Short Story Terms
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50 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 Antagonist | A person or force in society or nature that opposes the protagonist , or central character in a literary work. |
| Protagonist | The central character in a literary work around whom the main conflict revolves. ____ is often the person with whom audience members or readers sympathize or identify. |
| Character | An individual in a literary work. Can be people, animals, robots, or whatever the author chooses. |
| Dynamic Character | Develops and changes in the course of a literary work. This change may resilt from a conflict or from a newfound unferstanding of himself or others. |
| Flat Character | Reveals only one personality trait. |
| Round Character | Shows varied and sometimes contradictory traits. |
| Static Character | Remains the same from the beginning to the end. |
| Direct Characterization | TELLS the audience what the personality of the character is. |
| Indirect Characterization | SHOWS things that reveal the personality of a character. |
| Plot | The sequence of events in a narrative work. |
| Plot Triangle | The organizaton of the elements of a short story; traditional story structure. |
| Exposition | The introduction of the characters, the setting, or the situation at the beginning of a story. |
| Initial Incident | What starts the work in motion. |
| Setting | The time and place in which the events of a story, novel, or play occur. Often helps create an atmosphere or mood. Not just physical, includes ideas, customs, values and beliefs of a particular time and place. |
| Rising Action | The part of a plot that adds complications to the conflict and increases reader interest. |
| Denouement | the events following the climax of a drama or novel in which a resolution of clarification takes place. |
| Climax | The point of greatest emotional intesity, interest, or suspense in the plot of a narrative. It typically comes at the turning point in a story or drama. |
| Falling Action | In a play or story, the action that typically follows the climax and reveals its results. |
| Resolution | The part of the plot that concludes the falling action by revealing or suggesting the outcome of the conflict. |
| Linear Narrative | Events in a story are relayed in chronological order. |
| Nonlinear narrative | A narrative technique wherein events are portrayed out of chronological order. |
| Conflict | The struggle between opposing forces in a story or play. |
| Internal Conflict | Exists within the mind of a character who is torn between different courses of action (person vs self). |
| External Conflict | Exists when a character struggles against some outside force, such as another character, nature, sociaty or fate (person vs other). |
| Irony | A contrast between apperance and reality. |
| Dramatic Irony | Exists when the reader knows something that a character does not know. |
| Situational Irony | Exists when the actual outcome of a situation is the opposite of what is expected. |
| Verbal Irony | Exists when a person says one thing and means another. |
| Point of View | The relationship of the narrator to the story. |
| First Person POV | The narrator is a character in the story, referred to as " I ". The reader sees everything through that character's eyes. |
| Third Person Objective POV | The narrator is not a character in the story and describes overt events rather than thoughts and motives of characters, uses "he", "she", "it", or "they". (like a camera or a reporter...). |
| Third Person Limited POV | The narrator reveals the thoughts, feelings, and observations of only one character, referring to that character as "he" or "she". |
| Third Person Omniscient POV | The narrator is not a character in the story but someone who stars outside the story and comments on the action. This type of narrator knows everything about the character and the events may reveal details that the character themselves could not reveal. |
| Flashback | A literary device in which an earlier episode, conversation, or event is inserted into the chronological sequence of a narrative. |
| Foreshadowing | An authors use of clues that hint at events that will occur later in the plot. It often helps to build suspense as well as to prepare readers for what is to come. |
| Generalization | A broad statement about an entire group. |
| Insight | The capacity to discern the true nature of a situation. |
| Interpretation | An individual's view, explanation or critique of a literary peice. |
| Mood | The feeling or atmosphere that an author created in a literary work. It can suggest a specific emotion, such as excited or fearful. This can also suggest the quality of a setting, such as somber or calm. |
| Motif | A recurring thematic element. |
| Narrator | A person who tells a story: a speaker, a character in the story, an outside observer, or even the author. |
| Paradox | A situation or statement that includes two parts, both of which are true but seem to contradict each other. |
| Personification | A figure of speech where animals, ideas or inanimate objects are given human characteristics. |
| Repitition | A technique in which a sound, word, phrase, or line is repeated for effect or emphasis. |
| Simile | A type of figurative language that makes a comparison beween two otherwise unlike objects or ideas by connecting them with the words "like" or "as". |
| Summary | A brief recounting of the main ideas of a peice of writing in a persons own words, while omittiing unimportant details. |
| Suspense | A feeling of growing tension and excitement. Writers create this by raising questions in readers' minds about what might happen. |
| Symbol | An object, a person, a place, or an experience that represents something else, usually something abstract. |
| Theme | The main idea or message of a literary work. It is not the subject of the work but instead is an insight about human life or nature. |
| Tone | A reflection of a writer's or speakers attitude toward a subject of a poem, story, or other literary work. It may be communicated through words and details that express particular emotions and that evoke an emotional response in the reader. |
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