Literary Terms - M

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A character type deriving his name from the Florentine writer of The Prince (1469-1527), a sinister resourceful and unscrupulous villain

One of the two major epics composed in Sanskrit verse, alongside the Ramayana

The use of words incorrectly, often polysyllabic ones

The prize for fiction in English open to any writer from the Commonwealth of Republic of Ireland. Winners include Arundhati Roy, Julian Barnes and Kazuo Ishiguro

A public declaration of literary, philosophical or religious beliefs

A well-educated, well-read, civilized and perhaps learned person - who may also be a writer

An Indian religious chant

Refers to the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in verse. In English, this is based on stress rather than quantity

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A proposition which consists of a pithy, succinct statement (usually a sentence or two)

A figure of speech which contains an understatement for emphasis

A form of novel which purports to be a 'true' autobiographical- account but which is wholly or mostly fictitious

Any work of fiction which seems preoccupied by its own fictionality or with the nature of fiction generally

A figure of speech in which one thing is described in terms of another

A recently coined term used to denote the body of contemporary writing published at the turn of the 21st c. In Britain, it came into use with the publication of Zadie Smith's White Teeth in 2000

The conscious cetration of a myth. In literature, the appropriation and reworking of mythical material, or the creation of a kind of private mythology