Glossary of literary terms

Act and Scene The major structural divisions of a play are called acts, and their sub-divisions scenes.
Allegory A story which seeks to demonstrate philosophical or religious beliefs. Each element in the story stands for an aspect of the belief that the story is seeking to explain. There could, for instance, be allegorical figures representing Truth, Goodness or Virtue.
Alliteration The repetition of the same consonant sound.
Allusion A reference to another book, event, person or place. The allusion is usually implied or hinted, so the reader is given the pleasure of seeing it and understanding the effect it creates.
Ambiguity The capacity of a word or words to mean two or more different things.
Assonance The repetition of vowel sounds in adjoining words. The effect of assonance is similar to that of alliteration; that is to say, it helps to create tone.
Ballad A poem, usually of simple construction, that tells a story. Many English and Scottish ballads are quatrains, in which the first and third lines are longer than the second and fourth.
Black Comedy Comedy that invites laughter at serious or painful aspects of life such as disease, failure and death.
Blank Verse Poetry that is written in lines of unrhymed iambic pentameters. It is very common in English and can be used for telling a story or thinking about ideas and feelings. It is worthwhile noticing how regular and insistent its rhythms are.
Cadence The rise and fall in pitch the voice makes when at the end of a line, a sentence or caesura. The emotional impact of poetry is often created by cadences. There is no technical language to describe their effect, though they are often said to be ‘rising’, ‘falling’ or ‘steady’.
Caesura The break in a line of poetry. The convention for marking a caesura is||. Caesuras are important because they mark changes in tone, in argument and emotion.
Character and Characterisation Character is the name we give to the figures we encounter in narratives; characterisation is the way in which the character has been created.
Comedy and Tragedy A comedy is a play in which the confusion of characters, often prompted by love and furthered by deception or misunderstanding, eventually work out so that the play closes happily. The action of comedy is usually amusing, and the plot intricate. Tragedy is a play in which a character (often called the hero) falls from power, influence or happiness towards disaster and death. Often a hero is willful and seems to bring destruction upon himself.
Conceit A highly elaborate image that seems on first acquaintance far-fetched but yet which, with thought, is seen to be appropriate. It is strange but true.
Consonance The repetition of the same consonant sounds in two or more words in which the vowel sounds are different.
Denotations and Connotations The denotations of a word are its standard range of meanings, the connotations its additional meanings that emerge through association, suggestion, and emotional undertones.
Denouement A term that may be used of both novels and plays when talking about the way the tangled elements of a plot are untied. Denouements are often linked to discoveries, because it is often in the light of discovery that a plot can be wound up.
Discovery The moment, usually towards the close of a plot, when something is disclosed which alters the situation and allows the plot to be resolved.
Disjunction The event which by disturbing or rupturing the customary pattern of life initiates the main elements of a plot.
Flashback The flashback is a narrative technique in which a narrator or character interrupts the present time and returns to the past. Through this device, some aspects of the character or incident are illuminated.
End-stopped and Run-on Lines An end-stopped line is one in which the grammatical unit, be it clause or sentence, is coterminous with the line. Thus, there is the satisfaction of finding the line and the sense ending together. A run-on line (sometimes called an enjambed line) is where the grammar, and thus the sense, is left unfinished at the end of the line. Run-on lines create pleasurable feelings of expectation, as the reader has to look further for the full sense of what is being said.
Epigram Either a brief, usually witty, statement or a short poem which makes a simple but often dramatic or humorous point.
Expectation The effect of being led to think that something is going to happen. Short stories, novels and plays all build up expectations in readers and audiences. Expectations are built upon what is known about events and characters, and also on what the characters themselves expect to happen.
Flat and Round Characters Terms introduced by E. M. Forster to indicate the characters in novels who have little personal identity (flat), and those who are given much more individuality (round). You should use the terms with care, because characters in novels are rarely simply flat or round.
Genre A word taken from the French which means a literary type or kind. Comedy, tragedy and satire are genres, but nowadays it is also common to speak of poetry and the novel as genres, too.
Half-rhyme The effect that is created when the consonants of two words in a rhyming position have the same sounds but the vowels do not. In effect, it is consonance functioning in the place of rhyme. The effect of half-rhyme (or para-rhyme, as it is sometimes called) is to make the ear expect a rhyme which is denied. The result is that the words often sound strangely out of tune with each other.
Image and Imagery Any figurative or descriptive language that appeals to one of the five senses is called an image. Images could also be metaphors, similes, symbols and personification, as well as examples of non-figurative description. Images are impressive because they make ideas concrete. They also create atmosphere and can be used to establish a pattern within a poem.
Inference Frequently writers are interested in suggesting rather than explaining a theme or detail. This enables the writer to be subtle or indirect, leaving the reader to infer, or deduce, the writer’s meaning.
Intrusion A term usually used when discussing the way in which a narrator enters his or her own narration, usually for the purpose of commenting upon the events. George Eliot frequently does this in her novels. The effect is sometimes called narratorial intrusion.
Inversion Inversion occurs when an author, usually a poet, changes the ‘natural’ or ‘standard’ word order.
Irony The effect produced when a reader sees that there is a gap between the words that are being said and the real significance of those words. There are different kinds of gaps. The gap between words and truth occurs when sometimes the reader knows to be mistaken is said. A second type of gap, or discrepancy, is between the words and meaning. This occurs when the reader sees that the real significance of what is being said is very different from what the speaker supposes. The gap can lie between intention and result. A speaker can intend something but the reader will see that the result will not be what is expected. This is also called dramatic irony. There is also the irony of one character interpreting the world one way, whilst the reader is led to see that this is false. In all cases of irony, someone is put at a disadvantage because others, usually the author and reader, can see more clearly than he or she can.
Lyric A poem, usually of no more than forty or fifty lines, and often much shorter, which expresses the thoughts and feelings of the poet or of an imagined speaker.
Mental Landscape The effect created when a landscape is portrayed in terms of the feelings of the author or character, who views it. The outer world thus reflects the inner world of thoughts and feelings.
Metaphor and Simile The comparison of one thing in terms of another; in metaphor there is an implicit identity, whereas in simile the comparison is introduced by the words ‘like’ or ‘as’. Metaphors are thus more compressed and economical than similes, through similes are closer to ordinary speech, and there is a distinct pleasure in following though the comparison from the object being presented to that in terms of which it is presented.
Metre The regular rhythms of poetic lines, created by a sequence of stressed or unstressed syllables. A recurring unit of stressed and unstressed syllables is called a foot. Special names are given to these recurring feet, and also to the number of feet in a line. Common English metres are the following:
iambic: an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable;
anapaestic: two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable;
trochaic: a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable;
dactylic: a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables.
Multiple Narration A story that is told by more than one narrator.
Narrative A set of events that are related by an author to a reader or listener. Sometimes the term is used to cover the nature of fiction itself – what it is for a story to be told – and, by extension, it’s also used of the kind of problems readers encounter in narratives. In this latter sense the emphasis is always on how the narrative is made.
Narrator The narrator is one who tells a story. The narrator can, but need not, be the novelist. Narrator can tell their stories, or narratives, in the first or the third person. If the story is told in the first person, there is only access to the mind of the narrator. If, however, the story is narrated in the third person, it is possible to see into the minds of all the characters.
Onomatopoeia The effect that is created when the sounds of words mime or resemble the sounds of the object being described.
Overtones and Undertones The associations of a word or words. Overtones are the clear and obvious associations, while undertones are those meanings which are hinted and implied. Personification The effect created when a non-human object or quality is written about as if it were a human being.
Plot The pattern of events that constitutes the main business of a narrative. Because plot is a literary idea, it’s best to define it as the order of events as they are known to the reader.
Prolepsis/Proleptic An event the full significance of which is only realised in the future. The term can be used of those events that are only seen in their true light later on in the book.
Protagonist Originally the hero in a Greek play, but now it is also used to mean the speaker in a narrative poem or dramatic monologue. The protagonist is usually a specially created voice.
Realism and Naturalism Sometimes these terms are used interchangeably to refer to narratives that try to evoke the sense that what is being conveyed is a direct transcription of actual events. Historically, the terms have different origins; realism is any fiction that presents everyday characters in their usual settings, whereas naturalism was a more philosophical kind of fiction that presented characters as solely the products of their biological inheritance and social circumstances. Since there aren’t in English many novels that follow naturalistic presuppositions, realism is the more useful term.
Resolution A term for the ways in which a plot is sorted out, usually at the close of a book. Retrospective Narration A form of narrative (usually in the first person) that makes use of the past, often to allow the narrator to reflect what has happened and to discern the differences between past and present.
Rhyme The identity in two or more words of the final vowel and any consonants that follow it. When the rhyming words are monosyllabic, the rhyme is said to be masculine, as in ‘bold’ and ‘old’, and when they are polysyllabic, they are said to be feminine, as in ‘ending’ and ‘bending’. (You will also note that in the feminine rhymes the last syllable is unstressed.)
Satire The art of exposing folly or wickedness by mocking it. Sometimes a whole work is called a satire, but more often it is thought of as a quality or function of an author’s writing.
Setting The context in which the events in a literary work take place. Settings are often significant because they reflect in a number of ways the characters and events. The nature of characters, the mood of characters, the plight of characters and the significance of what is going on are often evident in the locations and surroundings.
Soliloquy A speech delivered when a character is either alone or isolated on the stage.
Sonnet A poem of fourteen lines. A number of forms have been created, but the two most popular are the one constructed in an octave (eight lines) and a sestet (six lines), and the one in three quatrains (four lines each) and a couplet (two lines).
Stanza A group of lines in a poem that form its basic, structural unit. The shape of a stanza is formed by the number of lines and often by the rhyme scheme. If you choose to write about the stanza form of a poem, you should seek to show how it moulds the meaning of the poem. You can also ask whether the stanza is appropriate to the mood and meaning of the poem.
Sup-plot A minor plot which often echoes the concerns of the major plot. You can use the term of both novels and plays. The relation between major and minor plots deserves attention.
Surprise The effect created when expectation is not fulfilled. It can, therefore, only be discussed in relation to expectation.
Symbol An object that stands for, points to and shares in a significant reality over and beyond it.
Synecdoche Synecdoche is a figure of speech in which a part is used to describe the whole or the whole is used for a part; the special is used for the general or the general for the special. Writers often employ synecdoche as a dramatic shorthand to focus sharply on an element of the story, as well as to express something in a striking fashion.
Theme The subject, concerns, issues and preoccupations of a poem, novel or play. The word is usually spoken of as meaning the significance of events rather than the events themselves.
Tone The emotional and intellectual attitude, manner, or poise of a piece of writing. A useful way of assessing the tone of a work is by asking how the author is speaking to you – the reader. In ordinary conversation you would pick up the tone from the way the words were delivered; when you are dealing with words on the page, you should allow their diction, rhythm and sounds to do this for you. Because tone is emotional, you must always try to characterize it. Thus, you may say the tone of a work is intimate, sly, innocent, hectoring, aggressive or fierce. You should remember that all literary works have a tone, and though it is sometimes difficult to detect, you can always try to discuss it.
Trajectory The direction of a plot. The term is useful when discussing how the initial conditions of a plot can be expected to develop. Quite often the delight we have in literature lies in the way in which the trajectory of the plot is other than that what we were led to expect.
Understatement Understatement occurs when a writer deliberately de-emphasizes the dialogue or action.
View, Viewpoint How an author regards and thereby invites the reader to regard the events of a narrative. The interesting questions to ask are the closeness of the author to the characters and events, the moral light in which they are regarded and any changes that occur in the author’s perspective.