Literary Terms

Adage

a proverb or short statement expressing a general truth:

Allegory

A literary work that portrays abstract ideas concretely.

Alliteration

The repetition of the same initial consonant sounds in a sequence of words or syllables.

Allusion

A reference to another work of literature, or to art, history, or current events.

Anachronism

A thing belonging or appropriate to a period other than that in which it exists, especially a thing that is conspicuously old-fashioned.

Anagnorisis

The point in a play, novel, etc., in which a principal character recognizes or discovers another character's true identity or the true nature of their own circumstances.

Anapestic

A metrical foot in a line of a poem that contains three syllables wherein the first two syllables are short and unstressed, followed by a third syllable that is long and stressed.

Anaphora

Repetition of an initial word or words to add emphasis

Antagonist

Character in a story or play who opposes the protagonist; while not necessarily an enemy, this character creates or intensifies a conflict for the protagonist.

Antithesis

A figure of speech in which an opposition or contrast of ideas is expressed by parallelism of words that are the opposites of, or strongly contrasted with, each other.

Aphorism

A pithy observation that contains a general truth, such as, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it.":

Apostrophe

A direct address to an abstraction (such as Time), a thing (the Wind), an animal, or an imaginary or absent person.

Archetypal Hero

The character is a protagonist whose life is a series of well-marked adventures.

• Characteristics:

o Self-sacrifice

o Endures separation and hardship

o Pays a price

o Entrance into a challenging world

o Returns to the ordinary

Archetype

A literary device in which a character is created based on a set of qualities or traits that are specific and identifiable for readers.

Aside

Words spoken by an actor directly to the audience, which are not "heard" by the other characters on stage during a play.

Assonance

The repetition of similar vowel sounds in a sentence or a line of poetry or prose(story).

Ballad

A narrative poem written in FOUR-LINE stanzas, characterized by swift action and narrated in a direct style.

Bathos

An effect of anticlimax created by an unintentional lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial or ridiculous.

Biblical Free Verse

Biblical poetry that does not have a rhyme scheme or a consistent metrical pattern.

Blank Verse

A line of poetry or prose in unrhymed iambic pentameter.

Bombastic

Pompous or overblown in language; full of high-sounding words intended to conceal a lack of ideas

Cacophony

A harsh, discordant mixture of sounds

Cadence

Quality of spoken text formed from combining the text's rhythm with the rise and fall in the inflection of the speaker's voice.

Caesura

A pause within a line of poetry, sometimes punctuated, sometimes not, often mirroring natural speech.

Caricature

A character with features or traits that are exaggerated so that the character seems ridiculous. The term is usually applied to graphic depictions but can also be applied to written depictions.

Carpe Diem

A widespread literary theme meaning "seize the day" in Latin and found especially in lyric poetry, This word encourages readers to enjoy the present and make the most of their short lives.

Catastrophe

The action at the end of a tragedy that initiates the denouement or falling action of a play. One example is the dueling scene in Act V of Hamlet in which Hamlet dies, along with Laertes, King Claudius, and Queen Gertrude.

Catharsis

Refers to the emotional release felt by the audience at the end of a tragic drama. The term comes from Aristotle's Poetics, in which he explains this frequently felt relief in terms of a purification of the emotions caused by watching the tragic events.

Climax

The point in a story when the conflict reaches its highest intensity.

Comedy

Usually used to refer to a dramatic work that, in contrast to tragedy, has a light, amusing plot, features a happy ending, centers around ordinary people, and is written and performed in the vernacular.

Comedy of Manners

A satiric dramatic form that lampoons social conventions.

Comic Relief

A humorous scene or speech intended to lighten the mood.

Conceit

A fanciful expression in writing or speech; an elaborate metaphor:

Conflict

A struggle between opposing forces in a story or play, usually resolved by the end of the work. The word may occur within a character as well as between characters.

Connotation

The associations called up by a word that goes beyond its dictionary meaning. Poets, especially, tend to use words rich in this word.

Consonance

An instance in which identical final consonant sounds in nearby words follow different vowel sounds.

Couplet

A literary device featuring two consecutive lines of poetry that typically rhyme and have the same meter.

Dactylic Foot

A stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones, as in FLUT-ter-ing or BLUE-ber-ry.

Denotation

The literal definition of a word, often referred to as the "dictionary definition."

Denouement

In this phase of a story's plot, the conflict has been resolved and balance is restored to the world of the story.

Dues Ex Machina

A god who resolves the entanglements of a play by supernatural intervention. The Latin phrase means, literally, "a god from the machine." The phrase refers to the use of artificial means to resolve the plot of a play.

Dirge

A lament for the dead, especially one forming part of a funeral rite. (Hymn or song)

Doggerel

Verse or words that are badly written or expressed.

Double Entendre

A word or phrase that is open to two interpretations, one of which is usually risqué or indecent:

Dramatic Monologue

A poem in the form of a speech or narrative by an imagined person, in which the speaker inadvertently reveals aspects of their character while describing a particular situation or series of events.

Euphony

The quality of being pleasing to the ear, especially through a harmonious combination of words.

Elegy

A contemplative poem, on death and mortality, often written for someone who has died.

End-Stopped Lines

A line of poetry concludes with punctuation that marks a pause. The line is completely meaningful in itself, unlike run-on lines, which require the reader to move to the next line to grasp the poet's complete thought.

English Sonnet

A type of fourteen-line poem. Traditionally, the fourteen lines of this word consist of 3 quatrains and 1 the couplet. (or two quatrains making up a stanza of 8 lines) and a sestet (a stanza of six lines). This word generally uses a meter of iambic pentameter and follows a set rhyme scheme.is any short, catchy phrase or saying.

Enjambment

A poetic technique in which one line ends without a pause and must continue on to the next line to complete its meaning; also referred to as a "run-on line."

Epigram

Is any short, catchy phrase or saying to demonstrate the seriousness of the situation in a memorable way.

Epigraph

A quotation preceding a work of literature that helps set the text's mood or suggests its themes

Epiphany

A character's transformative moment of realization. James Joyce, often credited with coining this as a literary term, defined it as the "sudden revelation of the whatness of a thing," the moment in which "the soul of the commonest object . . . seems to us radiant . . . a sudden spiritual manifestation [either] in the vulgarity of speech or of a gesture or in a memorable phrase of the mind itself."

Euphony

The quality of a sound that sounds pleasant to the ear.

Exposition

In a literary work, contextual an background information told to readers (rather than shown through action) about the characters, plot, setting and situation)

Fable

A brief story with an explicit moral provided by the author

Falling Action

In a plot diagram, this is a result of the climax or turning point. In this phase, the conflict is being resolved.

Farce

A dramatic form marked by wholly absurd situations, slapstick, raucous wordplay, and sometimes innuendo.

Foil

A character who contrasts and parallels the main character in a play or story.

Foreshadowing

Hints of what is to come in the action of a play or a story.

Free Verse

A form of poetry that does not have a regular rhythm or rhyme scheme.

Hamatria

A concept used by Aristotle to describe tragedy.

Heroic Couplet

Rhyming pairs of verse in iambic pentameter.

Homily

A sermon or speech is delivered typically by a member of the clergy whose purpose is to offer a moral change in direction.

Hubris

An extreme expression of pride or self-confidence in a character.

Hyperbole

Deliberate exaggeration used for emphasis or to produce a comic or ironic effect; an overstatement to make a point.

Iambic

The most common metrical foot in English poetry, is made up of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one.

Imagery

A description of how something looks, feels, tastes, smells, or sounds.

Implied Author

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

Implied Reader

Designates the image of the recipient that the author had while writing or, more accurately, the author's image of the recipient that is fixed and objectified in the text by specific indexical.

In Media Res

Latin for "in the middle of things," a technique in which a narrative begins in the middle of the action.

Onomatopoeia

Use of words that refer to sound and whose pronunciations mimic those sounds.

Parable

A tale told explicitly to illustrate a moral lesson or conclusion. Parables can take the form of drama, poetry, or fiction.

Pastoral

Literature that employs a romanticized description of leisurely farm or rural life.

Pathos

A quality of a play's action that stimulates the audience to feel pity for a character. This word is always an aspect of tragedy and may be present in comedy as well.

Personification

A figure of speech in which an animal or an inanimate object is imbued with human qualities.

Picaresque Novel

Relating the adventures of a rogue or lowborn adventurer as he drifts from place to place and from one social milieu to another in his effort to survive.

Plot vs Story

The arrangement of events in a narrative. Almost always, a conflict is central to a plot, and traditionally a plot develops in accordance with the following model: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement.

Point of View

The perspective from which a work is told.

Pun

A play on words that derives its humor from the replacement of one word with another that has a similar pronunciation or spelling but a different meaning.

Quatrain

A four-line stanza.

Resolution

The working out of a plot's conflicts, following the climax.

Reversal

When, in a narrative, the protagonist's fortunes take an unforeseen turn.

Rhyme Scheme

Rhyme often follows a pattern

Rising Action

The events, marked by increasing tension and conflict, that build up to a story's climax.

Romanticism

In literature, a late eighteenth- to early nineteenth-century movement that emphasized beauty for beauty's sake, the natural world, emotion, imagination, the value of a nation's past and its folklore, and the heroic roles of the individual and the artist.

Satire

A literary work that uses irony to critique society or an individual.

Sestet

A six-line stanza

Setting

Where and when a story takes place.

Simile

A figure of speech used to explain or clarify an idea by comparing it explicitly to something else, using the words like, as, or as though to do so.

Soliloquy

In a play, a monologue in which a character, alone on the stage, reveals his or her thoughts or emotions.

Sonnet

A poetic form composed of fourteen lines in iambic pentameter that adheres to a particular rhyme scheme.

Spondees

A metrical foot represented by two stressed syllables

Stasimon

A choral ode, especially in tragedy, divided into strophe and antistrophe

Stichomythia

A dialogue in which the endings and beginnings of each line echo each other, taking on a new meaning with each new line

Symbol/Symbolism

A setting, object, or event in a story that carries more than literal meaning and therefore represents something significant to understanding the meaning of a work of literature.

Synecdoche

A figure of speech in which part of something is used to represent the whole.

Tercet

A three-line stanza

Theatre of Absurd

A form of drama where multiple artistic features are used to express tragic theme with a comic form. The features include anti-character, anti-language, anti-drama and anti-plot.

Theme

Underlying issues or ideas of a work