Literal terms

AUTOBIOGRAPHY: A non-fictional account of a person's life--usually a celebrity, an important historical figure, or a writer--written by that actual person.

BIOGRAPHY: an account of a person's lif, non-fictional in nature. Modern biographies tend to be scrupulously accurate, at least as regards events. Early biographies were often written to augment or support a particular line of thought, and so the moral of a person's life became more important than the life itself.

Flashback:  a technique whereby the author interrupts the main narrative to relate events that took place at some time preceding the main narrative.

GOTHIC NOVEL: A type of romance wildly popular between 1760 up until the 1820s that has influenced the ghost story and horror story. The stories are designed to thrill readers by providing mystery and blood-curdling accounts of villainy, murder, and the supernatural. The term Gothic originally was applied to a tribe of Germanic barbarians during the dark ages. The first and the best  known early example is Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

NOVELLA: An extended fictional prose narrative that is longer than a short story, but not quite as long as a novel. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness,

PICARESQUE: in Spanish the picaro was a rogue or villain. The term of it traditionally refers to a novel  with a central figure. the picaro who is low-bor, a rogue or knave, and who goes through a sequence of adventures which are often a vehicle for satire.  Defoe's Moll Flanders, Henry Fielding's Jonathan Wild, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Plot: a story or narrative of events.

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS: Writing in which a character's perceptions, thoughts, and memories are presented in an apparently random form, without regard for logical sequence, chronology, or syntax. Often such writing makes no distinction between various levels of reality--such as dreams, memories, imaginative thoughts or real sensory perception. William James coined the phrase "stream of consciousness" in his Principles of Psychology (1890). The technique has been used by several authors and poets: Katherine Anne Porter, Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, T. S. Eliot, and William Faulkner.