Explanation of literary terms

Atmosphere refers to a dominant feeling in a story. It points to the mental and moral environment of the story and is different from the setting, with describes the physical environment in which the characters operate. Frequently the setting helps create the atmosphere.

Detachment is a syntactic stylistic figure consisting in separating a secondary part of a sentence with the aim of emphasizing it, e.g. There is a nice girl in our ballet school. I like her name, Diana.

Colloquialisms refer to informal or conversational language. It echoes the natural, unforced speech rhythms and vocabulary of everyday speech. Such language is frequently livened with slang. The sentences are short and often bend the rules of grammar. In several of the stories colloquialisms go hand in hand with dialects.

Dialect is a variety of speech different from the standard language of the culture. It usually corresponds to such differences among population groups as geographical location, social class, or age. Writers use dialect to make their characters seem authentic.

Ellipsis is a syntactic stylistic figure: omission of one or more words which are obviously understood, but must be used to make the expression grammatically complete, e.g. Where did you go? – To the disco.

Epithet is a figure of speech: a word or phrase expressing some quality of a person, thing, idea or phenomenon. Epithets are attributes that describe objects expressively, e.g. earth’s old and weary cry (W.B. Yeats); smiling Spring (R. Burns).

Expressive means of a language are those phonetic (stresses, pauses, whispering, singing, etc.), morphological (diminutive suffixes), lexical (epithets, vulgarisms, interjections, etc.) and syntactic units and forms which make speech emphatic. They introduce connotational (non-denotative) meanings into utterances.

Humor takes many forms. It ranges from exaggerated situations, snappy lines, and parody (comical imitation), through the sharp irony and the gentle irony to the comic characterizations and ingeniously funny plot.

Hyperbole is a deliberate exaggeration of a certain quality of an object or phenomenon, e.g. I was scared to death.

Inversion is a deliberate changing of the word-order of the initial sentence pattern, e.g. In came Marianna.

Irony is a figure of speech expressing either an attitude or a situation in which words or actions mean the opposite of what one really means. It is used for purpose of ridicule.

Metaphor is the result of transference of the name of one object to another object based upon similarity of the objects, e.g. "The rain came down in long knitting needles." (Enid Bagnold, National Velvet) "The streets were a furnace, the sun an executioner." (Cynthia Ozick, "Rosa")

Oxymoron is a combination of words which are semantically incompatible, e.g. hot snow, loving hate, speaking silence.

Personification is a figure of speech in which animals or things are given human characteristics. Like metaphors and similes, personification heightens our imaginative response to what is being described, e.g. Dawn was just breaking, with a guilty air.

Point of view refers to the specific character or narrator through whose eyes all or part of the story unfolds. What the narrator or character knows or is ignorant of will affect his or her view of the action. When reading a story, it is important to be alert to the narrator’s prejudices, which will certainly influence the way he or she perceives the action and thus the telling of the story.

Stories are usually narrated in the first or third person. A story narrated in the first person means that it is told by a participating character using the pronoun I. In first-person narration the point of view of the narrator is necessary subjective and incomplete, since he or she is not granted a full view of the action and does not have access to other characters’ thoughts.

A story narrated in the third person is told by a narrator using the pronouns he, she, and they. A third-person narrator may have either total omniscience (the narrator is not a participant in the story and has a complete view of the characters and events) or limited omniscience (the narrator can penetrate the thoughts of one or two characters only and provides a subjective view of characters and events).

Pun is the humorous or ludicrous sue of a word in more than one sense; a play of words, e.g. “ You promised to tell me your story, you know,” said Alice… “Mine is a long and sad tale!” said the Mouse, turning to Alice, and sighing. “It is a long tail, certainly,” said Alice, looking down with wonder at the Mouse’s tail.

Rhetorical question is not a question but an affirmative or negative statement put into the interrogative shape. It needs no answer, e.g. "Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?"
(H. L. Mencken).

Simile is the expressive comparison of two objects which have something in common; an imaginative comparison that contains the words like and as, e.g. Dust lay like fog in the street.

Synonyms are two or more words or phrases that have the same or nearly the same essential meaning, but usually suitable for different contexts, e.g. Synonyms of Jump: leap, bounce, hop, vault, spring

Tone of a story refers to the attitude of the writer or that of one of the characters in the story. For example, the tone may be humorous, sarcastic, ironic, cheerful, pessimistic, angry, unfeeling, or satirical.

(Sybil M. A World of Fiction Twenty Timeless Short Stories [Text] /

Marcus Sybil. – Addison Wesley P.C. Inc., 1995. – P. 273 –284;

Yarova H. Translator’s Glossary [Text] /Halyna Yarova.

– К.: Інститут філології КНУ імені Тараса Шевченка, 2009. – 17 с.)

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