Quick Facts
- Related Topics:
- figure of speech
- anticipation
Adding us as a Preferred Source tells Google you trust our content, so our articles show up more often in your Google Search, Discover feed, and AI Overviews.
verifiedCite
While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies.
Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions.
Select Citation Style
prolepsis
literature
prolepsis, a figure of speech in which a future act or development is represented as if already accomplished or existing. The following lines from John Keats’s “Isabella” (1820), for example, proleptically anticipate the assassination of a living character:
So the two brothers and their murdered man
Rode past fair Florence
The word may also refer to the anticipation of objections to an argument, a tactic aimed at weakening the force of such objections.

" height="20" alt="HEW Logo">