literary terms

Analepsis

Often referred to as flashback or retrospection, these are past events in the story being related at a point later than their chronological location within the narrative. Think of Gandalf relating his escape from the Balrog to the hobbits.

Prolepsis

From the Greek meaning “anticipation,” in our trusty Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, Chris Baldick describes it so: “used in three senses: (i) in a speech, the trick of answering an opponent’s objections before they are even made; (ii) as a FIGURE OF SPEECH, the application of an EPITHET or description before it actually becomes applicable, e.g. the wounded Hamlet’s exclamation ‘I am dead, Horatio’; (iii) in narrative works, a ‘flashforward’ by which a future event is related as an interruption to the ‘present’ time of the narration.”2

Asyndeton

A literary device that excludes conjunctions (and, so, for, nor, so, etc.). Take this example from Ulysses: “Before Nelson’s pillar trams slowed, shunted, changed trolley started for Blackrock, Kingstown

Colloquialism

The use of informal language and expressions that refer to everyday speech, rather than formally accepted pronunciation or vocabulary.

Pathetic Fallacy

Termed by John Ruskin in his 1856 Modern Painters, this is the ascription of human feeling or sensation to natural phenomena—rain, trees, wind, etc. This term can also apply to inanimate objects. Essentially, you are transposing human emotions to something non-human.

Characterization

Simply put, the description, commentary, or inferences made regarding a character that make them either “flat” or “dimensional.

Ambiguity

The openness of a text (or even a sentence) to interpretation. Or, when language used can be interpreted in a number of ways.

Subtext

Meaning that is implied by a text rather than stated directly. This is especially common in Modernist novels like Woolf’s Between the Acts, where meaning is found in silence and ellipses, rather than in words spoken.

Narratology

is, quite literally, the study of narrative. This is a massive field devoted more specifically to forms of narration and the varieties of narrators. For further reading on the topic, I can’t recommend Kent Puckett’s Narrative Theory enough

Chronotope

The setting of a novel considered as a whole in terms of time and space. This is a term from Mikhail Bakhtin’s “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel.” To oversimplify it for you, think of it as the relationship between time and space in the novel.

Focalization

The answer to the question “Who speaks?” in a novel. That is, any point of view from which the story is being told. In a traditional narrative with an omniscient narrator, the text is considered to be non-focalized.

Unreliable Narrator

A narrator whose accounts of the story may be poorly conceived, biased, misleading, or in any way distorted. A great example of an unreliable narrator is Nelly Dean in Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

Implied Author

From Baldick, “a term coined by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) to designate that source of a work’s design and meaning which is inferred by readers from the text, and imagined as a personality standing behind the work. As an imaginary entity, it is to be distinguished clearly from the real author, who may well have written other works implying a different kind of * PERSONA or implied author behind them.”4 Take, for instance, the implied author of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, who urges his implied reader to take action. Think back to high school when you likely read Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, what does the information in the text give us about the implied author?

Bildungsroman

This is the coming-of-age novel. The Bildungsroman, from the German meaning “formation novel,” traces the development of the given hero/heroine from childhood to adulthood. Usually, these novels trace the development of identity and focus on the trials and tribulations that the protagonist may come up against in their development. A great resource on this is Franco Moretti’s The Way of the World.

Social Realism

If realism is the representation or the impression of faithfully-depicted real-life, then social realism typically depicts the every-day or working people. It is also known as the “social novel” or, in some more specific cases, “the condition of England” novel. Typically, the characters in a social realism come up against problems of social life, like in Gaskell’s North and South, which tackles industrial labour inequality, unionism, poverty,

Domestic Novel

This term is quite strict in its application, traditionally. Typically, though, it refers to novels (particularly of the 19th-century) that center on the daily lives of Victorian women. It is often used in conjunction with sentimental fiction or “women’s fiction.”

Künstlerroman

Similar to a bildungsroman, this is the novel that traces the protagonist’s development as an artist from amateur to mature. A great example of this would be D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers or Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Bovarysme

Used less commonly these days, but the term originates with Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. This term describes a character in a novel whose daydreaming or fantasy life is so extreme that they refuse to acknowledge “real-life” and instead perceive themselves as hero or heroine. Emma Bovary is an example, as is Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey.