Tone Mood Atmo

TONE Source 1: The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms. 2nd ed. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. 482. Print. tone: The attitude of the author toward the reader or the subject matter of a literary work. An author's tone may be serious, playful, mocking, angry, commanding, apologetic, and so forth. The term is now often used to mean "tone of voice," a difficult-to-determine characteristic of discourse through which writers (and each of us in our daily conversations) reveal a range of attitudes toward everything from the subject at hand to those whom we are addressing. Some critics simply equate tone with voice, a term referring to the authorial presence that pervades a literary work, lying behind or beyond such things as imagery, character, plot, or even theme. Although the terms tone and atmosphere may both be equated with mood, tone and atmosphere are distinguished. Unlike tone, which refers to the author's attitude, atmosphere refers to the general feeling created in the reader or audience by a work at a given point. tone color: A phrase invented by poet Sidney Lanier in The Science of English Verse (1880) to compare the musicality of the sounds of words to timbre in music. Source 2: A Handbook to Literature. 7th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996. 507-509. Print. Tone (Tone Color) Tone has been used, following I. A. Richard's example, for the attitudes toward the subject and toward the audience implied in a literary work. Tone may be formal, informal, intimate, solemn, sombre, playful, serious, ironic, condescending, or many another possible attitude. Tone or tone color sometimes designates a musical quality in language that Sidney Lanier discussed in The Science of English Verse, which asserts that the sounds of words have qualities equivalent to timbre in music. "When the ear exactly coordinates a series of sounds with primary reference to their tone-color, the result is a conception of (in music, flute-tone as distinct from violin-tone, and the like; in verse, rhyme as opposed to rhyme, vowel varied with vowel, phonetic syzygy, and the like), in general ... tone-color." ATMOSPHERE Source 1: The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms. 2nd ed. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. 31. Print. atmosphere: The general feeling created in the reader or audience by a work at a given point. Atmosphere is sometimes used as a synonym for mood, although mood has also been equated with tone, from which atmosphere is distinguished. Unlike atmosphere, which refers to the feeling experienced by reader or audience, tone refers to the attitude of an author toward reader or audience, subject matter, or even himself or herself. MOOD Source 1: The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms. 2nd ed. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. 276. Print. mood: Defined by some critics as synonymous with atmosphere, by others as synonymous with tone, and by still others as synonymous with both. Tone refers to the attitude of authors toward their readers, toward their subject matter, and even toward themselves; atmosphere refers to the general feeling created in the reader by the work at a given point, which may be entirely different from the tone. The atmosphere of a work may be oppressive without its tone being so, although the two inevitably affect one another. Mood is probably closer to atmosphere than to tone, but as a general term, it can correctly be applied to either. One could say that an author creates a somber mood (thereby using it as a synonym for atmosphere), and one could also say that an author's mood is somber (thereby using it as a synonym for tone to describe the author's attitude toward the audience or subject matter). Source 2: A Handbook to Literature. 7th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996. 329. Print. Mood In a literary work the mood is the emotional-intellectual attitude of the author toward the subject. A group of poems about death may range from a mood of noble defiance in Donne's "Death, Be Not Proud," to pathos in Frost's "Out, Out –," to irony in Housman's "To an Athlete Dying Young," to morbidly joyous acceptance in Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." If a distinction exists between mood and TONE, it will be the fairly subtle one between mood as the attitude of the author toward the subject and TONE as the attitude of the author toward the audience. In cases where the writer uses ostensible "authors" within the work, mood and TONE can be quite distinct, as in Irving's use of Diedrich Knickerbocker. Byron, in canto III of Don Juan, has "a poet" (presumably Southey) write a poem beginning "The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!", which seems solemn, brave, and freedom-loving in mood; yet the tone of Byron (not the mood of the imaginary "poet") is mocking and satiric.