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in which the repeated pattern of consonants is marked by changes
in the intervening vowels--i.e., the final consonants of the
stressed syllables match each other but the vowels differ.
As M. H. Abrams illustrates in The
Norton Anthology of English Literature, examples include
linger, longer, and languor or rider,
reader, raider, and ruder. Do not
confuse consonance with a consonant
(see below). See also assonance and sound
symbolism.
CONSONANT: A speech sound that is not a vowel. To download a PDF file listing consonants and their symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet, click here.
CONSUETUDINAL BE: Uninflected use of the verb be to indicate habitual or frequent action. This grammatical structure is characteristic of Black Vernacular. An example would be as follows: "What you be doing on Thursdays?" "I be working every afternoon." Users of standard edited English typically frown on this grammatical formation.
CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE: Literature written "at the present moment." Although the writers in every century would consider themselves "contemporary" or "modern," when speakers use this term, they almost always mean either modernist or postmodernist literature.
CONTEXTUAL SYMBOL: A unique or original symbol an author creates within the context of an individual work or an author's collected works. Examples include the Snopes family in Faulkner's collected works, who together function as a symbol of the South's moral decay, or the town of Castle Rock, Maine, which in Stephen King's works functions as a microcosmic symbol of human society. Contrast with cultural symbol, below.
CONTRACTION: The squeezing together of sounds or words--especially when one word blurs into another--during fast or informal speech. Contractions such as I'm (I am), he's (he is), and they're (they are) are common in verbal communication, but they are often considered too loose for more formal writing.
CONTRAPASSIO ("counter-suffering): A thematic principle involving situational irony in which a punishment's nature corresponds exactly to the nature of a crime. Much of Dante's Inferno revolves around elaborate contrapassio.
CONTRASTIVE PAIR: Another term for a minimal pair.
CONTROL TEXT: A specific text upon which a modern edition is based. For instance, there are at least three dominant manuscript traditions of Langland's Piers Plowman poem: the A-text, the B-text, and the C-text (and possibly a Z-text, as recent scholarship has tentatively suggested). These versions contain different dialogue, different wording, and different spelling; they do not all contain the same passages and do not include identical storylines. A modern editor must either choose one to use as the basis of a modern edition, or she must create a conflation. Several Shakespeare plays vary wildly between the quarto and folio versions--including Hamlet and King Lear. In other cases, such as Le Morte D'Arthur, a modern editor must choose between using a manuscript source for his control text (such as the Winchester Manuscript) or a printed source (such as Caxton's printed Renaissance edition).
CONVENTION: A common feature that has become traditional or expected within a specific genre (category) of literature or film. In Harlequin romances, it is conventional to focus on a male and female character who struggle through misunderstandings and difficulties until they fall in love. In western films of the early twentieth-century, for instance, it has been conventional for protagonists to wear white hats and antagonists to wear black hats. The wandering knight-errant who travels from place to place, seeking adventure while suffering from the effects of hunger and the elements, is a convention in medieval romances. It is a convention for an English sonnet to have fourteen lines with a specific rhyme scheme, abab, cdcd, efef, gg, and so on. The use of a chorus and the unities are dramatic conventions of Greek tragedy, while, the aside, and the soliloquy are conventions in Elizabethan tragedy. Conventions are often referred to as poetic, literary, or dramatic, depending upon whether the convention appears in a poem, short story or novel, or a play.
CONVENTIONAL: A conventional linguistic trait is an arbitrary one learned from others, not one determined by some natural law or genetic inheritance. Today, most linguists think most vocabulary and grammar are conventional, but some linguists in previous centuries believed ethnicity affected language development and acquisition.
CORPUS CHRISTI PLAY: A religious play performed outdoors in the medieval period that enacts an event from the Bible, such as the story of Adam and Eve, Noah's flood, the crucifixion, and so on. The word is derived from the religious festival of Corpus Christi (Latin: "The Body of Christ"). See also cycle and mystery play.
CORRESPONDENCES: An integral part of the medieval and Renaissance model of the universe known as the "Chain of Being." The idea was that different links on the Chain of Being were interconnected and had a sort of sympathetic correspondence to each other. Each type of being or object (men, beasts, celestial objects, fish, plants, and rocks) had a place within a hierarchy designed by God. Each type of object had a primate, which was by nature the most noble, rare, valuable, and superb example of its type. For instance, the king was primate among men, the lion among beasts, the sun among celestial objects, the whale among fish, the oak among trees, and the diamond among rocks. Often, there was a symbolic link between primates of different orders--such as the lion being a symbol of royalty, or the king sleeping in a bed of oak. This symbolic link was a "correspondence." However, correspondences were thought to exist in the material world as well as in the world of ideas. Disturbances in nature would correspond to disturbances in the political realm (the body politic), in the human body (the microcosm), and in the natural world as a whole (the macrocosm). For instance, if the king were to become ill, Elizabethans might expect lions and beasts to fall sick, rebellions to break out in the kingdom, individuals to develop headaches or fevers, and stars to fall from the sky. All of these events could correspond to each other on the chain of being, and each would coincide with the others. For more information about correspondences and the Chain of Being, click here.
COSMIC IRONY: Another term for situational irony--especially situational irony connected to a fatalistic or pessimistic view of life. See discussion under irony, below.
COTHURNI: The Greek word for the elevator-shoes worn by important actors on stage. See discussion under buskins.
COTTABUS: See kottabos.
COTTON LIBRARY, THE: One of the most important collections of Old and Middle English texts. Click here for details.
COTTON NERO A.X: The Middle English manuscript that includes Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the Legend of Saint Erkenwald. Click here for details.
COTTON VITELLIUS A.XV: The Old English manuscript that includes The Passion of Saint Christopher, The Wonders of the East, and The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, Beowulf, and the Old English translation of Judith. Click here for details.
COUNTING: A technique of determining stylistic qualities of a piece of writing by counting the numbers of words in paragraphs or sentences, and determining the average number of modifiers, average word lengths, and so on.
COUPLET: Two lines--the second line immediately following the first--of the same metrical length that end in a rhyme to form a complete unit. Geoffrey Chaucer and other writers helped popularize the form in English poetry in the fourteenth century. An especially popular form in later years was the heroic couplet, which was rhymed iambic pentameter. It was popular from the 1600s through the late 1700s. Much Romantic poetry in the early 1800s used the couplet as well. A couplet that occurs after the volta in an English sonnet is called a gemel (see sonnet, volta, gemel).
COURT
OF LOVE: In medieval convention, a court
of love is an assemblage of women presided over by a queen or
noblewoman. At this mock-court, various young knights or courtiers
are summoned to court and put on "trial" by the ladies
for their crimes against love. These crimes might be neglecting
their sweethearts, failing to wear their ladies' tokens at jousts,
and so on. Chaucer himself may have been summoned to a court
of love for his "libelous" depiction of Criseyde in
Troilus and Criseyde, and Queen Anne may have required
him to write The Legend of Good Women as a penance for
his literary "crimes." In "The Wife of Bath's
Tale," we find an inversion of the normal play-acting in
which King Arthur gives Gwenevere and her ladies the right to
try a rapist-knight for his crimes. Here, the women literally
have power of life or death over the subject. Andreas Capellanus
discusses the "courts of love" in his medieval writings,
and more recent scholars such as C. S. Lewis (The Allegory
of Love) and Amy Kelly (
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