Foundational Concepts

Allusion

a brief, often implicit and indirect reference within a literary text to something outside the text, whether another text (e.g., the Bible, a myth, another literary work, a painting, or a piece of music) or any imaginary or historical person, place, or thing

Archetype

a character, ritual, symbol, or plot pattern that recurs in the myth and literature of many cultures; examples include the scapegoat or trickster (character type), the rite of passage (ritual), and the quest or descent into the underworld (plot pattern). the concept derives from Carl Jung, who argued that archetypes emerge from — and give us a clue to the workings of — the “collective unconscious,” a reservoir of memories and impulses that all humans share without being consciously aware of

Canon

the range of works that a consensus of scholars, teachers, and readers of a particular time and culture consider “great” or “major”

Convention

in literature, a standard or traditional way of presenting or expressing something, or a traditional and characteristic feature of a particular literary genre or subgenre. Examples:

• Division into lines and stanzas (poetry)

• a plot that begins in medias res and frequent use of epithets and extended similes (epic poem)

Diction

choice of words — often described as either informal or colloquial if it resembles everyday speech, or as formal if it is instead lofty, impersonal, and dignified. Tone is determined largely through this.

Drama

a literary genre consisting of works in which action is performed and all words are spoken before an audience by an actor or actors impersonating the characters (typically lacks the narrators and narration found in fiction)

Epigraph

a quotation appearing at the beginning or a literary work or of one section of such a work — not to be confused with epigram

Episode

a distinct action or series of actions within a plot

Fable

an ancient type of short fiction in verse or prose, illustrating a moral or satirizing human beings. The characters in a ___ are often animals that can talk and act like humans. The ___ is sometimes treated as a specific type of folktale, and sometimes as a fictional subgenre in its own right

• (think Aesop)

Fiction

any narrative, especially in prose, about invented or imagined characters and action — we tend to divide it into 3 major subgenres based on length:

• short story

• novella

• novel

Older, originally oral forms of this include the fable, legend, parable, and tale. They may also be categorized by their handling of particular elements, such as plot and character. Detective and science fiction, for example, are subgenres that include both novels and novellas.

Genre

a type or category of works sharing particular formal or textual features and conventions; especially used to refer to the largest categories for classifying literature — fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction. A smaller division within a ___ is usually known as a subgenre, such as gothic fiction or epic poetry

Imagery

• broadly defined, any sensory detail or evocation in a work

• more narrowly the use of figurative language to evoke a feeling, to call to mind an idea, or to describe an object. ___ may be described as auditory, tactile, visual, or olfactory depending on which sense it primarily appeals to — hearing, touch, vision, or smell

Legend

a type of tale conventionally set in the real world and in either the present or historical past, based on actually people and events and offering an exaggerated or distorted version of the truth about those people and events

• (think King Arthur)

Myth

• originally and more narrowly, a narrative explaining how the world and humanity developed into their present form and, unlike a folktale, is generally considered to be true by the people who develop it. Many, though not all, feature supernatural beings and have a religious significance or function within their culture of origin. Two especially common types are the creation ___ and the explanatory ___

• more broadly, any narrative that obviously seeks to work like a ___ in the first and more narrow sense, especially by portraying experiences or truths that it implies are universally valid regardless of culture or time

Moral

a rule of conduct or a maxim for living (that is, a statement about how one should live or behave) communicated in a literary work. Though fables often have ___ such as “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch,” more modern literary works instead tend to have themes

Motif

a recurrent device, formula, or situation within a literary work. Examples include:

• stormy weather whenever Adam appears in Frankenstein

Nonfiction

a work or genre of prose works that describe actual, as opposed to imaginary or fictional, characters and events. Subgenres include:

• biography

• memoir

• essay

Rhythm

the modulation of weak and strong (or stressed and unstressed) elements in the flow of speech. In most poetry written before the 20th century, ___ was often expressed in meter; in prose and free verse, ___ is present but in a much less predictable and regular manner

Parable

a short work of fiction that illustrates an explicit moral but that, unlike a fable, lacks fantastic or anthropomorphic characters. Examples include:

• stories about Jesus in the Bible

Poetry

one of the three major genres of imaginative literature, which has its origins in music and oral performance, and is characterized by controlled patterns of rhythm and syntax, compression and compactness and an allowance for ambiguity, a particularly concentrated emphasis on the sensual, especially visual and aural, qualities and effects of words and word order; and especially vivid, often figurative language

Rhetoric

the art and scholarly study of effective communication, whether in writing or speech. Many literary terms, especially those for figures of speech, derive from classical and Renaissance ___

Romance

• originally, a long medieval narrative in verse or prose written in one of the ___ languages (French, Spanish, Italian, etc.) and depicting the quests of knights and other chivalric heroes and the vicissitudes of courtly love, also known as chivalric ___

• later and more broadly, any literary work, especially a long work of prose fiction, characterized by a nonrealistic and idealizing use of the imagination

• commonly today, works of prose fiction aimed at a mass, primarily female, audience and focusing on love affairs

Setting

the time and place of the action in a work of fiction, poetry, or drama.

• spatial ___ is the place(s) in which action unfolds

• temporal ___ is the time

• general ___ is the general time and place in which all the action unfolds

• particular ___ are the times and places in which individual episodes or scenes take place

the film version of Gone with the Wind, for example, is generally set in Civil War-era Georgia, while its opening scene takes place on the porch of Tara, Scarlett O’Hara’s family home, before the war begins

Situation

the basic circumstances depicted in a literary work, especially when the story, play, or poem begins or at a specific later moment in the action

Syntax

word order — the way words are put together to form phrases, clauses, and sentences

Style

a distinctive manner of expression; each author’s ___ is expressed through their diction, rhythm, imagery, and so on

Theme

• broadly and commonly, a topic explored in a literary work (ex: “the value of all life”)

• more narrowly and properly, the insight about a topic communicated in a work (ex: “all living things are equally precious”) Most literary works have multiple ___, though some people reserve the term for the central or main insight, referring to others as subthemes. Usually, a ___ is implicitly communicated by the work as a whole rather than explicitly stated in it, though fables are an exception

Tone

the attitude a literary work takes towards its subject or that a character in the work conveys, especially as revealed through diction

Time

in literature, at least four potentially different ___ frames are at issue:

• another ___, when the author originally created or published a literary text

• narrator ___, when the narrator in a work of fiction supposedly narrated the story

• plot ___, when the action depicted in the work supposedly took place

• reader ___, when an actual reader reads the work or an actual audience sees it performed