Ms. Martinson AP English Literature

Add – Zuegma, Conceit, parallelism, catharsis, lyric poetry, narrative, metaphysical

Ms. Martinson AP English Literature

TERM
Aestheticism / The movement developed in Europe in the late 19th century, encouraging the separation of morality from artistic value.
Alliteration / The repetition of initial consonant sounds
Allegory / A form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative, are equated with the meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. The underlying meaning has moral, social, religious, or political significance
Allusion / A reference to history, mythology, literature or popular culture
Ambiguity / A statement whose meaning is intentionally left unclear or that has multiple meanings
Analogy / Comparison of two things for clarification or explanation
Anapest / A three beat poetic foot that ends with the accented syllable
Anaphora / The repetition of the same word or phrase at the beginning of successive phrases or sentences
Antagonist / The force against which the protagonist struggles in a world of literature
Antecedent / the word, phrase, or clause referred to by a pronoun
Antithesis / the placing of a sentence or one of its parts against another to which it is opposed to form a balanced contrast of ideas
Apostrophe / a figure of speech that directly addresses an absent or imaginary person or a personified
abstraction, such as liberty or love
Archetype / the original pattern or modelfrom which all things of thesame kind are copied or on which they are based; a model or first form
Aside / A part of an actor's lines supposedly not heard by others on the stage and intended only for the audience.
Assonance / The repetition of vowel sounds in a line of poetry
Atmosphere / the emotional mood created by the entirety of a literary work, established partly by the setting and partly by the author's choice of objects that are described
Ballad / simple narrative poem of folk origin, composed in short stanzas and adapted for singing – identified by alternating iambic tetrameter and trimester and ABCB rhyme
Beat Poets / A group of writers interested in changing consciousness and defying conventional writing.
Blank Verse / Unrhymed iambic pentameter
Black Humor / a form of humor that regardshuman suffering as absurd rather than pitiable, or that considers human existence as ironicand pointless but somehow comic
Cacophony / the use of unharmonious or dissonant speech sounds in language
Caesura / a break, especially a sense pause, usually near themiddle of a verse, and marked in scansion by a double vertical line
Cavalier Poets / cavaliers together is their use of direct and colloquial language expressive of a highly individual personality, and their enjoyment of the casual, the amateur, the affectionate poem
Characterization / The methods used by authors to develop character traits
Chiaroscuro / The arrangement of light and dark elements in a work of art
Cliché / A trite or overused expression
Chinese Box Narrative / refers to a novel or drama that is told in the form of a narrative inside a narrative (and so on), giving views from different perspectives
Colloquial / a word or phrase appropriate to conversation and other informal situations
Comedy of Manners / a comedy satirizing themanners and customs of a social class, especially one dealing with the amorous intrigues of fashionable society
Comedy of Ideas / Dramaticgenre that combines comedy with political, philosophical, and controversial attitudes.
Compression / What often distinguishes poetry from prose – the condensed language – compressed for effect
Conceit / a fanciful expression, usually in the form of an extended metaphor or surprising analogy between seemingly dissimilar objects
Confessional Poets / Confessional poetry is the poetry of the personal or "I." This style of writing emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s
Connotation / the nonliteral, associative meaning of a word; the implied, suggested meaning
Consonance / Repetition of internal or ending consonant sounds of words close together in poetry
Couplet / Two successive lines of poetry that rhyme
Dactyl / A three-beat poetic foot that begins with the accented syllable
Denotation / the strict, literal, dictionary definition of a word, devoid of any emotion, attitude, or color
Dialogue / the conversation between characters in a novel, drama, etc
Diction / referring to style, diction refers to the writer's word choices, especially with regard to their correctness, clearness, or effectiveness
Didactic / instructional literature in artistic form
Dumb Show / A part of a play, especially in medieval and Renaissance drama, that is enacted without speaking
Dramatic Irony / facts or events are unknown to a character but known to the reader or audience or
other characters in work
Elegy / a mournful, melancholy, or plaintive poem, especially a funeral song or a lament for thedead
End Stop / a grammatical pause at the end of a line of verse
Enjambment / The running on of thethought from one line, couplet, or stanza to the next without a syntactical break.
Epic / noting or pertaining to a long poetic composition, usually centered upon a hero, in which a series of great achievements or events is narrated in elevated style
Epiphany / a sudden, intuitive perceptionof or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something
Epigram / any witty, ingenious, or pointed saying tersely expressed
Euphemism / a more agreeable or less offensive substitute for a generally unpleasant word or concept
Euphony / pleasing and harmonious in sound
Explication / analysis or interpretation, esp. of a literary passage or work
Exposition / part of a text that sets the stage for the drama to follow: it introduces the theme, setting, characters, and circumstances
Existentialism / a modern philosophical movement stressing the importance of personal experience and responsibility and the demands that they make on the individual
Extrametrical / Additional poetic syllables at the start or end of a poetic line
Farce / a light, humorous play in which theplot depends upon a skillfully exploited situation rather than upon the development of character
Figurative Language / writing or speech that is not intended to carry literal meaning and is usually meant to
be imaginative and vivid
Flashback / A device in thenarrative of a motion picture, novel, etc., by which an event or scene taking place before the present timein the narrative is inserted into the chronological structure of the work.
Foil / A character that is presented as a contrast to a second character so as to point to or show to advantage some aspect of the second character.
Foot / A single unit of poetic verse consisting of one stressed and on or two unstressed syllables
Frame Narration / Story within a story
Free Verse / Poetry that lacks organized rhyme and rhythm
Genre / A general category under which pieces of literature may be grouped
Gothic / Gothic fiction (sometimes referred to as Gothic horror) is a genre of literature that combines elements of both horror and romance.
Hamartia / Tragic flaw
Hubris / The sin of extreme pride
Hyperbole / a figure of speech using deliberate exaggeration or overstatement
Iamb (iambic) / A poetic foot consisting of on unaccented and one accented syllable
Imagery / the sensory details or figurative language used to describe, arouse emotion, or represent
abstractions
Inciting Event / In a drama, this begins the action and also sets up the main question (Motivating Question) that the audience wants the play to answer
Inference / to draw a reasonable conclusion from the information presented
Interior Monologue / A narrative form capturing the unorganized ideas within the mind of a character
Intertextuality / the whole network of relations, conventions, and expectations by which the text is defined; the relationship between texts
Irony / An unexpected twist – irony may be situational, verbal or dramatic
Juxtaposition / an actor instance of placing close together or side by side, especially for comparison or contrast
Litotes / A figure of speech consisting of an understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by negating its opposite
Low Comedy / Comedy that appeals to the lowest elements – pratfalls, bodily noises, etc.
Metaphor / a figure of speech using implied comparison of seemingly unlike things or the substitution of one for the other, suggesting some similarity
Meter / Organized Rhythm in poetry (dimeter, trimester, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter, heptameter, octameter)
Metrical Split / When a line of poetry (or a play in Shakespeare’s case) is split between two speakers
Metonymy / from the Greek "changed label", the name of one object is substituted for that of another
closely associated with it (e.g. "the White House" for the President)
Mood / the prevailing atmosphere or emotional aura of a word
Motif / A recurring subject, theme, idea, etc., especially in a literary, artistic, or musical work.
Octave / An 8-lined stanza
Ode / A formal, stanzaic poem written in honor or tribute
Onomatopoeia / natural sounds are imitated in the sounds of words
Oxymoron / author groups apparently contradictory terms to suggest
a paradox
Paradox / a statement that appears to be self-contradictory or opposed to common sense but upon closer inspection contains some degree of truth or validity
Parallelism / the grammatical or rhetorical framing of words, phrases, sentences, or paragraphs to give structural similarity
Parody / a work that closely imitates the style or content of another with the specific aim of comic effect and/or ridicule
Pastoral / refers to a literary work dealing with shepherds and rustic life
Persona / the narrator of or a character in a literary work, sometimes identified with theauthor
Personification / a figure of speech in which the author presents or describes concepts, animals, or
inanimate objects by endowing them with human attributes or emotions
Point of View / the perspective from which a story is told
Prose / Non-poetic writing
Prosody / the scienceor study of poetic meters and versification
Protagonist / the leading character, hero, or heroine of a drama or other literary work
Pseudonym / a fictitious nameused by an author to conceal his or her identity
Pun / A clever play on words
Prose / genre including fiction, nonfiction, written in ordinary language
Rhetoric / from the Greek for "orator," the principles governing the art of writing effectively, eloquently, and persuasively
Rhyme Scheme / The pattern of repeated end rhymes
Romanticism / A movement in literature and the fine arts, beginning in the early nineteenth century, that stressed personal emotion, free play of the imagination, and freedom from rules of form
Satire / a work that targets human vices and follies or social institutions and conventions for reform or ridicule
Sestet / A 6-line stanza
Sestina / a poem of sixsix-line stanzas and a three-line envoy, originally without rhyme, in which each stanza repeats theend words of the lines of the first stanza, but in different order
Simile / A comparison using like or as
Soliloquy / A dramatic speech when a character directly addresses the audience
Sonnet / A formal poem of 14 lines with specific rhyme patterns – Shakespearean and Petrarchan
Spondee
Stream of Consciousness / thought regarded as a succession of ideas and imagesconstantly moving forward in time
Substitution / Using one poetic foot to substitute for another
Subtext / The underlying or implicit meaning, as of a literary work.
Surrealism / a style of artand literature developed principally in the20th century, stressing the subconscious or nonrational significance of imagery arrived at by automatism or the exploitation of chance effects
Synesthesia / a sensation produced in one modality when a stimulus is applied to another modality, as when thehearing of a certain sound induces the visualization of a certain color
Symbol / anything that represents or stands for something else
Syntax / the way an author chooses to join words into phrases, clauses, and sentences
Theme / the central idea or message of a work, the insight it offers into life
Thesis
Tone / similar to mood, describes the author's attitude toward his material, the audience, or both
Tragedy / A dramatic form that follows the downfall of the tragic hero by his or her own flaw
Trochee / A two syllable poetic foot starting with the accented syllable
Troubadours / Travelling poets who originated aural forms – the ballade being one
Truncation / The shortening of a line of poetry
Unreliable narrator / A subjective narration where the narrator cannot be believed
Verisimilitude / the appearance or semblance of truth; likelihood; probability
Vignette / a short graceful literary essay or sketch
Villanelle / A short poem of fixed form, written in tercets, usually five in number, followed by a final quatrain, all being based on two rhymes.
Wit / intellectually amusing language that surprises and delights