GLOSSARY OF LITERARY TERMS

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Accent: Accent, or stress, is emphasis on one syllable in relation to another or others when a word is spoken. It is a prominent feature of speech in English and has, since the fourteenth century, been the basis of rhythmic pattern in the language. See scansion.

Accentual verse and accentual-syllabic verse: The most common formal verse measure or metre is either accentual (where each line of verse has a uniform number of stressed syllables but not of unstressed ones) or accentual-syllabic (where each line has a uniform number of stressed and unstressed syllables). Syllabic verse (where the unit of measurement is the number of syllables exclusively) is much less common. Rarer still (but common in classical Greek and Latin) is quantitative verse, which is based on vowel length. See also metre and prosody.

Act: A main division of a drama.

Action: In any literary work, not only what the characters do or say, but also what happens to them. In some works, the action also includes what the characters feel and how they respond psychologically. See also plot.

Allegory: A text that functions on two levels at once: the literal, physical level and the symbolic, abstract level. For example, Pilgrim's Progress, an early allegory by John Bunyan, represents life as a journey. When Bunyan's Christian travels through the Slough of Despond, two levels of meaning are simultaneously conveyed to the reader.

Alliteration: The close recurrence of consonants for poetic effect, especially at the beginning of words and in stressed syllables.

Allusion: A reference in a text to something outside the text, whether it be a person, a place, an event, a biblical scene or action, or a mythic character or action. An allusion asks the reader to take the meaning attached to that external reference and apply it to the text.

Ambiguity: The effect of suggesting multiple meanings in a word, phrase, gesture, or action, rather than a single meaning. Ambiguity makes a text more complex and rich.

Amphibrach (amphibrachic): A poetic foot of three syllables, only the middle one being accented. See prosody.

Amphimacer (amphimacric): A poetic foot of three syllables, the first and last being accented; also called a cretic. See prosody.

Anagnorisis: The Greek word describing the central discovery made by the tragic hero, particularly the discovery of his or her responsibility for the reversal and fall that completes the action of a tragedy.

Anagram: A word or phrase made by rearranging the letters of another word or phrase.

Analysis: Interpreting a text or defending one's interpretation of a text by separating it into its parts. See also literary analysis.

Anapest (anapestic): A poetic foot of three syllables, only the last being accented. See prosody.

Antagonist: The opposing force in a narrative, which may be a character, a circumstance, an inner weakness of the character, or an agent in the environment. The collision of the antagonist with the protagonist creates the conflict in a narrative, a conflict that may or may not be resolved at the end of the narrative. See also plot.

Anti-hero: In twentieth-century literary works, a major character who is presented as having qualities antithetical either to those of the traditional hero or to those of the romantic hero of popular fiction. Anti-heroes are typically ineffectual and passive, but they may also be obnoxious and obtuse. See hero/heroine.

Antithesis: A device of expression that balances opposing concepts to make a contrast. In verse, antithesis may occur between lines (Andrew Marvell's "The grave's a fine and private place, / But none, I think, do there embrace") or between parts of single lines, as in Alexander Pope's description of Teresa Blount's Squire "Whose laughs are hearty, though his jests are coarse / And loves you best of all things - but his horse."

Apostrophe: An address to an absent or dead person, to an object, or to an abstraction.

Approximate rhyme: See rhyme.

Archetype: In literary criticism, a term borrowed from psychology employed to discuss the significance of an image, character, situation, etc. Archetypes are recurring configurations that appear in myth, religion, folklore, fantasy, and dreams, as well as in art and literature. In addition to operating essentially at the subconscious level, archetypes recur universally in human experience: psychologist Carl Jung saw them as manifestations of what he called the "collective unconscious." See motif.

Argument: One of the four major modes of prose. Argument attempts to convince the reader of the truth of a premise by means of logic and other forms of persuasion.

Aside: Words delivered by one character to another or to the audience, and understood not to be heard by other characters on the stage.

Assonance: The close repetition of the same or similar vowel sounds in stressed syllables. Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Ulysses complains of those "That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me."

Atmosphere: The emotional tone of a text.

Ballad: See poetic forms.

Blank verse: Unrhymed iambic pentameter (See also prosody).

Blocking: The planning of movement on the stage for a production of a drama.

Cacophony: A musical term describing the creation of discord on the reader's ear by employing sounds or sound combinations that are rough and unpleasant.

Cadence: In verse, a rhythmic unit based not on a standard line length or on metre, but on the spontaneous character of informal speech. See free verse.

Caesura: A pause in a line of verse. Because its placement may vary from line to line, it is a useful device for altering rhythmic emphasis or flow without breaking away from a metrical pattern.

Canon: Originally a body of sacred texts accepted by the Christian churches, the term was later applied to secular works accepted by experts as genuine works of particular authors. In contemporary literary terms, the canon consists of works regarded as classics and normally treated in university courses on literature. The canon reflects cultural shifts, so, for example, Shakespeare may be part of the literary canon of one age but not of another. Some argue that the canon is biased toward white males and excludes works by women and by ethnic minorities.

Caricature: Ludicrously exaggerated characterization.

Carpe diem (Latin, "seize the day"): A theme or viewpoint expressed frequently in love lyrics, but occurring as well in other literature, that since youth is fleeting and death certain, there should be no restraint in enjoying life's pleasures.

Catastrophe: One name for the concluding action of a tragedy.

Catharsis: The Aristotelian idea that the audience gains relief from feelings of pity and fear for the tragic hero by witnessing his or her fall, discovery, and death. Their witnessing forces them to feel these emotions and thus purge them.

Character: A fictional person in a literary work who may be either purely imaginary or based upon someone real. Many works employ a central character or protagonist, whose actions are the main focus of attention and represent a struggle against opposing forces that are often summed up in the person of an antagonist. Characters have been variously classified as flat (two-dimensional) or rounded (three-dimensional), types or individuals, and dynamic or static. Dynamic characters undergo change as a result of their experiences. They are frequently attractive because they are unpredictable. Static characters do not necessarily lack depth and complexity. They can be equally full of dramatic interest when a work is organized to allow for progressive revelation of their inner qualities that are not clear at the outset.

Characterization: The means an author employs in presenting and developing characters. Writers may either describe the qualities of characters directly or present them through action and dialogue. The former technique provides a quick impression; the latter method is a slow, cumulative one, but allows for depth and complexity. Characterization also varies according to the writer's narrative perspective.

Chorus: The group of people in a Greek play who comment directly on the action of the play and on the choices made by the central characters.

Classic: A work considered to be the best of its class.

Classical literature: The literature of ancient Greece and Rome.

Classical unities: The belief of Renaissance critics reading Aristotle's poetics that a well-made plot observes three unities: the action must take place in one day, the action must be limited to a single scene, and the action must stick to one main plot. These were called the unities of time, place, and action.

Classicism: The application of artistic principles supposedly derived from the classical literatures of Greece and Rome, including formal control, proportion, simplicity, unity, and rationality. Classicism emerged on the Continent and in England among the humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. See neoclassicism.

Cliché: An expression that has been used so frequently that it has lost its ability to surprise or inform the reader. The word comes from the French name for a printing block; when the characters wore off the block, it would no longer print.

Climax: The crucial or high point of tension, understanding, or recognition in a plot and the turning point of the action.

Closed couplet: See couplet.

Closure: A term borrowed from parliamentary procedure that refers to the call for conclusion to a debate. In literature, it refers to the principle that works should not end arbitrarily, that they ought to conclude with the action, feeling, or exposition being in some sense complete.

Colloquial: Informal language reflecting the way people frequently speak.

Comedy: While comedy employs wit and humour to make amusing comment on human folly and social values, it frequently strives to instruct as well as delight. Whether it is written as poetry, fiction, or drama, comedy is usually associated with happy endings, characters that are more survivors of trials than victims of fate, and narratives that sustain a light-hearted tone.
Farce is less subtle than comedy; its characters are frequently more improbable or exaggerated and their situations more ludicrous. Slapstick is even more far-fetched as a representation of life: the characters are more boisterous, the action more physical and violent, and the verbal humour more at the level of gags, jokes, and insults. See also satire.

Comic relief: A comic or humorous passage included in works that are basically non-comic in order to relieve tension or dispel excessive gloom. In tragedy, it is also used to heighten the tragic effect.

Comparison and contrast: A means of building an analysis or interpretation of a work. Comparison stresses similarities by examining two or more texts to see how they are different and how they are similar. Contrast stresses differences only.

Complication: An event that leads to ensuing action in a narrative, that renders the action more complex, or that leads the narrative in a different direction.

Conceit: An elaborate or extended comparison, whether simile or metaphor; known as Petrarchan conceits (after Petrarch, the poet who popularized them in his sonnets) when they are conventional, as with the comparison of a lover to a ship, and as metaphysical conceits (after the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century) when they are elaborate or ingenious comparisons of things not traditionally linked, as with the comparison of separated lovers to a compass.

Conflict: In literary narrative, the struggle between opposing forces embodied either in the interaction between characters or in the mind of the central figure.

Connotation: An association or suggestion attached to a word in addition to its literal meaning. In times of war, for example, propagandists have exploited pleasant associations in words like "pacification" in an attempt to justify unusually severe methods of social control such as bombing civilian targets.

Consonance: The close recurrence of consonants with differing vowel sounds in the middle and at the end of words. See alliteration.

Convention: In literature, the customary practice of writers, such as paragraph indentation or chapters in novels. Conventions are rules agreed on between author and reader but seldom made explicit.

Cosmic irony: See irony.

Couplet: Two adjacent lines of poetry that rhyme; called a closed couplet when the pair is end-stopped by significant punctuation and contains a complete thought; called a heroic couplet when the rhymed lines are in iambic pentameter.

Cretic: See amphimacer.

Crisis: The point in the plot where the action changes course; the major crisis of a plot is often called the climax.

Cultural Studies: See literary analysis

Dactyl (dactylic): A poetic foot of three syllables, only the first being accented. See prosody

Dactylic rhyme: See rhyme.

Deconstructionism: See literary criticism.

Denotation: The fixed meaning of a word as given by a dictionary.

Dénouement: A French word for the conclusion of a prose plot following the climax. The word means "unknotting" or "unravelling." In a detective story, for instance, the dénouement explains all the previously unexplained actions of the characters. See also resolution and falling action.

Description: The physical presentation of an object or an event; one of the four modes of discourse.

Deus ex machina: Literally, "the god out of the machine"; the descent of a god, represented by an actor lowered to the main level of the stage in a mechanical device, to intercede and conclude an ancient Greek drama; by extension, any contrived and improbable ending.

Dialect: A regional form of a language, with distinct diction, grammar, and vocabulary. Research has shown that there are nine dialects in Scotland, for instance; Newfoundland English can also be considered a dialect.

Dialogue: The conversational language spoken by the characters in a literary work. Dialogue may appear to resemble actual speech but at best is always a stylized version of what a character might actually say in a situation. Good dialogue attempts to record the idiom of characters as psychologically and socially observed.

Diction: The author's choice of words. Diction may be formal or informal, obscure or familiar, ornate or plain, depending on the context or the writer's purpose. See obscurity.

Didactic: A text described as didactic is one written with the clear intention to teach or instruct its readers, generally for a moral end.

Dimeter: A term of poetic measurement indicating a line containing two feet. See prosody.

Discovery: See anagnorisis.

Discourse: A term current in the humanities and social sciences, especially since the 1960s, which insists on language as social practice sustainable within particular social and cultural contexts. Discourse analysis in literary and other studies is concerned with the uses of discourse in running written or spoken conversation. A discourse community or culture is one that shares assumptions, beliefs, and modes of exchange.

Dissonance: Deliberate placement of words for inharmonious effect. It contrasts with cacophony, which also aims at discordance but employs words that are themselves harsh.

Dramatic irony: See irony.

Dramatic monologue: A poem in which the lines are spoken by, and ironically reveal the personality of, a character who addresses either a listener who is present or an imagined audience.

Dramatis personae: Literally, "the characters of the drama"; a descriptive list of characters prefixed to a drama. See character.

Dynamic character: A character who is capable of change and, therefore, of surprising us.

Editorial omniscience: See point of view.

Effaced narrator: See point of view.

Electra complex: A psychoanalytic term used to describe the conflict of a daughter's unconscious competition with her mother for her father's attention and love; the female counterpart of the Oedipus complex. In Greek legend, Electra plotted the death of her mother to avenge the death of her father, Agamemnon.

Elegy: In classical Greece, a poem on any serious theme that was written in a couplet form known as elegiac metre; since the Renaissance, used to refer to a lyric that laments a death.

Elision: The omission of part of a word, as in O'er or ne'er.

End rhyme: See rhyme.

End-stopped line: A line terminated with a relatively strong pause, usually indicated by the presence of a comma, semicolon, dash, or period; the opposite of enjambment.

English sonnet (also Shakespearean sonnet): See poetic forms.

Enjambment: A run-on line of verse. It occurs when the grammatical sense of a poem forces the reader to finish one line and start the next without a pause. See also stanza.

Epic: A long narrative poem recounting in elevated language the deeds of heroes; settings are vast, sometimes extending beyond earth, and episodes may involve the gods or other supernatural beings.

Epigram: A pointed, compressed, and memorable statement, sometimes written in verse. The epigram originates in Greek and Latin literature.

Epigraph: A quotation or a motto that prefaces a text.

Epilogue: The concluding, summarizing section of a drama in which all the strands of the plot are drawn together; sometimes the epilogue is an actual addition.

Epiphany: A religious term meaning a "manifestation" or "showing forth"; western Christianity celebrates the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6 to mark Christ's manifestation of divinity to the Magi; James Joyce applied the term to short fiction to describe the moment when events show forth their meaning, bringing illumination or revelation to a character.

Episode: An incident in a larger narrative.

Epistle: A letter; the term is usually applied to a verse letter.

Escape literature: See formulaic literature.

Essay: A reasonably brief prose discussion of a single topic, usually employing either the expository or argumentative mode. The term was first used by the French philosopher Montaigne in his Essais and later adopted by Francis Bacon.

Euphony: The use of pleasant, harmonious, or musical sounds for poetic effect. The opposite of cacophony.

Exact rhyme: See rhyme.

Exeunt: The plural form of the Latin "exit"; literally, "they go out"; a stage direction signalling the exit of all characters in a scene; sometimes expressed as "exeunt omnes" ("all go out"); when names or categories follow the term, as in "exeunt Lords," only the named group leaves the stage.

Explication: A method of reading a poem, originating in France, that requires careful, line by line analysis of a text, paying attention to the meanings and relationships of the words, phrases, images, and smaller units that compose that text.

Exposition: A prose text written to explain a subject; one of the four types of prose. Also, the presentation, usually at or near the beginning of a narrative or drama, of necessary background information about characters and situations.

Expressionism: An early-twentieth-century artistic movement that emphasized the inner world of emotions and thought and projected this inner world through distortions of real-world objects; unlike impressionism, expressionist literature and drama distorts and abstracts the external world, creating works that are symbolic, anti-realistic, and often nightmarish in vision; in prose, stream of consciousness narration is one of its major techniques.

Eye rhyme: See rhyme.

Fable: A brief allegorical tale told to illustrate a moral. Beast fables are folk tales that use animals to illustrate human shortcomings.

Falling action: See resolution and dénouement.

Farce: A dramatic piece intended to elicit laughter from the audience, using improbable situations, rough wit, and physical comedy.

Feminine rhyme: See rhyme.

Feminist criticism: See literary analysis.

Fiction: While the word generally refers to any imagined story, in literary works it means prose fiction in the form of a novel, short story, tale, etc. Even when prose fiction is based on facts or a true story, the process of narration requires much elaboration and this has to be based on invented detail.
If the novel has been typically oriented toward realism, freedom of invention has always characterized the popular romance. Romances originated in medieval court tales of love and adventure. From the eighteenth century onward, as the novel with a bias toward character development emerged, a distinction arose between the novel and romance. Although the two overlap in works of mixed genre, the freedom of romance to go beyond the novel's limits of probability appeals not only to writers of escapist stories but also to those who see it as a more useful vehicle than realism for serious exploration of particular themes and subjects.
While "novel" (usually a work of more than 50,000 words) is the most familiar term for extended works of prose fiction, "novelette" (15,000 to 50,000 words) is a less well-known term for a short novel. The novella (10,000 to 15,000 words) is more of a long story than a short novel. See short story.

Figures of speech and figurative language: Figures of speech are devices of expression, basically metaphorical in nature, that enable writers to make suggestions and statements beyond the literal meanings of words, phrases, comparisons, and sentences. Figurative language is effective in literature when it defines or describes something by making striking comparisons either to dissimilar objects or to objects having a partial resemblance. See conceit, hyperbole, irony, metaphor, metonymy, oxymoron, paradox, personification, simile, symbol, and synecdoche.

First-person narrator: A term for a storyteller who is a character in the work being narrated and who writes in the first person ("I"). Also called "character narrator." See point of view.

Fixed form: A term applied to established patterns of line, stanza, and metre. See strophic.

Flashback: A scene in a narrative that interrupts the normal time progression to return to the past and narrate something that happened before the fictional time present.

Flat character: A one-dimensional character who cannot change and therefore cannot surprise the reader. See also stereotype.

Foil: A character in a narrative whose principal contribution is to illuminate some facet of the main character or characters by contrast.

Foot: The basic metrical unit in poetry, consisting of one or more syllables, usually with one stressed or accented; a basic pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables commonly identified by names derived from Greek poetics, the most common being the iamb, the trochee, the dactyl, the anapest, and the spondee. See prosody.

Foreshadowing: The presentation of incidents, characters, or objects that hint at important events that will occur later.

Formal criticism (also formalist criticism): See literary analysis.

Formulaic literature: Texts that follow a prescribed pattern to fulfil the reader's expectations (e.g., Harlequin romances).

Free verse: Verse that is free of regular metre and other conventions of formal poetry. It relies on the cadenced phrase, on tone, on its flexibility and adaptability in relation to its subject, and on its ability to approximate where necessary traditional or formal verse rhythms. The works of Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams illustrate the use of free verse. See cadence.

Freytag's Pyramid: A structural diagram, resembling a pyramid in shape, devised by the nineteenth-century German playwright and critic Gustav Freytag to illustrate the rising and falling action of a five-act drama:
3. Climax
2. Rising Action 4. Falling Action
1. Exposition 5. Resolution

Genre: Literary works may be classified into major genres or types such as the novel, the short story, the play, the poem, and the essay, and into subgenres such as the problem play or the elegiac poem. Since descriptions of genre and subgenre characteristics are based on our conventional understanding and past experiences of literature, and since there are both hybrid types and many unclassifiable works, definitions of genre cannot be used prescriptively - especially in the assessment of new writing.

Haiku: See poetic forms.

Half rhyme: An imperfect rhyme. See also rhyme.

Hamartia: The flaw in the tragic hero leading him or her to the unfortunate act that provokes the concluding catastrophe.

Heptameter: A term of poetic measurement indicating a line containing seven feet. See prosody.

Hero/Heroine: The central figure around whom the plot of a literary work revolves. Originally, before the rise of realism, heroes and heroines had noble qualities. In modern literature, the term is often a synonym for protagonist. Many modern writers employ very ordinary, unheroic central figures. Such protagonists can be timid, awkward, obnoxious, or whatever is required for the author's purpose. See also anti-hero.

Heroic couplet: Iambic pentameter lines rhymed in pairs.

Hexameter: A term of poetic measurement indicating a line containing six feet. See prosody.

Historical criticism: See literary analysis.

Hubris, hybris: The Greek term for excessive pride, the quality in some tragic heroes that leads to their downfall.

Humour: A way of seeing that observes the ludicrous, the comic, and the amusing. While humour shares this tendency with wit, it is gentler, more tolerant, and warmer in its approach to life. Thus, in satire, where criticism is central to the writer's purpose, humour is as much a leavener of the narrative as it is a vehicle for commentary. In satire, humour is most effective when combined with art.

Hyperbole: Exaggeration or overstatement frequently employed for humorous purposes.

Iamb (iambic): A poetic foot of two syllables, the second being accented. See prosody.

Iambic pentameter: The most common accentual-syllabic verse line in English. Its great expressive range makes it the basis for a variety of traditional forms such as blank verse, the heroic couplet, the heroic quatrain, and several stanza patterns. William Shakespeare's sonnets are written in five-foot iambics. See prosody.

Image and Imagery: In literature, an image is a verbal representation of a sense impression. While images are most obviously recognized as visual, they may also be auditory, olfactory, tactile, and even taste-oriented. Depending on the work or context, images may be either literal or figurative, and they may be either frequently or sparsely employed.
Imagery is the term used for images in their aggregate form. Because imagery is patterned throughout a work and related images often concentrated in image clusters, analysis of imagistic detail, and of all language with a figurative function, is an essential part of defining the quality, the emotional content, and the meaning of a literary work.

Imperfect rhyme: See rhyme.

In medias res: Literally means "in the midst of things." This term is used to describe the convention of beginning a plot in the middle of the action.

Internal rhyme: See rhyme.

Interpretation: The reader's conscious attempt to understand a text and explain it through reference to its parts as well as its whole.

Irony: The use of language to express a meaning different from or incongruous with the literal meaning. Irony is used in literature to create humour or to reveal hidden meanings to the reader. Here are its various forms:

Verbal irony occurs when saying one thing while intending something opposite, as signalled by tone. In writing, it is more difficult to send that signal. Verbal irony is usually softer than sarcasm though similar in kind.

Dramatic irony occurs when the audience and one or more of the characters in the action know something or grasp an additional meaning that the character speaking does not.

Situational irony occurs when the contradiction or irony is embedded in the action or situation.

Tragic irony occurs in drama when the action of the protagonist will lead to a disastrous result opposite to what the protagonist intended.

Cosmic irony occurs when the reader perceives that the times are "out of joint" and no amount of human effort can do anything about this radical disorder. In Thomas Hardy's novels, for instance, the human agents are dwarfed by the malign forces that operate against them.

Italian sonnet (also Petrarchan sonnet): See poetic forms.

Leitmotif: A recurring word, phrase, situation, or theme running through a literary work. See also motif.

Limerick: See poetic forms.

Limited omniscience: See point of view.

Literary analysis: Many approaches are available to the reader in responding to a text; literary analysis is a term for those possible perspectives. The following are some common approaches to literary analysis:

Biographical criticism is a narrower version of historical criticism. This approach purports that examining the life of the writer will assist us in understanding the writer's texts. Such an approach is hindered by its narrow assumption that writers create only from their actual experience.

Cultural Studies argues that criticism should not only investigate individual authors and works, but that literature needs to be studied in a wider interdisciplinary context (along with sociological, economic, political and broadly cultural questions). A field rather than a method, cultural studies often applies the techniques and insights of Marxism and feminism to study both canonical texts and a wide range of popular genres.

Deconstructionism literally deconstructs the text. It starts from the assumption that language cannot create fixed or reliable meanings, nor can any construct made out of language. A text contains, within itself, the power to deconstruct itself. With a little effort, any number of "readings" of a text can be created, each with its own validity, if linguistic constructs can possess validity.

Feminist criticism focuses on the social construction of gender and identity. It has created a canon of female writers and critics and worked to supplement or replace what feminist critics see as a male-dominated critical perspective. It employs a large range of disciplines-especially history, psychology, and sociology-to assist in placing literature in a broad social context and in forging a criticism sensitive to feminist issues.

Formalist criticism takes an intrinsic approach, rather than the extrinsic approach of historical criticism. It focuses instead exclusively on the "form" of the text in the belief that everything necessary to understanding the text is inside the text itself. The most successful formalist school was the "New Criticism" approach, which flourished between 1940 and 1970.

Historical criticism starts from the assumption that knowing more about the culture and times of a writer will help the reader understand the writer's texts. Historicism can include a scientific belief alluded to in a poem or the meaning of a word at the time the work was published. Historicism also extends to periods and their dominant spirit or culture or to the examination of movements such as romanticism or neoclassicism.

Marxist criticism takes an extrinsic approach to texts. Marxism had a strong influence on American writing in the 1930s, and a Marxist critic assumes some of the same stances we see in that literature. The Marxist critic is particularly interested in what might be called the political content of a text and in how the text advances the desired ultimate goal of a classless society.

Mythological criticism seeks to identify what is universal in a text, including archetypes of experience and action, and patterns that link the text to other texts or primary myths.

New Historicism still attempts to frame a writer within his or her time. It assumes, however, that no accurate history of a time exists-that we have only the present's version of that past. New Historicism focuses on the ideology of an age and how the literary text reflects or resists that ideology. This approach posits that the literature tells us something about the times, just as the times tell us something about the literature.

Postcolonial theory like cultural studies uses a wide variety of techniques and theories to address a particular area of experience-in this case the culture (literature, art, history, etc.) of former colonies of European empires. Among other things, it is interested in examining the wide-ranging (often detrimental) effects of empire upon colonial subjects and in raising issues of racism and exploitation.

Psychological criticism seeks to meld intrinsic and extrinsic approaches and draws upon theories from psychologists, especially Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. In its simplest form, for example, it would read Hamlet as an Oedipus complex plot; in more blended approaches, it uses what we know about the human unconscious, dream theory, and archetypes to further illuminate the actions, reactions, and motivations of characters. It may also analyze the motivations of the writer.

Queer Theory is based in part on the work of Judith Butler and has important ties with feminist criticism as described here. It suggests that identities, rather than being fixed and determined by biological sex, are "performative" and available for change. Queer theory is interested in texts and performances (such cross dressing, drag performance, and various instances of camp) that challenge the notion of fixed identities. Queer theory is also related to-though not the same as-gay and lesbian studies.

Reader-response criticism places the reader at the centre, rather than the text or the context out of which the text emerges. It tries to describe the reader's reception of the text and, therefore, rejects the notion of any single "correct" reading of a text. This approach still demands, however, that the reader have some defensible rationale for a reading.

Sociological criticism examines social groups, relationships, and values as they appear in a text (and what they tell us about that particular society) or the sociology of producing the text (literary schools and fashions, magazines and mass texts, and patterns of marketing and consumption).

Litotes: Understatement for effect. It generally employs negation to create an affirmative statement, as in Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "Ulysses": "not unbecoming men who strove with gods."

Lyric: A short poem expressing strong personal feeling. As an arrested moment of intense emotion, lyric expression may occur as a tendency in (or in a passage of) a longer work like a play or a novel.

Marxist criticism: See literary analysis.

Masculine rhyme: See rhyme.

Melodrama: Originally applied to drama, this term refers to any work that relies on a romantic plot, stock characters, sensational action, direct emotional appeals to the audience, and other manipulative means to satisfy an audience.

Metafiction: A story or novel, the major theme of which is the nature of fiction.

Metaphor: An implied comparison of dissimilar objects. As such, it contrasts with simile, which is an explicit comparison. Metaphors apply words to objects where there is no normal, literal, or expected association ("Life's but a walking shadow").

Metaphysical conceit: See conceit.

Metaphysical poets: Seventeenth-century poets who linked physical with metaphysical or spiritual elements in their poetry.

Metonymy: The use of an attribute or association of an object to stand for the object itself (as John Milton uses "light" for vision; as we might use "Ottawa" to refer to the federal government).

Metre: The pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables that structures the rhythm of formal verse in English.

Metrical verse: Formal verse is based on a metrical unit of two or three syllables called a foot. The most familiar in English is the iambic, a two-syllable foot where an unstressed is followed by a stressed syllable (William Shakespeare: To bé, or nót to bé). Other feet are the trochaic, where the stressed precedes the unstressed syllable (Sir John Betjeman: Thínk of whát our Nátion stánds for), and two three-syllable feet, the anapestic (__´) and the dactyllic (´__).
In response to the need for occasional variation from the norm, substitution of one of the other feet can be employed. In addition to any of the four "base" feet, two other variants are employable in substitution: the spondee (two successive stressed syllables) and the pyrrhic (two successive unstressed syllables). See also accentual verse and accentual-syllabic verse, iambic pentameter, scansion, and versification.

Miltonic sonnet: See poetic forms.

Mimesis (Greek, "imitation"): The theory that literary works are a representation of human action. Mimetic theory and criticism focus on the relevance of a work to human experience rather than on its structural features.

Modernism: An artistic movement of the early twentieth century that deliberately broke from the reliance on established forms and insisted that individual consciousness, not something objective or external, was the source of truth; modernist literature may be structurally fragmented; its themes tend to emphasize the philosophy of existentialism, the alienation of the individual, and the despair inherent in modern life.

Monologue: Literally, a monologue is one person speaking. Conventionally, the term refers to a speech an actor delivers directly to an audience, unlike a soliloquy, which an actor delivers as if to him- or herself.

Monometer: A term of poetic measurement indicating a line containing one foot. See prosody.

Mood: The overall emotional atmosphere of a scene or situation.

Motif: An image, character, object, setting, situation, or theme recurring in many works. See also leitmotif.

Motivation: The reasons and justifications behind what a character does. The term refers to the action taken by a character in response to circumstance. If we accept the motivation, we are inclined to describe the character as convincing.

Myth: A narrative usually involving supernatural events or persons as a way of interpreting natural events. Every literature has its supporting mythology, and English readers are most familiar with the Judeo-Christian, Greek, Roman, and Norse myths. Writers can create their own myths, as William Butler Yeats did in "A Vision."

Mythological criticism: See literary analysis.

Narrator (narration, narrative): The narrator is the storyteller in a prose or verse narrative. In works of fiction or poetry in which the narrator is not involved in the action, the narrative voice may or may not be authorial (that is, identified with that of the author; see speaker). In addition to authorial narrators, characters are frequently employed as speakers and storytellers. Narration is the process of telling an audience what happens. While the narrative is the actual account of what happens, it is always a report from a certain perspective (see point of view). Narrative contrasts with dialogue, which, as a record of the speech of the characters, aims to present the action as it happens.

Narrative perspective: See point of view.

Narrative poem: A poem that tells a story.

Naturalism: A literary movement based on philosophical determinism, the belief that the lives of ordinary people are determined by biological, economic, and social factors; naturalists tend to use the techniques of realism in order to present a tragic vision of the fate of individuals crushed by forces they cannot control.

Near rhyme: See rhyme.

Neoclassicism: The principles of those writers who emerged with the restoration of Charles II to the throne of England in 1660 and who sought to restore classical restraint in all areas of life. The literature of the Neoclassical Period, which extends until about the 1798 publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, was highly formal (frequently being based on the heroic couplet), praised reason over emotion, and often used satire and irony to criticize deviations from decorum and propriety. See classicism.

New criticism: See literary analysis.

New historicism: See literary analysis.

Novel: An extended prose narrative.

Novella: A prose narrative of roughly forty-to-eighty pages in length; this form falls between the short story and the novel.

Objective point of view: See point of view.

Oblique rhyme: See rhyme.

Obscurity: A quality of language or literature where the writer's meaning is difficult to discern. This may be the result of archaism (the use of words no longer in contemporary speech), neologism (the use of newly coined words), figurative language, specialized terminology or technical jargon, slang, or some other unfamiliar form of diction or discourse. It may also be the result of difficult syntax, abstruse thought, or poor writing.

Octameter: A term of poetic measurement indicating a line containing eight feet. See prosody.

Octave: An eight-line stanza in any metre or any rhyme scheme; any eight-line unit of poetry, rhymed or unrhymed; the initial eight lines of a sonnet united by the rhyme scheme.

Ode: See poetic forms.

Oedipus complex: A psychoanalytic term referring to the Freudian belief that the male child sees his father as a rival for his mother's attention and love, and competes with his father for that love.

Off rhyme: See rhyme.

Omniscient narrator: Omniscient means "all-knowing." This narrator stands outside the action and comments in the third person from a perspective above the awareness level of the characters. See point of view.

Onomatopoeia: Words that have the special characteristic of suggesting their meaning by their actual sound, as in "buzz."

Oxymoron: A combination of contradictory terms drawn from the Greek words meaning "sharp-dull" (e.g., jumbo shrimp, deafening silence).

Parable: A tale illustrating a moral or religious lesson. Often it includes an enigmatic element to arrest the listener's attention. See allegory.

Paradox: A statement that appears to contradict itself but that still contains truth. Robert Browning's character Andrea del Sarto, in the dramatic monologue of the same name, says, "less is more," and we understand the truth of his apparently contradictory statement.

Paraphrase: A restatement, in other terms, of an original text. We sometimes paraphrase a text to check our understanding of it or to compare our understanding to someone else's.

Parody: A deliberately humorous copy of an original work, often created to mock or criticize certain elements of the original.

Pastoral: Originally, a form of poetry set in a classical rustic Arcadia with shepherds, flowers, flutes, and bucolic emotions. In modern literature, any work that presents rural settings, themes, and characters.

Pathos: The quality in literature that arouses our pity, tenderness, or sympathy for a subject.

Pentameter: A term of poetic measurement indicating a line containing five feet. See also prosody.

Peripeteia: The reversal of the protagonist's fortune, leading to fall and catastrophe in tragedy and to success in comedy. See also reversal.

Persona: The speaker of a poem. Literally, persona means "mask" and is a term applied to the narrator or speaker of a text to avoid confusion with the author.

Personification: A figure of speech that grants human qualities to nonhuman agents, whether they are objects, animals, nature or nature's properties, or ideas/abstractions.

Petrarchan conceit: See conceit.

Plot: Described by Aristotle as the "imitation of an action" and "the arrangement of incidents." Generally, plot means a sequence of events, which often includes an identifiable beginning, middle, and end. Plot traditionally involved a conflict between a protagonist and an antagonist, with the conflict being resolved or addressed by the events of the plot, but the plots of contemporary stories do not always fulfill this expectation.

Poem: A text composed of words; the text may be created or found. The first poems were sung by travelling bards in ancient times, before written language, and thus were characterized by their condensed and metaphorical language, rhyme, and rhythm, which helped the reciter to memorize the poem. Poems are often arranged in a sticchic pattern (one line following another) or strophic pattern (lines grouped into stanzas), and explore a subject in a personal or an impersonal way.

Poetic forms: The main styles and structures of poems are as follows:

Ballad: Traditionally, ballads are narrative poems that began as songs and were handed down orally. A ballad is a narrative poem employing quatrains with alternating four-beat and three-beat lines, and rhymes in the second and fourth lines. The ballad tradition has continued into our own time in folk music.

Blank verse: Verse written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. This is a common pattern in English narrative and dramatic poetry from Shakespeare to the twentieth century.

Dramatic monologue: A poem that one speaker recites to an audience of one or more listeners. The presence of the listeners and the situation surrounding the speech render the situation dramatic.

Elegy: A formal poem, originating in Greek and Latin literature, on the subject of death; an elegy is frequently provoked by the death of a particular person.

Ghazel: Originating in the Middle East in the eighth century, ghazels were originally related to love and wine and composed of five to eight couplets, all having the same rhyme. Contemporary poets have used the form to write about a variety of topics.

Haiku: A Japanese form of poetry that employs three lines of five, seven, and five syllables to evoke a word picture with complex associations.

Limerick: A light verse form with a pattern of five anapaestic lines with three feet (and one rhyme) in the first, second, and fifth lines, and two feet (and another rhyme) in the third and fourth lines. Generally, the limerick is intended to create a comic effect.

Ode: A lyrical poem focused on a single theme or topic. The ode has its origins in Greek dramatic poetry, where it was choral. In English, the ode has three types. The Pindaric ode uses three stanzaic divisions: strophe, antistrophe, and epode. The Horatian or homostrophic ode uses one stanzaic pattern. The irregular ode does not follow a set stanzaic pattern.

Prose poem: An open form of poetry presented as a prose passage but with the density and rhythm of poetry.

Rondeau: A verse pattern originating in France but popular in English literature, the rondeau characteristically has ten or thirteen lines, with the opening phrase repeated twice as a short refrain. Besides the refrain, the rondeau uses only two rhymes.

Sestina: A complex verse form, the sestina employs six six-line stanzas and a three-line envoy. Although usually unrhymed, the last words of the lines take on a fixed pattern. These end words must appear in each stanza, but their order is dictated by the fact that the last end word of one stanza becomes the first end word of the next stanza.
Thus, if the first stanza of a sestina ended 1,2,3,4,5,6, the second would end 6,1,5,2,4,3, and the third pattern would be 3,6,4,1,2,5. The three-line envoy must use the end words 5,3,1, which are the end words of the sixth six-line stanza, and it must employ the other end words 2,4,6 in each of its three lines.

Sonnet: A lyric form of fourteen lines, traditionally of iambic pentameter and following one of several established rhyme schemes.

Sonnet, English: Also called the Shakespearean sonnet; a sonnet consisting of three quatrains and a couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg. When the quatrains employ linked rhyme (abab bcbc cdcd ee), it is known as the Spenserian sonnet.

Sonnet, Miltonic: A variation of the Petrarchan sonnet that eliminates the pause at the end of the octave; thus, the volta, when it occurs, usually appears in the middle of the ninth line.

Sonnet, Petrarchan: Also called the Italian sonnet: the first eight lines (the octave) state a problem, and the final six lines (the sestet) frequently begin with a volta, or turn, such as but, yet, or however, and resolve or comment on the problem; originally limited to five rhymes, with the rhyme scheme of the octave usually being abba abba (thus dividing into two quatrains), and the rhyme scheme of the sestet varying, but generally being either cde cde (thus dividing into two tercets, or three-line units) or cdcdcd.

Sonnet, Spenserian: See sonnet, English.

Terza rima: Italian in origin, this form is composed of interlocking tercets in which the end word of the second line of one tercet forms the rhyme of the first and third line of the following tercet (aba, bcb, and so on). Sometimes terza rima ends with a different stanza form, such as a couplet or quatrain.

Villanelle: A nineteen-line poem using just two rhymes and repeating lines one and three. The first line recurs at lines six, twelve, and eighteen, and the third recurs at lines nine, fifteen, and nineteen. Lines one and three, in this pattern, also close the poem.

Point of view: As a literary term, point of view refers to the perspective from which the story is related. Point of view is one of the hidden yet deeply influential forces at play in a story. The choice of narrator has a great effect on the way readers receive and understand the story. Generally, a story is told by either a first- or third-person narrator.

First-person narrators are agents in the action and are therefore frequently called inside narrators. Because they are inside the story, they are limited in time and space and can relate only what they have directly witnessed or have been told by another character. The two principal kinds of inside narrators are witness narrators and protagonist narrators. The witness narrator is generally more reliable but less intimate as a narrator; with both narrators, however, we have to pay attention to any bias they may reveal in telling the story.

Third-person narrators are easily identified because there is no longer an "I" speaking directly to us. The narrator has now moved outside the story and relays what is happening from a much greater distance.
The most intimate kind of third-person narration is limited omniscience. This form of narration is limited to the perspective of one or more of the characters in the action; we occupy that character's consciousness and see from his or her perspective. Now we read, for example, "Lucy watched the man approach the bench. She wondered why he looked so anxious and why his approach was so tentative."
The most flexible form of third-person or outside narration is the omniscient narrator. This narrator has no time or space restrictions; she or he can go anywhere in time and space to observe and relay the action. We read, for instance, "The man, deeply troubled, slowly approached the couple on the bench." A variation originating in the eighteenth century is called editorial omniscient. In this form, the narrator not only has complete freedom but also uses it to directly address the reader about what was happening and even to express critical opinions from time to time. In this form, we might read, "Dear reader, try to imagine an anxious man, an uncertain man, approaching a bench and expecting rejection, and feel what he feels when he sees the couple look quickly away from his approaching form."
The most distanced of narrators is what has come to be called the objective narrator or effaced narrator. This narrator is analogous to a video camera recording the action, since only physical description is allowed. The narrator cannot enter any consciousness or relay anything that could not be physically witnessed.

Postcolonial: Writing concerned with the culture, history, and politics of former colonies of European empires. Instead of being the objects of European "expert" scrutiny, postcolonial writers become subjects or active agents who offer accounts of their experience that counter traditional imperial narratives depicting colonized peoples as quaint, inferior, or uncivilized.

Postcolonial theory: See literary analysis

Prologue: The introduction to a drama. The term has widened in application since its use in Greek and Roman drama and now can be applied to any formal introduction to a work.

Prose poem: See poetic forms.

Prosody: Prosody applies metrical analysis (scansion) to study the rhythm created by the poet. For many centuries, poetry written in English was dominated by the accentual syllabic tradition. Anglo-Saxon poetry was simply accentual, meaning the writer/singer had to create the right number of accents or stresses in each line. The accentual syllabic tradition also generally governed the number of syllables per line because, in English, the stress falls on the syllable.
To analyze the metre (pattern of stresses and syllables), you can simply follow these steps:

o Divide the lines of one stanza of the poem you are analyzing into syllables, using vertical lines to divide one syllable from another.

o Through reading aloud or some similar means, decide where the stresses fall in each line. Place the following mark above each syllable that is stressed or pronounced more loudly [ / ]. Then place this mark [ " ] above all the unstressed syllables.

o Divide the lines you have analyzed into feet; a metric foot is a unit with one stressed syllable in it and one or more unstressed syllables.

o Use the following tables to decide what the metre of the poem is. Metrical analysis, or scansion, uses terms drawn from classical antiquity, so initially they are difficult to understand. However, the basic system is simple enough: metre is described by naming the type of foot that dominates the poem and then the number of feet in a typical line.

Kinds of Feet:

iamb (iambic) " / (afraid)

trochee (trochaic) / " (beat it)

anapaest (anapaestic) " " / (from the tomb)

dactyl (dactylic) / " " (pottery)

spondee (spondaic) / / (dry rot)

pyrrhic " " (it was)

Number of Feet:

One = monometer

Two = dimeter

Three = trimeter

Four = tetrameter

Five = pentameter

Six = hexameter

Seven = heptameter

Eight = octometer

If you were analyzing a sonnet, you would find that the typical foot was one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable-in other words an iamb-and that there were five of these feet in each line. Putting the two elements together would let you name the metre of the poem, iambic pentameter.

Protagonist: The main character of a drama or story; the term originally meant the first actor in early Greek drama. The Greek word agon meant contest, and the protagonist and antagonist are the chief agents in that contest.

Psychological criticism: See literary analysis.

Pun: A play on words taking advantage of similarities in sound or meaning between two words; for example, a dead person has reached "a grave destination."

Pyrrhic: A poetic foot of two syllables, neither of which is accented. See prosody.

Quatrain: A four-line stanza in any metre or any rhyme scheme, except the heroic quatrain, which is in iambic pentameter and rhymes abab; any four-line unit of poetry, rhymed or unrhymed; four lines of a sonnet united by the rhyme scheme.

Queer Theory: See literary analysis

Quintet: A five-line stanza in any metre or any rhyme scheme; any five-line unit of poetry, rhymed or unrhymed.

Reader-response criticism: See literary analysis.

Realism: In terms of subject matter, realism has come to mean literature that deals with the ordinary commonplace world in preference to the world of exceptional circumstances. Characters are neither rich nor heroic, settings are prosaic rather than exotic, and yet there is a serious grappling with moral, social, and psychological dilemmas and a normal range of other themes and moods. The surface of life is usually carefully and faithfully observed, a plain style of description is employed, and an unintrusive narrative perspective is preferred, especially in the handling of character motivation and the presentation of interior consciousness.

Recognition: The point in a plot at which the protagonist discovers previously unknown facts that influence a change of direction or attitude in him or her.

Refrain: A repeated verse line, usually at the end of a stanza, with a function (whether lyric, comic, ironic, etc.) that may change throughout a poem.

Resolution: The completion of a plot's complications, sometimes referred to as the falling action.

Reversal: The turning point in a plot when the protagonist's fortune changes. See peripeteia.

Rhetorical question: A question asked for rhetorical effect rather than to elicit an answer, which is implicit in the actual phrasing of the question: "Will the minister admit that his government is ethically bankrupt and must now call an election?"

Rhyme (rime): The repetition of identical or similar final sounds in words, particularly at the end of lines of poetry. Single, or masculine, rhymes repeat only the last syllable of the words; double, or feminine, rhymes (also sometimes called trochaic rhymes) repeat identical sounds in both an accented syllable and the following unaccented syllable; triple, or dactylic, rhymes repeat identical sounds in an accented syllable and the two following unaccented syllables. End rhyme occurs when the rhyming words are at the end of their respective lines; internal rhyme occurs when one or both of the rhyming words are within a line.
Most rhyme involves the exact repetition of sounds; near rhyme (also known as slant, off, imperfect, or oblique rhyme) depends upon the approximation, rather than duplication, of sounds: it repeats either the final consonant (but not the preceding vowels) or the vowels (but not the following consonants) of the words. Eye, or sight, rhyme depends on the similar spelling of words, not their pronunciation, as in gone and lone.

Rhyme scheme: The pattern of rhyme within a fixed verse form or stanza. An elegiac quatrain, for instance, follows an abab scheme.

Rhythm: The term applied to the patterning of stressed and unstressed syllables in lines of poetry. See also prosody.

Rising action: The progression of events and development of the conflict of a story or play up to the point of the climax.

Romance: Fiction that features remarkable characters, exotic settings, dramatic events, supernatural or mysterious elements, and a strong love interest, or any fictional work free of the restraints of realism. Romance reinforces the value system of the society; in romance, the value system is triumphant in overcoming any challenge.

Romanticism: A literary movement that began in England sometime around the 1798 publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads and was a reaction to the restraint and order of neoclassicism. The Romantics praised emotion over reason and celebrated the imagination; their literature used a diction that was less formal and elevated than that of the classicists (see classicism), employed themes based on the supernatural, nature and nature's influence on human beings, and the power of the liberated imagination. "Romantic" and "romanticism" are applied to works that exhibit emotional and imaginative exuberance or that use such themes, whether or not written during the Romantic period.

Round character: A character capable of surprising the reader and of change; a psychologically complex character. E.M. Forster said a round character "has the incalculability of life about it."

Run-on line: See enjambment

Sarcasm: A mocking or bitter attack using language that contains a double meaning. See verbal irony.

Satire: A treatment of subject matter that can appear in any literary genre, satire usually employs devices of ridicule and appeals to amusement, scorn, or contempt to comment on or correct some human vice, social evil, or general tendency to folly.

Scansion: A system for measuring the rhythm of an accentual-syllabic poem. It chiefly employs two marks to indicate whether a syllable is stressed or unstressed and then evaluates the pattern of stresses by category (iambic, trochaic) and quantity (dimeter, trimeter). See also prosody.

Scene: Either a unit of a play or the physical and/or human environment for the action of a plot.

Sensibility: That part of a writer's or a character's personality that has a capacity for emotional responsiveness and sensitivity. The value of sensibility was heightened in the late eighteenth century when sentimentalism came into fashion in literature and heroes and heroines (and writers) came to be admired for their fine sensitivity to delicate nuances of feeling.

Sentimentality: The attempt of the writer to make us feel more deeply than the action of the plot warrants.

Septet: A seven-line stanza in any metre or any rhyme scheme; any seven-line unit of poetry, rhymed or unrhymed.

Sestet: A six-line stanza in any metre or any rhyme scheme; any six-line unit of poetry, rhymed or unrhymed; the final six lines of a Petrarchan sonnet, which are united by the rhyme scheme.

Sestina: See poetic forms.

Setting: In a narrative or dramatic work, setting involves the place, historical period, and social circumstances of the action. The setting has significant implications for atmosphere, character, plot, and theme.

Shakespearean sonnet: Also known as the English sonnet. See poetic forms.

Short story: A relatively brief type of prose fiction. In the early nineteenth century, a number of writers, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, developed the genre out of the sketch and literary essay. While the sketch was a relaxed narrative, usually written for a newspaper or periodical, with limited development of plot, character, and theme, the short story became more compact, complex, and ambitious. The short story is often characterized by its highly crafted structure and its use of subtle detail within a compressed spatial format. The short story ranges from 500 to 20,000 words, but normal length is from 2000 to 15,000 words.

Sight rhyme: See rhyme.

Simile: A figure of speech making a direct comparison between things by using like or as or similar words, as in "His heart is like a stone."

Single rhyme: See rhyme.

Slant rhyme: See rhyme.

Sonnet: See poetic forms.

Speaker: The voice that tells the story or the poem; see persona.

Spenserian sonnet: A variant of the English sonnet. See poetic forms.

Sprung rhythm: A distinctive and forceful poetic line developed by Gerard Manley Hopkins. As with trochaic and dactyllic feet (see metre), sprung rhythm places the accent on the initial syllable of each foot, but the number of unaccented syllables is irregular.

Stanza: Lines of verse may be composed in verse paragraphs, or they may be organized into formal units called stanzas. Each stanza provides the poet with a division mark, but frequently the division is blurred for a purpose discernible in the poem. While enjambment may occur as frequently between stanzas as between lines, it does not in any way diminish the impact of the stanza as a forceful unit in a poem.

Stanza forms: Some traditional stanzas are both fixed and elaborate in format (ottava rima, for instance, an eight-line iambic pentameter stanza, rhyming abababcc). Such stanzas are based on a predetermined metre, rhyme scheme, and number of lines and feet per line. Certain basic stanzas like the tercet have fixed variant forms - see also couplet and quatrain for their variants.
While a tercet is a three-line stanza employing a single rhyme, terza rima is a series of tercets with aba bcb cdc, interlinking rhymes. Ballads often alternate tetrameter and trimeter lines in abcb quatrains. Rhyme royal is a seven-line iambic pentameter stanza rhyming ababbcc. Modern poets frequently design stanzas for specific poems, and although their stanzas may not vary radically from traditional fixed forms, they do not expect readers to link their chosen pattern to a familiar stanza form.

Stereotype: A simplified, stock character, often dominated by a single characteristic. See also flat character.

Sticchic: Poetry without stanzaic divisions. See also strophic.

Stream-of-consciousness technique: A narrative that presents the random, sometimes disjointed, thoughts of a character as they come to the character.

Stress: The relative emphasis given a spoken syllable. See prosody.

Strophic: Poetry with stanzaic divisions. See also sticchic.

Structure: The organizing principles of a literary work revealed in such obvious elements of a literary framework as chapter, scene, or stanza divisions as well as more subtle compositional devices such as the arrangement of images and ideas. Structure affects theme and meaning and defines the elements that give unity and coherence to a work.

Style: A writer's characteristic way of writing, which may or may not be highly distinctive.

Subplot: A subordinate plot connected to the main plot by character or theme.

Summary: A condensation of material into a form that includes only the critical matter.

Suspense: The writer's deliberate use of delay in the action to heighten the interest or anxiety of the reader concerning the outcome of a particular action or set of actions.

Symbol: An image, object, gesture, detail, or event that evokes in the reader a sense of an additional range of meaning beyond the literal. Literary symbols are of two types, public and private, with a public symbol being a concrete entity that has a clearly established meaning within a particular culture. Private symbols take their meaning exclusively or primarily from the text in which they appear. The author often uses the reference more than once in a text, and this multiple appearance also complicates the meaning of a symbol because of the associative meanings added through repetition in different contexts.

Synecdoche: A figure of speech in which the part stands for the whole ("rhyme" for poem) or the whole stands for the part ("Canada" for Canadians).

Syntax: The order in which words are placed to make meaning; all languages require words to be correctly ordered in a successful statement. Syntax is often more unconventional in poetry than in prose.

Tale: An informal or spontaneous literary narrative. Originally oral in nature, it is now a loosely constructed story that is told with some of the relish of its folk origins. It contrasts with the typically more tightly structured narrative we call the short story.

Technique: A device or method of expression in literature and art.

Tercet: A three-line stanza.

Terza rima: See poetic forms.

Tetrameter: A term of poetic measurement indicating a line containing four feet. See prosody.

Texture: The formal qualities of literary language, as opposed to the content of a work of literature. Diction, rhythm, imagery, figurative language, stylistic and prosodic devices, and so on, are aspects of texture, but structural devices such as plot and character are not.

Theme: The central intent of a text; we have to test our notion of a text's theme by ensuring that it is sufficient to explain all parts of the text and not inconsistent with any individual part. In an essay, the term thesis is frequently employed to signify the subject of the essay and the author's perspective on that subject.

Thesis: See theme.

Third-person narrator: A narrator who stands outside the action when telling the story. Third-person narrators may be omniscient, but more commonly they limit their commentary to the perspective level of the characters. See point of view.

Tone: The reader's sense of what the writer's attitude is toward the subject and audience.

Tragedy: In drama, tragedy refers to a certain kind of play, a dramatic form that goes back to the Greeks and has a protagonist who falls, in part because of his or her own error, and who may be killed as a consequence of that error. As a literary form, tragedy bears witness to a predisposition in humans to struggle mightily but to fail and die, either through error or destiny.

Tragic flaw: The error of judgement or action referred to in tragedy. The tragic perception requires the audience to understand that the protagonist's doom is earned, in part, because of a flaw or lacking in the protagonist's character or judgement. Many Greek tragedies identify pride as the flaw. See also hubris/hybris.

Transition: A connection between one part of a text and the next.

Trimeter: A term of poetic measurement indicating a line containing three feet. See prosody.

Triple rhyme: See rhyme.

Triplet: A tercet; usually applied to one in which all three lines rhyme.

Trochaic rhyme: See rhyme.

Trochee (trochaic): A poetic foot of two syllables, the first being accented. See prosody.

Understatement: A figure of speech, the opposite of exaggeration, that intensifies meaning ironically by deliberately minimizing, or underemphasizing, the importance of ideas, emotions, and situations.

Unity: The cohesiveness of a literary work in which all the parts and elements harmonize.

Verbal irony: See irony.

Verse: (a) A single line of poetry. "Verse" is sometimes used to refer to a stanza;
(b) A composition either in metre or cadences that uses the line as a rhythmical unit.

Versification: The art of making verse. Versification is either formal or informal. For informal versification, see free verse. Formal versification employs metre and a regular line length. Each formal line is named according to its length, with the four-, five-, and six-foot lines being the most familiar (tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter). See iambic pentameter. Less well-known are monometer, dimeter, trimeter, and heptameter (the
one-, two-, three-, and seven-foot lines).

Vers libre: See free verse.

Villanelle: See poetic forms.

Voice: Every literary work, whether a brief lyric or a long prose narration, has a speaker or persona. The sense of personal presence behind the speaker's words constitutes voice. The term "voice" reminds us that the significance of what is said is qualified by who is speaking, and the speaker's tone and feeling. See speaker.

Volta: The turn of thought in a poem, especially after the octave of a Petrarchan sonnet.

Wit: Originally, wit was associated specifically with quickness of intellect; an instinct for irony, variety, and incongruity; and agility of ideas and language. It now tends to mean, at worst, a proclivity to make quips and, at best, the ability to communicate clever, amusing, or surprising observations that have at least a modicum of intellectual substance. Because wit can be incisive, intolerant, and intellectual, it is a useful element in satire.

Zeugma: A device in which one word is grammatically linked to two words (usually a verb to two objects or two subjects), with the linkage being logically appropriate in a different way for each word, as in Pope's "Or stain her honour, or her new Brocade."