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allegory
a literary work having a second meaning beneath the surface one in characters, objects, or actions represent abstractions. A system of representation; a symbolic representation.
Examples: Animal Farm and The Chronicles of Narnia.
it is the expression of truths or generalizations about human existence by means of symbolic fictional figures and their actions; story, picture, or other piece of art that uses symbols to convey a hidden or ulterior meaning, typically a moral or political one
anecdote
a short and often personal story used to emphasize a point, to develop a character or a theme, or to inject humor
antithesis
a balancing of opposing ideas.
“Man proposes; God disposes.” —Pope.
“Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” – Barry Goldwater.
“It was the best times; it was the worst of times.” – Charles Dickens
aphorism
a terse statement that expresses a general truth or moral principle; sometimes considered a folk proverb.
“Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”
a short statement of a general truth, insight, or good advice.
epigram
a short witty poem expressing a single thought or observation, or a concise, clever, often paradoxical statement. It can also be the last two lines of a sonnet.
epigraph
a motto or quotation at the beginning of a literary composition, setting forth a theme. T.S. Eliot uses lines spoken by Guido da Montfeltro in Dante’s Inferno to begin his poem “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
this can set up a theme, create context, or expose important information.
frame
A narrative structure that provides a setting and exposition for the main narrative in a novel, play, or collection of short stories. Often, a narrator will describe where he found the manuscript of the novel or where he heard someone tell the story he is about to relate or provide the rationale for the story or stories to be presented. The frame contains the entire work and helps control the reader's perception of the work; they have also been used in the past to help give credibility to the main section of the novel.
Examples: Mary Shelley Frankenstein; Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter; Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; and Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew.
narrative poem
a poem that tells a story.
“Rime of the Ancient Mariner” -- Coleridge
parable
a short story illustrating a moral or religious lesson.
“The Prodigal Son”
pastoral
a poem, play or story that celebrates and idealizes the simple life of shepherds and shepherdesses. The term has also come to refer to an artistic work that portrays rural life in an idyllic or idealistic way.
bombast
ranting, insincere, extravagant language. The diction is more grandiose than the emotion warrants.
Extravagant imagery in some Shakespearean plays is like this. In Henry IV, part I, this is used to achieve a humorous effect, as Falstaff, pretending to be the king, speaks in an inflated and theatrical manner: “For God’s sake, Lords, convey my tristful queen!/ For tears do stop the floodgates of her eyes.”
burlesque
a work designed to ridicule a style, literary form, or subject matter either by treating the exalted in a trivial way or by discussing the trivial in exalted terms (that is, with mock dignity). This concentrates on derisive or incongruous imitation, usually in exaggerated terms. The comic effect is achieved by presenting the trivial with ironic seriousness or the serious with grotesque levity. Its purpose is frequently critical or satirical, but it may just amuse by extravagant incongruity. Literary genres (like the tragic drama) can be burlesqued, as can styles of sculpture, philosophical movements, schools of art, and so forth. Its main aspects are parody, caricature, and travesty.
Example: Cervantes’ Don Quixote burlesques chivalry. See Parody and Travesty.
caricature
a method of burlesque that aims at definite portraiture by exaggeration or distortion of easily recognizable features.
Example: Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest.
comic relief
a humorous scene or incident in the course of serious drama; its purpose is to provide relief from emotional intensity and to heighten the seriousness of the story by contrast.
Example: drunken porter scene in Macbeth
farce
form of drama which is solely intended to provoke laughter by exaggerating improbable situations, gross incongruities, or horseplay, using gestures, puns, gags, buffoonery, or ludicrous incidents and expressions, as opposed to the language based and more subtle comedy of character or manners. Its most elementary form is found in the gestures and tricks of the circus clown.
horatian satire
in general, a gentler, more good humored and sympathetic kind of satire, somewhat tolerant of human folly even while laughing at it. Named after the poet Horace, whose satire epitomized it. This tends to ridicule human folly in general or by type rather than attack specific persons.
juvenalian satire
Harsher, more pointed, perhaps intolerant satire typified by the writings of Juvenal. This often attacks particular people, sometimes thinly disguised as fictional characters. While laughter and ridicule are still weapons as with Horatian satire, the satirists that use this also use withering invective and a slashing attack. Swift is this.
lampoon
a crude, coarse, often bitter satire ridiculing the personal appearance or character of a person.
parody
a comical imitation of a serious piece with the intent of ridiculing the author, his ideas, or his work. The user of this exploits the peculiarities of an author's expression--his propensity to use too many parentheses, certain favorite words, or other characteristics. This may also be focused on, say, an improbable plot with too many convenient events. It is burlesque when the imitation humorously parallels the styles or mannerisms of a particular author, work, or school.
Spaceballs and the space epic genre, Hot Shots and action films, Thin thighs in thirty Years and exercise books
pun
humorous plays on words that have several meanings or words that sound the same but have different meanings. ________ have both serious and comedic effects.
In Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio, as he is dying, says, “Ask for me to-morrow, and you shall find me a grave man.”
ridicule
Words intended to belittle a person or idea and arouse contemptuous laughter. The goal is to condemn or criticize by making the thing, idea, or person seem laughable and ridiculous. This is, not surprisingly, a common weapon of the satirist.
sarcasm
A form of sneering criticism in which disapproval is often expressed as ironic praise. If you drop your lunch tray and someone says, "Well, that was really graceful," that's this.
satire
the use of humor to ridicule and expose the shortcomings and failings of society, individuals, and institutions, often in the hope that change and reform are possible. Ridicule, irony, exaggeration, and several other techniques are almost always present. The user may insert serious statements of value or desired behavior, but most often he relies on an implicit moral code, understood by his audience and paid lip service by them. The user’s goal is to point out the hypocrisy of his target in the hope that either the target or the audience will return to a real following of the code. Thus, this is inescapably moral even when no explicit values are promoted in the work, for the user works within the framework of a widely spread value system. Many of the techniques of this are devices of comparison, to show the similarity or contrast between two things. A list of incongruous items, an oxymoron, metaphors, and so forth are examples. Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” in exposing the hypocrisy of the British, exposes the shortcomings of society.
travesty
a work that treats a serious subject frivolously-- ridiculing the dignified. Often the tone is mock serious and heavy handed.
Example: Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer’s Night Dream.
adventure novel
a novel where exciting events are more important than character development and sometimes theme.
Examples:
* H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon's Mines
* Baroness Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel
* Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers
* Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
apologue
A moral fable, usually featuring personified animals or inanimate objects which act like people to allow the author to comment on the human condition. Often, the ______ highlights the irrationality of mankind. The beast fable, and the fables of Aesop are examples. Some critics have called Samuel Johnson's Rasselas an____ rather than a novel because it is more concerned with moral philosophy than with character or plot.
Examples:
* George Orwell, Animal Farm
* Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book
autobiographical novel
a novel based on the author's life experience. Many novelists include in their books people and events from their own lives because remembrance is easier than creation from scratch.
Examples:
* James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
* Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel
bildungsroman
the German word ______ means "a novel of formation": that is, a novel of someone's growth from childhood to maturity.
It's easy to find examples that don't exactly fit the mold, but still involve elements of the Bildungsroman. About a third of Jane Eyre, for instance, is concerned with her childhood.
Children's novel
a novel written for children and discerned by one or more of these: (1) a child character or a character a child can identify with, (2) a theme or themes (often didactic) aimed at children, (3) vocabulary and sentence structure available to a young reader. Many "adult" novels, such as Gulliver's Travels, are read by children. The test is that the book be interesting to and--at some level--accessible by children.
Examples:
* Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer
* L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
christian novel
A novel either explicitly or implicitly informed by Christian faith and often containing a plot revolving around the Christian life, evangelism, or conversion stories. Sometimes the plots are directly religious, and sometimes they are allegorical or symbolic.
Examples:
* Charles Sheldon, In His Steps
* Lloyd C. Douglas, The Robe
* Henryk Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis
* Par Lagerkvist, Barabbas
* Catherine Marshall, Christy
* C. S. Lewis, Perelandra
* G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who was Thursday
* Bodie Thoene, In My Father's House
coming-of-age story
A type of novel where the protagonist is initiated into adulthood through knowledge, experience, or both, often by a process of disillusionment. Understanding comes after the dropping of preconceptions, a destruction of a false sense of security, or in some way the loss of innocence. Some of the shifts that take place are these:
* ignorance to knowledge
* innocence to experience
* false view of world to correct view
* idealism to realism
* immature responses to mature responses
Example:
* Jane Austen Northanger Abbey
detective novel
a novel focusing on the solving of a crime, often by a brilliant detective, and usually employing the elements of mystery and suspense.
Examples:
* Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
* Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express
* Dorothy Sayers, Strong Poison
dystopian novel
an anti-utopian novel where, instead of a paradise, everything has gone wrong in the attempt to create a perfect society.
Examples:
* George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
* Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
epistolary novel
A novel consisting of letters written by a character or several characters. The form allows for the use of multiple points of view toward the story and the ability to dispense with an omniscient narrator.
Examples:
* Samuel Richardson, Pamela
* Samuel Richardson, Clarissa
* Fanny Burney, Evelina
* C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
* Hannah W. Foster, The Coquette
existentialist novel
a novel written from an existentialist viewpoint, often pointing out the absurdity and meaninglessness of existence.
Example:
* Albert Camus, The Stranger
fantasy novel
Any novel that is disengaged from reality. Often such novels are set in nonexistent worlds, such as under the earth, in a fairyland, on the moon, etc. The characters are often something other than human or include nonhuman characters.
Example:
* J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
gothic novel
A novel in which supernatural horrors and an atmosphere of unknown terror pervades the action. The setting is often a dark, mysterious castle, where ghosts and sinister humans roam menacingly. Horace Walpole invented the genre with his Castle of Otranto. Gothic elements include these:
* Ancient prophecy, especially mysterious, obscure, or hard to understand.
* Mystery and suspense
* High emotion, sentimentalism, but also pronounced anger, surprise, and especially terror
* Supernatural events (e.g. a giant, a sighing portrait, ghosts or their apparent presence, a skeleton)
* Omens, portents, dream visions
* Fainting, frightened, screaming women
* Women threatened by powerful, impetuous male
* Setting in a castle, especially with secret passages
* The metonymy of gloom and horror (wind, rain, doors grating on rusty hinges, howls in the distance, distant sighs, footsteps approaching, lights in abandoned rooms, gusts of wind blowing out lights or blowing suddenly, characters trapped in rooms or imprisoned)
* The vocabulary of the gothic (use of words indicating fear, mystery, etc.: apparition, devil, ghost, haunted, terror, fright)
Examples:
* Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto
* William Beckford, Vathek
* Anne Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho
* Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
* Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
historical novel
a novel where fictional characters take part in actual historical events and interact with real people from the past.
Examples:
* Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe
* Sir Walter Scott, Waverly
* James Fenimore Cooper, Last of the Mohicans
* Lloyd C. Douglas, The Robe
humanism
the new emphasis in the Renaissance on human culture, education and reason, sparked by a revival of interest in classical Greek and Roman literature, culture, and language. Human nature and the dignity of man were exalted and emphasis was placed on the present life as a worthy event in itself (as opposed to the medieval emphasis on the present life merely as preparation for a future life).
humors
In medieval physiology, four liquids in the human body affecting behavior. Each _____ was associated with one of the four elements of nature. In a balanced personality, no humor predominated. When a_____ did predominate, it caused a particular personality. Here is a chart of the _____s, the corresponding elements and personality characteristics:
* blood...air...hot and moist: sanguine, kind, happy, romantic
* phlegm...water...cold and moist: phlegmatic, sedentary, sickly, fearful
* yellow bile...fire...hot and dry: choleric, ill-tempered, impatient, stubborn
* black bile...earth...cold and dry: melancholy, gluttonous, lazy, contemplative
The Renaissance took the doctrine of ______ quite seriously--it was their model of psychology--so knowing that can help us understand the characters in the literature. Falstaff, for example, has a dominance of blood, while Hamlet seems to have an excess of black bile.
hypertext novel
A novel that can be read in a nonsequential way. That is, whereas most novels flow from beginning to end in a continuous, linear fashion, a type of novel can branch--the reader can move from one place in the text to another nonsequential place whenever he wishes to trace an idea or follow a character. Also called hyperfiction. Most are published on CD-ROM. See also interactive novel. Examples:
* Michael Joyce, Afternoon
* Stuart Moulthrop, Victory Garden
interactive novel
a novel with more than one possible series of events or outcomes. The reader is given the opportunity at various places to choose what will happen next. It is therefore possible for several readers to experience different novels by reading the same book or for one reader to experience different novels by reading the same one twice and making different choices.
mock epic
treating a frivolous or minor subject seriously, especially by using the machinery and devices of the epic (invocations, descriptions of armor, battles, extended similes, etc.). The opposite of travesty.
Examples:
* Alexander Pope, The Dunciad
* Alexander Pope, Rape of the Lock
multicultural novel
a novel written by a member of or about a cultural minority group, giving insight into non-Western or non-dominant cultural experiences and values, either in the United States or abroad.
Examples:
* Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
* Amy Tan, The Kitchen God's Wife
* Forrest Carter, The Education of Little Tree
* Margaret Craven, I Heard the Owl Call My Name
* James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain
* Chaim Potok, The Chosen
* Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Penitent
* Alice Walker, The Color Purple
mystery novel
A novel whose driving characteristic is the element of suspense or mystery. Strange, unexplained events, vague threats or terrors, unknown forces or antagonists, all may appear in a mystery novel. Gothic novels and detective novels are often also mystery novels.
novel
This is an extended prose fiction narrative of 50,000 words or more, broadly realistic--concerning the everyday events of ordinary people--and concerned with character. "People in significant action" is one way of describing it.
Another definition might be "an extended, fictional prose narrative about realistic characters and events." It is a representation of life, experience, and learning. Action, discovery, and description are important elements, but the most important tends to be one or more characters--how they grow, learn, find--or don't grow, learn, or find.
novella
a prose fiction longer than a short story but shorter than a novel. There is no standard definition of length, but since rules of thumb are sometimes handy, we might say that the short story ends at about 20,000 words, while the novel begins at about 50,000. Thus, this is a fictional work of about 20,000 to 50,000 words.
Examples:
* Henry James, Daisy Miller
* Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
* Henry James, Turn of the Screw
* Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
novel of manners
a novel focusing on and describing in detail the social customs and habits of a particular social group. Usually these conventions function as shaping or even stifling controls over the behavior of the characters.
Examples:
* Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
* William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
picaresque novel
an episodic, often autobiographical novel about a rogue or picaro (a person of low social status) wandering around and living off his wits. The wandering hero provides the author with the opportunity to connect widely different pieces of plot, since the hero can wander into any situation. These types of novels tend to be satiric and filled with petty detail.
Examples:
* Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders
* Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
* Henry Fielding, Jonathan Wild
pulp fiction
novels written for the mass market, intended to be "a good read,"--often exciting, titillating, thrilling. Historically they have been very popular but critically sneered at as being of sub-literary quality. The earliest ones were the dime novels of the nineteenth century, printed on newsprint (hence "pulp" fiction) and sold for ten cents. Westerns, stories of adventure, even the Horatio Alger novels, all were forms of this type of fiction.
regional novel
a novel faithful to a particular geographic region and its people, including behavior, customs, speech, and history. Examples:
* Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
* Thomas Hardy, Return of the Native
roman a clef
[French for "novel with a key," pronounced roh MAHN ah CLAY] A novel in which historical events and actual people are written about under the pretense of being fiction.
novel that has the extraliterary interest of portraying well-known real people more or less thinly disguised as fictional characters
Examples:
* Aphra Behn, Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister
* Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
romance
an extended fictional prose narrative about improbable events involving characters that are quite different from ordinary people. Knights on a quest for a magic sword and aided by characters like fairies and trolls would be examples of things found in this type of fiction.
Examples:
* Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d'Arthur
* Sir Philip Sidney, The Arcadia
* Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto
In popular use, the modern _____ is a formulaic love story (boy meets girl, obstacles interfere, they overcome obstacles, they live happily ever after). Computer software is available for constructing these stock plots and providing stereotyped characters. Consequently, the books usually lack literary merit.
Examples:
* Harlequin Romance series
science fiction novel
a novel in which futuristic technology or otherwise altered scientific principles contribute in a significant way to the adventures. Often the novel assumes a set of rules or principles or facts and then traces their logical consequences in some form. For example, given that a man discovers how to make himself invisible, what might happen?
Examples:
* H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man
* Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
* Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey
* Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
sentimental novel
a type of novel, popular in the eighteenth century, that overemphasizes emotion and seeks to create emotional responses in the reader. The type also usually features an overly optimistic view of the goodness of human nature.
Examples:
* Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield
* Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling
* Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey
* Thomas Day, The History of Sandford and Merton
sequel
A novel incorporating the same characters and often the same setting as a previous novel. Sometimes the events and situations involve a continuation of the previous novel and sometimes only the characters are the same and the events are entirely unrelated to the previous novel. When these result from the popularity of an original, they are often hastily written and not of the same quality as the original. Occasionally this is written by an author different from that of the original novel. See series.
Examples:
* Mark Twain, Adventures of Tom Sawyer
* Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad
* Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Detective
* Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind
* Alexandra Ripley, Scarlett
series
several novels related to each other, by plot, setting, character, or all three. Book marketers like to refer to multi-volume novels as sagas.
Examples:
* Anthony Trollope, Barsetshire novels
* C. S. Lewis, Chronicles of Narnia novels
* L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea novels
* James Fenimore Cooper, The Leatherstocking Tales
setting
the total environment for the action of a fictional work. This includes time period (such as the 1890's), the place (such as downtown Warsaw), the historical milieu (such as during the Crimean War), as well as the social, political, and perhaps even spiritual realities. This is usually established primarily through description, though narration is used also.
style
the manner of expression of a particular writer, produced by choice of words, grammatical structures, use of literary devices, and all the possible parts of language use. Some general ____s might include scientific, ornate, plain, emotive. Most writers have their own particular ____s.
utopian novel
a novel that presents an ideal society where the problems of poverty, greed, crime, and so forth have been eliminated.
Examples:
* Thomas More, Utopia
* Samuel Butler, Erewhon
* Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward
western (novel)
a novel set in the western United States featuring the experiences of cowboys and frontiersmen. Many are little more than adventure novels or even pulp fiction, but some have literary value.
Examples:
* Walter Van Tilburg Clark, The Ox-Bow Incident
* Owen Wister, The Virginian
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