MCAS Study Guide
Literary Terms Review
Allegory / A story illustrating an idea or a moral principle in which objects take on symbolic meanings. / In Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, Dante, symbolizing mankind, is taken by the poet Virgil on a journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise in order to teach him the nature of sin, its punishments, and the way to salvation.
Alliteration / Repetition of initial consonant sounds /
- sweetly satisfying sound
- Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon poetry used this literary device to help scops (poem reciters) remember their lines.
Allusion / Reference to a well-known person, myth, historical event, biblical story, etc. /
- Beowulf references the story of Cain and Abel from the Old Testament.
- In Hamlet, Shakespeare references the story of Pyrrhus and Priam from Virgil’s epic poem the Aeneid.
Anaphora / The repetition of words or phrases at the beginning of consecutive lines or sentences / MLK’s repetition of ‘I have a dream…’ at the start of successive sentences in his famous speech.
Anecdote / A very short tale told by a character in a literary work. / In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, "The Miller's Tale" and "The Carpenter's Tale" are examples.
Antagonist / A person or force which opposes the protagonist in a literary work. / In Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, Assef is the antagonist of Amir. In Hamlet, Claudius opposes Hamlet.
Antecedent / The word or phrase to which a pronoun refers. It often precedes a pronoun in prose or in poetry. / “Oh that this too, too solid flesh would melt, / Thaw and resolve itself into a dew.” Flesh is the antecedent; itself is the pronoun that refers to it.
Anticlimax / An often disappointing, sudden end to an intense situation. / An excellent example of anticlimax in film is when Dorothy wakes up at the end of The Wizard of Oz to discover it was all just a dream.
Antihero / A protagonist who carries the action of the literary piece but does not embody the classic characteristics of courage, strength and nobility. / Holden Caulfield in The Cather in the Rye and Amir in The Kite Runner are considered to be antiheroes.
Aphorism / A brief statement which expresses an observation on life, usually intended as a wise observation. / In Hamlet, Polonius shares a series of aphorisms with Laertes before he leaves for France, including “Neither a borrower nor a lender be" and "To thine own self be true."
Apostrophe / Figure of speech in which one directly addresses an imaginary person or some abstraction. / “Frailty! Thy name is woman.”
Appositive / A noun or pronoun used to clarify or explain other nouns or pronouns already introduced. / From Beowulf: “We are Geats, / Men who follow Hieglac”
Archetype / A character, situation or symbol that is familiar to people from all cultures because it occurs frequently in literature, myth, religion or folklore. / Character: The hero - The courageous figure, the one who's always running in and saving the day. Example: Beowulf
Situation: The task - A situation in which a character or group of characters is driven to complete some duty of monstrous proportion. Example: Frodo's task to keep the ring safe in J. R. R. Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings trilogy
Symbol: The color red often represents blood, sacrifice, violent passion, disorder.
Aside / A device in which a character in a drama makes a short speech which is heard by the audience but not by other characters onstage in the play. / In Shakespeare's Hamlet, Polonius confronts Hamlet. In a dialogue concerning his daughter Ophelia, Polonius speaks this aside:
“How say you by that? Still harping on my daughter. / Yet he knew me not at first; he said I was a fishmonger. He is / far gone. And truly in my youth I suffered much extremity / for love, very near this. I'll speak to him again” (II.ii.39).
Assonance / The repetition of vowel sounds in a literary work, especially in a poem / How now brown cow.
Autobiography / The story of a person's life – usually his or her entire life -- written by himself or herself / William Colin Powell's My American Journey is an example.
Ballad / A story in poetic form, often about tragic love and usually sung. Ballads were passed down from generation to generation by singers. / Coleridge’s, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is a 19th century English ballad.
Biography / The story of a person's life written by someone other than the subject of the work. / Katherine Drinker Bowen's Yankee from Olympus, which details the life and work of the great jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., is an example.
Blank Verse / A poem written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. / Shakespeare used this technique, as seen in the following excerpt from Hamlet: “When honour’s at stake. How stand I then, / That have a father kill’d, a mother stain’d…”
Cacophony / Euphony / Cacophony is an unpleasant combination of sounds. Euphony, the opposite, is a pleasant combination of sounds. These sound effects can be used intentionally to create an effect, or they may appear unintentionally. / The following passage from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels uses cacophony to show the chaotic and destructive effects of war:
And being no stranger to the art of war, I have him a description / of cannons, culverins, muskets, carabines, pistols, bullets, powder, / swords, bayonets, battles, sieges, retreats, attacks, undermines, / countermines, bombardments, sea-fights…
The language is put together here to avoid being melodious, but instead give the reader the impression of harsh, clanking sounds that do not naturally flow together.
Caesura / A pause within a line of poetry which may or may not affect the metrical count. A caesura is sometimes indicated by the following symbol (//). / Caesuras were commonly used in Anglo Saxon poetry to give the speaker a moment to pause for breath.
Canto / A subdivision of an epic poem. / Each of the three books of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy is divided into cantos.
Carpe Diem / A Latin phrase which translated means "Seize (Catch) the day," meaning "Make the most of today." / The phrase originated as the title of a poem by the Roman Horace (65 B.C.-8 B.C.) and caught on as a theme with such English poets as Robert Herrick. Consider these lines from Herrick's "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time": Gather ye rose-buds while ye may, / Old Time is still a-flying: / And this same flower that smiles today, / To-morrow will be dying.
1
Catastrophe / The scene in a tragedy which includes the death or moral destruction of theprotagonist. / The catastrophe in Shakespearean tragedy occurs in Act 5 of each drama, and always includes the death of the protagonist. Consider the fates of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and Othello.
Catharsis / An emotional cleansing or feeling of relief as experienced by a reader or audience. / At the end of Gone With the Wind, many readers cry as they empathize with Scarlett O’Hara and her losses. They are experiencing catharsis.
Characterization / The method a writer uses to reveal the personality of a character in a literary work.
Direct: The author explicitly states the characters’ traits.
Indirect: The author reveals character (1) by what the character says about himself or herself; (2) by what others say about the character; and (3) by the character's own actions. / In Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, the reader learns that Hassan is loyal through his actions and through the words of Amir.
Chiasmus / A statement consisting of two parallel parts in which the second part is structurally reversed. /
- Susan walked in, and out rushed Mary.
- “Never let a fool kiss you--or a kiss fool you.”
- "You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.
Climax / The decisive moment in a drama. The climax is the turning point of the play to which the rising action leads. This is the crucial part of the drama, the part which determines the outcome of the conflict. / The outcome of the trial in To Kill a Mockingbird.
Comedy / A literary work which is amusing and ends happily. Modern comedies tend to be funny, while Shakespearean comedies simply end well. Shakespearean comedies also contain items such as misunderstandings and mistaken identity to heighten the comic effect. / A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Much Ado About Nothing are examples of Shakespearean comedies.
Comic Relief / Humor that provides a release of tension and breaks up a more serious series of events. / The grave-diggers provide comic relief in Act V of Hamlet.
Concrete Poetry / A poem that visually resembles something found in the physical world. /
1
Conflict / In the plot of a drama, conflict occurs when the protagonist is opposed by some person or force in the play. Examples of external conflict include human vs. nature, human vs. human and human vs. society. With internal conflict, the character’s struggle occurs within his or herself. / In Hamlet, Hamlet is in conflict with his murderous uncle Claudius. Additionally, he suffers from an internal conflict of whether or not he should obey his dead father’s wishes in seeking revenge and risk eternal damnation.Connotation / The associations a word calls to mind.
The more connotative a literary work is, the less objective its interpretation becomes. / House and home have similar dictionary definitions, but the word home connotes warmth and security, while the word house does not.
Denotation / The dictionary or literal meaning of a word or phrase. / Thin’s denotation is “not fat.” Skinny and scrawny also refer to someone or something that is not fat, but they imply or connote something more negative than the word thin does.
Denouement / The outcome or clarification at the end of a story that follows the climax and leads to the resolution. / The actions following the outcome of the trial in TKM: Tom’s death, the children coming to terms with the verdict, Bob Ewell’s attack on the children.
Diction / An author's deliberate choice of words to achieve an effect or tone. Since words have specific meanings, and since one's choice of words can affect feelings, a writer's choice of words can have great impact in a literary work. / Diction might include choice of words, phrases, sentence structures, and figurative language in a literary work. The diction of a poem can range from colloquial to formal, from literal to figurative, or from concrete to abstract.
Didactic / A didactic story, speech, essay or play is one in which the author’s primary purpose is to instruct, teach or moralize. / Many of Aesop’s fables are didactic because they end with moral lessons.
Elegy / A lyric poem lamenting death. / The Anglo-Saxon poem “The Wife’s Lament”
Epic / A long narrative poem on a great and serious subject, usually featuring legendary heroes. / Beowulf and Homer's The Iliad and The
Odyssey are all examples of epic poems.
Epigraph / A brief quotation found at the beginning of a literary work, reflective of the work’s theme.
Epiphany / A sudden flash of insight or a startling discovery and/or appearance. A dramatic realization. / Laertes experiences an epiphany at the end of Hamlet when he realizes that Claudius was in fact behind much of the treachery in Denmark.
Epistolary novel / A novel in letter form written by one or more of the characters. The novelist can use this technique to present varying first person viewpoints and does not need a narrator. / Alice Walker uses this form in The Color Purple.
Exposition / The presentation of essential information regarding what has occurred prior to the beginning of the work. / In the exposition to William Shakespeare's
Romeo and Juliet, two servants of the house of Capulet discuss the feud between their master and the house of Montague, thereby letting the audience
know that such a feud exists and that it will play an important role in influencing the plot.
Euphemism / A mild word of phrase which substitutes for another word or phrase which would be undesirable because it is too direct, unpleasant, harsh, or offensive. / Someone might say “he passed on” rather than “he died” or “correctional facility” instead of “jail.”
Fable / A brief tale designed to illustrate a moral lesson. / Aesop is one the most famous writers of fables.
Farce / A kind of comedy that depends on exaggerated or improbable situations, physical disasters, and sexual innuendo to amuse the audience. / Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and situation comedies on television are examples of farce.
Figurative language / Words used in an imaginative, non-literal sense. Uses figures of speech such as metaphor, simile, personification, and hyperbole. / When Robert Burns writes, “My love is a red, red rose,” he does not really mean that he has fallen in love with a red, aromatic, many-petalled, long, thorny-stemmed plant. He means that his love is as sweet and as delicate as a rose.
Flashback / A literary device that serves as an interruption in the action to show a scene that took place earlier. / Much of Hosseini’s The Kite Runner is told through flashback.
Flat character / A simple one-dimensional character who remains the same, and about whom little or nothing is revealed throughout the course of the work. Flat characters may serve as symbols of types of people, similar to stereotypical characters. / Assef ‘s character shows no development in The Kite Runner—he is an amoral character from beginning to end.
Foil / A character in a play who sets off the main character or other characters by
comparison / Fortinbras and Laertes – in their ability to act decisively – are foils to Hamlet – who is unable to act.
Foreshadowing / A hint of things to come / Gray clouds at the beginning of a story may foreshadow a storm that occurs later.
Genre / The category into which a piece of writing can be classified—poetry, novel, memoir, short-story, drama. Each genre has its own conventions or common elements. / Shakespeare’s plays are examples of drama, as well as The Crucible by Arthur Miller. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hossieni is a novel. Night by Elie Wiesel is a memoir.
Hubris / Insolence, arrogance or pride / In Greek tragedy, the protagonist’s hubris is usually the tragic flaw that leads to his or her downfall.
Hyperbole / A wild exaggeration or an overstatement for literary effect that is not meant to be interpreted literally. / When someone says, “I haven’t slept in ages!” they do not literally mean they haven’t slept in ages. In Shakespeare's Macbeth, after Macbeth
has murdered King Duncan, he asks: “Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand? No. This my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red.” It does not require an ocean to wash blood from one's hand, nor can the blood on one's hand turn the green ocean red. The hyperbole illustrates the guilt Macbeth feels about his crimes.
Imagery / Anything that affects or appeals to any of the reader’s five senses: sight, sound, touch, taste, or smell. The use of images serves to intensify the impact of the work. / In Hamlet, Shakespeare writes “Foul deeds will rise though all the earth o'erhelm them, to men's eyes.” By connecting sins to a rotten smell (foul deeds) that is not possible to bury under the earth, Shakespeare emphasizes the theme that sin and betrayal will ultimately be revealed.
In Medias Res / In literature, a work that begins in the middle of the story. / The Odyssey and Oedipus Rex begin in medias res.
The Star Wars saga also begins in media res.
1
Inference / A judgment based on reasoning rather than on direct or explicit statement. / Often readers make inferences about characters by the actions they take. In The Kite Runner, one may infer that Baba is an honorable man by his willingness to risk his life to save a woman he doesn’t know from being raped by Russian soldiers.Inversion / A reversal of normal word order / How adorable you are!
Irony
- situational
- verbal
- dramatic
- tragic
Verbal: when a writer or speaker says one thing, but really means something completely different.
Dramatic: when the reader or audience knows something that the character does not. There is a contrast between what the character says, thinks or does and the true situation.
Tragic: dramatic irony that occurs in a tragedy / Situational: In The Crucible, honest Rebecca Nurse is executed as a witch because she refuses to lie – and confess to witchcraft – to save her own life.
Verbal: In his satire, “A Modest Proposal,” Jonathan Swift proposes to solve famine in Ireland by using the babies of the starving lower classes as a source of food.
Dramatic: In The Crucible, the people of Salem believe that Abigail Williams is innocent and almost saintly. In contrast, the audience knows that Abigail is a manipulative liar.
Tragic: Characters continually refer to Iago as “Honest Iago” throughout Othello, though the audience knows the opposite is true.
Litotes / A type of understatement in which the speaker or writer uses a negative of a word ironically, to mean the opposite /
- Describing a particularly horrific scene: “It was not a pretty picture.”
- Describing a jerk: “She’s not the friendliest person.”
Metaphor / Comparisons between two unlike things that do NOT use like or as / They were tigers on the playing field, ferociously mauling their opponents.