Literary Terms Flashcards
Alliteration
Close repetition of initial consonant sounds of accented syllables (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds”)
Anaphora
Repetition of an opening word or phrase in a series of lines or clauses (“So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,/ So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”)
Antithesis
The placing of one sentence or one of its parts against another to form a balanced contrast of ideas (“Give me liberty or give me death”)
Assonance
Close repetition of the vowel sound of accented syllables or important words (“Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest in his shade”)
Asyndeton
The elimination of conjunctions where they are expected
Caesura
A marked pause within a line (“Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope”)
Chiasmus
The crosswise arrangement of contrasted pairs (“Featured like him, like him with friends possessed”)
Connotation
What a word suggests beyond its basic definition
Consonance
Close repetition of the consonant sounds anywhere but the beginning of accented syllables or important words (“Like to the lark at break of day arising.”)
Couplet
Two successive lines linked by rhyme
Denotation
The basic dictionary meaning of a word
End Rhyme
Rhymes that occur at the ends of the lines
End-stopped
A line that ends with a punctuation mark
Enjambment
A line that does not end with a punctuation mark but continues into the next line (“Like to the lark at break of day arising/ From sullen earth”)
Hyperbole
An exaggeration for emphasis
Imagery
Representation through language of sense experience (visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, olfactory)
Internal rhyme
A rhyme in which one or both of the rhyme words occur(s) within the line (“So long lives this, and this gives life to thee”)
Inversion
The natural word order is reversed (“By chance or nature’s changing course, untrimmed”)
Verbal irony
A figure of speech in which what is meant is opposite of what is said
Metaphor
A figure of speech in which two unlike things are implicitly compared
Metonymy
The use of something closely related, usually in time and space, to the thing actually meant (“And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries”)
Metrical feet
Four kinds to know: iamb (v/), trochee (/v), spondee (//), anapest (vv/)
Onomatopoeia
The use of words that mimic their meaning in their sound (for example, boom, click, plop)
Oxymoron
The use of two successive words that contradict each other (“eternal summer”)
Paradox
An apparently self-contradictory statement (“love is not love”)
Parallelism
Ideas arranged in similar grammatical structures (Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope”)
Personification
A figure of speech in which human attributes are given to an animal, object, or concept (“Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines”)
Polysyndeton
The repetition of conjunctions in a series of coordinate words, phrases, or clauses
Rhyme
Repetition of the accented vowel sound and all succeeding sounds in important words (e.g. day-May, temperate-date, despising-arising, shaken-taken)
Rhyme scheme
A fixed pattern of end-rhymes
Silmile
A figure of speech in which a concrete object stands for a general idea (e.g. rose-love)
Synecdoche
The use of the part for the whole (“It is the star to every wand’ring bark”)
Theme
The central idea of a literary work, usually related to human character or condition
Tone
The speaker’s attitude towards the subject, the audience, or themselves
