Literary Terms (use this one, the other list is locked)
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pinkpearl4444 on April 26, 2012
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80 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 Bathos, pathos | former is overdone emotion; latter is appropriately conveyed emotion |
| Black Humor | This is the use of disturbing themes in comedy. (In Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, the two tramps, Didi and Gogo, comically debate over which should commit suicide first, and whether the branches of the tree will support their weight.) |
| Bombast | arrogant, pompous language |
| Burlesque | a ludicrous, mocking, lewd imitation |
| Cacophony | deliberately harsh, awkward sounds |
| Dirge | A song for the dead. Its tone is typically slow, heavy, and melancholy. |
| Dissonance | The grating of incompatible sounds. |
| Doggerel | Crude, simplistic verse, often in sing-song rhyme. Ex: Limericks |
| Dramatic Irony | When the audience knows something that the characters in the drama do not. |
| Dramatic monologue | When a single speaker in literature says something to a silent audience. |
| Elegy | A type of poem that meditates on death or mortality in a serious, thoughtful manner. It often uses the recent death of a noted person or loved one as a starting point; also used to memorialize. |
| Paraphrase | To restate phrases and sentences in your own words; to rephrase. |
| Parenthetical Phrase | A phrase set off by commas that interrupts the flow of a sentence with some commentary or added detail. Ex: Jack's three dogs, including that miserable little spaniel, were with him that day. |
| Parody | The work that results when a specific work is exaggerated to ridiculousness. |
| Pastoral | A poem set in tranquil nature, or even more specifically, one about shepherds. |
| Pathos | A technique of writing that has the power to evoke feelings |
| Symbolism | A device in literature where an object represents an idea |
| Syntax | ordering and structure of the words |
| Technique | The methods, the tools, the "how-she-does-it" ways of the author. |
| Theme | The main idea of the overall work; the central idea. It is the topic of discourse or discussion. |
| Thesis | The main position of an argument. The central contention that will be supported. |
| Anthropomorphism | In literature, when inanimate objects, animals, or natural phenomena are given human characteristics, behavior, or motivation |
| Anticlimax | Occurs when an action produces far smaller results that one had been led to expect. |
| Antihero | A protagonist (main character) who is markedly unheroic: morally weak, cowardly, dishonest, or any number of other unsavory qualities |
| Aphorism | A short and usually witty saying, such as: "Classic? A book which people praise and don't read" - Mark Twain |
| Apostrophe | An address to someone not present, or to a personified object or idea |
| Archaism | The use of deliberately old-fashioned language. Authors sometimes use it to create a feeling of antiquity. |
| Syntax | Word order |
| Ballad | This type of poems tells a story similar to a folk tale or legend and often has a repeated refrain. It is often about love and is often sung. It can also be a story in poetic form. |
| Dramatic Monologue | a poem in which a speaker addresses a silent listener |
| Foreshadowing | the presentation of material in such a way that the reader is prepared for what is to come later in the work |
| Free Verse | Poetry that does not have a regular meter or rhyme scheme |
| Genre | type or category of literary work (e.g., poetry, essay, short story, novel, drama) |
| Gothic | of or relating to a style of fiction characterized by the use of desolate or remote settings and macabre, mysterious, or violent incidents |
| Hubris | excessive pride or arrogance that results in the downfall of the protagonist of a tragedy |
| Persona | The narrator in a non-first person novel. In a third person novel, even though the author isn't a character, you get some idea of the author's personality. However, it isn't really the author's personality because the author is manipulating your impressions there as in other parts of the book. |
| Personification | Giving an inanimate object human qualities or form (ex.The darkness of the forest became the figure of a beautiful, pale-skinned woman in night-black clothes.) |
| Plaint | A poem or speech expressing sorrow |
| Point of View | The perspective from which the action of a novel (or narrative poem) is presented, whether the action is presented by one character or from different vantage points over the course of the novel. |
| Omniscient Narrator | Third person narrator who sees, like God, into each character's mind and understands all the action going on. |
| Limited Omniscient Narrator; third person limited | Third-person narrator who generally reports only what one character (usually the main character) sees, and who only reports the thoughts of that one privileged character. |
| Objective, or Camera-Eye, Narrator | Third-person narrator who only reports on what would be visible to a camera. The objective narrator does not know what the character is thinking unless the character speaks of it. |
| First-Person Narrator | A narrator who is a character in the story and tells the tale from him or her point of view. When the first-person narrator is crazy, a liar, very young, or for some other reason not entirely credible, the narrator is unreliable. |
| Stream of Consciousness Technique | This method is like first-person narration but, instead of the character telling the story, the author places the reader inside the main character's head and makes the reader privy to all the character's thoughts as they scroll through her consciousness. |
| Coinage or neologism | a new word, usually one created on the spot. Ex. "Oh, man, you just pulled a major Wilson." |
| Colloquialism | A word or phrase used in everyday conversational English that isn't a part of accepted "school-book" English. |
| Complex, Dense | These two terms carry the similar meaning of suggesting that there is more than one possibility in the meaning of words (image, idea, opposition); there are subtleties and variations; there are multiple layers of interpretation; the meaning is both explicit and implicit. |
| Conceit | a metaphor developed and expanded upon several lines. |
| Connotation, Denotation | literal meaning; everything else that the word suggests or implies. For example, "the dark forest" |
| Metonymy | using one term to represent the whole (large for individual) "malt does more than Milton can / to justify God's ways to man." - A.E. Houseman |
| Nemesis | The protagonist's archenemy or supreme and persistent difficulty. |
| Neologism | another term for "coinage." This is a new word, usually one invented on the spot. People's names often become grist of coinages, as in: "Brian Bank is the Michael Jordan of rap." In this instance Brian and his rap skills are compared to arguably the greatest basketball player of all time, implying he is the greatest rapper of all time. |
| Objectivity | an impersonal or outside view of events. |
| Subjectivity | interior or personal view of a single observer and is typically colored with that observer's emotional responses. |
| Omniscient narrator | the third-person narrator who sees, like God, into each character's mind and understands all the action going on. |
| Hyperbole | exaggeration or deliberate overstatement |
| Implicit | to say or write something that suggests and implies but never says it directly or clearly. "between the lines" |
| In medias res | "in the midst of things" (Latin). Ex: The Illiad begins when the Trojan war has already been going on for seven years. |
| Interior monologue | The writing in poems or novels that records the mental talking that goes on inside a character's head. |
| Inversion | switching the customary order of elements in a sentence or phrase |
| Villanelle | a short poem of fixed form, written in tercets, usually five in number, followed by a final quatrain, all being based on two rhymes. 19 lines, 2 repeating lines, 2 refrains, with the first and third lines are repeated alternately in the last lines of the succeeding stanzas. |
| Sestina | The thirty-nine-line form follows a strict pattern of the repetition of the initial six end-words of the first stanza through the remaining five six-line stanzas, culminating in a three-line envoi. |
| Ode | a lyric poem typically of elaborate or irregular metrical form and expressive of exalted or enthusiastic emotion. Meant to be sung. |
| Lyric | Poetry that expresses personal and emotional feelings. Odes, Villanelles, and Sestinas are forms of this poetry, and this type of poetry depends on any regular meter. |
| Irony | a statement that means the opposite of what it seems to mean. |
| Lament | A poem of sadness or grief over the death of a loved one or over some other intense loss |
| Lampoon | A type of satire |
| Stanza | A group of lines in verse, roughly analogous in function to the paragraph in prose. |
| Carpe diem | Latin for "seize the day" Expresses the idea that you only live life once. |
| Catharsis | An emotional cleansing or a feeling of relief a reader feels at pinnacle parts of a work. |
| Chiasmus | The opposite of parallel construction, follows a A-B-B-A form, where 'A' and 'B' represent a type of word or phrase that have something in common. best shown with examples. "He knowingly led and we followed blindly" Knowingly and blindly are adverbs, led and followed are verbs. It goes Adverb, Verb, Verb, Adverb. "Jimmy ate apples joyously" It relies on the first letter of each word. J-A-A-J |
| Stanza | The lines of a poem (which equate to paragraphs of an essay) form stanzas. Stanzas have various lengths that accompany particular names. |
| Stanza with: 1 Line | a line |
| Stanza with: 2 Lines | couplet |
| Stanza with: 3 Lines | Tercet |
| Stanza with: 4 Lines | Quatrain |
| Stanza with: 5 Lines | cinquain |
| Stanza with: 6 Lines | Sestet |
| Stanza with: 7 Lines | Septet |
| Stanza with: 8 Lines | Octave |
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