poetic justice : The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms Oxford Reference

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Oxford Reference
The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (3 ed.)
Chris Baldick
Publisher: Oxford University Press Print ISBN-13: 9780199208272 Current Online Version: 2012 Print Publication Date: 2008 Published to Oxford Reference: 2008 eISBN: 9780191727177

poetic justice
The morally reassuring allocation of happy and unhappy fates to the virtuous and the vicious characters respectively, usually at the end of a narrative or dramatic work. The term was coined by the critic Thomas Rymer in his The Tragedies of the Last Age Consider'd (1678) with reference to Elizabethan poetic drama: such justice is poetic, then, in the sense that it occurs more often in the fictional plots of plays than in real life. As Miss Prism explains in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means. In a slightly different but commonly used sense, the term may also refer to a strikingly appropriate reward or punishment, usually a fitting retribution by which a villain is ruined by some process of his own making. See also NEMESIS.

MLA Citation Format: Baldick, Chris. "poetic justice." The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. : Oxford University Press, 2008. Oxford Reference. 2008. Date Accessed 13 Feb. 2013 <http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199208272.001.0001/ acref-9780199208272-e-891>.

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2013-02-14