A posteriori

VERS LIBRE: See discussion under free verse.

VERS DE SOCIÉTÉ: Light verse that compliments another or touches on the manners and morals of its time-period. The verse is often intended for public performance, and it is typically thought to be marked by wit, eloquence, and graceful diction.

VERSE: There are three general meanings for verse (1) a line of metrical writing, (2) a stanza, or (3) any composition written in meter (i.e., poetry generally). Remember that rhyme is not the identifying mark of poetry, but rather meter.

VERSE PARAGRAPH: A division of poetry indicated normally by adding an extra line-space above and below the section to set it off from other parts of the poem. Unlike a stanza, in which the division of poetry corresponds to repeated elements of rhyme or other poetic structure, and in which each stanza must be identical in length and form to that of other stanzas, verse paragraphs end and begin according to divisions of sense and subject-matter. They are much like prose paragraphs in an essay, in which each paragraph deals with a single topic or idea, and a new paragraph division indicates that a new topic or idea is to be explored. Like paragraphs in a prose essay (and unlike stanzas), verse paragraphs can vary in length within an individual poetic work. Milton's Paradise Lost is an example of a poem written in verse paragraphs. Contrast with stanza.

VERSIFICATION: Literally, the making of verse, the term is often used as another name for prosody. This refers to the technical and practical aspect of making poems as opposed to purely theoretical and aesthetic poetic concerns.

VERSO: See discussion under quarto or examine this chart.

VICTORIAN PERIOD: The period of British literature in the late nineteenth century. The date of the period is often given as 1837-1901--the years Queen Victoria ruled the expanding British Empire. Alternatively, the date is given as 1832-1901, according to the passage of the first labor reform bill in the 1832 English Parliament. The Victorian Period of literature is characterized by excellent novelists, essayists, poets, and philosophers, but only a few dramatists.

The positive characteristics, attitudes, and qualities of the Victorian Period often suggest a belief in social progress, a conservative attitude about sexual mores and respectability, values of middle-class industriousness and hard work, and a strong sense of gentlemanly honor and feminine virtue. The negative characteristics of the Victorian Period include complacency, hypocrisy, smugness, and simplistic moral earnestness. When applied to literature, the word Victorian often implies humorlessness, unquestioning belief or orthodoxy and authority in matters of politics and religion, prudishness, and condemnation of those who defy social and moral convention. These dual qualities originate in Britain's self-satisfaction and economic growth during the nineteenth century. The country's increased national wealth, its scientific and industrial advances, the growing power of its navy, and its relentless expansion in overseas colonies all contributed to the period's zeitgeist. Some of the prominent British writers include Cardinal Newman, Benjamin Disraeli, Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Swinburne, Samuel Butler, Charles Dickens, Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, Charlotte Bronte, Anne Bronte, George Eliot, Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, George Meredith, Lewis Caroll, William Morris, Wilkie Collins, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Lord Acton, Samuel Butler, and Louis Stevenson. Cf. didactic literature. Click here to download a list of the major periods of literary history.

VIGNETTE (French, "little vine"): A short composition showing considerable skill, especially such a composition designed with little or no plot or larger narrative structure. Often vignettes are descriptive or evocative in their nature. An example would be the brief narratives appearing in Sandra Cisneros's short-stories. More loosely, vignettes might be descriptive passages within a larger work, such as Virginia Woolf's "Kew Gardens," or Faulkner's descriptions of horses and landscapes in The Hamlet. The term vignette ("little vine") originally comes from a decorative device appearing on a title page or at the beginnings and ends of chapters. Conventionally, nineteenth-century printers depicted small looping vines here loosely reminiscent of the vinework in medieval manuscripts.

VIKING (Old Norse vikingr, "pirate," perhaps related to vik, a navigable creek, bay, or inlet to the sea, or perhaps related to an Old English word wic, meaning "encampment"): Technically, in its most exclusive sense, a viking is a pirate, any individual that goes i-viking ("plundering") regardless of the buccaneer's ethnicity. Historically, Irishmen, Anglo-Saxons, Franks, Bretons, and Slavs all joined in viking raids at various points, and chroniclers called them all vikings during their attacks. In its most common usage, the word viking applies to the pale-skinned North Germanic tribes between the years 550 CE and 1052 CE who inhabited modern Scandinavia (i.e., Denmark, Sweden, and Norway). These tribes eventually settled in Iceland and the Faroese islands and they conquered or raided large portions of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Normandy. The resulting ethnographic mixtures are often called Viking cultures (with a capital V- to indicate the scholar is referring to the larger race rather than pirates alone). The Old Norse and North Germanic languages that the Viking cultures spoke developed into modern Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese.The first mention of these tribes is in the writings of the Gothic historian Jordanes (c. 550 CE), who records their location. From archeological evidence, we know Viking forts built at Eketorp and Ismantorp date back at least a century earlier than Jordanes' records. Contact between the rest of Europe and the Viking-held lands was sporadic for centuries, involving occasional trade, small raids, or largely failed attempts to convert the Vikings. Such examples include Willibrord's first Christian mission sent to Scandinavia, (c. 725 CE) along with Archbishop Ebo of Rheims' missionary trip to Denmark in 823 CE.

However, the Vikings ultimately did burst onto the European stage in a shocking way when bands of them attacked Portland (c. 789), and then followed up by attacking the defenseless monastery of Lindisfarne (793). The idea of armed pagans cutting down pacifist Christian monks, looting churches, destroying illuminated bibles to claim the gold decoration, and carting off engemmed reliquaries and other holy paraphernalia as loot completely horrified Christian contemporaries, who grew to fear Vikings with an almost religious dread. The Vikings, astonished at how rich the monasteries were, and how helpless the "foolish" Christian monks were, returned in ever larger bands that would sail up creeks and inlets to strike unpredictable targets far inland in Britain and Europe. After killing defenders and burning defenses, they would frequently enslave monks, children, and women to take back north with them.

A sign of European helplessness is visible in the Viking practice of winter-seotling, or establishing a base camp in invaded territory during the winter rather than sailing home to Scandinavia with the ill-garnered gains. (It's a sign of some weakness when a band of burglars can break into a victim's house and steal her belongings; it's a sign of much greater helplessness if the band of burglars repeatedly decides to set up tents in the victim's living room and to stay there rather than go to the trouble of returning home between robberies.) In 839-840, the Viking invaders winter-seotled in Ireland for the first time. In 842, they winter-seotled in Francia [France]. In 850, they began winter-seotling in England. It would be tedious to list all the major raids, but ultimately Danish Vikings invaded and settled permanently in Dublin and large parts of northern England. The regions controlled by Danish Vikings in England (including London at one point in history, but most focused around Northumberland and York) became known as the Danelaw. The Danish presence had a profound influence on English, introducing many Old Norse vocabulary words into common English use, and even more importantly, leading to a loss of grammatical inflections in Anglo-Saxon.

The Viking raids left a particularly deep imprint in medieval English literature. "The Battle of Maldon," for instance, recounts the historical last-stand of an aging Anglo-Saxon regional governor and his untrained levy of troops against a Viking incursion in 991. Archbishop Wulfstan of York eloquently captured England's despair in his "Sermon of the Wolf to the English People," written in response to Svein Forkbeard's victory over the Anglo-Saxons in 1014.

See also related terms under althing, berserker, danegeld, saga, and thing.

VILLANELLE: A genre of poetry consisting of nineteen lines--five tercets and a concluding quatrain. The form requires that whole lines be repeated in a specific order, and that only two rhyming sounds occur in the course of the poem. A number of English poets, including Oscar Wilde, W. E. Henley, and W. H. Auden have experimented with it. Here is an example of an opening stanza to one poem by W. E. Henley:

A dainty thing's the Villanelle,
Sly, musical, a jewel in rhyme.
It serves its purpose passing well.
A double-clappered silver bell,
That must be made to clink in chime,
A dainty thing's the Villanelle.
And if you wish to flute a spell,
Or ask a meeting 'neath the lime,
It serves its purpose passing well.

Probably the most famous English villanelle is Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night."