The Anglo-Saxons used alliteration the way classic English poets used rhyme. He was a four fold father, this fighting prince: (“Beowulf”) In this case, Romeo is catching his first glimpse of Juliet as he stands below her balcony, and he’s so overcome by her beauty that he calls her “the sun.” Obviously he doesn’t mean this literally, or he’d be burned to a crisp. This famous line contains a metaphor – a literary device where a word is used in a non-literal sense to stand in for something else. Examples of Literary Devices in Literature Example 1īut soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the East, and Juliet is the sun! (William Shakespeare, “Romeo and Juliet”) Without such devices, we could barely even talk to each other, let alone create great works of literature and philosophy! Because literary devices serve such a broad range of functions, there’s no single overarching “purpose” to literary devices as a whole, other than just to improve the quality of writing. That could mean setting an emotional tone, making a poem more relatable, or just stretching your own creative muscles. Literary devices are the author’s whole toolkit: whatever you want to do in your story, you do it with literary devices. This device applies to the story as a whole rather than to a single word or sentence. Character development is a good example of a structural literary device: the character begins as one sort of person, but learns and grows throughout the story so that by the end she’s someone quite different. Structural Level: These devices apply to the entire piece, whether it’s a poem, novel, or creative nonfiction.Parallelism is a good example: “I enjoyed the play, but I preferred the intermission.” The two underlined phrases have identical grammatical structure, so the sentence as a whole demonstrates parallelism. Sentence Level: There are also many literary devices that apply to sentences or long phrases.So, for example, “The sun was a golden jewel” would be a metaphor, and a word-level literary device. For example, a metaphor is when one word stands in for another. Word Level: many literary devices affect individual words or short phrases.For simplicity’s sake, we can separate the types of literary device based on scale: The varieties of literary devices are basically infinite – since the invention of storytelling, people have been honing the craft of literature and have come up with all sorts of tricks. So the sentence really means that there are a thousand soldiers carrying spears, but expressing it this way is more poetic and evocative. In this case, the spear is part of the armed soldier. This is a metonym – a word-level literary devices in which a part stands in for the whole. Example 3Īlexander marched to Persia with a thousand spears at his back. It’s especially common in poetry, and can range from extremely obvious (as in the sentence above) to much more subtle.
Example 2Īble-bodied antelopes ambled along the alleyway.Īlliteration is a sentence-level literary device in which several (or all!) the words start with the same letter. This makes the characters seem more vivid and helps their attributes stand out. If the main character is intelligent but physically frail, the foil can be a brawny dimwit. The foil is a structural-level literary device in which a supporting character forms a striking contrast to the main character. The specific devices used are almost all the same, though. So all literary devices are rhetorical devices, but not all rhetorical devices are literary devices. The term rhetorical device has almost exactly the same meaning, but it’s a little broader: whereas literary devices occur in literature, rhetorical devices can occur in any kind of speech or writing. However, it’s a very broad term and isn’t strictly limited to this meaning. Typically, these devices are used for an aesthetic purpose – that is, they’re intended to make the piece more beautiful.
In literature, any technique used to help the author achieve his or her purpose is called a literary device.
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