IB Glossary of Literary Terms

Allegory: A story that suggests another story. An allegory is present in literature

whenever it is clear the author is saying, ‘By this I also mean that.’
Allusion: A meaningful reference either direct or indirect.
Ambiguity: Something suggesting multiple meanings. Literary ambiguity
concentrates meanings.
Ambivalence: Conflicting feelings about something, such as revulsion and
fascination, love and hate.
Analogy: A comparison between things similar in a number of ways. An analogy
is frequently used to explain the unfamiliar by the familiar, as when a camera is
compared by analogy to the human eye.
Animism: The belief that nonhuman object like stones, trees and animals have
souls. The concept is distinct from personification, a consciously imaginative
projection of the same concept.
Antagonist: The character pitted against the protagonist. An evil or cruel
antagonist is a villain; however, the antagonist is not necessarily a villain.
Anthropomorphism: The practise of giving human attribites to animals, plants,
rivers, winds and the like, or to entities and abstractions. Mythological gods are
anthropomorphisms – Zeus with his thunderbolts for natural power, Mercury for
swiftness, Athena for wisdom.
SEE PERSONIFICATION
Antihero: A protagonist in a modern work who does not exhibit the qualities of a
traditional hero. Instead of being a grand and/or admirable figure – brave,
honest,and magnaminous, for example – an antihero is all too ordinary and may
even be petty or downright dishonest.
Apostrophe: A figure of speech in which a speaker directly and often
emotionally addresses a person who is dead or otherwise not physically present,
an imaginary person or entitiy, something inhuman or a place or concept. The
person addresses the object of the apostophe as if this object were capapable of
understanding and responding.
It is distinct from an invocation which refers to an explicit request for aid in
writing to some supernatural entity.
Atmosphere: The mood or general feeling of a literary work, especially as it
relates to the physical setting.

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Bathos: A sudden slippage from the sublime to the ridiculous. Any anticlimax.
Sentimental pathos. Triteness or dullness.
Descent into sentimental or mundane language by a writer who is striving to be
noble or elevated.
Cacophony: ‘Bad sounding’. The opposite of euphony, the term signifies
discordant, jarring unharmonious language.
Cadence: In poetry, a flowing irregular pulse as opposed to metre.
Cliché: An overused expression, once clever or metaphorical, but now trite and
timeworn.
Climax: The point of greatest tension or emotional intensity in a plot.
Conceit: Any fanciful, ingenious expression or idea, but especially one in the
form of an extended metaphor.
Concrete: Possessing physical existence, capable of being perceived by the
senses; the opposite of abstract.
Conflict: A confrontation or struggle between opposing characters or forces in
the plot of a narrative work, from which the action emanates and around which
it revolves.
Demotic style: The language of common people in their everyday discourse. The
unpretentious style of a certain type of literary work. An author using demotic
stlye employs the associations, diction, rhythm, and syntax of mundane speech.
SEE HIERATIC STYLE
Dénouement: French for ‘unknotting’; the unravelling of plot threads towards
the end of a novel, play or other narrative.
Equivocation: Latin for ‘equal speaking’: speaking or writing ambiguously,
hedging one’s words to conceal or mislead.
Ethos: Greek for ‘character’: the prevailing or characteristic tone or sentiment of a
people or community. In literature ethos is the prevailing tone or character of a
work considered n its social context or as a reflection of the character of the
author.
Euphony: Melodious sound, the opposite of cacophony.
Figurative language: Language that is not literal; often used to describe similes,
metaphors and personification
Flat character: In a literary work, a character that is two-dimensional, without the
depth or complexity of a living person; the opposite of a round character.

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Foil:: A character who, by his or her contrast with the main character, serves to
accentuate that character’s distinctive qualities or characteristics.
Fundamental image: An image (or metaphor) basic to the structure of a work, as,
for example, the sea in Moby-Dick of the scarlet letter A in The Scarlet Letter.
Hieratic style: Greek for ‘priestly’; a style intended for an educated class or
group of initiates, that is often self-consciously learned or elaborate.
Hubris: From Greek hybris, ‘pride’: prideful arrogance or insolence of the kind
that causes the tragic hero to ignore the warnings that might turn aside the action
that leads to disater.
Humours: The cardinal humours of ancient medical theory: blood, phlegm,
yellow bile (choler), black bile (melancholy). They were believed to be largely
responsible for health and disposition. Character types were considered to be
produced by dominance of fluids: sanguine, or kindly, cheerful, amorous;
phlegmatic, or sluggish, unrepsonsive; choleric, or quick-tempered; melancholic, or
brooding, dejected.
Image: As an artistic term ‘image’ usually refers to an artistic description of the
visible world. When used in relation to literature, ‘image’ most often denotes
descriptive terms or figurative language used to produce mental impressions in
the mind of the reader, and the impressions thereby produced.
Leitmotif: A repeated phrase, word, or theme running through and unifying a
novel or play like ‘tomorrow and tomorrow’ and ‘time’ in Faulkner’s Sound and
Fury; or ‘rain’ in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.
Locale: The setting of a story or play.
Metre: The measured pulse of poetry.
Metonymy: ‘Substitute naming’. An associated idea names the item: “Homer is
hard’ for ‘Reading Homer’s poems is difficult’.
Milieu: French for ‘surroundings’ or ‘environment’. The milieu created for the
characters in a lierary work is an important part of its ethos.
Mise-en-Scène: French for ‘placing on stage’. The surroundings or setting of any
event.
Mood: The emotive attitude conveyed by a literary work – gaiety, gloom,
resignation, etc. Mood and tone are virtually synonymous, though some
distinguish mood – the author’s attutude towards the subject – from tone, the
writer’s attitude to the audience.
Motif: A recurrent thematic element – word, image, smbol, object, phrase, action.

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Objective correlative: A term introduced by T.S Eliot in his essay “Hamlet and
His Problems” (1919). Eliot observes that there is something in Hamlet which
Shakespeare cannot “drag into the light, contemplate, or manipulate into art” , at
least not in the same way that he can with Othello’s jealousy, or Coriolanus’
pride. He goes on to deduce that “the only way of expressing emotion in the
form or art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects,
a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for that particular
emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in a sensory
experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”
Parable: A short tale encapsulating a moral or religious lesson.
Pathos: The feeling of pity, sympathy, tenderness, compassion, or sorrow evoked
by someone or something that is helpless.
Pathetic fallacy: The presentation of natural events and objects as controlled by
human emotions, so that in some way they express human sorrow or joy (‘a
brave little snowdrop’; ‘the heavens smiled on our enterprise’). The phrase was
coined by the English critic John Ruskin in Modern Painters (1843–60), to describe
the ascription of human feelings to the outside world.
The attribution of animate or human characteristics to nature as, especially, when
rocks, trees, or weather are portrayed as acting in sympathy to human feelings or
events.
The easiest way to begin thinking about it is in terms of the outside weather
reflecting the inside weather.
Personification: It is a technique distinguished from the pathetic fallacy in which
human emotions are attributed to inanimate nature.
Personification is the technique of treating abstractions, things, or animals as
persons.
The bestowing of human characteristics upon anything non-human, from an
abstract idea to a physical force to an inaniamte object to a living organism.
Proverb: A short, pithy saying, frequently embodying the folk wisdom of a
group or nation.
Quip: A clever or witty saying; sharp or sarcastic repartee.
Resolution: The unwinding of the plot; the denouement.
Sarcasm: A cutting personal remark, from Greek sarkazein, ‘to tear the flesh’.
Because the tearing is often ironic, people often misapply the term to an ironic

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statement. ‘You ugly little thing’ addressed to a dwarf would be sarcastic but not
ironic.
Style: An author’s personal manner of expression. Style is a result of the choices
an author makes with respect not to subject matter but to its presentation.
Subjectivity: Personal or emotional expression or taste or opinion, as opposed to
objectivity, impersonal expression.
Sublime: Latin, sublimis (literally ‘up to the lintel): in literature, a quality
attributed to lofty or noble ideas, grand or elevated expression, or (the ideal of
sublimity) an inspiring combination of thought and language. In nature or art, it
is a quality, as in a landscape or painting, that inspires awe or reverence.
Subplot: A sequence of events subordinate to the main story in a narrative or
dramatic work. Frequently a subplot involves secondary characters in actions
separate from the central action, adding another dimension to the work and
sometimes presenting a second illustration of, or ironic commentary on, the main
plot.
Tone: The author’s attitude toward subject and audience – playful, serious,
ironic, formal, sombre and the like; a work’s mood.
Transferred Epithet: An epithet is a term characterising a person or thing. A
transferred epithet is an adjective modifying a noun not usually associated with
it: ‘a cold war’, ‘iron curtain’, ‘dry wit’, ‘blind mouths’, ‘snarling trumpets’,
‘muttering retreats’.
Verisimilitude: The appearance of actuality.