Literary Terms Flashcards
A story with a literal and an implied level of meaning the implied level of meaning may suggest actual persons placed events and situations or a set of ideas.
Allegory
The repetition of similar consonant sounds within a group of neighboring words or lines. Often initial consonant sounds are repeated. The poetic device often increases the musical effect of the language.
Alliteration
A reference within a work of literature to something outside it.
Allusion
A person or force opposing the protagonist in a drama or narrative.
Antagonist
A brief statement, often witty, that expresses a principle, truth, or observation about life.
Aphorism
The addressing of some non-personal (or absent) object as if it were able to reply.
Apostrophe
A short narrative song.
Ballad
A detailed account of a person’s life and accomplishments, written by another person.
Biography
Unrhymed iambic pentameter.
Blank verse
A break or pause introduced in the midst of a line or verse, language, or by content.
Caesura
Representations of person in literature.
Character
Drama that ends happily.
Comedy
An imaginative and metaphorical figure of speech that uses innovative ideas to develop a far-fetched connection between two seemingly dissimilar things.
Conceit
The struggle between opposing characters, forces, or emotions.
Conflict
A pair of rhymed lines.
Couplet
Regional variations within the same language, as spoken in different areas of a country.
Dialect
One’s choice of words in writing or speaking.
Diction
A story consisting of action and dialogue designed for stage performance.
Drama
A poem consisting of a speech by a character (who is not the author) addressing an audience at a critical moment in his life.
Dramatic monologue
A mournfully contemplative poem that mourns the death of someone, or the loss of something.
Elegiac poetry
Originally any poem of solemn mediation. Now it is a formal poem lamenting the death of a particular person or meditating on the subject of death itself.
Elegy
A line of verse that runs into the next line or lines without pause.
Enjambment
A long, stylized narrative poem celebrating the deeds of a national or ethnic hero.
Epic
A metaphor that extends throughout a stanza or an entire poem.
Extended metaphor
A literary form typically set in non-existent realms and often featuring supernatural beings.
Fantasy
A technique in which words and phrases that have literary meanings are enhanced and given freshness of expression by means of figures of speech.
Figurative language
A ballad that is anonymously composed and passed down orally through the generations before it is committed to print.
Folk ballad
A story originating in oral tradition.
Folktale
A literary device that supplies clues that hint at later plot developments.
Foreshadowing
A story within a story.
Frame story
A figure of thought that contrasts appearance and reality.
Irony
A metaphorical phrase or compound word that is used to indirectly name a person, place, or thing.
Kenning
A ballad that is written by known poets for literary effect.
Literary ballad
Short, melodious poems that focus on expressing emotions.
Lyrical poetry
Especially striking and complex.
Metaphysical conceit
The regular recurrence of accented syllables in a line of poetry.
Meter
Broadly, the expression of one thing in terms of another.
Metaphor
A poem in which the author tells a story.
Narrative poetry
A long highly stylized lyric poem written in a complex stanza on a serious theme and often for a specific occasion.
Ode
The giving of personal characteristics to something that is not a person.
Personification
An outcome in a literary work (not necessarily a poem) in which good is rewarded and evil is punished, especially in ways that particularly fit the virtue or the crime.
Poetic justice
The main character in fiction, drama, or narrative poetry.
Protagonist
A four-line stanza, one of the most common stanza forms.
Quatrains
The attempt in fiction to create an illusion of actuality by the use of seemingly random detail or by the inclusion of the ordinarily or unpleasant in life.
Realism
A phrase or sentence repeated at intervals throughout a poem, often at the end of a stanza.
Refrain
Identical sound in corresponding words or phrases.
Rhyme
A more or less regular recurrence of stressed syllables in written or spoken utterance.
Rhythm
A reaction against the cultural climate and values of neoclassicism. It insisted on the greater importance of 1) individualism 2) imagination 3) nature 4) the distant.
Romanticism
Corrective ridicule in literature, or a work that is designed to correct an evil by means of ridicule. Not to be confused with verbal irony or sarcasm, purpose is to upbraid and to warn.
Satire
An Old English poet or bard.
Scop
A stated comparison of two things using a linking word or phrase.
Simile
A lyric poem of fourteen iambic-pentameter lines conventionally rhyming according to one of two patterns.
Sonnet
A narrative method designed to reproduce the mental process of a character, mingling conscious with half-conscious thoughts and sensations, past with present experience, and rational and irrational associations, in an unbroken flaw.
Stream of consciousness
The use of one object as a symbol to represent or suggest another.
Symbolism
The way in which grammatical structure is employed to combine words, phrases, and clauses into sentences.
Syntax
A recurring or emerging idea in a work of literature.
Theme
The attitude of a work towards its subject.
Tone
A drama that ends unhappily.
Tragedy
