English Unit 1 Key Terms Flashcards
Folk Tales
An Antonymous traditional story passed down orally long before being written down. Folktales include animal stories, trickster stories, fairy tales, myths, legends, and tall tales
Origin Myths
Explain how natural phenomena such as the stars, moon, and mountains, came to be or why a society has certain beliefs and customs
Creation Myths
Tell how the world and human beings came to exist
Oral Tradition
Literature that passes by word of mouth from one generation to the next. Oral literature was a way of recording the past, glorifying leaders, and teaching morals and traditions to young people
Archetype
A symbol, story pattern, of character type that is found in the literature of many cultures
Totem
Native American cultures, each family group, or clan, believed it descended from a particular animal or other natural object, called the totem
Explorer Narratives
first hand accounts of what the explorers wrote about where they settled, the people they encountered, and the new land they found
Plain Style
A style of writing common among the Puritan settlers that focused on communicating ideas as clearly as possible. Thus marked a change from the ornate style used by the European writers of that time. Colonial writers such as William Bradford thought of writing as a practical tool for spiritual, self examination, religious instructions, not as an opportunity to demonstrate cleverness.
Historical Narrative
In a historical narrative, you tell about a historical event, blending facts with imagined characters and situations. When you write a historical narrative, you combine fiction with nonfiction. Like nonfiction, a historical narrative describes people who actually lived and events that actually happened. However, a historical narrative also includes fictional people and details imagined by the writer. A historical narrative should have the following characteristics:• accurate historic events and details of actual places • one person’s point of view • some characters and circumstances invented by the writer • chronological organization
Slave Narrative
The slave narrative is a literary form that grew out of the written accounts of enslaved Africans in Britain and its colonies, including the later United States, Canada and Caribbean
Autobiography
The story of a person’s life written by that person. They can give insights into the author’s view of himself or herself and of the society in which he or she lived
Captivity Narrative
Captivity Narratives are stories of people captured by enemies whom they generally consider “uncivilized”. Traditionally, historians have made limited use of certain captivity narratives. They have regarded the genre with suspicion because of its ideological underpinnings.
Allusion
A reference to a well-known character, place, or situation form history or from music, art or another work or literature.
Metaphor
A figure of speech that compares or equates two seemingly unlike things. It contrast to a simile, a metaphor implies the comparison instead of stating it directly, hence there is no use of connectives such as like or as
Syntax
The arrangement of words or phrases to create well-formed sentences in a language
