Language, Literature and Linguistics Online Resource (3LORe)
Welcome to the Language, Literature and Linguistics Online Resource (3LORe). This website represents an effort to compile a descriptive list of terms in the study of English Language, Literature and Linguistics.
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| Abstract |
There are two definitions for this term, dependent on whether it is a noun or an adjective. The noun refers to a summary or outline of a larger piece of work. The adjective refers to intangible senses, entities or concepts. |
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| Accent or Stress |
The loud
'beats' in a poem; a regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables
in a poem often gives the poem its distinctive quality. In literary criticism,
there is no basic difference between stress and accent, and one concentrates
only on two degrees of stress, unlike the four degrees of stress sometimes
distinguished in phonetics and phonology. (This entry was used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
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| Active Voice | A form of sentence construction where the subject is usually the person or thing performing an action. | ||||||
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| Actor | In the analysis of TRANSITIVITY in Functional Linguistics, the noun group performing the action describe by a verb. | ||||||
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| Adjective |
A word describing the characteristics of a noun. |
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| Adjunct | A word or phrase in a sentence other than the verb or predicate. | ||
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| Adverb | A word or phrase that describes or changes the meaning of a verb, adjective or another adverb, and possibly a sentence. | ||||||
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| Affective
Fallacy or Sympathetic Fallacy |
An error in judging the merits or faults of a work of literature. The "error" results from stressing the importance of the work's effect upon the reader - that is how it makes a reader "feel" emotionally (what it does as a literary work) - instead of stressing its inner qualities as a created object, or what it "is". | ||||||
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| Agent | The performer of an action. In Functional Linguistics TRANSITIVITY analysis, the initiator of action in a clause. The agent and actor usually map onto one another but in causative clauses, the agent causes the actor, who is not the agent, to perform the action. | ||||||
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| Allegory |
A story representing
an idea or belief that serves as an extended metaphor. Allegories are
written in the forms of fables, parables, poems, stories and almost any
other style or genre. The main purpose of an allegory is to tell a story
that has characters, a setting and/or other types of symbols that have
both literal and symbolic meanings.
An allegory can be religious or political and is usually used to convey
a moral lesson. |
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| Alliteration | The repetititon
of initial consonant sounds of two or more proximate words in a poem. The
repitition can be located at the beginning of successive words or inside
the words. Poets often use alliteration to audibly represent the action
that is taking place and to call attention to a phrase and fix it in the
reader's mind; thus it is useful for emphasis. (This entry contains excerpts used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
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| Allusion | A reference
to an idea, place, person or text (or part of a text) existing outside the
literary work. Allusions are often indirect or brief references to well-known
characters or events. This device is used to broaden the meaning of the
poem. (This entry contains excerpts used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
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| Ambiguity | A word
or expression which has more than one meaning. An ambiguity is not necessarily
negative in literary criticism. (This entry was used with permission Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
| Antagonist |
The main character in a piece narration, story, poem or drama that is at odds with the protagonist. The antagonist need not always be a person. It could be death, the devil, an illness, or any challenge that prevents the main character from living "happily ever after". In fact, the antagonist could be a character of virtue in a literary work where the protagonist represents evil. |
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| Anticlimax | The point in a piece of work where the result is less than what is expected, or where the outcome does not seem justified in view of the events leading up to it. | ||
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| Antithesis | A contrast
or polarity in meaning. (This entry was used with permission Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
| Antonym | A word opposite in meaning to another. | ||||
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| Apologue | A moral fable, usually featuring personofied animals or inanimate objects which act like people to allow the author to comment on the human condition. Often, the apologue highlights the irrationality of mankind. | ||||
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| Apostrophe | A figure of speech where the speaker is addressing someone or something that is absent, subtract or nonhuman. It is as if one were referring to someone as if they were not present. A response is not expected from the addressee. | ||||
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| Author | The writer of a book, usually in prose form. The actual person who composed a text, not necessarily appearing in the text itself. | ||||
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| Autobiography | A detailed and purportedly objective narrative that tells a persons life story. This narrative is written by the person himself or herself. | ||||
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| Ballad | A story in poetic form, often about tragic lives and usually sung. Most ballads use four-line stanzas that have the a-b-c-b rhyme scheme. Somtimes they are set to music and include many stanzas. The story of a ballad may cover a wide range of subjects but usually deals with folklore or popular legends.Some ballads use a refrain or chorus repeated at regular intervals - this reflects their musical association. | ||||
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| Biography | A detailed and purportedly objective narrative that tells a persons life story. This narrative is not written by the person himself. | ||||
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| Blank Verse | Poetry written in unrhymed iambic pentameter verse composed of lines of five two-syllable feet with the first syllable accented, the second unaccented. | ||||||
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| Burlesque |
Burlesque is a form of indirect satire that imitates a serious literary work or genre but applies the imitated form to inappropriate subject matter. It differs from comedy or farce in that it achieves its effects through caricature, ridicule and distortion. It differs from satire in that it is devoid of any ethical element.
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| Catastrophe | A scene in a tragedy which includes the death or moral destruction of the protagonist. | ||||||
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| Catharsis | Catharsis means "purgation". It is a term describing an audience's release of the emotions of fear and pity at the end of a tragedy. The feeling of pity is elicited as the protagonist faces misfortunes, and his failure to overcome them is a fearful reminder of human frailties and limitations as well as the terror associated with the human condition. But because the protagonist's suffering is also an affirmation of human values rather than despairing denial of them, these negative emotions are purged in the audience. | ||||
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| Character | A person,
animal or thing represented in a literary work or the 'person' in a work
of fiction or drama. The way the author creates these personages is called
characterisation. (This entry contains excerpts used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
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| Characterisation | The process
by which an author creates vivid, believable characters in his work. This
may be done in a variety of ways:
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| Climax | The turning point of the work, the moment when the conflict is at its most intense. | ||
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| Comedy | Literary
work (usually drama but may be applied to other literary kinds) intended
to amuse, where the central focus is triumph over adverse circumstance,
usually resulting in a successful or happy conclusion. Like many literary
terms (tragedy and epic being prominent examples), the term has its origin
in ancient Greece, but Aristotle's discussion on comedy in his Poetics
is believed to be missing, and one consequence of this is that the term
is less rigidly defined than the other major genre of drama, tragedy. (This entry contains excerpts used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
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| Complement | The part of a clause or sentence that is governed by a verb and which completes the meaning of the predicate. | ||||
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| Conceit | A far-fetched simile or metaphor, a literary conceit occurs when the speaker compares two highly dissimilar things. | ||||||
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| Concrete | The direct opposite of abstract, it refers to descriptions that may be quantified by the five senses. | ||||
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| Connotation | The impression created by a word that goes beyond its dictionary definition. | ||||
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| Consonance | The repetition of consonant sounds with differing vowel sounds in words near each other in a line or lines of poetry. Since devices like alliteration, rhyme and meter, consonances are used by the poets for effect, the reader must stop and consider what effect the inclusion of these devices has on the poem. | ||||
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| Couplet | Two successive lines of poetry ending with the same rhyme. | ||||
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| Criticism
or Literary Criticism |
The evaluation
of one or more literary works. The act of criticizing in literary criticism
is not necessarily negative. (This entry was used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
| Deduction |
Argument where the conclusion (C) is derived directly from the given premises (P). This is most explicitly observed in a syllogistic form:
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| Denotation | The actual definition of a word. | ||||
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| Diction | A technical
term for the author's choice and arrangement of words in a particular literary
work, or the language appropriate for a particular (usually poetic) work.
The term poetic diction refers to the appropriate selection of words in
a poem. (This entry contains excerpts used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
| Double Entendre | Used to describe words that are ambiguous enough to allow two meanings, one of them usually risqué. | ||||||
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| Drama | A literary
work meant to be performed in a theatre. If viewed from this functional
angle, the definition of drama as a literary kind is non-controversial.
But problems may arise when one tries to define it in terms of the intrinsic
qualities which a work must have in order for it to be classified as dramatic.
(This entry was used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
| Dramatic Monologue | A literary device that is used when a character reveals his or her innermost thoughts and feelings, those that are hidden throughout the course of the story line, through a poem or speech. This monologue often comes during a climactic moment in a work and often reveals hidden truths about a character, their history and their relationships. Also it can further develop a character's personality and also be used to create irony. | ||||
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| Dystopia | A utopia
gone sour, an imaginary setting where everything and everyone has gone bad. (This entry contains excerpts used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
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| Elegy | A poem
which mourns the death of someone. (This entry was used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
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| Elizabethan | The adjective
refers to British literary works which were written during the era of the
British monarch Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603). (This entry was used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
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| Enjambed | The running over of a sentence or thought into the next couplet or line without a pause at the end of the line; a run-on line. | ||
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| Epic |
An extended narrative poem written in a high style recounting actions, travels, adventures and heroic episodes. The setting is usually vast and the action is often given cosmic significance through the intervention of supernatural forces such as gods, angels, or demons. Some of the characteristics of an epic are:
The term is now also used for other long literary works (usually novels) with historical settings. (This entry contains excerpts used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
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| Epilogue | A closing speech delivered by an actor at the end of a play/drama, particularly those of the 17th and 18th centuries. It is often in verse. | ||
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| Euphemism | A mild word or phrase substituting for another which would be undesirable because it is too direct, unpleasant, or offensive. | ||
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| Exposition | The presentation, in drama, of essential information regarding what has occurred prior to the beginning of the play. | ||||
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| Fable | A narrative told with the intention of conveying a moral message. A distinctive feature of fables is that very often, animals are featured as characters. | ||||
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| Farce | A light, comic theatrical piece in which the characters and events are greatly exaggerated to produce broad, absurd humour and the humour is designed to provoke continual laughter. It is a type of comedy that is based on humourous situations such as the bank robber who mistakenly wanders into a police station to hide. The situation - not the cleverness of plot or lines nor the absurdities of the character - provides the humour. | ||||
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| Fiction | A story
that is the product of imagination rather than a documentation of fact,
usually written in prose. Stylistically, the description or narration of
fictional events usually has some noteworthy linguistic manifestations in
the literary work. Fiction is often associated with the novel. (This entry contains excerpts used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
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| Figurative Language |
Language that varies
from the norms of literal language and goes beyond what is denoted and
has a suggestive effect on the reader. Also known as the "ornaments of
language", figurative language does not mean exactly what it says, but
instead forces the reader to make an imaginative leap in order to comprehend
an author's point. It usually involves a comparison between two things
that may not, at first, seem to relate to one another. While figurative
language provides a writer with the opportunity to write imaginatively,
it also tests the imagination of the reader, forcing the reader to go
below the surface of a literary work into deep, hidden meanings. |
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| Finite | A word, usually a verb, that has a specific tense, number or person. In Functional Linguistics, a word that functions to make a proposition definite so that it can be argued about. | ||||||
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| First-person Narrator | A narrator who also inhabits the world of the story - the first-person narrator is also a character in the story that he or she is telling. The first-person narrator can usually be identified if a narrative makes use of first-person pronouns such as "I". | ||||
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| Flashback | A narrative technique that allows a writer to present past events during current events, in order to provide background for the current narration. By including material that occurred prior to the present event, the writer provides the reader with insight into a character's motivations and or a background to a conflict. This is done through various methods including narration, dream sequences and memories. Flashback is useful for exposition, to inform the reader about a character, place or the background to a conflict. | ||||||
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| Foil | A character whose qualities contrast strongly with, and therefore highlight, the corresponding qualities of another character. | ||
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| Foreshadow | A technique in writing where the author hints at or warns of the possible outcome of the story. | ||
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| Free Verse | Poetry
which lacks a regular stress pattern or metre and regular line lengths (and
which may also be lacking in rhyme). (This entry contains excerpts used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
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| Functional Linguistics | A form of grammatical analysis first introduced by M.A.K. Halliday. It is designed to account for how language is used to convey experiential (or ideational), interpersonal and textual meaning. The full analysis is basically realized through THEME, MOOD and TRANSITIVITY. | ||
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| Genre |
A French term that
means "kind", "genus" or "type". A poem, novel or other literary work
is said to belong to a particular genre if at shares at least a few conventions,
or standard characteristics, with other works in that genre. Examples
of literary genres are tragedy, comedy, epic and novel. Generic classifications
may appear simple on the surface, but one faces serious practical problems
when one tries to define terms such as comedy and tragedy with reference
to an actual corpus of literary works. One solution is to place spatio-temporal
constraints on generic definitions (for example, the 'early Victorian
novel' or 'Wordsworth's conception of the lyric poem'). |
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| Goal | In Funtional Linguistics TRANSITIVITY analysis, the participant at which the process is directed. The goal is acted upon by the actor. | ||||||
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| Gothic Novel | A gothic novel is thought to be a novel of horrors and mysteries. It has a theme and a philosophy of the "world evil", a representation of something supernatural, mysterious, sombre; its plot is always bound up with secret murders and the heroes are marked with the seal of a demonic lot. It differs with a dignified manner of telling and many people say that it reads like "an ancient novel about adventures of knights". In all gothic novels readers observe the main heroes going through a strife of passions and feelings. Here, good heroes fight with their enemies and seek a key to a solution. Supernatural things are always taken as real ones. | ||||
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| Haiku | Japanese poetry, constructed in three lines of five, seven, and five syllables respectively. These poems are constructed with the intention to capture the essence the moment described. | ||||||
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| Hero | A character, often the protagonist, who exhibits qualities such as courage, idealism, and honesty. | ||
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| Hyperbole | A deliberate overstatement or exaggeration made to impact a point. | ||||
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| Iamb(ic) | A pattern of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable. |
| Imagery |
Often taken as a synonym
for figurative language, but the term may also refer to the 'mental pictures'
which the reader experiences in his/her response to a literary work. Imagery
includes any words and phrases that appeal to one or more of the senses:
sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch. The use of images serves to intensify
the impact of the work. |
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| Induction |
An argument where the conclusion (C) is derived at by reasoning from specific premises (P) to form another general premise (P').
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| Irony |
The effect of language in which the intended meaning is the opposite of what is stated. Irony takes three main forms, as illustrated below.
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| Jacobean |
The adjective refers to British literary works which were written during the era of the British monarch King James I (1603-25). It is derived from Jacobus or 'James'. The Jacobean age has been viewed in certain quarters as a period of disenchantment when many pondered the apparent disintegration of faith in a fixed order of the universe. There was dissatisfaction with the extravagance and unbounded enthusiasm of the 16th century and a tendency toward melancholy and decadence. Paradoxically, there was a simultaneous flourishing of Baroque elements in literature, perhaps in reaction to the growing cynicism many observed around them. |
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| Kind
or Literary Kind |
A literary
genre which has a distinctive collection of external features. (This entry was used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
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| Limerick | A humourous poem, usually bawdy, five lines long with the rhyme scheme a-a-b-b-a. | ||||
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| Literal Language | Writing that does not exaggerate or embellish the subject matter and is not figurative. | ||||||
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| Literary Criticism | See Criticism |
| Literary Kind | See Kind |
| Lyric | A short
non-narrative poem that has a solitary speaker, and that usually expresses
a particular feeling, mood, or thought. (This entry was used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
| Metaphor | A word
which does not precisely or literally refer to the entity to which it is
supposed to refer. Metaphors are sometimes thought to exist only in works
of literature, but is actually prevalent in language in general. (This entry was used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
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| Metre | The recurrence
of a similar stress pattern in some or all lines of a poem. (This entry was used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
| Metonymy | A word or phrase that refers to another which is often closely associated to it. | ||||||
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| Mock Epic | The treatment of a frivolous or minor subject seriously, especially by using the machinery and devices of the epic (invocations, descriptions of armor, battles, extended similies, etc). | ||||
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| Modern | The modern
age in English literature is often taken as the period which began from
the start of the First World War onwards. But the problem here is that there
were works written before 1914 which displayed modernist tendencies, like
Joseph Conrad's Nostromo and the late novels of Henry James. Another problem
is that the modern age is already with us for more than three-quarters of
a century, and is now longer than the Victorian age, which in itself is
quite a lengthy period in the history of English literature. One solution
adopted by some critics is to proclaim a post-modern age, but what period
comes after the post-modern age is anybody's guess. It is perhaps high time
for both modern and post-modern to be rechristened, as many works belonging
to both these ages are now old hat, and it may not be legitimate to describe
them as 'modern'. However, the modern age is a fruitful period as far as
stylistic research is concerned, as experimentations with language are often
carried out in both poetry and prose. (This entry was used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
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| MOOD | A functional linguistic analysis which deals mostly with interpersonal meaning. | ||||
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| Motif | An element
which recurs in a literary work, or across literary works. (This entry was used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
| Narrative | A story, either written or spoken, about connected events. | ||||
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| Narrator | The personage
who 'tells' the story in a narrative work. Like the persona, the narrator
should not be confused with the author. (This entry was used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
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| Novel | A long
work of prose fiction. The novel as a more realistic literary genre is sometimes
distinguished in academic literary criticism from the romance; but this
distinction is not maintained by all literary critics. (This entry was used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
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| Noun | A word other than a pronoun used to identify people, places, things or events. Differentiated into common nouns (words that are used to refer to general classes) and proper nouns (words used to refer to a particular member of a class) | ||||||
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| Occasional Poem | A poem
written for a specific occasion (eg. a birthday, a wedding etc.). (This entry was used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
| Onomatopoeia | A word
or expression which resembles the sound which it represents. (This entry was used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
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| Oxymoron | A rhetorical figure in which an epigrammatic effect is created by the conjunction of incongrous or contradictory terms. | ||
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| Parable | A brief and often simple narrative that illustrates a moral or religious lesson. | ||||
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| Parallel Structure | A repetition of sentences using the same structure. | ||
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| Parody | A literary work that imitates the style of another literary work. A parody can be simply amusing or it can be mocking in tone, such as a poem which exaggerates the use of alliteration, in order to show the ridiculous effect of the overuse of alliteration. | ||||
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| Passive Voice | A form of sentence construction where the verb acts upon the subject. Usually identifiable through the use of the word "by" preceding the subject. | ||||||
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| Pastoral | A literary
genre. Originally a poem dealing with shepherds, a pastoral is usually written
by an urban poet who idealizes the shepherds' lives. The term has now been
extended to include any literary work which views and idealizes the simple
life from the perspective of a more complex life. (This entry was used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
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| Pathetic Fallacy | A fallacy is a reason in suggesting that nonhuman phenomena act from human feelings, as suggested by the word "pathetic" from the Greek pathos; a literary device wherein something nonhuman found in nature - a beast, plant, stream, natural force, etc, - performs as though from human feeling or motivation. | ||||||
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| Pathos | The sense
of pity or sorrow aroused by a particular element or scene in a literary
work. (This entry was used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
| Persona | The unidentified
personage who 'speaks' in a poem or prose work. The persona should not be
identified with the author of the work. (This entry was used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
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| Personification | A figure of speech where animals, ideas or inorganic objects are given human characteristics. | ||||
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| Petrarchan Conceit | The kind of conceit used by Italian Renaissance poet Petrarch and popular in Renaissance English sonnets. | ||||
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| Picaresque Novel | An episodic, often autobiographical novel about a rogue or picaro (a person of low status) wandering around and living off his wits. The wandering hero provides the author with the opportunity to connect widely different pieces of plot, since the hero can wander into any situation. Picaresque novels tend to be satiric and filled with pretty detail. | ||||
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| Plot | The arrangement
of actions in a particular (usually narrative) work of literature. (This entry was used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
| Poem | A literary composition that puts particular emphasis on diction (often involving rhyme), rhythm and imagery. | ||||||
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| Point of View | The perspective
established by the narrator of a literary work. Point of view can either
be of the first-person, in which case a character narrates the story, or
it can be told from the narrative perspective of the third-person, where
a personage who is not a character in the story, tells the story. (This entry was used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
| Predicate | The part of a clause or sentence that contains a verb and states something about the subject. | ||||||
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| Predicator | A verb or verbal group in a clause or sentence that specifies an action, event or process. | ||||||
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| Projection | The presentation and/or production of thought or speech. |
| Prologue | The section of a literary work that serves as an introduction before the main body of text. | ||
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| Pronoun | A word used in place of a noun to indicate someone or something that is already known or has been mentioned. | ||||||
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| Prose | Written or spoken language that does not exhibit a specific metre. | ||||
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| Protagonist | The central character serving as a focus for the story's themes and incidents. | ||||||
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| Pun | A play on words with similar sounds but different meanings. | ||
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| Quatrain | A four-line stanza which may be rhymed or unrhymed. A heroic quatrain is a four line stanza rhymed a-b-a-b. | ||||
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| Rheme | The part of a clause where the Theme is developed. Typically encodes new or unfamiliar information in a clause | ||||||
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| Rhetorical Question | A rhetorical question is an illocutionary act that has the direct illocutionary force of a question and is not generally used with the expectation of an answer but with some different, indirect force, such as a command, a tentative statement or an evaluation. | ||
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| Rhyme | The identity
of the sounds of the final syllables (usually stressed) of certain proximate
lines of a poem. (This entry was used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
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| Rhyme Scheme | The pattern of rhyme used in a poem, generally indicated by matching lowercase letters to show which lines rhyme. The letter "a" represents the first line and all other lines rhyming with the first line. The next line that does not rhyme with the first, or "a" line, and all others that rhyme with this second type of line, is represented by the letter "b", and so on. A rhyme scheme also helps give us a verse movement, providing a break before changing thoughts. | ||||
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| Romantic | Adjective
describing literary works which were mainly written between 1798 and 1932.
Among the characteristics of Romantic literary works are an emphasis on
the individual and on the expression of personal emotions, a tendency to
explore new literary forms or new means of expression, and a highlighting
of nature or the natural landscape. (This entry was used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
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| Sarcasm | A form of sneering criticism in which disapproval is often expressed as ironic praise. | ||
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| Satire | A literary
work which belittles or savagely attacks its subject. (This entry was used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
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| Scan | To assign
stress patterns to a poem. (This entry was used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
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| Simile | A type of figurative language; language that does not mean exactly what it says, that makes a comparison between two otherwise unalike objects or ideas by connecting them with the words "like" or "as". Similies allow an author to emphasise a characteristic of an object by comparing that object to an example with that characteristic. | ||||
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| Soliloquy | The act
of talking to oneself; in drama, a soliloquy is used by the playwright to
reveal the character's thoughts. (This entry was used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
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| Sonnet | A sonnet is a distinctive poetic style that uses a system or pattern of metrical structure and verse composition, usually consisting of fourteen lines, arranged in a set rhyme scheme or pattern. There are two main styles of sonnet, the Italian sonnet and the English sonnet. The Italian sonnet consists first of an octave, or eight lines, which asks a question or states a problem and follows the rhyme scheme a-b-b-a, a-b-b-a. The sestet, or last six lines, offers an answer or a resolution to the proposed problem, and follows the rhyme scheme c-d-e-c-d-e. | ||||
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| Speaker | The personage
or persona responsible for the voice in a poem; like the persona, the speaker
should not be confused with the poet. (This entry was used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
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| Stanza | A group of lines in a poem that form the poem's basic metrical unit. | ||
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| Stream of Consciousness | A technique
or method in modern narrative fiction which attempts to convey the characters'
rambling thoughts. (This entry was used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
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| Stress | See Accent |
| Subject | A person, thing, event or phenomenon that is being discussed. | ||||
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| Symbol | A word
or expression which signifies something other than the physical object to
which it directly refers. (This entry was used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
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| Sympathetic Fallacy | See Affective Fallacy |
| Synecdoche | A device related to metonymy which uses one closely related thing to represent another thing. | ||||||
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| Synonym | A word or phrase that means the same thing as another word or phrase in the same language. | ||||
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| THEME | A functional linguistic analysis which deals mostly with textual meaning. | ||||
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| Theme | In literature, the subject matter or topic of a literary work. In linguistics, the first major part of a clause, usually indicating subject matter, that is the point of departure for the message encoded in the clause. | ||||
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| Third-person Narrator |
A narrator that is not a character in a literary work. The third-person narrator may usually be identified through the absence of first-person pronouns in the narrative of a literary work. There are three traditional distinctions:
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| Tone |
Tone expresses the
attitude of a personage, narrator or author toward other personages in
the work or towards the reader. Since there are as many tones in literature
as there are tones of voice in real relationships, the tone of a literary
work may be one of anger or approval, pride or pity - the entire gemut
of attitudes towards life's phenomena. |
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| Tragedy | A broad
term, originally taken from drama; the term may refer to any work of literature
which has an unhappy ending for the main character such as a drama about
a noble, courageous hero of excellent character who, because of some critical
character flaw or pathetic circumstances brings ruin upon himself. There
have been various attempts to define tragedy, beginning with Aristotle's
Poetics (which it must be noted, is more correct in its description
of the tragic elements of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex than of Greek tragedy
in general). Like most literary genres however, tragedy must frequently
be re-defined when referring to individual works of literature. One is usually
more successful if one defines tragedy in terms of certain periods of literature,
or with reference to certain authors. (This entry was used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
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| Tragicomedy | A literary
work which combines elements of both tragedy and comedy. Tragicomic plays
were quite common during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods of English
literature. (This entry was used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
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| TRANSITIVITY | A functional linguistic analysis which deals mostly with experiential or ideational meaning. | ||||
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| Transitivity | In traditional grammar, the idea of whether a verb is able to take on a direct object. A verb that may take on a direct object is transitive while a verb that cannot take on a direct object is intransitive. | ||||
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| Utopia | A literary
work which describes the ideal state or way of life. (This entry was used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
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| Verb | A word used to describe action, process, state or occurence. Usually forms the main part of the predicate in a clause or sentence. | ||||||
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| Verse | A line of metered language, a line of a poem, or any work written in verse. | ||||
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| Victorian | The adjective refers to British literary works which were written, or which resemble those written during (or shortly before or after) the era of Queen Victoria (1837-1901). The adjective is also used to describe the code of morality which was believed to be predominant during her reign. (This entry was used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) | ||
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| Voice | The dominating
ethos or tone of a literary work. The voice existing in a literary work
is not always identifiable with the actual views of the author (cf. narrator
and persona). (This entry was used with permission from Ismail S. Talib's List of Key Terms in Literature) |
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Literature and Linguistics Online Resource