Literary Terms Crossword Puzzle - Free

Here's a free Literary Terms crossword puzzle, a fun way to exercise your brain. Print it out and solve it on paper.

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 crossword puzzle, check out my collection of easy printable crossword puzzles for more.

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.

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.

I enjoy solving crossword puzzles. It was a lot of fun coming up with the words and clues for this Literary Terms crossword puzzle.

Crossword puzzles train memory, word skills, and logical reasoning. Solve puzzles like this often to give your brain a boost!

Published: 04/10/2020
Last Updated: 05/07/2026