A List of Important Literary Terms

 

1) aesthetics: "Philosophical investigation into the nature of beauty and the perception of beauty, especially in the arts; the theory of art or artistic taste." (CB)

 

2) allegory: "A story or visual image with a second distinct meaning partially hidden behind its literal or visible meaning. In written narrative, allegory involves a continuous parallel between two (or more) levels of meaning in a story, so that its persons and events correspond to their equivalents in a system of ideas or a chain of events external to the tale." (CB)

 

3) allusion: "An indirect or passing reference to some event, person, place, or artistic work, the nature and relevance of which is not explained by the writer but relies on the reader’s familiarity with what is thus mentioned. The technique of allusion is an economical means of calling upon the history or the literary tradition that author and reader are assumed to share. . . ." (CB)

 

4) ambiguity: "Openness to different interpretations: or an instance in which some use of language may be understood in diverse ways." Defended by modern literary critics as "a source of poetic richness rather than a fault of imprecision." (CB)

 

5) canon: A body of works considered authentic (as in the body of works actually written by a particular author) or considered by a particular culture or subculture to be central to its cultural identity.

 

6) connotation: "The emotional implications and associations that words may carry, as distinguished from their denotative meanings." (HH)

 

7) convention: "An established practice—whether in technique, style, structure, or subject matter—commonly adopted in literary works by customary and implicit agreement or precedent rather than by natural necessity." (CB)

 

8) denotation: The basic dictionary meaning of a word, as opposed to its connotative meaning.

 

9) diction: Literary word choice.

 

10) didactic: A work "designed to impart information, advice, or some doctrine of morality or philosophy." (CB)

 

11) discourse: "[A]s a free-standing noun (‘discourse as such) the term denotes language in actual use within its social and ideological contexts and in institutionalized representations of the world called discursive practices." (CB) Literary works may contain or make use of any number of discourses. Literary language may itself be considered a kind of discourse.

 

12) figure of speech: "An expression that departs from the accepted literal sense or from the normal order of words, or in which an emphasis is produced by patterns of sound." (CB)

 

13) form: As a critical term, form "can refer to a genre. . ., or to an established pattern of poetic devices. . ., or, more abstractly, to the structure or unifying principle of design in a given work. . . When speaking of a work’s formal properties, critics usually refer to its structural design and patterning, or sometimes to its style and manner in a wider sense as distinct from its content." (CB)

 

14) genre: "The French term for a type, species, or class of composition. A literary genre is a recognizable and established category of written work employing such common conventions as will prevent readers or audiences from mistaking it [with] another kind." (CB) Genre as a term is distinguished from mode in its greater specificity as to form and convention.

 

15) ideology: A comprehensive world view pertaining to formal and informal thought, philosophy, and cultural presuppositions usually understood as associated with specific positions within political, social, and economic hierarchies. Many schools of modern literary criticism contend that the ideological context of both reader and author always affects the meanings assigned to or encoded in the work.

 

16) irony: "A. . . perception of inconsistency, [usually but not always humorous], in which an apparently straightforward statement or event is undermined by its context so as to give it a very different significance. . . [V]erbal irony. . . involves a discrepancy between what is said and what is really meant. . . .[S]tructural irony. . . involves the use of a naive or deluded hero or unreliable narrator whose view of the world differs widely from the true circumstances recognized by the author and readers. . . . [In] dramatic irony. . . the audience knows more about a character's situation than a character does foreseeing an outcome contrary to a character's expectations, and thus ascribing a sharply different sense to the character's own statements". (CB)

 

17) metaphor: A figure of speech "in which one thing, idea, or action is referred to by a word or expression normally denoting another thing, idea, or action, so as to suggest some common quality shared by the two." The term, "metaphor" is often reserved for figures of speech in which the comparison is implicit or phrased as an "imaginary identity," but it has become more common in recent years to refer to all figures of speech that depend upon resemblances as metaphors. You will therefore sometimes hear similes, where the comparison is explicit and no identity is implied, referred to as metaphorical figures. All metaphors, in any case, are based on the implicit formula, phrased as a simile, "X is like Y." The primary literal term of the metaphor is called the "tenor" and the secondary figurative term is the "vehicle." "[I]n the metaphor the road of life, the tenor is "life" and the vehicle is "the road" (CB).

 

18) metonymy: "A figure of speech that replaces the name of one thing with the name of something else closely associated with it" (CB). The figure is based upon logical connections other than resemblance. For example, you might use "sail" to refer to "ship," as in "I saw a sail on the horizon. This metonymy replaces the name of the whole thing with the name of one of its constituent parts. This kind of metonymy is called synecdoche. Also very common is replacing the name of a thing with itslocation, e.g. replacing "President" with "White House," or replacing "Congress" with "Capitol Hill."

 

19) mimesis: "The Greek word for imitation. . . . A literary work that is understood to be reproducing an external reality or any aspect of it is described as mimetic." (CB)

 

20) mode: "An unspecific critical term usually identifying a broad but identifiable literary method, mood, or manner that is not tied exclusively to a particular form or genre. [Some] examples are the satiric mode, the ironic, the comic, the pastoral, and the didactic." (CB)

 

21) motif: A recurrent image, word, phrase, represented object or action that tends to unify the literary work or that may be elaborated into a more general theme. Also, a situation, incident, idea, image, or character type that is found in many different literary works, folktales, or myths. (CB& HH, adapted)

 

22) novel: Usually an extended realistic fictional prose narrative most often describing "a recognizable secular social world often in a skeptical and prosaic manner. . . ." (CB)

 

23) paradox: "A statement or expression so surprisingly self-contradictory as to provoke us into seeking another sense or context in which it would be true. . ."Paradoxical language is valued in literature as expressing "a mode of understanding [that] . . . challenges our habits of thought." (CB)

 

24) point of view: "The position or vantage point from which the events of a story seem to be observed and presented to us." (CB)

 

25) prose: "In its broadest sense the term is applied to all forms of written or spoken expression not having a regular rhythmic pattern." (HH) "[A]lthough it will have some form of rhythm and some devices of repetition and balance, these are not governed by a regularly sustained formal arrangement, the significant unit being the sentence rather than the line." (CB)

 

26) sign: "A basic element of communication, either linguistic. . . . or non-linguistic . . . .; or anything that can be construed as having a meaning. . . . [E]very sign has two inseparable aspects, the signifier, which is the materially perceptible component such as a sound or written mark, and the signified, which is the conceptual meaning." (CB) The "signified" is the abstract and conceptual content of the sign and can be carried from context to context (e.g., the idea of "chair"). "Referent" is the term used to describe the specific object to which a sign refers in a given context (e.g. "the chair in my office").

 

27) subjectivity: "The quality originating and existing in the mind of a perceiving subject and not necessarily corresponding to any object outside that mind." (HH) In literary critical usage, texts which explore the nature of such a perceiving subject are said to be interested in subjectivity.

 

28) symbol: ". . . .[S]omething that is itself and also stands for something else. . . . In a literary sense, a symbol combines a literal and sensuous quality with an abstract or suggestive aspect." (HH)

 

29) syntax: "The way in which words and clauses are ordered and connected so as to form sentences; or the set of grammatical rules governing such word order." (CB)

 

30) theme: "A salient abstract idea that emerges from a literary work’s treatment of its subject-matter; or a topic occurring in a number of literary works." (CB)

 

31) topos (plural, topoi): A term for a type of convention specific to a given genre. Derived from the Greek term for "place," the term usually refers to a convention, motif, trope, or figure of speech that regularly appears at a particular point in the formal structure of works in a given genre, the absence or unconventional treatment or placement of which will always have profound significance for an interpretation of the work. For example, an epic without an invocation.

 

32) trope: A term often used to denote figures of speech in which words are used in a sense different from their literal meaning. Distinguished from figures of speech based upon word order or sound pattern.

 

Note: where indicated, the above definitions are taken from Chris Baldick, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford UP, 1990) (CB) or C. Hugh Holman and William Harmon, A Handbook to Literature, 6^th edition (Macmillan, 1992) (HH).

 

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