A posteriori

Servitor races, i.e., lesser alien species that worship and/or act as slaves to The Great Old Ones, including the shape-changing shoggoths, the intelligent fungus crabs (Mi-go) living on Pluto, the tentacled star-spawn, and the aquatic race of "Deep Ones" living near Devil's Reef in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth."

The imaginary town of Arkham, New England, used as a setting, along with nearby towns like Dunwich and Innsmouth along the Miskatonic river valley.

The theme of insanity (often protagonists suffer mental breakdowns merely by viewing one of the Old Ones).

The appearance of forbidden books of ancient and dangerous lore, such as the fictional Necronomicon, The Book of Eibon, and Unaussprechlichen Kulten.

CULTURAL SYMBOL: A symbol widely or generally accepted as meaning something specific within an entire culture or social group, as opposed to a contextual symbol created by a single author that has meaning only within a single work or group of works. Examples of cultural symbols in Western culture include the cross as a symbol of Christianity, the American flag as a symbol of America's colonial history of thirteen colonies growing into fifty states, the gold ring as a symbol of marital commitment, the Caduceus as a symbol of medicine, and the color black as a symbol of mourning. Examples of cultural symbols in other cultures include white as a symbol of mourning in Japan, the Yin-Yang sphere as an oriental symbol of oppositional forces in balance, the white crane as a symbol of longevity in Mandarin China, and so forth. Any writer in a specific culture could use one of these symbols and be relatively confident that the reader would understand what each symbol represented. Thus, if a writer depicted a pedophilic priest as trampling a crucifix into the mud, it is likely the reader would understand this action represents the way the priest tramples Christian ideals, and so forth. Contrast with contextual symbol and archetype.

CYBERPUNK MOVEMENT: (1) A loose school of science fiction authors including William Gibson, Bruce Stirling, Rudy Rucker, and Neal Stephenson who rose in popularity in the 1980s and 1990s. (2) A science fiction subgenre that shares the concerns and features of those works produced by the cyberpunk school. Features of their novels and short stories in this period include the following motifs:

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  a disturbing, amoral vision of the near-future focusing on urban life, often in post-industrial dystopias.
  
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  casual violence between gangs, private armies of mercenaries, and decadent government agencies
  
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  ubiquitous (and often dangerous) cybernetic implants and sensory enhancements in the general population
  
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  powerful multi-national corporations or franchises that have gradually become more influential than passé governments
  
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  appearances of high-tech multicultural crime syndicates--especially the Japanese yakuza and Jamaican drug posses
  
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  renegade or illegal artifical intelligence programs seeking to free themselves from corporate control
  
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  cheap designer drugs or precise mind-altering and mood-altering chemicals
  
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  failures of space travel, which forces ever greater numbers of people into cramped urban conditions
  
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  finally (and most especially) computer hackers who link to computers by directly plugging their brains into networks (often referred to as "jacking in" in cyberpunk parlance) or by wearing virtual reality goggles.
  

Common themes include the dehumanization, commodification, and mechanization of the individual; the negative effects of commercialization upon society; and implicit philosophical questions regarding consciousness and sensory reality. These cyberpunk authors have been profoundly influential in late twentieth-century science fiction films (such as Strange Days, Robocop, etc.) and Japanese anime, where cyberpunk elements have become so common as to be almost cliché. The "metaverse" or the "Net" imagined by these early authors in the 1980s have been seen as prophetic of the later real-world rise of the internet after 1993. Examples of novels, anthologies, short stories, and other literary works from the cyberpunk movement include Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Islands in the Net, and "Johnny Mnemonic." (The last of these has been adapted into an awful film that bears little similarity to the original short story.) More recently, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash has put a more satirical spin on the genre.

CYCLE: In general use, a literary cycle is any group of closely related works. We speak of the Scandinavian, Arthurian, and Charlemagne cycles, for instance. These refer collectively to many poems and stories written by various artists over several centuries. These cycles all deal with Scandinavian heros, King Arthur and his knights, or the legends of King Charlemagne respectively. More specifically, a mystery cycle refers to the complete set of mystery plays performed during the Corpus Christi festival in medieval religious drama (typically 45 or so plays, each of which depicted a specific event in biblical history from the creation of the world to the last judgment). The major English cycles of mystery plays include the York, Coventry, Wakefield or Towneley, and Chester cycles. See Corpus Christi play, above. See also sonnet cycle.

CYFARWYDD: A Welsh professional storyteller. The equivalent Irish term is an ollamh. Cf. bard and sceop.

CYHYDEDD HIR: A syllabic verse form in ancient Welsh poetry. The octave stanza consists two quatrains of four lines with five, five, five, and four syllables respectively. The rhyme scheme is AAAx AAAx, with X's indicating unrhymed lines. See octave and rhyme.

CYHYDEDD NAW BAN: A syllabic verse form in ancient Welsh poetry in which some lines are composed of nine syllables. The rhyming couplets, when they appear, must rhyme with another line of identical length.

CYNGHANEDD (pronounced kun HAN neth, lit. Welsh for "symphony"): A Welsh term that loosely denotes sound similarities peculiar to Welsh poetry, especially alliteration and internal rhyme. Typically, the consonants in one word or line repeat in the same pattern at the beginning and end of the next word or line--but the vowel sounds between the consonants change slightly. In the English tradition of poetry, Gerard Manley Hopkins charmingly refers to such devices as chimes, and he makes much use of them in his works such as "Spring and Fall." See also awdl and englyn. For an example of cynghanedd in English, click here.

CYNING: A king, another term for an Anglo-Saxon hlaford.

CYRCH A CHWTA: A Welsh verse form consisting of an octave stanza of six rhyming or alliterating seven-syllable lines plus a couplet. The second line of the couplet rhymes with the first six lines. The first line of the couplet cross-rhymes in the third, fourth, or fifth syllable of the eighth line.

CYRILLIC: The alphabet used to write Russian, Serbian, and Bulgarian. The name comes from the Greek missionary Saint Cyril, who traveled from Byzantium to convert Slavic races to Christianity.

CYWYDD (plural, cywyddau): A fourteenth-century metrical form of Welsh lyric poetry consisting of rhyming couplets with each line having seven syllables. Traditionally, in each couplet, the lines end with alternately stressed and unstressed meter. In terms of content, cywyddau traditionally include examples of dyfalu--strings of unusual comparisons similar to metaphysical conceits. The genre is associated with the poet Dafydd ap Gwilym.

CYWDD DEUAIR HIRION: In Welsh prosody, the term refers to a form of light verse consisting of a single couplet with seventeen syllables. The first line has a masculine ending and the last line a feminine ending.

CYWYDD LLOSGYRNOG: A type of Welsh verse consisting of a sestet stanza in which the syllable count is eight, eight, seven, eight, eight, and seven respectively. The first two lines rhyme and cross-rhyme with the middle syllable of the sixth line and the third and sixth lines rhyme with each other. Rime coueé or tail-rhyme has a similar scheme.

DACTYL: A three-syllable foot consisting of a heavy stress and two light stresses. Examples of words in English that naturally constitute dactyls include strawberry, carefully, changeable, merrily, mannequin, tenderly, prominent, buffalo, glycerin, notable, scorpion, tedious, horrible, and parable. Verses written in feet that follow this pattern are said to be in dactylic meter. For further discussion, see meter, or click here for a PDF handout contrasting dactyls and other types of feet.

DANEGELD: The practice of paying extortion money to Vikings to make them go away, often associated in particular with the Anglo-Saxon king "Aethelred Unraed." His nickname means "Aethelred the Unready," or more accurately translated, "Aethelred the Uncounciled." At various points in history, British kings paid as much as 20,000 pounds in silver to appease the Vikings and prevent invasion--a disastrous policy that bankrupted the island and encouraged the return of extortionate Vikings every few years. This failed policy of Danegeld ultimately led to large portions of northern England being settled by the Vikings in the area known as the Danelaw, which in turn played a key part in the evolution of the English language through the incorporation of Scandinavian loan-words. Words like skiff, ship, and shirt, for instance, are all loan-words borrowed from the Vikings. NB: Danegeld should not be confused with wergild.

DANELAW (Anglo-Saxon, Dena lagu): The region of northeast England up to the southern part of Scotland that was conquered and inhabited by Viking invaders. In 871 CE, a Wessex army under King Aethelred (the West Saxon king) and his brother Alfred confronted the Danish Vikings at the Battle of Ashdown (in modern Berkshire). Unfortunately, after a series of losses, Wessex began paying annual Danegeld (tribute) to the Vikings. Aethelred died soon after, and Viking settlers swarmed into the northern parts of England while their raiders occupied London.

The Vikings continued their expansion until 878 CE. That year, King Alfred the Great rallied men from Somerset and Wiltshire and decisively defeated the Danish Vikings. The Danes were too numerous to dislodge from their holdings, but it was clear that they would not be able to expand their territory while Alfred lived. King Alfred freed London from Danish occupation in 886. At this point, Alfred made a treaty with the Danes so that England was divided. The northeastern section between the Rivers Thames and Tees was officially declared to be Danish territory and later become known as the Danelaw (where the inhabitants followed Danish law from 890 onward). The influence of this period of Viking settlement is still visible in the North of England and the East Midlands, especially in toponyms or place-names. Towns with name-endings such as -by or -thorp are all places named by the Viking settlers.

DANS MACABRE (French, "morbid dance"): A gruesome motif or trend that spread through late medieval Europe's visual art, architecture, sculpture, and poetry in the wake of the Black Plague (1347-1349 CE) and which remained common in woodcuts, gravemarkers, and cenotaphs through the Renaissance two hundred years later. Visually, it took the form of imagery involving bones, skeletons, graves, and similar death-imagery, most famously in images of living revelers intermixed with animated skeletons carousing, eating, drinking, and dancing. Functionally, the art was a memento mori, a reminder of death's inevitability in the face of each individual's mortality. In terms of literature, we find traces of the dans macabre motif appearing in tombstone epitaphs such as "Such as I am, So Shalt Thou Be," or poetic verse such as "Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney-sweeps, come to dust."

DARK LADY SONNETS: Sonnets 127-147 of the Shakespearean collection published in 1609 are known loosely as the "Dark Lady" sonnets because most of them have an implied audience or implied subject-matter of a mysterious sexually promiscuous woman with dark features. This contrasts with the traditional Petrarchan conceits of a fair-haired and fair-skinned lover who is coldly aloof to the male speaker's wooing. Contrast with the "young man" sonnets earlier in the collection.