Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature

Extract

“Decorum” refers to the norm of propriety in a literary work, and maybe understood in various possible, often overlapping ways. Decorum requires, first, the author to adopt a style and tone appropriate to the work's genre and subject matter, and to represent the speech and actions of individual characters in a manner appropriate to their respective stations in life. Just as, for instance, a tragic work requires a serious tone and style, so must a king speak with the grandness of a king, and a peasant act with the simple rusticity of a peasant (see dialect ). Second, decorum refers more generally to the appropriateness of the literary work for reception by the public. Historically, decorum required that nothing should appear in a literary work that would offend against the given culture's prevailing moral and social norms. “Verisimilitude” is plausibility, or in other words, the quality of seeming true to life to the work's readers or spectators. In the broad sense, verisimilitude is a key component of realism in the novel. In the narrow sense, as a requirement for literary works according to the classical aesthetic doctrines most prominent in Europe from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, verisimilitude often means presenting, not necessarily a vision of ordinary real life, but an idealization of life—whether depicting true-to-life character types (rather than ... log in or subscribe to read full text