Literary Terms

Glossary of Literary Terms

abstract diction: words that express ideas or concepts, as opposed to concrete details perceptible to the senses. E.g.: “The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement, being in unceasing antagonism to that disposition to aim at something better than customary, which is called, according to circumstances, the spirit of liberty, or that of progress or improvement” (J. S. Mill).

allegory: a symbolic story in which characters, places and things correspond to other things at a different level of meaning. Usually an allegory is a longer work. Characters are personified abstractions like Mercy or Faith. Allegory was more common in the Middle Ages, but some modern works are allegorical.

alliteration: repetition of an initial sound (usually a consonant). E.g.: “beaded bubbles” (Keats).

allusion: an indirect reference to a famous person or thing, usually from the Bible, history, other literature, or mythology. The use of allusion assumes a common cultural background with readers.

antagonist: a character (or sometimes a thing) in conflict with the main character or protagonist.

anticlimax: a drop from dignity to banality or trivia; usually ironic and humorous in tone.

antithesis: the use of parallelism (i.e., similar grammatical constructions) to express contrasting ideas. E.g.: “Oft she rejects, but never once offends” (Alexander Pope).

apostrophe: a rhetorical address to someone or something invisible, inanimate, or not normally addressed. John Donne apostrophizes death in the line “Death, be not proud.”

aside: a dramatic convention: a speech to the audience, understood to be the speaker’s thoughts.

assonance: repetition of a vowel sound. E.g.: “Through the long noon coo” (George Meredith).

attitude: a judgment which an author, character or work expresses. To be distinguished from tone (the emotion with which views are expressed). Tone is emotional, attitude intellectual. Wilfred Owen’s poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” expresses the attitude that efforts to glorify war in the name of patriotism are lies that distort its ugly reality. Often in good poetry the tone is mixed and the attitude complex.

ballad: a narrative song in stanzas. Folk ballads are anonymous ballads, mostly from before 1700, and transmitted orally. They feature refrains, simple stanza forms, and sparse detail. E.g.: “Sir Patrick Spens.” The ballad stanza is four alternating 4- and 3-foot lines rhymed abcb. Literary ballads are modern imitations of folk ballads. E.g.: John Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” The literary term should not be confused with the use of “ballad” in modern popular music to mean “slow, sentimental love song.”

blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter. The most common verse in Shakespeare’s plays.

cacophony: deliberate use of harsh, dissonant sounds. E.g.: “Their clenched teeth still clench’d, and all their limbs / Locked up like veins of metal, clamped and screwed” (John Keats).

caesura (plural: caesurae): a light pause within a line; it may or may not be marked with punctuation. E.g.: “Downward to darkness || on extended wings” (Wallace Stevens).

canon: a body of writings considered authentic (e.g., books of the Bible, or Shakespeare’s works). Now it is used to mean the works considered worthy to be studied in college and included in anthologies. Literary critics debate the way canons are formed, and whether factors like gender and ethnicity affect inclusion.

carpe diem: Latin for “seize the day”: live for the joys of the moment. A common poetic theme.

catharsis: according to Aristotle, the purging of pity and fear that tragedy causes in viewers.

climax: the high point of tension in a plot, when the outcome is decided.

colloquial diction: the casual diction of informal speech and writing. With his line “Get stewed. Books are a load of crap,” Philip Larkin deliberately seeks an unpoetic effect.

comedy: a literary genre intended primarily to amuse the audience. Like tragedy, the term originally applied only to plays but is now also used for other genres.

complication: a secondary, minor conflict introduced part of the way through a story or drama.

compound epithet: a hyphenated adjective of two or more words. E.g.: Shakespeare’s “oak-cleaving thunderbolts,” or the cliché “ear-splitting noise.”

conceit: a startling metaphor or idea, especially one on which a Renaissance poem is based.

conflict: the central problem or issue to be resolved in a plot, involving the protagonist struggling against another character(s) or obstacle. Conflict can also refer to the ideas in a literary work.

concrete diction: words that express details perceptible by the senses. E.g.: “She went stealthily as a cat through this profusion of growth, gathering cuckoo-spittle on her skirts, cracking snails that were underfoot, staining her hands with thistle-milk and slug-slime, and rubbing off upon her naked arms sticky blights which, though snow-white on the apple-tree trunks, made madder stains on her skin . . .” (Thomas Hardy).

connotations: overtones or suggestions of additional meaning that a word gains from the contexts in which readers have encountered it. Not to be confused with denotation, the dictionary definition of a word.

consonance: slant rhyme in which all the consonant sounds are the same, but the vowel sound is different. E.g.: “bitter” and “batter.”

convention: necessary or convenient features of literature which audiences unquestioningly accept. An example from drama is the “fourth wall”: the audience’s understanding that a scene showing characters indoors has an invisible wall between the audience and the stage.

cosmic irony (irony of fate): irony in which a malicious fate seems to be deliberately frustrating human efforts. Usually found at a climactic point in a novel or tragedy (such as Oedipus Rex).

couplet: a two-line pattern of rhymed lines of the same length, either as a recurring pattern in itself or as part of a poem (such as the couplet that ends an English sonnet).

crisis: part of a plot: a scene of high tension that turns out not to be the climax.

dénouement (DAY-new-MAW), resolution or conclusion: the scene in which a plot reaches its final outcome: mysteries are solved, questions answered, and the main conflict settled.

deus ex machina (DAY-us ex MOCK-ee-na): a convention used in Greek tragedy after Sophocles for lowering or lifting actors playing gods by means of a crane on the skene. The Latin phrase deus ex machina (“a god from a machine”) is now used for any quick means of resolving a plot, like the sudden revelation at the end of Huck Finn that Jim is free and Huck has a fortune.

diction: choice of words. A writing style may vary according to the level of diction: formal or informal. Diction can be monosyllabic or polysyllabic, concrete or abstract, specific or general. Words that derive from Anglo-Saxon (Old English) tend to be monosyllabic, simple, and familiar (e.g., “Cats eat meat”); words of Latin origin are often polysyllabic, formal, general and abstract, and they produce a different effect (e.g., “Felines are carnivorous mammals”). Other terms for diction: ornate, elevated, learned, technical, simple, colloquial, regional, archaic. Jargon is a derogatory term for the needless use of technical terms. Diction is not a literary device like imagery or irony; in writing about literature, it makes no sense to say “The poet uses diction and imagery.” If there is no diction, there is no imagery and no poem, because there are no words. In writing about literature, diction is a useful term when you describe the effect of particular kinds of words:

Keats uses archaic diction like “casements,” “perilous” and “forlorn” to evoke the world of Medieval romance.

Thomas Hardy’s uneducated characters speak in colloquial diction.

Using diction with religious connotations, Lysander says that the lovestruck Helena “Devoutly dotes, dotes in idolatry” (1.1.109) on Demetrius, worshipping him like a god.

discovery: a scene in which a character comes to a major realization.

dramatic irony: irony that results when characters say or do something of greater significance than they realize. The audience’s knowledge is superior to that of the character(s).

dramatic monologue: a poem written as a speech made by a character at some decisive moment. It often helps the reader to imagine it as a speech taken out of a play, and to establish the situation and infer character. E.g.: Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses.”

dynamic character: a character who changes, especially one who comes to a major realization. The realization may or may not change the character’s actions, but the character must never be able to see the world in quite the same way. Not all protagonists are dynamic characters.

elegy: a sadly meditative poem, often expressing grief for the dead. E.g.: Walt Whitman’s elegy on Abraham Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” Not to be confused with eulogy, a formal expression of praise, not necessarily for someone who has died.

elision: omission of an unstressed syllable in scansion for the sake of regular meter. In William Wordsworth’s line “I was a traveler then upon the moor,” the second syllable in traveler (-el-) is elided:

Ĭ wās ⁄ ă trāv ⁄ elĕr thēn ⁄ upōn ⁄ thĕ mōor.

Elided syllables may be read aloud although they do not weigh in the meter. Poetic contractions like ’tis, e’en, and o’er exist for the sake of elision.

end-stopped and run-on lines: an end-stopped line ends in a full pause, marked by punctuation. Enjambment is the use of enjambed or run-on lines, in which sentences cross line breaks without punctuation. In these lines by Robert Browning, lines 2 and 3 illustrate enjambment:

That’s my last duchess standing on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive. I call

That piece a wonder, now; Frà Pandolf’s hands

Worked busily a day, and there she stands.

English (Shakespearean) sonnet: a sonnet with a rhyme scheme of ababcdcdefefgg. The first twelve lines are quatrains; the last two form a couplet. A turn, or transition, usually comes at the start of line 13 or 9.

enjambment: see end-stopped and run-on lines.

epic: a long narrative poem about the adventures of a hero. Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad and the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf are traditional or primary epics: ancient works from an oral tradition, recording legendary history. Poems that imitate primary epics are literary or secondary epics: Vergil’s Aeneid, Dante’s The Divine Comedy, John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The word is loosely used to describe any kind of story (such as a novel or movie) that is vast in scope.

epic simile: formal, lengthy similes imitating the style of Homer. They usually state the “vehicle” (the figurative part) first, using imagery, followed by a transitional phrase like “even so,” and a shorter statement of the “tenor” (the literal part). Usually they describe an action. The following example, from John Dryden’s translation of Vergil’s Aeneid, describes soldiers rushing into battle:

As hungry wolves, with raging appetite,

Scour through the fields, nor fear the stormy night—

Their whelps at home expect the promised food,

And long to temper their dry chaps in blood—

So rushed we forth at once; resolved to die

Resolved, in death, the last extremes to try.

epigram: a short poem culminating in a witty turn of thought. Usually rhymed and ironic in tone. E.g.: “Thy praise or dispraise is to me alike: / One doth not stroke me, nor the other strike” (Ben Jonson, “To Fool, or Knave”). The term is also used for a witty saying. E.g.: Oscar Wilde’s definition of a cynic as “A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

epithet: a descriptive word or phrase for a person or thing. Many epithets are well known bynames, such as “Our Redeemer,” “Ivan the Terrible,” and “Land of the Rising Sun.” The Homeric epithet (used by Homer in the Iliad and Odyssey) is a phrase like “the grey-eyed goddess” (Athena), “master charioteer” (Nestor) or “rosy-fingered Dawn.” Poets may invent epithets, like those describing sleep in a poem by Samuel Daniel: “Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night, / Brother to Death, in silent darkness born.” See also the entry on “compound epithet.” The literary device should not be confused with the modern use of “epithet” as an abusive phrase such as a racial or animal epithet.

epiphany: a sudden moment of realization in a story or play, often triggered by a mundane event. Originally a religious term for a worldly manifestation of God’s presence.

euphony: the use of language to produce a pleasing, harmonious sound. E.g.: “To watch the crisping ripples on the beach, / And tender curving lines of creamy spray” (Tennyson).

exposition: the revelation (usually early) in a story or play of necessary background information.

extended metaphor: a metaphor developed at length and in detail, typically over an entire poem, stanza or paragraph. E.g.: Robert Frost’s poem that begins, “She is as in a field a silken tent.”

fable: a short, unadorned prose fiction that teaches a moral lesson. Often animals are characters.

feminine rhyme: rhyme with stress on a syllable other than the last. E.g.: “hēav-ĕn” and “sēv-ĕn.”

figure of speech or figurative language: language that describes a thing by comparing it to something else. The most common figures of speech are metaphor, simile, personification, metonymy and synecdoche. The opposite of figurative is literal.

first-person or participant narrator: a narrator who is a (major or minor) character in the story.

flat character: a one-dimensional character who has only a few, easily defined traits. Most minor characters are flat. Not to be confused with static character.

foot: a unit of poetic meter (usually one stressed and one or two unstressed syllables).

foreshadowing: a hint that is fully understood only in retrospect after the reader discovers more information later in the plot. The term does not simply mean an omen or an explicit prediction of something that will happen later. Foreshadowing is always a noun; foreshadow is a verb.

form: the general design or structure of a poem or literary work as a whole.

formal diction: impersonal language of educated people, usu. written.

free verse: (from the French term vers libre) poetry in an open form, without rhyme or meter.

general English: the style of most literate usage; more formal than colloquial English.

genre (ZHAWN-ruh): a form or category of literature, such as epic, tragedy, comedy and satire.

haiku: in Japanese, a poem of about seventeen syllables.

hamartia (hahm-mar-TEE-uh): according to Aristotle, an error of judgment that causes the downfall of a tragic protagonist. The concept is often identified with the tragic flaw or fatal weakness in character, such as the jealousy of Othello or the pride of Oedipus.

heroic couplet: an iambic pentameter couplet, the first line ending in a light pause, the second more heavily end-stopped. Widely used in eighteenth-century poetry, heroic couplets lend themselves to witty satire and epigrammatic poetry. E.g. from John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester:

Birds feed on birds, beasts on each other prey,

But savage man alone does man betray.

Pressed by necessity, they kill for food;

Man undoes man to do himself no good.

hubris (HEW-bris): extreme (or “overweening”) pride, especially when considered a tragic flaw.

hyperbole (overstatement): a rhetorical device in which exaggeration is used for emphasis or effect. E.g.: “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.”

iambic meter: meter with alternating stressed and unstressed syllables.

iambic pentameter: a line of five iambs; a meter that occurs in all blank verse (such as Shakespeare’s plays), heroic couplets, and sonnets. The example below is from John Milton:

Lŏok hōme ⁄ wărd ān ⁄ gĕl nōw, ⁄ ănd mēlt ⁄ wĭth rūth:

Ănd, Ō ⁄ yĕ dōl ⁄ phĭns, wāft ⁄ thĕ hāp ⁄ lĕss yōuth.

image: a sensory experience rendered in language. An image is visual, auditory, tactile (touch), gustatory (taste), or olfactory (smell). E.g.: John Keats describes a beaker of wine “With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, / And purple-stained mouth.” The collective function of the images in a work, or an author’s use of images, is imagery.

internal rhyme: rhyme within a line. E.g.: “I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers” (P. B. Shelley).

inversion: reversal of normal word order for the sake of emphasis. In his line “And all the air a solemn stillness holds,” Thomas Gray puts the direct object (“stillness”) before the verb (“holds). In Edgar Allan Poe’s line “Once upon a midnight dreary,” he puts the adjective (“dreary”) before the noun it modifies. The United States national motto, which appears on American currency, is a short sentence that places a prepositional phrase at the start instead of the end.

ironic point of view: a first-person narrator who does not understand the implications of the story. Usually ironic point of view refers to unreliable or naïve narrators.

irony: Discrepancy, usually between apparent and real significance. Irony can refer to a manner of expression or a quality in the thing perceived. It is an indirect way of communicating an attitude. Irony can vary in tone, from humorous to bitter. See cosmic irony, dramatic irony, and irony of situation.

irony of situation: a situation in which an ironic discrepancy is apparent. E.g.: a song entitled “Almost There” peaked at number two on the pop charts. An example from literature comes at the climactic point in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, when Boo Radley, the neighbor whom the child protagonist feared, rescues her; the fact that it is Halloween when Boo emerges enhances the irony.

Italian (Petrarchan) sonnet: a sonnet with a rhyme scheme of abbacddc in the octave (the first eight lines). The sestet (the last six) has a combination of two or three rhymes (e.g., cdcdcd, cddcdd, or cdecde). A turn, or transition, usually comes in line 9, at the start of the sestet.

levels of diction: ranking of language (e.g., colloquial, general, formal) in order of formality.

limited or selective omniscience: narrative that sees into one (major or minor) character.

lost rhyme: words which no longer rhyme. In Shakespeare’s time, “love” and “move” rhymed.

lyric: a short poem that is neither narrative nor dramatic. It may express thoughts and feelings, describe something, or reflect upon something. Most poems studied in school are lyrics.

masculine rhyme: rhyme of one-syllable words or words with stressed final syllables. E.g.: “lēave” and “dĕ-cēive.”

metaphor: a figure of speech in which a thing is described as something else. On a sharp-witted old man, “the white locks of age were [. . .] the thatch of an intellectual tenement in good repair” (Nathaniel Hawthorne). The term metaphor is sometimes used to refer to the collective use of figurative language, even if some examples might be similes or other figures.

meter: a rhythmic pattern of stress in a poem. Double meter (usually iambic) is much more common in English. Its basic pattern has one unstressed syllable between every two stressed syllables. Triple meter (usually anapestic) has two unstressed syllables between every two syllables. E.g. of triple meter: “The Night Before Christmas,” “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

metonymy: a figure of speech in which one thing is substituted for another with which it is associated. In “The pen is mightier than the sword,” pen and sword represent the printed word and military force.

metric feet and line lengths:

anapest: a metrical foot with an unstressed-unstressed-stressed (for example, “ănd ăwāy”).

dactyl: stressed-unstressed-unstressed (for example, “Thīs ĭs thĕ”).

iamb: unstressed‑stressed (for example, “ălōne”).

pyrrhic: unstressed-unstressed (for example, “ĭn ă”).

spondee: stressed-stressed (for example, “dīm sēa”).

trochee: stressed-unstressed (for example, “hōnŏr”).

monometer: a line of poetry consisting of one metric foot. Pronounced mo-NOM-eter.

dimeter: a two-foot line. Pronounced DIM-e-ter.

trimeter: a three-foot line. Pronounced TRIM-eter.

tetrameter: a four-foot line. Pronounced teh-TRAM-eter.

pentameter: a five-foot line. Pronounced pen-TAM-eter.

hexameter: a six-foot line. Pronounced hex-AM-eter.

mixed metaphor: the stringing together of stale metaphors. Usually not intentional; considered a fault. E.g.: She tried to cure her broken heartstrings.

monologue: a lengthy speech by a single character in a play, either alone or to others. Distinguished from a soliloquy because the speaker is not necessarily alone on stage.

motivation: the reasons an author establishes for a character’s actions. In The Tempest, the desire to achieve justice and regain his rightful position in Milan motivates Prospero.

myth: a traditional story about the exploits of immortal beings. A famous collection of myths is the Metamorphoses by the Roman poet Ovid.

mythology: myths taken collectively.

naïve narrator: a narrator who is too innocent to understand the story fully.

narrative: a story; an account of a sequence of events, whether fictional or non-fictional. To be distinguished from writing that is strictly descriptive, expository (like an essay), or dramatic (i.e., like a play). A narrative may include some description and analysis, but it must tell a story.

narrative poem: a poem that tells a story. E.g.: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

objective narrator: a technique that only describes and does not enter characters’ thoughts.

octave: the first eight lines of a sonnet, especially an Italian sonnet.

ode: a formal lyric, usually serious in tone, which expands upon a theme. Usually addressed to a subject which it praises or contemplates. Odes are an ancient Greek form which modern writers have imitated, notably eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English poets.

omniscience: narrative that sees into different characters. In editorial omniscience, a variant of omniscience, the third-person narrator adds comments judging characters.

onomatopoeia: the use of sound to suggest the qualities of the thing described. Poets use meter, vowel sounds, and consonant sounds to suggest sound, time, movement, effort, texture or tone. Watching the tide retreat, Matthew Arnold writes, “Now I only hear / Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.”

oxymoron: a rhetorical device in which contradictory terms (usually an adjective and noun) are combined. E.g.: “Beautiful tyrant! Fiend angelical!” (Juliet describing Romeo).

parable: a short narrative that illustrates a moral, philosophical or spiritual lesson. A parable may be allegorical. E.g.: the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32).

paradox: a kind of rhetorical device: a statement that at first seems self-contradictory but that on reflection makes sense. E.g.: Shakespeare’s sonnet 43 begins, “When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see.” He means that he sees “best” in his dreams, when he can see his beloved. A shorter example is Alexander Pope’s mocking description of false architectural grandeur as “huge heaps of littleness.”

parallel: a similarity of situations in a literary work. Parallel is a noun, adjective or verb; a novel can have parallel subplots or scenes that parallel one another. Not to be confused with parallelism, which is only a noun and refers only to sentence structure.

parallelism: the use of similar grammatical constructions to express related ideas. E.g.: “Wild as wind, and light as feather” (Samuel Johnson). Not to be confused with parallel.

paraphrase: a summary in which the reader restates essential ideas.

parody: a mocking imitation of another work or writer.

persona (plural personae): the speaking voice in a poem, as distinguished from the poet’s own voice. The term is most useful when the speaker is clearly not the poet, as in “My Last Duchess,” where Robert Browning assumes the persona of a murderous duke in Renaissance Italy.

personification: a figure of speech in which something abstract or internal (e.g., time, love) is represented as a person. The term is sometimes used for pathetic fallacy (giving feelings or thoughts to subhuman things, as in “whispering breeze”), but the more important use is for abstract things. E.g.: “Yet Reason frowns on War’s unequal game” (Samuel Johnson). Not all personification is indicated by capital letters.

point of view: the perspective from which a story is narrated. Second-person narrative is possible, but two classes of narrator are common: first-person (or participant) and third-person (or nonparticipant).

prosody (PROSS-uh-dee): the study of meter, rhyme and poetic form; a synonym for versification.

protagonist: main character. A more general term than hero; not all protagonists are heroic.

pun: a play on words. A pun can be strictly for humor, as in Dorothy Parker’s telegram after a much-publicized pregnancy: “Dear Mary, we all knew you had it in you.” Poets sometimes use puns, humorously or seriously, to suggest more than one meaning. Satirizing small-minded critics, Alexander Pope writes, “’twere a sin to rob them of their mite,” playing on mite (small bit) and might (power). The terms wordplay and ambiguity are also used; ambiguity may refer more to phrasing than words.

quatrain: a stanza consisting of four lines; or a four-line section of an English sonnet.

realism: as a term in literary history, realism refers to fiction and drama of the late nineteenth century that depicted ordinary middle-class existence and its daily concerns like money, society, and marriage. Characters are bankers, farmers and housekeepers, not swashbuckling pirates, gallant knights, or supernatural beings. In a more general sense, realistic refers to a manner of representing life, as opposed to romantic.

refrain: words, phrases, or lines repeated at intervals in a song or songlike poem. E.g.: “The answer is blowing in the wind.” Refrains can be terminal (following a stanza), incremental (varying slightly with each recurrence), and internal (within a stanza). A refrain can be nonsense words (“E-I-E-I-O”).

reversal or peripety: a part of a plot: a dramatic change (for better or worse) in a character’s fortunes or situation. An ironic reversal is a situation in which (as the cliché goes) the tables are turned.

rhetoric: the art of using language persuasively; or the adornment of literal, straightforward language to produce emphasis or emotional effect. Nowadays the word is often used with unfavorable overtones (“phony political rhetoric”). Rhetorical device is a useful term for an expression (e.g., paradox, apostrophe, repetition) that is not, strictly speaking, a figure of speech.

rhetorical question: a question used for emphasis, not to gain information. The question “Do snakes have ears?” is literal, but “Hath not a Jew eyes?” (spoken by Shylock in The Merchant of Venice) is a rhetorical way of saying, “Jews are human beings with feelings, just like Christians.”

rhyme: identical or similar sounds, usually at the end of a line of poetry.

rhyme scheme: the order in which rhymed words recur. In a stanza of four lines, the possible rhyme schemes include abab, abcb, and abba.

rhythm: recurrence of stresses and pauses in a poem.

round character: a multi-faceted character, especially one who is capable of choosing right or wrong. Usually a protagonist is a round character. Not to be confused with dynamic character.

run-on line: see end-stopped or run-on lines.

satire: a form of literature or art that criticizes something (e.g., an idea or institution) by making it seem ridiculous. Satire refers to a technique (“Jonathan Swift uses satire in Gulliver’s Travels”), a genre (“Swift excelled at satire”), or a single work (“Gulliver’s Travels is a satire”). Adjective: satirical; verb: satirize.

scansion: the act of scanning the meter of a poem or line: identifying stressed and unstressed syllables and breaks between metric feet. The example is from Thomas Hardy:

Wōmăn mŭch ⁄ mīssed, hŏw yŏu ⁄ cāll tŏ mĕ, ⁄ cāll tŏ mĕ,

Sāyĭng thăt ⁄ nōw yŏu ăre ⁄ nōt ăs yŏu ⁄ wēre.

sestet: the last six lines of a sonnet, esp. an Italian sonnet; or a six-line stanza.

setting: the location of a story. It may be important in developing character, motivation and meaning. In To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee carefully establishes what Maycomb is like.

simile: a metaphor using an explicit connective such as like or as. E.g.: “Man, like the generous vine, supported lives, / And gains his strength from the support he gives” (Alexander Pope).

slant rhyme: rhyme in which final sounds are similar but not identical. The opposite of exact or true rhyme. Also called near or half rhyme. E.g.: good and cod.

soliloquy: (plural soliloquies) a speech in a play made alone on stage, understood as a character’s thoughts.

sonnet: a fourteen-line poem with a fixed rhyme scheme. The sonnet originated in Italy (the original name, sonnetto, meant “little song”). Early sonnets were often about unrequited love.

stanza: a group of lines whose pattern (number, meter, rhyme) recurs throughout a poem. The term stanza is loosely used for any group of lines set apart in a poem.

static character: a character who does not undergo a change; contrasted with dynamic character.

stichomythia (stick‑uh‑MYTH‑ee‑uh): dialogue consisting of alternating single lines spoken by two characters. It was used in Greek tragedy to show tense disputes. It is similar to repartee (rep-ar-TAY), a fast-paced exchange of witty retorts in modern comedy.

stock character: a character type used repeatedly, often a stereotype like the mad scientist of horror stories or the blonde airhead of teen movies. Stock characters are usually encountered in popular fiction. However, excellent writers have sometimes used stock characters in original ways.

stream of consciousness: narrative that represents the process of a character’s thoughts and sense impressions; it may consist largely of sentence fragments. The term interior monologue is sometimes used as a synonym, but some critics use it to mean a narrative told as if the character were speaking to him- or herself. In this case, the interior monologue is usually more coherent than stream-of-consciousness narrative.

stress or accent: greater force given to one syllable in speaking.

style: the distinctive features of a writer’s language. In elements such as diction (choice of words) and sentence structure, style can range from formal to informal, complex to simple, and poetic to plain. Writing styles may vary according to the use of description, dialogue, figurative language, tone, narrative point of view, and other qualities. The three sentences below, all from prose fiction, produce very different effects:

Unfathomable to mere mortals is the lore of fiends. (Nathaniel Hawthorne)

She’s easy to be with. (Raymond Carver)

Sugar done swiped her mama’s lipstick, so we ready. (Toni Cade Bambara)

symbol: a thing that suggests more than its literal meaning. A symbol can be a thing (e.g., the flowers in John Steinbeck’s story “The Chrysanthemums”) or an action (Robert Frost’s choice of the road not taken). Recurring images (blackness in Macbeth, fire in Great Expectations) can take on symbolic overtones. Symbolism is the collective function of symbols in a work, or an author’s use of symbols.

synecdoche: a figure of speech in which a part of a thing stands for the whole. E.g.: “Lend me your ears” (Shakespeare, Julius Caesar).

tale: a short narrative, usually lacking in detail, with unrealistic and sometimes fantastic characters and events. Usually tales are less concerned than short stories with revealing theme and character. The term tale has connotations of timeless folklore. E.g.: “Jack and the Beanstalk.”

theme: a term used for the main idea (not necessarily the subject) of a work of literature, an idea which a work explores, or an argument that a work advances. A theme can be identified in a complete sentence (“Power corrupts”), a noun phrase (“the corrupting influence of power”), or a single word (“power”). Because a theme is not a writing technique (like irony or imagery), it is incorrect to say a writer “uses” a theme.

third-person or nonparticipant narrator: a narrator who is not a character. Third-person narrators include objective narrators, limited (or selective) omniscience, and omniscience.

tone: the emotion with which views are expressed. To be distinguished from attitude, which is a judgment of something. Tone is emotional, attitude intellectual. The tone of a love poem might be awestruck, pleading, self-pitying, bitter, or many other things; it may involve more than one emotion. In good poetry the tone is often mixed and the attitude complex.

tragedy: a literary genre depicting serious actions that usually have a disastrous outcome for the protagonist. Strictly speaking, the term applies only to drama, but it is now also used for novels.

understatement: a rhetorical device, usually ironic in tone, in which something is emphasized by being understated. E.g. from a bumper sticker: “One nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day.”

unity: wholeness in a work of art, regarded as an ideal for which writers should strive. A unified work satisfies readers; it has a beginning, middle and end, and each part contributes to the whole. A work lacking unity might have several subplots which are not closely tied together, or scenes which are unnecessary.

unreliable narrator: a narrator who misinterprets the story due to prejudice, madness, etc.

verbal irony: the rhetorical use of language to mean the opposite of what is expressed. Andrew Marvell’s lines “sure as oft as women weep / It is to be supposed they grieve” are an indirect comment on coyness.

verse: lines in regular meter; or a synonym for poetry.