Juergens Lit Terms
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| 89160618 | Genre | A sub-category of literature. | |
| 89160619 | Gothic (Novel) | These showed up in the middle of the 18th century and were immensely popular for about sixty years. Think mysterious gloomy castles perched on high sheer cliffs, brooding handsome heroes with a mysterious past, persecuted heroines and diabolical villains. | |
| 89160620 | Hamartia | Aristotle's term for the tragic hero's fatal error in judgment. Literally,"missing the mark". | |
| 89160621 | Hubris | In tragedy, the excessive pride or ambition that leads to the protagonist's downfall. | |
| 89160622 | Hyperbole | Overstatement for the purpose of emphasis. | |
| 89160623 | Idyll | A lyric poem describing a kind of ideal life or place. | |
| 89160624 | Imagery | Language that appeals to the senses: olfactory, visual, auditory, gustatory and tactile. | |
| 89160625 | In media res | Latin for "in the middle of things." One of the conventions of epic poetry is the action begins here. | |
| 89160626 | Intentional Fallacy | The judging of the meaning or success of a work of art by what the author has to say about it, that is, by the author's intent. | |
| 89160627 | Interior Monologue | This is a term for novels and poetry, not dramatic literature. It refers to writing that records the mental talking going on inside a character's head. It is related to stream of consciousness but is more coherent. | |
| 89160628 | Irony | A broad term referring to the recognition of a reality different from appearances. | |
| 89160629 | Verbal Irony | a figure of speech in which the actual intent is expressed in words that carry the opposite meaning. | |
| 89160630 | Dramatic Irony | this involves an incongruity between what a character perceives and what the author intends the audience or reader to perceive. | |
| 89160631 | Situational Irony | this involves an incongruity between appearance and reality, between expectation and fulfillment, or between the actual situation and what would seem to be appropriate. | |
| 89160632 | Cosmic Irony | in this, a discrepancy exists between what a character aspires to and what the universe provides. | |
| 89160633 | Lament | A poem of sadness or grief over the death of a loved one or some other intense loss - the loss of one's home, one's true-love, one's innocence. | |
| 89160634 | Lampoon | A satire. | |
| 89160635 | Litotes | A form of understatement in which the negative of the contrary is used to achieve emphasis and intensity. Fred Astaire was not a bad dancer. | |
| 89160636 | Lyric Poem | A type of poetry that explores the poet's personal interpretation of and feelings about life, the universe and everything. | |
| 89160637 | Masculine Rhyme | A rhyme ending on the final stressed syllable, moon and June, for instance | |
| 89160638 | Melodrama | A form of cheesy drama in which the hero is very, very good, the villain mean and rotten, and the heroine oh-so pure. It can be straightforward or played for comic effect. | |
| 89160639 | Metaphor | A comparison or analogy that states one thing is another. "His eyes were burning coals, or in the morning, the lake is covered in liquid gold." | |
| 89160640 | Metonymy | A word that is used to stand for something else that it has attributes of or is associated with. "The pen is mightier than the sword, or a hired gun." | |
| 89350504 | Meiosis | Intentional understatement for humorous or satiric effect. "Rhymster" instead of poet; "Treehugger" instead of environmentalists. | |
| 89350505 | Mood | Emotional response or attitude of the reader to the subject. | |
| 89350506 | Motif | Repeated devise that serves as a unifying agent in conveying or emphasizing theme. | |
| 89350507 | Onomatopoeia | Words that sound like what they mean. "BOOM!" "Splat" | |
| 89350508 | Oxymoron | A short phrase (usually two words) composed of opposites; a seeming contradiction. "jumbo shrimp" "dark light" | |
| 89350509 | Parable | A story that instructs. | |
| 89350510 | Paradox | A situation or statement that seems to contradict itself, but on closer inspection, does not. | |
| 89350511 | Parallelism | Repeated syntactical similarities used for effect | |
| 89350512 | Parenthetical Phrase | A phrase set off by commas that interrupts the flow of a sentence with some commentary or added detail. | |
| 89350513 | Parody | A spoof of a specific work which results when the original work is ridiculously exaggerated. | |
| 89350514 | Pastoral | A poem set in tranquil, idyllic nature or even more specifically, a poem about shepherds. | |
| 89350515 | Pathetic Fallacy | A term which describes the human tendency to see our emotions reflected in our environment. "Cruel sea" or " a glorious day" | |
| 89350516 | Persona | A term taken from the mask used by Roman actors, this is the character that the author of a literary work assumes as the narrator. | |
| 89350517 | Personification | A figure of speech in which an inanimate object or non-human entity takes on human shape. | |
| 89350518 | Plaint | A poem expressing sorrow. | |
| 89350519 | Point of View | This is the perspective from which the action from the narrative is presented, whether the action is presented by one or several over the course of the narrative. | |
| 89350520 | Omniscient Narrator | Third person non-diegetic narrator who sees all, knows all and tells all. | |
| 89350521 | Limited Omniscient Narrator | Third person non-diegetic narrator who reports from the perspective of one character. | |
| 89350522 | Objective Eye Narrator (Camera Eye Narrator) | Third person narrator who only reports what would be visible to a camera. | |
| 89350523 | Prelude | An introductory poem or chapter to a longer work or verse. | |
| 89350524 | Protagonist | The main character of a novel or play. | |
| 89360747 | Pun | A play on words based on the similarity of sounds between two words with different meanings. | |
| 89360748 | Refrain | A line or set of lines repeated several times over the course of the poem. | |
| 89360749 | Requiem | A hymn, composition or service for the dead. | |
| 89360750 | Rhapsody | An intensely passionate verse usually of love or praise. | |
| 89360751 | Rhetorical Question | A question asked for its rhetorical effect and not requiring a reply. | |
| 89360752 | Rite of Passage | A story of initiation into maturity or experience. | |
| 89360753 | Sarcasm | A form of verbal irony in which apparent praise is actually harshly critical. This is personal, bitter, and intended to wound. | |
| 89360754 | Satire | A literary work that holds up human folly to ridicule and censure. This blends a censorious attitude with humor and wit with the purported aim of improving human institutions or humanity. | |
| 89360755 | Horatian | The type of satire that is gentle, urbane, smiling; it aims to correct by broadly sympathetic laughter. | |
| 89360756 | Juvenalian | The type of satire that is bitter and anger; it points with contempt and indignation to the corruption of human beings and institutions. | |
| 89516050 | Simile | A figure of speech in which an explicit comparison is made between two things. This often uses "like" or "as" to indicate the comparison, but other phrases may be used. | |
| 89516051 | Soliloquy | A speech spoken alone by a character on stage. This is meant to convey the impression that the audience is listening to the character's thoughts. Unlike an aside, this is not meant to imply that the character acknowledges the audience's presence. | |
| 89516052 | Sonnet | A 14-lined poem usually in iambic pentameter. | |
| 89516053 | Stanza | A group of lines in verse roughly analogous to a paragraph in prose. | |
| 89516054 | Stock Character | Standard or clichéd character types: the drunk, the miser, etc. These characters are usually flat. | |
| 89516055 | Stream of Consciousness | This technique is like first person narration but instead of the character telling the story, the author places the reader inside the character's head and makes the reader privy to the character's thoughts. The reader seems to directly experience the character's thoughts with no interpretation by the author. | |
| 89516056 | Suspension of Disbelief | The demand made of a theatre audience to accept the limitations of staging and supply the details with their imagination. Also, by acceptance of the audience or reader of the basic premises of a play or story. | |
| 89516057 | Symbol | A device in literature where an object is itself and also represents something else. | |
| 89516058 | Synaesthesia | The concurrent response of two or more of the senses to the stimulation of one. The term is applied in literature to the description of one kind of sensation in terms of another sense--the description sounds in terms of colors (blue music), of colors in terms of sound (a loud shirt), sounds in terms of taste (how sweet the sound) etc. | |
| 89516059 | Synecdoche | A figure of speech in which a part represents a whole. | |
| 89516060 | Tone | The speaker's attitude toward the subject. | |
| 89516061 | Tragic Flaw | In tragedy, this is the weakness in a character or mistake in judgment which ultimately leads to the downfall of the tragic hero. | |
| 89516062 | Truism | An oh-so-obvious truth. | |
| 89516063 | Understatement | An ironic figure of speech that describes something in a way that is less than the true case. | |
| 89516064 | Utopia | An ideal, impossibly perfect community in which people live in happiness and peace. ` | |
| 89516065 | Zeugma | A term used in several ways, all involving a sort of yoking. The most common form is when two different words that sound exactly alike are yoked together with "and" or "or". "He closed the door and his heart on his lost love", where closing one's heart and closing one's door are too different actions. |
