Introduction

This is a general introduction to close reading, and a specific set of principles and terms for my own students.

This guide to close reading is a subset of my broader guide to Effective Critical Writing. (It is indebted to similar guides by Robert Matz and John Lye, and to The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 5th edition, ed. J.A. Cuddon and revised by M. A. R. Habib [print]).

Feel free to share this guide, and to adapt it to your own needs — so long as you share what you write under the same creative-commons license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) that I adopt here.

Here are some useful resources:

• My Model Close Reading Essay, written in 2016.
• My rubric for grading close-reading papers, also in 2016.
• My instructions on “How to Close-read a Sonnet in 12 Steps,” written in 2019.
• The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (4th edition, 2015) [University of Calgary users only].
• For poetry readers, a comprehensive Glossary of Poetic Terms from the Poetry Foundation.

What is Close Reading?

Close reading is a practice, a habit of reading texts slowly enough to notice their details. It considers the functions of a text’s verbal parts, and asks why the author has chosen them rather than others: its form; its speaker (voice, tone); its argument; its structure; its setting or context; its imagery; its sound and rhythm; its language (syntax, diction, and word meanings); and its rhetorical schemes and tropes (especially metaphors, similes, and symbols).

See it in action

My video (“Turn Ideas into Arguments“) takes you through the four stages of annotating texts (for six features); thinking about your notes; filtering your thoughts; and summarizing your arguments. It uses the example of a Dylan Thomas poem, “In my craft or sullen art“.

Why do it?

If you’re reading this, presumably someone like me has assigned you the task of close-reading a text. But why? What’s the rationale behind these assignments?

Close reading is an essential skill for literary criticism because it studies the building-blocks of meaning, the words that we interpret whenever we make claims about texts. It focuses on the evidence that separates valid claims from invalid ones.

You do it because literary criticism is like palaeontology. You can’t build a dinosaur skeleton until you’ve spent many hours in the field, excavating and dusting fragments of bone. Similarly, you can’t make an argument about a text until you’ve closely examined its parts.

Is it objective?

No. There’s no such thing. Nor is there a checklist of things in a text that you must notice in order to ‘do it right.’ A text is not a box that its author packed full of hidden treasures that you need to unpack. It’s a collection of words that either do or don’t have significance.

The first time you do a close reading it’ll be hard to recognize or describe all those significant moments. But as you learn terms, and as you practice recognizing their formulations and variety, it gets easier — because you get better at it.

Good close readings have only one thing in common: they make rigorous evidence-based claims. Close reading is always based on evidence, and the evidence is always the same — so while there will be commonalities among close readings, most texts are rich enough that two readings will differ. What’s more, a reading you do today will differ from one you do tomorrow, because you’ll notice different things tomorrow.

Is it over-analysis?

William Wordsworth, whose very poetry you may be close reading for this assignment, thought it could be. “Our meddling intellect | Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things,” he warned.

So yes, there is such a thing as reading too much into things. But close reading should generate a flurry of ideas and details, which you then sift and filter to decide if they’re valid. You decide whether features seem accidental or deliberate. For instance, if you note that every 17th syllable of a poem uses the letter “w,” say, that’s probably less valid to note than a poem’s recurrent use of nautical terms.

What should I look for?

At least six components of texts are worth noting when you do a close reading. They are:

1. Form: the text’s external shape, including (for verse) its line length and rhyme scheme.
2. Structure and argument: the internal progression or cumulative development of the text’s meaning.
3. Speaker’s voice and tone: the qualities of and changes in tone, as it expresses emotions or states of mind.
4. Sound and rhythm: the length of words, and their arrangement; also any repeated consonants or vowel-sounds (“alliteration”).
5. Language
   • syntax, or word order
   • diction, or word choice
   • meanings of words
   • repetitions of words
6. Tropes:
   • metaphors (“my love is a rose”)
   • similes, or explicit metaphors (“my love is like a rose”)

But that’s just the beginning. The 35 terms below, divided into four categories, name different elements of a text that close readings can describe. Some terms, like diction or syntax, are in every text you read. Others, like metaphor or allegory, are only in some texts. Your task is to recognize them where they occur.

Okay, so how do I do it?

Step 1: Paraphrase

Read the passage and carefully paraphrase its meaning in modern or ordinary language. Split it up into parts. Try to understand how it’s organized, and what gives it this structure. Does the argument of the passage ever contradict itself?

Step 2: Reflect

Write your questions, ideas, and issues in the margins of your book. Think about how the different parts of the passage are working together. Think about how words from one part reflect words from another.

Step 3: Use a dictionary

What words do you not know? Which seem to be used in unexpected ways? Do some words seem to have more than one meaning? Identify at least two words that seem archaic in usage and meaning. Look them up in the Oxford English Dictionary, which tells you how a word’s meanings have changed through time. How do these different meanings change your paraphrase?

Step 4: Reread

A close reading requires many readings of the same passage. It’s often a good idea, in fact, to do an intensive close reading of a passage one day, and then come back to it again with a new look on a different day. Are any key words or phrases repeated? Do they change in meaning or connotation from one instance to another?

Dos and Don’ts

• DO give your close reading a structure, with paragraphs that each have a beginning, middle, and end. Move from broad to narrow features, or general to particular. It can help to move sequentially through the passage — but:
• DON’T retell the story, or paraphrase the text in your own words without doing analysis of it. Assume that your reader is familiar with the text or passage.
• DON’T toss all your ideas into a blender and pour them onto the page. All you’ll get is mushy prose, gathering ideas without order.
• DO follow the guidelines for clear, precise, and natural language that are the hallmarks of all good writing.
• DON’T quote long passages. Single out words in phrases that are typically no longer than 5-6 words.

Can I see some examples?

Sure. These are all from Shakespeare, and were originally compiled by Sarah Hertz (in 2011). Many of the examples come from As You Like It, only because that was the play we were teaching at the time. Sarah used standard reference works like The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory; and some specific ones like Reading Shakespeare’s Dramatic Language (Arden).

Four categories

In this list, I group literary terms into four categories, which you can think of as different levels of close reading. Each of these is defined at the beginning of each section below:

1. linguistic;
2. semantic;
3. structural; and
4. cultural.

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1 / Linguistic Terms

These are terms that address language on the surface level, as they appear and are arranged in sequence. They cover vocabulary, grammar, word choice and order, and figures of speech.

alliteration

❧ (From the Latin ‘repeating and playing upon the same letter.’) A figure of speech in which consonants are repeated. They are often at the beginning of words or in stressed syllables.

Two examples from As You Like It:

Alliteration is a very old device in English verse — much older than rhyme — and is common in verse generally. It is also used occasionally in prose.

antithesis

❧ (From the Greek ‘opposition.’) A rhetorical figure in which two ideas are directly opposed. Think of antithesis as tension plus parallelism : opposing ideas presented in a grammatically parallel way.

assonance

❧ The repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds in neighbouring words. It is distinct from rhyme in that the final consonants differ although the vowels or diphthongs match: sweet dreams, hit or miss.

How is assonance different from alliteration? Alliteration refers to repeated consonants, and assonance to repeated vowels. They often occur in proximity to each other.

This example, by John Addington Symonds, combines assonance with alliteration:

diction

❧ (1) Narrowly defined, a speaker’s (or author’s) word choice.

❧ (2) More broadly defined, the general type or character of language used in speech or in a work of literature.

In the second, broader sense, diction is typically divided into two components: vocabulary and syntax. Vocabulary encompasses the degree of difficulty, complexity, abstractness, formality, and currency of words used, as well as their etymology or origin (native or foreign, Latinate or Germanic, and so on).

Poetic diction refers specifically to the choice and phrasing of words suitable for poetry.

dissonance

❧ Harshness of sound and/or rhythm, either inadvertent or deliberate. The term is nearly equivalent to cacophony, but tends to denote a lack of harmony between sounds rather than the harshness of a particular sound in isolation.

euphony

❧ (From the Greek ‘sweetness of sound.’) A pleasing smoothness of sound, perceived by the ease with which the words can be spoken in combination. The pleasurable impression achieved may be due as much or more to the images evoked as to any inherent musicality in the sounds; calling a passage euphonious thus necessarily involves a subjective judgement. Euphony is the opposite of cacophony, or discordant sounds.

interruption

❧ The sudden breaking off of an utterance before it is completed, usually in moments of emotion. It seems quite a colloquial and natural feature in speech, but in earlier literature and drama it would be rare. Consider Hamlet’s emotional response to his mother’s remarriage:

onomatopoeia

❧ (From the Greek for ‘name-making.’) Wording that seems to signify meaning through sound effects. Onomatopoeic words, such as hiss and sizzle, ostensibly imitate the sounds they represent; onomatopoeic passages more broadly suggest an association between sound and meaning.

parallelism

❧ The arrangement of similarly constructed clauses, sentences, or verse lines in a pairing or other sequence suggesting some correspondence between them.

The effect of parallelism is usually a balanced arrangement that repeats the same syntax. When the elements arranged in parallel are in tension with each other, the result is often antithesis.

In a more extended sense, parallelism can also means correspondences between a text’s larger elements, such as the relation of subplot to main plot.

syntax

❧ The ways in which words and clauses are ordered and connected to form sentences; or the set of grammatical rules governing such word-order. Syntax also refers to the arrangement — the ordering, grouping, and placement — of words within any phrase, clause or sentence.

Syntax is a prime determinant of literary style, and a key difference between poetic language and so-called ordinary language. While English sentences usually have the structure ‘subject-verb-object’ (e.g. “Romeo killed Tybalt”), poets often distort this syntax through inversion, while even prose writers can use elaborate syntax.

tension

❧ Generally, the balance or equilibrium between opposing elements in a literary work, especially a poem, that provoke our interest in its outcome. Tensions could include: good/evil; nature/culture; or feminine/masculine. Tension is essential to conflicts or binary oppositions like abstract/concrete, general/particular, and structure/texture. In Tension in Poetry (1938), Allen Tate defines tension as the relationship between two types of meaning: “extension” (concrete, denotative meaning) and “intention” (abstract, metaphorical meaning).

Dramatic tension and inner struggle are central to the plot in Hamlet:

zeugma

❧ (From the Greek for ‘yoking together.’) The use of one word — usually a verb — that governs or refers to two or more other words in the same clause or sentence. You can recognize a zeugma by the absence of words that, in ordinary discourse, you would expect to (re)appear.

Another definition of zeugma is missing words. For instance,  in the line “He works his work, I mine” (Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses”) there are words missing from the second clause. It should technically be “He works his work, [just as] I [work] mine.” The words in [brackets] are a sign that zeugma is present in the example.

Bold verbs are zeugmatic in these two examples:

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2 / Semantic Terms

These are terms that involve the meanings and the ideas that are associated with words.

connotation

❧ The suggestion or implication of a word or phrase, beyond its denotation or literal meaning. A good example is the difference between ‘house’ and ‘home’: a ‘house’ is a physical structure, more or less; whereas the connotative meaning of ‘home’ relates to the close relationships among its inhabitants. Authors choose words with connotations that raise their desired emotional and cultural associations.

denotation

❧ The literal meaning of a word or phrase. When reading recent or contemporary texts, you’ll know the meaning of most words and only look up specialized vocabulary (e.g ‘moorish’ or ‘espoused’) — although if you look up words you think you understand, you often find secondary meanings you didn’t know about.

But in historical texts (i.e. written 5 or more decades ago), you’ll encounter words whose meanings have shifted over time (e.g. ‘rude’ or ‘naked’), and words that are no longer in use (e.g. ‘hies’ or ‘livery’). That’s when you need the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which gives you the historical denotations of words.

The other category of difficult words is idioms, or idiomatic expressions. These are ways of using words to convey more than their literal or grammatical meaning, and they are particular to time and place. Consider the many different ways of answering “thank you”: “no problem,” “you’re welcome,” “sure thing,” “no worries,” “don’t mention it,” “je vous en prie.” Each is particular to the customs of its culture, language, nationality, and time; and none means its literal meaning. Someday our own expressions will be surpassed by new expressions, and we’ll sound a tad ancient ourselves. (God forfend!)

Often when you see an idiom in a historical text, though, you don’t recognize it because we don’t use it in everyday speech: “in my mind’s eye,” “in the main,” “laugh to scorn,” “thick and fast,” “the quick and the dead.” The only way to recognize and translate these into their modern-English equivalents is to read a lot of historical texts, to stay curious about their idioms, and to look up the ones that seem unfamiliar in — where else? — the OED.

double entendre

❧ French for ‘double meaning’, adopted in English to denote a pun in which a word or phrase has a second, usually sexual, meaning, as in Elizabethan uses of the verb ‘lie’ referring both to death and to orgasm.

“Lie” = “to fall to the ground.” Echoing biblical descriptions of the body’s return to the earth at death and punning on “lie with” as slang for “have sexual relations with.”

metaphor

❧ (From the Greek ‘carrying from one place to another.’) A figure of speech in which one thing, idea, or action is referred to by a word or expression normally denoting another thing, idea or action, so as to suggest some common quality shared by the two.

The use of metaphor to combine ideas is a major feature of poetry, although it is quite possible to write poems without metaphors.

In As You Like It, Orlando compares trees to books, and tree bark to pages of the books:

Metaphors are more compressed versions of similes, and are sometimes more complex for us to understand. Much of our everyday language is also made up of metaphorical words and phrases that pass unnoticed as ‘dead’ metaphors, like the branch of an organization or the leg of a table. But Shakespeare often takes common, conventional, or ‘dead’ metaphors and gives them a new twist or elaboration. So Hamlet thinks about the implication of the common image of death as sleep:

A mixed metaphor is one in which the combination of qualities suggested is illogical or ridiculous, usually as a result of trying to apply two metaphors to one thing.

paradox

❧ (From the Greek ‘beside/beyond opinion.’) Originally a paradox was merely a view that contradicted accepted opinion. By about the middle of the 16th century, the word had acquired its now-commonly accepted meaning: an apparently self-contradictory, even absurd statement which, on closer inspection, is found to contain a truth reconciling the conflicting opposites. Two examples from As You Like It:

Some paradoxes cannot be resolved into truths, remaining flatly self-contradictory, e.g. “Everything I say is a lie.”

A paradox formed by the juxtaposition of two opposite or contradictory words (rather than by a complete statement) is an oxymoron. Consider Romeo’s lament in Romeo and Juliet, a long series of oxymorons:

personification

❧ A figure of speech or trope, like metaphor, by which animals, abstract ideas, or inanimate things are referred to as if they were human, as in Sir Philip Sidney’s line: “Invention, Nature’s child, fled stepdame Study’s blows.”

In drama, the term is sometimes applied to the impersonation of non-human things and ideas by human actors.

Time travels in divers paces with divers persons. I’ll tell you who Time ambles withal, who Time trots withal, who Time gallops withal and who he stands still withal. (As You Like It, 3.2.299-302)

Personification, known in Greek as prosopopoeia, is common in everyday speech: e.g. “time flies” or “chair legs.” It is common in most ages of poetry, particularly in the 18th century. It has a special function as the basis of allegory.

A pathetic fallacy is a limited form of personification, in which human traits and emotions are attributed to inanimate nature: “the sea was angry that day.” Compared to personification in general, the pathetic fallacy is narrower in scope, since it applies only to nature rather than anything non-human, and its ‘humanizing’ characterization is typically less sustained.

pun

❧ A figure of speech which involves a play-on-words exploiting a similarity in spelling and/or pronunciation between words with different meanings. Alternatively, a pun may employ one word that has multiple meanings.

One of the earliest types of wordplay, the pun is a fairly universal form of humour. Puns are often intended humorously, but not always.

A pun form known as asteismus involves a reply to earlier words used in a different sense. This example occurs in Cymbeline(II, i):

Rosalind uses the same joke with Touchstone in As You Like It (1.2). Touchstone is a wellspring of puns:

Whereas Hamlet is not quite so funny:

repetition

❧ An essential unifying element in nearly all poetry and much prose. It may consist of sounds, particular syllables and words, phrases, stanzas, metrical patterns, ideas, allusions and shapes. Thus refrain, assonance, rhyme, internal rhyme, alliteration and onomatopoeia are frequent in repetition. One example from As You Like It is in the definition of ‘line length’ below; this is the other:

simile

❧ A figure of speech (more specifically a trope) that compares two distinct things by using words such as like or as to link them together. Simile is distinguished from metaphor, another trope that associates two distinct things, but without the use of a connective word. To say “That child is like a cyclone” is to use a simile, whereas to say “That child is a cyclone” is to use a metaphor. In either case, the cyclone is the vehicle, the image used to represent the child, which is the tenor, or subject of the figure.

Two examples from As You Like It:

An epic, or Homeric, simile is an extended and elaborate simile in which the vehicle is described at such length that it nearly obscures the tenor.

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3 / Structural Terms

These terms involve relationships between a text’s form and its themes or ideas.

caesura

❧ A break or pause in a line of poetry, dictated by the natural rhythm of the language and/or enforced by punctuation. A line may have more than one caesura, or none at all. If near the beginning of the line, it is called the initial caesura; near the middle, medial; near the end, terminal. The commonest is the medial.

enjambment

❧ (French for ‘striding over.’) A sentence or statement that spans more than one verse line. Lines exhibiting enjambment do not end with grammatical breaks, and their sense is incomplete without the following line(s). Such lines are sometimes called run-on lines to distinguish them from end-stopped lines. The meaning of an end-stopped line, in which a grammatical pause marked by punctuation and the physical end of the line coincide, is complete in itself. The following lines, from The Winter’s Tale, are enjambed:

Whereas, in contrast, these lines from Romeo & Juliet are all end-stopped:

line length

❧ The number of syllables —- not words —- in a line of poetry. In Shakespeare’s verse the convention is ten syllables per line, but different passages (e.g. songs) will have shorter or longer lines. When one or more lines are significantly different in length to those around it/them, Shakespeare is often suggesting something about the meaning of the line(s), or the character speaking them.

rhyme

❧ The formalized consonance of syllables, represented in an abstract notation or ‘scheme’: e.g. AA, BB, CC for couplets. Blank verse has no rhyme scheme; that is the meaning of ‘blank.’

stanza

❧ A group of lines in poetry, set off by whitespace before and after. As the units into which poets divide poems, stanzas are similar to paragraphs in prose — but different insofar as they are usually of a uniform length, typically between 4 and 12 lines. Poets may repeat words, lines (as refrains), and more often rhyme schemes between stanzas (e.g. ABABBCC).

Sonnets are occasionally divided into two or more stanzas denoting their rhyme scheme (e.g. octave and sestet, quatrains and couplet).

structure & distinct phases

❧ These non-technical terms refer to the progression of the text’s meaning, or the stages through which a text moves. Where are its shifts of subject, mood, story, theme, tone, verb tenses? Is there a beginning, middle, and end to what the text describes or recounts? Where do those transitions happen?

For shorter texts like lyrical poems, consider sentences or clauses and their relationships. Does one contradict or reply to another? Is the poem split into stanzas? How might you group some stanzas together, and divide them from others? Don’t look at layout alone, but how it relates to what’s happening at each stage.

For longer texts like stories, plays, and narrative poems, look for internal divisions (e.g. chapters, scenes, acts). But look also within those divisions, to pivotal moments (e.g. revelations or discoveries) that shift the story. Structure also obtains in non-fictional prose. If the text is an argument, for example, does it make a claim at the beginning and then back it up with evidence? Or use evidence/examples to establish a claim?

title & epigraphs

❧ A text’s title might be useful when you are interpreting its meaning, only if you’re sure that it hasn’t been added or changed by someone other than the author, like a modern editor. (For instance, many of the titles of Shakespeare’s plays are abbreviated versions of the titles under which they were first performed or printed.) Poems published in the past few centuries have titles provided either by the author or by their acquaintances and publishers, so you need to be certain which category your title is in before you make too much of it.

Poem titles can be illuminating when they address features that direct and frame your interpretation — as in the case of William Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence,” originally known by the more descriptive title “The Leech Gatherer.””

Epigraphs are short quotations that precede texts; they often represent ideas that inspired or otherwise influenced the text. Normally in a close reading you investigate an epigraph’s source and briefly address its influence alongside other sources or contexts.

Novels or plays often print epigraphs on separate pages like title pages, or they appear at divisions like chapter-breaks. Poems print them just before the first line.

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4 / Cultural Terms

These terms relate to a text’s connections with things outside of its boundaries, like references to places or to other texts, mythology, or other external elements. To identify them, you need to recognize and understand such externalities.

allegory

❧ (From the Greek allēgoria, ‘speaking otherwise.’) A story or visual image with a second distinct meaning partially hidden behind its literal or visible meaning.

The principal technique of allegory is personification, whereby abstract qualities are given human shape — as in public statues of Liberty or Justice.

In written narrative, allegory involves a sustained, continuous parallel between two (or more) levels of meaning in a story, so that its persons and events correspond to their equivalents in a system of ideas or a chain of events external to the tale.

An allegory may be conceived as a metaphor that is extended into a structured system. Many critics consider the allegory to be an extended metaphor and, conversely, consider metaphors — which involve saying one thing but meaning another — to be ‘verbal allegories’. Famous examples are John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Milton’s Paradise Lost.

In As You Like It, Oliver tells the story of his rescue by Orlando (4.3) in supposedly factual terms, or as an event that really happened. But it contains so many symbols (the ancient oak, the “green and gilded snake,” the lioness) that it could be construed as an allegory — specifically, as a quasi-Biblical story of good defeating evil, and mankind overpowering nature.

allusion

❧ Usually an implicit reference, perhaps to another work of literature or art, to a person or an event. It is often a kind of appeal to a reader to share some experience with the writer.

An allusion enriches the text by association with some established tradition. The writer tends to assume that the audience is able to ‘pick up’ the reference.

There are many allusions in As You Like It:

[*Alluding to a biblical account in Genesis 7:2 in which pairs of male and female animals shelter on Noah’s ark to escape the flood that covers the earth.]

[*Alluding to the classical myth of an earlier world of perpetual spring, abundance, and ease from which humankind had degenerated (Ovid, Metamorphoses 1). This golden world was often identified with a pastoral life.]

apostrophe

❧ (From the Greek ‘turning away.’) A figure of speech in which a thing, a place, an abstract quality, an idea, a dead or absent person, is addressed as if present and capable of understanding.

In classical rhetoric, the term could also denote a speaker’s turning to address a particular member or section of the audience. The apostrophe is one of the conventions appropriate to the ode and to the elegy. The poet’s invocation of a muse in epic poetry is a particular form of apostrophe.

implied reader / audience

❧ The person(s) to whom a text is addressed; the intended audience of a speech. These qualities of a text often have a direct influence on verbal style. For instance, when Touchstone confronts William in As You Like It 5.1, he uses vocabulary to intimidate him, and to impress Audrey with his learning. Another example from the same play is Phoebe’s declaration of love to ‘Ganymede,’ in the letter that Silvius carries:

irony

❧ (From the Greek ‘dissimulation.’) A subtly humorous perception of inconsistency, in which an apparently straightforward statement or event is undermined by its context so as to give it a very different significance.

At its simplest, as in verbal irony, it involves a discrepancy between what is said and what is really meant, as in its crude form, sarcasm. Cross-dressing provides ample opportunity for ironic statements:

The more sustained structural irony in literature involves the use of a naïve or deluded hero or unreliable narrator, whose view of the world differs widely from the true circumstances recognized by the author and readers.

A similar sense of detached superiority is achieved by dramatic irony, in which the audience knows more about the character’s situation than the character does, foreseeing an outcome contrary to the character’s expectations, and thus ascribing a sharply different sense to some of the character’s own statements; in tragedies, this is called tragic irony.

The term cosmic irony is sometimes used to denote a view of people as the dupes of a cruelly mocking fate.

mood

❧ Defined by some critics as synonymous with atmosphere, by others as synonymous with tone, and by still others as synonymous with both. Mood is probably closer to atmosphere than to tone, but, as a general term, it can be correctly applied to either. One could say that an author creates a somber mood, thereby using it as a synonym for atmosphere; one could also say than an author’s mood is somber, thereby using it as a synonym for tone. Shakespeare uses dialogue to establish mood and setting in Hamlet:

perspective/point of view

❧ The position or vantage-point from which the events of a text seem to be observed and presented to us.

The chief distinction usually made between points of view is that between third-person narratives and first-person narratives.

A third-person narrator may be omniscient, and therefore show an unrestricted knowledge of the story’s events from outside or ‘above’ them; but another kind of third-person narrator may confine our knowledge of events to whatever is observed by a single character or a small group of characters, this method being known as ‘limited point of view’. A first-person narrator’s point of view is normally restricted to their partial knowledge and experience, and therefore will not give us access to other characters’ hidden thoughts.

Many modern authors also use multiple points of view, in which readers are shown events from the positions of multiple characters.

symbol

❧ (From the Greek verb symballein, ‘to throw together’ and its noun symbolon, ‘mark’, ‘emblem’, ‘token’ or ‘sign’). An object, animate or inanimate, which represents or ‘stands for’ something else.

[*Ophelia, recalling each flower’s symbolic meaning, distributes them to Laertes, Gertrude, and Claudius.]

[*may Hercules bring you luck. Hercules’ name is synonymous with physical strength. This is also an allusion to the classical hero.]

A symbol differs from an allegorical sign in that it has a real existence, whereas an allegorical sign is arbitrary. It can be an action or a gesture, and in literature it is used to combine an image with a concept (words themselves are a kind of symbol).

tone

❧ The attitude of an author or speaker toward a text’s readers, audiences, or subjects. An author’s tone may be serious, playful, mocking, and so forth.

Tone is sometimes equated with voice, particularly in the sense of a creative authorial voice that pervades and underlies literary work. It is often used to mean ‘tone of voice,’ an indeterminate quality of language through which writers (and us in our daily conversations) reveal a range of attitudes towards everything from the subject at hand to those being addressed.

Hamlet’s disregard for the body of Polonius is cheeky, flippant, and morbid:

Although the terms tone and atmosphere may both be equated with mood, their meanings differ. Unlike tone, which refers to the author’s attitude, atmosphere refers to the general feeling created for the reader or audience by a work at a given point.