Glossary Flashcards
Act
A major division in a play, consisting of one or more scenes and involving a complete clearing of the stage. Often, the break between acts marks a significant shift in time or place. Traditional plays have five acts, modern ones have fewer or none (sequence of scenes instead).
Alliteration
The repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words or stressed syllables in a sequence of words.
Alternating rhyme
A rhyme scheme that follows the pattern abab, linking the first and third lines, and the second and fourth lines.
Ambiguity
The use of a word or expression in a way that makes it have two or more meanings (multiple interpretations).
Anapest
A metrical foot with two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one (˘ ˘ ′).
Anaphora
The repetition of words or phrases at the beginning of successive lines, sentences, phrases, or other sections of the text.
Antithesis
A contrast in the meanings of contiguous phrases or clauses that are parallel in their syntax (word-order and structure).
Apostrophe
A direct and explicit address to an absent person or to an abstract or non-human entity.
Aside
A character’s thoughts or intentions are addressed in a short speech directed to the audience, but is inaudible to the other characters on the stage.
Assonance
The repetition of identical or similar vowels (especially in stressed syllables) in a sequence of nearby words.
Author
An individual who uses their intellect and imagination to create a unique literary work from their experiences and knowledge. (Some literary theorists challenge this view, suggesting that the author is not the sole creator but rather a “space” where cultural norms, codes, and language come together to form a text, or a “site”, reflecting the cultural, social, and power dynamics of the time.)
Caesura
A pause / break within a line of poetry, usually resulting from the natural rhythm of the language, sometimes marked by punctuation and spacing. Usually marked with a double upright line ( ‖ ).
Camera Eye Point of View
A form of narration in which the perspective of the narrator is that of an external observer of the action being narrated, only providing information related to things that such an observer would be aber to see (no information about thoughts or feelings of characters).
Canon
The list of authors and texts considered (according to critics, scholars, and teachers) to be the most important or significant examples of a given tradition or body of literary work at a given historical moment.
Character
A figure in a literary work, understood through their moral, intellectual, or emotional qualities.
Characterization
The methods used in a text to constructed a character by providing information about that character to the reader.
Explicit: Directly stating traits.
Implicit: Revealing traits through actions or dialogue.
Chiasmus
A structure where words or phrases are mirrored in reverse order.
Character Point of View
A form of narration in which the perspective of the narrator is the same (or almost the same) as that of a character within the world of the story.
Climax
The moment in a plot in which the conflict or tension that develops in the rising action reaches its highest point. A decisive moment or turning point is reached, and then the rising actions gives way to falling action.
Comedy
A literary genre in which the materials are selected and managed primarily in order to interest and amuse. The characters and actions engage pleasurable attention rather than concern, and usually the action turns out happily for the chief characters.
Comment
A mode of literary presentation in which the narrator, character, or speaker offers their own thoughts, opinions, or other commentary on the text or a specific aspect of that text.
Conceit
An extended metaphor, often based around a surprising comparison of two very different things, that dominates an entire passage or even an entire poetic text and consists of a series of interconnected similes and / or metaphoric images.
Consonance
The repetition of consonant sounds in a sequence of words. Unlike alliteration, the term consonance is not restricted to the beginning of words or to stressed syllables.
Convention
Recognised and recurring elements that occur repeatedly in works of literature and identifies a given work of literature as belonging to a given form, genre, period, or tradition.
Couplet
Two poetic lines that work together as a unit, usually linked through shared meter and often through end rhyme. They sometimes appear as individual stanzas, but often long series of couplets appear together without breaks.
Dactyl
A poetic foot consisting of a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables; dactylic hexameters are important in classical Greek poetry but uncommon in English poetry
Denouement
The final portion of a plot, in which the outcome of a narrative is revealed: the action either ends in success or failure for the protagonist, the conflicts are settled, the mystery is solved, the misunderstanding is cleared away, etc.
Description
A mode of literary presentation in which the narrator provides information about the appearance of characters, settings, and other aspects of the story world.
Deviation
A deliberate violation of a language’s normal rules, patterns, and/or conventions of grammar, syntax to draw attention or achieve a literary effect. A common example is using dialect.
Dialogue
Words spoken by a characters in a literary text, usually marked by distinctive formatting conventions. Dialogue is usually introduced with the name of the character who is speaking or with a dialogue phrase.
Dimeter
A poetic meter consisting of two feet
Discourse
Defined in contrast to “story” and refers to how a story is told, that is, to the narrative techniques that are used to communication or transmit the information that makes up the story. Thus it includes things like how a story is organized in the telling, the nature and position of the narrator, the perspective from which the narrator perceives the events being narrated, the kinds of utterances the narrator uses to communication with the reader, and the style of the narrator’s language. Discourse is the only thing the reader has access to, as they only learn about the story via discourse.
Drama
All forms of literature designed for performance in the theatre, or on a stage of any kind. It is often understood to be one of the three main genres of literature. Drama is defined by the way in which is is consumed by the audiences (seen on stage, rather than on page like poetry and prose)
Dramatic irony
Refers to a situation in a play or a narrative in which the audience or reader has knowledge that a character is ignorant of, or the character makes a statement that stands in contrast to the facts known by the audience.
Ellipsis
Part of a sentence of a phrase is deliberately omitted. Often marked by three dots that replace the omitted material.
End rhyme
The placement of rhyming words at the ends of two or more lines in a poem. A regular pattern of end rhymes in a poem is referred to as a “rhyme scheme”.
End-stopped line
A line of poetry in which the pause in speech produced by the end of a sentence, clause, or other syntactic unit ( a grammatical pause) coincides with the end of the line. Such lines usually end with a punctuation mark. The opposite of an end-stopped line is an enjoyed line, in which the syntactic unit continues in the next line.
Enjambment
The continuation of a sentence or clause over the end of a line in poetry and into the next line, without punctuation or a pause at the end of the first line.
Epic
A poetic genre consisting of long narrative poems about the deeds and accomplishment of great heroes. Epics often center on war and battles, and often offer a mythologized account of the history of a people or nation. Focus on figures and situations that exceed the limits of normal human life.
Epiphora
The repetition of words at the end of lines, sentences, or phrases.
Explicit Characterization
A narrative technique in which information about a character is provided directly. The narrator says what kind of person the character is.
Exposition
The part of a plot in which characters, settings, and the initial situation are introduced.
External focalization
A form of focalization (how information is restricted in storytelling) in which the narrator only provides information that would be available to someone watching or listening to the events taking place in the story, and thus does not provide information regarding the thoughts or feelings of characters or about anything not immediately involved in the scene being narrated. Also known as observer POV, camera eye POV or vision from outside.
Eye rhyme
The correspondence between two words that, based on their spelling, might be thought to rhyme but that actually, based on their standard pronunciation, do not.
Falling action
The part of a plot in which the conflict that develops in the rising action and reaches a point of highest tension in the climax begins to move towards its final resolution.
Flat character
A character built around a single idea or quality (attribute/characteristic) and presented without much individualizing detail. Flat characters often represent social types, typical or idealized representations of specific social classes.
Focalization
A term used to describe the way in which the information about the story word is provided by the narrator is restricted or selected. It is similar to the concept of narrative point of view, and involves the kinds and quantities of information provided by the narrator relative to the kinds and quantities of information available to individual characters.
Focalizer
The character whose perspective and experience determines the kinds of information provided by a narrator with internal focalization. The focalizer does not tell the story, but the information by the heterodiegetic narrator focuses on or is organized around the character.
Foot
A unit of poetic meter, usually consisting of two or three syllables in one of a number of defined patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables.
Free Indirect Discourse
A narrative technique in which a character’s voice is presented by a narrator (usually heterodiegetic) without the use of quotation marks, dialogue tags, or other traditional markers of reproduced speech normally used in direct or indirect discourse
Free verse
Poetry written in lines without regular meter, and often without regular line lengths or regular patterns of rhyme.
Genre / sub-genre
A specific kind of literary text; a given literary work can be identified as belonging to a given genre by the presence of specific features associated with the genre, usually consisting of both specific formal features (e.g. meter or structure) and specific subject matter (e.g. plot elements, stock characters, themes). The major classical genres were the comedy, tragedy, epic and lyric.
