Entertainment / Literature / Vignette: A short composition showing considerable skill, especially such a composition designed with little or no plot or larger narrative structure. Often vignettes are descriptive or evocative in their nature. An example would be the brief narratives appearing in Sandra Cisneros's short-stories. More loosely, vignettes might be descriptive passages within a larger work, such as Virginia Woolf's 'Kew Gardens,' or Faulkner's descriptions of horses and landscapes in The Hamlet. The term vignette (little vine') originally comes from a decorative device appearing on a title page or at the beginnings and ends of chapters. Conventionally, nineteenth-century printers depicted small looping vines here loosely reminiscent of the vinework in medieval manuscripts. (French, 'little vine')
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