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| 11683758963 | Metafiction | Fiction that concerns the nature of fiction itself, either by reinterpreting a previous fictional work or by drawing attention to its own fictional status. Examples of the former include John Garderner's Grendel, which retells the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf from a new perspective. | 0 | |
| 11683777940 | Bildungsroman | A German term, meaning "formation novel," for a novel about a child or adolescent's development into maturity, with special focus on the protagonist's quest for identity. James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a notable example. | 1 | |
| 11683792140 | Novel of Manners | A novel that focuses on the social customs of a certain class of people, often with a sharp eye for irony. Jane Austen's novels are a prime example of this genre. | 2 | |
| 11683809562 | Meiosis | An intentional understatement, as, for example in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, when Mercutio is mortally wounded and says it is "only a scratch." It is the opposite of hyperbole and often employs litotes to iconic effect. | 3 | |
| 11683828015 | Litotes | A form of understatement in which a statement is affirmed by negating its opposite: "He is not unfriendly." | 4 | |
| 11683835985 | Non sequitur plot | More of an "anti-plot," it defies traditional logic by presenting events without any clear sequence and characters without any clear motivation. The theater of the absurd contains many examples of this plot. | 5 | |
| 11683845528 | Parody | A humorous and often satirical limitation of the style or the particular work of another author. | 6 | |
| 11683851969 | Pun | A double meaning or ambiguity in a word, often employed in a witty way. They are often associated by wordplay. | 7 | |
| 11683866722 | Metonymy | The substitution of one term for another that generally is associated with it. For example, "suits" instead of "businessmen." | 8 | |
| 11683874700 | Synecdoche | A form of metonymy in which a part of an entity is used to refer to the whole, for example, "my wheels," for "my car." | 9 |
