Terminologies in Literature
1. Allegory
A symbolic narrative in which the surface details imply a secondary
meaning.
Allegory often takes the form of a story in which the characters
represent moral qualities.
The most famous example in English is John Bunyan's Pilgrim's
Progress, in which the name of the central character, Pilgrim, epitomizes the
book's allegorical nature.
Kay Boyle's story "Astronomer's Wife" and Christina
Rossetti's poem "Up-Hill" both contain allegorical elements.
2. Alliteration
The repetition of consonant sounds, especially at the beginning
of words.
Example: "Fetched fresh, as I suppose, off some sweet
wood." Hopkins, "In the Valley of the Elwy."
3. Anapest
Two unaccented syllables followed by an accented one, as in
com-pre-HEND or in-ter-VENE.
An anapestic meter rises to the accented beat as in Byron's
lines from "The Destruction of Sennacherib":
"And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea, /
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee."
4. Antagonist
A character or force against which another character struggles.
Creon is Antigone's antagonist in Sophocles' play Antigone;
Teiresias is the antagonist of Oedipus in Sophocles' Oedipus the King.
5. Assonance
The repetition of similar vowel sounds in a sentence or a line
of poetry or prose, as in "I rose and told him of my woe."
Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer"
contains assonantal "I's" in the following lines:
"How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, /
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself."
6. Aubade
A love lyric in which the speaker complains about the arrival of
the dawn, when he must part from his lover.
John Donne's "The Sun Rising" exemplifies this poetic
genre.
7. Ballad
A narrative poem written in four-line stanzas, characterized by
swift action and narrated in a direct style.
The Anonymous medieval ballad, "Barbara Allan,"
exemplifies the genre.
8. Blank Verse
A line of poetry or prose in unrhymed iambic pentameter.
Shakespeare's sonnets, Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost, and
Robert Frost's meditative poems such as "Birches" include many lines
of blank verse.
Here are the opening blank verse lines of "Birches":
When I see birches bend to left and right /
Across the lines of straighter darker trees, /
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
9. Caesura
A strong pause within a line of verse.
The following stanza from Hardy's "The Man He Killed"
contains caesuras in the middle two lines:
He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,
Off-hand-like--just as I--
Was out of work-had sold his traps--
No other reason why.
10. Character
An imaginary person that inhabits a literary work.
Literary characters may be major or minor, static (unchanging)
or dynamic (capable of change).
In Shakespeare's Othello, Desdemona is a major character, but
one who is static, like the minor character Bianca.
Othello is a major character who is dynamic, exhibiting an
ability to change.
11. Characterization
The means by which writers present and reveal character.
Although techniques of characterization are complex, writers
typically reveal characters through their speech, dress, manner, and actions.
Readers come to understand the character Miss Emily in
Faulkner's story "A Rose for Emily" through what she says, how she
lives, and what she does.
12. Climax
The turning point of the action in the plot of a play or story.
The climax represents the point of greatest tension in the work.
The climax of John Updike's "A&P," for example,
occurs when Sammy quits his job as a cashier.
13. Closed Form
A type of form or structure in poetry characterized by
regularity and consistency in such elements as rhyme, line length, and metrical
pattern.
Frost's "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening"
provides one of many examples.
A single stanza illustrates some of the features of closed form:
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though.
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
14. Complication
An intensification of the conflict in a story or play.
Complication builds up, accumulates, and develops the primary or
central conflict in a literary work.
Frank O'Connor's story "Guests of the Nation" provides
a striking example, as does Ralph Ellison's "Battle Royal."
15. Conflict
A struggle between opposing forces in a story or play, usually
resolved by the end of the work.
The conflict may occur within a character as well as between
characters.
Lady Gregory's one-act play The Rising of the Moon exemplifies
both types of conflict as the Policeman wrestles with his conscience in an
inner conflict and confronts an antagonist in the person of the ballad singer.
16. Connotation
The associations called up by a word that goes beyond its
dictionary meaning.
Poets, especially, tend to use words rich in connotation.
Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night"
includes intensely connotative language, as in these lines:
"Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright /
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, /
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
17. 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.
18. Couplet
A pair of rhymed lines that may or may not constitute a separate
stanza in a poem.
Shakespeare's sonnets end in rhymed couplets, as in
"For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings /
That then I scorn to change my state with kings."
19. Dactyl
A stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones, as in
FLUT-ter-ing or BLUE-ber-ry.
The following playful lines illustrate double dactyls, two
dactyls per line:
Higgledy, piggledy,
Emily Dickinson
Gibbering, jabbering.
20. Denotation
The dictionary meaning of a word.
Writers typically play off a word's denotative meaning against
its connotations, or suggested and implied associational implications.
In the following lines from Peter Meinke's "Advice to My
Son" the references to flowers and fruit, bread and wine denote specific
things, but also suggest something beyond the literal, dictionary meanings of
the words:
To be specific, between the peony and rose
Plant squash and spinach, turnips and tomatoes;
Beauty is nectar and nectar, in a desert, saves--
...
and always serve bread with your wine.
But, son,
always serve wine.
21. Denouement
The resolution of the plot of a literary work.
The denouement of Hamlet takes place after the catastrophe, with
the stage littered with corpses.
During the denouement Fortinbras makes an entrance and a speech,
and Horatio speaks his sweet lines in praise of Hamlet.
22. 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.
23. Diction
The selection of words in a literary work.
A work's diction forms one of its centrally important literary
elements, as writers use words to convey action, reveal character, imply
attitudes, identify themes, and suggest values.
We can speak of the diction particular to a character, as in
Iago's and Desdemona's very different ways of speaking in Othello.
We can also refer to a poet's diction as represented over the
body of his or her work, as in Donne's or Hughes's diction.
24. Elegy
A lyric poem that laments the dead.
Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays" is elegiac in
tone.
A more explicitly identified elegy is W.H. Auden's "In
Memory of William Butler Yeats" and his "Funeral Blues."
25. Elision
The omission of an unstressed vowel or syllable to preserve the
meter of a line of poetry.
Alexander uses elision in "Sound and Sense":
"Flies o'er th' unbending corn...."
26. Enjambment
A run-on line of poetry in which logical and grammatical sense
carries over from one line into the next.
An enjambed line differs from an end-stopped line in which the
grammatical and logical sense is completed within the line.
In the opening lines of Robert Browning's "My Last
Duchess," for example, the first line is end-stopped and the second
enjambed:
That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now....
27. Epic
A long narrative poem that records the adventures of a hero.
Epics typically chronicle the origins of a civilization and
embody its central values.
Examples from western literature include Homer's Iliad and
Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, and Milton's Paradise Lost.
28. Epigram
A brief witty poem, often satirical.
Alexander Pope's "Epigram Engraved on the Collar of a
Dog" exemplifies the genre:
I am his Highness' dog at Kew;
Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?
29. Exposition
The first stage of a fictional or dramatic plot, in which
necessary background information is provided.
Ibsen's A Doll's House, for instance, begins with a conversation
between the two central characters, a dialogue that fills the audience in on
events that occurred before the action of the play begins, but which are
important in the development of its plot.
30. Falling Action
In the plot of a story or play, the action following the climax
of the work that moves it towards its denouement or resolution.
The falling action of Othello begins after Othello realizes that
Iago is responsible for plotting against him by spurring him on to murder his
wife, Desdemona.
31. Falling Meter
Poetic meters such as trochaic and dactylic that move or fall
from a stressed to an unstressed syllable.
The nonsense line, "Higgledy, piggledy," is dactylic,
with the accent on the first syllable and the two syllables following falling
off from that accent in each word.
Trochaic meter is represented by this line: "Hip-hop,
be-bop, treetop--freedom."
32. Fiction
An imagined story, whether in prose, poetry, or drama.
Ibsen's Nora is fictional, a "make-believe" character
in a play, as are Hamlet and Othello.
Characters like Robert Browning's Duke and Duchess from his poem
"My Last Duchess" are fictional as well, though they may be based on
actual historical individuals.
And, of course, characters in stories and novels are fictional,
though they, too, may be based, in some way, on real people.
The important thing to remember is that writers embellish and
embroider and alter actual life when they use real life as the basis for their
work.
They fictionalize facts, and deviate from real-life situations
as they "make things up."
33. Figurative Language
A form of language use in which writers and speakers convey
something other than the literal meaning of their words.
Examples include hyperbole or exaggeration, litotes or
understatement, simile and metaphor, which employ comparison, and synecdoche
and metonymy, in which a part of a thing stands for the whole.
34. Flashback
An interruption of a work's chronology to describe or present an
incident that occurred prior to the main time frame of a work's action.
Writers use flashbacks to complicate the sense of chronology in
the plot of their works and to convey the richness of the experience of human
time.
Faulkner's story "A Rose for Emily" includes flashbacks.
35. Foil
A character who contrasts and parallels the main character in a
play or story.
Laertes, in Hamlet, is a foil for the main character; in
Othello, Emilia and Bianca are foils for Desdemona.
36. Foot
A metrical unit composed of stressed and unstressed syllables.
For example, an iamb or iambic foot is represented by ˘', that
is, an unaccented syllable followed by an accented one. Frost's line
"Whose woods these are I think I know" contains four iambs, and is
thus an iambic foot.
37. Foreshadowing
Hints of what is to come in the action of a play or a story.
Ibsen's A Doll's House includes foreshadowing as does Synge's
Riders to the Sea.
So, too, do Poe's "Cask of Amontillado" and Chopin's
"Story of an Hour."
38. Free Verse
Poetry without a regular pattern of meter or rhyme.
The verse is "free" in not being bound by earlier
poetic conventions requiring poems to adhere to an explicit and identifiable
meter and rhyme scheme in a form such as the sonnet or ballad.
Modern and contemporary poets of the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries often employ free verse.
Williams's "This Is Just to Say" is one of many
examples.
39. Hyperbole
A figure of speech involving exaggeration. John Donne uses
hyperbole in his poem: "Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star."
40. Iamb
An unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, as in to-DAY.
41. Image
A concrete representation of a sense impression, a feeling, or
an idea.
Imagery refers to the pattern of related details in a work.
In some works one image predominates either by recurring
throughout the work or by appearing at a critical point in the plot.
Often writers use multiple images throughout a work to suggest
states of feeling and to convey implications of thought and action.
Some modern poets, such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos
Williams, write poems that lack discursive explanation entirely and include
only images.
Among the most famous examples is Pound's poem "In a
Station of the Metro":
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
42. Imagery
The pattern of related comparative aspects of language,
particularly of images, in a literary work.
Imagery of light and darkness pervade James Joyce's stories
"Araby," "The Boarding House," and "The Dead."
So, too, does religious imagery.
43. Irony
A contrast or discrepancy between what is said and what is meant
or between what happens and what is expected to happen in life and in
literature.
In verbal irony, characters say the opposite of what they mean.
In irony of circumstance or situation, the opposite of what is
expected occurs.
In dramatic irony, a character speaks in ignorance of a
situation or event known to the audience or to the other characters.
Flannery O'Connor's short stories employ all these forms of
irony, as does Poe's "Cask of Amontillado."
44. Literal Language
A form of language in which writers and speakers mean exactly
what their words denote.
45. Lyric Poem
A type of poem characterized by brevity, compression, and the
expression of feeling.
The anonymous "Western Wind" epitomizes the genre:
Western wind, when will thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Christ, if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
46. Metaphor
A comparison between essentially unlike things without an
explicitly comparative word such as like or as.
An example is "My love is a red, red rose,"
From Burns's "A Red, Red Rose."
Langston Hughes's "Dream Deferred" is built entirely
of metaphors.
Metaphor is one of the most important of literary uses of
language.
Shakespeare employs a wide range of metaphor in his sonnets and
his plays, often in such density and profusion that readers are kept busy
analyzing and interpreting and unraveling them.
47. Meter
The measured pattern of rhythmic accents in poems.
48. 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."
49. Narrative Poem
A poem that tells a story.
50. Narrator
The voice and implied speaker of a fictional work, to be
distinguished from the actual living author.
For example, the narrator of Joyce's "Araby" is not
James Joyce himself, but a literary fictional character created expressly to
tell the story.
Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" contains a communal
narrator, identified only as "we."
51. Octave
An eight-line unit, which may constitute a stanza; or a section
of a poem, as in the octave of a sonnet.
52. Ode
A long, stately poem in stanzas of varied length, meter, and
form.
Usually a serious poem on an exalted subject, such as Horace's
"Eheu fugaces," but sometimes a more lighthearted work, such as
Neruda's "Ode to My Socks."
53. Onomatopoeia
The use of words to imitate the sounds they describe.
Words such as buzz and crack are onomatopoetic.
The following line from Pope's "Sound and Sense"
onomatopoetically imitates in sound what it describes:
When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
The line too labors, and the words move slow.
Most often, however, onomatopoeia refers to words and groups of
words, such as Tennyson's description of the "murmur of innumerable
bees," which attempts to capture the sound of a swarm of bees buzzing.
54. Open Form
A type of structure or form in poetry characterized by freedom
from regularity and consistency in such elements as rhyme, line length,
metrical pattern, and overall poetic structure. E.E. Cummings's "[Buffalo
Bill's]" is one example.
55. Parody
A humorous, mocking imitation of a literary work, sometimes
sarcastic, but often playful and even respectful in its playful imitation.
Examples include Bob McKenty's parody of Frost's "Dust of
Snow" and Kenneth Koch's parody of Williams's "This is Just to
Say."
56. Personification
The endowment of inanimate objects or abstract concepts with
animate or living qualities.
An example: "The yellow leaves flaunted their color gaily
in the breeze." Wordsworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud"
includes personification.
57. Plot
The unified structure of incidents in a literary work.
58.Point Of View (POV / Viewpoint)
The angle of vision from which a story is narrated.
A work's point of view can be:
first person, in which the narrator is a character or an
observer, respectively;
objective, in which the narrator knows or appears to know no
more than the reader;
omniscient, in which the narrator knows everything about the
characters;
and limited omniscient, which allows the narrator to know some
things about the characters but not everything.
59. Protagonist
The main character of a literary work--Hamlet and Othello in the
plays named after them, Gregor Samsa in Kafka's Metamorphosis, Paul in
Lawrence's "Rocking-Horse Winner."
60. Pyrrhic
A metrical foot with two unstressed syllables ("of
the").
61. Quatrain
A four-line stanza in a poem, the first four lines and the
second four lines in a Petrachan sonnet.
A Shakespearean sonnet contains three quatrains followed by a
couplet.
62. Recognition
The point at which a character understands his or her situation
as it really is.
Sophocles' Oedipus comes to this point near the end of Oedipus
the King; Othello comes to a similar understanding of his situation in Act V of
Othello.
63. Resolution
The sorting out or unraveling of a plot at the end of a play,
novel, or story.
64. Reversal
The point at which the action of the plot turns in an unexpected
direction for the protagonist.
Oedipus's and Othello's recognitions are also reversals.
They learn what they did not expect to learn.
65. Rhyme
The matching of final vowel or consonant sounds in two or more
words.
The following stanza of "Richard Cory" employs
alternate rhyme, with the third line rhyming with the first and the fourth with
the second:
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him;
He was a gentleman from sole to crown
Clean favored and imperially slim.
66. Rhythm
The recurrence of accent or stress in lines of verse.
In the following lines from "Same in Blues" by
Langston Hughes, the accented words and syllables are underlined:
I said to my baby,
Baby take it slow....
Lulu said to Leonard
I want a diamond ring
67. Rising Action
A set of conflicts and crises that constitute the part of a
play's or story's plot leading up to the climax.
68. Rising Meter
Poetic meters such as iambic and anapestic that move or ascend
from an unstressed to a stressed syllable.
69. Satire
A literary work that criticizes human misconduct and ridicules
vices, stupidities, and follies.
Swift's Gulliver's Travels is a famous example.
Chekhov's Marriage Proposal and O'Connor's "Everything That
Rises Must Converge," have strong satirical elements.
70. Sestet
A six-line unit of verse constituting a stanza or section of a
poem; the last six lines of an Italian sonnet.
Examples: Petrarch's "If it is not love, then what is it
that I feel," and Frost's "Design."
71. Sestina
A poem of thirty-nine lines and written in iambic pentameter.
Its six-line stanza repeat in an intricate and prescribed order
the final word in each of the first six lines.
After the sixth stanza, there is a three-line envoi, which uses
the six repeating words, two per line.
72. Setting
The time and place of a literary work that establish its
context.
The stories of Sandra Cisneros are set in the American southwest
in the mid to late 20th century, those of James Joyce in Dublin, Ireland in the
early 20th century.
73. Simile
A figure of speech involving a comparison between unlike things
using like, as, or as though.
An example: "My love is like a red, red rose."
74. Sonnet
A fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter.
The Shakespearean or English sonnet is arranged as three
quatrains and a final couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg.
The Petrarchan or Italian sonnet divides into two parts: an
eight-line octave and a six-line sestet, rhyming abba abba cde cde or abba abba
cd cd cd.
75. Spondee
A metricalfoot represented by two stressed syllables, such as
KNICK-KNACK.
76. Stanza
A division or unit of a poem that is repeated in the same
form--either with similar or identical patterns or rhyme and meter, or with
variations from one stanza to another.
The stanzas of Gertrude Schnackenberg's "Signs" are
regular; those of Rita Dove's "Canary" are irregular.
77. Style
The way an author chooses words, arranges them in sentences or
in lines of dialogue or verse, and develops ideas and actions with description,
imagery, and other literary techniques.
78. Subject
What a story or play is about; to be distinguished from plot and
theme.
Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" is about the decline of
a particular way of life endemic to the American south before the civil war.
Its plot concerns how Faulkner describes and organizes the
actions of the story's characters.
Its theme is the overall meaning Faulkner conveys.
79. Subplot
A subsidiary or subordinate or parallel plot in a play or story
that coexists with the main plot.
The story of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern forms a subplot with
the overall plot of Hamlet.
80. Symbol
An object or action in a literary work that means more than
itself, that stands for something beyond itself.
The glass unicorn in The Glass Menagerie, the rocking horse in
"The Rocking-Horse Winner," the road in Frost's "The Road Not
Taken"--all are symbols in this sense.
81. Synecdoche
A figure of speech in which a part is substituted for the whole.
An example: "Lend me a hand."
82. Syntax
The grammatical order of words in a sentence or line of verse or
dialogue.
The organization of words and phrases and clauses in sentences
of prose, verse, and dialogue.
In the following example, normal syntax (subject, verb, object
order) is inverted:
"Whose woods these are I think I know."
83. Tercet
A three-line stanza, as the stanzas in Frost's "Acquainted
With the Night" and Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind."
The three-line stanzas or sections that together constitute the
sestet of a Petrarchan or Italian sonnet.
84. Theme
The idea of a literary work abstracted from its details of
language, character, and action, and cast in the form of a generalization.
85. Tone
The implied attitude of a writer toward the subject and
characters of a work, as, for example, Flannery O'Connor's ironic tone in her
"Good Country People."
86. Trochee
An accented syllable followed by an unaccented one, as in
FOOT-ball.
87.
Understatement
A figure of speech in which a writer or speaker says less than
what he or she means; the opposite of exaggeration.
The last line of Frost's "Birches" illustrates this
literary device:
"One could do worse than be a swinger of birches."
88. Villanelle
A nineteen-line lyric poem that relies heavily on repetition.
The first and third lines alternate throughout the poem, which
is structured in six stanzas --five tercets and a concluding quatrain.
Examples include Bishop's "One Art," Roethke's
"The Waking," and Thomas "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good
Night."ll
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