Literary Terms Crossword Puzzle - Free

Open:

Here's a free Literary Terms crossword puzzle, a fun way to exercise your brain. Solve the puzzle online or print it out.

To solve it online, click the Solve Online button under the picture of the puzzle. This opens the crossword in a pop-up window.

This puzzle is part of the free online brain games collection. For a list of all my free crosswords, visit the Easy Printable Crossword Puzzles page.

Literary Terms Crossword Puzzle Instructions

If you like this Literary Terms crossword puzzle, check out the other word games on this site, including Hangman Classic and the free online word searches collection.

HOW TO PLAY. Using your memory and logic skills, use the provided clues to figure out the words hidden in the puzzle. The hidden words are arranged in a criss-cross grid, where the words overlap each other at common letters.

For the online version of the Literary Terms crossword, click any row or column to highlight it and display the clue. The clue is shown at the top of the puzzle.

If you have a guess for the answer for the clue, type it in the grid. As you work on the puzzle, you can go back and change any of the words you've typed in previously.

To print the crossword and solve it on paper, click the gear icon in the upper right of the puzzle window. Then click the "Printable Version" option to display the printable crossword.

To see the full solution for the Literary Terms crossword online, choose the "Show the Puzzle Solution" option in the gear menu.

The puzzle solution is also provided with the printable version. The solution appears on page 2.

Best of luck solving the puzzle!

Even More Literary Terms

Following are a some interesting literary writing styles relating to types of fiction, from The University of Richmond's Writing Center, to put you in the mood to solve the literary terms crossword puzzle above. The terms below are not in the crossword.

Cyberpunk: genre of science fiction pioneered by William Gibson and a few others in the 1980s; Gibson first coined the term "cyberspace." In these texts and films, humans have begun to merge with computer technology and the future is generally dark as major corporations replace governments as oppressive power-brokers. Life is usually short and uncertain with huge gaps between a small corporate elite and the gangs, the poor, and the insane who make up the bulk of the population. Cyberpunk protagonists are often cynical rebels--punks, mercenaries, hackers, spies, and nomads--who work outside the system and the "suits" who run it.
Dystopia/Utopia: A fictional world so oppressive that it might be a nightmare for someone from our society. Examples of dystopian fiction would be Orwell's 1984. Some post-apocalyptic worlds (see below) are dystopias, but the usual feature of most dystopian fiction and film is that some type of society, however awful, still exists. A utopian world is exactly the opposite--a paradise of some sort. The eternal bliss of the biblical Garden of Eden and the perfect technological future predicted at the 1939 World's Fair in the film The World of Tomorrow are both utopian.
Magical Realism: a type of fiction in which the world appears just as ours in all respects but very extraordinary things happen: a poor family finds a sick angel in the back yard and nurses him back to health, one morning a man wakes up in his family's apartment to find that he's become a giant bug. Gabriel Garcia Marquez and many Latin-American writers use the technique well. Unlike science fiction, most magical realism makes no attempt to explain such events. They simply happen, often with people reacting as if such things are not all that unusual.
Post-apocalyptic: fictional worlds depicting life after a global disaster such as a nuclear holocaust, alien invasion, or ecological collapse. The tone is usually grim, so The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a comic piece of science fiction occurring after the earth is destroyed, would not be post-apocalyptic. Planet of the Apes, in its original 1968 movie form, is both dystopian and post-apocalyptic (evolved apes running a society with human slaves thousands of years after a nuclear war).
Surrealism: associated with painting and film more than with writing, but the term has grown with use. Surrealist work tends to delve into the nonsensical, or the wildest sides of psychological and physical experiences. Some horror movies become surreal (a man's severed hand begins to stalk him) and even in realistic work, surreal scenes can occur. For example, Wyatt's and Billy's acid-trip in New Orleans toward the end of Easy Rider is filmed from their LSD-soaked points of view, so for the viewer this sequence of scenes is surrealistic. Surrealist work can be absurd, but a film such as the comedy Office Space would more accurately be called black comedy.