English: Lit HL - Literary Terms

Quick tips: Don't mix ambiguity and ambivalence, mood and atmosphere, contradiction and paradox, irony and dramatic irony, monologue and soliloquy, parody and pastiche, plots and story, rhythm and meter!

Alienation

Suggests that under Capitalism we live estranged from our true human natures.

Allegory

A story of some complexity that corresponds to another situation on a deeper level.

Alliteration

Repetition of an identical consonant sound at the beginning of stressed words, usually close together

Allusion

A reference to an event, person, place, work of literature, etc. that gives additional layers of meaning to a text or enlarges its frame of reference.

Ambiguity

Where language and tone are (usually deliberately), unclear and may have two or more interpretations or meanings.

Ambivalence

Where the writer’s attitude to, for example, a character or event is not clear-cut, but may seem to hold at least two responses

Antithesis

Contrasting ideas by balancing words of opposite meaning and idea.

Apostrophe

An exclamatory passage where the speaker or writer breaks off in the flow of a narrative or poem to address a dead or absent person, a particular audience, or object (often personified).

Assonance

Repetition of similar vowel sounds close to one another

Atmosphere

Refers specifically to place, a setting, or surroundings.

Bathos

A sudden descent from the sublime or serious, to the ridiculous or trivial; anti-climactic

Bildungsroman

German term for a novel focusing on the development of a character from youth to maturity.

Blank verse

Unrhymed poetry that’s not broken into stanzas, keeping a strict pattern in each line, usually in iambic pentameter. It is close to the rhythm of speech.

Caesura

A break or pause within a line of poetry by comma or full stop or unmarked pause, used for emphasis, or to change direction or pace.

Caricature

An exaggerated representation of a character, often through the emphasis on a small number of features, usually for comic and satiric purposes

Colloquial

Everyday speech and language as opposed to literary or formal register. The inclusion of the odd colloquial word or phrase in an otherwise formal work can be striking.

Conceit

A witty thought or idea or image, a fanciful or deliberately far-fetched comparison, as found in 16th and 17th century English poetry.

Concrete (As in concrete detail)

Refers to objects or aspects that may be perceived by the senses.

Connotation

An association that a word may suggest. (Very useful word when discussing diction.)

Consonance

Where the final consonants are the same in two or more words close together.

Contradiction

Stating or implying the opposite of what has been said or suggested.

Couplet (rhyming couplet)

Two consecutive rhyming lines of verse. May clinch or emphasize an idea.

Defamiliarization

The technique of making the familiar seem new and strange, thus making us see more vividly. (This may be done through POV).

Denouement

How the ending of a novel or play turns out, how the plot is unraveled or revealed.

Diction

The writer’s choice of words or vocabulary

Didactic

Describes the tone or intention to preach a (usually) moral, political, or religious point. It usually has a negative connotation.

Dramatic irony

A very powerful tool especially in drama, used for tragic or comic purposes. Where a character (or characters) is/are unaware of something that the audience/reader and possibly other characters on state are aware of.

Elegiac

Describes a meditative mood in prose or verse, reflecting on the past.

Elegy

A mournful lament for times past or the dead. It has a particular poetic form but the term can be used more generally

End-stopped line

A line of poetry where the meaning pauses or stops at the end of a line.

Enjambment

The sentence flows over from one line to another, perhaps even to the next stanza. This can reflect a build-up of emotion or create a dramatic effect.

Epigram

A concise, pointed, witty statement.

Form

A word that often crops up and seems vague, but is important. It is the shape of a work, the arrangement of its parts, and the patterns, divisions, and structures used.

Free verse

Verse written without any fixed or traditional structure in meter or rhyme. It is very flexible because it follows the speech rhythms of the language.

Genre

A specific type or kind of literature, such as drama, prose, poetry, essay, autobiography.

Grain

A reader can go acceptingly along with assumptions and values in a text, or go “against the grain,” resisting and questioning values and assumptions in that text.

Hyperbole

A deliberate exaggeration for various effects, comic, tragic, etc.

Iambic

A metrical measure, or foot, in which a short/unstressed syllable is followed by a long/stressed syllable.

Idyll/idyllic

Refers to innocent simple life in idealized rural setting. Untroubled, and simple qualities. Useful adjective.

Imagery

It means concrete descriptions we can see and sense in works of literature.

Interior monologue

Here the character is thinking to him/herself in language, in words, conscious of what he/she is thinking. Thoughts are formulated in words..not through the narrator

Internal rhyme

Where there are rhymes within a line instead of, or as well as, at the ends of lines.

Irony

A gap or mismatch between what is being said, and what is intended, perhaps between the way a character or group sees him/her/itself, and the way the author wishes us to see him/her/it. A powerful tool for a writer as it exposes hypocrisies and lack of awareness.

Lyric

A songlike poem expressing personal feeling.

Metaphor

A comparison of two things without using a comparing word such as “like.”

Meter

The organization of lines of verse into regular patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables to achieve a rhythmic effect.

Mimesis

Describes an interesting and common effect

Mood

Describes a person’s (a character’s or the narrator’s) frame of mind or state of feeling. It may also indicate the emotional response the author hopes to evoke in the mind of the reader.

Monologue

Speech, usually of some length, by a single speaker. A ‘dramatic monologue’ (usually a whole poem) has a listener present and reveals the character of the speaker in a striking way.

Motif

Recurrent elements (images, ideas) in a work. These are not as significant as themes but have a cumulative effect like a refrain, and can assume symbolic importance.

Omniscient Narrator

It literally means ‘all-knowing,’ describing one who stands outside and can see into all characters and happenings.

Onomatopoeia

The effect of words that imitate the sound of things (‘hiss,’ ‘crash.’)

Oxymoron

Where two words of opposite meaning are joined—“an open secret.” It can suggest something quite complex or provocative.

Paradox

Seemingly contradictory statement, but on reflection, it makes sense, and contains its own resolution or truth.

Parody

Usually comic imitation of another work.

Pastiche

A literary work composed in the style of a well-known author.

Persona

The identity or character assumed by the author in a work of literature.

Personification

Where human feelings or sensations are attributed to an inanimate object. Human qualities may also be given to abstract ideas.

Plot

The events of a narrative in the order the author has chosen to present them. Chronology may be distorted for particular effects, as in flashbacks or flash-forwards.

Point of view

The angle from which the narrative is seen or told. Who sees? Who speaks? The point of view may shift in a work.

Protagonist

Main character in a work.

Quatrain

Stanza or group of four lines that can have different rhyme schemes.

Refrain

Repetition in a work of literature of a phrase or lines.

Rhythm

Has to do more generally with the flow of sound created by stressed and unstressed syllables. (Steady, irregular?)

Satire

Exposing and ridiculing of human follies in a society, sometimes with the aim to reform, sometimes predominantly to deflate. May be gentle, comic, biting or bitter, or a combination.

Setting

Context in which a work of literature takes place

Sibilance

Repetition of the ‘s’ sound, which creates a hushing or hissing quality.

Simile

Where a comparison is made explicit with ‘as’ or ‘like’. Can make descriptions vivid and unusual.

Skaz

A technique of narration that mirrors oral narration with its hesitations, corrections, grammatical mistakes, interactions, etc.

Soliloquy

A speech by a character alone on stage, thinking aloud, revealing thoughts and emotions, or communicating directly with the audience. A powerful tool for revealing psychological complexity.

Sonnet

A fourteen-line rhyming poem often in iambic pentameter (five iambs in a line). Rhyme schemes and organization of lines vary, depending on the type of sonnet, but often set out as a block of 8 lines (octave) and six lines (sestet).

Stanza

The blocks of lines into which a poem is organized.

Story

The events of a narrative in the chronological order in which they actually happened.

Stream of consciousness

The impression of a random stream of thoughts. This is the representation of a free, apparently random succession of thoughts and sensations in a character’s mind, especially when alone. The first person, “I”, is not used here.

Style

Necessary concept to know and use, but tricky to define and discuss. It has to do with the distinctive traits in an author’s work, the ‘how’ of writing. It concerns theme, diction (emotional, abstract, poetic), sentence construction, imagery, sound, etc.

Subtext

Ideas, feelings, thoughts, not dealt with directly in the text but existing underneath.

Symbol

Objects that represent or evoke an idea or concept of wider, abstract significance, as roses represent love, walls divisions.

Syntax

The grammatical structure of words in a sentence. The normal order of words can be slightly displaced to create a particular effect, without losing the sense.

Theme

Central ideas or issues, often abstract (for example racial injustice) explored or illustrated in a text. Can also refer to an argument raised or pursued in a text, like a thesis.

Tone

The technique of writing to convey the **attitude of the writer** **towards his/her subject**. Created through aspects of language like diction, syntax, rhythm.

Trochee/trochaic

A stressed/long syllable followed by a short/unstressed syllable. May be used as a contrast within an iambic line, to stress an idea, as it’s the opposite of iambic.