Literary Terms and Theories: A Comprehensive Guide
Literary Terms and Theories
Metrics
Alexandrine
A 14-syllable verse consisting of two hemistiches of seven syllables each, with accents on the sixth and thirteenth syllables. It was widely used in the lyric of Clergy Mester. The Alexandrine does not accept sinalefa between the two hemistiches.
Hemistich
Each of the two parts into which the caesura divides a line.
Caesura
In Greek and Latin poetry, the final syllable of a word that ends a foot and another begins. In modern poetry, a cut or break that divides a line into two parts or hemistiches.
Elegiac Couplet
A stanza of two lines, a hexameter and a pentameter. This classic form was very common in Greco-Roman poetry.
Hexameter
A verse from Greek and Latin poetry consisting of six feet composed of dactyls (a sequence of three syllables) and trochees (one long and one short syllable) or spondees. A dactyl is formed by a long syllable and two short, a spondee by two long syllables.
Enjambments
Occurs when a sentence does not end with a verse, but continues into the next.
Dolce Stil Novo
The Tuscan expression Dolce Stil Novo (“Sweet New Style”), coined by Francesco de Sanctis in the nineteenth century, refers to a group of Italian poets of the second half of the thirteenth century, including Guido Guinizelli, Guido Cavalcanti, Dante Alighieri, Lapo Gianni, Cino da Pistoia, Guianni Alfani, and Dino Frescobaldi. The expression comes from Dante’s Divine Comedy, specifically Purgatorio XXIV, v. 57, (“Di qua dal dolce stil novo ch’i’ odo”) where the Florentine poet Bonagiunta da Lucca refers to Dante’s work as opposed to the troubadour lyric.
Rhetoric
Allegory
An allegory is a literary or artistic figure that represents an abstract idea using human forms, animals, and everyday objects. Because it is evocative, it was used extensively in religious and secular contexts. It has been used since antiquity in Pharaonic Egypt, Ancient Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, and the Baroque period.
Alliteration
The sound effect produced by the consecutive repetition of the same phoneme, or similar phonemes. Alliteration often suggests images related to the senses.
Anaphora
Anaphora (from Latin Greek anaphora and this ἀναφορά “promotion, the above reference) is a rhetorical device of repetition, specifically the repetition of the first words of a verse. Anaphora is also considered the simple repetition of a word when it appears at the beginning of a sentence, or the use of demonstrative pronouns that refer to previously mentioned text.
Epithet
An epithet is an adjective that describes, defines, or indicates the characteristic quality of an object.
Hyperbaton
The hyperbaton (plural, hipérbatos) is the literary figure that disrupts or alters the natural syntactic order of a sentence.
Metonymy
The use of a word or phrase for another with which it has a relationship of contiguity, such as the effect for the cause (the painful bill, for the account to be paid), the concrete for the abstract (some are born with a star…), the instrument for the person using it (one of the best pens in the country for a writer), and other similar constructions. Borges cites two examples from Lugones: “arid camel” and “studious lamps,” and one from Virgil: “Ibant Obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram” (They were walking dark under the night alone in the shadows). In all of them, we can speak of metonymic displacements.
Metaphor
Metaphor, from the Greek meta (beyond) and pherein (to carry), is a figure of speech that expresses a concept with a different meaning or in a different context than usual. It is one of the most appealing rhetorical devices.
Oxymoron
The combination of two opposing concepts in a single expression, thus forming a third concept. Since the literal sense of an oxymoron is ‘absurd’ (for example, “an eternal moment”), it forces the reader to seek a metaphorical meaning (in this case: a moment that, due to the intensity of the experience, makes you lose the sense of time).
Personification
The attribution of qualities of corporeal beings, animate and inanimate, or abstract entities, or human behaviors and qualities to things that are not, bringing them to life. It is a widely used resource in fables and fairy tales. Personification is one of the figures of fiction within literary figures.
Synesthesia
A figure of speech that links sensations perceived by different sensory organs.
Theory
Analepsis
A retrospective passage that breaks the chronological sequence of a literary work.
Prolepsis
A figure of speech in which the author anticipates the objection that could be made.
Flashback
An interruption in a literary story.
Catharsis
The effect that tragedy has on the viewer, raising and purifying compassion, fear, horror, and other emotions.
Mimesis
In classical aesthetics, the imitation of nature that is the essential purpose of art.
Diegesis
In literature, the narrative development of events.
Poetics
The Poetics[1] is a work by Aristotle, written in the fourth century BC. Its main theme is aesthetic reflection through the characterization and description of tragedy. The Poetics contains a work of identification and characterization of tragedy and other imitative arts. Alongside these considerations are others, less developed, about the history and comparison with poetry (the arts in general), linguistic considerations, and others on mimesis.
Chronotope
The term chronotope (Greek: kronos = time and topos = space, location) refers to the relations connecting temporal and spatial elements artistically assimilated into literature. The chronotope is the indissoluble space-time unit and its formal expression. In the same story, different chronotopes can coexist, articulating and relating the textual fabric, creating a special atmosphere and a certain effect.
Intertextuality
Intertextuality refers to the set of relationships that connect a particular text to other texts from various sources: the same author or, more commonly, from others, from the same period or earlier periods, with an explicit reference (literal or allusion, or otherwise) or appeal to a genre, a formula, or a vague or anonymous textual archetype.
Interior Monologue
Interior monologue (also known as ‘stream of consciousness’) is a literary technique that attempts to capture the flow of real-world pressure and the inner world imagined by one of the protagonists. In interior monologues, writers try to express hidden feelings or suppressed desires that cannot be expressed in words or actions. They are “different worlds inside people,” which in most cases, are hidden fantasies and thoughts that can never be achieved.
Aesthetics of Reception
The aesthetics of reception is one of several literary theories analyzing reader response to literary texts. This school emphasizes the reader’s mode of reception, conceived as a collective history. This textual analysis focuses on the scope of “negotiation” and “opposition” in the audience. This implies that a text is not always accepted by the audience, but that the reader interprets the meanings of the text based on their individual cultural background and experiences.