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Your friendly guide to literary terms

Your friendly guide to literary terms - book cover

by J.O. Hendry
First published 1997
121 pages
ISBN 0-620-21588-7
5 000 copies sold
A5 book in soft cover
Price (incl VAT) R 81-94

A comprehensive dictionary of literary terms and writing techniques, academic and thorough but expressed in clear, non-technical language, with simple definitions and extensive examples.

A practical reference tool for the general reader, as well as for students and teachers at both secondary and tertiary level, and a valuable source for skills-based literature lessons.

The book was reviewed in 2003 in the prestigious African Book Publishing Record (Columbia SC, USA), as follows:

This is an exceptional little book and a valuable resource for students of literature ... The complete absence of jargon makes the book accessible to all readers ... This book is strongly recommended for school and university libraries, and also for teacher training colleges, as it will prove a valuable resource for teachers and students alike. Your friendly guide to literary terms will find a place in general collections as well, for the non-academic reader of literature.
Maeve Cooney
University of Texas

This extract will give you an idea of how the book works:

SYNECDOCHE
That figure of speech in which a part of the thing is mentioned in order to mean the whole thing (thus 'five thousand head of cattle'; 'a fleet of thirty sail'); or in which, conversely, the whole thing is mentioned when only the part is meant ('England beat Wales by twelve points to nil'; 'the palace is happy to announce the birth of a son').

In this example, the use of synecdoche effectively focuses attention on the noise the fearful traveller's horse makes, in contrast with the ghostly silence that is left behind:
… they heard his voice upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.
(Walter de la Mare: The listeners)

The synecdoche of these next lines – heads – suggests that the scholars operate on a purely cerebral level, with ironically no sensual response to the essentially sensuous poetry that they study:
Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love's despair
To flatter beauty's ignorant ear.
(W.B. Yeats: The scholars)

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