REVIEW LIST FOR LITERARY TERMS
1.
Allusion - reference, often to literature, history, mythology, or the Bible, that is
unacknowledged in the text but that the author expects a reader to recognize. An example of allusion
in a title is Charles Baxter's "Gryphon" (a mythical beast). Some modern writers, notably T.S. Eliot
and James Joyce, use allusions drawn from their private reading, expecting few readers to
understand them.
2.
Metaphor - concise form of comparison equating two things that may at first seem completely
dissimilar, often an abstraction and a concrete image – for example, "My love's a fortress." Some
people consider metaphor to be the essential element of poetry. An extended metaphor, or conceit,
is a comparison used throughout a work; in Tillie Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing," the mother
compares her daughter to a dress waiting to be ironed, thus conveying her daughter's passivity and
vulnerability.
3.
Metonymy - figure of speech in which the term for one thing can be applied to another with
which it is closely associated - for example, using "defend the flag" to mean "defend the nation."
4.
Allegory - story with two parallel and consistent levels of meaning, one literal and one
figurative, in which the figurative level offers a moral or political lesson; John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's
Progress and Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" are examples of moral allegory. An
allegorical figure has only one meaning (for instance, it may represent good or evil), as opposed to
a symbol, which may suggest a complex network of meanings. An allegorical framework is the
system of ideas that conveys the allegory's message.
5.
Antagonist - character who is in conflict with or opposition to the protagonist; the villain.
Sometimes the antagonist may be a force or situation (war or poverty) rather than a person.
6.
Archetype - image or symbol that is so common or significant to a culture that is seems to
have a universal importance. The psychologist Carl lung believed that because archetypes are an
inherent part of psyches, we recognize then subconsciously when we encounter them and therefore
give them a greater meaning than they would otherwise possess. Many archetypes appear in
classical myths (for example, a journey to the underworld).
7.
Alliteration - repetition of initial sounds in a series of words, as in Blake's "The Chimney
Sweeper": "So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep." Alliteration may be reinforced by
repeated sounds within and at the end or words.
8.
Aside - brief comment spoken by the actor to the audience (such as, "'Here she comes. III
play a fine trick on her now!), and assumed not to be heard by the other characters. Chekhov's The
Brute includes asides.
9.
Assonance - repetition of vowel sounds in a series of words: "creep three feet."
10.
Apostrophe - figure of speech in which an absent character or a personified force or object is
addressed directly, as if it were present or could comprehend: “O Rose, thou art sick!"
11.
Ballad - narrative poem, rooted in an oral tradition, usually arranged in quatrains rhyming abcb
and containing a refrain.
12.
Carpe diem - "Seize the day"; the philosophy that gave its name to a kind of
seventeenth-century poetry arguing that one should enjoy life today before it passes one by, as seen
in Herrick's “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time."
13.
Connotation - meaning that a word suggests beyond its literal, explicit meaning, carrying
emotional associations, judgments, or opinions. Connotations can be positive, neutral, or negative.
For example, family has a positive connotation when it describes a group of loving relatives; a neutral
connotation when it describes an organization of criminals.
14.
Character - fictional representation of a person, usually but not necessarily in a
psychologically realistic way. E. M. Forster classified characters as round (well developed, closely
involved in the action and responsive to it) or flat (static, stereotypical, or operating as foils for the
protagonist). Characters can also be classified as dynamic (growing and changing in the course of
the action) or static (remaining unchanged). Also, a brief satirical sketch illustrating a type of
personality, popular in eighteenth-century England.
15.
Catharsis - Aristotle's term for the emotional reaction or '"purgation" that takes place in an
audience watching a tragedy. Aristotle theorized that when we see a good tragedy, we feel both pity
(and thus closeness to the protagonist) and fear or revulsion from the action taking place on stage)
because we recognize in ourselves the potential for similar action. The purging of these emotions we
experience by seeing the dramatic action unfold before is catharsis.
16.
Cliche' - overused phrase or expression.
17.
Conflict - struggle between opposing forces (protagonist and antagonist) In a work of
literature.
18.
Climax - point of greatest tension or importance, where the decisive action of a play or story
takes place.
19.
Denotation - dictionary meaning of a word; its explicit, literal meaning.
20.
Dialect - particular regional variety of language, which differ from the more widely used
standard or written language in its pronunciation, grammar, or vocabulary. Eliza Doolittle's cockney
dialect in the George Bernard Shaw play Pygmalion is an example.
21.
Diction - word choice of an author, which determines the level of language used In a piece of
literature. Formal diction Is lofty and elaborate (typical of Shakespearean nobility); informal diction
is idiomatic and relaxed (like the dialogue in John Updike's "A&P”). Jargon is the specialized diction
of a professional or occupational group (such as computer hackers). Idioms are the colloquial
expressions, including slang, of a particular group or society.
22.
Denouement - this is the final stage in the plot of a drama or work of fiction. Here the action
comes to an end and remaining loose ends are tied up.
23.
Irony - Dramatic - such as that found In Oedipus the King, depends on the audience's
knowing something the protagonist has not yet realized (and thus experiencing simultaneously its
own interpretation of the events and that of the protagonist).
24.
Irony - Situational - exists when what happens is at odds with what the story's situation leads
readers to expect will happen, as in Browning's "Porphyria's Lover."
25.
Elegy - poem commemorating someone's death, usually in a reflective or mournful tone, such
as A. E. Houseman's "To an Athlete Dying Young."'
26.
Epiphany - term first applied to literature by James Joyce and now used generally to describe
a sudden moment of revelation about the deep meaning inherent in common things, such as the
boy's realization at the end of "Araby,"
27.
Euphemism - word consciously chosen for its pleasant connotations; often used for
subjects like sex and death whose frank discussion is somewhat taboo, in our society. For example,
a euphemism for “to die" Is "'to pass away" or "to go to one's reward."
28.
Fantasy - nonrealistic piece of literature that depends on whimsical plot, supernatural or
mythical characters, and implausible actions, usually with a happy ending.
29.
Fame - comedy in which stereotypical characters engage in boisterous horseplay and
slapstick humor, as in Chekhov's The Brute.
30.
flashback - variation on chronological order that presents an event or situation that occurred
before the time in which the story's action takes place.
31.
Foreshadow - presentation early in a story of situations, characters, or objects that seem to
have no special importance but in fact are later revealed to have great significance. For example, a
casual mention of a character's unusually accurate memory for faces may become significant only
when his or her fate turns out to hinge on recognizing a person from the distant past.
32.
Genre - category of literature. Fiction, drama, and poetry are the three major genres;
sub-genres include the novel, the farce, and the lyric poem.
33.
Hubris - tragic flaw of overwhelming pride that exists in the protagonist of a tragedy.
34.
Imagery - words and phrases that describe the concrete experience of the five senses, most
often sight. A pattern of imagery is a group of related images developed throughout a work.
Synethesia is a form of imagery that mixes the experience of the senses (hearing something visual,
smelling something audible, and so on): "He smelled the blue fumes of her scent." Static imagery
freezes the moment to give it the timeless quality of painting or sculpture. Kinetic Imagery attempts
to show motion or change.
35.
Lyrical - ??? form of poetry, usually brief and intense, that expresses a poet's subjective
response to the world. In classical times, lyrics were set to music. The Romantic poets, particularly
Keats, often write lyrics about love, death, and nature.
36.
Irony - Verbal - occurs when what is said is in contrast with what is meant. It can be
expressed as understatement, hyperbole, or sarcasm.
37.
Monologue - extended speech by one character.
38.
Myth - anonymous story reflecting the religious and social values of a culture or explaining
natural phenomena, often involving gods and heroes.
39.
Naturalism - nineteenth-century movement whose followers believed that life should not be
idealized when depicted in literature. Rather, literature should show that human experience is a
continual (and for the most part losing struggle against the natural world. Emile Zola, Jack London,
and Stephen Crane are important practitioners of naturalism.
40.
Plot - way in which the events of the story are arranged. When there are two stories of more
or less equal importance, the work has been a double plot; when there is more than one story but
one string of events is clearly the most significant, the other stories are called subplots. Plot in fiction
often follows the pattern of action in drama, rising to a climax and then failing to a resolution.
41.
Point of view - perspective from which a story is told. The storyteller may be a character in
the story (first-person narrator) or someone who does not figure in the action (third-person narrator),
in which case he or she may know the actions and internal doings of everyone in the story
(omniscient narrator) or some part of these (limited omniscient narrator). Rarely, there may be a
second-person narrator who uses "you" and the imperative mood throughout the story.
The narrator may be an observer or a participant If he or she is untrustworthy (stupid or bad, for
instance), one has an unreliable narrator, narrators who are unreliable because they do not
understand what they are reporting (children, for instance) are called naive narrators. If the
perspective on the events is the same as one would get by simply watching the action unfold on
stage, the point of view is dramatic or objective.
42.
Persona / speaker - narrator or speaker of a poem or story; in Greek tragedy, a persona was
a mask worn by an actor.
43.
Realism - writing that stresses careful description of setting and the trappings of daily life,
psychological probability, and the lives of ordinary people. Its practitioners believe they are
presenting life "as it really is"; Ibsen's A Doll House is an example.
44.
Romanticism - eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary movement that valued subjectivity,
individuality, the imagination, nature, excess, the exotic, and the mysterious.
45.
Overstatement/ hyperbole - figurative language that depends on intentional overstatement;
Mark Twain often used it to create humor; Jonathan Swift used it for satire,
46.
Personification - endowing inanimate objects or abstract ideas with life or human
characteristics: “the river wept."
47.
Satire - literary attack on folly or vanity by means of ridicule; usually intended to improve
society.
48.
Sarcasm - form of irony in which apparent praise is used to convey strong, bitter criticism,
49.
Soliloquy - convention of drama in which a character speaks directly to the audience,
revealing thoughts and feelings, which other characters present on stage are assumed not to hear.
By convention, a soliloquy is taken to reflect a character's sincere feelings and beliefs.
50.
Simile - comparison of two seemingly unlike things using the words like or as: "'My love is like
an arrow through my heart."
51.
Symbol - person, object, action, or idea whose meaning transcends its literal or denotative
sense in a complex way. For instance, if someone wears a rose in a lapel to a dance, the rose may
simply be a decoration, but in Blake's “The Sick Rose"' it becomes a symbol because it takes on a
range of paradoxical and complementary meanings. A symbol is invested with significance beyond
what it could carry on its own: A swastika, for instance, is a powerful and frightening symbol as a
result of Hitler's Nazism. Universal symbols, such as the grim reaper, may be called archetypes;
conventional symbols, such as national flags, evoke a general and agreed-upon response from
most people. There are also private symbols, such as the "gyre" created by Yeats, which the poet
himself invested with extraordinary significance.
52.
Tone - attitude of the speaker or author of a work toward the subject itself or the audience, as
can be determined from the word choice and arrangement of the piece.
53.
Theme - central or dominant idea of a piece of literature, made concrete by the details and
emphasis in the work itself.
54.
Tragedy - literary work, especially a play, that recounts the downfall of an individual. Greek
tragedy demanded a noble protagonist whose fall could be traced to a tragic personal flaw.
Shakespearean tragedy also treats noble figures, but the reasons for their tragedies may be less
clear-cut than in Greek drama. Domestic or modern tragedy tends to deal with the fates of ordinary
people.
55.
Understatement - intentional downplaying of a situation's significance, often for ironic or
humorous effect, as in Mark Twain's famous comment on reading his own obituary, "The reports of
my death are greatly exaggerated."