Terms : Hide Images
| 86925108 | Abstract | complex writing, discusses intangible qualities like good and evil; seldom uses exmples to support its points | |
| 86925109 | academic | writing style- dry and theoretic; sucks all the life out of its subject with analysis | |
| 86925110 | accent | the stressed word(s) or portion in a line of poetry; opens that portion up for a variety of interpretations | |
| 86925111 | aesthetic | appealing to the senses (adj).; coherent sense of taste (noun) | |
| 86925112 | aesthetics | the study of beauty ("what is beauty?", "is the beautiful always good?") | |
| 86925113 | allegory | a story in which each aspect of the story has a symbolic meaning outside the tale itself | |
| 86925114 | alliteration | the repetition of initial consonant sounds ("happy houdini") | |
| 86925115 | allusion | a reference to another work or a famous figure | |
| 86925116 | topical allusion | refers to a current event | |
| 86925117 | popular allusion | refers to something from popular culture, such as tv or a hit movie | |
| 86925118 | anachronism | "misplaced in time"; when someone forgets to do something important and the mistake or late timing is comical | |
| 86925119 | analogy | a comparison; usually involve two or more symbolic parts and are employed to clarify an action or a relationship | |
| 86925120 | anecdote | a short narrative | |
| 86925121 | antecedent | the word, phrase, or clause that a pronoun refers to or replaces | |
| 86925122 | anthropomorphism | when inanimate objects, animals, or natural phenomena are given human characteristics, behavior, or motivation (confused with personification, but personification is when something nonhuman takes on human shape) | |
| 86925123 | anticlimax | when an action produces far smaller results than one had been led to expect; frequently comic | |
| 86925124 | antihero | a protagonist who is remarkably unheroic: morally weak, cowardly, dishonest, or any number of other unsavory qualities | |
| 86925125 | aphorism | a short and usually witty saying ("classic? a book which people praise and don't read." -Mark Twain) | |
| 86925126 | apostrophe | an address to someone not present, or to a personified object or idea | |
| 86925127 | archaism | the use of deliberately old-fashioned language- used to create a feeling of antiquity | |
| 86925128 | aside | a speech made by an actor to the audience, as though momentarily stepping out of the action on stage (as if we were in his mind) | |
| 86925129 | aspect | a trait or characteristic (an aspect of the dew drop) | |
| 86925130 | assonance | the repeated use of vowel sounds "Old king cole was a merry old soul." | |
| 86925131 | atmosphere | the emotional tone or background that surrounds a scene | |
| 86925132 | ballad | a long, narrative poem, usually in a very regular meter and rhyme; typically has a naive folksy quality, a characteristic that distinguishes it from epic poetry | |
| 86925133 | bathos | when writing strains for grandeur it can't support and tries to elicit tears from every hiccup | |
| 86925134 | pathos | when the writing of a scene evokes feelings of dignified pity and sympathy | |
| 86925135 | black humor | the use of disturbing themes in comedy (fighting over who will commit suicide first- "Waiting for Godot") | |
| 86925136 | bombast | pretentious, exaggeratedly learned language; when one tries to use the largest, most uncommon words, they fall into this | |
| 86925137 | burlesque | a broad parody that takes a style or form, such as a tragic drama, and exaggerates it into ridiculousness- like Hamlet (interchangeable with parody) | |
| 86925138 | cacophony | using deliberately harsh, awkward sounds | |
| 86925139 | cadence | the beat or rhythm of poetry in a general sense; can be gentle, conversational, marching, etc. | |
| 88958354 | canto | the name for a section division in a long work of poetry; divides a long poem into parts the way chapters divide a novel | |
| 88958355 | caricature | a portrait (verbal or otherwise) that exaggerates a facet of personality | |
| 88958356 | catharsis | (term drawn for Aristotle's writings on tragedy); refers to the "cleansing" of emotion of an audience member experiences, having lived vicariously through the experiences presented on stage | |
| 88958357 | chorus | in drama, it is a group of citizens who stand outside the main action on stage and comment on it | |
| 88958358 | classic | can mean typical; it can also mean an accepted masterpiece | |
| 88958359 | classical | the arts of ancient greece and rome and the qualities of those arts | |
| 88958360 | coinage (neologism) | a new word--usually invented on the spot; neologism is the technical term | |
| 88958361 | colloquialism | a word or phrase used in everyday conversational english that isn't part of accepted "schoolbook" english "i'm toasted." | |
| 88958362 | complex, dense | both mean that there is more than one possibility in the meaning of words, that there are subtleties or variations and multiple layers of interpretation; they imply that the meaning is both explicit and implicit | |
| 88958363 | conceit | a startling or unusual metaphor in poetry or a metaphor developed and expanded upon over several lines | |
| 88958364 | controlling image | when an image or idea dominates and shapes an entire work | |
| 88958365 | connotation | everything else but the literal meaning that a word suggests or implies ("dark" can mean dangerous, not just a lack of light) | |
| 88958366 | denotation | the literal meaning of a word | |
| 88958367 | consonance | the repetition of consonant sounds within words (rather than at their beginnings, which is alliteration); "a flock of sick, black-checkered ducks" | |
| 89400897 | couplet | a pair of lines that end in rhyme | |
| 89400898 | decorum | in order to observe this, a character's speech must be styled according to his social station, and in accordance with the occasion | |
| 89400899 | diction | the author's choice of words | |
| 89400900 | syntax | the ordering and structuring of words | |
| 89400901 | dirge | a song for the dead; its tone is typically slow, heavy, and melancholy | |
| 89400902 | dissonance | the grating of incompatible sounds | |
| 89400903 | doggerel | crude, simplistic verse, often in sing-song rhyme (limericks are a kind of doggerel) | |
| 89400904 | dramatic irony | when the audience knows something that the characters in the drama do not | |
| 89400905 | dramatic monologue | when a single speaker in literature says something to a silent audience | |
| 89400906 | elegy | a type of poem that meditates on death or mortality in a serious, thoughtful manner; often memorialize specific dead people | |
| 89400907 | element | a word used constantly and with the assumption that you know exactly what it means-- that is, the beasic techniques of each genre of literature (elements of a short story: characters, irony, theme, symbol, etc.) | |
| 89400908 | enjambment | the continuation of a syntactic unit from one line or couplet of a poem to the next with no pause | |
| 89400909 | epic | a long, narrative poem on a serious theme in a dignified style; typically deal with profound or glorious subject matter (a great war, a herioc journey, a battle with supernatural forces, etc.) | |
| 89400910 | mock-epic | a parody form of writing that deals with mundane events and ironically treats them as worthy of epic poetry | |
| 89400911 | epitaph | a line or handful of lines that commemorate the dead at their burial place; sometimes serious and religious, sometimes witty and slightly irreverent |
