Baldick - The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms

This is a book of hard words alphabetically arranged and briefly explained. It cannot purport to fulfil the functions of a balanced expository guide to literary criticism or to all literary concepts, nor does it attempt to catalogue the entire body of literary terms in use. It offers instead to clarify those twelve hundred terms that are most likely to cause the student or general reader some doubt or bafflement in the context of literary criticism and other discussion of literary works. Rather than include for the sake of encyclopaedic completeness all the most common terms found in literary discussion, I have set aside several that I have judged to be sufficiently well understood in common speech (anagram, clich, and many more), along with a broad category of general concepts such as art, belief, culture, etc., which may appear as literary-critical problems but which are not specifically literary terms. This policy has allowed space for the inclusion of many terms generated by the growth of academic literary theory in recent decades, and for adequate attention to the terminology of classical rhetoric, now increasingly revived. Along with these will be found hundreds of terms from literary criticism, literary history, prosody, and drama. The selection is weighted towards literature and criticism in English, but there are many terms taken from other languages, and many more associated primarily with other literatures. Many of the terms that I have omitted from this dictionary are covered by larger or more specialist works; a brief guide to these appears at pages 39192.

In each entry I have attempted to explain succinctly how the term is or has been used, with a brief illustrative example wherever possible, and to clarify any relevant distinctions of sense. Related terms are indicated by cross-reference, using an asterisk (*) before a term explained elsewhere in the dictionary, or the instruction see. I have chosen not to give much space to questions of etymology, and to discuss a terms origin only when this seems genuinely necessary to clarify its current sense. My attention has been devoted more to helping readers to use the terms confidently for themselves. To this end I have displayed the plural forms, adjectival forms, and other derived words relevant to each entry, and have provided pronunciation guides for more than two hundred potentially troublesome terms. The simplified pronunciation system used, closely based on the system devised by Joyce M. Hawkins for the Oxford Paperback Dictionary, offers a basic but sufficient indication of the essential features of stress-placing and vowel quality. One of its advantages is that it requires very little checking against the pronunciation key on page ix.

The dictionary in its present form is a thoroughly updated version of the third edition of 2008 , which itself was an expanded form of what was formerly the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms ( 1990 , revised 2001 ). Concision remains, I trust, a virtue of the entries themselves, but there are now a further 200 of those, extending the books coverage not only of recently circulated terms but of modern critical and theoretical movements, schools of American poetry, Spanish verse forms, life writing, crime fiction, and much else. The provision of recommended reading has been extended widely, and is now accompanied in fifty entries by recommended web resources for further research.

My work on this dictionary and its predecessors has occupied me intermittently for more than twenty years, during which period I have incurred several debts of gratitude. From the start I was sustained by an inspirational editor at Oxford University Press, the late Kim Scott Walwyn, who first invited me to tackle this work, and whose enthusiasm and professionalism became legendary among the authors lucky enough to work with her. Wise counsel and well-directed advice came also at an early stage from Pamela Jackson, Harriet Barry, and John Simons, along with help on pronunciations from Michael Ockenden and Joyce Hawkins. Michael Hughes, Colin Pickthall, and Hazel Richardson came generously to my aid for particular entries in the first Concise edition. More lately, as I have brought the work up to date, it has benefited from the expertise of many of my colleagues past and present at Goldsmiths, who have borne sudden interrogation cheerfully. These are Alcuin Blamires, Lucia Boldrini, Michael Bruce, Marie-Claude Canova-Green, Helen Carr, Josh Cohen, Elizabeth Crossley, Rick Crownshaw, Hayley Davis, Alan Downie, Russ McDonald, Philip McGowan, Tim Parnell, Jacqueline Rattray, Michael Simpson, and Catherine Spooner. Annika Lindskog has also kindly provided advice on Swedish orthography for this 4th edition.