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Definition
| Most siimply, what happens to, or what is done by, the characters in a story. A somewhat more technical usage- in which "action" is nearly synonymous with "plot"- makes the term signify a unified sequence of events with a beginning, middle, and end. |
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| A literary work in which the characters and their situations clearly represent general qualities and types- as, in an animal fable, each animal may represent a type of human personality. |
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| Any story or element in a story that can be interpreted in different ways is said to be ambiguous. |
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| The enveloping spirt or mood of a story. |
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| Explanations or statements that go beyond a rendering of the situation to make an interpretive comment about it. The author seems to address the reader directly, abandoning the illusion of his or her tale in order to deliver an opinion. |
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1. One of the people who has a part in the story.
2. The quality or the sum of the qualities of such a person. |
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| The clock or calendar of events presented in a story. |
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| The outcome of the main action of a story. |
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| The consistency of various parts of a story. We expect a character's speech and actions to be consisten with his nature. |
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| The emergence of a problem out of the interaction between characters and the situation that prevails as the story begins. |
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| Fiction renders those concrete details of sensuous experience from which moral and emotional interpretations can be made. |
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| The active opposition of characters, ideas, ways of life. A dynamic test of the capacities of one thing or person to overcome whatever competes with or frustrates it or him. |
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| Any aspect of the literary art that has been established by earlier and repeated usage as part of the way in which language represents experience. |
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| This term frequently has a pejorative meaning- though it derives directly from convention, without which no communication would be possible. When used disparagingly, conventional means that the writer has tried to find approval by clinging to familiar narrative types and procedures, and noncontroversial values. |
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| The authenticity of the writing. |
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| A synonym for resolution. |
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| Those passages devoted to a presentation of the appearance of characers or the setting. |
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| The actual speech of characters in a story, usually punctuated with quotation marks. |
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| The choice and arrangement of words. |
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| A story is said to be didactic if it deliberately teaches some lesson about the way people should behave. |
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| It may mean the distinction authors preserve between themselves and their central characters OR the use of language that seperates the adventure described from the experience of the reader. |
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| "like something presented on the stage of a theater", write shows us, not just tells us OR a synonym for exciting or suspenseful. |
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| In third-person narration we frequently find that part of the description and narrative is givne in a language attributable to the character whose point of view has been assumed by the author, while other parts are in a language that must be attributed to the author's own understanding and observations. This latter is said to come from the efface narrator, THE SPEAKER STANDING HIDDEN BEHIND HIS OR HER CHARACTER. |
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| A single part of the continuing action of a story. |
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| Usually signifies a loosely constructed or incoherent series of actions. |
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| That part of a story -frequently at the beginning or near it -which gives information about the characters and their situation before the action begins to change them. |
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| First- and Third-Person Narration |
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Definition
| In first-person narration the story is told by a character who habbitually refers to him/herself with the pronoun "I". In third-person all characters are referred to by third-person pronouns and the story is told directly by the author. |
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| A break in the chronological sequence of a story made to deal with earlier events. |
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| Whatever the author tries to make most prominent in his or her narration. May be PLOT, SETTING, CHARACTERS, SITUATIONS, A SOCIAL PROBLEM, or a MORAL ENIGMA. |
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| A term so broad that it sums up all the others in this glossary. The totality of conventions exploited and modified by an author in his or her creative act. |
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| No story provides optical illusions. Sensory experiences evoked by language. Stories provide the sense that one is morally and emoptionally involved in a situation shared with fictional characters. |
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1. Figures of speech. Similes. Metaphors.
2. More generally, all descriptions that prompt the reader to visualize characters in their setting. |
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| The effect or illusion of sharing the experience that the characters in a story are undergoing. |
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| Sometimes- more popularly- called stream of consciousness. |
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| A discrepancy between what is expected and what is revealed |
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| The political, social, cultural, economic, and intellectual aspects of the setting, |
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| The prevailing feeling of a story, generated by language, setting, and the quality of the action. |
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| The instructive point of a story. The lesson drawn or to be drawn from the outocme of the action. |
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| The internal and external forces which compel a character to take action. |
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1. A synonym for story-telling
2. In fiction, narrative passages are distinguished from descriptions and scenes. In narrative passages, the chronology is condensed so that relatively few words will encompass the events of an extended period of time. |
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| In first-person narration, the character who tells the story in his or her own words. |
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| Term of flexible usage, referring basically to the length of the piece of fiction so described, somewhere between a short story and a novel. |
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| Telling a story without bias; telling a story without the interpretive comment to be expected from a partisan or sympathetic observer. |
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| A convention in which the author speaks directly to the reader about events that will come in the future and other matters beyong the knowledge of the central character. |
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| The speed at which writers develop any given part of a story. |
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| A story told to point a moral or teach a lesson. |
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| A statement that appears to be contradictory or inconsistent with common sense. |
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| Mimicry of a work or a style of expression. |
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| The pity roused by the situation or the misfortunes of the characters in a story. |
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| Another metaphorical and ambiguous term. It is generally taken to refer to changes in the relative position of the characters. |
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| Consists of the phases of action in a story which are linked together by a chain of causal relationships. |
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| The events of a story may be told as they appear to one or more participants or observers. |
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| An interest in and emphasis on life as it is. |
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| The point in a story at which the conflict is decided one way or another and the struggle is concluded. |
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| Satire aims to correct, by an exposure to ridicule, deviations from normal conduct or reasonable opinion. The chief tool of satire is to exaggerate deformities to the point at which their absurdity is unmistakably apparent. |
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Definition
| An author's attempt to produce an emotional response greater than is warranted by what he or she has to tell. |
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| The physical and cultural environment within which an action takes place. |
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| Stories of a length less than that typical of short stories in general. |
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| A fictional device or convention in which the author undertakes an imiation of a mind responding to exterior experiences. |
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| A writer's habitual way of expressing him/herself is his/her style. |
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| An act, a person, a thing, or a spectable that stand for something else, usually something less palpable than the named symbol. |
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| The emotional and intellectual force generated by disparate potentials within a literary work. In every ambiguity there is a tension between the primary meaning and the secondary meanings of a word, phrase, etc. |
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Definition
| A unifying point or meaning of a story. Often the theme is implicit in the outcome of the action. |
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| A wide-ranging metaphorical term that usually invites analogy to the tone of voice in which a speaker relates an episode. |
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| The technique of playing down or underemphasizing a statement. |
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| The shape and consistency of a story |
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| May be the characteristic mode of expression of a first-person narrator. |
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