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A prologue or prolog (from Greek πρόλογος prólogos, from πρό pró, "before" and λόγος lógos, "word") is an opening to a story that establishes the context and gives background details, often some earlier story that ties into the main one, and other miscellaneous information.
Also apophthegm. A terse, pithy saying, akin to a proverb, maxim, or aphorism. aposiopesis A rhetorical device in which speech is broken off abruptly and the sentence is left unfinished. apostrophe A figure of speech in which a speaker breaks off from addressing the audience (e.g., in a play) and directs speech to a third party such as an opposing litigant or some other individual, sometimes ...
Louis Antoine de Saint-Just's line "Nobody can rule guiltlessly" appears before chapter one in Arthur Koestler's 1940 anti-totalitarian novel Darkness at Noon. A Samuel Johnson quotation serves as an epigraph in Hunter S. Thompson's novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."
Preface to the poem Milton by William Blake. A preface (/ ˈ p r ɛ f ə s /) or proem (/ ˈ p r oʊ ɛ m /) is an introduction to a book or other literary work written by the work's author. An introductory essay written by a different person is a foreword [contradictory] and precedes an author's preface.
The prologue introduces a company of Norsemen who have fled the pestilence and set sail to seek the fabled Earthly Paradise "across the western sea where none grow old." Not having succeeded in their quest, they have returned "shrivelled, bent, and grey," after lengthy wanderings abroad, to a "nameless city in a distant sea" where the worship ...
Oral literature is especially rich in chiastic structure, possibly as an aid to memorization and oral performance. In Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, for instance, Cedric Whitman finds chiastic patterns "of the most amazing virtuosity" that simultaneously perform both aesthetic and mnemonic functions, permitting the oral poet easily to recall the basic structure of the composition during ...
Sweeney Agonistes by T. S. Eliot was his first attempt at writing a verse drama although he was unable to complete the piece. In 1926 and 1927 he separately published two scenes from this attempt and then collected them in 1932 in a small book under the title Sweeney Agonistes: Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama.
In his work Poetics, Aristotle defines an epic as one of the forms of poetry, contrasted with lyric poetry and drama (in the form of tragedy and comedy). [12] Epic poetry agrees with Tragedy in so far as it is an imitation in verse of characters of a higher type. They differ in that Epic poetry admits but one kind of meter and is narrative in form.