IB Literature SL key terms

Careful, line-by-line analysis of a short passage that examines word choice, syntax, imagery, and structure to show how meaning is built, rather than summarising plot or restating the author's biography.

The writer's choice of particular words from the available alternatives. Register, connotation, and precision of diction shape how a reader responds to a character, setting, or idea.

The associations and emotional colouring a word carries beyond its literal meaning. Writers exploit connotation to imply judgement or mood without stating it directly.

The literal, dictionary-level meaning of a word, stripped of emotional association. Distinguishing denotation from connotation helps explain why a synonym is not interchangeable in context.

Descriptive language that appeals to the senses, often visual but also auditory, tactile, or olfactory. Patterns of imagery reveal a text's preoccupations and can carry symbolic weight.

A recurring element such as an image, phrase, object, or situation that gains meaning through repetition across a text. Motifs often point toward the work's themes.

An object, person, or event that suggests a larger meaning beyond itself while still functioning literally in the narrative. Symbols are usually interpreted in context, not decoded by fixed formula.

A central idea or question the text explores, such as guilt, migration, or power. A theme is expressed as an idea or tension, not as a single word or a moral lesson.

The attitude a text or speaker seems to take toward its subject or audience, conveyed through diction, syntax, and detail. Tone differs from mood, which concerns the reader's emotional response.

The atmosphere or emotional feeling a text creates in the reader, built through setting, imagery, pacing, and sound. Mood is an effect produced, whereas tone is an attitude expressed.

The distinctive personality and style of a narrator or speaker, shaped by vocabulary, rhythm, and attitude. In poetry, voice refers to the constructed speaker rather than the historical author.

The constructed identity a writer adopts to speak through, which may differ sharply from the author's own beliefs or biography. Reading persona as the author is a common interpretive error.

The perspective from which a narrative is told, including first or third person, omniscience, and focalisation. Point of view controls what the reader can know and whose judgements are trusted.

The degree to which a narrator's account and judgements can be trusted. Unreliable narration arises from limited knowledge, self-interest, or distortion, and invites the reader to read against the account.

A narrative technique that reports a character's thoughts in third-person narration, blending the narrator's voice with the character's idiom. It blurs the boundary between narrator and character.

A poem spoken by a single fictional character to an implied listener, revealing personality and situation through the speech itself. The gap between what the speaker says and what the poem implies is often the point.

A gap between what is stated and what is meant, or between expectation and outcome. Irony requires the reader to infer a second layer of meaning beyond the surface statement.

A figure of speech that describes one thing in terms of another without using 'like' or 'as', asserting an implied comparison. Metaphors structure perception, not just decoration.

A comparison introduced explicitly by 'like', 'as', or 'than'. The vehicle chosen for comparison often reveals assumptions about the thing being described.

A comparison sustained across several lines, a stanza, or an entire work, often organising the poem's argument. Tracking its development shows how meaning shifts through the text.

An elaborate, often surprising or intellectual metaphor that yokes together apparently unrelated things, typical of metaphysical poetry. Its wit depends on the reader following the logic of the comparison.

The arrangement of words and phrases into sentences, including length, clause order, and punctuation. Deliberate disruption of expected syntax can create emphasis, tension, or a sense of breathlessness.

The continuation of a sentence or phrase across a line break without punctuation. Enjambment can accelerate pace, create suspense, or set up a turn in meaning at the line's start.

A pause or break within a line of verse, marked by punctuation or a natural speech rhythm. Caesuras can slow pace, isolate a word, or dramatise hesitation and emphasis.

The patterned arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables in verse, such as iambic pentameter. Metrical regularity or variation contributes to rhythm and can signal emphasis or disruption.

Poetry without a fixed metrical pattern or rhyme scheme, organised instead through line breaks, cadence, and imagery. Its freedom from regular metre does not mean absence of form.

The point at which a poet ends a line and begins the next. Decisions about where to break lines control pacing, emphasis, and the reader's anticipation of meaning.

The time and place in which a narrative or scene occurs, including social and historical conditions. Setting can function as more than backdrop, shaping character, conflict, and mood.

The historical, social, and biographical circumstances surrounding a text's production and reception. Context informs interpretation but should not be used to reduce a text to its background.

How a text was read, valued, or contested by audiences at different moments, including censorship or critical reassessment. Reception history shows that literary meaning changes over time.

The body of works a culture or institution treats as especially significant and worth studying. Canon formation reflects power and taste as much as literary merit, and is continually contested.

Works read and circulated beyond their culture of origin, often in translation. The term raises questions about how translation and global reception reshape a text's meaning.

The rendering of a text from one language into another, always involving interpretive choices about tone, ambiguity, and cultural reference. Comparing translations can reveal what is at stake in those choices.

The political and economic domination of one territory by another, often accompanied by cultural imposition. Postcolonial texts respond to colonial histories, language hierarchies, and legacies of power.

Writing and criticism concerned with the experience and aftermath of colonial rule, including resistance, identity, and language. Postcolonial reading asks whose voices and histories a text privileges.

The process of defining a group as alien or inferior in contrast to a dominant norm. Literary analysis identifies othering in characterisation, description, and narrative perspective.

A fixed, oversimplified generalisation about a group, often reproduced uncritically in texts. Analysing stereotypes involves asking whether a text reinforces, complicates, or challenges them.

The way groups, places, and experiences are depicted in language and form, and with what effects. Questions of representation concern who is shown, by whom, and for whom.

The way texts gain meaning through references, echoes, and relationships with other texts. Recognising intertextuality shows that meaning is produced between works, not only within one.

An indirect reference to another text, figure, or event, which relies on the reader's knowledge to be completed. Allusions can enrich meaning or create ironic distance from the source.

An imitation of a style or text that exaggerates its features for comic or critical effect. Parody can honour and undermine its target at the same time.

Writing that uses humour, irony, or exaggeration to expose and criticise folly or vice. Satire depends on shared values between writer and reader to land its critique.

A work reworked into a new form, medium, or context, such as a novel made into a film or a myth retold. Comparing an adaptation with its source highlights what each version values.

The deliberate taking of elements from another text or culture and reusing them in a new work. Appropriation may be creative homage, critique, or an exercise of cultural power.

A mode depicting rural life in idealised terms, often contrasted with the corruption of the city or court. Later texts frequently invoke pastoral conventions in order to question them.

A widely recognised feature or rule of a genre, form, or mode, such as the soliloquy or the sonnet's turn. Texts may follow, revise, or deliberately frustrate conventions.

A category of writing defined by shared conventions, such as tragedy, elegy, or the bildungsroman. Genre shapes reader expectations and provides a frame for interpreting deviation.

The mixing of forms, languages, genres, or cultural traditions within a single text. Hybridity can challenge fixed categories and is a key concept in postcolonial writing.

A reasoned account of what a text means and how its features produce that meaning. Strong interpretations are supported by textual evidence and acknowledge plausible alternatives.