English Lit Devices

Literary Devices – ENG3U7

Allegorical Elements: Representations or symbolizations of ideas and concepts; can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one

Alliteration: The repetition of the beginning sounds of adjacent or closely connected words

Allusion: A figure of speech that makes a reference to, or a representation of, people, places, events literary work, myths, or works of art

Anadiplosis: The repetition of the final words of a sentence or line at the beginning of the next

Analogy: Comparison of two pairs which have the same relationship

Anaphora: The repetition of the same word at the beginning of successive verse lines, clauses, or phrases

Antanaclasis: The repetition of a word or phrase whose meaning changes in the second instance

Antimetabole: Reversing the order of repeated words or phrases (e.g. fair is foul, and foul is fair)

Antithesis: The balancing of two contrasting words, ideas, or phrases against each other

Aposiopesis: A sudden breaking off of a thought in the middle of a sentence

Apostrophe: A direct and explicit address to an absent person, inanimate objects, or an abstract quality or being

Assonance: The repetition of similar vowel sounds of adjacent or closely connected words

Asyndeton: The omission or absence of a conjunction between parts of a sentence

Caesura: A pause in a line of verse

Cacophony: A harsh, discordant mixture of sounds

Climax: The turning point of action in a story that represents the point of greatest tension

Consonance: The repetition of similar consonant sounds of adjacent or closely connected words

Enjambment: The continuation of a syntactic unit from one line of verse into the next line without a pause

Epanalepsis: The repetition of the initial word(s) of a clause or sentence at the end of that same clause or sentence

Epic Simile: An extended simile, often running to several lines, used typically in epic poetry to intensify the heroic nature of the subject

Epic...