the different meanings. In the opening line of The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot
describes April as ‘the cruellest month’. A month cannot be cruel, however, so we
understand him to mean that it is cold; that glimpses of the sun encourage us to anticipate
the spring, which is yet to arrive. We often use personification as part of our everyday
language. For example, when we describe nature as Mother Nature, we are implying that
the natural world is feminine and, specifically, that it has the same caring and nurturing
qualities we ascribe to mothers.
3-SECOND PLOT
Personification is the giving of human qualities to non-human things. It helps the reader to imagine an
idea or object more vividly.
3-MINUTE THEME
Personification and anthropomorphism can be easily confused. Anthropomorphism refers solely to
animals being made to act, and sometimes look, like humans, while personification is the technique of
giving ideas and objects human characteristics to make them appear more vivid. George Orwell used
anthropomorphism in Animal Farm to enable him to disguise the Russian leaders he was criticizing.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
SONNET
ODE
ANTHROPOMORPHISM
‘I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD’
1804
William Wordsworth
‘THE MIRROR’
1961
Sylvia Plath
‘FOR FOREST’
1988
Grace Nichols
‘RAIN AT THREE’
2018
Tishani Doshi
30-SECOND TEXT
Naomi Frisby
By giving life to objects or ideas in literature, we gain a new perspective on our

world.
FORESHADOW & FLASHBACK
What’s yet to come? And what has already occurred but not yet been revealed?
Foreshadowing and flashbacks are structural devices writers use to disrupt the beginning-
to-end trajectory of their stories. Hints can be dropped about future outcomes and scenarios
brought to light from the past that shed light on the present of the narrative. The technical
term for a flashback is analepsis, and foreshadowing, or a flash-forward, is known as
prolepsis; both are examples of anachrony, or the manipulation of the chronological order
of a text. Flashbacks have long been commonplace in global literature, across both
narrative fiction and poetry, from Homer’s Odyssey, in which Odysseus retrospectively
relates his exploits, to Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), which uses flashback to explore
the importance of family history in multi-ethnic communities. Flashbacks can provide plot-
crucial information, fill in characters’ backstories and act as vehicles for a character’s
memories. Foreshadowing appears in two main guises: narrative clues laying the
atmospheric groundwork for some significant later development, and forthright statements
detailing some specific state of affairs that has not yet come to pass, as in Muriel Spark’s
The Driver’s Seat (1970): ‘She will be found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab-
wounds’.
3-SECOND PLOT
Flashbacks and foreshadowing allow the writer to play with narrative time; they complicate the
chronological sequencing of a story to create a more dynamic plot.
3-MINUTE THEME
While analepsis is frequently and seamlessly incorporated into texts as a function of the characters’
memories, prolepsis is a more evident display of authorial control: Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), for
instance, is littered with glimpses of the narrator’s future that highlight her present innocence, and Harper
Lee anticipates her novel’s climactic scenes in the opening sentence of To Kill A Mockingbird (1960).
Foreshadowing draws overt attention to narrative as a deliberate construct.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
MODERN LITERATURE
EPIC POEM
‘OS LUSÍADAS’
1572
Luís Vaz de Camões
HEART OF DARKNESS
1899
Joseph Conrad
SONS FOR THE RETURN HOME

1973
Albert Wendt
RED SORGHUM
1986
Mo Yan
THE KITE RUNNER

2003
Khaled Hosseini
30-SECOND TEXT
Valerie O’Riordan
In To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout, the first-person narrator, warns of some of the

events to come.
LITERARY STYLES
LITERARY STYLES
GLOSSARY
authorial voice The voice of the author, conveying their unique style and attitude,
personality and character. Many authors have such distinctive voices that they can be
identified simply by reading a few paragraphs of their work.
Dadaism An artistic movement originating in Switzerland during the First World War,
whose primary aim was to ridicule the meaninglessness of the modern world. The writer
Hugo Ball founded the movement at the Cabaret Voltaire and he invented the word ‘dada’
for its childish simplicity.
first-person narrative Any piece of fiction told in the voice of ‘I’ or ‘we’, narrated by one
person at a time and speaking about himself or herself.
hyperbole A kind of figurative language, not meant to be taken literally, which exaggerates
for effect.
hyperreality The idea that life may seem real to us but is no longer real. French theorist
Jean Baudrillard postulated that our modern society has replaced all of reality with images
and that the human experience is now a simulation of reality. For example, reality
television is more real to us than our actual lives. The term also applies to art and literature
and how these can now only be produced by reworking existing ideas and cannot ever be
original as all original ideas have already been developed.
intertextual This refers to the relationship between two texts, and also the borrowing of
text from another source and putting it into the body of your own original work. Authors
often use allusion, parody, satire and pastiche as ways of referring to other works. Julia
Kristevo, the French semiotician, created the word from the Latin intertexto, meaning ‘to
intermingle while weaving’. She claimed that all texts produced now are intertextual with
the texts that came before them, as they will always refer back to what has been written
before.
literary minimalism A style of writing characterized by sparseness, simplicity and a lack

of extraneous words.
Magic Realism Fiction in which a realistic view of the world is presented alongside some
fabulous or impossible events, which are generally accepted without question or remark by
the other characters in the book.
metafiction Fiction that flaunts the fact that it is fiction, alluding to literary devices and
techniques while telling the story, so as to force the reader to become aware of the artifice
of reading.
omniscient narrator The voice in which a story is written, which purports to see inside the
heads of all the characters, and to have an overview of all the action – an all-seeing and all-
knowing presence. This is the most commonly used storytelling voice.
pastiche A work of literature in a form or style that imitates that of another work in order
to celebrate it, unlike parody, which seeks to mock the original.
pidgin English A non-specific name given to any language derived from English,
normally in a once-colonized country. When a pidgin vernacular becomes a first language,
it is called a Creole.
rhetoric Language intended to have a persuasive or powerful effect, often without

meaningful content.
second-person narrative A story in which the voice of the narrator addresses ‘you’ –
either the you of the actual reader or an imagined third person who is addressed as ‘you’.
Spanglish A name given to pidgin or Creole languages that blend Spanish and English.
Surrealism An artistic movement started in 1920s New York by the writer André Breton
that rejected a rational view of life in favour of one that celebrated the unconscious and
dreams, juxtaposing unusual pairings of images and ideas.
technoculture A culture that is informed by its technological activity; also a culture that is
very dependent on technology.
third-person narrative A story in which the point of view is written in the third person,
for example, he or she. Third-person omniscient narration means the story is told as if the
writer can see into all the character’s innermost thoughts. Third-person limited narration
means that they only represent a single person’s thoughts and feelings.
unreliable narrator A device whereby the author uses the narrator of a story to subvert the
reader’s understanding of the action; the narrator may portray themselves as an honest or
reliable source of events but will eventually reveal or be revealed to be otherwise.
NARRATIVE VOICE
A way of describing the speech and thought patterns of a character or narrator in a work of
fiction or poetry, the term ‘narrative voice’ is literary shorthand for a range of stylistic
choices typically associated with characterization. These include not only how a character
speaks (vocabulary, grammar, dialect) but also what they choose to speak about. While
first-person narratives like Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1885) typically relay only a
single voice, third-person narratives, like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), can allow
multiple voices to filter through. Second-person narratives are more unusual: books like
Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller (1979) address the reader directly and
are frequently associated with literary postmodernism and its critique of realism. Narrative
voice is sometimes mixed up with authorial voice, but they’re not quite the same: narrative
voice applies to one particular character (whether human, non-human or even inanimate)
rather then to an author’s entire work. Even when a narrator is unnamed and/or omniscient,
and apparently unidentifiable, they still have a distinct mode of expression, which we can’t
assume is consistent with the author’s ‘real’ voice. As with real-life speakers, narrators
cannot always be trusted: the unreliable narrator’s voice enables him to deceive and
manipulate readers.
3-SECOND PLOT
Much like a real-life individual’s speaking voice, the term narrative voice describes how the narrator
expresses him or herself: or, what a text sounds like.
3-MINUTE THEME
Narrative voice was a key stylistic device in much twentieth-century postcolonial literature, as writers
from dispossessed and marginalized nations and communities eschewed the diction and conventions of
literary English (and other languages) in favour of narrative styles that reflected their own heritages: Ken
Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy (1985) was written in Nigerian pidgin English, and Puerto-Rican writer Giannina
Braschi’s Yo-Yo Boing! (1998) was the first novel published in Spanglish.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
REALISM
POSTMODERNISM
THE SOUND AND THE FURY
1929
William Faulkner
THE COLOR PURPLE
1982
Alice Walker
THE WHALE RIDER

1987
Witi Ihimaera
GONE GIRL
2012
Gillian Flynn
30-SECOND TEXT
Valerie O’Riordan
The voice of the narrator – whether omniscient, first-, second- or third-person,

sets the tone of a story.
REALISM
Literary realism endeavours to accurately represent everyday life in narrative; it remains

popular today, having first appeared in the mid-nineteenth century when British writers like
Thomas Hardy and Elizabeth Gaskell instigated a move away from the stylized excesses of
Romanticism and Gothic fiction. Realist fiction aims to be unpretentious and objective; its
prose style is notable for its focus on specific detail, and its avoidance of rhetorical flourish
has frequently allied it with literary minimalism. Proponents of realism shun the
implausible and the extraordinary, concentrating instead on the commonplace, often taking
as their subject matter the lives of the working classes. Realism is commonly associated
with narratives about urban life: a variant from the 1980s, known as dirty realism and
associated with Raymond Carver and Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, looks particularly at blue-
collar workers and societally marginalized characters. Historically, realist novels have often
examined society and politics, with George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2) looking in
forensic detail at confluences of developments in medicine, marriage, education and
political reform. Whether it’s the apparent simplicity of its prose or its attentiveness to real-
world scenarios, realism is always characterized by a deep concern with the believability of
the narrative.
3-SECOND PLOT
The attempt to provide, in fiction, an accurate, unembellished and uncensored portrait of humdrum daily
life.
3-MINUTE THEME
Some twentieth-century post-structural theorists argued against literary realism, suggesting that it
depends upon an assumption we can’t prove: that my reality definitely matches your reality and that we
can communicate this reality with words. Critics like Roland Barthes argued that multiple ‘realities’ co-
exist, and what we call ‘objective reality’ is a cultural construction: literary realism merely presents us
with one particular style and tries to pass that off as ‘reality’.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
MODERN LITERATURE
NARRATIVE VOICE
MEMÓRIAS PÓSTUMAS DE BRÁS CUBAS
1881
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
THE AGE OF INNOCENCE
1920
Edith Wharton
THE HARP IN THE SOUTH

1948
Ruth Park
A FINE BALANCE
1995
Rohinton Mistry
30-SECOND TEXT
Valerie O’Riordan
Kitchen-sink realism is a literature featuring British working-class characters,

often from the north of England.
ALI SMITH
Ali Smith is one of the most inventive and

influential writers of today, constantly
redefining the boundaries of fiction as we know
it. Her ambition is ‘to shatter the way we
usually see things’. Born in Inverness, one of
five children, she grew up on a council estate
and went on to study English Literature at the
University of Aberdeen. Afterwards she went to
Newnham College, Cambridge to write a
doctorate in American and Irish modernism;
the plays she began writing here were
performed at the Edinburgh Fringe and the
Cambridge Footlights, which led her to
suspend her studies.
In 1995 her first book of short stories, Free
Love and Other Stories, was published to much
acclaim. Her modernist novel Hotel World was
nominated for the Booker Prize in 2001,
bringing her international renown. It is divided into six sections, with five different narrative
voices that represent a different aspect of grieving, as well as a different aspect of time. The
narrative structure defies convention, employing devices such as stream of consciousness and
synecdoche to convey its unique look at life and death. In How to be Both (2014), which won
numerous literary awards, Smith employs a binary narrative: one narrator lives in the present
day, the other is a fifteenth-century artist; one could in fact have been invented by the other, as at
one point the contemporary narrator writes an essay in the voice of the artist. There are also
different printings of the novel, some with the stories in reverse order. This is exactly the kind of
playful construct that Smith is famous for.
Themes in this book – and in all of Smith’s work – include gender fluidity, same-sex love,
interweaving time periods and real contemporary events that invade the fictional narrative. Such
an intertextual reality has become particularly important in Smith’s seasonal cycle of novels –
Autumn, Winter, Spring and the yet-to-be-written Summer – released to coincide with the given
season in the year in which they are published, which when complete will form a single multi-
volume work. Smith was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007, and in 2015
was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to literature.
Ella Berthoud
24 August 1962
Born in Inverness, Scotland
1980–85
Attended Aberdeen University
1985–90
PhD at Cambridge University
1995
Free Love and Other Stories published
2001
Hotel World published and nominated for the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction
2005
The Accidental published and wins Whitbread Novel of the Year award
2007
Girl Meets Boy published
2011
There But For The published
2012
Artful published
2014
How to Be Both published
2015
Wins the Costa Novel Award, Women’s Prize for Fiction and Goldsmiths Prize for How to Be Both
2016
Autumn published (first of projected Seasonal Quartet series of novels)
2017
Winter published
2019
Spring published
SATIRE
Satire is a form of rhetoric that is used to expose vices, foibles and foolish or immoral
behaviour in individuals, organizations, governments or societies at large, with the aim of
enacting or preventing political or social change. Satirists employ various forms of
mockery to attack the targets of their displeasure, including wit, hyperbole, irony, sarcasm
and outright ridicule. Satire is often humorous, though humour is not an essential
component of the art. To be effective, any satire should make the reader feel
uncomfortable, encouraging them to reject the behaviour depicted. The use of irony
highlights the distance between what is said and what is understood or what is expected
and what actually happens. However, the difficulty with this technique is that deliberate
ironies can be confused with honest opinion: Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn (1885), for example, has been accused of the racism it aims to reveal. The Vernon
Subutex trilogy by Virginie Despentes is a satire on modern society, set in Paris. Through
the people the protagonist meets, Despentes uses irony to comment on the rise of the far
right and the death of intellectualism alongside a range of other issues.
3-SECOND PLOT
Satire uses wit, irony, sarcasm and/or ridicule to expose foolish or immoral behaviour in humans,
organizations, governments or society.
3-MINUTE THEME
Parody is often confused with satire. While satire aims to criticize and possibly correct failings in society,
parody mimics for comic effect, to entertain and amuse. Parody is the imitation of a writer or genre
created by exaggerating traits, as in caricatures. In Don Quixote (1615), Cervantes parodies the medieval
romance and the chivalric idea of the knight-errant by making the protagonist’s quests ridiculous.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
COMEDY
IRONY
Candide
1759
Voltaire
NORTHANGER ABBEY
1817
Jane Austen
CATCH-22
1961
Joseph Heller
THE SELLOUT
2015
Paul Beatty
30-SECOND TEXT
Naomi Frisby
Mark Twain used satire in many of his novels to highlight uncomfortable issues
such as hypocrisy and racism.
GOTHIC
Groaning with castles, ruins, vampires and moonlit graveyards, Gothic literature began
with Horace Walpole’s playfully frightening The Castle of Otranto (1764). Including
elements of the supernatural, high emotion, labyrinths, madness and miraculous survivals,
all set around Gothic architecture, it was the catalyst for a writing style that thrives to this
day. Gothic overlaps significantly with horror; Gothic literature establishes a mood of fear,
creating an eerie atmosphere that is unsettling rather than gruesome. Gothic tales
commonly employ foreshadowing in the form of visions, omens and curses. Superstitious
portents such as black cats, broken mirrors and nightmares might predict an unfortunate
series of events. The English Romantic poets were drawn to the heightened emotional
states of the style, with John Keats’ utilizing it in his long, narrative poem The Eve of St
Agnes (1820). Lord Byron hosted a ghost-story writing competition in 1816 that sparked
the creation of one of literature’s Gothic masterpieces, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(1818). The Brontë sisters in the mid-nineteenth century also brought Gothic elements into
their writing, as the intense circumstances afforded by the genre allowed their female
characters to behave in non-conformist ways at odds with patriarchal society.
3-SECOND PLOT
The Gothic style conveys an atmosphere of mystery and fear, and is mostly set in castles, with graveyards,
storms and extreme emotions.
3-MINUTE THEME
In 1976, the scholar Ellen Moers divided Gothic literature into the male and the female genres. She
suggested that those works written by men are focused around masculine transgression of social taboos,
while those written by women portray the heroine in flight from an oppressive male. Male Gothic aimed to
create horror, while female Gothic aimed to engender terror; in female Gothic the supernatural had a
scientific explanation, in male the ghosts were real.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
HORROR
MELODRAMA
THE DEVIL’S ELIXIRS
1815
E.T.A. Hoffman
DRACULA
1897
Bram Stoker
WIDE SARGASSO SEA

1966
Jean Rhys
BELOVED
1987
Toni Morrison
30-SECOND TEXT
Ella Berthoud
The Gothic aesthetic in literature is characterized by an air of foreboding and a

sense of the macabre.
POSTMODERNISM
Postmodernism encompasses a broad range of literary styles and ideas, linked by their
reaction to the preceding Modernist movement. The common tropes of postmodern
literature, which were prominent from the mid- to the late-twentieth century, include the
age-old use of text acknowledging the reader, recognizing the role they play in responding
to the work; while metafiction is often used to draw attention to the work as a piece of
storytelling. For example, The Golden Notebook (1962) by Doris Lessing, employs five
notebooks in which the protagonist Anna Wulf records her life. Interspersed with these are
seemingly realistic sections from Anna’s life that overlap and interact with the diary
entries. Although any list of features commonly found in the postmodern novel can never
be exhaustive, as the movement inherently resists definition, they include: texts being often
fragmented or non-linear; the use of ‘intertextual’ conversations; pastiche combining
different styles or genres within one text; irony and black humour; technoculture and
hyperreality examining the role of capitalism; and Magic Realism employing magical or
supernatural elements to explore the political and human state, as in Isabel Allende’s novel
of postcolonial Latin America, The House of the Spirits (1982).
3-SECOND PLOT
Postmodernism is a broad range of literary styles that question the idea of objective truth, reality,
morality and reason, considering them to be socially constructed.
3-MINUTE THEME
Postmodernism was a movement across the disciplines of art, literature, film, music, drama, architecture,
history and philosophy during the mid-to-late twentieth century. Artists and writers associated with
Dadaism and Surrealism, such as Hannah Höch and André Breton, influenced the development of
Postmodern literature. Their playful use of collage, chance and parody, their desire to challenge the
authority of the artist through exploring the subconscious mind, influenced literary writers in their
approach to texts.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
NARRATIVE VOICE
LIFE: A USER’S MANUAL
1978
Georges Perec
IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT A TRAVELLER

1979
Italo Calvino
BLOOD AND GUTS IN HIGH SCHOOL

1984
Kathy Acker
THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE

1997
Haruki Murakami
30-SECOND TEXT
Naomi Frisby
Postmodern literature makes the reader self-consciously aware of the act of

reading.
A narrative technique that aims to mimic the uninhibited flow of its characters’ thoughts as
they occur, stream of consciousness differs from other narrative modes in its move away
from conventionally ‘correct’ grammar, punctuation and syntax. Its non-linear, fragmented
and associative style aims to approximate the actual experience of thinking; in fact, the
very term ‘stream of consciousness’ was coined by an American psychologist (William
James) rather than a literary theorist. As a prose style, however, it’s often seen as
experimental and difficult, largely through association with the literary modernists who
pioneered it. Writers like James Joyce, with Ulysses (1922), used stream of consciousness
in order to place their readers as close as possible to the workings of their characters’
minds, complete with messy impressions and distractions: ‘Open your eyes now. I will.
One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane.
Basta!’ As European and American modernism lost popular ground to postmodernism
(which was less concerned with interiority), stream of consciousness fell out of fashion. It
has, however, re-emerged in the twenty-first century, with writers such as Eimear McBride
using this fragmentation to explore the collapse of language under the pressure of violence
and trauma.
3-SECOND PLOT
Stream of consciousness is a literary technique that seeks to reproduce on the page the chaos, the
unpredictability and the associative diversions of actual thoughts.
3-MINUTE THEME
Stream of consciousness lends itself to dissidence due to its rejection of convention and order. While it’s
often associated with European literary modernism (Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf), it has a rich
pedigree around the world, from the short fiction of Assamese writer Saurav Kumar Chaliha (jailed in 1950
for his involvement with the Revolutionary Communist Party of India) and Zimbabwean novelist Charles
Mungoshi’s Ndiko Kupindana Kwamazuva (1975), whose anti-colonial works were banned by the
Rhodesian government.
RELATED TOPICS
See also
NARRATIVE VOICE
NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND
1864
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
TENDER BUTTONS
1914
Gertrude Stein
AMULET
1999
Roberto Bolaño
HOW STELLA GOT HER GROOVE BACK

1996
Terry McMillan
30-SECOND TEXT
Valerie O’Riordan
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway depicts the consciousnesses of a large cast of

characters in London on a single day.
APPENDICES
RESOURCES
BOOKS
Poetics
Aristotle
(Penguin Classics, 1996)
The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories
Christopher Booker
(Continuum, 2005)
The Book of Forgotten Authors
Christopher Fowler
(Quercus, 2017)
Mythologies
Roland Barthes
(Hill & Wang, 1973)
The Art of Fiction
David Lodge
(Vintage, 2011)
A Glossary of Literary Terms
M. H. Abrams and Geoffrey Harpham
(Wadsworth Publishing; 10th edn, 2011)
The Elements of Eloquence:
How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
Mark Forsyth
(Icon Books, 2016)
An Introduction to Literature Criticism and Theory
Andrew Bennet
(Routledge, 5th edn, 2016)
The Poetry Handbook
John Lennard
(Oxford Unversity Press, 2nd edn, 2006)
The Ode Less Travelled:
Unlocking the Poet Within
Stephen Fry
(Arrow, 2007)
A Little History of Literature
John Sutherland
(Yale University Press, 2013)
History of the Theatre
Oscar G. Brockett and Franklin J. Hildy
(Pearson, 10th edn, 2007)
Global Literary Theory: an Anthology
ed. Richard J. Lane
(Routledge 2013)
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism
(W. W. Norton, 2nd edn, 2010)
Literature: Why it Matters
Robert Eaglestone
(Polity Press, 2019)
What is World Literature?
David Damrosch
(Princeton University Press, 2003)
An Ecology of World Literature
Alexander Beecroft
(Verso Books, 2015)
WEBSITES
The Times Literary Supplement
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/latest-edition/
The Paris Review Daily
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/
The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine
The Millions
https://themillions.com/about-the-millions
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
CONSULTANT
Ella Berthoud studied English Literature at Cambridge University and went on to the University of
East London to study Fine Art. She has worked as an artist in residence at HM Pentonville Prison, at
Friends’ School Saffron Walden and at Queenswood School in Hertfordshire. In 2007, Ella and Susan
Elderkin developed the idea of bibliotherapy – prescribing literature for ailments – in conjunction with
The School of Life. Ella and Susan co-authored The Novel Cure: An A-Z of Literary Remedies and The
Story Cure: How to Keep Kids Happy, Healthy and Wise. Ella has since written The Art of Mindful
Reading: Embracing the Wisdom of Words.
Lucien Young studied English at Selwyn College, Cambridge, where he was a member of the world-
famous Footlights comedy group, as well as a contributor to Varsity. A television writer with credits
including BBC Three’s Siblings and Murder in Successville, Lucien is also a poet and the author of four
books, including three works of political literary satire and #Sonnets, published in October 2019, which
looks at some of the trashiest aspects of contemporary life via the exacting disciplines of the
Shakespearean sonnet.
Valerie O’Riordan is a fiction writer and lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Bolton. She
has also taught at the University of Manchester, where she completed her PhD on the narrativization of
trauma in the post-9/11 short story cycle. She has published on narrative form in the works of Ali Smith
and A.L. Kennedy, and her short fiction has appeared in Tin House, The Manchester Review and
LitMag. She was a winner of the O. Henry Award in 2019 and is working on a novel funded by Arts
Council England. She is Senior Editor of The Forge Literary Magazine and Executive Editor of The
Bolton Review. She is particularly interested in working-class representation and hybrid forms in
contemporary British and Irish fiction.
Naomi Frisby is a doctoral candidate in Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University. She has
written on a variety of topics for OZY, Fiction Uncovered and the Waterstones’ blog, as well as
appearing on Radio 3’s Free Thinking. She regularly chairs literary events for festivals and for
Waterstones. Her short fiction has been shortlisted for The White Review Short Story Prize and
longlisted for the Manchester Fiction Prize.
Charlotte Raby is a writer and educational consultant who is currently advising the Department for
Education. She works with publishers, schools, universities and parents to develop resources and policy
about early reading and the teaching of English. She is an advocate of reading for pleasure and
regularly speaks at conferences about the importance of reading. She has written hundreds of
educational resources, teaching programmes and children’s books for schools and home learning. She
writes regular articles and blogs about reading, vocabulary and children’s literature.
Lauren de Sá Naylor is a writer, artist and educator based in West Yorkshire. She did her Masters in
Critical and Cultural Theory at the University of Leeds and teaches contextual studies at Salford
University.
INDEX
A
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 72, 126
Agbabi, Patience 86
alienation 12
allegory 12, 122
anachrony 118, 130
analepsis 118, 130
anon 80
anthropomorphism 119, 128
apostrophe 80, 88
Apuleius: The Golden Ass 52
Aristophanes 104, 106
Aristotle 102, 104, 119
Aryan 12, 18
Asante tales 128
Ashvaghosa 18
Atwood, Margaret 42, 50
authorial voice 136, 138
auto-fiction 64, 70
autobiographies 70
autonomous characters 64
avant-garde 100
B
ballads 92
Beowulf 20, 82
Bible, the 76, 84, 122
bibliomancy 80, 91
Bildungsroman 34, 58
Blake, William 24
Blume, Judy 58
bodice rippers 35, 54
Book of the Dead 16
Books of Hours 20
Borges, Jorge Luis 119, 124
Brecht, Bertolt 114
Buddha, Gautama 74
Bulgakov, Mikhail: The Master and Margarita 122
C
cadence 80
catharsis 100, 102
chapbooks 36
Chaucer, Geoffrey: Canterbury Tales 20, 36, 126
children’s literature 24, 40, 128
clowning 101
Coehlo, Paul: The Alchemist 122
comedy 104
Confucius 74
crime fiction 44
cuneiform script 13, 16
D
Dadaism 136, 148
dialogic texts 35, 38
diaries 68
Dickens, Charles 24, 56, 70
dirty realism 140
dissidents 64
Doolittle, Hilda 26
Dostoevsky, Fyodor 24, 46
Doyle, Arthur Conan 44
drabbles 65
dramatic irony 119
dribbles 65
dystopian fiction 50
E
early modern literature 22
Eliot, T.S.: The Waste Land 28, 128
Elizabethan era 81
Enheduanna 16
epic narratives/verses 12, 36, 82
Epic of Gilgamesh 16, 42, 82
epic theatre 101
epistolary novels 38
eutopias 50
exegesis 65
existentialism 64, 74
F
fables 64, 66, 118
fairy tales 22, 24
fantasy fiction 52
farces 100
Fielding, Henry: Shamela 38
first-person narratives 137
flash fiction 64, 65, 66
flashbacks 130
flintlock 34, 52
folklore 34
foreshadowing 130
forum theatre 114
fragmented narratives 12, 28
framed tales 64
free verse 84
G
ghazal, the 96
gijinka/gijinhō 118, 128
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 24, 76
Gothic style 146
graphic novels 56
grimdark 34, 52
guerrilla theatre 100, 114
Gutenberg Parenthesis 12, 14
H
Hafez-de-Chiraz 90, 96
haiga 94
haiku 94
heroic couplets 81, 86
Hinton, S.E.: The Outsiders 58
historical novels 40
Homer 30, 82, 122, 130
Horace 88, 120
Horatian satire 104
Horation odes 80, 88
horror 48
humanism 118
hyperbole 136
hyperreality 136, 148
I
iambic pentameters 80, 86
Illiad, The 30, 82, 122
Instapoets 80, 84
intertextual relationships 137, 148
invisible theatre 101, 114
irony 120, 144
J
Joyce, James 28, 150
Juvenalian satire 104
K
Kālidāsa 18
kāvya 12, 18
King, Stephen: The Shining 48
Kipling, Rudyard 30
kuhi 80, 94
L
Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di: The Leopard 40
Laozi: Tao Te Ching 16
Lee, Harper: To Kill a Mockingbird 130
Lewis, Wyndham 28
LGBTQ+ literature 60
libri gialli 44
literary minimalism 137
Living Theatre, The 114
lyric poems 81
M
Magic Realism 52, 137, 148
mahākāvya 18
manga 56
Mantel, Hilary: Wolf Hall 40, 120
Marlowe, Christopher 22, 102
medieval literature 20
melodrama 108
memoirs 13, 70
metafiction 137
metre 81
microfiction 64, 66
Milton, John: Paradise Lost 22, 76,
mime 101
minisagas 65
mnemonic devices 13
modernism 28, 150
monologic texts 35, 38
Moore, Marianne 84
morality plays 100
More, Sir Thomas: Utopia 50
mytho-fantasy 34, 42
mythology 34
N
Nanak, Guru 74
narrative voice 138
nasībs 96
Newton, Isaac 74
Nietzsche, Friedrich 64, 74
non-fiction novels 65
novellas 34, 36
novels 22, 36 see also individual types
O
O’Connor, Frank 66
Oberammergau 112
odes 88
Odyssey, The 82
omniscient narrators 137
oral tradition 14, 18
orality 13
Orwell, George: Animal Farm 128
Ovid: Metamorphoses 52
Owen, Wilfred 28, 120
P
Panchatantra 118, 128
Parables 119, 122
paradigms 100
parody 101, 144
Passion plays 112
pastiche 137, 148
patois 13, 30
Perrault, Charles 22
personification 128
Petrarch 86
Petronius: The Satyricon 60
philosophical works 65, 74
pidgin English 137, 138
Pindar 88
placards 101
Plato 16, 74
Poe, Edgar Allan 44
political theatre 114
polylogic texts 35, 38
postcolonial literature 30, 138
postmodernism 148
Pound, Ezra 27, 28, 84
pratfalls 100
progenitors 35
prolepsis 118, 130
psalms 13
pulp fiction 35
Q
qasidas 96
Qur’an, the 76
R
Rambhadracharya, Jagadguru 82
Ramlila of Ramnagar 112
Realism 24, 28, 140
register 80
religious texts 76
renga 81
Restoration, the 80
rhetoric 119
rhetorical devices 81
rhyme schemes 81
Rokeya, Begum 42
romance 35, 54
Romanticism 13, 24, 81
S
Saikaku 22
San Pedro, Diego de: Prison of Love 38
Sanskrit 13, 18, 104
sarcasm 119, 120
Sartre, Jean Paul 64, 74
satire 104, 144
science fiction 42
Scott, Sir Walter 40, 92
second-person narratives 137
Sewell, Anna: Black Beauty 128
Shakespeare, William 22, 86, 102, 104, 126
Shastri, Satya Vrat 18
Shaw, George Bernard: Pygmalion 120
Shintoism 119, 128
short stories 66
short-short fiction 65, 66
Singh, Jagjit 96
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 20
Smith, Ali 142
Smith, Zadie: White Teeth 130
sonnets 86
Soyinka, Wole 102
Spanglish 137, 138
Spanish Inquisition 35, 48
speculative fiction 35, 42
Spiegelman, Art: Maus 56
St. Aubyn, Edward 65
stanzas 81
steampunk 35, 52
Stein, Gertrude 70
stream of consciousness 28, 150
Sturm und Drang 13, 24
sudden fiction 65
Sumerians 16, 42, 48
Surrealism 137, 148
Suzuki, Koji: Ring 48
Swift, Jonathan: Gulliver’s Travels 22
symbolism 126
T
Ta’ziyeh 112
Tan, Shaun: The Arrival 56
technocultures 137, 148
Theatre of the Absurd 110
Theatre of the Oppressed 114
third-person narratives 137
Thoreau, Henry David 70
Tolkien, J.R.R. 52
Tolstoy, Leo 24
tragedy 102
travel journals 65, 68
Tudor Court 81, 86
twitterature 65
U
Übermensch 64, 74
Ultraists 119, 125
unreliable narrators 38, 137, 138
utopian fiction 50
V
vaudeville 100
Vedic literature 12, 14, 18
verbal irony 119
vers libre 84
Virgil: Aeneid 82, 126
voltas 80
W
Webtoons 35, 56
Whitman, Walt: Leaves of Grass 84
Williams, William Carlos 27, 84
Wu Tsao 60
Y
Yoruba 101
young adult fiction 58, 60
Z
zeitgeist 54
Zola, Émile 24
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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30-Second Literature - Ella Berthoud

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30-SECOND

Literature is imagination in the form of words on paper, or simply memorized and

How this book works

bawdy Humorously indecent, referring to sexual matters.

cuneiform An ancient system of writing developed by the Sumerians in 3500–3000 BCE.

fragmented narrative Fragmented narratives throw time into a kaleidoscope of jumbled

Romanticism (or Romantics) A movement in literature that originated in Europe in the

Vorticism A short-lived literary and artistic movement founded by Wyndham Lewis –

GRIMM’S FAIRY TALES

THE ART OF WAR

THE DIVINE COMEDY

THE LAND OF COCKAYGNE

While religious texts were an important aspect of medieval literature, humour

TALES AND STORIES OF THE PAST WITH MORALS

THE HOUSE OF MIRTH

William Wordsworth was a key voice in the Romantic movement, which

Born in 1886, Hilda Doolittle was a poet,

(novel), not published until 1992

TRILOGY: MOLLOY, MALONE DIES, THE UNNAMEBLE

Postcolonial literature is a term applied to work by non-European writers in continents

bildungsroman Novels whose central focus is a protagonist’s psychological and moral

grimdark Characterized by violent, dystopian and bleak subject matter, a subgenre of

monologic/dialogic/polylogic Texts written in one voice are monologic; those in two

mytho-fantasy A genre combining mythological and fantastical themes, particularly

progenitor An ancestor or parent, or a person who sets in motion an artistic, literary,

Spanish Inquisition An organization within the Roman Catholic Church created to

Webtoons A type of digital comic published exclusively online, originating in South

Long fictional narratives describing human experiences on an intimate psychological basis,

THE WHITE TIGER

Fictionalized private thoughts addressed to others in letters have long been a

WAR AND PEACE

THE RED TENT

THE GLASS PALACE

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY

DEATH OF A RED HEROINE

Dostoevsky has been described as the greatest

NEWS FROM NOWHERE

BEFORE SHE SLEEPS

PERDIDO STREET STATION

THE NIGHT CIRCUS

CAPTURING THE SILKEN THIEF

HATE TO WANT YOU

Love in all its guises is the subject of the romantic novel.

AMERICAN BORN CHINESE

THE ARAB OF THE FUTURE

Graphic novels have increasingly found a place in mainstream bookshops over

SOMEWHERE IN THE DARKNESS

FACES IN THE WATER

THE HATE U GIVE

THE PRICE OF SALT

From Sappho to Stein to Armistead Maupin, the rainbow of sexual identities

dissident A person who opposes, protests or challenges official policy, especially in an

flash fiction A very short story of 1,000 words or less.

philosophical novel Works of fiction in which a significant proportion of the novel is

‘THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA’

THE SECRET DIARIES OF MISS ANNE LISTER (1791–1840)

THE DIARY OF FRIDA KAHLO

REBORN: JOURNALS AND NOTEBOOKS, 1947–63

An autobiography is a written account of the author’s own life, intended to be understood