Lit Terms-Carroll 2025

Allegory

A story in which people, things, and events have another meaning.  Ex: Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Spenser’s Faerie Queens, and Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Ambiguity

Multiple meanings a literary work may communicate, especially two meanings that are incompatible.

Apostrophe

Direct address, usually to someone or something that is not present.  Keats’ “Bright Star! Would I were steadfast!” is an apostrophe to a star, and “To Autumn” is an apostrophe to a personified season.

Connotation

The implication of a word or phrase, as opposed to its exact meaning (denotation).  Both Japan and North Korea denote a region in Asia, but to a modern reader, the associations of the two words are different.

Convention

A device of style or subject matter so often used that it becomes a recognized means of expression.  For example, a lover observing the literary love convention cannot eat or sleep and grows pale and lean.  Romeo, at the beginning of the play is a conventional lover, while an overweight lover in Chaucer is consciously mocking the convention.

Denotation

The dictionary meaning of a word, as opposed to connotation.

Didactic

Explicitly instructive. A didactic poem or novel may be good or bad.  Pope’s “Essay on Man” is didactic; so are the novels of Ayn Rand.

Digression

The use of material unrelated to the subject of a work.  The interpolated narrations in the novels of Cervantes or Fielding may be called digressions, and Tristram Shandy includes a digression on digressions.

Epigram

A pithy (brief, forceful, and meaningful expression) saying, often using contrast.  The epigram is also a verse form, usually brief and pointed.  Ex:  We think our fathers fools, so wise we grow,/ Our wiser sons, no doubt, will think us so.

Epithet

An adjective or other descriptive phrase that is regularly used to characterize a person, place, or thing.  Phrases such as “Peter the Great!”, “Richard the Lion-Hearted”, and “America the Beautiful” are epithets.

Homeric Epithet

A compound adjective that is regularly used to modify a particular noun.  Famous examples are “the wine-dark sea”, “the flashing-eyed Athena”, and “the rosy-fingered dawn.”

Euphemism

A figure of speech using indirection to avoid offensive bluntness, such as “deceased” for “dead” or “remains” for “corpse”.

Grotesque

Characterized by distortions or incongruities. The fiction of Poe or Flannery O’ Connor is often described as grotesque.

Hyperbole

Deliberate exaggeration, overstatement.  As a rule. Hyperbole is self-conscious, without the intention of being accepted literally.  “The strongest man in the world” or “a diamond as big as my head” is hyperbolic.

Jargon

The special language of a profession or group.  The term jargon usually has pejorative associations, with the implication that jargon is evasive, tedious, and unintelligible to outsiders.  The writings of the lawyer and the literary critic are both susceptible to jargon.

Literal

Not figurative, accurate to the letter, matter of fact, or concrete.

Lyrical

Songlike, characterized by emotion, subjectivity, and imagination.

Oxymoron

A combination of opposites; the union of contradictory terms.  Romeo’s line “feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health” has four examples of the device.  

Parable

A story designed to suggest a principle, illustrate a moral, or answer a question.  Parables are allegorical stories.

Paradox

A statement that seems to be self-contradicting but, in fact, is true.  The figure in Donne’s holy sonnet that concludes ``I never shall be chaste except you ravish me” is a good example of the device.

Parody

A composition that imitates the style of another composition normally for comic effect.  Fielding’s Shamela is a parody of Richardson’s Pantela. A contest for parodies of Hemingway draws hundreds of entries each year. 

Personification

A figurative use of language that endows the nonhuman (ideas, inanimate objects, animals, abstractions) with human characteristics.  Keats personifies the nightingale, the Grecian urn, and autumn in his major poems.

Reliability

A quality of some fictional narrators whose word the reader can trust/  There are both reliable and unreliable narrators, that is, tellers of a story who should or should not be trusted.  Most narrators are reliable, but some are clearly not to be trusted.  And there are some about whom readers have been unable to decide.

Rhetorical Questions

A question asked for effect, not in expectation of a reply.  No reply is expected because the question presupposes only one possible answer.  The lover in Shaw’s  “Shall I, wasting in despair/ Die because a lady’s fair?” has already decided the answer is “no.”

Soliloquy

A speech in which a character who is alone speaks his or her thoughts aloud.  A monologue also has a single speaker, but the monologuist speaks to others who do not interrupt.  Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” and “O! what a rogue and peasant slave am I” are soliloquies.  Browning’s “My Last Duchess” and “Fra Lippo Lilli” are monologues, but the hypocritical monk of his “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” cannot reveal his thoughts to others.

Stereotype

A conventional pattern, expression, character, or idea.  In literature, a stereotype could apply to the unvarying plot and characters of some works of fiction (those of Barbara Cartland, for example) or to the stock characters and plots of many of the greatest stage comedies. 

Syllogism

A form of reasoning in which two statements are made and a conclusion is drawn from them.  A syllogism begins with a major premise (“All tragedies end unhappily.”) followed by a minor premise (“Hamlet is a tragedy.”) and a conclusion (“Therefore, Hamlet ends unhappily.”).

Thesis

The theme, meanings or positions that a writer undertakes to prove or support.  

(Beginning of metrical terms) Alliteration

The repetition of identical or similar consonant sounds, normally at the beginning of words.  “Gnus never knows pneumonia” is an example of alliteration, since despite the spellings, all four words begin with the “n” sound.

Assonance

The repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds.  “A land laid waste with all its young men slain” repeats the same “a” sound in “laid waste,” and “slain.”

Ballad Meter

A four line stanza rhymed abcb with four feet in lines one and three and three feet in lines two and four.

Mother, mother make my bed.

Make it soft and narrow.

Since my love died for me today,

I’ll die for him tomorrow.

Blank verse

Unrhymed iambic pentameter.  It is the meter of most Shakespeare’s plays, as well as that of Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Men called him Mulciber and how he fell

From heaven, they fabled, thrown by angry Jove

Sheer o’er the crystal battlements: from morn

To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve.

Cossonance

Repetition of two or more consonant sounds within a line.

And all is seared with trade; bleared smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares men’s smell: the soil.

Dactyl

A metrical foot of three syllables, an accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables.

End-stopped

A line with a pause at the end.  Lines that end with a period, comma, colon, semicolon, exclamation point, or question mark are end-stopped.

Enjambment

Lines keep going, no punctuation.  The opposite of end-stopped.

Free verse

Poetry which is not written in a traditional meter but is still rhythmical.  The poetry of Walt Whitman is perhaps the best known example of free verse.

Heroic couplet

Two end-stopped iambic pentameter lines rhymed aa, bb, cc with the thought usually completed in the two-line unit.

When those fair suns shall set, as set the must,

And all those tresses shall be laid in dust,

This lock, the Muse shall consecrate to fame,

And ‘midst the stars inscribe Belinda’s name.

Hexameter

A line containing six feet.

Iamb

A two-syllable foot with an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable.  The iamb is the most common foot in English poetry. U/

Troche

/U

Dactyl

/UU

Internal rhyme

Rhyme that occurs within a line, rather than at the end.

“God save thee, ancient Mariner!

From the fiends, that plague thee thus! –

Why look’st thou so?” – With my crossbow

I shot the Albatross.

Metonomy

The substitution of a word which is related to the object or person named, in place of the name itself.  “The serpent that did sting thy father’s life./ Now wears his crown.” (Object, symbol, item stands for another)

Onomotopaeia

The use of words whose sound suggests their meaning.  Examples are “buss”, “hiss”, or “honk.”

Pentameter

A line containing five feet.  The iambic pentameter is the most common line in English verse written before 1950.

Rhyme royal

A seven-line stanza of iambic pentameter rhymed ababbcc, used by Chaucer and other medieval poets.

Slant/oblique rhyme

close enough, not complete rhyme

Sonnet

Normally a fourteen-line iambic pentameter poem.  The conventional Italian, or Petrarchan, sonnet is rhymed abba, abba, cde, cde; the English, or Shakespearean, sonnet is rhymed abab, cdcd, efef, gg.

Stanza

Usually a repeated grouping of three or more lines with the same meter and rhyme scheme.

Synecdoche

A figure of speech in which a part represents the whole object or idea. “Not a hair perished (person).”  Takes a small part of something to represent the whole.

Terza rima

A three-line stanza rhymed aba, bcb, cdc.  Dante’s Divine Comedy is written in terza rima.

Tetrameter

A line of four feet.

Iambic

U/U/

Trochaic

/U/U

Anapest

UU/ Poems: The Cloud-Percy Shelley, the Destruction of Sennacherib-Byron, A Visit from St Nicholas/the Night Before Christmas-Clement Clarke Moore

Dactylic

/UU, Epic Poetry usually

Spondee

//

pyrrhic

UU

(Beginning of grammatical terms) Antecedent

That which goes before, especially the word, phrase, or clause to which a pronoun refers.  In the sentence “The witches cast their spells,” the antecedent of the pronoun “their” is the noun “witches”.

Clause

A group of words containing a subject and its verb that may or may not be a complete sentence.  In the sentence “When you are old, you will be beautiful,” the first clause is a dependent clause and not a complete sentence.  The second clause is an independent clause and could stand by itself.

Ellipsis

The omission of a word or several words necessary for a complete construction that is still understandable.  “If rainy, bring an umbrella” is clear though the words “it is” and “you” have been left out.

Imperative

The mood of a verb that gives an order.  “Eat your spinach” uses an imperative verb.

Modify

To restrict to limit in meaning.  In the phrase “large, shaggy dog,” the two adjectives modify the noun, the adverb “very” modifies the adjective “shaggy,” which modifies the noun “dog.”

Parallel structure

A similar grammatical structure within a sentence or within a paragraph.  Winston Churchill’s “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight in the fields” speech or Martin Luther King's “I have a dream” speech depends chiefly on the use of parallel structure.

Periodic sentence

A sentence grammatically complete only at the end.  A loose sentence is grammatically complete before the period.  Periodic sentences complete the important idea at the end, while loose sentences put the important idea first.  Neither is a better sentence.  Good writers use both.  The following are (1) periodic and (2) loose sentences.

1. When conquering love did first my heart assail,/ Unto mine aid I summoned every sense.

2. Fair is my love, and cruel as she’s fair.

Syntax

The structure of a sentence.