Definition of literary devices

1. Literary Devices
Figures of Speech and Other
Literary Techniques

2. Related to Content
• 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 Classical, Topical, Biblical or
Literary.

3. Related to Content
• Antithesis: opposition, or contrast of ideas or words
in a balanced or parallel construction.
e.g. Brutus: Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I
loved Rome more. [Shakespeare, Julius Caesar]

4. Related to Content
• An anti-climax is an abrupt declension (either deliberate
or unintended) on the part of a speaker or writer from the
dignity of idea which he appeared to be aiming at; as in
the following well-known distich:-– "The great Dalhousie, he, the god of war,
– Lieutenant-colonel to the earl of Mar."
• An anticlimax can be intentionally employed only for a
jocular or satiric purpose. It frequently partakes of the
nature of antithesis, as-– "Die and endow a college or a cat."
• It is often difficult to distinguish between "anticlimax" and
"bathos"; but the former is more decidedly a relative
term. A whole speech may never rise above the level of
bathos; but a climax of greater or less elevation is the
necessary antecedent of an anticlimax.

5. Related to Content
• Aphorism is a brief saying embodying a moral, a
concise statement of a principle or precept given in
pointed words.
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.

6. Related to Content
• 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.

7. Related to Content
• Archetype is the usage of any object or
situation as it was originally made - think
of it as the biggest cliché ever, but one
that never dies.
ex: The Odyssey is so full of archetypes
that there is probably at least one of every
kind. Odysseus is the archetypical hero,
Hydra and Charybdis and the Cyclops are
the archetypical monsters...

8. Related to Content
•
Circumlocution
the use of a longer phrasing in place of a possible shorter form of
expression; a roundabout or indirect manner of writing or speaking.
E.g. Polonius’s speech
• In literature periphrasis is sometimes used for comic effect. 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 substituted for your class, the
class participated in behaviours that were most unruly and
displeasing in general
vs.
Your class misbehaved when I substituted for you.

9. Related to Content
• Climax is a figure of speech, in which words,
phrases, or clauses are arranged in order of
increasing importance. It is sometimes used with
anadiplosis, which uses the repetition of a word
or phrase in successive clauses.
• E.g. "...Lost, vaded, broken, dead within an hour.
William Shakespeare, The Passionate Pilgrim,
XIII
• "...the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness." Martin Luther King, I Have
a Dream

10. Related to Content
• Connotation is an implied meaning of a
word. Opposite of denotation.
Example:
Good night, sweet prince, and flights of
angels sing thee to thy rest (burial)

11. Related to Content
• Denotation is the literal meaning of a
word, the dictionary meaning. Opposite of
connotation.
Example:
Good night, sweet prince, and flights of
angels sing thee to thy rest (sleep).

12. Related to Content
• Euphemism is the substitution of an
agreeable or less offensive expression in
place of one that may offend or suggest
something unpleasant to the listener.
E.g. He was taken to his father – in – law’s
house (prison)

13. Related to Content
• Hypallage (pronounced /haɪˈpælədʒiː/) is a literary
device that is the reversal of the syntactic relation of two
words (as in "her beauty's face").
• One kind of hypallage, also known as a transferred
epithet, is rhetorical device in which a modifier, usually
an adjective, is applied to the "wrong" word in the
sentence. The word whose modifier is thus displaced
can either be actually present in the sentence, or it can
be implied logically.
• "The plowman homeward plods his weary way, / And
leaves the world to darkness and to me" (Thomas Gray,
"Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard") — Weary way
is a hypallage: it is the plowman, not the way, that is
weary.

14. Related to Content
• Hyperbaton An inversion of normal word order.
Word order reversal in "Cheese, I love it!"
• "Bloody thou art; bloody will be thy end" William Shakespeare in Richard III, 4.4, 198.
• "Object there was none. Passion there was
none." - Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart.
• "This is the sort of English up with which I will
not put." - Attributed to Winston Churchill

15. Related to Content
• Hyperbole is exaggeration or
overstatement.
Opposite of Understatement
• Example:
I'm so hungry I could eat a horse.
He's as big as a house.

16. Related to Content
• Image is language that evokes one or all
of the five senses:
seeing – visual
hearing – auditory
tasting – gustatory
smelling – olfactory
touching - tactile

17. Related to Content
• Irony is an implied discrepancy between what is
said and what is meant.
Three kinds of irony:
1. verbal irony is when an author says one thing
and means something else.
2. dramatic irony is when an audience perceives
something that a character in the literature does
not know.
3. irony of situation is a discrepency between the
expected result and actual results.

18. Related to Content
Litotes
• rather than making a certain statement
directly, a speaker expresses it even more
effectively, or achieves emphasis, by
denying its opposite.
• E.g. rather than merely saying that a
person is rather attractive (or even very
attractive), one might say that he or she is
"not unattractive".

19. Related to Content
• Metaphor comparison of two unlike things
using the verb "to be" and not using like or
as as in a simile.
• A metaphor establishes a relationship at
once; it leaves more to the imagination. It
is a shortcut to the meaning; it sets two
unlike things side by side and makes us
see the likeness between them.
• E.g. The camel is the ship of the desert

20. Related to Content
• Simile:
When Robert Burns wrote "My love is like
a red, red rose" he used a simile. When
Robert Herrick wrote "You are a tulip" he
used a metaphor.

21. Related to Content
• Metonymy is substituting a word for
another word closely associated with it.
Example:
bowing to the sceptred isle. (Great Britain)

22. Related to Content
Oxymoron is putting two contradictory
words together.
Examples:
hot ice, cold fire, wise fool, sad joy,
eloquent silence,

23. Related to Content
Paradox reveals a kind of truth which at
first seems contradictory. Two opposing
ideas.
Example:
Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron
bars a cage.

24. Related to Content
• Pathetic Fallacy:
The attribution of human traits to nature or inanimate
objects.
e.g. One passage, after a pointless bout of cruelty by
Hannie, describes her black mood: `She felt rudderless
and directionless, like the dead sheep the November
rains had carried down the river. Day after day it had
drifted up and down, up and down, moving swiftly away
with the pull of the sea's ebbing tide, pushing back again
as it rose. Bloated, a perch for the gulls. Until it snagged
on some drowned tree and left off its journeying.'

25. Related to Content
• Personification is giving human qualities to animals or
objects.
• Example:
a smiling moon, a jovial sun
• In "Mirror" by Sylvia Plath:
I am silver and exact.
I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful-• In John Keats' "To Autumn," the fall season is
personified as "sitting careless on a granary floor" (line
14) and "drowsed with the fume of poppies" (line 17.)

26. Related to Content
• polysyndeton
The repetition of connectives
Example:
"the snow, the silence, the quick love, the
astral call oh fly the friendly skies,..."

27. Related to Content
PUNS
• the usually humorous use of a word in such a
way as to suggest two or more of its meanings
or the meaning of another word similar in sound.
• A pun can rely on the assumed equivalency of
multiple similar words (homonymy), of different
shades of meaning of one word (polysemy), or
of a literal meaning with a metaphor.

28. Related to Content
• satire: a literary tone used to ridicule or
make fun of human vice or weakness,
often with the intent of correcting, or
changing, the subject of the satiric attack.

29. Related to Content
• Simile is the comparison of two unlike
things using like or as. Related to
metaphor
• Example:
He eats like a pig.
Vines are like golden prisons.

30. Related to Content
• Syllepsis When a single word that governs or
modifies two or more others must be understood
differently with respect to each of those words.
e.g.
Alexander Pope was a master of the literary
figure. Take this couplet from The Rape of the
Lock:
Here thou, great ANNA! whom three realms
obey,
Dost sometimes counsel take - and sometimes
tea.

31. Related to Content
• Symbol is using an object or action that
means something more than its literal
meaning.
• Example:
the bird of night (owl is a symbol of death)

32. Related to Content
• Synecdoche is when one uses a part to
represent the whole.
Example:
lend me your ears (give me your
attention).

33. Related to Content
• Synesthesia is the conflation of the
senses.
e. g “ruby grape of Proserpine”

34. Related to Content
• Syntax
1 a : the way in which linguistic elements
(as words) are put together to form
constituents (as phrases or clauses)
b : the part of grammar dealing with this
2 : a connected or orderly system :
harmonious arrangement of parts or
elements

35. Related to Content
• Theme is the general idea or insight about
life that a writer wishes to express, the
most common ones being, death and love.
Example:
– "After reading (this book, poem, essay), I think
the author wants me to understand......."

36. Related to Content
• Tone is the attitude a writer takes towards
a subject or character: serious, humorous,
sarcastic, ironic, satirical, tongue-in-cheek,
solemn, objective.

37. Related to Content
• Understatement
This device is used to understate the
obvious. On a day of extreme weather,
like it is really really hot, one might say, "Is
it warm enough for you?"

38. Related to Content
• Verisimilitude
1. The appearance of truth; the quality of
seeming to be true.
2. Something that has the appearance of
being true or real.

39. Acknowledgements
• Google Search
• http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/lit_terms/
• All my teachers of this miraculous bane,
the computer, starting from my Father.
• Ms Deepa Das, my constant support
• Our students who will take the IB exams
in 2009 and 2010, who, I believe, will bring
only 6s and 7s