Baldick Chris. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms

2nd edition. — Oxford University Press, 2001. — 280 p.With over 1,000 entries, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms contains all of the most taxing literary terms that readers may come across. Clear and entertaining explanations are given for words such as multi-accentuality, postmodernism, and hypertext. The dictionary also provides extensive coverage of traditional drama, rhetoric, literary history, and textual criticism. This edition includes useful advice on further reading for particularly complex terms, as well as helpful pronunciation guides on over 200 terms.
Fully updated to include terms that have become prominent in literature in the last few years, from cyberpunk to antanaclasis, the Second Edition is ingeniously designed to tackle the less obvious terms that students and general readers will encounter.Entry sample:
American Renaissance, the name sometimes given to a flourishing of distinctively American literature in the period before the Civil War. As described by F.O. Matthiessen in his influential critical work American Renaissance (1941), this renaissance is represented by the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, H. D. Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman. Its major works are Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850), Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), and Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855). The American Renaissance may be regarded as a delayed manifestation of Romanticism, especially in Emerson's philosophy of Transcendentalism.