Literary Terms For Exams

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Satire

Back 1

Literary work mocking human vices or mistakes; writing that ridicules or criticizes individuals, ideas, institutions, social conventions, or other works of art or literature.

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Tone

Back 2

Writers attitude towards his or her subject, characters, or audience. May be formal or informal, friendly or distant, personal or pompus.

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Transcendentalism

Back 3

American literature and philosophical movement of the nineteenth century. Taught people to be true to themselves.

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Plain style

Back 4

type of writing in which umcomplicated sentences and ordinary words are used to make simple, direct statements.

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Regionalism

Back 5

Literature is the tendency among certain authors to write about specific geographical area.

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Naturalism

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Literary movement among novelists at the end of the nineteenth century and during the early decades of the twentieth century.

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Mood

Back 7

or atmosphere, is the feeling created in the reader by a literary work or passage. Elements that can influence the mood of a work include its setting, tone, and events

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Verbal Irony

Back 8

A word or a phrase is used to suggest the opposite of its usual meaning.

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Dramatic Irony

Back 9

contradiction between what a character thinks and what the reader or audience knows.

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Situational Irony

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event occurs that contradicts the expectations of the characters, of the reader, or the audience

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Foreshawdowing

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Literary work is the use of clues to suggest events that have yet too occur

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Allusion

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Reference to a well-known person, place, event, literary work, or work of art. Writers often make allusions to stories from the Bible, to Greek and Roman myths, to plays by Shakespeare, to political and historical events, and to other materials with which they can expect their readers to be familar.

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Aphorism

Back 13

General truth or observation about life, usually stated concislely.

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Realism

Back 14

Presentation in art of the details of actual life. Began in the nineteenth century and stressed the actual as opposed to the imagined or the fanciful

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Romanticism

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Literary and artistic movement of the nineteenth century that arose in reaction oagainst eighteenth-century Neoclassicism and placed a prenium on imagination, emotion, nature, individuality, and exocita. American writers.

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Direct Characterization

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Writer simply states a character's traits, as when Fitzgerald writes of the main character in his story.

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Indirect Characterization

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character is revealed through words, thoughts, or actions of the character, descriptions of the characters apperance or background, what other characters say about the character.

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point of view

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Perspective, or vantage point, from which a story is told

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Omniscient Point Of View

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narrator is an observer who can relate everything that happens as well as the private thoughts and feelings of all characters

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Limited Third Person Point Of View-

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LImited to what a single character feels, thinks, and observers,

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Stream of Consciousness

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technique in which a characters thoughts are presented as the mid experiences them- in short bursts w/o obvious logic