Literary Terms 2

Question 1

Enjambment

Answer 1

In poetry, when the syntax of the poem carries over the end of the verse line, so that the thought being expressed dos not end at the end of the line but is continued to the next line.

Question 2

Euphony

Answer 2

Language that is musical and pleasing to the ear.

Question 3

Fable

Answer 3

A short story to illustrate a moral.

Question 4

Fabliau

Answer 4

A comic short story about middle- or working-class characters; this form was popular in medieval times and is often bawdy. E. g., Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale

Question 5

Feminine Rhyme

Answer 5

A rhyme of two syllables in which the first syllable is stressed. Slee-ping and Cree-ping. E. g., 
"Yankee doodle went to town
Riding on a po-ny
Stuck a feather in his hat
And called it maca-ro-ni"

Question 6

Flat Character

Answer 6

A character not given very much individuation by the author; this character is usually used to illustrate an idea. E. g., the Red Shirts in Star Trek.

Question 7

Free Verse

Answer 7

A form of poetry that does not follow traditional meter or rhyme schemes. Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound’s poetry often employs free verse

Question 8

Kunstlerroman

Answer 8

A type of Bildungsroman about the development of the protagonist into an artist. E. g., Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”

Question 9

Leitmotif / Motif

Answer 9

An element that recurs frequently in literature or within a single work of literature. E. g. crows as symbols of death or ‘darkness’ in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Question 10

Malapropism

Answer 10

The mistaken use of a word in place of another that it resembles, resulting in a comic effect. This term comes from the character Mrs. Malaprop in Richard Sheridan’s “The Rivals”

Question 11

Masculine Rhyme

Answer 11

A rhyme of one accented syllable. E. g. “The rat wears a hat”

Question 12

Metaphor

Answer 12

A figure of speech where one word is used to describe another without making an explicit comparison. E. g. “The curtain of night…” or “All the world is a stage…”

Question 13

Metonymy

Answer 13

Something is evoked by an associated term; for example, the crown can refer to a queen, king, or royalty and monarch in general

Question 14

Morality Play

Answer 14

Late medieval morality plays dramatize moral instruction by allegorically personifying vices and virtues. E. g. the anonymously written “The Summoning of Everyman” contains characters like Everyman, Death, Fellowship, Goods, and Good Deeds.

Question 15

Objective Correlative

Answer 15

A phrase coined by T. S. Eliot in the essay “Hamlet and His Problems” to describe the concept that a poet must communicate emotion by finding a concrete situation that corresponds to or evokes the emotion. E. g., Eliot argues Shakespeare’s Hamlet is imperfect because there is no objective correlative, while Lady MacBeth on the other hand is a successful example.

In other words, Eliot felt that Shakespeare was unable to provoke the audience to feel as Prince Hamlet did through images, actions, and characters, and instead only inadequately described his emotional state through the play’s dialogue