English Lit Term

Plot

The sequence of events in a story or play. Generally follows this structure:

1. Rising action 

2. Climax (major turning point when conflict reaches its peak)

3. Falling action 

4. Resolution

Exposition

Background information, summary, and/or explanation. (Often but not always at the beginning of a story.)

Scene

The parts of the story in which events are taking place. Things are happening rather than the reader just being told about them.

Conflict

The opposing forces that tie incidents together and move the plot 

1. Internal 

          Character vs. self 

2. External (non-exhaustive examples:)

         Character vs. character 

         Character vs. nature 

         Character vs. society

Setting

Time and location that a story takes place. The when and where.

Character

A person in a fictional story. 

          flat (one-dimensional) 

          vs. round (multi-dimensional)

          static (doesn’t change)

          vs. dynamic (changes)

          primary (main characters)

          secondary (supporting characters)

          tertiary (minor characters)

Characterization

The process by which the writer reveals the personality of a character 

          Direct: we are told

          Indirect: we must infer (based on actions or dialog, etc.)

Protagonist

Central character of the story; all major events are important to this character.

Antagonist

Opposition or "enemy" of the main character/protagonist. The character (or sometimes entity) with which the protagonist is in conflict. Sometimes, but not necessarily, the “villain” or “bad guy”

Character Foil

A character whose personality contrasts with—and thus highlights—the personality of another character

Dialogue

The conversation of characters in a literary work. In fiction, dialogue is typically enclosed within quotation marks. In plays, characters' speech is preceded by their names.

Point of View (POV)

The angle/perspective from which the story is told. 

1. First 

2. Second 

3. Third 

● Limited 

● Omniscient

Theme

Central message, underlying meaning, key idea

Motif

Something that repeats throughout a piece of writing. Usually an object, image and/or symbol, but may also be a word/phrase, sound, etc. A motif will generally lead you toward a theme or themes.

Symbol

Something concrete which is used to represent something abstract

Tone

The attitude, mood, vibe, or energy of a piece of writing

Allusion

A reference to someone or something, often literary

Epigraph

A short quotation at the beginning of a piece of writing or at the beginning of a section of a piece of writing; an epigraph might  introduce a theme or set of themes, place the work in conversation with other work, or—less frequently—provide necessary information or context.

Irony

A dissonance, incongruity, discrepancy, and/or contrast in expectation, meaning and/or understanding.

Verbal Irony

A dissonance between what is said and what is meant. The most common example is sarcasm.

Situational Irony

When one event is expected to occur but the opposite happens.

Dramatic Irony

Discrepancy between what characters know and what readers know. The reader or audience understands a fuller significance of words or a situation compared to the characters.

Paradox

A situation, person, or thing that combines contradictory features or qualities.

Foreshadow

A warning or indication of a future event, often works to create dramatic irony.

Flashback

An interruption of the chronological sequence of an event to show an earlier occurrence. Often provides background or context to the current events of a narrative

Juxtaposition

Two things being seen or placed close together with contrasting effect

Diction

Word choice/usage

Syntax

Arrangement of words/word order

Denotation

The dictionary meaning of a word.

Connotation

The associations called up by a word that goes beyond its dictionary meaning.

Homonym

Two or more distinct words with the same pronunciation and spelling but with different meanings.

Homophone

Two or more words with the same pronunciation but with different meanings and spellings.

Synonym

One of two or more words that have the same or nearly the same meanings.

Antonym

A word opposite in meaning to another.

Inference

A conclusion reached on the basis of evidence and reasoning.

Anaphora

A type of repetition wherein the repetition occurs at the beginning of successive clauses, sentences, or (in poetry) lines.

Imagery

Usually: visually descriptive language. Sometimes: any detail that appeals to the five senses; in other words: sensory detail

Figurative Language

A form of language use in which writers and speakers convey something other than the literal meaning of their words.

Metaphor

a direct comparison of two unlike things

Simile

a comparison of two unlike things using "like" or "as"

Personification

a specific type of metaphor where human qualities are given to non-living objects

Hyperbole

exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally

Metonymy

A figure of speech in which a closely related term is substituted for an object or idea. An example: "We have always remained loyal to the crown."

Synecdoche

A figure of speech in which a part is substituted for the whole. An example: "Lend me a hand."

Oxymoron

A combination of contradictory or incongruous words (such as cruel kindness)

Craft

A general term for the “how” or “how it’s made” of a piece of writing (or other form of art). In other words: “the artistic skill or technique with which an author puts together narrative and other elements in order to convey meaning and produce effect”

Literary Convention

A customary feature of a literary work, such as the use of a chorus in Greek tragedy, the inclusion of an explicit moral in a fable, or the use of a particular rhyme scheme in a villanelle. Literary conventions are defining features of particular literary genres, such as novel, short story, ballad, sonnet, and play.

Trope

A convention that is particularly common in a particular genre.

Notes: This term can be used as a neutral or a pejorative one as a way to say a story is unoriginal, predictable, cliche, and/or stereotypical

“Trope” can also mean a figure of speech/a nonliteral phrase.

Genre Trope Examples:

Romance: Love at first sight, enemies-to-lovers, love triangle

Action/YA: The orphan hero, the chosen one

Horror: The Final Girl, splitting up, abandoned location

Deus ex Machina

The Latin phrase means, literally, “a god from the machine.” The phrase refers to the use of artificial–and usually overly-convenient–means to resolve the plot of a story.

Hero’s Journey

A narrative pattern of adventure and transformation in which the protagonist, or “Hero,” starts off in “The Ordinary World” and goes through three narrative phases: Departure, Initiation, and Return. Sometimes referred to as the “monomyth.”

The Hunger Games, The Marrow Thieves, Harry Potter, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Shrek, In the Distance, Moana, The Wizard of Oz, Moby Dick, Macbeth, and several stories in Greek mythology (including the Aeneid) all follow some iteration of this story structure.

Bildungsroman

German for “novel of education” or “novel of formation,” a novel dealing with one person's formative years or spiritual education. (Note that “spiritual” here does not mean religious, but rather refers to one’s moral and psychological self.)

Genre

A category of artistic composition, as in music or literature, characterized by similarities in form, style, or subject matter.

In literature, the big-picture genres are generally considered to be fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama.

Allegory

A symbolic narrative in which the surface details imply a secondary meaning.

Parody

A humorous, mocking imitation of a literary work, sometimes sarcastic, but often playful and even respectful in its playful imitation.

Satire

A literary work that criticizes human misconduct and ridicules vices, stupidities, and follies.

Prose

Written or spoken language in its ordinary form.

In literature we distinguish prose–written in paragraph form rather than in lines or in meter–from poetry. Fiction and nonfiction are the major categories of literary prose.

Novel

A book-length piece of fiction.

Creative Nonfiction (CNF)

Creative nonfiction is a genre of writing that combines factual accounts found in nonfiction with literary techniques found in fiction and poetry. In other words, it’s a true story with a touch of literary flair. Certain genres of nonfiction are often written as creative nonfiction, such as memoir, personal essays, literary journalism, and travel and food writing.

Memoir

A nonfiction narrative in which the author shares their memories from a specific time period or reflects upon a string of themed occurrences throughout their life.

Autobiography

A factual and historical account of one’s own entire life from beginning to end

Essay

A short piece of writing on a particular subject. Kinds of essays include analytical, personal, and lyrical.

Act

A large section of a play, made up of scenes. Plays–especially in contemporary drama–are commonly 3 acts, though there is variation, such as Shakespeare’s play which all have 5 acts.

Stage Directions

A playwright's descriptive or interpretive comments that provide readers (and actors) with information about the dialogue, setting, and action of a play.

Monologue

A speech by a single character without another character's response.

Soliloquy

A speech in a play that is meant to be heard by the audience but not by other characters on the stage. If there are no other characters present, the soliloquy represents the character thinking aloud. Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech is an example.

Aside

Words spoken by an actor directly to the audience, which are not "heard" by the other characters on stage during a play. In Shakespeare's Othello, Iago voices his inner thoughts a number of times as "asides" for the play's audience.

Fourth Wall

The imaginary wall of the box theater setting, supposedly removed to allow the audience to see the action.

Chorus

A group of characters in Greek tragedy (and in later forms of drama), who comment on the action of a play (usually) without participation in it. Sophocles' Antigone and Oedipus the King both contain an explicit chorus.

Tragedy

A type of drama in which the characters experience reversals of fortune, usually for the worse. 

Comedy

A type of drama in which the characters experience reversals of fortune, usually for the better. In comedy, things work out happily in the end. Comic drama may be either romantic--characterized by a tone of tolerance and geniality--or satiric. Satiric works offer a darker vision of human nature, one that ridicules human folly.

Farce

A type of dramatic comedy using absurd moments, improbable situations, and/or exaggeration for an over-the-top effect. A farce may also be intended to make the audience laugh, use stereotyped characters, and/or contain violent physical humor.

One-Act

Exactly as it sounds: a play that is only one act. Six Degrees of Separation is an example of a one-act play.

Speaker of the Poem 

The narrator of the poem, not to be conflated with the author.

Conceit

From the Latin term for “concept,” a poetic conceit is an often unconventional, logically complex, or surprising metaphor whose delights are more intellectual than sensual. Conceit is sometimes used interchangeably with the terms “extended metaphor” or “sustained metaphor.”

Stanza

An arrangement of a certain number of lines, sometimes having a fixed length, meter, or rhyme scheme, forming a division of a poem. The equivalent of a paragraph in prose.

Stanzas may be labeled by the number of lines, especially when those lines rhyme and are approximately the same length. E.g. singlet, couplet, tercet, quatrain, cinquain, sestet.

Line break

Where the text of the poem shifts down to the next line. Line breaks operate as a way to create emphasis, pacing, rhythm, and/or shape in a poem. They also may produce tension by delaying language or doubling meaning.

End Stop

A line of a poem that ends with a period.

Enjambed Line/Enjambment

A line of poetry wherein the sentence continues through the line break.

Consonance

The repetition of consonant sounds.

Assonance

The repetition of similar vowel sounds in a sentence or line of poetry.

Alliteration

The repetition of (usually) consonant sounds at the beginning of words.

Rhyme scheme

The matching of final vowel or consonant sounds in two or more words and the pattern by which these sounds are arranged.

Slant-rhyme / Off-rhyme

Words with similar sounds that aren’t quite a true rhyme. While “sea” and “me” comprise a true rhyme, “poises” and “pauses” or “soul” and “all” are slant rhymes.

Form

The arrangement, manner, or method used to convey the content. Many poems written in the 20th and 21st centuries are written in free verse rather than a traditional/fixed/“inherited” form.

Sonnet

A poem, generally expressive of a single, complete thought, idea, or sentiment, of 14 lines, with a volta, a point–near the end–where the poem “turns” or shifts in some way. 

The two most common historical forms of the sonnet–both of which are traditionally written in iambic pentameter, are the Italian (Petrarchan) form divided into a major group of 8 lines (the octave) followed by a minor group of 6 lines (the sestet) and the English (Shakespearean) form into 3 quatrains followed by a couplet. 

(Some American sonnets in the last half-century or so, tend to deviate from the standard form, still containing 14 lines and a volta but vary in meter and stanza structure, e.g. Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” [1966].)

Blank Verse

A line of poetry in unrhymed iambic pentameter.

Haiku

A short poem of Japanese origin, usually about a moment of observation or insight regarding nature.

In Japanese, haiku are structured based on phonetic units that are similar, but not the same, as English syllables. In English, haiku are most commonly written in 3 lines with the first and third lines containing 5 syllables and the second containing 7.

Villanelle

The villanelle is a highly structured poem made up of five tercets followed by a quatrain, with two repeating rhymes and two refrains.

Ballad

A simple narrative poem of folk origin, composed in short stanzas and adapted for singing.

Acrostic

A poem in which the first letter of each line can be read vertically to form a word.

Abecedarian

A poem in which the first letter of each line begins which a letter of the alphabet, sequentially.

Meter

The measured pattern of rhythmic accents in poems. Each rhythmic unit is called a foot.

Meter is labeled by the type and number of rhythmic units in a line. A line of 5 metrical feet, for example, is pentameter.

Main types:

          Iamb/Iambic: unstressed / stressed

               e.g. arise, return, inspire

          Trochee/Trochaic: stressed / unstressed

               e.g. happy, doctor, shatter

          Dactyl/Dactylic: stressed / unstressed / unstressed

               e.g. merrily, prominent, scorpion

          Anapest/Anapestic: unstressed / unstressed / stressed

               e.g. understand, interrupt

“Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?” from Shakespeare’s sonnet 18 is 5 iambs and therefore iambic pentameter.