Lit Terms
Abstract (style) — Writing that focuses on ideas, concepts, or emotions rather than concrete, physical details.
Academic (style) — Formal, structured writing that uses precise language and a serious, scholarly tone.
Accent — Emphasis placed on a particular syllable or word through stress or pronunciation.
Aesthetic / Aesthetics — The qualities of a work that create a particular sense of beauty, style, or artistic effect.
Allegory — A story in which characters, events, or settings represent deeper abstract ideas, often moral, political, or social ones.
Alliteration — Repetition of the same initial consonant sound in nearby words.
Allusion — An indirect reference to a well-known person, event, place, text, myth, or cultural idea.
Anachronism — Something that appears in a time period where it does not historically belong.
Analogy — A comparison between two things used to explain or clarify an idea.
Anecdote — A short story or account of an interesting, meaningful, or humorous event.
Antecedent — The word, phrase, or idea that a pronoun or later reference refers back to.
Anthropomorphism — Giving human characteristics, emotions, or behaviors to nonhuman things.
Anticlimax — A disappointing or unexpectedly weak conclusion after events have built toward something more significant.
Antihero — A protagonist who lacks traditional heroic qualities such as courage, morality, or idealism.
Aphorism — A short, memorable statement expressing a general truth or observation.
Apostrophe — Directly addressing an absent person, dead person, object, abstract idea, or something incapable of responding.
Archaism — An old-fashioned word, phrase, or style used to suggest an earlier time period.
Aside — A character’s brief remark intended for the audience to hear but supposedly not heard by other characters.
Assonance — Repetition of vowel sounds in nearby words.
Atmosphere — The overall emotional feeling or mood created by a work or setting.
B–D
Ballad — A narrative poem, often musical in quality, that tells a story and traditionally uses regular rhythm and rhyme.
Black humor — Humor that makes light of serious, disturbing, tragic, or otherwise uncomfortable subjects.
Bombast — Excessively grand, inflated, or pretentious language used to make something seem more important.
Burlesque — A work that humorously imitates or exaggerates another style, subject, or genre.
Cacophony — A harsh, unpleasant combination of sounds, often used to create tension, chaos, or discomfort.
Cadence — The rhythm or rise and fall of a speaker’s voice or a line of poetry.
Canto — A major section or division of a long poem, especially an epic.
Caricature — An exaggerated portrayal of a person or character that emphasizes certain traits, often for humor or criticism.
Catharsis — The emotional release or cleansing experienced by a character or audience, often after intense suffering or conflict.
Chorus — A group or character that comments on the action of a play and may provide background, interpretation, or moral perspective.
Colloquialism — An informal word or expression commonly used in everyday conversation.
Conceit — An extended, often surprising or elaborate comparison between seemingly unrelated things.
Connotation — The emotional, cultural, or implied associations attached to a word beyond its literal meaning.
Consonance — Repetition of consonant sounds within or at the ends of nearby words.
Couplet — Two consecutive lines of poetry that usually work together and often rhyme.
Decorum — The idea that language, behavior, and style should be appropriate for the character, situation, genre, or setting.
Denotation — The literal, dictionary definition of a word.
Diction — An author’s specific choice of words and the effects those choices create.
Dirge — A mournful poem, song, or speech expressing grief, especially for someone who has died.
Dissonance — A combination of harsh, conflicting, or unsettling sounds or ideas that creates tension.
D–P
Doggerel — Poor-quality or deliberately simplistic poetry, often characterized by awkward rhyme or rhythm.
Dramatic irony — A situation in which the audience or reader knows something that a character does not.
Dramatic monologue — A poem or speech in which one speaker addresses a silent listener and unintentionally reveals their character or situation.
Elegy — A poem or work expressing sorrow, usually over someone’s death.
Enjambment — The continuation of a sentence or thought from one poetic line into the next without a terminal punctuation mark.
Epic — A long narrative work, usually involving a heroic figure and significant events that affect a culture or nation.
Epitaph — A short inscription or statement written in memory of a deceased person.
Euphemism — A mild or indirect expression used instead of a harsher, more direct, or unpleasant one.
Euphony — Pleasant, harmonious, or smooth-sounding language.
Farce — A comedic work that uses exaggerated situations, absurdity, physical humor, and unlikely events.
Feminine rhyme — A rhyme involving two or more syllables, with the stress usually falling on the next-to-last syllable.
Foil — A character whose differences from another character highlight or reveal that character’s traits, values, or qualities.
Foot — The basic rhythmic unit of a line of poetry, consisting of a particular arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables.
Foreshadowing — Hints or clues that suggest events or developments that will occur later.
Free verse — Poetry that does not follow a regular rhyme scheme or metrical pattern.
Gothic novel — A genre featuring mystery, fear, darkness, supernatural or seemingly supernatural elements, and often isolated or threatening settings.
Hubris — Excessive pride or self-confidence, often leading a character to make destructive decisions.
Hyperbole — Deliberate exaggeration used for emphasis or effect; it is not meant to be taken literally.
Interior monologue — A representation of a character’s private thoughts and internal reasoning.
Inversion — A deliberate reversal of normal word order or sentence structure.
Irony — A contrast between what is expected or stated and what actually occurs or is meant.
Lampoon — A work that mocks or ridicules a person, institution, or idea, usually through humor or exaggeration.
Lyric — A short poem that primarily expresses the speaker’s personal thoughts, emotions, or feelings rather than telling a narrative.
Masculine rhyme — A rhyme involving a single stressed syllable, usually at the end of a line.
Melodrama — An overly emotional or exaggerated style that emphasizes dramatic situations and clear extremes of good and evil.
Metaphor — A comparison between two unlike things without using “like” or “as.”
Metonymy — A figure of speech in which something is referred to by the name of something closely associated with it.
Nemesis — A character, force, or situation that brings about another character’s downfall or serves as a formidable opponent.
Objectivity — Presenting information or events without personal feelings, opinions, or bias.
Onomatopoeia — A word whose sound imitates or resembles the sound it describes.
Oxymoron — A combination of two seemingly contradictory words that creates a meaningful expression.
Parable — A short fictional story that teaches a moral, spiritual, or ethical lesson.
Paradox — A seemingly contradictory statement or situation that contains a deeper truth.
Parallelism — The use of similar grammatical structures or patterns to emphasize related ideas.
Parody — An imitation of a work, style, or genre that exaggerates its characteristics, often for humor or criticism.
Pastoral — A literary work that idealizes rural life, nature, or the simplicity of the countryside.
Pathos — A quality that evokes feelings of pity, sympathy, sadness, or compassion in the audience.
Persona — The voice, character, or identity adopted by an author or speaker in a literary work.
Personification — Giving human qualities, emotions, or actions to an inanimate object, animal, or abstract idea.
Plaint — A poem or expression of sorrow, grief, or lamentation.
P–Z
Protagonist — The main character whose experiences and conflicts drive the story.
Pun — A play on words that uses multiple meanings or similar sounds to create humor or additional meaning.
Refrain — A repeated line, phrase, or group of lines in a poem or song.
Requiem — A work, especially a musical or poetic one, honoring or mourning the dead.
Rhapsody — An enthusiastic, highly emotional, or expressive literary or musical work.
Rhetorical question — A question asked for effect rather than to receive an actual answer.
Satire — The use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize human flaws, institutions, or society.
Simile — A comparison between two unlike things using “like” or “as.”
Soliloquy — A speech in which a character, typically alone, expresses their private thoughts aloud to the audience.
Stanza — A grouped set of lines in a poem, similar to a paragraph in prose.
Stock characters — Conventional, recognizable characters based on familiar stereotypes or roles.
Subjectivity — Presenting something through personal feelings, opinions, experiences, or perspective.
Subjunctive mood — A grammatical mood used to express hypothetical, imagined, wished-for, doubtful, or contrary-to-fact situations.
Summary — A concise statement of the main events, ideas, or points of a work.
Symbolism — The use of an object, character, setting, action, or image to represent a larger idea or meaning.
Theme — A central idea or insight about life, humanity, or society that a literary work develops.
Thesis — A clear, defensible claim or interpretation that establishes the main argument of an essay.
Tragic flaw — A character trait or error in judgment that contributes significantly to a tragic protagonist’s downfall.
Travesty — A distorted or exaggerated imitation of something serious, often making it ridiculous or absurd.
Truism — A statement expressing an obvious or generally accepted truth.
Utopia — An imagined ideal society characterized by perfect conditions, harmony, or social organization.
Zeugma — A figure of speech in which one word, usually a verb, applies to two or more other words in different or unexpected ways.