| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Imagery | language that appeals to the senses. |
| Alliteration | The repetition of sounds in closely associated words. |
| Allusion | A brief reference to a person, event, or place, real or ficticious, or to a work of art |
| Apostrophe | When an absent person, an abstract concept, or an important object is directly addressed. |
| Caesura | Natural pause or break. |
| Characterization | Method used by a writer to develop a character. |
| Flashback | Action that interrupts to show an event that happened at an earlier time which is necessary to better understanding. |
| Foreshadowing | The use of hints or clues to suggest what will happen later in literature. |
| Hyperbole | Exaggeration or overstatement. |
| Image | Language that evokes one or all of the five senses. |
| Irony | An implied discrepancy between what is said and what is meant. |
| Metaphor | Comparison of two unlike things using like or as. |
| Mood | Emotional attitude the author takes towards hir subject. |
| Onomatopoeia | Word that imitates the sound it represents. |
| Paradox | Reveals a kind of truth which at first seems contradictory. |
| Personification | Giving human qualities to animals or objects. |
| Rhyme Scheme | Rhymed words at the ends of lines. |
| Rhyme | Pattern of words that contain similar sounds. |
| Satire | Literary tone used to ridicule or make fun of human vice or weakness,often with the intent of correcting, or changing. |
| Setting | The time and place in which a story takes place. |
| Simile | The comparison of two unlike things using like or as. |
| Stanza | Unified group of lines in poetry. |
| Symbol | using an object or action that means something more than its literal meaning. |
| Sestet | A six-line stanza or poem or the last six lines of an italian, or petrarchan, sonnet. |
| Sonnet | Afourteen-line lyric poem, usually written in iambic pentamete, that has one of several rhyme schemes. |
| Short story | A brief work of fiction. |
| Refrain | A repeated word, phrase, line, or group of lines. |
| Quatrain | A fourteen-line stanza or poem or a group of four lines unified by a rhyme scheme. |
| Protagonist | The main character i.n fiction,drama, or narrative poetry. |
| Point Of View | The vantage point from which a writer tells a story. |
| Paradox | An apparant contradiction that is actually true. |
| Parable | A short, allegorical story that teaches a moral or religious lesson about life. |
| Oxymoran | A figure of speech that combines apparently contradictory or incongrous ideas. |
| Ode | A complex, generally long lyric poem on a serious subject. |
| Octave | An eight-line stanza or poem or the first eight lines of an italian, or petrarchan, sonnet. |
| Meter | A generally regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry. |
| Metonymy | A figure of speech in which something closely related to a thing or suggested by it is substitutued for the thing itself. |
| Myth | An anonymous traditional story that usually serves to explain a belief, custom, or mysterious natural phenomenon. |
| Narrator | One who tells, or narrates, a story. |
| Free Verse | Poetry that has no regular meter or rhyme scheme. |
| Imagery | Language that appels to the senses. |
| Comedy | In general, a story that ends happily. |
| Couplet | Two consecutive lines of poerty that rhyme. |
| Connotations | All the meanings, associations, or emotions that a word suggest. |
| Consonace | The repetiton of final consonant sounds after different vowel sounds. |
| Denotation | The literal, dictionary definition of a word. |
| Analogy | A comparison of two things to show that they are alike in certain respects. |
| Atmosphere | The mood or feeling in a literary work. |
| Suspense | The uncertainty or anxiety we feel about what is going to happen next in a story. |
| Wit | A quality of speech or writting that combines verbal cleverness with keen perception, especially of the incongrous. |
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