A posteriori

LYRIC POETRY: See discussion under lyric and lyric moment.

LYRICS: (1) The words to a song. (2) Samples of lyric poetry; see discussion under lyric.

MABINOGI (Welsh, "Four Branches"): The four branches or four parts of The Mabinogion, a medieval collection of Welsh myths and legends important in Celtic studies generally and in Arthurian legends more specifically.

MACHIAVELLIAN: As an adjective, the word refers generally to sneaky, ruthless, and deceitful behavior, especially in regard to a ruler obsessed with power who puts on a surface veneer of honor and trustworthy behavior in order to achieve evil ends. The term originates in a treatise known as The Prince. This work was written by Niccoló Machiavelli, an early sixteenth-century political advisor who worked for the Borgia family in Italy. In contrast to the medieval ideal of the ruler as God's holy deputy and dispenser of justice, Machiavelli stressed that effective rulers often must engage in evil (or at least immoral) activities to ensure the stability of their rule. He suggests that, based on the evidence of history and his own personal observations, the rulers that have remained in power have not been kindly, benevolent men concerned with justice and fairness, but rather ruthless individuals willing to do anything to ensure the security of their state and their own personal power. Click here for more information.

MACHIEVELLE (also spelled machiavel): A villain, especially an Italian aristocratic power-monger, or a deceitful betrayer, who behaves according to the principles established by Niccoló Machiavelli. (See Machiavellian, above.) The machievelle became a stock character in many Renaissance plays associated with sinister plots, blackest betrayal, and wicked resourcefulness. Examples from Shakespeare include Richard of Gloucester in Richard III and Edmund and Cornwall in King Lear.

MACARONIC TEXT: Any medieval or modern manuscript written in a jumble of several languages--say a mixture of Latin and French or Latin and German--is said to be macaronic. The mixture might involve bilingual vocabulary and grammatical switches within a single sentence, or in alternating lines or paragraphs, or in purely random intervals. Examples from the Restoration period would be the steamier scenes of Samuel Pepys' diary entries for 1666-1668, in which Pepys frequently mingles Spanish and Latin words in the text to hide the exact details of his sexual indiscretions. Cf. code-switching.

MACROCOSM (Cf. microcosm): The natural universe as a whole, including the biological realms of flora and fauna, weather, and celestial objects such as the sun, moon, and stars. See discussion under chain of being.

MACRON: A diacritical mark in the form of a horizontal line indicating the vowel beneath it is long.

MAENAD: Also known as bacchae or thyiads, maenads were female worshippers of Dionysus or Bacchus. In the mystery cult of Dionysus, worshippers would get drunk on wine and then undergo an all-night process of stylized frenzied dancing in order to achieve the divine state of ekstasos. At the height of the frenzy, they believed that they would become one with Dionysus/Bacchus (thus the common Latin name "bacchae," a feminine plural form of the god Bacchus' name. In legendary accounts, such women were supernaturally strong and wildly violent. They would run through the forest naked after the ceremonies and would catch small animals (or in some myths men and children!), rip them apart bare-handed, and then eat the flesh raw. In literature, Euripides' tragedy The Bacchae is a dramatic retelling of the arrival of the Dionysiac rites in Greece.

MAGIC REALISM: In 1925, Franz Roh first applied the term "magic realism" (magischer Realismus in German) to a group of neue Saqchlichkeit painters in Munich (Cuddon 531). These painters blended realistic, smoothly painted, sharply defined figures and objects--but in a surrealistic setting or backdrop, giving them an outlandish, odd, or even dream-like qualilty. In the 1940s and 1950s, the term migrated to the prose fiction of various writers including Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina, Gabriel Garcia Márquez in Colombia, and Alejo Carpentier in Cuba. The influence also spread later to Günter Grass in Germany and John Fowles in England (Abrams 135). These postmodern writers mingle and juxtapose realistic events with fantastic ones, or they experiment with shifts in time and setting, "labyrinthine narratives and plots" and "arcane erudition" (135), and often they combine myths and fairy stories with gritty Hemingway-esque detail. This mixture create truly dreamlike and bizarre effects in their prose.

An example of magic realism (and one of my own personal favorites in postmodern narrative) would be Gabriel Garcia Márquez's short story, "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings," a narrative in which a fisherman discovers a filthy, lice-ridden old man trapped face-down in the muddy shore of the beach, weighed down by enormous buzzard wings attached to his back. A neighbor identifies the old man as an angel who had come down to claim the fisherman's sick and feverish child but who had been knocked out the sky by storm winds during the previous night. Not having the heart to club the sickly angel to death, the protagonist decides instead to keep the supernatural being captive in a chicken coop. The very premise of the story reveals much of the flavor of magic realism. Cf. postmodernism.

MAJUSCULE: A large letter or a capital letter as opposed to minuscule.

MALAPROPISM: Misusing words to create a comic effect or characterize the speaker as being too confused, ignorant, or flustered to use correct diction. Typically, the malapropism involves the confusion of two polysyllabic words that sound somewhat similar but have different meanings. For instance, a stereotyped black maid in Edgar Rice Burrough's Tarzan of the Apes series cries out as she falls into the jungle river, "I sho' nuff don't want to be eaten by no river allegories, no sir!" Dogberry the Watchman in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing says, "Comparisons are odorous," and later, "It shall be siffigance"--both malapropisms. In Sheridan, we find pineapple instead of pinnacle, and we read in Twain's Huckleberry Finn how one character declares, "I was most putrified with astonishment" instead of "petrified," and so on. The best malapropisms sound sufficiently similar to the correct word to let the audience recognize the intended meaning and laugh at the incongruous result.