Literary Terms A-H

Front 1

Accent

Back 1

attempts to mark the accented and unaccented sounded in a line of poetry as well as the number of syllables

Front 2

Allegory

Back 2

a work of art intending to be meaningful on at least two levels of understanding

Front 3

Alliteration

Back 3

the repetition of sound in poetry or prose

Front 4

Allusion

Back 4

an indirect or inexplicit reference by one text to another text to a historical occurrence, or to myths and legends

Front 5

Anachronism

Back 5

an accidental or deliberate inconsistency in some chronological arrangement, especially i a chronological misplacing of persons, event, objects, or customs in regard to each other

Front 6

Analogy

Back 6

a comparison between persons, places, objects, or ideas for the purpose of explanation

Front 7

Anecdote

Back 7

a short and amusing or interesting story about a real incident or person.

Front 8

Aphorism

Back 8

denotes an original thought, spoken or written in a laconic and memorable form.

Front 9

Apostrophe

Back 9

a term used to describe a digression

Front 10

Aside

Back 10

a speech or a remark, made by a character on stage, which is by convention heard only by the audience and not by the other characters

Front 11

Assonance

Back 11

the repetition of vowels

Front 12

Ballad

Back 12

a narrative poem composed in short stanzas

Front 13

Folk Ballad

Back 13

based of stories passed down by song or word of mouth

Front 14

Literary Ballad

Back 14

based on literature

Front 15

Blank Verse

Back 15

unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter

Front 16

Burlesque

Back 16

a humorous theatrical entertainment involving parody and sometimes grotesque exaggeration

Front 17

Cacophony

Back 17

the demonstration of unpleasant phonaesthetics

Front 18

Caricature

Back 18

: a description of a person using exaggeration of some characteristics and oversimplification of others

Front 19

Catharsis

Back 19

emotional cleansing of the audience and/or characters in a play

Front 20

Chorus

Back 20

group that sang in verse while performing a dance or ritualized movements

Front 21

Classicism

Back 21

a knowledge of and predilection for the literature, philosophy, art, and aesthetic tastes of the ancient Greek and Roman cultures

Front 22

Colloquialism

Back 22

a linguistic phrase that is characteristic of or only appropriate for casual, ordinary, familiar, and/or informal written or spoken conversation, rather than for formal speech, standard writing, or paralinguistics

Front 23

Conceit

Back 23

characteristic means of expression that reflect habits of thought and perceptioin

Front 24

Consonance

Back 24

the repetition of constant sounds

Front 25

Conundrum

Back 25

a logical postulation that evades resolution, an intricate and difficult problem

Front 26

Description

Back 26

one of four rhetorical modes (also known as modes of discourse), along with exposition, argumentation, and narration

Front 27

Diction

Back 27

the kinds or levels of language employed in a work

Front 28

Discource

Back 28

generally refers to "written or spoken communication or debate”

Front 29

Dissonance

Back 29

the deliberate avoidance of assonance, i.e. patterns of repeated vowel sounds

Front 30

Elegy

Back 30

a meditative poem lamenting a death

Front 31

End Rhyme

Back 31

a rhyme in the final syllable(s) of a verse (the most common kind)

Front 32

Epic

Back 32

a long narrative poem

Front 33

Epigram

Back 33

any terse, witty, pointed statement

Front 34

Euphony

Back 34

the claim or study of inherent pleasantness or beauty

Front 35

Exemplum

Back 35

a moral anecdote, brief or extended, real or fictitious

Front 36

Exposition

Back 36

provides the background information needed to properly understand the story, such as the protagonist, the antagonist, the basic conflict, and the setting

Front 37

Farce

Back 37

comedy which aims to entertain the audience by means of unlikely, extravagant, and improbable situations, disguise and mistaken identity

Front 38

Figurative Language

Back 38

a distinction in traditional systems for analyzing language

Front 39

Figures of Speech

Back 39

a use of a word that diverges from its normal meaning, or a phrase with a specialized meaning not based on the literal meaning of the words in it such as a metaphor, simile, or personification

Front 40

Foil

Back 40

a character who contrasts with another character (usually the protagonist) in order to highlight various features of that other character's personality, throwing these characteristics into sharper focus

Front 41

Folklore

Back 41

consists of culture, including stories, music, dance, legends, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, customs and so forth within a particular population comprising the traditions (including oral traditions) of that culture, subculture, or group

Front 42

Foots

Back 42

the basic unit in their description of the underlying rhythm of a poem

Front 43

Anapest

Back 43

a metrical foot used in formal poetry

Front 44

Dactyl

Back 44

a type of foot in meter in poetry

Front 45

Iamb

Back 45

a commonly used metrical line in traditional verse and verse drama

Front 46

Spondee

Back 46

a metrical foot consisting of two long syllables, as determined by syllable weight in classical meters, or two stressed syllables, as determined by stress in modern meters

Front 47

Trochee

Back 47

a metrical foot used in formal poetry consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one

Front 48

Foreshadowing

Back 48

a technique by which an author suggest or predicts an outcome of plot

Front 49

Free Verse

Back 49

a broadly descriptive term for poetry that does not follow a regular metrical pattern or rhyme scheme

Front 50

Genre

Back 50

to designate a category or a type of literature

Front 51

Gothic

Back 51

to describe generally the cultural characteristics of a medieval Germanic tribe

Front 52

Hubris

Back 52

means extreme haughtiness or arrogance

Front 53

Humor

Back 53

the tendency of particular cognitive experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement

Front 54

Hyperbole

Back 54

to describe a deliberate exaggeration