LITERARY STYLE TERMS

GENERAL
Allegory: a story that may be applied to another, parallel, set of situations while
maintaining its own narrative integrity; serves as an extended metaphor
Alliteration: repetition of identical consonant sounds in different words in close
proximity (see assonance, consonance, and sibilance)
Allusion: references (usually unacknowledged) to literary works, persons, sayings,
and other elements of our cultural heritage
Anaphora: deliberate repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of several
successive verses, clauses, or paragraphs (see repetition)
Antithesis: a balancing or contrasting of one term against another
Apostrophe: the addressing of discourse to a real or imagined person who is not
present (may have died); a speech to an animate object
Assonance: similarity or repetition of a vowel sound in two or more words
(versus consonance)
Cacophony: words combining consonant sounds that do not permit an easy flow of
pronunciation, but rather produce sharpness or harshness
Catalogue: long rhetorical list or inventory traditional epic device
Chiasmus: a rhetorical sentence pattern (or even a larger pattern) repeating in the
sequence A-B-B-A, such as I know she loves me, but she loves to keep me
from knowing it.
Comedy: literary work beginning in adversity and ending in prosperity that describes
the regeneration and success of a group or society
Comedy of Humors: exposes and ridicules the humors (excesses and eccentricities)
of characters in order to reform them
Comedy of Manners: usually high comedy, in which the social conventions of
society are examined and satirized
Comedy of the Absurd: modern form of
Comedy that dramatizes the absurdities of existence and ends ambiguously
Conceit: an elaborate or unusual comparison, using unlikely metaphors, similes,
imagery, hyperbole, and oxymora, such as Shakespeares comparison in Richard II of
two kings competing for power as two buckets in a well
Connotation: the emotional, psychological, or social overtones or implications that
words carry in addition to their standard dictionary meaning (versus denotation)
Consonance: repetition of identical or similar consonants in neighboring words
whose vowel sounds are different (versus assonance)

Denotation: standard dictionary meaning of a word (versus connotation)

Dichotomy: division into two exclusive, opposed, or contradictory groups
Diction: word choice, type of words, and level of language.
Dissonance: discord or incongruity of sounds
Double Entendre: deliberate ambiguity as to the meaning of a phrase, with one
meaning being straightforward and another meaning often being risqu
Elision: the omitting of one or more sounds in a word, may be used to portray a
characters actual speech or to preserve a rhythm in poetry; contractions are
examples of elision
Epanalepsis: where a phrase begins and ends with the same wording, lending
emphasis; He is noticeable for nothing in the world except for the markedness by
which he is noticeable for nothing from Poes The Literati of New York City
Epigraph: motto or quotation at the beginning of a book, poem, chapter, etc. that
often indicates the theme
Epithet: a word or phrase added to or substituted for the name of a deity or person
Eponym: a name (from a person, real or fictitious) so commonly associated with the
attributes of its owner that it comes to symbolize those attributes; Benedict Arnold is
associated with treason
Equivocate: to use ambiguous or unclear expressions, usually to mislead and
deceive
Hyperbole: use of exaggeration or overstatement to heighten effect, not to be taken
literally
Imagery: literary references to sensory impressions, making for immediacy and
vividness; forms of compressed representation that work through comparison,
allusion, or suggestion; tactile (touch), olfactory (smell), gustatory (taste), kinesthetic
(sensations of movement)
Irony: awareness by author, character, or reader of a contrast or difference between
the way things seem and the way they are
Dramatic: special type of situational irony in which a character perceives his or her
plight in one way, while the spectator and one or more of the other characters
understand it in a greater perspective
Situational: type of irony emphasizing that human beings are enmeshed in forces
beyond their comprehension or control

Verbal: language stating the opposite of what is meant

Cosmic: situational irony that is connected to a pessimistic or fatalistic view of life
Litotes: means of expressing the affirmative by denying the contrary; deliberate
understatement, such as she is not so unkind to mean she is kind
Metaphor: an implied comparison of two usually unlike things
Metonymy: substitution of a word naming an object for another word closely
associated with it, such as Washington being used as a metonym for the American
government
Onomatopoeia: the use of a word to represent or imitate natural sounds
Oxymoron: two terms that in ordinary usage are contraries; effective combination of
contradictory or incongruous words
Parable: brief and often simple narrative designed to illustrate a moral or religious
truth
Paradox: concept that seems to be self- contradictory or absurd, yet on closer
scrutiny, the apparent contradiction disappears and the statement is found to be truly
meaningful
Parallelism: a rhetorical figure in which the same grammatical forms are repeated in
two or more phrases, lines of verse, or sentences.
Persona: the narrator or storyteller of a work created by the author; may be a
character or anonymous onlooker invented for artistic purposes
Personification: an inanimate object or an abstract concept is spoken of as though it
were endowed with life or with human attributes or feelings
Prose Fiction: novels, short stories, and shorter prose works that generally focus on
one or a few characters who undergo some sort of change as they encounter other
characters or deal with some problem
Prose Poem: a short work, written in prose, but employing the methods of verse,
such as imagery, for poetic ends
Pun: a word play in which the writer surprisingly reveals that words with totally
different meaning have similar or even identical sounds
Realism: the use of true, life-like, or probable situations and concerns; concept
underlying the use of reality in literature
Repetition: specifically refers to repeated words, phrases, lines, or even stanzas

Anaphora: deliberate repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of several

successive verses, clauses, or paragraphs
Chorus: regular repetition of a larger unit of a poem, usually a stanza
Incremental: repetition of whole phrases or sentences
Refrain: repetition of a line or two at the end of each stanza
Rhetoric: the art of persuasive writing, the general art of writing; short or long
sentences, parallelism, climax, simile, metaphor, irony, symbolism, etc. are aspects of
rhetoric.
Rhyme: similarity of final sounds in two or more words
Masculine: only last stressed syllable corresponds: cat-hat
Feminine: last two syllables correspond: buying-flying
Triple: last three syllables correspond: tenderly-slenderly
Slant/Para rhyme: slightly imperfect rhyme: heaven-given
Identical: two words pronounced the same way, but with different spellings,
meanings, and origins: deer-dear
Satire: an attack on human follies or vices, as measured positively against a
normative religious, moral, or social standard
Simile: figurative language in which words such as like or as are used to draw
similarities between two apparently unlike things
Sibilance: characterized by a hissing sound; sibilant speech sounds such as (s), (sh),
(z), or (zh)
Symbol: a word or image that signifies itself and something other than what is
literally represented; it may stand for ideas, values, persons, or ways of life; always
points beyond its own meaning towards a greater and more complex meaning
Synecdoche: the technique of mentioning a part of something to represent the whole
Syntax: the way in which linguistic elements (as words) are put together to form
constituents (as phrases or clauses)
Theme: the specific and central idea or ideas that a literary work explores or asserts
about its subject
Tragedy: a literary work, beginning in prosperity and ending in adversity that
recounts the fall of an individual

Tragic Flaw: the error, frailty, or flaw that causes the downfall of a tragic protagonist
Tone: the literary speakers attitude toward his subject, characters, or readers
formal or intimate, outspoken or reticent, abstruse or simple, serious or ironic,
condescending or obsequious
Understatement: the deliberate underplaying or undervaluing of a thing for
purposes of emphasis
Verisimilitude: a characteristic of literature, particularly fiction, that emphasizes the
probable and lifelike
DRAMATIC PLOT STRUCTURE
I.Exposition: provides background information needed to properly identify a story
II.Rising Action/Complication: the onset of the major conflicts in a work
III.Climax: high point in an action, where the conflict and consequent tension are
brought out to the fullest extent; hence the turning point of a work at which the
outcome is determined
IV.Falling Action: the conflict gradually unravels
V.Denouement/Resolution/Catastrophe: single moment of revelation or realization
when everything falls into place

DRAMA-SPECIFIC
Aside: a short speech delivered by one character to the audience without the rest of
the characters onstage being able to hear; represents an unspoken thought
(see soliloquy)
Monologue: a long speech spoken by a single character to himself or herself, the
audience, or an off-stage character
Soliloquy: a convention in which a character, alone onstage, utters his or her
thoughts aloud, allowing the audience to be informed about the characters
motivations and state of mind; longer than an aside (see aside)
POETRY-SPECIFIC
Ballad: a narrative poem composed of quatrains in which lines of iambic tetrameter
alternate with iambic trimester, rhyming a b c b

Narrative Ballad: a ballad that communicates a story

Blank Verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter
Caesura: clear pauses in the middle of lines, especially prominent in Greek and Latin
verse, often found in heroic verse form, dactylic hexameter, (related to enjambment)
Clerihew: a humorous closed-form poem in four lines, rhyming a b a b, usually about
a famous person or figure
Concrete Poetry: also known as shape poetry, where the poem draws most or all of
its meaning from the typographical arrangement of the words, which are meant to
produce a visual impact
Double-Dactyl: humorous closed-form poem in two quatrains, written predominantly
in dactylic dimeterthe first line must be a proper name, then the sixth or seventh a
single word
Dramatic Monologue: type of poem derived from the theater, in which a speaker
speaks to an internal listener or the reader at length (see soliloquy)
English Sonnet: a fourteen-line poem, in iambic pentameter, composed of three
quatrains and a couplet, rhyming in a b a b, c d c d, e f e f, g g
Enjambment: run-on lines (from the French striding over); the pressure of the
incomplete syntactic unit toward closure carries on over the end of the verse line, thus
contributing to variation, emphasis, and smoothness (related to caesura)
Epigram: a short and witty poem, usually in couplets, that makes a humorous or
satiric point
Form: shape, structure, or general pattern of a poem
Free Verse: nonmetrical poetry that depends on language cadences and punctuation
for rhythm
Lyric: short poem written in repeating stanzaic form, often designed to be set to
music; usually emphasizes the thoughts and/or feelings of the speaker
Italian Sonnet: fourteen-line poem, iambic pentameter, composed of two quatrains
(the octet) and two tercets (the sestet); octet rhymes
a b b a a b b a, with the sestet rhyming variously, such as c d e c d e, c d c c d c, c d c
dcd
Meter (Measure): the number of feet within a line in traditional verse; generally
regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of poetry as determined
by the number and kind of feet

Metrical Foot: basic building block of a line of poetry, usually consisting of one
stressed syllable and one or more lightly stressed syllableunits of rhythm into which
a line of poetry is divided
Iamb: two syllables; unstressed syllable followed by stressed syllable ( /)
IAMBIC: / / / / /
Trochee: two syllables; stressed syllable followed by unstressed syllable (/ )
TROCHAIC: / / / / /
Anapest: three syllables; light, light, heavy ( /)
ANAPESTIC: / / / / /
Dactyl: three syllables; heavy, light, light (/ )
DACTYLIC: / / / / /
Monometer: line of one metrical foot
Dimeter: line of two metrical feet
Trimeter: line of three metrical feet
Tetrameter: line of four metrical feet
Pentameter: line of five metrical feet
Hexameter (Alexandrine): line of six metrical feet
Heptameter: line of seven metrical feet
Octameter: line of eight metrical feet
Amphibrach: three syllables; light stress, heavy stress, light stress ( / )
Amphimacer: three syllables; heavy, light, heavy (/ /)
Anacrusis: extra unstressed syllable at beginning of line before beginning regular
meter
Bacchic: three syllables; light, heavy, heavy ( / /)
Catalexis: omitted syllable(s) at end
Feminine Ending: extra unstressed syllable at end of line
Imperfect Foot: foot consisting of a single syllable, either stressed or unstressed

Pyrrhic: two unstressed syllables

Truncation: omitted syllables at beginning
Spondee: two successive, heavily stressed syllables
Ode: rather long poem written in complex stanzaic form that deals with a speakers
thoughts and feelings
Poem: arrangement of words in lines having rhythm or a regularly repeated accent,
and, often, rhyme; composition in verse, often highly imaginative or emotional,
designed to express or convey deep feelings and thoughts
Closed-Form: poetry written in specific and traditional patterns produced through
rhyme, meter, line-length, and line groupings
Open-Form: poems that avoid traditional structural patterns, such as rhyme or
meter, in favor of other methods of organization
Rhyme: the similarity of final sounds in two or more words
End Rhyme: occurs at the end of a line
Internal Rhyme: occurs within a line of poetry
Rhyme Scheme: pattern of rhyming sounds in a poem, usually indicated by
assigning letter of the alphabet to each sound
Rhythm: arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables in a poem; when this
arrangement assumes a regular pattern, rhythm determines meter
Stanza: a unit of lines of verse that are grouped together by rhyme and/or meter in a
poem; the patterns established in the first stanza are usually repeated throughout
Couplet: two successive lines of poetry, usually in the same meter, that rhyme
Heroic Couplet: two successive lines of poetry in iambic pentameter that rhyme,
second line is usually end-stopped
Tercet: three-line unit or stanza of poetry, often rhyming a a a or a b a
Terza Rima: a three-line stanza form in which each stanza is linked with the next
through repeated rhyme sounds:a b a, b c b and so on
Quatrain: a four-line stanza or poetic unit Sestet: a six-line stanza or unit of poetry
Octave: an eight-line stanza or unit of poetry

Villanelle: a closed poetic form of nineteen lines, composed of five triplets and a
quatrainthe form requires that whole lines be repeated in a specific order and that
only two rhyme sounds occur throughout.