[AH-ree-uh] In music, an elaborate melody sung as a solo or sometimes a duet, usually in an opera or an oratorio, with an orchestral accompaniment.
evolution
The theory, set forth in the nineteenth century by Charles Darwin, that plants and animals, including humans, evolved over millions of years from simpler forms through a process of natural selection.
higher criticism
A rational approach to Bible study, developed in German Protestant circles in the nineteenth century, that treated the biblical Scriptures as literature and subjected them to close scrutiny, testing their literary history, authorship, and meaning.
leitmotif
[LITE-mo-teef] In music, and especially in Wagner's operas, the use of recurring themes associated with particular characters, objects, or ideas.
libretto
[lih-BRET-oh] In Italian, "little book"; the text or words of an opera, an oratorio, or a musical work of a similar dramatic nature involving a written text.
luminism
In nineteenth century American landscape painting, a group of artists, who were inspired by the vastness of the American west and influenced by Transcendentalism, approached their work by consciously removing themselves from their paintings.
music drama
An opera in which the action and music are continuous, not broken up into separate arias and recitatives, and the music is determined by its dramatic appropriateness, producing a work in which music, words, and staging are fused; the term was coined by Wagner.
Realism
In medieval philosophy, the school that asserted that objects contained common or universal qualities that were not always apparent to the human senses but that were more real or true than the objects' physical attributes; opposed to Nominalism. In art and literature, a mid- to late-nineteenth-century style that focused on the everyday lives of the middle and lower classes, portraying their world in a serious, accurate, and unsentimental way; opposed to Romanticism.
slave narrative
A literary genre, either written by slaves or told by slaves to secretaries, which emerged prior to the American Civil War; the genre was launched by the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845); the harsh details of the inhumane and unjust slave system, as reported in these narratives, contributed to Realist literature.
socialism
An economic and political system in which goods and property are owned collectively or by the state; the socialist movement began as a reaction to the excesses of the factory system in the nineteenth century and ultimately called for either reforming or abolishing industrial capitalism.
Utilitarianism
[yoo-til-uh-TARE-e-uh-niz-uhm] The doctrine set forth in the social theory of Jeremy Bentham in the nineteenth century that the final goal of society and humans is "the greatest good for the greatest number."
