a stage design in which the audience is seated all the way around the acting area; actors make their entrances and exits through the auditorium.

see irony

though sometimes used as a synonym for stanza, this term technically designates passages of verse, often beginning with an indented line, that are unified by topic (as in a prose paragraph) rather tha [..]

a short pause within a line of poetry; often but not always signaled by punctuation. Note the two caesuras in this line from Poe’s "The Raven": "Once upon a midnight dreary, [..]

also called resolution, the fifth and last phase or part of plot, the point at which the situation that was destabilized at the beginning becomes stable once more and the conflict is resolved.

see diction

see biography

a figure of speech that involves treating something nonhuman, such as an abstraction, as if it were a person by endowing it with humanlike qualities, as in "Death entered the room."

see genre

in literature, at least four potentially quite different time frames are at issue: (1) author time, when the author originally created or published a literary text; (2) narrator time, when the narrato [..]