A posteriori

NORMANDY: The region along the northern coast of France. See Norman for more information.

NORTHERN DIALECT: A dialect of American English stretching through the northernmost sections of the United States.

NORTH GERMANIC: The sub-branch of the Germanic languages that contains Swedish and Old Norse.

NORTH MIDLAND DIALECT: A dialect of American English spoke in a strip of land just south of the Northern Dialect. This should not be confused with the Midlands dialect of English spoken in Britain.

NORTHUMBRIAN: The Old English dialect spoken in the kingdom of Northumbria (i.e., north of the Umber river).

NOSTOS: The theme or motif of the homecoming--a return to one's family, community, or geographic origins after a long time away. Traditionally, this Greek designation refers specifically to Odysseus's return to Ithaca after two decades of wandering, but the motif appears in many other myths, folktales, and literary works. Steven Marion's novel Hollow Ground, for instance, deals with a return to Appalachia after the collapse of the coal-mining industry.

NOSTRATIC: A hypothetical superfamily of languages that might embrace other large family language groups--including Indo-European, Finno-Ugric, possibly Afroasiatic, and other family groups. Its existence is highly contested, however, since its origins would go back beyond the 5,000 BCE marker--long before written records existed to help corroborate that nostratic ever really existed.

NOVEL: In its broadest sense, a novel is any extended fictional prose narrative focusing on a few primary characters but often involving scores of secondary characters. The fact that it is in prose helps distinguish it from other lengthy works like epics. We might arbitrarily set the length at 50,000 words or more as a dividing point with the novella and the short story. The English novel is primarily thought of as a product of the eighteenth-century, though many earlier narratives in classical Greek such as Heliodorus's Aethiopica and Daphnis and Chloë (attributed to Longus) easily fulfill the normal requirements of the genre, as the scholar Edmund Gosse has pointed out. Likewise, the Japanese Tale of the Genji and collected writings of Murasaki Shikibu from 1004 CE would clearly qualify as well by our definition--though most Western scholars treat these works as separate from the novel genre because historically they do not play a direct part or direct influence in the evolution of the popular English novel genre today.

NOVELLA: An extended fictional prose narrative that is longer than a short story, but not quite as long as a novel. We might arbitrarily assign an approximate length of 20,000-50,000 words. Early prototypes include the Decameron of Boccaccio, the Cento Novelle Antiche, and the Heptameron of Marguerite of Valois. English examples include Henry James's Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Note that some scholars in previous generations distinguished between what they called the novella (short stories in Italian, French, and German that served as later influences on English prose) and the novelette (English extended prose narratives longer than a short story but not quite as long as a novel.) Today, most American critics use the two terms interchangeably.

NOVEL OF MANNERS: A novel that describes in detail the customs, behaviors, habits, and expectations of a certain social group at a specific time and place. Usually these conventions shape the behavior of the main characters, and sometimes even stifle or repress them. Often the novel of manners is satiric, and it always realistic in depiction. Examples include Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair, and various works by Edith Wharton.

NOVEL OF SENSIBILITY: See sentimental novel.

NOVELETTE: See discussion under novella.

NOWELL CODEX: The common scholarly nickname for the medieval manuscript that contains Beowulf. The official designation for this manuscript is Cotton Vitellius A.xv. You can click here to see the first page of Beowulf as it appears in the Nowell Codex. Cf. manuscript.

NUMEROLOGY: Number symbolism, especially the idea that certain numbers have sacred meanings. Classical Hebrew writers, following the lead of other Mesopotamian cultures, often embody certain numbers with sacred meanings--such as three, seven, twelve, forty, etc., an idea that develops more fully under the medieval kabalah. Many medieval authors such as Dante use poetic structure to convey theological ideas, such as Dante's use of terza rima in collected groups of thirty-three stanzas per canto in The Divine Comedy, or the Pearl Poet's elaborate numerological symbolism in Pearl. The standard reference book is Vincent Hopper's Medieval Number Symbolism. Click here for more information.

OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE: Click here for a pdf handout explaining this term.

The American Painter Washington Allston first used the term "objective correlative" about 1840, but T. S. Eliot

made it famous and revived it in an influential essay on Hamlet in the year 1919. Eliot writes: