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| 5149449538 | Allegory | A story in which people, things, and events have another meaning. | 0 | |
| 5149449539 | Ambiguity | Multiple meanings a literary work may communicate, especially two meanings that are incompatible. | 1 | |
| 5149449540 | Apostrophe | Direct address, usually to someone or something that is not present. (Keats's "Bright star! Would I were steadfast" is an apostrophe to a star, and "To Autumn" is an apostrophe to a personified season. | 2 | |
| 5149453116 | Connotation | The implications of a word or phrase, as opposed to its exact meaning. | 3 | |
| 5149453117 | Convention | A device of style or subject matter so often used that it becomes a recognized means of expression. For example, a lover observing the literary love of this cannot eat or sleep and grows pale and lean. Romeo, at the beginning of the play is a conventional lover, while an overweight lover in Chaucer is consciously mocking the convention. | 4 | |
| 5149453118 | Denotation | The dictionary meaning of a word. | 5 | |
| 5149456184 | Didactic | Explicitly instructive. Examples: Pope's "Essay on Man" and the novels by Ayn Rand. | 6 | |
| 5149456185 | Digression | The use of material unrelated to subject of a work. | 7 | |
| 5149456186 | Epigram | A pithy saying, often using contrast. This is also a verse form, usually brief and pointed. | 8 | |
| 5149458477 | Euphemism | A figure of speech using indirection to avoid offensive bluntness, such as "deceased" for "dead" or "remains" for "corpse." | 9 | |
| 5149458478 | Grotesque | Characterized by distortions or incongruities. The fiction of Poe or Flannery O'Conner is often described as this. | 10 | |
| 5149458479 | Hyperbole | Deliberate exaggeration, over statement. As a rule, this is self conscious, without the intention of being accepted literally. "The strongest man in the world" and "a diamond as big as the Ritz" are hyperbolic. | 11 | |
| 5149461753 | Jargon | The special language of a profession or group. This term usually has pejorative associations, with the implication that it is evasive, tedious, and unintelligible to outsiders. The writings of the lawyer and the literary critic are both susceptible to jargon. | 12 | |
| 5149461754 | Literal | Not figurative; accurate to the letter; matter of fact or concrete. | 13 | |
| 5149461755 | Lyrical | Songlike; characterized by emotion, subjectivity, and imagination. | 14 | |
| 5149465210 | Oxymoron | A combination of opposites; the union of contradictory terms. Romeo's line "feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health" has four examples of this device. | 15 | |
| 5149467999 | Parable | A story designed to suggest a principle, illustrate a moral, or answer a question. These are allegorical stories. | 16 | |
| 5149468000 | Paradox | A statement that seems to be self-contradicting, but, in fact, is true. The figure in Donne's holy sonnet that concludes I never shall be "chaste except you ravish me" is a good example of the device. | 17 | |
| 5149468001 | Parody | A composition that imitates the style of another composition normally for comic effect. Fielding's Shamela is a ****** of Richardson's Pamela. A contest for these of Hemingway draws hundreds of entries each year. | 18 | |
| 5149468047 | Personification | A figurative use of language that endows the nonhuman (ideas, inanimate objects, animals, abstractions) with human characteristics. Keats personifies the nightingale, the Grecian urn, and autumn in his major poems. | 19 | |
| 5149471113 | Reliability | A quality of some fictional narrators whose word the reader can trust. There are two types of these narrators, that is tellers of a story who should or should not be trusted. Most narrators are reliable (Fitzgeral's Nick Carraway, Conrad's Marlow), but some are clearly not to be trusted (Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart," several novels by Nabokov). And there are some about whom readers have been unable to decide (James's governess in The Turn of the Screw, Ford's The Good Soldier). | 20 | |
| 5149471114 | Rhetorical Question | A question asked for effect, not in expectation of a reply. No reply is expected because the question presupposes only one possible answer. The lover of Suckling's "Shall I wasting in despair / Die because of a lady's fair?" has already decided the answer is no. | 21 | |
| 5149473513 | Soliloquy | A speech in which a character who is alone speaks his or her thoughts aloud. This also has a single speaker, but the speaker speaks to others who do not interrupt. Hamlet's "To be, or not to be" and "O! What a rogue and peasant slave am I" are examples of these. Browning's "My Last Duchess" and "Fra Lippo Lippi" are these, but the hypocritical monk of his "Soliloquy of a Spanish Cloister" cannot reveal his thoughts to others. | 22 | |
| 5149473514 | Stereotype | A conventional pattern, expression, character, or idea. In literature, this could apply to the unvarying plot and characters of some works of fiction (those of Barbara Cartland, for example) or to the stock characters and plots of many of the greatest stage comedies. | 23 | |
| 5149476097 | Syllogism | A form of reasoning in which two statements are made and a conclusion is drawn from them. A ********* begins with a major premise ("All tragedies end unhappily.") followed by a minor premise (Hamlet is a tragedy.") and a conclusion (Therefore, "Hamlet ends unhappily."). | 24 | |
| 5149476098 | Thesis | The theme, meaning, or position that a writer undertakes to prove or support. | 25 |
