Unit 1: Literary Terms

Front 1

commercial fiction

Back 1

Fiction written to meet the taste of a wide popular audience and relying usually on tested formulas for satisfying such taste.

Front 2

literary fiction

Back 2

Fiction written with serious artistic intentions, providing an imagined experience yielding authentic insights into some significant aspect of life.

Front 3

Suspension of Disbelief

Back 3

A sacrifice of realism and logic for the sake of enjoyment.

Front 4

melodrama

Back 4

A type of drama related to tragedy but featuring sensational incidents, emphasizing plot at the expense of characterization, relying on cruder conflicts, and having a happy ending.

Front 5

cliche

Back 5

A trite, stereotyped expression; a sentence or phrase, usually expressing a popular or commonthought or idea, that has lost originality, ingenuity, and impact by long overuse.

Front 6

irony

Back 6

A situation or use of language involving some kind of incongruity or discrepancy.

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verbal irony

Back 7

A figure of speech in which what is said is the opposite of what is meant.

Front 8

dramatic irony

Back 8

An incongruity or discrepancy b/w what a character says or thinks and what the reader know, or thinks she knows, to be true.

Front 9

situational irony

Back 9

In which there is an incongruity b/w appearance and reality, or b/w expectation and fulfillment, or b/w the actual situation and what would seem appropriate.

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setting

Back 10

The context in time and place in which the action of a story occurs.

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direct characterization

Back 11

In which the author, by exposition or analysis, tells us directly what a character is like, or has someone else in the story do so.

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indirect characterization

Back 12

In which the author shows us a character in action, compelling us to infer what the character is like from what is said or done by the character.

Front 13

round character

Back 13

Distinguishing moral qualities or personal traits are complex and many-sided.

Front 14

flat character

Back 14

Distinguishing moral qualities or personal traits are summed up in one or two traits.

Front 15

static character

Back 15

Is the same sort of person at the end of a work as at the beginning.

Front 16

stock character

Back 16

Stereotyped; one whose nature is familiar to us from prototypes in previous literature.

Front 17

dynamic character

Back 17

Who, during the course of a work, undergoes a permanent change in some distinguishing moral qualities or personal traits or outlook.