Literary Terms & English 11 Final Review
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Created by:
isabelledow on June 10, 2012
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16 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 protagonist | Noun: The leading character or a major character in a drama, movie, novel, or other fictional text. Synonyms: hero |
| protagonist | Noun: The main character or force opposing the protagonist in a literary work or drama. Synonyms: adversary, foe, enemy |
| character foil | a character who contrasts with another character (usually the protagonist) in order to highlight various features of that other character's personality, throwing these characteristics into sharper focus. |
| theme | An idea that recurs in or pervades a work of art or literature |
| motif | A distinctive feature or dominant idea in an artistic or literary composition |
| symbolism | symbolic meaning attributed to natural objects or facts |
| paradox | A statement or situation containing apparently contradictory or incompatible elements A figure of speech in which an apparently self-contradictory statement is nevertheless found to be true. |
| foreshadowing | A warning or indication of (a future event) |
| Black Friday/Stock Market Crash of 1929 | the Stock Market Crash of 1929 was the most devastating stock market crash in the history of the United States, taking into consideration the full extent and duration of its fallout. The crash signaled the beginning of the 10-year Great Depression that affected all Western industrialized countries and that did not end in the United States until the onset of American mobilization for World War II at the end of 1941. The Roaring Twenties, the decade that led up to the Crash, was a time of wealth and excess. Despite the dangers of speculation, many believed that the stock market would continue to rise indefinitely. DEATH OF A SALESMAN OF MICE & MEN |
| Great Depression | The Stock Market Crash was just the beginning. Since many banks had also invested large portions of their clients' savings in the stock market, these banks were forced to close when the stock market crashed. Seeing a few banks close caused another panic across the country. Afraid they would lose their own savings, people rushed to banks that were still open to withdraw their money. This massive withdrawal of cash caused additional banks to close. Since there was no way for a bank's clients to recover any of their savings once the bank had closed, those who didn't reach the bank in time also became bankrupt. DEATH OF A SALESMAN OF MICE & MEN |
| Dust Bowl | In previous depressions, farmers were usually safe from the severe effects of a depression because they could at least feed themselves. Unfortunately, during the Great Depression, the Great Plains were hit hard with both a drought and horrendous dust storms. Years and years of overgrazing combined with the effects of a drought caused the grass to disappear. With just topsoil exposed, high winds picked up the loose dirt and whirled it for miles. The dust storms destroyed everything in their paths, leaving farmers without their crops. OF MICE & MEN |
| 1692 | From June through September of 1692, nineteen men and women, all having been convicted of witchcraft, were carted to Gallows Hill, a barren slope near Salem Village, for hanging. Another man of over eighty years was pressed to death under heavy stones for refusing to submit to a trial on witchcraft charges. Hundreds of others faced accusations of witchcraft; dozens languished in jail for months without trials until the hysteria that swept through Puritan Massachusetts subsided. THE CRUCIBLE |
| Jazz Age / Roaring 20s | Emphasizing the era's social, artistic, and cultural dynamism. "Normalcy" returned to politics in the wake of hyper-emotional patriotism during World War I, jazz music blossomed, the flapper redefined modern womanhood, Art Deco peaked. Economically the era saw the large-scale diffusion and use of automobiles, telephones, motion pictures, and electricity, unprecedented industrial growth, accelerated consumer demand and aspirations, and significant changes in lifestyle and culture. The media focused on celebrities, especially sports heroes and movie stars, as cities rooted for their home team and filled the new palatial movie theaters and gigantic stadiums. In most major countries women were voting for the first time. Finally the Wall Street Crash ended the era in 1929. GATSBY |
| Salem Witch Trials | 1629 outbreak of witchcraft accusations in a puritan village marked by an atmosphere of fear, hysteria and stress The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts, between February 1692 and May 1693. THE CRUCIBLE |
| The New England Renaissance | Period from the 1830s roughly until the end of the American Civil War in which U.S. literature came of age as an expression of a national spirit. The literary scene was dominated by New England Brahmin writers, notably Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell. Also influential were the Transcendentalists (see Transcendentalism), including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, as well as the great imaginative writers Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Edgar Allan Poe. THOREAU/EMERSON/DICKINSON |
| Transcendentalism | in literature, philosophical and literary movement that flourished in New England from about 1836 to 1860. It originated among a small group of intellectuals who were reacting against the orthodoxy of Calvinism and the rationalism of the Unitarian Church, developing instead their own faith centering on the divinity of humanity and the natural world. The ideas of transcendentalism were most eloquently expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson in such essays as "Nature" (1836), "Self-Reliance," and "The Over-Soul" (both 1841), and by Henry David Thoreau in his book Walden (1854). The movement began with the occasional meetings of a group of friends in Boston and Concord to discuss philosophy, literature, and religion. |
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