Glossary of Literary and Rhetorical Terms

Allegory

A story in which the characters and events are symbols expressing truths about human life. The narrative has an underlying meaning different from the surface meaning of the story or poem, often personifying abstract ideas, told to teach or explain something.

Alliteration

The practice of beginning several consecutive or neighboring words with the same sound.

Allusion

A reference to a mythological, literary, or historical person, place, or thing

Anaphora

A rhetorical figure involving the exact repetition of words or phrases at the beginning of successive lines or sentences. Anaphora is a type of parallelism.

Anastrophe

Departure from normal word order for the sake of emphasis or for metrical/rhyming consistency.

Antithesis

A rhetorical figure in which two ideas are directly opposed. For a statement to be truly antithetical, the opposing ideas must be presented in a grammatically parallel way, thus creating a perfect rhetorical balance.

Apostrophe

A figure of speech in which the speaker directly and often emotionally addresses a person who is dead or otherwise not physically present, an imaginary person or entity, something inhuman, or a place or concept. The speaker addresses the object of the apostrophe as if this object were present and capable of understanding and responding.

Assonance

The repetition of vowel sounds within words.

Asyndeton

A rhetorical figure involving the deliberate omission of conjunctions to create a concise, terse, and often memorable statement.

Atmosphere

The prevailing aura or feeling conveyed about a physical setting within a work of literature.

Caesura

A pause in a line of poetry. The caesura is dictated not by meter but by natural speaking rhythm. Sometimes it coincides with the poet’s punctuation, but occasionally it occurs where some pause in speech is inevitable. In scansion, the caesura is indicated by the symbol ||.

Chiasmus

A rhetorical figure in which certain words, sounds, concepts, or syntactic structures are reversed or repeated in reverse order.

Connotation

The implicit rather than explicit meaning of a word consisting of the suggestions, associations, and emotional overtones attached to a word. For example, the word house has a different emotional effect on the reader than does the word home, with its connotation of safety, coziness, and security.

Consonance

The repetition of a consonant sound within a series of words to produce a harmonious effect: e.g., “And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.” The “d” sound is in consonance. The “s” sound is also in consonance.

Denotation

The exact, literal definition of a word independent of any emotional association or secondary meaning.

Diction

Word choice intended to convey a certain effect.

Enjambement

A poetic expression that spans more than one line. Lines exhibiting enjambement (or enjambment) do not end with grammatical breaks, and their sense is not complete without the following line(s).

Elision

The omission of part of a word (typically a letter). Often employed to make verse more rhythmic or to conform to a metrical pattern.

Epiphora

A rhetorical figure involving repetition of a word or phrase at the end of several clauses.

Exposition

A literary device that introduces meaningful background information to the reader.

Figures of Speech

Words or phrases that describe one thing in terms of something else. They always involve some sort of imaginative comparison between seemingly unlike things. Not meant to be taken literally, figurative language is used to produce images in a reader’s mind and to express ideas in fresh, vivid, and imaginative ways. The most common examples of figurative language, or figures of speech, used in both prose and poetry, are simile, metaphor, and personification.

Foreshadowing

The use of hints or clues in a narrative to suggest future action.

Hyperbole

A deliberate, extravagant, and often outrageous exaggeration

Imagery

The representation in words of any sensual experience that points out some sort of relationship between the abstract and the concrete. It is a collective term embracing image, simile, metaphor, and symbol.

Irony

An event or outcome which is the opposite of what would naturally be expected. There are three types of irony: verbal, situational, and dramatic.

Metaphor

A comparison of unlike things without using a word of comparison such as like or as.

Meter

A pattern of accented and unaccented syllables in lines of poetry.

Mood

The predominant emotion in a literary work conveyed by the feelings of and between characters.

Onomatopoeia

Using words or letters to imitate sounds. (hiss, slam, buzz, whirr, sizzle)

Oxymoron

A form of paradox that combines a pair of opposite terms into a single unusual expression

Parallelism

uses grammatically similar structures.

Personification

Applying human qualities to non-human things.

Plot

The sequence of events or actions in a short story, novel, play, or narrative poem.

Polyptoton

A rhetorical term for repetition of words derived from the same root but with different endings.

Polysyndeton

A rhetorical figure involving the inclusion of many conjunctions.

Rhetoric

The art of using words to persuade in writing or speaking. In the study of rhetoric, the focus should be how a writer uses elements of language---diction, detail, image, tone, syntax, logical ordering, juxtaposition, or contrast, for example---to achieve a specific purpose.

Rhyme

The repetition of similar ending sounds. If the rhyme ends in an accented syllable [sail/whale, defer/incur] it is called masculine. If it ends in an unstressed syllable [laden/maiden; sailor/whaler], it is called feminine. If it ends in two unstressed syllables [stupidity/avidity] it is called double feminine.

Satire

The literary art of diminishing a subject by making it ridiculous and exposing what is wrong or hypocritical about it. A satire seeks to criticize and correct the behavior of human beings and their institutions by means of humor, wit, and ridicule.

Scansion

The analysis, typically using visual symbols, of poetic meter, the more or less regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry. Meter is typically described in one of the following three ways: by citing the dominant type of foot (a poetic line’s rhythmic unit, containing some combination of stressed and unstressed syllables), the number of feet per line, or a combination of these two factors.

Setting

The time and place in which events in a short story, novel, play, or narrative poem take place.

Simile

A direct comparison of one object to another, using “like” or “as.”

Sound Devices

Stylistic techniques that convey meaning through sound. Some examples of sound devices are rhyme (two words having the same sound), assonance (repetition of similar vowel sounds), consonance (repetition of consonant sounds in the middle or at the end of words), alliteration (words beginning with the same consonant sound), and onomatopoeia (words that sound like their meaning).

Stream of Consciousness

A literary technique that approximates the flow (or jumble) of thoughts and sensory impressions that pass through the mind each instant. Psychological association (rather than rules of syntax or logic) determines the presence or absence, as well as the order, of elements in the “stream.”

Structure

The framework or organization of a literary selection. For example, the structure of fiction is usually determined by plot and by chapter division; the structure of drama depends upon its division into acts and scenes; the structure of an essay depends upon the organization of ideas; the structure of poetry is determined by its rhyme scheme and stanzaic form.

Style

The writer’s characteristic manner of employing language.

Symbol

Any object, person, place, or action that has both a meaning in itself and that stands for something larger than itself, such as a quality, attitude, belief, or value: e.g., the land turtle in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath suggests or reflects the toughness and resilience of the migrant workers.

Synaesthesia

The description of one kind of sensation in terms of another—that is, the description of sounds in terms of colors, as a “blue note,” of colors in terms of temperature, as a “cool green,” etc.

Synecdoche

A form of metaphor in which a part of something is used to signify the whole: e.g., “All hands on deck.” Also, the reverse, whereby the whole can represent a part, is synecdoche

Syntax

The arrangement of words and the order of grammatical elements in a sentence.

Theme

The central message of a literary work. It is not the same as a subject, which can be expressed in a word or two: courage, survival, war, pride, etc. The theme is the idea the author wishes to convey about that subject. It is expressed as a sentence or general statement about life or human nature.

Tone

The speaker or author’s attitude toward the subject, which is revealed by the words he or she chooses.

Understatement

The opposite of hyperbole. It is a kind of irony that deliberately represents something as being much less than it really is