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A GLOSSARY OF LITERARY TERMS

Adapted from F. Grellet, A Literary Guide, 2020, The Oxford Companion to English
Literature (https://www-oxfordreference-com.ezproxy.u-bordeaux-
montaigne.fr/view/10.1093/acref/9780192806871.001.0001/acref-9780192806871) & The
Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (https://www-oxfordreference-com.ezproxy.u-
bordeaux-montaigne.fr/view/10.1093/acref/9780198715443.001.0001/acref-
9780198715443)

Allegory: a story that can be understood on two or more levels,the superficial one of
the narrative and a political, ethical, religious or historical one. Ex.: Bunyan's
Pilgrim's Progress. Parables and fables are types of allegory.
Alliteration: repetition of consonants, especially at the beginning of related words.
Anacoluthon: A grammatical term for a change of construction in a sentence that
leaves the initial construction unfinished. For example, Mr Micawber in Charles
Dickens’s David Copperfield: ‘Accidents will occur in the best-regulated families; and
in families not regulated by that pervading influence which sanctifies while it
enhances the—a—I would say, in short, by the influence of Woman…’.
Anadiplosis: A rhetorical figure of repetition in which a word or phrase appears
both at the end of one clause, sentence, or stanza, and at the beginning of the next,
thus linking the two units, as in the final line of Shakespeare’s 36th sonnet: “As thou
being mine, mine is thy good report”.
Analepsis: retrospective narration, a flashback. Ex.: many analepses are to be found
in Woolf's Mrs Dalloway.
Anaphora: repetition of the same word(s) at the beginning of successive clauses or
sentences. Ex: “A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who
proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four...” (C. Dickens)
Antithesis: contrasting words, clauses, ideas in structures of parallelism. Ex:
“Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures”. (Johnson)
Aposiopesis: A rhetorical device in which the speaker suddenly breaks off in the
middle of a sentence, leaving the sense unfinished. The device usually suggests strong
emotion that makes the speaker unwilling or unable to continue. Shakespeare’s King
Lear is notably given to such unfinished outbursts: “I will have such revenges on you
both/That all the world shall–”
Apostrophe: A rhetorical figure in which the speaker addresses a dead or absent
person, or an abstraction or inanimate object. In classical rhetoric, the term could
also denote a speaker’s turning to address a particular member or section of the
audience.
Assonance: the repetition of vowel sounds, especially in stressed syllables. Ex.:"The
ship was cheered, the harbour cleared” (Coleridge).
Asyndeton: A form of verbal compression which consists of the omission of
connecting words (usually conjunctions) between clauses. The most common form is
the omission of ‘and’, leaving only a sequence of phrases linked by commas, as in
these sentences from Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’: ‘An empty stream, a great silence,
an impenetrable forest. The air was thick, warm, heavy, sluggish.’
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Bildungsroman: a 'novel of education or initiation', showing the development of

someone from childhood to adulthood, and the protagonist's search for his/her
identity. Ex: David Copperfield (Dickens)
Chiasmus: a mirror inversion. Ex: "Whoever exalts himself will be humbled and
whoever humbles himself will be exalted." (Matthew 23:11-12)
Coinage, coined words: a neologism, a word invented by an author. Ex: twindles
(in Hopkins's 'Inversnaid').
Comic relief: a humorous element to alleviate the tension in a tragedy or a dramatic
passage.
Consonance: The repetition of identical or similar consonants in neighbouring
words whose vowel sounds are different (e.g. coming home, hot foot;
middle/muddle, wonder/wander). A counterpart to the vowel-sound repetition
known as assonance.
Deus ex machina: (from the god which was lowered onto the stage by machinery at
the end of Greek plays to unravel the plot) any improbable device to resolve the plot.
Diegesis: designates the narrated events or story as a ‘level’ distinct from that of
the narration. The diegetic level of a narrative is that of the main story, whereas the
‘higher’ level at which the story is told is extradiegetic (i.e. standing outside the
sphere of the main story). An embedded tale-within-the-tale constitutes a lower level
known as intradiegetic (see G. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales). Extradiegetic
narrators are ‘above’ or ‘superior’ to the story they narrate. Intradiegetic narrators
are characters in the first narrative told by the extradiegetic narrator and narrators of
a narrative within the first narrative.
Double entendre: a pun in which one of the two meanings is risqué or bawdy. For
example, in Elizabethan times, there were often puns on the verb 'to die', which could
then mean both lose one's life and reach sexual orgasm.
Dramatic irony: the discrepancy between what the reader or audience know and
what the character is aware of, as when King Duncan praises Macbeth's castle, where
the audience know he will be murdered.
Dystopia: a term coined to convey the opposite of utopia. The dystopian mode,
which projects an unpleasant or catastrophic future, is frequently used by science
fiction writers. Ex: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948) by G. Orwell and The Handmaid’s
Tales (1980) by M. Atwood.
Ellipsis: the omission of words in a sentence, or of events in the chronological
sequence of a story. Ex.: “Some people go to priests, others to poetry: I to my friends”.
(Virginia Woolf)
Epanalepsis: A figure of speech in which the initial word of a sentence or verse line
reappears at the end.
Epigraph: a quotation or motto on the title page of a book or at the beginning of a
chapter.
Epiphany: a manifestation of God's presence in the world. In Dubliners and A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce uses the term in a secular way, to
describe a transformative moment of sudden revelation.
Euphemism: the use of an indirect expression to avoid bluntness. Ex.:'pass away’
for 'die'.
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Excipit (also explicit or desinit) : the concluding section (pages or paragraphs) of

a text.
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. Ancient of
rhetoric named and categorized dozens of figures, drawing a rough distinction between
those (known as tropes or figures of thought) that extend the meaning of words,
and those that merely affect their order or their impact upon an audience (known as
figures of speech, schemes, or rhetorical figures). The most important tropes are
metaphor, simile, metonymy, synecdoche, personification, and irony; others
include hyperbole (overstatement) and litotes (understatement). The minor
rhetorical figures can emphasize or enliven a point in several different ways: by placing
words in contrast with one another (antithesis), by repeating words in various
patterns (anadiplosis, anaphora, chiasmus), by changing the order of words
(hyperbaton), by missing out conjunctions (asyndeton), by changing course or
breaking off in mid-sentence (anacoluthon, aposiopesis), or by assuming special
modes of address (apostrophe) or enquiry (rhetorical question).
Focalization: The technical term in modern narratology for the adoption of a
limited ‘point of view’ from which the events of a given story are witnessed, usually by
a character within the fictional world. See Inner, outer and zero focalization in ‘point
of view’.
Free indirect speech/ free indirect discourse: a type of indirect speech in
which the words or thoughts of a character are reported without a reporting clause. It
therefore combines the character's focalization with the narrator's voice. ex: “Mary
talked, but she [Anne] could not attend. She had seen him. They had met.They had
been once more in the same room!” (Austen) The last three sentences report in free
indirect speech what goes on in Anne's mind.
Gothic: A mode of narrative fiction which developed in the late 18th century and
deals with supernatural or horrifying events and generally possessed of a
claustrophobic air of oppression or evil. Its main characteristic theme is the
stranglehold of the past upon the present, or the encroachment of the ‘dark’ ages of
oppression upon the ‘enlightened’ modern era. In gothic romances and tales this
theme is embodied typically in enclosed and haunted settings such as castles, crypts,
convents, or gloomy mansions, in images of ruin and decay, and in episodes of
imprisonment, cruelty, and persecution. Two famous examples: Horace Walpole's
The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794).
Grotesque: Characterized by bizarre distortions, especially in the exaggerated or
abnormal depiction of human features. The literature of the grotesque involves
freakish caricatures of people’s appearance and behaviour, as in the novels of
Dickens. A disturbingly odd fictional character may also be called a grotesque.
Homo-/hetero-/autodiegetic: see narrator
Hyperbaton: A figure of speech by which the normal order of words in a sentence is
significantly altered. A very common form of poetic licence, of which Milton’s
Paradise Lost affords many spectacular examples: “Him the Almighty Power/Hurled
headlong flaming from th’ethereal sky”.

Hyperbole : exaggeration. Ex. : “An hundred years should go to praise/Thine

eyes…” (Marvell)
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Hypotactic style: sentences linked by subordination (as opposed to paratactic

style).
Incipit: the opening words or paragraphs of a literary work.
Interior monologue: An extended representation in prose or verse of a character's
unspoken thoughts, memories, and impressions, rendered as if directly ‘overheard’ by
the reader without the intervention of a summarizing narrator. Technically speaking,
it is distinct from the stream of consciousness technique, as the narrator does not
intervene as guide or commentator and tries not to tidy the vagaries of the mental
process into grammatical sentences or into a logical order.
In medias res: the technique of beginning a story in the middle of the action.
Intertextuality: the fact that all texts quote or refer to other texts–consciously or
unconsciously. T.S.Eliot's The Waste Land offers an obvious example of
intertextuality.
Intrusive narrator: a narrator who comments on the characters and action, as
Thackeray does in Vanity Fair.
Irony: expressing an idea with words which carry the opposite meaning, as when Mr
Bennet says in Pride and Prejudice: “I admire all my three sons-in-law highly.
Wickham, perhaps, is my favourite.”
Litotes: an understatement (see euphemism), stating something by negating its
contrary. Ex.: “She's no fool.”
Magic realism: fiction in which realism mingles with magic or fantasy. It is much
used in postmodern literature to emphasize the fact that any narrative is an
invention. Ex.: Carter's Nights at the Circus ( 1984 ) and Rushdie ’s The Satanic
Verses ( 1988 ).
Metafiction, metatextuality: fiction about fiction, the narrator self-consciously
reflecting upon the process of writing and the links between fiction and reality. Ex.:
Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman or Sterne's Tristram Shandy.
Metaphor: an analogy between two objects, created by using one word instead of
another, thus creating identification. Ex.: “All the world's a stage...” (Shakespeare).
Compare with 'simile'. There are dead metaphors (so often used that they have
become almost clichés), extended metaphors (which link several images), and
mixed metaphors (linking several kinds of image, as in Shakespeare's “Was the
hope drunk/ wherein you dress'd yourself?”,with the two incongruous images of
drink and dress)
Metonymy: instead of using a word, using a term related to it in some semantic way.
Ex.: ‘The White House' for 'the US presidency'. See synecdoche.
Modernism: A catch-all term designating the remarkable variety of contending
groups, movements, and schools in literature, art, and music that flourished in
Europe from the late 1900s to the late 1920s. It is generally characterized by a
deliberate break with classical and traditional forms or methods of expression. The
modernist novel, for instance, may be seen as a reaction against 19th-century
conventions of representation and narrative omniscience and is often non-
chronological, with experiments in time such as sudden jumps, temporal
juxtapositions, simultaneity, or a concern with duration (making a great deal occur
within a small amount of text, or stretching a small amount of action over a large
textual space) in evidence. Instead of upholding the realist illusion, major modernist
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novels, such as James Joyce’s and Virginia Woolf’s, break narrative frames or move
from one level of narration to another without warning or foreground the reflexivity
of their texts.
Motif: recurring situations, subjects and ideas in literature.
Narration: The process of relating a sequence of events; or another term for
a narrative. In the first sense, narration is often distinguished from other kinds of
writing (dialogue, description, commentary) which may be included in a narrative; it
is also distinguished from the events recounted, i.e. from the story, and from the
narrative itself. Narrations are usually either retrospective (when the story takes
place many years before; usually coupled with the use of the past tense) or
simultaneous (when the story takes place at the same time as the narration; usually
coupled with the use of the present tense).
Narrative: A telling of some true or fictitious event or connected sequence of events,
recounted by a narrator to a narratee (although there may be more than one of each).
A narrative will consist of a set of events (the story) recounted in a process of
narration (or discourse), in which the events are selected and arranged in a particular
order (the plot). The category of narratives includes both the shortest accounts of
events (e.g. the cat sat on the mat, or a brief news item) and the longest historical or
biographical works, diaries, travelogues, etc., as well as novels, ballads, epics, short
stories, and other fictional forms. In the study of fiction, it is usual to divide novels
and shorter stories into first-person narratives and third-person narratives. As an
adjective, ‘narrative’ means ‘characterized by or relating to story-telling’: thus
‘narrative technique’ is the method of telling stories.
Narrator: narrators can be either absent from or present in the story they narrate.
Heterodiegetic narrators are not characters in the story or do not take part in it.
Homodiegetic narrators are also characters or take part in the story; homodiegetic
narration often coincides with narration using the first-person pronoun I (they are then
called autodiegetic) : “I” can fulfill 2 different functions, those of the I-narrator
telling the story and the I-character who can appear as the object upon which the
discourse focuses.
Naturalism: an extreme form of realism applying the principles of determinism to
fiction. Men are seen as conditioned by inner forces and drives as well as by
environmental ones, forces they cannot understand or control. Naturalist fiction
focuses on the causes, the scientific laws that explain actions. It is often pessimistic,
viewing men driven by fear, sex or hunger, mere puppets in a cruel universe. In
France, Émile Zola was the dominant practitioner of naturalism. In the English‐
speaking world, some of the ambitions and effects of naturalism are to be found
echoed or adapted in novels of the 1890s and beyond, Thomas Hardy's Jude the
Obscure (1895), Somerset Maugham's Liza of Lambeth (1897), Frank Norris's
McTeague (1899), Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900), and Arnold Bennett's
Anna of the Five Towns (1902).
Objective correlative: in his essay 'Hamlet and His Problems' (1919), Eliot argued
that the best way of expressing emotions is not through a direct statement or
description of that emotion, but through the objective description of an object, a
situation, or events which will evoke the emotion for the reader.
Omniscient narrator: a narrator who knows everything about what the different
characters think or feel, and who has the freedom to comment upon the action.
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Omniscient point of view is common in Victorian fiction (Ex: Thackeray's Vanity

Fair).
Onomastics: The study and meaning of personal and place names.
Onomatopoeia: a word with a sound similar to what it refers to. Ex: 'hiss', 'sizzle',
'buzz'.
Oxymoron: the juxtaposition of contradictory terms. Ex.: “O loving hate!” (Romeo
and Juliet)
Parable: a story with a lesson or moral thesis. Ex.:Christ's parables in the Bible.
Paradox: a statement which seems contradictory or absurd but which in fact makes
sense. Ex.: “The child is father of the man.” (Wordsworth)
Paratactic style: sentences linked by simple juxtaposition, as in Caesar's “Veni,vidi,
vici”.
Parody: the exaggerated imitation of the style, words, themes, tone or ideas of a
work to render it ridiculous. The purpose can be humorous and/or satirical. Ex.:
Austen's Northanger Abbey.
Pastiche: the literary exercise of imitation or a collage of imitated styles.
Pastoral: Poetry, prose or drama originally about the country pleasures of
shepherds. The definition was then widened to refer to simple rural life as opposed to
complex urban life.
Pathetic fallacy: attributing human characteristics or feelings to nature, excessive
personification. The term was used derogatively by Ruskin,who explained in Modern
Painters that in a line such as “The cruel, crawling foam”, the foam is neither cruel
nor crawling.
Persona: the first-person speaker created by the author to narrate the story in
poetry or fiction; this 'second self' may or may not represent the views of the author.
Personification: A figure of speech by which animals, abstract ideas, or inanimate
things are referred to as if they were human, as in Sir Philip Sidney’s line: “Invention,
Nature’s child, fled stepdame Study’s blows”.

Picaresque: a picaresque novel describes the peregrinations of a hero, usually of low

birth, who tries to make his fortune through his own wit. The plot is loose and
episodic, the character travels and encounters a large range of characters, which leads
to social satire. Ex.: Fielding's Tom Jones.
Plot: 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, such as
surprise or suspense. Distinct from the story, the plot is the selected version of events
as presented to the reader or audience in a certain order and duration, whereas the
story is the full sequence of events as we imagine them to have taken place in their
‘natural’ order and duration. The story, then, is the hypothetical ‘raw material’ of
events which we reconstruct from the finished product of the plot.
Poetic justice: The rewarding of virtue and punishing of evil in a play or in fiction.
Point of view: the narrative mode, which can be (1) first-person narration, with a
persona telling the story (Ex.: Mark Twain's Huck), (2) a third-person narration by an
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all-knowing omniscient narrator, (3) a third-person narration, but with the limited
point of view of a 'reflector' or 'centre of consciousness', or 'focalizer', as in many of
James's novels. This can include stream of consciousness narration. In Figures
III, Genette uses the terms 'internal focalization' for events seen through the eyes
of one of the characters and 'external focalization' when the events are seen from
a distance, by someone exterior to the story. He speaks of 'zero focalization' for the
unrestricted vision of an omniscient narrator.
Polyphony: a polyphonic text is one in which several different voices or points of
view interact on more or less equal terms.
Polyptoton: A figure of speech in which a partial repetition arises from the use in
close proximity of two related words having different forms, e.g. singular and plural
forms of the same word. An example is found at the close of this couplet by Byron: “A
little while she strove, and much repented,/And whispering ‘I will ne'er consent’—
consented”.
Polysemy: designates a word’s capacity to carry two or more distinct meanings,
e.g. grave: ‘serious’ or ‘tomb’.
Postcolonial literature: Literatures in English emerging from the anglophone
world outside Britain, Ireland, and the United State. Many of the regions and
countries from which these literatures emerge—the Caribbean, the Indian sub‐
continent, West Africa, in particular Nigeria and Ghana, East and southern Africa,
and Australasia and the Pacific islands—were once colonies of Britain, and now form
part of the Commonwealth, which accounts for the chronological designation of the
word ‘postcolonial’. The term aims at embracing the powerful and diverse body of
literary responses to the challenges presented by decolonization and the transitions to
independence and post-independence in a wide variety of political and cultural
contexts. Rather than simply being the writing which ‘came after’ empire,
postcolonial literature might be broadly defined as that which critically or
subversively scrutinizes the colonial relationship, and offers a reshaping or rewriting
of the dominant meanings pertaining to race, authority, space, and identity prevalent
under colonial and decolonizing conditions. Ex.: Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart,
1958), Peter Carey (Oscar and Lucinda, 1988), Nadine Gordimer (Burger’s
Daughter, 1979), Hanif Kureishi (The Buddha of Suburbia, 1990), Doris Lessing (The
Golden Notebook, 1962), V. S. Naipaul (A House for Mr Biswas, 1961), Michael
Ondaatje (The English Patient, 1992), Jean Rhys (Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966),
Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things, 1997), Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s
Children, 1981)…
Postmodernism: a term which describes what comes after modernism. While the
modernists still believed that they could restore meaning to the world and that their
experiments with form could help literature reach the universal, postmodernists no
longer think that religion, science or any ideology can bring progress. Refusing any
authoritative meaning, they undermine it through the use of parody, pastiche or
absurdity. According to them, authors no longer control the meaning of their works,
which, like history, are open to revision. Postmodern writers tend to break the
illusion of reality through metafiction and intertextuality and to blur the
boundaries between fact and fiction (see magic realism). They also tend to collapse
the distinctions between high and popular culture as well as between languages and
cultures (see postcolonial literature). Most commonly it is prose fiction that is
held to exemplify the postmodernist mood or style, notably in works by American
novelists such as Vladimir Nabokov (Pale Fire, 1962), John Barth (Lost in the
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Funhouse, 1968), Thomas Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow, 1973) Kurt Vonnegut

(Slaughterhouse‐Five, 1969) and Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy, 1985-7), and
by the British authors John Fowles (The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 1969) Angela
Carter (The Magic Toyshop, 1967), Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children, 1981), and
Jeanette Winterson (Sexing the Cherry, 1989).
Prolepsis: relating an event before it happens chronologically. The contrary of
'analepsis'.
Prosopopeia: The Greek rhetorical term for a trope of the representation of an
imaginary, dead, or absent person as alive and capable of speech and hearing.
Pun: a play on words, which comes from the similarity between two words or from
the fact that a single word has several meanings. Ex.: 'Ask for me tomorrow and you
shall find me a grave man', says Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet as he is about to die.
Realism: A mode of writing that gives the impression of recording or ‘reflecting’
faithfully an actual way of life. The term refers, sometimes confusingly, both to a
literary method based on detailed accuracy of description (i.e.verisimilitude) and to a
more general attitude that rejects idealization, escapism, and other extravagant
qualities of romance in favour of recognizing soberly the actual problems of life.
Modern criticism frequently insists that realism is not a direct or simple reproduction
of reality (a ‘slice of life’) but a system of conventions producing a lifelike illusion of
some ‘real’ world outside the text, by processes of selection, exclusion, description,
and manners of addressing the reader. In its methods and attitudes, realism may be
found as an element in many kinds of writing prior to the 19th century ; but as a
dominant literary trend it is associated chiefly with the 19th-century novel of middle-
or lower-class life, in which the problems of ordinary people in unremarkable
circumstances are rendered with close attention to the details of physical setting and
to the complexities of social life. In Britain, the chief representatives of the realist
school are George Eliot (ex. Middlemarch, 1871-2) and Charles Dickens (ex. Oliver
Twist, 1837-39). In early-20th century America, Edith Wharton’s The House of
Mirth (1905).
Rhetorical question: A question asked for the sake of persuasive effect rather than
as a genuine request for information, the speaker implying that the answer is too
obvious to require a reply, as in Milton’s line “For what can war but endless war still
breed?”

Romance: fanciful, idealistic fiction,with little realistic verisimilitude.

Romanticism: a profound shift in Western attitudes to art and human creativity
that dominated much of European culture in the first half of the 19th century. As it
emerged in the 1790s in Germany and Britain, and in the 1820s in France and
elsewhere, it is known as the ‘Romantic Movement’. Its chief emphasis was upon
freedom of individual self-expression: sincerity, spontaneity, and originality became
the new standards in literature, replacing the decorous imitation of classical models
favoured by 18th-century neoclassicism. Rejecting the ordered rationality of the
Enlightenment as mechanical, impersonal, and artificial, the Romantics turned to the
emotional directness of personal experience and to the boundlessness of individual
imagination and aspiration. They saw themselves as free spirits expressing their own
imaginative truths; several found admirers ready to hero-worship the artist as a
genius or prophet. The restrained balance valued in 18th-century culture was
abandoned in favour of emotional intensity, often taken to extremes of rapture,
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nostalgia (for childhood or the past), horror, melancholy, or sentimentality. Some—

but not all—Romantic writers cultivated the appeal of the exotic, the bizarre, or the
macabre; almost all showed a new interest in the irrational realms of dream and
delirium or of folk superstition and legend. The creative imagination occupied the
centre of Romantic views of art, which replaced the ‘mechanical’ rules of conventional
form with an ‘organic’ principle of natural growth and free development. The main
representatives of Romantic poetry in England are W. Wordsworth and S.T.
Coleridge (Lyrical Ballads, 1798), P.B. Shelley (Prometheus Unbound, 1820), J.
Keats (Poems, 1820).
Round and flat characters: a distinction made by E.M.Forster to describe two
types of characters. Flat characters, like humours, are built round a simple idea and
not capable of evolving; round characters are more complex, subtle and can surprise
us.
Satire: a genre that censures folly or vice through exaggeration, burlesque,
mockery and caricature. The blend of criticism and humour or wit aims at
condemning and reforming. Ex.: Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.
Simile: a directly expressed comparison, often introduced by 'like', 'as' or 'than'.
Stock character: a conventional type of character (the disguised romantic heroine,
the melancholy man, the character seeking revenge, in Elizabethan drama).
Stream of consciousness: A term used variously to describe either the continuity
of impressions and thoughts in the human mind, or a special literary method for
representing this psychological principle in unpunctuated or fragmentary forms of
interior monologue. As used famously by James Joyce in his novel Ulysses (1922),
the stream‐of‐consciousness style represents the ‘flow’ of impressions, memories, and
sense‐impressions through the mind by abandoning accepted forms of syntax,
punctuation, and logical connection. However, contrary to the interior monologue
there are lingering traces of narrative intervention (syntax, tense).
Suspension of disbelief: The expression, used by Coleridge in his Biographia
Literaria (1817), describes the need for the reader to withhold any doubts or
questions about the reality or truth of the work of art, a state of mind necessary to
enter the author's imaginative world.
Synaesthesia: describing one sensation in terms of another. Ex.: “The light is
braying like an ass.” (E. Sitwell)
Synecdoche: a form of metonymy in which the part stands for the whole, or the
whole for the part. Ex.: 'hands' for people.
Tall tale: a humorous tale (common on the American frontier), which uses realistic
detail to relate incredible and impossible happenings showing someone's
superhuman abilities.
Telling vs showing: two methods of characterization. With 'telling', the narrator
tells us what the characters are like; with 'showing', the reader has to deduce it from
the way they speak and behave.
Tragic Flaw: it is similar to Aristotle's hamartia,the mistake or error which leads to
the tragic action, but the fatal or tragic flaw comes from the character of the tragie
hero.
Trope: A figure of speech, especially one that uses words in senses beyond their
literal meanings. The theory of rhetoric has involved several disputed attempts to
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clarify the distinction between tropes (or ‘figures of thought’) and schemes (or
‘figures of speech’). The most generally agreed distinction in modern theory is that
tropes change the meanings of words, by a ‘turn’ of sense, whereas schemes merely
rearrange their normal order.
Unreliable narrator: a fictional narrator whose views are not those of the author
(as in Swift's 'A Modest Proposal') or who does not accurately relates what happens in
the story (as in Ford's The Good Soldier, 1915).
Utopia: From the Greek meaning either “good place” or “nowhere land”. The name
‘Utopia” was coined by Thomas More (1551 for the English translation) in a book
describing a far-away island governed by a reasonable ruler and where there is no
private property and no vice. It passed into general usage, and has been adopted to
describe works describing an ideal world or an imaginary country which is neither
better nor worse than our own but so different that it points to some of the merits or
failures of our own system. By describing far-off countries, utopias often present
indirect criticism of authoritative governments. In the 20 th century, the sense of
anguish which accompanied two world wars, the holocaust and the atomic bomb, led
to several dystopias.
Verisimilitude: the semblance of truth and actuality.
Vernacular: the language native to a country, for example Old English in Anglo-
Saxon times, when Latin was the dominant language of learning.
Wit: an unexpected use of language which surprises and delights; wit is mainly
intellectual (resulting from paradox, pun, contrast) and leads to brilliant and
sparkling utterances or verbal fencing.Ex.:Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest
(1895).