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Literary Devices
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Achilles' Heel | a person's area of particular vulnerability |
| Pound of Flesh | someone's insistence on being repaid, even if the repayment will destroy or harm the debtor |
| Sacred Cow | something that cannot be interfered with or harmed in any way |
| Allegory | any writing in verse or prose that has a double meaning |
| Alliteration | the repetition of identical or similar consonant sounds, normally at the beginning of words |
| Allusion | a reference in a work of literature to something outside the work, especially to a well-known historical or literary event, person, or work |
| Anachronism | placing an event, person, item, or verbal expression in the wrong time period |
| Anadiplosis | "doubling;" repeating the last word of a clause at the beginning of the next clause |
| Anaphora | the repetition at the beginning of clauses |
| Antihero | a protagonist who is a non-hero or the antithesis of a traditional hero |
| Anthropomorphism | when an object or animal is actually doing something human |
| Antithesis | a figure of speech characterized by strongly contrasting words, clauses, sentences, or ideas; a balancing of one term against another for emphasis or stylistic effectiveness |
| Aphorism | an original thought spoken or written in a concise or memorable form |
| Apostrophe | a figure of speech in which someone, some abstract quality, or a nonliving object is addressed as through present |
| Assonance | the repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds |
| Crossing the Rubicon | take an irreversible step, often involving some danger |
| Casting Pearls before Swine | offer something precious to someone or a group of people unable to appreciate the value of what they are being given |
| Once in a Blue Moon | something that occurs very rarely |
| Bildungsroman | a novel or play in which an adolescent protagonist comes to adulthood by a process of experience and disillusionment |
| Blank Verse | unrhymed iambic pentameter |
| Cacophony | a harsh, unpleasant combination of sounds or tones |
| Caesura | a pause, usually near the middle of a line of verse, used to add suspense or emphasis |
| Catharsis | the emotional purging that brings about a moral or spiritual renewal or relief |
| Chiasmus | the repetition of words in successive clauses in reverse grammatical order |
| Chivalry | a knight's code of behavior in the late medieval period |
| Circumlocution | the use of longer phrasing in place of possible shorter format of expression |
| Climax | a decisive moment or turning point in a story or play when the action changes course and begins to resolve itself |
| Colloquialism | a word or phrase used in everyday plain and relaxed speech |
| Comedy | a play that ends happily; often has to do with the concerns and exploits of ordinary people |
| Black Comedy | a play where the reader is invited to laugh at events that are mortifying or grotesque |
| Comic Relief | a humorous scene or character or line occurring after some serious or tragic moment |
| Euphony | a pleasant sounding combination of words |
| Grundyism/Mrs. Grundy | an attitude of narrow-minded prudishness |
| Shed Crocodile Tears | show false sympathy for someone |
| Sirens | anything that tempts a person away from safety and toward a destructive path |
| Siren Song | the temptation used to lure a person |
| Conceit | an ingenious or fanciful notion or concept, usually expressed through an elaborate analogy, an pointing to a striking parallel between two seemingly dissimilar things |
| Consonance | the repetition of similar consonant sounds in a group of words |
| Couplet | a two-line stanza, usually with end-rhymes the same |
| Dialect | the language of a particular district, class, or group of persons; a major technique of characterization that reveals the social or geographic status of a character |
| Dialogue | the lines spoken by a character or characters in a play, essay, story, or novel, especially a conversation between two characters |
| Deus Ex Machina | "god from the machine"; a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem is suddenly and abruptly resolved by the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, or object |
| Diction | the author's word choice (formal, informal, colloquial) |
| Didactic | a text intended primarily to teach a lesson |
| Dirge | a somber song or lament expressing mourning or grief (funeral) |
| Dramatic Poem/Dramatic Monologue | employs a dramatic form or some element of dramatic techniques |
| Read the Riot Act | issue a stern warning that if unacceptable behavior does not cease, severe consequences will follow |
| Thirty Pieces of Silver | payment received for an act of treachery |
| Betrayed with a Kiss | a supposed friend’s treachery |
| Gordian Knot | any extremely complex problem |
| Cutting the Gordian Knot | solving a complex problem in a quick, decisive manner |
| Elegy | a sustained and formal poem setting forth the poet’s meditations upon death or another solemn topic |
| Ellipsis | the omission of a word or phrase |
| End-Stopped | a line with a pause at the end |
| Enjambment | the continuation of the sense and grammatical construction from one line of poetry to the next |
| Epigram | brief, clever, and memorable statement |
| Epilogue | a conclusion added to a literary work; contrast to prologue |
| Epiphany | revelation of such power and insight that it alters the entire world view |
| Epistle | a letter |
| Epistrophe | ending a series of lines, phrases, clauses, or sentences with the same word or words |
| Epithet | a short poetic nickname |
| Etymology | study of the history of words, origins, forms, and meaning |
| Euphemism | the substitution of an agreeable or less offensive expression in place of one that may offend or suggest something unpleasant to the listener |
| Extended Metaphor | a comparison that is carried throughout a stanza or entire poem |
| Eye Rhyme | rhyme that appears correct from spelling, but is a half-rhyme or slant rhyme from the pronunciation. |
| Ivory Tower | a beautiful, unreachable place |
| Residing in an Ivory Tower | secluded or protected from the real world and thus out of touch with reality |
| All that Glitters is not Gold | something which appears valuable on the outside, may in fact be less than valuable; appearances can be deceptive |
| Sound and Fury | a great, tumultuous, and passionate uproar that actually is unimportant or meaningless |
| Fable | fictional story featuring animals which are given human qualities to illustrate a moral lesson |
| Feminine Rhyme/Double Rhyme | a rhyme of two syllables, one stressed and one unstressed |
| Figurative Language | writing that uses figures of speech such as metaphor, irony, and simile; language that is not meant to be taken literally. |
| Flashback | a method of narration in which present action is temporarily interrupted so that the reader can witness past events—usually in the form of a character’s memories, dreams, narration, or authorial commentary |
| Frame Narrative | the result of inserting one or more small stories within the body of a larger story that encompasses the smaller ones |
| Free Verse | poetry without regular rhythm or rhyme |
| Heroic Couplet | two end-stopped iambic pentameter lines rhymed aa, bb, cc with the thought usually completed in the two-line unit |
| Hubris | arrogant, excessive self-pride or self-confidence |
| Hyperbole | extravagant and often outrageous exaggeration |
| Imagery | the sensory details of a work; the figurative language of a work |
| Irony | when what happens is the opposite of what is expected |
| Verbal Irony | actual intent is expressed in words which carry the opposite meaning |
| Dramatic Irony | the audience knows something a character does not |
| Situational Irony | situations are drastically different than one would predict |
| In Media Res | when a text begins in the middle of a story |
| Internal Rhyme | rhyme that occurs within a line, rather than at the end |
| Litote | opposite of hyperbole; drastic understatement |
| Be an Icarus/Fly too Close to the Sun | fail or be destroyed because of a lack of caution or excessive ambition |
| Bread and Circuses | policies designed to prevent unrest by keeping people happy and thus deflecting concern about troubling issues |
| Tabula Rasa | "blank slate"; the idea that something or someone is entirely unmarked and uninfluenced |
| Tantalus/Tantalized | be offered something desirable which is then withheld |
| Malapropism | misusing words to create a comical effect |
| Masculine Rhyme | rhyme that falls on the stressed and concluding syllables of the rhyme words |
| Memoir | an autobiographical sketch that typically focuses on a specific memory |
| Metaphor | figurative language in which a comparison is expressed without the use of a comparative term ("as", "like," "than") |
| Meter | regular rhythm in a line of poetry |
| Foot | a unit of meter |
| Metonymy | a figure of speech which is characterized by the substitution of a term naming an object closely associated with the word in mind for the word itself |
| Monologue | the internal or emotional thoughts or feelings of an individual; a speaker speaking aloud to themselves or a group |
| Motif | a recurring element, such as an incident, reference, phrase, color, or image which appears frequently in a work of literature |
| Narrative Poem | a poem which tells a story |
| Octave | an eight-line stanza |
| Ode | a long lyric poem of formal style and complex form that commemorates or celebrates a special quality, object, or occasion |
| NIMBY | "Not In My Back Yard"; refers to the idea that, while people may be aware of the necessity of some unpleasant realities, such as prisons, landfills, or chemical plants, they insist that these places be located away from where they live |
| Meet One's Waterloo | suffer an ultimate, decisive defeat |
| Emperor's New Clothes | when someone points out the falseness or pretentiousness of something, especially when others are afraid to admit the truth |
| Left-Handed Compliment | a compliment that, despite being a compliment, is insulting or rude in some way |
| Golden Calf | an idol or any object, especially a material object, that is worshiped even though it is not worthy of worship |
| Onomatopoeia | the use of words whose sound suggests their meaning |
| Oxymoron | a form of paradox that combines a pair of contrary terms into a single expression |
| Parable | a story designed to reveal allegorically some religious principle, moral lesson, or general truth |
| Paradox | a situation or action or feeling that appears to be contradictory but on inspection turns out to be true or at least to make sense |
| Parallelism | a similar grammatical structure within a line or lines of poetry |
| Parody | a text imitating or ridiculing another, usually serious, piece of work |
| Pastoral | dealing with the life of the shepherds or with a simple rural existence; usually idealizes shepherd's lives in order to create an image of peaceful or uncorrupted existence |
| Personification | a type of metaphor that gives inanimate objects or abstract ideas human characterstics |
| Polysyndention | using many conjunctions to achieve an overwhelming effect |
| Asyndenton | conjunction are deliberately omitted from a series of related clauses |
| Propaganda | refers to information, rumors, or ideas spread deliberately to help or harm another group, movement, belief, or government |
| Pun | a play on words |
| Sword of Damocles | an awareness of impending or imminent danger |
| Non Sequitur | "It does not follow"; a statement that is unrelated to what has been said before; a conclusion that does not logically follow from the premises |
| White Elephant | an object that has no use to its owner and may even represent a burden or inconvenience |
| Fiddle while Rome Burns | display indifference in the midst of an emergency or disaster |
| Quatrain | a four-line stanza |
| Refrain | a group of words forming a phrase or sentence and consisting of one or more lines repeated at intervals in a poem |
| Rhyme | close similarity or identity of sound |
| External Rhyme | rhyming words at the ends of successive lines |
| Rhythm | the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables |
| Sarcasm | type of irony in which a person appears to be praising something but is actually insulting it (verbal irony) |
| Satire | writing that seeks to arouse a reader's disapproval of an object by ridicule; usually comedy that exposes errors with an intent to correct a vice or folly |
| Scansion | a system for describing the meter of a poem by identifying the number and type of feet per line |
| Sestet | a six-line stanza |
| Simile | a comparison of two objects, usually with "like," "as," or "than" |
| Sonnet | a fourteen line iambic pentameter poem |
| Soliloquy | a dramatic speech alone on stage in which a character speaks his thoughts aloud |
| Loaves and Fishes | an almost miraculous abundance in the face of seeming scarcity |
| Magnum Opus | "great work"; the greatest work produced by a writer, composer, or other artist |
| Janus | the wisdom of a person who sees everything, or the two-faced, hypocritical nature of a person who presents two appearances |
| Chip on One's Shoulder | inclined to be resentful or seems to be looking for an excuse to fight |
| Stanza | a repeated grouping of three or more lines with the same meter and rhyme scheme |
| Structure | the arrangement of materials within a work; the relationships of the parts of a work to the whole; the logical divisions to a work |
| Style | the modes of expression in language; manner of expression of an author |
| Suspense | a state of uncertainty or when the reader wants to know "what will happen next?" |
| Symbol | something that is simultaneously itself and a sign of something else |
| Synecdoche | a form of metaphor in which mentioning a part signifies the whole |
| Synesthesia | taking one type of the senses and combining it with another sense |
| Syntax | the ordering of words in a sentence |
| Noble Savage | a person who has not been corrupted by society or civilization |
| Burning Bush | a medium through which the voice of absolute authority speaks |
| Narcissus/Narcissism | the obsessive focus on oneself, particularly one's physical appearance |
| Skeleton in the Closet | unpleasant or embarrassing things about a person that he or she would prefer to keep hidden from others |
| Tercet | a stanza of three lines in which each line ends with the same rhyme |
| Terza Rima | a three-line stanza rhymed aba, bcb, cdc, etc. |
| Theme | the main thought expressed through a work |
| Tone | the manner in which an author expresses his or her attitude; the intonation of the voice that expresses meaning; typically described through adjectives |
| Tragedy | a serious play in which the chief character passes through a series of misfortunes leading to a final, devastating catastrophe |
| Tragic Hero | the main character in a Greek or Roman tragedy; typically an admirable character who is undone by a fatal flaw or tragic mistake |
| Epic Hero | a character who embodies the values of his culture and appears in an epic poem |
| Fifteen Minutes of Flame | when someone receives a great deal of media attention for something fairly trivial |
| Let the Cat out of the Bag | a secret being revealed |
| Buy a Pig in a Poke | buying something sight unseen; considered unwise because of the risks involved |
| Lot's Wife/Pillar of Salt | someone who unwisely chooses to look back once he or she has begun on a course of action; someone who disobeys an explicit rule or command |
| Cassandra | someone who predicts disasters or negative results, especially to someone whose predictions are disregarded |
| Catch-22 | an absurd, no-win situation |
| Transcendentalism | an American philosophical, religious, and literary movement roughly equivalent to the Romantic movement and generally stresses individual intuition and conscience and holds that nature reveals the whole of God's moral law |
| Verisimiltude | how precisely characters or events in fiction match reality |
| Vernacular | relating to using the language or ordinary speech rather than formal writing |
| Vignette | a brief sketch or verbal description of a scene or incident |
| Zeguma | an expression in which a single word stands in the grammatical relation to two other words, but does not have the same figurative meaning with respect to both |
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