Literary Terms:

What are they and how do they contribute to meaning

Alliteration

• is the repetition of initial consonant sounds in words.

Our gang paces the pier like an old myth

Allusion

• A reference to a well-known person, place, or event

Analogy

• is a comparison of two or more similar objects, suggesting that if they are alike in certain respects, they will probably be alike in other ways as well.

Antagonist

• is the person, force, or thing working against the protagonist, or hero, of a literary work.

Antithesis

• The antithesis of something is its direct opposite

Aside

• A comment made by a stage performer that is intended to be heard by the audience but supposedly not by other characters.

Characterization

• is the method an author uses to reveal characters and their personalities.

• This is established by what the character does, says, thinks, and has said about him.

Climax

• The turning point—where the conflict is resolved

Conflict• is the problem or struggle in a story that triggers the action. There

are five basic types of conflict:• Person vs. Person: One character in a story has a problem with one

or more of the other characters.• Person vs. Society: A character has a problem with some element

of society: the school, the law, the accepted way of doing things.• Person vs, Self: A character has a problem deciding what to do in a

certain situation.• Person vs. Nature: A character has a problem with nature: heat,

cold, a tornado, an avalanche, or any other element of nature.• Person vs Fate (God): A character must battle what seems to be an

uncontrollable problem attributed to fate or an act of God.

Denouement

• The final part of a play, movie, or narrative in which the strands of the plot are drawn together and matters are explained or resolved.

• From the French “to unknot”

• Also termed the “resolution.”

• See also “falling action”

Dialogue

• is the conversation carried on by the characters in a literary work, usually written in quotation marks.

• Used to reveal character or further the plot.

Diction

• Word choice

Dramatic Irony

• Occurs when the audience of a play or the reader of a work of literature knows something that a character in the work itself does not know.

Dramatic Monologue

• is a literary work (or part of a literary work) in which a character is speaking about him- or herself as if another person were

present. The words of the speaker reveal something important about his or her character.

Epiphany

• A sudden revelation of truth; usually a sudden self-awareness.

Exposition

• is writing that is intended to explain something that might otherwise be difficult to understand. In a play or novel, it would be the portion that gives the background or situation surrounding the story.

Euphemism

• substitution of an agreeable or at least non-offensive expression for one whose plainer meaning might be harsh or unpleasant.

Falling Action

• is the part of a play or story that works out the decision arrived at during the climax.

Figurative Language

• is language used to create a special effect or feeling.

• Such as

Flashback

• is returning to an earlier time (in a story) for the purpose of making something in the present more clear.

Foil

• is someone who serves as a contrast or challenge to another character.

Foreshadowing

• is giving hints or clues of what is to come later in a story.

Hyperbole :

• (hi-por-be-Ie) is an exaggeration or overstatement

"I have seen this river so wide it had only one bank."

Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

Imagery

• is the use of words to create a certain picture in the reader's mind. Imagery is usually based on sensory details: Sight, Sound, Smell, Taste, Feeling

"The sky was dark and gloomy, the air was damp and raw, the streets were wet and sloppy." -Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers

Irony

• is using a word or phrase to mean the exact opposite of its literal or normal meaning. There are three kinds of irony:

dramatic irony, in which the reader or the audience sees a character's mistakes, but the character does not;

verbal irony, in which the writer says one thing and means another:

irony of situation, in which there is a great difference between the purpose of a particular action and the result.

Juxtaposition

• Placing side by side, usually to achieve a particular effect

Metaphor

• is a comparison of two unlike things in which no word of comparison (as or like) is used:

"A green plant is a machine that runs on solar energy."

-Scientific American

Mood

• is the feeling a text arouses in the reader: happiness, peacefulness, sadness, and so on.

Motif

• A reoccurring idea, image, or object

Narrator

• Is the person telling the story.

Oxymoron

• is a combination of contradictory terms as jumbo shrimp, tough love, or cruel kindness

Personification

• is a literary device in which the author speaks of or describes an animal, object, or idea as if it were a person:

• "The rock stubbornly refused to move."

Paradox

• is a statement that seems contrary to common sense, yet may, in fact, be true: "The coach considered this a good loss."

Parody

• an imitation of a serious literary work or the signature style of a particular author in a ridiculous manner.

Parallelism

• A method of comparison of two ideas in which each is developed in the same grammatical structure.

Plot

• Is the action or sequence of events in a story. What happens.

Point of View

• is the vantage point from which the story is told.

1st, 3rd, 2nd, limited, omniscient

Protagonist

• Is the main character or the hero of the story.

Pun

• A play on words

“Not so my lord. I am too much in the sun.”

Realism

• portray familiar characters, situations, and settings in a realistic manner. This was done primarily by using an objective narrative point of view and through the buildup of accurate detail. The standard for success of any realistic work depends on how faithfully it transfers common experience into fictional forms.

Romanticism

• An idealized view of the world

Resolution

• The events following the climax of a plot; falling action

Rising Action

• is the series of struggles or conflicts that builds a story or play toward a climax.

Satire

• A work that uses ridicule, humor, and wit to criticize and provoke change in human nature and institutions.

Simile

• is a comparison of two unlike things using the words like or as:

• "She stood in front of the altar, shaking like a freshly caught trout.“

• -Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Setting

• Is the time and place in which the action of a literary work occurs.

Soliloquy

• is a speech delivered by a character when he or she is alone on stage. It is as though the character is thinking out loud.

Stream of Consciousness

• A narrative technique for rendering the inward experience of a character. This technique is designed to give the impression of an ever-changing series of thoughts, emotions, images, and memories in the spontaneous and seemingly illogical order that they occur in life.

Syntax

• The arrangement or order of words in a sentence. Includes sentence length and complexity; inversion; repetition; parallelism; types of sentences

Imperative Sentence

• command

Interrogative Sentence

• A question

Declarative Sentence

• A direct statement

Exclamatory Sentence

• A sudden vehement emotional expression!

Symbol

• is a person, a place, a thing, or an event used to represent something else: the dove is a symbol of peace. Characters in literature may be symbols of good or evil.

Theme

• is the statement about life that a writer is trying to get across in a piece of writing.

• This must be a complete sentence; do not confuse with “motif.”

Tone

• Is the author’s attitude toward his subject matter.

Tragedy

• is a literary work in which the hero is destroyed by some character flaw or by forces beyond his or her control.

Transcendentalism

• the philosophical ideas of Emerson and some other 19th-cent. New Englanders, based on a search for reality through spiritual intuition

POETRY TERMS

Apostrophe

• Directly addressing an object, idea, or absent person

Assonance

• The repetition of similar vowel sounds in Poetry.

Ballad

• a verse narrative that is, or originally was, meant to be sung. Characterized by repetition and often by a refrain

Blank Verse

• Unrhymed iambic pentameter

Cacophony

• Harsh, unpleasant sounds

Caesura

• A pause or break within a line of poetry

Closed Form Poetry

• Poetry written in a a specific or traditional pattern according to the required rhyme, meter, line length, line groupings, and number of lines

Couplet

• is a pair of lines of verse of the same length that usually rhyme.

Connotation

• The impression that a word gives beyond its defined meaning

Consonance

• A special type of alliteration in which the repeated pattern of consonants is marked by changes in the intervening vowels--i.e., the final consonants of the stressed syllables match each other but the vowels differ. As M. H. Abrams illustrates in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, examples include linger, longer, and languor or rider, reader, raider, and ruder.

Denotation

• The accepted literal meaning of a word

Dramatic Poetry

• from the point of view of a fictional character.

Elegy

• A lyric poem that laments the death of a person or the eventual death of all people.

Enjambment

• The running over of the sense and structure of a line of Verse or a couplet into the following verse or couplet.

Epic

• a long poem that celebrates, in a continuous narrative, the achievements of mighty heroes and heroines, usually in founding a nation or developing a culture, and uses elevated language and a grand, high style.

Euphony

• Pleasant sounds

Free Verse

• is poetry that does not have a regular meter or RHYTHM.

Lyric

• A short poem meant to express an emotion

Meter

• is the patterned repetition of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of poetry.

Metonymy

• a figure of speech in which the name of one thing is used to refer to another thing associated with it.

Narrative Poetry

• Poetry that tells a story.

Ode

• Name given to an extended lyric poem characterized by exalted emotion and dignified style

Onomatopoeia

• is the use of a word whose sound suggests its meaning, as in clang, buzz, and twang.

Open Form Poetry

• Poetry that does not follow patterns of meter, rhyme, line lengths, number of lines,

Refrain

• is the repetition of a line or phrase of a poem at regular intervals, especially at the end of each stanza.

Quoth the raven, “Nevermore”

Repetition

• is the repeating of a word, a phrase, or an idea for emphasis or for rhythmic effect: "someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door..." (E.A.Poe, 'The Raven")

Rhyme

• is the similarity or likeness of sound existing between two words. Sat and cat are perfect rhymes because the vowel and final consonant sounds are exactly the same.

Types of Rhyme

• End rhyme—occurs at end of a line

• Eye rhyme—a rhyme by sight, not sound

• Feminine rhyme—a rhyme that ends on an unstressed syllable

• Identical rhyme—repeating a word

• Internal rhyme—occurs within the line

• Masculine rhyme—a rhyme that ends on a stressed syllable

• Slant rhyme/Imperfect rhyme—same vowel, different consonant

• Perfect rhyme—both the final consonant and vowel rhyme

Rhythm

• is the regular or random occurrence of sound in poetry. Regular rhythm is called meter. Random occurrence of sound is called free verse.

Scansion

• the process of analyzing (and sometimes also marking) verse to determine its meter, line by line.

Sonnet

• is a poem consisting of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter.

The Italian (Petrarchan) rhyming abbaabba, cdecde.or cdcdcd.

The Shakespearean rhyming

abab, cdcd, efef, gg.

Stanza

• A unit of lines in a poem

Synecdoche

• the part is used to name or stand in for the whole, as when we refer to manual laborers as hands or say wheels to mean a car.

Verse

• is a metric line of poetry. It has a regular rhythm. It is named according to the kind and number of feet composing it: iambic pentameter, for example.

Villanelle• a verse form consisting of nineteen lines

divided into six stanzas—five tercets (three-line stanzas) and one quatrain (four- line stanza). The first and third lines of the first tercet rhyme with each other, and this rhyme is repeated through each of the next four tercets and in the last two lines of the concluding quatrain. The villanelle is also known for its repetition of select lines

Eye Rhyme

• Words that look like they should rhyme, but they do not sound the same

iambic

• Unstressed, stressed –rising rhythm

Trochee

• Stressed, unstressed –falling rhythm

Anapest

• Unstressed, unstressed, stressed—rising rhythm

Dactyl

• Stressed, unstressed, unstressed—falling rhythm

Spondee

• Stressed, stressed syllables

Works Cited

• “Glossary of Terms.” Gale Cenage Learning. 7 April 2011.<http://www.gale.cengage.com/free_resources/glossary/index.htm>

• Sebranek, Patrick. Kemper, David, and Meyer, Verne. Writers Inc. Wilmington Massachusetts: Write Source, 2006. Pg. 253-261.

• LitWeb: The Norton Introduction to Literature Studyspace.