Questions tagged [literary-device]
For questions regarding an author's use of various literary techniques and other stylistic elements to allow the reader to better interpret and appreciate the work of literature.
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What figure of speech is "trèfles de braise" in "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame"?
This is an extract of Book X, chapter IV of Victor Hugo's novel Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, emphasis mine):
Tous les yeux s'étaient levés vers le haut de l'église. Ce qu'ils ...
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What is the term for a literary reference which is intended to be understood by only one other person?
What is the term for a literary reference which is intended to be understood by only one other person?
I came across this term some years ago but did not record it - wrongly assuming I could easily ...
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Is there a term for the final step an author takes when they "prove" a theme by assigning a reward or tragedy on a character?
For example, in the tale of the tortoise and the hare the tortoise's victory and the social acceptance it wins would be the step that proves to the reader that committing to being “slow and steady” is ...
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Making trivial things big, and big things trivial
In Sherriff’s play Journey’s End, Sherriff makes a recurring point of soldiers ‘coping’ with the war by making trivial things big and big things small, so much so that deviation from this theme leads ...
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Literary devices in "Thou wouldst be great" et cetera in Macbeth
From Macbeth, Act I Scene V:
Lady Macbeth: Thou wouldst be great;
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it.
I understand what the quote means, but which literary devices ...
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Has anastrophe decreased in frequency during the period of Modern English?
Anastrophe, the changing of usual subject-verb-object order for poetic reasons, is something that, anecdotally, strikes me as less frequent nowadays than in older writing from, say, the 19th century. ...
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What is the "YOU LED THEM TO US??!!!" plot device called?
I want to know what the plot device is called where the stumbling protagonist has a brush encounter with the antagonist who lets them free, so that they lead them to the "motherland" / "...
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Is there a word for the device where an adjective or descriptive verb is applied to a nearby word rather than the word it actually describes?
Eg. "the green and climbing eyesight of a cat" ("Sir, Say No More"); "[the quarry] whose trail soon vanished in the antlered wood" ("Arrowhead Hunting"). The ...
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What form of figurative language is this in Achebe's "Things Fall Apart"?
I was reading Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe which is set in pre-colonial Nigeria. During a ceremony where members of the clan of Umofia are hearing out cases the leaders who are dressed up as ...
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Are there any literary techniques in the following quote from Othello other than metaphor?
Whilst re-reading Othello, I came across the following quote from Iago. I understand that there is metaphor within the quote, however, can anyone identify any more interesting techniques within the ...
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Name for device in "Possessions" by Hart Crane?
The poem 'Possessions' by Hart Crane contains a lot of what I call 'false units', that is, sentences which appear to have predicates describing subjects, but in reality the predicates do not modify ...
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Expression used when a subplot is the genuine plot
I'm looking for the literary expression that is used when the themes and plot of a subplot are the real plot of a narrative, which is counterpoised to another, more accessible story plot that is only ...
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In Philip Roth's The Human Stain, why might Delphine Roux be considered a caricature?
Roth is commonly considered to be, at best, a masculine writer and, at worst, a misogynistic one. In The Human Stain, for example, the central relationship is between two men, one of whom is sleeping ...
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What is the irony of a ten-dollar bill in Philip Dick's "Voices from the Street"?
There is a scene in the novel where the protagonist has sex with a woman, beats her up, and then departs leaving some money.
He had left a ten-dollar bill on the dresser for Marsha... He wondered if ...
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Figures of speech in "Once Upon a Time" by Gabriel Okara
Here are two extracts from the poem "Once Upon a Time" by Gabriel Imomotimi Okara:
‘Feel at home!’ ‘Come again’:
they say, and when I come
again and feel
at home, once, twice,
there will be ...
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Does Vivien sleep with Merlin in Tennyson's "Idylls of the King"?
I am re-reading Tennyson's Idylls of the King after many years. His idyll "Merlin and Vivien" is a rather in-depth look at how Vivien learns Merlin's magic through some impressive feats of ...
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Literary or rhetorical term meaning "past for the future"?
William Blake, in his poem in his preface to Milton, a Poem, commonly known as "Jerusalem" (not to be confused with the long poem Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804-1820)), ...
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Analysis of "While I speak God's law, I will not crack its voice with whimpering."
In The Crucible, during act 4 (Danforth's monologue), he says
While I speak God's law, I will not crack its voice with whimpering.
When looking at this quote the only technique I can see is ...
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If a first-person narrator addresses the reader, is it considered speech or thought?
I'm reading the novel Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief for my literature class and was trying to use the characterisation framework of PAIRS (Physical appearance, Actions, Inner Thought, ...
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Is there a name for the narrative technique of starting at the end and then going back to the beginning? (As in Lord Jim)
I've been reading Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad, which is rife with what I would call non-standard narrative structures.
There are obvious narrative peculiarities in the book that have been discussed at ...
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What is the opposite of deus ex machina?
Deus ex machina is a plot device in which a seemingly unsolvable problem is resolved by a sudden and unexpected external event. For example: "The villain has our hero backed in a corner with no ...
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Why are some metaphors not similes?
This Master Class website says that
A simile is a type of metaphor. All similes are metaphors, but not all metaphors are similes.
Is this true? Can anyone cite an official textbook?
Please explain ...
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Term for intentionally impressing different meanings on different audiences
Is there a term for when an author intentionally generates two completely different responses from two distinct parts of their audience or readership?
An example I found could be in The Picture of ...
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What figure of speech is "transient feet" in "A Photograph" by Shirley Toulson?
In the poem "A Photograph" by Shirley Toulson, the phrase "transient feet" appears in the last line of the first stanza:
All three stood still to smile through their hair
At the ...
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Effect of enjambment in "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams
In "The Red Wheelbarrow" the poet William Carlos Williams uses enjambment to great effect (or so I have read):
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the ...
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Can "women echoed" be considered a figure of speech?
I'm trying to understand the use of literary devices, and in particular the literary conventions related to metonymy, metaphor and similar figures of speech.
For example, in the following sentence, ...
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What is the figure of speech used in this part of "Cataract Operation"?
What is the figure of speech used in these lines taken from the Simon Armitage poem "Cataract Operation"?
the olé of a crimson towel.
the cancan of a ra ra skirt,
the monkey business of a ...
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What literary device is used in from "one thing to another"?
The extract is
Then, from one thing to another, M. Hamel went on to talk of the French language, saying that it was the most beautiful language in the world — the clearest, the most logical; that we ...
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Was Anton Chekhov the earliest to use stream-of-consciousness technique in his works?
Anton Chekhov was a famous Russian short story writer and dramatist. Early in his career, he mastered the form of the one-act play and produced several masterpieces of this genre.
I remember I ...
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Where is dramatic irony present in Macbeth?
In a school book it is written
Dramatic Irony or Irony of situation: It involves a situation in a play or story in which the audience knows the reality which the speaker or character is ignorant of.
...
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What literary device is Walter de la Mare's "It is I" in "Napoleon"?
Walter de la Mare's short poem "Napoleon" goes like this:
What is the world, O soldiers?
It is I:
I, this incessant snow,
This northern sky;
Soldiers, this solitude
Through which we go
Is I....
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What figure of speech is "change of mood" in Robert Frost's "Dust of Snow"?
From "Dust of Snow" by Robert Frost:
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
What figure of speech, or poetic device, is used in the line, "A ...
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What literary term/device is used when a character in a novel represents the author?
I'm reading a novel called Persepolis for my English course, and it's about a girl named Marji that grows up during the 1979 Revolution. The author's intention with the novel is to break Western ...
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Sonnet 39 of Astrophil and Stella: Are these epithets or metaphors?
This is Sonnet 39 of Astrophil and Stella, also known as Come Sleep! O Sleep:
Come Sleep! O Sleep, the certain knot of peace,
The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe,
The poor man’s wealth, the ...
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What is the name of the literary device where successive lines paraphrase each other?
The literary device I'm thinking of is when you say something, then you say it again using different words, or words which are equivalent in meaning. For example, in Psalm 137
If I forget you, ...
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Is the stormy weather an element of Naturalism in The Shining by Stephen King?
In Stephen King's novel The Shining, there seems to me to be a correlation between the weather and the sanity of Jack Torrance.
Namely, as the Torrance family becomes more isolated (i.e. people from ...
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Why does isolating "there" on its own line sound less emphatic in Korean than English?
I was reading Translator’s Note: Three Poems by Ko Un from the Poetry Foundation and came across this excerpt:
We translated “명사도 동사도 다” (“all nouns and verbs”) as “all words,” which sounds less ...
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What are the poetic devices used in this poem and how do they relate to its meaning?
What are the poetic devices (tone, imagery etcetera) used in this poem and how do they contribute to the poem's overall theme? I would appreciate an answer based on a close reading of the text.
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Name of this lyrical device comparing oneself to something that's described by the same word, but in another sense of the word?
Warning: The examples contain some offensive words, but I believe that is not against the rules here?
Lately I've been listening a lot to a certain hip-hop album, in which almost every track uses a ...
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Identify rhetorical/stylistic device in Tanpınar's The Time Regulation Institute
Is this an example of any rhetorical/stylistic device or literary technique?
But can one really call it a life? If to live is to endure endless pain and destitution and to suffer humiliation so deep ...
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Where can I find sources that could help me write about parody of human feelings in Beckett's novel "Molloy"?
My college assignment is to write about parody in Beckett's Molloy and I need to write about the parody of human feelings in this novel too. I would appreciate if someone could tell me which sources ...
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Is there a contrast between "straight" and "late" in this example?
King Crimson's song "I talk to the wind" starts with:
Said the straight man to the late man
Where have you been?
I'm pretty sure that the songwriter is creating a contrast (e.g., an ...
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What is the point of "the story so far"/recaps in book series?
I just finished the book "The Fellowship of the Ring". Now I've started with "The Two Towers". It begins by recapping the story of the first book.
For who exactly is this "...
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The name of a device by which an author reports the use of coarse language without quoting it?
Don, a soldier sleeping in a hammock, is abruptly awakened some hours earlier than expected and is quite alarmed, thinking the camp may be under attack by the enemy. The company headquarters runner ...
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Analyzing the alliteration of the first line of Lolita
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.
Please help me analyze the alliteration from the line above. Which 'L' words attribute to the alliteration? Lo, Li from Lolita and light, ...
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What is the "uncanny" element of Gothic Literature?
In Wikipedia, the "uncanny" is defined as
the psychological experience of something as strangely familiar, rather than simply mysterious. It may describe incidents where a familiar thing or event ...
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What kind of language features appear in Lady Macbeth's line "too full o' the milk of human kindness"?
In Macbeth Act I Scene 5, Lady Macbeth says the following:
Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be
What thou art promised: yet do I fear thy nature;
It is too full o' the milk of human ...
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What is the term used for a story's narrator becoming self-aware?
I was reading a short-story titled "A Face in the Dark" by Ruskin Bond. There's this passage in it:
"It had no eyes, ears, nose or mouth. It was just a round smooth head — with a ...
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What figure of speech does "alive enough to have strength to die" by Hardy contain?
The poem "Neutral Tones" by Thomas Hardy was written in 1867 and published in the 1898 collection Wessex Poems and Other Verses. It contains the stanza:
The smile on your mouth was the ...
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What's the technique in 'To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus.' from Macbeth?
What's the technique in these (half-)lines from Macbeth?
To be thus is nothing,
but to be safely thus.
They are from Act 3 Scene 1. Macbeth is insecure because of ...
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