Si ÇCossary of

Literary Verms
SEVENTH EDITION

M. H. ABRAMS
CORNELL U N I V E R S I T Y

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A Glossary of Literary Terms/ Seventh Edition

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 PROSODY · PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM 247

can be placed along a spectrum according to the degree to which they exploit,
and make prominent, modes of formal organization. At one end is the irregu-
lar, and only occasionally formal, prose of ordinary discourse. Distinguished
written discourse, in what John Dryden called "that other harmony of prose,"
is no less an art than distinguished verse; in all literatures, in fact, artfully
written prose seems to have developed later than written verse. As written
prose gets more "literary"—whether its function is descriptive, expository,
narrative, or expressive—it exhibits more patent, though highly diverse,
modes of rhythm and other formal features. The prose translations of the po-
etic books of the Old Testament in the King James Bible, for example, have a
repetition, balance, and contrast of clauses which approximate the form that
in the nineteenth century was named "the prose poem." Prose poems are
densely compact, pronouncedly rhythmic, and highly sonorous composi-
tions which are written as a continuous sequence of sentences without line
breaks. Examples of prose poems are, in French, Charles Baudelaire's Little
Poems in Prose (1869) and Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations (1886), and in En-
glish, excerptible passages in Walter Pater's prose essays, such as his famous
meditation on Leonardo da Vinci's painting the Mona Lisa, in The Renaissance
(1873). John Ashberry's Three Poems (1972) are prose poems, in that they are
printed continuously, without broken lines. Farther still along the formal
spectrum, we leave the domain of prose, by the use of line breaks and the con-
trolled rhythms, pauses, syntactical suspensions, and cadences that identify
free verse. At the far end of the spectrum we get the regular, recurrent units of
weaker and stronger stressed syllables that constitute the meters of English
verse.
See style (including the list of readings), and for a special form of elabo-
rately formal prose, euphuism. Refer to George Saintsbury, A History of English
Prose Rhythm (1912); M. Boulton, Anatomy of Prose (1954); George L. Trager
and Henry Lee Smith, Jr., An Outline of English Structure (1951); Robert
Adolphe, The Rise of Modern Prose Style (1968). E. D. Hirsch discusses the de-
velopment of English prose in The Philosophy of Composition (1977), pp. 51-72.
On the prose poem, see Jonathan Monroe, A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem
and the Politics of Genre (1987).

Prosody signifies the systematic study of versification in poetry; that is, a

study of the principles and practice of meter, rhyme, and stanza forms. Some-
times the term "prosody" is extended to include also the study of speech-
sound patterns and effects such as alliteration, assonance, euphony, and
onomatopoeia.

Psychological and Psychoanalytic Criticism. Psychological criticism

deals with a work of literature primarily as an expression, in fictional form, of
the state of mind and the structure of personality of the individual author.
This approach emerged in the early decades of the nineteenth century, as part
of the romantic replacement of earlier mimetic and pragmatic views by an ex-
pressive view of the nature of literature; see criticism. By 1827 Thomas Carlyle
248 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM

could say that the usual question "with the best of our own critics at present"
is one "mainly of a psychological sort, to be answered by discovering and de-
lineating the peculiar nature of the poet from his poetry." During the Roman-
tic Period, we find widely practiced all three variants of the critical procedures
(still current today) that are based on the assumption that a work of literature
is correlated with its author's distinctive mental and emotional traits: (1) ref-
erence to the author's personality in order to explain and interpret a literary
work; (2) reference to literary works in order to establish, biographically, the
personality of the author; and (3) the mode of reading a literary work specifi-
cally in order to experience the distinctive subjectivity, or consciousness, of
its author (see critics of consciousness). We even find that John Keble, in the se-
ries of Latin lectures On the Healing Power of Poetry—published in 1844, but
delivered more than ten years earlier—proposed a thoroughgoing proto-
Freudian literary theory. "Poetry," Keble claimed, "is the indirect expression . . .
of some overpowering emotion, or ruling taste, or feeling, the direct indul-
gence whereof is somehow repressed"; this repression is imposed by the au-
thor's sentiments of "reticence" and "shame"; the conflict between the need
for expression and the compulsion to repress such self-revelation is resolved
by the poet's ability to give "healing relief to secret mental emotion, yet with-
out detriment to modest reserve" by a literary "art which under certain veils
and disguises . . . reveals the fervent emotions of the mind"; and this dis-
guised mode of self-expression serves as "a safety valve, preserving men from
madness." (The emergence and the varieties of romantic psychological criti-
cism are described in M. H. Abrams, The Minor and the Lamp, 1953, chapters 6
and 9.) In the present era many critics make at least passing references to the
psychology of an author in discussing works of literature, with the notable ex-
ception of those whose critical premises invalidate such reference; mainly for-
malism, New Criticism, structuralism, deconstruction.
Since the 1920s, a very widespread form of psychological literary criticism
has come to be psychoanalytic criticism, whose premises and procedures
were established by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Freud had developed the dy-
namic form of psychology that he called psychoanalysis as a means of analysis
and therapy for neuroses, but soon expanded it to account for many develop-
ments and practices in the history of civilization, including warfare, mythol-
ogy, and religion, as well as literature and the other arts. Freud's brief comment
on the workings of the artist's imagination at the end of the twenty-third lec-
ture of his Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1920), supplemented by relevant pas-
sages in the other lectures in that book, set forth the theoretical framework of
what is sometimes called "classical" psychoanalytic criticism: Literature and
the other arts, like dreams and neurotic symptoms, consist of the imagined, or
fantasied, fulfillment of wishes that are either denied by reality or are prohib-
ited by the social standards of morality and propriety. The forbidden, mainly
sexual ("libidinal") wishes come into conflict with, and are repressed by, the
"censor" (the internalized representative within each individual of the stan-
dards of society) into the unconscious realm of the artist's mind, but are per-
mitted by the censor to achieve a fantasied satisfaction in distorted forms
 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM 249

which serve to disguise their real motives and objects from the conscious
mind. The chief mechanisms that effect these disguises of unconscious wishes
are (1) "condensation" (the omission of parts of the unconscious material and
the fusion of several unconscious elements into a single entity); (2) "displace-
ment" (the substitution for an unconscious object of desire by one that is ac-
ceptable to the conscious mind); and (3) "symbolism" (the representation of
repressed, mainly sexual, objects of desire by nonsexual objects which resem-
ble them or are associated with them in prior experience). The disguised fan-
tasies that are evident to consciousness are called by Freud the "manifest"
content of a dream or work of literature; the unconscious wishes that find a
semblance of satisfaction in this distorted form he calls the "latent" content.
Also present in the unconscious of every individual, according to Freud,
are residual traces of prior stages of psychosexual development, from earliest
infancy onward, which have been outgrown, but remain as "fixations" in the
unconscious of the adult. When triggered by some later event in adult life, a
repressed wish is revived and motivates a fantasy, in disguised form, of a satis-
faction that is modeled on the way that the wish had been gratified in infancy
or early childhood. The chief enterprise of the psychoanalytic critic, in a way
that parallels the enterprise of the psychoanalyst as a therapist, is to reveal the
true content, and thereby to explain the effect on the reader, of a literary work
by translating its manifest elements into the latent, unconscious determi-
nants that constitute their suppressed meanings.
Freud also asserts, however, that artists possess special abilities that differ-
entiate them radically from the patently neurotic personality. The artistic
person, for example, possesses to an especially high degree the power to sub-
limate (that is, to shift the instinctual drives from their original sexual goals
to nonsexual "higher" goals, including the discipline of becoming proficient
as an artist); the ability to elaborate fantasied wish-fulfillments into the man-
ifest features of a work of art in a way that conceals or deletes their merely
personal elements, and so makes them capable of satisfying the unconscious
desires of people other than the individual artist; and the "puzzling" ability—
which Freud elsewhere says is a power of "genius" that psychoanalysis cannot
explain—to mold the artistic medium into "a faithful image of the creatures
of his imagination," as well as into a satisfying artistic form. The result is a
fantasied wish-fulfillment of a complex and artfully shaped sort that not only
allows the artist to overcome, at least partially and temporarily, personal con-
flicts and repressions, but also makes it possible for the artist's audience "to
obtain solace and consolation from their own unconscious sources of gratifi-
cation which had become inaccessible" to them. Literature and art, therefore,
unlike dreams and neuroses, may serve the artist as a mode of fantasy that
opens "the way back to reality."
This outline of his theory of art in 1920 was elaborated and refined, but not
radically altered, by the later developments in Freud's theory of mental struc-
tures, dynamics, and processes. Prominent among these developments was
Freud's model of the mind as having three functional aspects: the id (which in-
corporates libidinal and other desires), the superego (the internalization of
250 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM

standards of morality and propriety), and the ego (which tries as best it can to
negotiate the conflicts between the insatiable demands of the id, the impossibly
stringent requirements of the superego, and the limited possibilities of gratifica-
tion offered by the world of "reality"). Freud has himself summarized for a gen-
eral audience his later theoretical innovations, with his remarkable power for
clear and dramatic exposition, in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalys
(1933) and An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1939).
Freud asserted that many of his views had been anticipated by insightful
authors in Western literature, and he himself applied psychoanalysis to brief
discussions of the latent content in the manifest characters or events of liter-
ary works including Shakespeare's Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night'
Dream, and King Lear. He also wrote a brilliant analysis of Fyodor Dostoevsky's
The Brothers Karamazov and a full-length study, Delusion and Dream (1917), o
the novel Gradiva by the Danish writer Wilhelm Jensen. Especially after the
1930s, a number of writers produced critical analyses, modeled on classical
Freudian theory, of the lives of authors and of the content of their literary
works. One of the best-known books in this mode is Hamlet and Oedipus
(1949) by the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones. Building on earlier suggestions by
Freud himself, Jones explained Hamlet's inability to make up his mind to kill
his uncle by reference to his Oedipus complex—that is, the repressed but
continuing presence in the adult's unconscious of the male infant's desire to
possess his mother and to have his rival, the father, out of the way. (Freud de-
rived the term from Sophocles' Greek tragedy Oedipus the King, whose protag-
onist has unknowingly killed his father and married his mother.) Jones
proposes that Hamlet's conflict is "an echo of a similar one in Shakespeare
himself," and goes on to account for the audience's powerful and continued
response to the play, over many centuries, as a result of the repressed Oedipal
conflict that is shared by all men. In more recent decades there has been in-
creasing emphasis by Freudian critics, in a mode suggested by Freud's later
writings, on the role of "ego psychology" in elaborating the manifest content
and artistic form of a work of literature; that is, on the way that the "ego," in
contriving the work, consciously manages to mediate between the conflicting
demands of the id, the superego, and the limits imposed by reality. On such
developments see Frederic C. Crews, "Literature and Psychology," in Relations
of Literary Study, ed. James Thorpe (1967), and the issue on "Psychology and
Literature: Some Contemporary Directions," in New Literary History 12 (1980).
Norman Holland is a leading exponent of the application of psychoanalytic
concepts not (as in most earlier criticism) to the relation of the author to the
work, but to the relation of the reader to the work, explaining each reader's
individual response as the product of a "transactive" engagement between his
or her unconscious desires and defenses and the fantasies that the author has
projected in the literary text; see under reader-response criticism.
The term psychobiography designates an account of the life of an author
(see biography) that focuses on the subject's psychological development, rely-
ing for evidence both on external sources and on the author's own writings. It
stresses the role of unconscious and disguised motives in forming the author's
 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM

personality, and is usually written in accordance with a version, or a revision,

of the Freudian theory of the stages of psychosexual development. A major ex-
emplar of the mode was Erik H. Erikson's Young Man Luther (1958), in which
Erikson stressed the importance of Luther's adolescent "identity crisis." Other
notable instances of literary psychobiography are Leon Edel, Henry fames (5
vols., 1953-72), and Justin Kaplan, Mark Twain and His World (1974). Promi-
nent and diverse examples of Freudian literary criticism are in the collections
listed below. It should be noted, in addition, that many modern literary critics,
like many modern authors, owe some debt to Freud; such major critics, for ex-
ample, as Kenneth Burke, Edmund Wilson, and Lionel Trilling assimilated cen-
tral Freudian concepts into their overall critical views and procedures.
Carl G. Jung is sometimes called a psychoanalyst, but although he began as
a disciple of Freud, his mature version of depth-psychology is very different
from that of his predecessor, and what we call Jungian criticism of literature
departs radically from psychoanalytic criticism. Jung's emphasis is not on the
individual unconscious, but on what he calls the "collective unconscious,"
shared by all individuals in all cultures, which he regards as the repository of
"racial memories" and of primordial images and patterns of experience that he
calls archetypes. He does not, like Freud, view literature as a disguised form of li-
bidinal wish-fulfillment that to a large extent parallels the fantasies of a neu-
rotic personality. Instead, Jung regards great literature as, like the myths whose
patterns recur in diverse cultures, an expression of the archetypes of the collec-
tive unconscious. A great author possesses, and provides for readers, access to
the archetypal images buried in the racial memory, and so succeeds in revitaliz-
ing aspects of the psyche which are essential both to individual self-integration
and to the mental and emotional well-being of the human race. Jung's theory
of literature has been a cardinal formative influence on archetypal criticism and
myth criticism. See Jung, Contributions to Analytic Psychology (1928) and Modern
Man in Search of a Soul (1933); also Edward Glover, Freud or Jung (1950).
Since the development of structural and poststructural theories, there has
been a strong revival of Freud, although in diverse reformulations of the clas-
sical Freudian scheme. Close attention to Freud's writings, and frequently the
assimilation of some version of Freud's ideas to their own views and proce-
dures, are features of the criticism of many current writers, whether they are
Marxist, Foucauldian, or Derridean in theoretical commitment or primary
focus. Harold Bloom's view of the anxiety of influence specifically adapts to the
composition and reading of poetry Freud's concepts of the Oedipus complex
and of the distorting operation of defense mechanisms in dreams. A number
of feminist critics have attacked the male-centered nature of Freud's theory—
especially evident in such crucial conceptions as the Oedipus complex and
"penis envy" on the part of the female child; but many feminists have also
adapted a revised version of Freudian concepts and mental mechanisms to
their analyses of the writing and reading of literary texts. See Juliet Mitchell,
Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1975); Mary Jacobus, Reading Woman (1986);
Nancy Chodorow, Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (1990); Rosalind Min-
sky, ed., Psychoanalysis and Gender: An Introductory Reader (1996).
252 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM

Jacques Lacan, "the French Freud," developed a semiotic version of Freud,

converting the basic concepts of psychoanalysis into formulations derived
from the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure, and applying these con-
cepts not to human individuals, but to the operations of the process of signi-
fication. (See under linguistics in literary criticism.) Typical is Lacan's oft-quoted
dictum, "The unconscious is structured like a language." His procedure is to
recast Freud's key concepts and mechanisms into the linguistic mode, viewing
the human mind not as pre-existent to, but as constituted by the language we
use. Especially important in Lacanian literary criticism is Lacan's reformula-
tion of Freud's concepts of the early stages of psychosexual development and
the formation of the Oedipus complex into the distinction between a pre-
linguistic stage of development that he calls the imaginary and the stage
after the acquisition of language that he calls the symbolic. In the imaginary
stage, there is no clear distinction between the subject and an object, or be-
tween the self and other selves. Intervenient between these two stages is what
Lacan calls the mirror stage, the moment when the infant learns to identify
with his or her image in a mirror, and so begins to develop a sense of a sepa-
rate self that is later enhanced by what is reflected back to it from encounters
with other people. When it enters the symbolic stage, the infant subject as-
similates the inherited system of linguistic differences, hence is constituted by
the symbolic, as it learns to accept its pre-determined "position" in such lin-
guistic oppositions as male/female, father/son, mother/daughter. This sym-
bolic realm of language, in Lacan's theory, is the realm of the law of the
father, in which the "phallus" (in a symbolic sense) is "the privileged sig-
nifier" that serves to establish the mode for all other signifiers. In a parallel
fashion, Lacan translates Freud's views of the mental workings of dream-
formation into textual terms of the play of signifiers, converting Freud's dis-
torting defense-mechanisms into linguistic figures of speech. And according
to Lacan, all processes of linguistic expression and interpretation, driven by
"desire" for a lost and unachievable object, move incessantly along a chain of
unstable signifiers, without any possibility of coming to rest on a fixed signi-
fied, or presence. (See Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, 1977; Lacan's much
discussed reading of Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Purloined Letter as an al-
legory of the workings of the signifier, in Yale French Studies, Vol. 48, 1972
and Malcolm Bowie, Lacan, 1991.) Lacan's notions of the inalienable split, or
"difference," that inhabits the self, and of the endless chain of displacements
in the quest for meaning, has made him a prominent reference in poststruc-
tural theorists. And his distinction between the pre-Oedipal, maternal stage of
the pre-linguistic imaginary and the "phallocentric" stage of symbolic lan-
guage has been exploited at length by a number of French feminists; see He-
lene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva under feminist criticism.
Many of Freud's psychoanalytic writings on literature and the arts have
been collected by Benjamin Nelson, ed., Sigmund Freud on Creativity and the U
conscious (1958). Anthologies of psychoanalytic criticism by various authors are
William Phillips, ed., Art and Psychoanalysis (1957), and Leonard and Eleanor
Manheim, eds., Hidden Patterns: Studies in Psychoanalytic Literary Crit
 PUN · PURPLE PATCH 253

(1966). Useful discussions and developments of Freudian literary theory are

Frederick J. Hoffman, Freudianism and the Literary Mind (rev., 1957), which also
describes Freud's wide influence on writers and critics; Norman N. Holland,
Holland's Guide to Psychoanalytic Psychology and Literature-and-Psychology (1990
and Peter Brooks, Psychoanalysis and Storytelling (1994). Elizabeth Wright, Psy-
choanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice (1984), reviews various recent develop-
ments in psychoanalytic theories and their applications to literary criticism. For
two major traditional critics who have to an important extent adapted Freudian
concepts to their general enterprise, see Edmund Wilson, The Wound and the
Bow (1941), and Lionel Trilling, "Freud and Literature," in The Liberal Imagina-
tion (1950). Frederic C. Crews, who in 1966 wrote an exemplary Freudian criti-
cal study, The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes, later retracted
his Freudian commitment; see his Skeptical Engagements (1986). For feminist
views and adaptations of Jacques Lacan, see Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (1985),
Shoshana Felman, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight (1987); and Eliza-
beth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (1990).

Pun. A play on words that are either identical in sound (homonyms) or very
similar in sound, but are sharply diverse in meaning; an example is the last
word in the title of Oscar Wilde's comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest
(1895). Puns have often had serious literary uses. The authority of the Pope in
Roman Catholicism goes back to the Greek pun uttered by Christ in Matthew
16:18, "Thou art Peter [Petros] and upon this rock [petra] I will build my
church." Shakespeare and other writers used puns seriously as well as for
comic purposes. In Romeo and Juliet (III. i. 101) Mercurio, bleeding to death,
says grimly, "Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man"; and
John Donne's solemn "Hymn to God the Father" (1633) puns throughout on
his own name and the past participle "done." Milton was an inveterate in-
ventor of serious puns in Paradise Lost. In the eighteenth century and there-
after, however, the literary use of the pun has been almost exclusively comic.
A major exception is James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939), which exploits
puns throughout in order to help sustain its complex effect, at once serious
and comic, of multiple levels of meaning; see portmanteau word.
A special type of pun, known as the equivoque, is the use of a single
word or phrase which has two disparate meanings, in a context which makes
both meanings equally relevant. An example is the couplet in a song from
Shakespeare's Cymbeline: "Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney sweep-
ers, come to dust." An epitaph suggested for a bank teller consists of a series of
equivocal phrases:
He checked his cash, cashed in his checks,
And left his window. Who is next?
Purple Patch. A translation of Horace's Latin phrase "purpureus . . . pan-
nus" in his versified Ars Poetica (first century B.C.). It signifies a marked height-
ening of style in rhythm, diction, repetitions, and figurative language that
makes a passage of verse or prose—especially a descriptive passage—stand out