Author: The Editors

A moderately brief prose discussion of a restricted topic. Classifying the essay has eluded man skill. A basic and very useful division can, however, be made: formal and informal. Informal Essay: The informal essay includes aphoristic essays such as Bacon's Periodical Essays.... Qualities that make an essay informal include: the ... Read More

The first phase or part of plot, which sets the scene, introduces and identifies characters, and establishes the situation at the beginning of a story or play. Additional exposition is often scattered throughout the work ... Read More

Choice of words. Diction is often described as either informal or colloquial if it resembles everyday speech, or as formal if it is instead lofty, impersonal, and dignified. Tone is determined largely through diction. (The Norton Anthology of World Literature: Literary Terms) ... Read More

A character that serves as a double of a character. A doppelgänger will often have foil qualities as well. (Handbook to Literature) ... Read More

A study of the intersections between humanity and nature including focuses on the pastoral, the frontier, gender position, ethnicities, communities, urbanites, industrialization and technology. (Literary Theories and Schools of Criticism) ... Read More

Dialogue tags are short modifications to sections of dialogue. They let the reader know who is speaking. Dialogue tags should be used sparsely. In fact, many writers avoid them altogether, and instead, allow the voices within the dialogue to identify the speaker. If dialogue is developed well, tags should be ... Read More

To both defer and differ. Originally suggested by Jacques Derrida as a Postmodernist critical consideration of conventions and aesthetics, to the writer, it alludes to the French différer (defer and differ). Différance can apply to many aspects of writing technique—i.e., a creative writer will both defer and differ from linguistic ... Read More

Dialogue is the conversation of two or more people. It is sometimes used in general expository and philosophical writing, embodies certain values: (1) It advances the action and is not mere ornament. (2) It is consistent with the character of the speakers. (3) It gives the impression of naturalness without being ... Read More

Literally, 'untying' (as of a knot) in French; a plot-related term used in three ways: (1) as a synonym for falling action, (2) as a synonym for conclusion or resolution, and (3) as the label for a phase following the conclusion in which any loose ends are tied up [the ... Read More

Critical Race Theory, or CRT, is a theoretical and interpretive mode that examines the appearance of race and racism across dominant cultural modes of expression. In adopting this approach, CRT scholars attempt to understand how victims of systemic racism are affected by cultural perceptions of race and how they are ... Read More

The relationship between words in which the final consonants in the stressed syllables agree but the vowels that preceded them differ. A form of repetition used in prose and poetry. (A Handbook to Literature) ... Read More

The struggle that grows out of the interplay of two opposing forces. Conflict provides interest, suspense, and tension (Handbook to Literature). Person versus self is arguably the most important conflict within any character-based narrative. How the characters battle their own "demons," drives a deeper conflict and exploration of what it ... Read More

The struggle that grows out of the interplay of two opposing forces. Conflict provides interest, suspense, and tension (Handbook to Literature). Person versus self is arguably the most important conflict within any character-based narrative. How the characters battle their own "demons," drives a deeper conflict and exploration of what it ... Read More

The third part of plot, the point at which the action stops rising and begins falling or reversing; also called turning point or (following Aristotle) peripeteia. (Norton) ... Read More

The third part of plot, the point at which the action stops rising and begins falling or reversing; also called turning point or (following Aristotle) peripeteia. (Norton) ... Read More

Contrasting light and shade. Originally applied to painting, the term is used in the criticism of various literary forms involving the contrast of light and darkness, as in much of Hawthorne's and Nabokov's fiction and in Faulkner's Light in August. Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow involves complex interplay of black and ... Read More

Contrasting light and shade. Originally applied to painting, the term is used in the criticism of various literary forms involving the contrast of light and darkness, as in much of Hawthorne's and Nabokov's fiction and in Faulkner's Light in August. Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow involves complex interplay of black and ... Read More

A character is an imaginary personage who acts, appears, or is referred to in a literary work. Major or main characters are those that receive most attention, [such as the protagonist and the antagonist], minor characters least. Flat characters are relatively simple, have a few dominant traits, and tend to be predictable. Conversely, round characters are complex and multifaceted and ... Read More

A character is an imaginary personage who acts, appears, or is referred to in a literary work. Major or main characters are those that receive most attention, [such as the protagonist and the antagonist], minor characters least. Flat characters are relatively simple, have a few dominant traits, and tend to be predictable. Conversely, round characters are complex and multifaceted and ... Read More

One of the great unsettled issues. That it implies a beneficial cathartic effect produced by witnessing a tragic action is clear; how it is produced is in question. Some believe that the spectators, by vicarious participation, learn through the fate of the tragic hero, that fear and pity are destructive ... Read More

A narrative based in the bodily experiences—physical, emotional and more—of a central subject (personal essay or poetry) or character (fiction). Body narrative is a growing trend in not only artistic venues but also medicinal. "Developed at Columbia University in 2000, 'Narrative Medicine' fortifies clinical practice with the ability to recognize, ... Read More

The beholder's share is the viewer’s relation to art. Suggested by Eric Kandel as an important element in the study of artistic forms and cognitive perception. Some people are concerned that a reductionist analysis will diminish our fascination with art, that it will trivialize art and deprive it of its ... Read More

"A maxim or aphorism whose truth is held to be self-evident. In logic an axiom is a premise accepted as true without the need of demonstration and is used in building an argument." (Handbook to Literature) ... Read More

"[Much like consonance], assonance is generally a patterning of vowel sounds without regard to consonants. The patterning may be successive" (A Handbook to Literature). "Repetition of vowel sounds in a sequence of words with different endings—for example, 'The death of the poet was kept from his poems' in W. H. Auden’s ... Read More

Arkhe is of Greek origin [arche] meaning primary as of the senses or "the beginning." The Greek prefix can be found in archetype ... Read More

"Archetype is a term brought into literary criticism from the psychology of Carl Jung, who holds that behind each individual's 'unconscious'—the blocked-off residue of the past—lies the 'collective unconscious' of the human race—the blocked-off memory of our racial past, even of our prehuman experiences. [It is something like subconscious allusions.] ... Read More

"The rhythm established in the sequence of stressed and unstressed syllables in a phrasal unit. In a third and broader sense it is the rhythmical movement of writing when it is read aloud, the modulation produced by the rise and fall of the voice, the rhythm that sounds the "inner" ... Read More

"Alliteration is the repetition of initial identical consonant sounds or any vowel sounds in successive or closely associated syllables, especially stressed syllables" (A Handbook to Literature). Alliteration is used in both prose and poetry to create lyricism and fluidity in language ... Read More

"A consolidation of two or more entities into a single entity. This can be a consolidation of people, places, iconic items. Amalgamation is a craft technique used by many writers when writing fictional elements that draw from real life experiences." ... Read More

"An allusion is a [figure of speech in prose or poetry that makes a] brief, often implicit and indirect, reference within a literary text to something outside the text, whether another text (e.g., the Bible, a myth, another literary work, a painting, or a piece of music) or any imaginary ... Read More

"One of the rhetorical devices of repetition, in which the same expression (word or words) is repeated at the beginning of two or more lines, clauses or sentences" (A Handbook to Literature) ... Read More

"An analogy is a comparison of two things, alike in certain aspects; particularly a method used in exposition and description by which something unfamiliar is explained by being compared to something more familiar. In argumentation and logic, analogy is frequently employed to justify contentions. Analogy is widely used in poetry ... Read More

"Allegory is a form of extended metaphor in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative are equated with meanings that lie outside the narrative itself" (A Handbook to Literature) ... Read More