Literature Highlights

• Essay

  A prose nonfictional composition of varying length, depth and breadth revealing traces of the writer's personality, attitude, and vision of life
• Formal essay

  An essay with a formal subject matter, tone, and appeal
• Familiar essay

  An essay with a familiar subject matter, tone, and appeal
• Flash Fiction

  A prose narrative marked by extreme conciseness, also known as micro-narrative, postcard story, or sudden fiction
• Literary Realism

  A movement in art which calls for a faithful rendering of life in a literary text, through a narrative technique known as verisimilitude
• Naturalism

  An extreme form of realism in fiction that depicts the sick, ugly and morbid aspects of life
• Myth

  A legendary story derived from the Greek word mythos which means "story", usually revolving around ideas that involve cosmology and origins of the world
• Irony


  A literary device wherein you say something different from what you originally mean, used to emphasize the artistic effect
• Types of irony

  • Verbal irony
  • Situational irony
  • Dramatic irony
• Fantasy genre

  Includes fairytales, legends, folktales, horror, and myths, with the presence of the magical, supernatural, and enchanting as common elements
• Types of fantasy narratives

  • Portal-quest fantasy
  • Intrusion fantasy
  • Liminal fantasy
  • Immersive fantasy
• Historical novel

  A novel based on a historical event or personality, recreating the milieu with strong historical verisimilitude
• Formalism or American New Criticism

  A critical approach that looks at the text as a verbal construct which exhibits organic unity, considering the intrinsic elements of a literary work like tropes, images and symbols, and figurative language such as irony, paradox, and ambiguity.
• Nature Writing

  A sub-genre of creative nonfiction where the author's experience of nature and the natural environment serve as the focal point of the essay

  it can be traced to the works of the romantic, and transcendentalist writers
• Eyewitness Literature

  A sub-genre of Trauma Literature wherein the author, recounting the life threatening moment, personally observed the actual dangerous situation

  A way of healing the deep emotional wound
• Chick Lit (Literature)

  A genre in fiction that caters specifically to issues being experienced by women, usually with a light and humorous plot
• Travel Writing

  Explores the author's affective connection with a place, leaving strong and memorable sense impressions among the readers regarding the landscapes, peoples, and cultures.
• Trauma Literature

  Represents different tests about profound sense of loss, and extreme fear on the level of the individual or the community
• Person, mask or the speaker

  The voice that talks to the readers in poetry, a creative invention of the writer which serves as a mouthpiece of his/her ideas or feelings
• Noir Fiction

  A genre of crime fiction and film marked by moral ambiguity, fatalism and cynicism, a sub-genre of Hardboiled thriller which is also known as black or dark fiction
• Sudden Fiction

  A narrative genre marked by brevity or word limit, often associated with flash fiction, micro fiction or pocket story

  50 words or fewer than 1000
• Marvelous Realism or magical realism

  Blends supernatural elements with the mundane reality, requiring poetic faith in accepting the magical elements
• Sociological Approach

  One of the many ways in which literature is read, including biographical, historical, psychological, linguistic, moral, and formalist. considering the issues, problems and challenges affecting society as they are reflected in a literary text
• Creative nonfiction

  Borrows significantly from conventions of nonfiction writing and from techniques of fiction such as dialogue, literary embellishments, and devices in rendering the author's personal experience.

  memory is an important element of creative nonfiction
• Epigraph

  A terse and pointed inscription found at the beginning of a poem, setting up the theme or tone of the literary text
• Epistle

  A letter, missive, note, correspondence, or any written form of communication, which may be formal or didactic, or informal or funny and humorous

  Epistolary style is manifested in diaries, letters, emails, blogposts, twitterature, and facebook
• Theme

  The central truth about life exemplified in the text, not to be confused with a moral lesson

  has a tendency to focus only on ethical or moral values in a selection
• Epistolary Literature

  A text composed of a series of letters between two individuals

  greek noun epistole which means "letter" or "message"
• Migrant Literatures

  Literary works of peoples who voluntary or involuntarily leave a homeland for another country, often exploring themes of alienation, isolation, home and exile

  associated with colonialism

  reasons for expatriation vary from economic exigencies, political and religious persecutions, cultural divisions, and others.
• Blog

  A web blog consisting of posts or entries displayed through a reverse order, generally interactive in nature
• Characters

  Moral agents of an action, revealed by the author through vivid description, dialogue, and reactions of other characters
• Types of characters

  • Protagonist
  • Antagonist
  • Foil
  • Confidant
  • Background
• Characterization

  The author's technique in giving life to the characters, resulting in round or flat characters
• Narrative Point of View

  The vantage point from where the story is narrated, including first person, second person, third person omniscient, and third person limited
• Nostalgia

  The combined feeling of sadness and pleasure brought about by a certain memory or an event in the past
• Reportage

  A prose composition that narrates or documents an event which has been observed by the writer, a journalistic way of presenting a historical moment or action
• Bandwagon

  A rhetorical technique used to convince the audience/readers to be involved in something, giving them the idea that "everybody is doing it"
• Close Reading

  A reading strategy that pays sustained attention to individual words and word orders, performing detailed analysis of context, literary devices, and more
• Symbol

  An image loaded with meaning, conveying a connotative sense rather than a denotative meaning, using an object, color, place, person, or event to represent a feeling or an idea
• Plot

  The arrangement of events in a narrative following the principle of causality, either chronologically or climatically, with conflict as the soul of the plot structure