The following is a list of literary terms; that is, those words used in discussion, classification, criticism, and analysis of poetry, novels and picture books.

See also: Glossary of poetry terms

Glossary of poetry terms

-Types of metre:Below, "short/long" definitions of a syllable of classical languages correspond to "unstressed/stressed" of English language.* Amphibrach: short-long-short* Amphimacer or cretic: long-short-long* Anapaest or antivdactylus: short-short-long...

, Literary criticism

Literary criticism

Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals...

, Literary theory

Literary theory

Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature. However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of...

A

• Abecedarius
  Abecedarius
  An abecedarius is an acrostic in which the first letter of every word, strophe or verse follows the order of the alphabet. Abecedarius is also a generic term for an alphabet book, which dates back to Biblical writings such as the Psalms, which used successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet as the...
  
  
• Academic drama
  Academic drama
  Academic drama, also called school drama, is a dramatic tradition which arose from the Renaissance, in which the works of Plautus, Terence, and other ancient dramatists were performed in schools and colleges. At first, these dramas were performed in Latin, but later also in vernacular adaptations...
  
  
• Acatalectic
  Acatalectic
  An acatalectic line of verse is one having the metrically complete number of syllables in the final foot. When talking about poetry written in English the term is arguably of limited significance or utility, at least by comparison to its antonym, catalectic, for the simple reason that acatalexis...
  
  
• Accent
  Accent (poetry)
  In poetry, accent refers to the stressed syllable of a polysyllabic word, or a monosyllabic word that receives stress because it belongs to an "open class" of words or because of "contrastive" or "rhetorical" stress. In basic analysis of a poem by scansion, accents are represented with a slash...
  
  
• Accentual verse
  Accentual verse
  Accentual verse has a fixed number of stresses per line or stanza regardless of the number of syllables that are present. It is common in languages that are stress-timed, such as English—as opposed to syllabic verse, which is common in syllable-timed languages, such as French.- Children's poetry...
  
  
• Acrostic
  Acrostic
  An acrostic is a poem or other form of writing in which the first letter, syllable or word of each line, paragraph or other recurring feature in the text spells out a word or a message. As a form of constrained writing, an acrostic can be used as a mnemonic device to aid memory retrieval. A famous...
  
  
• Act
• Aisling
  Aisling
  The aisling , or vision poem, is a poetic genre that developed during the late 17th and 18th centuries in Irish language poetry...
  
  
• Allegory
  Allegory
  Allegory is a demonstrative form of representation explaining meaning other than the words that are spoken. Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation...
  
  
• Alliteration
  Alliteration
  In language, alliteration refers to the repetition of a particular sound in the first syllables of Three or more words or phrases. Alliteration has historically developed largely through poetry, in which it more narrowly refers to the repetition of a consonant in any syllables that, according to...
  
  
• Allusion
  Allusion
  An allusion is a figure of speech that makes a reference to, or representation of, people, places, events, literary work, myths, or works of art, either directly or by implication. M. H...
  
  
• Anachronism
  Anachronism
  An anachronism—from the Greek ανά and χρόνος — is an inconsistency in some chronological arrangement, especially a chronological misplacing of persons, events, objects, or customs in regard to each other...
  
  
• Anacrusis
  Anacrusis
  In poetry, an anacrusis is the lead-in syllables, collectively, that precede the first full measure.In music, it is the note or sequence of notes which precedes the first downbeat in a bar. In the latter sense an anacrusis is often called a pickup, pickup note, or pickup measure, referring to the...
  
  
• Anadiplosis
  Anadiplosis
  Anadiplosis is the repetition of the last word of a preceding clause. The word is used at the end of a sentence and then used again at the beginning of the next sentence.-Examples:...
  
  
• Anagnorisis
  Anagnorisis
  Anagnorisis is a moment in a play or other work when a character makes a critical discovery. Anagnorisis originally meant recognition in its Greek context, not only of a person but also of what that person stood for...
  
  
• Analects
• Analepsis
• Analogue
  Analogue (literature)
  The term analogue is used in literary history in two related senses:* a work which resembles another in terms of one or more motifs, characters, scenes, phrases or events....
  
  
• Analogy
  Analogy
  Analogy is a cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject to another particular subject , and a linguistic expression corresponding to such a process...
  
  
• Anapest
• Anaphora
• Anastrophe
  Anastrophe
  Anastrophe is a figure of speech in which a language's usual word order is inverted: for example, saying "smart you are" to mean "you are smart"....
  
  
• Anecdote
  Anecdote
  An anecdote is a short and amusing or interesting story about a real incident or person. It may be as brief as the setting and provocation of a bon mot. An anecdote is always presented as based on a real incident involving actual persons, whether famous or not, usually in an identifiable place...
  
  
• Annal
• Annotation
  Annotation
  An annotation is a note that is made while reading any form of text. This may be as simple as underlining or highlighting passages.Annotated bibliographies give descriptions about how each source is useful to an author in constructing a paper or argument...
  
  
• Antagonist
  Antagonist
  An antagonist is a character, group of characters, or institution, that represents the opposition against which the protagonist must contend...
  
  
• Antanaclasis
  Antanaclasis
  In rhetoric, antanaclasis is the stylistic trope of repeating a single word, but with a different meaning each time. Antanaclasis is a common type of pun, and like other kinds of pun, it is often found in slogans.-Examples:...
  
  
• Antepenult
• Anthology
  Anthology
  An anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler. It may be a collection of poems, short stories, plays, songs, or excerpts...
  
  
• Anticlimax
• Anti-hero
  Anti-hero
  In fiction, an antihero is generally considered to be a protagonist whose character is at least in some regards conspicuously contrary to that of the archetypal hero, and is in some instances its antithesis in which the character is generally useless at being a hero or heroine when they're...
  
  
• Anti-masque
  Anti-masque
  An anti-masque is a comic or grotesque dance presented before or between the acts of a masque, a type of dramatic composition. The anti-masque is a spectacle of disorder which usually starts or precedes the masque itself...
  
  
• Anti-romance
  Anti-romance
  An anti-romance, sometimes referred to as a satire, is a type of story characterized by having an apathetic or self-doubting anti-hero cast as the protagonist, who fails in the object of his journey or struggle. Most anti-romances take place in urban settings, and frequently feature insanity,...
  
  
• Antimetabole
  Antimetabole
  In rhetoric, antimetabole is the repetition of words in successive clauses, but in transposed grammatical order...
  
  
• Antinovel
  Antinovel
  An antinovel is any experimental work of fiction that avoids the familiar conventions of the novel. The term was coined by the French philosopher and critic Jean-Paul Sartre....
  
  
• Antistrophe
  Epistrophe
  Epistrophe , also known as epiphora , is a figure of speech and the counterpart of anaphora. It is the repetition of the same word or words at the end of successive phrases, clauses or sentences...
  
  
• Antithesis
  Antithesis
  Antithesis is a counter-proposition and denotes a direct contrast to the original proposition...
  
  
• Antonym
  Antonym
  In lexical semantics, opposites are words that lie in an inherently incompatible binary relationship as in the opposite pairs male : female, long : short, up : down, and precede : follow. The notion of incompatibility here refers to the fact that one word in an opposite pair entails that it is not...
  
  
• Aphorism
  Aphorism
  An aphorism is an original thought, spoken or written in a laconic and memorable form.The term was first used in the Aphorisms of Hippocrates...
  
  
• Apocope
  Apocope
  In phonology, apocope is the loss of one or more sounds from the end of a word, and especially the loss of an unstressed vowel.-Historical sound change:...
  
  
• Apocrypha
  Apocrypha (fiction)
  In the context of fiction, apocrypha includes those fictional stories that do not belong within a fictional universe's canon, yet still have some authority relating to that fictional universe...
  
  
• Apollonian and Dionysian
  Apollonian and Dionysian
  The Apollonian and Dionysian is a philosophical and literary concept, or dichotomy, based on certain features of ancient Greek mythology. Several Western philosophical and literary figures have invoked this dichotomy in critical and creative works....
  
  
• Apologue
  Apologue
  An apologue or apolog is a brief fable or allegorical story with pointed or exaggerated details, meant to serve as a pleasant vehicle for a moral doctrine or to convey a useful lesson without stating it explicitly. Unlike a fable, the moral is more important than the narrative details...
  
  
• Apology
  Apologetics
  Apologetics is the discipline of defending a position through the systematic use of reason. Early Christian writers Apologetics (from Greek ἀπολογία, "speaking in defense") is the discipline of defending a position (often religious) through the systematic use of reason. Early Christian writers...
  
  
• Apothegm
• Aposiopesis
  Aposiopesis
  Aposiopesis is a figure of speech wherein a sentence is deliberately broken off and left unfinished, the ending to be supplied by the imagination, giving an impression of unwillingness or inability to continue. An example would be the threat "Get out, or else—!" This device often portrays its...
  
  
• Apostrophe
  Apostrophe (figure of speech)
  Apostrophe is an exclamatory rhetorical figure of speech, when a speaker or writer breaks off and directs speech to an imaginary person or abstract quality or idea...
  
  
• Apron stage
  Apron stage
  The apron is any part of the stage that extends past the proscenium arch and into the audience or seating area. The Elizabethan stage, which was a raised platform with the audience on three sides, is the outstanding example....
  
  
• Arcadia
  Arcadia (utopia)
  Arcadia refers to a vision of pastoralism and harmony with nature. The term is derived from the Greek province of the same name which dates to antiquity; the province's mountainous topography and sparse population of pastoralists later caused the word Arcadia to develop into a poetic byword for an...
  
  
• Archaism
  Archaism
  In language, an archaism is the use of a form of speech or writing that is no longer current. This can either be done deliberately or as part of a specific jargon or formula...
  
  
• Archetype
  Archetype
  An archetype is a universally understood symbol or term or pattern of behavior, a prototype upon which others are copied, patterned, or emulated...
  
  
• Aristeia
  Aristeia
  An aristeia or aristia is a scene in the dramatic conventions of such works as the Iliad in which a hero in battle has his finest moments . It is usually associated with men but can be expanded also to encompass women . In the latter case the aristeia is of a different sort, grief...
  
  
• Argument
  Argument
  In philosophy and logic, an argument is an attempt to persuade someone of something, or give evidence or reasons for accepting a particular conclusion.Argument may also refer to:-Mathematics and computer science:...
  
  
• Arsis
  Arsis and thesis
  In music and prosody, arsis and thesis refer to the stronger and weaker parts of a musical measure or poetic foot. Arsis and thesis were the raising and lowering of the foot in beating of time, or the raising and lowering of the voice in pitch or stress...
  
  
• Art for art's sake
  Art for art's sake
  "Art for art's sake" is the usual English rendering of a French slogan, from the early 19th century, l'art pour l'art, and expresses a philosophy that the intrinsic value of art, and the only "true" art, is divorced from any didactic, moral or utilitarian function...
  
  
• Asemic writing
  Asemic writing
  Asemic writing is a wordless open semantic form of writing. The word asemic means "having no specific semantic content". With the nonspecificity of asemic writing there comes a vacuum of meaning which is left for the reader to fill in and interpret. All of this is similar to the way one would...
  
  
• Aside
  Aside
  An aside is a dramatic device in which a character speaks to the audience. By convention the audience is to realize that the character's speech is unheard by the other characters on stage. It may be addressed to the audience expressly or represent an unspoken thought. An aside is usually a brief...
  
  
• Assonance
  Assonance
  Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds to create internal rhyming within phrases or sentences, and together with alliteration and consonance serves as one of the building blocks of verse. For example, in the phrase "Do you like blue?", the is repeated within the sentence and is...
  
  
• Asyndeton
  Asyndeton
  Asyndeton is a stylistic scheme in which conjunctions are deliberately omitted from a series of related clauses. Examples are veni, vidi, vici and its English translation "I came, I saw, I conquered." Its use can have the effect of speeding up the rhythm of a passage and making a single idea more...
  
  
• Atmosphere
• Attitude
  Attitude (psychology)
  An attitude is a hypothetical construct that represents an individual's degree of like or dislike for something. Attitudes are generally positive or negative views of a person, place, thing, or event— this is often referred to as the attitude object...
  
  
• Aube
  Aubade
  An aubade is a morning love song , or a song or poem about lovers separating at dawn. It has also been defined as "a song or instrumental composition concerning, accompanying, or evoking daybreak"....
  
  
• Aubade
  Aubade
  An aubade is a morning love song , or a song or poem about lovers separating at dawn. It has also been defined as "a song or instrumental composition concerning, accompanying, or evoking daybreak"....
  
  
• Audience
  Audience
  An audience is a group of people who participate in a show or encounter a work of art, literature , theatre, music or academics in any medium...
  
  
• Autobiography
  Autobiography
  An autobiography is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.-Origin of the term:...
  
  
• Autotelic
  Autotelic
  A thing which is autotelic is described as "having a purpose in and not apart from itself". It is a broad term that can be applied to missionaries, scientists, systems, and so forth.-Origins:...
  
  
• Avant-garde
  Avant-garde
  Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
  
  

B

• Ballad
  Ballad
  A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads were particularly characteristic of British and Irish popular poetry and song from the later medieval period until the 19th century and used extensively across Europe and later the Americas, Australia and North Africa. Many...
  
  
• Ballade
  Ballade
  The ballade is a form of French poetry. It was one of the three formes fixes and one of the verse forms in France most commonly set to music between the late 13th and the 15th centuries....
  
  
• Ballad stanza
  Ballad Stanza
  In poetry, a Ballad stanza is the four-line stanza, known as a quatrain, most often found in the folk ballad. This form consists of alternating four- and three-stress lines. Usually only the second and fourth lines rhyme . Assonance in place of rhyme is common...
  
  
• Bard
  Bard
  In medieval Gaelic and British culture a bard was a professional poet, employed by a patron, such as a monarch or nobleman, to commemorate the patron's ancestors and to praise the patron's own activities.Originally a specific class of poet, contrasting with another class known as fili in Ireland...
  
  
• Baroque
  Baroque
  The Baroque is a period and the style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music...
  
  
• Bathos
  Bathos
  Bathos is an abrupt transition in style from the exalted to the commonplace, producing a ludicrous effect. While often unintended, bathos may be used deliberately to produce a humorous effect. If bathos is overt, it may be described as Burlesque or mock-heroic...
  
  
• Beast fable
  Beast fable
  The beast fable or beast epic, usually a short story or poem in which animals talk, is a traditional form of allegorical writing. It is a type of fable in which human behaviour and weaknesses are subject to scrutiny by reflection into the animal kingdom....
  
   (beast epic)
• Beast poetry
  Beast poetry
  Beast poetry, in the context of European literature and Medieval studies, refers to a corpus of poems written in Latin from the 8th to the 11th century....
  
  
• Beat Generation
  Beat generation
  The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...
  
  
• Beginning rhyme
• Belles-lettres
  Belles-lettres
  Belles-lettres or belles lettres is a term that is used to describe a category of writing. A writer of belles-lettres is a belletrist. However, the boundaries of that category vary in different usages....
  
  
• Bestiary
  Bestiary
  A bestiary, or Bestiarum vocabulum is a compendium of beasts. Bestiaries were made popular in the Middle Ages in illustrated volumes that described various animals, birds and even rocks. The natural history and illustration of each beast was usually accompanied by a moral lesson...
  
  
• Beta reader
  Beta reader
  A beta reader is a person who reads a written work, generally fiction, with what has been described as "a critical eye, with the aim of improving grammar, spelling, characterization, and general style of a story prior to its release to the general public."The author or writer, who can be referred...
  
  
• Bibliography
  Bibliography
  Bibliography , as a practice, is the academic study of books as physical, cultural objects; in this sense, it is also known as bibliology...
  
  
• Bildungsroman
  Bildungsroman
  In literary criticism, bildungsroman or coming-of-age story is a literary genre which focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood , and in which character change is thus extremely important...
  
  
• Biography
  Biography
  A biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life. More than a list of basic facts , biography also portrays the subject's experience of those events...
  
  
• Black comedy
  Black comedy
  A black comedy, or dark comedy, is a comic work that employs black humor or gallows humor. The definition of black humor is problematic; it has been argued that it corresponds to the earlier concept of gallows humor; and that, as humor has been defined since Freud as a comedic act that anesthetizes...
  
  
• Blank verse
  Blank verse
  Blank verse is poetry written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. It has been described as "probably the most common and influential form that English poetry has taken since the sixteenth century" and Paul Fussell has claimed that "about three-quarters of all English poetry is in blank verse."The first...
  
  
• Bloomsbury Group
  Bloomsbury Group
  The Bloomsbury Group or Bloomsbury Set was a group of writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists who held informal discussions in Bloomsbury throughout the 20th century. This English collective of friends and relatives lived, worked or studied near Bloomsbury in London during the first half...
  
  
• Body
• Bombast
  Fustian
  Fustian is a term for a variety of heavy woven, mostly cotton fabrics, chiefly prepared for menswear. It is also used to refer to pompous, inflated or pretentious writing or speech, from at least the time of Shakespeare...
  
   (fustian)
• Boulevard theatre
  Boulevard theatre
  Boulevard theatre is a theatrical aesthetic which emerged from the boulevards of Paris's old city.-Origin:Starting from the second half of the 18th century, popular and bourgeois theatre alike took up residence on the boulevard du Temple, then nicknamed Boulevard of Crime due to the many...
  
  
• Bourgeosis drama
• Bouts-Rimés
  Bouts-Rimés
  Bouts-Rimés, literally "rhymed-ends", is the name given to a kind of poetic game defined by Addison, in the Spectator, as...
  
  
• Bowdlerize
  Thomas Bowdler
  Thomas Bowdler was an English physician who published an expurgated edition of William Shakespeare's work, edited by his sister Harriet, intended to be more appropriate for 19th century women and children than the original....
  
  
• Breviloquence
• Broadside
  Broadside
  A broadside is the side of a ship; the battery of cannon on one side of a warship; or their simultaneous fire in naval warfare.-Age of Sail:...
  
  
• Burlesque
  Burlesque
  Burlesque is a literary, dramatic or musical work intended to cause laughter by caricaturing the manner or spirit of serious works, or by ludicrous treatment of their subjects...
  
  
• Burletta
  Burletta
  A burletta , also sometimes burla or burlettina, is a musical term generally denoting a brief comic Italian opera...
  
  
• Burns stanza
  Burns stanza
  The Burns stanza is a verse form named after the Scottish poet Robert Burns. It was not, however, invented by Burns, and prior to his use of it was known as the standard Habbie, after the piper Habbie Simpson...
  
  
• Buskin
  Buskin
  A buskin is a knee- or calf-length boot made of leather or cloth which laces closed, but is open across the toes. It was worn by Athenian tragic actors, hunters and soldiers in Ancient Greek, Etruscan, and Roman societies....
  
  
• Byronic hero
  Byronic hero
  The Byronic hero is an idealised but flawed character exemplified in the life and writings of English Romantic poet Lord Byron. It was characterised by Lady Caroline Lamb, later a lover of Byron's, as being "mad, bad, and dangerous to know"...
  
  

C

• Cadence
• Caesura
  Caesura
  thumb|100px|An example of a caesura in modern western music notation.In meter, a caesura is a complete pause in a line of poetry or in a musical composition. The plural form of caesura is caesuras or caesurae...
  
  
• Calligram
  Calligram
  A calligram is a poem, phrase, or word in which the typeface, calligraphy or handwriting is arranged in a way that creates a visual image. The image created by the words expresses visually what the word, or words, say. In a poem, it manifests visually the theme presented by the text of the poem...
  
  
• Canon
  Western canon
  The term Western canon denotes a canon of books and, more broadly, music and art that have been the most important and influential in shaping Western culture. As such, it includes the "greatest works of artistic merit." Such a canon is important to the theory of educational perennialism and the...
  
  
• Canso
  Canso (song)
  The canso is a song style used by the troubadours. It consists of three parts. The first stanza is the exordium, where the composer explains his purpose. The main body of the song occurs in the following stanzas, and usually draw out a variety of relationships with the exordium. The canso can end...
  
  
• Canticum
• Canto
  Canto
  The canto is a principal form of division in a long poem, especially the epic. The word comes from Italian, meaning "song" or singing. Famous examples of epic poetry which employ the canto division are Lord Byron's Don Juan, Valmiki's Ramayana , Dante's The Divine Comedy , and Ezra Pound's The...
  
  
• Canzone
  Canzone
  Literally "song" in Italian, a canzone is an Italian or Provençal song or ballad. It is also used to describe a type of lyric which resembles a madrigal...
  
  
• Capa y espada
• Captivity narrative
  Captivity narrative
  Captivity narratives are stories of people captured by "uncivilized" enemies. The narratives often include a theme of redemption by faith in the face of the threats and temptations of an alien way of life. Barbary captivity narratives, stories of Englishmen captured by Barbary pirates, were popular...
  
  
• Caricature
  Caricature
  A caricature is a portrait that exaggerates or distorts the essence of a person or thing to create an easily identifiable visual likeness. In literature, a caricature is a description of a person using exaggeration of some characteristics and oversimplification of others.Caricatures can be...
  
  
• Carmen figuratum
• Carpe diem
  Carpe diem
  Carpe diem is a phrase from a Latin poem by Horace that has become an aphorism. It is popularly translated as "seize the day"...
  
  
• Catachresis
  Catachresis
  Catachresis is "misapplication of a word, especially in a mixed metaphor" according to the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory...
  
  
• Catalectic
  Acatalectic
  An acatalectic line of verse is one having the metrically complete number of syllables in the final foot. When talking about poetry written in English the term is arguably of limited significance or utility, at least by comparison to its antonym, catalectic, for the simple reason that acatalexis...
  
  
• Catalexis
  Acatalectic
  An acatalectic line of verse is one having the metrically complete number of syllables in the final foot. When talking about poetry written in English the term is arguably of limited significance or utility, at least by comparison to its antonym, catalectic, for the simple reason that acatalexis...
  
  
• Catastrophe
  Catastrophe (drama)
  In drama, particularly the tragedies of classical antiquity, the catastrophe is the final resolution in a poem or narrative plot, which unravels the intrigue and brings the piece to a close. In comedies, this may be a marriage between main characters; in tragedies, it may be the death of one or...
  
  
• Catharsis
  Catharsis
  Catharsis or katharsis is a Greek word meaning "cleansing" or "purging". It is derived from the verb καθαίρειν, kathairein, "to purify, purge," and it is related to the adjective καθαρός, katharos, "pure or clean."-Dramatic uses:...
  
  
• Caudate sonnet
  Caudate sonnet
  A caudate sonnet is an expanded version of the sonnet. It consists of 14 lines in standard sonnet forms followed by a coda .The invention of the form is credited to Francesco Berni...
  
  
• Cavalier drama
• Cavalier poetry
• Celtic Renaissance
• Celtic Twilight
• Caesura
  Caesura
  thumb|100px|An example of a caesura in modern western music notation.In meter, a caesura is a complete pause in a line of poetry or in a musical composition. The plural form of caesura is caesuras or caesurae...
  
  
• Chain of Being
  Great chain of being
  The great chain of being , is a Christian concept detailing a strict, religious hierarchical structure of all matter and life, believed to have been decreed by the Christian God.-Divisions:...
  
  
• Chain verse
• Chanson de geste
  Chanson de geste
  The chansons de geste, Old French for "songs of heroic deeds", are the epic poems that appear at the dawn of French literature. The earliest known examples date from the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, nearly a hundred years before the emergence of the lyric poetry of the trouvères and...
  
  
• Chansonnier
  Chansonnier
  A chansonnier is a manuscript or printed book which contains a collection of chansons, or polyphonic and monophonic settings of songs, hence literally "song-books," although some manuscripts are so called even though they preserve the text but not the music A chansonnier is a manuscript or...
  
  
• Chant royal
  Chant royal
  The Chant Royal is a poetic form that is a variation of the ballad form and consists of five eleven-line stanzas with a rhyme scheme a-b-a-b-c-c-d-d-e-d-E and a five-line envoi rhyming d-d-e-d-E or a seven-line envoi c-c-d-d-e-d-E...
  
  
• Chantey
  Sea shanty
  A shanty is a type of work song that was once commonly sung to accompany labor on board large merchant sailing vessels. Shanties became ubiquitous in the 19th century era of the wind-driven packet and clipper ships...
  
  
• Chanty
  Sea shanty
  A shanty is a type of work song that was once commonly sung to accompany labor on board large merchant sailing vessels. Shanties became ubiquitous in the 19th century era of the wind-driven packet and clipper ships...
  
  
• Chapbook
  Chapbook
  A chapbook is a pocket-sized booklet. The term chap-book was formalized by bibliophiles of the 19th century, as a variety of ephemera , popular or folk literature. It includes many kinds of printed material such as pamphlets, political and religious tracts, nursery rhymes, poetry, folk tales,...
  
  
• Character
  Fictional character
  A character is the representation of a person in a narrative work of art . Derived from the ancient Greek word kharaktêr , the earliest use in English, in this sense, dates from the Restoration, although it became widely used after its appearance in Tom Jones in 1749. From this, the sense of...
  
  
• Characterization
• Charactonym
  Charactonym
  A charactonym is a name that suggests the personality traits of a fictional character. In other words, it is the name given to a literary character that especially fits his or her personality.-Examples:...
  
  
• Chaucerian stanza
• Chiasmus
  Chiasmus
  In rhetoric, chiasmus is the figure of speech in which two or more clauses are related to each other through a reversal of structures in order to make a larger point; that is, the clauses display inverted parallelism...
  
  
• Chivalric romance
• Choriamb
  Choriamb
  In Greek and Latin poetry, a choriamb is a metron consisting of four syllables in the pattern long-short-short-long , that is, a trochee alternating with an iamb. Choriambs are one of the two basic metra that do not occur in spoken verse, as distinguished from true lyric or sung verse...
  
  
• Choriamb
  Choriamb
  In Greek and Latin poetry, a choriamb is a metron consisting of four syllables in the pattern long-short-short-long , that is, a trochee alternating with an iamb. Choriambs are one of the two basic metra that do not occur in spoken verse, as distinguished from true lyric or sung verse...
  
  us
• Chorus
  Greek chorus
  A Greek chorus is a homogenous, non-individualised group of performers in the plays of classical Greece, who comment with a collective voice on the dramatic action....
  
  
• Chronicle
  Chronicle
  Generally a chronicle is a historical account of facts and events ranged in chronological order, as in a time line. Typically, equal weight is given for historically important events and local events, the purpose being the recording of events that occurred, seen from the perspective of the...
  
  
• Chronicle play
• Cinquain
  Cinquain
  Cinquain is a class of poetic forms that employ a 5-line pattern. Earlier used to describe any five-line form, it now refers to one of several forms that are defined by specific rules and guidelines.-Crapsey cinquain:...
  
  
• Classicism
  Classicism
  Classicism, in the arts, refers generally to a high regard for classical antiquity, as setting standards for taste which the classicists seek to emulate. The art of classicism typically seeks to be formal and restrained: of the Discobolus Sir Kenneth Clark observed, "if we object to his restraint...
  
  
• Classification (literature)
  Classification (literature)
  Classification is a figure of speech linking a proper noun to a common noun using the or other articles.- Bibliography :*Marcello Sorce Keller, "The Problem of Classification in Folksong Research: a Short History", Folklore, XCV, no. 1, 100-104....
  
  
• Classification of rhymes (Peter Dale)
• Clerihew
  Clerihew
  A clerihew is a whimsical, four-line biographical poem invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley. One of his best known is this :* It is biographical and usually whimsical, showing the subject from an unusual point of view; it pokes fun at mostly famous people...
  
  
• Cliché
  Cliché
  A cliché or cliche is an expression, idea, or element of an artistic work which has been overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect, especially when at some earlier time it was considered meaningful or novel. In phraseology, the term has taken on a more technical meaning,...
  
  
• Climax
  Climax (narrative)
  The Climax is the point in the story where the main character's point of view changes, or the most exciting/action filled part of the story. It also known has the main turning point in the story...
  
  
• Cloak-and-sword play
• Closed heroic couplet
• Closet drama
  Closet drama
  A closet drama is a play that is not intended to be performed onstage, but read by a solitary reader or, sometimes, out loud in a small group. A related form, the "closet screenplay," developed during the 20th century.-Form:...
  
  
• Comédie larmoyante
  Comédie larmoyante
  Comédie larmoyante was a genre of French drama of the 18th century. In this type of sentimental comedy, the impending tragedy was resolved at the end, amid reconciliations and floods of tears. Plays of this genre that ended unhappily nevertheless allowed the audience to see that a "moral...
  
  
• Colloquialism
  Colloquialism
  A colloquialism is a word or phrase that is common in everyday, unconstrained conversation rather than in formal speech, academic writing, or paralinguistics. Dictionaries often display colloquial words and phrases with the abbreviation colloq. as an identifier...
  
  
• Comedy
  Comedy
  Comedy , as a popular meaning, is any humorous discourse or work generally intended to amuse by creating laughter, especially in television, film, and stand-up comedy. This must be carefully distinguished from its academic definition, namely the comic theatre, whose Western origins are found in...
  
  
• Comedy of errors
  Comedy of errors
  A comedy of errors is a narrative work that is light and often humorous or satirical in tone, in which the action usually features a series of comic instances of mistaken identity, and which typically culminates in a happy resolution of the thematic conflict.-Satire and farce:A slight variation of...
  
  
• Comedy of humors
• Comedy of intrigue
• Comedy of manners
  Comedy of manners
  The comedy of manners is a genre of play/television/film which satirizes the manners and affectations of a social class, often represented by stock characters, such as the miles gloriosus in ancient times, the fop and the rake during the Restoration, or an old person pretending to be young...
  
  
• Comedic relief
  Comic relief
  Comic relief is the inclusion of a humorous character, scene or witty dialogue in an otherwise serious work, often to relieve tension.-Definition:...
  
  
• Commedia dell'arte
  Commedia dell'arte
  Commedia dell'arte is a form of theatre characterized by masked "types" which began in Italy in the 16th century, and was responsible for the advent of the actress and improvised performances based on sketches or scenarios. The closest translation of the name is "comedy of craft"; it is shortened...
  
  
• Comic relief
  Comic relief
  Comic relief is the inclusion of a humorous character, scene or witty dialogue in an otherwise serious work, often to relieve tension.-Definition:...
  
  
• Common measure
• Commonplace book
• Common rhyme
• Comoedia erudate
• Comparative linguistics
  Comparative linguistics
  Comparative linguistics is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages to establish their historical relatedness....
  
  
• Compensation
  Compensation (psychology)
  In psychology, compensation is a strategy whereby one covers up, consciously or unconsciously, weaknesses, frustrations, desires, feelings of inadequacy or incompetence in one life area through the gratification or excellence in another area. Compensation can cover up either real or imagined...
  
  
• Complaint
  Complaint
  In legal terminology, a complaint is a formal legal document that sets out the facts and legal reasons that the filing party or parties In legal terminology, a complaint is a formal legal document that sets out the facts and legal reasons (see: cause of action) that the filing party or parties In...
  
  
• Conceit
  Conceit
  In literature, a conceit is an extended metaphor with a complex logic that governs a poetic passage or entire poem. By juxtaposing, usurping and manipulating images and ideas in surprising ways, a conceit invites the reader into a more sophisticated understanding of an object of comparison...
  
  
• Concordance
  Concordance (publishing)
  A concordance is an alphabetical list of the principal words used in a book or body of work, with their immediate contexts. Because of the time and difficulty and expense involved in creating a concordance in the pre-computer era, only works of special importance, such as the Vedas, Bible, Qur'an...
  
  
• Concrete universal
• Confessional literature
• Confidant
  Confidant
  The confidant is a character in a story that the lead character confides in and trusts. Typically, these consist of the best friend, relative, doctor or boss.- Role :...
  
  /confidant
  Confidant
  The confidant is a character in a story that the lead character confides in and trusts. Typically, these consist of the best friend, relative, doctor or boss.- Role :...
  
  e
• Conflict
  Conflict (narrative)
  In literature, Conflict is the inherent incompatibility between the objectives of two or more characters or forces. By its nature, conflict is unstable. One side must always win out in the end...
  
  
• Connotation
  Connotation
  A connotation is a commonly understood subjective cultural or emotional association that some word or phrase carries, in addition to the word's or phrase's explicit or literal meaning, which is its denotation....
  
  
• Consistency
  Consistency
  Consistency can refer to:* Consistency , the psychological need to be consistent with prior acts and statements* "Consistency", an 1887 speech by Mark Twain...
  
  
• Consonance
• Contradiction
  Contradiction
  In classical logic, a contradiction consists of a logical incompatibility between two or more propositions. It occurs when the propositions, taken together, yield two conclusions which form the logical, usually opposite inversions of each other...
  
  
• Context
  Context (language use)
  Context is a notion used in the language sciences in two different ways, namely as* verbal context* social context- Verbal context :...
  
  
• Contrast
  Contrast (literary)
  In literature, an author writes contrast when he or she describes the difference between two or more entities. For example, in the first four lines of William Shakespeare's Sonnet 130, Shakespeare contrasts a mistress to the sun, coral, snow, and wire....
  
  
• Convention
  Convention (norm)
  A convention is a set of agreed, stipulated or generally accepted standards, norms, social norms or criteria, often taking the form of a custom....
  
  
• Copyright
  Copyright
  Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...
  
  
• Counterplot
  Subplot
  A subplot is a secondary plot strand that is a supporting side story for any story or the main plot. Subplots may connect to main plots, in either time and place or in thematic significance...
  
  
• Coup de théâtre
• Couplet
  Couplet
  A couplet is a pair of lines of meter in poetry. It usually consists of two lines that rhyme and have the same meter.While traditionally couplets rhyme, not all do. A poem may use white space to mark out couplets if they do not rhyme. Couplets with a meter of iambic pentameter are called heroic...
  
  
• Courtesy book
  Courtesy book
  A Courtesy book or Book of Manners was a book dealing with issues of etiquette, behaviour and morals, with a particular focus on the life at princely courts...
  
  
• Courtly love
  Courtly love
  Courtly love was a medieval European conception of nobly and chivalrously expressing love and admiration. Generally, courtly love was secret and between members of the nobility. It was also generally not practiced between husband and wife....
  
  
• Cowleyan ode
• Cradle books
  Incunabulum
  Incunable, or sometimes incunabulum is a book, pamphlet, or broadside, that was printed — not handwritten — before the year 1501 in Europe...
  
  
• Craft cycle
• Crisis
  Crisis
  A crisis is any event that is, or expected to lead to, an unstable and dangerous situation affecting an individual, group, community or whole society...
  
  
• Criticism
  Literary criticism
  Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals...
  
  
• Cross acrostic
  Acrostic
  An acrostic is a poem or other form of writing in which the first letter, syllable or word of each line, paragraph or other recurring feature in the text spells out a word or a message. As a form of constrained writing, an acrostic can be used as a mnemonic device to aid memory retrieval. A famous...
  
  
• Crown of sonnets
  Crown of sonnets
  A crown of sonnets or sonnet corona is a sequence of sonnets, usually addressed to some one person, and/or concerned with a single theme....
  
  
• Curtain raiser
  Curtain raiser (drama)
  A curtain raiser is a performance, stage act, show, actor or performer that opens a show for the main attraction. The term is derived from the act of raising the stage curtain...
  
  
• Curtal sonnet
  Curtal sonnet
  The curtal sonnet is a form invented by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and used in three of his poems.It is an eleven-line sonnet, but rather than the first eleven lines of a standard sonnet it consists of precisely ¾ of the structure of a Petrarchan sonnet shrunk proportionally...
  
  

D

• Dactyl
  Dactyl (poetry)
  A dactyl is a foot in meter in poetry. In quantitative verse, such as Greek or Latin, a dactyl is a long syllable followed by two short syllables, as determined by syllable weight...
  
  
• Dada
  Dada
  Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
  
  
• Dale's classification of rhymes
• Dandy
  Dandy
  A dandy is a man who places particular importance upon physical appearance, refined language, and leisurely hobbies, pursued with the appearance of nonchalance in a cult of Self...
  
  ism
• Débat
• Death poem
  Death poem
  A death poem is a poem written near the time of one's own death. It is a tradition for literate people to write one in a number of different cultures, especially in Joseon Korea and Japan.-History:...
  
  
• Death of the novel
  Death of the novel
  The death of the novel is the common name for the theoretical discussion of the declining importance of the novel as literary form. Many 20th century authors entered into the debate, often sharing their ideas in their own fiction and non-fiction writings....
  
  
• Debut novel
  Debut novel
  A debut novel is the first novel an author publishes. Debut novels are the author's first opportunity to make an impact on the publishing industry, and thus the success or failure of a debut novel can affect the ability of the author to publish in the future...
  
  
• Decadence
  Decadence
  Decadence can refer to a personal trait, or to the state of a society . Used to describe a person's lifestyle. Concise Oxford Dictionary: "a luxurious self-indulgence"...
  
  
• Decasyllabic verse
• Decorum
  Decorum
  Decorum was a principle of classical rhetoric, poetry and theatrical theory that was about the fitness or otherwise of a style to a theatrical subject...
  
  
• Denotation
  Denotation
  This word has distinct meanings in other fields: see denotation . For the opposite of Denotation see Connotation.*In logic, linguistics and semiotics, the denotation of a word or phrase is a part of its meaning; however, the part referred to varies by context:** In grammar and literary theory, the...
  
  
• Dénouement
• Description
  Description
  Description is one of four rhetorical modes , along with exposition, argumentation, and narration. Each of the rhetorical modes is present in a variety of forms and each has its own purpose and conventions....
  
  
• Descriptive linguistics
  Descriptive linguistics
  In the study of language, description, or descriptive linguistics, is the work of objectively analyzing and describing how language is spoken by a group of people in a speech community...
  
  
• Detective story
  Detective fiction
  Detective fiction is a sub-genre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator , either professional or amateur, investigates a crime, often murder.-In ancient literature:...
  
  
• Deus ex machina
  Deus ex machina
  A deus ex machina is a plot device whereby a seemingly inextricable problem is suddenly and abruptly solved with the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability, or object.-Linguistic considerations:...
  
  
• Deuteragonist
  Deuteragonist
  In literature, the deuteragonist is the second most important character, after the protagonist and before the tritagonist. The deuteragonist may switch from being with or against the protagonist depending on the deuteragonist's own conflict/plot.-History:Greek drama began with simply one actor,...
  
  
• Dialect
  Dialect
  The term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors,...
  
  
• Dialogue
  Dialogue
  Dialogue is a literary and theatrical form consisting of a written or spoken conversational exchange between two or more people....
  
  
• Dibrach
• Dicks
  Dicks
  Edmond de la Fontaine , better known by his pen name of Dicks, was a Luxembourgian jurist, poet, and lyricist, known for his work in the Luxembourgish language. He is considered the national poet of Luxembourg, and, along with Michel Lentz and Michel Rodange, one of the most important figures in...
  
  
• Diction
  Diction
  Diction , in its original, primary meaning, refers to the writer's or the speaker's distinctive vocabulary choices and style of expression in a poem or story...
  
  
• Didactic
• Digest
  Digest size
  Digest size is a magazine size, smaller than a conventional or "journal size" magazine but larger than a standard paperback book, approximately 5½ x 8¼ inches, but can also be 5⅜ x 8⅜ inches and 5½ x 7½ inches. These sizes have evolved from the printing press operation end...
  
  
• Digression
  Digression
  Digression is a section of a composition or speech that is an intentional change of subject. In Classical rhetoric since Corax of Syracuse, especially in Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, the digression was a regular part of any oration or composition...
  
  
• Dime novel
  Dime novel
  Dime novel, though it has a specific meaning, has also become a catch-all term for several different forms of late 19th-century and early 20th-century U.S...
  
  
• Diameter
  Diameter
  In geometry, a diameter of a circle is any straight line segment that passes through the center of the circle and whose endpoints are on the circle. The diameters are the longest chords of the circle...
  
  
• Dipody
• Dirge
  Dirge
  A dirge is a somber song expressing mourning or grief, such as would be appropriate for performance at a funeral. A lament. The English word "dirge" is derived from the Latin Dirige, Domine, Deus meus, in conspectu tuo viam meam , the first words of the first antiphon in the Matins of the Office...
  
  
• Discourse
  Discourse
  Discourse generally refers to "written or spoken communication". The following are three more specific definitions:...
  
  
• Dissociation of sensibility
  Dissociation of sensibility
  Dissociation of sensibility is a literary term first used by T. S. Eliot in his essay “The Metaphysical Poets” It refers to the way in which intellectual thought was separated from the experience of feeling in seventeenth century poetry.-Origin of terminology:...
  
  
• Dissonance
  Assonance
  Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds to create internal rhyming within phrases or sentences, and together with alliteration and consonance serves as one of the building blocks of verse. For example, in the phrase "Do you like blue?", the is repeated within the sentence and is...
  
  
• Distich
• Distributed Stress
• Dithyramb
  Dithyramb
  The dithyramb was an ancient Greek hymn sung and danced in honour of Dionysus, the god of wine and fertility; the term was also used as an epithet of the god: Plato, in The Laws, while discussing various kinds of music mentions "the birth of Dionysos, called, I think, the dithyramb." Plato also...
  
  
• Diverbium
• Divine afflatus
• Doggerel
  Doggerel
  Doggerel is a derogatory term for verse considered of little literary value. The word probably derived from dog, suggesting either ugliness, puppyish clumsiness, or unpalatability in the 1630s.-Variants:...
  
  
• Dolce stil nuove
  Dolce stil nuove
  A movement among 13th and 14th century Italian and Florentine poets, who wrote sonnets, cantos and ballads on an idealized view of love and women....
  
  
• Domestic tragedy
  Domestic tragedy
  In English drama, a domestic tragedy is a play in which the tragic protagonists are ordinary middle-class or lower-class individuals. This subgenre contrasts with classical and Neoclassical tragedy, in which the protagonists are of kingly or aristocratic rank and their downfall is an affair of...
  
  
• Donnée
• Doppelgänger
  Doppelgänger
  In fiction and folklore, a doppelgänger is a paranormal double of a living person, typically representing evil or misfortune...
  
  
• Double
  Double
  Double or The Double may refer to:* Multiplication by 2* Look-alike* Body double, someone who substitutes for the credited actor of a character* Doppelgänger, ghostly double of a living person* Polish Enigma doubles...
  
  
• Double rhyme
• Drama
  Drama
  Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance. The term comes from a Greek word meaning "action" , which is derived from "to do","to act" . The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a...
  
  
• Drama of sensibility
  Sensibility
  Sensibility refers to an acute perception of or responsiveness toward something, such as the emotions of another. This concept emerged in eighteenth-century Britain, and was closely associated with studies of sense perception as the means through which knowledge is gathered...
  
  
• Dramatic character
• Dramatic irony
• Dramatic lyric
• Dramatic monologue
  Dramatic monologue
  M. H. Abrams notes the following three features of the dramatic monologue as it applies to poetry:-Types of monologues:One of the most important influences on the development of the dramatic monologue is the Romantic poets...
  
  
• Dramatic proverb
• Dramatis personae
  Dramatis Personae
  Dramatis Personae is a poetry collection by Robert Browning. It was published in 1864.- Background :Browning wrote the collection in London, where he had returned with his son after his wife's death. It was his first publication after a nine-year hiatus...
  
  
• Dramaturgy
  Dramaturgy
  Dramaturgy is the art of dramatic composition and the representation of the main elements of drama on the stage. Dramaturgy is a distinct practice separate from play writing and directing, although a single individual may perform any combination of the three. Some dramatists combine writing and...
  
  
• Dream allegory
• Dream vision
  Dream vision
  A dream vision is a literary device in which a dream is recounted for a specific purpose. While dreams occur frequently throughout the history of literature, the dream vision emerged as a poetic genre in its own right, and was particularly popular in the Middle Ages. This genre typically follows a...
  
  
• Droll
  Droll
  A droll is a short comical sketch of a type that originated during the Puritan Interregnum in England. With the closure of the theatres, actors were left without any way of plying their art. Borrowing scenes from well-known plays of the Elizabethan theatre, they added dancing and other...
  
  
• Dumb show
  Dumb Show
  Dumb Show is a play by Joe Penhall.The three-character play, directed by Terry Johnson, premiered at the Royal Court Theatre' London, September 4, 2004. It received its American premiere at South Coast Repertory in September, 2006. It was performed at Keswick's Theatre by the Lake from...
  
  
• Duodecimo
• Duologue
• Duple meter
  Duple meter
  Duple meter is a musical metre characterized by a primary division of 2 beats to the bar, usually indicated by 2 and multiples or 6 and multiples in the upper figure of the time signature, with 2/2 , 2/4, and 6/8 being the most common examples...
  
  /duple rhythm
• Dystopia
  Dystopia
  A dystopia is the idea of a society in a repressive and controlled state, often under the guise of being utopian, as characterized in books like Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four...
  
  
• Dynamic Character

E

• Echo verse
• Eclogue
  Eclogue
  An eclogue is a poem in a classical style on a pastoral subject. Poems in the genre are sometimes also called bucolics.The form of the word in contemporary English is taken from French eclogue, from Old French, from Latin ecloga...
  
  
• Edition
  Edition
  In printmaking, an edition is a number of prints struck from one plate, usually at the same time. This is the meaning covered by this article...
  
  
• Ekphrasis
• Elegiac couplet
• Elegiac meter
• Elegy
  Elegy
  In literature, an elegy is a mournful, melancholic or plaintive poem, especially a funeral song or a lament for the dead.-History:The Greek term elegeia originally referred to any verse written in elegiac couplets and covering a wide range of subject matter, including epitaphs for tombs...
  
  
• Elision
  Elision
  Elision is the omission of one or more sounds in a word or phrase, producing a result that is easier for the speaker to pronounce...
  
  
• Emblem
  Emblem
  An emblem is a pictorial image, abstract or representational, that epitomizes a concept — e.g., a moral truth, or an allegory — or that represents a person, such as a king or saint.-Distinction: emblem and symbol:...
  
  
• Emblem book
  Emblem book
  Emblem books are a category of mainly didactic illustrated book printed in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries, typically containing a number of emblematic images with explanatory text....
  
  
• Emendation
• Emotive language
• Encomiastic verse
• End rhyme
• End-stopped line
• English sonnet
• Enjambment
  Enjambment
  Enjambment or enjambement is the breaking of a syntactic unit by the end of a line or between two verses. It is to be contrasted with end-stopping, where each linguistic unit corresponds with a single line, and caesura, in which the linguistic unit ends mid-line...
  
  
• Entr'acte
  Entr'acte
  ' is French for "between the acts" . It can mean a pause between two parts of a stage production, synonymous to an intermission, but it more often indicates a piece of music performed between acts of a theatrical production...
  
  
• Envoy
  Envoy
  Envoy may refer to:*an Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary*a Special Envoy*a diplomat in general*Envoy , the British Vauxhall cars for Canadian market in 1960-'70*Envoy , a document reader and document file format...
  
  /envoi
  Envoi
  In poetry, an envoi is a short stanza at the end of a poem used either to address an imagined or actual person or to comment on the preceding body of the poem.-Form:...
  
  
• Epanalepsis
  Epanalepsis
  The epanalepsis is a figure of speech defined by the repetition of the initial word of a clause or sentence at the end of that same clause or sentence. The beginning and the end are the two positions of stronger emphasis in a sentence; so, by having the same phrase in both places, the speaker...
  
  
• Èpater le bourgeois
• Epic poetry
  Epic poetry
  An epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Oral poetry may qualify as an epic, and Albert Lord and Milman Parry have argued that classical epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form...
  
  
• Epic simile
• Epic Theater
  Epic theater
  Epic theatre was a theatrical movement arising in the early to mid-20th century from the theories and practice of a number of theatre practitioners, including Erwin Piscator, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold and, most famously, Bertolt Brecht...
  
  
• Epigraph
  Epigraph (literature)
  In literature, an epigraph is a phrase, quotation, or poem that is set at the beginning of a document or component. The epigraph may serve as a preface, as a summary, as a counter-example, or to link the work to a wider literary canon, either to invite comparison or to enlist a conventional...
  
  
• Epilogue
  Epilogue
  An epilogue, epilog or afterword is a piece of writing at the end of a work of literature or drama, usually used to bring closure to the work...
  
  
• Epiphany
  Epiphany (feeling)
  An epiphany is the sudden realization or comprehension of the essence or meaning of something...
  
  
• Episode
  Episode
  An episode is a part of a dramatic work such as a serial television or radio program. An episode is a part of a sequence of a body of work, akin to a chapter of a book. The term sometimes applies to works based on other forms of mass media as well, as in Star Wars...
  
  
• Episteme
  Episteme
  Episteme, as distinguished from techne, is etymologically derived from the Greek word ἐπιστήμη for knowledge or science, which comes from the verb ἐπίσταμαι, "to know".- The Concept of an "Episteme" in Michel Foucault :...
  
  
• Epistle
  Epistle
  An epistle is a writing directed or sent to a person or group of people, usually an elegant and formal didactic letter. The epistle genre of letter-writing was common in ancient Egypt as part of the scribal-school writing curriculum. The letters in the New Testament from Apostles to Christians...
  
  
• Epistolary novel
  Epistolary novel
  An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of documents. The usual form is letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used. Recently, electronic "documents" such as recordings and radio, blogs, and e-mails have also come into use...
  
  
• Epistrophe
  Epistrophe
  Epistrophe , also known as epiphora , is a figure of speech and the counterpart of anaphora. It is the repetition of the same word or words at the end of successive phrases, clauses or sentences...
  
  
• Epitaph
  Epitaph
  An epitaph is a short text honoring a deceased person, strictly speaking that is inscribed on their tombstone or plaque, but also used figuratively. Some are specified by the dead person beforehand, others chosen by those responsible for the burial...
  
  
• Epithalamion
• Epithet
  Epithet
  An epithet or byname is a descriptive term accompanying or occurring in place of a name and having entered common usage. It has various shades of meaning when applied to seemingly real or fictitious people, divinities, objects, and binomial nomenclature. It is also a descriptive title...
  
  
• Epizeuxis
  Epizeuxis
  In rhetoric, an epizeuxis is the repetition of words in immediate succession, for vehemence or emphasis.Examples:* "O horror, horror, horror." * "Words, words, words." * "Rain, rain, rain, rain, rain."...
  
  
• Epode
  Epode
  Epode, in verse, is the third part of an ode, which followed the strophe and the antistrophe, and completed the movement.At a certain point in time the choirs, which had previously chanted to right of the altar or stage, and then to left of it, combined and sang in unison, or permitted the...
  
  
• Eponymous author
  Eponymous author
  The eponymous author of a literary work, often a work that is meant to be prophetic or homiletic, is not really the author. An anonymous author chooses to write in the name of another. This eponymous author is not merely a pen name for the real author, but someone with a completely different identity...
  
  
• Equivalence
  Moral equivalence
  Moral equivalence is a term used in political debate, usually to criticize any denial that a moral hierarchy can be assessed of two sides in a conflict, or in the actions or tactics of two sides...
  
  
• Erziehungsroman
• Essay
  Essay
  An essay is a piece of writing which is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition...
  
  
• Ethos
  Ethos
  Ethos is a Greek word meaning "character" that is used to describe the guiding beliefs or ideals that characterize a community, nation, or ideology. The Greeks also used this word to refer to the power of music to influence its hearer's emotions, behaviors, and even morals. Early Greek stories of...
  
  
• Eulogy
  Eulogy
  A eulogy is a speech or writing in praise of a person or thing, especially one recently deceased or retired. Eulogies may be given as part of funeral services. However, some denominations either discourage or do not permit eulogies at services to maintain respect for traditions...
  
  
• Euphony
  Euphony
  Phonaesthetics is the claim or study of inherent pleasantness or beauty or unpleasantness of the sound of certain words and sentences. Poetry is considered euphonic, as is well-crafted literary prose...
  
  
• Euphuism
  Euphuism
  Euphuism is a peculiar mannered style of English prose. It takes its name from a prose romance by John Lyly. It consists of a preciously ornate and sophisticated style, employing in deliberate excess a wide range of literary devices such as antitheses, alliterations, repetitions and rhetorical...
  
  
• Evidence
  Evidence
  Evidence in its broadest sense includes everything that is used to determine or demonstrate the truth of an assertion. Giving or procuring evidence is the process of using those things that are either presumed to be true, or were themselves proven via evidence, to demonstrate an assertion's truth...
  
  
• Exegesis
  Exegesis
  Exegesis is a critical explanation or interpretation of a text, especially a religious text. Traditionally the term was used primarily for exegesis of the Bible; however, in contemporary usage it has broadened to mean a critical explanation of any text, and the term "Biblical exegesis" is used...
  
  
• Exemplum
  Exemplum
  An exemplum is a moral anecdote, brief or extended, real or fictitious, used to illustrate a point.-Exemplary literature:...
  
  
• Existentialism
  Existentialism
  Existentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
  
  
• Exordium
  Exordium (rhetoric)
  In Western classical rhetoric, the exordium was the introductory portion of an oration. The term is Latin and the Greek equivalent was called the Proem or Prooimion....
  
  
• Experimental novel
• Explication de texte
  Explication de Texte
  Explication de Texte is a French formalist method of literary analysis that allows for limited reader response, similar to close reading in the English-speaking literary tradition. The method involves a detailed yet relatively objective examination of structure, style, imagery, and other aspects...
  
  
• Exposition (literary technique)
  Exposition (literary technique)
  At the beginning of a narrative, the exposition is the author's providing of some background information to the audience about the plot, characters' histories, setting, and theme. Exposition is considered one of four rhetorical modes of discourse, along with argumentation, description, and narration...
  
  
• Exposition (dramatic structure)
• Expressionism
  Expressionism
  Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas...
  
  
• Extended metaphor
  Extended metaphor
  An extended metaphor, also called a conceit, is a metaphor that continues into the sentences that follow. It is often developed at great length, occurring frequently in schools coursework or throughout a work, and are especially effective in poems and fiction.Symbolism is often a great tool to use...
  
  
• Extension
  Extension (semantics)
  In any of several studies that treat the use of signs - for example, in linguistics, logic, mathematics, semantics, and semiotics - the extension of a concept, idea, or sign consists of the things to which it applies, in contrast with its comprehension or intension, which consists very roughly of...
  
  
• Extrametrical verse
  Acatalectic
  An acatalectic line of verse is one having the metrically complete number of syllables in the final foot. When talking about poetry written in English the term is arguably of limited significance or utility, at least by comparison to its antonym, catalectic, for the simple reason that acatalexis...
  
  
• Extravaganza
  Extravaganza
  An extravaganza is a literary or musical work characterized by freedom of style and structure and usually containing elements of burlesque, pantomime, music hall and parody. It sometimes also has elements of cabaret, circus, revue, variety, vaudeville and mime...
  
  
• Eye rhyme
  Eye rhyme
  Eye rhyme, also called visual rhyme and sight rhyme, is a similarity in spelling between words that are pronounced differently and hence, not an auditory rhyme...
  
  

F

• Fable
  Fable
  A fable is a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, mythical creatures, plants, inanimate objects or forces of nature which are anthropomorphized , and that illustrates a moral lesson , which may at the end be expressed explicitly in a pithy maxim.A fable differs from...
  
  
• Fabliau
  Fabliau
  A fabliau is a comic, often anonymous tale written by jongleurs in northeast France between ca. 1150 and 1400. They are generally characterized by an excessiveness of sexual and scatological obscenity. Several of them were reworked by Giovanni Boccaccio for the Decamerone and by Geoffrey Chaucer...
  
  
• Falling action
• Falling rhythm
• Fancy and imagination
• Fantasy
  Fantasy
  Fantasy is a genre of fiction that commonly uses magic and other supernatural phenomena as a primary element of plot, theme, or setting. Many works within the genre take place in imaginary worlds where magic is common...
  
  
• Farce
  Farce
  In theatre, a farce is a comedy which aims at entertaining the audience by means of unlikely, extravagant, and improbable situations, disguise and mistaken identity, verbal humour of varying degrees of sophistication, which may include word play, and a fast-paced plot whose speed usually increases,...
  
  
• Feeling
  Feeling
  Feeling is the nominalization of the verb to feel. The word was first used in the English language to describe the physical sensation of touch through either experience or perception. The word is also used to describe experiences, other than the physical sensation of touch, such as "a feeling of...
  
  
• Feminine ending
  Meter (poetry)
  In poetry, metre is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study of metres and forms of versification is known as prosody...
  
  
• Feminine rhyme
  Feminine rhyme
  A feminine rhyme is a rhyme that matches two or more syllables, usually at the end of respective lines, in which the final syllable or syllables are unstressed.-English:...
  
  
• Fiction
  Fiction
  Fiction is the form of any narrative or informative work that deals, in part or in whole, with information or events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary—that is, invented by the author. Although fiction describes a major branch of literary work, it may also refer to theatrical,...
  
  
• Figurative language
• Figure of speech
  Figure of speech
  A figure of speech is the use of a word or words diverging from its usual meaning. It can also be a special repetition, arrangement or omission of words with literal meaning, or a phrase with a specialized meaning not based on the literal meaning of the words in it, as in idiom, metaphor, simile,...
  
  
• Fin de siècle
  Fin de siècle
  Fin de siècle is French for "end of the century". The term sometimes encompasses both the closing and onset of an era, as it was felt to be a period of degeneration, but at the same time a period of hope for a new beginning...
  
  
• Flashback
  Flashback (narrative)
  Flashback is an interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point the story has reached. Flashbacks are often used to recount events that happened before the story’s primary sequence of events or to fill in crucial backstory...
  
  
• Flashforward
  Flashforward
  A flashforward is an interjected scene that takes the narrative forward in time from the current point of the story in literature, film, television and other media. Flashforwards are often used to represent events expected, projected, or imagined to occur in the future...
  
  
• Flat character
• Fleshly school
  Fleshly School
  The Fleshly School is the name given by Robert Buchanan to a realistic, sensualschool of poets, to which Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Algernon Charles Swinburne belong. He accused them of immorality in an article entitled "The Fleshly School of Poetry" in The Contemporary Review in...
  
  
• Foil
  Foil (literature)
  In fiction, a foil is a character who contrasts with another character in order to highlight particular qualities of another character....
  
  
• Folio
• Folk drama
• Folklore
  Folklore
  Folklore consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales and customs that are the traditions of a culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The study of folklore is sometimes called...
  
  
• Folk tale
• Foot
  Foot (prosody)
  The foot is the basic metrical unit that generates a line of verse in most Western traditions of poetry, including English accentual-syllabic verse and the quantitative meter of classical ancient Greek and Latin poetry. The unit is composed of syllables, the number of which is limited, with a few...
  
  
• Foreshadowing
  Foreshadowing
  Foreshadowing or adumbrating is a literary device in which an author indistinctly suggests certain plot developments that might come later in the story.-Repetitive designation and Chekhov's gun:...
  
  
• Form
• Four levels of meaning
• Four meanings of a poem
• Fourteener
  Fourteener (poetry)
  A Fourteener, in poetry, is a line consisting of 14 syllables, usually having 7 iambic heptametric feet, most commonly found in English poetry produced in the 16th and 17th centuries...
  
  
• Frame story
  Frame story
  A frame story is a literary technique that sometimes serves as a companion piece to a story within a story, whereby an introductory or main narrative is presented, at least in part, for the purpose of setting the stage either for a more emphasized second narrative or for a set of shorter stories...
  
  
• Free indirect discourse
• Free verse
  Free verse
  Free verse is a form of poetry that refrains from consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or any other musical pattern.Poets have explained that free verse, despite its freedom, is not free. Free Verse displays some elements of form...
  
  
• French forms
• Freytag's pyramid
• Fugitives and Agrarians
  Southern Agrarians
  The Southern Agrarians were a group of twelve American writers, poets, essayists, and novelists, all with roots in the Southern United States, who joined together to write a pro-Southern agrarian manifesto, a...
  
  
• Fustian
  Fustian
  Fustian is a term for a variety of heavy woven, mostly cotton fabrics, chiefly prepared for menswear. It is also used to refer to pompous, inflated or pretentious writing or speech, from at least the time of Shakespeare...
  
  
• Futurism
  Futurism (art)
  Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasized and glorified themes associated with contemporary concepts of the future, including speed, technology, youth and violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane and the industrial city...
  
  

G

• Gallows humor
  Gallows humor
  Gallows humor , derives from gallows which is a platform with a noose used to execute people by hanging. Gallows humor is the type of humor that still manages to be funny in the face of, and in response to, a perfectly hopeless situation...
  
  
• Gamebook
  Gamebook
  A gamebook is a work of fiction that allows the reader to participate in the story by making effective choices. The narrative branches along various paths through the use of numbered paragraphs or pages...
  
  s
• Gathering
• Genetic fallacy
  Genetic fallacy
  The genetic fallacy is a fallacy of irrelevance where a conclusion is suggested based solely on something or someone's origin rather than its current meaning or context. This overlooks any difference to be found in the present situation, typically transferring the positive or negative esteem from...
  
  
• Genius and talent
• Genre
  Literary genre
  A literary genre is a category of literary composition. Genres may be determined by literary technique, tone, content, or even length. Genre should not be confused with age category, by which literature may be classified as either adult, young-adult, or children's. They also must not be confused...
  
  
• Georgian poetry
  Georgian Poetry
  Georgian Poetry was the title of a series of anthologies showcasing the work of a school of English poetry that established itself during the early years of the reign of King George V of the United Kingdom....
  
  
• Georgics
  Georgics
  The Georgics is a poem in four books, likely published in 29 BC. It is the second major work by the Latin poet Virgil, following his Eclogues and preceding the Aeneid. It is a poem that draws on many prior sources and influenced many later authors from antiquity to the present...
  
  
• Gesta
  Cantar de gesta
  A cantar de gesta is the Spanish equivalent of the Old French medieval chanson de geste or "songs of heroic deeds".The most important cantares de gesta of Castile were:...
  
  
• Gloss
  Gloss
  A gloss is a brief notation of the meaning of a word or wording in a text. It may be in the language of the text, or in the reader's language if that is different....
  
  
• Gnomic verse
• Golden line
  Golden line
  The golden line is a type of Latin dactylic hexameter frequently mentioned in Latin classrooms in English speaking countries and in contemporary scholarship written in English.-Definition:...
  
  
• Goliardic verse
  Goliard
  The Goliards were a group of clergy who wrote bibulous, satirical Latin poetry in the 12th and 13th centuries. They were mainly clerical students at the universities of France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and England who protested the growing contradictions within the Church, such as the failure of the...
  
  
• Gongorism
• Gonzo journalism
  Gonzo journalism
  Gonzo journalism is a style of journalism that is written without claims of objectivity, often including the reporter as part of the story via a first-person narrative. The word "gonzo" is believed to be first used in 1970 to describe an article by Hunter S. Thompson, who later popularized the style...
  
  
• Gothic novel
• Grand Guignol
  Grand Guignol
  Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol — known as the Grand Guignol — was a theatre in the Pigalle area of Paris . From its opening in 1897 until its closing in 1962 it specialized in naturalistic horror shows...
  
  
• Graveyard poetry
• Graveyard school
• Greek tragedy
• Grub Street
  Grub Street
  Until the early 19th century, Grub Street was a street close to London's impoverished Moorfields district that ran from Fore Street east of St Giles-without-Cripplegate north to Chiswell Street...
  
  
• Grundyism
  Mrs Grundy
  Mrs Grundy is the name of an imaginary English character, who typifies the disciplinary control of the conventional proprieties of society over conduct, the tyrannical pressure of the opinion of neighbours on the acts of others...
  
  
• Guignol
  Grand Guignol
  Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol — known as the Grand Guignol — was a theatre in the Pigalle area of Paris . From its opening in 1897 until its closing in 1962 it specialized in naturalistic horror shows...
  
  

H

• Hagiography
  Hagiography
  Hagiography is the study of saints.From the Greek and , it refers literally to writings on the subject of such holy people, and specifically to the biographies of saints and ecclesiastical leaders. The term hagiology, the study of hagiography, is also current in English, though less common...
  
  
• Hagiology
  Hagiography
  Hagiography is the study of saints.From the Greek and , it refers literally to writings on the subject of such holy people, and specifically to the biographies of saints and ecclesiastical leaders. The term hagiology, the study of hagiography, is also current in English, though less common...
  
  
• Haikai
  Haikai
  Haikai is a poetic genre that includes a number of forms which embrace the aesthetics of haikai no renga, and what Bashō referred to as the "poetic spirit" , including haiku, renku , haibun, haiga and senryū ."Haikai" is sometimes used as an abbreviation for "haikai no...
  
  
• Haikai no renga
• Haiku
  Haiku
  ' , plural haiku, is a very short form of Japanese poetry typically characterised by three qualities:* The essence of haiku is "cutting"...
  
  
• Half rhyme
  Half rhyme
  Half rhyme or slant rhyme, sometimes called sprung, near rhyme, oblique rhyme, off rhyme or imperfect rhyme, is consonance on the final consonants of the words involved . Many half/slant rhymes are also eye rhymes.Half/slant rhyme is widely used in Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and Icelandic verse...
  
  
• Hamartia
  Hamartia
  Hamartia is a term developed by Aristotle in his work Poetics. The word hamartia is rooted in the notion of missing the mark and covers a broad spectrum that includes ignorant, mistaken, or accidental wrongdoing, as well as deliberate iniquity, error, or sin...
  
  
• Handwaving
• Headless line
• Head rhyme
• Hebraism
  Hebraism
  Hebraism is the identification of a usage, trait, or characteristic of the Hebrew language. By successive extension it is sometimes applied to the Jewish people, their faith, national ideology, or culture.- Idiomatic Hebrew :...
  
  -Hellenism
• "The Hedgehog and the Fox
  The Hedgehog and the Fox
  "The Hedgehog and the Fox" is an essay by the liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin. It was one of Berlin's most popular essays with the general public. Berlin himself said of the essay: "I never meant it very seriously. I meant it as a kind of enjoyable intellectual game, but it was taken seriously...
  
  "
• Hemistich
  Hemistich
  A hemistich is a half-line of verse, followed and preceded by a caesura, that makes up a single overall prosodic or verse unit. In Classical poetry, the hemistich is generally confined to drama. In Greek tragedy, characters exchanging clipped dialogue to suggest rapidity and drama would speak in...
  
  
• Hendecasyllable
  Hendecasyllable
  The hendecasyllable is a line of eleven syllables, used in Ancient Greek and Latin quantitative verse as well as in medieval and modern European poetry.-In quantitative verse:...
  
  
• Hendecasyllabic verse
• Heptameter
  Heptameter
  Heptameter is one or more lines of verse containing seven metrical feet .An example from Lord Byron's Youth and Age:...
  
  
• Heptastrich
• Heresy of paraphrase
• Hero
  Hero
  A hero , in Greek mythology and folklore, was originally a demigod, their cult being one of the most distinctive features of ancient Greek religion...
  
  
• Heroic couplets
• Heroic drama
  Heroic drama
  Heroic drama is a type of play popular during the Restoration era in England, distinguished by both its verse structure and its subject matter. The sub-genre of heroic drama evolved through several works of the middle to later 1660s; John Dryden's The Indian Emperour and Roger Boyle's The Black...
  
  
• Heroic quatrain
• Heroic stanza
• Hexameter
  Hexameter
  Hexameter is a metrical line of verse consisting of six feet. It was the standard epic metre in classical Greek and Latin literature, such as in the Iliad and Aeneid. Its use in other genres of composition include Horace's satires, and Ovid's Metamorphoses. According to Greek mythology, hexameter...
  
  
• Hexastich
• Hiatus
  Hiatus (linguistics)
  In phonology, hiatus or diaeresis refers to two vowel sounds occurring in adjacent syllables, with no intervening consonant. When two adjacent vowel sounds occur in the same syllable, the result is instead described as a diphthong....
  
  
• High comedy
  High comedy
  High comedy or 'pure comedy' is a type of comedy characterized by witty dialog, satire, biting humor, or criticism of life. Today, high comedy can be seen among sitcoms targeted at cultured and articulate audiences. Examples of high comedy are frequently found in Monty Python skits....
  
  
• Higher criticism
• Historical linguistics
  Historical linguistics
  Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...
  
  
• Historical novel
  Historical novel
  According to Encyclopædia Britannica, a historical novel is-Development:An early example of historical prose fiction is Luó Guànzhōng's 14th century Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which covers one of the most important periods of Chinese history and left a lasting impact on Chinese culture.The...
  
  
• Historic present
• History play
• Hokku
  Hokku
  is the opening stanza of a Japanese orthodox collaborative linked poem, renga, or of its later derivative, renku . From the time of Matsuo Bashō , the hokku began to appear as an independent poem, and was also incorporated in haibun , and haiga...
  
  
• Holograph
  Holograph
  A holograph is a document written entirely in the handwriting of the person whose signature it bears. Some countries or local jurisdictions within certain countries give legal standing to specific types of holographic documents, generally waiving requirements that they be witnessed...
  
  
• Homeric epithet
• Homeric simile
• Homily
  Homily
  A homily is a commentary that follows a reading of scripture. In Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, and Eastern Orthodox Churches, a homily is usually given during Mass at the end of the Liturgy of the Word...
  
  
• Horatian ode
• Horatian satire
• Hornbook
  Hornbook
  A hornbook is a book that serves as primer for study. The hornbook originated in England in 1450 . The term has been applied to a few different study materials in different fields...
  
  
• Hovering accent
• Hubris
  Hubris
  Hubris , also hybris, means extreme haughtiness, pride or arrogance. Hubris often indicates a loss of contact with reality and an overestimation of one's own competence or capabilities, especially when the person exhibiting it is in a position of power....
  
  
• Hudibrastic
  Hudibrastic
  Hudibrastic is a type of English verse named for Samuel Butler's Hudibras, published in parts from 1663 to 1678. For the poem, Butler invented a mock-heroic verse structure. Instead of pentameter, the lines were written in iambic tetrameter...
  
  
• Humor
• Humours
• Hybris
  Hubris
  Hubris , also hybris, means extreme haughtiness, pride or arrogance. Hubris often indicates a loss of contact with reality and an overestimation of one's own competence or capabilities, especially when the person exhibiting it is in a position of power....
  
  
• Hymn
  Hymn
  A hymn is a type of song, usually religious, specifically written for the purpose of praise, adoration or prayer, and typically addressed to a deity or deities, or to a prominent figure or personification...
  
  
• Hymnal stanza
• Hypallage
  Hypallage
  Hypallage is a literary device that is the reversal of the syntactic relation of two words .One kind of hypallage, also known as a transferred epithet, is the trope or rhetorical device in which a modifier, usually an adjective, is applied to the "wrong" word in the sentence...
  
  
• Hyperbole
  Hyperbole
  Hyperbole is the use of exaggeration as a rhetorical device or figure of speech. It may be used to evoke strong feelings or to create a strong impression, but is not meant to be taken literally....
  
  
• Hypercatalectic
  Meter (poetry)
  In poetry, metre is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study of metres and forms of versification is known as prosody...
  
  
• Hypermetrical
• Hypocorism
• Hysteron-proteron
• Hypotactic

I

• Iambic pentameter
  Iambic pentameter
  Iambic pentameter is a commonly used metrical line in traditional verse and verse drama. The term describes the particular rhythm that the words establish in that line. That rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables; these small groups of syllables are called "feet"...
  
  
• Ideology
  Ideology
  An ideology is a set of ideas that constitutes one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things , as in common sense and several philosophical tendencies , or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to...
  
  
• Idiom
  Idiom
  Idiom is an expression, word, or phrase that has a figurative meaning that is comprehended in regard to a common use of that expression that is separate from the literal meaning or definition of the words of which it is made...
  
  
• Idyll
  Idyll
  An idyll or idyl is a short poem, descriptive of rustic life, written in the style of Theocritus' short pastoral poems, the Idylls....
  
  
• Imagery
• Imagism
  Imagism
  Imagism was a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. The Imagists rejected the sentiment and discursiveness typical of much Romantic and Victorian poetry. This was in contrast to their contemporaries, the Georgian poets,...
  
  
• Impressionism
  Impressionism
  Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...
  
  
• Incipit
  Incipit
  Incipit is a Latin word meaning "it begins". The incipit of a text, such as a poem, song, or book, is the first few words of its opening line. In music, it can also refer to the opening notes of a composition. Before the development of titles, texts were often referred to by their incipits...
  
  
• Indeterminacy
  Indeterminacy (literature)
  Indeterminacy in literature can be simply defined as when components of a text call for or require the reader to make their own decisions about the text’s meaning...
  
  
• Inference
  Inference
  Inference is the act or process of deriving logical conclusions from premises known or assumed to be true. The conclusion drawn is also called an idiomatic. The laws of valid inference are studied in the field of logic.Human inference Inference is the act or process of deriving logical conclusions...
  
  
• In medias res
  In medias res
  In medias res or medias in res is a Latin phrase denoting the literary and artistic narrative technique wherein the relation of a story begins either at the mid-point or at the conclusion, rather than at the beginning In medias res or medias in res (into the middle of things) is a Latin phrase...
  
  
• Innuendo
  Innuendo
  An innuendo is a baseless invention of thoughts or ideas. It can also be a remark or question, typically disparaging , that works obliquely by allusion...
  
  
• Internal conflict
  Internal conflict
  In literature, internal conflict is the struggle occurring within a character's mind. Often more literary works are focused on internal battles while more populist literature is more focused on external conflict....
  
  
• Internal rhyme
  Internal rhyme
  In poetry, internal rhyme, or middle rhyme, is rhyme that occurs in a single line of verse.Internal rhyme occurs in the middle of a line, as exemplified by Coleridge, "In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud" or "Whiles all the night through fog-smoke white," in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." ...
  
  
• Interpretation
• Intertextuality
  Intertextuality
  Intertextuality is the shaping of texts' meanings by other texts. It can include an author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a reader’s referencing of one text in reading another. The term “intertextuality” has, itself, been borrowed and transformed many times since it was coined...
  
  
• Intuitive description
• Irony
  Irony
  Irony is a rhetorical device, literary technique, or situation in which there is a sharp incongruity or discordance that goes beyond the simple and evident intention of words or actions...
  
  

J

• Jacobean era
  Jacobean era
  The Jacobean era refers to the period in English and Scottish history that coincides with the reign of King James VI of Scotland, who also inherited the crown of England in 1603 as James I...
  
  
• Jeremiad
  Jeremiad
  A jeremiad is a long literary work, usually in prose, but sometimes in poetry, in which the author bitterly laments the state of society and its morals in a serious tone of sustained invective, and always contains a prophecy of society's imminent downfall....
  
  
• Journal
  Literary magazine
  A literary magazine is a periodical devoted to literature in a broad sense. Literary magazines usually publish short stories, poetry and essays along with literary criticism, book reviews, biographical profiles of authors, interviews and letters...
  
  
• Judicial criticism
• Juncture
• Juggernaut
  Juggernaut
  A juggernaut in colloquial English usage is a literal or metaphorical force regarded as mercilessly destructive and unstoppable.Originating in ca...
  
  
• Juvenalian satire
• Juxtaposition
  Contrast (linguistics)
  In semantics, contrast is a relationship between two discourse segments. Contrast is often overtly marked by markers such as but or however, such as in the following examples:# It's raining, but I am not taking an umbrella....
  
  

K

• Kabuki
  Kabuki
  is classical Japanese dance-drama. Kabuki theatre is known for the stylization of its drama and for the elaborate make-up worn by some of its performers.The individual kanji characters, from left to right, mean sing , dance , and skill...
  
  
• Kafkaesque
• Katharsis
  Catharsis
  Catharsis or katharsis is a Greek word meaning "cleansing" or "purging". It is derived from the verb καθαίρειν, kathairein, "to purify, purge," and it is related to the adjective καθαρός, katharos, "pure or clean."-Dramatic uses:...
  
  
• Kenning
  Kenning
  A kenning is a type of literary trope, specifically circumlocution, in the form of a compound that employs figurative language in place of a more concrete single-word noun. Kennings are strongly associated with Old Norse and later Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon poetry...
  
  
• Kigo
  Kigo
  is a word or phrase associated with a particular season, used in Japanese poetry. Kigo are used in the collaborative linked-verse forms renga and renku, as well as in haiku, to indicate the season referred to in the stanza...
  
  
• "King's English
  Received Pronunciation
  Received Pronunciation , also called the Queen's English, Oxford English or BBC English, is the accent of Standard English in England, with a relationship to regional accents similar to the relationship in other European languages between their standard varieties and their regional forms...
  
  "
• Kireji
  Kireji
  is the term for a special category of words used in certain types of Japanese traditional poetry. It is regarded as a requirement in traditional haiku, as well as in the hokku, or opening verse, of both classical renga and its derivative renku . There is no exact equivalent of kireji in English,...
  
  
• Kitsch
  Kitsch
  Kitsch is a form of art that is considered an inferior, tasteless copy of an extant style of art or a worthless imitation of art of recognized value. The concept is associated with the deliberate use of elements that may be thought of as cultural icons while making cheap mass-produced objects that...
  
  
• Künstlerroman
  Künstlerroman
  A Künstlerroman , meaning "artist's novel" in German, is a narrative about an artist's growth to maturity. It may be classified as a specific sub-genre of Bildungsroman; such a work, usually a novel, tends to depict the conflicts of a sensitive youth against the values of a bourgeois society of his...
  
  

L

• Lai
  Lai
  A lai is a lyrical, narrative poem written in octosyllabic couplets that often deals with tales of adventure and romance.Lais were mainly composed in France and Germany, during the 13th and 14th centuries. A Provençal term for a similar kind of poem is descort.The English term lay is a...
  
  
• Lake Poets
  Lake Poets
  The Lake Poets are a group of English poets who all lived in the Lake District of England at the turn of the nineteenth century. As a group, they followed no single "school" of thought or literary practice then known, although their works were uniformly disparaged by the Edinburgh Review...
  
  
• Lament
  Lament
  A lament or lamentation is a song, poem, or piece of music expressing grief, regret, or mourning.-History:Many of the oldest and most lasting poems in human history have been laments. Laments are present in both the Iliad and the Odyssey, and laments continued to be sung in elegiacs accompanied by...
  
  
• Lampoon
  Parody
  A parody , in current usage, is an imitative work created to mock, comment on, or trivialise an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation...
  
  
• L'art pour l'art
  Art for art's sake
  "Art for art's sake" is the usual English rendering of a French slogan, from the early 19th century, l'art pour l'art, and expresses a philosophy that the intrinsic value of art, and the only "true" art, is divorced from any didactic, moral or utilitarian function...
  
  
• Laureate
  Laureate
  In English, the word laureate has come to signify eminence or association with literary or military glory. It is also used for winners of the Nobel Prize.-History:...
  
  
• Lay
  Lai
  A lai is a lyrical, narrative poem written in octosyllabic couplets that often deals with tales of adventure and romance.Lais were mainly composed in France and Germany, during the 13th and 14th centuries. A Provençal term for a similar kind of poem is descort.The English term lay is a...
  
  
• Leaf
  Bookbinding
  Bookbinding is the process of physically assembling a book from a number of folded or unfolded sheets of paper or other material. It usually involves attaching covers to the resulting text-block.-Origins of the book:...
  
  
• Legend
  Legend
  A legend is a narrative of human actions that are perceived both by teller and listeners to take place within human history and to possess certain qualities that give the tale verisimilitude...
  
  
• Legitimate theater
  Legitimate theater
  The term "legitimate theater" dates back to the Licensing Act of 1737, which restricted "serious" theatre performances to the two patent theatres licensed to perform "spoken drama" after the English Restoration in 1662...
  
  
• Leonine rhyme
• Lexis
  Lexis (linguistics)
  In linguistics, a lexis is the total word-stock or lexicon having items of lexical, rather than grammatical, meaning. This notion contrasts starkly with the Chomskian proposition of a “Universal Grammar” as the prime mover for language...
  
  
• Letters
  Intellectual
  An intellectual is a person who uses intelligence and critical or analytical reasoning in either a professional or a personal capacity.- Terminology and endeavours :"Intellectual" can denote four types of persons:...
  
  
• Level stress (even accent)
• Libretto
  Libretto
  A libretto is the text used in an extended musical work such as an opera, operetta, masque, oratorio, cantata, or musical. The term "libretto" is also sometimes used to refer to the text of major liturgical works, such as mass, requiem, and sacred cantata, or even the story line of a...
  
  
• Light ending
• Light poetry
  Light poetry
  Light poetry, or light verse, is poetry that attempts to be humorous. Poems considered "light" are usually brief, and can be on a frivolous or serious subject, and often feature word play, including puns, adventurous rhyme and heavy alliteration...
  
  
• Light rhyme
• Light stress
• Light poetry
  Light poetry
  Light poetry, or light verse, is poetry that attempts to be humorous. Poems considered "light" are usually brief, and can be on a frivolous or serious subject, and often feature word play, including puns, adventurous rhyme and heavy alliteration...
  
  
• Limerick
  Limerick (poetry)
  A limerick is a kind of a witty, humorous, or nonsense poem, especially one in five-line or meter with a strict rhyme scheme , which is sometimes obscene with humorous intent. The form can be found in England as of the early years of the 18th century...
  
  
• Linguistics
  Linguistics
  Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
  
  
• Linked rhyme
• Link sonnet
• Literary ballad
• Literary criticism
  Literary criticism
  Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals...
  
  
• Literary epic
• Literary realism
  Literary realism
  Literary realism most often refers to the trend, beginning with certain works of nineteenth-century French literature and extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors in various countries, towards depictions of contemporary life and society "as they were." In the spirit of...
  
  
• Literary theory
  Literary theory
  Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature. However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of...
  
  
• Literature
  Literature
  Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...
  
  
• Litotes
  Litotes
  In rhetoric, litotes is a figure of speech in which understatement is employed for rhetorical effect when an idea is expressed by a denial of its opposite, principally via double negatives....
  
  
• Litterateur
  Intellectual
  An intellectual is a person who uses intelligence and critical or analytical reasoning in either a professional or a personal capacity.- Terminology and endeavours :"Intellectual" can denote four types of persons:...
  
  
• Liturgical drama
  Liturgical drama
  Liturgical drama or religious drama, in its various Christian contexts, originates from the mass itself, and usually presents a relatively complex ritual that includes theatrical elements...
  
  
• Living Newspaper
  Living Newspaper
  Living Newspaper is a term for a theatrical form presenting factual information on current events to a popular audience. Historically, Living Newspapers have also urged social action and reacted against naturalistic and realistic theatrical conventions in favor of the more direct, experimental...
  
  
• Local color
  Regionalism (literature)
  In literature, regionalism or local color refers to fiction or poetry that focuses on specific features – including characters, dialects, customs, history, and topography – of a particular region...
  
  
• Logaoedic
• Logical fallacy
  Fallacy
  In logic and rhetoric, a fallacy is usually an incorrect argumentation in reasoning resulting in a misconception or presumption. By accident or design, fallacies may exploit emotional triggers in the listener or interlocutor , or take advantage of social relationships between people...
  
  
• Logical stress
• Logos
  Logos
  ' is an important term in philosophy, psychology, rhetoric and religion. Originally a word meaning "a ground", "a plea", "an opinion", "an expectation", "word," "speech," "account," "reason," it became a technical term in philosophy, beginning with Heraclitus ' is an important term in...
  
  
• Long metre
  Long metre
  Long metre is a poetic meter consisting of four line stanzas, or quatrains, in iambic tetrameter with alternate rhyme pattern a-b-a-b. It is similar to Common metre, which consists of four lines in alternating iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter....
  
  
• Loose sentence
  Loose sentence
  A loose sentence is a type of sentence in which the main idea is elaborated by the successive addition of modifying clauses or phrases.-Effect:...
  
  
• Lost Generation
  Lost Generation
  The "Lost Generation" is a term used to refer to the generation, actually a cohort, that came of age during World War I. The term was popularized by Ernest Hemingway who used it as one of two contrasting epigraphs for his novel, The Sun Also Rises. In that volume Hemingway credits the phrase to...
  
  
• Low comedy
  Low comedy
  Low comedy is a type of comedy characterized by "horseplay", slapstick or farce. Examples include somebody throwing a custard pie in another's face. This definition has also expanded to include lewd types of comedy that rely on physical jokes, for example, the wedgie.- History :This type of comedy...
  
  
• Lullaby
  Lullaby
  A lullaby is a soothing song, usually sung to young children before they go to sleep, with the intention of speeding that process. As a result they are often simple and repetitive. Lullabies can be found in every culture and since the ancient period....
  
  
• Lyric
  Lyric poetry
  Lyric poetry is a genre of poetry that expresses personal and emotional feelings. In the ancient world, lyric poems were those which were sung to the lyre. Lyric poems do not have to rhyme, and today do not need to be set to music or a beat...
  
  

M

• Macaronic language
  Macaronic language
  Macaronic refers to text spoken or written using a mixture of languages, sometimes including bilingual puns, particularly when the languages are used in the same context . The term is also sometimes used to denote hybrid words, which are in effect internally macaronic...
  
  
• Madrigal (music)
  Madrigal (music)
  A madrigal is a secular vocal music composition, usually a partsong, of the Renaissance and early Baroque eras. Traditionally, polyphonic madrigals are unaccompanied; the number of voices varies from two to eight, and most frequently from three to six....
  
  
• Madrigal (poetry)
  Madrigal (poetry)
  Madrigal is the name of a form of poetry, the exact nature of which has never been decided in English.The definition given in the New English Dictionary, "a short lyrical poem of amatory character," offers no distinctive formula; some madrigals are long, and many have nothing whatever to do with...
  
  
• Magic realism
  Magic realism
  Magic realism or magical realism is an aesthetic style or genre of fiction in which magical elements blend with the real world. The story explains these magical elements as real occurrences, presented in a straightforward manner that places the "real" and the "fantastic" in the same stream of...
  
  
• Malapropism
  Malapropism
  A malapropism is an act of misusing or the habitual misuse of similar sounding words, especially with humorous results. An example is Yogi Berra's statement: "Texas has a lot of electrical votes," rather than "electoral votes".-Etymology:...
  
  
• Märchen
  Fairy tale
  A fairy tale is a type of short story that typically features such folkloric characters, such as fairies, goblins, elves, trolls, dwarves, giants or gnomes, and usually magic or enchantments. However, only a small number of the stories refer to fairies...
  
  
• Marginalia
  Marginalia
  Marginalia are scribbles, comments, and illuminations in the margins of a book.- Biblical manuscripts :Biblical manuscripts have liturgical notes at the margin, for liturgical use. Numbers of texts' divisions are given at the margin...
  
  
• Marinism
  Marinism
  Marinism is the name now given to an ornate, witty style of poetry and verse drama written in imitation of Giambattista Marino , following in particular La Lira and L'Adone.-Features:The critic James V...
  
  
• Marivauge
• Marxist literary criticism
  Marxist literary criticism
  Marxist literary criticism is a loose term describing literary criticism based on socialist and dialectic theories. Marxist criticism views literary works as reflections of the social institutions from which they originate...
  
  
• Masculine ending
  Masculine ending
  Masculine ending is term used in prosody, the study of verse form. It refers to a line ending in a stressed syllable. Its opposite is feminine ending, which describes a line ending in a stressless syllable...
  
  
• Masculine rhyme
  Masculine rhyme
  A masculine rhyme is a rhyme that matches only one syllable, usually at the end of respective lines. Often the final syllable is stressed.-English:In English prosody, a masculine rhyme is a rhyme on a single stressed syllable at the end of a line of poetry...
  
  
• Masked comedy
  Commedia dell'arte
  Commedia dell'arte is a form of theatre characterized by masked "types" which began in Italy in the 16th century, and was responsible for the advent of the actress and improvised performances based on sketches or scenarios. The closest translation of the name is "comedy of craft"; it is shortened...
  
  
• Masque
  Masque
  The masque was a form of festive courtly entertainment which flourished in 16th and early 17th century Europe, though it was developed earlier in Italy, in forms including the intermedio...
  
  
• Maxim
  Saying
  A saying is something that is said, notable in one respect or another, to be "a pithy expression of wisdom or truth."There are a number of specific types of saying:...
  
  
• Meaning
• Medieval drama
• Meiosis
  Meiosis (figure of speech)
  In rhetoric, meiosis is a euphemistic figure of speech that intentionally understates something or implies that it is lesser in significance or size than it really is. Meiosis is the opposite of auxesis, and also sometimes used as a synonym for litotes...
  
  
• Melic poetry
• Melodrama
  Melodrama
  The term melodrama refers to a dramatic work that exaggerates plot and characters in order to appeal to the emotions. It may also refer to the genre which includes such works, or to language, behavior, or events which resemble them...
  
  
• Memoir
  Memoir
  A memoir , is a literary genre, forming a subclass of autobiography – although the terms 'memoir' and 'autobiography' are almost interchangeable. Memoir is autobiographical writing, but not all autobiographical writing follows the criteria for memoir set out below...
  
  
• Menippean satire
  Menippean satire
  The genre of Menippean satire is a form of satire, usually in prose, which has a length and structure similar to a novel and is characterized by attacking mental attitudes instead of specific individuals...
  
  
• Mesostich
  Acrostic
  An acrostic is a poem or other form of writing in which the first letter, syllable or word of each line, paragraph or other recurring feature in the text spells out a word or a message. As a form of constrained writing, an acrostic can be used as a mnemonic device to aid memory retrieval. A famous...
  
  
• Metaphor
  Metaphor
  A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...
  
  
• Metaphysical conceit
• Metaphorical language
  Metaphorical language
  Metaphorical language is the use of a complex system of metaphors to create a sub-language within a common language which provides the basic terms to express metaphors....
  
  
• Metaphysical poets
  Metaphysical poets
  The metaphysical poets is a term coined by the poet and critic Samuel Johnson to describe a loose group of British lyric poets of the 17th century, who shared an interest in metaphysical concerns and a common way of investigating them, and whose work was characterized by inventiveness of metaphor...
  
  
• Meter
  Meter (poetry)
  In poetry, metre is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study of metres and forms of versification is known as prosody...
  
  
• Metonymy
  Metonymy
  Metonymy is a figure of speech used in rhetoric in which a thing or concept is not called by its own name, but by the name of something intimately associated with that thing or concept...
  
  
• Metre
  Meter (poetry)
  In poetry, metre is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study of metres and forms of versification is known as prosody...
  
  
• Metrical accent
• Metrical foot
  Foot (prosody)
  The foot is the basic metrical unit that generates a line of verse in most Western traditions of poetry, including English accentual-syllabic verse and the quantitative meter of classical ancient Greek and Latin poetry. The unit is composed of syllables, the number of which is limited, with a few...
  
  
• Metrical structure
  Meter (poetry)
  In poetry, metre is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study of metres and forms of versification is known as prosody...
  
  
• Middle Comedy
• Miles gloriosus
  Miles Gloriosus
  Miles Gloriosus is a stock character of a boastful soldier from the comic theatre of ancient Rome, and variations on this character have appeared in drama and fiction ever since. The character derives from the alazôn or "braggart" of the Greek Old Comedy...
  
  
• Miltonic sonnet
• Mime
  Mime
  The word mime is used to refer to a mime artist who uses a theatrical medium or performance art involving the acting out of a story through body motions without use of speech.Mime may also refer to:* Mime, an alternative word for lip sync...
  
  
• Mimesis
  Mimesis
  Mimesis , from μιμεῖσθαι , "to imitate," from μῖμος , "imitator, actor") is a critical and philosophical term that carries a wide range of meanings, which include imitation, representation, mimicry, imitatio, receptivity, nonsensuous similarity, the act of resembling, the act of expression, and the...
  
  
• Minnesang
  Minnesang
  Minnesang was the tradition of lyric and song writing in Germany which flourished in the 12th century and continued into the 14th century. People who wrote and performed Minnesang are known as Minnesingers . The name derives from the word minne, Middle High German for love which was their main...
  
  
• Minstrel
  Minstrel
  A minstrel was a medieval European bard who performed songs whose lyrics told stories of distant places or of existing or imaginary historical events. Although minstrels created their own tales, often they would memorize and embellish the works of others. Frequently they were retained by royalty...
  
  
• Mystery play
  Mystery play
  Mystery plays and miracle plays are among the earliest formally developed plays in medieval Europe. Medieval mystery plays focused on the representation of Bible stories in churches as tableaux with accompanying antiphonal song...
  
   (miracle play)
• Miscellanies
  Anthology
  An anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler. It may be a collection of poems, short stories, plays, songs, or excerpts...
  
  
• Mise en scène
  Mise en scène
  Mise-en-scène is an expression used to describe the design aspects of a theatre or film production, which essentially means "visual theme" or "telling a story"—both in visually artful ways through storyboarding, cinematography and stage design, and in poetically artful ways through direction...
  
  
• Mixed metaphor
  Metaphor
  A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...
  
  
• Mock-heroic
  Mock-heroic
  Mock-heroic, mock-epic or heroi-comic works are typically satires or parodies that mock common Classical stereotypes of heroes and heroic literature...
  
   (mock epic)
• Mode
  Mode (literature)
  In literature, a mode is an employed method or approach, identifiable within a written work. As descriptive terms, form and genre are often used inaccurately instead of mode; for example, the pastoral mode is often mistakenly identified as a genre...
  
  
• Modernism
  Modernism
  Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
  
  
• Monodrama
  Monodrama
  A monodrama is a theatrical or operatic piece played by a single actor or singer, usually portraying one character.- Monodrama in opera :...
  
  
• Monody
  Monody
  In poetry, the term monody has become specialized to refer to a poem in which one person laments another's death....
  
  
• Monograph
  Monograph
  A monograph is a work of writing upon a single subject, usually by a single author.It is often a scholarly essay or learned treatise, and may be released in the manner of a book or journal article. It is by definition a single document that forms a complete text in itself...
  
  
• Monologue
  Monologue
  In theatre, a monologue is a speech presented by a single character, most often to express their thoughts aloud, though sometimes also to directly address another character or the audience. Monologues are common across the range of dramatic media...
  
  
• Monometer
  Monometer
  In poetry, a monometer is a line of verse with just one metrical foot, exemplified by this portion of Robert Herrick's "Upon His Departure Hence":A more famous example is the slogan of the Milk Marketing Board in the 1970s:DrinkaPintaMilkaDay...
  
   (monopody)
• Monostich
  Monostich
  A monostich is a poem which consists of a single line.The following is an example:A monostich could be also titled; due to the brevity of the form, the title is invariably as important a part of the poem as the verse itself:...
  
  
• Monograph
  Monograph
  A monograph is a work of writing upon a single subject, usually by a single author.It is often a scholarly essay or learned treatise, and may be released in the manner of a book or journal article. It is by definition a single document that forms a complete text in itself...
  
  
• Mood
  Setting tone
  Authors set a Tone in literature by conveying emotions/feelings through words. The way a person feels about an idea/concept, event, or another person can be quickly determined through facial expressions, gestures and in the tone of voice used. In literature an author sets the tone through words...
  
  
• Mora
  Mora (linguistics)
  Mora is a unit in phonology that determines syllable weight, which in some languages determines stress or timing. As with many technical linguistic terms, the definition of a mora varies. Perhaps the most succinct working definition was provided by the American linguist James D...
  
  
• Moral
  Moral
  A moral is a message conveyed or a lesson to be learned from a story or event. The moral may be left to the hearer, reader or viewer to determine for themselves, or may be explicitly encapsulated in a maxim...
  
  
• Morality play
  Morality play
  The morality play is a genre of Medieval and early Tudor theatrical entertainment. In their own time, these plays were known as "interludes", a broader term given to dramas with or without a moral theme. Morality plays are a type of allegory in which the protagonist is met by personifications of...
  
  
• Motif
  Motif (narrative)
  In narrative, a motif is any recurring element that has symbolic significance in a story. Through its repetition, a motif can help produce other narrative aspects such as theme or mood....
  
  
• Motivation
• Movement
• Mummery
  Mummers Play
  Mummers Plays are seasonal folk plays performed by troupes of actors known as mummers or guisers , originally from England , but later in other parts of the world...
  
  
• Muses
• Musical comedy
• Mystery play
  Mystery play
  Mystery plays and miracle plays are among the earliest formally developed plays in medieval Europe. Medieval mystery plays focused on the representation of Bible stories in churches as tableaux with accompanying antiphonal song...
  
  
• Mythology
  Mythology
  The term mythology can refer either to the study of myths, or to a body or collection of myths. As examples, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece...
  
  

N

• Narrative point of view
  Point of view (literature)
  The narrative mode is the set of methods the author of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical story uses to convey the plot to the audience. Narration, the process of presenting the narrative, occurs because of the narrative mode...
  
  
• Narrator
  Narrator
  A narrator is, within any story , the fictional or non-fictional, personal or impersonal entity who tells the story to the audience. When the narrator is also a character within the story, he or she is sometimes known as the viewpoint character. The narrator is one of three entities responsible for...
  
  
• Naturalism
  Naturalism (literature)
  Naturalism was a literary movement taking place from the 1880s to 1940s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character...
  
  
• Neologism
• Non-fiction
  Non-fiction
  Non-fiction is the form of any narrative, account, or other communicative work whose assertions and descriptions are understood to be fact...
  
  
• Non-fiction novel
  Non-fiction novel
  The non-fiction novel is a literary genre which, broadly speaking, depicts real historical figures and actual events narrated woven together with fictitious allegations and using the storytelling techniques of fiction. The non-fiction novel is an otherwise loosely-defined and flexible genre...
  
  
• Novel
  Novel
  A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
  
  
• Novelette
  Novelette
  A novelette is a piece of short prose fiction. The distinction between a novelette and other literary forms is usually based upon word count, with a novelette being longer than a short story, but shorter than a novella...
  
  
• Novella
  Novella
  A novella is a written, fictional, prose narrative usually longer than a novelette but shorter than a novel. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards for science fiction define the novella as having a word count between 17,500 and 40,000...
  
  
• Novelle
• narrative poem

O

• Objective correlative
  Objective correlative
  An objective correlative is a literary term referring to a symbolic article used to provide explicit, rather than implicit, access to such traditionally inexplicable concepts as emotion or colour.- Origin of terminology :Popularized by T. S...
  
  
• Objective criticism
• Obligatory scene
• Octameter
  Octameter
  Octameter in poetry is a line of eight metrical feet. It is not very common in English verse. E.g.: -TrochaicOctameter in poetry is a line of eight metrical feet. It is not very common in English verse. E.g.: -Trochaic...
  
  
• Octave
  Octave (poetry)
  An octave is a verse form consisting of eight lines of iambic pentameter or of hendecasyllables . The most common rhyme scheme for an octave is abba abba....
  
  
• Ode
  Ode
  Ode is a type of lyrical verse. A classic ode is structured in three major parts: the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode. Different forms such as the homostrophic ode and the irregular ode also exist...
  
  
• Oedipus complex
  Oedipus complex
  In psychoanalytic theory, the term Oedipus complex denotes the emotions and ideas that the mind keeps in the unconscious, via dynamic repression, that concentrate upon a boy’s desire to sexually possess his mother, and kill his father...
  
  
• Oning
  Oning
  Oning in noun in context of Switching a device ON.It is not very common in English verse.E.g.: -Oning...
  
  
• Onomatopoeia
• Open couplet
• Oulipo
  Oulipo
  Oulipo is a loose gathering of French-speaking writers and mathematicians which seeks to create works using constrained writing techniques. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais...
  
  
• Orchestra
• Ottava rima
  Ottava rima
  Ottava rima is a rhyming stanza form of Italian origin. Originally used for long poems on heroic themes, it later came to be popular in the writing of mock-heroic works. Its earliest known use is in the writings of Giovanni Boccaccio....
  
  
• Oxymoron
  Oxymoron
  An oxymoron is a figure of speech that combines contradictory terms...
  
  

P

• Palinode
  Palinode
  A palinode or palinody is an ode in which the writer retracts a view or sentiment expressed in an earlier poem. The first recorded use of a palinode is in a poem by Stesichorus in the 7th century BC, in which he retracts his earlier statement that the Trojan War was all the fault of Helen...
  
  
• Pantoum
  Pantoum
  The pantoum is a form of poetry similar to a villanelle in that there are repeating lines throughout the poem. It is composed of a series of quatrains; the second and fourth lines of each stanza are repeated as the first and third lines of the next. This pattern continues for any number of stanzas,...
  
  
• Pantun
  Pantun
  The pantun is a Malay poetic form. The pantun originated as a traditional oral form of expression. The first examples to be recorded appear in the 15th century in the Malay Annals and the Hikayat Hang Tuah. The most common theme is love....
  
  
• Parable
  Parable
  A parable is a succinct story, in prose or verse, which illustrates one or more instructive principles, or lessons, or a normative principle. It differs from a fable in that fables use animals, plants, inanimate objects, and forces of nature as characters, while parables generally feature human...
  
  
• Paraclausithyron
  Paraclausithyron
  Paraclausithyron is a motif in Greek and especially Augustan love elegy, as well as in troubadour poetry.The details of the Greek etymology are uncertain, but it is generally accepted to mean "lament beside a door", from παρακλαίω, "lament beside", and θύρα, "door". A paraklausithyron typically...
  
  
• Paradelle
  Paradelle
  A paradelle is a modern poetic form which was invented by United States Poet Laureate Billy Collins as a parody of the villanelle.-Derivation:...
  
  
• Paradox
  Paradox (literature)
  In literature, the paradox is an anomalous juxtaposition of incongruous ideas for the sake of striking exposition or unexpected insight. It functions as a method of literary composition - and analysis - which involves examining apparently contradictory statements and drawing conclusions either to...
  
  
• Paraphrase
  Paraphrase
  Paraphrase is restatement of a text or passages, using other words. The term "paraphrase" derives via the Latin "paraphrasis" from the Greek , meaning "additional manner of expression". The act of paraphrasing is also called "paraphrasis."...
  
  
• Pararhyme
  Pararhyme
  Pararhyme, also known as partial or imperfect rhyme is a term devised by the poet Edmund Blunden to describe a near rhyme in which the consonants in two words are the same, but the vowels are different. It is distinguished from half rhyme in that all the consonants should match rather than just the...
  
  
• Paratactic
• Partimen
  Partimen
  The partimen is a genre of Occitan lyric poetry composed between two troubadours, a subgenre of the tenso or cobla exchange in which one poet presents a dilemma in the form of a question and the two debate the answer, each taking up a different side. It was especially popular in poetic contests....
  
  
• Pastourelle
  Pastourelle
  The pastourelle is a typically Old French lyric form concerning the romance of a shepherdess. In most of the early pastourelles, the poet knight meets a shepherdess who bests him in a wit battle and who displays general coyness. The narrator usually has sexual relations, either consensual or...
  
  
• Pathetic fallacy
  Pathetic fallacy
  The pathetic fallacy, anthropomorphic fallacy or sentimental fallacy is the treatment of inanimate objects as if they had human feelings, thought, or sensations. The pathetic fallacy is a special case of the fallacy of reification...
  
  
• Pathya Vat
  Pathya Vat
  The Pathya Vat is a Cambodian verse form, consisting of four lines, where lines two and three rhyme. When a poem consists more than one stanza, the last line of the previous stanza rhymes with the second and third lines of the following one....
  
  
• Parallelism
  Parallelism (grammar)
  In grammar, parallelism is a balance of two or more similar words, phrases, or clauses. The application of parallelism in sentence construction can sometimes improve writing style clearness and readability. Parallelism may also be known as parallel structure or parallel construction...
  
  
• Parody
  Parody
  A parody , in current usage, is an imitative work created to mock, comment on, or trivialise an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation...
  
  
• Pastoral
  Pastoral
  The adjective pastoral refers to the lifestyle of pastoralists, such as shepherds herding livestock around open areas of land according to seasons and the changing availability of water and pasturage. It also refers to a genre in literature, art or music that depicts such shepherd life in an...
  
  
• Pathos
  Pathos
  Pathos represents an appeal to the audience's emotions. Pathos is a communication technique used most often in rhetoric , and in literature, film and other narrative art....
  
  
• Pentameter
• Periodic sentence
  Periodic sentence
  A periodic sentence is a stylistic device employed at the sentence level, characterized as a sentence that is not grammatically complete until the final clause or phrase.-Characteristics:...
  
  
• Periodical literature
• Peripetia
• Perspective
  Point of view (literature)
  The narrative mode is the set of methods the author of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical story uses to convey the plot to the audience. Narration, the process of presenting the narrative, occurs because of the narrative mode...
  
  
• Persona
  Persona
  A persona, in the word's everyday usage, is a social role or a character played by an actor. The word is derived from Latin, where it originally referred to a theatrical mask. The Latin word probably derived from the Etruscan word "phersu", with the same meaning, and that from the Greek πρόσωπον...
  
  
• Personification
• Phronesis
  Phronesis
  Phronēsis is an Ancient Greek word for wisdom or intelligence which is a common topic of discussion in philosophy. In Aristotelian Ethics, for example in the Nicomachean Ethics it is distinguished from other words for wisdom as the virtue of practical thought, and is usually translated "practical...
  
  
• Pièce bien faite
  Well-made play
  The well-made play is a genre of drama from the 19th century that Eugène Scribe first codified and that Victorien Sardou developed. By the mid-19th century, it had entered into common use as a derogatory term...
  
  
• Picaresque novel
  Picaresque novel
  The picaresque novel is a popular sub-genre of prose fiction which is usually satirical and depicts, in realistic and often humorous detail, the adventures of a roguish hero of low social class who lives by his wits in a corrupt society...
  
  
• Plain Style
• Platonic
  Platonic idealism
  Platonic idealism usually refers to Plato's theory of forms or doctrine of ideas,Some commentators hold Plato argued that truth is an abstraction...
  
  
• Plot
• Poem
  Poetry
  Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
  
  
• Poem and song
• Poetic diction
  Poetic diction
  Poetic diction is the term used to refer to the linguistic style, the vocabulary, and the metaphors used in the writing of poetry. In the Western tradition, all these elements were thought of as properly different in poetry and prose up to the time of the Romantic revolution, when William...
  
  
• Poetic transrealism
  Poetic transrealism
  Transrealism in poetry or uchronism, according to this poetic movement's father, the Chilean poet Sergio Badilla Castillo, is created upon a transposition of time, which means that temporary scenes merge, in the textual corpus, and in this way linear coherence between the past, the present and the...
  
  
• Poetry
  Poetry
  Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
  
  
• Point of view
  Point of view (literature)
  The narrative mode is the set of methods the author of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical story uses to convey the plot to the audience. Narration, the process of presenting the narrative, occurs because of the narrative mode...
  
  
• Polysyndeton
  Polysyndeton
  Polysyndeton is the use of several conjunctions in close succession, especially where some might be omitted . It is a stylistic scheme used to achieve a variety of effects: it can increase the rhythm of prose, speed or slow its pace, convey solemnity or even ecstasy and childlike exuberance...
  
  
• Post-colonialism
• Postmodernism
  Postmodernism
  Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
  
  
• Pound's Ideogrammic Method
  Pound's Ideogrammic Method
  The Ideogrammic Method was a technique expounded by Ezra Pound which allowed poetry to deal with abstract content through concrete images. The idea was based on Pound's reading of the work of Ernest Fenollosa....
  
  
• Primal scene
  Primal scene
  In psychoanalysis, the primal scene is the initial witnessing by a child of a sex act, usually between the parents, that traumatizes the psychosexual development of that child...
  
  
• Procatalepsis
  Procatalepsis
  Procatalepsis, also called prebuttal, is a figure of speech in which the speaker raises an objection to his own argument and then immediately answers it...
  
  
• Prolepsis
  Prolepsis
  Prolepsis may refer to:* Flashforward, in storytelling, an interjected scene that takes the narrative forward* Prolepsis , 1975 work by Arrogance...
  
  
• Prologue
  Prologue
  A prologue is an opening to a story that establishes the setting and gives background details, often some earlier story that ties into the main one, and other miscellaneous information. The Greek prologos included the modern meaning of prologue, but was of wider significance...
  
  
• Progymnasmata
  Progymnasmata
  Progymnasmata are rhetorical exercises gradually leading the student to familiarity with the elements of rhetoric, in preparation for their own practice speeches and ultimately their own orations.Both Hermogenes of Tarsus and Aelius Festus Aphthonius wrote treatises containing progymnasmata...
  
  
• Prose
  Prose
  Prose is the most typical form of written language, applying ordinary grammatical structure and natural flow of speech rather than rhythmic structure...
  
  
• Prosimetrum
  Prosimetrum
  A prosimetrum is a literary piece that is made up of alternating passages of prose and poetry.-Examples:*De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii by Martianus Capella*Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius*Cosmographia by Bernard Silvestris...
  
  
• Prosody (poetry)
• Protagonist
  Protagonist
  A protagonist is the main character of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical narrative, around whom the events of the narrative's plot revolve and with whom the audience is intended to most identify...
  
  
• Proverb
  Proverb
  A proverb is a simple and concrete saying popularly known and repeated, which expresses a truth, based on common sense or the practical experience of humanity. They are often metaphorical. A proverb that describes a basic rule of conduct may also be known as a maxim...
  
  
• Pruning poem
  Pruning poem
  A pruning poem is a poem that uses rhymes that are prunings of each other.Each rhyme word is one letter shorter than the rhyme word before. Otherwise, they are the same word. While it is possible to write a pruning poem in couplets or longer, it is most effective when the reader sees the pruning...
  
  
• Psychoanalytic literary criticism
  Psychoanalytic literary criticism
  Psychoanalytic literary criticism refers to literary criticism or literary theory which, in method, concept, or form, is influenced by the tradition of psychoanalysis begun by Sigmund Freud....
  
  
• Psychoanalytic theory
  Psychoanalytic theory
  Psychoanalytic theory refers to the definition and dynamics of personality development which underlie and guide psychoanalytic and psychodynamic psychotherapy. First laid out by Sigmund Freud, psychoanalytic theory has undergone many refinements since his work...
  
  
• Pun
  Pun
  The pun, also called paronomasia, is a form of word play which suggests two or more meanings, by exploiting multiple meanings of words, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect. These ambiguities can arise from the intentional use and abuse of homophonic,...
  
  
• Purple prose
  Purple prose
  Purple prose is a term of literary criticism used to describe passages, or sometimes entire literary works, written in prose so extravagant, ornate, or flowery as to break the flow and draw attention to itself. Purple prose is sensually evocative beyond the requirements of its context...
  
  
• Purpose for Reading
• Pyrrhic
  Pyrrhic
  A pyrrhic is a metrical foot used in formal poetry. It consists of two unaccented, short syllables. It is also known as a dibrach.Tennyson used pyrrhics and spondees quite frequently, for example, in In Memoriam: "When the blood creeps and the nerves prick." "When the" and "and the" in the second...
  
  

R

• Reader-response criticism
  Reader-response criticism
  Reader-response criticism is a school of literary theory that focuses on the reader and his or her experience of a literary work, in contrast to other schools and theories that focus attention primarily on the author or the content and form of the work.Although literary theory has long paid some...
  
  
• Realism
  Realism (arts)
  Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular, empirical rules", as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation...
  
  
• Redaction
  Redaction
  Redaction is a form of editing in which multiple source texts are combined and subjected to minor alteration to make them into a single work. Often this is a method of collecting a series of writings on a similar theme and creating a definitive and coherent work...
  
  
• Red herring
  Red herring
  A red herring is a deliberate attempt to divert attention.Red herring may refer to:* Red herring , the informal fallacy of presenting an argument that may in itself be valid, but does not address the issue in question....
  
  
• Refrain
  Refrain
  A refrain is the line or lines that are repeated in music or in verse; the "chorus" of a song...
  
  
• Regency novel
  Regency novel
  Regency novels are either:* Fiction actually written during the Regency era - The works of Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Susan Ferrier, and Maria Edgeworth would fall into this category.* Later fiction set within the Regency era...
  
  
• Regionalism (literature)
  Regionalism (literature)
  In literature, regionalism or local color refers to fiction or poetry that focuses on specific features – including characters, dialects, customs, history, and topography – of a particular region...
  
  
• Renga
  Renga
  ' is a genre of Japanese collaborative poetry. A renga consists of at least two or stanzas, usually many more. The opening stanza of the renga, called the , became the basis for the modern haiku form of poetry....
  
  
• Renku
• Repetition
  Repetition (rhetorical device)
  Repetition is the simple repeating of a word, within a sentence or a poetical line, with no particular placement of the words, in order to emphasize. This is such a common literary device that it is almost never even noted as a figure of speech...
  
  
• Resolution
• Reverse chronology
  Reverse chronology
  Reverse chronology is a method of story-telling whereby the plot is revealed in reverse order.In a story employing this technique, the first scene shown is actually the conclusion to the plot...
  
  
• Rhapsodes
• Rhetoric
  Rhetoric
  Rhetoric is the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the facility of speakers or writers who attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. As a subject of formal study and a productive civic practice, rhetoric has played a central role in the Western...
  
  
• Rhetorical agency
• Rhetorical device
  Rhetorical device
  In rhetoric, a rhetorical device or resource of language is a technique that an author or speaker uses to convey to the listener or reader a meaning with the goal of persuading him or her towards considering a topic from a different perspective. While rhetorical devices may be used to evoke an...
  
  
• Rhetorical operations
  Rhetorical operations
  Since classical rhetoric, the four fundamental rhetorical operations, which still today serve to encompass the various figures of speech, have been: addition , omission , permutation and transposition...
  
  
• Rhetorical question
  Rhetorical question
  A rhetorical question is a figure of speech in the form of a question posed for its persuasive effect without the expectation of a reply. Rhetorical questions encourage the listener to think about what the answer to the question must be. When a speaker states, "How much longer must our people...
  
  
• Rhetorical tension
• Rhyme
  Rhyme
  A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds in two or more words and is most often used in poetry and songs. The word "rhyme" may also refer to a short poem, such as a rhyming couplet or other brief rhyming poem such as nursery rhymes.-Etymology:...
  
  
• Rhymed prose
  Rhymed prose
  Rhymed prose is a literary form and literary genre, written in unmetrical rhymes. This form has been known in many different cultures. In some cases the rhymed prose is a distinctive, well-defined style of writing...
  
  
• Rhyme royal
  Rhyme royal
  Rhyme royal is a rhyming stanza form that was introduced into English poetry by Geoffrey Chaucer.-Form:The rhyme royal stanza consists of seven lines, usually in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is a-b-a-b-b-c-c. In practice, the stanza can be constructed either as a terza rima and two couplets...
  
  
• Rising action
• Robinsonade
  Robinsonade
  Robinsonade is a literary genre that takes its name from the 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. The success of this novel spawned enough imitations that its name was used to define a genre, which is sometimes described simply as a "desert island story"...
  
  
• Romance (genre)
  Romance (genre)
  As a literary genre of high culture, romance or chivalric romance is a style of heroic prose and verse narrative that was popular in the aristocratic circles of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe. They were fantastic stories about marvel-filled adventures, often of a knight errant portrayed as...
  
  
• Romance novel
  Romance novel
  The romance novel is a literary genre developed in Western culture, mainly in English-speaking countries. Novels in this genre place their primary focus on the relationship and romantic love between two people, and must have an "emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending." Through the late...
  
  
• Romanticism
  Romanticism
  Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
  
  
• Romanzo d' appendice
  Romanzo d' appendice
  Romanzo d'appendìce was a popular genre in literature, which originated in England and France, in the second half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th....
  
  
• Roman à clef
  Roman à clef
  Roman à clef or roman à clé , French for "novel with a key", is a phrase used to describe a novel about real life, overlaid with a façade of fiction. The fictitious names in the novel represent real people, and the "key" is the relationship between the nonfiction and the fiction...
  
  
• Round character
  Character (arts)
  A character is the representation of a person in a narrative work of art . Derived from the ancient Greek word kharaktêr , the earliest use in English, in this sense, dates from the Restoration, although it became widely used after its appearance in Tom Jones in 1749. From this, the sense of...
  
  
• Round-robin story
  Round-robin story
  A round-robin story, or simply "round robin," is a type of collaborative fiction or storytelling in which a number of authors each write chapters of a novel or pieces of a story, in rounds. Round-robin novels were invented in the 19th century, and later became a tradition particularly in science...
  
  
• Ruritanian romance
  Ruritanian Romance
  A Ruritanian Romance is a story set in a fictional country, usually in Central or Eastern Europe, such as the Ruritania that gave the genre its name...
  
  
• Russian formalism
  Russian formalism
  Russian formalism was an influential school of literary criticism in Russia from the 1910s to the 1930s. It includes the work of a number of highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars such as Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Vladimir Propp, Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Grigory Vinokur who...
  
  

S

• Satire
  Satire
  Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...
  
  
• Scanning
• Scansion
  Scansion
  Scansion is the act of determining and graphically representing the metrical character of a line of verse.-Overview:Systems of scansion, and the assumptions that underlie them, are so numerous and contradictory that it is often difficult to tell whether differences in scansion indicate opposed...
  
  
• Scene
• Scene a faire
• Sea shanty
  Sea shanty
  A shanty is a type of work song that was once commonly sung to accompany labor on board large merchant sailing vessels. Shanties became ubiquitous in the 19th century era of the wind-driven packet and clipper ships...
  
  
• Semiotics
  Semiotics
  Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes , indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication...
  
  
• Semiotic literary criticism
  Semiotic literary criticism
  Semiotic literary criticism, also called literary semiotics, is the approach to literary criticism informed by the theory of signs or semiotics...
  
  
• Setting
  Setting (fiction)
  In fiction, setting includes the time, location, and everything in which a story takes place, and initiates the main backdrop and mood for a story. Setting has been referred to as story world or milieu to include a context beyond the immediate surroundings of the story. Elements of setting may...
  
  
• Shanty
  Sea shanty
  A shanty is a type of work song that was once commonly sung to accompany labor on board large merchant sailing vessels. Shanties became ubiquitous in the 19th century era of the wind-driven packet and clipper ships...
  
  
• Serial
• Sestet
  Sestet
  A sestet is the name given to the second division of an Italian sonnet , which must consist of an octave, of eight lines, succeeded by a sestet, of six lines. The first documented user of this poetical form was the Italian poet, Petrarch. In the usual course the rhymes are arranged abc abc, but...
  
  
• Shakespearean sonnet
• Sicilian octave
  Sicilian octave
  The Sicilian octave is a verse form consisting of eight lines of eleven syllables each, called a hendecasyllable. The form is common in late medieval Italian poetry. In English poetry, iambic pentameter is often used instead of syllabics...
  
  
• Simile
  Simile
  A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two different things, usually by employing the words "like", "as". Even though both similes and metaphors are forms of comparison, similes indirectly compare the two ideas and allow them to remain distinct in spite of their similarities, whereas...
  
  
• Slant rhyme
  Half rhyme
  Half rhyme or slant rhyme, sometimes called sprung, near rhyme, oblique rhyme, off rhyme or imperfect rhyme, is consonance on the final consonants of the words involved . Many half/slant rhymes are also eye rhymes.Half/slant rhyme is widely used in Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and Icelandic verse...
  
  
• Slice of life
  Slice of life
  Slice of life is a phrase describing the use of mundane realism depicting everyday experiences in art and entertainment.-Theater:The theatrical term refers to a naturalistic representation of real life, sometimes used as an adjective, as in "a play with 'slice of life' dialogue." The term...
  
  
• Sobriquet
  Sobriquet
  A sobriquet is a nickname, sometimes assumed, but often given by another. It is usually a familiar name, distinct from a pseudonym assumed as a disguise, but a nickname which is familiar enough such that it can be used in place of a real name without the need of explanation...
  
  
• Soliloquy
  Soliloquy
  A soliloquy is a device often used in drama whereby a character relates his or her thoughts and feelings to him/herself and to the audience without addressing any of the other characters, and is delivered often when they are alone or think they are alone. Soliloquy is distinct from monologue and...
  
  
• Sonnet
  Sonnet
  A sonnet is one of several forms of poetry that originate in Europe, mainly Provence and Italy. A sonnet commonly has 14 lines. The term "sonnet" derives from the Occitan word sonet and the Italian word sonetto, both meaning "little song" or "little sound"...
  
  
• Sonneteer
• Speaker
  Grammatical person
  Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns...
  
  
• Spenserian stanza
  Spenserian stanza
  The Spenserian stanza is a fixed verse form invented by Edmund Spenser for his epic poem The Faerie Queene. Each stanza contains nine lines in total: eight lines in iambic pentameter followed by a single 'Alexandrine' line in iambic hexameter. The rhyme scheme of these lines is...
  
  
• Sprung rhythm
  Sprung rhythm
  Sprung rhythm is a poetic rhythm designed to imitate the rhythm of natural speech. It is constructed from feet in which the first syllable is stressed and may be followed by a variable number of unstressed syllables...
  
  
• Strambotto
  Ottava rima
  Ottava rima is a rhyming stanza form of Italian origin. Originally used for long poems on heroic themes, it later came to be popular in the writing of mock-heroic works. Its earliest known use is in the writings of Giovanni Boccaccio....
  
  
• Stanza
  Stanza
  In poetry, a stanza is a unit within a larger poem. In modern poetry, the term is often equivalent with strophe; in popular vocal music, a stanza is typically referred to as a "verse"...
  
  
• Static character
• Stigma of print
  Stigma of print
  The stigma of print is the concept that an informal social convention restricted the literary works of aristocrats in the Tudor and Jacobean age to private and courtly audiences — as opposed to commercial endeavors — at the risk of social disgrace if violated, and which obliged the author to...
  
  
• Stereotype
  Stereotype
  A stereotype is a popular belief about specific social groups or types of individuals. The concepts of "stereotype" and "prejudice" are often confused with many other different meanings...
  
  
• Stream of consciousness
• Structuralism
  Structuralism
  Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...
  
  
• Subplot
  Subplot
  A subplot is a secondary plot strand that is a supporting side story for any story or the main plot. Subplots may connect to main plots, in either time and place or in thematic significance...
  
  
• Syllogism
  Syllogism
  A syllogism is a kind of logical argument in which one proposition is inferred from two or more others of a certain form...
  
  
• Symbol
  Symbol
  A symbol is something which represents an idea, a physical entity or a process but is distinct from it. The purpose of a symbol is to communicate meaning. For example, a red octagon may be a symbol for "STOP". On a map, a picture of a tent might represent a campsite. Numerals are symbols for...
  
  
• Synecdoche
  Synecdoche
  Synecdoche , meaning "simultaneous understanding") is a figure of speech in which a term is used in one of the following ways:* Part of something is used to refer to the whole thing , or...
  
  
• Synaesthesia
  Synesthesia in literature
  Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which one or more sensory modalities become linked. However, for over a century, the term synesthesia has also been used to refer to artistic and poetic devices which attempt to express a linkage between the senses...
  
  
• Syntax
  Syntax
  In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....
  
  

T

Tone: very vague critical term usually designating the mood or atmosphere of a work, although in some more restricted uses it refers to the author's attitude to the reader (e.g. formal, intimate, pompous) or to the subject-matter (e.g. ironic, light, solemn, satiric, sentimental).
Example:

Theme: salient abstract idea that emerges from a literary work's treatment of its subject-matter; or a topic recurring in a number of literary works.

Example: While the subject of a work is described concretely in terms of its action (e.g. 'the adventures of a newcomer in the big city'), its theme or themes will be described in more abstract terms (e.g. love, war, revenge, betrayal, fate, etc.).

• Tautology
  Tautology (rhetoric)
  Tautology is an unnecessary or unessential repetition of meaning, using different and dissimilar words that effectively say the same thing...
  
  
• Tableau
  Tableau vivant
  Tableau vivant is French for "living picture." The term describes a striking group of suitably costumed actors or artist's models, carefully posed and often theatrically lit. Throughout the duration of the display, the people shown do not speak or move...
  
  
• Tail rhyme
• Tagelied
  Tagelied
  The Tagelied is a particular form of mediaeval German language lyric, taken and adapted from the Provençal troubadour tradition by the German Minnesinger...
  
  
• Tale
• Techne
  Techne
  Techne, or techné, as distinguished from episteme, is etymologically derived from the Greek word τέχνη which is often translated as craftsmanship, craft, or art. It is the rational method involved in producing an object or accomplishing a goal or objective...
  
  
• Telestich
• Tenor
  Tenor
  The tenor is a type of male singing voice and is the highest male voice within the modal register. The typical tenor voice lies between C3, the C one octave below middle C, to the A above middle C in choral music, and up to high C in solo work. The low extreme for tenors is roughly B2...
  
  
• Tension
  Suspense
  Suspense is a feeling of uncertainty and anxiety about the outcome of certain actions, most often referring to an audience's perceptions in a dramatic work. Suspense is not exclusive to fiction, though. Suspense may operate in any situation where there is a lead-up to a big event or dramatic...
  
  
• Tercet
  Tercet
  A tercet is composed of three lines of poetry, forming a stanza or a complete poem. English-language haiku is an example of an unrhymed tercet poem...
  
  
• Terza rima
  Terza rima
  Terza rima is a rhyming verse stanza form that consists of an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme. It was first used by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri.-Form:Terza rima is a three-line stanza using chain rhyme in the pattern A-B-A, B-C-B, C-D-C, D-E-D...
  
  
• Tetrameter
  Tetrameter
  Tetrameter: [ti'tramitə]; te·tram·e·ter; a verse of four measuresOrigin: early 17th century : from late Latin tetrametrus, originally neuter from Greek tetrametros 'having four measures,' from tetra- 'four' + metron 'measure'....
  
  
• Tetrastich
• Text
  Text (literary theory)
  A text, within literary theory, is a coherent set of symbols that transmits some kind of informative message. This set of symbols is considered in terms of the informative message's content, rather than in terms of its physical form or the medium in which it is represented...
  
  
• Textual criticism
  Textual criticism
  Textual criticism is a branch of literary criticism that is concerned with the identification and removal of transcription errors in the texts of manuscripts...
  
  
• Textuality
  Textuality
  Textuality is a concept in linguistics and literary theory that refers to the attributes that distinguish the text as an object of study in those fields...
  
  
• Texture
  Structure
  Structure is a fundamental, tangible or intangible notion referring to the recognition, observation, nature, and permanence of patterns and relationships of entities. This notion may itself be an object, such as a built structure, or an attribute, such as the structure of society...
  
  
• Theater of Cruelty
• Theater of the Absurd
• Theme
  Theme (literature)
  A theme is a broad, message, or moral of a story. The message may be about life, society, or human nature. Themes often explore timeless and universal ideas and are almost always implied rather than stated explicitly. Along with plot, character,...
  
  
• Thesis
  Thesis
  A dissertation or thesis is a document submitted in support of candidature for an academic degree or professional qualification presenting the author's research and findings...
  
  
• Thesis play
• Third person narrative
• Threnody
  Threnody
  A threnody is a song, hymn or poem of mourning composed or performed as a memorial to a dead person. The term originates from the Greek word threnoidia, from threnos + oide ; ultimately, from the Proto-Indo-European root wed- that is also the precursor of such words as "ode", "tragedy", "comedy",...
  
  
• Tirade
• Tone
  Tone (literature)
  Tone is a literary technique that is a part of composition, which encompasses the attitudes toward the subject and toward the audience implied in a literary work. Tone may be formal, informal, intimate, solemn, somber, playful, serious, ironic, guilty, condescending, or many other possible attitudes...
  
  
• Tract
  Tract (literature)
  A tract is a literary work, and in current usage, usually religious in nature. The notion of what constitutes a tract has changed over time. By the early part of the 21st century, these meant small pamphlets used for religious and political purposes, though far more often the former. They are...
  
  
• Tractarian Movement
  Oxford Movement
  The Oxford Movement was a movement of High Church Anglicans, eventually developing into Anglo-Catholicism. The movement, whose members were often associated with the University of Oxford, argued for the reinstatement of lost Christian traditions of faith and their inclusion into Anglican liturgy...
  
  
• Tragedy
  Tragedy
  Tragedy is a form of art based on human suffering that offers its audience pleasure. While most cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, tragedy refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of...
  
  
• Tragedy of blood
• Tragic flaw
• Tragic hero
  Tragic hero
  A tragic hero is the main character in a tragedy. Tragic heroes appear in the dramatic works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster, Marston, Corneille, Racine, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Strindberg, and many other writers.-Aristotle's tragic hero:Aristotle...
  
  
• Tragic irony
• Tragicomedy
  Tragicomedy
  Tragicomedy is fictional work that blends aspects of the genres of tragedy and comedy. In English literature, from Shakespeare's time to the nineteenth century, tragicomedy referred to a serious play with either a happy ending or enough jokes throughout the play to lighten the mood.-Classical...
  
  
• Tranche de vie
  Slice of life
  Slice of life is a phrase describing the use of mundane realism depicting everyday experiences in art and entertainment.-Theater:The theatrical term refers to a naturalistic representation of real life, sometimes used as an adjective, as in "a play with 'slice of life' dialogue." The term...
  
  
• Transcendentalism
  Transcendentalism
  Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement that developed in the 1830s and 1840s in the New England region of the United States as a protest against the general state of culture and society, and in particular, the state of intellectualism at Harvard University and the doctrine of the Unitarian...
  
  
• Transferred epithet
• Transition
  Transition (fiction)
  Transitions in fiction are words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, or punctuation that may be used to signal various changes in a story, including changes in time, location, point-of-view character, mood, tone, emotion, and pace...
  
  
• Translation
  Translation
  Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. Whereas interpreting undoubtedly antedates writing, translation began only after the appearance of written literature; there exist partial translations of the Sumerian Epic of...
  
  
• Travesty
  Burlesque
  Burlesque is a literary, dramatic or musical work intended to cause laughter by caricaturing the manner or spirit of serious works, or by ludicrous treatment of their subjects...
  
  
• Triad
  Triad
  Triad is a term used to describe many branches of Chinese criminal organizations based in Hong Kong, Vietnam, Macau, Taiwan, China, and also in countries with significant Chinese populations, such as Malaysia, Singapore, the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom...
  
  
• Tribe of Ben
• Tribrach
  Tribrach (poetry)
  A tribrach is a metrical foot used in formal poetry and Greek and Latin verse. In quantitative meter , it consists of three short syllables; in accentual-syllabic verse , the tribrach consists of three unstressed syllables. According to some sources, another name for this meter is choree, from the...
  
  
• Trimeter
  Trimeter
  In poetry, a trimeter is a metre of three metrical feet per line—example:...
  
  
• Triolet
  Triolet
  A triolet is a three stanza poem of eight lines. Its rhyme scheme is ABaAabAB and often all lines are in iambic tetrameter: the first, fourth and seventh lines are identical, as are the second and final lines, thereby making the initial and final couplets identical as well.-Examples:The form...
  
  
• Triple rhyme
• Triple meter
• Triple rhythm
• Triplet
  Tercet
  A tercet is composed of three lines of poetry, forming a stanza or a complete poem. English-language haiku is an example of an unrhymed tercet poem...
  
  
• Tristich
• Tritagonist
• Trivium
• Trobar clus
  Trobar clus
  Trobar clus , or closed form, was a complex and obscure style of poetry used by troubadours for their more discerning audiences, and it was only truly appreciated by an elite few. It was developed extensively by Marcabru, but by 1200 its inaccessibility led to its disappearance...
  
  
• Trochee
  Trochee
  A trochee or choree, choreus, is a metrical foot used in formal poetry consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one...
  
  
• Trope (literature)
  Trope (literature)
  A literary trope is the usage of figurative language in literature, or a figure of speech in which words are used in a sense different from their literal meaning...
  
  
• Troubadour
  Troubadour
  A troubadour was a composer and performer of Old Occitan lyric poetry during the High Middle Ages . Since the word "troubadour" is etymologically masculine, a female troubadour is usually called a trobairitz....
  
  
• Trouvère
  Trouvère
  Trouvère , sometimes spelled trouveur , is the Northern French form of the word trobador . It refers to poet-composers who were roughly contemporary with and influenced by the troubadours but who composed their works in the northern dialects of France...
  
  
• Truncated line
  Acatalectic
  An acatalectic line of verse is one having the metrically complete number of syllables in the final foot. When talking about poetry written in English the term is arguably of limited significance or utility, at least by comparison to its antonym, catalectic, for the simple reason that acatalexis...
  
  
• Tumbling verse
• Type character
• Type scene
  Type scene
  A type scene is a literary convention employed by a narrator across a set of scenes, or related to scenes already familiar to the audience. The similarities with, and differences from, the established type are used to illuminate developments in plot and character...
  
  

U

• Ubi sunt
  Ubi sunt
  Ubi sunt is a phrase taken from the Latin Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?, meaning "Where are those who were before us?"...
  
  
• Underground culture
  Underground art
  Underground art, as with underground music and underground film, is a term that seeks to describe art forms that are aloof to the mainstream art world, are illegal, taboo, unconventional, rebellious or revolutionary...
  
  
• Underground press
  Underground press
  The underground press were the independently published and distributed underground papers associated with the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and other western nations....
  
  
• Understatement
  Understatement
  Understatement is a form of speech which contains an expression of less strength than what would be expected. This is not to be confused with euphemism, where a polite phrase is used in place of a harsher or more offensive expression....
  
  
• Unities
• Unity
  Classical unities
  The classical unities, Aristotelian unities or three unities are rules for drama derived from a passage in Aristotle's Poetics. In their neoclassical form they are as follows:...
  
  
• Universality (disambiguation)
• University Wits
  University Wits
  The University Wits were a group of late 16th century English playwrights who were educated at the universities and who became playwrights and popular secular writers...
  
  
• Unobtainium
  Unobtainium
  In engineering, fiction, and thought experiments, unobtainium is any extremely rare, costly, or impossible material, or device needed to fulfill a given design for a given application. The properties of any particular unobtainium depend on the intended use...
  
  
• Utopia
  Utopia
  Utopia is an ideal community or society possessing a perfect socio-politico-legal system. The word was imported from Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The term has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempt...
  
  
• Utopian and dystopian fiction
  Utopian and dystopian fiction
  The utopia and its offshoot, the dystopia, are genres of literature that explore social and political structures. Utopian fiction is the creation of an ideal world, or utopia, as the setting for a novel. Dystopian fiction is the opposite: creation of a nightmare world, or dystopia...
  
  
• Unreliable narrator
  Unreliable narrator
  An unreliable narrator is a narrator, whether in literature, film, or theatre, whose credibility has been seriously compromised. The term was coined in 1961 by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction. This narrative mode is one that can be developed by an author for a number of reasons, usually...
  
  

V

• Variable syllable
• Variorum
  Variorum
  A variorum is a work that collates all known variants of a text. It is a work of textual criticism, whereby all variations and emendations are set side by side so that a reader can track how textual decisions have been made in the preparation of a text for publication...
  
  
• Varronian satire
  Menippean satire
  The genre of Menippean satire is a form of satire, usually in prose, which has a length and structure similar to a novel and is characterized by attacking mental attitudes instead of specific individuals...
  
   (Menippean satire)
• Vates
  Vates
  The earliest Latin writers used vātēs to denote "prophets" and soothsayers in general; the word fell into disuse in Latin until it was revived by Virgil...
  
  
• Vaudeville
  Vaudeville
  Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill...
  
  
• Vehicle
  Vehicle
  A vehicle is a device that is designed or used to transport people or cargo. Most often vehicles are manufactured, such as bicycles, cars, motorcycles, trains, ships, boats, and aircraft....
  
  
• Verb displacement
  Verb displacement
  Verb displacement as it relates to prose, is a technique used to impart a lyrical or poetic feel to a phrase, sentence, or paragraph. This technique finds particular expression in minimalist literature....
  
  
• Verbal irony
  Irony
  Irony is a rhetorical device, literary technique, or situation in which there is a sharp incongruity or discordance that goes beyond the simple and evident intention of words or actions...
  
  
• Verisimilitude
  Verisimilitude (literature)
  Verisimilitude, with the meaning "of being true or real" is a likeness or resemblance of the truth, reality or a fact's probability. It comes from Latin verum meaning truth and similis meaning similar.-Original roots:...
  
  
• Verism
  Verism
  Verism is the artistic preference of contemporary everyday subject matter instead of the heroic or legendary in art and literature; a form of realism. The word comes from Latin verus .-In Roman art:...
  
  
• Vers de société
  Vers de société
  Vers de société, a term for social or familiar poetry, which was originally borrowed from the French, and has now come to rank as an English expression.-In France:...
  
  
• Verse
  Verse (poetry)
  A verse is formally a single line in a metrical composition, e.g. poetry. However, the word has come to represent any division or grouping of words in such a composition, which traditionally had been referred to as a stanza....
  
  
• Verse paragraph
  Verse paragraph
  Verse paragraphs are stanzas with no regular number of lines or groups of lines that make up units of sense. They are usually separated by blank lines.Verse paragraphs are frequently used in blank verse and in free verse....
  
  
• Vers libre
  Free verse
  Free verse is a form of poetry that refrains from consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or any other musical pattern.Poets have explained that free verse, despite its freedom, is not free. Free Verse displays some elements of form...
  
  
• Verso
• Victorianism
  Victorianism
  Victorianism is the name given to the attitudes, art, and culture of the later two-thirds of the 19th century. This usage is strong within social history and the study of literature, less so in philosophy. Many disciplines do not use the term, but instead prefer Victorian Era, or simply "Late 19th...
  
  
• Viewpoint
  Point of view (literature)
  The narrative mode is the set of methods the author of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical story uses to convey the plot to the audience. Narration, the process of presenting the narrative, occurs because of the narrative mode...
  
  
• Vignette
  Vignette (literature)
  In theatrical script writing, sketch stories, and poetry, a vignette is a short impressionistic scene that focuses on one moment or gives a trenchant impression about a character, an idea, or a setting and sometimes an object...
  
  
• Villain
  Villain
  A villain is an "evil" character in a story, whether a historical narrative or, especially, a work of fiction. The villain usually is the antagonist, the character who tends to have a negative effect on other characters...
  
  
• Villanelle
  Villanelle
  A villanelle is a poetic form that entered English-language poetry in the 19th century from the imitation of French models. The word derives from the Italian villanella from Latin villanus . A villanelle has only two rhyme sounds...
  
  
• Virelay
• Virgule
• Voice
  Writer's voice
  Writer's voice is the literary term used to describe the individual writing style of an author. Voice was generally considered to be a combination of a writer's use of syntax, diction, punctuation, character development, dialogue, etc., within a given body of text . Voice can be thought of in terms...
  
   (of the writer)
• Voice
  Voice (phonetics)
  Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds, with sounds described as either voiceless or voiced. The term, however, is used to refer to two separate concepts. Voicing can refer to the articulatory process in which the vocal cords vibrate...
  
   (in phonetics)
• Volta
  Volta (literature)
  In literature, the volta, also referred to as the turn, is the shift or point of dramatic change. The term is most frequently used in discussion of sonnet form, in which the volta marks a shift in thought...
  
  
• Vorticism
  Vorticism
  Vorticism, an offshoot of Cubism, was a short-lived modernist movement in British art and poetry of the early 20th century. It was based in London but international in make-up and ambition.-Origins:...
  
  
• Vulgate
  Vulgate
  The Vulgate is a late 4th-century Latin translation of the Bible. It was largely the work of St. Jerome, who was commissioned by Pope Damasus I in 382 to make a revision of the old Latin translations...
  
  

W

• Wardour Street English
• Weak ending
• Weak foot
• Well-made play
  Well-made play
  The well-made play is a genre of drama from the 19th century that Eugène Scribe first codified and that Victorien Sardou developed. By the mid-19th century, it had entered into common use as a derogatory term...
  
  
• Wellerism
  Wellerism
  Wellerisms, named after Sam Weller in Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers, make fun of established clichés and proverbs by showing that they are wrong in certain situations, often when taken literally. In this sense, wellerisms that include proverbs are a type of anti-proverb...
  
  
• Western fiction
  Western fiction
  Western fiction is a genre of literature set in the American Old West frontier and typically set from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century. Well-known writers of Western fiction include Zane Grey from the early 1900s and Louis L'Amour from the mid 20th century...
  
  
• Wimmering
• Wit
  Wit
  Wit is a form of intellectual humour, and a wit is someone skilled in making witty remarks. Forms of wit include the quip and repartee.-Forms of wit:...
  
  
• Word accent
• Wrenched accent
• Watermark
  Watermark
  A watermark is a recognizable image or pattern in paper that appears as various shades of lightness/darkness when viewed by transmitted light , caused by thickness or density variations in the paper...