Glossary of Literary Terms:

Allegory
A symbolic narrative in which the surface details imply a secondary meaning. Allegory often takes the form of a story in which the characters represent moral qualities.

Antagonist
A character or force against which another character struggles. Darth Vader is an antagonist in the Star Wars Trilogy.

Character
An imaginary person that inhabits a literary work. Literary characters may be major or minor, static (unchanging) or dynamic (capable of change).

Characterization
The means by which writers present and reveal character. Although techniques of characterization are complex, writers typically reveal characters through their speech, dress, manner, and actions. Vladek’s father, for example, is characterized as a survivor of the Holocaust, in specific and interesting ways.

Climax
The turning point of the action in the plot of a play or story. The climax represents the point of greatest tension in the work. In Fight Club, the scene in which the main character fights his alter-ego in the basement of the office building is the climax. The fight between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker in A New Hope is another example.

Complication
An intensification of the conflict in a story or play. Complication builds up, accumulates, and develops the primary or central conflict in a literary work. “Luke, I am you Father!”

Conflict
A struggle between opposing forces in a story or play, usually resolved by the end of the work. The conflict may occur within a character as well as between characters.

Connotation
The associations called up by a word that goes beyond its dictionary meaning. Poets, especially, tend to use words rich in connotation.

Convention
A customary feature of a literary work, such as the use of a chorus in Greek tragedy, the inclusion of an explicit moral in a fable, or the use of a particular rhyme scheme in a villanelle. Literary conventions are defining features of particular literary genres, such as novel, short story, ballad, sonnet, and play.

Denotation
The dictionary meaning of a word. Writers typically play off a word's denotative meaning against its connotations, or suggested and implied associational implications.

Denouement
The resolution of the plot of a literary work. In Fight Club, the denouement occurs as the cityscape collapses.

Dialogue
The conversation of characters in a literary work. In fiction, dialogue is typically enclosed within quotation marks. In plays, characters' speech is preceded by their names.

Diction
The selection of words in a literary work. A work's diction forms one of its centrally important literary elements, as writers use words to convey action, reveal character, imply attitudes, identify themes, and suggest values. Vladek’s father has a very specific diction, particular to speakers of Yiddish.

Exposition
The first stage of a fictional or dramatic plot, in which necessary background information is provided.

Fable
A brief story with an explicit moral provided by the author. Fables typically include animals as characters.

Fiction
An imagined story, whether in prose, poetry, or drama. Characters in stories and novels are fictional, though they, too, may be based, in some way, on real people. The important thing to remember is that writers embellish and embroider and alter actual life when they use real life as the basis for their work. They fictionalize facts, and deviate from real-life situations as they "make things up."

Figurative language
A form of language use in which writers and speakers convey something other than the literal meaning of their words. Examples include hyperbole or exaggeration, litotes or understatement, simile and metaphor, which employ comparison, and synecdoche and metonymy, in which a part of a thing stands for the whole.

Flashback
An interruption of a work's chronology to describe or present an incident that occurred prior to the main time frame of a work's action. Writers use flashbacks to complicate the sense of chronology in the plot of their works and to convey the richness of the experience of human time.

Foil
A character who contrasts and parallels the main character in a play or story.

Foreshadowing
Hints of what is to come in the action of a play or a story.

Hyperbole
A figure of speech involving exaggeration.

Image
A concrete representation of a sense impression, a feeling, or an idea. Imagery refers to the pattern of related details in a work. In some works one image predominates either by recurring throughout the work or by appearing at a critical point in the plot. Often writers use multiple images throughout a work to suggest states of feeling and to convey implications of thought and action.

Imagery
The pattern of related comparative aspects of language, particularly of images, in a literary work.

Irony
A contrast or discrepancy between what is said and what is meant or between what happens and what is expected to happen in life and in literature. In verbal irony, characters say the opposite of what they mean. In irony of circumstance or situation, the opposite of what is expected occurs. In dramatic irony, a character speaks in ignorance of a situation or event known to the audience or to the other characters.

Literal language
A form of language in which writers and speakers mean exactly what their words denote.

Metaphor
A comparison between essentially unlike things without an explicitly comparative word such as like or as. An example is "My love is a red, red rose,"

Narrator
The voice and implied speaker of a fictional work, to be distinguished from the actual living author.

Onomatopoeia
The use of words to imitate the sounds they describe. Words such as buzz and crack are onomatopoetic. Most often, however, onomatopoeia refers to words and groups of words, such as Tennyson's description of the "murmur of innumerable bees," which attempts to capture the sound of a swarm of bees buzzing.

Parable
A brief story that teaches a lesson often ethical or spiritual.

Parody
A humorous, mocking imitation of a literary work, sometimes sarcastic, but often playful and even respectful in its playful imitation.

Personification
The endowment of inanimate objects or abstract concepts with animate or living qualities. An example: "The yellow leaves flaunted their color gaily in the breeze." Wordsworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud" includes personification.

Plot
The unified structure of incidents in a literary work.

Point of view
The angle of vision from which a story is narrated. See Narrator. A work's point of view can be: first person, in which the narrator is a character or an observer, respectively; objective, in which the narrator knows or appears to know no more than the reader; omniscient, in which the narrator knows everything about the characters; and limited omniscient, which allows the narrator to know some things about the characters but not everything.

Protagonist
The main character of a literary work.

Reversal
The point at which the action of the plot turns in an unexpected direction for the protagonist.

Satire
A literary work that criticizes human misconduct and ridicules vices, stupidities, and follies. Swift's Gulliver's Travels is a famous example. Chekhov's Marriage Proposal and O'Connor's "Everything That Rises Must Converge," have strong satirical elements.

Setting
The time and place of a literary work that establish its context. The stories of Sandra Cisneros are set in the American southwest in the mid to late 20th century, those of James Joyce in Dublin, Ireland in the early 20th century.

Simile
A figure of speech involving a comparison between unlike things using like, as, or as though.

Style
The way an author chooses words, arranges them in sentences or in lines of dialogue or verse, and develops ideas and actions with description, imagery, and other literary techniques.

Subject
What a story or play is about; to be distinguished from plot and theme. Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" is about the decline of a particular way of life endemic to the American south before the civil war. Its plot concerns how Faulkner describes and organizes the actions of the story's characters. Its theme is the overall meaning Faulkner conveys.

Subplot
A subsidiary or subordinate or parallel plot in a play or story that coexists with the main plot.

Symbol
An object or action in a literary work that means more than itself, that stands for something beyond itself. The glass unicorn in The Glass Menagerie, the rocking horse in "The Rocking-Horse Winner," the road in Frost's "The Road Not Taken"--all are symbols in this sense.

Synecdoche
A figure of speech in which a part is substituted for the whole. An example: "Lend me a hand."

Syntax
The grammatical order of words in a sentence or line of verse or dialogue. The organization of words and phrases and clauses in sentences of prose, verse, and dialogue.

Tale
A story that narrates strange happenings in a direct manner, without detailed descriptions of character.

Theme
The idea of a literary work abstracted from its details of language, character, and action, and cast in the form of a generalization.

Tone
The implied attitude of a writer toward the subject and characters of a work.

Understatement
A figure of speech in which a writer or speaker says less than what he or she means; the opposite of exaggeration.

Adapted from McGraw Hill’s literary glossary.