Tropology

Tropology is a term used in literary and cultural analysis to denote the study of tropes—figures of speech, symbolic motifs, and recurring narrative patterns. The field focuses on how figurative language functions, how cultural tropes shape interpretation, and how storytelling structures recur across genres and media. In some scholarly circles, tropology is treated as a distinct, systematic inquiry into the use and meaning of tropes, while in others it is considered part of related disciplines such as rhetoric, semiotics, or literary theory.

Etymology traces the word to the Greek tropē, meaning turn, and logia, meaning study or discourse. Accordingly, tropology typically encompasses linguistic devices such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony, allegory, symbol, and hyperbole, as well as broader cultural tropes—archetypal plots, character types, and familiar thematic patterns that recur in different works and media. The scope often extends from close linguistic analysis of individual figures to cross-cultural and historical comparisons of how tropes function in society.

Methods in tropology draw on close reading, typology and cataloging of tropes, semiotic analysis, and, in contemporary work, cognitive poetics or corpus-based approaches. It intersects with narratology, the study of genres, and media studies, applying trope analysis to literature, film, television, comics, and online content. Because the term tropology is not universally standardized, definitions and emphases vary across disciplines; some scholars favor more established terms such as rhetoric, figures of speech, or cultural analysis to describe similar concerns.