Literary Terms

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Assonance

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the repetition of vowel sounds in nieghbouring syllables. The consonants can differ: so 'deep sea' is an example of assonance, whereas 'The queen will sweep past the deep crowds' is an example of internal rhyme

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Asyndeton

Back 2

The omission of a conjunction from a list ('chips, beans, peas, vinegar, salt, pepper')

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Decorum

Back 3

In literary parlance, the appropriateness of a work to its subject, its genre and its audience.

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Elision

Back 4

The omission of one or more letters or syllables from a word. This is usually marked by an apostrophe: as in 'he's going to the shops'

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Homophones

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Words which sound exactly the same but which have different meanings ('maid' and 'made').

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Hypermetrical

Back 6

having an extra syllable over and above the expected normal length of a line of verse.

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Metonymy

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A figure of speech in which the name of one object is replaced by another which is closely associated with it. So 'the turf' is a metonym for horse-racing

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Polysyndeton

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The use of multiple conjunctions, usually where they are not strictly necessary ('chips and beans and fish and egg and peas and vinegar and tomato sauce')

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Refrain

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A repeated line, phrase or group of lines, which recurs at regular intervals through a poem or song, usually at the end of a stanza.

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Topos

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from a Greek word meaning 'place', a 'topos' in poetry is a 'commonplace', a standard way of describing a particular subject. Describing a person's physical features from head to toe (or somewhere in between) is, for example, a standard topos of medieval and Renaissance poetry.

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co-ordinate clause

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A co-ordinate clause is of equal status with the main clause: 'I did it and she did it at the same time.'

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subordinate clause

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A subordinate clause might be nested within a sentence using the conjunction 'that': 'he said that the world was flat.' Here 'he said' is the main clause and the subordinate clause is 'the world was flat

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Relative clauses

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Relative clauses are usually introduced by a relative pronoun: 'I read the book which was falling to pieces'; 'She spoke to the man who was standing at the bar.'

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Co-ordinating conjunctions

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Co-ordinating conjunctions such as 'and', and 'but' link together elements of equal importance in a sentence ('Fish and chips' are of equal importance).

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Subordinating conjunctions

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Subordinating conjunctions such as 'because', 'if', 'although', connect a subordinate clause to its superordinate clause ('We will do it if you insist'; 'We did it because he insisted).

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Charactonym

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using a character’s name to present a certain facet of their personality

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Anachronism

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not following a chronological order

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Pejorative

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employing a belittling tone

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Parenthesis

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eg blah blah blah - blah blah - blah blah blah

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Parenthesis

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eg blah blah blah - blah blah - blah blah blah

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Embedded acrostic

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Ie book 9 lines 510-514, where the first letter of each line spells a word