Literary device
A literary device is a technique used by authors across various forms of literature, including novels, short stories, plays, and poems, to effectively communicate their messages and enhance the reader's experience. Literary devices can vary in type and number depending on the genre and the author's purpose, and they serve to add depth and complexity to a work. While literary elements such as plot and characterization are essential for storytelling, devices like metaphor, symbolism, and irony offer additional layers of meaning, guiding readers through the text.
In poetry, authors may employ structural devices such as rhyme and meter, while in prose, they might use devices like foreshadowing or flashback. The study of these devices enables readers to conduct critical analyses and draw comparisons among different texts. This approach is often associated with the literary critical theory known as New Criticism, which emphasizes close reading and understanding a work's inherent meaning. By examining literary devices, readers can deconstruct texts and gain insights into the author's intentions and the broader thematic implications. Overall, literary devices play a crucial role in enriching the reading experience and fostering a deeper understanding of literature.
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Subject Terms
Literary device
A literary device is a tool that authors use in works such as novels, short stories, plays, and poems to convey their message to audiences. The types and number of literary devices that authors choose to incorporate depend on the genre and context of the work as well as the purpose of their message. Literary elements, such as plot, are intrinsic to telling a story effectively and serve as the foundation of a literary work. Literary devices, such as metaphor, are additional conventions or structures that provide further depth and complexity to the text, enhancing the artistic qualities of the work. Together, these literary elements and devices assist readers in their interpretations of meaning and ensure their thorough engagement with texts.
Overview
Literary devices are universal techniques that can be found in all different types of literature. Readers can conduct critical analysis and compare texts through recognition and study of these devices. Examples of literary elements found in novels include characterization of the protagonist and antagonist, plot, theme, setting, narrator, point of view, and tone. To accent these elements and guide readers through a story, novelists also usually employ devices that can include allegory, allusion, metaphor, simile, symbolism, foreshadowing, flashback, imagery, personification, puns, and irony. In addition, poets often rely upon more concrete and structural devices such as alliteration, assonance, consonance, caesura, rhyme, meter, diction, syntax, and enjambment.
In using literary devices during their textual analysis, readers gain insight into the meaning and inner structure of a work. Modern literary analysis based upon literary devices is typically associated with the school of literary critical theory known as New Criticism, which gained popularity in the mid-twentieth century and advocated a method of evaluation that focuses exclusively on a work’s inherent, autonomous ability to convey meaning. This formalist manner of close reading is the primary method of literary analysis taught to students in secondary education.
Connecting with texts through the study of literary devices helps readers to deconstruct these texts. Literary devices provide a conceptual framework for analysis that allows readers to interpret how these techniques affect their readings of texts. For example, a secondary school student asked to scrutinize William Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily” (1930) might decide to look at the text through the literary technique of allegory, linking the story to the change and decline of traditional Southern culture during Faulkner’s time. Students might also find thematic significance in Faulkner’s symbolic use of the rose. If asked to focus on a literary element, students might consider the story according to its plot structure, comparing and contrasting it to the traditional narrative arc.
Analyses of literary devices often help readers comprehend deeper meanings of the texts under consideration and enrich their reading experience. In addition, readers can make inferences about an author’s intended impact on an audience.
Bibliography
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Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. 5th ed. Boston: Longman, 2011. Print.
Cuddon, J. A. Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. 5th ed. Hoboken: Wiley, 2013. Print.
DaFoe, Nancy. Writing Creatively: A Guided Journal to Using Literary Devices. Lanham: Rowman, 2014. Print.
Dancygier, Barbara, and Eve Sweetser. Figurative Language. New York: Cambridge UP, 2014. Print.
Foster, Thomas Campbell. How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading between the Lines. Rev. ed. New York: Harper, 2014. Print.
Greene, Roland, ed. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. 4th ed. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012. Print.
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