100 Literary Device Flashcards

fable: a short moral story (often with animal characters)

• repitition of consonant sounds within a line or stanza
• Example: "around the rock the ragged rascal ran"
• "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers …"

usually an implict reference, perhaps to another work of literature or art, to a person or an event

more than one meaning or interpertation, meaning cannot be determined by its context

something located at a time when it could not have existed or occurred, an artifact that belongs to another time

an inference that if things agree in some respects they probably agree in others

using a pronoun or similar word instead of repeating a word used earlier

• the balancing of one idea with a contrasting idea, exact opposite
• Example: to err is human; to forgive, devine

A figure of speach in which a thing, a place, an abstract idea, a dead or absent person, is adressed as if present and capable of understanding

A symbol, usually an image, which recurs often enough in literature to be recognizable as an element of one's literary experience as a whole. ?

• An aside is a dramatic device in which a character speaks to the
• audience. By convention the audience is to realize that the character's
• speech is unheard by the other characters on stage. It may be addressed
• to the audience expressly (in character or out) or represent an unspoken
• thought.

Verse which consists of unrhymed five-stress lines; properly, iambic pentameters

a break or pause in a line of poetry, dictated by the natural rythm of the language and/or enforced by punctuation

The suggestion or implication evoked by a word or phrase, or even quite a long statement of any kind, over and above what they mean or actually denote

The close reptition of identical consonant sounds before and after diffrent vowels

The most literal and limited meaning of a word, regardless of what one may feel about it or the suggestions and ideas it conntes.

Denotes the vocabulary used by the writer

In classical literature an elegy was any poem composed of elegiac distichs, about various subjects such as death, war, love and similar themes

A line of six iambic feet (each pair of feet taken as a unit or dipody) very common in skaspearean plays.

The reflection of a writer's attitude, manner, mood, and moral outlook of his work