A-B Lit Terms

Question 1

the last of the four steps of characterization in a performed play.

Answer 1

Acting

Question 2

an imagined event or series of events; an event may be verbal as well as physical, so that saying something or telling a story within the story may be an event.

Answer 2

action

Question 3

as in metaphor, one thing (usually nonrational, abstract, religious) is implicitly spoken of in terms of something concrete, but in an allegory the comparison is extended to include an entire work or large portion of a work.

Answer 3

allegory

Question 4

the repetition of initial consonant sounds through a sequence of words— for example, “While I nodded, nearly napping” in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.”

Answer 4

Alliteration

Question 5

a reference—whether explicit or implicit, to history, the Bible, myth, literature, painting, music, and so on—that suggests the meaning or generalized implication of details in the story, poem, or play.

Answer 5

allusion

Question 6

the use of a word or expression to mean more than one thing.

Answer 6

ambiguity

Question 7

the design of classical Greek theaters, consisting of a stage area surrounded by a semicircle of tiered seats.

Answer 7

amphitheater

Question 8

a comparison based on certain resemblances between things that are otherwise unlike.

Answer 8

analogy

Question 9

a neutral term for a character who opposes the leading male or female character. See hero/heroine and protagonist.

Answer 9

antagonist

Question 10

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

Answer 10

anapestic

Question 11

a leading character who is not, like a hero, perfect or even outstanding, but is rather ordinary and representative of the more or less average person.

Answer 11

antihero

Question 12

a plot or character element that recurs in cultural or cross-cultural myths, such as “the quest” or “descent into the underworld” or “scapegoat.”

Answer 12

archetype

Question 13

a stage design in which the audience is seated all the way around the acting area; actors make their entrances and exits through the auditorium.

Answer 13

arena stage

Question 14

the repetition of vowel sounds in a sequence of words with different endings— for example, “The death of the poet was kept from his poems” in W. H. Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.”

Answer 14

assonance

Question 15

a morning song in which the coming of dawn is either celebrated or denounced as a nuisance.

Answer 15

aubade

Question 16

someone other than the reader—a character within the fiction—to whom the story or “speech” is addressed.

Answer 16

auditor

Question 17

distinct from plot time and reader time, authorial time denotes the influence that the time in which the author was writing had upon the conception and style of the text.

Answer 17

authorial time

Question 18

a narrative poem that is, or originally was, meant to be sung. Characterized by repetition and often by a repeated refrain (recurrent phrase or series of phrases), ballads were originally a folk creation, transmitted orally from person to person and age to age.

Answer 18

ballad

Question 19

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

Answer 19

ballad stanza

Question 20

the verse form most like everyday human speech; blank verse consists of unrhymed lines in iambic pentameter. Many of Shakespeare’s plays are in blank verse.

Answer 20

blank verse