Q and R Lists Literary Devices

Question 1

a four line stanza in a poem, the first four lines and the second four lines in a Petrarchan sonnet; a Shakespearean sonnet contains three of these followed by a couplet

Answer 1

quatrain

Question 2

describing a literary technique, the goal of which is to render work that feels true, immediate, natural, and realistic

Answer 2

Realism

Question 3

drama that attempts, in content and in presentation to preserve the illusion of actual, everyday life

Answer 3

realistic drama

Question 4

a repeated word, phrase, line, or group of lines, normally at some fixed position in a poem, written in stanzaic form

Answer 4

refrain

Question 5

the sorting out or unraveling of a plot at the end of a play, novel, or story

Answer 5

resolution

Question 6

the point at which the action of the plot turns in an unexpected direction for the protagonist

Answer 6

reversal

Question 7

aka caesura; a natural pause, unmarked by punctuation, introduced into the reading of a line by its phrasing or syntax

Answer 7

rhetorical pause

Question 8

poetry using artificially eloquent language, that is, language too high-flown for its occasion and unfaithful to the full complexity of human experience

Answer 8

rhetorical poetry

Question 9

a question asked for stylistic effect and emphasis to make a point rather than to solicit an answer

Answer 9

rhetorical question

Question 10

the matching of final vowel or consonant sounds in two or more importantly positioned words

Answer 10

rhyme

Question 11

any fixed pattern of rhymes characterizing a whole poem or its stanzas

Answer 11

rhyme scheme

Question 12

the recurrence of accent or stress in lines of verse

Answer 12

rhythm

Question 13

the events, marked by increasing tension and conflict, that build up to a story’s climax

Answer 13

rising action

Question 14

poetic meters such as iambic and anapestic that move or ascend from an unstressed to a stressed syllable

Answer 14

rising meter

Question 15

a novel in which real persons or actual events figure under disguise (FR: novel w/ a key); novel that has the extraliterary interest of portraying identifiable people more or less thinly disguised as fictional characters

Answer 15

roman a clef

Question 16

a type of comedy whose likable and sensible main characters are placed in difficulties from which they are rescued at the end of the play. either attaining their ends or having their good fortunes restored

Answer 16

romantic comedy

Question 17

in literature, a late 18th to early 19th century movement that emphasized beauty for beauty’s sake, the natural world, emotion, imagination, the value of a nation’s past and its folklore, and the heroic roles of the individual and the artist

Answer 17

Romanticism

Question 18

a character whose distinguished moral qualities or personal traits are complex and many-sided

Answer 18

round character

Question 19

a line which has no natural speech pause at its end, allowing the sentence to flow uninterruptedly into the succeeding line

Answer 19

run-on line