Literary Elements: Fiction and Poetry
Review the core building blocks of literary analysis, from plot and theme to figurative language and poetic form.
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Questions Covered in This Set
10 cards to master
What are the five stages of classic plot structure?
Exposition (setup), rising action (complications), climax (highest tension/turning point), falling action, and resolution.
How is theme different from topic?
A topic is a word or phrase ('love'); a theme is a full, arguable sentence about life ('Love that demands total loyalty can become a kind of cage'). Theme is not a moral lecture.
What is the difference between tone and mood?
Tone is the author's or speaker's attitude (bitter, playful, reverent); mood is the feeling created in the reader (tense, melancholy, cozy). Tone lives in diction (word choice).
Name the four main points of view.
First person ('I'), second person ('you'), third limited (inside one character's head), and third omniscient (access to many minds). Also ask whether the narrator is unreliable.
Round vs. flat, dynamic vs. static characters?
Round = complex and contradictory; flat = one trait. Dynamic = changes over the story; static = stays the same.
What is the difference between a simile and a metaphor?
A simile compares using 'like' or 'as' ('Her laugh was like a door slamming'); a metaphor compares directly with no like/as ('Hope is the thing with feathers').
What are the five types of conflict?
Character vs. character, vs. self, vs. society, vs. nature, and vs. fate.
What is enjambment, and what does it do?
A sentence running past the line break instead of stopping at it; it creates momentum or surprise. An end-stopped line creates finality instead.
How does Dickinson's 'Hope is the thing with feathers' work as a metaphor?
By making hope a bird rather than saying it is like one, she makes hope small, alive, fragile, capable of flight, and living inside the soul — a whole argument compressed into a few words.
What poetry-specific tools should you analyze?
Speaker (never assume it's the poet), line breaks, stanza structure, rhyme scheme (ABAB), meter (e.g., iambic pentameter), and sound devices like alliteration and assonance.
