Skip to main content
We’re so back. See what’s new for the 2026-2027 school year →
The new Teacher Workspace is here. Your first 3 assignments are free. Try it →

🧿Intro to Literary Theory
Key Terms

246 essential vocabulary terms and definitions to know for your Intro to Literary Theory exam

Study Intro to Literary Theory →

Browse All A-Z

A

Abolitionist literature
Activist poetics
Actual reader
Adaptation theory
Aesthetic autonomy
Affect theory
Affective response
African Literature
Anti-war novels
Arbitrary Nature of the Sign
Arbitrary signs
Archetypal approach
Archetypal Hero
Art as technique
Autobiographical theory
Autoethnography

B

Bioregionalism
Black feminist thought
Book banning
Book history
Boris Eichenbaum

C

Can the subaltern speak?
Canon formation
Castration Anxiety
Character motivation
Charles Sanders Peirce
Cheryll Glotfelty
Chronotope
Class affiliation
Class conflict
Class consciousness
Class relations
Class struggle
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Cleanth Brooks
Cli-fi
Climate fiction
Cognitive literary studies
Cold war paranoia
Colonial authority
Commodity fetishism
Comparative Literature
Contextual Reading
Counter-narratives
Cultural alienation
Cultural Criticism
Cultural Critique
Cultural Hegemony
Cultural industry
Cultural Production
Cultural studies

D

Dark ecology
Defamiliarization
Digital archives
Distant reading
Dominant
Dominant ideology
Dream interpretation
Dream symbolism
Dystopian fiction

E

Eco-feminism
Eco-fiction
Ecocritical Perspectives
Ecofeminism
Ecological metaphor
Environmental Aesthetics
Environmental Narrative
Epistemology of the closet
Erasure
Erlebnis
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Exotic other

F

Female literary tradition
Feminist poetry
Feminist postmodernism