literarylit‧e‧ra‧ry /ˈlɪtərəri $ ˈlɪtəreri/ ●●○ W2 adjective [only before noun] 
a literary prize literary criticism (=the study of the methods used in writing literature)2typical of the style of writing used in literature rather than in ordinary writing and talking: a literary style of writing3liking literature very much, and studying or producing it: a literary woman
WORD ORIGINliterary
Origin:
1600-1700 Latin litterarius, from littera; ➔ LETTER1EXAMPLES FROM OTHER DICTIONARIES
- literary criticism
- a very literary style of writing
- Drawn to the subject via a footnote, McKillop did some literary detective work to uncover Deeks's story.
- Gow acted as Housman's literary executor, and supervised a reprint of his edition of Manilius.
- His literary proteges were allowed to publish more and the film industry also prospered.
- It ended up getting published in the literary magazine but I got a B in the course.
- It largely disappears when literary texts are treated as cultural traces in a cognitive rather than an affective reading.
- So many of the literary works having hypocrisy in their title add to it the word exposed, or a synonym.
- The malaise about a shared intellectual and literary culture was short-lived, the product of passing confrontation.
- What is everywhere assumed, if not always made explicit, is that literary judgement has no place in the academy.
WORD SETS
acrostic, nounadapt, verballiteration, nounanagram, nounannual, nounanthology, nounantihero, nounapologia, nounappendix, nounassonance, nounauthorship, nounautobiography, nounballad, nounbard, nounbathos, nounbiography, nounblank verse, nounbowdlerize, verbburlesque, nouncaesura, nouncameo, nouncanon, nouncanto, nouncaricature, nounchapter, nouncharacterization, nouncitation, nounclimax, nounclimax, verbcoda, nouncollected, adjectiveconceit, nouncorpus, nouncouplet, nouncritique, noundactyl, noundeclamatory, adjectivedeconstruction, noundense, adjectivedevice, noundialogue, noundiarist, noundiction, noundigest, noundoggerel, noundraft, noundraft, verbdrama, noundub, nounelegy, nounending, nounepic, adjectiveepigram, nounepilogue, nounepistolary, adjectiveepitaph, nounessay, nounessayist, nouneulogy, nounexegesis, nounfable, nounfairy tale, nounfantasy, nounfiction, nounfictional, adjectivefirst edition, nounfirst person, nounflashback, nounflorid, adjectiveflowery, adjectivefolk, adjectiveforeword, nounformulaic, adjectivefree verse, nounghost story, nounGothic, adjectivegrandiloquent, adjectivehaiku, nounheroic, adjectiveheroic couplet, nounhexameter, nounhumorist, nounhyperbole, nouniamb, nouniambic pentameter, nounimage, nounimagery, nouninformal, adjectiveingénue, nouninstalment, nounirony, nounjournal, nounlay, nounlimerick, nounlit., literary, adjectiveliterature, nounlyric, adjectivelyric, nounlyrical, adjectivelyricism, nounman of letters, nounmanuscript, nounmetaphor, nounmetaphorical, adjectivemetre, nounmetrical, adjectivemonologue, nounnarrative, nounnarrator, nounnaturalism, nounnaturalistic, adjectivenom de plume, nounnovel, nounnovelist, nounnovella, nounnursery rhyme, nounode, nounonomatopoeia, nounpadding, nounpaean, nounparagraph, nounparaphrase, verbparaphrase, nounparenthetical, adjectivepassage, nounpathetic fallacy, nounpen name, nounpentameter, nounperiphrasis, nounperoration, nounpicaresque, adjectiveplaywright, nounplot, nounpoem, nounpoet, nounpoetess, nounpoetic, adjectivepoetic licence, nounpoet laureate, nounpoetry, nounpolemic, nounpolemical, adjectivepotboiler, nounprécis, nounpreface, nounprefatory, adjectiveprologue, nounprose, nounprosody, nounprotagonist, nounpseudonym, nounpulp, nounquatrain, nounquotation, nounquote, verbreading, nounrecite, verbrendition, nounrevise, verbrevision, nounrhetoric, nounrhyme, nounrhyme, verbromance, nounsaga, nounsatire, nounsatirist, nounscience fiction, nounscribbler, nounscript, nounself-portrait, nounSF, Shakespearean, adjectiveshort story, nounsimile, nounsoliloquy, nounsonnet, nounstanza, nounstilted, adjectivestory, nounstream of consciousness, nounstylist, nounsubplot, nounsubtitle, nounsuperhero, nounsurrealism, nounsurrealistic, adjectivesynopsis, nountailpiece, nountale, nountalking book, nountearjerker, nountext, nountextual, adjectivetexture, nountheme, nounthriller, nountitle, nountragedian, nountragedy, nountragic, adjectivetragicomedy, nountrope, nounturgid, adjectiveunabridged, adjectiveverse, nounvignette, nounvolume, nounweepy, nounwell-turned, adjectivewhodunit, nounwriter, nounwriter's block, nounyarn, noun
COLLOCATIONS FROM THE ENTRY literary criticism (=the study of the methods used in writing literature)COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES a literary agent Eliot’s poetry is full of biblical allusions. In his poetry we find many allusions to the human body. readers of a more literary bent the cultural heritage of Italy
literary criticism (=the study of the methods used in writing literature) a literary agent Eliot’s poetry is full of biblical allusions. In his poetry we find many allusions to the human body.· The book was nominated for a major US literary award.
readers of a more literary bent· There has been a lot of debate about this issue in political circles.
(=of books and other literature)
· In a literary essay, you should explore the meaning and construction of the text.
(=expressing something as poetry or in literature)· The subject does not easily lend itself to poetic expression.
· the Cheltenham Literary Festival.
the cultural heritage of Italy (=the qualities that make something good as a book, play, or poem)· There was no literary merit in his poems.
· He had a huge influence on the literary scene.
· His musical tastes changed radically.
COLLOCATIONS FROM THE CORPUSNOUN· Quitting after a fracas he had gone to work as a literary agent and had prospered.· Her family, besieged by calls, retained New York literary agent Laurie Liss.· John Pawsey describes a week in the life of a literary agent.· Nina, the literary agent, was on her way to London on business.· I gave the novel to the literary agent Curtis Brown to negotiate with a publisher.· Loretta Barrett, our literary agent, was a successful editor at a major publishing company.· I therefore contacted a literary agent, Al Zuckerman, who had been introduced to me as the brother-in-law of a colleague.· Simple start All seemed relatively simple at the start, recalls literary agent Alexandra Cann.
· A little literary allusion, for another.
· Eleanor's husband had secured his first lectureship, and her first novel had been acclaimed in literary circles.· By 1920 she had proved herself by earning a living in a difficult world, and by winning recognition in literary circles.· Bill Raeper was well known in literary circles in Oxford.
· Bakhtin is unusual among literary critics in making the focus of his activity the novel rather than lyric poetry or drama.· She is learning skills that trial lawyers and literary critics, alike, use.· He was equally admired by literary critics, such as Southey and De Quincey.· I just wanted to know what the literary critics are into now.· His other major influence was to be his wife, the literary critic and translator Farzaneh Taheri.· Morrison clearly enjoyed this foray into the territory of the literary critic.· The relationship between content and style has been a constant and controversial preoccupation of literary critics.· Megill writes not as a literary critic but as a philosophically trained historian of ideas.
· Author of seven books, he is rector of a literary institute, where he lectures on literary criticism.· The literature of opera includes plenty of criticism, much of it as intellectually impressive as the best literary criticism.· In a longer perspective, the contribution of Marxists to literary criticism is considerable.· But then Hugo Gonzales mentioned that he some-times thought of writing a book of literary criticism.· Not only sociology and cultural anthropology but even a field like literary criticism increasingly becomes infested with the jargon of empirical addiction.· In literary criticism, the idea of the postmodern has scarcely taken hold at all.· The main game of both critics is to appropriate the language of literary criticism for their analyses of television.
· The malaise about a shared intellectual and literary culture was short-lived, the product of passing confrontation.· And in a country whose language has become the world's lingua franca its literary culture is its culture.· The poem stylistically asserts its participation in high literary culture, a culture by the 1670s unquestionably associated with a social elite.
· He had told her that he had to be quick on the phone because his literary editor was listening to him.· Joe wrote extensively for the magazine and became a literary editor during his final year.· In 1935 he became literary editor of the Listener, a post he held for twenty-four years.· He contributed to the Grotonian and be-came literary editor in his sixth-form year.· They were headed by the Guardian's literary editor, Claire Armitstead.· When Amis became literary editor of the New Statesman, he appointed Barnes his deputy.· There should be an agreement among literary editors, not to employ Kingsley Amis to review any book dealing with humour.
· Great literary figures past and present.· Scholars have found, for instance, surprising links between Taylor and a number of literary figures.· There were great discussions especially among show business and literary figures, about the legalization of pot.· Yet, along with journalists, poets, literary figures, and agitators, they do help form opinions.· Or perhaps established literary figures enjoy a certain immunity from such cranky zeal.· If by chance there were no illustrious literary figures to listen to, everyone went to bed early.· No other nation's literary figures could speak like Austen's heroes and heroines.
· Conversely, poetry is in many ways closer to music than to the more extended and discursive literary forms.· But what does this mean for literary form?· For Robbe-Grillet, there was also a direct correlation between Balzacian realism as a literary form and the society which produced it.· And what will be the consequences in literary form of this satisfaction with the immediate?· The Formalists evaluate literary form for its perceptibility and not for its mimetic capacity.· As the millennium approaches the memoir has become the trendiest of literary forms.· Since materials are classified and grouped first by language, all literary forms such as poetry are scattered according to language. 4.· Form criticism Form criticism is concerned with the study of literary form in the Bible.
· By the 1850s the tradition had declined, so that Baudelaire was seeking to give new life to a decayed literary genre.· Evidence suggests that some teachers are least happy about teaching poetry to this age group, in comparison with the other main literary genres.
· Unlike these cities, Dublin is thought of first and foremost for its literary heritage, rather than for its art.
· It is what makes him such a refreshing literary historian.· The Faculty in those days was comparatively small, and still dominated by old men who were primarily literary historians.
· His death marks the close of half a century of academic and literary history, of which he was the chronicler.· Her knowledge of publishing trends, literary history, and books of every description and genre, however, filled rooms.· Sequels are part and parcel of literary history.· It includes also some illuminating statements by the poets themselves on their aesthetic outlook and their place in literary history.· Similarly, seventeenth-century literary history is not merely a progress of lyric development from Donne to Marvell.· His nomenclature has a very respectable literary history.· Post-war Britain found its own literary history, at least since mid-Victorian times, still unwritten.
· Though published quarterly, it was very different from the traditional quarterly literary journal.· Several have been published in fine literary journals.· The low circulation and poor distribution of leading literary journals provide clear evidence of the élitist character of the cultured few.· The old literary journal on the kindling pile is as satisfying as the newest ones creating a stir back in the city.· These were after all the two leading literary journals.
· For many teachers therefore written language is equated with literary language, with the polished performance of narrative, drama or poetry.· Scepticism about literary language, however, was not only the province of those opposed in some absolutist sense to literary practices.· In the examples that I have taken, he generalises from literary language to an account of all language.· All language and not just literary language, is informed by the play of différance.· This sounds like a criterion for literary language.· They also disagree on how functions are manifested in literary language.· This was particularly true of the highly organised rhetoric of some literary language.
· It is not just a question of new ground being broken in the academic journals and literary magazines.· I talked about literature and philosophy and about the literary magazine, and he watched me.· He vaguely remembered her name from the literary magazines, where she was quite well thought of.· She landed in a literary publications class at the University of Baltimore, where the assignment was to produce a literary magazine.· I often see his picture in literary magazines.· I ended up number one in the class, managing editor of the paper, and started a literary magazine.· He sends his work to a tiny literary magazine and hopes that one day one of this screenplays might be published.· Poet and editor of JackLeg, a community-based literary magazine.
· Obviously, there is no literary merit in such rhymes.· For most novels of literary merit, neither the dualist nor the monist doctrine will be entirely satisfactory.
· Apart from philosophical essays and translations, May Sinclair's early literary production covered poetry and short stories.· This more sophisticated view of literary production is clearly at odds with the vulgar Marxist criticism of Zhdanov, Radek and Stetsky.· With these words Nizan set out in 1932 his fundamental views on literary production.· Clearly the aesthetic and technical problems of literary production had been conveniently neglected and subsumed within a strategically advantageous ideological reference system.
· We had a few concluding words about the literary scene in London, which he thought to have reached a pretty low ebb.· The Beat Generation and their fellow writers never rose to a position of world dominance on the literary scene.· Perhaps the only firm conclusion to emerge from this continuing debate is the recognition that the literary scene has become pluralistic.· It's a breath of fresh air on the stale London literary scene.· As the century went on, women poets exercised much greater influence on the literary scene.
· This dilemma has been present since the beginnings of institutionalized literary study.· Jakobson's essay thus constitutes as strong a claim as can possibly be made for the relevance of linguistics to literary study.· Herbert would seem to be far more obviously the choice for literary study, and the institutional canon confirms this.· Nevertheless, there are no fixed rules about justifying arguments in literary studies.· Of the many functional classifications of language that have been proposed, three have had some currency in literary studies.· Literariness, and not this or that work by this or that author, is the object of literary studies.· In practice, it weakens the claim of literary study to be a coherent and self-sufficient discipline.· An adversarial stance appeared in literary study.
· His literary style was plain and factual, without witticisms or flourishes, and his character seems similar.· Writing done for other purposes generally does not make such generous use of subheadings and depends on literary style for effective communication.· Together, these arguments may seem to leave very little foothold for quantitative methods in the study of literary style.· His literary style is representative of this highly charged emotional tone.· So finally, it is with literary style or dramatic mode.· He emphasizes how variegated were the personalities of these poets, and the literary styles which they practised.
· It largely disappears when literary texts are treated as cultural traces in a cognitive rather than an affective reading.· They were arriving in their World Humanities class unable to make sense of a literary text.· Examining Spenser and Ireland, therefore, raises more questions about relations between literary texts and historical contexts than it resolves.· The exploration of literary texts is not an elitist activity, distinct from the study of other means of communication.· Even if literary texts were not seen as copies of reality, they were nevertheless regarded as copies of structuralist models.· But the distinction between literary texts and cultural texts is important, and I shall return to it.· A literary text is compatible with an indefinite number of contexts yielding indefinitely many readings and re-readings.· For the production-model of the literary text is a very academic one.
· Brooke-Rose's engagement with feminist theory is typical of her encounter with literary theory in general.· Everyone knows that, or at least everyone who has read his or her beginner's guide to literary theory.· Contemporary literary theory has also questioned whether a relation between words and things is easily achieved, even possible.· As far as literary theory is concerned, it is perhaps this more than anything else which constitutes the structuralist revolution.· In literary theory they emerge as Marxism, phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction.· Tredell's analysis is perhaps too synchronic, suggesting that the various modes of literary theory coexist, whether easily or uneasily.· The result is a range of different genres of literary criticism and literary theory, to some extent distinguished by register.· What flows from his pen in this book is a mixture of autobiography, literary theory, and metaphysical speculation.
· It is as if by working in Weston Hall, Leapor came into contact with that family's modest literary tradition.· I ask you: why did women think they could suppress a literary tradition of hundreds of years?· The literary tradition associates the beginning of painting with Corinth and neighbouring Sicyon.· The period of emancipation, the flowering of literary tradition, the Holocaust.· What they do have, though, is a literary tradition, which reveres the short story.· Fly fishing has a literary tradition, too.· The literary tradition is valued in so far as it offers a critical evaluation of this transformation and its consequences.
· But on the second level, in most novels and plays there is a sequence of exposure within the literary work itself.· But when I find homes or schools in which literary work primarily involves worksheets and computer programs, I do object.· The literary work is to define the mould which is to be instrumental in shaping the life's work.· Such an outlook is particularly well illustrated by the literary work of the Arminian clergyman, George Herbert.· I said that literary work often left me with a depressed feeling.· Yet Golshiri never allowed anger to turn his literary work into sloganeering.
· So many of the literary works having hypocrisy in their title add to it the word exposed, or a synonym.· These criteria, sensible or not, apply almost exclusively to literary works.· The main thrust will be in the middle ground, but we want to publish good quality literary works as well.· In this scheme of things there is obviously no place for the biographies and personalities of the producers of literary works.· The bulk of his library of about twenty thousand volumes, consists of historical and literary works.
· In little pockets - that's nothing unusual, in the literary world.· The presentation of information is not neatly organized by the literary world into important and non-important scientific material.· The London literary world runs on bile.· Maligned by their critics and adored by their readers, romances have definitely had an effect upon the literary world.· In recent years the lifestyle of the intelligence officer has acquired a glamorous image thanks to the literary world and the screen.· But Fielding enters the literary world dragging all the paraphernalia of neoclassicism behind him.· He was a man of influence in the literary world.
WORD FAMILYnounliteratureliteracy ≠ illiteracyilliterateliteratiadjectiveliteraryliterate ≠ illiterate
1relating to literature: a literary prize literary criticism (=the study of the methods used in writing literature)2typical of the style of writing used in literature rather than in ordinary writing and talking: a literary style of writing3liking literature very much, and studying or producing it: a literary woman