a narrative recounting travelers' adventures, strange customs, and concepts challenging to the travelers' home nations, a genre popular in the post-Columbian era when explorers' narrati [..]

the rhetorical style which defeated the ornate style by advocating lean prose, pruned of ornaments, getting logically to its conclusions by the shortest number of premises and eschewing all digression [..]

the ability to read and write a language.  In Medieval England, the term literatus distinguished those who could read (but not necessarily write) Latin.  There was no particular term for the &quot [..]

the literary quality of texts written to be read or sung aloud.  Middle and Early Modern English literature was almost entirely intended for oral performance.  Even solitary readers tended to read alo [..]

in modern literary criticism, especially Reader-Response Criticism, the reader's construction of a reading of the text by applying the language's grammar rules and a standardized lexicon of [..]

in modern literary criticism, the act of examining a text's meaning (see Hirsch, "sharable . . . verbal meaning") to determine its significance as an aesthetic, cultural, politi [..]

a system of rules for judging beauty.  Most readers begin their careers using an unexamined set of aesthetic rules they have inherited from their cultural moment, though there is some debate about whe [..]

as in "four-stress verse," verse in which syllabic "feet" are not measured carefully ("metrical") but rather the poem's rhythm is organized b [..]

verse in which metrical stress in each line falls on words or phrases which usually begin with the same consonant.  (E.g., these two lines from "The Battle of Maldon":

        heorte þy cenre,  [Spirit shall be so much the harder,  heart, the keener]