Literary terms Explanation
Allegory
Allegory is a rhetorical device that creates a close, one-to-one comparison. An allegorical comparison of 21st century Britain to a hive might point out that Britain and the hive have queens, workers and soldiers.
Burlesque
Satire that uses caricature.
Colloquial
Colloquial language is the informal language of conversation.
Denouement
The culmination or result of an action, plan or plot.
Diatribe
An impassioned rant or angry speech of denunciation.
Empiricism
As a philosophy empiricism means basing knowledge on direct, sensory perceptions of the world. Empirical means seeking out facts established by experience not theory.
Foreground
To emphasise or make prominent.
Form
The type of literary expression chosen by an author
Genre
A more precise definition of the different literary forms. There are general categories, such as poetry, drama, prose. There are specific categories within these larger divisions, so a sonnet is a specific genre within the larger genre of poetry.
Hyperbole
The use of exaggeration for effect: ‘The most daring, prodigious, death-defying feat attempted by man or woman in all human history!’
Intertextuality
A term describing the many ways in which texts can be interrelated, ranging from direct quotation or echoing, to parody.
Meta
From the Greek meaning ‘above or beyond’. Metaphysics’ is ‘above’ or ‘beyond’ physics. ‘Meta’ is often used in compound words: metatext, metatheatre, etc. These words usually describe moments when a text goes beyond its own fictionality or makes readers/audience aware of the conventions of its fiction. An aside could be described as a ‘metatheatrical’ event. The audience offstage hear words the audience onstage cannot hear. Brecht’s alienation effect (Verfremdungseffekt), where a character suddenly addresses the audience directly, breaking the convention that the characters on stage do not notice the audience during a play, is a metatheatrical effect.
Metaphor
A comparison that creates a direct correspondence ‘society is a hive’ unlike a simile.
Modernism
The name given to experiments carried out in poetry, prose, and art from around 1920-1939. The relationship of Modernism with tradition is frequently complex but the appearance of a Modernist work is usually aggressively different to that of an older text. Often spelt with a capital: ‘Modernism’, ‘Modernity’ to distinguish the word from ‘modern’ meaning ‘up to date’.
Narrator/narrative voice
A narrator or a narrative voice conveys a story. Sometimes the narrator’s presence is emphasised, as in the ‘Dear Reader’ convention employed by Charlotte Bronte’s Villette (1853). This is called a first person narrative. Sometimes the story is told by an unseen author, as in George Orwell’s 1984 (1949). This is called a third person narrative. Some stories are told by an unreliable narrator. In these tales readers are expected to work out that the person who tells the story is biased, partial or mistaken in the views they put forward. The narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) is a narrator of this kind. By contrast the omniscient narrator maintains a god-like view of the story in order to provide shaping and commentary. This is the viewpoint usually adopted by George Eliot (1819-80) in her novels.
Oxymoron
Language device where two opposite words or meanings are used side by side e.g. ‘sour sweet’.
Parody
The reducing of another text to ridicule by hostile imitation.
Pathetic Fallacy
The use of setting, scenery or weather to mirror the mood of a human activity. Two people having an argument whilst a storm breaks out is an example. The technique is used to make sure the feelings of readers or audience are moved. See pathetic.
Poetic Justice
A literary version of the saying ‘hoist with his own petard’. The trapper is caught by the trap in an example of ironic but apt justice. Despite the word ‘poetic’, examples usually turn up in texts which are narrative and not necessarily poems.
Point of View/viewpoint
These words look as though they should be interchangeable but this is not always the case. A point of view is an opinion; a viewpoint can also be the foundation on which an opinion is based or, literally, a place from which a view can be enjoyed.
Postmodernism
A complex term. Postmodern texts tend to be aware of their own artifice, be filled with intertextual allusions, and ironic rather than sincere.
Reportage
Literally means reporting news but in literary criticism the word often means the inclusion of documentary material, or material which purports to be documentary, in a text. Mrs Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) contains documentary details about life in the Manchester slums that Mrs Gaskell observed first hand.
Satire
A destructive reduction of an idea, image, concept or text. It can employ exaggeration, mimicry, irony or tone.
Semantics
The study of how words create meaning.
Semantic field
The area of language from which a text draws most of its tropes.
Signifier/Signified
According to Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) meaning is created by the partnership of signifier (the indicator) and signified (the indicated). Together they make up a sign. Later semanticists and Postmodernists have questioned if the sign is as simple as Saussure’s ideas imply.
Simile
A comparison introduced with ‘like’ or ‘as’: ‘society is like a hive’.
Stream of Consciousness
The removal of conventional sentence structures and grammar in an attempt to imitate the free flow of thoughts. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Light House (1927) are examples.
Symbol
A symbol is more independent than a metaphor and less specific than an allegory. Where both metaphors and allegories have precise meanings or are ways of explaining a complex concept, symbols are often elusive in their exact meaning. The lighthouse of Virginia Wolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) is frequently seen as symbolic but opinions differ as to what it might represent.
Symbolism
The process of creating or detecting symbols within a work. Sometimes critics will talk of a text symbolising a larger concept or idea, irrespective of the author’s intention. Many critics have interpreted T .S. Elliot’s The Waste Land (1922) as symbolising post-WWI Britain, though Elliot always discouraged such an interpretation.
Text
A Postmodernist concept designed to eradicate distinction between literary genres. Some forms of Postmodernism collapse all types of human experience, including history, into text.
Transgressive
The crossing of a boundary of culture or taste, usually with a subversive intention. Vladimir Nabakov’s Lolita (1955) can be described as a transgressive text that challenges assumptions about sex, love, the age of consent and morality
Trope
Any of the devices (metaphors, similes, rhyme etc.) whereby art language differentiates itself from functional language.
Valorise
To invest with value.
Writing Back
A term which describes the appropriation of a text or genre and a rewriting in response. This is a technique frequently employed by Post-colonial writers or feminist writers. Rastafarianism reinterprets the Bible as text of black liberation; Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) rewrites the Bible to expose its anti-feminist implications.
