aubade: a song or lyric poem lamenting the arrival of dawn to separate two lovers. The form, which has no fixed metrical pattern, flourished in late Middle Ages in France; it was adopted in Germany by Eschenbach and in England by Chaucer, whose Troilus and Criseyde includes a fine aubade. Later English examples include Donne's The Sunne Rising and Act III, Scene v of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

Epistolary novel: a novel written in form of a series of letters exchanged among the characters of the story, with extracts from their journals sometimes included. There are three types of epistolary novels: monologic (giving the letters of only one character), dialogic (giving the letters of two characters), and polylogic (with three or more letter-writing characters).

Hagiography: writing devoted to recording and glorifying the lives of saints and martyrs. This form of Cristian propaganda was much practiced in the Middle ages but has few equivalents in modern literary equivalents apart from G. B. Shaw's play Saint Joan (1923). By extension, the term is now often applied to modern biographies that treat their subjects reverentially as if they were saints.

Anxiety of Influence, in the unusual view of literary history offered by the critic Harold Bloom, a poet's sense of the crushing weight of poetic traditions which he has to resist and challenge in order to make room for his own original vision. Bloom has in mind particularly the mixed feelings of veneration and envy with which the English Romantic poets regarded Milton, as a 'father' who had to be displaced by his 'sons'. This theory represents the development of poetic tradition as a masculine battle of wills modeled on Freud's concept of the Odeipus complex: the 'belated' poet fears the emasculating dominance of the 'precursor' poet and seeks to occupy his position of strength through a process of misreading or misprision of the parent-poem in the new poem, which is always a distortion of the original. Thus Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind' is a powerful misreading of Wordsworth's 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality', through which the younger poet tries to free himself from the hold of his predecessor. Bloom's theory is expounded in The Anxiety of Influence (1973), in which he claims that 'the covert subject of most poetry for the last three centuries has been the anxiety of influence, each poet's fear that no proper work remains for him to perform'

New Criticism: is an American literary criticism movement which emphasized close reading of poems, concentrating on verbal complexities of literary works, especially poems, considered as self-sufficient objects without attention to their origins. The term originates from John Crowe Ransom's book The New Criticism (1941), in which he surveyed theories developed in England by T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, and William Empson, together with the work of American critic Yvor Winters. Before this close reading (or explication de texte) was considered as inferior criticism and not the work of a serious scholar. The New Criticism not only replaced this notion, but also became the academic orthodoxy of 1950's till 70's and especially with the publication of the very influential Understanding Poetry by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. Other critics usually referred under this heading, despite their differences, include Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur, W. K. Wimsatt Jr., and Kenneth Burke.The outstanding works of New Criticism are Brook's The Well-Wrought Urn (1947) and Wimsatt's The Verbal Icon (1954).

baroque: eccentric or lavishly ornate in style. The term in used more precisely in music and in art history that it is in literary history, where it mostly refers to the artificial poetic styles of the early 17th century, especially known as Gongorism or Marinism after the Spanish poet Luis de Gongogra and the Italian poet Giovanni Battista Marini. In English the ornate poetic style of Sir Thomas Browne may be called baroque, as may be strange conceits of the metaphysical poets especially Richard Crashaw. Some critics have tried to extend the term to works of Milton and later works of Shakespeare.

magic realism: a kind of modern  fiction in which fabulous an d fantastical elements are included in the narrative that otherwise maintains the reliable tone of objective realistic report. The term was once applied to the a trend in German fiction of the early 1950, but in  now chiefly associated with certain leading novelist of Central and South America notably Miguel Angel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The latter's One Hundred years of Solitude (1967)  is cited as a leading example.

The term has also been extended to works from very different cultures, designating the tendencies of novel to reach beyond the confines of realism and draw upon the energies of fable, myth and folklore while maintiaining a strong contemporary social relevance. Thus Gunter Grass's The Tim Drum (1959), Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981) and Satanic Verses (1988) are examples of the genre.

jouissance: the French word for 'enjoyment' (often used in sexual sense), employed by the critic Roland Barthes in his Le Plaisir du texte (1973) to suggest a kind of response to literary response that is different from ordinary plaisir (pleasure). Whereas plaisir is comfortable and reassuring, jouissance - usually translated as 'bliss' to retain its erotic sense - is unsettling and destabilizing. More information may be found here on wikipedia. The distinction corresponds to a further distinction Barthes makes between texte lisible (readable text) and texte scriptible (writable text).

Again this word also has a strong connotation in Psychology due to Jacques Lacan, and more may be read here.

autotelic: having, an artistic work, no end or purpose beyond its own existence. The term was used by T. S. Eliot in 1932 and adopted by New Criticism to distinguish the self-referential nature of literary art from didactic, philosophical, critical, or biographical works that involve practical reference to things outside themselves: in the words of the American poet Archibald MacLeish, "A poem should not mean/ But be". A similar idea is implied in the theory of the 'poetic function' put forward in Russian Formalism. This word also has a connotation in Psychology in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's classification of personalities.

[Etymology: Greek autotelēs, from aut- + telos, meaning self + goal.]

A Pedant's Glossary

hermeticism: A tendency towards obscurity in modern poetry, involving the use private or occult symbols and the rejection of logical expression in favour of musical suggestion. Hermetic poetry is associated primarily with the French Symbolists and poets influenced by them, notably Italians Giuseppe Ungraretti, Eugenio Montale, and Salvatore Quasimodo, who are sometimes grouped together as exponents of ermetismo.

(More details may be found here.)