Fiction Vocab Test Flashcards
Allusion
A brief, often implicit and indirect reference within a literary text to something outside the text, whether another text (e.g. The Bible, a myth, another literary work, painting, or a piece of music) or any imaginary or historical person, place, or thing.
Ambiguity
When we are involved in interpretation—figuring out what different elements in a story “mean”—we are responding to a work’s ambiguity.
Antagonist
A character or a nonhuman force that opposes, or is in conflict with, the protagonist.
Antihero
A protagonist who is in one way or another the very opposite of a traditional hero. Instead of being courageous and determined, for instance, an antihero might be timid, hypersensitive, and indecisive to the point of paralysis.
Archetype
A character, ritual, symbol, or plot pattern that recurs in the myth and literature of many cultures; examples include the scapegoat or trickster (character type), the rite of passage (ritual), and the quest or descent into the underworld (plot pattern).
Characterization
The presentation or delineation of a fictional personage. Direct characterization or direct definition occurs when the narrator explicitly tells what a character is like.
Climax
The third part of plot (see Freytag’s pyramid), the point at which the action stops rising and begins falling or reversing; also called turning point.
Complication
In plot, an action or event that introduces a new conflict or intensifies the existing one, especially during the rising action phase of plot.
Conflict
A struggle between opposing forces that sets the action in motion.
Dénouement (French for “untying as of a knot)
A plot-related term used in three ways: (1) as a synonym for falling action, (2) as a synonym for conclusion or resolution, and (3) as the label for a phase following the conclusion in which any loose ends are tied up. See Freytag’s pyramid.
Epiphany
A sudden moment of illumination or revelation of truth, often inspired by a seemingly simple or commonplace event.
Exposition
The first phase or part of plot (see Freytag’s pyramid), which sets the scene, introduces and identifies characters, while establishing the situation at the beginning of a story. Additional information is often scattered throughout the work.
Flashback
A plot-structuring device inserting a scene from the fictional past into the fictional present.
Foreshadowing
A hint or clue about what will happen at a later moment in the plot.
Hero/Heroine
A character in a literary work, especially the leading male/female character, who is especially virtuous, usually larger than life, sometimes almost godlike.
An medias res (Latin for in the midst of things”)
Opening of the plot in the middle of the action, and then filling in past details by means of flashback.
Image/Imagery
Broadly defined, imagery is any sensory detail or evocation in a work; more narrowly, the use of figurative language to evoke a feeling, to call to mind an idea, or to describe an object.
Irony
A situation or statement characterized by a significant difference between what is expected and what actually happens, or between what is understood and what is meant.
Metaphor
A general term for almost any figure of speech involving comparison; more commonly, a particular figure of speech in which two unlike things are compared implicitly—that is, without the use of a signal such as the word like or as—as in “Love is a rose, but you better not pick it”.
Narrator
Someone who recounts a narrative or tells a story.
Plot
The arrangement of the action. The five main parts or phases of plot are exposition, rising action, climax or turning point, falling action, and conclusion or resolution.
Protagonist
The main character in a work, whether male or female, heroic or non-heroic.
Rising action
The second of the five phases or parts of plot (see Freytag’s pyramid), in which events complicate the situation existing at the beginning of a work by intensifying the initial conflict or introducing a new one.
Setting
The time and place of the action in a work of fiction.
