Literary terms

• Literary terms

General terms

• Fiction: Imaginative writing originating from the author's mind.
• Narrative: A literary text that tells a story, having a beginning, middle, and end.
• Genre: A category of literary works with similar form, style, content, or purpose; examples include horror, fantasy, and historical texts and is a good starting point for analyzing works

Parts of a Narrative and Structural Elements

• Plot: Events in a narrative work.
• Setting: The physical location, historical time, and social conditions of a story; includes values and the governing body and contributes to the text.
• Character: A player in the story and the sum total of a person's traits and qualities.
• Characterization: The process by which an author reveals a character's traits, background, and motivation.
• Character Development: The change a character undergoes during a text.
• Protagonist: The main character on whom the reader's attention is focused.
• Antagonist: The character who creates conflict for the main character and is not necessarily a villain.
• Foil: A character who sharply contrasts with another, stressing and highlighting distinctive and opposing traits; for example, Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy.
• Conflict: The struggle between two opposing forces, either within a character (internal) or between a character and an external force. Without conflict, there is no plot. Types include: Character vs character, character vs self, character vs society. Character vs self is also known as internal conflict.
• Atmosphere: The mood or emotional experience the author creates for the reader and can be tense, lighthearted, serious, sentimental, gloomy, playful, or joyful.
• Introduction (Exposition): Establishes the setting, atmosphere, characters, and central conflicts of a narrative and is also known as exposition.
• Inciting Incident: The event that sets the plot in motion, usually at the end of the introduction; marks the end of the introduction and sets things in motion such as when Harry gets his letter and finds out he is a Wizard.
• Rising Action: A series of events after the inciting incident that leads to the climax.
• Climax: The moment of highest action or interest for the reader when the protagonist confronts the central conflict and/or the antagonist; the big "moment" the plot has been "leading up to" dealing with the central conflict.
• Falling Action: The central action of the climax shifts towards the resolution of the conflict, tension is relieved after the climax.
• Resolution (Denouement): The final strands of the narrative are brought together and matters are explained or resolved. This may not tie everything off and could be a cliffhanger.
• Flashback: Scenes within a narrative that represent events that happened before the story began.
• Narrator: The voice or character telling the story.
• Point of View: The perspective from which the story is told, working with the narrator to create an effect.
• First Person: The narrator speaks as "I" and is a participant in the plot, often the protagonist; for example, Katniss tells her story in The Hunger Games.
• Second Person: The narrator (or author, in non-fiction) addresses the reader as "you", creating a connection between them; often used in personal or informal non-fiction writing and for example is "Choose your own adventure books".
• Third Person: Characters are referred to as "he," "she," or "they" by an all-knowing "voice" aware of all the characters' thoughts, feelings, and motivations and is also known as an omniscient narrator and a limited third person narrator only knows the thoughts and feelings of one character.
• Theme: A central idea that runs throughout a text, such as survival, self-discovery, or man's inhumanity to man, and is not the same as "subject" or "topic" but implies what the author is saying about the subject.

Stylistic Devices (Literary Techniques)

• Symbol: A person, place, object, or idea representing something larger in meaning; for example, snakes represent evil in the Harry Potter series.
• Motif: An element that reappears to emphasize a theme; could be a symbol, object, color, a line of dialogue, or a type of imagery and for example: in the red balloons become a motif that supports the childhood trauma.
• Allusion: A reference to a person, place, or thing from another well-known source outside the text such as, "It rained so hard I thought we'd have to build an ark" (referring to the Biblical story of Noah's ark).
• Paradox: A statement or situation that seems to contradict itself such as a fire station engulfed in flames.
• Irony: When the meaning intended is the opposite of that expressed or expected, creating an effect similar to a paradox and includes verbal irony (sarcasm) and situational irony (when the situation is the opposite of what you would expect).
• Dramatic Irony: The audience knows more than the characters, creating suspense or humour such as knowing the killer is in the basement in a horror movie.
• The process of giving the reader hints about coming events.
• The audience's feelings of uncertainty about coming events.
• An event that brings about a sudden outpouring or release of emotion in the reader and/or the characters after a considerable build-up.
• The emotion may be positive (such as relief) or negative (such as anger).
• Provides the audience with a moment of relief from a serious or tense scene.
• May be used to show the sharp contrast between two events.
• The author's choice of words
• The literal or primary meaning of a word.
• The emotion or idea a word suggests.
• Two words, usually opposite in meaning, placed in juxtaposition to one another.
• A play on words that are either identical or similar in sound, but generally different in meaning.
• Deliberate exaggeration to create a particular effect.
• An implied comparison between two seemingly unlike things.
• A comparison between two things, often using "like," "as if" or "as...as.”
• Assigning human traits or abilities to inanimate objects or abstract ideas.
• A form of personification that ascribes human feelings to nonhuman objects or nature or natural phenomena (such as the weather).
• Words in which the sound is connected to the meaning.
• Using vivid description, which evokes the five senses, to paint a picture with words.

Explore fiction, narrative, and genre. Understand plot, setting, and character. Learn about characterization, character development, and the role of the protagonist.