Literary Terms Flashcards
Learn all about the terms which will be on midterm 1.
Sometimes referred to as a “B story” or a “C story” and so on, is a secondary plot that is auxiliary to the main plot.
Subplot
someone other than the reader–a character within the fiction–to whom the story or “speech” is addressed.
Auditor
in it’s original, primary meaning, refers to the writer’s or the speaker’s distinctive vocabulary choices and style of expression.
Diction
any event with a sad and unfortunate outcome, but the term also applies specifically in Western culture to a form of drama defined by Aristotle, characterized by seriousness and dignity and involving a great person who experiences a reversal of fortune.
Tragedy
the repetition of leading vowels or consonant sounds in adjacent words as in “Peter Piper Picked a Peck of Pickled Peppers”.
Alliteration
includes but is not limited to, alliteration with vowel sounds.
Assonance
objects, characters, or other concrete representations of ideas, concepts, or other abstractions.
Symbols
in poetry, the deliberate avoidance of assonance, i.e. patterns of repeated vowel sounds
Dissonance
a figure of speech that combines two normally contradictory terms.
Oxymoron
a literary device in which an author drops subtle hints about plot developments to come later in the story.
Foreshadowing
a “second self” created by the author and through whom the narrative is related.
Persona
any recurring element in a story that has symbolic significance
Motif
the mood or feeling of a literary work.
Tone
the use of the five senses (sight, touch, smell, hearing, and taste), or any series of words that create a picture in your head.
Imagery
a figure of speech that gives inanimate objects human traits and qualities.
Personification or Anthromorphism
the study of the history of words - when they entered a language, from what source, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.
Etymology
that against which the protagonist contends.
Antagonist
the basic conflict is complicated by the introduction of related secondary conflicts, including various obstacles that frustrate the protagonist’s attempt to reach their goal.
Rising Action
a form of art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its ostensible meaning.
Poetry
a literary genre that is usually fictional narrative prose and tends to be more concise and to the point than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels.
Short Story
the specific mode of friction represented in performance. it is derived from a Greek word meaning “action”.
Drama
a term applies to a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, architecture, art, literature, and culture, which are generally characterized as either emerging from, in reaction to, or superseding, modernism.
Postmodernism
the perspective of the narrative voice; the pronoun used in narration.
Point of View
an entity within a story that tells the story to the reader.
Narrator
a disembodied and takes no actions and has no physical form in or out of the story. However, being omniscient, it witnesses all events, even some that no characters witness.
Omniscient Narrator
a literary device in which the credibility of the narrator is seriously compromised.
Unreliable Narrator
the literal meaning of the word.
Denotation
the suggestive meaning of a word.
Connotation
a repetition of identical or similar sounds in two or more different words and is most often used in poetry.
Rhyme
language that directly Compares seemingly unrelated subjects.
Metaphor
a comparison of two unlike things typically marked by use of “like”, “as”, “than”, or “resembles”.
Simile
a figure of speech in which one refers covertly or indirectly to an object or circumstance that has occurred or existed in an external context.
Allusion
when the reader has grown sympathetic of the poet.
Poetic Situation
an interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point the story has reached
Flashback
the feeling of uncertainty and interest about the outcome of certain actions, most often referring to an audience’s perceptions in a dramatic work.
Suspense
contains elements of contrast, but it usually refers to a situation in a play where a character, whose knowledge is limited, says, does or encounters something of greater significance than he or she knows.
Dramatic Irony
the interpretation of a story or text with its proposed environment in mind.
Cultural Context
a character who emphasizes the traits of the main character.
Foil
the way an author develops a series of events in a text
Plot
the environment in which a story or event takes place. setting can include specific information about time and place (e.g. Boston, Massachusetts, in 1809) or can simply be descriptive (e.g. a lonely farmhouse on a dark night).
Setting
