A posteriori

wit ("we two ")

unc ("us two ")

uncer or ("the two of ours, ours both")

git ("the two of you" i.e., "ye two")

inc ("you both")

incer ("yours both")

A number of these pronouns appear in The Wife's Lament. In Modern English, the old dual forms survive in only a few other linguistic fossils--such as the impersonal pronouns both, either, and neither. Several other Indo-European languages have or have had a distinction between the dual and the plural--including Egyptian, Arabic, Sanskrit, Greek, and Old Gothic, as Vincent Hopper notes (4). Other non-Indo-European languages like Hebrew also make this distinction.

DUANAIRÍ: Anthologies of Irish bardic poetry from between 1150-1500 CE. An example is the Yellow Book of Lecan (Trinity College Manuscript 1363).

DUMB SHOWS: These mimed scenes before a play or before each act in a play summarized or foreshadowed the coming events of the plot. These shows were common in early Renaissance drama, but Greenblatt notes that they already seemed old-fashioned in Shakespeare's time. Still, writers employed them up until the 1640s (Greenblatt 1139).

DUPLE METER: Poetry consisting of two syllables to a metrical foot, and one foot to each line. It is a rare form. One example noted in J. A. Cuddon's Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms comes from Herrick's "Upon His Departure Hence":

Thus I
Passe by,

And die:
As One,
Unknown,
And go.

DYFALU: A Welsh term for a form of fanciful conceit in which a string of sequential metaphors compares an object to a number of diverse things--often using compound words in a manner similar to the Anglo-Saxon or Old Norse kenning. The 14th century Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym is particularly known for this poetic technique. Cf. cataloging.

DYING RHYME: Another term for feminine metrical endings. See discussion under meter.

DYNAMIC CHARACTER: Also called a round character, a dynamic character is one whose personality changes or evolves over the course of a narrative or appears to have the capacity for such change. The round character contrasts with the flat character, a character who serves a specific or minor literary function in a text, and who may be a stock character or simplified stereotype. Typically, a short story has one round character and several flat ones. However, in longer novels and plays, there may be many round characters. The terms flat and round were first coined by the novelist E. M. Forster in his study, Aspects of the Novel. See flat character, character, characterization, round character, and stock character.

DYSTOPIA (from Greek, dys topos, "bad place"): The opposite of a utopia, a dystopia is an imaginary society in fictional writing that represents, as M. H. Abrams puts it, "a very unpleasant imaginary world in which ominous tendencies of our present social, political, and technological order are projected in some disastrous future culmination" (Glossary 218). For instance, while a utopia presents readers with a place where all the citizens are happy and ruled by a virtuous, efficient, rational government, a dystopia presents readers with a world where all citizens are universally unhappy, manipulated, and repressed by a sinister, sadistic totalitarian state. This government exists at best to further its own power and at worst seeks actively to destroy its own citizens' creativity, health, and happiness. Examples of fictional dystopias include Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's 1984, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed.

E TEXT, THE (Also called the E Document or the Elohist Text): In biblical scholarship, the editorial abbreviation for the Elohist Text (see below or or click here for more detailed discussion.)

EARLY MODERN ENGLISH: Modern English covers the time-frame from about 1450 or so up to the present day. However, linguists sometimes subdivide Modern English into "Early Modern" (c. 1450-1800) and "Late Modern" (c. 1800 to the present).

EASE OF ARTICULATION: The linguistic concern for how certain sound changes in words might be motivated by how easy or hard the word is to pronounce.

EAST GERMANIC: A sub-branch of the Germanic language family. Gothic was an East Germanic language.

EASTER UPRISING: On Easter Monday in 1916, about 1,200 Irish revolutionaries armed with only rifles engaged in an aborted rebellion against English domination of their country. They attempted to capture the fourteen most prominent buildings in Dublin (including most famously the General Post Office). The British responded by using heavy cannon to flatten the buildings in rebel hands. The rebels attempted a final stand near (ironically) King's Street, but they were wiped out with significant loss of life among Irish civilians and noncombatants who attempted to hide from the fighting. Secret military courts tried and executed rebel leaders--some apparently tied up to chairs and shot in spite of being previously wounded. The Easter Uprising was significant because it lead to anti-British sentiment in Ireland. It built up a greater sense of Irish national identity apart from English control, and it rekindled the failing republican movement. Several prominent Irish poets and authors wrote works based on or inspired by this incident, including W. B. Yeats' "Easter 1916." The violence and bloodshed probably also influenced Yeats' "The Second Coming" in a more abstract sense.

ECHOIC WORDS: Another term for onomatopoeia, i.e., when the actual sound of the word resembles its referent--like fizz or hiss. See onomatopoeia under tropes.

ECLIPSIS (Greek "leaving out," cf. Modern English eclipse): A type of enallage in which an author or poet omits essential grammatical elements to create a poetic or artful effect. One example might be the following: "This sentence no verb!" In this example, the necessary verb has vanishes, but the intentional effect is to highlight its omission. This term is not to be confused with ellipsis, below.

ECLIPSIS MUTATION: See discussion under mutation.

ECLOGUE (Greek "selection"): A short poem or short section of a longer poem in the form of a dialogue or soliloquy--especially one with pastoral elements. The term was first applied to Virgil's pastoral poems, but the term covers Renaissance imitators as well. Examples include Spenser's The Shepheard's Calendar (1579). After the 1700s, the term increasingly came to mean any poem having the structural form of the earlier eclogues--even works that were not pastoral. Examples of these eclogues include Swift's A Town Eclogue, Frost's Build Soil, or W. H. Auden's The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue. The term should not be confused with epilogue, below.

ECPHRASIS (plural, ecphrases): A passage of literature or poetry in which the writer disrupts the narrative and writes a lengthy passage describing, representing, or "translating" another type of art such as a painting, a piece of architecture or sculpture, or music. This ecphrasis is the "translation" of one type of non-verbal art into words. See discussion under mimesis.

ÉCRITURE: In deconstruction, writing as a social institution and as a group of inter-related texts. This results in textuality--a term for the idea that no single literary work can be studied as an autonomous object, but that each text is part of of a larger, culturally endorsed collection of texts, conventions, codes, and meanings.