Literary Terms
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TheRustler on April 10, 2012
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76 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 ALLEGORY - | a figure of speech in which two stories are being told at the same time: the surface story and an implied story; there must be a one-for-one correspondence between the events and persons of the surface story and of the implied.story. |
| ALLITERATION | - The repetition of consonant sounds in a group of words close together. Most often alliteration comes at the beginning of words, although it can appear in the middle and at the end of words as well. |
| ALLUSION | -A reference within a piece of literature to another work of literature, art, or music or to a well known historical event, person, or place. The purpose of an allusion is to give us a fuller understanding of the piece of literature in which it appears by helping us to see it in comparison with something else we may know better. |
| ANACHRONISM | - a literary term which is a reference to a person, thing, or idea in a time when it did not exist |
| ASSONANCE - | The repetition of vowel sounds in a group of words close together. |
| AUTOBIOGRAPHY | - Someone's account of his or her own life. |
| BIOGRAPHY person. | An account of someone's life, written by another |
| BLANK VERSE | Similar to free verse, there is no rime scheme in the poem; but, unlike free verse, it must be written in iambic pentameter. Such poems may have many examples of internal rime but no pattern of end rime. Shakespeare wrote his plays primarily in blank verse. |
| CHARACTERIZATION | The methods used to present the personality of a character in a work of literature and to make that character more believable. |
| CHARACTERS - | Persons — or animals or natural forces represented as persons — in a work of literature. |
| COMEDY | - A literary work which ends happily because the hero or heroine is able to overcome obstacles and get what he or she wants. |
| CONNOTATION | - The emotional meaning of a word. |
| COUPLETS | - A two successive lines of poetry with the same end rime. |
| DENOTATION - The dictionary definition of a word. | ... |
| DRAMATIC IRONY | - A figure of speech which allows an audience or a reader to know something that a character in a drama or story is unaware of. |
| DYNAMIC CHARACTER | A character who changes in the course of a story; by definition, the main character must be a dynamic character. |
| END RIME | - The repetition of the same sounds at the end of two or more lines of poetry. |
| ESSAY - | - A brief examination of a subject in prose, usually expressing a personal or limited view of the topic. |
| ETYMOLOGY | - The study of the origin and subsequent history of words. |
| EXAGGERATION (HYPERBOLE) - | Saying more than what is literally true, usually for humor or for emphasis. |
| EXPOSITION | (1) The kind of writing that explains a subject or provides information (as in expository writing); (2) the opening part of a story or play in which the setting is given, the character is introduced, and the problem is hinted at. (in Freytag's Pyramid, it comes before the Rising Action) |
| FALLING ACTION - | All the action in a story or play that follows the turning point (see Freytag's Pyramid).. |
| FICTION | - Any work of literature that includes material that is invented or imagined, that is not a record of things as they actually happened. |
| FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE (FIGURE OF SPEECH) - | - Language that is used to describe one thing in terms of something else; language that is not intended to be taken literally. |
| FLASHBACK - | A scene in a story or play that interrupts the present action to tell about events that happened at an earlier time. |
| FOIL- | A character who is the mirror image of the another character (usually the main character); it is a technique which allows an author to develop one character by contrasting that character with its foil. |
| FORESHADOWING | - The use of clues that hint at important plot development that are to follow in a story or drama. |
| FREE VERSE | — The absence of a rime scheme in a poem. Such poems may have many examples of internal rime but no pattern of end rime. Unlike blank verse, it does not necessarily have an iambic pentameter meter. |
| HYPERBOLE | —see Exaggeration |
| IAM | - a Greek metrical foot consisting of two syllables; the first syllable is unstressed while the second syllable is stressed. |
| IAMBIC PENTAMETER | - A classification of a poem's meter when most (though certainly not all) of the feet are iambs. Iambic pentameter is the most natural meter for English poetry. |
| IMAGERY - | Words or phrases that reproduce in the mind of the reader the sensation of one or more of the five physical senses: |
| —visual imagery | appeals to the sense of sight; |
| —auditory | imagery appeals to the sense of hearing; |
| —tactile/kinesthetic | imagery appeals to the sense of touch; |
| —olfactory | imagery appeals to the sense of smell; |
| —gustatory | imagery appeals to the sense of taste. |
| INTERNAL RIME - | The repetition of the same sound at the end of two or more words, only one of which can be an end rime. |
| LITERAL LANGUAGE | - Language that states facts or ideas directly. |
| METAPHOR | - A comparison made between two things which are basically dissimilar, with the intent of giving added meaning to one of them. METAPHORS ARE FREQUENTLY CARRIED IN VERBS. |
| METER | - The natural rhythm of a line of poetry, similar to the rhythm in music. |
| MONOLOGUE | - A long speech in a play or story, delivered by a single person (see soliloquy). |
| MORAL | - A practical lesson about right and wrong conduct often stated at the conclusion of an instructive story such as a fable. |
| NARRATION - | - The kind of writing or speaking that relates a series of events. |
| NARRATOR | - One who narrates, or tells, a story (in poetry, it is called the Speaker). |
| NEAR RIME | - The repetition of approximately the same sound at the end of two or more words in a poem. Near rimes sometimes occur because of differences in regional dialects between the author and the reader. Other times the near rime may share the same consonant sounds but differ only in a vowel sound (i.e. "cat" and "cot" are near rimes). |
| NOVEL | - A long fictional narrative written in prose, usually having many characters and a strong plot. |
| OXYMORON | - A figure of speech that combines opposite or contradictory ideas or terms, such as living dead. |
| PARAPHARASE | - A rewording of a text or of a passage from a text, often for the purpose of clarification or simplification. |
| PERSONIFICATION | - A figure of speech in which something nonhuman is given human characteristics or feelings. |
| PERSUASION | - A kind of speaking or writing that is intended to influence people's actions. |
| PLOT | - The sequence of related events that make up a story or a drama (plot can be visually represented on a Freytag's Pyramid). |
| POETRY | - Traditionally, poetry is compressed language arranged in lines with regular rhythm and often with a definite rhyme scheme. |
| POINT OF VIEW | - The vantage point from which a narrative is told (see First Person, Third Person Omniscient, and Third Person Limited) |
| PUN - | A humorous play on words, using either (1) two or more different meanings of the same word, or (2) two or more words that are spelled and pronounced somewhat the same but have different meanings. |
| REFRAIN - | One or more words, phrases, or lines that are repeated regularly in a poem, usually at end of each stanza. |
| REPETITION | - The reappearance of a word, phrase, stanza, or structure in any literary work. |
| RESOLUTION - | The moment in a short story, novel, play, or narrative poem when the conflict ends and the outcome of the action is clear (in Freytag's Pyramid, it comes after the Falling Action). |
| RIME - | The repetition of accented vowel sounds and all succeeding sounds in words that appear close together in verse. Also known as rhyme. |
| RIME SCHEME - | The deliberate pattern of end rimes in a poem. Lower case letters are used to indicate the different sounds at the end of each line, as shown in the example below (taken from Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky"): |
| RISING ACTION - | The series of events in a drama that lead up to a turning point, where the plot is developed through a series of complications which are related to each other through a cause and effect relationship. (in Freytag's Pyramid, it comes between the Exposition and the Turning Point). |
| SETTING - | The time and place in which the events of a literary work take place. |
| SHORT STORY - | A fictional narrative written in prose, which is shorter than a novel. |
| SIMILE - | A direct comparison made between two unlike things, using a word of comparison such as like, as, than, such as, or resembles. |
| SITUATIONAL IRONY - | a figure of speech in which appearances do not match reality or what actually happens does not match what was expected to happen. |
| SOLILOQUY - | A dramatic convention in which a character makes an extended speech while alone on the stage (see monologue). |
| SPEAKER - | the narrator of a poem; not to be confused with the poet who wrote the poem. |
| STANZA - | A group of related lines that forms a division of a poem or a song (comparable to a paragraph in prose). |
| STATIC CHARACTER - | A character who does not change in the course of a story. |
| SUBPLOT - | A plot in a story or play that is secondary to the main plot (In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the argument between Oberon and Titania is a subplot). |
| SYMBOL - | Something in a literary work which maintains its own meaning while at the same time standing for something broader than itself (i.e. the American flag is a symbol of our country). |
| SYNECDOCHE - | A figure of speech in which the part stands for the whole, or the whole for the part. |
| THEME | A lesson about life, which is portrayed in a literary work. Because each person brings a unique set of experiences and beliefs to a work of literature, each person will see a slightly different set of themes in a literary work. There can be many themes in a piece of literature, each of which is valid as long as the reader can demonstrate where she or he found that theme portrayed in the story. |
| TRAGEDY - | A literary work dealing with very serious and important themes, in which the main character—often a dignified tragic figure—fails to solve the problem of the story—and frequently meets destruction—usually through some personal flaw or weakness. |
| TURNING POINT - | The moment of highest emotional intensity in a plot, when the outcome of the conflict is finally made clear to us; it is the point at which the main character does something, realizes something, decides something, that allows the problem in the story to start moving toward a resolution (in Freytag's Pyramid, it comes between the Rising Action and the Falling Action). |
| VERBAL IRONY - A figure of speech in which a person says one thing but means the exact opposite | A figure of speech in which a person says one thing but means the exact opposite |
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