*Literary Terms*

[Asalbanoo]

Allegory is a form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative, are
equated with the meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. The underlying meaning has moral, social, religious, or political significance, and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas as charity, greed, or envy.
Thus an allegory is a story with two meanings, a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning.

Example:
Fairie Queen Spenser; Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan; Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne

[Asalbanoo]

Alliteration is the repetition of initial consonant sounds in neighboring words.


Example:
In cliches: sweet smell of success, a dime a dozen, bigger and better, jump for joy
Wordsworth: And sings a solitary song That whistles in the wind.


The matching or repetition of consonants is called alliteration, or the repeating of the same letter (or sound) at the beginning of words following each other immediately or at short intervals. A famous example is to be found in the two lines by Tennyson:


The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees.
The ancient poets often used alliteration instead of rhyme; in Beowulf there are three alliterations in every line. For example:


Now Beowulf bode in the burg of the Scyldings, Leader beloved, and long he ruled In fame with all folk since his father had gone . . .
Modern poets also avail themselves of alliteration, especially as a substitute for rhyme. Edwin Markham's "Lincoln, the Man of the People" is in unrhymed blank verse, but there are many lines as alliterative as:


She left the Heaven of Heroes and came down To make a man to meet the mortal need A man to match the mountains and the sea The friendly welcome of the wayside well
Robert Frost's "The Death of the Hired Man" begins:


Mary sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table
Waiting for Warren. When she heard his step. . . .
The eye immediately sees the alliteration in the "m's" in "Mary sat musing" and the "w's" in "Waiting for Warren. When. . . ." But it is the car that picks up the half-buried in "sounds in" lamp-flame sounds which act like faint and distant rhymes.

Like rhyme, alliteration is a great help to memory. It is powerful a device that prose has borrowed it. It is the alliteration which makes us remember such phrases as: "sink or swim," "do or die," "fuss and feathers," "the more the merrier," "watchful waiting," "poor but proud," "hale and hearty," "green as grass," "live and learn," "money makes the mare go."

While alliteration is the recurrence of single letter-sounds, there is another kind of recurrence which is the echo or repetition of a word or phrase. This is found in many kinds of poetry, from nonsense rhymes to ballads. The repeated words or syllables add an extra beat and accentuate the rhythm. They are often heard in "choruses" or "refrains," as in Shakespeare's "With a hey and a ho and a hey nonino" or Rudyard Kipling's:


For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' " Chuck him out, the brute!
But it's "Savior of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot.

Excellent use of repetition occurs through the whole of Rudyard Kipling's "Tommy" "Danny Deever" and Alfred Noyes's "The Barrel-Organ" especially in such lines as:

Come down to Kew in lilac-time, in lilac-time, in lilac-time;
Come down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from London!)
And you shall wander hand in hand with love in summer's wonderland;
Come down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from London!)

Fun story filled with alliteration, Pecked by a Pesky Pelican.

[Asalbanoo]

Allusion is a brief reference to a person, event, or place, real or ficticious, or to a work of art. Casual reference to a famous historical or literary figure or event.
An allusion may be drawn from history, geography, literature, or religion.

Example:
Stephen Vincent Benet's story "By the Waters of Babylon" contains a direct reference to Psalm 137 in the Bible

[Asalbanoo]

Amplification is use of bare expressions, likely to be ignored or misunderstood by a hearer or reader because of the bluntness. Emphasis through restatement with additional details.

Example:
Holofernes in Love's Labors Lost

Analogy is the comparison of two pairs which have the same relationship. The key is to ascertain the relationship between the first so you can choose the correct second pair. Part to whole, opposites, results of are types of relationships you should find.

Example:
hot is to cold as fire is to ice OR hot:cold::fire:ice

[Asalbanoo]

a.naph.o.ra n. [LLat. Gk. anapherein, to repeat: ana-, again + pherein, to carry] The deliberate repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of several successive verses, clauses, or paragraphs.
One of the devices of repetition, in which the same phrase is repeated at the beginning of two or more lines.

Example:
Poetry of Walt Whitman
Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: "And Brutus is an honorable man."
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Graham, Vicki, Bishop's 'At the Fishhouses.' (Elizabeth Bishop)., Vol. 53, The Explicator, 01-01-1995, pp 114(4). "The suspension broken, repetition and anaphora set up a new rhythm which is as compelling and variable as the sea's: I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same, slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones, icily free above the stones, above the stones and then the world."

[Asalbanoo]

anastrophe a.nas.tro.phe n. Inversion of the normal syntactic order of words, for example: To market went she.[Gk. anastrophe Example:
Woolf, Virgina, Works of Virginia Woolf: The Lighthouse., Monarch Notes, 01-01-1963. "Mrs. Woolf also makes use of other figures of speech such as anastrophe (the deliberate inversion of word order)..."

Aphorism is a brief saying embodying a moral, a concise statement of a principle or precept given in pointed words.

Example:
Hippocrates: Life is short, art is long, opportunity fleeting, experimenting dangerous, reasoning difficult.
Pope: Some praise at morning what they blame at night.
Emerson: Imitation is suicide
Franklin: Lost Time is never Found again.

[Asalbanoo]

Anthropomorphism is used with God or gods. The act of attributing human forms or qualities to an entities which are not human. Specifically, anthropomorphism is the describing of gods or goddesses in human forms and possessing human characteristics such as jealousy, hatred, or love.

Mythologies of ancient peoples were almost entirely concerned with anthropomorphic gods.The Greek gods such as Zeus and Apollo often were depicted in anthropomorphic forms. The avatars of the Hindu god Vishnu possessed human forms and qualities.

Current religious holds that is not logical to describe the Christian God, who is believed to be omnipotent and omnipresent, as human. However, it is extremely difficult for the average person to picture or discuss God or the gods without an anthropomorphic framework.

In art and literature, anthropomorphism frequently depicts deities in human or animal forms possessing the qualities of sentiment, speech and reasoning. A.G.H.

Reminds me of the old Mark Twain quotation "God created man in his image, and man, being a gentleman, returned the compliment."

See Personification for more.

[Asalbanoo]

Apostrophe is when an absent person, an abstract concept, or an important object is directly addressed.

Example:
With how sad steps, O moon, thou climbest the skies. Busy old fool, unruly sun.


Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds but not consonant sounds as in consonance.


Example:
fleet feet sweep by sleeping geeks.

[Asalbanoo]

Cacophony is harsh, discordant sounds. Opposite of euphony.

Example:
finger of birth-strangled babe.

Bibliomancy prediction based on a Bible verse or literary passage chosen at random.

[Asalbanoo]

Caesura is a natural pause or break.

Example:
England - how I long for thee!


Characterization is the method used by a writer to develop a character. The method includes (1) showing the character's appearance, (2) displaying the character's actions, (3) revealing the character's thoughts, (4) letting the character speak, and (5) getting the reactions of others.