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| Isocolon | Parallel structure in which the parallel elements are similar not only in grammatical structure, but also in length. For example, "An envious heart makes a treacherous ear" (Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston). |
| Aesthetic | Pertaining to the value of art for its own sake or for form |
| Juxtaposition | Placing of two items side by side to create a certain effect, reveal an attitude, or accomplish some other purpose |
| Elegy | Poem or prose lamenting the death of a particular person. Perhaps the most famous elegy is Thomas Grey's poem, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard." |
| Antihero | Protagonist of a literary work who does not embody the traditional qualities of a hero (e.g., honor, bravery, kindness, intelligence); for example, the protagonists created by Byron in Don Juan and Childe Harold, and the characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead |
| Catharsis | Purification or cleansing of the spirit through the emotions of pity and terror as a witness to a tragedy. |
| Epigraph | Quote set at the beginning of a literary work or at its divisions to set the tone or suggest a theme. |
| Motif | Recurrent device, formula, or situation that often serves as a signal for the appearance of a character or event |
| Parallelism | Recurrent syntactical similarity where several parts of a sentence or several sentences are expressed alike to show that the ideas in the parts or sentences equal in importance. It also adds balance, rhythm, and clarity to the sentence. For example, "I have always searched for, but never found the perfect painting for that wall." |
| Anaphora | regular repetition of the same word or phrase at the beginning of successive phrases or clauses. For example, "We shall fight in the trenches. We shall fight on the oceans. We shall fight in the sky." |
| Anadiplosis | Repetition of the last word of one clause at the beginning of the next clause. For example, "The crime was common, common be the pain." (Alexander Pope) |
| Appeals to: authority, emotion, logic | Rhetorical arguments in which the speaker: either claims to be an expert or relies on information provided by experts (appeal to authority), attempts to affect the listener's personal feelings (appeal to emotion), or attempts to persuade the listener through use of deductive reasoning (appeal to logic). |
| Imagery | Sensory details in a work; the use of figurative language to evoke a feeling, call to mind an idea, or describe an object. Imagery involves any or all of the five senses |
| Euphemism | Substitution of a milder or less direct expression for one that is harsh or blunt. For example, using "passed away" for "dead." |
| Genre | Term used to describe literary forms, such as tragedy, comedy, novel, or essay |
| Voice | The acknowledged or unacknowledged source of words of the story; the speaker, a "person" telling the story or poem. |
| Tone | The attitude a literary work takes towards its subject and theme. It reflects the narrator's attitude. |
| Theme | The central or dominant idea or concern of a work; the main idea or meaning |
| Protagonist | The chief character in a work of literature |
| Denotation | The dictionary definition of a word; the direct and specific meaning |
| Mood | The feeling or ambience resulting from the tone of a piece as well as the writer/narrator's attitude and point of view. The effect is created through descriptions of feelings or objects that establish a particular feeling such as gloom, fear, or hope |
| Realism | The literary practice of attempting to describe life and nature without idealization and with attention to detail |
