| Term | Definition |
|---|
| colloquialism | slang |
| protagonist | main character |
| climax | highest point of action; moment at which crisis reaches its point of greatest intensity and is thereafter resolved |
| motif | repeated mini-theme; conspicuous element, such as type of incident, device, reference or formula, which occurs frequently in works of literature |
| paradox | something that's impossible but is |
| aside | one person speaking privately to audience; other actores cannot hear |
| monologue | one person speaking |
| soliloquy | one person (alone) on stage talking (thoughts) |
| foil | a character who seems identical to protagonist; character who, by sharp contrast, serves to stress and highlight the distinctive temperament of the protagonist |
| prose | writing in sentences |
| dramatic irony | audience knows something characters don't |
| euphemism | polite or vague way of saying something |
| verse | poetry |
| irony | the opposite of what's expected |
| black humor | sick humor |
| anachronism | something out of time order |
| comic relief | a scene to drop the tension (in the audience) |
| pathos | anger and frustration over the situation |
| static | unchanging (no action) |
| dynamic | changing |
| apostrophe | speech or address to something or someone not present |
| hyperbole | over-exaggeration |
| malaprop | a word that is similar to the word intended |
| satire | using humor to criticize serious, controversial topics; literary art of diminishing or derogating a subject by making it ridiculous evoking toward it attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn or indignation |
| persona | a character based off the author (author pretending to be someone else) |
| cliff hanger | a question or situation that's unanswered (always at the ends of a chapter) |
| picaresque | protagonist or hero, often with companions, goes on ordeals and adventures (adventure story); don't need to worry about plot line, just go place to place |
| teaser | unexplained information in middle of chapter |
| parody | extreme humor to the point of silliness on a topic |
| turning point | something happens to change things; a point of great tension in a narrative that determines how the action will come out |
| diction | choice of a particular word as opposed to others; language |
| genre | types/classes of literature: 1. lyric (uttered throughout in first person) 2. epic/narrative (narrator speaks in first person, then lets characters speak for themselves) 3. drama (characters do all the talking) |
| denotation | dictionary meaning |
| connotation | associated significations and meanings which it commonly suggests or implies |
| blank verse | consists of lines of iambic pentameter which are unrhymed |
| alliteration | repetition of a speech sound in a sequence of nearby words; only consonants and only when recurrent sound begins a word or a stressed syllable with a word |
| short story | brief work of prose fiction; organizes the action, thought and dialogue of its characters into the artful pattern of a plot |
| hero | do something good that is above and beyond expectations |
| Christian hero | upholds Christian/middle class values |
| tone | writer's feeling expressed through story |
| antagonist | character that deceives, frustrates, or works against the protagonist in some way |
| anti-climax | part of falling action after climax; things get resolved |
| syntax | creation of good sentences |
| voice | denominating tone of a literary work |
| narrative | a story (in prose or verse) involving events, characters, and what characters say and do |
| coincidence | a striking occurrence of two or more events at one time apparently by mere chance |
| comedy | a fictional work in which the materials are selected and managed primarily in order to interest and amuse us; no great disaster, happy chief characters |
| tragic flaw | lack of some important insight, some blindness that ironically results from one's own strengths and abilities |
| minor character | character that is not central to the story |
| audience | the person(s) reading a text, listening to a speaker, or observing a perfomance |
| third person omniscient | hear thoughts or feelings of different characters |
| falling action | action after the climax characterized by diminishing tensions and the resolution of the plot's conflicts and complications |
| figurative language | conspicuous departure from what users of a language apprehend as the standard meaning of words, or else the standard order of words, in order to achieve some special meaning or effect |
| dramatic monologue | poem in which a poetic speaker addresses either the reader or an internal listener |
| major character | character that is central to the story |
| situational irony | accidental events occur that seem oddly appropriate |
| psychological realism | find out what character is thinking |
| imagery | some literary figure that you can taste, hear, touch, smell, or see |
| essay | any short composition in prose that undertakes to discuss a matter, express a point of view, persuade us to accept a thesis on any subject, or simply entertain |
| foreshadowing | suggesting, hinting, indicating, or showing what will occur later in a narrative |
| assonance | repetition of identical or similar vowels in a sequence of nearby words |
| understatement | deliberately represents something as very much less in magnitude or importance than it really is, or is ordinarily considered to be |
| iambic pentameter | five-stress iambic verse; pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables |
| epic | a long narrative poem originally handed down through oral tradition, dealing with great heroes and adventure |
| setting | general locale, historical time, and social circumstances in which its action occurs (overall setting); particular physical location in which it takes place (setting of single scene or episode) |
| chronological narrative | in time order |
| narrator | someone outside story proper who refers to all the characters in the story by name, or as "he", "she", "they" (in third person narrative) |
| point of view | signifies the way a story gets told; mode established by means of which reader is presented with characters, dialogue, actions, setting, and events which constitute the narrative in a work of fiction |
| allusions | reference to another piece of literature |
| rite of passage | change in status or behavior |
| existentialism | reason to live |
| first person | the pronoun "I" |
| dynamic character | changes during course of story |
| allegory | a narrative, whether in prose or verse, in which the agents and actions, and sometimes the setting as well are contrived by the author to make coherent sense on the "literal," or primary, level of signification, and at the same time to signify a second, correlated order of signification |
| synecdoche | when one uses a part to represent the whole |
| realism | detailed, probing analyses of the way "things really are" |
| social realism | societal realism; some component of society that is criticized |
| symbol | a word or phrase that signifies an object or event which in its turn signifies something, or has a range of reference, beyond itself |
| theme | a central idea or statement that unifies and controls an entire literary work |
| omen | a miraculous sign, a natural disaster, or a disturbance in nature that reveals the will of the gods in the aren of politics or social behavior or predicts a coming change in human history |
| personification | an inanimate object or an abstract concept is spoken of as though it were endowed with life or with human attributes or feelings |
| consonance | repetition of a sequence of two or more consonants, but with a change in the intervening vowel (live-love, lean-alone, pitter-patter) |
| novel | variety of writings all being works of fiction written in prose; as an extended narrative, its magnitude permits a greater variety of characters, greater complication of plot(s), and more sustained exploration of character and motives than do shorter, more concentrated modes |
| play | designed for perfomance in the theater, in which actors take the roles of the characters, perform indicated action and utter the written dialogue |
| anti-hero | chief person in a modern novel or play whose character is widely discrepant from that of the protagonist/hero; is petty, ignominious, passive, ineffectual, or dishonest |
| flashback | interpolated narratives or scenes (of justified as a memory, a reverire, or confession by one of the characters) which represents events that happened before the time at which the work opened |
| speaker | voice used by an author to tell a story or speak a poem |
| tragedy | literary representations of serious actions which eventuate in a disastrous conclusion for the protagonist |
| archetype | ideas that are frequently repeated in literature, myth, religion, or folklore, making them universal across culture and time |
| play of manners | static; little physical action |
| mood | emotional tone pervading a section of the whole of a literary work, which fosters in the reader expectations as to the course of events, whether happy or terrifying or disastrous |
| second person | pronoun "you" |
| rising action | action leading to the climax |
| static character | unchanging character |
| frame | structure of a story |
| catharsis | the sudden release of pent up emotion |
| coherence | the smooth movement from one are to the next |
| episodic | one story after another |
| achronological | not in time order |
| political realism | author criticizing something based on his/her political views |
Combine with other sets
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