Literary Terms and Concepts

Alliteration – The repetition of initial consonant sounds.  For example: “the wild and wasteful ocean” (Henry V, 3.2.14).

Assonance – The repetition of vowel sounds.  For example: “Thus with imagined wing our swift scene flies” (Henry V, Chorus 3.1).  (The “i” in “wing” is in orange because it seems nearly assonant.)  Can you find the alliteration in this example?

Ellipses – The omission of a word or words in that have to be filled in by the reader.  Example: I went to the movies, and enjoyed.  (understand: and I enjoyed myself or and I enjoyed the movie).  For Shakespearean examples, click here.

Circumlocution – Using more words than necessary to express something.  Example: I went to the house of Hollywood pleasures (not: I went to the movies).  For Shakespearean examples, click here.

Anastrophe – Departure from the usual order of English syntax.  Example: To the movies I went.  For Shakespearean examples, click here.

Binary Opposition – Refers to our tendency to organize ideas through two opposite: Example: civilized vs. savage; mind vs. body; idealism vs. practicality; high culture vs. low culture, etc.  (Note: especially in modern literary and cultural studies, one interest is in how such binaries tend to break down and at key moments blur into one another.)

Foils – Two literary characters who share some qualities but are in at least one respect associated with opposite ideas, feelings or values.

Genre – a category of a literary work or any artwork based on shared qualities.  Examples of genres are the sonnet, the revenge tragedy, the romance novel, the heavy metal song.

Image – in literary studies, a visually rich moment in the text, which also often suggest broader ideas, feelings or values.  Other senses may be evoked as well.

Metatheatricality – Reference to playing a role or to the theater within a play. Sometimes the performance is explicit, as when Tamora and her sons pretend to be Revenge, Rape and Murder, and sometimes it is part of the way people behave in the fiction of the play, as when Titus “plays along” with Tamora’s deceit, pretending to be deceived by her.

Diction – The word choice of a piece of writing or speech, especially with reference to social register (high class, middling, or low class speech), emotion (angry or sad words, for example), or particular professions or sub-cultures (for example the language of a mechanic or the elementary school playground).

Denotation – The dictionary definition of a word.

Connotation – The culturally specific associations we have with a word, that cannot be got from the definition of the word itself.  Examples: inexpensive and cheap have about the same dictionary definition (see Denotation), but “inexpensive” is a more polite and positive word than cheap.  Likewise with car and automobile.  They both have the same denotative meaning, but “automobile” is a fancier world.  Another example: bureaucrat vs. civil servant.  The second term is positive, the first negative, though they both refer to the same thing.

Metaphor – The comparison one thing to something otherwise like it. Comparing a blueberry to a blackberry is not a metaphor, just a comparison, because they’re both fruits. However, calling the earth is a blueberry (a “blueberry spinning in space,” let’s say) is a metaphor.

Pun – The same word with two different meanings, often though not only for comic effect. For (a lame) example, it would be a pun to tell someone who just brought a new suit, “that suits you” (suit = article of clothing and suit = is appropriate for you).

Malapropism – A character’s unkowning use of the wrong (and often inappropriately wrong) word, with comic effect. For example, when Mistress Quickly uses the word “adultery” when she means to say “battery.”

Poetry – Writing organized by the line and the stanza (groups of lines, separated by white space). In Renaissance poetry (including Shakespeare) the lines usually have a regular length and rhythm, most often 10 syllables with an iambic beat of unstressed then stress syllables. The lines may also rhyme.

Prose – Writing organized by the sentence and the paragraph. This is the ordinary kind of writing we do all the time, which I’m doing right now in this sentence. Line breaks are irrelevant in prose–they occur wherever one runs out of space at the right margin, since prose has no regular meter or rhythm to separate into lines.

Character – A person in a literary text.  Also refers to the qualities of that person.  Often characters are recognizable types: e.g. in Shakespeare: the villain, the fool, the angry father.

Plot – Events and other details selected from a chronology in order to achieve interest and significance in a story.

Carnivalesque – A term borrowed from anthropology that describes period times of festival celebration that involves unruly or otherwise usually forbidden behavior.  Mardi Gras is an example, with its drinking, sexual behaviors and wearing of costumes.  Comedies often drawn on the pleasures of the carnivalesque.

Dramatic Irony – A particular kind of irony created by dramatic performance, when the audience of a play is aware of something that at least some of the play’s characters are not–for example, Falstaff does not know the mistresses Page and Ford are tricking him, but the audience does

Verbal Irony – A particular kind of irony created when one thing is said, but another, often the opposite is meant.  For example, when the jealous Ford angrily calls his wife “the honest woman, the modest wife, the virtuous creature, that hath the jealous fool to her husband!” he is using verbal irony, since he is implying the opposite.  There’s another layer of verbal irony here too, because Shakespeare wants us to understand that what Ford thinks is not true really is true.

Comedy – a genre of dramatic performance that frequently involves laughter, inversion of ordinary social or gender role, carnivalesque behavior, and disguises.  Another defining feature is that comedies have a happy ending; in Renaissance drama this happy ending is typically marriage.

Polysemy – Words with multiple meanings.  More broadly, the quality of many literary works to have multiple and sometimes even opposing meanings.

Terms and ideas from performance

• thesis: what important idea(s) about the play does the performance convey?
• tone: emotional mood of the play (also used to talk about emotional mood in stories or poems)
• blocking: relationship of bodies to one another on stage
• physical body type of actors: how used to convey something about the character, or his/her relationship to other characters
• setting: where and when the performance is set (also used to describe where and when stories take place)
• props: objects on stage.  How are they used?  What tone or idea about the play do they convey?
• costume: what the characters are wearing. How do these convey tone or thesis regarding the play or its characters?
• delivery of lines: how does the voice convey the tone of lines or ideas in them?
• special effects: lighting, sound.  How do these convey tone or idea about the play?