Literary Vocabualry Terms

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Action Adventure Genre

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Action adventure fiction features physical action and violence, often around a quest or military-style mission set in exotic or forbidding locales such as jungles, deserts, or mountains.

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Alliteration

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Alliteration is a pattern of sound that includes the repetition of consonant and vowel sounds. The repetition can be located at the beginning of successive words or inside the words. Poets often use alliteration to audibly represent the action that is taking place.

The use of similar sound for alliterative effect is eveident in these lines from Tennyson:

The moan of doves in immemorial elms,

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Allusion

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A reference in a literary work to a person, place, or thing in history or another work of literature. Allusions are often indirect or brief references to well-known characters or events

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Antagonist

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The antagonist is someone or something that deceives, frustrates, or works again the main character, or protagonist, in some way. The antagonist doesn’t necessarily have to be a person. It could be death, the devil, an illness, or any challenge that prevents the main character from living “happily ever after.“

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Antithesis

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exact opposite; "his theory is the antithesis of mine"

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Antonym

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Words in the same language with opposite meanings.

For example, up and down are antonyms

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Assonance

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Resemblance or similarity in sound between vowels in two or more syllables. Related to rhyme, assonance is only an approximate resemblance of sound, where rhyme is an exact correspondence. Used in the strict sense, assonance demands that the sound similarity occur with the vowels, not the consonants and only in the accented syllables

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Biography

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An informational book about a person's life. Accurate facts are presented and should be well documented. The person is shown in the time and place in which he or she lived. An autobiography is the story of a person's life written by that person.

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Caricature

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• A caricature is either a portrait that exaggerates or distorts the essence of a person or thing to create an easily identifiable visual likeness, or in literature, a description of a person using exaggeration of some characteristics and oversimplification of others.

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Characterization

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The portrayal, in writing, of a person---his actions, manner of thought, personality, distinctive qualities and traits. The ability to create and depict fictional characters so that the reader perceives them as living beings is essential to the novelist or dramatist.

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Cliche

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an overused phrase or expression.

Examples:

We gave it 110%. If you can't beat them, join them.

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Climax

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Climax is the point when the main character makes a choice which will see him/her overcome or defeat the conflict (s)he faces.

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Coherence

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This word means "to stick together.“

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Colloquialisms

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Colloquial language refers to a type of informal diction that reflects casual, conversational language

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Comedy Genre

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Fiction full of fun, fancy, and excitement meant to entertain, but can be contained in all genres

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Conciseness

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expressing much with little to no extraneous detail or words; not verbose; brief and precise

• gets to the point quickly

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Conflict

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Conflict is the struggle within the plot between opposing forces. The protagonist engages in the conflict with the antagonist, which may take the form of a character, society, nature, or an aspect of the protagonist’s personality.

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Connotation

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Connotation is an association that comes along with a particular word. Connotations relate not to a word's actual meaning, or denotation, but rather to the ideas or qualities that are implied by that word

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Consonance

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The repetition of the final consonant sound without repeatinig the vowel sound before it.

E.g.

It simply could not be a year

Since Emily turned four

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Denotation

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Denotation is the exact meaning of a word, without the feelings or suggestions that the word may imply. It is the opposite of “connotation” in that it is the “dictionary” meaning of a word, without attached feelings or associations.