Part 5. Glossary

Allegory is a tale in prose or verse in which characters, actions or settings represent abstract ideas or moral qualities. Thus, an allegory has two meanings, a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning.

Alliteration is the repetition of similar sounds, usually consonants, in a group of words. Alliteration serves several purposes: it is pleasing to the ear, it emphasizes the words in which it occurs, and it links and emphasizes the ideas, these words express.

Allusion is a figure of speech, in which one refers covertly or indirectly to an object or circumstance that has occurred or existed in an external context. It is left to the reader or hearer to make the connection (Fowler); an overt allusion is a misnomer for what is simply a reference.

Antagonist is a person or force opposing the protagonist in a drama or a narrative. The word antagonist comes from a Greek word meaning ‘to struggle against”.

Assonance is the repetition of similar vowel sounds, especially in poetry. It creates a musical effect and emphasizes certain sounds to create a mood.

Archetype is a generic, idealized model of a person, object, or concept from which similar instances are derived, copied, patterned, or emulated. In psychology, an archetype is a model of a person, personality, or behavior. This article is about personality archetypes, as described in literature analysis and the study of the psyche.

Free verse is unrhymed verse, which has either no metrical pattern or an irregular pattern.

Gothic is a term that describes the use in fiction of grotesque, gloomy settings (often castles) and mysterious violent and supernatural occurences to create suspense and awe. The term is most often used in reference to Gothic novels, which became popular in England in the 18^th century.

Haiku is a Japanese verse form consisting of three lines and seventeen syllables. The first line of the haiku contains five syllables; the second line, seven, and the third, five. The haiku usually focuses on an image that suggests a thought or emotion. The Imagist poets were influenced by oriental verse forms, particularly by the haiku and a related Japanese form, the tanka.

Intertextuality is the shaping of texts' meanings by other texts. It can refer to an author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a reader’s referencing of one text in reading another. The term “intertextuality” has, itself, been borrowed and transformed many times since it was coined by poststructuralist Julia Kristeva in 1966. As critic William Irwin says, the term “has come to have almost as many meanings as users, from those faithful to Kristeva’s original vision to those who simply use it as a stylish way of talking about allusion and influence”.

Myth (mythos) is a sacred story concerning the origins of the world or how the world and the creatures in it came to have their present form. The active beings in myths are generally gods and heroes. Myths often are said to take place before recorded history begins. In saying that a myth is a sacred narrative, what is meant is that a myth is believed to be true by people who attach religious or spiritual significance to it. Use of the term by scholars does not imply that the narrative is either true or false. A myth in popular use is something that is widely believed to be false.

Modernism describes a series of reforming cultural movements in art and architecture, music, literature and the applied arts which emerged in the three decades before 1914.The term covers many political, cultural and artistic movements rooted in the changes in Western society at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. It is a trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology and practical experimentation.

Naturalism is an extreme form of realism. Naturalistic writers usually depict the sordid side of life and show the characters, who are severely, if not hopelessly, limited by their environment or heredity.

A narrator is an entity within a story that tells the story to the reader. It is one of three entities responsible for story-telling of any kind. The others are the author and the reader (or audience). The author and the reader both inhabit the real world. It is the author's function to create the alternate world, people, and events within the story. It is the reader's function to understand and interpret the story. The narrator exists within the world of the story (and only there—although in non-fiction the narrator and the author can share the same persona, since the real world and the world of the story are the same) and presents it in a way the reader can comprehend.

Paradigm (pærədaɪm/) since the late 1960s, has referred to a thought pattern in any scientific discipline or other epistemological context.

Pastiche denotes a literary technique employing a generally light-hearted tongue-in-cheek imitation of another's style; although jocular, it is usually respectful. For example, many stories featuring Sherlock Holmes, originally created by Arthur Conan Doyle, have been written as pastiches since the author's time. David Lodge's novel The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965) is a pastiche of works by Joyce, Kafka, and Virginia Woolf. Much fan fiction is pastiche.

Point of view is the vantage point from which a narrative is told. There are two basic points of view. In the first-person point of view, the story is told by one of he characters in his or her own words, and the reader is told only what his character knows and observes. In the third-person point of view, the author is not a character in the story at all. The third-person narrator might tell a story from a limited point of view, focusing only on one character in the story.

Postmodernism (sometimes abbreviated Pomo) was originally a reaction to modernism (not necessarily "post" in the purely temporal sense of "after"). Largely influenced by the disillusionment induced by the Second World War, postmodernism tends to refer to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle and embodying extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, and interconnectedness or interreferentiality.

Protagonist is the central character of a drama, novel, short story, or narrative poem. The protagonist is the character on whom the action centers and with whom the reader sympathizes most.

Realism is the attempt in literature and art to represent life as it really is, without sentimentalizing or idealizing it.

Stream of consciousness is a literary technique that seeks to portray an individual's point of view by giving the written equivalent of the character's thought processes, either in a loose interior monologue, or in connection to his or her sensory reactions to external occurrences. Stream-of-consciousness writing is strongly associated with the modernist movement. Its introduction in the literary context, transferred from psychology, is attributed to May Sinclair.

Symbol is an object, person , place, or action that has a meaning in itself and that also stands for something larger than itself, such as a quality, an attitude, a belief, or a value.

Utopian novel is a type of novel, which arose from the technological revolution, preceding World War I, depicting a perfect future society achieved through science.