Literary Terms

Question 0

Antihero

Answer 0

A protagonist who is a non hero or the antithesis of a traditional hero. While the hero may be dashing strong, bold, handsome, or resourceful; antihero may be incompetent, unlucky, clumsy, dumb, ugly, or clownish or an everyday hero

Question 1

Antagonist

Answer 1

The character against whom the protagonist struggles or contend, can be an idea, concept, government, or themselves

Question 2

Anachronism

Answer 2

Placing an event, person, item, or verbal expression in the wrong historical period. For example, in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, he writes the following lines:

Brutus: Peace! Count the Clock!
Cassius: The clock has stricken three! (Act 2 lines 193-94)

Of course, there were no household clocks during Roman times.

Question 3

Allusion

Answer 3

A casual reference in literature to a person, place, event, or another passage of literature, often without explicit identification

Question 4

Archetype

Answer 4

An original model or pattern from which other later copies are made, especially a character such as a dashing prince, the womanizing Don Juan, the hunted man, the femme fatale, etc

Question 5

Byronic hero

Answer 5

An antihero who is a romanticized but wicked character. Conventionally the figure is a young and attractive male with a bad reputation. (Bad boy reputation). He defies authority and conventional morality, and becomes paradoxically ennobled by his peculiar rejection of virtue

Question 6

Colonialism

Answer 6

Refers to broadly and generally to the habit of powerful civilizations to colonize less powerful ones. Tis process can take the form of a literal geographic location, enslavement, religious conversion at gun point, forced assimilation of native people’s. on a subtle level, this process can take the form of a bureaucratic policy that incidentally or indirectly leads to the extinction of a minority’s language or culture, economic exploration of cheap labor, and globalistic erasure of cultural differences. The term is often applied in academic discussion of literature from the colonial period we can seethe concerns of colonialism and imperial ambition in the works of George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant”, Rudyard Kipling’s fictional tales about India, and Josef Cobrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness

Question 7

Conflict

Answer 7

The opposition between two characters, two large groups or people, or between the protagonist and a larger problem such as forces of nature, ideas, public mores, etc. conflict may be internal like the protagonist dealing with their psychological tendencies (drug addiction, self destructive behavior, and so on). Conflict is the engine that drives the plot, William Faulkner says that the most important literature deals with the subject of ‘the human heart in conflict with itself.’

Question 8

Connotation

Answer 8

Extra tinge or taint of meaning each word caries beyond the minimal, strict definition of a word

Question 9

Denouement

Answer 9

French word meaning “unknotting” or “unwinding” and refers to the outcome or result of a complex situation or sequence of events. An aftermath or resolution that usually occurs near the final stages of a plott and it is unraveling of the main dramatic complications in a player novel or ect

Question 10

Diction

Answer 10

Word Choice

Question 11

Dystopia

Answer 11

The opposite of a utopia, is an imaginary society in fictional writing that represents “a very unpleasant imaginary world in which ominous tendencies of our present social, political, and technological order are projected in some disastrous future culmination

Question 12

Epiphany

Answer 12

In fiction, a sudden revelation of great importance usually experienced by a character at or near the end, but sometimes only by the reader

Question 13

Farce

Answer 13

Form of low comedy designed to provoke laughter through highly exaggerated caricatures of people in improbable or silly situations. Traits of farce include physical bustle (like slapstick), sexual misunderstandings and mix ups, and broad verbal humor such as puns

Question 14

Flat characters

Answer 14

Static/flat character is a simplified character who doesn’t Change their personality over the story or without extensive personality and characterization, contrast with a round character

Question 15

Foreshadowing

Answer 15

Suggesting or hinting what will occur later in a story

Question 16

Fourth wall

Answer 16

Imaginary wall that separates the events on stage or screen from the audience, a character is said to be breaking the fourth wall when they speak directly to the audience

Question 17

Harlem Renaissance

Answer 17

Period of writing, poetry, music, and art among black Americans during the 1920s and 1930s including Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurtson and Langston Hughes, Jazz age too because of the growth of jazz and souls music

Question 18

In Medias Res

Answer 18

Latin term “in the middle of things” opening not in chronological order where the story may begin in the middle or after the action has begun
Used to heightened dramatic tension or to create a sense of mystery

Question 19

Juxtaposition

Answer 19

Arrangement of two or more ideas, characters, actions, settings, phrases, or words side by side or in similar narrative moments for the purpose of comparison, contrast, rhetorical effect, suspense, or character development

Question 20

Melodrama

Answer 20

Dramatic form characterized by excessive sentiment, exaggerated emotion, sensational, and thrilling action, and an artificially happy ending

Question 21

Metaphor

Answer 21

Comparison or analogy stated in such a way as to imply that one object is another one figuratively speaking

Question 22

Modernism

Answer 22

Vague, amorphous term referring to the art and literature and philosophy of Europe and America in the late 20th century, began after ww1 and ended after WW2 or the bombing of Nagasaki or in 1960s, three traits:
Desire to break away from established traditions, quest to find fresh ways to view man’s position or function in the universe, an experiments in form and style, especially with fragmentation

Question 23

Motif

Answer 23

Conspicuous recurring element, such as a type of incident, a device, a reference, an image, a word, or a phrase which appears frequently in a work of literature

Question 24

Narrator

Answer 24

The voice that speaks it tells the story

Question 25

Novella

Answer 25

Extended fictional prose narrative that is longer than a short story, but not quite as long as a novel

Question 26

Parody

Answer 26

Imitates the serious manner and characteristic features a particular literary work in order to make fun those same features

Question 27

Personification

Answer 27

When abstractions, animals, ideas, and inanimate objects are given human character, traits, abilities, or reactions

Question 28

Protagonist

Answer 28

Main character in a work, on whom the author focuses most of the narrative attention

Question 29

Verisimilitude

Answer 29

Sense that what one reads is “real” or at least realistic an believable

Question 30

Syntax

Answer 30

Sentence structure

Question 31

Naturalism

Answer 31

Depicted life as accurately as possible without artificial

Question 32

Postmodernism

Answer 32

Literary changes and tendencies after the 1940s and 1950s up to
The present day, 
Traits:
Rejection of traditional authority 
Radical experimentation gimmicky 
Eclecticism and multiculturalism 
Parade an pastiche
Intensifies these earlier characteristics

Question 33

Prose

Answer 33

Anything written material that is not written in regular meter like poetry, writing in sentences and paragraphs

Question 34

Psychological realism

Answer 34

Sense that character in fictional narratives have realistic inferiority or complex emotional and intellectual depth, including subconscious urges and fears they are not aware of

Question 35

Round character

Answer 35

Depicted with psychological depth and detail that thy are like a real person

Question 36

Satire

Answer 36

Attack or criticism of any stupidity or vice in the form o scathing humor, or a critique of what the author sees as dangerous religious, political, moral, or social standards

Question 37

Stream or consciousness

Answer 37

Writing in which a character’s perceptions, thoughts, and memories are presented in an apparently random form, without regard for logical sequence, chronology, or syntax. Often such writing makes no distinctions between various levels of reality such as dreams, memories, imaginative thoughts or real sensory perception. It is an attempt to capture with some sense of veracity the inner workings of the human mind or the way we think

Question 38

Symbolism

Answer 38

Frequent use of words, places, characters, or objects that mean something beyond what they are on a literal level

Question 39

Unreliable narrator

Answer 39

A narrator who can’t be trusted and they speak with bias, makes mistakes, or even lies. Creates an aura of authenticity in their work