Basic Literary Terms                                                              

Allegory (Gk. allos "another, different" + agoreuein "speak openly, speak in the assembly," from agora "assembly.") a story, poem, or picture that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one: Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory of the spiritual journey. • the genre to which such works belong. • a symbol.

Alliteration (L. ad- "to" + litera "letter") the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words (e.g., calm, cool, and collected).

Anapest (Gk. ana- "back" + paiein "to strike") a foot consisting of two short or unstressed syllables followed by one long or stressed syllable.

Antagonist (Gk. anti- "against" + agonizesthai "to contend for a prize") the most prominent of the characters who oppose the protagonist or hero(ine) in a dramatic or narrative work.

Aside ("to one side, out of the way," from a- + side) a short speech or remark spoken by a character in a drama, directed either to the audience or to another character, which by convention is supposed to be inaudible to the other characters on stage.

Assonance (L. ad- "to" + sonare "to sound") the resemblance of sound between syllables in nearby words arising from the rhyming of stressed vowels (e.g. sonnet , porridge ), and also from the use of identical consonants with different vowels (e.g. killed , cold , culled ).

Aubade (L. alba "dawn") a poem or piece of music appropriate to the dawn.

Ballad (L.L. ballare "to dance") a folk song or orally transmitted poem telling in a direct and dramatic manner some popular story usually derived from a tragic incident in local history or legend.

Blank Verse (O.Fr. blanc "white, shining"; L. vertere  "to turn") verse without rhyme, especially that which uses iambic pentameters.

Caesura (L. cædere "to cut down")  a pause in a line of verse, often coinciding with a break between clauses or sentences.

Catastrophe (Gk. kata "down" + strephein "turn.") the final resolution or dénouement of the plot in a tragedy, usually involving the death of the protagonist .

Catharsis (Gk.katharsos "pure") the effect of ‘purgation’ or ‘purification’ achieved by tragic drama.

Character (Gk. kharassein "to engrave")  a personage in a narrative or dramatic work ( see characterization ); also a kind of prose sketch briefly describing some recognizable type of person.

Characterization: the representation of persons in narrative and dramatic works.

Chorus (Gk. khoros "band of dancers or singers, dance, dancing ground") a group of singers distinct from the principal performers in a dramatic or musical performance; also the song or refrain that they sing.

Climax (Gk. klinein "to slope") any moment of great intensity in a literary work, especially in drama.

Comedy (Gk. komos "revel, carousal" + oidos "singer, poet") a play (or other literary composition) written chiefly to amuse its audience by appealing to a sense of superiority over the characters depicted.

Comic Relief (O.Fr. relief "assistance")  the interruption of a serious work, especially a tragedy, by a short humorous episode.

Connotation (L. com- "together" + notare "to mark") the range of further associations that a word or phrase suggests in addition to its straightforward dictionary meaning.

Convention (com- "together" + venire "to come") an established practice—whether in technique, style, structure, or subject-matter—commonly adopted in literary works by customary and implicit agreement or precedent rather than by natural necessity.

Couplet (L. copula "tie, connection") a pair of rhyming verse lines, usually of the same length.

Dactyl (Gk. dactylos "finger") a metrical unit ( foot ) of verse, having one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables, as in the word carefully.

Denotation (L. de- "completely" + notare "to mark") straightforward dictionary meaning.

Denouement (L. dis- "un-" + Fr. nouer "to tie, knot") the clearing up or ‘untying’ of the complications of the plot in a play or story.

Deus ex machina ("the god from the machine," the device by which "gods" were suspended over the stage in Greek theater) an unexpected event or intervention in a play or novel, which resolves a difficult situation.

Dialogue (Gk. dia- "across" + legein "speak") spoken exchanges between or among characters in a dramatic or narrative work; or a literary form in prose or verse based on a debate or discussion, usually between two speakers.

Diction (L. dicere "speak, tell, say") the choice of words used in a literary work.

Dramatic monologue  (Gk. dran "to do, act, perform" + Gk. monos "single, alone" + logos "speech, word") a kind of poem in which a single fictional or historical character other than the poet speaks to a silent ‘audience’ of one or more persons.

Dramatis Personae (L. "persons of the play") used to refer collectively to the characters represented in a dramatic work (or, by extension, a narrative work).

Elegy (Gk. elegos "poem or song of lament") an elaborately formal lyric poem lamenting the death of a friend or public figure, or reflecting seriously on a solemn subject.

Elision (L. ex- "out" + -lidere, comb. form of laedere "to strike.") the suppression of a vowel or syllable in pronouncing.

Enjambment (Fr. enjamber "to stride over," from jambe "leg") the unpunctuated running over of the syntax and sense of one verse line into the next.

Epic (Gk epos "word, story, poem") a long narrative poem celebrating the great deeds of one or more legendary heroes, in a grand ceremonious style.

Epigram (epi- "on" + graphein "write") a short poem with a witty turn of thought; or a wittily condensed expression in prose.

Exposition (L. ex- "forth" + ponere "to put, place")  the setting forth of a systematic explanation of or argument about any subject; or the opening part of a play or story, in which we are introduced to the characters and their situation, often by reference to preceding events.

Fable (L. fari "speak, tell,")  a brief tale in verse or prose that conveys a moral lesson, usually by giving human speech and manners to animals and inanimate things

Fiction (L. fingere "to form") the general term for invented stories, now usually applied to novels, short stories, novellas, romances, fables, and other narrative works in prose.

Figure (L. figura "a shape, form, figure") an expression that departs from the accepted literal sense or from the normal order of words, or in which an emphasis is produced by patterns of sound.

Flashback (analepsis): a form of anachrony by which some of the events of a story are related at a point in the narrative after later story-events have already been recounted.

Foil (L. folium "leaf," from the practice of backing a gem with metal foil to make it shine better) a character whose qualities or actions serve to emphasize those of the protagonist (or of some other character) by providing a strong contrast with them.

Foot (O.E. fot) a group of syllables taken as a unit of poetic metre in traditional prosody , regardless of word-boundaries.

Foreshadowing (M.E. + late O.E. sceadwian "to protect as with covering wings") presenting an indication or a suggestion of beforehand.

Free verse: a term loosely used from the early years of the 20th cent. to describe many forms of irregular, syllabic, or unrhymed verse, freed from the traditional demands of metre.

Hero (Gk. heros "demi-god")  the main character in a narrative or dramatic work.

Hyperbole (Gk. hyper- "beyond" + bol-, nom. stem of ballein "to throw")  exaggeration for the sake of emphasis in a figure of speech not meant literally.

Iamb (Gk. iaptein "to assail") a metrical unit ( foot ) of verse, having one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable, as in the word ‘beyond.’

Imagery (L. imitari "to copy, imitate" )  a modern critical term for the totality of references to perceptible things and actions to be found—usually but not exclusively in such figures of speech as metaphor and simile—within a poem or play.

Irony (Gk. eiron "dissembler") a subtly humorous perception of inconsistency, in which an apparently straightforward statement or event is undermined by its context so as to give it a very different significance.

Lyric (Gk. lyra "lyre") in the modern sense, any fairly short poem expressing the personal mood, feeling, or meditation of a single speaker (who may sometimes be an invented character, not the poet).

Metaphor  (Gk. meta- "over, across" + pherein "to carry, bear") the transfer of a name or descriptive term to an object different from, but analogous to, that to which it is properly applicable.

Meter (Gk. metron "measure")  the pattern of measured sound-units recurring more or less regularly in lines of verse. Poetry may be composed according to one of four principal metrical systems:
(i) in quantitative metre, used in Greek and Latin, the pattern is a sequence of long and short syllables counted in groups known as feet (foot, quantitative verse);
(ii) in syllabic metre, as in French and Japanese, the pattern comprises a fixed number of syllables in the line (see syllabic verse);
(iii) in accentual metre (or ‘strong-stress metre’), found in Old English and in later English popular verse, the pattern is a regular number of stressed syllables in the line or group of lines, regardless of the number of unstressed syllables (accentual verse);
(iv) in accentual-syllabic metre, the pattern consists of a regular number of stressed syllables appropriately arranged within a fixed total number of syllables in the line (with permissible variations including feminine endings), both stressed and unstressed syllables being counted. The fourth system—accentual-syllabic metre—is the one found in most English verse in the literary tradition since Chaucer; some flexible uses of it incline towards the accentual system. However, the descriptive terms most commonly used to analyze it have, confusingly, been inherited from the vocabulary of the very different Greek and Latin quantitative system. Thus the various English meters are named after the classical feet that their groupings of stressed and unstressed syllables resemble, and the length of a metrical line is still often expressed in terms of the number of feet it contains: a dimeter has two feet, a trimeter three, a tetrameter four, a pentameter five, a hexameter six, and a heptameter seven. A simpler and often more accurate method of description is to refer to lines in either accentual or accentual-syllabic metre according to the number of stressed syllables: thus an English tetrameter is a ‘four-stress line’, a pentameter a ‘five-stress line’ (these being the commonest lines in English).

Metonymy (Gk. meta- "change" + onoma "name") a figure of speech that replaces the name of one thing with the name of something else closely associated with it, e.g. the bottle for alcoholic drink.

Monologue (Gk. monos "single, alone" + logos "speech, word") an extended speech uttered by one speaker, either to others or as if alone.

Narrative (L. narrare "to tell, relate, recount, explain") a telling of some true or fictitious event or connected sequence of events, recounted by a narrator to a narratee.

Narrator: one who tells, or is assumed to be telling, the story in a given narrative . In modern analysis of fictional narratives, the narrator is the imagined ‘voice’ transmitting the story, and is distinguished both from the real author (who may have written other tales with very different narrators) and from the implied author (who does not recount the story, but is inferred as the authority responsible for selecting it and inventing a narrator for it).

Octave (Gk. okto, "eight") a group of eight verse lines forming the first part of a sonnet (in its Italian or Petrarchan form); or a stanza of eight lines.

Ode (Gk. oide "song") an elaborately formal lyric poem, often in the form of a lengthy ceremonious address to a person or abstract entity, always serious and elevated in tone.

Onomatopoeia (Gk. onoma  "word, name" + poiein "compose, make" ) the use of words that seem to imitate the sounds they refer to (whack, fizz, crackle, hiss).

Parable (Gk. para- "alongside" + bole "a throwing, casting") a brief tale intended to be understood as an allegory illustrating some lesson or moral.

Parody (Gk. para- "beside, parallel to" + oide "song, ode") a mocking imitation of the style of a literary work or works, ridiculing the stylistic habits of an author or school by exaggerated mimicry.

Pathos (Gk. "suffering, feeling, emotion") the emotionally moving quality or power of a literary work or of particular passages within it, appealing especially to our feelings of sorrow, pity, and compassionate sympathy.

Personification  (L. persona  + -ficare "to make") a figure of speech in which inanimate objects or abstractions are endowed with human qualities or represented as possessing human form.

Plot (O.E. plot "small piece of ground") the pattern of events and situations in a narrative or dramatic work, as selected and arranged both to emphasize relationships—usually of cause and effect—between incidents and to elicit a particular kind of interest in the reader or audience.

Point of view (L. pungere "prick, pierce"; videre "to see") the position or vantage-point from which the events of a story seem to be observed and presented to us.

Props (L. proprius "one's own, special") the usual abbreviation for stage ‘properties,’ i.e. those objects that are necessary to the action of a dramatic work.

Protagonist (Gk protos "first" + agon "contest") the chief character in a play or story, who may also be opposed by an antagonist .

Quatrain (L. L. quattuor "four.") a verse stanza of four lines, rhymed or (less often) unrhymed.

Recognition (anagnorisis)  (L. re- "again" + cognoscere "know) the turning point in a drama at which the protagonist discovers the true state of affairs to which he or she had been blind.

Resolution (L. re-, intensive prefix, + solvere "loosen") the substitution of one metrical unit for another, especially the substitution of two short syllables for one long syllable in quantitative verse.

Reversal (peripeteia) (L. re- "back" + vertere "to turn") a sudden reversal of a character's circumstances and fortunes, usually involving the downfall of the protagonist in a tragedy, and often coinciding with the ‘recognition’ or anagnorisis. In a comedy, however, the reversal abruptly restores the prosperity of the main character(s).

Rhyme (Gk. rhythmos "measured motion, time, proportion")  the identity of sound between syllables or paired groups of syllables, usually at the ends of verse lines; also a poem employing this device.

Rhythm (Gk. rhythmos "measured motion, time, proportion") the pattern of sounds perceived as the recurrence of equivalent ‘beats’ at more or less equal intervals. In most English poetry, an underlying rhythm (commonly a sequence of four or five beats) is manifested in a metrical pattern ( see Meter ).

Satire (L. satira "satire, poetic medley") a mode of writing that exposes the failings of individuals, institutions, or societies to ridicule and scorn. Satire is often an incidental element in literary works that may not be wholly satirical, especially in comedy.

Sestet (L.  sextus "sixth") a group of six verse lines forming the second part of a sonnet (in its Italian or Petrarchan form), following the opening octave . More rarely, the term may refer to a stanza of six lines.

Sestina (L.. sextus "sixth") a poem of six 6-line stanzas and a 3-line envoi , linked by an intricate pattern of repeated line-endings.

Setting (O.E. settan "cause to sit, put in some place, fix firmly") prescribing the unfolding of (a drama or narrative, for instance) in a specific place.

Simile (L. similis "like") a figure of speech involving the comparison of one thing with another thing of a different kind (e.g. he was as brave as a lion ).

Soliloquy (L. solus "alone" + loqui "speak") an act of speaking one's thoughts aloud when alone or regardless of hearers, especially by a character in a play.

Sonnet (L. sonus "sound" ) a poem of fourteen lines using any of a number of formal rhyme schemes, in English, typically in iambic pentameter.

Spondee (Gk. sponde "solemn libation")a foot consisting of two long (or stressed) syllables.

Stage direction (L. stare "to stand"; dis- "apart" + regere "to guide") an instruction in a play script indicating the position or tone of an actor, or specifying sound effects, lighting, etc.

Style (L. stilus "stake, instrument for writing, manner of writing, mode of expression") any specific way of using language, which is characteristic of an author, school, period, or genre.

Subplot (L. sub- "under" + O.E. plot "small piece of ground") a secondary sequence of actions in a dramatic or narrative work, usually involving characters of lesser importance.

Symbol (Gk. syn- "together" + stem of ballein "to throw") in the simplest sense, anything that stands for or represents something else beyond it—usually an idea conventionally associated with it.

Synecdoche Gk. syn- "with" + ek "out" + dekhesthai "to receive") a figure of speech by which a more comprehensive term is used for a less comprehensive or vice versa, as whole for part or part for whole, e.g. ‘There were six guns out on the moor’ where ‘guns’ stands for shooters.

Syntax (Gk. syn- "together" + tassein "arrange") the way in which words and clauses are ordered and connected so as to form sentences; or the set of grammatical rules governing such word-order.

Tercet (L. tertius "third") a unit of three verse lines, usually rhyming either with each other or with neighboring lines.

Theme (Gk. thema "a proposition, subject, deposit") a salient abstract idea that emerges from a literary work's treatment of its subject-matter; or a topic recurring in a number of literary works.

Tone (Gk. tonos "vocal pitch, raising of voice, accent, key in music") a very vague critical term usually designating the mood or atmosphere of a work.

Tragedy (Gk. tragos "goat" + oide "song") a serious play (or, by extension, a novel) representing the disastrous downfall of a central character, the protagonist.

Tragic flaw (O.N. flaga "stone slab, flake") the defect of character that brings about the protagonist's downfall in a tragedy.

Trochee (Gk. trokhaios (pous), lit. "a running, spinning (foot)") a metrical unit ( foot ) of verse, having one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable, as in the word ‘tender.’

Trope (Gk. tropein "to turn,") a figure of speech , especially one that uses words in senses beyond their literal meanings.

Understatement (O.E. under; L. stare "to stand") a statement that is restrained in ironic contrast to what might have been said.

Unities (L. unitas "oneness, sameness, agreement") the unity of time, the unity of place, and the unity of action.

Villanelle (M.L. villanus "farmhand") a poem, usually of a pastoral or lyrical nature, consisting normally of five three-lined stanzas and a final quatrain, with only two rhymes throughout.

Compiled from

dictionary.com

Etymonline

Oxford Reference Online

Jeremy Brigstocke

Professor of English

Santa Monica College