Literary Terms Flashcards
For the BC English 12 Provincial Exam
Active Voice
A direct statement.
Passive Voice
Inverting the normal pattern. (It’s harder to define passive voice than it is to recognize it.)
Allegory
A narrative that has a second meaning beneath the surface.
A story with at least two meanings, a literal meaning and a symbolic one.
e.g. George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
Alliteration/Assonance/Consonance
Alliteration: Repetition of the initial consonant sounds (e.g. terrible truths and lullaby lies)
Assonance: Repetition of similar vowel sounds, usually on stressed syllables. (e.g. mystery disguised within)
Consonance: Repetition of similar consonant sounds (e.g. glooMy woMan)
Allusion
A reference to a person, place, event, or literary work that the writer expects the reader to recognize and respond to. Adds layers of meaning.
Ambiguity
With writing, can refer to a carelessness that produces two or more meanings where a single one is intended.
With literature, it generally refers to a richness of poetic expression. Can show a fundamental division in the author’s mind, as well as challenge the reader to invent interpretations based on these contradictions.
Analogy
A comparison between things similar in a number ways; often used to explain the unfamiliar by the familiar. Sometimes used to justify conclusions logic would not allow.
Anecdotal evidence
A short narrative, usually presented as true and incorporated into essays as supporting evidence. Can be emotionally compelling.
Antagonist
The major force that opposes the protagonist.
Anti-climax
A sudden descent from the impressive to the trivial, especially at the end of an ascending series, for ludicrous or humorous effect.
Antithesis
The juxtaposition of contrasting or opposite ideas, often in parallel structure. e.g. “Though studious, he was popular; though argumentative, he was modest”
Apostrophe
A figure of speech in which an abesent or dead person, or an abstract quality or something non-human is addressed directly. e.g. “Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean - roll!”
Archaic language
Language that is old-fashioned or obsolete. Deliberately used to imply that something was written in the past.
Aside
In theatre, a speech given to the audience that is apparently unheard by the other characters in the play, who continue in their roles without the knowledge thus given the spectators.
Atmosphere (or mood)
The prevailing feeling created by the story, created by descriptive diction, imagery, and dialogue.
Audience
The person or people gathered to hear, see, or read a work.
Autobiography
The description of a life, or a portion of it, written by the person who has lived it. Contrast “biography”, which presents a life as written by another person.
Ballad
A narrative poem, usually simple and fairly short, originally meant to be sung. Often begins abruptly, utilizes simple language, tells the story tersely, and makes use of refrains (a line or lines repeated at intervals).
Ballad stanza
The name for common meter as found in ballads: a quatrain in iambic meter, alternating tetrameter and trimeter lines, usually rhyming abcb. e.g.
There lived a wife at Usher’s Well,
And a wealthy wife was she’
She had three stout and stalwart sons,
And sent them o’er the sea.
(Quatrain)
Four line stanza, could be rhymed or unrhymed. Most common form of stanza in English.
Bias
An inclination or preference towards one side; a kind of prejudice. Can make it difficult or impossible to judge fairly in a particular situation.
Blank verse
Unrhymed iambic pentameter. “Blank” means the lines don’t rhyme, “iambic” is a meter that begins unstressed and ends stressed, “meter” refers to a regular pattern.
Cacophony
“Bad-sounding”. Contrast euphony. Cacophony signifies discordant, jarring, unharmonious language. e.g. Tennyson’s Morte D’Arthur:
Dry clashed his harness in the icy caves
And barren chasms, and all to left and right
The bare black cliff clanged round him, as he based
His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang
Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels -
And on a sudden, lo! the level lake,
And the long glories of the winter moon.
The alliteration and assonance of the first five lines are rough; the last two lines are mellifluously smooth and euphonious.
Caricature
In literature and art, a portrait that ridicules a person by exaggerating and distorting his most prominent features and characteristics.
Case study
A detailed analysis of a single person or group, especially as an exemplary model of medical, psychological, or social phenomena.
Catastrophe
The final disaster of a tragedy, usually including a resolution back to order.
Cause and effect
A common strategy in argumentative essays. It is the explaining of the “why” of something. They often work both ways: one can argue from an effect back to a cause, or take a cause and argue a possible effect.
Character
Both a fictional person in a story, and the moral, dispositional, and behavioral qualities of that fictional person.
Flat character
A character with few qualities. Not well developed.
Round character
A realistic character with several dimensions. A more complex, fully-developed person.
Static character
A character who does not change by the end of the story.
Dynamic (or developing) character
One who undergoes a significant, lasting change, usually in his or her outlook on life. In a short story, this is often the protagonist.
Stereotyped (or stock) character
A predictable, one-dimensional character who is recognizable to the reader as “of a type”, e.g. the jock, the brain, the yuppe, the absent-minded professor, and so on.
Character foil
A character whose behaviour, attidues, and/or opinions contrast with those of the protagonist.
Characterization
The creation or description of a character in a work of fiction.
Chorus
In Greek drama, the group of singers and dancers that appears at intervals within a play to comment on the action or sing the praises of the gods. Generally, the chorus expresses the judgment of objective bystanders not directly involved in the passions of the protagonist and other major characters.
Chronological order
Arranging events in the order that they happened.
Cliché
An overused expression, once clever or metaphorical but now trite and timeworn.
Climatic order
Ideas arranged in the order of least to most important. A common strategy in composing an argument.
Climax
The point of greatest intensity in a plot.
Coincidence
A remarkable concurrence between two events that appear not to have any causal connection.
Colloquial language
Everyday speech and writing, relaxed and idiomatic. May contain slang or cliché.
Comedy
A literary work that ends happily with a healthy, amicable armistice between the protagonist and society. Frequently depict the overthrow of rigid social fashionis and customs.
Comic relief
A comic element usually insterted into a tragic or somber work to relieve its tension, widen its scope, or heighten by contrast the tragic emotion.
Compare and contrast
Two strategies that are often paired as a device for exploring literary work.
Comparison
A consideration of separate things in the light of their similarities. Similarity is the basic principle behind inductive argument and analogy.
Conflict (and the three types)
The struggle between opposing characters or forces.
Man versus man, man versus environment, and man versus self.
Connotation
All of the emotions and associations that a word or phrase may arouse. e.g. “Springtime” has the connotations of youth, rebirth, and romance.
Contrast
The juxtaposition of disparate or opposed images, ideas, or both.
Couplet
Two consecutive lines of poetry that rhyme. Shakespeare often closes a scene with a couplet. e.g. from Hamlet:
It shall be so.
Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.
Denotation
The dictionary or literary meaning of a word.
Dénouement
A French term for the “unknotting” or resolution of the plot.
Deus ex machina
“God out of the machine”, refers to the resolution of the plot from outside forces or by highly improbable chances or coincidence.
Dialect
A variety of language belonging to a particular time, place, or social group. For example, an eighteenth-century cockney dialect, or a New England dialect.
Dialogue
A conversation between characters.
Diary
A daily record of events and observations, especially personal ones.
Diction
A writer’s choice of words. Can be formal or informal, abstract or concrete.
Didactic
When the primary aim of a work is to expound some moral, political, or other teaching.
Dilemma
A situation requiring a choice between two equally balanced alternatives.
Direct presentation
A type of characterization where the author directly tells the readers what a character is like, perhaps by description or by having another character talk about the character in question. (e.g. Eustace was a very naughty boy)
Dissonance
A harsh or disagreeable combination of sounds; discord; cacophony.
e.g. Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est”:
Gas! Gas! Quick boys! - An ecstacy of fumbling,
fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
Drama
A form of fiction acted out in front of an audience, distinguishing it from poetry, short stories, and other works.
Wit
Intellectual acuity, an amused indulgence of human deficiencies. Quick perception coupled with creative fancy.
Voice
Describes a person’s writing-incorporates things such as dictions, imagery, vigour, ton, irony and the audience’s perception of the writer’s purpose.
Universality
Quality of a story that gives it relevance beyond the narrow confines of its particular characters, subject or setting. Universal stories reveal truths about human nature or society.
Understatement
Opposite of hyperbole. It is the minimizing of something, in order to emphasize it.
