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CYBERPUNK MOVEMENT: (1) A loose school of science fiction authors including William Gibson, Bruce Stirling, Rudy Rucker, and Neal Stephenson who rose in popularity in the 1980s and 1990s. (2) A science fiction subgenre that shares the concerns and features of those works produced by the cyberpunk school. Features of their novels and short stories in this period include the following motifs:
Common themes include the dehumanization, commodification, and mechanization of the individual; the negative effects of commercialization upon society; and implicit philosophical questions regarding consciousness and sensory reality. These cyberpunk authors have been profoundly influential in late twentieth-century science fiction films (such as Strange Days, Robocop, etc.) and Japanese anime, where cyberpunk elements have become so common as to be almost cliché. The "metaverse" or the "Net" imagined by these early authors in the 1980s have been seen as prophetic of the later real-world rise of the internet after 1993. Examples of novels, anthologies, short stories, and other literary works from the cyberpunk movement include Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Islands in the Net, and "Johnny Mnemonic." (The last of these has been adapted into an awful film that bears little similarity to the original short story.) More recently, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash has put a more satirical spin on the genre.
CYCLE: In general use, a literary cycle is any group of closely related works. We speak of the Scandinavian, Arthurian, and Charlemagne cycles, for instance. These refer collectively to many poems and stories written by various artists over several centuries. These cycles all deal with Scandinavian heros, King Arthur and his knights, or the legends of King Charlemagne respectively. More specifically, a mystery cycle refers to the complete set of mystery plays performed during the Corpus Christi festival in medieval religious drama (typically 45 or so plays, each of which depicted a specific event in biblical history from the creation of the world to the last judgment). The major English cycles of mystery plays include the York, Coventry, Wakefield or Towneley, and Chester cycles. See Corpus Christi play, above. See also sonnet cycle.
CYFARWYDD: A Welsh professional storyteller. The equivalent Irish term is an ollamh. Cf. bard and sceop.
CYHYDEDD HIR: A syllabic verse form in ancient Welsh poetry. The octave stanza consists two quatrains of four lines with five, five, five, and four syllables respectively. The rhyme scheme is AAAx AAAx, with X's indicating unrhymed lines. See octave and rhyme.
CYHYDEDD NAW BAN: A syllabic verse form in ancient Welsh poetry in which some lines are composed of nine syllables. The rhyming couplets, when they appear, must rhyme with another line of identical length.
CYNGHANEDD (pronounced kun HAN neth, lit. Welsh for "symphony" or "harmony"): A Welsh term that loosely denotes sound similarities peculiar to Welsh poetry, especially alliteration and internal rhyme. Typically, the consonants in one word or line repeat in the same pattern at the beginning and end of the next word or line--but the vowel sounds between the consonants change slightly. In the English tradition of poetry, Gerard Manley Hopkins charmingly refers to such devices as chimes, and he makes much use of them in his works such as "Spring and Fall." See also awdl and englyn. For an example of cynghanedd in English, click here.
CYNING: A king, another term for an Anglo-Saxon hlaford. Not to be confused with kenning, an Anglo-Saxon poetic device.
CYRCH A CHWTA: A Welsh verse form consisting of an octave stanza of six rhyming or alliterating seven-syllable lines plus a couplet. The second line of the couplet rhymes with the first six lines. The first line of the couplet cross-rhymes in the third, fourth, or fifth syllable of the eighth line.
CYRILLIC: The alphabet used to write Russian, Serbian, and Bulgarian. The name comes from the Greek missionary Saint Cyril, who traveled from Byzantium to convert Slavic races to Christianity.
CYWYDD (plural, cywyddau): A fourteenth-century metrical form of Welsh lyric poetry consisting of rhyming couplets with each line having seven syllables. Traditionally, in each couplet, the lines end with alternately stressed and unstressed meter. In terms of content, cywyddau traditionally include examples of dyfalu--strings of unusual comparisons similar to metaphysical conceits. The genre is associated with the poet Dafydd ap Gwilym.
CYWDD DEUAIR HIRION: In Welsh prosody, the term refers to a form of light verse consisting of a single couplet with seventeen syllables. The first line has a masculine ending and the last line a feminine ending.
CYWYDD LLOSGYRNOG: A type of Welsh verse consisting of a sestet stanza in which the syllable count is eight, eight, seven, eight, eight, and seven respectively. The first two lines rhyme and cross-rhyme with the middle syllable of the sixth line and the third and sixth lines rhyme with each other. Rime coueé or tail-rhyme has a similar scheme.
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