Lit Terms | 51-75 | Niccum

Free Verse: unrhymed poetry which follows no uniform meter.  ex: Whitman

Genre: the distinct types of categories into which literary works are grouped according to form or technique.  ex: a novel, poem, drama, short story, essay, etc.

Grotesque: the merging of the cosmic and the tragic which grows out of the modern interest in the irrational.  Grotesque characters may be physically or spiritually deformed and do things that are clearly intended by the author to be abnormal.  ex: characters in Faulkner, O’Conner, Durrenmatt

Heroic couplet: a pair of rhyming iambic pentameter line ex: “But when to mischief mortals bend their will,/ How soon they find fit instruments of ill!” (Pope, The Rape of the Lock)

Hyperbole: a figure of speech in which conscious exaggeration is used without the intent of literal persuasion.  It may be used to heighten the effect or to produce comic relief.

Hypotaxis: a stylistic pattern in composition in which the writing contains clauses that are subordinated to and dependent on one another

Imagery: the representation in poetry of a sensory experience.  Imagery does not consist merely of mental pictures but may make an appeal to any of the senses.

Innuendo: an insinuation or indirect suggestion which often has sinister or harmful connotations.

Internal Rhyme: rhyme occurring within a line of poetry.  ex: “The wedding Guest he beat his breast.” (Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner)

Irony: a situation, or use of language, involving some kind of incongruity or discrepancy; the contrast between actual meaning and the suggestion of another meaning.  Verbal irony consists of saying one thing and meaning another.  Situational irony occurs when there is an incongruity between actual circumstances and those that would seem appropriate or between what is anticipated and what actually happens.  For dramatic irony, see above.

Jargon: an uncomplimentary term for language full of indirect expressions and long, high-sounding words; also the technical, esoteric vocabulary of science, art, trade, profession, or other specific groups.

Juxtaposition: the placement of two images or symbols close together for the purpose of comparison or contrast. 

Metaphor: a figure of speech that makes a comparison between two things that are basically dissimilar.  ex: The red sun was a wafer pasted in the sky.

Meter: the recurrence in the poetry of rhythmic pattern.

Mood: a state or quality of feeling at a particular time.  ex: iambic pentameter, anapestic, trochaic

Motif: a recurring feature, such as a name, an image, or a phrase, in a work of literature that generally contributes in some way to the theme of a piece.  It may also refer to some commonly used plot (conflict) or character type in literature, such as the “ugly duckling motif,” which refers to the transformation of a plain-looking person into a beauty.

Onomatopoeia: the combination of words that imitate sounds; a figure of speech in which the sound is suggestive of the meaning.  ex: murmuring of bees; rustling of the curtains.

Paradox: a statement or situation which seems on the surface contradictory or untrue, but proves valid upon closer inspection.  ex: “If ever two were one, then surely we,” Anne Bradstreet

Parallelism: a structural arrangement of parts of a sentence, sentence, paragraphs, and larger units of composition by which one element of equal importance with another is equally developed and similarly phrased. The principle of parallel construction simply dictates that coordinated ideas should have coordinated presentation ex: “…without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement or one smile of favor,” Samuel Johnson.

Parataxis:  a stylistic pattern in composition in which the writing contains clauses that are equally weighted without subordination; can occur with asyndeton (no coordinating conjunctions) and polysyndeton (many coordinating conjunctions)

Persona: The persona is the mask that covers the direct voice of the author. The persona may be the narrator of the story or maybe a voice in a story that is not “directly” the author’s voice but which is created by the author in order to allow the author to speak indirectly through this making persona. ex: Twain does this with Huck Finn’s Col. Sherburne, who in his speech to the mob, expresses the author’s view.

Personification: the endowment of animals, ideas, abstractions, and inanimate objects with a human form, character, or sensibilities.  ex: Death hurled his spear at the crouching hag.

Point of View: the point of view from which the story is told. First-person—related exclusively from the position of a single character who uses it throughout. 2) Second Person—rare. 3) Third person—point of view is restricted to that of a single character referred to always by name or by a pronoun in the third person. 4) Omniscient—the all-seeing eye—third person but does not usually limit the point of view to just one person. If the author discloses the thoughts and emotions of his character, he is using SUBJECTIVE CHARACTERIZATION. If he simply reveals their words and actions, he is using OBJECTIVE CHARACTERIZATION. 5) Stream of consciousness—the jumbled, frequently incoherent, half-formed ideas, images, memories, thoughts, etc., that stream through a character’s consciousness.

Polysyndeton: a stylistic pattern in composition in which the writing contains an overabundance of coordinating conjunctions, having the effect of slowing down the pace of the writing; can occur with or without parataxis

Protagonist: the chief character in a piece of literature.