Literary Terms Dictionary

Abbreviation/Clipping/ Shortening

The contracted form of a word, by an by becomes recognized as a word replacing the full form. ‘Zoological Gardens’ become ‘zoo’.

Ablaut:

Ablaut or vowel gradation is the term applied to a process in which a vowel sound undergoes a change, according to whether they occur in a stressed or unstressed syllable, mainly seen at work in principal parts of strong verbs.

Abutting Consonants:

Consonant sequences that occur in the middle of words.

Acronymy:

Acronymy is a process by which a word is formed from the first letters of a succession of words.

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Affective Fallacy:

The error of evaluating a poem by its emotional effects upon the reader.

Allegory :

It is an art of describing a moral doctrine under fictitious incidents and characters.  It begins with an abstract idea and invents concrete characters.  Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" and  Spenser's "Faerie Queen" are examples of allegorical works.

Alliteration:

It is repetition of consonants especially at the beginning of the words or of stressed syllables.

Antonomasia:

It is a  process of deriving common nouns, verbs or adjectives from proper nouns.  Examples: quixotic, romeo

Archetype:

A term borrowed into literary criticism from the depth-psychology of C.G. Jung which stands for 'primordial images' formed by repeated experience in the lives of our ancestors inherited in the 'collective consciousness of the human race' and often expressed in the myths, religion, dreams, and fantasies as well as in literature and folklore.

Back Formation:

The process of deriving one part of speech out of another.
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Bathos:

A term for a sudden sinking from the sublime to the trivial.

Blank Verse:

It is unrhymed iambic pentameter verse and the most fluid verse from in English which comes closest to the natural speech rhythm.

Burlesque:

Burlesque is a literary composition or dramatic representation which aims at exciting laughter by the comical treatment of a serious subject.

Catharsis (Katharsis):

A word used by Aristotle in his Poetics to describe the effect or function of tragedy which means purgation of pity and fear. Aristotle argues that tragedy does not leave an audience depressed, but relieved and almost elated.

Choral Character:

A character who does not directly take part in the action of the play and serves as mere commentator as the chorus of the Greek plays.

Chronicle Plays:

They are dramatic renderings of materials taken from the chronicle histories of England.

Clipped Word:

The part of a long word that stands for the whole.

Closet Drama: 

A play meant for only reading is called a closet drama.
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Conceit:

It is a figure of speech which establishes a striking parallel, usually an elaborate parallel between two apparently dissimilar things or situations.

Conversion:

It is the process of word-formation by assigning the base to a different word-class without changing its form.

Couplet:

Couplets are lines of verse rhyming in pairs.

Criticism:

It is the art of interpreting and appreciating the meaning of literary works.

Denotation:

The primary meaning of a word.

Denouvement:

The last part of the tragedy between the peripety and the end.

Diction:

It means the selection of words and expressions in the works of literature.

Diglossia:

The existence of two or more dialects of a language side by side.

Electra Complex:

A daughter's unnatural attachment to her father.

Empathy:

An involuntary projection of a person into an object, participating in its physical sensations.
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Enjambment:

The technical term in verse for carrying on the sense of a line into the next.

Epiphany:

A sudden spiritual manifestation, often caused by a common-place object.

Epistolary Novel:

A novel in which the story is told through an exchange of letters between the characters.

Etimology:

The study of word origin is called etimology.

Exemplum:

A story told in the course of a sermon to exemplify something.

Expressionism:

A literary movement begun in Germany before the first world war and reached its height in 1919-1925 and affected especially the American theatre.

Euphuism:

Artificial or affected style of writing is known as Euphuism.

Farce:

It is a type of comedy in which one-dimensional characters are put into ludicrous situations, while ordinary standards of probability in motivation and event are freely violated in order to evoke the maximum laughter from the audience.

Folk Etymology:

The process of changing the form of a word on the analogy of more familiar words.

Free Verse

Free verse or Verse Libre is the verse which is written without a regular metrical pattern, and usually without rhythm. It is more rhythmic than prose.

Haplology:

The loss of a syllable in a word at junctions of identical syllables.

Hiatus:

The break between two vowels coming together as parts of two different syllables.

Hypernasality:

The excessive nasalization of sounds owing to defective soft palate.

Ideographic Spelling:

The system of spelling in which the letters represent the idea and not the phonetic value of the letters.

Irony:

A dissembling speech.

Metanalysis:

In this process there is a combination of two words where the consonant at the end of one word gets attached to the vowel at the beginning of the second word. Thus ‘an ickname’ became ‘a nickname’.

Montage:

Montage is a technique of presenting a series of disconnected scenes in a novel or picture.

Morphology:

It is the study of the internal organization of words.

Pastoral Elegy:

It is a poem in which shepherds are introduced as mourners.

Peripety:

Aristotle's term for a sudden reversal in the story of a play.

Poetic License:

The freedom the poet can avail in matters of grammar, word order, usage, meaning, etc.

Polisemy:

The property of a word having several meanings.

Poetic Justice:

It means rewarding the virtuous and punishing the vice in a work of art.

Pre-fortis Clipping

The reduction in length of a vowel or a sonorant consonant before a fortis consonant.

Prosody:

This term denotes the systematic study of versification including metre, rhyme and stanza forms.

Purple patch:

A sudden heightening of rhythm, diction and figurative language that makes a passage stand out from the rest.

Refrain:

Refrain is a line that is repeated in the course of the poem.

Semantics:

It is a branch of linguistics that deals with the study of meaning.

Smoothing

It is a term used in phonetics to denote the process of dropping the middle vowel sound in sequence of three vowels in speeded speech.

Sonnet:

A short lyric poem of fourteen iambic pentameter lines, following one or other of certain definite rhyme schemes.

Syncopation

In this process a vowel is elided and the consonants on either side are brought together, a syllable being lost. ‘Perambulator’ is syncopated to ‘pram’.

Syntax:

A branch of linguistics that deals with the organization of words and phrases into sentences.

Umlaut

Umlaut or mutation is the term applied to certain changes in vowels as accented syllable owing to the influence of neighbouring sounds.

Variorum Edition:

An edition that lists all the textual variants and revisions.