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Don Quixote and his sidekick Sancho Panza, as illustrated by Gustave Doré: the characters' contrasting qualities [1] are reflected here even in their physical appearances. In any narrative, a foil is a character who contrasts with another character, typically, a character who contrasts with the protagonist, in order to better highlight or differentiate certain qualities of the protagonist.
List of writing genres. Writing genres (more commonly known as literary genres) are categories that distinguish literature (including works of prose, poetry, drama, hybrid forms, etc.) based on some set of stylistic criteria. Sharing literary conventions, they typically consist of similarities in theme/topic, style, tropes, and storytelling ...
A stock character, also known as a character archetype, is a type of character in a narrative (e.g. a novel, play, television show, or film) whom audiences recognize across many narratives or as part of a storytelling tradition or convention. There is a wide range of stock characters, covering people of various ages, social classes and ...
Antihero is a literary term that can be understood as standing in opposition to the traditional hero, i.e., one with high social status, well liked by the general populace. Past the surface, scholars have additional requirements for the antihero. The "Racinian" antihero, is defined by three factors. The first is that the antihero is doomed to ...
A stock character, popular in 16th-century Spanish literature, who is comically and shockingly vulgar. Clarín, the clown in Pedro Calderón de la Barca 's Life is a dream, is a gracioso. Examples of similar characters in Anglophone culture include Bubbles, Wheeler Walker, Jr. and the stand-up persona of Bob Saget.
Shakespearean fool. The Shakespearean fool is a recurring character type in the works of William Shakespeare. Shakespearean fools are usually clever peasants or commoners that use their wits to outdo people of higher social standing. In this sense, they are very similar to the real fools, and jesters of the time, but their characteristics are ...
Three notable examples are The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, where the narrator is Death, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, where the narrator is the titular character but is describing the story of the main characters, and The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, where a young girl, having been killed, observes, from some post ...
Scholars have described the narrative structure of The Lord of the Rings, a high fantasy work by J. R. R. Tolkien published in 1954–55, in a variety of ways, including as a balanced pair of outer and inner quests; a linear sequence of scenes or tableaux; a fractal arrangement of separate episodes; a Gothic cathedral-like edifice of many different elements; multiple cycles or spirals; or an ...