50 Fun Facts About Literary Elements

In One Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade stays alive by ending each night's tale on which storytelling device?

Cliffhanger endings were Scheherazade's survival plan: she told King Shahryar stories for 1,001 nights, stopping each one short to put off her own execution.

Which term for a mystery's false clue did William Cobbett popularise with a tale of distracting hounds from a hare?

Red herring first meant a real food: a kipper cured in brine or heavily smoked until it was strong-smelling. In his 1807 story Cobbett said he had used one to divert the hounds.

Comic-book sound effects such as 'bam', 'pow' and 'wham' are examples of which device, whose words imitate noises?

Onomatopoeia reached comics largely through cartoonist Roy Crane, who is credited with adding 'bam', 'pow' and 'wham' to what had been an almost entirely visual vocabulary.

Which literary term names the role Lord Voldemort plays opposite the hero of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels?

Antagonist does not always mean villain. In Shakespeare's Macbeth the tyrant is the main character, so the opposing role falls to Macduff, who is arguably in the right.

'The Star-Spangled Banner' has four of which unit of verse, though usually only the first is ever sung?

Stanzas two to four of Francis Scott Key's poem are rarely performed, and in 1861 the poet Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. even penned an unofficial fifth.

Jonathan Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels, now popularly seen as a children's book, as a political work of which genre?

Satire was risky: Swift very likely had the manuscript copied by another writer, so that his own handwriting could not be used as evidence if a legal case arose.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, begun for Lord Byron's ghost-story challenge, ranks among the first novels of which genre?

Science fiction fits, critic Brian Aldiss argued, because Victor Frankenstein makes a deliberate decision and turns to modern experiments in the laboratory to get his fantastic results.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows ends with a scene set nineteen years later; what is such a final section called?

Epilogue comes from Greek words meaning 'in addition' and 'word'. In this one, Harry and his friends see their own children off to Hogwarts.

Ebenezer Scrooge, who ends A Christmas Carol a changed man, is a popular example of which type of fictional character?

Dynamic characters change over the course of a story, while static characters remain the same throughout. Generic stock characters, by contrast, are generally flat.

Which George Orwell novella retells the Russian Revolution as an allegory, with a pig named Napoleon as Joseph Stalin?

Animal Farm follows events from the 1917 revolution into the Stalinist era. Orwell called it the first book in which he tried to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole.

Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart' is told by a killer insisting on being sane, a case of which kind of narrator?

Unreliable narrators got their name from the critic Wayne C. Booth in 1961, more than a century after Poe's story first appeared in a short-lived Boston magazine in 1843.

Dr. Watson narrates most of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories as 'I', an example of which point of view?

First person narration by the detective's assistant became a tradition of the genre, so much so that the narrating helper is known as 'the Watson'.

Children's gamebooks that let readers choose what happens next are written in the second person, built on which pronoun?

You is the pronoun of second-person narration: the reader takes the protagonist's role and makes the choices that decide the plot.

Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet begins with fourteen lines spoken by a Chorus, an opening section known by which name?

The Prologue is itself a complete Shakespearean sonnet, and the Chorus comes back to read a second prologue before Act 2.

In Romeo and Juliet, the dying Mercutio jokes with a word meaning both serious and a burial place, using which device?

A pun was Mercutio's last joke, playing on the two senses of 'grave'. The scholar Molly Mahood identified at least 175 puns and wordplays in the play.

'Jumbo shrimp' and 'bittersweet' show which figure of speech, named from Greek words for 'sharp' and 'dull'?

Oxymoron is itself an oxymoron, roughly 'sharp-dull' or 'pointedly foolish'. Shakespeare's Romeo strings together thirteen of them in a row in one speech.

Which figure of speech, marked by 'like' or 'as', opens Robert Burns's poem A Red, Red Rose?

Simile and metaphor can do much the same job: drop the comparison word from Burns's opening line and it becomes a metaphor, calling his love a rose outright, without confusing anyone.

Saying a heavy bag 'weighed a ton' is an example of which figure of speech, a staple of American tall tales?

Hyperbole is what makes Paul Bunyan a giant: the American tall tale about him relies heavily on it to establish his huge stature and abilities.

The Grim Reaper, a robed skeleton carrying a scythe, is a familiar example of which literary device?

Personification gives an abstract idea such as death a human form. In more modern stories the Grim Reaper causes a death by coming to collect the person's soul.

'Spill the beans', 'break a leg' and 'raining cats and dogs' are well-known examples of which kind of expression?

Idiom meanings differ from the literal meanings of the words inside them: 'spill the beans' means to reveal a secret, and 'break a leg' wishes a performer good luck.

When an audience knows what the characters do not, as in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, which kind of irony is at work?

Dramatic irony places the audience in a position of advantage, able to see a character's words and actions as counter-productive. Tragic irony is one specific type of it.

In Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games novels, the mockingjay comes to represent rebellion, an example of which device?

Symbolism runs through the whole trilogy: Publishers Weekly called the hybrid birds an important symbol of hope and rebellion throughout the books.

Which ancient Greek philosopher advised in his Poetics that a play should have a beginning, a middle and an end?

Aristotle's advice is why the three-act structure is often credited to him, but falsely: he in fact argued for two parts, a 'complication' and a 'dénouement'.

For E. M. Forster, 'The king died, and then the queen died' becomes a plot once which two words are added?

Of grief supplies a cause, and for Forster the cause-and-effect relationship between events is what makes a plot; a story merely orders events in a time sequence.

Anton Chekhov's best-known rule of storytelling says that which object, once shown to an audience, must later be used?

A gun gives the principle its name, Chekhov's gun. James Bond films follow it too: the gadgets handed to the spy at the beginning of a mission typically each serve a vital role later.

Which term did Alfred Hitchcock popularise for an object that drives a plot yet barely matters, like the Maltese Falcon?

MacGuffin was a term originated by Angus MacPhail, and Hitchcock popularised it with The 39 Steps, where the object of the chase is some otherwise incidental military secrets.

German novelist Gustav Freytag's five-part model of how a drama unfolds is named after which shape?

Pyramid is the name later given to the system in Freytag's 1863 book Die Technik des Dramas, whose stages run from introduction and rise to return or fall and catastrophe.

Unlike tone, a narrator's attitude to a subject, which literary element is the feeling a story creates in its reader?

Mood is created by means of setting, the attitude of the narrator or characters, and descriptions. Atmosphere is the aura of it that surrounds the story.

Which element of fiction, a story's central idea, can often be summed up in one noun such as 'love' or 'betrayal'?

Theme is counted with plot, character, setting and style as a component of fiction. A longer one can be a noun phrase, such as 'the dangers of unchecked ambition'.

Which term names a character such as Draco Malfoy, whose choices highlight Harry Potter's by contrast?

Foil comes from the old practice of backing gems with foil to make them shine more brightly. Draco struggles with his allegiances through the whole series, while Harry opposes Voldemort wholeheartedly.

In the film The Princess Bride, a grandfather reading to his reluctant grandson wraps the fairy tale in which device?

A frame story can hold several layers: in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Robert Walton's letters to his sister relay Victor's tale, which in turn contains the monster's own.

Which novel's setting is the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, during three years of the Great Depression?

To Kill a Mockingbird draws on Harper Lee's own childhood: its plot and characters are loosely based on her family, her neighbors and an event near her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama.

Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, about a fisherman and a marlin, centres on which type of conflict?

Person versus nature, traditionally worded 'man versus nature', is one of three basic types commonly listed, beside struggles against another character and against oneself.

Lois Lowry's The Giver, set in a community that has adopted 'Sameness', is an example of which genre of novel?

Dystopian fiction shows the price of a seemingly perfect order: Sameness has taken away pain and strife, but it has also eradicated emotional depth from people's lives.

'Exit, pursued by a bear' in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale is a famous example of which part of a play's script?

The stage direction presages the offstage death of Antigonus. The bear itself is almost certainly indebted to Mucedorus, a chivalric romance revived at court around 1610.

Unaware that Romeo is listening below her balcony, Juliet voices her private thoughts in which kind of speech?

Soliloquy joins the Latin words for 'alone' and 'to speak'. The speaker is usually alone on stage or, like Juliet, under the assumption of being unheard.

Citizen Kane, which opens with its hero dying on the word 'Rosebud', is told largely through which narrative device?

Flashback storytelling is far older than film: it is employed in several Arabian Nights tales, among them 'Sinbad the Sailor' and 'The City of Brass'.

Which narrative device drops early hints of events to come, where a flash-forward would jump ahead and show them?

Foreshadowing can be planted in dialogue, plot events or changes in setting. Even the title of a work or a chapter can act as a clue to what is going to happen.

Which stage of a plot, the point of highest tension, sits between the rising action and the falling action?

Climax comes from the ancient Greek word for a staircase or ladder. It is also called the turning point, and the falling action and resolution lead away from it.

The passing navy officer who rescues the stranded boys in Lord of the Flies is seen by some critics as which device?

Deus ex machina is the charge some critics level at the ending; William Golding himself called the rescue a 'gimmick'. Tolkien's Great Eagles have been critiqued in the same way.

Which scholar set out the 'hero's journey' in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a pattern George Lucas used for Star Wars?

Joseph Campbell, who was influenced by Carl Jung's analytical psychology, described 17 stages of the journey. Lucas has said Star Wars was deliberately structured with it in mind.

Which third-person narrator, typical of Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy, knows what every character thinks and feels?

Omniscient narration was typical of nineteenth-century fiction, George Eliot's included. The Harry Potter novels, by contrast, focus on their hero's view for much of the series.

S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders, which she began writing at fifteen, is a classic example of which genre of novel?

Coming-of-age fiction follows a young character growing up, and Hinton was living it: she wrote the bulk of the novel when she was 16 and a junior in high school.

Which Greek word for extreme pride describes Arachne, turned into a spider after boasting her weaving outdid Athena's?

Hubris was rarely left unpunished in Greek myth; other examples include Icarus, Niobe and Tantalus. In ancient Athens it was also a legal term for using violence to shame a victim.

Nearly every Shakespeare sonnet follows its three quatrains with which closing unit of rhyming lines?

A couplet ends almost all of the sonnets, but a few break the mould: number 126 consists of six couplets, followed by two blank lines marked with italic brackets.

'Nevermore', which closes verse after verse of Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Raven', is an example of which poetic device?

The refrain became part of a plagiarism row: after Poe's death his friend Thomas Holley Chivers claimed to have been the inspiration for it, as well as for the poem's meter.

Saying a worker was 'let go' rather than fired, or calling someone 'late' rather than dead, is which figure of speech?

Euphemism can hide far worse: during the Soviet Great Purge, an effective death sentence often used the clause 'imprisonment without right to correspondence'.

Writers use the put-down 'infodump' for a clumsy overload of which story element, the background a reader needs?

Exposition is the insertion of background information within a story. Dropped in one large dump, it can slow down the plot or break immersion for the readers.

Homer's Iliad begins nine years into the Trojan War rather than at its start, a technique known by which Latin phrase?

In medias res means 'into the middle of things'. The Roman poet Horace first used the phrase in his Ars Poetica, praising the poet who does not begin the Trojan War 'from the egg'.

Which Newbery Medal-winning novel is set at Camp Green Lake, a juvenile corrections facility in a Texas desert?

Holes also won the 1998 US National Book Award for Young People's Literature. Louis Sachar's 2006 follow-up, Small Steps, centres on a secondary character, Theodore 'Armpit' Johnson.