Lit terminology

Allegory: A literary or visual form in which characters, events or images represent or symbolize ideas. It can be a story of some complexity corresponding to another situation on a deeper level.

Alliteration: Repetition of an identical consonant sound at the beginning of stressed words, usually close together. Can create different effects. Used in poetry and prose.

Allusion: An indirect reference to an event, person, place, another work of literature, etc. that gives additional layers of meaning to a text or enlarges its frame of reference. For example,  Robert Frost’s poem “Out, Out”, about a boy’s accidental death references Macbeth’s line about life: “Out, out, brief candle”.

Antithesis: Expressing contrasting ideas by balancing words of opposite meaning and idea in a line or sentence, for rhetorical impact: “They promised opportunity and provided slavery”.

Caricature: An exaggerated representation of a character, often emphasizing physical or vocal features, usually for comic and satiric purposes. Jane Austen and Dickens frequently use this.

Colloquial: Everyday speech and language; as opposed to a literary or formal register.

Connotation: An association suggested by a word, useful when discussing diction.

Consonance: Where the final consonants are the same in two or more words close together, as in Macbeth’s “Poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage”.

Context: (i) The circumstances, background or environment in which an event (or text) takes place, or an idea is set, and in terms of which it can be understood. (ii) The part of a text that surrounds a word or passage and determines or clarifies its meaning.

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

Diction: The writer’s choice and arrangement of words or distinctive vocabulary (its effectiveness and precision).

Foreshadowing: An indication of something that will happen in the future, often used as a literary device to hint at or allude to future plot developments.

Genre: A specific type or kind of literature.

Hyperbole: A deliberate exaggeration for various effects – comic, tragic, etc. When Frost writes that the beauty of Spring “is only so an hour”, he emphasizes how very brief the life of precious things seems.

Imagery: The mental pictures created by language (both metaphorical and literal) that appeal to the senses.

Irony: A gap or mismatch between what is said and what is intended. For example, between what a character or group might see or think, and what the author wishes us to see or think. A powerful tool for a writer to expose hypocrisies and lack of awareness.

Metafiction: Fiction that draws attention to the fact that it is fiction or construct of the author, and to the writing process itself. The author may break the reader out of the fictional frame and comment on what s/he is doing or concerned about in the act of writing, or offer the reader a choice of endings, etc.

Metaphor: A comparison between two unlike things that are seen as alike in some aspect, without the use of ‘like’ or ‘as’. It can facilitate understanding of an abstract concept (for example, life as a journey) or open up the imagination by creating a striking visual and sensual link between things not normally associated.

Mood: Describe the emotional response created in the mind of the reader or audience by elements in literature. Is considered ‘atmosphere’ when dealing with setting/a place.

Motif: Recurrent element in a narrative or drama (such as an image or spoken phrase) that  has symbolic significance and can contribute, through cumulative effect, to a theme.

Omniscient: “third person” narrator: An “all-knowing” narrator who can see into the minds of any character and see any event, place, time, from the ‘outside’. It is the most common and flexible narrative method.

Onomatopoeia: The use of words that imitate or suggest the sounds associated with them, such as “murmur” or “buzz”.

Oxymoron: Where two words, seemingly contradictory or incongruous are joined, often suggesting something complex.

Paradox: An apparently contradictory statement, which on investigation is found to contain a truth.

Parody: A comic imitation of another work, for deliberately comic, ridiculous or satiric effect. It is actively critical or attacking.

Personification: Where human feelings, sensations, and/or actions are attributed to an inanimate object.

Plot: The events of a narrative in the order the writer has chosen to arrange them in, to show cause and effect or pattern, for artistic and emotional effect.

Point of view: The angle from which a narrative is told, reflecting who is seeing and speaking. May shift within a work or even a paragraph.

Protagonist: Main character in a work.

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. Chaucer, Swift, Jane Austen and Dickens use this tool memorably.

Setting: Context and location in which a work of literature takes place: it involves the physical place, time, and social environment.

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

Story:The events of a narrative in the chronological order in which they actually happened, not in terms of being deliberately patterned and arranged.

Stream of consciousness: The representation of a character’s (or first person narrator’s) thought processes-feelings, sensations, memories, etc. as a random stream of thoughts.

Style: The distinctive linguistic traits in an author’s work, but also involves the writer’s quality of vision and subject matter. It concerns theme, diction (emotional, abstract, poetic), sentence construction, imagery, sound, etc.

Subtext: Ideas, feelings, thoughts, not dealt with directly in the text (drama especially), but existing underneath. Characters don’t always express their real thoughts.

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 or grammatical structures can be slightly displaced to create a particular effect, without losing the sense.

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

Tone: Created where the writing conveys the attitude and emotions of the writer towards his/her subjects through aspects of language like diction, syntax, and connotation.