Literature & Literary Theory

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118 domain-specific abstractions whose origin domain is Literature & Literary Theory. They span 118 subdomains — sort by that column to group them, or click any subdomain to filter to it.

Abstraction	Subdomain	Description
Acrostic	Poetic Form	An acrostic makes the initials of successive textual units form a readable name, message, or alphabetic sequence alongside the ordinary text.
Alien Space Bats	Alternate History	An alternate-history trope marking a desired divergence whose causal bridge needs extraordinary outside intervention, whether criticized as implausible or openly adopted as fantasy.
Anagnorisis	Poetics	Aristotle's moment of dramatic recognition — a character's discrete move from ignorance to knowledge of a load-bearing fact about identity or agency that retroactively reorganizes the meaning of every prior scene rather than adding a new event.
Analepsis (Flashback)	Narratology	A flashback, more formally known as analepsis, is an interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point in the story.
Anceps	Metrics and Prosody	A position in quantitative poetic meter that may be realized by either a long or a short syllable under the meter's rules.
Antilabe	Dramatic Poetics	Split one dramatic verse line between speakers by changing voice before the line ends.
Asefru	Kabyle Literature and Poetics	A Kabyle Berber poetic form conventionally organized as three three-line stanzas with an AAB rhyme pattern and seven-five-seven syllabic lines, performed in recitation or song.
Audience Reveal	Narrative Craft and NarratologyAudience Information Management	A deliberately staged discourse event that makes a previously unavailable, concealed, or unshown story element legible to the audience at a chosen moment, changing its knowledge state without requiring any character to learn the same thing.
Bahr (poetry)	Prosody	A named metrical pattern in Arabic prosody, built from a regulated sequence of feet and adapted across Persian, Turkic, and Urdu poetic traditions.
Balliol rhyme	Poetics	A four-line comic verse form of two rhyming couplets, four beats per line and first-person caricature of a named subject.
Byronic Hero	Character TypologyRomantic and Gothic Literature	A recurring literary figure whose alienated self-assertion and troubling conduct remain in tension with magnetic appeal and moral judgment.
Canon	Canon Formation	The bounded, institutionally policed set of works a tradition treats as exemplary and interpretively authoritative — taught as models, cited to adjudicate disputes, and contested at the boundary — as distinct from the totality of what it has produced or widely read.
Catalexis	ProsodyMetrics	Metrical incompleteness in a verse line, usually through omission of the final syllable or part of the final foot, with headlessness conventionally treated as an initial-position form and related line endings classified separately.
Chronotope	Bakhtinian Poetics	Read the coupling of a narrative's time-pattern and space-pattern as an admissibility structure that determines which events, encounters, and protagonists can take shape inside it, rather than as separable descriptive settings.
Collaborative poetry	PoetryPoetic Composition	Collaborative or collective poetry is an alternative and creative technique for writing poetry by more than one person.
Common measure	English Verse MeterProsody	A four-line verse metre alternating eight- and six-syllable lines, usually in an iambic 4/3-beat pattern.
Conflict (Narrative)	Plot DesignDramatic Action	A narrative conflict sets a character's pursued aim against resistance that changes action, delay, or choice.
Constrained writing	Literary Technique	The literary practice of composing under an explicit rule that forbids, requires, counts, orders, or transforms elements of the text.
Cut-up technique	Literary Technique	An aleatory composition method that fragments an existing text and rearranges the pieces into a new sequence.
Damsel in Distress	Narrative Tropes	A recurring gender-coded narrative pattern in which a female character's peril motivates another character's rescue-centered action and shifts plot agency toward the rescuer.
Dark lord	Literary Archetypes	A fictional antagonistic archetype that concentrates supreme evil and command at the apex of a heroic narrative, acting through subordinate agents and drawing the plot toward climactic confrontation.
Dawn Parting of Lovers	Literary SituationLyric and Drama	A literary situation in which lovers together through the night face daybreak as the boundary for actual or imminent separation.
Dead metaphor	Figurative LanguageMetaphor Theory	A dead metaphor is a figure of speech which has lost the original imagery of its meaning by extensive, repetitive, and popular usage, or because it refers to an obsolete technology or forgotten custom.
Denouement	NarratologyDramatic Structure	Denouement (, ) is an element in the structure of many stories, in which all plot lines typically resolve, the major conflict ends or diminishes, events are explained, etc.
Dialogism	Many Voiced Meaning	Read meaning as assembled from the intersection of prior voices any word already carries, so even an apparent monologue is mapped as a meeting-place of endorsed, parodied, and contested voices rather than a single speaker's verdict.
Dialogue (Bakhtin)	Bakhtinian Dialogism	Bakhtin's principle that meaning and personhood emerge through open-ended address and response among irreducible voices rather than through a final monologic synthesis.
Dream Vision	Dream Vision StudiesMedieval LiteratureGenre Theory	A literary form in which a narrator recounts entering sleep or visionary suspension, experiencing an allegorical or revelatory otherworld that addresses waking concerns, and returning to record or interpret the gained knowledge.
Dynamic Character	NarratologyCharacterization	Dynamic characters are those that change over the course of the story, while static characters remain the same throughout.
Epic Laws of Folk Narrative	FolkloristicsNarrative Theory	The epic laws of folk narrative are Axel Olrik's proposed recurring compositional principles governing repetition, contrast, character grouping, plot concentration, and closure in traditional narratives.
Eucatastrophe	Fantasy Literary Criticism	Tolkien's name for a sudden good turn in a story that brings joy of deliverance against a real possibility of sorrow or failure.
Explication de Texte	Literary AnalysisClose ReadingFrench Pedagogy	Explication de Texte is a French formalist method of literary analysis that allows for limited reader response, similar to close reading in the English-speaking literary tradition.
Exposition (narrative)	Narratology	Background information inserted into a narrative so readers can understand its setting, characters, prior events or governing context.
Fake memoir	Literary FraudLife Writing	A fake memoir is a type of literary forgery in which a wholly or partially fabricated autobiography, memoir or journal of an individual is presented as fact.
Flashforward	Narrative TimeStorytelling Technique	A narrative flashforward presents a later scene before its usual story position, then orients the audience to an earlier reference line.
Floating timeline	NarratologySerial Fiction Continuity	A floating timeline (also known as a sliding timescale) is a device used in fiction, particularly in long-running comics and animation, in which characters age little or not at all while the setting around them remains contemporary to the real world.
Focalisation	Narratology	The narratological relation determining through whose perceptual, cognitive, or informational position narrative events are selected and presented.
Foil (literature)	CharacterizationNarratology	A narrative character, subplot, setting, or other element whose structured contrast with another element makes the latter's qualities, choices, or thematic function more legible.
Frame tale	Narratology	A frame story (also known as a frame tale, framing device, frame narrative, sandwich narrative, nested narrative, or intercalation) is the literary technique and narrative structure in which an opening narrative introduces either a more emphasized second narrative or a set of shorter tales.
Free Indirect Discourse	NarratologySpeech Thought and Consciousness Representation	A mode of represented speech, thought, or perception in which narrator-aligned person and tense coexist with a character's deictic center, idiom, expressivity, and judgments, without quotation or an overt subordinating report frame.
Genre	Convention Systems	A historically evolving cluster of cultural artifacts whose recurring conventions set up a contract between producer and audience — an inherited craft toolkit on one side, a reading strategy and evaluative horizon on the other — shaping both how works are made and how they are judged.
Gentleman Thief	Crime FictionCriminal Protagonist Archetypes	A recurring crime-fiction character who makes theft narratively attractive by joining criminal mastery to elite social performance, finesse in place of ordinary force, and a self-limiting code.
Heteroglossia	Bakhtinian Discourse Analysis	Bakhtin's condition of a text in which multiple distinct social voices coexist within a shared utterance space and dialogically interanimate one another — each voice's meaning partly constituted by its tension with the others rather than resolved into a single authorial voice.
Horizon of Expectations	Reception Aesthetics	Explain a work's reception as the aesthetic distance between its actual features and the reconstructible set of generic and cultural expectations its first audience brought, so the same fixed text registers differently as that horizon drifts over time.
Hybrid genre	Literary and Media Studies	A work category formed by combining recognizable conventions, themes, structures, tones, or audience promises from two or more established genres.
Ideogrammic method	Modernist Poetics	Ezra Pound’s poetic method of juxtaposing concrete images or particulars so an abstract relation emerges without discursive statement.
Idiot Plot	NarratologyFilm Criticism	Diagnose a story whose central conflict persists only because characters repeatedly leave an ordinary, available resolving move unused.
Implied Reader	Reception Aesthetics	Recover the audience a text constructs for itself — the knowledge it presumes, inferences it expects, and role it assigns — by reading its formal choices about what to explain and what to leave implicit, distinct from author and actual reader.
Intercalary chapter	NarratologyNovel Structure	An intercalary chapter (also called an inner chapter, inserted chapter, or interchapter ) is a chapter in a novel or novella that is relevant to the theme, but does not involve the main characters or further the plot.
Intertextuality	Meaning and Reference	The condition of a text whose meaning is partly constituted by its relations to other texts — allusion, quotation, parody, generic convention — where a competent reader's recognition of the relation is itself part of what the text says.
Irony	Rhetoric and Figurative Language	Produce meaning from a legible gap between two levels — said versus meant, character-knowledge versus audience-knowledge, expectation versus outcome — that an interpreter holds simultaneously, which is what manufactures the effects of complicity, critique, pathos, or humor.
Knight-Errant	Chivalric RomanceMedieval Literature	A knight-errant (or knight errant ) is a figure of medieval chivalric romance literature.
Lexia (hypertext)	Hypertext TheoryNarratology	In hypertext, a lexia (plural lexias; from French lexie, lexies; etymologically from "diction, word") is a text unit that links to other lexias, corresponding to a node in a network.
Mary Sue	Character StudiesFan Fiction	The Mary Sue is a type of fictional character, usually a young woman, who is perceived as unrealistically free of weaknesses or character flaws, or as serving a wish-fulfillment role for the author.
Metrical Bridge	Classical MetricsGreek Verse	A verse-metre rule or strong tendency that avoids a defined word boundary at a specified position in a poetic line.
Metrical Foot	PoeticsMetrics	A metrical foot is a local ordered group of syllabic positions defined by a verse tradition's quantity or relative-stress contrast.
Mimesis	Poetics	The classical aesthetic concept of selective, shaped representation of action or reality in art, where dropping some features and amplifying others is not failed copying but the mechanism that makes the subject more visible than raw experience would.
Mimesis criticism	Literary Criticism	A literary-critical method that tests whether a later text imitates an earlier cultural or literary model through sustained structural transformation.
Mock-heroic	Literary Studies	A satirical literary mode that applies elevated heroic style and epic conventions to trivial, foolish, or disproportionate subjects.
Monorhyme	PoeticsProsody	Monorhyme is a passage, stanza, or entire poem in which all lines have the same end rhyme.
Mythos (Aristotle)	Aristotelian PoeticsDramatic Theory	Mythos [from Ancient Greek μῦθος mûthos] is the term used by Aristotle in his Poetics (c.
Narrative Characterization	NarratologyCharacter Theory and Narrative Discourse	The construction of a storyworld character by explicitly ascribing properties and by prompting audiences to infer them from actions, speech, appearance, consciousness, setting, and performance cues.
Narrative criticism	Literary and Scriptural Studies	An interpretive method that analyzes how a text's narrator, plot, characterization, setting, time and implied audience organize meaning as a story.
Narrative Device	Narratology	A narrative device is a recurrent structural technique or function-bearing element that organizes chronology, disclosure, viewpoint, contrast, plot expectation, or audience inference within a narrative while remaining distinguishable from the events narrated.
Narrative Frame Transition	Fiction WritingNarrative Presentation	A fiction-writing device that marks a change of narrative time, place, or viewpoint and re-anchors the reader in the new frame.
Narrative Gap	Narratology	Turn a deliberate, cued absence in a story — a withheld fact or unrendered scene the reader is meant to feel and close by inference — into an active device tuned on one knob: the gap's width and signposting.
Narrative network	Computational NarratologyDigital Humanities	A network representation of a narrative in which selected characters, events, places, concepts, or states become nodes and textually evidenced interactions, sequence, co-occurrence, causation, or discourse relations become edges under an explicit extraction and perspective model.
Narrative Pace	NarratologyFilm Analysis	The comparison between how much presentation a narrative gives to a segment and the story or plot interval that segment represents.
Narrative Poetry	PoeticsPoetic Genres	Narrative poetry is a form of poetry that tells a story, often using the voices of both a narrator and characters; the entire story is usually written in metered verse.
Narrative point of view	Narratology	Narrative point of view, perspective, or voice: the choice of grammatical person used by the narrator to establish whether or not the narrator and the audience are participants in the story; also, this includes the scope of the information or knowledge that the narrator presents.
Narrative Thread	Narratology	A traceable local line of linked events actually narrated within a larger account, recognizable through its continuity and relation to other narrated material.
Narrativity	Narratology	The degree to which a communication is organized and experienced as a story through event structure and discourse, supporting transportation and potentially persuasion.
Narreme	Narratology	A minimal functional unit of narrative structure defined by its contribution to an event, state, transition, or relation in a story rather than by sentence length.
Nation language	Caribbean Literary and Postcolonial Language Studies	Kamau Brathwaite's term for Caribbean and African-diasporic language practice rooted in creole speech, oral rhythm, African continuities and lived community usage rather than being subordinated as a deficient English dialect.
New historicism	Literary Theory and Cultural History	A literary-critical approach that reads literary and nonliterary texts as mutually constitutive products of historically specific power relations, discourses and cultural practices.
Nonlinear narrative	NarratologyNarrative Structure	A storytelling structure that presents events in an order or branching arrangement different from their chronological or direct causal sequence.
Objective Correlative	Modernist Poetics	Evoke a specific emotion in an audience not by stating it but by presenting a configured set of objects, situations, and events that is the formula of that state, so perceiving the particulars produces the feeling directly.
Organic unity	PoeticsNew Criticism	The interpretive idea that a bounded whole gains coherence through differentiated parts whose roles and effects are interdependent within a governing form.
Outside Context Problem	Science Fiction	A term coined in Iain M. Banks's Culture fiction for an unprecedented external encounter or threat so far beyond a society's prior models, experience, and response repertoire that even recognizing the situation exposes the limits of its context.
Pantoum	Poetics and Verse FormsFixed Forms	A linked-quatrain poetic form whose second and fourth lines recur as the first and third lines of the next stanza, conventionally closing by bringing opening material back at the end.
Parable	Narrative Rhetoric and Religious Literature	A concise didactic narrative that places a concrete human situation alongside a moral, spiritual, or practical principle so interpretation of the story carries an instructive lesson.
Paratext	Book History	Treat everything wrapping a text but not part of it — title, cover, preface, blurb, interviews — as a threshold that pre-sorts the work into a reception category and primes a reading strategy before the first page is read.
Pathetic Fallacy	PoeticsFigurative Description	Emotion-shaped literary perception that makes an external thing seem to have a quality or possible action its literal character does not warrant.
Petrarchan sonnet	PoeticsPoetic Forms	A fourteen-line sonnet form divided into an octave and sestet, typically turning from a problem or exposition toward a response as its rhyme scheme changes.
Plot	Narratology	Distinguish the causally bound, tension-shaped arrangement of selected events into a rising-climax-resolution arc from the mere chronicle of what happened in sequence — the move from 'and then' to 'because of' — and hold the underlying story fixed while varying its telling.
Plot (narrative)	Narratology	The organized sequence and causal arrangement of events in a narrative.
Poetic closure	Poetics and Literary Form	The textual and perceptual devices that make a poem's ending feel conclusive, complete, suspended, or deliberately resistant to completion.
Poetic Form	Literary StudiesPoeticsVerse Form	A poetic form is a repeatable organization of verse whose recognizable identity arises from constraints or conventions governing such features as line, meter, rhythm, rhyme, stanza, sequence, recurrence, voice, or prescribed progression.
Poetic Metre	VersificationMetrics	A repeatable prosodic scheme constraining the length or marked positions of verse lines under a tradition's accepted variations.
Polysystem theory	Semiotic Systems	A literary and semiotic-cultural model of interacting, hierarchically positioned co-systems whose repertoires and relations change through time.
Posthumous narrative	NarratologyUnnatural and Postmortem Narration	Let a character narrate from a position established as after that character's death, creating an impossible or conventionally licensed retrospective voice with expanded temporal knowledge.
Reader-Response	Reception Aesthetics	Treat meaning as co-produced in the act of reading rather than fixed in the text, and locate any divergence of readings at one of three sources — the text's gaps, the reader's horizon, or the interpretive community.
Redaction (editorial synthesis)	Textual StudiesEditorial Synthesis and Redaction Criticism	An editorial operation that combines multiple textual sources, lightly alters them, and produces a coherent single work.
Redshirt	Narratology	A supporting-character role whose early death demonstrates a threat's stakes while the focal characters or mission continue.
Regulated verse	Classical Chinese Poetics	A Classical Chinese shi form governed by fixed line length, rhyme placement, tonal patterns and prescribed parallelism.
Renshi	Japanese PoetryCollaborative Poetry	Renshi are typically composed by a group of Japanese and foreign poets collaborating in the writing process in sessions lasting several days.
Reset Button Technique	Television NarrativeSeriality	A narrative device that cancels or declines to carry forward a consequential deviation so an established story premise remains usable.
Rhyme	Poetics	Rhyme links words or syllables through recurring similar sounds, often at patterned positions in verse.
Rictameter	Poetic FormsProsody	A nine-line syllabic verse form with the count pattern 2-4-6-8-10-8-6-4-2 and an ending that repeats the opening two-syllable word or phrase.
Serial (literature)	PublishingSerial Fiction	In literature, a serial is a printing or publishing format by which a single larger work, often a work of narrative fiction, is published in smaller, sequential installments.
Somatic theory	Translation StudiesSomatics of Language	Somatic theory is a theory of human social behavior based on the somatic marker hypothesis of António Damásio.
Stanza	Poetics	A visually or formally grouped unit of poetic lines, often carrying a recurring meter, rhyme, syntax, or rhetorical function.
Structuralism	Theory Methodology	Analyse meaning in a system as determined by the relations among its elements rather than their intrinsic properties — defining each unit by what it is not, bracketing history, and recovering the small latent relational grammar that generates a corpus's large surface variety.
Superhero	Comics StudiesPopular NarrativeGenre Theory	A superhero is a recurring popular-narrative character type endowed with extraordinary abilities, equipment, or status and organized around a public protective identity, heroic mission, and recognizable persona.
Syllabic Verse	VersificationProsody	A verse system whose primary metrical rule is a fixed or constrained syllable count per line, often supplemented by counted hemistichs and language-specific boundary stresses or quantities.
Tellability	Narrative Studies	The context-dependent quality that makes an event or sequence sufficiently remarkable, consequential and audience-relevant to warrant narration.
Textual criticism	Textual ScholarshipTextual Criticism and Scholarly Editing	Evaluate variant readings across documentary witnesses to describe a text's transmission and, under an explicit editorial aim, establish or represent a critically reasoned text and apparatus.
The Chosen One (Trope)	NarratologySpeculative Fiction	A narrative role in which a character's special designation for a consequential future organizes expectation, even if the destiny fails.
The Heresy of Paraphrase	New CriticismPoetry Interpretation	A poem's extracted prose message is not equivalent to its meaning when the poem makes meaning through the ordered play of imagery, tone, and tensions worked through in the poem.
Theatrum Mundi	Literary StudiesWorld as Theater Metaphor	Frame the world or social life as a theater in which roles, scripts, stages, spectatorship, and performance organize interpretations of action and appearance.
Theme (Narrative)	Thematic Interpretation	A narrative theme is a sustained general concern or point inferred from patterned characters, choices and events across a story.
Thing theory	Literary and Material Culture Theory	A critical-theory approach examining how material objects become socially and aesthetically salient as 'things' when ordinary use, classification or circulation breaks down.
Tiffany problem	Historical Fiction	The Tiffany problem occurs when a historically accurate detail appears anachronistic to modern audiences because of later associations.
Transtextuality	Narratology and Textual Theory	Gerard Genette's umbrella for all overt or hidden relations that connect one text with other texts or with categories, commentaries, and transformations surrounding it.
Villain	Narrative Studies	A morally framed harmful agent in a narrative whose actions create or concentrate consequential conflict, whether an opponent or the story's focal character.
Villanelle	PoeticsPoetic Forms	A villanelle, also known as villanesque, is a nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain.
Virelai	Medieval Poetry	Virelai is a recurring medieval poetry, medieval music identity in which a fixed French verse and song form alternates a refrain with internally patterned stanzas.
Volta	Poetics and Prosody	The structural pivot in a lyric poem — codified at line 9 of a Petrarchan sonnet or line 13 of a Shakespearean one — where the argument or perspective turns and retroactively reframes everything that preceded it, rather than merely continuing it.
Wise fool	Literary Tropes and Character Functions	A literary and dramatic paradox in which a character dismissed as foolish, naive, marginal, or comic voices insight that more learned or powerful characters cannot perceive.