1) Act: Major Division of Action in a Play

Literary Terms

Drama

1) act: major division of action in a play

2) antagonist: character or force that acts against the protagonist

3) aside: speech directed to the audience, supposedly not audible to others

4) catastrophe: the denouement of a play, especially a classic tragedy

5) catharsis: release of the emotions of pity and fear at the end of a tragedy

6) character:

• dynamic: undergoes a change because of the action of the plot
• flat: embodies one or two ideas, qualities, or traits; not complex
• round: more fully developed; often display inconsistencies
• static: does not change or grow throughout the work
• stock: embody stereotypes ("dumb blond," "mean step-mother")

7) climax: high point in the action

8) comedy: intended to interest and amuse than reader

• high comedy: verbal wit, puns
• low: physical action
• romantic: love affair with obstacles that are overcome

9) comic relief: humorous scene or incident that alleviates tension

10) conflict: struggle between opposing forces

11) crisis: turning pointin the action that has a powerful affect on the protagonist

12) denouement: resolution; literally "unknotting"

13) deus ex machina: "God from a machine"; artificial or improbable character

14) epilogue: short poem or speech spoken directly to the audience following the conclusion

15) exposition: explains necessary background information; introduction

16) failing action: action between the climax and denouement

17) farce: form of humor based on exaggerated, improbable incongruities

18) foil: character whose behavior and values contrast with those of another character in order to highlight the distinctive temperament of that character (usually protagonist)

19) Freitag’s Pyramid: plot triangle (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement)

20) hamartia: coined by Aristotle, a term to describe some error or frailty that brings about misfortune for the tragic hero; close to tragic flaw

21) hero: principle character, usually endowed with great courage and strength

22) hubris: excessive pride or self-confidence (common form of hamartia)

23) monologue: extended speech given by one person

24) prologue: opening speech or dialogue

25) protagonist: main character in a narrative

26) rising action: between exposition and climax

27) scene: subdivision of an act

28) soliloquy: a character alone on stage utters his thoughts out loud

29) tragedy: recount the downfall of an individual

30) tragic flaw: error or defect that leads to a character's downfall

31) villain: wicked or evil person

Elements of Style

1) anaphora: repetition of beginnings of sentences

2) atmosphere: environment / surroundings; tone or mood in a work

3) colloquial: type of informal diction that reflects casual, conversational language; slang

4) connotation: associations and implications that go beyond the literal meaning of a word

5) denotation: dictionary meaning of a word

6) dialect: type of informational diction; spoken by definable groups

7) dialogue: verbal exchange

8) diction: writer's choice of words, phrases, sentence structures, and figurative

language, which combine to help create meaning

9) epigram: brief, pointed, and witty poem that usually makes a satiric or humorous point

10) invective: abusive language or expression

11) inversion: change in normal word order (i.e. verb before subject)

12) irony: literary devices that uses contradictory statements or situations to reveal a reality different from what appears to be true

dramatic: discrepancy between what the character and the reader know

situational: incongruity between what is expected to happen and what does

verbal: when a person says one thing and means another

13) mood: pervading feeling or impression for the reader

14) paradox: initially appears to be contradictory, but eventually makes sense

15) parenthesis: pausing in a sentence, usually seen by the use of actual parenthesis or dashes

16) proverb: short, pithy saying in widespread use that expresses a truth or fact

17) pun: play on words that involves the word having more than one meaning

18) rhetorical question: a question that does not need answered

19) sarcasm: a sharply mocking or contemptuously ironic remark intended to wound another

20) satire: art of ridiculing a folly or vice in order to expose or correct it

21) slang: nonstandard vocabulary

22) tone: author's implicit attitude toward the reader or things in the work

23) voice: tone, style and personality of a work

Fiction

1) anecdote: short account of an interesting or humorous incident

2) anticlimax: a decline viewed in disappointing contrast with a previous rise

3) character: person presented in a work

4) flashback: break in the narrative that give information that took place prior to the beginning of the work

5) incident: definite and separate occurrenceor event

6) motivation: reason for one's actions

7) narrative voice: tone, style and personality of a narrator

8) point of view: who tells the story and how it is told

• first person: uses "I" and is a participant in the story
• objective: third person narrator who does not see into the minds of characters omniscient: all-knowing
• limited: author restricts the narrator to a single perspective of a major or minor character
• third person: uses he, she, they and is not a participant
• unlimited: author does not restrict the narrator to a single perspective of a major or minor character

9) stream-of-consciousness: flow of thought inside the character

10) subplot: secondary action of a story, complete in its own right

11) theme: central meaning or dominant idea in a literary work

Figures of Speech

1) allusion: brief reference to a person, place, thing, event, or idea in history or literature

2) apostrophe: an address, either to someone who is absent and therefore cannot hear thespeaker or to something nonhuman that cannot comprehend (opportunity to think aloud)

3) euphemism: act or substituting an inoffensive term for one considered offensive

4) hyperbole: boldly exaggerated statement that is not necessarily true

5) litotes: figure of speech in which an affirmative is expressed by the negation of its opposite (i.e. "no small problem," "not uncommon")

6) metaphor: direct comparison

• extended: sustained comparison
• controlling: runs through an entire work
• metonymy: something closely associated with the subject is substituted for it ("the crown" = king, queen)

7) onomatopoeia: sounds like the word it represents

8) personification: human characteristics attributed to non-living things

9) simile: comparison using "like" or “as”

10) symbol: noun that evokes a range of additional meanings beyond the literal

11) synecdoche: metaphor where part signifies the whole ("gossip" = "wagging tongue")

12) understatement: opposite of hyperbole; says less than intended

Form

1) allegory: narration usually restricted to a single meaning because its events, actions, characters, settings, and objects represent specific abstractions or ideas

2) anecdote: short account of an interesting or humorous incident

3) diary: personal entries

4) discourse

• argumentation
• description
• exposition
• narration

5) epistolary: series of documents (often a diary)

6) essay:

• formal
• humorous
• informal

7) fable: fictitious story, usually about animals, meant to teach a moral lesson

8) genre: divisions of literature

9) novel: full-length work of fiction

10) novella: shorter work or fiction

11) parable: simple story illustrating a moral or religious lesson

12) prose: not verse

13) rhetorical approaches: how something is written

• chronological
• anachronistic (out of proper time in history)
• comparative persuasive
• frame story (story within a story; i.e.Frankenstein)
• cause and effect
• propaganda
• conversational
• formal
• instructive
• descriptive
• reflective expository (autobiography)
• interpretive
• argumentative
• metaphorical
• ethos (appeal to ethics)
• logos (appeal to logic)
• pathos (appeal to feeling)

14) verse: poetry

Poetry

1) alliteration: repetition of initial sounds

2) assonance: repetition of internal vowel sounds

3) blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter

4) cacophony: language that is discordant and difficult to pronounce; literally "bad

sound"

5) cadence: balanced, rhythmic flow of poetry

6) caesura: pause within a line of poetry that contributes to the rhythm of the line; marked as two vertical lines in analysis

7) conceit: elaborate or exaggerated metaphor; ingenious or witty thought

8) connotation- associations or implications that go beyond the literal meaning of a word

9) consonance: common type of near rhyme that consists of identical consonant soundspreceded by different vowel sounds (home, same, worth, breath)

10) controlling image: also controlling metaphor

11) couplet: two consecutive rhyming lines, usually with the same meter

• heroic couplet (epic/narrative poem in iambic pentameter, always masculine rhyme

12) didactic intent: intended to instruct or moralize

13) dirge: slow, mournful poem

14) dissonance: harsh or disagreeable combination of sounds

15) dramatic monologue: type of lyric poem in which a character addresses a distinct but silent audience imagined to be present in the poem in such a way as to reveal a dramatic situation and, often unintentionally, some aspect of his or her temperament or personality -

16) elegy: mournful, contemplative lyric poem written to commemorate the dead; also, a serious, meditative poem

17) end-stopped line: poetic line that has a pause at the end, usually marked by punctuation

18) enjambment: when one line ends without a pause and continues into the next line for its meaning; also called run-on line

19) epic: long, narrative poem, told in a formal, elevated style with a serious subject

20) euphony: language that is smooth and musically pleasant to the ear; literally "good sound"

2 1) foot: metrical unit by which a line of poetry is measured; afoot usually consists of one stressed and one or two unstressed syllables

• iambic: one unstressed, one stressed ("away")
• trochaic: one stressed, one unstressed ("lovely")
• anapestic: two unstressed, one stressed ("understand")
• dactylic: one stressed, two unstressed ("desperate")

22) free verse: eliminates patterns

23) iamb: one unstressed, one stressed syllable

24) image: sensory words or phrases that paint a picture in the mind

25) in media res: beginning in the middle of the action

26) lyric: brief poem that expresses the personal emotions and thoughts of a single speaker; first person

27) measure: specified unit, such as a foot or a line

28) meter: rhythmic pattern of stresses

29) octave: eight-line stanza; first eight lines of a sonnet

30) ode: lengthy lyric poem that often expresses lofty emotions in a dignified style

3 1) pentameter: metrical line containing five feet

32) persona: speaker created by the writer to tell a story or speak in a poem; literally "a mask"

33) phonetic intensive: sound to some degree suggests meaning

34) quatrain: four-line stanza

35) refrain: repeated word, line, phrase

36) repetition: process of repeating

37) rhyme: repetition of identical or similar concluding syllables in different words, usually at the end of a line

• end: at end
• external
• feminine: a rhymed stressed syllable followed by one or more identical unstressed syllables (butter, clutter; gratitude, attitude; quivering, shivering)
• internal: places at least one of the rhymed words within the line ("Dividing and gliding and sliding")
• masculine: rhyming of single-syllable words (grade, shade); also in rhymingwords of more than one syllable when the same sound occurs in the final stressed syllable (defend, contend)
• near rime/ slant rime: some sound correspondence, but not perfect rime (push, rush)

38) scansion: process of measuring the stresses in a line of verse in order to determine the metrical pattern of the line

39) sestet: stanza consisting of six lines

40) sestina: 6 6 line stanzas and a three line envoi (dedication or summary)

41) sonnet: fixed form of lyric poetry that consists of fourteen lines, usually written in

• iambic pentameter

• Italian / Petrarchan: divided into an octave, typically abbaabba, and a sestet (possibly cdecde, cdcdcd, cdccdc); usually octave presents a situation and the sestet comments or resolves
• English / Shakespearean: divided into three quatrains and a couplet, typically abab cdcd efef gg

42) spondee: 2 syllables equally accented (true blue)

43) stanza: grouping of lines set off by a space

44) stress: accent of a given syllable

45) synesthesia: description of one kind of sense impression that normally describes another (hear a sound, visualize a color)

46) trochee: metrical foot consisting of one accented syllable followed by one unaccented ("barter")

47)villanelle: 19 line poem; 5 tercets, final quatrain on two rhymes, with the first and third lines of the first tercets repeated alternately as a refrain closing the succeeding stanzas and joining the first couplet of the quatrain

48) volta: turn in the argument or mood of a sonnet; 9th line in Italian, couplet in English

Syntax

1) antithesis: juxtaposition of sharply contrasting ideas in balanced or parallel words, phrases, or grammatical structures

2) balanced sentence

3) coherence: orderly or logical

4) complex sentence: one main clause and one or more subordinate clauses

5) compound-complex: at least two main clauses and one or more subordinate clause

6) ellipsis: omission of word or phrase

7) inverted sentence: sentence in which the si4bject follows the verb

8) loose sentence

Misc.

1) archetype: characters, images, and themes that symbolically embody universal meanings and basic human experiences, regardless of when or where they live (quests, initiations, decents to hell, assents to heaven)

2) bildungsroman: follows the development of the hero from childhood through a quest for identity

2) canon: those works generally considered to be the most important to read and study

3) doggerel: derogatory terms used to describe poetry whose subject is trite and whoserhythm is monotonous

4) doppelganger: fictional ghostly double of a living person in sinister form

5) problem play: type of drama that presents a social issue in order to awaken the audience to it

6) valediction: expression used to say good-bye, usually at the end of the letter

8) verisimilitude: appearance of being true or real