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Ben Jonson's Execration Upon Vulcan, one of the first recorded forms of the plain style in English literature. The plain style in literature, otherwise referred to as the 'low style', is the most common form of communication in the English language. It is a form of rhetoric which expresses a message very clearly to convey a direct meaning. The ...
Literal language is the usage of words exactly according to their direct, straightforward, or conventionally accepted meanings: their denotation. Figurative (or non-literal) language is the usage of words in a way that deviates from their conventionally accepted definitions in order to convey a more complex meaning or a heightened effect. [1]
A simile (/ ˈ s ɪ m əl i /) is a type of figure of speech that directly compares two things. [1] [2] Similes are often contrasted with metaphors, where similes necessarily compare two things using words such as "like", "as", while metaphors often create an implicit comparison (i.e. saying something "is" something else).
Authors writing their texts consider not only a word's denotation but also its connotation. For example, a person may be described as stubborn or tenacious, both of which have the same basic meaning but are opposite in terms of their emotional background (the first is an insult, while the second is a compliment).
Backside of a clay tablet from Pylos bearing the motif of the Labyrinth, an allusion to the mythological fight of Theseus and the Minotaur. In the most traditional sense, allusion is a literary term, though the word has also come to encompass indirect references to any source, including allusions in film or the visual arts. [8]
Figurative language examples include “similes, metaphors, personification, hyperbole, allusions, and idioms.”” [4] One of the most commonly cited examples of a metaphor in English literature comes from the "All the world's a stage" monologue from As You Like It:
James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses bears an intertextual relationship to Homer's Odyssey.. Julia Kristeva coined the term "intertextuality" (intertextualité) [13] in an attempt to synthesize Ferdinand de Saussure's semiotics: his study of how signs derive their meaning from the structure of a text (Bakhtin's dialogism); his theory suggests a continual dialogue with other works of literature and ...
Also apophthegm. A terse, pithy saying, akin to a proverb, maxim, or aphorism. aposiopesis A rhetorical device in which speech is broken off abruptly and the sentence is left unfinished. apostrophe A figure of speech in which a speaker breaks off from addressing the audience (e.g., in a play) and directs speech to a third party such as an opposing litigant or some other individual, sometimes ...