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Literary Terms and Definitions W

cn.edu

This page is under

perpetual construction! It was last updated April 8, 2013.
This list is meant to assist, not intimidate. Use it as a touchstone for important concepts and
vocabulary that we will cover during the term. Vocabulary terms are listed alphabetically.
[ N ] [ O ] [ P ] [ Q ] [ R ] [ S ] [ T ] [ U ] [ V ] [ W] [ X ] [ Y ] [ Z ]
WAKA: A Japanese genre of poetry closely related to the tanka, consisting of alternate five- and
seven-syllable lines. The primary difference seems to be that the word waka dates back to the sixth
century BCE, while the more familiar terms tanka and uta date back to an eighth-century CE poetry
anthology, the Manyoshu. See tanka.
WANDERJAHR (German, "Wander-Year"): A period in a character's life during which she is absent
from her normal routine, engaged in thought, travel, and a quest for novel experiences or insight.
WAR OF THE ROSES: A civil war in England that lasted from 1455-1487 between the families
descended from Edward III and the families descended from Henry IV. The event forms the
background of Shakespeare's Henry VI plays and strongly influenced Sir Thomas Malory's depiction
of King Arthur in Le Morte Darthur as he wrote in 1469-1470. Click here for more discussion.

WARP SPASM: In ancient Irish literature, a beserk battle-rage in which the hero's physical form
conventionally transforms into a distorted and grotesque appearance before he enters battle. The
most famous examples appear in The Tin B Cuailinge, in which the hero Cuchulainn has his joints
bend backwards, one eye shrinks inside his skull while the other expands to monstrous size, his lungs
and liver flap up into his mouth, fire and smoke boils from his head, and his hair sticks up in spikes
sharp enough to impale apples. Along with the warp spasm, the ancient Irish heros conventionally
engaged in a number of supernatural battle-feats. Again, The Tin catalogs without much explanation
the ones Cuchulainn learned from the warrior-woman Scthach. The list of skills includes juggling nine
apples, "the thunder feat," the feat of the sword-edge, the body-feat, the feat of the heroic
salmon-leap, the pole-throw, the use of the gae bolga (a barbed spear), the spurt of seed, the feat of
throwing chariot-wheels, the breath-feat, the hero's scream, the stunning shot, and ability to step on
spears thrown in flight.
WEAK DECLENSION: In linguistics, a Germanic/Teutonic noun or adjective that changes little from
one declension to another. The consonant [n] is prominent in this declension.
WEAK ENDING: In poetry, another term for a feminine ending, in which the last syllable of a metrical
line is unstressed. See discussion under meter.
WEAK VERB: In linguistics, a Germanic verb whose principle parts require the addition of a dental
suffix--i.e., typically a /d/ or a /t/. Contrast with a strong verb, one whose linguistic principal parts
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were formed by ablaut of the stem vowel, Examples of a strong verb surviving in modern English
would be the verb swim, with forms like swim, swam, swum, as opposed to a weak verb like indicate,
indicated, or have indicated.
WEDGE: A diacritical mark used in some Eastern European countries. It indicates a sound like the
digraph <ch> in checkers.
WEIGHT: The quality created in a syllable of verse in which that syllable both (a) has heavy stress
and (b) has a long vowel that stretches out the duration of time necessary to pronounce that syllable.
For instance, consider this line by Tennyson:
God-gifted organ voice of England.
As Babette Deutsch points out, in this line of nine syllables, we have five syllables with heavy stress,
and in each case, the vowel is a "long" vowel (193). See quantitative and qualitative meter.
WELL-MADE PLAY (French, "la piece bien faite"): A form of French theater developed in the 1800s.
Eugne Scribe and Victorien Sardou popularized it. The well-made play involves secrets and timely
arrivals of surprise characters and sudden twists in plot introduced by external threats. In modern
critical parlance, the term is considered pejorative and it refers to any overly neat and precisely
constructed play, especially one that uses artificial authorial interventions to cause problems for the
characters. Well-made plays continued to be popular through the 1950s. A recent example is Agatha
Christie's The Mousetrap from 1952. Ibsen's A Doll's House also exhibits traits of the well-made play.
WELTANSCHAUUNG (German, "manner of looking at the world"): The philosophy of an individual, an
artist, or a group of like-minded individuals, especially the philosophy concerning one's relationship to
civilization. Cf. Weltansicht, below.
WELTANSICHT (German, "world-sight"):The general attitude toward life and reality an individual or
character demonstrates. Cf. Weltanschauung, above.
WELTSCHMERZ (German "world-woe"): According to Shipley's Dictionary of World Literature (623),
Jean Paul (1763-1825) coined this German phrase to refer to the sentimental pessimism one
feels--the sorrow, disillusionment, and discontent one accepts as a part of existence--especially when
comingled with egotism, arrogant pride, and cynicism. This attitude is especially prevalent in certain
post-Napoleonic German and Italian existential writers including Musset, Leopardi, Platen, and
Heine--but it also typifies some English poets/poems such as the poetic speaker in Byron's Childe
Harold's Pilgrimage (Shipley 632).
WN and WU: The two main classes of traditional Chinese drama: civil (wn) and martial (wu). The
"script" of these plays is more like a roughly outlined scenario than an actual dramatic text as
westerners understand drama. The plays include dialogue in prose and verse, dancing, mime,
operatic singing, and acrobatics. Conventionally, the action takes place on a square stage. The
subject-matter deals with traditional legends and historical events. The narrative points to a moral, and
their setting seems to be a timeless amalgamation of various Chinese periods blended together.
Various props are conventionally simple and may represent various other objects. For instance, a
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table may represent a wall, an altar, a hill, a judicial bench, or a bridge. To represent wind, characters
on the edge of the stage will flap four black flags vigorously. A cap marked with red cloth represents a
decapitated head, and so on. Likewise, there are symbol gestures for actors. For example, holding a
sleeve up near one's eyes denotes weeping.
Musical accompaniment is done with instruments similar to a Western fiddle, but the orchestra (which
also stands on the stage) uses brass percussion instruments. Both actors and singers use falsetto
voices, though comedic actors render their lines in basso tones.
There are four types of character in Chinese drama: shng (general male characters), tan (general
female characters), hua-lien (strong vigorous male characters with faces painted like masks), and
ch'ou (comedians). Costumes for each role are lavish, adapted from the styles of T'ang, Sung, Yan,
and Ming dynasties. Conventionally, emperors wear red on stage, government officials wear yellow,
and so on. The make-up for various characters denotes their personality: yellow face-paint indicates
guile; black indicates integrity and honesty; white indicates treachery and deceit; red shows loyalty
and courage, and green indicates a character is a demon, brigand, or outlaw. Blue or red beards
indicate a creature is a supernatural being, and the length of a character's beard indicates the
character's relative status and prestige.
Wn and Wu conventions have had a powerful influence on later forms of Chinese drama. Contrast
with No plays and karagz puppet-theater.
WERGELD: An alternative spelling for wergild. See wergild, below.
WERGILD (Anglo-Saxon, lit. "man-gold," also spelled wergeld): The legal system of many Germanic
tribes, including the Anglo-Saxons. This tradition allowed an individual and his family to make amends
for a crime by paying a fine known as wergild to the family of another man whom he had injured or
killed. The price varied depending upon the nature of the injury and the status of the injured man.
Surviving laws of Wihtfrid (8th century CE) show how elaborate the wergild system had become by the
ninth century. Wihtfrid included a varying price in silver for each tooth knocked out during a fight. If an
individual could not or would not pay the wergild, the injured family was considered within its
traditional rights to kill a member of the culprit's family of similar rank and status. This process often
led to extended blood-feuds lasting several generations. The concerns of wergild appear prominently
in Anglo-Saxon poems such as Beowulf, in which the supernatural predations of the monsters are
figured in the legalistic language associated with this practice. See also peace-weaver. NB: Wergild
should not be confused with Danegeld, the practice of paying extortive Vikings to go away without
attacking.
WERTHERISM: The term comes from the character Werther in Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen
Werthers (1774) i.e., The Sorrows of Young Werther. In the novella, Werther is a hypersensative,
emotional young teenager who ends up committing suicide. Thus, a "Wertherism" is any action,
behavior, or attitude reminiscent of Werther--i.e., fits of depression, suicidal urges, hopeless romantic
longings, Weltschmerz, or what 21st century American teenagers would call "emo" behavior.
WEST GERMANIC: A sub-branch of the Germanic family of languages including Dutch, English, and
German, in contrast with the North Germanic sub-branch (including Old Norse, Norwegian, and
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Icelandic) and the East Germanic sub-branch (which included the now extinct language of Gothic).
WEST SAXON: The Old English dialect spoken in Wessex.
WESTERN: A literary and cinematic genre marked by numerous conventions. The usual setting is a
short main street in a dust-blown frontier village of the American west during the 1800s. Traditionally,
the protagonists wear white hats and the antagonists wear black hats. Conventional characters
include Mexican bandits, stereotypical Plains Indians bedecked in feathered headresses, a town
drunkard, a local madame who assists the protagonist, and so on. Often, the thematic concern is a
struggle between law and lawlessness, between communal health and chaotic individualism.
Historical accuracy usually comes second place to action, and the dramatic climax often takes the
form of a dual or gunfight at high noon. "Spaghetti westerns" are a cinematic subgenre of the western
film consisting of those films overseen by Italian directors and filmed completely or partly in
Italy--including a large number of Clint Eastwood westerns from the 1960s and 1970s. Recent writers
of westerns include Louis Lamour, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, A. B. Guthrie, Conrad Richter, and
H. L. Davis.
WHEEL: See under discussion of Bob-and-Wheel.
WHEEL-AND-BOB: Another term for Bob-and-Wheel.
WHIG: In Questions of English, Marshall notes the term Whig originally was an insulting nickname for
Scottish Presbyterian rebels, but after 1680 it became a label for the political faction in England that
opposed James, Duke of York (James II) as an heir to the throne because of his Roman Catholicism.
Eventually, during the time of Swift, Addison, Steele, and Johnson in the 1700s, the terms Tory and
Whig became the names of the two major political factions in England. Tories were associated with
the Established Chuch of England (the Anglican Church) and conservative country gentry, but the
Whigs were associated with religious dissenters (Quakers, anabaptists, Puritans, etc.) and the rising
bourgeois class of industrialists wanting political change. In modern British politics, the term Tory
today remains informally attached to the Conservative party, but the word Whig has fallen out of
political use for the Liberal Party (Marshall 11-12). See also Tory
WHODUNNIT (from English "Who Done It?"): A slang term for a crime-story or mystery novel in which
the plot revolves around solving a crime--especially a murder.
WHORF'S HYPOTHESIS: A proposal that language affects how its speakers perceive and react to
the world--and that the limitations of language thus become the limitations of human thought. Although
first set forward by amateur linguist Benjamin Whorf (i.e., a fire engineer writing in an M.I.T. alumni
magazine) and inspired by a false understanding of Inuit (Eskimo) language, this hypothesis has been
remarkably influential in cognitive psychology and linguistics. In fiction like George Orwell's 1984,
government control of language allows the party to expunge thoughtcrime (illegal ideas) in its
dystopian monopoly of intellect. This idea is based largely on Whorf's Hypothesis.
WIDOW: In printing, a widow is a single short line ending a paragraph but separated from the earlier
lines in that paragraph by a page break, thus appearing by itself at the top of the next page or column.
Widows traditionally should be avoided in printing and in college essays. Luckily for students, writers
can avoid such a faux pas by turning on "widow/orphan control" on their word processors. The trick in
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Microsoft Word is to click on the "format" option and then select "paragraph." Then select "line and
page breaks" to find the appropriate option. Contrast with orphan.
WILLING SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF: Temporarily and willingly setting aside our beliefs about
reality in order to enjoy the make-believe of a play, a poem, film, or a story. Perfectly intelligent
readers can enjoy tall-tales about Pecos Bill roping a whirlwind, or vampires invading a small town in
Maine, or frightening alternative histories in which Hitler wins World War II, without being "gullible" or
"childish." To do so, however, the audience members must set aside their sense of "what's real" for
the duration of the play, or the movie, or the book.
Samuel Coleridge coined the English phrase in Chapter 14 of Biographia Literaria to describe the way
a reader is implicitly "asked" to set aside his notions of reality and accept the dramatic conventions of
the theater and stage or other fictional work. Coleridge writes:
. . . My endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least
romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of
truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of
disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith (quoted in Cuddon, page 1044).
Coleridge may have been inspired by the French phrase, "cette belle suspension d'esprit de law
sceptique" from Franois de La Mothe le Vayer, or by Ben Jonson's writing where Jonson notes, "To
many things a man should owe but a temporary belief, and suspension of his own judgment." Cf.
verisimilitude.
WINCHESTER MANUSCRIPT: A handwritten book or manuscript by two scribes containing the text
of Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur. Librarian Walter Oakeshott discovered the text in 1934. It had been
locked in a safe in the Warden's lodgings of Winchester College. The scholar Lotte Hellinga later
demonstrated that the manuscript had been kept in William Caxton's print-shop at the same time that
he was working on his 1485 printed edition of Le Morte D'Arthur. The Winchester MS provides
additional autobiographical information about Malory. It has different divisions and decorations than
the Caxton print, and literally thousands of variant readings. The best facsimile is N. R. Ker's The
Winchester Malory: A Facsimile, as published by Oxford University Press in conjunction with the Early
English Text Society (Oxford, 1976).
WINE PRIZING: See baade setaee.
WISH FULFILLMENT: In psychoanalytic criticism, wish fulfillment refers to something in literature that
satisfies the conscious or subconscious desires of either the creator or the reader of a work. A writer
of action adventure stories, for instance, might imagine a male protagonist who is stronger, tougher,
younger, and smarter than himself. This protagonist lives a sophisticated life of international intrigue;
he woos exotic women and foils evil plots, doing all the things the writer himself cannot do. Readers
sharing similar conscious or unconscious fantasies may be attracted to such stories to fulfill their own
desires vicariously. Nearly all popular literature has some element of wish fulfillment in it. This
phenomenon usually begins with children's literature and fairy tales ("and they lived happily ever
after"). Some juvenile fantasy novels offer beautiful and exotic landscapes where the lines between
good and evil are always clear and distinct, and where magic allows the characters to participate in or
control awesome events. Crime novels may present readers with characters who live outside the
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constrictions of law and morality in a way the reader cannot. Harlequin romance novels or similar
bodice-rippers promise whirlwind romance and steamy sex without unpleasant physical consequences
or imperfect enjoyment. Western novels offer unspoiled naturalistic landscapes and lawless terrain far
away from the pollution, litter, and legislative restrictions of the modern world.
Aside from popular entertainment, the same element of wish fulfillment can appear in more serious
literary works as well. Utopian literature fulfills our desires for a perfect society, even as it critiques
the failures of real government. An atheistic critic might argue that religious narratives are another
example of wish fulfillment, pointing out that stories of eternal life in paradise for the good fulfills
humanity's desire to avoid death, that tales of angels or benevolent spirits fulfill our desires to be
loved, protected, and watched over, that descriptions of hell or apocalypse fulfill our desires for all
criminals and wrong-doers to be punished and the imperfections of the world wiped away.
Wish fulfillment is not limited to positive desires. Freud speaks of thanatos (the death wish), a
subconscious desire to reject life and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. The Oedipal
complex is a subconscious desire to murder or destroy a father-figure and incestuously take his
sexual role with the mother. Through psychological projection, viewers may sublimate destructive
desires by placing it on the characters in a tragedy, "enjoying" a healthy orgy of grief and catharsis.
Readers may also project their own subconscious impulses toward hateful or forbidden behavior onto
the villain, marveling at the antagonist's imaginary crimes and paradoxically reveling in the bad guy's
eventual punishment at a safe distance.
Note that clever writers might create characters and imagine these characters with sufficient
psychological detail to suggest elements of fictional wish fulfillment in them, as if an imaginary person
had psychological depth of her own. For instance, Chaucer creates the fictional Wife of Bath, an aging
pilgrim seeking her sixth husband while on pilgrimage. The Wife tells a tale to the other pilgrims. Her
narrative includes a fairy tale hag who embodies the desires of the Wife herself. This hag wins the
love of a handsome young knight, gains dominance over him in the marriage, and through his love
and submission, magically transforms herself into a young woman again. These desires might
correspond to the fantasies of the Wife of Bath herself as a fictional storyteller. See also escapist
literature.
WIT (from Anglo-Saxon witan, "to know"): In modern vernacular, the word wit refers to elements in a
literary work designed to make the audience laugh or feel amused, i.e., the term is used
synonymously with humor. In sixteenth-century usage, Renaissance writers thought of wit merely as
the intellectual ability to write poetry, as Sir Philip Sidney suggests (Cuddon 1045). In the
seventeenth-century usage, usage changed. The term humor then generally referred to broad
emotional mood--but wit much more exclusively denotes intellectual originality, ingenuity, and mental
acuity--especially in the sense of using paradoxes, making clever verbal expressions, and coining
concise or deft phrases. As Alexander Pope put it, "True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd, / What oft
was thought, but ne'er so well express'd."
The issue of what counted as wit and what did not was a contentious matter for Enlightenment critics
and their descendants. For Dryden, Cowley, and Pope, wit was a matter of creating the proper word or
proper image to convey an established and accepted idea in a new way--a blending of conservative
thought with original expression. Samuel Johnson disagreed, scorning "heterogenous ideas . . . yoked
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by violence together" (qtd. in Cuddon 1045). Addison in several issues of The Spectator attempts to
distinguish between "false" and "true wit," concluding that wit must combine resemblence or
recognition with an oppositional surprise. He gives an example of a twist on Petrarchan imagery--"My
mistress' bosom is as white as snow--and as cold." Here, the wit comes from a familiar and common
Petrachan image referring to the beauty of Laura's snow-white breasts, but he deflates the expected
passion by the imagery of her cold response (Shipley 626). Addison goes on to list twelve types of
"false wit" that he condemns as intellectually unworthy:
shaped verse
lipograms
rebus
echo-verse
a poem ringing the changes of a word
anagrams
acrostics
chronograms
bouts-rims
double rhymes--i.e. "perfect rhymes" like time/thyme
any pun that cannot be translated into another language ("vox et praeterea nihil")
witches' prayers or rime brise--i.e., verse that can be read one way to have one meaning,
but which means the opposite when read backward.
For Addison, using any of the above techniques disqualifies one as being a "true wit." Later, William
Hazlitt distinguished between "wit" (which he saw as artificial and emotionally sterile intellectual
exercises) with "imagination" (which he saw as valid and more worthy originality) (Cuddon 1045).
Finally, in the 19th century, wit was associated with a lack of gravity. The Victorian critic Matthew
Arnold, for instance, condemned Chaucer and Pope for their "wittiness," their lack of "high
seriousness" (1045). Finally, T. S. Eliot swung the pendulum back again, and he rehabilitated the
reputation of John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and similar poets in his critical writings because he saw
them as figures able to combine wit and seriousness--an assessment most 20th- and early
21st-century critics would uphold (1045).
"WITHIN": In the stage directions for Shakespeare's plays, a "noise within" indicates offstage sound
effects such as shouts, drums, and trumpets. These noises were produced typically in the
tiring-house.
WORLD ENGLISH: English as used worldwide or internationally and the common features of this
international English.
WOUND-RAIN: Also called blood-rain, this is a supernatural motif common in Old Norse sagas in
which a rain of blood--sometimes boiling--falls on a ship or field, or, alternatively, an unattended and
clean weapon spontaneously begins to drip blood. This motif serves as foreshadowing of coming
violence. Old Icelandic literature probably borrowed the motif from Irish sources (see Robert Cook's
notes to the Penguin Classics edition of Njal's Saga, page 321).
WRENCHED ACCENT: As Babette Deutsch phrases it, wrenched accent is "The triumph of metrical
stress over word accent when the two conflict" (195). Normally, a word like body typically has a strong
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stress on the first syllable and a weaker stress on the second syllable. However, the overwhelming
pattern of surrounding meter can come into conflict with this natural stress pattern and even
overwhelm it, as is the case in the last line of this stanza by Rossetti:
"And many's the good gift, Lord Sands, You've promised oft to me; But the gift of yours I
keep today, Is the babe in my body." (qtd. in Deutsch 195)
If you read the passage aloud, you will probably find that a strong impulse moves you to alter the
normal accent of the word body so that a heavy stress falls on the final syllable rather than the noraml
first syllable. That phenomenon is wrenched accent.
WYNN (or wyn): A letter shape used in writing Middle English. Click here to see an example.
WYRD: Often translated as "fate," wyrd is an Anglo-Saxon term that embodies the concept of
inevitability in Old English poetry. Unlike destiny, in which one imagines looking forward into the future
to see the outcome of one's life, wyrd appears to be linked to the past. As an example illustrating this
difference, a male speaker might claim, "It is my destiny to eat too many hamburgers, develop high
cholesterol, and die of a heart attack in Pittsburgh at age fifty-three." The speaker is predicting what
will inevitably happen to him, what is fated to occur sometime in the future. On the other hand, one
might claim, "It is my wyrd to be born as a Caucasian child to impoverished parents who neglected to
feed me properly, so that my health is always bad." In the first case, the speaker describing destiny
implies that the future is set, and therefore the outcome of his life is beyond his control. In the second
case, the speaker describing wyrd implies that the past is unchangeable, and therefore the current
circumstances in which he finds himself are beyond his alteration. In Anglo-Saxon narratives, heroic
speakers like Beowulf describe themselves as being "fated" (i.e., having a wyrd) that requires them to
act in a certain way. It is Beowulf's wyrd to help King Hrothgar, not because some abstract destiny
wills it so, but because in the past, Hrothgar helped Beowulf's father, and it is Beowulf's duty to return
that favor. The exact circumstances are beyond Beowulf's control, but Beowulf can choose how he
reacts to that "fate." This idea contrasts with the Greek idea of moira.
Although wyrd dies out in Middle English and Early Modern usage, some scholarly speculation has
posited that the three "weird" sisters in Macbeth may actually be the three "wyrd" sisters, thus the
three fates in an archetypal form.
[A] [B] [C] [D] [E] [F] [G] [H] [I] [J] [K] [L] [M]
[ N ] [ O ] [ P ] [ Q ] [ R ] [ S ] [ T ] [ U ] [ V ] [ W] [ X ] [ Y ] [ Z ]
I consulted the following works while preparing this list. I have tried to give credit to specific sources
when feasible, but in many cases multiple reference works use the same examples or provide the
same dates for common information. Students should examine these resources for more information
than these humble webpages provide:
Works Cited:
Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 6th edition. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College
Pub., 1993. [Now superseded by later editions.]
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Algeo, John and Thomas Pyles. The Origin and Development of the English Language. 5th
edition. U.S.A., 2004.
Baugh, A. C. and Thomas Cable. A History of the English Language. 5th edition. Englewood
Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 2002.
Brown, Michelle P. Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts: A Guide to Technical Terms.
London: The British Library and the J. Paul Getty Museum, 1994.
Burkert, Walter. Greek Religion. [Originally published 1977 as Griechische Religion der
archaischen und klassischen Epoche.] Trans. John Raffan. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985.
Catholic University of America Editorial Staff. The New Catholic Encyclopedia. New York:
McGraw-Hill. 1967-79.
Corbett, Edward P. J. Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student. 3rd edition. Oxford: Oxford
UP, 1990.
Cuddon, J. A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London:
Penguin Books, 1991.
Damrosch, David, gen. ed. The Longman Anthology of British Literature. 2nd Compact
Edition. Volume A. New York: Pearson, 2004. 3 Vols.
Deutsch, Babette. Poetry Handbook: A Dictionary of Terms. Fourth Edition. New York: Harper
and Row, 1974. Reprint as Barnes and Noble Edition, 1981.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.
Gabel, John B. and Charles B. Wheeler. The Bible as Literature: An Introduction. New York:
Oxford U P, 1986.
Giroux, Joan. The Haiku Form. New York: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1974. Reprinted New
York: Barnes and Noble, 1999.
Guerin, Wilfred L., et al. "Glossary." A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. 2nd ed.
New York: Harper and Row, 1979. 317-29.
Harkins, Williams E. Dictionary of Russian Literature. The New Students Outline Series.
Patterson, New Jersey: Littlefield, Adams, and Co., 1959.
Harvey, Sir Paul and Dorothy Eagle, eds. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 4th
ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1969.
Holman, C. Hugh. A Handbook to Literature. 3rd edition. New York: The Odyssey Press,
1972.
Hopper, Vincent Foster. Medieval Number Symbolism: Its Sources, Meaning, and Influence
on Thought and Expression. 1938. Republished Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2000.
Horobin, Simon. Chaucer's Language. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2007.
Kane, George. The Autobiographical Fallacy in Chaucer and Langland Studies. London: H.
K. Lewis, 1965.
Lacy, Norris J. The New Arthurian Encyclopedia. New York: Garland Publishing, 1996.
Lanham, Richard A. A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. 2nd edition. Berkeley: U of California P,
1991.
Marshall, Jeremy and Fred McDonald. Questions of English. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995.
McManus, Damian. Ogam Stones At University College Cork. Cork: Cork U P, 2004.
Metzger, Bruce M. and Michael D. Coogan, eds. The Oxford Companion to the Bible. New
York: Oxford U P, 1993.
O'Donoghue, Heather. Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Short Introduction. Malden,
MA:Blackwell Publishing, 2004.
Palmer, Donald. Looking At Philosophy: The Unbearable Heaviness of Philosophy Made
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Lighter. 2nd edition. Mountain View, California: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1994.
Peck, Harry Thurston. Harper's Dictionary of Clasical Literature and Antiquities. New York:
The American Book Company, 1923. 2 vols.
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