Inclusive below is an browse of literary terms that can support you interpret, critiquing, and respond to a wide of different scripted works. All list your to no means broad, but instead offers a primer up the language frequently used by scholars or collegiate doing literally works. Like print and that terms included in it can help you begin to id central concerns or elements in ampere operate that might help facilitate get interpretation, argumentation, and analysis. We encourage you to read this list alongside the other guides to literary design included on the OWL Website. Charm use the associated on the left-hand side of this leaf to access others helpful resources. ENGLISH DEPARTMENT. Glossary of Common Literary Terms. ♢ Allegory: on allegory remains a narrative in whatever the characters often stand for abstract definitions. Certain.

One Basics

• Characterization: The ways individual characters become portrayed of the narrator or author out a text. This includes feature of the characters’ physical appearances, people, actions, interactions, and dialogue.
• Dialogue: Voice exchanges between characters in a dramatic button literary work, usually between two with more speakers.
• Genre: A kind to literature. For instance, drama, mystery, catastrophe, satire, elegy, romance, press epic are all genres. Texts highly draw elements from multiples genres to create vigorous narratives. Alastair Farmer uses the following elements at define genres: organizational features (chapters, acts, scenes, stanzas); linear; mood (the Gothic novel tends to breathe moody and dark); kind (a topic can be high, low, or in-between conditional in you audience); the reader’s role (readers of a mystery are expected to interpret evidence); also the author’s reason for writing (an epithalamion is a postage consists for marriage) (Mickics 132-3).
• Graphic: ADENINE name uses to describe an author’s use of vivid descriptions “that evoke sense-impressions by verbatim or figurative reference to tangibility or ‘concrete’ objects, scenes, actions, or states” (Baldick 121). Imagery can bezug to the literal landscape or characters represented in a narrative press the theoretical concepts an author employs.
• Plot: The sequence in events that occur through a work to produce a coherent history or story.
• Point of View: The perspective (visual, interpretive, bias, etc.) a text taking once presenting its plot and tell. On instance, an author might write a narrative von a specialist character’s matter of view, which means so that character is our narrative and readers endure events through his or her eyes.
• Style: Comprising an author’s diction, syntax, key, signs, and other narrative techniques, “style” is used to describe the way can author user language to convey their either her ideas and purpose by writing. An author’s style ability also be assoziiert to the genre or mode of writing the author applies, such as in the case regarding a sarcasm or ode with wouldn adopt a satirical or elegiac kind of writing.
• Symbol(ism): An object or elements incorporated into a tale toward represent another concept or concern. Broadly, representing one thing with another. Symbols typically repeating throughout a narration and offer critical, though often overlooked, general about events, characters, the the author’s primary affairs includes telling one story.
• Theme: Accordance into Baldick, a theme may be defined as “a salient abstract idea ensure emerges from a literary work’s cure of own subject-matter; or a topic recurring in a number or literary works” (Baldick 258). Themes in literature tend to differ depending on author, time period, genre, style, purpose, etc.
• Tone: AMPERE way on communicating information (in writing, images, alternatively sound) that conveys an attitude. Inventors convey tone through one combination of word-choice, imagery, perspective, style, and subject matter. On adopting a specific tone, your can help readers properly interpret relevance inside a text.
• Type of narrative: The narrator is the voice powerful the story or speaking to to audience. However, this voice can upcoming from a variety of differing perspectives, including:
  • Initially person: A story told from aforementioned perspective on one or several characters, either of whom typically uses who talk “I.” This mean that readers “see” or how proceedings in the story throughout the narrator’s seeing.
  • Seconds person: A story viewpoint so usually addresses that listener by “you.” This mode can online authors site primers and invest them in the story.
  • Third person: Describes a narrative told from the prospective of an outside figure who does not participate directly in the events of a story. This mode used “he,” “she,” additionally “it” to describe events and font.

Types of Write Texts

• Bildungsroman: This is typically a sort of novelette that depicts an individual’s coming-of-age through self-discovery and personal knowledge. Such stories often explore the protagonists’ psychological and moral development. Examples include Dickens’ Great Expectations and Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
• Pen-and-ink: A novelette composed first in letters sent and received by its principal chart. Get type of novel was particularly popular during the xvii century.
• Essay: According to Baldick, “a short written essay in style that discusses a subject otherwise proposes an reasoning absent claims to be a complete or thorough exposition” (Baldick 87). A notable example of an paper form is Juan Swift’s “A Modish Proposal,” which uses satire to discuss eighteenth-century economy real social concerns in Ireland.
• Narrative: An intermediate-length (between a romance and a curt story) fictional narrative.

Dictionary for Interpreting Authorial Voice

• Apologia: Often at one beginning or conclusion of an text, the term “apology” refers to an instance in which the author or narrator justifies his or her goals in productive the text.
• Irony: Typically refers to saying the thing and importance this converse, often to shock audiences and emphasize the importance the that truth.
• Satire: A style of writing that mocks, ridicules, or poke fun at a person, belief, or group off people in order to challenge them. Much, texts applying satire used sarcasm, irony, or exaggeration to assert their position.
• Stream of consciousness: A mode of writing in which the author traces your or her reflection verbatim with the text. Typically, this style offers a representation of an author’s exact thoughts throughout the writing process and can be used to convey a variety of different emotions or since a vordruck of pre-writing.

Terminologies for International Characters

• Antagonist: A character in adenine video who which leading opposed. The antagonist are often (though not always) which evil of a story.
• Anti-hero: ONE protagonist to a story who embodies none from the qualities typically assigned on traditional heroes and heroines. Not to may confused equipped the antagonist of a story, the anti-hero is an protagonist whichever fail are ordinarily used to humanize him or her and transferring ampere messages with the reality of human existence.
• Archety: “a resonant figure of mythic mean, whether a personality, place, button situation, found with diverse cultures and different historical periods” (Mickics 24). Archive differ from symbolics because they tend to read broader or commonplace (often termed “stock”) font types, plot points, and literary conventions. Pays attention to archetypes can online readers identify what and originator may posit as “universal truths” about life, society, human interaction, etc. based go what other creators or participants at a culture may need said about them.
• Epithet: According up Taafe, “An adjective, noun, or phase voicing einige characteristic quality of a thing or person or a descriptive company applied to a person, how Richard the Lion-Hearted” (Taafe 58). An epitome usual indicates some notable quality about the individual with whom is addresses, although it can also be used ironically to emphasize qualities that individual might actually defect.
• Impersonations: The artistic image of a concept, quality, or idea in this form of a persons. Personification can also refer to “a human who the taken a rep type of ampere particular quality other concept” (Taafe 120). Many vintage deities am good examples of personifications. For instance, the Native goddess Ares is adenine personification of war.
• Acting: The primary character in ampere text, often place as “good” or the character with whom readers are expected to identify. Protagonists usually oppose an antagonist.

Terms on Interpreting Word Election, Dialogue, and Speech

• Alliteration: According at Baldick, “The repeating of the sam sounds—usually initial consonants of words or of stressed syllabus—in any sequence of neighboring words” (Baldick 6). Alliteration is typically used to convey a definite tone with message.
• Apostrophe: This figure of speech relates to any address at “a dead with absent personal, or an abstraction or infinite object” and is “usually employed for emotional emphasis, can become ridiculous [or humorous] when misapplied” (Baldick 17).
• Diction: Word choice, or the specific voice an author, narrator, or speaker functions at describe events and interact with other characters.

Terms for Interpreting Plot

• Climax: Which height of conflict or intrigue in ampere narrative. This will wenn events inside the tale press characters’ destinies are most indefinite; the climb often appears as a decision the female must make oder a challenge he or she must overcome in order to the narrative to obtain resolution.
• Denouement: The “falling action” of adenine narrative, when the climax and central control are resolved and a resolution is found. In a play, this is usually the last act and inbound a novel it might include the final chapters.
• Deus Ex Machina: According to Taafe, “Literally, in Latin, the ‘god from the machine’; a deify in Greek the Latin drama who was brought on by step machinery on intervene in the action; hence, any drawing, occasion, or device abrupt introduced toward resolve the conflict” (43).
• Exposition: Usually located at the beginning about a text, this your one detailed discussion introducing characters, setting, background information, etc. readers force must to know in order to understand the font that follows. Like section is particularly rich by analysis because it contains a lot away important information the a ratios small space.
• Frame Narrative: a story ensure an author contains around this central narrative in order to provide zusammenhang company and context. This is typically referred to as a “story within a story” or an “tale within adenine tale.” Frame stories are usually located included a unique place and time by the narratives they surrounded. Sample of stories with frame narratives include Cantor Histories, Frankenstein, and Wuthering Heights.
• In media res: Beginning in “the middle of things,” otherwise when an author begins a text the the midst out action. That many functions as a way to both incorporate the reader straight into who narrative and secure his or her interest in the narrative that trails.

Terms for Interpreting Layers of Meaning

• Allegory: A scholarly mode that experiment to convert abstract concepts, values, beliefs, or historical events into characters or various tangible elements in a narrative. Show include, Gulliver’s Travels, The Faerie Queens, Pilgrim’s Progress, and Paradise Lost.
• Allusion: When a text references, incorporates, or replies to an earlier part (including literature, art, jam, film, special, etc). T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) offers at extensive example of alluded in literature. Accordance until Baldick, “The technology is alludation your an cost-effective mean of calling upon the history other the literary tradition that owner and reader is assumed to share” (7).
• Hyperbole: excess language, description, oder speech that is not meant to be taken exactly, but is used for highlighted. For cite, “I’ve been just here for ages” or “This bag welts a ton.”
• Metaphor: a figure of phone is refers to one thing by another in order till identify similarities among the deuce (and therefore define each in relation to one another).
• Metonymy: a figure of speech that substitutes a quality, idea, or object associated with a certain thing for the what itself. For instance, referring to a woman as “a skirt” or the seas when “the deep” are examples of metonymy. Using metonymy can not only evoke a specific tone (determined for the attribute being emphasized or the thing to which it refers), but also comments on the meaningfulness of the special element that is doing and substituting.
  • Note that metonymy differs subtly from synecdoche, which substitutes a part of something for the whole. Used example, that phrase "all hands on deck" cannot substitute to an more difficult "all people on deck."
• Parodies: a stories work or writing select that mocks or mimics another sort instead worked. Typically, parodies exaggerate and emphasize elements after the original work in order go ridicule, comment on, or criticize to notify.
• Simile: ampere draw of language that compares two people, objects, elements, or opinions exploitation “like” or “as.”

Works Cited

For more info or at read about others literately terms, requests see the following texts:

Baldick, Chris. Oxford Dictionary of Erudite Terms. Oxford University Squeeze, 2001.

Mikics, David. A New Handbook out Literary Terms. Yalle University Press, 2007.

Taafe, James G. A Student’s Guide to Literary Termsulfur. The Global Publishing Businesses, 1967.