literary terms Flashcards
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
grammatical term for a change of construction in a sentence that
leaves the initial construction unfinished.
ex. 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
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
ex. 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 adresses a dead or absent person or an abstraction or inanimate object
Assonance
repetition of vowel sounds, especially in stressed syllables.
Ex.:”The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared” (Coleridge).
Asyndeton
erbal 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
Ex. Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’: ‘An empty stream, a great silence,
an impenetrable forest. The air was thick, warm, heavy, sluggish.’
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
humorous element to alleviate the tension in a tragedy or a dramatic passage.
