Literary Terms & Devices

Figures of Speech: Tropes

Tropes involve semantic shift — using a word or phrase to mean something other than its literal sense.

• Metaphor — direct assertion that one thing is another (“the world is a stage”); no comparative marker. Distinguished from simile by the absence of “like” or “as.”
• Simile — explicit comparison using “like” or “as” (“my love is like a red, red rose”).
• Dead metaphor — a metaphor so familiar it is no longer felt as figurative (“the leg of a table,” “time flies”).
• Extended metaphor (conceit) — a metaphor sustained across a passage or entire work. A Petrarchan conceit uses elaborate, often hyperbolic analogies (Donne’s compass in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”).
• Metonymy — substituting an associated attribute or object for the thing itself (“the White House announced” for the US administration; “the Crown” for the monarchy). The substituted term is contiguous with the referent.
• Synecdoche — a part stands for the whole (“all hands on deck”) or the whole for a part; often treated as a subtype of metonymy but technically distinct by the part-whole relationship.
• Personification (prosopopoeia) — attributing human qualities to non-human things or abstractions (“Death be not proud”).
• Apostrophe — addressing an absent person, a dead person, or an abstraction directly (“O Death, where is thy sting?”). Distinct from personification: it involves direct address.
• Hyperbole — deliberate exaggeration for effect (“I’ve told you a million times”).
• Litotes — understatement using negation of the opposite to affirm (“not bad” meaning good; “no small feat”). The opposite of hyperbole in effect.
• Meiosis — deliberate understatement, broader than litotes; diminishes the importance of something.
• Irony (verbal) — saying the opposite of what is meant. Sarcasm is a harsh, often contemptuous subtype.
• Dramatic irony — the audience knows something a character does not; creates suspense or pathos.
• Situational irony — outcome is contrary to expectation (the fire station burns down).
• Cosmic irony — fate or the universe seems to work against human wishes (Hardy’s novels).
• Socratic irony — feigned ignorance to expose contradictions in an interlocutor’s reasoning.
• Oxymoron — compressed contradiction in adjacent words (“living death,” “deafening silence”).
• Paradox — a statement that seems contradictory but reveals a deeper truth (“I must be cruel to be kind”). Unlike oxymoron, a paradox is a full proposition.
• Antithesis — juxtaposition of contrasting ideas in parallel structure (“To err is human; to forgive, divine”).
• Allegory — a narrative in which characters, events, and settings systematically represent abstract ideas or moral/political truths (The Faerie Queene, Animal Farm, The Pilgrim’s Progress).
• Symbolism — a concrete object, image, or action carries consistent meaning beyond itself; unlike allegory, the mapping need not be systematic or exhaustive.
• Euphemism — a mild or indirect word substituted for one considered harsh (“passed away” for died).
• Dysphemism — the reverse: a harsh or blunt substitution for a neutral term.
• Catachresis — strained or mixed metaphor; also the application of a term to something for which no proper word exists (“the arms of the chair”).
• Zeugma — one word (typically a verb) governs two or more elements that it fits grammatically but not logically or semantically in the same way (“He lost his coat and his temper”). Distinguished from syllepsis, where the governing word applies to the two elements in genuinely different senses, often for comic effect (“She broke his heart and his good china”).
• Periphrasis (circumlocution) — using many words where fewer would suffice; roundabout expression.
• Kenning — compound poetic epithet replacing a simple noun, common in Old English/Norse poetry (“whale-road” for the sea, “ring-giver” for a king). A defining feature of Old English verse such as Beowulf.
• Invective — sustained, vehement verbal attack using harsh or abusive language to denounce a person or institution; more prolonged and formal than simple insult.
• Antanaclasis — a figure in which a word is repeated but each repetition carries a different meaning (“Your argument is sound — nothing but sound”).
• Paronomasia — a pun; a play on words that sound alike or share a form but differ in meaning; broader than antanaclasis in that the words need not be identical.
• Paralipsis (apophasis) — drawing attention to something by claiming to pass over it (“I will not mention his criminal record…”). The speaker raises the very point they pretend to omit.
• Hendiadys — expressing a single idea through two nouns joined by a conjunction instead of a noun modified by an adjective (“sound and fury” for “furious sound”; “nice and warm”). Common in Shakespeare.
• Hypallage — a transferred epithet; an adjective is applied to a noun other than the one it logically modifies (“the prisoner’s restless chains” instead of “the restless prisoner’s chains”).
• Metalepsis — a figure invoking a chain of earlier figures or causes by referring to a later one; also used in narratology for transgression of narrative levels (a character addressing their author). Distinct from simple metonymy by involving multiple steps of substitution.
• Anacoluthon — a grammatical break in which a sentence shifts construction mid-stream, abandoning its original structure; often signals agitation or spontaneous speech.
• Aposiopesis — a sentence that breaks off suddenly, leaving it incomplete, implying the speaker cannot or will not continue (“If you do that again, I’ll — “).
• Antimetabole — repetition of words in reverse grammatical order (“I know what I like; I like what I know”); a specific subtype of chiasmus where the same words recur.

Figures of Speech: Schemes

Schemes involve patterning of words or syntax without semantic shift.

• Anaphora — repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses (“I have a dream … I have a dream”).
• Epistrophe (epiphora) — repetition at the end of successive clauses (“government of the people, by the people, for the people”).
• Symploce — combines anaphora and epistrophe (same beginning and ending in successive clauses).
• Chiasmus — reversal of grammatical structures in successive clauses (“Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country”). When only words repeat in reversed order: antimetabole.
• Parallelism — identical or equivalent syntactic structure in successive elements.
• Asyndeton — deliberate omission of conjunctions (“I came, I saw, I conquered”).
• Polysyndeton — deliberate use of many conjunctions (“and … and … and …”), slowing or intensifying.
• Ellipsis — omission of words recoverable from context.
• Anadiplosis — the last word of one clause begins the next (“Fear leads to anger; anger leads to hate”).
• Anastrophe — inversion of normal word order (“Much have I traveled in the realms of gold”).
• Hyperbaton — broad term for any displacement of normal word order.
• Rhetorical question — a question asked for effect with no answer expected.
• Climax (gradatio) — arrangement of elements in ascending order of importance or intensity.
• Anticlimax (bathos) — deliberate or unintentional descent from the elevated to the trivial.
• Loose sentence — a sentence in which the main clause comes first and subordinate elements follow; the meaning is complete before the sentence ends. Contrasts with the periodic sentence.
• Periodic sentence — a sentence in which the main clause is withheld until the end, creating suspense and emphasis; the meaning is incomplete until the final words. Contrasts with the loose sentence.
• Syllogism — a three-part deductive argument: major premise, minor premise, conclusion (“All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal”). In rhetoric, an enthymeme is an abbreviated syllogism with one premise implied.

Sound Devices

• Alliteration — repetition of initial consonant sounds in closely connected words (“Peter Piper picked”). A subtype of consonance.
• Assonance — repetition of vowel sounds in nearby words, not necessarily at the start (“the rain in Spain”). Distinguished from rhyme: end-consonants need not match.
• Consonance — repetition of consonant sounds in nearby words, typically medially or finally (“pitter-patter,” “blank and think”). Broader category that includes alliteration.
• Rhyme — identity of sound from the last stressed vowel onward. End rhyme at line endings; internal rhyme within a line; eye rhyme looks alike but sounds different (“love/move”).
• Slant rhyme (near rhyme, half rhyme) — approximate sound similarity, not exact (“death/breath,” Emily Dickinson).
• Onomatopoeia — words whose sound imitates the thing described (“buzz,” “crackle,” “sibilant”).
• Euphony — combinations of sounds that are smooth and pleasant to hear; often achieved through liquids and nasals (l, m, n, r).
• Cacophony — harsh, discordant sounds used for effect; often uses stops and fricatives.
• Sibilance — heavy use of /s/ and /ʃ/ sounds, a subtype of consonance.

Meter and Versification

Metrical feet

• Iamb (iambic) — unstressed + stressed (da-DUM): “a-LONE.” The most common foot in English.
• Trochee (trochaic) — stressed + unstressed (DUM-da): “TI-ger.”
• Spondee — two stressed syllables (DUM-DUM): “heartbreak.”
• Pyrrhus (pyrrhic) — two unstressed syllables (da-da); rare alone, common as variation.
• Dactyl (dactylic) — stressed + two unstressed (DUM-da-da): “MEA-ning-ful.”
• Anapest (anapestic) — two unstressed + stressed (da-da-DUM): “in the NIGHT.”
• Amphibrach — unstressed + stressed + unstressed (da-DUM-da): “a-LONE-ly.”
• Amphimacer (cretic) — stressed + unstressed + stressed (DUM-da-DUM).

Line length (by number of feet)

• Monometer (1), dimeter (2), trimeter (3), tetrameter (4), pentameter (5), hexameter (6, also alexandrine in French), heptameter (7), octameter (8).
• Iambic pentameter — five iambs per line; the standard of English dramatic and epic verse (Shakespeare, Milton).
• Heroic couplet — two rhymed lines in iambic pentameter; used by Dryden, Pope.

Versification terms

• Blank verse — unrhymed iambic pentameter; not free verse. Used in Paradise Lost, Shakespeare’s plays.
• Free verse (vers libre) — no fixed meter or rhyme scheme; relies on other rhythmic principles.
• Scansion — the analysis and marking of metrical patterns in verse.

• Caesura — a pause within a line of verse, often marked by punctuation (

  ).

• Enjambment — the continuation of a sentence beyond the end of a line without a pause; opposite of end-stopped (a line that ends with punctuation).
• Foot substitution — replacing the expected foot with a different one for emphasis; a spondee substituted for an iamb is common.
• Sprung rhythm — Gerard Manley Hopkins’s system in which each foot begins with a stressed syllable followed by any number of unstressed syllables; counts only stresses, not the total number of syllables per foot.
• Accentual-syllabic verse — verse that counts both stresses and syllables per line; the basis of most traditional English prosody (iambic pentameter, trochaic octameter, etc.).
• Acephalous line (headless line) — a metrical line missing its opening unstressed syllable; common in trochaic verse.
• Hypermetric line — a line that has one or more extra unstressed syllables beyond the expected pattern.
• Feminine ending — a line ending on an extra unstressed syllable after the final stress (“To BE or NOT to BE, that IS the QUES-tion”).
• Masculine ending — a line ending on a stressed syllable, the more common pattern in English.

Poetic Forms

• Sonnet — 14-line poem. Petrarchan (Italian): octave (ABBAABBA) + sestet (CDECDE or variant); the volta (turn) typically at line 9. Shakespearean (English): three quatrains (ABAB CDCD EFEF) + couplet (GG); turn typically at the couplet.
• Spenserian sonnet — linked rhyme scheme: ABAB BCBC CDCD EE; interlocks quatrains.
• Villanelle — 19 lines: five tercets + closing quatrain; two refrains (lines 1 and 3) alternate as the last lines of each tercet and together close the quatrain. Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle” is the canonical English example.
• Sestina — 39 lines: six 6-line stanzas + a 3-line envoi (tercet); the six end-words rotate through a set pattern across stanzas and all appear in the envoi.
• Terza rima — interlocking tercets rhyming ABA BCB CDC…; used by Dante in The Divine Comedy.
• Ottava rima — 8-line stanzas rhyming ABABABCC; used by Ariosto and Byron (Don Juan).
• Ballad — narrative poem in quatrains; typically ABCB or ABAB rhyme; often in alternating 4- and 3-stress lines (ballad meter).
• Ode — extended lyric on a dignified subject. Pindaric ode: strophe, antistrophe, epode; Horatian ode: uniform stanzas; irregular ode: no fixed pattern (Wordsworth’s Intimations ode).
• Elegy — a lyric poem mourning the dead or lamenting loss (Milton’s Lycidas, Tennyson’s In Memoriam). Not to be confused with the elegiac couplet (hexameter + pentameter) of classical verse.
• Pastoral (eclogue) — poetry presenting idealized rural or shepherd life.
• Epic — long narrative poem on heroic subjects; formal conventions include the invocation of a muse, in medias res opening, catalogs, and epic similes (Iliad, Aeneid, Paradise Lost).
• Mock epic (mock-heroic) — applies epic conventions to trivial subjects for comic effect (Pope’s The Rape of the Lock).
• Haiku — Japanese form: three lines of 5, 7, 5 syllables (in the Japanese phonetic unit, the mora); traditionally includes a kigo (seasonal word) and a kireji (cutting word).
• Tanka — Japanese: 5-7-5-7-7 syllables.
• Ghazal — Arabic/Persian form: couplets sharing a radif (refrain) and rhyme; the poet names themselves in the final couplet.
• Pantoum — Malay form in quatrains; lines 2 and 4 of each stanza become lines 1 and 3 of the next.
• Limerick — five lines, AABBA, anapestic or amphibrachic, humorous.
• Concrete (shape) poetry — text arranged visually to mirror its subject.
• Prose poem — written in prose but employing poetic compression and devices without line breaks.
• Rhyme royal — seven-line stanzas in iambic pentameter rhyming ABABBCC; used by Chaucer (Troilus and Criseyde) and Shakespeare (The Rape of Lucrece).
• Spenserian stanza — nine lines (eight iambic pentameter + one alexandrine) rhyming ABABBCBCC; devised by Spenser for The Faerie Queene and adopted by Keats (The Eve of St. Agnes) and Byron (Childe Harold).
• Ballade — French fixed form: three eight-line stanzas (ABABBCBC) plus a four-line envoi (BCBC); each stanza and the envoi end with the same refrain line.
• Rondeau — French fixed form of 15 lines in three stanzas, using only two rhymes; the opening words recur as an unterhymed refrain at lines 9 and 15.
• Aubade — a dawn poem; celebrates lovers parting at daybreak, or laments the arrival of morning (Donne’s “The Sun Rising,” Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet III.v).
• Epithalamion (epithalamium) — a lyric poem composed in honor of a bride and bridegroom; Spenser’s Epithalamion is the most celebrated English example.
• Palinode — a poem or passage retracting something said in an earlier poem; the term goes back to the Greek poet Stesichorus’s retraction of his portrayal of Helen.
• Cento — a poem (or text) composed entirely of lines or passages drawn from other authors’ works; the name is Latin for “patchwork garment.”
• Blason — a Renaissance catalogue poem praising a beloved’s physical features part by part (hair, eyes, lips, etc.); the ironic variant attacking features is an anti-blason (blazon). Shakespeare parodies the form in Sonnet 130.
• Epitaph — a brief inscription or short poem written in memory of the dead; in poetry, the term also covers verse meditations on mortality in the voice of an epitaph.
• Encomium — a formal speech or poem of high praise, typically for a person or institution; in Hellenistic poetics, a recognized genre distinct from the eulogy (spoken after death).
• Idyll — a short poem or prose piece depicting a peaceful, picturesque scene; often rural or pastoral (Theocritus’s Idylls, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King adapts the form).

Narrative Terms

Point of View

• First person — narrator is a character in the story (“I”).
• Second person — narrator addresses “you”; uncommon (If on a winter’s night a traveler).
• Third person limited — narrator outside the story but confined to one character’s consciousness.
• Third person omniscient — narrator knows all characters’ thoughts and events.
• Free indirect discourse — third-person narration that slips into a character’s idiom and perspective without attribution; associated with Austen and Flaubert.
• Unreliable narrator — a narrator whose account is skewed, self-deceiving, or deliberately deceptive; requires the reader to read against the grain (The Turn of the Screw, Lolita, Gone Girl).

Narrative Structure and Technique

• In medias res — beginning a narrative in the middle of the action, then filling in earlier events.
• Frame narrative — a story within a story; an outer narrative introduces an inner one (The Canterbury Tales, Heart of Darkness, Frankenstein).
• Bildungsroman — a novel of education and moral/psychological development from youth to maturity (David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, The Catcher in the Rye).
• Künstlerroman — a subtype of bildungsroman tracing an artist’s development (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man).
• Stream of consciousness — narrative technique representing the continuous flow of thoughts, perceptions, and feelings (Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner).
• Interior monologue — a character’s unspoken thoughts rendered directly; closely related to stream of consciousness but may be more structured.
• Flashback (analepsis) — narration of events that occurred before the story’s present moment.
• Flash-forward (prolepsis) — anticipation of future events.
• Foreshadowing — early hints that prefigure later events.
• Chekhov’s gun — the principle that any significant element introduced must be used later; nothing narratively irrelevant should appear.
• Deus ex machina — an improbable or contrived plot device that resolves an otherwise irresolvable situation; originally a god lowered by stage machinery in Greek theater.
• Dénouement — the final unraveling of a plot after the climax.
• Exposition — background information provided to orient the reader.
• Rising action / falling action — Freytag’s Pyramid: exposition → inciting incident → rising action → climax → falling action → resolution.
• Subplot — a secondary narrative strand that runs alongside the main plot.
• Foil — a character who contrasts with another (often the protagonist) to highlight particular traits.
• Motif — a recurring element (image, symbol, situation, idea) that reinforces the work’s themes.
• Leitmotif — a recurring motif closely associated with a character, idea, or situation; term borrowed from music (Wagner).
• MacGuffin — an object or goal that motivates characters but has little intrinsic narrative significance (the briefcase in Pulp Fiction).
• Pathetic fallacy — the attribution of human emotions to nature or the environment (stormy weather mirroring a character’s grief); coined by Ruskin.
• Epistolary novel — told through letters or documents (Pamela, Clarissa, Frankenstein).
• Atmosphere — the prevailing emotional tone or mood of a literary work, created through setting, imagery, diction, and pacing; distinct from theme (what the work means) and tone (the author’s attitude).
• Mise en abyme — a narrative (or visual) structure in which the work contains a smaller internal version of itself, creating an infinite-regress effect; coined by André Gide from heraldry.
• Analepsis — the technical narratological term for a flashback; narration of events that occurred before the story’s present moment. See also prolepsis (flash-forward).
• Prolepsis — anticipation of future events; narratologically, a passage that refers to events that will occur later in the narrative timeline. See also analepsis.
• Fabliau — a short, comic, often bawdy verse tale popular in medieval French and English literature; typically features lower-class or bourgeois characters and turns on sexual or scatological humor (The Miller’s Tale in The Canterbury Tales).
• Exemplum — a short illustrative narrative or anecdote inserted within a sermon, treatise, or longer narrative to demonstrate a moral point; plural exempla. Common in medieval preaching and framing tales.
• Hagiography — a biography of a saint or venerated person; by extension, any biography that is uncritically adulatory.
• Apocrypha — writings of uncertain authorship or authority, excluded from the canonical body of a tradition; in literary studies, works attributed to an author but not definitively authenticated.
• Travelogue — an account of travels, whether in prose, verse, or lecture; a subgenre of non-fiction that has historically carried fictional or embellished elements (Travels of Sir John Mandeville).
• Ubi sunt — a motif (from the Latin “where are they?”) lamenting the passing of great people, places, or things; characteristic of Old English elegy (The Wanderer) and medieval verse.
• Carpe diem — a lyric motif urging the enjoyment of present pleasures before time passes (Horace, Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”).
• Memento mori — a reminder of death; an image, object, or motif (a skull, an hourglass) in visual art and literature intended to prompt reflection on mortality.
• The sublime — in aesthetics, an experience of awe, terror, and grandeur in the face of overwhelming magnitude or power; theorized by Longinus (literary), Burke (psychological terror), and Kant (mathematical vs. dynamical sublime). Central to Romantic literature.
• The grotesque — a mode combining the comic and the horrifying, distorting the human body or social order to create unease; associated with Rabelais, Gothic literature, and Flannery O’Connor. Distinguished from the merely ugly by its quality of comic incongruity.

Drama Terms

Structure and Genre

• Tragedy — a serious drama ending in catastrophe, typically for the protagonist; associated with catharsis (Aristotle).
• Comedy — ends happily, often in marriage or social reintegration; does not require humor in the modern sense.
• Tragicomedy — blends tragic and comic elements.
• Farce — a comedy relying on exaggerated physical action, improbable situations, and mistaken identity.
• Melodrama — exaggerated emotions, clear moral polarization (heroes and villains), sensational plot.
• Problem play — a drama dramatizing a social or moral issue with no neat resolution (Ibsen, Shaw).
• Closet drama — a play written to be read rather than staged; the term implies literary intent over theatrical practicality (Byron’s Manfred, Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, Hardy’s The Dynasts).
• Masque — a courtly entertainment, popular in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, combining poetry, music, elaborate scenery, and dance; often allegorical, performed by masked aristocratic amateurs (Ben Jonson wrote the most celebrated examples).
• Commedia dell’arte — an Italian theatrical tradition from the sixteenth century featuring masked stock characters (the miserly Pantalone, the boastful Capitano, the clever Zanni/Arlecchino, the naive Innamorati), improvised plot, and physical comedy; major influence on European drama and opera buffa.
• Dumbshow — a pantomimed scene (without speech) performed within a play, typically summarizing or foreshadowing the main action; most famous in the play-within-a-play in Hamlet.
• Stichomythia — rapid, line-by-line dialogue exchange between two characters in drama, each line of equal length; characteristic of Greek tragedy (Sophocles) and used by Shakespeare in scenes of confrontation.
• Skene — in ancient Greek theater, the building or backdrop behind the acting area, from which actors entered; the origin of the word “scene.” The roof could be used as an acting platform.
• Orchestra — in ancient Greek theater, the circular performance area (literally “dancing floor”) where the chorus performed; distinct from the raised stage used by actors.
• Theatrum mundi — the “world as stage” topos: the idea that human life is a theatrical performance; pervasive in Renaissance literature (Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage,” Calderón).

Aristotelian Dramatic Theory

• Mimesis — imitation or representation of life; Aristotle’s foundational term for art.
• Catharsis — the emotional purgation or purification experienced by the audience through pity and fear in tragedy.
• Hamartia — the protagonist’s fatal flaw or error of judgment that contributes to their downfall. Not necessarily a moral failing; can be a mistake.
• Hubris — excessive pride or arrogance; a common form of hamartia but conceptually distinct. Hubris invites divine retribution (nemesis).
• Nemesis — divine retribution, the force that punishes hubris.
• Anagnorisis — the protagonist’s moment of recognition or discovery (often of their own true nature or situation).
• Peripeteia — a sudden reversal of fortune; often coincides with anagnorisis.
• Unities (classical) — unity of action (single plot), time (one day), and place (one location); derived from Aristotle (action only explicit in Poetics; time and place codified by later neoclassicists).

Staging and Convention

• Soliloquy — a character speaks their thoughts aloud while alone on stage; the audience hears; other characters do not.
• Aside — a brief remark made by a character audible to the audience but not to other characters on stage.
• Monologue — an extended speech by one character, not necessarily alone; an aria in opera.
• Prologue / epilogue — introductory or closing material framing the drama; may be spoken by a character outside the action.
• Chorus — in Greek drama, a group representing common people, commenting on and responding to the action. In Elizabethan drama, a single figure providing narrative context.
• Proscenium — the arch framing the stage; the traditional separation of audience from performance space.
• Fourth wall — the imaginary boundary between performers and audience; breaking it means addressing the audience directly.

Genres and Modes

• Lyric — expressive, often short poem centered on the speaker’s inner life; the broadest poetic category.
• Dramatic monologue — a poem in which a speaker addresses a silent listener, inadvertently revealing character (Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” Tennyson’s “Ulysses”). The reader perceives a gap between what the speaker intends to communicate and what they actually reveal.
• Satire — literary mode using irony, ridicule, or exaggeration to critique society, individuals, or institutions. Horatian satire: gentle and playful. Juvenalian satire: harsh and indignant.
• Picaresque — episodic novel following a roguish, low-born hero through a series of adventures (Don Quixote, Tom Jones, Moll Flanders).
• Gothic — genre featuring atmosphere of dread, ruined settings, the supernatural, and psychological terror (The Castle of Otranto, Frankenstein, Rebecca).
• Magic realism — realistic setting incorporating magical elements treated as ordinary; associated with Latin American literature (García Márquez, Borges).
• Metafiction — fiction that self-consciously draws attention to its own constructed nature (Tristram Shandy, If on a winter’s night a traveler).
• Postcolonial literature — works by writers from formerly colonized nations addressing colonialism, identity, and cultural hybridity.
• Dystopia / utopia — fictional societies representing the worst / best possible social arrangements (1984, Brave New World, The Handmaid’s Tale; More’s Utopia).
• Roman à clef — a novel with a “key”: real people and events thinly disguised as fictional (Primary Colors).
• Tragicomedy / dark comedy / black comedy — registers that mix comic and tragic, often with a cynical or nihilistic tone.
• Aphorism — a terse, memorable statement of a general truth or principle (“The unexamined life is not worth living”). Distinguished from a maxim (which is practical/moral) and an epigram (which is witty and pointed); aphorisms may be any of these.
• Didactic — literature whose primary purpose is to teach or instruct, whether morally, philosophically, or practically (De rerum natura, The Faerie Queene). The term is pejorative when the instructive intent overwhelms artistic qualities.
• Homily — a sermon or moralizing discourse intended to edify an audience; by extension, any tediously moralistic speech or passage. Distinct from the aphorism (which is brief and non-sermonic) and the essay (which argues rather than exhorts).
• Colloquial — characteristic of informal, everyday spoken language rather than formal writing; used in literature to render vernacular speech, establish character, or create an intimate register.
• Pedantic — excessively focused on minor details, formal rules, or learning in a way that is ostentatious or tiresome; in literary contexts, describes a narrator, character, or style that prioritizes erudition over clarity or readability.
• Rhetorical modes — the classical categories of discourse purpose: narration (telling a sequence of events), description (evoking sensory detail), exposition (explaining or informing), and argumentation (persuading); most texts blend several modes.
• Semantics — the branch of linguistics concerned with meaning: how words, phrases, and sentences relate to concepts and the world. In literary study, semantic analysis examines connotation, denotation, ambiguity, and how meaning shifts with context.
• Wit — the capacity to perceive incongruities and express them with sharpness, brevity, and verbal dexterity; in Renaissance usage encompassed general intelligence, but since the seventeenth century denotes intellectual humor distinct from mere comedy or slapstick.

Literary Criticism Schools

• Formalism / New Criticism — focuses on the text itself (“close reading”), ignoring historical and biographical context; key terms: paradox, ambiguity, irony, tension. Associated with Cleanth Brooks, I. A. Richards.
• Structuralism — applies linguistics (Saussure) to literature; seeks underlying systems and binary oppositions. Figures: Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss, early Barthes.
• Post-structuralism / Deconstruction — challenges the stability of meaning; all texts are self-undermining. Derrida’s différance; texts contain the seeds of their own contradiction.
• Reader-response criticism — meaning is produced in the act of reading; the reader is not passive. Figures: Stanley Fish (interpretive communities), Wolfgang Iser.
• Psychoanalytic criticism — applies Freudian or Lacanian concepts (the unconscious, repression, desire, the Other) to texts and authors.
• Marxist criticism — examines literature in relation to class, ideology, and material conditions; a work reflects or resists the dominant ideology.
• Feminist criticism — examines gender, representation, the canon, and the conditions of women’s writing. Écriture féminine (Cixous): writing that expresses a distinctly female body and experience.
• New Historicism — reads literature in relation to its historical context; both texts and contexts are “texts” to be interpreted. Greenblatt; key concept: cultural poetics.
• Postcolonial criticism — analyzes the legacy of colonialism in literature; key concepts: Orientalism (Said), hybridity (Bhabha), subaltern (Spivak).
• Ecocriticism — examines literature’s representation of the natural world and human-environment relations.
• Queer theory — critiques heteronormativity and stable gender/sexual identity in texts; figures: Butler, Sedgwick.

Critical Concepts and Key Terms

• Objective correlative — T. S. Eliot’s term for the set of objects, situations, or events that serve as the precise formula for evoking a particular emotion in the reader; the emotion is communicated through the concrete rather than stated directly.
• Negative capability — Keats’s term for the capacity to remain in uncertainty, mystery, and doubt without irritably reaching after fact and reason; the quality he attributed to Shakespeare and considered essential to the poetic character.
• Willing suspension of disbelief — Coleridge’s phrase for the reader’s acceptance of fictional premises in exchange for poetic truth; the audience sets aside skepticism to engage with the imaginative world of the work.
• Defamiliarization (ostranenie) — Viktor Shklovsky’s formalist concept: art renews perception by presenting familiar things in strange ways, breaking through habitual automatized seeing; the Russian term is ostranenie (estrangement).
• Intentional fallacy — Wimsatt and Beardsley’s New Critical argument that the author’s stated intention is neither available nor relevant as a criterion for judging a work; meaning resides in the text, not the author’s mind.
• Affective fallacy — the companion New Critical argument (Wimsatt and Beardsley) that the emotional response of the reader is an unreliable standard for evaluating a literary work; the work itself, not its effects, is the proper object of analysis.
• Dialogism — Bakhtin’s concept that language and the novel are inherently multi-voiced; each utterance exists in dialogue with prior utterances and the anticipated responses of others. Related to his term polyphony (multiple independent voices in the novel).
• Intertextuality — Julia Kristeva’s term (drawing on Bakhtin) for the principle that every text is a mosaic of quotations from and transformations of other texts; no text is an isolated original.
• The uncanny (das Unheimliche) — Freud’s concept of the eerie sensation produced when something familiar is made strange, or when something long repressed returns; central to horror, Gothic, and psychoanalytic literary criticism.
• Ekphrasis — a literary description of a visual work of art; classically, the description of Achilles’s shield in the Iliad; modern examples include Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts.”
• Skaldic poetry — Old Norse court poetry composed by professional skalas, characterized by dense diction, elaborate kennings, and intricate syllabic meter (dróttkvætt); distinct from the simpler Eddic verse of mythological and heroic subjects.
• Canon — the body of literary works considered authoritative, representative, or central to a tradition; the concept is contested in postcolonial and feminist criticism for its historical exclusions.
• Aporia — in deconstruction (Derrida), an undecidable contradiction or impasse within a text that resists resolution; more broadly, a rhetorical admission of uncertainty or perplexity.
• Hegemony — Gramsci’s Marxist term for the way a dominant class maintains power through cultural consent rather than force alone; in literary studies, used to analyze how canonical texts normalize particular ideologies.
• Jouissance — Lacan’s term for excessive pleasure that borders on pain; adopted by Barthes to distinguish the transgressive, destabilizing pleasure of the text (le plaisir = comfortable pleasure; la jouissance = bliss/disruption).
• The gaze — in feminist and psychoanalytic film theory (Mulvey), the way visual narratives position the spectator in an implicitly male, voyeuristic perspective; applied by extension to literary point of view and representation.
• Palimpsest — a manuscript in which an earlier text has been scraped off and written over but remains partially legible; in literary criticism, a text that retains traces of earlier texts or meanings beneath its surface.
• Apophatic (via negativa) — describing something by what it is not rather than what it is; in literary criticism, a method of negative definition, and a recognized theological mode (God described only by negation) that has influenced mystical and experimental writing.