Understanding Literature, a guide and work of reference

[Ravi]

Understanding Literature,
a guide and work of reference

Introduction

First of all I’d like to wish everyone here a good morning, and welcome! I made this thread so it can be used as a small guide to literature but also as a work of reference. I will try to encompass as much literary subjects as possible in the best logistical way I can think of. This way everyone can learn about literature if they feel like it and look things up if something in this section is mentioned which you didn’t understand. Hopefully this work will inspire some of you to really get into literature, make that leap and make your first thread/comment, or maybe it’ll turn out as an opportunity for you to learn something new. Either way, you’re very welcome.

Everything in this thread is a combination of personal knowledge, interpetation, research and is only meant for personal use.
I will probably always be adding/removing things, it’s a work in progress, especially in the beginning. Examples are made by me unless I’ve added credits to the original author.


Index

The three sections of Literature

General literary construction

- Sentence construction
- Stanza/ paragraph construction

Sound and rhyme

- Definition of rhyme
- Alliteration
- Assonance
- Middle, inside and endrhyme
- Rhymeschemes
- Rhyme blanche/riche

Metrics

-Metrics
-Common Metrics
-Antimetrics

Rhetorical devices

Allegory

Story elements

How to analyse a poem

Sources/Endnotes



The three sections of Literature

Literature can traditionally be divided in three sections. Prose, poetry and drama. Please note that these three categories overlap constantly, literature can be very free. Borderlining all three sections with a single piece is entirely possible.

Poetry,
Poetry is mostly identified as a composition of language. It often uses rhyme and is built upon imagery and emotions. Poetry can take almost any form in composition and length it’s a combination of the sound/llength of words and sentences and their (often not literal) meaning in context.

Prose,
Prose is writing that does not make use of any particular formal construction. This section includes stories, essays, novels, etc. Prose can also of course take on a beautiful form, but uses writing style instead of particular characteristics of words like in poetry.

Drama,
Drama basically is literature concerning the theatre. This section includes plays, stage settings and ttheatricalcompositions.


General literary construction

Sentence construction,
From sentence construction you can often get many clues as to which parts are important to interpretate the poem/story. Such as;

Notable use of characters: things may be different from the ordinary, consider extra exclamation marks and other marks out of the ordinary a point to important passages.
Changes in tense: moving from past tense to present tense or from present to past is a large hint that important information is coming up. These skips can turn around entire stories.
Conglomeration: is what happens when a wordgroup supplies a unified meaning in a passage.

Originally Posted by Example

The ancient cascades mirror themselves
in the glass facade,
springing between the shimmerlights.

The ancient cascades’ function both before and after the comma, but is only mentioned once, without a reference like ‘they’.
Elision: is dropping weakly accented vowels. Like ‘‘Twas’ instead of ‘It was’, and ‘Stumblin’’ instead of ‘Stumbling’.
Enjambement: continuing a ssentenceto follow it’s natural cause over the end of a line. This happens often when sentences skip to the next line in the middle of a sentence, there is no natural pause in this situation and you have to read on as if it was one complete sentence

Stanza/paragraph construction,
A paragraph is a unit of sentences within a poem, often set off by a space. A stanza (also called strophe) is the same but used in the context of poetry. Poetry has stanzas, other literature has paragraphs.
Paragraph construction is often unimportant in stories, however small paragraphs in contrast to big ones may be used by the author to give references, insights and elaborations.
On the other hand almost every poem has a very distinguishable stanza cconstruction aalwayswith a certain consistency. Here are some commonly used stanza-forms:

The distich: A stanza existing of 2 sentences
The tercet: A stanza existing of 3 sentences
The quatrain: A stanza existing of 4 sentences
The sextet: A stanza existing of 6 sentences
The octave: A stanza existing of 8 sentences

The combinations of these common forms often result in common stanza constructions. For example the Sonnet. A Sonnet is oftenly composed out of two quartrains (which form an octave together) and two tercets (which form a sextet together). This particular form is often called the Italian Sonnet. Originally the rhymescheme was abba, abba, cdc, dcd. Nowadays poets rarely limit themselves by rigid forms. Between the octave and the sextet there’s aalwaysa certain connection, it can be a contradiction, the sextet can give the conclusion or the octave can ccharacterizea situation. A connection between stanzas like this is called a chute, or simpler: a twist.


Sound and rhyme

Definition of rhyme,
We can speak of rhyme when three conditions are reached. 1.It must concerns equal sounds (not necessarily equal letters), 2. The sounds have to be close together and 3. The sounds have to be the stressed part of the word. This looks pretty complicated, but I’m sure I can trust everyone to know when something rhymes. It’s easy! There are some special exceptions though. Which I will name now.

Alliteration,
When a series of words occur where the beginning sounds are so alike it’s striking, you get alliteration. This alliteration often results in change of stressed syllables, which can be fun!

Originally Posted by Example

Dishes, brass, brown and broke alike.

Notice how you automatically stress the br ‘s? Often alliteration fuses the word together in meaning as well.

Assonance,
When equal and stressed vowels are so close together it’s
peculiar.

Originally Posted by Example

Hear the mellow wedding bells. ~Edgar Allan Poe.

The e in ‘the’ is not highlighted because it’s not a stressed vowel.

Middle, inside and endrhyme,
Middle rhyme is when rhyming words keep appearing at the same spot in sentences.

Originally Posted by Example

There’s a life in motion,
So we strive to this notion
like a knife with passion
for my putrid blood.

Inside rhyme is when words inside a sentence rhyme with eachother. Easy peasy, just like that. Endrhyme is the most basic form of rhyming. It’s rhyming words at ends of sentences with eachother, so endrhyme is when rhyming is done with the last stressed syllable in a sentence.

Rhymeschemes,
Patterns in endrhyme can be shematically presented where rhyming sentences are represented by the same letter. When a new rhyming word appears, you take a new letter. Be careful though! Sometimes sentences at the end of the poem might actually rhyme with sentences in the beginning, resulting in the same representation and letter!

Originally Posted by Example

There’s a spider living in my lock.
There’s one breeding inside my clock.
And I think there’s one under my bed.
Making a small web, thread by thread.

What is the rhymescheme?

AABB

There are several different types of common rhymeschemes, oftenly used in a quartrain stanzas. The names make sense, mostly.

Paired rhyme: AABB
Enveloping rhyme: ABBA
Broken rhyme: ABCB or ABAC
Jumping rhyme: ABCABE


Rhyme blanche/riche, double rhyme,
With rhyme riche the rhymed word is repeated entirely. It’s basically two sentences ending in the same word. Double rhyme is what happens when two or more syllables rhyme!

Originally Posted by Example

A very old man in Gasterland
once took a bronzen vase at hand.
And without asking further consent,
gave his wife a butcher’s end.

Rhyme blanche are rhymeless verses, it’s making poetry without rhyming. It can be awkward or weird at times and hard to identify wether it’s poetry or prose. Style will often give hints though.


Metrics

Metrics
Metrics, also known as the metre of a poem, is the rhythmical use of strongly and weaker stressed syllables. Normally these happen one after the other resulting in a flow going ‘ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum’. Like a nicely formed woman walking down a shopping isle..When we speak and talk to eachother this isn’t done automatically, that is why things that are said poetically sound different from normal talking. There’s rhythm, timing and of course emotion. The use of stressed syllables is what causes the rhythm.
So let’s integrate a small system. ~ stands for strongly stressed syllables, and – for weakly stressed syllables. We divide them up into verse feet using /’s. So it’ll look like this:

Originally Posted by Example

I can write no stately proem
As a prelude to my lay;
From a poet to a poem
I would dare to say. ~Oscar Wilde

/ ~ - / ~ - / ~ - / ~
/ ~ - / ~ - / ~ - / ~
/ ~ - / ~ - / ~ - / ~
/ ~ - / ~ - / ~

Is it starting to make a little sense? If you’re really confused you can try tapping along with your finger, read it out loud and tap along. You’ll notice the ‘Ba-dums’ sooner then you might think.

Common Metrics
Now it’s time for some jargon. As you’ve seen in the above example, there are some pretty repetitive forms going around. Namely:

Jambe: / ~ - /
Trochee: / - ~ /
Dactylus: / - ~ ~ /
Anapest: / ~ ~ - /

Antimetrics
Ironically antimetrics only occur in a poem which is built strongly upon metrics. When the metre changes, or when it turns away from the scheme the poem was originally built on we speak of antimetrics.
If you see the above example you see that at every end of a sentence there’s an extra ~, this means there’s one stressed syllable outside the normally used Jambes. However you could say this is not in fact antimetrics, because the first three sentences have this extra ~ after 3 Jambes. This in result means that the last sentence IS antimetric, there’s a jambe missing.


Endnotes

Finally, I’d like to thank you for reading. Any form of feedback and/or suggestions are highly appreciated. However I would like it if you don’t posts in this thread. PM me instead, for anything. That includes anything concerning opinions, grammar flaws, possible literary mistakes, things you just plain disagree with, things that are vague/badly described and any questions.
Maybe I disagree in term with you, at that point I’ll give you my MSN and we can debate it elaborately!

Sources

I was asked to put in some sources for this. Most of this is what I learned in Dutch poetry from my Dutch language teacher and mentor. I translated what I had learned and applied it to the English language, then I made up some examples and here we are! (Examples are written by me, unless I give out credit within them)
I use Wikipedia.org to brush up on some things I halfly forget about and sometimes I find some awesome quotes of writers I could use there! I'll probably use this again when I'm asked to add things I have no knowledge about. Wiki is way too elaborate though, this is more of a easy wrapped up version of basic literary analysis.

~Second update done!~
~ This took me longer then expected, next up is a big one, I'll probably do it in two parts.~