| Term | Definition |
| drama | a story written to be preformed by actors |
| tragedy | is work of lit. esp. a play that results in a catastrophe for the main character |
| comedy | a play, movie, etc. of light and humorous character with a happy or cheerful ending |
| tragicomedy | a dramatic or other lit. compostion combining elements of both tragedy and comedy |
| melodrama | a dramatic play that does not observe the laws of cause and effect and exaggerates emotion and emphasizes plot but lacks in characterzation |
| farce | a light humorous, play in which the plot depends upon a skillfully explated situation rather than upon the development of character |
| tragic hero | a lit. character who makes a error in judgement or has a fatal flaw that combined with fate and external force brings on tragedy |
| tragic flaw | the character defeat the causes the downfall of the protangonist of tragedy |
| Freytag's Pyramind | ??? |
| caesura | a break or pause in a line of poetry, dictates usally by the natural rhythm of the language |
| analogy | a similarity b/w like features of two things on which comparison maybe based |
| motivation | 1) the act or an instance or motivating 2) the state of condition of being motivated 3) something that motivates inducement, incentive |
| false analogy | ??? |
| script | the manuscript or one of various copies of the written text of a play, motion picture, or a television broadcast |
| anachronism | used deliberately to distance events and to underline a universal verisimilitude and timeless to prevent something being "dated" |
| monologue | a speech by one character in a play, story, or poem |
| soliloquy | is a long speech expressing the thoughts of a charcter alone on stage |
| aside | a short speech by an actor in a play, usally to the audience where other actors can't hear it |
| blank verse | a verse is poetry written in unrhymed iambic pentameter lines |
| iamb/ iambic | a foot with one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable as in the word "again" |
| pentameter | a line of verse consisting of five metrical feet / two dactyls, one long syllables, two more dactyls and another long syllable |
| iambic pentameter | a common meter in poetry consisting of an unrhymed line with five feet or accents, each foot containing on unaccented syllable and an accented syllable |
| foil | a character who provides a contrast to another character (Benvolio & Tybalt) |
| catharsis | the purging of the emotions or relieving of emotional tensions esp. through certain kinds of art as tragedry of music |
| irony | the general term for lit. techniques that protray differenced between appearence and reality or expection and result |
| verbal irony | words are used to suggest the opposite of what is meant |
| situational irony | an event occurs that directly contradicts the expectations of the charcters, the readers, or the audience |
| dramatic irony | there is an contradiction b/w what a character thinks and what the readers or audience knows to be true |
| cosmic irony | the idea of fate, destiny, or a god controls and toys with human hopes and expectations/ or that the universe is indifferent to the plight of man |
| convention (literary) | 1) a meeting or formal assembly for discusion of the actions of common concern 2) a rule, method, or practice established by usage (custom) |
| rhetoric | 1) the undue use of exaggeration or display 2) the art of science of all specialised literay uses of languages in prose or verse, including figures of speech |
| ethos | the moral element in dramatic lit. that determines a character's actions rather than his or her thought or emotion |
| pathos | the quality of power in an actual life experience on in lit., music, speech, or other forms or expression or envoking a feeling of pity or compassion |
| logos | a rational principle that governs and develops the universe |
| sonnet | a fourteen-line lyric poem, usally written in rhymed iambic pentameter |
| Elizabethan/ Shakespearean Sonnet | sonnet consists of three quatrains (four-line stanzas) and a couplet (two-lines) usally rhyming (abab cdcd efef gg) |
| Italian/ Petrarchan Sonnet | sonnet consists of an octave (eight-line stanza) and a sestet (six-line stanza) often the octave rhymes (abbaabba) and sestet rhymes (cdecde) /octave asks a question and the sestet answers the question |