University Bound English: For Kids Who

CareLiterary Terms and Devices

Selected from

A Handbook to Literature, 8th Edition

by William Harmon and Deano Andrico

allegory• A form of extended METAPHOR or a

story within a story in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative are equated with meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. Thus, an allegory is a story in which everything is a symbol.

Wizard of Oz

George Orwell1984

Animal FarmWilliam Golding

Lord of the Flies

Lord of the Flies

alliteration

• The repetition of initial identical consonant sounds.

allusion

• A figure of speech that makes brief reference to a historical or literary figure, event, or object. The effectiveness of allusion depends on a body of knowledge shared by writer and reader.

analogy

• A comparison of two things, alike in certain aspects; particularly a method used in EXPOSITION and DESCRIPTION by which something unfamiliar is explained or described by comparing it to some thing more familiar.

anecdote

• A short NARRATIVE detailing particulars of an interesting EPISODE or event. The term most frequently refers to an incident in the life of an important person and should lay claim to an element of truth.

antagonist

• The character directly opposed to the PROTAGONIST. A rival, opponent, or enemy of the PROTAGONIST.

–non-character entities can be antagonistic (settings or events)

17. assonance (as in poetry))• Same or similar vowel sounds in

stressed syllables that end with different consonant sounds. Assonance differs from RHYME in that RHYME is a similarity of vowel and consonant. “Lake” and “fake” demonstrate RHYME; “lake” and “fate” assonance.

Bildungsroman

Pip

Great Expectations

black humor—Cuckoo’s Nest

• The use of the morbid and the ABSURD for darkly comic purposes in modern literature. The term refers as much to the tone of anger and bitterness as it does to the grotesque and morbid situations, which often deal with suffering, anxiety, and death.

catharsis

• In the Poetics Aristotle, in defining TRAGEDY. Sees it objective as being “through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation [catharsis]of these emotions,”…

climax

• A rhetorical term for a rising order of importance in the ideas expressed, Such an arrangement is called climatic, and the item of greatest importance is called the climax.

consonance

• The relation between words in which the final consonants in the stressed syllables agree but the vowels that precede them differ, as “add-read,” “mill-ball,” and “torn-burn.”

dystopia

• Literally, “bad place.” the term is applied to accounts of imaginary worlds, usually in the futre, in which present tendencies are carried ou to their intensely unpleasant culminations. (George Orwell’s 1984, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed)

epiphany

• Literally a manifestation or showing-forth, usually of some divine being. The Christian festival of Epiphany commemorates the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles in the form of the Magi.

euphemism

• A device in which indirectness replaces directness of statement, usually in an effort to avoid offensiveness.

euphemism

huskybig-bonedheftyportlyplumpfluffy

foil• A foil character is either one who is

opposite to the main character or nearly the same as the main character. The purpose of the foil character is to emphasize the traits of the main character by contrast only. A foil is a secondary character who contrasts with a major character.

foreshadowing• The presentation of material in

a work in such a way that later events are prepared for. Foreshadowing can result form the establishment of a mood or atmosphere, as in the opening of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or the first act of Hamlet.

hubris

• overweening pride or insolence that results in the misfortune of the PROTAGONIST of a tragedy. Hubris leads the protagonist to break a moral law, attempt vainly to transcend normal limitations, or ignore a divine warning with calamitous results.

hyperbole

• Exaggeration. The figure may be used to heighten effect or it may be used for humor.

imagery

• Imagery in its literal sense means the collection of IMAGES in a literary work. In another sense it is synonymous with TROPE or FIGURE OF SPEECH.

in medias res

• A term from Horace, literally meaning “in the midst of things.” it is applied to the literary technique of opening a story in the middle of the action and then supplying information about the beginning of the action through flashbacks and other devices for exposition.

in medias res

irony

• A broad term referring to the recognition of reality different from appearance. Verbal irony is a FIGURE OF SPEECH in which the actually intent is expressed in words that carry the opposite meaning.

motif

• A simple element that serves as a basis for expanded narrative; or, less strictly, a conventional situation, device, interest, or incident. In literature, recurrent images, words, objects, phrases, or actions that tend to unify the work are called motives.

oxymoron

• A self-contradictory combination of worlds or smaller verbal units. “Oxymoron” itself is an oxymoron, from the Greek meaning “sharp-dull.”

parallelism

• Such an arrangement that one element of equal importance with another is similarly developed and phrased, the principle of parallelism dictates that coordinate ideas should have coordinate presentation.

personification• A figure that endows animals,

ideas, abstractions, and animate objects with human form; the representing of imaginary creatures or things as having human personalities, intelligence and emotions.

protagonist

• The chief character in a work. The word was originally applied to the “first” actor in early Greek drama. The actor was added to the CHORUS and was its leader; …

satire

• A work or manner that blends a censorious attitude with humor and wit for improving human institutions or humanity. In America, Eugene…

• the use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc.

Stream of Consciousness

• The total range of awareness and emotive-mental response of an individual, from the lowest pre-speech level to the highest fully articulated level of rational thought.

Stream of Consciousness

James Joyce

tone

• Tone has been used for the attitudes toward the subject and toward the audience implied in literary work. Tone may be formal, informal, intimate, solemn, somber, playful, serious, ironic, condescending, or many another possible attitudes.

tragic flaw

• The theory that there is a flaw in the tragic hero that causes his or her downfall. The theory has been revised or refuted by criticism that considers the supposed flaw as an integral and even defining part to the protagonist's character.

utopia• A fiction describing an

imaginary ideal world. DYSTOPIA, meaning “bad place,” is the term applied to unpleasant imaginary places, such as those in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984.

utopia

Charlotte Perkins Gilman