Commonly seen terms What are they?

Shorthand for Latin terms e.g. = exempli gratia i.e. = id est cf. = confer et al. = et alii / inter alia

What they mean e.g. = for example i.e. = that is to say cf. = compare / clarify* (* less common meaning) et al. = and others

Basic fields of analysis Have you ever wondered about how literature is often approached?

1 Influences & Analogies e.g., Shakespeare’s influence on German Romanticism (c. 1780); similarities between early 18th-cent. paintings and poems of age similarity in work by writers who didn’t know about each other known as confluence category has produced large no. of studies (Jost 34-8)

2 Movements & Trends e.g., Baroque; Enlightenment; Romanticism best way to record change and development in literature; often criticized for being too vague and built on misconceptions many terms borrowed from art history; well suited for writing of literary histories that chart progress and evolution of ideas

3 Genres* & Forms (* genre is Fr., derives from Latin genus; “a kind or type”) e.g., epic; drama; lyric oldest category (Miner 7) since this is how ancient Greeks and Romans classified literature, distinguishing epic from drama, which with lyric formed classical trilogy (wherein epic “tells,” drama “enacts,” and lyric makes you “feel”) novel accepted as fourth genre by 18 th and 19 th cents.

4 Motifs & Themes Beardsley and Falk define the theme as abstract, while the motif is concrete themes are assigned to ideas that emerge via structure of textual elements, such as actions, gestures, settings, etc., which are called motifs (qtd. in Jost 178) literary analysis organized only along these lines is often referred to as close-textual reading (sometimes limited in scope)

Works Cited Jost, François. Introduction to Comparative Literature. Indianapolis: Pegasus, Miner, Earl. Comparative Poetics: An Intercultural Essay on Theories of Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990.