Characters
This character narrates To Kill a Mockingbird and represents childhood innocence slowly confronting injustice.
Scout Finch
This novel criticizes slavery through a boy’s journey and the use of Southern vernacular speech.
The Adventures of Huck Finn
This movement tried to portray life as it really was rather than idealizing it.
Realism
King’s repeated phrase “I have a dream” is powerful because it creates rhythm, emphasis, and persuasion through this device.
Anaphora
Maverick poets
Dickinson and Whitman
This character in “Fiesta, 1980” narrates the story and experiences both physical sickness and emotional discomfort.
Yunior
This work uses the symbol of a letter to explore hypocrisy.
The Scarlet Letter
This movement focuses on local speech, customs, setting, and regional identity.
Regionalism
In The Jungle, immigrant workers being treated almost like meat creates this kind of comparison.
Metaphor
This poet is known as the father of free verse.
Walt Whitman
In The Crucible, this character manipulates fear and hysteria after accusing others of witchcraft.
Abigail Williams
This short story uses a party setting to reveal hidden family conflict instead of simple celebration.
Fiesta, 1980
This movement believed truth could be found through intuition, self-reliance, and nature rather than institutions.
Transcendentalism
In To Kill a Mockingbird, the mockingbird represents innocence harmed by injustice, making it this device.
Symbol
This poet often explored death, immortality, and hope using dashes, slant rhyme, and unusual capitalization.
Emily Dickinson
This character in The Great Gatsby observes the corruption of wealth but is not fully separate from the society he criticizes.
This play’s title comes from a Langston Hughes poem about postponed dreams.
A Raisin in the Sun
This movement helped affirm Black identity while criticizing exclusion from American society.
The Harlem Renaissance
Poe uses this device to reinforce the speaker’s despair through this literary device and the word "nevermore"
Repetition
In “I, Too,” Hughes “converses” with Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing,” making the poem an example of this device.
Allusion
This character in A Raisin in the Sun feels pressured to become the provider and prove his masculinity through financial success.
Walter Lee Jr.
This work was fiction, but it functioned as social criticism by making readers emotionally experience immigrant suffering.
The Jungle
This movement argues that people are shaped by heredity, environment, and social conditions.
Naturalism
In The Crucible, the Salem Witch Trials are used to criticize another historical event, making the play an example of this device.
Allegory
In “Harlem,” images like rotten meat, a sore, and a heavy load create this literary effect by appealing to the senses.
Imagery