Literary Terms
... vowels, as in assonance. Conventions: standard or traditional ways of saying things in literary works, employed to achieve certain expected effects. Couplet: a stanza of two lines, usually rhyming. Heroic couplet: rhymed pairs of lines in iambic pentameter. Decorum: the requirement that individual characters, the characters' actions, and the style of speech should be matched to each other and to the genre in which they appear. Lowly characters, low actions, and low style, for instance, were thought necessary for satire. Epic literature, on the other hand, called for characters of high estate, engaging in great actions, and speaking using elevated, poetic diction. Diction: an author's choice of words. Since words have specific meanings, and since one's choice of words can affect feelings, a writer's choice of words can have great impact in a literary work. Syntax: the way words are put together to form phrases, clauses, and sentences. Dirge: a brief funeral hymn or song. Dissonance/cognitive dissonance: a harsh, discordant, unpleasant-sounding choice and arrangement of sounds. Doggerel: bad verse, characterised by clichés and an irregular metre. Examples can be found in your closest greeting card shop. Elegy/Elegiac: a lyric poem lamenting death. Enjambment: the running over of a sentence or thought into the next couplet or line without a pause at the end of the line; a run-on line. Epic/mock-epic or mock-heroic: an extended narrative poem recounting actions, travels, adventures, and heroic episodes and written in a high style (with ennobled diction, for example). It may be written in hexameter verse, especially dactylic hexameter, and it may have twelve books or twenty four books. Epigram: the epigram is the most condensed and concentrated form of poetry. Epitaph: a burial inscription, often in verse. Euphemism: a mild word of phrase which substitutes for another which would be undesirable because it is too direct, unpleasant, or offensive. Farce: a type of comedy based on a humorous situation such as a bank robber who mistakenly wanders into a police station to hide. It is the situation here which provides the humor, not the cleverness of plot or lines, nor the absurdities of the character, as in situational comedy. Feminine rhyme: a rhyme in which the repeated accented vowel is in either the second or third last syllable of the words involved. Masculine rhyme: a rhyme in which the repeated accented vowel sound is in the final syllable of the words involved. Figurative language: in literature, a way of saying one thing and meaning something else. Foil: a character in a play who sets off the main character or other characters by comparison. Foot: the basic unit of measurement in a line of poetry. Foreshadowing: the use of hints or clues to suggest what will happen later in literature. Free verse: unrhymed Poetry with lines of varying lengths, and containing no specific metrical pattern. Gothic/gotchic novel: used to describe literary works that make extensive use of primitive, medieval, wild, mysterious, or natural elements. Hubris: negative term implying arrogant and a lack of some important insight due to pride in one’s abilities. Hyperbole: a figure of speech in which an overstatement or exaggeration occurs In Medias Res: usually describes a narrative that begins, not at the beginning of a story, but somewhere in the middle -- usually at some crucial point in the action. Inverted syntax: inverted word order Interior monologue: a type of stream of consciousness where the author depicts the interior thoughts of a single individual in the same order these thoughts occur in that character's head. Dramatic monologue: a dramatic monologue is a species of lyric poem in which the speaker is a persona created by the poet; the speaker's character is revealed unintentionally through his or her attitudes in the dramatic situation. Verbal irony: when an author says one thing and means something else. Situational irony: a discrepency between the expected result and actual results. Dramatic irony: when an audience perceives something that a character in the literature does not know. Lament: a song or poem expressing deep grief or mourning. Lampoon: a written attack ridiculing a person, group, or institution. Litote: a figure of speech that emphasises its subject by conscious understatement. Loose sentence: a sentence which is grammatically complete, makes sense before its end. Periodic sentence: a sentence not complete in meaning or grammatical structure without the final words. Lyric: a short poem expressing personal emotion. Melodrama: a type of drama related to tragedy but featuring sensational incidents, emphasising plot at the expense of chracterisation, relying on cruder conflicts (virtous protagonist vs. villainous antagonist), and having a happy ending in which good triumphs over evil. Metaphor: comparison of two unlike things using the verb "to be" and not using like or as as in a simile. Simile: the comparison of two unlike things using like or as. Metonymy: a figure of speech in which a word represents something else which it suggests. Narrative/narrative pace: a story or account, whether prose or poetry, involving events, characters, and what the characters say and do Nemesis: a punisher motivated by evil deeds. Objectivity: unbiased; require facts, not opinion. Subjectivity: influenced by feeling; biased by opinion. Omniscient narrator: the author tells the story, using the third person, knowing all and free to tell us anything, including what the characters are thinking or feeling and why they act as they do. Onomatopoeia: a word that imitates the sound it represents. Oxymoron: putting two contradictory words together. Parable: a brief story, told or written in order to teach a moral lesson. Paradox: a situation or a statement that seems to contradict itself, but on closer inspection, does not. Parallelism: two or more expressions that share traits, whether metrical, lexical, figurative, or grammatical, and can take the form of a list. Parody: a literary work that imitates the style of another literary work. A parody can be simply amusing or it can be mocking in tone, such as a poem which exaggerates the use of alliteration in order to show the ridiculous effect of overuse of alliteration. Pastoral: a literary work that has to do with shephards and rustic settings. Persona: the voice or figure of the author who tells and structures the story and who may or may not share the values of the actual author. Personification: giving human qualities to animals or objects. Plaint: an oral or written statement of the cause. POV: a piece of literature contains a speaker who is speaking either in the first person, telling things from his or her own perspective, or in the third person, telling things from the perspective of an onlooker. The perspective used is called the Point of View, and is referred to either as first person or third person. If the speaker knows everything including the actions, motives, and thoughts of all the characters, the speaker is referred to as omniscient (all-knowing). Prelude: anything serving as an introduction. Protagonist: the hero or central character of a literary work. Antagonist: a person or force which opposes the protagonist in a literary work. Pun: a play on words wherein a word is used to convey two meanings at the same time. Refrain: a repeated word, phrase, line, or group of lines, normally at some fixed position in a poem written in stanzaic form. Requiem: any grand musical composition, performed in honor of a deceased person. Rhetorical question: the poet asks a question without expecting to learn anything from the response, which is expected to be what the poet already knows or implies. Horation satire: in general, a gentler, more good humored and sympathetic kind of satire, somewhat tolerant of human folly even while laughing at it. Juvenalian satire: harsher, more pointed, perhaps intolerant satire typified by the writings of Juvenal. Juvenalian satire often attacks particular people, sometimes thinly disguised as fictional characters. Soliloquy: a speech in which a character, alone on the stage, addresses himself or herself; a soliloquy is a "thinking out loud", a dramatic means of letting an audience know a character's thoughts and feelings. Stanza: A group of lines whose metrical pattern (and usually its rhyme scheme as well) is repeated throughout a poem Stock character: A stereotyped character: one whose nature is familiar to us from prototypes in previous literature. Stream of consciousness: Narrative which presents the private thoughts of a chracter without commentary or interpretation by the author. Style: the author's words and the characteristic way that writer uses language to achieve certain effects. Syncope: The elision of an unstressed syllable so as to keep to a strict accentual-syllabic metre. This can be managed by dropping either a...