1. University Bound English: For Kids Who Care
Literary Terms and Devices
Selected from
A Handbook to Literature, 8th Edition
by William Harmon and C. Hugh Holman

2. allegory
A form of extended METAPHOR 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. RPM—rebellion, open thinking, manliness; Nurse—hate, control, judgment, conformity

3. 6. allegory Wizard of Oz Lord of the Flies
George Orwell 1984 Animal Farm
William Golding Lord of the Flies

4. alliteration
The repetition of initial identical consonant sounds or any vowel sounds in successive or closely associated syllables, especially stressed syllables.

5. alliteration

6. 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. A good example is T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and the author’s notes to that poem.

7. allusion
Babe the Blue Ox

8. anachronism
Assignment of something to a time when it was not in existence.

9. anachronism
Back to the Future

10. Eliza : Dorothy :: Higgins : Wizard
analogy
A comparison of two things, alike in certain aspects; particularly a method used in EXPOSITION an DESCRIPTION by which something unfamiliar is explained or described by comparing it to some thing more familiar.
Will Castle—
Eliza : Dorothy :: Higgins : Wizard

11. analogy
find is to lose as construct is to: build demolish misplace materials 2. find is to locate as feign is to: pane pretend line mean

12. 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.

13. anecdote
Though anecdotes are often used as the basis for short stories, an anecdote lacks complicated PLOT and relates a single EPISODE.

14. anecdote
John Falstaff

15. 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)

16. antagonist
Nurse Ratched

17. 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.

18. assonance (as in poetry)
John Donne

19. avant-garde
Applied to new writing that shows striking (and usually self-conscious) innovations in style, form, and subject matter.

20. avant-garde
John Ashbery
Frank O’Hara

21. Bildungsroman
Great Expectations
Pip

22. 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.

23. black humor
Kurt Vonnegut

24. 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,”…

25. 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.

26. climax
H.G. Wells

27. collage
In the pictorial arts the technique by which materials not usually associated with one another, such as newspaper clippings, labels, cloth, wood , bottle tops, or theater tickets, are assembled and pasted together on a single surface.

28. 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.”

29. consonance
T.S. Eliot
John Milton

30. didactic novel
Any novel plainly designed to teach a lesson, it is properly used as a synonym for the EDUCATION NOVEL.

31. didactic novel
Upton Sinclair
The Jungle

32. 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)

33. dystopia
George Orwell’s 1984

34. ellipsis
The omission of one or more words that, while essential to a grammatic structure, are easily supplied.
(…) only three periods!

35. 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.

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

37. euphemism
husky big-boned hefty portly plump fluffy

38. Expressionism
A movement affecting painting and literature, which followed and went beyond IMPRESSIONISM in its efforts to “objectify inner experience.” Expressionism was strongest in theater in the 1920s,…

39. Expressionism (cont.)
…and its entry into other literary forms was probably though the stage. In the novel the presentation of the objective outer world as it expresses itself in the impressions or moods of a character is widely used device.

40. Expressionism “The Muse” Jeff Buckley
“Lady and Her Cat” Millie Shapiro

41. 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.

42. 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.

43. foreshadowing (cont.)
It can result from the appearance of physical objects or facts, as do the clues do in a detective story, or from the revelation of a fundamental and decisive character trait. In all cases, the purpose of foreshadowing is to prepare the reader or viewer for action to come.

44. foreshadowing

45. 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.

46. hubris
Poseidon

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

48. hyperbole
Kurt Vonnegut

49. 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.

50. imagery
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ernest Hemingway

51. 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.

52. in medias res

53. 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.

54. irony

55. 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.

56. In books, recurring themes, images, ideas, characters, etc.
motif (cont.)
Patterns of day and night, blonde and brunette, summer and winter, north and south, white and black; and the game of chess.
In books, recurring themes, images, ideas, characters, etc.

57. motif
Cervantes Don Quixote

58. Oedipus Complex
In psychoanalysis a libidinal feeling that develops in a child, especially a male child, between the ages of three and six, for the parent of the opposite sex. This attachment is generally accompanied by hostility to the parent of the child’s own sex.

59. Oedipus Complex (cont.)
Oedipus & the Sphinx

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

61. palindrome
Writing that reads the same for left to right and from right to left, such as the word “civic” or the statement attributed to Napoleon, “Able was I ere I saw Elba.”

62. palindrome

63. palindrome
Racecar I did roll--or did I?
Hannah Poop

64. 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.

65. 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.

66. 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; …

67. protagonist
…hence the continuing meaning of protagonist and the “first” or chief player. In Greek drama AGON is contest, the protagonist and the ANTAGONIST, the second most important character, are contestants.

68. Pip from Great Expectations
protagonist (cont.)
Pip from Great Expectations
Batman/Spiderman

69. 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.

70. satire
O’Neill, Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, George Kaufman and Moss Hart, John P. Marquand, and Joseph Heller have commented satirically on human beings and their institutions. Two major types: FORMAL SATIRE and INDIRECT SATIRE.

71. satire

72. 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.

73. Stream of Consciousness
James Joyce

74. Surrealism
A movement in art emphasizing the expression of the imagination as realized in dreams and presented without conscious control.

75. Surrealism
William Burroughs

76. symbolism
In its broad sense symbolism is the use of one object to represent or suggest another; or, in literature, the serious and extensive use of SYMBOLS. Men = people in world; Nurse = oppression; Chief = oppressed peoples; McMurphy = change, hope, awareness; Control panel = ???; Ward = society; Monopoly = men’s attempt to control something

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

78. 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.

79. 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.

80. utopia
Charlotte Perkins Gilman