Midterm Flashcards
A stage device in which a character briefly discloses his thought in the presence of other characters who by convention do not hear him
Aside
The emotion pervading a work
Atmosphere
A short, simple narrative song
Ballad
Unrhymed iambic pentameter
Blank Verse
A break between words within a metrical foot
Caesura
A strained and elaborate comparison
Conceit
A pair of rhymed lines
Couplet
Concerned with teaching; instruction in literature
Didacticism
A poem of solemn meditation or lamenting the death of a particular person/ meditating on the subject of death itself
Elegiac Poetry
A long, stylized narrative poem celebrating the deeds of a national hero
Epic
Characteristically impersonal, compressed, dramatic, ritualistic in effect, and simple in stanza form
Folk Ballad
A story within a story
Frame Story
A type or category of literature
Genre
Exaggeration - implies less than what is said
Hyperbole
A metaphoric compound of two words
(such as whalepath for sea)
Kenning
Is written by known poets for literary effect
Literary Ballad
A short, melodic, personally expressive poem
Lyric Poetry
Consists of ten syllables per line, paired by alternating stresses of five iambic feet
Meter
An expression in which a related thing stands for the thing itself
Metonymy
A work that treats a trivial subject in heroic terms
Mock Epic
A highly artificial literary mode which centers on shepherds and idealizes rural settings
Pastoralism
First eight lines, called the octave, rhymes abbaabba and forms a distinct unit of the thought; the last six lines, a sestet, rhymes variously with two or three new rhymes and forms another unit of thought
Petrarchan / Italian Sonnet
The attribution of a personal nature or human characteristics to something nonhuman, or the representation of an abstract quality in human form
Personification
The expression of an idea in a roundabout, more elegant way
Periphrastic Epithet