Essential Literary Terms: Definitions and Movements

Understanding Key Literary Concepts

Myth

A myth (from the Greek μῦθος, mythos, meaning 'story') is a traditional narrative of miraculous events, featuring extraordinary or supernatural beings such as gods, demigods, heroes, or monsters.

Interior Monologue

Interior monologue (also known as 'stream of consciousness') is a literary technique that attempts to capture on paper the flow of thoughts and feelings, representing both the real world and the inner world imagined by a protagonist.

Psychological Novel

The psychological novel, or novel of psychological analysis (also known as psychological realism), is a work of prose fiction that emphasizes the internal characterization of its characters, their motives, and circumstances. Internal action is born and developed from external action.

Sentimental Novel

The sentimental novel is a historical literary subgenre that developed between the pre-Renaissance of the fifteenth century and the Renaissance of the first half of the sixteenth century. This archigenre, included in epic or narrative prose, consists of prose interspersed with verses, sometimes in epistolary form. Its themes are love, often within the known laws of courtly love.

Parable

A parable (from the Latin parabola, and from the Greek παραβολή, parabolē) is a literary form consisting of a figurative story which, by analogy or resemblance, derives a lesson on a topic that is not explicit. It is, in essence, a symbolic story or a comparison based on a credible observation. The parable has a didactic purpose, and we can find examples of it in the Christian Gospels, where Jesus tells many parables and teachings to the people.

Petrarchism

Petrarchism, a genre of lyric poetry, is an aesthetic trend that mimics the style, compositional structures, topics, and imagery of the Humanist lyric poet Petrarch. Petrarchism was a powerful current of lyrical inspiration that spread throughout Europe with the Renaissance, drawing inspiration from the courtly love poetry of the Provençal troubadours. This movement superimposed a new amatory philosophy influenced by Platonism. Its influence extended into the early eighteenth century, and few poets, like William Shakespeare, escaped it, with Shakespeare even creating a sonnet dedicated to a man.

Prolepsis

In a literary sense, prolepsis refers to a leap forward in the narrative, through which the reader is given plot elements in advance, so before reading the novel, you know or at least intuit what the end will be. Prolepsis requires a certain expertise in handling, as it is difficult to maintain the reader's interest when they already know the ending.

Literary Realism

Realism is a literary current invented by the French writer and associate Jules Champfleury (1821-1889), who first defined his art as realistic. Literary realism is inscribed within a broader movement that also affects the plastic arts.