An anti-utopian novel where, instead of a paradise, everything has gone wrong in the attempt to create a perfect society. See utopian novel. Examples:

• George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
• Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

A line that has a natural pause at the end (period, comma, etc.). For example, these lines are end stopped:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun.
Coral is far more red than her lips red.

--Shakespeare

The running over of a sentence or thought into the next couplet or line without a pause at the end of the line; a run-on line. For example, the first two lines here are enjambed:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove. . . .

--Shakespeare

The substitution of a mild or less negative word or phrase for a harsh or blunt one, as in the use of "pass away" instead of "die." The basic psychology of euphemistic language is the desire to put something bad or embarrassing in a positive (or at least neutral light). Thus many terms referring to death, sex, crime, and excremental functions are euphemisms. Since the euphemism is often chosen to disguise something horrifying, it can be exploited by the satirist through the use of irony and exaggeration.

A highly ornate style of writing popularized by John Lyly's Euphues, characterized by balanced sentence construction, rhetorical tropes, and multiplied similes and allusions.

A novel written from an existentialist viewpoint, often pointing out the absurdity and meaninglessness of existence. Example:

• Albert Camus, The Stranger