A HANDBOOK TO L ITERATURE

A HANDBOOK TO L ITERATURE

A HANDBOOK TO L ITERATURE Tenth Edition WILLIAM HARMON University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Based on Earlier Editions by William Flint Thrall, Addison Hibbard, and C. Hugh Holman Upper Saddle River, New Jersey 07458

Editorial Director: Leah Jewell Acquisitions Editor: Vivian Garcia Editorial Assistant: Melissa Casciano Production Liaison: Joanne Hakim Marketing Manager: Emily Cleary Marketing Assistant: Kara Pottle Manufacturing Buyer: Brian Mackey Cover Art Director: Jayne Conte Cover Design: Bruce Kenselaar Cover Image: Sally Harmon Director, Image Resource Center: Melinda Reo Manager, Rights and Permissions: Zina Arabia Manager, Visual Research: Beth Brenzel Manager, Cover Visual Research & Permissions: Karen Sanatar Photo Researcher: Elaine Soares Photo Coordinator: Richard Rodrigues Composition/Full-Service Project Management: GGS Book Services, Atlantic Highlands Printer/Binder: The Courier Companies Credits borrowed from other sources and reproduced, with permission, in this textbook appear on appropriate page within text. Acknowledgments: E. E. Cummings, Complete Poems: 1904 1962. Reprinted by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation, New York, NY. Robert Creeley, Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945 1975. Reprinted by permission of University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Copyright 2006, 2003, 2000, 1996 by Pearson Education, Inc., Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, 07458. Pearson Prentice Hall. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. This publication is protected by Copyright and permission should be obtained from the publisher prior to any prohibited reproduction, storage in a retrieval system, or transmission in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or likewise. For information regarding permission(s), write to: Rights and Permissions Department. Pearson Prentice Hall is a trademark of Pearson Education, Inc. Pearson is a registered trademark of Pearson plc Prentice Hall is a registered trademark of Pearson Education, Inc. Pearson Education LTD., London Pearson Education Singapore, Pte. Ltd Pearson Education, Canada, Ltd Pearson Education Japan Pearson Education Australia PTY, Limited Pearson Education North Asia Ltd Pearson Educación de Mexico, S.A. de C.V. Pearson Education Malaysia, Pte. Ltd Pearson Education, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey 10987654321 ISBN 0-13-134442-0

Contents Preface to the Tenth Edition vii To the User ix Handbook to Literature 1 Outline of Literary History: British and American 557 APPENDICES 621 A Table of Monetary Terms and Values 622 Nobel Prizes for Literature 625 Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction 628 Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry 630 Pulitzer Prizes for Drama 632 Index of Proper Names 635 v

Preface to the Tenth Edition Clive James has said of Wayne Booth s The Rhetoric of Fiction, A prodigious range of learning is expressed in hearteningly straightforward prose, but the effect is to leave you wondering what special use there is in presenting the student with yet another codified list of rhetorical devices. Separated from the works of fiction in which Professor Booth has so ably detected them, these devices are lifeless except as things to be memorized for the passing of examinations. There is also a strong chance that any student who spends much time studying rhetorical devices will not read the works of fiction, or will read them with his attention unnaturally focused on technical concerns. James s own rhetoric works so skillfully that a reader will probably agree with the main point for a few minutes; but someone who read James s opinion when it first appeared twenty-five years ago ought to have known that Booth s book is nothing like a codified list of devices and that what Booth signifies as rhetoric is nothing like what is usually meant by rhetorical devices. Even so, James makes sense, as he almost always does. But now, old enough to entertain literary memories going back more than fifty years, I know that James is wrong when he pictures the student who spends much time studying rhetorical devices as one who will not read works of fiction. Nothing could be further from the truth. The more I read as a student and I read a good deal the more I wanted to know about the devices, rhetorical, grammatical, prosodic, graphic. I first read Ulysses less than fifteen years after Joyce s death, and it was still possible to enjoy it as a novel without footnotes and so forth. There were a few studies, and, poor as I was, I bought a copy of Stuart Gilbert s James Joyce s Ulysses; I know I was not alone in getting a kick out of the material on the Aeolus chapter the Cave of the Winds transformed into a newspaper office where devices of rhetoric were daily staples. With relish and fascination, I studied the long list of Greek and Latin terms that Joyce provided. I do not know that my devotion to such lists kept me from literature (I do know that when I wrote a paper on Shakespeare s sonnet 66 and dropped the name asyndeton, the teacher, a most distinguished scholar, penciled a little question mark in the margin). Having worked on six editions of this handbook over twenty years, I have to admit there is little for me to add in the way of groundbreaking or pioneering discoveries. I have enjoyed finding out about certain things Manga and Jumping the Shark and Coffee Table Book, suggested by my three children, born in three different decades between 1966 and 1989. All have made many more contributions, as though sharing my sentiment that the project has long been a family enterprise. The new appendix on monetary terms and values was a challenge and a pleasure to prepare. I am grateful to my wife for carrying out most of the calculations, based on a website maintained by vii

PREFACE Economic History Services. I am delighted to record debts and thanks to Joseph M. Flora, Albrecht B. Strauss, Cynthia Clay Adams, Paul Mellencamp, Mark Sigmon, and Zac Barker, who furnished information of various sorts, and to Vivian Garcia and Melissa Casciano of Prentice-Hall who have joined a succession of those who represent the publisher in providing support and assistance and whose influence continues in the current edition (Jennifer Crewe, Barbara Heinssen, and Carrie Brandon). I also wish to thank the following reviewers of this edition: Matthew Allen Fike, Winthrop University; Whitney D. Smith, College of Southern Idaho; Carol A. Galbus, Winona State University; Fidel Fajardo-Acosto, Creighton University; Craig White, University of Houston Clear Lake; and Julie Yen, California State University Sacramento. I wish I had the space to add an essay on the invaluable contributions made by Robert Kirkpatrick, a great reader and inspired teacher as well as a cherished colleague and friend for thirty-five years, who died in early 2004. With his office two doors away from mine, our running discussion of prosody and literature in general covered decades. He was an acknowledged expert on the Romantics, to be sure, but he was also master of many other realms, including classical antiquity, religion, Byzantium, cookery, psychiatry, and much else. It is time that I confessed my debt to two redoubtable institutions, The Oxford English Dictionary and The Times Literary Supplement. I cannot imagine doing without them even for a day. In fact, some items in the Handbook (and at least one scholarly note and one poem) have been inspired just by the TLS crossword. With the OED I have carried on a conversation that began even before I bought my own copy in 1964 (thirteen volumes for 65, which then amounted to $182, almost a month s pay for a young Naval officer). With the OED now in CD-ROM form and as an online site available through a university library, one can stay up-to-date and even submit e-mails with suggestions for corrections and additions. I prepared the fifth edition in 1984 1985 with nothing in the way of information technology except an electric typewriter. Then, cutting and pasting literally involved scissors and paste. Now we have four computers at home and two more in our offices, and we move data back and forth at the speed of light. All that has had little effect on literature as such, and novels and plays and poems are still pretty much what they always were: texts you can buy and performances you can attend. But film studies have changed completely in the past twenty years, since works that were unavailable or very difficult and expensive to obtain are now as easy to access as books in shops and libraries. Watching a film in your living room may be inferior to watching in a theater, true, but it is superior to not being able to watch at all. And the detailed work of scholarship is much enhanced by computers, especially the search and storage functions. Alas, very few autograph-letters-signed and typed-letters-signed come in the mail any more, and I send very few myself, but e-mail is much more efficient. And signed paper materials are all the more valuable, even though I can no longer contribute boxes of letters, postcards, manuscripts, and such materials to my university library. Bookshops still exercise a powerful charm, but the location and collection of rare texts is much easier now. A dealer in far Saskatoon can sell rare material to a reader in Cancun or Rangoon with a few clicks of the mouse, and everybody s a winner. Of course, that makes a basic Handbook all the more necessary. Now I shall get back to the eleventh edition. William Harmon viii

To the User The Handbook proper is a listing of terms variously defined, discussed, explained, and illustrated, with no attempt at exhaustiveness, completeness, or novelty. As with certain earlier editions, this tenth edition provides selected references for some of the more important, difficult, or controversial entries. As in earlier editions, the initial capitals heading the chapters have been chosen from twenty-six different typefaces significant in the history of writing and printing. Terms being defined are given in boldface type. Within the body of the definition, the term in question, along with variants and derivatives, is in italics. A term used in a sense defined elsewhere may be printed in SMALL CAPITALS to indicate a cross-reference. If other articles in the Handbook seem helpful, the statement See an appropriate article is included. For example, the entry on Complication includes the terms PLOT, resolution, dramatic structure, rising action, act, and TRAGEDY, all of which are listed in the Handbook: Each appears in SMALL CAPITALS to indicate that entries thereon may be consulted. The word complication itself is italicized in the body of the entry. Immediately following the alphabetical listing, the Outline of Literary History tabulates the most important events in the literary history of English-speaking people, along with a few undeniably significant non-english items. Since the fifth edition, the Handbook has included an Index of Proper Names, which lists the names and pseudonyms of all actual persons mentioned in the Handbook proper. The Index gives the title or short title of articles in which the person is mentioned. The following abbreviations and symbols are used in the main body of this Handbook: b. = born c. = circa (around, about) d. = died ed. = editor, edition, edited by edd. = editions eds. = editors = breve (marks the first vowel in short syllables of quantitative scansion and weak syllables of qualitative scansion) = macron (marks the first vowel in long syllables of quantitative scansion) = acute accent (marks the first vowel in syllables with primary stress in qualitative scansion) ` = grave accent (marks the first vowel in syllables with secondary stress in qualitative scansion as in séc ondár y) ix

A HANDBOOK TO L ITERATURE