A glossary of literary terms
Fiction and Truth
 In an inclusive sense, fiction is any literary narrative,
whether in prose or verse, which is invented instead of
being an account of events that actually happened.
Figurative Language(1)
 Figurative Language is a conspicuous departure
from what competent users of a language
apprehend as the standard of words, or else the
standard order of order to achieve some special
meaning or effect.
 A mixed metaphor conjoins two or more obviously
diverse metaphoric vehicles.
 A dead metaphor is one which, like the leg of a
table or the heart of the matter, has been used so
long and become so that its users have ceased to be
aware of the discrepancy between vehicle and
tenor.
Figurative Language(2)
 In metonymy the literal term for one thing is applied
to another with which it has become closely associated
because of a recurrent relation in common experience.
 In synecdoche, a part of something is used to signify
the whole, or the whole is used to signify a part.
Folklore(1)
 Folklore, since the mid-nineteenth century, has
been the collective name applied to sayings, verbal
compositions, and social rituals that have been
handed down solely, or at least primarily, by word
of mouth and example rather than in written form.
 Folk drama originated in primitive rites of song
and dance, especially in connection with
agricultural activities, which centered on
vegetational deities and goddesses of fertility.
Folklore(2)
 Folk songs include love songs, Christmas carols, work
songs, sea chanties, religious songs, drinking songs,
children’s game-songs, and many other types of lyric,
as well as the narrative song, or traditional ballad.
Form and structure
 Form is one of the most frequent terms in literary
criticism, but also one of the most diverse in its
meanings.
Formalism
 A type of literary theory and analysis which originated
in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the second decade of
the twentieth century.
Format of a Book
 Format signifies the page size, shape and other
physical features of a book.
 Free Verse is sometimes referred to as open form verse,
or by the French term vers libre.
Gender criticism
 Gender criticism, like the gender studies of which it is
a part, is based on the premise that, while sex is
determined by anatomy, gender can be largely
independent of anatomy, and is a social construction
that is diverse, variable, and depaendent on historical
circumstances.
 Genres
A term, French in origin, that denotes types or classes of
literature
 Golden Age
The term derives from the chronological primitivism that was
propounded in the Greek poet Hesiod’s Works and Days, as
well as by many later Greek and Roman writers.
Gothic Novel
The word Gothic originally referred to the Goths, an early
Germanic tribe, then came to signify germanic, then
medieval.
Great Chain of Being
The conception of the Great Chain of Being is
grounded in ideas about the nature of God, or the First
Cause, in the Greek philosophers Plato, Aristotle, and
Plotinus, and was developed by later thinkers into a
comprehensive philosophy to account for the origin,
types, and relationships of all living things in the
universe.
Heroic Couplet(1)
 Lines of iambic pentameter which rhyme in pairs: aa,
bb, cc, and so on. The adjective heroic was applied in
the later seventeenth century because of the frequent
use of such couplets in heroic poems and plays.
 Alexander Pope, used it almost to the exclusion of
other meters.
.
Heroic Couplet(2)
 In order to maximize the interrelation of the
component parts of the couplet, neoclassic often used
an end-stopped first line.
 Alexander Pope, the greatest master of the metrical,
syntactical, and rhetorical possibilities of the closed
heroic couplet.
Humanism(1)
 In the sixteenth century the word humanist was
coined to signify one who taught or worked in the
studia humanitatis, or humanities that is, grammar,
rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy, as
distinguished from fields less concerned with the
moral and imaginative aspects and activities of man,
such as mathematics, natural philosophy, and theology.
Humanism(2)
 Renaissance humanism assumed the dignity and
central position of human beings in the universe;
emphasized the importance of the study of classical
imaginative and philosophical literature, although
with emphasis on its moral and practical rather than
its aesthetic values.
Humanism(3)
 Many humanists also stressed the need for a
rounded development of an individual’s diverse
powers.
 The result was that they tended to emphasize the
values achievable by human beings in this world,
and to minimize the earlier Christian emphasis on
innate corruption and on the ideals of asceticism
and of withdrawal from this world in a
preoccupation with the world hereafter.
Humanism(4)
 New Humanism, argued strongly for a return to a
primarily humanistic education, and for a conservative
view of moral, political, and literary values that is
grounded mainly on classical literature.
Hymn
 In current usage denotes a song that celebrates God or
expresses religious feelings and is primarily intended
to be sung as part of a religious service
Hyperbole and Understatement(1)
 The figure of speech, or trope, called hyperbole is
bold overstatement, or the extravagant
exaggeration of fact or of possibility; it may be
used either for serious or ironic or comic effect.
 The contrary figure is understatement, which
deliberately represents something as much less in
magnitude or importance than it really is, or is
ordinarily considered to be.
Hyperbole and Understatement(2)
 Meiosis to the use in literature of a simple,
unemphatic statement to enhance the effect of a
deeply pathetic or tragic event; an example is the
line at the close of the narrative in Wordsworth’s
Michael: And never lifted up a single stone.
 Litotes, the assertion of an affirmative by negating
its contrary: He’s not the brightest man in the
world meaning He is stupid.
Harlem Renaissance
 A period of remarkable creativity in literature, music,
dance, painting, and sculpture by African-Americans,
from the end of the First World War in 1917 through
the 1920s.
Heroic Drama
 Was a form mainly specific to the Restoration Period,
though in stances continued to be written in the early
eighteenth century.
 See Bonamy Dobree, Restoration Tragedy(1929);
Allardyce Nicoll, Restoration Drama(1955); Arthur C.
Kirsch, Dryden’s Heroic Drama.