28 terms
Editorial Practice
Editorial practice (textological) is the applied part of textology that develops the principles and methods of the scholarly edition of works: the selection and establishment of the base text, its rendering (transcription), the compiling of the apparatus (variants, variant readings, notes, commentary), and the structure of the edition. The main types of scholarly editions are the academic (complete, with an exhaustive textological apparatus), the critical (with a cleansed, verified text and variants), and the popular-scholarly. Editorial practice resolves complex questions: which text to take as the base (the author's 'final creative will' or one published in their lifetime), how to render orthography and punctuation, and how to present authorial and censorship corrections. Ukrainian academic editorial practice has weighty achievements: the multi-volume complete editions of Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko, and Lesia Ukrainka, prepared by the Institute of Literature, free the texts from the censorship distortions of the Soviet era.
Elegy
The elegy is a lyric poem of a meditative, reflective character, imbued with a mood of sorrow, of contemplation upon the transience of life, lost love, solitude, or the inevitability of death. The name derives from the Greek elegos — a mournful song to the accompaniment of a flute. In antiquity the elegy had a broader content (Ovid, Propertius), acquiring its melancholic coloring in modern European poetry. A classic example is Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. In Ukrainian literature elegiac motifs sound in the poetry of Taras Shevchenko and Lesia Ukrainka, and especially in the philosophical lyric of Volodymyr Svidzinsky and in the elegies of the Neoclassicists Maksym Rylsky and Mykola Zerov, where grief is joined to clarity of thought and perfection of form.
Ellipsis
Ellipsis is a stylistic figure consisting in the deliberate omission of a structurally necessary member of a sentence (most often the predicate) that is easily restored from the context. Ellipsis lends speech dynamism, rapidity and emotional tension, imitating an agitated or colloquial intonation ("We are from the village, and you from the town"). The omission of a word compels the reader to supply it, activating perception and heightening the expressiveness of the utterance. Elliptical constructions are widely represented in folk creativity, in dramatic dialogue and in poetry oriented toward the laconism and energy of the phrase. Ellipsis must be distinguished from aposiopesis, where the sentence breaks off unfinished; in ellipsis, however, the thought is grammatically incomplete but semantically whole.
Emblem
An emblem is a conventional symbolic depiction of a certain concept, idea, or phenomenon, accompanied by a verbal text (a motto and an explanation). The classic Baroque emblem consisted of three parts: the motto (a short device, Latin lemma), the image (Latin pictura, icon), and the epigrammatic interpretive caption (Latin subscriptio). The emblem combined the visual and the verbal, the 'seen' and the 'read,' teaching through allegory. The art of emblematics flourished in European culture of the 16th–18th centuries (from Andrea Alciato's 'Book of Emblems,' 1531) and was an organic part of the Baroque worldview with its love of the symbol and 'wise play.' In Ukrainian culture, emblematics occupied an important place in Baroque literature, preaching, book engraving, and the school poetics of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Emblematic thinking appears vividly in the work of Hryhorii Skovoroda, notably in the collection 'The Garden of Divine Songs.' The emblem should be distinguished from the broader concept of the symbol.
Enjambment
Enjambment is the non-coincidence of syntactic and verse segmentation, when a sentence or phrase does not conclude within the line but "flows over" into the next, breaking closely linked words at the line boundary. Enjambment creates tension between the rhythmic pause at the end of the line and the incompleteness of the thought that demands continuation. This device brings verse closer to living speech intonation, destroys the monotony of end pauses and allows the logical emphasis of the carried-over word at the beginning of the new line. Deliberately applied, enjambment becomes a powerful means of expressiveness — from dramatic agitation to conversational ease — and is especially characteristic of modern and contemporary poetry with its striving for intonational freedom.
Envelope rhyme
Envelope (enclosed) rhyme is a way of joining lines by the scheme abba, when the first line rhymes with the fourth and the second with the third, as if the outer pair "encloses" the inner one. Such a structure creates a closed, concentrated sound of the stanza, in which the outer lines frame the central ones, emphasising their semantic connection. Envelope rhyme lends the quatrain intonational completeness and a particular harmonious integrity, and it is therefore often used in meditative, philosophical lyric and in canonical forms, notably in the quatrains of the Italian sonnet. Together with adjacent and alternate rhyme, envelope rhyme completes the triad of basic schemes for organising rhyme in the quatrain.
Epic (literary kind)
The epic is one of the three literary kinds (alongside the lyric and the drama), depicting events as something objective and external to the author: the world of action unfolds in the past tense through a narrator's telling. The term derives from the Greek epos — word, tale. The epic is marked by an extended plot, a system of characters, descriptions of setting, and authorial characterization. Historically it grew from folkloric heroic epic (Homer's Iliad and Odyssey; the Ukrainian dumas and byliny of the Kyiv cycle) and developed into the large prose forms of the novel and the tale. Classic examples of Ukrainian epic include Ivan Kotliarevsky's Eneida, and the novels of Panas Myrny (Do the Oxen Low When Mangers Are Full?) and Oles Honchar (The Cathedral).
Epic Novel
The epic novel is the largest and most complex variety of the novel, combining the scale of a people's national-historical destiny with a detailed depiction of the private lives of many characters. The genre grows out of the ancient epic but transfers its monumentality into modern prose. The epic novel is marked by a wide temporal and spatial span, numerous plot lines, and the portrayal of pivotal historical events (wars, revolutions) as a background that shapes the characters' fates. The classic world example is Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. In Ukrainian literature the genre is approached by Ulas Samchuk's Volhynia, by the novels of Oles Honchar (notably The Standard-Bearers), and by historical prose that embraces the destinies of whole generations against the backdrop of the liberation struggles.
Epigram
The epigram is a short, witty poem of satirical or jesting content, directed against a particular person, phenomenon, or vice, which ends with an unexpected sharp conclusion (a pointe). Originally (among the ancient Greeks) an epigram was any inscription on an object or monument; later, thanks to the Roman poet Marcus Valerius Martial, the genre took on a satirical character. The epigram demands laconism, aptness of word, and the effect of surprise. In Ukrainian literature, epigrams and satirical miniatures were written by Ivan Franko, and in the revival of the 1920s by Volodymyr Sosiura and Ostap Vyshnia (in the prose form of his 'smiles'). A master of the sharp satirical poem was also Volodymyr Samiilenko. Epigrammatic concision and wit are characteristic of the aphoristic poetry of Lina Kostenko.
Epigraph
An epigraph is a short text (a quotation, saying, proverb, or line of verse) placed by the author at the beginning of a work (or a chapter of it) before the main text, which concisely expresses the idea, theme, mood, or problematics of the ensuing exposition. The epigraph is an element of the paratext (per Gérard Genette) that attunes the reader to the intended perception, enters into dialogue with the work, and often contains a hidden authorial evaluation or a key to understanding. The source of an epigraph may be Scripture, the classics, folklore, the words of another author, or the writer's own. The epigraph establishes an intertextual connection between the work and the cultural tradition. Taras Shevchenko masterfully used biblical epigraphs (the poem 'The Caucasus' has as its epigraph the words of the prophet Jeremiah; the poem 'The Dream' a quotation from the Gospel of John), lending his works a prophetic, denunciatory resonance.
