Literary devices help us understand a writer’s intentions, and allow us to identify genre, form, and specific terms and techniques used in fiction, non-fiction, drama and poetry. We use literary terms to describe and explain the techniques writers use.
Literary terms are the words used to describe the various types and tools of Literature.
Fiction is any work of prose that is created from the author’s imagination. While it may be inspired by real events and experiences, it will also be filtered through the author’s creativity into a work of fiction, such as a novel or short story.
What is a literary device?
A literary device is a tool authors use to help structure a story, whether fiction or non-fiction, to engage the reader’s interest, and add layers to a narrative or story. They usually hint at something outside of the story.
Literary Devices include:
We shall be looking at what these are with some examples.
Fictional devices
Fictional devices can include genre and technique. Genres categorise literary fiction, while the technique is the method used for telling the story.
Typical literary formats are:
- Novel
- Short story
- Poetry
- Stage plays/drama
A novel is a work of fiction (it is imaginary, although it can be based on true events) and is longer than a short story. According to today’s publishing standards a novel is typically 80,000 words or more. (Less than 80,000 words makes it a 'novella'). Usually, a novel is made up of chapters. There will be a main plot or storyline, and often one or more subplots.
Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868), where a detective is called to investigate the theft of a priceless diamond. There are eleven different narrators, and at least two (romantic) subplots.
A short story will usually be around 15,000 words or less, and usually with one plot and fewer characters than in a novel.
‘The Open Window’ (1911) by Saki (H.H.Munro) takes place at a country house during one misty afternoon. Saki makes deft use of the weather to suggest the ethereal afterlife in his story about an ingenuous house guest and his rather unorthodox young hostess.
Poetry can be of various lengths and may tell a story or express an emotion or thought. A narrative or epic poem can be book-sized!
Thomas Gray’s 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard', (1750) meditates on loss and the transience of life:
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.’
Drama or Stage plays are stories played out for an audience on a stage. Their plots and characters may be as complex as those of a novel.
Hamlet (1599-1601) by Shakespeare
Amadeus (1979) by Peter Shaffer
The fictional device as a technique
Let’s say an author is a third of the way through his latest novel and suddenly hits a brick wall. His leading character needs some information – but has no means of getting it. The author, eager to meet his publisher’s deadline, hits on an idea – he decides to introduce another character who tells a story that provides the missing information. This will allow the first character to resolve his problem in a (fairly) natural manner. The author finishes his novel and meets his deadline.
The author has told a story within a story, or framed narrative, which is a fictional device.
Fictional devices are handy tools for the author and can:
- help introduce background information.
- bring in new characters and situations that help propel the story forward.
In Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847), for example, the first narrator, Mr Lockwood, is haunted by a phantom while visiting his landlord at Wuthering Heights. Confined to bed after catching a cold on the Yorkshire moors, Lockwood asks his housekeeper to tell him about the morose family resident at Wuthering Heights. The housekeeper, Nelly Dean, then becomes the main narrator and continues the story until the last couple of chapters when Lockwood, returning to the area a year later, takes over the conclusion of the novel.
Non-fiction devices
Non-fiction writers often use fictional devices to help tell the story of real events, rather than imaginary ones. For example, they may use metaphors.
Metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things. The most common metaphors use the structure “X is Y,” i.e. "The mind is an ocean" and "the city is a jungle" are both metaphors.
Fig. 1 - The mind is an ocean.Non-fiction formats
Non-fiction includes:
- Travelogues
- Biography
- Autobiography
A travelogue is a (usually personal) account of a journey.
Robert Louis Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey (1879) is a humorous account of Stevenson’s outdoor adventures in France with a slow-moving donkey called Modestine.
A biography is the chronologically narrated life story of a person in an entertaining and meaningful way. A classic prototype is James Boswell’s biography of Dr. Samuel Johnson (The Life of Samuel Johnson, 1791), the man responsible for the earliest dictionaries in the English Language. In this biography, anecdotes are combined with recorded conversation.
Peter Ackroyd's Dickens (1990) is a detailed account of Charles Dickens’ life, including family origins, his traumatic childhood, his successful career, anxieties, train accident and sleeping disorder.
Autobiography is the detailed and (usually) chronologically narrated life of its author up to the time of writing. These are mostly by celebrities (or their ghostwriters) but can be by anyone who wishes to share their life experiences.
Benjamin Franklin's The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1771-1778) is noted for its clarity of prose. Franklin’s autobiography was written in segments, during the periods 1771, 1784, and 1788. This was owing to interruptions from civil war and later, infirmity. It offers a detailed picture of 18th-century American life, and concepts of the 'self-made man'.
Dramatic devices
Drama is a broad term used to include any type of performance by actors on stage, tv, radio, in film or online. Drama can be divided into devices or categories including:
Comedy
Comedy was mostly a combination of classical comedy and farce until the 18th century, when satire and 'comedies of manners' evolved.
The industrial revolution led to big shifts in society, which was reflected in the comedies produced for stage. 19th to 21st-century audiences have been entertained by drawing-room comedies, romantic comedies, comedies involving slapstick, social comment and/or parody.
A comedy of manners pokes fun at the conventions and ‘manners’ of contemporary society.
Drawing room comedies, like comedies of manners, are about society (usually ‘high’ society), where the action mostly takes place in a drawing-room.
Shakespeare: Midsummer’s Night Dream, 1595 (farce & classical)
G.B.Shaw: Pygmalion, 1913 (social comment)
Lewis, Sayer, Shields: The Play that Goes Wrong, 2012 (farce & parody)
Tragedy
Tragedy, like comedy, has its origins in Ancient Greece. Analysis of drama also began there. Aristotle defined the concepts of catharsis, discovery and reversal (ie. the hero discovers some shattering information that leads to the downturn (a reversal) of his fortunes)
Catharsis - an emotional release or cleansing.
Seneca of Ancient Rome influenced Renaissance drama, which adopted the 5-act-structure. This consists of:
Act 1) Introduction, setting the scene
Act 2) Action that sets the story in motion – very often the conflict is introduced here
Act 3) Action intensifies into a climax
Act 4) The action relaxes – also called a ‘falling action’
Act 5) Resolution – where loose ends are tied up and often a message is conveyed.
Note: Shakespeare’s plays have a 5-act structure.
In the 19th century, the playwright Gustav Freytag devised a scheme that is called Freytag’s Pyramid, which breaks the structure down into 7 steps. This includes an incident after the introduction and a denouement after the resolution.
Dramatic structure
Seneca’s influence on Renaissance theatre has carried on into the present day and is used for films as well as plays.
The five-act structure continues to be used in film, story-telling and advertising. It is a more detailed version of the 3-act structure.
The neoclassical style of the 17th century drew on Ancient Greek mythology and literature for plots and dramatic voice. This was followed by a trend for historical tragedies in the 18th century. 19th-century theatre used Realism and Naturalism. By the 20th century, however, tragedy as a dramatic form declined and was considered ‘dead’.
Shakespeare - Hamlet 1609 (5-act structure, fatal flaw, discovery and reversal)
Ibsen - The Master Builder, 1892 (realistic tragedy)
Strindberg - Miss Julie, 1888 (naturalistic tragedy)
Tragicomedy
Comedy began to be mixed with tragedy as early as the Renaissance. Tragicomedy refers to a play that might appear very serious in tone throughout but finish on a happy note. Both Chekhov and Ibsen toyed with the concept, then Chekhov inverted the format by creating comedies with tragic endings and infusing them with psychological insight (Uncle Vanya, 1898). In the 20th century, the blend of comic-tragedy/tragicomedy became a component of Absurdist theatre (Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 1953).
Melodrama
Melodrama (melody + drama) was a popular form of entertainment in the 19th century, filled with action rather than depth, and aimed at providing ‘sensationalist’ entertainment. Stock characters included the gallant hero, the sighing heroine, the gloating arch-villain, the trusty servant, the clownish messenger and their entrances and exits would probably be signalled with snatches of music. A typical example is The Frozen Deep (1856) by Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens.
Poetic devices
Poets don’t only rely on rhyming when writing poetry, they also rely on poetic devices such as structure and metre.
Terms used to talk about poetry include:
- Poetic form
- Poetic genre
- Metre
- Rhyme
Poetic form is about the structure of the poem and its content. For example, a sonnet is usually a love poem (content) made up of 3 stanzas and a rhyming couplet (form).
Poetic genre refers to the type of poetry, including:
- Epic - an extended poem usually in praise of heroic endeavour, such as ‘The Illiad’.
- Lyric - short poems that have the structure and musical quality of a song.
- Satirical - a poem that makes fun of social conventions, or human weaknesses.
- Ode - a lengthy lyric poem that contemplates grand themes of life and mortality.
- Sonnet - a poem, often narrative or amatory, of 14 lines, with specific rhyme patterns.
Metre is about the pattern or rhythm in a poem, based on the number of syllables in each line and the emphasis given to those syllables. Rhyme is when two words share the same (vowel) sound. Even though these words open with different consonants, the final vowel syllables rhyme.
The rhyming words in the verse may sound similar but have different meanings and spellings.
There are several types of rhyme, including perfect, imperfect, end rhyme, feminine, masculine, eye rhyme, and monorhyme.
The three most common are:
- Perfect rhyme
- Imperfect rhyme
- End rhyme
Perfect or full rhyme
The perfect rhyme is when:
- two words share the same vowel sound in the final syllable
- the final consonants of the two words are identical.
'Fleet' and 'treat' rhyme perfectly, because a) the vowel sound is identical and b) the final consonant is identical.
Imperfect or half-rhyme
In this kind of rhyme, the rhyming words do not sound identical. Instead, they only sound ‘half’ similar (hence half-rhyme).
For example, in the first verse of Emily Dickinson’s ‘Hope is the thing with Feathers' (1861) the words ‘soul’ and ‘all’ are not an exact match, and are only vaguely similar in sound:
'Hope' is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -”
End rhyme
End rhymes can be found when the phrases end in rhyming syllables. These are the most frequently used rhymes in poetry and plays.
Rhyming verse is still a popular form of poetry. However there are poets who prefer not to use rhyme in their works, and this type of poetry is called 'free verse'.
Free Verse (also known as vers libre) is used to describe various types of poetry that have no unifying rhyme scheme. It became popular in the 20th century with the Imagist and Modernist movements, and literary figures such as Ezra Pound, Rainer Maria Rilke, T.S.Eliot, D.H.Lawrence and Walt Whitman.
Imagism is a poetic movement from the early 20th century that focused on brevity, the economy of language, and precise descriptions of an object rather than symbolic interpretation. The movement wanted to challenge traditional poetic conventions from the Romantic and Victorian periods.
Modernism is a literary movement that occurred between 1910 to 1945. Novelists and poets broke the formal conventions of literature through the use of stream-of-consciousness narratives, abstract or ambiguous narratives and plots, and unreliable narrators. Following disillusionment after the First World War, authors wanted to reassess realism in literature and the impact of modern technology.
Literary devices can be used in fiction, non-fiction and poetry. They form an integral part of language, adding depth, meaning and variety.
Literary Devices/Structures - Key takeaways
- A literary device is a tool authors use to help structure a story
A literary device helps engage the reader’s interest and add layers
A narrative can be a novel, poem, short story, or play
Poetic devices include
Literary devices include:
Frame narrative
Metaphor
Short story
End rhyme
Literary devices can be used in fiction, non-fiction, drama and poetry
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