A Glossary of Major Literary Terms
General Literary Terms
Genre  denotes a type or species of literature.
Diction   signifies the kinds of words, phrases, sentence structures, and figurative language in a work of literature.
Myth is one story in a mythology—a system of hereditary stories which were once believed to be true by a particular cultural group, and which served to explain why the world is as it is and things happen as they do, as well as to establish the rationale for social customs and observances, and the sanctions for the rules by which people conduct their lives.
Prose is often used as an inclusive term for all discourse, spoken or written, which is not patterned into the lines and rhythms either of metric verse or of free verse.
Essay  is the brief nonfiction reflections in prose
Terms of Novel
Novel  is now applied to a great variety of writings that have in common only the attribute of being extended works of fiction written in prose.
Plot  is the structure of its actions, as these are rendered and ordered toward achieving particular emotional and artistic effects
Flashback  a narrative or scene which represent events that happened before the time at which the work opened.
Foreshadow  is to indicate what is to happen.
Character  is the person presented in a dramatic or narrative work.
Flat Character is built around “a single idea or quality” and is presented without much individualizing detail, and therefore can be fairly adequately described in a single phrase or sentence.
Round Character  is complex in temperament and motivation and is represented with subtle particularity.
Characterization  is to establish the distinctive characters of the persons in a narrative.
Protagonist  the chief character in a work, on whom our interest centers.
Antagonist  the minor character who is pitted against an important opponent.
Point of View signifies the way a story gets told—the mode or perspective established by an author by means of which the reader is presented with the characters, actions, setting, and events which constitute the narrative in a work of fiction.
Third-person narrative   the narrator is someone outside the story proper, who refers to all the characters in the story by name, or as “he”, “she”, “they”
First-person narrative  the narrator speaks as “I”, and is himself a participant in the story.
Omniscient point of view  in a work of fiction that the narrator knows everything that needs to be known about the agents and events.
Limited point of view the narrator tells the story in the third person, but within the confines of what is experienced, thought, and felt by a single character within the story.
Setting is the general locale, historical time , and social circumstances in which its action occurs.
Atmosphere (mood) is the tonality pervading a literary work, which fosters in the reader expectations as to the course of events, whether happy or terrifying or disastrous.
Style   is the manner of linguistic expression in prose or verse—it is how speakers or writers say whatever it is that they say.
Symbol  is applied to a word or phrase that signifies an object or event which in turn signifies something, or has a range of reference, beyond itself.
Theme is sometimes used interchangeable with “motif”, but the term is more usefully applied to a general claim, or doctrine, whether implicit or asserted, which an imaginative work is designed to incorporate and make persuasive to the reader.
Motif   is an element—a type of incident, device, reference, or formula—which recurs frequently in literature.
Stream of Consciousness   is to describe the unbroken flow of thought and awareness in the waking mind.
Terms of Poetry
Verse  metrical language; the opposite of prose
Blank Verse  consists of lines iambic pentameter which are unrhymed.
Free Verse  is printed in short lines instead of with the continuity of prose, and has a more controlled rhythmic pattern than ordinary prose; but it lacks the regular syllabic stress pattern, organized into recurrent feet, of traditional meter.reference group
Stanza  is a grouping of the verse-lines in a poem, set off by a space in the printed text.
Run-on line  a line which has no natural speech pause at its end, allowing the sense to flow uninterruptedly into the succeeding line.

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