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.
Ground
The ground, which is the relationship between the topic and the vehicle, gives the metaphor its meaning.
One of the three components of a metaphor. The ground consists of those aspects, properties, or connotations of the vehicle that a metaphor asks us to apply to the tenor.
Heterodiegetic narrator
A narrator who is not a character in the story being told, and is thus located outside of the world of the narrative.
Hexameter
A poetic meter with six feet per line. A line of iambic hexameter is called an “alexandrine”.
Homodiegetic narrator
A narrator who is a character in the story being told, and who is thus located inside the world of the narrative.
Iamb
A poetic foot consisting of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable. It is the most commonly used metrical foot in English poetry.
Implicit characterization
A technique in which information about a character is provided indirectly. The reader must draw their own conclusions about what kind of person the character is based on the character’s speech, actions, and/or appearance.
Internal focalization
A form of narrative focalization in which the kinds and quantities of information provided by the narrator are determined by the information available to a specific character, including the thoughts and feelings of that character.
Internal rhyme
The appearance of two or more rhyming words within one line of poetry.
Intertextuality
Refers to the different kinds of connections between literary texts, including overt or covert citations, allusions, repetitions, and transformations of the formal and substantive features of earlier texts.
Italian / Petrarchan sonnet
a sonnet consisting of an octave with the rhyme pattern abbaabba, followed by a sestet with the rhyme pattern cdecde or cdcdcd.
Line
A group of words arranged into a row that ends at a place deliberately chosen by the poet. The point at which a line ends is known as a line break.
Literary Period
Retrospectively created historical time units help us understand literary texts in relation to the social and cultural environment in which they were written.
Lyric
A genre of poetry broadly defined as any short poem consisting of the utterance of a single speaker, who expresses a state of mind or a process of perception, thought, and/or feeling. They are not narrative or dramatic.
Metaphor
One thing is described in terms of something else
Meter
The patterned arrangement of syllables in lines. The most common metrical patterns in English poetry use what is called “accentual-syllabic meter,” in which each line contains a specific number of
syllables and a specific number of stressed syllables. Metrical patterns are determined based on
metrical “feet,” groups of syllables with a regular pattern of stresses
Metonymy
The literal or standard term for one thing is used to refer to another thing which it has become closely associated because of a recurrent relationship in common experience. E.g. White House is used to refer to the U.S. government.
Modes of Presentation
Refers to the different kinds of utterances that can be found in literary texts. The most basic distinction that can be made is between “mimetic” or “showing”
utterances and “diegetic” or “telling” utterances; that is, between utterances that help the reader to see or hear something and utterances which talk about things.
Monologue
An extended, uninterrupted speech delivered by a single speaker or character. It is most often used in the context of drama.
Motif
A recurring situation in works of literature or within a particular genre.
Narrative
A story that is told by a given storyteller(s) in a specific fashion. The voice that tells the story is referred to as a narrator. Narratives can be told in any literary genre.
Narrator
The character or voice that tells the story of a narrative. The narrator can either be outside or within the narrative being told.
Octave
An eight-line stanza
Omniscient Point of View
A form of narration in which the perspective of the narrator is a “God’s eye view” of the story world, so that the narrator knows everything that takes place in a narrative, including the thoughts and feelings of individual characters and things that the individual characters do not know.
Onomatopoeia
A word or a combination of words is used in such a way that their sound seems to closely resemble the sound they indicate/denote.
Pair rhyme
A rhyme scheme that follows the pattern aabb, in which the final word of one line rhymes with the final word of the following line.
Parallelism
The repetition of syntactic, grammatical, or conceptual patterns in a text, so that two phrases or lines exhibit similar word-order and structure.
Pentameter
Poetic meter with five feet per line.
Persona
A type of poetic speaker who is clearly fictitious and whose experiences, thoughts and attitudes are decidedly different from those of the real poet. Often used for satirical purposes or psychological exploration.
Personification
An animal, inanimate object, or abstract concept is spoken of as though it were endowed with life or with human attributes and feelings.
Plot
Used to refer to the casual and logical connections between the events that make up a story that are established through the act of narration (telling the story). It is to be contrasted with “story”, which refers simply to the series of chronological events itself.
Poetic form
A general term for all the devices used in a poem to render and support content. E.g. meter, lines, rhyme, diction and rhetorical figures.
Poetic speaker
The voice that speaks in a lyric poem. Also known as the lyric speaker or lyric I. This concept allows us to distinguish between the voice that speaks in the poem and the author that wrote the poem.
Poetry
An inclusive term for all spoken or written language that is organized in lines, either with or without meter. It derives from an Ancient Greek work meaning to make.
Poetry is defined in contrast to “prose,” language that is not organized into lines.
A closely related word in English is “verse,” which can refer to the category of poetry as a
whole; a text written as poetry—that is, written in lines—is said to be “written in verse.”
Poetry
is often taught as one of the three main genres of literature, along with prose fiction and drama
(but it is important to note that these categories overlap in various ways—much drama is
written in the form of poetry, for example, and almost all drama is narrative).
Point of View
An aspect of the way in which a story is told, involving the perspective from which the reader is presented with information about the characters, dialogue, actions, setting and events of the narrative. It is similar to the concept of focalization.
Prose
An inclusive term for all spoken and written language that is not organized into the well-defined lines of poetry. It is one of the three main genres of literature.
If you were to change the margins of this document, and thus to change the way the words are organized in each line of the text, the meaning and effect of the document as a whole would
not be changed; this is the hallmark of prose.
Pun
A form of wordplay. It may involve words that are identical (homonyms) or very similar but that are divergent in meaning, or it might play with a single word or phrase that has multiple meanings.
Quatrain
A stanza consisting of four lines, often linked by shared meter or a standardized rhyme scheme.
Repetition
Identical or similar words or phrases appear multiple times in the same text.
Report
A mode of presentation in which the narrator provides information about the actions of characters and other events that take place within the story world.
Rhetorical devices
Also known as rhetorical figures or figures of speech. They are artful arrangements of language that depart from common usage and are intended to have a particular impact or effect.
Rhyme
The repetition of the last stressed vowel sound and all of the speech sounds following that vowel in two or more words.
Rhyme scheme
The pattern of end rhymes in a poem, usually designated by assigning a lowercase letter to each rhymed sound.
Rising action
The part of a plot in which the initial situation introduced in the exposition is changed or complicated in some way, leading to the development of a conflict that builds in intensity towards a point of highest intensity (the climax).
Round character
A character who is complex in temperament and motivation and is represented with detailed particularity.
Scene
A sub-division in a play, in which there is usually only a small shift in time or place, although the setting and / or configuration of characters changes.
Sestet
A stanza constino of six lines.
Setting
The physical location, historical time, and social/cultural context in which the action of a narrative takes place. E.g. medieval Verona in Romeo and Juliet.
Simile
One thing is explicit compared to another, most often using the word “like” or “as”, in such a way as to expand upon or add to the meaning of one or both terms.
Soliloquy
A special case of monologue in which a character speaks to themselves whilst alone on stage. This is a highly artificial conversation that allows a playwright to communicate a character’s thoughts to the audience, even in a situation where it wouldn’t really make sense for that character to speak their thoughts aloud.
Sonnet
14-line poem, consisting of one single stanza. It is written in iambic pentameter and follows the rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg
A poetic genre, adapted from Italian love poetry, consisting of a single stanza of fourteen iambic pentameter lines. It is often marked at a defined point, by a shift in argument, topic, or tone referred to as the volta.
Sound devices
Rhetorical devices that manipulate the sounds of words or syllables, often through the arrangement of repeated sounds into specific patterns. E.g. alliteration, assonance, consonance, rhyme, onomatopoeia
Stage directions
In drama, notes included in the written text that describe aspects of the action or the staging, but are not read aloud during performance. Stage directions are used to give details about the way the stage should be organized, to describe the costumes the actors wear, and to explain how the actors are to move around on the stage, including where and when they should enter and exit the stage.
Stanza
A grouping of lines in a poem, usually set off by blank space in the printed text.
The stanzas in a given poem are often, but not necessarily, uniform in the number, length, and
meter of their component lines, and often feature a recurring pattern of rhyme. The more common stanza forms have specific names based on the number of lines they contain (couplet, tercet, quatrain, sestet, etc.); other, more complex stanza forms have specialized names (the Spenserian stanza, the rime royal, the ballad stanza, etc.).
Story
The chronological sequence of events that take place in a narrative, as opposed to the arrangement of those events in a narrative or dramatic text (which is referred to as the plot).
The term “story” is also sometimes used in a more extensive way to denote what is narrated (characters, setting, and action), and in this sense the complementary term is “discourse,” which refers to the process of narration, namely types of narration and style.
Style
The manner or character of the language in a given space of literature.
Factors
commonly cited as contributing to style include diction (choice of words), syntax, and the frequency, density, and
kinds of figurative language used.
Suspense
The feeling of uncertainty and anticipation that a reader or audience experiences whilst waiting to learn about the outcome of the narrative.
Symbol
Anything that represents or stands for something else. Symbols are often material objects that represent abstract ideas or concepts. E.g. scales used as a symbol for justice.
Target reader
The reader or group of readers for whom a piece of literature was originally intended.
Tenor
The “subject” of a metaphor. The term that designates the thing that the metaphor describes.
Tercet
A stanza consisting of three lines.
Tetrameter
A poetic meter consisting of four feet.
Theme
A general concept, idea, or doctrine, either implicit or asserted, that an imaginative work is designed to incorporate and make persuasive to the reader. The main idea(s) of a given literary text.
Tragedy
A literary genre in which the materials are selected and managed primarily in order to evoke the emotions of pity and fear. The characters and action engage concerned attention rather than amusement, and usually the action turns out badly for the chief characters.
Trimeter
A poetic meter consisting of three feet.
Trochee
A poetic foot consisting of one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable. A line written in trochees is said to have a trochaic meter.
Unity
The sense that all of the elements in a literary work fit together to produce a harmonious effect. This concept originates in the “unity of action” developed in Aristotle’s Poetics (idea that all of the events in a plot should be connected), and was then extended to other areas (unity of place, of time, of effect, etc.).
Vehicle
The figurative element in a metaphor. The term that is applied in a non-literal fashion to the thing that the metaphor describes.
Verbal irony
A statement in which the meaning that a speaker wants to communicate differs sharply from the meaning that is ostensibly expressed by the words they are using.
Verse
Most often used to refer to poetry as a general category or to the art of poetry as such. Thus, to say that a text is written “in verse” means simply that it is written in the form of poetry—that is, that it is organized into lines.
However, “verse” can also be used to refer to individual poems, or to the unit of poetic language more commonly known as a “stanza” (this is common when talking about songs), or to a line of poetry (this usage, which is analogous to the German “Vers,” is rarely used in contemporary English).
Volta
In a sonnet, the volta is the moment at which the line of thought, argument, or emotion changes.
Zero focalization
A form of focalization in which the narrator provides more information than would be available to any given character in the narrative. It is also referred to as omniscient POV or God’s eye POV or as vision from behind.
Spondee
Spondaic feet consists of 2 stressed syllables
Alexandrine
iambic hexameter
Stream of consciousness technique
Stream of consciousness is a narrative mode or method that attempts to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind of a narrator
Free indirect thought (FIT)
Integration of thoughts with narrative
Stream-of-consciousness technique / interior monologue technique
Narrative Reports of Speech Acts (NRSA) using Free indirect speech (FIS)
Integration of a series of speech acts with narrative
It is unclear whether it is a word-for-word report or the narrator’s paraphrase of the message
Indirect speech
Use of a reporting verb followed by a paraphrase of the speech
Direct speech
Use of a reporting verb followed by quotation marks
Free direct speech
Speech without the use of a reporting verb
