Intro To Lit

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the practice of beginning a poetic narrative at the earliest possible chronological point

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Ab ovo

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of, relating to or dealing with the beautiful

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aesthetic

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a poem or song of or about lovers separating at dawn

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alba/aubade

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a line of iambic hexameter(twelve syllables divided into six feet of iambic stress pattern)

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alexandrine

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the expression by means of symbolic fictional figures and actions of truths or generalizations about human existance

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allegory

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the repetition of usually initial consonant sounds in two or more neighboring words or syllables

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alliteration

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a statement which can contain two or more meanings

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ambiguity

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a very short tale told by a character in a literary work

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anecdote

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flowers of verse, small poems by various writers gathered together

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anthology

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a defense and justification for some belief, doctrine, piece of writing, cause or action without any admission of blame with which we contemporarily associate the word

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apology

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a figure of speech wherein the speaker speaks directly to something nonhuman

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apostrophe

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a device in which a character in a drama makes a short speech which is heard by the audience but not by other characters in the play

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aside

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quatrains of alternating tetrameter and trimeter rhyming either abab or abcb

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ballad stanza

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a pause within a line of poetry which may or may not affect the metrical count

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caesura

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the works of an author that have been accepted as authentic

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canon

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the scene in a tragedy which includes the death (or moral destruction of the protaganist)

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catastrophe

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emotional content of a word

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connotation

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a rule or practice based upon general consent and upheld by society at large

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convention

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in poetry, a metrical pattern consisting of one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables

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dactyl

Front 20

comic or burlesque and usually loose or irregular in measure

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doggerel

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the part of a drama which follows the climax and leads to the resolution

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denouement

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any artificial or improbable device resolving the difficulties of a plot

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deus ex machina

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a author's choice of words

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diction

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literature designed explicitly to instruct

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didactic

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the general term for performances in which actors impersonate the actions and speech of fictional or historical characters for the entertainment of an audience

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drama

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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

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dramatic irony

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in literature, the occurence of a single speaker saying something to a silent audience

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dramatic monologue

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a situation in which people are involved in conflicts that solicit the audience's empathetic involvement in their predicament

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dramatic situation

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a character who undergoes a permanent change in outlook or character during the story

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dynamic character

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a lyric poem lamenting death

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elegy

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the running on of the thought from one line, couplet, or stanza to the next without a syntactical break

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enjambment

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a short often satirical poem dealing concisely with a single subject, and usually ending with a witty or ingenious turn of thought

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epigram

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a literary work or section of a work presenting, usually symbolically such a moment of revelation and insight

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epiphany

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a song or poem in honor of a bride and bridegroom

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epithalamion

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a explanation, interpretation

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explication

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critical explanation or interpretation of a text or portion of a text

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exegesis

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a rhyme either of two syllables of which the second is unstressed or of three syllables of which the second and third are unstressed

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feminine rhyme

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a character in a play who sets off the main character or other characters by comparison

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foil character

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the basic unit of measurement in a line of poetry

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foot

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a literary type or form

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genre

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a figure of speech in which an overstatement or exaggeration occurs

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hyperbole

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a verse or line containing additional syllables after those proper to the meter

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hypermetric

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a literary composition that imitates the manner or subject of another author or work

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imitation

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a form of internal rhyme in which the word preceding the caesura rhymes with the final word in the line

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Leonine Rhyme

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in the middle of things

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In medias res

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a regular pattern of unstressed and stressed syllables in a line of poetry

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meter

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a figure of speech wherein a comparison is made between two unlike quantities without the use of words like or as

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metaphor

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a figure of speech in which a word represents something else which it suggests

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metonomy

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a type of multiple rhyme in which a single multisyllabic word is made to rhyme with two or more words

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mosaic rhyme

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consisting of or characterized by the telling of a story

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narrative

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a poem written for a particular occasion

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occasional poem

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a brief story told or written in order to teach a moral lesson

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parable

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a situation or a statement that seems to contradict itself, but on closer inspection does not

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paradox

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the use of a word in different senses or the use of words similar in sound to achieve a specific effect as humor or a dual meaning

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paronomasia

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the narrator of or a character in a literary work, sometimes idetified with the author

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persona

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a sonnet form popularized by Petrarch consisting of an octave with the rhyme scheme abbaabba and of a sestet with one of several rhyme schemes, as cdecde or cdcdcd

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Petrarchan sonnet

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the structure of a story, the sequence in which the author arranges events in a story

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plot

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license or liberty taken by a poet, prose writer or other artist in deviating from rule, conventional form, logic or fact, in order to produce a desired effect

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poetic license

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the position of the narrator in relation to the story, as indicated by the narrator's outlook from which the events are depicted and by the attitude toward the characters

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point of view

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the study of the metrical structure of verse

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prosody

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a figure of speech in which an imaginary, absent or deceased person is represented as speaking or acting

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prosopopoeia

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the hero or central character of a literary work

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protagonist

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the pattern of rhymed words in a stanza or generalized throughout a poem, expressed in alphabetic terms

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rhyme scheme

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a piece of literature designed to ridicule th subject of the work

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satire

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to analyze as to its prosodic or metrical structure

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scan

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a sonnet form used by Shakespeare and having a rhyme scheme abab, cdcd, efef, gg

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Shakespearean sonnet

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tragic drama tragedy (comic writing for the theater comedy or comic drama)

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buskin(sock)

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the stanza used by Spenser and employed since by other poets, consisting of eight iambic pentameter lines and a final Alexandrine, with a rhyme scheme of ababbcbcc

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Spenserian stanza

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a narrative, either true or fictitious, in prose or verse, designed to interest, amuse, or instruct the hearer or reader

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story

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any separate section or extended movement in a poem, distinguished from a stanza in that it does not follow a regularly repeated pattern

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strophe

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one sensory experience described in terms of another sensory experience

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synaesthesia

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a figure of speech wherein a part of something represents the whole thing

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synecdoche

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the art of 'shaped' poems in which the visual force is supposed to work spiritually or magically

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technopaegnia

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an Italian form of iambic verse consisting of eleven-syllable lines arranged in tercets, the middle line of each tercet rhyming with the first and last lines of the following tercet

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terza rima

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show topicality by reference to recent events

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topical allusion

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a convention or motif in a literary work a rhetorical convention

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topos

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dramatic irony in tragic drama

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tragic irony

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any literary or rhetorical device, that consists in the use of words in other than their literal sense

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trope

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a figure of speech in which what is said is the opposite of what is meant

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verbal irony

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a stanza, a poem, metrical composition

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verse