Literary technique

Annotated List of Literary Techniques

• Author surrogate, a character who acts as the author's spokesman.
• Autobiographical novel, tales of the author's life as seen by the author in fictional form; sometimes significant changes are made. An example is James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
• Breaking the fourth wall is acknowledging to the reader or audience that what is being presented is fiction.
• Constrained writing, in which artificial constraints, such as "no words containing the letter 'e'", are imposed.
• Epistolary novel, novel in the form of letters exchanged between the characters. Examples include Samuel Richardson's Pamela, Tobias Smollett's Humphry Clinker, Bram Stoker's Dracula.
• False documents, fiction written in the form of, or about, apparently real, but actually fake documents. Examples include Robert Graves' I, Claudius, a fictional autobiography of the Roman emperor Claudius; and H.P. Lovecraft's Necronomicon, a fictional book of evil that appeared frequently in horror fiction and film, written by both Lovecraft and his admirers.
• First-person narrative, the narrator tells their own tale
• Flashback, general term for altering time sequences, taking characters back to the beginning of the tale, for instance.
• Frame tale, or a story within a story, where a main story is used to organise a series of shorter stories
• Historical novel, story set amidst historical events, pioneered by Sir Walter Scott in his novels of Scottish history. Protagonists may be fictional or historical personages, or a combination.
• Magic realism, a form particularly popular in Latin American but not limited to that region, in which events are described realistically, but in a magical haze of strange local customs and beliefs. Gabriel García Márquez is a notable author in the style.
• Narrative, fiction written as if it were related to the reader by a single participant or observer.
• Omniscient narrator, particular form of narrative in which the narrator sees and knows all
• Parody, ridicule by imitation, usually humorous, such as MAD Magazine
• Pastiche, using forms and styles of another author, generally as an affectionate tribute, such as the many stories featuring Sherlock Holmes not written by Arthur Conan Doyle.
• Picaresque novel, episodic recounting of the adventures of a rogue (Spanish picaro) on the road, such as Tom Jones or Huckleberry Finn.
• Roman a clef, a "novel with a key", that is, whose characters and plot are related to real-life happenings
• Satire, "An attack on wickedness and folly", as Samuel Johnson called it, such as 1984 or Brave New World. Not necessarily humorous.
• Stream of consciousness, an attempt to portray all the thoughts and feelings of a character, as in parts of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
• Word play, in which the nature of the words used themselves become part of the work

Authors also manipulate the language of their works to create a desired response from the reader. This is the realm of the rhetorical devices.

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