Glossary of Literary Terms

Repetition of initial consonant sounds in nearby words.

Repetition of vowel sounds within nearby words, without matching consonants.

Unrhymed iambic pentameter — Milton's medium in Paradise Lost, and Shakespeare's on stage.

Verse without regular metre or rhyme, organised by phrase and breath. Whitman's line is the founding English example.

A pause within a line of verse, often marked by punctuation.

A sentence running past the line ending without pause, so meaning turns on the break.

Rhymed iambic pentameter in pairs, closed at the couplet's end. Pope's instrument.

An eight-line stanza rhyming abababcc; Byron's vehicle in Don Juan, where the final couplet punctures the preceding six lines.

Interlocking three-line stanzas rhyming aba bcb cdc — Dante's form, used by Shelley in Ode to the West Wind.

A fourteen-line poem. Petrarchan form divides 8+6; Shakespearean form runs three quatrains and a couplet.

The turn in a sonnet where the argument shifts — at line 9 in the Petrarchan form, often at the couplet in the Shakespearean.

An extended lyric of serious address. Keats's 1819 odes are the English standard.

A poem of mourning. Milton's Lycidas, Shelley's Adonais, Arnold's Thyrsis form a pastoral elegiac line.

Narrative poem in four-line stanzas, often with refrain, drawn from oral tradition. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner is a literary ballad.

Autonomous couplets sharing a refrain and a rhyme before it, with the poet's name in the last couplet. Agha Shahid Ali established its real form in English.

A poem spoken by a character other than the poet, to a silent listener, revealing more than the speaker intends. Browning's form.

An extended, surprising comparison sustained by argument — the metaphysical poets' signature device.

Describing one sense in terms of another; Keats tastes sound and sees by scent in Ode to a Nightingale.

Attributing human feeling to nature. Ruskin coined the term, disapprovingly.

The set of objects or events that must stand in for an emotion in art. T.S. Eliot, 1919.

Pound's 1913 programme: direct treatment of the thing, no superfluous word, composition by musical phrase.

Narration that adopts a character's idiom without quotation marks, so the reader shares their colouring while remaining subject to irony. Austen's technique.

Rendering thought as it moves rather than as it is reported. Joyce and Woolf.

The direct presentation of a character's unspoken thought, as in Molly Bloom's closing chapter.

Henry James's method of filtering narrative through a single character's perception.

A narrator whose account the reader has cause to distrust. The governess in The Turn of the Screw.

A story containing another story. Heart of Darkness, Wuthering Heights, The Canterbury Tales.

A novel of formation, following a protagonist from youth to maturity. Great Expectations, A Portrait of the Artist.

A bildungsroman specifically about an artist's development.

A novel told in letters or documents. Walker's The Color Purple.

The supernatural narrated in the same register as the everyday, so neither is privileged. García Márquez.

Fiction that draws attention to its own status as fiction.

The dependence of a text on other texts; Kristeva's term, developing Bakhtin.

Beginning in the middle of the action, an epic convention.

A sudden revelation of a thing's essence; Joyce took the term from theology into aesthetics.

Forster's distinction in Aspects of the Novel: types built on a single quality, versus characters capable of surprising convincingly.

Forster's example: 'the king died and then the queen died' is story; 'the queen died of grief' is plot, because it supplies causality.

Steinbeck's alternation of the Joad narrative with general chapters, reframing a family's story as an economic process.

The purgation of pity and fear that Aristotle's Poetics assigns to tragedy.

The error or flaw that precipitates a tragic hero's fall.

Reversal of fortune, and the recognition that accompanies it.

Action, time, and place — a neoclassical rule derived loosely from Aristotle, which Shakespeare ignores and Ibsen observes.

A character alone on stage thinking aloud. Hamlet has seven.

A remark heard by the audience but not by other characters.

An implausible external agency resolving a plot.

Satire of the conventions of a fashionable class. Congreve, Sheridan, Wilde.

A drama built around a contested social question. Ibsen and Shaw; also used of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure.

Brecht's anti-illusionist practice, using interruption and the alienation effect (Verfremdungseffekt) to keep the audience critical.

Esslin's term for drama that stages the gap between the human demand for meaning and a silent universe. Beckett, Ionesco, Genet.

An ordinary domestic surface with an unexplained and unaccounted-for threat. Pinter.

Tennessee Williams's use of light, sound, and set symbolically rather than realistically.

Badal Sircar's free, portable performance without sets, lighting, costume, or ticketing.

Grotowski's reduction of theatre to the actor–spectator relation, stripping away everything else.

Imitation or representation; Aristotle's account of what art does, against Plato's suspicion of it.

I.A. Richards's method of close reading unattributed texts, which shaped Cambridge English.

Mid-century American practice treating the poem as a self-sufficient verbal object; sources include Eliot's essays.

Wimsatt and Beardsley's argument that the author's intention is neither available nor decisive for meaning.

Their companion argument against judging a work by its emotional effect on the reader.

Eliot's claim that thought and feeling separated in English poetry after the metaphysicals.

Ostranenie — Shklovsky's Russian Formalist term for art's renewal of perception by making the familiar strange.

Analysis of texts as systems of relations governed by underlying rules, following Saussure's account of the sign.

Saussure's two faces of the sign: the sound-image and the concept, related arbitrarily.

Derrida's reading practice, exposing how a text's argument depends on hierarchical oppositions its own logic cannot sustain.

The Western privileging of speech, presence, and the voice as guarantors of meaning.

Derrida's coinage combining difference and deferral: meaning arises from differences between signs and is never fully present.

In Foucault, the regulated system of statements determining what can be said, by whom, with what authority.

Foucault's insistence that forms of knowing and forms of control produce one another.

Surveillance that is possible but unverifiable, producing self-monitoring subjects.

Gramsci's account of rule secured through consent and culture rather than force.

Bakhtin's account of the novel as a contest of social voices rather than a single authorial one.

Bakhtin's term for the temporary inversion of hierarchy through festivity, laughter, and the grotesque body.

Reading texts as participants in the discourses of their period rather than reflections of them. Greenblatt, after Foucault.

Barthes's argument that a text's meaning is not fixed by its author's intention; the reader's birth costs the author's death.

Barthes's lisible and scriptible: texts that offer settled meaning to consume, versus texts that require the reader to produce it.

Said's term for the Western discourse constructing the East as a knowable, static Other, functioning as an instrument of rule.

Reading a metropolitan text alongside the colonial history it presupposes but does not narrate.

Those outside hegemonic structures of representation; Spivak asks whether such a position permits audible speech.

The damage done by imposing Western categories of knowledge while claiming merely to describe.

The tactical adoption of a unified group identity for political ends, while acknowledging it as constructed.

Bhabha's term for the mixed cultural forms produced in the colonial encounter, unsettling claims to purity on both sides.

Colonial imitation producing a subject almost the same but not quite — a resemblance that threatens the authority it copies.

The interstitial site of enunciation where cultural meaning is negotiated rather than inherited.

The francophone movement of Césaire and Senghor affirming Black cultural identity; Soyinka mocked it as tigritude.

Kamau Brathwaite's term for Caribbean vernacular as a literary medium, against Walcott's literary English.

Butler's account of gender as constituted by compelled repetition of acts, not expressed from an inner essence.

The framework requiring bodies to be coherently sexed, gendered, and desiring in order to be intelligible.

Showalter's programme for studying women's writing as a tradition in its own right rather than against male norms.

Cixous's call for a writing of the female body, outside masculine symbolic order.

Mulvey's account of a viewing position that constructs women as object; adapted widely in literary study.

Limbale's argument that Dalit writing requires its own criteria — authenticity and lived experience — rather than upper-caste standards of beauty.

The aesthetic emotion produced in the audience. Bharata's Natyashastra lists eight; a ninth, shanta, was added later.

The emotional state depicted, which combines with determinants and consequents to produce rasa.

Suggestion — Anandavardhana's argument that a poem's real meaning is what it suggests rather than what it states.

Crooked or deviant speech; Kuntaka's principle that poetic language works by artful departure from ordinary usage.

Figures of speech and ornament, the earliest organising category of Sanskrit poetics.

Style, understood as the arrangement of words characteristic of a school or region.

Propriety — Kshemendra's principle that every element must be fitting to its context.

Poetic excellences and faults, the evaluative categories of classical criticism.

Universalisation — the process by which a particular depicted emotion becomes available to any spectator.

A local legend of a place. Raja Rao shapes Kanthapura as one.

Autobiography, and specifically the dominant form of early Marathi Dalit writing, treating one life as evidence about a system.