Because it’s necessary, I’ll keep a running list of the slang, made-up-words, made-up slang, and actual literary criticism terms I use here on the blog for easy reference. (Slang or made-up terms are italicized.) I define them here in reference to how I use them which may be more specialized than the broader definition, which you can look up with a resource like Answers.com. Additionally, a lot of the literary jargon and theories that inform me on this blog grew out of research of the honors thesis I wrote several years ago, on the archetype of the female hero in young adult fantasy.
agency
A character’s action or their ability to act of either their own volition or free will, or that as motivated by another source but followed through as a result of the character’s choice. A protagonist without agency has no story; characters without agency are reduced to pawns manipulated by an external source.
coming of age
Used to specifically refer to the transitional point between childhood and adolescence, adolescence to adulthood, or childhood to adulthood. It’s a theme that is usually present in many young adult novels and many adult novels. The character does not have to grow in age from childhood to adulthood, for instance, for the work to have a theme of “coming of age”; the theme refers to the realization the reader or character has of their own passage from the innocence (however defined) of youth to the wisdom (however defined) of maturity (however defined).
[See also rite of passage]
deus ex machina
My quick definition: When the author saves the day by plonking down a solution to a problem in an arbitrary or artificial way. When the author bails out the characters, not only does it cheapen the effect of the story by removing agency from the characters, but it can also give the idea that any problem can have a magic solution in real life. It’s especially tempting in fantasy to let the magic or the world or the gods or whatever trope you’re using save the day for the characters, but it’s much stronger and more meaningful if the characters find ways around the problem themselves. This device can be used well, however, in certain situations, especially when the author is going for an ironic ending or when the instant problem solving results in some other problem being created. It’s a tricky device.
epic, epic fantasy
- Adjective (an “epic fantasy”). A modern fantasy wherein the events take place on a world-wide scale involving a large cast of characters. Often the individual character of the protagonist or many of the minor characters are reduced to those of theme/motif/trope characters (“the hero”, “the old man/wise mentor”, “the love interest”, “the trickster”, “the faithful sidekick”, “the great evil villain”, and others).
- Noun. The pre-modern literary genre referring to works of long length that encompass a world-wide scale (however large the world of the work is defined) and focuses upon themes of society, culture, class, man versus fate, man versus a deity or deities, good versus evil, and other larger-than-life themes and issues. Epics rarely deal with the individual thoughts and cares of an individual character, sacrificing the nuance of an individual for the themes of the whole society. Theme/motif/trope character types abound. Examples include Homer’s The Iliad, The Odyssey; Beowulf; John Milton’s Paradise Lost.
[See romance for a contrast.]
hero, heroine
An archetypical trope. The central figure in the hero story. The guy or girl who saves the day.
[Note: this term can also be used as a synonym for the protagonist of the novel. I won't ever use it to describe the protagonist of a novel unless they meet the qualifications of being a hero in the sense of the motif of the hero story. See my thesis for more on that.]
female hero
This is a complicated idea I’ve developed and argued. As I wrote in my thesis:
Heroism is a concept our world has never seemed to be without. As far back as stories stretch, we find tales of heroes performing great deeds and saving their people. Very often, however, women have been left out of that venerable heroic tradition. Often when women are included, they serve functions more often than they embody individual character. They also often face an inevitable fate of marriage in the comic or romantic tale, or death in the tragedy. The few examples of women performing heroic (not heroinic) deeds—the myth of Psyche, the true martyrdom of Joan of Arc, for example—are dwarfed by both the number and scale of male hero stories, both mythic and those based in history. There are many other stories, plays, fairy tales, and novels with female main characters, but those women are often termed as “heroines”—female protagonists who, while demonstrating strength and complexity of character, fall into the more commonly defined roles for women. Literary critic Nadya Aisenberg points out that, “Though there is no dearth, and never has been, of courageous women, active women, spiritual women, women of leadership, the Hero has nonetheless been our culture’s central symbol” (11). The heroic stories that form the traditional fabric of our culture are intensely male-dominated; in today’s culture of both strong men and women, as Aisenberg states,
“We need a new heroine with new strengths, new virtues, and new energies to play new roles because classical heroes and the heroic code they embrace have failed us badly. The paradigm of virtue that heroes like Aeneas, like Roland, and the heroic code — maiden-rescuing, dragon-slaying — represent has been destructive both to the individual and to Western culture…. Examining the hero, we discover his essential narrowness which neglects concerns with community, negotiation, nature, human relations, and the enablement of individual destinies to flourish in their differences” (11-12).
Our culture needs new heroic archetypes, new figures to inspire us with their heroic mettle and steadfast determination. We need female heroes.
Why not new heroines? In the twenty-first century, women are functioning in roles that would have been socially unthinkable outside the male gender less than a century ago. More than ever our changing culture needs a changing heroic tradition, one that features heroic women along with heroic men—side by side. Young girls and women are growing up to face new roles and look to fiction as one of the sources for worthy, strong, capable role models on which to pattern their dreams. Strong female archetypes are necessary “For our daughters,” Mathin tells Harry; new female archetypes are not only important in society as a whole but for examples whom young girls and women can admire. As our society becomes more and more gender-egalitarian, gender-neutral language is more often being used for the sake of being politically correct. I therefore propose that heroic women—women whose quests and adventures, in reality or depicted in fiction, fit the criteria of being “heroic”—deserve the title of “hero,” without the diminutive. If women can prove themselves equal to the professions, tasks, and intellectual capacities of men, the heroic title should reflect that equality.
[Citations reference the thesis bibliography.]
So in essence, if I call a protagonist a “female hero” or a “hero” I consider her worthy of the title in a gender-egalitarian/-neutral context. She’s heroic, pure and simple.
infodump, infodumping
When an author loads a lot of information into a passage of exposition, a speech, or a very transparently unrealistic conversation between characters. This can be both good and bad, and handled in tolerable and untolerable ways. (The most intolerable is front-loaded infodumping, when the novel starts with a ton of worldbuilding or character backstory information that is thrown at the reader.) Fantasy is, unfortunately, the most frequent culprit genre due to the inherently informationally complicated issues associated with building a fantasy world from scratch.
fantasy
The literary genre that is the modern descendant of the epic and romance. The modern fantasy involves certain elements, most usually a form of magic (which can originate in people/creatures, nature, or deities). Depending on the specific lore and how it is used and/or involved in the fantasy, the fantasy can be classified in a number of different subgenres.
[Also: fantastic (adjective, referring to fiction that falls in the fantasy genre or has elements of fantasy), fantasist (noun, one who writes fantasy).]
motif
A motif is a recurring literary element or device in a work. It can also be a work’s dominant theme or central idea. The hero story, for example, is a motif that is also a work’s dominant theme.
protagonist
The character in a novel who drives all of the action forward, usually also the main character. (Note: I’m not going to pull the The Great Gatsby argument over this, so let’s say the protagonist is usually the main character and get on with it.) In an epic fantasy, there are usually several technical protagonists, so in that case I call the protagonist the character who embodies the trope definition of “the hero” or “the chosen one,” the character around whom the action tends to swirl or the plots return. (Examples: The Wheel of Time series’ Rand; The Sword of Truth series’ Richard; The Belgariad’s Garion.)
rite of passage
I’m going to quote my thesis for this:
Arnold van Gennep, a French anthropologist, first analyzed and discussed the cultural importance of rituals in his 1909 book, Les rites de passage. In it, Van Gennep explains, “Transitions from group to group and from one social situation to the next are looked on as implicit in the very fact of existence, so that a man’s life comes to be made up of a succession of stages with similar ends and beginnings…. For every one of these events there are ceremonies whose essential purpose is to enable the individual to pass from one defined position to another which is equally well-defined” (3). Often these major life events mark a change or turning point; the individual undergoes a “rite of passage” and becomes acknowledged by his or her society as more mature or more individual than before. Van Gennep defines “rites of passage” as “The ceremonial patterns which accompany a passage from one situation to another or from one cosmic or social world to another” (Van Gennep, 10).
[See also coming of age.]
romance
- The modern genre of romance. (Look at what your favorite book retailer lists as “romance” for examples.)
- The pre-modern genre of romance referring to hero stories involving tropes such as “the quest” and “the heroine”, usually also having a large or influential love subplot. As opposed to the epic hero story, the romantic hero story is focused on a small group of characters or a single character, occasionally involving elements of allegory or morality. Examples include most Arthurian legends (“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”), Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and others.
self-consistency (self-consistent)
As elaborated by J. R. R. Tolkien and Ursula K. Le Guin, a fantasy’s self-consistency refers to the author’s consistency when building a fantasy world in a story, novel, or series. A world has its own set of rules (such as physics) that govern everything; in fantasy such laws must be re-written and iterated by the author. For a work to be “self-consistent,” its author must stay consistently within that world’s boundaries and set rules throughout the process of world-building, making all later world-building and revelations consistent with the rules and world that has already been illuminated.
theme
The main idea or ideas in a work. A work can have several themes or thematic elements and they can be simple or complicated.
thwwwp
If a book actually had the ability to suck me into it, I bet it would sound rather like that — thwwwp. A nice slurping noise. So I tend to refer to books that have that can’t-put-down quality to them as “thwwwp” books.
trope [tropic/tropical]
A recurring literary stand-in. The “hero”, the “love interest”, the “tragic heroine”, the “evil villain” are tropes — at their barest elements they are character types that serve certain purposes in a work that has a dominant motif. (Note: I won’t ever use “tropical” to refer to it. I’ll say “tropic” or get around using the adjective. I don’t want any confusion with the climate of the Bahamas.) Things can also serve as tropes — the “quest object,” the “magic sword,” etc. (All of these elements are present in a very transparent form in The Belgariad heptology by David Eddings.)
world-building, worldbuilding
I use it to refer to the fantasy world the author creates and how the building and creation of that world is accomplished through different styles of revelation in the text. A fantasy world does not exist in any world but the author’s imagination and as such must be built from scratch and revealed through revelation in the text. Most science fiction and fantasy authors take a world we already know or are moderately familiar with (the not-so-distant future; medieval western Europe) and expand upon that preexisting world with their own. (Which is obviously frequently done and definitely acceptable.) Without giving us the ability to relate to the world they’ve created, an author can alienate us, explaining why so many fantasy worlds are built upon other worlds. Sometimes authors take what has been established in another author’s world — such as Tolkien’s seminal The Lord of the Rings — and build upon that. (That I do frown upon.)
[Note: Sometimes I use it with or without the hyphen; it ought to be hyphenated as it's a self-modifying adjectival phrase.]
