Lit Terms

Literary Devices

  • Protagonist: The central character in a story, play, or novel.

  • Antagonist: A person or force working against the protagonist or main character.

  • Characterization: How an author develops characters and their personalities.

    • Direct: directly stated character trait for a character (said by the narrator or someone else in the story)

    • Indirect: The reader assigns the character trait based on the character’s action, speech, or relationship with others.

  • Conflict: A struggle between opposing forces.

  • Internal conflict: 

    • Person vs. Self

  • External conflict:

    • Person vs. Person

    • Person vs. Nature

    • Person vs. Fate

    • Person vs. Society

  • Plot: The sequence of events in a literary work

    • Exposition: The essential background information at the beginning of a literary work.

    • Rising action: The development of conflict and complications in a literary work

    • Climax: The turning point in a literary work

    • Falling action: Results or effects of the climax of a literary work

    • Resolution/Denouement: End of a literary work/ when loose ends are tied up and questions are answered

  • Setting: The time and place of a literary work

  • Tone: The author’s attitude toward the subject of a work.

  • Mood: How a reader feels while reading. The mood is created by the author’s use of detail, setting, characters, etc., and the tone they create. 

  • Theme: A literary work conveys a message about life or human nature. It is a topic and insight given about that topic. 

  • Point of view: The vantage point or perspective from which a literary work is told.

    • First -person point of view: the narrator is the character (use of ‘I’

    • Third-person point of view: the narrator is outside of the story (use of ‘he,’ ‘she,’ ‘they’)

  • Figurative Language: Language that represents one thing in terms of something dissimilar (non-literal language), including simile, metaphor, personification, hyperbole, symbol, pun, etc. )

    • Hyperbole: An author’s use of exaggeration or overstatement for emphasis.

    • Simile: A comparison of two things that have some quality in common.  Uses the words like or as.

    • Metaphor: A comparison of two things that have some quality in common.  Does not use the words like or as.

    • Personification: Giving of human qualities to an inanimate object or idea.

    • Symbol: A person, a place, an object, or an action that stands for something beyond itself.

    • Idiom: figures of speech that society has assigned meaning to. For example, “butterflies in my stomach, head in the clouds,” etcetera.  

  • Imagery: Descriptive language that utilizes any of the five senses (touch, taste, smell, sound, sight)

  • Flashback: The method of returning to an earlier point in time to make the present clearer.

  • Foreshadowing: A hint of what is to come in a literary work.

  • Irony: A contrast between what is expected and what exists or happens.

    • Situational irony: occurs when the actual result of a situation is different from what you’d expect the result to be

    • Dramatic irony: occurs when the audience knows a critical piece of information that a character in a play, movie, or novel does not. This type of irony makes us yell, “DON’T GO IN THERE!!” during a scary movie.

    • Verbal irony: a speaker’s intention is the opposite of what he or she is saying. For example, a character stepping out into a hurricane and saying, “What nice weather we’re having!” 


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