The Inferno vocab/literary
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25 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 gaudy | ostentatiously or tastelessly ornamented |
| omnipotence | an agency or force of unlimited power |
| unshriven | someone whose confession has not been heard before death |
| hoard | to accumulate for preservation, future use, etc., in a hidden or carefully guarded place |
| expound | to set forth or state in detail |
| fraudulent | characterized by, involving, or proceeding from cheating or lying, as actions, enterprise, methods, or gains |
| lecherous | given to or characterized by lustful behavior |
| gibbet | gallows with a projecting arm at the top, from which the bodies of criminals were formerly hung in chains and left suspended after execution |
| dissolute | indifferent to moral restraints; given to immoral or improper conduct; licentious; dissipated |
| scourge | to beat with a whip; to lash |
| avarice | insatiable greed for riches; inordinate, miserly desire to gain and hoard wealth |
| mountebank | a person who sells quack medicines, as from a platform in public places, attracting and influencing an audience by tricks, storytelling, ect. |
| propitious | presenting favorable conditions; favorable |
| fulcrum | the support, or point of rest, on which a lever turns in moving a body |
| supine | lying on the back, face or front upward |
| allegory | any writing in verse or prose that has a double meaning; this narrative acts as an extended metaphor in which persons, abstract ideas, or events represent not only themselves on the literal level, but they also stand for something else on the symbolic level |
| canon | those works in anthologies that have come to be considered standard or traditionally included in the classroom and published textbooks |
| leitmotif | in literature, it's an object, character, animal, phrase, or other thing loosely associated with a character, setting, or event; it gives the audience a "heads-up" by calling attention to itself and suggesting that its appearance is somehow connected with its appearance in other parts of the narrative |
| style | the arrangement of words to best express the individuality of the author and the author's ideas and intent |
| unity | the sense that all the elements in a piece of writing fit together to create a harmonious effect |
| epilogue | a conclusion added to a literary work such as a novel, play, or long poem |
| allusion | a casual reference in literature to a person, place, event, or another passage of literature, often without explicit identification |
| canto | a sub-division of an epic or narrative poem comparable to a chapter in a novel |
| tricolon | the repetition of a parallel grammatical construction three times for rhetorical effect |
| terza rima | a three-line stanza form with interlocking rhymes that move from one stanza to the next |
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