Terminology

Octave

An eight-line unit, which may constitute a stanza; or a section of a poem, as in the octave of a sonnet.

Iamb

An unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, as in to-DAY.

Nemesis

Arch-enemy of the protagonist. Examples: Hamlet and King Claudius, Hal and Hotspur, Beowulf and Grendel

Aside

Delivered directly to the audience without any other characters overhearing, the aside is a very short observation, whereas a soliloquy is a longer explanation of the character's thoughts.

Epigram

A brief witty poem, often satirical. Alexander Pope's "Epigram Engraved on the Collar of a Dog" exemplifies the genre: I am his Highness' dog at Kew; Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?

Hypophora

Figure of speech in which a character asks a question and immediately answers it. Example: FALSTAFF: What is honor? A word. What is in that word 'honor'? What is that 'honor'? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o' Wednesday.

Quatrain

Four-line Stanza

Apostrophe

A character breaks off from addressing one character to address a third party who may either be present or absent in the scene, or even to an inanimate object or intangible concept. Examples: "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio" (Hamlet addresses a skull.)

Antagonist

A character or force against which another character struggles. Example: Iago

Foil

A character who contrasts and parallels the main character in a play or story. Example: Laertes is a foil for Hamlet.

Static Character

A character who does not change: In Shakespeare's Othello, Desdemona is a major character, but one who is static.

Dynamic Character

A character who is capable of change: Othello is a major character who is dynamic, exhibiting an ability to change.

Metaphor

A comparison between essentially unlike things without an explicitly comparative word such as like or as. An example is "My love is a red, red rose," from Robert Burns's "A Red, Red Rose."

Irony

A contrast or discrepancy between what is said and what is meant or between what happens and what is expected to happen in life and in literature. In verbal irony, characters say the opposite of what they mean. In irony of circumstance or situation, the opposite of what is expected occurs.

Metonymy

A figure of speech in which a closely related term is substituted for an object or idea. An example: "We have always remained loyal to the crown."

Synedoche

A figure of speech in which a part is substituted for the whole. An example: "Lend me a hand."

Simile

A figure of speech involving a comparison between unlike things using like, as, or as though. An example: "My love is like a red, red rose."

Hyperbole

A figure of speech involving exaggeration. John Donne uses hyperbole in his poem: "Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star."

Figurative language

A form of language use in which writers and speakers convey something other than the literal meaning of their words. Examples include hyperbole or exaggeration, litotes or understatement, simile and metaphor, which employ comparison, and synecdoche and metonymy, in which a part of a thing stands for the whole.

Gothic Novel

A genre or mode of literature and film that combines fiction and horror, death, and at times romance. Examples: Frankenstein

Parody

A humorous, mocking imitation of a literary work, sometimes sarcastic. Example: Henry Fielding's Shamela (An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews) based on Joseph Richardson's novel Pamela

Pyrrhic

A metrical foot with two unstressed syllables ("of the").

Ballad

A narrative poem written in four-line stanzas, characterized by swift action and narrated in a direct style.

Soliloquy

A speech that a character makes in a work of drama only to him or herself without any other characters overhearing. Example: To be or not to be speech from Hamlet

Dactyl

A stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones, as in FLUT-ter-ing or BLUE-ber-ry. The following playful lines illustrate double dactyls, two dactyls per line: Higgledy, piggledy, Emily Dickinson Gibbering, jabbering.

Tercet

A three-line stanza, as the stanzas in Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind."

Trochee

An accented syllable followed by an unaccented one, as in FOOT-ball.

Understatement

A figure of speech in which a writer or speaker says less than what he or she means; the opposite of exaggeration. The last line of Frost's "Birches" illustrates this literary device: "One could do worse than be a swinger of birches."

Farce

A lighthearted comedy that centers around a ridiculous plot that usually involves exaggerated and improbable events. Farces usually do not have much character development, but instead rely on absurdity, physical humor, and a skillful exploitation of a situation. Example: Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest

Blank verse

A line of poetry or prose in unrhymed iambic pentameter. Examples: Shakespeare's sonnets, Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost.

Satire

A literary work that criticizes human misconduct and ridicules vices, stupidities, and follies. Swift's Gulliver's Travels is a famous example.

Epic

A long narrative poem that records the adventures of a hero. Epics typically chronicle the origins of a civilization and embody its central values. Example: Milton's Paradise Lost.

Aubade

A love lyric in which the speaker complains about the arrival of the dawn, when he must part from his lover. Example: John Donne's "The Sun Rising"

Elegy

A lyric poem that laments the dead. Example: W.H. Auden's "In Memory of William Butler Yeats"

Foot

A metrical unit composed of stressed and unstressed syllables. For example, an iamb or iambic foot is represented by ˘', that is, an unaccented syllable followed by an accented one. Frost's line "Whose woods these are I think I know" contains four iambs, and is thus an iambic foot.

Stream of Consciousness Novel

A narrative device that attempts to give the written equivalent of the character's thought processes, either in a loose interior monologue (see below), or in connection to his or her actions. Examples: James Joyce's Ulysses and American writer Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway

Epistolary Novel

A novel written as a series of documents. The usual form is letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings and other documents. Example: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Samuel Richardson's Pamela

Villanelle

A poem that consists of 19 lines divided into five tercets (three line stanzas) and one quatrain. Example: Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night."

Sprung Rhythm

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. Gerald Manley Hopkins "discovered" it in the 1800s.

Euphemism

A polite or mild word or expression used to refer to something embarrassing, taboo, or unpleasant.Lady Macbeth does not say outright that Macbeth must kill Duncan, but instead that Duncan "must be provided for."

Enjambment

A run-on line of poetry in which logical and grammatical sense carries over from one line into the next. An enjambed line differs from an end-stopped line in which the grammatical and logical sense is completed within the line. In the opening lines of Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess," for example, the first line is end-stopped and the second enjambed: That's my last Duchess painted on the wall, Looking as if she were alive. I call That piece a wonder, now....

Monologue

A speech that one character delivers aloud to express his or her inner thoughts to other characters, or at least overheard by other characters if delivered to the audience. Example: King Henry V's "St. Crispin's Day speech" is one of the most famous monologue examples in all of Shakespeare's works, and indeed of theater. The purpose of this monologue is to spur Henry's men on to action and get them ready for the next day's battle. This monologue gives the troops confidence and pride in order that they may triumph against difficult odds.

Caesura

A strong pause within a line of verse. Example: the following stanza from Hardy's "The Man He Killed": He thought he'd 'list, perhaps, Off-hand-like--just as I-- Was out of work-had sold his traps-- No other reason why.

Allegory

A symbolic narrative in which the surface details imply a secondary meaning. Example: Pilgrim's Progress, Christina Rossetti's poem "Up-Hill"

Closed form

A type of form or structure in poetry characterized by regularity and consistency in such elements as rhyme, line length, and metrical pattern. Sonnets and Villanelle are examples.

Pentameter

A type of poetic meter formed by five metrical feet per line. A metrical foot is a grouping of one stressed syllable with one to two unstressed syllables that repeats in a regular pattern. Example of Iambic Pentameter: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date.

Free Verse

A type of poetry that does not contain patterns of rhyme or meter.

Open verse

A type of structure or form in poetry characterized by freedom from regularity and consistency in such elements as rhyme, line length, metrical pattern, and overall poetic structure.

Innuendo

A veiled remark about someone or something that indirectly insinuates something bad or impolite/inappropriate. Shakepeare is full of them.

Connotation

The associations called up by a word that goes beyond its dictionary meaning.

Recognition

The point at which a character understands his or her situation as it really is. Example: Othello comes to understand his situation in Act V.

Alliteration

The repetition of consonant sounds, especially at the beginning of words.

Assonance

The repetition of similar vowel sounds in a sentence or a line of poetry or prose, as in "I rose and told him of my woe."

Denouement

The resolution of the plot of a literary work. The denouement of Hamlet takes place after the catastrophe, with the stage littered with corpses. During the denouement Fortinbras makes an entrance and a speech, and Horatio speaks his sweet lines in praise of Hamlet.

Aposiopesis

The rhetorical device of breaking off in the middle of speech. The sentence or thought is unfinished and the end left to the imagination of the interlocutor or audience. This can signify a speaker's unwillingness or inability to continue for any number of reasons. Usually these reasons have to do with an extreme emotion interfering with continuous thought processes, such as fear, anger, joy, etc.

Onomatopoeia

The use of words to imitate the sounds they describe. Words such as buzz and crack are onomatopoetic. The following line from Pope's "Sound and Sense" onomatopoetically imitates in sound what it describes: When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw, The line too labors, and the words move slow. Most often, however, onomatopoeia refers to words and groups of words, such as Tennyson's description of the "murmur of innumerable bees," which attempts to capture the sound of a swarm of bees buzzing.

Antanaclasis

To repeat a word or phrase but with a different meaning than in the first case. Often used humorously, and is found in many pun examples. Example from Henry V: PISTOL says: To England will I steal, and there I'll steal (first means sneak, second means to thieve) Othello: Put out the light, and then put out the light (first, turn off the light, second, kill the wife)

Couplet

Two rhyming lines in a poem

Anapest

Two unaccented syllables followed by an accented one, as in com-pre-HEND or in-ter-VENE. An anapestic meter rises to the accented beat as in Byron's lines from "The Destruction of Sennacherib": The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold; And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea, When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee. This stanza is an example of anapestic tetrameter. This means that each line has four metrical feet, each of which is an anapest. Each line therefore contains twelve syllables. Though anapestic meter is often considered to be more light-hearted, this is a quite serious poem about the Assyrian king Sennacherib's attempt to invade Jerusalem. Lord Byron intentionally used anapestic meter to mimic the sound of horses riding into battle.

Rising of meter

Poetic meters such as iambic and anapestic that move or ascend from an unstressed to a stressed syllable.

Falling meters

Poetic meters such as trochaic and dactylic that move or fall from a stressed to an unstressed syllable. The nonsense line, "Higgledy, piggledy," is dactylic.

Anadiplosis

Repeating or doubling a term to make it more significant. Example from Shakepeare's RICHARD II: The love of wicked men converts to fear; That fear to hate, and hate turns one or both To worthy danger and deserved death.

Epizeuxis

Repetition that shows an extreme emotion on the part of the speaker. Example: "Out, out, brief candle!" (MacBeth) and the excerpt from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea! And never a saint took pity on My soul in agony.

Elision

The omission of an unstressed vowel or syllable to preserve the meter of a line of poetry. Alexander Pope uses elision in "Sound and Sense": "Flies o'er th' unbending corn...."

Elizabethan Sonnet

Three quatrains and one couplet. The rhyme scheme for the English sonnet is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.

Oxymoron

Two words placed close together which are contradictory, yet have truth in them. Example: (from Romeo & Juliet) O heavy lightness, serious vanity, Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms! Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health, Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!

Litote

Understatement