-:- LITERARY TERMS -:-

Alliteration: The repeated initial consonants of the proximate words in
a poem.

Allusion: A reference to an idea, place, person or text (or part of a text)
existing outside the literary work.

Ambiguity: A word or expression which has more than one meaning.
Ambiguity is not necessarily negative in literary criticism.

Ballad: A song which tells a story.

Connotation: The associated meanings of a word or expression (for the
opposite term, see denotation).

Denotation: The actual meaning of a word or expression (for the opposite
term, see connotation).

Diction: The selection of words in a particular literary work, or the language
appropriate for a particular work. The term poetic diction refers to the
appropriate selection of words in a poem.

Hyperbole: An overstatement or exaggeration.

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 literary works or other texts. Images appeal to the
five senses: sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell.

Genre: A kind of literature which has a distinctive collection of external
features.

Litotes: The opposite of a hyperbole where the significance of something
is understated.

Lyric: A short non-narrative poem that has a solitary speaker, and that
usually expresses a particular feeling, mood, or thought.

Metaphor: A word which does not precisely or literally refer to the entity
to which it is supposed to refer. A comparison made without using the
words like or as.

Metre: The recurrence of a similar stress pattern in some or all lines of
a poem.

Motif: An element which recurs in a literary work, or across literary works.

Occasional poem: A poem written for a specific occasion (eg. a birthday,
a wedding etc.).

Onomatopoeia: A word or expression which resembles the sound which it
represents, like the meow of a cat or the quack of a duck.

Pathos: The sense of pity or sorrow aroused by a particular element or
scene in a literary work.

Persona: The unidentified personage who 'speaks' (see speaker) in a poem
or prose work. The persona should not be identified with the author of the work.

Pun: Words which have the same sound, but with different meanings.

Rhyme: The identity of the sounds of the final syllables (usually stressed)
of certain proximate lines of a poem.

Satire: A literary work which belittles or savagely attacks its subject.

Scan: To assign stress patterns to a poem.

Speaker: The personage or persona responsible for the voice in a poem;
like the persona, the speaker should not be confused with the poet.

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.

Symbol: A word or expression which signifies something other than the
physical object to which it directly refers. A rose for example, may
symbolize love, and the cross, Christianity.

Tone: The attitude, as it is revealed in the language of a literary work, of a 
character, narrator or author, towards the other characters in the work or
towards the reader.

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).


NOTE: This list is not exhaustive. Please let me know if there is a term you
would like me to add to the list.