Definition:

A sentence style that employs many conjunctions (opposite of asyndeton). Adjective: polysyndetic. See also:

·  “We lived and laughed and loved and left."
(James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939)

·  "Let the whitefolks have their money and power and segregation and sarcasm and big houses and schools and lawns like carpets, and books, and mostly--mostly--let them have their whiteness."
(Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 1969)

·  "And she pushed St. Peter aside and took a keek in, and there was God--with a plague in one hand and a war and a thunderbolt in the other and the Christ in glory with the angels bowing, and a scraping and banging of harps and drums, ministers thick as a swarm of blue-bottles, no sight of Jim [her husband] and no sight of Jesus, only the Christ, and she wasn't impressed. And she said to St. Peter This is no place for me and turned and went striding into the mists and across the fire-tipped clouds to her home."
(Ma Cleghorn in Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Grey Granite, 1934)

·  "There were frowzy fields, and cow-houses, and dunghills, and dustheaps, and ditches, and gardens, and summer-houses, and carpet-beating grounds, at the very door of the Railway. Little tumuli of oyster shells in the oyster season, and of lobster shells in the lobster season, and of broken crockery and faded cabbage leaves in all seasons, encroached upon its high places."
(Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, 1848)

·  "Oh, my piglets, we are the origins of war--not history's forces, nor the times, nor justice, nor the lack of it, nor causes, nor religions, nor ideas, nor kinds of government--not any other thing. We are the killers."
(Katherine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter)

From: http://grammar.about.com/od/pq/g/polysyndterm.htm

AB OVO (Latin, "from the egg"): This phrase refers to a narrative that starts "at the beginning" of the plot, and then moves chronologically through a sequence of events to the tale's conclusion. This pattern is the opposite of a tale that begins in medias res, one in which the narrative starts "in the middle of things," well into the middle of the plot, and then proceeds to explain earlier events through the characters' dialogue, memories, or flashbacks. Horace coins the phrase in his treatise, Ars Poeticae, a treatise not to be confused with the Poetics of Aristotle. Contrast with in medias res.

From: http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/lit_terms_A.html