| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Alliteration | The repetition of initial vowel or consonant sounds. |
| Antagonist | The major character-in a narrative or drama who works against the hero. |
| Archetype | An original pattern or model from which all other things of the same kind are made. |
| Atmosphere | The overall aesthetic effect of a work of art. |
| Autobiography | The story of a person's life written by the person. |
| Bias | An inclination of temperament or outlook, especially a personal and sometimes unreasoned judgment. |
| Biography | The story or a person's lire written by another person |
| Character | A person or animal that takes part in the action of a literary work. |
| Characterization | The act or creating and developing a character by showing or telling what the character looks like, says, or does, as well as the wan other characters react to him or her. |
| Cliché | A phrase or expression that has become boring from too much use. |
| Climax | The highpoint of interest or suspense in a novel, story, or play. |
| Conflict | A struggle between opposing forces. Types are external and internal. |
| Dialogue | A conversation between characters. Quotation marks are usually used to indicate a speaker's words. |
| Diction | A writer's choice or words, phrases, sentence structures, and figurative language, which combine to help create meaning. |
| Euphemism | The substitution of an agreeable inoffensive expression for one that may offend or suggest something unpleasant |
| Figurative Language | Writing or speech that is used to create vivid impressions by setting up comparisons between dissimilar things, [examples are metaphor, simile, and personification. |
| Flashback | A device used in literature to present action that occurred before the beginning or the story. |
| Foreshadowing | The use of clues that suggest events yet to occur. Helps to create suspense. |
| Hyperbole | Exaggeration or overstatement. |
| Imagery | Use in literature to create word pictures for the reader by using details or sight, sound, taste, touch, smell, or movement. |
| Irony | Literary techniques that portray differences between appearances and reality, expectation and result, or meaning and intention. |
| Malapropism | The usually unintentionally humorous misuse or distortion of a word or phrase’; especially the use of a word sounding somewhat like the one intended but ludicrously wrong in context |
| Metaphor | A figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. |
| Mood | The feeling evoked in the reader by a literary work or passage. Often can be described in one word such as light-hearted, frightening, or despairing |
| Narration | Writing that tells a story, or the act of telling a story. |
| Narrator | The speaker or character that tells a story. |
| Onomatopoeia | A word that imitates the sound it represents. |
| Oxymoron | Combination of two seemingly contradictory or opposite words in short phrase. |
| Personification | A type of figurative language is which a nonhuman subject is given human characteristics |
| Plot | The sequence of events in a literary work. The four parts are exposition, complication, climax, and resolution. |
| Point of View | The narrative perspective from which a literary work is presented to the reader. Main types are 1st person, 2nd person and 3rd person. |
| Protagonist | The central character of a story who serves as a focus for its themes and incidents and as the principal rationale for its development. |
| Pun | A play on words that have similar sounds but different meanings. |
| Realism | A nineteenth-century European literary movement that sought to portray familiar characters, situations, and settings in a realistic manner. |
| Rhyme | A situation in which words sound identical or very similar and appear in parallel positions in two or more lines of poetry. |
| Setting | The time and place of the action in a work of literature. |
| Simile | A figure of speech in which the words like or as are used to make a comparison between two basically unlike ideas. |
| Suspense | A feeling of curiosity of uncertainty about the outcome of events in a literary work. |
| Tone | The writer's attitude toward her audience and subject. |
| Understatement | To state or present with restraint especially for effect. |
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