Literary Terms
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112 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 Act | A major division of play. |
| Alliteration | The repition of similar sounds, usually consonant clusters, in a group of words. |
| Allusion | A reference in one work of the literature to a person, place or event in another work of literature or in history art or music. |
| Anachronism | An event or detail existing out of its proper time in history. |
| Analogy | An extended comparison showing the similatirities between two things. |
| Anecdote | A brief account of an interesting or amusing incident. Often used as evidence to support or explain an idea, or it may be used to entertain readers or reveal the personality of the author or of another person. |
| Antagonist | A person or force in society or nature that opposes the protagonist or central character in a literary work. |
| Argument | A form of discourse in which reason is used to influence or change people's ideas or actions. |
| Aside | Words spoken by a character in a play, usually in a undertone, bot intended to be heard by the other characters on stage. |
| Assonance | The repetition of similar vowel sounds, usually in an undertone, not intended to be heard bt the other characters on stage. |
| Atmosphere | The mood or emotional quality of a literary work. Often created with details about people and setting. |
| Author's Purpose | The author's reason for writing. For example, the purpose be to persuade, to express an opinion, or to inform. |
| Autobiography | A peron's account to his/her own life. |
| Ballad | A story told in verse and usually meant to be sung. |
| Biography | An account of a peron's life written by another person. |
| Blank Verse | Verse written in unrhymed iambic pentameter, where each line usually contains ten syllables and everyother syllable is stressed. |
| Catastrophe | The tragic denouncement, or unknotting of a play of story. |
| Characterization | The personality a character displays; also, the means by which an author reveals that personality. |
| Cinquain | A five-live poem of stanza that allows a specific pattern of syllables. The first line has two syllables, the next has four, then six, then eight, and the fifth line has two again. |
| Climax | That point of greatest emotional intensity, interest, or suspense in a narrative. |
| Comedy | In general, a literary work that is amusing and ends happily. |
| Comic Relief | A short, funny episode that interrupts an otherwise serious or tragic work of drama. |
| Conclusion | The ending of a piece of writing that provides closure to the piece and expresses the author's feelings about his/her experience. |
| Complication | A series of difficulties forming the central acton in narrative. |
| Conflict | A struggle between two opposing forces or characters in a short story, novel, play or narrative poem. |
| Connotation | The emotion or association that a word or phrase may arouse. |
| Conventions | Unrealistic devices or procedures that the reader agrees to accept. |
| Consonance | The repetition of consonant sounds before or after different vowel sounds. |
| Couplet | Two consecutive lines of poetry that rhyme. |
| Crisis/Turning Point | A point of great tension in a narrative that dtermines how the action will come out. |
| Denotation | The literal or dictionary meaning of a word. |
| Description | Any careful detailing of a person, place, thing, or event. |
| Dialect | A representation of the speech patterns of a particular region or social group. |
| Dialogue | Conversation between two characters in a literary work. |
| Diction | A writer's choice of words, particularly for clarity effectiveness, and precision. |
| Drama | A story acted out, usually on stage, by actors and actresses who take the parts of specific characters. |
| Dramatic Poetry | Poetry in which one or more characters speak. |
| Dynamic Character | A character who undergoes an important and basic changes in personality or outlook. |
| Epic | A long narrative poe, that relates the deeds of a hero. |
| Epithet | A descriptive adjective or phrase used to characterize someone or something. |
| Epic Simile | An extended comparison using like or as to compare two seemingly unlike things. |
| Essay | A piece of prose writing, usually short, that deals with a subject in a limited way and expresses a particular point of view. |
| Exposition | The kind of writing that is intended primarily to present information. |
| Fable | A brief story or poem that is told to present a moral of practical lesson. |
| Falling Action | All of the action in a plau that follows the turning point. |
| Fantasy | Ahighly imaginative type of fiction in which the events could not really happen. |
| Farce | A type of comedy based on a farfetched humorous situation, often with ridiculous or stereotyped characters. |
| Fiction | Anything that is invented or imagined, especially a prose narrative. |
| Figurative Language | Language that is not intended to be interpreted in a literal sense. |
| Flashback | A literary device in which an earlier episode, conversation, or event is inserted into the chronological sequence of a narrative. |
| Figure of Speech | A term applied to a specific kind of figurative language, such as a metaphor or simile. |
| Foil | A character who sets off another character by contrast. |
| Folklore | The traditional beliefs, customs, stories, songs, and dances, of the culture. |
| Folk Ballad | A story told in verse that is by an unknown author and meant to be sung. |
| Folk Tale | An account, legend, or story that is passed along orally from generation to generation. |
| Foreshadowing | The use of hints or clues in a narrative to suggest what action is to come. |
| Framework Story | A narrative that contains another narrative. |
| Free Verse | Poetry that has no fixed meter or pattern and depends on natural speech rhythms. |
| Genre | A category or type of literature characterized by a particular form of style. |
| Heroic Couplet | Two consecutive lines of rhyming poetry that are written in iambis pentameter and that contain a complete thought. |
| Hero | The main character in a literary work, typically one whose character or deeds inspire the admiration of the reader. |
| Homeric Simile | An extended comparison that mounts in excitement and usually ends in a climax. |
| Hyperbole | A figure of speech in which great exaggeration is used for emphasis or humorous effect. |
| Iambic Pentameter | The most common verse line in English Poetry. |
| Idiom | A work or phrase that has a special meaning different from its standard or dictionary meaning. |
| Imagery | Language that appeals to any sense or any combination of senses. |
| Inversion | A reversal of the usual order of words to achieve some kind of emphasis. |
| Irony | A contrast or an incongruity between what is stated and really meant, or between what is expected to happen and actually does happen. |
| Legend | A story handed down from the past through the oral tradition and commonly believed to be based on historical events. |
| Line | In a poem, a word or row of words that may or may not form a complete sentence. |
| Literal Language | A fact of idea stated directly. |
| Literary Ballad | A story told in verse in which a known writer imitates a folk ballad. |
| Local Color | The use of specific details to re-create the language, customs, geography, and habits of a particylar area. |
| Lyric Poetry | Poetry that expresses a speaker's personal thoughts or feelings. |
| Magic Realism | A style of writing in which realistic details, events, settings, characters, and dialogue are interwoven with magical, bizarre, fantastic, or supernatural elements. |
| Memoir | A type of narrative nonfiction that presents the story of a period in a person's life and is usually written from the first person point of view. |
| Metaphor | A comparison between two unlike things with the intent of giving added meaning to one of them. |
| Meter | A generally regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry. |
| Monologue | A long, uninterrupted speech that is spoken in the presence of other characters |
| Mood | The feelings or atmoshpere that an author creats in a leterary work. |
| Moral | A practical lesson about right and wrong conduct. |
| Myth | A traditional story of anonymous origin that deals with gooddesses, gods, heroes, and supernatural events. |
| Narration | The kind of writing or speaking that tells a story. |
| Narrative Poetry | Peotry that tells a story. |
| Narrator | one who narrates ot tells a story. |
| Nonfiction | Any prose narrative that tells about things as they actually happened or that presents factual information about something. |
| Novel | A fictional narrative in prose, generally longer than a short story. |
| Octave | The first eight lines of a Petrarchan sonnet. |
| Onomatopoeia | The use of a word whose sound in come degree imitates or suggests its meaning. |
| Oral Tradition | Literature that passes by word of mouth from one generation to the next. |
| Oxymoron | A figure of speech that is a combination of seemingly contradictory words. |
| Parable | A simple story pointing to a moral or religious lesson. |
| Paradox | A situation or statement that includes two parts, both of which are true but seem to contradict each other. |
| Parallelism | The use of phrases, clauses, or sentences that are similar of complementary in structure or in meaning. |
| Paraphrase | A summary or a recapitulation of a piece of literature. |
| Personification | A figure of speech in which an animal, an object, a natural force, or and idea is given personality or described as if it were human. |
| Persuasion | The type of speaking or writing that is intended to make its audience adopt a certain opinion or perform a certain action or do both. |
| Petrarchan Sonnet | A fourteen-line lyric poem consisting of two parts, the octave and the sestet. |
| Plot | The sequence of events or happenings in a literary work. |
| Poetry | Language arranged in lines with a regular rhythm and often a definite rhyme scheme. |
| Point of View | The vantage point from which a narative is told. |
| Pun | The humurous use of a word or phrase to suggest two or more meanings at the same time. |
| Quatrain | A stanza or poem of four lines. |
| Refrain | A word, phrase, line, or group of lines repeated regularly in a peom, usually at the end of each line. |
| Repetition | The return of a word, phrase, stanza form, or effect in any form of literature. |
| Resolution | The outcome of the conflict in a play or story. |
| Rhyme | The repetition of sound in two or more words or phrases that usually appear close together to each other in a poem. |
| Rhyme Scheme | The pattern of rhymesin a poem. |
| Rhythm | The arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables into a pattern. |
| Rising Action | Those events in a play that leads to a turning point in the actionl |
| Satire | A kind of writing that holds up to ridicule cntempt, the weaknesses or wrongdoings of individuals, groups, institutions, or humanity in general. |
| Sestet | The last six lines of a Petrarchan sonnet. |
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