50 Fun Facts About Literary Terms

Which novelist's surname became an adjective for nightmarish predicaments like those in his novel The Trial?

Franz Kafka gave English the word 'Kafkaesque', though he asked for his unpublished works to be destroyed. His friend Max Brod ignored the request and published them.

Which Russian playwright advised that a rifle hanging on the wall in the first act must go off by the third?

Anton Chekhov repeated the advice in several letters to young playwrights. The rule now carries his name: nothing should appear in a story unless it will be used.

Which fourteen-line poem, mastered by Petrarch and Shakespeare, takes its name from the Italian for 'little song'?

Sonnet comes from the Italian sonetto, and the form reached English through Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey, who translated and imitated Petrarch.

Which word for a perfect society did Thomas More coin from Greek roots that literally mean 'no place'?

Utopia was the name More gave an imaginary island in his 1516 book. The word also echoes the Greek for 'good place', a pun More himself pointed out.

Which Japanese poem of three short phrases in a five-seven-five pattern is tied above all to Matsuo Bashō?

Haiku began as hokku, the opening verse of a longer linked poem. The writer Masaoka Shiki gave the form its modern name at the end of the 19th century.

In George Orwell's Animal Farm, pigs stand for leaders of the Russian Revolution, a famous case of which kind of story?

Allegory gives characters a second, hidden meaning: Orwell's boar Napoleon stands for Joseph Stalin, and the exiled Snowball's life parallels that of Leon Trotsky.

Which five-line comic verse form, rhymed AABBA, did Edward Lear popularise in his Book of Nonsense?

Limerick was a name Lear never used for his 212 nonsense verses. The word is generally taken to refer to the Irish city or county, though its origin is debated.

Which suspense device did Thomas Hardy make literal in a famous scene of his novel A Pair of Blue Eyes?

Cliffhanger fits the scene exactly: Hardy left Henry Knight hanging off a cliff. Such endings became a staple of Victorian serial fiction because a hero left in peril sold the next instalment.

Which term for a story's main character comes from the ancient Greek for the actor who plays the first part?

Protagonist joins the Greek protos, 'first', to agonistes, 'actor' or 'competitor', a word rooted in agon, the Greek for a contest.

Hamlet's 'To be, or not to be' is a famous example of which speech, named from the Latin for 'speaking alone'?

Soliloquy lets an audience overhear a character thinking aloud. Saint Augustine used the Latin word around 386 for a book of his own inner debates.

Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, urging the Irish poor to sell their children as food, is a classic of which genre?

Satire this savage is called Juvenalian, after the Roman poet Juvenal. Swift's title is now shorthand for any outrageous suggestion made with a straight face.

Jaques' line 'All the world's a stage' in As You Like It is among literature's most cited examples of which device?

Metaphor says one thing is another, with no 'like' or 'as'. Jaques stretches his across a whole speech, casting men and women as players who act out seven ages.

The tongue-twister 'Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers' is a textbook example of which sound device in poetry?

Alliteration repeats the opening sound of nearby words. Old English poems such as Beowulf used it, rather than rhyme, as the backbone of every line.

Which figure of speech, from Greek words meaning 'throw beyond', drives American tall tales about the giant Paul Bunyan?

Hyperbole is exaggeration that is not meant to be taken literally, and rhetoric has a second name for it: auxesis, which literally means 'growth'.

Which figure of speech, named from the Greek for 'sharp' and 'dull', covers phrases like 'cruel kindness'?

Oxymoron is itself a contradiction in terms, and J. R. R. Tolkien liked to read his own surname as a German equivalent meaning 'dull-keen'.

Which device, known to critics as analepsis, interrupts a story to show earlier events, as the tale of Sinbad does?

Flashback is far older than cinema. Another early example is 'The Three Apples', a murder mystery that is also among the tales of the Arabian Nights.

Which device plants early hints of events to come, and differs from a red herring by pointing readers the right way?

Foreshadowing usually appears near the start of a story to build anticipation. It can also make a bizarre later event feel credible, because readers sense they saw it coming.

When Oedipus vows to hunt down a killer the audience already knows is Oedipus himself, Sophocles is using which device?

Dramatic irony hands the audience knowledge that a character lacks, so every curse Oedipus calls down on the murderer falls, unknown to him, on his own head.

Which term for a character who sets off another by contrast comes from an old jewellers' trick for making gems shine?

Foil characters work like the bright leaf behind a jewel. Hamlet even puns on the word before his fencing match, telling Laertes, 'I'll be your foil.'

Which short tale with talking animals and a closing moral is linked above all to Aesop, a legendary Greek slave?

Fable heroes are usually animals that talk and scheme like people, as in 'The Tortoise and the Hare', 'The Crow and the Pitcher' and 'The Lion and the Mouse'.

Which device does Emily Dickinson use when Death, a courteous gentleman, kindly stops his carriage for the speaker?

Personification turns Death into a gentleman caller on a leisurely carriage ride to the grave. The poem first reached print in 1890, after Dickinson had died, under the title 'The Chariot'.

Which sound device, named from the Greek for 'name-making', does Edgar Allan Poe push to extremes in 'The Bells'?

Onomatopoeia so fills the poem that it popularised 'tintinnabulation', a word built on the Latin for 'bell' and often wrongly thought to be Poe's own coinage.

Which theatrical genre, staged at Athenian festivals of Dionysus, takes its name from Greek words meaning 'goat song'?

Tragedy may owe its name to a goat given as the prize in early choral contests, or to one that was sacrificed after the chorus had danced around it.

Which term for a group of lines set off within a poem comes from the Italian word for 'room'?

Stanza has had homelier English names too, among them batch, fit and stave. A blank line or an indent usually marks where one ends and the next begins.

Which term for a story's point of highest tension comes from the ancient Greek word for a ladder or staircase?

Climax first named a figure of speech in which words, phrases or clauses are arranged in order of increasing importance, each one a rung above the last.

Which term for a comically misused word honours a character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's comedy The Rivals?

Malapropism recalls Mrs Malaprop, who praises a man as 'the very pineapple of politeness'. Sheridan built her name on the French mal à propos, 'poorly placed'.

Which Romantic poet's name describes a proud, moody, brooding kind of hero first seen in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage?

Lord Byron made the poem partly a self-portrait, and the type soon travelled: Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin echoes the solitary brooding of Childe Harold.

Which narrative technique, a phrase credited to William James, renders Molly Bloom's thoughts in James Joyce's Ulysses?

Stream of consciousness was first applied to fiction in 1918, when May Sinclair reviewed Dorothy Richardson's novel sequence Pilgrimage. James had used the phrase in 1890 in The Principles of Psychology.

Which German term covers novels of growing up, from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship to Jane Eyre?

Bildungsroman joins the German Bildung, 'formation' or 'education', to Roman, 'novel'. The philologist Karl Morgenstern coined it in his university lectures in 1819.

Which Latin phrase for a contrived rescue recalls the crane that lowered actors playing gods onto Greek stages?

Deus ex machina means 'god from the machine'. More than half of Euripides's surviving plays end with one, and Aristophanes mocked the habit by swinging Euripides himself on stage by crane.

Walt Whitman is often called the American father of which style of poetry, the mode of his Leaves of Grass?

Free verse is usually counted an early 20th-century innovation with roots in the French vers libre, yet Whitman self-published his landmark collection in 1855.

Which literary style, first named by a German critic of painting, is tied above all to Gabriel García Márquez?

Magic realism began as a painter's label, magischer Realismus, coined in 1925 for a style of German art. In fiction, One Hundred Years of Solitude is its landmark novel.

Which French word for a worn-out phrase began as printers' jargon for a plate that reproduced type repeatedly?

Cliché may echo the click of a block dabbed into molten type-metal. Printers used the word for a stereotype plate, so two terms for tired ideas come from the print shop.

Which American short-story writer is a byword for the surprise ending, as in 'The Gift of the Magi'?

O. Henry was the pen name of William Sidney Porter, who published stories under various pseudonyms while serving a prison sentence for embezzlement.

Which word for a blend such as 'chortle' did Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty borrow from a two-part piece of luggage?

Portmanteau comes from the French porte-manteau, a case that opened into two equal halves. Humpty Dumpty uses it in Through the Looking-Glass to explain 'slithy', a mix of 'slimy' and 'lithe'.

Which term did critic Wayne C. Booth coin for storytellers such as Huckleberry Finn and Nabokov's Humbert Humbert?

Unreliable narrator types were later sorted into four kinds by the critic William Riggan: the pícaro, the clown, the madman and the naïf. He filed Huck under naïf and Humbert under clown.

Which genre takes its name from the subtitle Horace Walpole added to the second edition of The Castle of Otranto?

Gothic fiction began with a hoax: Walpole's first edition posed as a translation of an old book printed in Naples, and he admitted to writing it only in the second.

Bram Stoker's Dracula and Alice Walker's The Color Purple are both told in which form of novel?

Epistolary novels are told through letters, and the word goes back to the Greek epistolē, 'a letter'. Stoker stretched the form to take in diaries, newspaper accounts and even dictation cylinders.

Which Christian feast's name did James Joyce borrow for a character's sudden flash of insight in his Dubliners stories?

Epiphany took on its literary sense in Stephen Hero, Joyce's early version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Critics later traced the same sudden moments of vision in Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust.

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio's Decameron both set their tales inside which larger narrative structure?

Frame story collections spread west over the centuries, and the best known has Scheherazade tell a sultan tale after tale across One Thousand and One Nights.

Which French term for a plot's final unravelling comes from a verb meaning 'to untie', rooted in the Latin for 'knot'?

Denouement is the untying of a tale's knots: storylines resolve and events are explained. Short stories, with their economy of words, often do without an elaborate one.

Which Greek word, a medical term for purging, did Aristotle apply in his Poetics to an audience's pity and fear?

Catharsis means 'purification' or 'cleansing', and Aristotle first used it of the mind when writing about music in his Politics. Scholars dispute whether he meant emotions purged or emotions refined.

Which Latin phrase did Horace coin in Ars Poetica for poets who refuse to begin the Trojan War 'from the egg'?

In medias res means 'into the middle of things'. Horace's egg is the one laid by Leda, from which Helen of Troy was born, so a tale begun there starts absurdly early.

Which term did John Ruskin coin in Modern Painters to criticise poets who call sea foam 'cruel' and 'crawling'?

Pathetic fallacy was Ruskin's charge against the sentimental poetry of the late 18th century. Of the foam he wrote that it 'is not cruel, neither does it crawl'.

Which figure of speech, sharing its name with a punctuation mark, does John Donne use to address 'Death, be not proud'?

Apostrophe has a speaker break off to address someone absent or something that cannot answer, as Juliet does with 'O happy dagger!' in the last scene of Romeo and Juliet.

Which nineteen-line form with two repeating lines did Dylan Thomas use for 'Do not go gentle into that good night'?

Villanelle comes from the Italian villanella, a rustic song or dance. The strict modern form derives from a single French poem by Jean Passerat, published in 1606.

Which term, from a French verb meaning 'to straddle', describes a sentence that runs past the end of a line of poetry?

Enjambment delays the meaning, building a tension that the next line releases. Shakespeare leaned on it more and more as his style developed.

Which compound figure of Old English and Old Norse poetry calls the sea a 'whale-road' in Beowulf?

Kenning is a word English took straight from Old Norse. Beowulf also calls the sea a 'swan-road' and a 'sail-road', and one Norse poet named a sword an 'icicle of red shields'.

Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'I have a dream', repeated eight times in one speech, is a famous example of which device?

Anaphora repeats words at the start of neighbouring clauses, and its Greek name means 'carrying back'. Repeating them at the ends of clauses instead is called epistrophe.

Which interlocking rhyme scheme did Dante invent for the Divine Comedy and Shelley borrow for 'Ode to the West Wind'?

Terza rima means 'third rhyme': the middle line of each three-line group supplies the rhyme for the next. Chaucer was the first to try Dante's scheme in English.