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QLDEnglishQuick questions
Unit 3: Textual Connections
Quick questions on Aesthetic features and stylistic devices in literary texts (QCE English Unit 3)
15short Q&A pairs drawn directly from our worked dot-point answer. For full context and worked exam questions, read the parent dot-point page.
What are a working list of stylistic devices?Show answer
The point of naming devices is to use the right name. Specificity is mark-bearing.
What are aesthetic features?Show answer
Properties of the text as a whole or of large sections of it. Form, structure, voice, focalisation, tone, atmosphere, pacing, narrative time, intertextuality. Aesthetic features operate at the scale of the chapter, the section, the novel.
What are stylistic devices?Show answer
Local language moves that operate sentence by sentence. Metaphor, simile, polysyndeton, anaphora, free indirect discourse, irony, juxtaposition, allusion, alliteration, assonance, syntactic inversion. Stylistic devices are the building blocks the writer arranges to produce the aesthetic features.
What is form?Show answer
Novel, novella, short story, verse novel, lyric poem, narrative poem, play, screenplay, memoir, essay. Form is the kind of text. Form determines what the text can do (a verse novel can do compression and narrative simultaneously; a play cannot do interiority without convention).
What is structure?Show answer
The architecture of the parts. Linear or fragmented chronology, frame narrative, parallel plots, embedded narratives, ring composition. Structure is meaning at the level of organisation.
What is voice and focalisation?Show answer
Who speaks and through whose consciousness the reader sees. First person interior, first person retrospective, third person limited, third person omniscient, free indirect discourse, choric (multiple voices).
What is tone?Show answer
The text's stance toward its material. Elegiac, ironic, comic, solemn, intimate, austere, exuberant. Tone is what colours the reader's reception.
What is atmosphere?Show answer
The felt environment the text creates. Atmosphere is built through diction, sensory detail, pacing and weather.
What is narrative time?Show answer
When the text is set and how it moves through time. Flashback, flash-forward, real time, summary. Time handling is an aesthetic feature.
What is intertextuality?Show answer
The text's relationship to other texts (allusion, quotation, parody, homage). At scale, intertextuality is an aesthetic feature; at the sentence level, an allusion is a stylistic device.
What is figurative language?Show answer
Metaphor (one thing is another), simile (one thing is like another), personification (giving human qualities to non-human things), extended metaphor (a metaphor sustained across a passage), conceit (an elaborate, surprising figure).
What is sound and rhythm?Show answer
Alliteration (repeated initial consonants), assonance (repeated vowel sounds), consonance (repeated consonants), sibilance (hissing sounds), onomatopoeia, rhythm (the pulse of the prose or verse), enjambment (a poetic line that runs across the line break).
What is syntax?Show answer
Polysyndeton (many conjunctions), asyndeton (no conjunctions), anaphora (repeated phrase at the start of clauses), epistrophe (repeated phrase at the end), tricolon (three-part structures), syntactic inversion, sentence fragmentation.
What is voice technique?Show answer
Free indirect discourse (the narrator's voice infused with a character's), interior monologue, stream of consciousness, dialogue with or without tags.
What is diction?Show answer
The level of vocabulary (plain, ornate, archaic, colloquial, technical, lyrical). Diction colours everything else.