A resource every writer should have.

The best-selling Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (formerly the Concise dictionary) provides clear, concise, and often witty definitions of the most troublesome literary terms from abjection to zeugma. It is an essential reference tool for students of literature in any language. It is now available in a new and expanded edition and includes increased coverage of new terms from modern critical and theoretical movements, such as feminism, and schools of American poetry, Spanish verse forms, life writing, and crime fiction. It includes extensive coverage of traditional drama, versification, rhetoric, and literary history, as well as updated and extended advice on recommended further reading and a pronunciation guide to more than 200 terms. New to this edition are recommended entry-level web links updated via the Dictionary of Literary Terms companion website.

A Contemporary Guide to Literary Terms is a brief, inexpensive, and accessible handbook of literary terms for a full range of courses, including introduction to literature, literature for composition, American literature, British literature, and Shakespeare. In clear, concise, and user-friendly language, the text highlights its entries with contemporary, multicultural examples. This edition features more terms and new entries for all periods of literary history.

This compact guide covers a wide variety of terms commonly used in academic discussions of poetry, fiction, drama, rhetoric, and literary theory. Definitions are kept concise; examples are abundant. The coverage ranges from traditional topics through to recent scholarship, and the straightforward entries aim to enable students to learn new terms with confidence. The pocket glossary brings together entries from a variety of Broadview publications—including The Broadview Anthology of British Literature and The Broadview Anthology of Short Fiction—and adds a number of new entries.

Edition for 1975 published under title: Literary terms.

Covering both established terminology as well as the specialist vocabulary of modern theoretical schools, this is an indispensable guide to the principal terms and concepts encountered in debates over literary studies in the twenty-first century.