Literary Devices

What is a literary device?

A literary device is a tool authors use to help structure a story, whether fiction or non-fiction, to engage the reader’s interest, and add layers to a narrative or story. They usually hint at something outside of the story.

Literary Devices include:

• Fictional Devices
• Non-fiction devices
• Dramatic Devices
• Poetic Devices

We shall be looking at what these are with some examples.

Fictional devices

Fictional devices can include genre and technique. Genres categorise literary fiction, while the technique is the method used for telling the story.

Typical literary formats are:

• Novel
• Short story
• Poetry
• Stage plays/drama

A novel is a work of fiction (it is imaginary, although it can be based on true events) and is longer than a short story. According to today’s publishing standards a novel is typically 80,000 words or more. (Less than 80,000 words makes it a 'novella'). Usually, a novel is made up of chapters. There will be a main plot or storyline, and often one or more subplots.

A short story will usually be around 15,000 words or less, and usually with one plot and fewer characters than in a novel.

Poetry can be of various lengths and may tell a story or express an emotion or thought. A narrative or epic poem can be book-sized!

Drama or Stage plays are stories played out for an audience on a stage. Their plots and characters may be as complex as those of a novel.

The fictional device as a technique

Let’s say an author is a third of the way through his latest novel and suddenly hits a brick wall. His leading character needs some information – but has no means of getting it. The author, eager to meet his publisher’s deadline, hits on an idea – he decides to introduce another character who tells a story that provides the missing information. This will allow the first character to resolve his problem in a (fairly) natural manner. The author finishes his novel and meets his deadline.

The author has told a story within a story, or framed narrative, which is a fictional device.

Fictional devices are handy tools for the author and can:

• help introduce background information.
• bring in new characters and situations that help propel the story forward.

In Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847), for example, the first narrator, Mr Lockwood, is haunted by a phantom while visiting his landlord at Wuthering Heights. Confined to bed after catching a cold on the Yorkshire moors, Lockwood asks his housekeeper to tell him about the morose family resident at Wuthering Heights. The housekeeper, Nelly Dean, then becomes the main narrator and continues the story until the last couple of chapters when Lockwood, returning to the area a year later, takes over the conclusion of the novel.

Non-fiction devices

Non-fiction writers often use fictional devices to help tell the story of real events, rather than imaginary ones. For example, they may use metaphors.

Fig. 1 - The mind is an ocean.

Non-fiction formats

Non-fiction includes:

• Travelogues
• Biography
• Autobiography

A travelogue is a (usually personal) account of a journey.

A biography is the chronologically narrated life story of a person in an entertaining and meaningful way. A classic prototype is James Boswell’s biography of Dr. Samuel Johnson (The Life of Samuel Johnson, 1791), the man responsible for the earliest dictionaries in the English Language. In this biography, anecdotes are combined with recorded conversation.

Autobiography is the detailed and (usually) chronologically narrated life of its author up to the time of writing. These are mostly by celebrities (or their ghostwriters) but can be by anyone who wishes to share their life experiences.

Dramatic devices

Drama is a broad term used to include any type of performance by actors on stage, tv, radio, in film or online. Drama can be divided into devices or categories including:

• Comedy

• Tragedy

• Tragicomedy

• Melodrama

Comedy

Comedy was mostly a combination of classical comedy and farce until the 18th century, when satire and 'comedies of manners' evolved.

The industrial revolution led to big shifts in society, which was reflected in the comedies produced for stage. 19th to 21st-century audiences have been entertained by drawing-room comedies, romantic comedies, comedies involving slapstick, social comment and/or parody.

Tragedy

Tragedy, like comedy, has its origins in Ancient Greece. Analysis of drama also began there. Aristotle defined the concepts of catharsis, discovery and reversal (ie. the hero discovers some shattering information that leads to the downturn (a reversal) of his fortunes)

Seneca of Ancient Rome influenced Renaissance drama, which adopted the 5-act-structure. This consists of:

• Act 1) Introduction, setting the scene

• Act 2) Action that sets the story in motion – very often the conflict is introduced here

• Act 3) Action intensifies into a climax

• Act 4) The action relaxes – also called a ‘falling action’

• Act 5) Resolution – where loose ends are tied up and often a message is conveyed.

Dramatic structure

Seneca’s influence on Renaissance theatre has carried on into the present day and is used for films as well as plays.

The five-act structure continues to be used in film, story-telling and advertising. It is a more detailed version of the 3-act structure.

The neoclassical style of the 17th century drew on Ancient Greek mythology and literature for plots and dramatic voice. This was followed by a trend for historical tragedies in the 18th century. 19th-century theatre used Realism and Naturalism. By the 20th century, however, tragedy as a dramatic form declined and was considered ‘dead’.

Tragicomedy

Comedy began to be mixed with tragedy as early as the Renaissance. Tragicomedy refers to a play that might appear very serious in tone throughout but finish on a happy note. Both Chekhov and Ibsen toyed with the concept, then Chekhov inverted the format by creating comedies with tragic endings and infusing them with psychological insight (Uncle Vanya, 1898). In the 20th century, the blend of comic-tragedy/tragicomedy became a component of Absurdist theatre (Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 1953).

Melodrama

Melodrama (melody + drama) was a popular form of entertainment in the 19th century, filled with action rather than depth, and aimed at providing ‘sensationalist’ entertainment. Stock characters included the gallant hero, the sighing heroine, the gloating arch-villain, the trusty servant, the clownish messenger and their entrances and exits would probably be signalled with snatches of music. A typical example is The Frozen Deep (1856) by Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens.

Poetic devices

Poets don’t only rely on rhyming when writing poetry, they also rely on poetic devices such as structure and metre.

Terms used to talk about poetry include:

• Poetic form
• Poetic genre
• Metre
• Rhyme

Poetic form is about the structure of the poem and its content. For example, a sonnet is usually a love poem (content) made up of 3 stanzas and a rhyming couplet (form).

Poetic genre refers to the type of poetry, including:

• Epic - an extended poem usually in praise of heroic endeavour, such as ‘The Illiad’.
• Lyric - short poems that have the structure and musical quality of a song.
• Satirical - a poem that makes fun of social conventions, or human weaknesses.
• Ode - a lengthy lyric poem that contemplates grand themes of life and mortality.
• Sonnet - a poem, often narrative or amatory, of 14 lines, with specific rhyme patterns.

Metre is about the pattern or rhythm in a poem, based on the number of syllables in each line and the emphasis given to those syllables. Rhyme is when two words share the same (vowel) sound. Even though these words open with different consonants, the final vowel syllables rhyme.

The rhyming words in the verse may sound similar but have different meanings and spellings.

There are several types of rhyme, including perfect, imperfect, end rhyme, feminine, masculine, eye rhyme, and monorhyme.

The three most common are:

• Perfect rhyme
• Imperfect rhyme
• End rhyme

Perfect or full rhyme

The perfect rhyme is when:

• two words share the same vowel sound in the final syllable
• the final consonants of the two words are identical.

Imperfect or half-rhyme

In this kind of rhyme, the rhyming words do not sound identical. Instead, they only sound ‘half’ similar (hence half-rhyme).

For example, in the first verse of Emily Dickinson’s ‘Hope is the thing with Feathers' (1861) the words ‘soul’ and ‘all’ are not an exact match, and are only vaguely similar in sound:

End rhyme

End rhymes can be found when the phrases end in rhyming syllables. These are the most frequently used rhymes in poetry and plays.

Rhyming verse is still a popular form of poetry. However there are poets who prefer not to use rhyme in their works, and this type of poetry is called 'free verse'.

Free Verse (also known as vers libre) is used to describe various types of poetry that have no unifying rhyme scheme. It became popular in the 20th century with the Imagist and Modernist movements, and literary figures such as Ezra Pound, Rainer Maria Rilke, T.S.Eliot, D.H.Lawrence and Walt Whitman.

Literary devices can be used in fiction, non-fiction and poetry. They form an integral part of language, adding depth, meaning and variety.