English Lit Terms

Question 1

Allegory

Answer 1

A story that can be interpreted on the literal and figurative level

Question 2

Allusion

Answer 2

A reference either explicit or implicit to something outside of the story

Question 3

Catharsis

Answer 3

A audiences sense of the release pent up emotions through vicariously experiencing character emotions

Question 4

Drama

Answer 4

Verse or prose composition intended to portray life or character or tell a story usually involving conflicts and emotions through actio and dialogue

Question 5

Genre

Answer 5

A distinctive type of literary composition

Question 6

Literal language

Answer 6

Words being used in their primary or dictionary definitions

Question 7

Mood

Answer 7

Feeling or vibe that the reader is made to deal while reading the story

Question 8

Motif

Answer 8

A recurring object concept or theme in a story

Question 9

Oxymoron

Answer 9

Words that contradict each other

Question 10

Pathetic fallacy

Answer 10

Attributing human emotions or responses to nature inanimate objects or animals

Question 11

Personification

Answer 11

Giving inanimate objects living qualities

Question 12

Symbol

Answer 12

Any idea object being thing action that represents another idea

Question 13

Syntax

Answer 13

The grammatical order of words in a sentence of verse or dialogue

Question 14

Tone

Answer 14

A literary element of composition that encompasses the attitudes toward the subject and toward the audience implied in a literary work

Question 15

Archetype

Answer 15

A basic model from which copies are made with characters in fiction

Question 16

Frame narrative

Answer 16

A story within a story several layers of a story can be embedded within any novel

Question 17

Apostrophe

Answer 17

A figure of speech in which some absent or nonexistent person or thing is addressed as if present and capable of understanding

Question 18

Assonance

Answer 18

The repetition of similar vowel sounds in a sentence or a line of poetry or prose

Question 19

Couplet

Answer 19

A pair of rhymed lines that may or may not constitute a separate stanza in a poem

Question 20

Denotation

Answer 20

The dictionary meaning of a word

Question 21

Elegy

Answer 21

A poem that laments the dead

Question 22

Enjambment

Answer 22

A run on line of poetry in which logical and grammatical sense Carrie’s over from one line into the next

Question 23

Epic

Answer 23

A long narrative poem that records the adventures of a hero

Question 24

Foot

Answer 24

A metrical unit composed of stressed and unstressed syllables

Question 25

Free verse

Answer 25

A poetry without regular pattern or meter or rhyme

Question 26

Lamb

Answer 26

An unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one

Question 27

Iambic pentameter

Answer 27

A line of poetry of five feet each composed of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed one