A literary trope is an artistic effect realized with figurative language — word, phrase, image — such as a rhetorical figure. In editorial practice, a trope is "a substitution of a word or phrase by a less literal word or phrase". Semantic change has expanded the definition of the literary term trope to also describe a writer's usage of commonly recurring an overused literary techniques and rhetorical devices (characters and situations) motifs, and clichés in a work of creative literature.

Origins

The term trope derives from the Greek τρόπος (tropos), 'a turn, a change', related to the root of the verb τρέπειν (trepein), 'to turn, to direct, to alter, to change'; this means that the term is used metaphorically to denote, among other things, metaphorical language. Tropes and their classification were an important field in classical rhetoric. The study of tropes has been taken up again in modern criticism, especially in deconstruction. Tropological criticism (not to be confused with tropological reading, a type of biblical exegesis) is the historical study of tropes, which aims to "define the dominant tropes of an epoch" and to "find those tropes in literary and non-literary texts", an interdisciplinary investigation of which Michel Foucault was an "important exemplar".

In medieval writing

A specialized use is the medieval amplification of texts from the liturgy, such as in the Kyrie Eleison (Kyrie, / magnae Deus potentia, / liberator hominis, / transgressoris mandati, / eleison). The most important example of such a trope is the Quem quaeritis?, an amplification before the Introit of the Easter Sunday service and the source for liturgical drama. This particular practice came to an end with the Tridentine Mass, the unification of the liturgy in 1570 promulgated by Pope Pius V.

Types and examples

Rhetoricians have analyzed a variety of "twists and turns" used in poetry and literature and have provided a list of labels for these poetic devices. These include For a longer list, see Figure of speech: Tropes. Kenneth Burke has called metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony the "four master tropes" owing to their frequency in everyday discourse. These tropes can be used to represent common recurring themes throughout creative works, and in a modern setting relationships and character interactions. It can also be used to denote examples of common repeating figures of speech and situations. Whilst most of the various forms of phrasing described above are in common usage, most of the terms themselves are not, in particular antanaclasis, litotes, metonymy, synecdoche and catachresis.

Citations

Sources

Trop literari Trop