Literary Term Glossary Study Set

Allegory

A narrative in which characters, action, and sometimes setting represent abstract concepts or moral qualities.

Alliteration

The repetition of same or similar consonant sounds in words that are close together.

Allusion

A seemingly brief reference to something in history, politics, literature, art, or music which the writer expects the reader to understand and relate to the work.

Anagnorisis

A moment of recognition or discovery, primarily used in Greek tragedy.

Antagonist

The character that opposes the hero.

Antithesis

A figure of speech in which an opposition or contrast of ideas is expressed by parallelism of words that are the opposites of, or strongly contrasted with, each other.

Aphorism

A short, often witty statement of a principle or a truth about life.

Atmosphere

The mood or prevailing feeling created in a literary work.

Binary opposition

A pair of related terms or concepts that are opposite in meaning.

Caricature

Exaggeration or distortion of a character’s physical, emotional, and moral characteristics, for the purpose of comic criticism.

Catharsis

An emotional discharge through which one can achieve a state of moral or spiritual renewal or achieve a state of liberation from anxiety and stress.

Character

An imaginary person in a literary work.

Static character

A character that does not change in the course of the story.

Dynamic character

A character that changes in some important way as a result of the story’s action.

Flat character

A character that has few personality traits and can be summed up by a single phrase.

Round character

A character that has more dimension to their personalities and is complex like real people.

Characterization

The creation of believable fictitious personalities.

Cliché

An overused phrase which has lost its freshness.

Close reading

A careful reading that is attentive to organization, figurative language, sentence structure, vocabulary, and other literary and structural elements of a text.

Colloquial

Informal language of a region, the vernacular.

Confidant

A character in a novel or a drama who takes little part in the action but is a close friend of the main character and who receives the confidences and intimate thoughts of the main character.

Conflict

The struggle between opposing forces in a story.

Internal conflict

Involves opposing forces within a person’s mind.

External conflict

Exists between two people, between a person and a force of nature or a machine, or between a person and a whole society.

Connotation

The implied meaning of a word or phrase.

Crisis

A significant action which changes inevitably the course of the literary work.

Denouement

The final part of a play, movie, or narrative in which the strands of the plot are drawn together and matters are explained or resolved.

Denotation

The literal (dictionary) meaning of a word or phrase.

Dialect

A way of speaking that is characteristic of a certain group or of the inhabitants of a certain geographical area.

Dialogue

The conversation of characters in a story.

Diction

The choice or use of words in oral and written discourse.

Epiphany

A sudden, powerful and spiritual realization.

Euphemism

The use of a mild, delicate, inoffensive, or vague word or expression for one thought to be coarse, unpleasant, offensive, or blunt.

Figurative language

A form of language in which writers and speakers mean something other than the literal meaning of their words.

Flashback

An interruption of a story's chronology to describe an incident that occurred prior to the main time frame of the action.

Foil

A character whose traits are the opposite of those of another character and who thus points up the strengths or weaknesses of another character.

Foreshadowing

Implication by the author of events to come later in a literary work.

Hyperbole

An exaggeration for the sake of emphasis and is not to be taken literally.

Idiom

Phrase or expression that means something different from what the words actually say.

Imagery

The use of vivid, concrete sensory details.

In media res

Starting a narrative in the middle of the action.

Intertextuality

A textual reference within some text that reflects the text used as a reference.

Irony

The contrast between what appears to be on the surface and what actually is.

Verbal irony

Occurs when someone says one thing and means something else.

Situational irony

Occurs when the opposite of what the characters or reader expects happens.

Dramatic irony

Occurs when an audience or reader knows some crucial piece of information that the characters do not know.

Jargon

Specialized or technical language of a trade, profession, or similar group.

Malapropism

The act or habit of misusing words to comic effect.

Metaphor

A figure of speech involving an implied comparison between two essentially unlike things.

Mixed metaphor

A metaphor that does not make a logical comparison.

Microcosm

A tiny world within the macrocosm.

Mood

The atmosphere or predominant emotion in a literary work.

Motif

A central theme or idea that is repeated in a work.

Motivation

A circumstance or set of circumstances that prompts a character to act in a certain way or that determines the outcome of a situation or literary work.

Non-linear narrative

A story that is not told in chronological order.

Onomatopoeia

Words which imitate sounds.

Oxymoron

A figure of speech that combines opposite or contradictory ideas or terms.

Paradox

A statement or situation that seems contradictory or mistaken on the surface, yet turns out to make sense when carefully examined.

Parallel structure

The use of similar forms in writing for nouns, verbs, phrases, or thoughts.

Parallelism

Similarities between elements (themes, symbols, characters) in a narrative.

Pathetic fallacy

The attribution of human feeling or motivation to a nonhuman object, mostly nature.

Pathos

The quality of work that evokes high emotion (sorry, pity, compassion) in the reader or audience.

Pattern

Any significant recurrences within a literary work.

Persona

The mask which covers the direct voice of the author.

Personification

The giving of human characteristics to something which is essentially non-human.

Plot

The progression of events in a literary work.

Exposition

Opening information in a literary work; usually provides background information, establishes the setting, and introduces the characters.

Rising action

A set of conflicts and crises which lead up to the climax.

Climax

The turning point or highest peak of the action in the plot.

Falling action

The action following the climax.

Resolution (or denouement)

The final unraveling of the plot, solution of mystery, explanation or outcome, or untying of the knot of intrigue.

Point of view

The perspective from which the author conveys the story to the reader.

First person point of view

The narrator is the one telling the story from their point of view using the pronoun "I".

Third person limited point of view

The narration is outside the characters but the motivations and thoughts of all characters are not understood but rather, ONE character's motivations and thoughts are revealed and drive the story.

Third person omniscient point of view

An all-knowing narrator knows every character's thoughts, feelings, and motivations.

Prose

The normal pattern of speech and writing (any writing other than poetry).

Protagonist

The main character in a literary work, who may or may not be heroic.

Pun

A play on words or the humorous use of a word emphasizing a different meaning or application.

Sarcasm

The use of verbal irony in which a person appears to be praising something but is actually insulting it.

Setting

The environment in which a story unfolds.

Simile

Direct comparison of one thing with another, announced by the words "like" or "as".

Suspense

The poised anticipation of the reader or audience as to the outcome of the events of a short story, a novel, or a drama.

Style

The way an author chooses words, arranges them in sentences and dialogue, and develops ideas and action with description and summary by means of imagery and other literary techniques.

Symbol/symbolism

Something relatively concrete, such as an object, action, character, or scene, which signifies something relatively abstract, such as a concept or an idea.

Synaesthesia

The use of one kind of sensory experience to describe another.

Syntax

The arrangement of words to form phrases, clauses, and sentences; sentence construction.

Theme

The main idea of a literary work.

Tone

The writer's or speaker's implied attitude toward his subject, characters, and audience, and sometimes toward himself.

Tragedy

In its most general sense, a term referring to any narrative writing in which the protagonist suffers disaster after a serious and significant struggle, but faces his downfall in such a way as to attain heroic stature.