Literary Terms
Terms
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- Omniscient
- A third person narrator who sees into each character's mind and understands all the action going on.
- Trimeter
- A poetic line with three feet
- Explicit
- To say or write something directly and clearly.
- Aside
- A speech (usually just a short comment) made by an actor to the audience, as though momentarily stepping outside of the action on stage.
- Suspension of disbelief
- The demand made of a theater audience to accept the limitations of staging and supply the details with their imagination.
- Pastoral
- A poem set in tranquil nature or even more specifically, one about shepherds.
- Ballad
- A long, narrative poem, usually in meter and rhyme. Typically has a naive folksy quality.
- Requiem
- A song of prayer for the dead.
- Lampoon
- A satire.
- Pun
- The usually humorous use of a word in such a way to suggest two or more meanings
- Interior Monologue
- Refers to writing that records the mental talking that goes on inside a character's head; tends to be coherent.
- Plaint
- A poem or speech expressing sorrow.
- Free verse
- poetry written without a regular rhyme scheme or metrical pattern
- Stock characters
- Standard or cliched character types.
- Academic
- Dry and rhetorical writing; sucking all the life out of its subject with analysis.
- Black humor
- The use of disturbing themes in comedy.
- Imperfect
- A poetic foot -- single light or single heavy
- Anthropomorphism
- When inanimate objects are given human characteristics. Often confused with personification.
- Spondee
- A poetic foot -- heavy, heavy
- Travesty
- A grotesque parody
- Accent
- In poetry, the stressed portion of a word.
- Dramatic Irony
- When the audience knows something that the characters in the drama do not
- Elements
- Basic techniques of each genre of literature
- Suggest
- To imply, infer, indicate.
- Antihero
- A protagonist who is markedly unheroic: morally weak, cowardly, dishonest, or any number of other unsavory qualities.
- Allusion
- A reference to another work or famous figure.
- Objective
- A thrid person narrator who only reports on what would be visible to a camera. Does not know what the character is thinking unless the character speaks it.
- Foot
- The basic rhythmic unit of a line of poetry, formed by a combination of two or three syllables, either stressed or unstressed.
- Utopia
- An idealized place. Imaginary communities in which people are able to live in happiness, prosperity, and peace.
- Unreliable narrator
- When the first person narrator is crazy, a liar, very young, or for some reason not entirely credible
- Catharsis
- Drawn from Aristotle's writings on tragedy. Refers to the "cleansing" of emotion an audience member experiences during a play
- synecdoche
- a form of metonymy which refers to a specific part to refer to the whole or vice versa
- Metonymy
- A word that is used to stand for something else that it has attributes of or is associated with.
- Pentameter
- A poetic line with five feet.
- Anachronism
- "Misplaced in time." An aspect of a story that doesn't belong in its supposed time setting.
- Irony
- A statement that means the opposite of what it seems to mean; uses an undertow of meaning, sliding against the literal a la Jane Austen.
- Atmosphere
- The emotional tone or background that surrounds a scene
- Periodic Sentence
- A sentence that is not grammatically complete until it has reached it s final phrase: Despite Barbara's irritation at Jack, she loved him.
- Caricature
- A portrait (verbal or otherwise) that exaggerates a facet of personality.
- Cadence
- The beat or rhythm or poetry in a general sense.
- Lyric
- A type of poetry that explores the poet's personal interpretation of and feelings about the world.
- Thesis
- The main position of an argument. The central contention that will be supported.
- Parody
- The work that results when a specific work is exaggerated to ridiculousness.
- Euphemism
- A word or phrase that takes the place of a harsh, unpleasant, or impolite reality.
- Trochee
- A poetic foot -- heavy, light
- Theme
- The main idea of the overall work; the central idea.
- Foreshadowing
- An event of statement in a narrative that in miniature suggests a larger event that comes later.
- Gothic
- A sensibility that includes such features as dark, gloomy castles and weird screams from the attic each night.
- Tragic flaw
- In a tragedy, this is the weakness of a character in an otherwise good (or even great) individual that ultimately leads to his demise.
- Enjambment
- The continuation of a syntactic unit from one line or couplet of a poem to the next with no pause.
- Tetrameter
- A poetic line with four feet
- Abstract
- Complex, discusses intangible qualities like good and evil, seldom uses examples to support its points.
- Nemesis
- The protagonist's arch enemy or supreme and persistent difficulty.
- Dirge
- A song for the dead. Its tone is typically slow, heavy, depressed, and melancholy
- Parallelism
- Repeated syntactical similarities used for effect.
- Chorus
- In Greek drama, the group of citizens who stand outside the main action on stage and comment on it.
- Assonance
- The repeated use of vowel sounds: "Old king Cole was a merry old soul."
- Conceit (Controlling Image)
- A startling or unusual metaphor, or to a metaphor developed and expanded upon several lines.
- Genre
- A sub-category of literature.
- Aspect
- A trait or characteristic
- Onomatopoeia
- Words that sound like what they mean
- Euphony
- When sounds blend harmoniously.
- Anticlimax
- Occurs when an action produces far smaller results than one had been led to expect.
- Epic
- A very long narrative poem on a serious theme in a dignified style; typically deal with glorious or profound subject matter.
- Soliloquy
- A speech spoken by a character alone on stage, meant to convey the impression that the audience is listening to the character's thoughts.
- Stanza
- A group of lines roughly analogous in function in verse to the paragraphs function in prose.
- caesura
- a pause
- First person
- A narrator who is a character in the story and tells the tale from his or her point of view.
- Classic
- Typical, or an accepted masterpiece.
- Objectivity
- Treatment of subject matter in an impersonal manner or from an outside view.
- Archaism
- The use of deliberately old-fashioned language.
- In media res
- Latin for "in the midst of things," i.e. beginning an epic poem in the middle of the action.
- Loose sentence
- A sentence that is complete before its end: Jack loved Barbara despite her irritating snorting laugh.
- Subjunctive Mood
- A grammatical situation involving the words "if" and "were," setting up a hypothetical situation.
- Persona
- The narrator in a non first-person novel.
- Meaning
- What makes sense, what's important.
- Rhapsody
- An intensely passionate verse or section of verse, usually of love or praise.
- Canto
- The name for a section division in a long work of poetry.
- Subjectivity
- A treatment of subject matter that uses the interior or personal view of a single observer and is typically colored with that observer's emotional responses.
- Denotation
- A word's literal meaning.
- Refrain
- A line or set of lines repeated several times over the course of a poem.
- Simile
- A comparison or analogy that typically uses like or as.
- Decorum
- A character's speech must be styled according to her social station, and in accordance to the situation.
- Technique
- The methods and tools of the author.
- Foil
- A secondary character whose purpose is to highlight the characteristics of a main character, usually by contrast.
- Parable
- A story that instructs.
- Doggerel
- Crude, simplistic verse, often in sing-song rhyme, like limericks.
- Aesthetic
- Appealing to the senses; a coherent sense of taste.
- Hyperbole
- Exaggeration or deliberate overstatement.
- Zeugma
- The use of a word to modify two or more words, but used for different meanings. He closed the door and his heart on his lost love.
- Hubris
- The excessive pride or ambition that leads to the main character's downfall
- Couplet
- A pair of lines that end in rhyme
- Syntax
- The ordering and structuring of words.
- Limited Omniscient
- A Third person narrator who generally reports only what one character sees, and who only reports the thoughts of that one privileged character.
- Satire
- Attempts to improve things by pointing out people's mistakes in the hope that once exposed, such behavior will become less common.
- Iamb
- A poetic foot -- light, heavy
- Implicit
- To say or write something that suggests and implies but never says it directly or clearly.
- Personification
- When an inanimate object takes on human shape.
- Analogy
- A comparison, usually involving two or more symbolic parts, employed to clarify an action or a relationship.
- Paraphrase
- To restate phrases and sentences in your own words.
- Antecedent
- The word, phrase, or clause that determines what a pronoun refers to.
- Anapest
- A poetic foot -- light, light, heavy
- Anecdote
- A Short Narrative
- Epitaph
- Lines that commemorate the dead at their burial place.
- Paradox
- A situation or statement that seems to contradict itself, but on closer inspection, does not.
- Colloquialism
- A word or phrase used in everyday conversational English that isn't a part of accepted "school-book" English.
- Coinage (neologism)
- A new word, usually one invented on the spot.
- Aphorism
- A short and usually witty saying.
- Summary
- A simple retelling of what you've just read.
- Stream of Consciousness
- Author places the reader inside the main character's head and makes the reader privy to all of the character's thoughts as they scroll through her consciousness.
- heroic couplet
- two line rhymes in iambic pentameter
- Allegory
- A story in which each aspect of the story has a symbolic meaning outside the tale itself.
- Bathos
- Writing strains for grandeur it can't support and tries too hard to be a tear jerker.
- Pathos
- Writing evokes feelings of dignified pity and sympathy.
- Dactyl
- A poetic foot -- heavy, light, light
- Diction
- The words an author chooses to use.
- Complex (Dense)
- Suggesting that there is more than one possibility in the meaning of words; subtleties and variations; multiple layers of interpretation; meaning both explicit and implicit
- Farce
- Extremely broad humor; in earlier times, a funny play or a comedy.
- Cacophony
- In poetry, using deliberately harsh, awkward sounds.
- Melodrama
- A form of cheesy theater in which the hero is very, very good, the villain mean and rotten, and the heroine oh-so-pure.
- Apostrophe
- A figure of speech wherein the speaker talks directly to something that is nonhuman.
- Protagonist
- The main character of a novel or play
- Feminine rhyme
- Lines rhymed by their final two syllables. Properly, the penultimate syllables are stressed and the final syllables are unstressed.
- Elegy
- A type of poem that meditates on death or mortality in a serious, thoughtful manner.
- Ode
- A poem in praise of something divine or noble
- Bombast
- Pretentious, exaggeratedly learned language.
- Oxymoron
- A phrase composed of opposites; a contradiction.
- Burlesque
- Broad parody, one that takes a style or form and exaggerates it into ridiculousness.
- Dissonance
- Refers to the grating of incompatible sounds.
- Point of View
- The perspective from which the action of a novel is presented.
- Lament
- A poem of sadness or grief over the death of a loved one or over some other intense loss.
- Blank Verse
- unrhymed iambic pentameter.
- Dramatic Monologue
- When a single speaker in literature says something to a silent audience.
- Connotation
- Everything other than the literal meaning that a word suggests or implies.
- Masculine rhyme
- A rhyme ending on the final stressed syllable (regular old rhyme)
- Prelude
- An introductory poem to a longer work of verse
- Parenthetical phrase
- A phrase set off by commas that interrupts the flow of a sentence with some commentary or added detail.
- Symbolism
- A device in literature where an object represents an idea.
- Metaphor
- A comparison or analogy that states one thing IS another.
- Inversion
- Switching the customary order of elements in a sentence or phrase.
- Truism
- A way-too obvious truth
- Rhetorical question
- A question that suggests an answer.
- Consonance
- The repetition of consonant sounds within words (rather than at their beginnings)
- Opposition
- A pairing of images whereby each becomes more striking and informative because it's placed in contrast to the other one.
- Ambibrach
- A poetic foot -- light, heavy, light
- Alliteration
- The repetition of initial consonant sounds.
- Pyrrhic
- A poetic foot -- light, light