A Glossary of Literary and Writing Terms

A narrative in which characters, places, and events stand for abstract ideas or moral qualities, so that the story carries a second, systematic meaning. Example: John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress; Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” leans toward allegory.

The repetition of initial consonant sounds in nearby words: “the fair breeze blew, the white foam flew” (Coleridge).

A brief reference to a person, place, event, or text outside the work, which the reader is expected to recognize.

Further on this site: Pastiche and Undertow; Naming as Fate: Onomastics and Allusive Christening

The deliberate use of language or events that support more than one meaning. Open endings often rely on it.

Something placed in a period to which it does not belong, whether by error or for effect.

Aristotle’s term for recognition: the moment a character passes from ignorance to knowledge.

An extended comparison that explains something unfamiliar by likening it to something familiar.

The repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive lines, clauses, or sentences.

The character, force, or institution that opposes the protagonist.

A collection of works by several writers, chosen by an editor.

A central character who lacks conventional heroic qualities such as courage, idealism, or moral clarity.

A short, memorable statement of a general truth.

A direct address to an absent person, a dead person, an object, or an idea: “Death, be not proud.”

A character type, image, or pattern that recurs across many cultures and periods: the journey, the trickster, the wise elder.

In drama, a short speech to the audience that other characters on stage are understood not to hear.

The repetition of vowel sounds in nearby words.

The emotional feeling a work creates in the reader, largely through setting and description. Compare mood.

An account of a person’s life written by that person. Compare memoir.

Events that took place before the story begins and that shape the present action.

A narrative poem or song, usually in short stanzas with a refrain, often telling a dramatic or tragic tale.

A novel of education or coming of age, following a young person’s growth into adulthood.

Unrhymed iambic pentameter, the line of Shakespeare’s plays and Milton’s Paradise Lost.

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

The body of works regarded as most important or most often taught in a tradition; the term also names the accepted works of a single author.

Aristotle’s term for the purging or clarifying of pity and fear that tragedy produces in its audience.

The change a character undergoes over the course of a story.

The means by which a writer reveals character: through action, speech, thought, appearance, and the responses of others (indirect), or through the narrator’s statement (direct).

The principle, attributed to Anton Chekhov, that every significant detail introduced in a story should matter later.

In Greek drama, a group that comments on the action; by extension, any voice that speaks for a community.

An expression or idea used so often that it has lost its force.

The point of highest tension, at which the conflict reaches its decisive moment.

Further on this site: The Shape of a Story: where the decisive turn falls

Careful, detailed analysis of a short passage, attending to word choice, syntax, sound, image, and structure.

Further on this site: Downloadable Studies: book-length close readings; How to Analyze Literature

A work that moves from difficulty toward a happy resolution, often ending in reconciliation or marriage.

A story about a young person’s passage into adult knowledge or responsibility.

An extended and often surprising comparison, as in the Metaphysical poets.

The struggle between opposing forces that drives a plot: person against person, against society, against nature, or against self.

The associations and emotional coloring a word carries beyond its literal meaning. Compare denotation.

The repetition of consonant sounds, especially at the ends of words.

Two consecutive lines of verse, usually rhymed.

A brief letter accompanying a submission to a magazine, giving the title, the word count, and a few lines about the writer.

Further on this site: The Short Story Today (PDF)

Factual prose written with the techniques of fiction and poetry: scene, voice, structure, and image. Includes memoir and the personal essay.

The literal, dictionary meaning of a word.

The final part of a plot, after the climax, in which events are resolved or settled.

An improbable event or device that resolves a plot artificially; literally “god from the machine.”

A form of a language particular to a region or social group, reproduced in dialogue to characterize speakers.

The words characters speak to one another.

Further on this site: The Grammar of Interruption: Dialogue Mechanics and Withheld Speech

A writer’s choice of words, from plain to elevated, concrete to abstract.

Intended mainly to teach or instruct.

A version of a work in progress. Writers commonly speak of first, second, and final drafts.

A situation in which the audience knows something a character does not.

A poem spoken by a single character to a silent listener, revealing the speaker’s character. Example: Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess.”

A character who changes during the story. Compare static character.

A poem of mourning or meditation on death.

The continuation of a sentence from one line of poetry to the next without a pause.

A long narrative poem on a grand scale about heroic deeds, such as the Iliad, Beowulf, or Paradise Lost.

A quotation placed at the start of a book, chapter, or poem.

A sudden moment of insight or revelation, often prompted by something ordinary. James Joyce gave the word its modern literary sense.

Further on this site: The Shape of a Story: Joyce’s “Araby” turns at 99%

Written in the form of letters, diary entries, or other documents.

A short prose work exploring a subject from the writer’s point of view.

Background information about characters, setting, and situation, especially near the beginning of a story.

A short tale, often with animal characters, that illustrates a moral.

The events that follow the climax and lead to the resolution.

Comedy built on improbable situations, physical humor, and rapid action.

Imaginative prose narrative: the short story, the novella, and the novel.

Narration by an “I” who is usually a character in the story.

A very short story, commonly 1,000 words or fewer.

Further on this site: The Shape of a Story: a length and beat-map tool

A scene that interrupts the present action to show an earlier event.

A character built around a single trait or idea. Compare round character.

A character whose contrasting qualities highlight those of another.

A page number in a printed book or document.

Hints of what is to come.

The shape or structure of a work: sonnet, villanelle, short story, essay, and so on.

A story that contains another story, as in The Canterbury Tales or The Decameron.

Third-person narration that takes on the thoughts and idiom of a character without quotation marks or tags.

Poetry without regular meter or rhyme.

A category of literature: poetry, drama, fiction, nonfiction; or within fiction, mystery, science fiction, fantasy, and so on.

Fiction marked by mystery, terror, the supernatural, and decaying settings; in America, from Poe to Faulkner and O’Connor.

A Japanese verse form traditionally of three lines with five, seven, and five syllables, usually centered on an image from nature.

Aristotle’s term for the error or flaw that leads to a tragic hero’s downfall.

The central figure of a work, especially one who acts with courage.

Excessive pride or self-confidence, often the cause of a tragic fall.

Deliberate exaggeration for emphasis or effect.

A metrical foot of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one: “be-LOW.”

A line of five iambs, the most common meter in English poetry.

Ernest Hemingway’s principle that a writer may omit much, if he knows it well, and the omitted part will still be felt.

Language that appeals to the senses.

Further on this site: The Recurring Image: A Concordance of Motifs

The pattern of images in a work.

Further on this site: The Recurring Image: A Concordance of Motifs

Beginning a narrative in the middle of the action; literally “into the middle of things.”

The event that sets the central conflict in motion.

The direct representation of a character’s thoughts.

A gap between what is said and what is meant (verbal irony), between what is expected and what happens (situational irony), or between what a character knows and what the audience knows (dramatic irony).

The placing of two things side by side to invite comparison or contrast.

A compound metaphor in Old English and Norse poetry, such as “whale-road” for the sea.

The point at which a line of poetry ends; a powerful tool of emphasis and timing.

Fiction valued chiefly for its style, depth of character, and treatment of human experience rather than for genre conventions.

A short poem expressing personal feeling or thought.

Fiction in which magical events occur in an otherwise realistic world and are treated as ordinary.

An author’s text submitted to an editor, publisher, or agent.

An account of a part of the writer’s life, organized around a theme, period, or relationship rather than the whole life.

Fiction that draws attention to its own status as fiction.

An implied comparison that speaks of one thing as if it were another.

The pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in verse.

A figure in which something is named by something closely associated with it: “the crown” for the monarch.

An extremely short story, often 400 words or fewer.

Further on this site: The Shape of a Story: a length and beat-map tool

A spare style that uses few words, little ornament, and much implication; associated with Raymond Carver.

The movement in the arts, about 1900 to 1945, marked by experiment, fragmentation, and interiority: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Faulkner.

An extended speech by a single character.

The emotional atmosphere a work creates for the reader.

A recurring image, idea, or situation that develops a theme.

Further on this site: The Habit of Return: Repeated Motifs; The Recurring Image: A Concordance of Motifs

An account of connected events.

The voice that tells a story.

A form of realism that depicts characters as shaped by heredity and environment.

A long work of prose fiction, commonly 40,000 words or more.

A work of fiction between 7,500 and 17,500 words, in the definitions used by the Hugo and Nebula awards.

Further on this site: The Shape of a Story: a length and beat-map tool

A work of fiction between the short story and the novel, often defined as 17,500 to 40,000 words.

Further on this site: The Shape of a Story: a length and beat-map tool

Narration that reports only what can be seen and heard, without entering any character’s mind.

A formal lyric poem of praise or meditation.

A narrator who knows the thoughts and actions of all characters.

A word that imitates the sound it names: buzz, hiss, murmur.

A phrase that joins contradictory terms: “sweet sorrow.”

A short story that teaches a moral or spiritual lesson.

A statement that seems contradictory but contains a truth.

An imitation of a style or work for comic or critical effect.

A work that imitates the style of another writer or period, often in tribute.

Further on this site: Pastiche and Undertow

A work idealizing rural life.

The quality in a work that evokes pity or sorrow.

The voice or mask a writer adopts, especially in poetry.

A short work of nonfiction exploring the writer’s experience and thought.

Giving human qualities to something not human.

The arrangement of events in a story.

The vantage from which a story is told: first person, second person, third person (limited or omniscient), or objective.

Literature after about 1945 that questions grand narratives, mixes forms, and often draws attention to its own artifice.

An introductory section before the main action.

Ordinary written language, not arranged in lines of verse.

A poem written in sentences and paragraphs rather than lines.

The central character of a work.

A name adopted by a writer in place of his or her own.

A stanza of four lines.

A one-page letter pitching a book-length manuscript to a literary agent.

The months during which a magazine accepts submissions.

Further on this site: The Short Story Today (PDF)

Writing that represents ordinary life truthfully and in detail.

A line or phrase repeated at intervals in a poem or song.

The end of a plot, when the conflict is settled.

The art of persuasion; the strategies a writer uses to move a reader.

The repetition of sounds at the ends of words. End rhyme falls at line endings; internal rhyme within lines; slant rhyme is approximate.

The pattern of sound and stress in language.

The events that build tension toward the climax.

The movement, about 1780 to 1850, that prized imagination, emotion, nature, and the individual: Wordsworth, Keats, Emerson.

A complex, many-sided character who can surprise the reader. Compare flat character.

A line of text, such as the title, repeated at the top of each page of a book or document.

A work that uses humor, irony, or exaggeration to criticize folly or vice.

The analysis of a poem’s meter.

A unit of action presented moment by moment, usually with dialogue. Compare summary.

Narration addressed to “you.”

Further on this site: The Reader as Confessor: Second-Person Address in the Poetry

The time and place of a work.

A brief work of prose fiction, commonly under 7,500 words, that can be read at a sitting.

Further on this site: The Shape of a Story: a length and beat-map tool; The Greatest Short Stories: A Reading List

A comparison using “like” or “as.”

Sending the same work to more than one magazine at the same time, which most magazines permit if you withdraw promptly on acceptance.

Further on this site: The Short Story Today (PDF)

Edgar Allan Poe’s principle that a short story should be designed to produce one unified impression.

A partial or approximate rhyme: “soul” and “all.”

Unsolicited submissions awaiting an editor’s reading.

A speech in which a character alone on stage speaks his or her thoughts aloud.

A fourteen-line poem, usually in iambic pentameter. The Petrarchan sonnet divides into an octave and a sestet; the Shakespearean into three quatrains and a couplet.

The voice of a poem, not necessarily the poet.

A group of lines forming a unit in a poem.

A character who does not change. Compare dynamic character.

A technique representing the flow of a character’s thoughts and sensations as they occur.

The distinctive manner of a writer: diction, syntax, rhythm, and tone together.

A secondary line of action.

Meaning beneath the surface of dialogue or action, never stated directly.

Narration that compresses time, reporting events rather than dramatizing them. Compare scene.

An object, person, or event that stands for something beyond itself.

A figure in which a part stands for the whole: “all hands on deck.”

The arrangement of words in sentences.

A stanza of three lines.

The central idea or insight a work explores. A theme is usually expressed as a statement, not a single word.

Narration that stays close to one character’s perceptions and thoughts.

The writer’s or speaker’s attitude toward the subject and the reader.

A work in which a protagonist suffers a downfall, often through hamartia, arousing pity and fear.

See hamartia.

The American movement of the 1830s to 1850s, led by Emerson and Thoreau, that emphasized intuition, nature, and the divinity of the individual soul.

Further on this site: Mulhern’s Transcendentalism

A shift in thought, feeling, or argument; in a sonnet, the volta.

Further on this site: The Shape of a Story: where the decisive turn falls

Deliberately presenting something as less important than it is.

A narrator whose account cannot be fully trusted.

Further on this site: Unreliable Child Narrators and the Limits of Innocence; The Unreliable Confession

The appearance of truth or reality in a work.

A brief, evocative sketch or scene.

A nineteen-line poem of five tercets and a quatrain, with two refrains and two rhymes. Example: Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.”

The distinctive personality of a narrator or writer as heard on the page.

The turn in a sonnet, where the argument or feeling shifts.

The number of words in a manuscript; the measure editors use to determine length.

Further on this site: The Shape of a Story: a length and beat-map tool

A group in which writers read and discuss one another’s work in progress.

A figure in which one word governs two others in different senses: “She lost her hat and her temper.”