Essential Literary Terms

Essential Literary Terms offers clear, concise definitions over 220 must-know literary terms for introductory students.

This text defines and discusses terms, critical theories, and points of view that are commonly used to classify, analyse, interpret, and write the history of works of literature. The Glossary presents a series of essays in alphabetic order.

A resource every writer should have.

The best-selling Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (formerly the Concise dictionary) provides clear, concise, and often witty definitions of the most troublesome literary terms from abjection to zeugma. It is an essential reference tool for students of literature in any language. It is now available in a new and expanded edition and includes increased coverage of new terms from modern critical and theoretical movements, such as feminism, and schools of American poetry, Spanish verse forms, life writing, and crime fiction. It includes extensive coverage of traditional drama, versification, rhetoric, and literary history, as well as updated and extended advice on recommended further reading and a pronunciation guide to more than 200 terms. New to this edition are recommended entry-level web links updated via the Dictionary of Literary Terms companion website.

Covering both established terminology as well as the specialist vocabulary of modern theoretical schools, this is an indispensable guide to the principal terms and concepts encountered in debates over literary studies in the twenty-first century.