Trope (literature)

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 or overused literary techniques and rhetorical devices (characters and situations), motifs, and clichés in a work of creative literature.