Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Literary Terms
Literary Terms
Literary Terms
Selected from
A Handbook to Literature, 8th Edition
by William Harmon and C. Hugh Holman
1. acronym
Mel Gibson
as Hamlet Kenneth Derek
Branagh Jacobi
3. adaptation
(this is a
painting by
Chuck Close,
entitled
“Self-Portrait”)
4. aesthetics
Picasso’s
“House-
garden”
5. agrarian
• Literary people living in an
agricultural society, or espousing
the merits of such a society, as the
Physiocrats did. In literary history
and criticism, however, the term is
usually applied to a group of
Southern…
5. agrarian
…American writers who
published in Nashville, Tennessee,
between 1922 and 1925 The
Fugitive, a LITTLE MAGAZINE
of poetry and some criticism
championing agrarian
REGIONALISM but attacking
“the old high-castle Brahmins of
the Old South.”
5. agrarian
Hamlin
Garland
“Literature in its most
comprehensive sense is the
autobiography of humanity.”
-Bernard Berenson
6. 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
6. allegory (cont.)
• Samuel Coleridge: the
traditional distinction between a
“symbol” and allegory is that “an
allegory is but a translation of
abstract notions into picture-
language,” whereas “a Symbol
always partakes of the Reality
which it makes intelligible.”
Wizard of Oz
6. allegory
Babe the
Blue Ox
9. anachronism
• Assignment of something to a
time when it was not in
existence.
9. anachronism
William
Wordsworth
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.
12. anecdote
John
Falstaff
13. annotation
• A VARIOUM EDITION
represents the ultimate in
annotation. An annotated
BIBLIOGRAPHY, in addition
to the standard bibliographical
data includes comments on the
works listed.
13. annotation
Northrop
Frye
14. antagonist
• The character directly opposed
to the PROTAGONIST. A
rival, opponent, or enemy of the
PROTAGONIST.
Nurse Ratched
15. anthology
• Literally “a gathering of
flowers,” the term designates a
collection of writing, either
prose or poetry, usually by
various authors.
15. anthology
“Literature is the art of writing
something that will be read
twice; journalism, what will be
grasped at once.”
-Cyril Connolly
16. aside (as in drama)
• A dramatic convention by
which an actor directly
addresses the audience but is
not supposed to be heard by the
other actors on the stage.
16. aside (as in drama)
John
Donne
18. autobiography
Maya
Angelou
Charles 18. autobiography
Bukowski
19. avant-garde
John Ashbery
Frank O’Hara
20. bard
Shakespeare
“Our literature is substitute
for religion, and so is our
religion.”
-T.S. Eliot
21. Bildungsroman
Great
Expectations
Pip
22. biography
• A written account of a person’s
life, a life history. LETTERS,
MEMOIRS, DIARIES,
JOURNALS, and
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES ought to
be distinguished from biography
proper.
22. biography
• MEMOIRS, DIARIES,
JOURNALS, and
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES are
closely related to each other in
that each is recollection written
down by the subject of the work.
22. biography
Paul Burrell
Princess Diana
23. 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. canon
• In a figurative sense, a standard
of judgment; a criterion.
Harold
Bloom
25. 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. catharsis
Irene Jacob
in Othello
“To provoke dreams of terror
in the slumber of prosperity
has become the moral duty of
literature.”
-Ernst Fischer
26. character
• It is a brief descriptive
SKETCH of a personage who
typifies dome definite quality.
26. character
Lennie Small
Don Quixote
27. cliché
• From the French word for
stereotype plate; a block for
printing. Hence, any
expression so often used that its
freshness and clarity have worn
off is called a cliché, a
stereotyped form.
27. cliché
H.G. Wells
29. collage
William
Faulkner
“In an incarcerate society, free
literature can exist only as
denunciation and hope.”
-Eduardo Galeano
31. consonance
T.S. Eliot
Ezra Pound
33. denouement
• Literally, “unknotting.” The
final unraveling of a plot; the
solution of a mystery; an
explanation or outcome.
• Denouement is sometimes used
as a synonym for FALLING
ACTION.
33. denouement
Scooby-Doo Stories
34. dialogue
• Conversation of two or more people.
Embodies certain values
1.)advances the action and is not mere
ornament
2.)consistent with the character of the
speakers.
34. dialogue
• 3.)gives impression of naturalness
without being verbatim record
4.)presents the interplay of ideas and
personalities
5.)varies according to the various
speakers
6.)serves to give relief from passages
34. dialogue
Shirley
Jackson
“Literature decays only as
men become more and more
corrupt.”
-Goethe
36. didactic novel
Upton
The Jungle Sinclair
37. dime novel
Malaeska
38. discourse
• Mode or category of
expression, in grammar, we
speak of discourse as direct or
indirect. Discourse refers to
ways of speaking that are bound
by…
38. discourse
• …ideological, professional,
political, cultural, or sociological
communities. Way in which the
use of language in a particular
domain helps to constitute the
objects it refers to.
38. discourse
Sandra Looney
Augustana John Dudley USD
39. dynamic character
George
Orwell’s
1984
“It takes a great deal of history
to produce a little literature.”
-Henry James
41. elegy
• A sustained and formal poem
setting forth meditations on death
or another solemn theme. The
meditation often is occasioned by
the death of a particular person,
but it may be generalized
observation or the expression of a
solemn mood.
41. elegy
Oleg
Liubkivsky
The Elegy
of Far
Autumn,
1992
42. ellipsis
Odysseus
Trojan Horse
44. 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.
45. euphemism
Harry Potter
47. 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,…
47. Expressionism (cont.)
“The Muse”
“Lady and Her Cat” Jeff Buckley
Millie Shapiro
48. falling action
• The second half or RESOLUTION
of a dramatic plot. It follows the
CLIMAX, beginning often with a
tragic force, exhibits the failing
fortunes of the hero (in a tragedy)
and the successful efforts in the
COUNTERPLAYERS, and
culminates in the CATASTROPHE.
48. falling action
flat character
• a literary character whose
personality can be defined by
one or two traits and does not
change in the course of the
story
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.
49. foot (as in poetry)
William
Blake
50. 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.
50. 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.
50. foreshadowing
King John
52. 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.
52. hubris
Poseidon
53. hyperbole
Kurt Vonnegut
54. iamb (as in poetry)
• A foot consisting of an
unaccented syllable and an
accented ( ˘ ́ ). The most
common rhythm in English
verse.
54. iamb (as in poetry)
Shakespeare
55. idiom
• A use of words peculiar to a given
language; an expression that cannot
be translated literally. “To carry
out” literally means to carry
something out (of a room perhaps),
but idiomatically it means to see that
something is done, as to “carry out a
command.”
55. idiom
James
Thurber
“Literature is mostly about
having sex and not much
about having children. Life is
the other way around.”
-David Lodge
56. imagery
“Ninfee
Bianche”
Claude
Monet
1899
59. 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.
59. in medias res
60. internal rhyme (as in poetry)
• Rhyme that occurs at some
place before the last syllables in
a line. In the opening line of
Eliot’s “Gerontion”—”Here I
am, an old man in a dry
month”—there is internal
rhyme between “am” and
“man” and between “I” and
“dry.”
60. internal rhyme (as in poetry)
Li-Young Lee
“A great literature is …
chiefly the product of
doubting and inquiring
minds in revolt against the
immoveable certainties of
the nation.”
-H.L. Mencken
61. 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.
61. irony
62. Künstlerroman
• A form of the APPRENCESHIP
NOVEL in which the protagonist
is an artist struggling from
childhood to maturity toward an
understanding of his or her
creative mission. The most
famous Künstlerroman in English
is James Joyce’s A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man.
62. Künstlerroman
Chaim Potok
63. limerick
James Frey,
A Million
Little Pieces
67. metaphysical
John Donne
68. meter (as in poetry)
• The recurrence in poetry of a
rhythmic pattern, or the RHYTHM
established by the regular
occurrence of similar units of
sound. The four basic kinds of
rhythmic patters are:
68. meter (as in poetry) (cont.)
1.) QUANTITIVE
2.) accentual
3.) syllabic
4.) accentual-syllabic
68. meter (as in poetry)
69. 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.
69. 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.
69. motif
Cervantes
Don Quixote
70. mood
http://shekinah.elysiumgates.com/muse/muses.jpg
72. Naturalism
• A term best reserved for a literary
movement in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. It
draws its name from its basic
assumption that everything real
exists in NATURE, and…
72. Naturalism (cont.)
• …conceived as the world of
objects, actions, and forces that
yield their secrets to objective
scientific inquiry. Naturalism is a
response to the revolution in
thought that science has produced.
From Freud it gains a vielw of the
determinism of the iner and
subconscious self.
72. Naturalism (cont.)
• Naturalist ic worlks tend to
emphasize either a biological or
socioeconomic determinism.
Pessimistic about human
capabilities– life is a vicious trap;
frank in portrayal of humans and
animals being driven by
fundamental urges—fear, hunger,
and sex.
72. Naturalism
Stephen Crane
73. Nobel prize
• The Swedish chemist and
engineer Alfred Bernhard
Nobel willed the income from
practically his entire estate for
the establishment of annual in
the literature and other fields.
73. Nobel prize (cont.)
• Originally, the literature prize was
to go to the person who had
produced during the year the most
eminent piece of work in the field
of idealistic literature; in practice,
however, the prize rewards
recipient’s total career, and some
of the literature is not notably
idealistic.
73. Nobel prize
Ernest
Hemingway William
1954 T.S. Eliot Golding
1948 1983
74. noir
http://www.slushpile.net/wp-content/uploads/2006/06/irish%20noir.jpg
75. novel (and nonfiction novel)
John Keats
78. 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.
78. Oedipus Complex (cont.)
• …characters. A freedom in
movement in both time and
place, and freedom of the
narrator to comment on the
meaning of actions.
79. omniscient point of view
• A self-contradictory
combination of worlds or
smaller verbal units.
“Oxymoron” itself is an
oxymoron, from the Greek
meaning “sharp-dull.”
81. oxymoron
82. palindrome
• A composition imitating
another, usually serious, piece.
It is designed to ridicule a work
or its style or author.
85. parody
“Ernest: What is the difference
between literature and
journalism?
Gilbert: Oh! journalism is
unreadable, and literature is not
read.”
-Oscar Wilde
86. persona
• Literally, a mask. The term is
widely used to refer to a “second
half” created by an author and
through whom the narrative is
told….
86. persona
• …The persona can be not a
character but “an implied author”;
that is, a voice not directly the
author’s but created by the author
and through which the author
speaks.
86. persona
John
Berryman
87. 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.
87. personification
88. Petrarchan Sonnet
Petrarch
89. plot
Pip from
Batman/Spiderman Great Expectations
95. proverb
• A saying that briefly and memorably
expresses some recognized truth
about life; originally preserved by
oral tradition, though it may be
transmitted in written literature as
well. Proverbs may owe their
appeal to metaphor, antithesis, a
play on words, rhyme, or alliteration
or parallelism.
95. proverb
“One may recollect generally that
certain thoughts or facts are to be
found in a certain book; but without
a good index such a recollection
may hardly be more available than
that of the cabin boy,who knew
where the ship’s tea kettle was
because he saw it fall overboard.”
-Horace Binney
96. Pulitzer Prize
• Annual prizes for journalism,
literature, and music, awarded
annually since 1917 by the
School of Journalism and the
Board of Trustees of Columbia
University. The prizes are
supported by a bequest from
Joseph Pulitzer.
96. Pulitzer Prize
Laurence Fishburne
from Othello
“The easiest books are
generally the best, for whatever
author is obscure and difficult
in his own language certainly
does not think clearly.”
-Lord Chesterfield
111. science fiction
• A form of fantasy in which
scientific facts, assumptions, or
hypotheses form the basis, by
logical extrapolation, of
adventures in the future, on
other planets in other
dimensions in time or space, or
under new variants of scientific
law.
111. science fiction
Ray Bradbury
112. semantics
Michel
Foucault
113. semiotics
• The study of the rules that enable
social phenomena, considered as
SIGNS, to have meaning. When
semiotics is used in literary
criticism, it deals not with the
simple relation…
113. semiotics
• …between sign and
significance, but with literary
conventions, such as those of
prosody, genre, or received
interpretations of literary
devices at particular times.
113. semiotics
Jacques Derrida
114. Sentimentalism
• The term is used in two senses:
(1) an overindulgence in
emotion, especially the
conscious effort to induce
emotion in order to enjoy it; (2)
an optimistic overemphasis of
the goodness of humanity
(SENSIBILITY).
114. Sentimentalism
115. Shakespearean Sonnet
Petrarch
118. stage directions
• Material that an author, editor,
prompter, performer, or other
person adds to a text to indicate
movement, attitude, manner,
style, or quality of a speech,
character, or action. Some of
the simplest and oldest are
“enter,” “exit” or “exeunt,” and
“aside.”
118. stage directions
119. static character
Henry Higgins
120. stanza
• A recurrent grouping of two or
more verse lines in terms of
length, metrical form, and, often,
rhyme scheme. However, the
division into stanzas is sometimes
mad according to thought as well
as form, in which case the stanza
is a unit like a prose paragraph.
120. stanza
“I don’t like to read books; they
muss up my mind.”
-Henry Ford
121. stock character
• Conventional character types. A
high-thinking vengeance-
seeking hero, disguised
romantic heroine, melancholy
man, a court fool, and a witty
clownish servant are examples.
121. stock character
• Eliot's “Gerontion” is a
gerontion—the world itself is
the name of a favorite stock
character of Greek (and later)
comedy: the geezer, codger,
“little old man.”
121. stock character
Tom
Robinson in
To Kill a
Mockingbird
122. Stream of Consciousness
James Joyce
123. Surrealism
William
Burroughs
124. 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
124. symbolism
125. symposium
• A Greek world meaning “a
drinking together” or banquet.
The world later came to mean
discussion by different persons
of a single topic or a collection
of speeches or essays on a
given subject.
125. symposium
“One always tends to
overpraise a long book, because
one has got through it.”
-E.M. Forster
126. synopsis
• A summary of the main points
of a composition so made as to
show the relation of parts to the
whole; an ABSTIACT. A
synopsis is usually more
connected than an outline,
because it is likely to be given
in complete sentences.
126. synopsis
127. syntax
John Henry
129. Theatre of the Absurd
• A term invented by Martin
Esslin for the kind of drama
that presents a view of the
absurdity of the human
condition by abandoning of
usual or rational devices and by
the used of nonrealistic form.
129. Theatre of the Absurd
Samuel Beckett
130. theme
• A central idea. Both theme and
thesis imply a subject and a
predicate of some kind—not
just vice in general, say, but
some such proposition as “Vice
seems more interesting than
virtue but turns out to be
destructive.”
130. theme
“All good books are alike in
that they are truer than if they
had really happened.”
-Ernest Hemingway
131. thesis
• An attitude or position on a
problem taken by a writer or
speaker with the purpose of
proving or supporting it. The
term is also used for the paper
written to support the thesis.
131. thesis
132. 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.
132. tone
133. tour de force
Thomas Cole
The Voyage of Life: Youth
1842
136. Transcendentalism
Example of irony
137. trope
Example of irony
138. 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.
138. utopia
Sandra Cisneros
“Books are a narcotic.”
-Franz Kafka