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.

opposition, or contrast of ideas or words in a balanced or parallel construction.

1) denotes the entire body of literature traditionally thought to be suitable for admiration and study.

2) refers to the writings of an author that generally are accepted as genuine, such as the "Chaucer canon" or the "Shakespeare canon." Chaucer's canon includes The Canterbury Tales, for instance, but it does not include the apocryphal work, "The Plowman's Tale," which has been mistakenly attributed to him in the past.

an implied meaning of a word.

Example: Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest (burial)

the repetition of consonant sounds, but not vowels.

Examples: lady lounges lazily, dark deep dread crept in.

A common feature that has become traditional or expected within a specific genre (category) of literature or film.

In Harlequin romances, for instance, it is conventional to focus on a male and female character who struggle through misunderstandings and difficulties until they fall in love.

the literal meaning of a word, the dictionary meaning.

Example: Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest (sleep).

a line ending in a full pause, often indicated by appropriate punctuation such as a period or semicolon. Here is an example of end-stopped rhyme from Robert Browning's "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister":

A line having no pause or end punctuation but having uninterrupted grammatical meaning continuing into the next line. Here is an example from George S. Viereck's "The Haunted House":

A short, poetic nickname--often in the form of an adjective or adjectival phrase--attached to the normal name. Frequently, this technique allows a poet to extend a line by a few syllables in a poetic manner that characterizes an individual or a setting within an epic poem.

1) Homeric epithet - in classical literature often includes compounds of two words such as, "fleet-footed Achilles."

2) Historical epithet - a descriptive phrase attached to a ruler's name. For example, King Alfred the Great.

Attempting to group words together harmoniously, so that the consonants permit an easy and pleasing flow of sound when spoken. Here is an example of euphony from John Keats' The Eve of St. Agnes (1820):

And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferred
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one
From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon.

a form of low comedy designed to provoke laughter through highly exaggerated caricatures of people in improbable or silly situations. Traits of farce include: (1) physical bustle such as slapstick,

(2) sexual misunderstandings and mix-ups, and

(3) broad verbal humor such as puns.

Many literary critics (especially in the Victorian period) have tended to view farce as inferior to "high comedy" that involves brilliant dialogue.

If a line ends in a lightly stressed syllable, it is said to be feminine. For example:

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mousing."

The result of inserting one or more small stories within the body of a larger story that encompasses the smaller ones. Often this term is used interchangeably with both the literary technique and the larger story itself that contains the smaller ones, which are called pericopes, "framed narratives" or "embedded narratives."

Example: The 1001 Arabian Nights is probably the most famous Middle Eastern frame narrative.

A form of Japanese poetry that follows several conventions (the following are only three, there are others as well):

1) Consists of three lines with syllable counts of 5, 7, and 5 respectively.

2) Typically provides a Zen description of a location, natural phenomena, wildlife, or common everyday occurrence.

3) Set during a particular season or month.

A term from Greek tragedy that literally means "missing the mark." Protagonists frequently possess some sort of hamartia that causes catastrophic results after they fail to recognize some fact or truth that could have saved them if they recognized it earlier. The idea of hamartia is often ironic; it frequently implies the very trait that makes the individual noteworthy is what ultimately causes the protagonist's decline into disaster.

Example: for the character of Macbeth, the same ambition that makes him so admired is the trait that also allows Lady Macbeth to lure him to murder and treason.

A generic term for changing the normal or expected order of words.

Example: "One ad does not a survey make."

A poetic device in which a word in the middle of a line rhymes with a word at the end of the same metrical line.

Internal rhyme appears in the first and third lines in this excerpt from Shelley's "The Cloud":

A short poem (between 12 to 50 lines) written in a repeating stanzaic form, often designed to be set to music. Unlike a ballad, the lyric usually does not have a plot or storyline, but it rather expresses the feelings, perceptions, and thoughts of a single poetic speaker (not necessarily the poet) in an intensely personal, emotional, or subjective manner.

A lyric can also be any poem having the form and musical quality of a song.

Rhymes that end with a heavy stress on the last syllable in each rhyming word.

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse."

Fiction in which the subject of the story is the act or art of storytelling of itself, especially when such material breaks up the illusion of "reality" in a work

Example: John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, in which the author interrupts his own narative to insert himself as a character in the work. Claiming not to like the ending to the tale, the author sets his watch back ten minutes, and the storyline backs up ten minutes so an alternative ending can unfold.

A comparison or analogy stated in such a way as to imply that one object is another one, figuratively speaking.

Example: When we speak of "the ladder of success," we imply that being successful is much like climbing a ladder to a higher and better position.

Using a vaguely suggestive, physical object to embody a more general idea. The term metonym also applies to the object itself used to suggest that more general idea.

Some examples of metonymy are using the metonym crown in reference to royalty or the entire royal family, or stating "the pen is mightier than the sword" to suggest that the power of education and writing is more potent for changing the world than military force.

A figure of speech that combines contradictory terms.

Example: Jumbo shrimp

a succinct story, in prose or verse, that illustrates a lesson. It differs from a fable in that fables use animals, plants, inanimate objects, and forces of nature as characters, while parables generally feature human characters. It is a type of analogy.

Parables sketch a setting, describe an action, and show the results. They often involve characters facing moral dilemmas, or making questionable decisions and then facing the consequences.

A way of writing that favors short, simple sentences, with the use of coordinating rather than subordinating conjunctions. Opposite of hypotaxis.

Example: Things Fall Apart is paratactical.

A type of (often accidental or awkward) personification in which a writer ascribes the human feelings of his or her characters to inanimate objects or non-human phenomena of the natural world.

Example: Coleridge's Christabel, in which we read of a dancing autumn leaf:

The one red leaf, the last of its clan
That dances as often as dance it can.

Adding in superfluous words to extend the message you are trying to give - "beating around the bush", so to speak

Example: I have observed that within the time I subsituted for your class, the class participated in behaviours that were most unruly and displeasing in general.

Compared to: Your class misbehaved when I subsituted for you.

An external representation of oneself which might or might not accurately reflect one's inner self, or an external representation of oneself that might be largely accurate, but involves exaggerating certain characteristics and minimizing others.

Example: Johnathan Swift creates the persona of a well-to-do English intellectual in his "A Modest Proposal," when in reality he was an angry Irishman outraged over Britain's economic exploitation of Ireland.

(1): the mechanics of verse poetry--its sounds, rhythms, scansion and meter, stanzaic form, alliteration, assonance, euphony, onomatopoeia, and rhyme.

(2) The study or analysis of the previously listed material. This is also called versification.

A play on two words similar in sound but different in meaning.

Example: the title of the movie Good Will Hunting.

A line or set of lines at the end of a stanza or section of a longer poem or song--these lines repeat at regular intervals in other stanzas or sections of the same work. Sometimes the repetition involves minor changes in wording.

Example: Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven" (with the word "nevermore")

A variety of language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting.

Example: Formal writing probably wouldn't include the word "ain't."

The Shakespearean sonnet uses three quatrains; each rhymed differently, with a final, independently rhymed couplet that makes an effective, unifying climax to the whole. Its rhyme scheme is abab, cdcd, efef, gg.

Typically, the final two lines follow a "turn" or a "volta," (sometimes spelled volte, like volte-face) because they reverse, undercut, or turn from the original line of thought to take the idea in a new direction.

A trope in which accidental events occur that seem oddly appropriate, such as the poetic justice of a pickpocket getting his own pocket picked. However, both the victim and the audience are simultaneously aware of the situation in situational irony.

Probably the most famous example of situational irony is Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, in which Swift "recommends" that English landlords take up the habit of eating Irish babies as a food staple.

Rhymes created out of words with similar but not identical sounds. In most of these instances, either the vowel segments are different while the consonants are identical, or vice versa.

An example from a poem by William Butler Yeats:

Writing in which a character's perceptions, thoughts, and memories are presented in an apparently random form, without regard for logical sequence, chronology, or syntax. Often such writing makes no distinction between various levels of reality--such as dreams, memories, imaginative thoughts or real sensory perception.

Examples: William Faulkner. Duh.

A rhetorical trope involving a part of an object representing the whole, or the whole of an object representing a part.

Examples: A writer might state, "Twenty eyes watched our every move." Rather than implying that twenty disembodied eyes are swiveling to follow him as he walks by, she means that ten people watched the group's every move. When a captain calls out, "All hands on deck," he wants the whole sailors, not just their hands.

A two-syllable unit or foot of poetry consisting of a heavy stress followed by a light stress.

Examples: Many English words naturally form trochees: happy, hammer, roses, etc.

An earlier figure, event, or symbol in the Old Testament thought to prefigure a coming antitype (corresponding figure, event, or symbol) in the New Testament.

Note: Not sure if this is the definition we need to know.

EDIT: Could refer more generally to a group of literary works similar in their method of depicting reality, for which the original model is an object or subject or the act of artistic expression itself. (Sounds like similar to "genre.") - Credit: Daniel Habibi

An imaginary storyteller or character who describes what he witnesses accurately, but misinterpets those events because of faulty perception, personal bias, or limited understanding. Often the writer or poet creating such an unreliable narrator leaves clues so that readers will perceive the unreliablity and question the interpretations offered.

The sense that what one reads is "real," or at least realistic and believable. For instance, the reader possesses a sense of verisimilitude when reading a story in which a character cuts his finger, and the finger bleeds. If the character's cut finger had produced sparks of fire rather than blood, the story would not possess verisimilitude.

Note that even fantasy novels and science fiction stories that discuss impossible events can have verisimilitude if the reader is able to read them with suspended disbelief.

There are three general meanings for verse:

(1) a line of metrical writing,

(2) a stanza, or

(3) any composition written in meter (i.e., poetry generally).