literary terms set 2
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Created by:
magnitude864 Plus on February 21, 2012
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42 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 classicism | movement or tendency in art, literature, and music using principles of ancient Greece and Rome |
| climax | the decisive point in a narrative or drama |
| comedy of manners | a genre in which behavior and deportment of men and women are the central object |
| comic relief | comic episodes or interludes, usually in tragedies, that relieve tension |
| conceit | a type of metaphor that makes a comparison between 2 completely different things |
| conflict | a struggle between the 2 opposing forces in literature |
| connotation | a word's secondary significance/feelings that the word implies |
| consonance | the repetition of consonant sounds |
| couplet | two consecutive lines of poetry that rhyme |
| denotation | a word's primary significance or reference |
| denouement | the outcome of a plot |
| deus ex machina | any artificial, forced, or improbable device used to resolve entanglements in a play |
| didactic | any literature that is meant to instruct or to teach |
| dramatic monologue | a poem in which a speaker addresses a silent listener |
| elegy | a poem of mourning |
| encomium | formal eulogy in prose of verse glorifying people, objects, ideas or events |
| existentialism | the philosophical idea that man fashions his own existence, and only exists by doing so |
| exposition | writing that is intended to present information |
| expressionism | movement of literature that emphasizes more on the life of the mind and feelings rather than the realistic details of everyday life |
| foot | a unit used to measure the meter and rhythmic pattern of a line in poetry |
| foreshadowing | hints and clue in a narrative that suggest what is about to happen |
| free verse | un rhymed verse that has no metric pattern or an irregular pattern |
| hubris | from the Greek meaning "wanton insolence," a shortcoming of a tragic hero that leads him to ignore warnings from the gods and leads to his downfall |
| hyperbole | a bold overstatement |
| iambic pentameter | the most common verse line in English and American poetry consisting of five verse feet |
| imagery | words or phrases that create pictures or images in the readers mind |
| invective | speech or writing which is highly denunciatory or abusive |
| irony | contrast between what is stated to happen and what actually happens |
| journey | a personal or physical path to a destination, whether known or unknown |
| kenning | a descriptive phrase used in place of the ordinary name for a thing or person |
| Künstlerroman | a work that represents the growth of a novelist or other artist into the stage of maturity that signals the mastery of artistic craft |
| lyric | a short poem that expresses a speaker's personal thoughts or feelings |
| magic realism | fiction that is characterized byt the mingling or juxtaposition of the realistic with the fantastic/bizarre |
| metaphor | figure of speech that compares two things that are dissimilar |
| meter | the regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry |
| metonymy | the literal term for one thing is applied to another with which it had become closely relaed |
| mood | the prevailing feeling or emotional climate in a piece of literature |
| motif | one of the dominant ideas ina work of literature |
| narrative verse | a poem that tells a story |
| naturalism | an extreme form of realism |
| ode | a lengthy, complex lyric poem, written in a dignified formal style of some lofty or serious subject |
| onomatopoeia | the use of a word whose sound in some degree imitates or suggests its meaning |
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