Definitions: Chapter 21 – “Symbol, Allegory, and Irony”
Symbol: a person, object, image, word, or event that evokes a range of additional meanings beyond and usually more abstract than its literal significance.
Conventional symbol: have meanings that are widely recognized by a society or culture.
Literary or contextual symbols: can be a setting, character, action, object, name, or anything else in a work that maintains its literal significance while suggesting other meanings.
Allegory: a narration or description usually restricted to a single meaning because its events, characters, actions, settings, and objects represent specific abstractions.
Didactic poetry: poetry designed to teach an ethical or moral lesson.
Irony: a literary devise that uses contradictory statements or situations to reveal a reality different from what appears to be true.
Situational irony: exists when there is an incongruity between what is expected to happen and what actually happens due to forces beyond human comprehension and / or control.
Verbal irony: is a figure of speech that occurs when a person says one thing but means the opposite.
Dramatic irony: creates a discrepancy between what a character believes or says and what the reader or audience member knows to be true.
Satire: the literary are of ridiculing a folly or vice in order to expose or correct it.