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In rhetoric, litotes (/ l aɪ ˈ t oʊ t iː z, ˈ l aɪ t ə t iː z /, US: / ˈ l ɪ t ə t iː z /), [1] also known classically as antenantiosis or moderatour, is a figure of speech and form of irony in which understatement is used to emphasize a point by stating a negative to further affirm a positive, often incorporating double negatives for effect.
The French actress Sarah Bernhardt was considered insufficiently understated in English terms. Photograph by Félix Nadar, c. 1864. This attitude of understatement was exemplified by a comment upon Sarah Bernhardt's violent depiction of Cleopatra in the 1891 play of that title: "How different, how very different, from the home life of our own dear Queen!"
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 ...
Some examples of topoi are the following: the locus amoenus (for example, the imaginary world of Arcadia) and the locus horridus (for example, Dante's Inferno); the idyll; cemetery poetry (see the Spoon River Anthology); love and death (in Greek, eros and thanatos), love as disease and love as death, (see the character of Dido in Virgil's Aeneid);
Colloquialism – a word or phrase that is not formal or literary, typically one used in ordinary or familiar conversation. Common topics – arguments and approaches useful in rhetorical settings. Consubstantiality – substance commonality. Contingency – the contextual circumstances that do not allow an issue to be settled with complete ...
Literary fiction is a term that distinguishes certain fictional works that possess commonly held qualities to readers outside genre fiction. [citation needed] Literary fiction is any fiction that attempts to engage with one or more truths or questions, hence relevant to a broad scope of humanity as a form of expression.
Tropological criticism (not to be confused with tropological reading, a type of biblical exegesis) is the historical study of tropes, which aims to "define the dominant tropes of an epoch" and to "find those tropes in literary and non-literary texts", an interdisciplinary investigation of which Michel Foucault was an "important exemplar". [9]
Henry Peacham, for example, in his The Garden of Eloquence (1577), enumerated 184 different figures of speech. Professor Robert DiYanni, in his book Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, Drama and the Essay [8] wrote: "Rhetoricians have catalogued more than 250 different figures of speech, expressions or ways of using words in a nonliteral sense."