Literary analysis has a long catalogue of words and expressions. So to simplify matters and understand them better, let’s group them into big categories first.
Form
It is the form a work of fiction will take: short story, novel, trilogy, series, play, sonnet, etc. It is centred on the global structure.
Examples based on length are flash fiction, short story, novella, novel, trilogy, and series.
Other examples are play, poetry, sonnet, epistolary novel, and diary.
Prosody
It is a category in poetry. It is all the ways a poet can assemble stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of poetry, to convey implicit meaning by the ‘melody’ it creates. It is centred on rhythm.
Each pattern has a name; for example, an iamb is a two-syllable pattern made of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one.
Genre
It is a classification in fiction based on the main theme and atmosphere that you find throughout the book. It is centred on the main book content.
For example, romance’s theme is love and/or marriage, and its atmosphere is based on pleasure. It has a happy ending. Hard-boiled detective fiction’s theme is investigation, and its atmosphere is bleak and violent, whereas cosy mystery’s theme is also investigation, but its atmosphere is non-violent, everyday life.
Poetry may be used as a genre when you don’t know how to define a poet’s genre, but it is technically a form.
Literary device
Literary devices are narrative techniques writers use to tell a story. It is similar to storytelling techniques. They focus on the order and the duration in which the different elements of the story will be told. It is a sort of game between what the narrator knows and what the reader already knows or may or may not guess. They are centred on narration and plot.
For example: red herrings in detective fiction, cliffhangers, flashbacks, foreshadowing, unreliable narrators, and stream of consciousness. Tropes belong here as ready-made mini plots.
Figure of speech
Figures of speech can be found in the microstructures of the story. They are short devices as small as a phrase and no longer than a paragraph. They are based on the way the words of a sentence are organised to create an effect and add new meanings. They are centred on the choice of words and the way they are assembled.
The most famous figure of speech is the metaphor (an implicit comparison). Another example is alliteration, which is the use of the same consonant in successive words.
Style
It is a personal way of writing that is different from other writers. It is a writer’s voice.
Style regroups all the techniques favoured by a writer, for example, the type of vocabulary used, the length of sentences, the microstructures, and literary devices. It is centred on a writer’s personal and unique way of writing.
For example, in a nutshell, Hemingway is said to use simple words, and Proust uses very long and complex sentences (among other stylistic choices).
Era or Period
It is a historical classification based on major figures like kings or major events like wars. It has nothing to do with literature. We use eras to pinpoint on a timeline. It is centred on time and history.
For example, the Victorian Era was the time when Queen Victoria was reigning, and Interwar Britain was the time between the two world wars.
But historical periods may interfere with what people think about life. Apart from history, there is also social history, which studies the evolution of ways of life. There is the concept of generations (Boomers, Gen Z, Lost Generation), which describes common features and struggles shared by a whole generation group. And this may have consequences in fiction as a reflection of real life.
Literary movement
A literary movement characterises the way a book is written, its global style and aesthetics, which is often related to some underlying philosophical ideas about what it is to be a human being. It is the way style, the way a book is written, conveys ideas about what life is about. It is a kind of meaningful aesthetics. It is centred on a global style of writing that is used by all the writers following the movement.
Writers may belong to a movement and have a common global style with other writers as a consequence, but they add their personal voice, their unique style to their works at the same time.
For example, Realism’s aesthetics is made of immersive objective descriptions and realistic dialogues, the use of an omniscient narrator; its underlying meaning is that things are objective and can be explained rationally. But Modernism’s aesthetics uses non-chronological order, stream of consciousness and impressions; its underlying meaning is that things are subjective and can only be explained from someone’s point of view.
A school is more or less the same as a literary movement. For example, the school of Spenser.