English Literary Terms

Compiler: Associate Professor Ismail S. Talib; e-mail: ellibst@leonis.nus.edu.sg.
The following list of key terms in literature is intended primarily for students who do not do literature at university level. Those of you who did or are doing literature, should be familiar with the terms, although you may be interested in looking at some of the items or exploring the hypertext links indicated in the document, including links to some of Prof Talib's lecture notes on the Web. The list is not exhaustive, and there may also be additional and/or slightly different definitions of the terms in my own lectures (or, for that matter, in the lectures of other teachers). For a more detailed glossary of literary terms, students are urged to consult the following:
  M.H. Abrams' A Glossary of Literary Terms,   Seventh Edition (New York: Heinle & Heinle, 1999) or
        Literature students should be familiar with the above books. If you are taking a linguistic approach to literature, the following may be of additional interest:
      Katie Wales' Dictionary of Stylistics (London: Longman,   1989). [NB: The second edition of this book (2001) is also available].     On the WWW, the following electronic documents or sites may be of interest:
  A Glossary of Rhetorical Terms with Examples   from the University of Kentucky,
      A Glossary of Literary Criticism   from the Summer Institute of Linguistics,
      Glossary of Poetic Terms   from Bob's Byway and
      University of Victoria's Literary and Rhetorical Terms,   which are listed alphabetically,   or by category.
    Several hypertext links to the University of Victoria site will be given in this document.
For terms pertaining to narrative, more detailed treatments of some aspects of narrative are given in in my web-book, Narrative Theory.
For further definitions or links to other sites of relevance, you may want to visit the following:
  Links to Other Glossaries   from Bob's Byway,
      the...