Literary Terms - English 2 Honors

Allusion

An indirect reference to a person, event, statement, or theme found in literature, the arts, history, myths, religion, or popular culture.

Antithesis

Opposition or contrast of ideas or words in a balanced or parallel construction.

Apostrophe

A figure of speech in which the speaker directly addresses a person who is dead, imaginary, inhuman, or a place or concept.

Chiasmus

A type of rhetoric where the second part is syntactically balanced against the first.

Figurative Language

Language that moves beyond literal meanings with additional connotations; includes tropes and rhetorical figures.

Genus

Meaning 'the whole', as opposed to species, which means 'part of the whole'.

Imagery

Language that conveys a visual picture or sensory experience, and uses figures of speech to express abstract ideas vividly.

Irony

An implied discrepancy between what is said and what is meant.

Literal Imagery

Direct representation of an object or event using words that appeal to the five senses.

Metaphor

A trope that represents one thing through another without using connective words like "like" or "as".

Metonymy

Reference to something by naming one of its attributes.

Motif

A unifying element in an artistic work, such as a recurrent image, symbol, theme, or narrative detail.

Parallelism

A rhetorical figure that emphasizes ideas by using grammatically similar constructions for balance.

Pun

A play on words that exploits similarities in spelling or pronunciation between words with different meanings.

Rhetorical Figure

A division of figures of speech that involves less radical use of language to achieve special effects.

Simile

A trope that compares one thing to another using connective words like "like" or "as".

Species

Meaning 'part of the whole', as opposed to genus, which means 'the whole'.

Symbol

An image that has both literal and figurative meaning.

Symbolism

The sustained use of symbols to represent or suggest other things and ideas.

Synecdoche

A figure of speech where a whole is represented by naming one of its parts or vice versa.

Tenor

The object being represented by an image in a figure of speech.

Trope

Metaphorical language; includes principal tropes like metaphor, simile, metonymy, synecdoche, and personification.

Vehicle

The image used to represent something else in a figure of speech.