Literary Terms
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40 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 nonfiction | writing that tells about real people, places, or events |
| autobiography | the writer's account of his or her own life |
| biography | an account of a person's life written by another person |
| essay | a brief work of nonfiction that deals with a single subject |
| fiction | writing that is made up |
| plot | the chain of related events that take place in a story |
| conflict | a struggle between opposing forces |
| exposition | gives background information about characters, conflict, and setting |
| rising action | where suspense builds because complications arise that make the conflict more difficult for the main characters to resolve |
| climax | where the reader's interest reaches its highest point |
| falling action | where the conflict ends |
| resolution | where loose ends are tied up |
| foreshadowing | a writer's use of hints or clues to indicate events and situations that will occur later in a narrative |
| flashback | an account of a conversation, episode, or event that happened before the beginning of a story |
| dynamic character | A character who grows emotionally, learns a lesson, or alters his or her behavior |
| static character | one who is simple, with few emotions, remains unchanged throughout |
| protagonist | Main character, hero or heroine |
| antagonist | Person or thing opposing the main character |
| setting | a particular time and place in which the events occur |
| style | the particular way that a work of literature is written |
| diction | a writer's selection of language |
| sentence structure | the length and kinds of sentences used |
| repetition | the use of the same word or phrase more than once |
| parallelism | the use of similar grammatical structures, sentence patterns, or figures of speech to express equal or similar ideas |
| imagery | the use of words and phrases that appeal to the reader's senses |
| symbol | a term used to designate an object or a process that not only serves as an image itself but also refers to a concept or abstract idea that is important to the theme of the work |
| theme | the central idea in the work of literature |
| narrator | the character or voice that relates the events of a story to the reader |
| point of view | the vantage point from which a story is told |
| first-person | when the narrator is a character in the story |
| third-person limited | when the narrator does not participate in the action of the story and knows the thoughts and feelings of only one character |
| third-person omniscient | when the narrator does not participate in the action of the story and knows the thoughts and feelings of all the characters |
| mood | the feeling, or atmosphere, that a writer creates for the reader |
| allusion | an indirect reference to something outside the literature to another well-known literary work |
| aside | lines whispered to the audience or to another character on stage (implied to be not heard by all the other characters) |
| soliloquy | a single character on stage thinking out loud (a way of letting the audience know what is in the character's mind) |
| simile | an expressed comparison between two different things using 'like' or 'as' |
| metaphor | an implied comparison between two different things; identifying a person or object as the thing to which it is being compared |
| personification | giving the quality of life to inanimate things |
| foil | a character in a story that acts in a drastically different way than the main protagonist in order to show the strong differences between the characters |
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