English 100 Midterm

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Action

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any event or series of events that takes place in a literary work.

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Allegory

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a literary work in which the characters, actions, and even settings have two connected levels of meaning.

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Alliteration

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The repetition of usually initial consonant sounds through a sequence of words.

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Anapestic

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Referring to a metrical form in which each foot consists of two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one.

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Antagonist

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A character or a nonhuman force that opposes or is in conflict with the protagonist.

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Antihero

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a protagonist who is in one way or another the very opposite of a traditional hero. Instead of being courageous and determined, he or she might be timid, hypersensitive, or indecisive.

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Apostrophe

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a figure of speech in which a speaker or narrator addresses an abstraction, an object, or a dead or absent person.

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Archetype

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a character, ritual, symbol, or plot pattern that recurs in the myth and literature of many cultures.

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Allusion

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a brief, often implicit and indirect reference within a literary text to something outside the text, whether another text or any imaginary or historical person, place or thing.

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Assonance

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The repetition of vowel sounds in a sequence of words with different endings.

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Auditor

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an imaginary listener within a literary work, as opposed to the actual reader or audience outside the work.

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Author

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the actual or real author of a work is the historical person who actually wrote it and the focus of biographical criticism which interprets a work by drawing on facts about the author's life and career.

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Implied Author

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The implied author is the vision of the author's personality and outlook implied by the work as a whole.

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Ballad

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a verse narrative that is, or originally was folk version, transmitted orally from person to person, and age to age and characterized by relatively simple diction, meter, and rhyme scheme.

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Ballad Stanza

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a common stanza form, consisting of quatrain that alternates four-foot and three-foot lines; lines 1 and 3 are unrhymed iambic tetrameter (four feet) and lines 2 and 4 are rhymed iambic trimeter (three feet).

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Biography

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a work of nonfiction that recounts the life of a real person.

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Blank Verse

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the metrical verse form most like everyday human speech; consists of unrhymed lines in iambic pentameter.

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Carpe Diem

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literally "seize the day" in Latin, a common theme of literary works that emphasize the brevity of life and the need to make the most of the present.

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Character

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an imaginary personage who acts, appears, or is referred to in a literary work.

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Major or Main Characters

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are those that receive most attention

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Minor Characters

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receive the least attention.

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Flat Characters

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are relatively simple, have a few dominant traits and tend to be predictable.

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Round Characters

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complex and multifaceted and act in a way that readers might not expect but accept as possible.

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Static Characters

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Do not change.

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Dynamic Characters

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Do change.

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Stock Characters

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Represent familiar types that recur frequently in literary works, especially of a particular genre.

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Characterization

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the presentation of a fictional personage

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Climax

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The third part of plot, the point at which the action stops rising and begins falling or reversing (the turning point).

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Comedy

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a broad category of literary, especially dramatic, works intended primarily to entertain and amuse an audience.

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Complication

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The action or event that introduces a new conflict or intensifies the existing one, especially during the rising action.

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Conclusion

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also called resolution, the fifth and last phase or part of plot, the point at which the situation that was destabilized at the beginning becomes stable once more and the conflict is resolved.

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Concrete Poetry

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poetry in which the words on the page are arranged to look like an object.

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Conflict

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a struggle between opposing forces. A conflict is external when it pits a character against something or someone outside himself or herself -- another character or characters or something in nature or society. A conflict is internal when the opposing forces are two drives, impulses, or parts of a single character.

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Connotation

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the implied meaning of a word. what is suggest by it aside from what it literally means.

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Couplet

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two consecutive lines of verse linked by rhyme and meter.

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Crisis

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in plot, the moment when the conflict comes to a head, often requiring the character to make a decision; sometimes the crisis is equated to the climax.

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Dactylic

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referring to the metrical pattern in which each foot consists of a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones.

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Denotation

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a word's direct and literal meaning.

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Deus Ex Machina

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literally, "god out of the machine", any improbable, unprepared-for plot contrivance induced late in a literary work to resolve the conflict.

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Dialogue

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spoken word by the characters in a literary work

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Diction

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choice of words.

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Drama

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A literary genre consisting of works in which action is performed and all words are spoken before an audience by an actor or actors impersonating the characters.

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Dramatic Poem

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a poem structures so as to present a scene or series of scenes, as in a work of drama.

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Elegy

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focus on the formal lament on the death of a particular person, but mainly focuses on the speakers efforts to come to terms with his or her grief.

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Epic

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a long narrative poem that celebrates the achievements of mighty heroes and heroines, usually in founding a nation or developing a culture, and uses elevated language and grand, high style.

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Epilogue

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in fiction, a short section or chapter that comes after the conclusion tying up loose ends and often describing what happens to the characters after the resolution of the conflict.

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Epihany

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a sudden revelation of truth, often inspired by a seemingly simple or commonplace event.

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Episode

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A distinct action or series of actions within a plot.

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Epitaph

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an inscription on a tombstone or grave marker.

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Exposition

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the first phase or part of plot, which sets the scene, introduces and identifies characters, and establishes the situation at the beginning of the story or play.

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Fable

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an ancient type of short fiction in verse or prose, illustrating a moral or satirizing human beings. The characters in a fable are often animals that talk and act like human beings.

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Falling Action

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the fourth of the five phases or parts of plot, in which the conflict or conflicts move towards resolution.

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Fantasy

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a genre of literary work featuring strange settings and characters and often involving magic or the supernatural.

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Farce

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a literary work, especially drama, characterized by broad humour, wild antics, and often slapstick, pratfalls, or other physical humour.

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Fiction

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any narrative especially in prose about invented or imagined characters and action.

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Figurative Language

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language that uses figures of speech

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Figure of Speech

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any word or phrase that creates a "figure" in the mind of the reader by effecting an obvious change in the usual meaning or order of words, by comparing or identifying one thing with another; also called a trope.

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Focus

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the visual component of point of view, the point from which people, events, and other details in a story are viewed.

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Foil

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a character that serves as a contrast to another.

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Foot

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the basic unit of poetic meter, consisting of any of various fixed patterns of one to three stressed and unstressed syllables. A foot may contain more than one word or just one syllable of a multisyllabic word.

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Foreshadowing

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a hint or clue about what will happen at a later moment in the plot.

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Free Verse

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poetry characterized by varying line lengths, lack of traditional meter, and non-rhyming lines

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Genre

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a type or category of works sharing particular formal or textual features and conventions.

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Gothic fiction

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a sub-genre of fiction conventionally featuring plots that involve secrets, mystery, and the supernatural.

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Haiku

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a poetic form, Japanese in origin, that consists of seventeen syllables arranged in three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables respectively.

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Hero/Heroine

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a character in a literary work especially the leading male/female character who is virtuous, usually larger than life, sometimes almost godlike.

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Historical Fiction

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a sub-genre of fiction, of whatever length, in which the temporal setting, or plot time, is significantly earlier than the time in which the work was written.

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Iambic

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referring to a metrical form in which each foot consists of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one.

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Image/Imagery

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any sensory detail or evocation in a work; more narrowly, the use of figurative language to evoke a feeling, to call to mind an idea, or to describe an object.

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Inciting Incident

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an action that sets a plot in motion by creating conflict.

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Irony

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a situation or statement characterized by a significant difference between what is expected or understood and what actually happens or is meant.

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Verbal Irony

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occurs when a word or expression in context means something different from, and usually the opposite of, what it appears to mean.

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Situational Irony

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occurs when a character holds a position or has an expectation that is reversed or fulfilled in an unexpected way.

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Dramatic Irony

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occurs in a tragedy sometimes called tragic irony.

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Cosmic Irony and Irony of Fate

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used to refer to situations in which situational irony is the result of ate, chance, the gods, or some other superhuman force or entity

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Limerick

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a light or humorous poem or sub-genre of poems consisting of mainly anapestic lines of which the first, second, and fifth are of three feet; the third and fourth lines are of two feet; and the rhyme shceme is AABBA

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Lyric

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originally, a poem meant to be sung to accompaniment of a lyre; now, any relatively short poem in which the speaker expresses his or her thoughts and feelings in the first person rather than recounting a narrative or portraying a dramatic situation.

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Metafiction

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a sub-genre of works that playfully draw attention to their status as fiction in order to explore the nature of fiction and the role of authors and readers.

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Metaphor

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a figure of speech in which two unlike things are compared without using like or as.

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Meter

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the more or less regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of poetry.

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Metonymy

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a figure of speech in which the name of one thing is used to refer to another associated thing.

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Monologue

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a long speech, usually in a play but also in other genres, spoken by one person and uninterrupted by the speech of anyone else, or an entire work consisting of this sort of speech

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Narration

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Broadly, the act of telling a story or recounting a narrative.

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Narrative

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a story whether fictional or true and in prose or verse, related by a narrator or narrators.

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Frame Narrative

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recounts (frames) the telling of another narrative or story.

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Narrative Poem

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a poem in which a narrator tells a story.

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Narrator

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Someone who recounts a narrative or tells a story. Though we usually use the term speaker when referring to poetry as opposed to prose fiction

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Internal Narration

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when the narrator is a character within the work telling the story to an equally fictional auditor or listener

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First Person Narrator

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an internal narrator who usually referst to themself using the first person pronuns

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Second person Narrator

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consistently uses the second-person pronoun you (uncommon technique)

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Third Person Narrator

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External narrators, omniscient (all knwoing).

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Non-Fiction

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a work or genre of prose that describe actual events and characters.

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Novel

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a long work of fiction

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Novella

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a work of prose fiction that falls between a short story and a novel in terms of length

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Octameter

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a line of poetry with eight feet

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Octave

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eight lines of verse linked by a pattern of end rhymes, especially the first eight lines of an Italian, or Petrarchan sonnet.

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Ode

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a lyric poem characterized by a serous topic and formal tone but without prescribed formal pattern in which the speaker talks about, and often to, an especially revered person or thing.

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Onomatopeia

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a word capturing or approximating the sound of what it describes (example: buzz)

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Oxymoron

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a figure of speech that combines two apparently contradictory elements (example: wise fool)

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Parable

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a short work of fiction that illustrates an explicit moral but that, unlike a fable, lacks fantastic or anthropomorphic characters.

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Parody

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any work that imitates or spoofs another work or genre for comic effect by exaggerating the style and changing the content of the original

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Pentameter

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a line of poetry with five feet

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Persona

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the voice or figure of the author who tells and structures the work and who may or may not share the values of the actual author

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Personification

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a figure of speech that involves treating something nonhuman, such as an abstraction, as if it were a person by endowing it with humanlike qualities

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Plot

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the arrangement of the action. The five main parts or phases of plot are: exposition, rising action, climax or turning point, falling action, and conclusion or resolution

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Plot Summary

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a brief recounting of the principal action of a work of fiction, drama or narrative poetry, usually in the same order in which the action is recounted in the original work rather than in chronological order.

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Poetry

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one of the three major genres of imaginative literature, which has its origins in music and oral performance and is characterized by controlled patterns of rhythm and syntax.

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Point of View

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the perspective from which people, events, and other details in a work of fiction are viewed

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Prose

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the regular form of spoken and written language, measured in sentences rather than lines, as in poetry.

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Protagonist

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the most neutral and broadly applicable term for the main character in a work, whether male/female, heroic/not-heroic

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Quatrain

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a four line unit of verse, whether an entire poem, a stanza, or a group of four lines linked by a pattern of rhyme.

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Rhyme

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repetition or correspondence of the terminal sounds of words

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Rhyme Scheme

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the pattern of end rhymes in a poem, often noted by small letters (example: ABAB or ABBA)

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Rhythm

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The modulation of stressed and unstressed elements in the flow of speech.

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Rising Action

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the second out of the five phases or parts of plot, in which events complicate the situation that existed at the beginning of a work, intensifying the initial conflict or introducing a new one.

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Setting

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the time and place of the action in a work of fiction, poetry or drama.

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Short Story

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a relatively short work of prose fiction.

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Simile

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a figure of speech involving a direct explicit comparison of one thing to another using like or as.

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Situation

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the basic circumstances depicted in a literary work.

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Soliloquy

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a monologue in which a character in a play is alone onstage and thinking out loud.

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Sonnet

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a fixed verse form consisting of fourteen lines usually in iambic pentameter.

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Speaker

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The person who is the voice of the poem or anyone who speaks the dialogue in a work of ficition, ppetry or drama

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Spondee

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a metrical foot consisting of a pair of stressed syllables.

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Symbol

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a person, place, thing, or event that figuratively represents or stand for something else.

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Symbolic Poem

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a poem in which the use of symbols is so persuasive and internally consistent that the reference to the outside world being symbolized comes secondary.

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Synecdoche

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a type of metonymy in which the part is used to name or stand in for the whole, as when we refer to manual labourers as hands or say wheels to mean a car.

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Syntax

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word order; the way words are put together to form phrases, clauses, and sentences.

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Tetrameter

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a line of poetry with four feet

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Theme

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a topic explored in a literary work.

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Thesis

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The central debatable claim articulated, supported, and developed in an essay or other work of expository prose.

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Tone

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the attitude a literary work takes toward its subject, especially the way this attitude is revealed through diction

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Tragedy

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a work, especially of drama, in which a character is brought to a disastrous end in his or her confrontation with a superior force, but also comes to understand the meaning of his or her deeds and to accept an appropriate punishment.

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Trimeter

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a line of poetry with three feet

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Trochaic

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referring to a metrical form in which the basic foot is a trochee-- a metrical foot consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one

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Villain

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a character who not only opposes the hero or heroine, but also is characterized as an epsecially evil person or 'bad guy"

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Voice

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the verbal aspect of point of view, the acknowledged or unacknowledged source of a story's words