Literary Elements
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50 free Literary Elements trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Literary elements are the working parts of every story: who it happens to, where and when it happens, what goes wrong, who is telling it and what it all adds up to. Once a reader can name those parts, a novel, a play or a poem becomes much easier to talk about. This quiz covers the elements and devices taught in middle school and high school English: the stages of a plot, kinds of characters and narrators, points of view, genres, figures of speech and the techniques writers use to build suspense. Most questions start from a famous example, from Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe to Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, so the answer can be reasoned out and not just recited. It suits students revising for a reading test, teachers who want a ready multiple-choice set to print, and anyone who enjoys putting the right name to a writer's trick. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In One Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade stays alive by ending each night's tale on which storytelling device?
Cliffhanger
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.
Q 02Which term for a mystery's false clue did William Cobbett popularise with a tale of distracting hounds from a hare?
Red herring
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.
Q 03Comic-book sound effects such as 'bam', 'pow' and 'wham' are examples of which device, whose words imitate noises?
Onomatopoeia
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.
Q 04Which literary term names the role Lord Voldemort plays opposite the hero of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels?
Antagonist
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.
Q 05'The Star-Spangled Banner' has four of which unit of verse, though usually only the first is ever sung?
Stanzas
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.
Q 06Jonathan Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels, now popularly seen as a children's book, as a political work of which genre?
Satire
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.
Q 07Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, begun for Lord Byron's ghost-story challenge, ranks among the first novels of which genre?
Science fiction
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.
Q 08Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows ends with a scene set nineteen years later; what is such a final section called?
Epilogue
Epilogue comes from Greek words meaning 'in addition' and 'word'. In this one, Harry and his friends see their own children off to Hogwarts.
Q 09Ebenezer Scrooge, who ends A Christmas Carol a changed man, is a popular example of which type of fictional character?
Dynamic
Dynamic characters change over the course of a story, while static characters remain the same throughout. Generic stock characters, by contrast, are generally flat.
Q 10Which George Orwell novella retells the Russian Revolution as an allegory, with a pig named Napoleon as Joseph Stalin?
Animal Farm
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.
Q 11Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart' is told by a killer insisting on being sane, a case of which kind of narrator?
Unreliable
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.
Q 12Dr. Watson narrates most of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories as 'I', an example of which point of view?
First person
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'.
Q 13Children's gamebooks that let readers choose what happens next are written in the second person, built on which pronoun?
You
Q 21When an audience knows what the characters do not, as in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, which kind of irony is at work?
Dramatic
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.
Q 22In Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games novels, the mockingjay comes to represent rebellion, an example of which device?
Symbolism
Symbolism runs through the whole trilogy: Publishers Weekly called the hybrid birds an important symbol of hope and rebellion throughout the books.
Q 23Which ancient Greek philosopher advised in his Poetics that a play should have a beginning, a middle and an end?
Aristotle
You is the pronoun of second-person narration: the reader takes the protagonist's role and makes the choices that decide the plot.
Q 14Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet begins with fourteen lines spoken by a Chorus, an opening section known by which name?
Prologue
The Prologue is itself a complete Shakespearean sonnet, and the Chorus comes back to read a second prologue before Act 2.
Q 15In Romeo and Juliet, the dying Mercutio jokes with a word meaning both serious and a burial place, using which device?
A pun
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.
Q 16'Jumbo shrimp' and 'bittersweet' show which figure of speech, named from Greek words for 'sharp' and 'dull'?
Oxymoron
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.
Q 17Which figure of speech, marked by 'like' or 'as', opens Robert Burns's poem A Red, Red Rose?
Simile
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.
Q 18Saying a heavy bag 'weighed a ton' is an example of which figure of speech, a staple of American tall tales?
Hyperbole
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.
Q 19The Grim Reaper, a robed skeleton carrying a scythe, is a familiar example of which literary device?
Personification
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.
Q 20'Spill the beans', 'break a leg' and 'raining cats and dogs' are well-known examples of which kind of expression?
Idiom
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.
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'.
Q 24For E. M. Forster, 'The king died, and then the queen died' becomes a plot once which two words are added?
Of grief
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.
Q 25Anton Chekhov's best-known rule of storytelling says that which object, once shown to an audience, must later be used?
A gun
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.
Q 26Which term did Alfred Hitchcock popularise for an object that drives a plot yet barely matters, like the Maltese Falcon?
MacGuffin
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.
Q 27German novelist Gustav Freytag's five-part model of how a drama unfolds is named after which shape?
Pyramid
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.
Q 28Unlike tone, a narrator's attitude to a subject, which literary element is the feeling a story creates in its reader?
Mood
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.
Q 29Which element of fiction, a story's central idea, can often be summed up in one noun such as 'love' or 'betrayal'?
Theme
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'.
Q 30Which term names a character such as Draco Malfoy, whose choices highlight Harry Potter's by contrast?
Foil
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.