| Term | Definition |
|---|
| First Person Narrator | a character in the story who tells the tale from his/her point of view |
| Flashback | a scene that interrupts the action to show an event that happened earlier |
| Foil | a secondary character whose purpose is to highlight the characteristics of the main character |
| Foot | basic rhythmic unit of a line of poetry, formed by two or three syllables, stressed or not |
| Foreshadowing | an event or statement that, in miniature, suggests a larger event that comes later |
| Free Verse | poetry without regular rhyme or meter |
| Genre | sub-category of literature; categorizes literature by types |
| Gothic | use of eerie themes and images (shrieking women, ghosts) |
| Haiku | Japanese poetry with 3 lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables |
| Half Rhyme | words that almost rhyme, slant rhyme (dizzy/easy) |
| Hamartia | tragic flaw or error which brings down the protagonist of a tradgedy |
| Harlem Renaissance | Flowering of African American art & music in the 1920s; center was in Harlem, New York |
| Headed Rhyme | another word for alliteration |
| Heptameter | poem of seven metrical feet |
| Heroic couplet | a rhyming couplet in iambic pentameter |
| Hexameter | poetic form of six metrical feet |
| Homonyms | words that sound alike but have different spellings and meanings (sale/sail) |
| Hubris | excessive pride/ambition which leads to character's downfall |
| Hyperbaton | departure from normal word order; a form of inversion (a personality indescribable) |
| Hyperbole | exaggeration or deliberate overstatement |
| Hypophora | raising a question then proceeding to answer it |
| Iambic | a metrical foot with an unstressed first syllable and a stressed second syllable |
| In Media Res | a piece of writing that begins in the middle of the action |
| Incongruity | the joining of opposites to create an unexpected situation |
| Interior Monologue | recording of mental talk in character's head |
| Invective | speech/writing that abuses, denounces, attacks |
| Inversion | switching the customary order of elements in a sentence or phrase |
| Irony | events turn out exactly the opposite of how they might be expected; saying the opposite of what is meant |
| Lament | a poem of sadness or grief over the death of a loved one or some intense loss |
| Lampoon | a satire |
| Linked Rhyme | first syllable of a line echoes the last syllable of the previous line (on the rooftop/stops the light of a cop) |
| Literal Image | concrete replication in words of an object or experience |
| Litotes | Type of understatement achieved in denying the opposite (Heat waves are not rare in summer) |
| Local Color | use of specific details describing dialect, dress customs, and scenery associated with a particular region |
| Loose sentence | a sentence complete before it's end (Jack loved Barbara despite her irritating laugh) |
| Lyric | poetry that explores the poet's personal interpretation of and feelings about the world |
| Madrigal | a short lyric on love or pastoral scenes |
| Masculine Rhyme | rhyme ending on the final stressed syllable |
Combine with other sets
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