Ap Lit Vocabulary 8

Front 1

Slant Rhyme

Back 1

A case in which vowel or consonant sounds are similar but note exactly the same, such as heap and
rap and tape. Also called near rhyme, imperfect rhyme and off rhyme

Front 2

Soliloquy

Back 2

A monologue delivered by a character in a play who is alone onstage. ___________ generally have a
character revealing his or her thoughts to the audience.

Front 3

Sonnet

Back 3

A poem of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter in a recognizable pattern or rhyme. contain a
volta, or turn, in which the last lines resolve or change direction from the controlling idea of the preceding lines

Front 4

Static Character

Back 4

A character, often flat, who does not change over the course of the story.

Front 5

Stream of Consciousness

Back 5

A character’s thoughts are presented flowing by in a free association, and the literary
convention that rules is that there is no writer mediating the consciousness of the subject.

Front 6

Surrealism

Back 6

A technique of the modern theater in which the realms of conscious and unconscious experience are
fused together to create a total reality. In this way the fiction writer, poet, and playwright, tap into the resources of
the unconscious mind and the imagination and portray in story on the page or on the modern stage the stuff of
human desire, hope, and dreams.

Front 7

Synecdoche

Back 7

A figure of speech that uses a piece or part of a thing to represent the thing in its entirety. For
example, in the Biblical saying that man does not live by bread alone, bread stands for the larger concept of food or
physical sustenance.

Front 8

Tercet

Back 8

A group of three lines of poetry, sometimes called a triplet when all three lines rhyme

Front 9

Terza Rima

Back 9

A tercet fixed form featuring the interlocking rhyme scheme aba, bcb, cdc, ded, etc.

Front 10

Tone

Back 10

The author’s attitude toward his or her characters or subject matter

Front 11

Trochee

Back 11

A poetic foot consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. The opposite of an
iamb, and so sometimes called an “inverted foot,” often beginning a line of iambic pentameter.

Front 12

Verbal Irony

Back 12

A statement in which the stated meaning is very different (sometimes opposite) from the implied
meaning.

Front 13

Villanelle

Back 13

A poem consisting of five tercets and a concluding quatrain. Each tercet rhymes aba and the final
quatrain rhymes abaa. The poem’s opening line repeats as the final line of the second and fourth stanzas, and in the
second-to-last line of the poem. The last line of the first stanza repeats as the final line of the third and fifth stanzas
and is also the final line of the poem overall.