ABRAMS, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th Ed. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1999.
[p. 11] Antithesis is a contrast or opposition in the meanings of contiguous phrases or clauses that manifest parallelism -that is, a similar word-order and structure -in their syntax.
BALDICK, C. Oxford Dictionary of literary terms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Antithesis
[p. 19] A contrast or opposition either rhetorical or philosophical. In rhetoric, any disposition of words that serves to emphasize a contrast or opposition of ideas, usually by the balancing of connected clauses with parallel grammatical constructions. In Milton’s Paradise (1667). Antithesis was cultivated especially by Pope and other 18th-century poets. It is also familiar device in prose, as in John Ruskin’s sentences.
Chiasmus
A figure of speech by which the order of the terms in the first of two parallel clauses is reversed in the second. This may involve a repetition of the same words, in which case the figure may be classified as antimetabole, or just a reversed parallel between two corresponding pairs of ideas, as in this line from Mary Leapor’s ‘Essay on Woman’ (1751) Despised, if ugly, if she’s fair, betrayed. The figure is especially common in 18th-century English poetry, but is also found in prose of all periods.
GREEN, Roland et al., Eds. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Fourth Edition. Princeton University Press, 2012.
[p. 58] Antitheton (Gr. “opposition”); Lat. contentio). The juxtaposition of contraries: the contrast of ideas, sharpened or pointed up by he use of words of opposite or conspicuously different meaning in contiguous or parallel phrases or clauses. Antithesis is a form of expression recommended as satisfying by Aristotle (Rhet. 3.9.8). The anonymous Rhetorica ad Alexandrum (3rd c BCE, chap.26) observes that antithesis may oppose words or ideas or both, and later authorities likewise stress the clarity and force that an antithesis may impart to an idea (e.g. Rhetorica ad Herennium [86-82 BCE] 4.15.21); Johannes Susenbrotus Epitome troporum ac schematum et grammaticorum and Rhetorme arte rhetorica [1541], under contentio). Antithesis is one of the two or three fundamental strategies of biblical parallelism first defined by Bishop Robert Lowth (1753) and is fairly frequent in OE poetry. In both these trads., as in nearly all others, antithesis achieves heightened effect when confined to the two halves of a hemistichic line or two lines of a couplet, securing thereby the reinforcement of meter. Antithesis was cultivated by the cl. poets, and while these poets sometimes contrive a strict balance of form (the figure parison in cl. rhet.) or a complex opposition of idea. (…) This kind of ingenuity is even more characteristic of the Eng. and Fr. poets of the 17th and 18th cs. (…) But it is the heroic couplet, which emerged in the course of the 17th c. to become the preferred meter of the Restoration and 18th-c. poets, that offered nearly the ideal medium for that balanced, con-/p.59 cise, antithetical expression, serious and witty alike, which is the major characteristic of neoclassical style. In John Dryden and Alexander Pope, antithesis becomes an inestimable device for the display of satirical wit. (…) In contemp. Writing, antithesis continues to be used to achieve effects (…). If the contrastive members of the antithesis are set in adjoining clauses that are not parallel but rather contrastive syntactically, the figure is termed syncrisis. The antithesis combined with chiasmus may be seen in the old definition of the scholar: “one who knows something about everything, and everything about something.” (T.V.F. Brogan; A.W. Halsall)