A literary element, or narrative element, or element of literature is an essential characteristic of all works of written and spoken
narrative
A narrative, story, or tale is any account of a series of related events or experiences, whether nonfictional (memoir, biography, news report, documentary, travel literature, travelogue, etc.) or fictional (fairy tale, fable, legend, thriller (ge ...
fiction
Fiction is any creative work, chiefly any narrative work, portraying individuals, events, or places that are imaginary, or in ways that are imaginary. Fictional portrayals are thus inconsistent with history, fact, or plausibility. In a traditi ...
. Literary elements include
plot
Plot or Plotting may refer to:
Art, media and entertainment
* Plot (narrative), the story of a piece of fiction
Music
* ''The Plot'' (album), a 1976 album by jazz trumpeter Enrico Rava
* The Plot (band), a band formed in 2003
Other
* ''Plot' ...
,
theme
Theme or themes may refer to:
* Theme (arts), the unifying subject or idea of the type of visual work
* Theme (Byzantine district), an administrative district in the Byzantine Empire governed by a Strategos
* Theme (computing), a custom graphical ...
,
character
Character or Characters may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Literature
* ''Character'' (novel), a 1936 Dutch novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk
* ''Characters'' (Theophrastus), a classical Greek set of character sketches attributed to The ...
and
tone. In contrast,
literary techniques are non-universal features of literature and include
figurative language
Literal and figurative language is a distinction within some fields of language analysis, in particular stylistics, rhetoric, and semantics.
*Literal language uses words exactly according to their conventionally accepted meaning (linguistics), me ...
,
irony
Irony (), in its broadest sense, is the juxtaposition of what on the surface appears to be the case and what is actually the case or to be expected; it is an important rhetorical device and literary technique.
Irony can be categorized into ...
, and
foreshadowing
Foreshadowing is a narrative device in which a storyteller gives an advance hint of what is to come later in the story. Foreshadowing often appears at the beginning of a story, and it helps develop or subvert the audience's expectations about upco ...
.
Purpose
Literary elements aid in the discussion and understanding of works of literature as basic categories of critical analysis; literary elements could be said to be produced by the readers of a work just as much as they are produced by its author. For the most part, they are popular concepts that are not limited to any particular branch of
literary criticism
Literary criticism (or literary studies) is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of literature's goals and methods. Th ...
, although they are most closely associated with the
formalist method of professional literary criticism. There is no official definition or fixed list of terms of literary elements; however, they are a common feature of literary education at the
primary and
secondary level, and a set of terms similar to the one below often appears in institutional student evaluation. For instance, the New York State Comprehensive English
Regents Exam requires that students use and discuss literary elements relating to specific works in each of the three essays.
Terms
Notes
References
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*
*
*
*
* {{citation , first1 = Lewis , last1 = Turco , title = The Book of Literary Terms: The Genres of Fiction, Drama, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, and Scholarship , location = Hanover , publisher =
University Press of New England
The University Press of New England (UPNE), located in Lebanon, New Hampshire and founded in 1970, was a university press consortium including Brandeis University, Dartmouth College (its host member), Tufts University, the University of New Hampsh ...
, year = 1999 , isbn = 0-87451-954-3 , url = https://archive.org/details/bookofliteraryte0000turc
Writing
Element