Terms : Hide Images
| 4688375646 | Allegory | An extended narrative that carries a second meaning along with the surface story. | 0 | |
| 4688375958 | Alliteration | The repetition of accented consonant sounds at the beginning of words that are close to each other. | 1 | |
| 4688376800 | Allusion | A reference in literature to previous literature, history, mythology, pop culture, or the Bible. | 2 | |
| 4688378411 | Ambiguity | The quality of being intentionally unclear. Makes the situation able to be interpreted in more than one way. | 3 | |
| 4688379026 | American Reaissance | The writing of the period before the Civil War, beginning with Emerson and Thoreau and the Transcendentalist movement including Whitman, Hawthorne, and Melville. | 4 | |
| 4688380776 | Anachronism | In a literary work, something placed in an inappropriate period in time. Often, but not always, a mistake on the part of the author. | 5 | |
| 4698161769 | Anadiplosis | (Greek or doubling). Repeating the last word of a clause at the beginning of the next clause. | 6 | |
| 4698162949 | Analogy | A comparison, usually extended of two different things. | 7 | |
| 4698163754 | Anaphora | The repetition of an identical word or group of words in successive verses or clauses. | 8 | |
| 4698164941 | Anastrophe | The inversion of normal word order to achieve a particular effect. | 9 | |
| 4698165631 | Anecdote | A brief account of a story about an individual or incident. | 10 | |
| 4698166205 | Antagonist | A character who functions as a resisting force to the goals of the protagonist, without association of good or evil. | 11 | |
| 4698167063 | Antimetabole | (Greek for "turning about"). A rhetorical scheme involving repetition in reverse order. | 12 | |
| 4698170053 | Anticlimax | A drop, often sudden and unexpected from a dignified or important idea or situation to one that is trivial or humorous. Also, a sudden descent from something sublime to something ridiculous. (The end of As I lay Dying). | 13 | |
| 4698173604 | Antihero | A protagonist who carries the action of the literary piece, but does not embody the classic characteristics of courage, strength, and nobility. Frequently a pathetic, comic, or anti-social figure. | 14 | |
| 4698175311 | Antithesis | A rhetorical figure in which sharply opposing are expressed within a balanced grammatical structure. | 15 | |
| 4698178026 | Aporia | An un-resolvable conflict between thought and language. "There is no God and we are his prophets" | 16 | |
| 4698179838 | Aphorism | A short pithy statement of a truth or doctrine. | 17 | |
| 4698181026 | Aposiopesis | An abrupt breaking off in the middle of a sentence without the completion of the idea, often under the stress of emotion. | 18 | |
| 4698183558 | Apostrophe | A figure of speech in which a person not present or a personified abstraction is directly addresses as though present. | 19 | |
| 4698184448 | Apotheosis | Elevation of someone to the status of god. | 20 | |
| 4698185088 | Archetype | A character, situation, or symbol that is familiar to people from all cultures and eras because it occurs frequently in literature, myth, religion, or folklore. | 21 | |
| 4698186469 | Aside | In a play, a character's short speech or remark heard by the audience but not by other characters. | 22 | |
| 4698187508 | Assonance | The repetition of similar vowel sounds, usually close together, to achieve a particular effect of euphony. | 23 | |
| 4698189416 | Atmoshere | The emotional tone pervading a section or a whole of a literary work. | 24 | |
| 4698189889 | Attitude | he author's feeling toward the topic he or she is writing about; often used interchangeably with "tone". | 25 | |
| 4698190956 | Aubade | A poem or song announcing/celebrating he coming of dawn. | 26 | |
| 4729155564 | Ballad | A narrative poem, usually simple and fairly short, originally designed to be sung. | 27 | |
| 4729156101 | Bathos | Similar to anti-climactic, a sudden descent from the exalted to the ridiculous; excessive sentimentality or pathos; authors achieve bathos unintentionally. | 28 | |
| 4729157951 | Beat Generation | Denotes a group of American writers who became prominent in the 1950s. Their convictions and attitudes were unconventional, provocative, anti-intellectual, anti-hierarchical, And anti-middle class. | 29 | |
| 4729160502 | Bildungsroman | A novel which is an account of the youthful development of a hero or heroine. | 30 | |
| 4729161015 | Blank Verse | Poetry of unrhymed iambic pentameter. | 31 | |
| 4729161568 | Bowdlerize | To prudishly expurgate supposedly offensive passages. | 32 | |
| 4729162848 | Bucolic | Used to describe an idealized country setting; basically a synonym for pastoral. | 33 | |
| 4729163215 | Burlesque | A work designed to ridicule attitudes, style, or subject matter by handling either an elevated subject in trivial manner or a low subject with mock dignity. | 34 | |
| 4729164011 | Byronic Hero | In literature, a rebel, proudly defiant in his attitude toward conventional social codes and religious beliefs; an exile or outcast hungering for an ultimate truth to give meaning to his life. Despite past transgressions he remains a sympathetic figure. | 35 | |
| 4731461818 | Cacophony | Harsh, discordant sounds, unpleasant to the ear. | 36 | |
| 4731461995 | Cadence | The natural rise and fall of the voice in reciting, reading, or speaking; flow of rhythm, inflection, or modulation in a tone. | 37 | |
| 4731462748 | Caesura | A pause separating phrases within a line of poetry. | 38 | |
| 4731465081 | Canon | A body of writings established over time as having a genuine literary merit. | 39 | |
| 4731465326 | Caricature | The exaggeration of features and mannerisms fro satirical effect. | 40 | |
| 4731465833 | Carpe Diem | Latin phrase meaning "seize the day", the idea of which (time is short and life is fleeting) was used frequently in 16th and 17th century poetry. | 41 | |
| 4731467533 | Catastrophe | Greek for "overturning"; the tragic denouncement of a play or story. | 42 | |
| 4731469245 | Catharsis | Emotional cleansing or feeling of relief felt by the audience at the conclusion of a tragedy. In a sense, the tragedy, having aroused powerful feelings in the spectator, also having therapeutic effects. | 43 | |
| 4731470854 | Chiasmus | A literary scheme involving a specific inversion of word order. It involves taking parallelism and deliberately turning it inside out. | 44 | |
| 4731472506 | Cliche | An expression that deviates enough from ordinary usage to call attention to itself and has been used so often that it is felt to be hackneyed or cloying. | 45 | |
| 4731474105 | Climax | The point of greatest dramatic tension or emotional intensity in a plot is defined at the climax. | 46 | |
| 4731476111 | Closed Form | Type of poetry in which the structure is dictated or predetermined. | 47 | |
| 4731476576 | Coin | To invent and put into use a new word or expression. | 48 | |
| 4731477582 | Colloquial | Words, phrases or expressions used in everyday speech and writing. | 49 | |
| 4731478779 | Comedy of Manners | Concerned with intrigues, regularly amorous, of witty and sophisticated members of an aristocratic society. | 50 | |
| 4731479318 | Comic Relief | Humorous element inserted into a somber or tragic work, in order to relieve its tension, widen its scope, or heighten by contrast the tragic emotion. | 51 | |
| 4731480437 | Conceit | A far-fetched comparison between two seemingly unlike things. | 52 | |
| 4731481261 | Confidant | A character entrusted with the secrets and private thoughts of another character, usually the protagonist. | 53 | |
| 4731481925 | Connotation | Associations a word calls to mind. | 54 | |
| 4731482216 | Consonance | The close repetition of identical consonant sounds before and after different vowels. | 55 | |
| 4731483567 | Convention | A device, principle, procedure or form which is generally accepted; an audience at a play accepts the convention of a representation of scenery and action. | 56 | |
| 4731484872 | Couplet | Two successive rhyming lines of the same number of syllables, with matching cadence. | 57 | |
| 4731485568 | Crisis | The turning point of uncertainty and tension resulting from earlier conflict in a plot. | 58 | |
| 4731486263 | Deconstructionism | As a contemporary literary theory, this asserts that, rather than the traditional view that a text has only one fixed and stable meaning any text carries a plurality of meaning. | 59 | |
| 4731486948 | Denotation | The dictionary or literal meaning of a word or phrase. | 60 | |
| 4731487479 | Denouement | The typing up of loose ends after the climax in a story, novel, or play. | 61 | |
| 4731488598 | Deus Ex Machina | Literally 'god out of the machine'; at a story's end, any unanticipated intervention that resolves a seemingly impossible plot problem. | 62 | |
| 4731489719 | Diction | A writer's choice of language to achieve a desired tone or effect, be it formal, informal, colloquial, elevated, etc. | 63 | |
| 4731490406 | Didactic | Story, speech essay, or play in which the author's primary purpose is to instruct, teach, or moralize. | 64 | |
| 4731490770 | Direct Characterization | Telling the attributes and qualities of a character. | 65 | |
| 4731491562 | Distortion | Variation from expected or typical proportion or arrangement. Intentional variation from norms of harmony, balance, and order. | 66 | |
| 4731492051 | Doggerel | Rough, Crudely written verse. The term is one of critical judgement rather than technical description. | 67 | |
| 4731492517 | Doppleganger | A device by which a character is self-duplicated; The "divided self" or ghostly double e. g. Victor Frankenstein and his creature. | 68 | |
| 4731494292 | Dramatic Irony | A form of irony that depends more on the structure of a play than words; where the audience knows something vital that the character does not know. | 69 | |
| 4731494869 | Dramatic Monologue | A poem consisting of the words of a single character who reveals in his speech his own nature; discloses the psychology of the speaker at a particular moment. | 70 | |
| 4731495621 | Dramatis Personae | The characters in a play, usually listed on a page prior to the opening lines. | 71 | |
| 4731496515 | Dynamic Character | A character that changes during the course of a work. | 72 | |
| 4731496793 | Dystopia | Work in which a society in an attempt to perfect itself, instead goes terribly wrong. | 73 | |
| 4740379224 | Edwardian Period | Pertaining to Kind Edward VII's reign (1901-1910) - a period of considerable change and reaction against Victorianism as well as growing apprehension about technology and industrialization. | 74 | |
| 4740384346 | Elegy | A poem mourning the death of an individual. | 75 | |
| 4740385429 | Elision | Slurring or omission of an unstressed syllable to make a line of poetry conform to a metrical pattern. (O'er) | 76 | |
| 4740387492 | Elizabethan Era | Named for England's Queen Elizabeth the First, a somewhat vague classification applied tot he second half of the 16th and early 17th centuries, remarkable for its creative activity and output in English literature, especially drama. | 77 | |
| 4740392073 | Emblem | A symbolic picture accompanied by a motto and occasionally by exposition. | 78 | |
| 4740393209 | End Rhyme | Rhyme which comes at the end of a line of verse. | 79 | |
| 4740393722 | End-Stopped | When the sense and meter coincide at the end of the line. | 80 | |
| 4740394816 | English Sonnet | Traditionally, a fourteen-line love poem in iambic pentameter, but in contemporary poetry, themes and forms vary. | 81 | |
| 4740395646 | Enjambment | In poetry, the running over of a sentence from one verse or stanza to the next without stopping at the end of the first. | 82 | |
| 4740397265 | Enlightenment | An intellectual movement in the late-17th and 18th centuries uniting the concepts of God, nature, reason, and man in the in the belief that "right reason" could achieve for man a perfect society by freeing him from the oppressive restraints of unexamined authority, superstition and prejudice. (Age of Reason). | 83 | |
| 4740403717 | Epic | An extended narrative poem, exalted in style and heroic in theme. | 84 | |
| 4740404289 | Epigram | A short, usually witty statement, graceful in style and ingenious in thought. | 85 | |
| 4740405436 | Epigraph | A brief quotation at the beginning of a work that reflects the theme of the work. | 86 | |
| 4740406121 | Epiphany | A sudden flash of insight; a startling discovery; a dramatic realization. | 87 | |
| 4740407212 | Epistolary Novel | Novel written in the form of letters. (technically Frankenstein). | 88 | |
| 4740407795 | Epithalamion | A song or poem sung outside the bridal chamber on the wedding night. | 89 | |
| 4740409985 | Epithet | An adjective or phrase expressing some quality or attribute characteristic of an individual, as in Atilla the Hun, or Jack the Ripper. | 90 | |
| 4740411116 | Ethos | Appeal to ethics. | 91 | |
| 4740411550 | Euphemism | A word or phrase which substitutes for another which would likely be undesirable because it may be too direct, unpleasant, or offensive. ("pass on" instead of "die"). | 92 | |
| 4740413436 | Euphony | Denotes pleasing, mellifluous sounds, usually produced by long vowels rather than consonants. | 93 | |
| 4740414547 | Eye rhyme | Rhyme which depends on spelling rather than pronunciation; rhyme that is seen, not heard. | 94 | |
| 4740415192 | Farce | Any Play which evokes laughter by such devices of low comedy such as physical buffoonery, rough wit or ridiculous situations; unconcerned with subtlety/plausibility. | 95 | |
| 4740417156 | Feminine rhyme | Terminal rhyme that extends over two or more syllables. | 96 | |
| 4740417503 | Figurative Language | Unlike literal expression, uses of figures of speech in order to appeal to one's senses. Commonly used in poetry. | 97 | |
| 4740420410 | First Person Narrator | A character in the story who tells the story, using the pronoun I. The character has a limited perspective of the narration and is therefore unreliable. | 98 | |
| 4740421832 | Flashblack | A scene inserted in a novel, play, or story showing events which happened at an earlier time. | 99 | |
| 4740422292 | Flat Character | A one-dimensional character, about whom little is revealed throughout the course of the work. | 100 | |
| 4740424292 | Foil | A character whose contrasting personal characteristics draw attention to, enhance, or contrast with those of the main character. | 101 | |
| 4740425466 | Foot | A group of syllables forming a metrical unit. | 102 | |
| 4740425467 | Foreshadowing | Hints at what is to come. | 103 | |
| 4740426277 | Fourth Wall | The imaginary "wall" at the front of the stage in a traditional three-walled box set in a proscenium theater, through which the audience sees the action in the world of the play. (in traditional stagecraft actors never break the fourth wall). | 104 | |
| 4740429840 | Frame Story | A narrative enclosed within another. | 105 | |
| 4740432077 | Free Verse | Poetry without regular rhyme or meter. | 106 | |
| 4740425283 | Foot | 107 |
