| Term | Definition |
|---|
| adage | wise saying; proverb; saying |
| allegory | literary work in which characters, events, objects, and ideas have a secondary or symbolic meaning |
| alliteration | repetition of consonant sounds |
| allusion | reference to a historical event, mythology, or literature |
| anadiplosis | figure of speech in which a word or phrase at the end of a sentence, clause, or line of verse is repeated at or near the beginning of the next sentence, clause, or line of verse |
| anagnorisis | a moment of epiphany, time of revelation when a character discovers his true identity |
| anaphora | repetition of a word, phrase, or clause at the beginning of a word groups occurring one after the other |
| anecdote | a little story, often amusing, inserted in an essay or a speech to help reinforce the thesis |
| antagonist | character in a story or poem who opposes the main character (protagonist) |
| antithesis | placement of contrasting or opposing words, phrases, clauses, or sentences side by side |
| assonance | repetition of vowel sounds preceded and followed by different consonant sounds |
| ballad | poem that tells a story about people of a particular region and culture; usually meant to be sung |
| caesura | a pause in a line of verse shown in scansion by two vertical lines or large spaces |
| catharsis | a purification of emotions; used by the Greek philosopher, Aristotle, to describe the effect on the audience of a tragedy acted out on stage |
| classicism | a tradition espousing the ideals of ancient Greece and Rome; where the writer restrains his emotions and his ego while writing in clear, dignified language with carefully structured plots |
| cliche | an overused expression |
| diction | word choice; the quality of the sound of a speaker or singer |
| enjambment | carrying the sense of one line of verse over to the next line without a pause |
| epic | long poem in a lofty style about the exploits of heroic figures |
| epigraph | quotation inserted at the beginning of a poem, a novel, or any literary work; a dedication of a literary work; words inscribed or painted on a monument, building, trophy, tombstone |
| epilogue | a short address spoken by an actor at the end of a play that comments on the meaning of the events in the play or looks ahead to expected events; an afterword in any literary work |
| expressionism | a writing approach, process, or technique in which a writer depicts a character's feelings about a subject (or the writer's own feelings about it) rather than the objective surface reality of the subject |
| flashback | device in which a writer describes significant events of an earlier time or actually returns the plot to an earlier time |
| foil | a secondary or minor character in a literary work who contrasts or clashes with the main character; a secondary or minor charaacter with personal qualities that are the opposite or different from another character; the antagonist in a play or another literary work |
| genre | type or kind, as applied to literature and film |
| hyperbole | exaggeration; overstatement |
| inversion | arrangement of sentence parts out of their normal order to achieve a lyrical effect, as in poetry or verse |
| jargon | vocabulary understood by members of a profession or trade but usually not by other members of the general public |
| kenning | compound expression, often hyphenated, representing a single noun (whale-road=sea, ocean) |
| machine | armlike device in an ancient Greek theater that could lower a "god" onto the stage from the heavens; deus ex machina; a contrived event |
| malapropism | unintentional use of an inappropriate word similar in sound to the appropriate word, often with humorous effect |
| metonymy | substitution of one word or phrase to stand for a word or phrase similar in meaning (White House=government; President) |
| motif | recurring theme in a literary work |
| mock-epic | work that parodies the serious, elevated style of the classical epic poem to poke fun at human follies; a type of satire; treats petty humans or insignificant occurrences as if they were extraordinary or heroic |
| naturalism | an extreme form of realism that developed in France in the 19th Century; applies the principles of scientific and economic determinism to literature to depict a detailed picture of everyday life |
| ode | in ancient Greece, a long poem on a serious subject that develops its theme with dignified language intended to be sung |
| Old English Versification | unrhyming verse, without stanzas, with a caesura in the middle of each line, representing everyday speech; each line is divided into two parts (hemistich--half a line) and (stich--complete line) with two stressed syllables and a varying number of unstressed syllables |
| paradox | contradictory statement that may actually be true; similar to an oxymoron, but does not place opposing words side by side |
| philippic | speech that bitterly denounces, blames, accuses, or insults a person; speech that viciously attacks a person or his ideas |
| quatrain | a four-lined stanza; usually with a rhyme scheme of abab, abba, or abcb |
| realism | a movement in literature that stressed the presentation of life as it is, without embellishment or idealization |
| rhetoric | art of effectively using words in speech and writing; the study of language and its rules |
| satire | literary work that attacks or pokes fun at vices and imperfections; political cartoon that does the same |
| style | the way an author writes a literary work through diction, phrases, the structure of sentences, length of paragraphs, tone of the work, etc. |
| syncope | omitting letters or sounds within a word |
| synecdoche | substitution of a part to stand for the whole, or the whole to stand for a part (wheels=car) |
| thespian | an actor or actress |
| Transcendentalism | the belief that every human being has inborn knowledge that enables him to recognize and understand moral truth without benefit of knowledge obtained through the physical senses; with this inborn knowledge, an individual can make a moral decision without relying on information gained through everyday living, education, and experimentation |
| verse | a collection of lines that follow a regular, rhythmic pattern |
| figispicity | being so specific that even Fig is impressed |
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