Literary Terms

Alliteration

Repetition of consonant sounds

Example of Alliteration

Busy as a Bee

Home Sweet Home

Allusion

a figure of speech at which an object or circumstance from an unrelated context is referred to covertly or indirectly

Example of Allusion

She showed up looking like Venus

That is my Achilles Heel

Allegory

a story, poem, or picture that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one.

Example of Allegory

Lion and the Mouse

3 little pigs

Animal Farm by George Orwell

Apostrophe

a speech or address to a person who is not present or to a personified object

Example of an Apostrophe in literature

"O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?"

Assonance

repetition of vowels without repetition of consonants used as an alternative to rhyme in verse

Example of Assonance

Stony and Holy

Auditory Imagery

a form of mental imagery that is used to organize and analyze sounds when there is no external auditory stimulus present

Example of Auditory Imagery

'the wind howled'

The clank of the keys.

Blank Verse

Poetic verse that does not rhyme

Example of Blank Verse

"But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun"

Connotation

use of a word to suggest a different association to its literal meaning

Example of Connotation

cheap=negative

affordable=neutral

inexpensive=positive

Consonance

recurrence of similar sounds in close proximity

Example of Consonance

Mike likes his new bike

tick tock

she sells seashells

hickory dickory dock

Couplet

two consecutive lines of verse with end rhymes

Example of Couplet

"Blessed are you whose worthiness gives scope,/Being had, to triumph; being lacked, to hope."

Denotation

the literal meaning of a word

Example of Denotation

denotation for the color blue

blue=blue

The Girl Was Blue

Diction

the choice and use of words in speech or writing

Example of Diction

"The professor relishes erudite conversations with his pupils"

=academic word choice

End Rhyme

A word at the end of one line rhymes with a word at the end of another line

Example of an End Rhyme

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date;

Figurative Language

a literary device that uses words or phrases for effect, humorous or exagerration purposes, instead of their literal translation

Examples of Figurative Language

simile, metaphor, personification, hyperbole

Figure of Speech

a device used to produce figurative language

Example of Figure of Speech

A simile: Juliet is like the sun.

Free Verse

poetry that does not rhyme or have a regular meter

Example of Free Verse

The fog comes

on little cat feet.

It sits looking

over harbor and city

on silent haunches

and then moves on.

Gustatory Image

the author's use of language to represent experiences or sensations of taste

Exampe of Gustatory Image

Sweetness

Sourness

Saltiness

Savoriness

Hyperbole

exaggeration or overstatement

Example of Hyperbole

I'm so hungry I could eat a horse.

Idiom

A common, often used expression that doesn't make sense if you take it literally.

Example of Idiom

break a leg

its raining cats and dogs

Imagery

a literary device that allows the writer to paints pictures in the readers' mind so they can more easily imagine a story's situations, characters, emotions, and settings

Example of Imagery

"A shaggy brown dog rubbed its back on the white picket fence"

Internal Rhyme

A word inside a line rhymes with another word on the same line

Example of Internal Rhyme

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary

Metaphor

a figure of speech in which something is described as though it is something else

Example of Metaphor

The snow is a white blanket.

Meter

the rhytmical pattern of a poem determined by the number of stresses (beats) in a line

Example of Meter

Shakespeare's sonnet, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" has the following metrical pattern (da DUM, da DUM, da DUM, da DUM, da DUM)

Metonymy

a figure of speech in which a concept is referred to by the name of something closely associated with that thing or concern

Example of Metonymy

tongue as a substitute for language

hand as a substitute for assistance

Mood

the feeling created by a literary work in the reader

What is an example of Mood

-happy

-sad

-cheery

-peaceful

-depressed

Olfactory Imagery

a literary technique that stimulates the readers' nose and sense of smell

Example of Olfactory Imagery

"The fresh pine scent of the forest was invigorating, mixed with the earthy aroma of the damp soil"

Oxymoron

comes from 2 contradictory words to describe the same thing

Example of Oxymoron

Parting is such sweet sorrow

Bitter Sweet

Awfully Good

Parallelism

The repetition of similar grammatical or syntactical patterns.

Example of Parallelism

"Easy come, Easy go"

Paradox

a logically self-contradictory statement or a statement that runs contrary to one's expectation

Example of Paradox

Less is More

This is the beginning of the end.

Personification

the attribution of human characteristics to things, abstract ideas, as for literary or artistic effect

Example of Personification

The sun smiled

The flowers begged for water

Pun

a joke based on the interplay of homophones

Example of Pun

A horse is a very stable animal.

Quatrain

A four line stanza

Example of Quatrain

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there's some mistake.