Literary Terms- Figures of Speech

Archetype

A character, situation, or symbol that is familiar to people from all cultures because it occurs frequently in literature, myth, religion, or folklore.

Controlling metaphor

A controlling metaphor runs through an entire work and determines the form or nature of that work. The controlling metaphor in Anne Bradstreet's poem "The Author to Her Book" likens her book to a child.

Simile

A direct comparison made between two unlike things, using a word of comparison such as like, as, than, such as, or resembles.

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."

Prosopopoeia

A figure of speech in which an absent or imaginary person is represented as a speaking similar to personification

Oxymoron

A figure of speech that combines opposite or contradictory terms in a brief phrase.

Personification

A form of metaphor in which human characteristics are attributed to nonhuman things. Personification offers the writer a way to give the world life and motion by assigning familiar human behaviors and emotions to animals, inanimate objects, and abstract ideas. For example, in Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," the speaker refers to the urn as an "unravished bride of quietness."

Hyperbole

A gross over exaggeration used in order to make a point

Meiosis

A kind of humorous understatement that dismisses or belittles, especially by using terms that make something seem less significant than it really is or ought to be. Examples include "grease monkey" for a mechanic, or "shrink" for a psychiatrist.

Irony

A literary device that uses contradictory statements or situations to reveal a reality different from what appears to be true. It is ironic for a firehouse to burn down, or for a police station to be burglarized.

Contextual symbol

A literary or contextual symbol can be a setting, character, action, object, name, or anything else in a work that maintains its literal significance while suggesting other meanings. Such symbols go beyond conventional symbols; they gain their symbolic meaning within the context of a specific story. For example, the white whale in Melville's Moby-Dick takes on multiple symbolic meanings in the work, but these meanings do not automatically carry over into other stories about whales.

Metaphor

A metaphor is a figure of speech that makes a comparison between two unlike things, without using the word "like" or "as." Metaphors assert the identity of dissimilar things, as when Macbeth asserts that life is a "brief candle." Metaphors can be subtle and powerful, and can transform people, places, objects, and ideas into whatever the writer imagines them to be.

Symbol

A person, object, image, word, or event that evokes a range of additional meaning beyond and usually more abstract than its literal significance. Symbols are educational devices for evoking complex ideas without having to resort to painstaking explanations that would make a story more like an essay than an experience.

Pun

A play on words that relies on a word's having more than one meaning or sounding like another word. Shakespeare and other writers use puns extensively, for serious and comic purposes; in Romeo and Juliet (III.i.101), the dying Mercutio puns, "Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man."

Motif

A recurrent image word phrase represented object or action that tends to unify the literary work or that may be elaborated into a more general theme

Paradox

A statement that initially appears to be contradictory but then, on closer inspection, turns out to make sense. For example, John Donne ends his sonnet "Death, Be Not Proud" with the paradoxical statement "Death, thou shalt die." To solve the paradox, it is necessary to discover the sense that underlies the statement. Paradox is useful in poetry because it arrests a reader's attention by its seemingly stubborn refusal to make sense.

Image

A word, phrase, or figure of speech (especially a simile or a metaphor) that addresses the senses, suggesting mental pictures of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings, or actions. Images offer sensory impressions to the reader and also convey emotions and moods through their verbal pictures.

Apostrophe

An address, either to someone who is absent and therefore cannot hear the speaker or to something nonhuman that cannot comprehend. Apostrophe often provides a speaker the opportunity to think aloud.

Extended metaphor

An extended metaphor is a sustained comparison in which part or all of a poem consists of a series of related metaphors. Robert Francis' poem "Catch" relies on an extended metaphor that compares poetry to playing catch.

Implied metaphor

An implied metaphor is a more subtle comparison; the terms being compared are not so specifically explained. For example, to describe a stubborn man unwilling to leave, one could say that he was "a mule standing his ground." This is a fairly explicit metaphor; the man is being compared to a mule. But to say that the man "brayed his refusal to leave" is to create an implied metaphor, because the subject (the man) is never overtly identified as a mule.

Overstatement

An overstatement is when the author or speaker exaggerates to help the reader grasp the severity of the issue. An example would be "If students are allowed to wear whatever they want to school, their attire well inspire others to kill on a weekly basis."

Conventional symbol

Conventional symbols have meanings that are widely recognized by a society or culture. Some conventional symbols are the Christian cross, the Star of David, a swastika, or a nation's flag. Writers use conventional symbols to reinforce meanings.

Cosmic irony

Cosmic irony occurs when a writer uses God, destiny, or fate to dash the hopes and expectations of a character or of humankind in general. In cosmic irony, a discrepancy exists between what a character aspires to and what universal forces provide. Stephen Crane's poem "A Man Said to the Universe" is a good example of cosmic irony, because the universe acknowledges no obligation to the man's assertion of his own existence.

Dramatic irony

Dramatic irony creates a discrepancy between what a character believes or says and what the reader or audience member knows to be true.

Hyperbaton

Excursion from natural word order in various ways: "Theirs was a glory unsurpassed"; "It is a sad story but true."

Metaphysical conceit

It usually sets up an analogy between one entity's spiritual qualities and an object in the physical world and sometimes controls the whole structure of the poem.

Metonymy

Metonymy is a type of metaphor in which something closely associated with a subject is substituted for it. In this way, we speak of the "silver screen" to mean motion pictures, "the crown" to stand for the king, "the White House" to stand for the activities of the president.

Synecdoche

Synecdoche is a kind of metaphor in which a part of something is used to signify the whole, as when a gossip is called a "wagging tongue," or when ten ships are called "ten sails." Sometimes, synecdoche refers to the whole being used to signify the part, as in the phrase "Boston won the baseball game."

Verbal irony

Verbal irony is a figure of speech that occurs when a person says one thing but means the opposite. Sarcasm is a strong form of verbal irony that is calculated to hurt someone through, for example, false praise.

Dead metaphor

a metaphor that has become so overused that we no longer realize that is a figure of speech—we simply skip over the metaphorical connection it makes.

Mixed metaphor

is a metaphor that has gotten out of control and mixes its terms so that they are visually or imaginatively incompatible. "The President is a lame duck who is running out of gas."

Situational irony

ituational irony exists when there is an incongruity between what is expected to happen and what actually happens due to forces beyond human comprehension or control. The suicide of the seemingly successful main character in Edwin Arlington Robinson's poem "Richard Cory" is an example of situational irony.

Tenor

referring to the concept, object, or person meant in a metaphor

Periphrasis

substitution of a descriptive word or phrase for a name, "fickle mistress" for luck, "big man upstairs" for God

Vehicle

the image that carries the weight of the comparison