Literary technique

Literary technique, also called literary device. Novels and short stories do
not simply come from nowhere. Usually the author employs some general
literary technique as a framework for artistic work.

Annotated List of Literary Techniques

   * Author surrogate, a character who acts as the author's spokesman.
   * Autobiographical novel, tales of the author's life as seen by the
     author in fictional form; sometimes significant changes are made. An
     example is James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
   * Breaking the fourth wall is acknowledging to the reader or audience
     that what is being presented is fiction.
   * Constrained writing, in which artificial constraints, such as "no words
     containing the letter 'e'", are imposed.
   * Epistolary novel, novel in the form of letters exchanged between the
     characters. Examples include Samuel Richardson's Pamela, Tobias
     Smollett's Humphry Clinker, Bram Stoker's Dracula.
   * False documents, fiction written in the form of, or about, apparently
     real, but actually fake documents. Examples include Robert Graves' I,
     Claudius, a fictional autobiography of the Roman emperor Claudius; and
     H.P. Lovecraft's Necronomicon, a fictional book of evil that appeared
     frequently in horror fiction and film, written by both Lovecraft and
     his admirers.
   * First-person narrative, the narrator tells their own tale
   * Flashback, general term for altering time sequences, taking characters
     back to the beginning of the tale, for instance.
   * Frame tale, or a story within a story, where a main story is used to
     organise a series of shorter stories
   * Historical novel, story set amidst historical events, pioneered by Sir
     Walter Scott in his novels of Scottish history. Protagonists may be
     fictional or historical personages, or a combination.
   * Magic realism, a form particularly popular in Latin American but not
     limited to that region, in which events are described realistically,
     but in a magical haze of strange local customs and beliefs. Gabriel
     Garc’a M‡rquez is a notable author in the style.
   * Narrative, fiction written as if it were related to the reader by a
     single participant or observer.
   * Omniscient narrator, particular form of narrative in which the narrator
     sees and knows all
   * Parody, ridicule by imitation, usually humorous, such as MAD Magazine
   * Pastiche, using forms and styles of another author, generally as an
     affectionate tribute, such as the many stories featuring Sherlock
     Holmes not written by Arthur Conan Doyle.
   * Picaresque novel, episodic recounting of the adventures of a rogue
     (Spanish picaro) on the road, such as Tom Jones or Huckleberry Finn.
   * Roman a clef, a "novel with a key", that is, whose characters and plot
     are related to real-life happenings
   * Satire, "An attack on wickedness and folly", as Samuel Johnson called
     it, such as 1984 or Brave New World. Not necessarily humorous.
   * Stream of consciousness, an attempt to portray all the thoughts and
     feelings of a character, as in parts of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
   * Word play, in which the nature of the words used themselves become part
     of the work

Authors also manipulate the language of their works to create a desired
response from the reader. This is the realm of the rhetorical devices.

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