English 11 Quarterly 1 Terms

  1. Antagonism/antagonist—enemy of protagonist (“bad guy”)
  2. Protagonism/protagonist—the main character (often, the “good guy”)
  3. Hyperbole—an elaborate exaggeration
  4. Satire—Writing that uses humor to expose and ridicule human vice and folly
  5. Kenning –A two-word renaming of a noun
  6. Epithet—A three (or more)-word renaming of a noun
  7. Heroic Code (of warriors)—Warriors fight for their own glory and to protect their lord, to preserve their religion, and defend the liberties of their people. They are to exhibit strength, courage, and loyalty at all times and often boast of their successes.
  8. Oral Tradition—A body of songs, stories, and poems preserved from generation to generation orally
  9. Boast(ing)—To brag of one’s successes
  10. Lament(ing)—To express grief
  11. Alliteration—The repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words
  12. Folk Epic—An epic composed orally and passed down from storyteller to storyteller
  13. Exemplum—A tale that teaches a moral and is usually part of a sermon
  14. Chivalric Romance—A tale of adventure that includes knights, kings, or distressed ladies; the characters are motivated by love, faith, and adventure
  15. Epic Poem-- a long narrative poem, sometimes developed orally, that celebrates the deeds of a legendary and heroic figure
  16. Mock Heroic Style—A style of writing in which epic language is applied to ordinary characters and trivial events in order to create amusing (and ridiculous) contrasts.
  17. Sermon—A speech offering religious or moral instruction
  18. (Beast) Fable—A brief tale that points out a moral truth using animals as characters
  19. Parable—A short, simple story from which a moral or religious lesson can be drawn
  20. Irony—A contradiction between what is expected and what really happens in a narrative
  21. Melodrama—A work, usually a play, based on a romantic plot and includes exaggerated emotion and action
  22. Allusion--A casual reference in literature to a person, place, event, or another passage of literature, often without explicit identification. Allusions can originate in mythology, biblical references, historical events, legends, geography, or earlier literary works.
  23. Apostrophe--the act of addressing some abstraction or personification that is not physically present (“Oh, Death, be not proud…”)
  24. Personification—Giving something that isn’t human, human characteristics.
  1. Consonance--A special type of alliteration in which the repeated pattern of consonants is marked by changes in the intervening vowels--i.e., the final consonants of the stressed syllables match each other but the vowels differ. (rider, reader, raider, and ruder)
  2. Metaphor—An implied comparison between two dissimilar things
  3. Simile—A comparison between two dissimilar things using like or as