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| A narrative shaped or made form the author's imagination. Parts of a fictional story, novel, or drama may refer to factual reality, but the story and characters arise from the musings of the creator. |
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| Fiction written to meet the taste of a wisde popular audience and relying usually on tested formulas for satisfying such taste. |
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| Fiction written with serious artistic intentions, providing an imagined experience yielding authentic insights into some significant aspect of life. |
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| The tension and anticipation that develops in the audience with regard to the plot, usually focusing on what will happen to the main character |
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| The series of events unfolded throughout the course of a narrative. A conventional plot is organized in terms of conflict, climax, resolution, and dénouement. |
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| The series of events unfolded throughout the course of a narrative. A conventional plot is organized in terms of conflict, climax, resolution, and dénouement. |
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| Pertaining to any drama, the structure of a work refers to the arrangement of its elements. |
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| A struggle between two forces that drives a narrative's plot. The two forces in conflict can be two characters, a character and his or her environment or society, or two large social groups. Conflict can also be wholly internal to a character, as in narratives in which a character struggles with his or her psychological issues or conflicting desires. |
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| The main character - whether hero or anti-hero - of any given literary text. |
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| The character who opposes the lead character, or protagonist. Occasionally, when the conflict is internal, the antagonist is actually another side of the protagonist's own personality. |
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| A character who usually carries the action of a narrative without adding emotional insight or plot development. E.M. Forster coined the term to describe a character with few traits. The parlor maid in a play or the sheriff in a cowboy movie may be a flat character is she or he is there merely to facilitate the scene. |
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| Realistic literary characters distinguished by depth, psychological complexity, and even self-contradiction. |
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| A kind of character, usually one-dimensional, appearing regularly in certain types of literature: the wicked stepmother in fairy tales, for instance. |
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| A character who does not grow or change throughout a narrative. |
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| Also known as a round character; a complex character depicted as having psychological depth, particularly one who develops and changes over the course of a narrative. See flat character. |
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| A character that sets off or contrasts with another character maybe serving as a foil or opposite. |
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| In poetry, fiction, or drama, the theme is the dominating idea in a work. For example, one might say that the theme of Romeo and Juliet is the problem of star-crossed love. |
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| The language of a particular class, ethnic group, or region, as represented in literature. Dialect is a method of characterization that uses spelling, grammar, and word choice to represent the sounds of that character's speech, often with the intent of distinguishing the character from others in the narrative. A famous example of the use of dialect can be found in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. |
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| The particular word choices made by an author. Diction may be formal or informal, concrete or abstract; diction is a major contributor to an author's style. |
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| The use in fiction of distinctive though typically superficial regional material intended to provide realistic background. Regional particularities can be expressed in specific types of setting, dialect, dress, custom or habit. |
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| In a narrative work, events are constructed so that early events will suggest later events in the development of the plot; thus a gun in the first act of a play suggests that someone will be shot in a later act. Without foreshadowing, the reader or audience might not be prepared for the outcome of the narrative. |
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| The interruption in the line of the narrative which occurs when a character suddenly remembers a past event so vividly that it takes over the line of action for a time. Flashbacks are used in both novels and film to enhance the story line or to add information that is necessary to the plot of the work. Often in stories of war or conflict, the character will suddenly find him or herself out of time and into an episode of memory. This memory may explain something in the current action or something in the motivation of the character. |
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| First-Person Point of View |
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| The story is told by one of its characters, using the first person. |
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| Third-Person Omniscient Point of View |
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| The author tells the story using the third person, knowing all and free to tell us anything, including what the characters are thinking or feeling and why they act as they do. |
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| Third-Person Limited Point of View |
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| The author tells the story using the third person, but is limited to a complete knowledge of one character in the story and tells us only what that one character thinks, feels, sees, or hears. |
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| Third Person Objective Point of View |
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| The dramatic third-person point of view, when the narrator reports on events and speech, but does not comment on the thoughts of other characters. |
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| The atmosphere or tone of a literary work, conveyed through diction, characterization, and setting. |
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| Tone signifies the attitude of a work of literature. For example, the attitude may be ironic, sad, joyful, or pensive. |
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| A symbol in a work of art is an element that stands for something beyond its literal meaning in the text. It embodies an idea, such as the way in which the white whale in Moby-Dick is invested with meaning. |
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| A narrative in which the characters, action, and dialogue work to represent an abstract concept. The fable of the ant and the grasshopper, for example, is an allegory advocating industriousness. |
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| A fantasy must have magic and magical characters, and these characters must find themselves in amazing and imaginative situations. The stories often unfold in worlds far away or long ago, and the characters often find themselves doing and experiencing things quite impossible in the ordinary world. |
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| A figure of speech in which the implied meaning of something differs from the literal meaning, such as in a sarcastic remark. |
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| A dramatic device in which the reader or spectator knows something about a situation that a character does not, with the result that the character either behaves inappropriately or expects an outcome that is opposed to that which the reader knows is forthcoming. Dramatic irony runs rampant in Sophocles Oedipus Rex, as Oedipus repeatedly curses the murderer of Laius, not knowing that he is in fact the murderer. |
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| A type of irony in which an action differs markedly from audience expectations, resulting in surprise and sometimes discomfort. Herman Melville uses situational irony in Benito Cereno, for example, as readers discover at the end of the novella that the reality of the situation is the complete opposite of their (and the protagonist's) perceptions. |
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| The implied or figurative meaning that a word or image carries, as distinct from its literal or explicit meaning. Connotation often includes contextual or culturally specific overtones. For instance, "home" literally means the place one lives, but it often carries the connotations of safety and security. See denotation. |
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| The literal or explicit meaning that word or image carries, as distinct form its implied or figurative meaning. Denotation usually disregards the cultural or contextual overtones of a term. Dictionary definitions are generally denotative. See connotation. |
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| In poetic writing the stress may be expressly on the image that is being described or envisioned. Imagery is also used in fiction to create a particular mood or impression. It is important to keep in mind that these images appeal to the senses, giving an evocative picture of that which is being described. |
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| In poetry, a figure of speech whereby two unlike objects are compared to each other with the word like or as, e.g., "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun." |
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| A figure of speech, not mean tot be factually true, in which one thing is compared or substituted for something else. Although the two things are not identical, they are associated in language to emphasize a similarity between them. |
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| Also known as "anthropomorphism," personification is the attribution of human characteristics to an inanimate object or phenomenon. |
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| An address either to a person who is dead or not present, to an inanimate object, or to an abstract concept, designed in part to provide insight into a character's thoughts. |
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| A figure of speech which substitutes the name of one thing with that of another with which it is closely associated in common experience. The use of the "White House" or "Oval Office" to refer to the United States presidency is a familiar example. |
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| A figure of speech in which a part signifies the whole or the whole signifies the part, e.g., in the phrase "All hands on deck," hands stands for people. |
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| A reference, often to a historical figure, myth, or artwork, that exists outside the literary work. Allusions to the Bible are common in Western literature. |
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| An overstatement used to stress a point. |
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| A kind of word-play that depends upon identical or similar sounds among words with different meanings. |
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| A statement or expression playing on words that initially seems self-contradictory, but which provokes reflection on ways or contexts in which it might seem valid. |
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| A condensed paradox combining two contradictory terms, such as bittersweet. |
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| A repetition of a sound, usually the initial sound, in a sequence of words, such as "Full many a flower is born to blush unseen" (Thomas Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"). |
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| A pattern of identical or similar vowel sounds, usually in stressed syllables of words with different end sounds. For example, the "o" sound is repeated five times in this line from George Gordon, Lord Byron's "Childe Harold": "Roll on, thou deep and dark-blue ocean, roll!" |
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| A pleasant combination of sounds; also, the repetition of consonants or groups of consonant, particularly at the ends of words. See also alliteration, assonance. |
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| Concurrence of similar or identical sounds within different words. |
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| The pattern of repeated words-sounds throughout the course of an entire poem or stanza. |
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| Also referred to as slant or near rhyme, these rhymes share sound qualities or sounds within words. An example of such a rhyme is the feminine or half rhyme. Approximate rhymes are often repeated strategically within a perfect rhyme scheme in order to achieve a particular effect, e.g., told, woe. |
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| Rhyme occurring in the final words or syllables of two or more lines of poetry, as opposed to internal rhyme, which occurs within a line. |
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| Within the lines of a poem, words will rhyme, affecting the ear more than the rhythm, as does a rhyme at the end of a line: with laugh the gaff was gone. |
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| The attempt to label a thing by forming a word from sounds associated with it. |
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| A regular, recurring rhythm, or pattern of stresses and pauses, in lines of verse. |
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| In poetry, the means of measuring meter. A foot has either two or three syllables with varying accents. |
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| The process of determining a poem's rhythmic pattern through recognition of stressed and unstressed syllables. |
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| A metrical foot consisting of two unaccented syllables followed by one accented syllable, e.g., like a child, like a ghost. |
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| A metrical foot consisting of one accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables, e.g., "strawberry" and "horrible" |
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| A metrical foot consisting of one accented syllable followed by one unaccented syllable. |
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| A metrical foot consisting of one unaccented syllable followed by one accented syllable. |
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| A line of poetry consisting of five iambic feet. |
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| Unrhymed verse written in iambic pentameter. Considered to be the poetic form closest to normal speech patterns, blank verse is featured in Shakespeare's plays and in narrative poems such as John Milton's Paradise Lost. |
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| Free verse has no prescribed form or meter, but free verse does have form, often a form found by the poet while composing. Meter and rhythm vary according to the needs and demands of the poem itself. |
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| The basic unit of a poem typically comprised of two or more lines. A stanza operates much as the paragraph does in prose. |
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| Two successive lines of poetry of the same metrical length, usually rhyming, that form a complete unit. |
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| Fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, usually divided into three quatrains followed by a couplet, with the rhyme scheme of ababcdcdefefgg. |
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| Fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, usually divided into an octet with the rhyme scheme of abbaabba, followed by a sestet, with rhyme schemes of either cdcdcd or cdecde. |
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