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Genre of novel or short story in which a mystery is solved mainly by the action of a professional or amateur detective. Where the mystery to be solved concerns a crime, the work may be called crime fiction.
A novel with a period in history as its setting, which includes historical events and characters.
In literature, written messages, ranging from those addressed to the public and those sent from lover to lover, to business letters and thank-you notes. The common quality they share is a lively style, echoing the personality of the sender yet aimed at the mind and heart of the receiver.
Or mystery story, literary genre in which the cause (or causes) of a mysterious happening, often a crime, is gradually revealed by the hero or heroine.
In modern literary usage, a sustained work of prose fiction a volume or more in length. It is distinguished from the short story and the fictional sketch, which are necessarily brief.
Literary work in which the shepherd's life is presented in a conventionalized manner. In this convention the purity and simplicity of shepherd life is contrasted with the corruption and artificiality of the court or the city. The pastoral is found in poetry, drama, and fiction, and many subjects.
In literature, tales of love and chivalric adventure, in verse or prose, that became popular in France about 1200 and spread throughout Europe.
Short work of prose fiction, usually consisting of between 500 and 10,000 words, which typically either sets up and resolves a single narrative point or depicts a mood or an atmosphere.
From Columbia Encyclopedia
Term applied to certain American artists and writers who were popular during the 1950s. Essentially anarchic, members of the beat generation rejected traditional social and artistic forms.
From The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Electronic poems typically include one or more of the following: multimedia, animation, sound effects or soundtracks, reader interaction in the form of choices or other participatory features, and automated behaviors.
Term used to describe a flowering of African-American literature and art in the 1920s, mainly in the Harlem district of New York City.
From The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
A school of poetry which flourished in England and America between 1912 and 1914 and emphasized the virtues of clarity, compression, and precision.
A type of post-modernist fiction that mixes elements of fantasy, fable, and folklore with realistic narrative, imbuing it with a fabulous or dreamlike quality.
Modernism is based on a concern with form and the exploration of technique as opposed to content and narrative. In literature, writers experimented with alternatives to orthodox sequential storytelling.
From Key Concepts in Postcolonial Literature
Performance poetry is largely known in the forms produced by Caribbean poets and African American poets, the latter clearly influenced by the radical politics of the 1950s/60s Beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso and Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones).
A late 18c and early 19c movement in art, literature and music, characterized by an emphasis on feelings and emotions, often using imagery taken from nature, and creating forms which are relatively free from rules and set orders.
From Contemporary Youth Culture: An International Encyclopedia
SLAM is a hybrid of spoken word and performed poetry, sometimes with music, that gives individuals an opportunity to voice their opinions and feelings on any topic; conveys urgency, action, and excitement.
Transcendentalism was a series of new ideas that flourished among writers and philosophers in New England during the 19th century.
In literature, short, narrative poem usually relating a single, dramatic event. Two forms of the ballad are often distinguished—the folk ballad, dating from about the 12th century, and the literary ballad, dating from the late 18th century.
Poetry which conveys meaning through the physical arrangement of the words on the page as well as through the words themselves.
A lyric poem, usually a fairly long one, with lines of different lengths and complex rhythms, addressed to a particular person or thing.
Imaginative literary form, particularly suitable for describing emotions and thoughts. Poetry is highly ‘compressed’ writing, often using figures of speech to talk about one thing in terms of another.
A poem of 13 or sometimes 10 lines with only two rhymes, and with the first line used as a refrain after the eighth and thirteenth lines.
From The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
The most complicated of the verseforms initiated by the troubadours (q.v.), the s. is composed of six stanzas of six lines each, followed by an envoi (q.v.) of three lines, all of which are unrhymed.
A short poem with 14 lines of 10 or 11 syllables each and a regular rhyming pattern according to the scheme: the Italian sonnet consists of an octave and a sestet, whereas the English sonnet consists of three quatrains and ends with a rhyming couplet.
From The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Introduced into France in the 16th c. the v. first had as its only distinguishing features a pastoral subject and use of a refrain; in other respects it was without rule, although a sequence of four 8-line stanzas with a refrain of one or two lines repeated at the end of each stanza.
From The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English
Edith Wharton's Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel describes the disillusionment of its thoughtful, conformist hero with the stifling manners and mores of 19th-century New York society.
From The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English
A novel by Sinclair Lewis, published in 1922. It depicts the complacency and materialism of George F. Babbitt, a real-estate agent and representative middle-class family man from the city of Zenith in the American Midwest.
From Brewer's Curious Titles
A novel (1961) by Joseph Heller (1923-99) about the experiences of Captain Yossarian of the 256th United States (Army) bombing squadron in Italy during the Second World War.
From The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English
The only novel by the American writer Margaret Mitchell (1900-49), published in 1936 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize in the following year. An immediate best-seller, it has sold more than 25 million copies, been translated into 27 languages and inspired an enduringly popular film.
From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
Non-fiction novel (1965) by US writer Truman Capote. Subtitled ‘A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences’, it was based on interviews and tells of the murder of a Kansas farming family in 1959.
From The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English
A novel by Herman Melville, published in New York and London in 1851. The British title was The Whale. The highly complex story begins with the narrator Ishmael's decision to go to sea.
From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
Novel (1876) by US author Mark Twain. It describes the childhood escapades of Tom Sawyer and his friends Huckleberry Finn and Joe Harper in a small Mississippi community before the Civil War.
From The Cambridge Guide to Children's Books in English
Novel by J.D. Salinger (1919-), about adolescence rather than for adolescents, and widely seen as a precursor of (or to blame for) probably the most common form of writing for young adults.
From The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English
A novel by John Steinbeck, published in 1939 and awarded a Pulitzer Prize the following year. The novel tells the story of Oklahoma farmers who are driven off their land by soil erosion.
From The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English
A novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1925.
The narrator, Nick Carraway, rents a cottage in West Egg, Long Island, next door to the mansion of Jay Gatsby and across the water from the home of Tom Buchanan and his wife Daisy, Carraway's cousin.
From The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English
A novel by Ernest Hemingway, published in 1926. The English edition which appeared the following year was entitled Fiesta. Set in the mid-1920s, it deals with the ‘lost generation’ of American and British expatriates who have settled in Paris, depicted here as a moral wasteland of drunkenness and promiscuity.
From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
Novel by the US writer Harper Lee (born 1926) published in 1960. Set in a small town in Alabama in the 1930s, it is a dramatic depiction of racial tension and prejudice.
U.S. novelist, noted for her children's books, especially Little Women (1869).
U.S. writer; his novels include Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) and In Cold Blood (1964), based on an actual multiple murder.
1897-1962, US novelist, short-story writer, and poet; noted for The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930); Nobel prize for literature 1949.
(Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald), 1896–1940, American novelist and short-story writer, b. St. Paul, Minn. He is ranked among the great American novelists.
U.S. novelist and short-story writer. His novels include The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and The Old Man and the Sea (1952): Nobel prize for literature 1954.
Writer, born in Portland, Maine, USA. He graduated from his state university and continued to live in Maine, at first supporting himself with odd jobs while establishing his writing career.
1819–91, American author, b. New York City, considered one of the great American writers and a major figure in world literature.
(2/18/1931–) Novels, criticism; editor In 1993, Toni Morrison became the first black woman to receive the Nobel Prize for literature.
has gained prominence and cultlike acclaim from a large cross section of the American public on the basis of a rather limited literary output-one novel, three collections of novellas and short stories, and several additional uncollected short stories.
1902–68, American writer, b. Salinas, Calif., studied at Stanford. He is probably best remembered for his strong sociological novel The Grapes of Wrath.
U.S. novelist and humorist, famous for his classics The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).
American writer whose works include the novels Meridian (1976) and The Color Purple (1982), for which she won a Pulitzer Prize.