Macbeth Literary devices

Anaphora the repetition of a certain word or phrase at the beginning of successive lines of writing or speech.
Apostrophe A writer or a speaker, using an apostrophe, detaches himself from the reality and addresses an imaginary character in his speech.
Blank Verse A literary device defined as un-rhyming verse written in iambic pentameter.
Caesura a rhythmical pause in a poetic line or a sentence.
Catharsis an emotional discharge through which one can achieve a state of moral or spiritual renewal or achieve a state of liberation from anxiety and stress.
Elegy a form of literature which can be defined as a poem or song in the form of elegiac couplets, written in honor of someone deceased.
Enjambment a thought or sense, phrase or clause in a line of poetry that does not come to an end at the line break but moves over to the next line.
Epiphora a word or a phrase is repeated at the end of successive clauses
Euphemism polite, indirect expressions which replace words and phrases considered harsh and impolite or which suggest something unpleasant.
Equivocation the use of ambiguous language to conceal the truth or to avoid committing oneself; prevarication
Foot A metrical unit composed of stressed and unstressed syllables.
Heroic couplet a traditional form for English poetry, commonly used in epic and narrative poetry, and consisting of a rhyming pair of lines in iambic pentameter.
Hubris extreme pride and arrogance shown by a character that ultimately brings about his downfall.
Iamb a foot containing unaccented and short syllables followed by a long and accented syllable in a single line of a poem (unstressed/stressed syllables).
Irony words are used in such a way that their intended meaning is different from the actual meaning of the words.
Leitmotif a “short, constantly recurring musical phrase” associated with a particular person, place, or idea.
Meter a stressed and unstressed syllabic pattern in a verse or within the lines of a poem.
Metonymy a figure of speech that replaces the name of a thing with the name of something else with which it is closely associated.
Motif an object or idea that repeats itself throughout a literary work.
Ode a literary technique that is lyrical in nature, but not very lengthy.
Parody an imitation of a particular writer, artist or a genre, exaggerating it deliberately to produce a comic effect.
Pastoral poems are set in beautiful rural landscapes
Pentameter A line of verse consisting of five metrical feet
Quatrain A type of stanza, or a complete poem, consisting of four lines
Scansion The analysis of a poem’s meter. This is usually done by marking the stressed and unstressed syllables in each line and then based on the pattern of the stresses dividing the line into feet.
Sestet a 6 line stanza
Slant rhyme rhyme in which the vowel sounds are nearly, but not exactly the same (i.e. the words “stress” and “kiss”); sometimes called half-rhyme, near rhyme, or partial rhyme
Spondee a metrical foot consisting of two long syllables, as determined by syllable weight in classical meters, or two stressed syllables, as determined by stress in modern meters
Synecdoche a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa
Synesthesia the representation of ideas, characters or places in such a manner that they appeal to more than one senses like hearing, seeing, smell etc. at a given time.
Troche a metrical foot consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one
Chiasmus a rhetorical device in which two or more clauses are balanced against each other by the reversal of their structures in order to produce an artistic effect
Antithesis a literary device to put two contrasting ideas together
Parallelism use of components in a sentence that are grammatically the same; or similar in their construction, sound, meaning or meter.
September 4, 2019