23 Important Literary Terms You Should Know About

allegory: a narrative that carries a moral meaning along with the surface meaning. EXAMPLE: John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress
alliteration: the repetition of initial consonant sounds. EXAMPLE: “As I pondered, weak and weary…” (Poe)
anagram: a word resulting from the transposition of letters. EXAMPLE: now/won.
anapest: a metrical foot made of two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable. EXAMPLE: “The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold.” (Byron)
anaphora: the repetition of a word or phrase. EXAMPLE: “We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground …” (Lincoln)
antagonist: the major villain or character opposed to the protagonist
assonance: the repetition of vowel sounds. EXAMPLE: “I met a traveler from an antique land …” (Shelley)
caesura: a natural pause in a line of verse. EXAMPLE: “I see before me now/a traveling army halting …” (Whitman)
consonance: the repetition of consonant sounds that do not fall at the beginning of words EXAMPLE: “The curfew tolls the knell of parting day …” (Gray)
dactyl: a metrical foot made of one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables. EXAMPLE: “Here where the reaper was at work of late …” (Arnold)
denouement: the events following the climax of a plot elegy: a poem lamenting a death. EXAMPLE: John Milton’s “Lycidas”
epic: a long narrative poem with a heroic theme. EXAMPLE: Homer’s Iliad
epistolary novel: a narrative in letter form. EXAMPLE: Samuel Richardson’s Pamela
flashback: a scene that reveals events that happened earlier foreshadowing: a plot device that hints at events to come later
haiku: a Japanese poem of seventeen syllables
iamb: a metrical foot made of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. EXAMPLE: “I wandered lonely as a cloud …” (Wordsworth)
idyll: a short lyrical poem celebrating the pastoral life. EXAMPLE: William Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper”
onomatopoeia: a word whose sound expresses its meaning. EXAMPLES: ding, arf, pow
picaresque novel: a narrative featuring the adventures of a rogue. EXAMPLE: Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Roderick Random
protagonist: the hero of a novel or drama. EXAMPLE: Hamlet is the protagonist of the play by that name; Claudius may be seen as the antagonist.
soliloquy: a monologue in which a character expresses his or her thoughts. EXAMPLE: Hamlet’s “To be or not to be”
stream of consciousness: depiction of the random feelings and thoughts of a character in prose. EXAMPLE: Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse
trochee: a metrical foot made of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. EXAMPLE: “Where the bee sucks, there suck I” (Shakespeare)