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DEFINITION: An excitement-induced state of playfulness or silliness. SIMILAR EMOTIONS: EXCITEMENT, ELATION, EUPHORIA. NOTES: Giddiness is usually aligned with positive excitement, but depending on the root cause, can create an out-of-control feeling that can cause anxiety or nervousness. PHYSICAL SIGNALS AND BEHAVIORS:
Concise definitions, usage tips, and lots of examples for 136 literary devices and terms.
- Celebration of Nature
- Focus on The Individual and Spirituality
- Celebration of Isolation and Melancholy
- Interest in The Common Man
- Idealization of Women
- Personification and Pathetic Fallacy
Romantic writers saw nature as a teacher and a source of infinite beauty. One of the most famous works of Romanticism is John Keats’ To Autumn (1820): Keats personifies the season and follows its progression from the initial arrival after summer, through the harvest season, and finally to autumn’s end as winter takes its place.
Romantic writers turned inward, valuing the individual experience above all else. This in turn led to a heightened sense of spirituality in Romantic work, and the addition of occult and supernatural elements. The work of Edgar Allan Poe exemplifies this aspect of the movement; for example, The Raventells the story of a man grieving for his dead lov...
Ralph Waldo Emerson was a very influential writer in Romanticism; his books of essays explored many of the themes of the literary movement and codified them. His 1841 essay Self-Relianceis a seminal work of Romantic writing in which he exhorts the value of looking inward and determining your own path, and relying on only your own resources. Related...
William Wordsworth was one of the first poets to embrace the concept of writing that could be read, enjoyed, and understood by anyone. He eschewed overly stylized language and references to classical works in favor of emotional imagery conveyed in simple, elegant language, as in his most famous poem I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud:
In works such as Poe’s The Raven, women were always presented as idealized love interests, pure and beautiful, but usually without anything else to offer. Ironically, the most notable novels of the period were written by women (Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Mary Shelley, for example), but had to be initially published under male pseudonyms bec...
Romantic literature’s fixation on nature is characterized by the heavy use of both personification and pathetic fallacy. Mary Shelley used these techniques to great effect in Frankenstein: Romanticism continues to influence literature today; Stephenie Meyers’ Twilightnovels are clear descendants of the movement, incorporating most of the characteri...
- Jeffrey Somers
Sep 30, 2021 · Conflict provides crucial tension in any story and is used to drive the narrative forward. It is often used to reveal a deeper meaning in a narrative while highlighting characters’ motivations, values, and weaknesses. There are six main types of literary conflict, each of which is detailed below.
Tone is a literary device that reflects the writer’s attitude toward the subject matter or audience of a literary work. By conveying this attitude through tone, the writer creates a particular relationship with the reader that, in turn, influences the intention and meaning of the written words.
A theme is a universal idea, lesson, or message explored throughout a work of literature. One key characteristic of literary themes is their universality, which is to say that themes are ideas that not only apply to the specific characters and events of a book or play, but also express broader truths about human experience that readers can ...
A literary genre that graphically explores such topics as incest and other aberrant sexual practices, mutilation, the sprouting of sexual organs in various places on the human body, urban violence and violence against women, drug use, and highly dysfunctional family relationships, and that is based on the premise that knowledge is to be found at the edge of experience and that the body is the ...
