Literary Terms Flashcards
Story or poem in which characters, settings, and events stand for other people or events or for abstract ideas or qualities
Allegory
Inversion of the usual normal or logical order of the parts of a sentence
Anastrophe
Repetition of words in successive clauses in reverse grammatical order. In poetry, it is chiasmus
Antimetabole
Balancing words, phrases, or ideas that are strongly contrasted, often by means of grammatical structure
Antithesis
Other word for personification
Anthropomorphism
Brief, cleverly worded statement that makes a wise observation about life, or of a principle or accepted general truth.
Aphorism
Calling out to an imaginary, dead, or absent person
Apostrophe
Commas used without a conjunction to connect a list
Asyndeton
Reversing the order of the line within the same line. Syntatically balanced. Poem only.
Chiasmus
Informal writing
Colloquialism
An elaborate metaphor where two things are startingly different.
Conceit
Diary-styled poetry
Confessional poetry
Form of fiction or nonfiction that teaches a specific lesson or moral
Didactic
Poem about a dead person, normally about how great they are
Elegy
Device of repetition where the word is at the beginning and end.
Epanalepsis
Device of repetition at the end. opposite of anaphora
Epistrophe
An adjective or adjective phrase applied to a person.
Epithet
Act of interpreting or discovering the meaning of a text
Explication
Opposite of a character mainly antagonist.
Foil
When someone says something, but means something else
Verbal irony
Discrepancy between what happens and what should happen
Situational
The audience knows something the character doesn’t
Dramatic
Intentional understatement
Litotes
A poem that doesn’t tell a story but expresses emotion
Lyric
Two words placed together for surprising affect
Juxtaposition
A noun is referred to as something closely associated with it.
Metonymy
Recurring image
Motif
Statement that seems contradictory, but reveals a truth.
Paradox
List with no commas
Polysendeton
4 lines in unit
Quatrain
Line, word, phrase repeated
Refrain
A long speech
Soliloquy
A part represents the whole
Synecdoche
