Some short Literary Terms
Comedy: In the most common literary application, a 'comedy' is a fictional work in which the materials are selected and managed primarily in order to interest and amuse us: the characters and their discomfitures engage our pleasurable attention rather than our profound concern, we are made to feel confident that no great disaster will occur and usually the action turns out happily for the chief characters. The term "comedy" is customarily applied only to plays for the stage or to motion pictures and television dramas; it should be noted, however, that the comic form of the plot as just defined also occurs in prose fiction and narrative poetry. Paradox: A paradox is a statement that seems on its face to be logically contradictory or absurd, yet turns out to be interpretable in a way that makes sense. The Paradox is used occasionally by almost all poets but was a persistent and central device in the seventeenth century in both its religious and secular f...