Literary Techniques, Style, and Context
Techniques to name precisely
Examiners reward accurate terminology. Learn to identify and explain:
- Sound and rhythm: alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, anaphora, chiasmus, asyndeton, polysyndeton.
- Figures of thought: apostrophe, rhetorical question, praeteritio, occupatio, irony, hyperbole, litotes.
- Structure: ring composition, enjambment, framing, catalogue, simile, exemplum.
Style and author
Each author has a signature. Cicero's periodic sentences and tricolon; Caesar's spare third-person narrative and commentarii style; Virgil's dense allusion and Homeric modelling; Horace's curiosa felicitas; Ovid's wit and elegiac couplets; Tacitus' brevity and moralising. Match the technique to the author's purpose.
Context matters
A technique is not effective in a vacuum. Link it to:
- Genre expectations: epic, elegy, satire, historiography, oratory, letters.
- Audience and occasion: a funeral speech, a recusatio, a laudatio.
- Historical moment: late Republic politics, Augustan ideology, imperial court.
Common traps
- Naming without explaining: 'there is chiasmus' earns little; 'the chiasmus arma virumque... frames the two themes' earns more.
- Over-identifying: not every repeated word is anaphora.
- Ignoring context: a simile in Virgil may allude to Homer; say so.
- Confusing technique with effect: the technique is the device; the effect is what it does to the reader.
Rule of thumb
Use the formula: device → Latin quotation → effect on reader or argument. Always explain why the device matters.
Worked example
Arma virumque cano - the opening of the Aeneid.
- Device: tricolon of themes (arms, man, and the journey) and a programmatic opening.
- Quotation: arma virumque cano.
- Effect: signals epic subject matter (war) and personal hero (man), while cano claims poetic authority.
- Context: echoes Homeric openings; announces Augustan themes of duty and suffering.