Lit terms Part one words Flashcards
A story witch people things and events have another meaning
Allegory
repetition of similar consonant sounds “gnus never knew pneumonia
Alliteration
reference in literature to something outside of the work like a well known historical or literary event person or work.
allusion
multiple meanings a literary work might communicate
ambiguity
a thing belonging or appropriate to a period other than that in which it exists.
anachronism
general term for altering time sequences (like a flashback)
analeptic
2 short unstressed syllables followed by 1 long stressed syllable UU/
anapest
use of a word referring to or replacing a word used earlier in a sentence, to avoid repetition, such as “do” in “I like it and so do they.”
2 the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses.
anaphora
a central character in story movie or drama that lacks conventional heroic attributes
anti-hero
figure of speech characterized by strong contrasting words (Man proposes god disposes)
antithesis
observation that contains general truth (If it aint broke don’t fix it)
aphorism
direct address to something or someone that is not present. example to autumn is to a personified season
apostrophe
repetition of identical vowel sounds “A land laid waste with all its young men slain” repeats the same “a” sound in “laid,” “waste,” and “slain.”
Assonance
is a figure of speech in which one or several conjunctions (and, but, or, yet, etc) are omitted from a series of related clauses. Examples are veni, vidi, vici and its English translation “I came, I saw, I conquered”. Its use can have the effect of speeding up the rhythm of a passage and making a single idea more memorable.
asyndeton
a poem or song narrating a story in short stanzas
Ballad
coming of age story
Bildungsroman
Unrhymed iambic pentameter. (Iambic= unstressed>stressed syllables; Pentameter = 5 meters or 10 syllables)
Blank verse is the meter of most of Shakespeare’s plays, as well as that of Milton’s Paradise Lost:
Men called him Mulciber; and how he fell
From heaven, they fabled, thrown by angry Jove
Sheer o’er the crystal battlements: from morn
To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve.
blank verse
an absurd or comically exaggerated imitation of something. a parody
Burlesque
a harsh unpleasant combination of sounds or tones
Cacophony
a pause general in the middle of a line or a verse indicated by the sense of the line and often greater than the normal pause.
caesura
a rhetorical or literary figure in which words, grammatical constructions, or concepts are repeated in reverse order, in the same or a modified form; e.g. ‘Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.’
chiasmus
Everyday speech particular to an area or group of people
colloquialisms
an ingenious and fanciful notion or conception, usually expressed through an elaborate analogy, and pointing to a striking parallel between two seemingly dissimilar things. A conceit may be a brief metaphor, but it also may form the framework of an entire poem. A famous example of a conceit occurs in John Donne’s poem “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” in which he compares his soul and his wife’s to legs of a mathematical compass.
conceit
The implications of a word or phrase, as opposed to its exact meaning
Connotation(Denotation
the repetition of similar consonant sounds in a group of words. The term usually refers to words in which the ending consonants are the same but the vowels that precede them are different. is found in the following pairs of words: “add” and “read,” “bill and ball,” and “born” and “burn.”
consonance
A device of style or subject matter so often used that it becomes a recognized means of expression
Convention
two lines of verse, usually in the same meter and joined by rhyme, that form a unit. (usually two lines that rhyme: AA BB CC would be three pairs of couplets);
couplet
A metrical foot of three syllables: an accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables– / u u (think of a Waltz).
Dactyl
dictionary meaning of a word
denotation
The techniques of deploying the sound of words, especially in poetry. Among devices of sound are rhyme, alliteration, assonance, consonance, and onomatopoeia.
devices of sound
