The Glossary of Literary Terms for the AP English Literature and Composition Test
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| 10527937 | Abstract | Complex, discusses intangible qualities like good and evil, seldom uses examples to support its points. | |
| 10527938 | Academic | Dry and rhetorical writing; sucking all the life out of its subject with analysis. | |
| 10527939 | Accent | In poetry, the stressed portion of a word. | |
| 10527940 | Aesthetic | Appealing to the senses; a coherent sense of taste. | |
| 10527941 | Allegory | A story in which each aspect of the story has a symbolic meaning outside the tale itself. | |
| 10527942 | Alliteration | The repetition of initial consonant sounds. | |
| 10527943 | Allusion | A reference to another work or famous figure. | |
| 10527944 | Anachronism | "Misplaced in time." An aspect of a story that doesn't belong in its supposed time setting. | |
| 10527945 | Analogy | A comparison, usually involving two or more symbolic parts, employed to clarify an action or a relationship. | |
| 10527946 | Anecdote | A Short Narrative | |
| 10527947 | Antecedent | The word, phrase, or clause that determines what a pronoun refers to. | |
| 10527948 | Anthropomorphism | When inanimate objects are given human characteristics. Often confused with personification. | |
| 10527949 | Anticlimax | Occurs when an action produces far smaller results than one had been led to expect. | |
| 10527950 | Antihero | A protagonist who is markedly unheroic: morally weak, cowardly, dishonest, or any number of other unsavory qualities. | |
| 10527951 | Aphorism | A short and usually witty saying. | |
| 10527952 | Apostrophe | A figure of speech wherein the speaker talks directly to something that is nonhuman. | |
| 10527953 | Archaism | The use of deliberately old-fashioned language. | |
| 10527954 | Aside | A speech (usually just a short comment) made by an actor to the audience, as though momentarily stepping outside of the action on stage. | |
| 10527955 | Aspect | A trait or characteristic | |
| 10527956 | Assonance | The repeated use of vowel sounds: "Old king Cole was a merry old soul." | |
| 10527957 | Atmosphere | The emotional tone or background that surrounds a scene | |
| 10527958 | Ballad | A long, narrative poem, usually in meter and rhyme. Typically has a naive folksy quality. | |
| 10527959 | Bathos | Writing strains for grandeur it can't support and tries too hard to be a tear jerker. | |
| 10527960 | Pathos | Writing evokes feelings of dignified pity and sympathy. | |
| 10527961 | Black humor | The use of disturbing themes in comedy. | |
| 10527962 | Bombast | Pretentious, exaggeratedly learned language. | |
| 10527963 | Burlesque | Broad parody, one that takes a style or form and exaggerates it into ridiculousness. | |
| 10527964 | Cacophony | In poetry, using deliberately harsh, awkward sounds. | |
| 10527965 | Cadence | The beat or rhythm or poetry in a general sense. | |
| 10527966 | Canto | The name for a section division in a long work of poetry. | |
| 10527967 | Caricature | A portrait (verbal or otherwise) that exaggerates a facet of personality. | |
| 10527968 | Catharsis | Drawn from Aristotle's writings on tragedy. Refers to the "cleansing" of emotion an audience member experiences during a play | |
| 10527969 | Chorus | In Greek drama, the group of citizens who stand outside the main action on stage and comment on it. | |
| 10527970 | Classic | Typical, or an accepted masterpiece. | |
| 10527971 | Coinage (neologism) | A new word, usually one invented on the spot. | |
| 10527972 | Colloquialism | A word or phrase used in everyday conversational English that isn't a part of accepted "school-book" English. | |
| 10527973 | Complex (Dense) | Suggesting that there is more than one possibility in the meaning of words; subtleties and variations; multiple layers of interpretation; meaning both explicit and implicit | |
| 10527974 | Conceit (Controlling Image) | A startling or unusual metaphor, or to a metaphor developed and expanded upon several lines. | |
| 10527975 | Denotation | A word's literal meaning. | |
| 10527976 | Connotation | Everything other than the literal meaning that a word suggests or implies. | |
| 10527977 | Consonance | The repetition of consonant sounds within words (rather than at their beginnings) | |
| 10527978 | Couplet | A pair of lines that end in rhyme | |
| 10527979 | Decorum | A character's speech must be styled according to her social station, and in accordance to the situation. | |
| 10527980 | Diction | The words an author chooses to use. | |
| 10527981 | Syntax | The ordering and structuring of words. | |
| 10527982 | Dirge | A song for the dead. Its tone is typically slow, heavy, depressed, and melancholy | |
| 10527983 | Dissonance | Refers to the grating of incompatible sounds. | |
| 10527984 | Doggerel | Crude, simplistic verse, often in sing-song rhyme, like limericks. | |
| 10527985 | Dramatic Irony | When the audience knows something that the characters in the drama do not | |
| 10527986 | Dramatic Monologue | When a single speaker in literature says something to a silent audience. | |
| 10527987 | Elegy | A type of poem that meditates on death or mortality in a serious, thoughtful manner. | |
| 10527988 | Elements | Basic techniques of each genre of literature | |
| 10527989 | Enjambment | The continuation of a syntactic unit from one line or couplet of a poem to the next with no pause. | |
| 10527990 | Epic | A very long narrative poem on a serious theme in a dignified style; typically deal with glorious or profound subject matter. | |
| 10527991 | Epitaph | Lines that commemorate the dead at their burial place. | |
| 10527992 | Euphemism | A word or phrase that takes the place of a harsh, unpleasant, or impolite reality. | |
| 10527993 | Euphony | When sounds blend harmoniously. | |
| 10527994 | Explicit | To say or write something directly and clearly. | |
| 10527995 | Farce | Extremely broad humor; in earlier times, a funny play or a comedy. | |
| 10527996 | Feminine rhyme | Lines rhymed by their final two syllables. Properly, the penultimate syllables are stressed and the final syllables are unstressed. | |
| 10527997 | Foil | A secondary character whose purpose is to highlight the characteristics of a main character, usually by contrast. | |
| 10527998 | Foot | The basic rhythmic unit of a line of poetry, formed by a combination of two or three syllables, either stressed or unstressed. | |
| 10527999 | Foreshadowing | An event of statement in a narrative that in miniature suggests a larger event that comes later. | |
| 10528000 | Free verse | poetry written without a regular rhyme scheme or metrical pattern | |
| 10528001 | Genre | A sub-category of literature. | |
| 10528002 | Gothic | A sensibility that includes such features as dark, gloomy castles and weird screams from the attic each night. | |
| 10528003 | Hubris | The excessive pride or ambition that leads to the main character's downfall | |
| 10528004 | Hyperbole | Exaggeration or deliberate overstatement. | |
| 10528005 | Implicit | To say or write something that suggests and implies but never says it directly or clearly. | |
| 10528006 | In media res | Latin for "in the midst of things," i.e. beginning an epic poem in the middle of the action. | |
| 10528007 | Interior Monologue | Refers to writing that records the mental talking that goes on inside a character's head; tends to be coherent. | |
| 10528008 | Inversion | Switching the customary order of elements in a sentence or phrase. | |
| 10528009 | Irony | A statement that means the opposite of what it seems to mean; uses an undertow of meaning, sliding against the literal a la Jane Austen. | |
| 10528010 | Lament | A poem of sadness or grief over the death of a loved one or over some other intense loss. | |
| 10528011 | Lampoon | A satire. | |
| 10528012 | Loose sentence | A sentence that is complete before its end: Jack loved Barbara despite her irritating snorting laugh. | |
| 10528013 | Periodic Sentence | A sentence that is not grammatically complete until it has reached it s final phrase: Despite Barbara's irritation at Jack, she loved him. | |
| 10528014 | Lyric | A type of poetry that explores the poet's personal interpretation of and feelings about the world. | |
| 10528015 | Masculine rhyme | A rhyme ending on the final stressed syllable (regular old rhyme) | |
| 10528016 | Meaning | What makes sense, what's important. | |
| 10528017 | Melodrama | A form of cheesy theater in which the hero is very, very good, the villain mean and rotten, and the heroine oh-so-pure. | |
| 10528018 | Metaphor | A comparison or analogy that states one thing IS another. | |
| 10528019 | Simile | A comparison or analogy that typically uses like or as. | |
| 10528020 | Metonymy | A word that is used to stand for something else that it has attributes of or is associated with. | |
| 10528021 | Nemesis | The protagonist's arch enemy or supreme and persistent difficulty. | |
| 10528022 | Objectivity | Treatment of subject matter in an impersonal manner or from an outside view. | |
| 10528023 | Subjectivity | A treatment of subject matter that uses the interior or personal view of a single observer and is typically colored with that observer's emotional responses. | |
| 10528024 | Onomatopoeia | Words that sound like what they mean | |
| 10528025 | Opposition | A pairing of images whereby each becomes more striking and informative because it's placed in contrast to the other one. | |
| 10528026 | Oxymoron | A phrase composed of opposites; a contradiction. | |
| 10528027 | Parable | A story that instructs. | |
| 10528028 | Paradox | A situation or statement that seems to contradict itself, but on closer inspection, does not. | |
| 10528029 | Parallelism | Repeated syntactical similarities used for effect. | |
| 10528030 | Paraphrase | To restate phrases and sentences in your own words. | |
| 10528031 | Parenthetical phrase | A phrase set off by commas that interrupts the flow of a sentence with some commentary or added detail. | |
| 10528032 | Parody | The work that results when a specific work is exaggerated to ridiculousness. | |
| 10528033 | Pastoral | A poem set in tranquil nature or even more specifically, one about shepherds. | |
| 10528034 | Persona | The narrator in a non first-person novel. | |
| 10528035 | Personification | When an inanimate object takes on human shape. | |
| 10528036 | Plaint | A poem or speech expressing sorrow. | |
| 10528037 | Point of View | The perspective from which the action of a novel is presented. | |
| 10528038 | Omniscient | A third person narrator who sees into each character's mind and understands all the action going on. | |
| 10528039 | Limited Omniscient | A Third person narrator who generally reports only what one character sees, and who only reports the thoughts of that one privileged character. | |
| 10528040 | Objective | A thrid person narrator who only reports on what would be visible to a camera. Does not know what the character is thinking unless the character speaks it. | |
| 10528041 | First person | A narrator who is a character in the story and tells the tale from his or her point of view. | |
| 10528042 | Stream of Consciousness | Author places the reader inside the main character's head and makes the reader privy to all of the character's thoughts as they scroll through her consciousness. | |
| 10528043 | Prelude | An introductory poem to a longer work of verse | |
| 10528044 | Protagonist | The main character of a novel or play | |
| 10528045 | Pun | The usually humorous use of a word in such a way to suggest two or more meanings | |
| 10528046 | Refrain | A line or set of lines repeated several times over the course of a poem. | |
| 10528047 | Requiem | A song of prayer for the dead. | |
| 10528048 | Rhapsody | An intensely passionate verse or section of verse, usually of love or praise. | |
| 10528049 | Rhetorical question | A question that suggests an answer. | |
| 10528050 | Satire | Attempts to improve things by pointing out people's mistakes in the hope that once exposed, such behavior will become less common. | |
| 10528051 | Soliloquy | A speech spoken by a character alone on stage, meant to convey the impression that the audience is listening to the character's thoughts. | |
| 10528052 | Stanza | A group of lines roughly analogous in function in verse to the paragraphs function in prose. | |
| 10528053 | Stock characters | Standard or cliched character types. | |
| 10528054 | Subjunctive Mood | A grammatical situation involving the words "if" and "were," setting up a hypothetical situation. | |
| 10528055 | Suggest | To imply, infer, indicate. | |
| 10528056 | Summary | A simple retelling of what you've just read. | |
| 10528057 | Suspension of disbelief | The demand made of a theater audience to accept the limitations of staging and supply the details with their imagination. | |
| 10528058 | Symbolism | A device in literature where an object represents an idea. | |
| 10528059 | Technique | The methods and tools of the author. | |
| 10528060 | Theme | The main idea of the overall work; the central idea. | |
| 10528061 | Thesis | The main position of an argument. The central contention that will be supported. | |
| 10528062 | Tragic flaw | In a tragedy, this is the weakness of a character in an otherwise good (or even great) individual that ultimately leads to his demise. | |
| 10528063 | Travesty | A grotesque parody | |
| 10528064 | Truism | A way-too obvious truth | |
| 10528065 | Unreliable narrator | When the first person narrator is crazy, a liar, very young, or for some reason not entirely credible | |
| 10528066 | Utopia | An idealized place. Imaginary communities in which people are able to live in happiness, prosperity, and peace. | |
| 10528067 | Zeugma | The use of a word to modify two or more words, but used for different meanings. He closed the door and his heart on his lost love. | |
| 10528068 | Ode | A poem in praise of something divine or noble | |
| 10528069 | Iamb | A poetic foot -- light, heavy | |
| 10528070 | Trochee | A poetic foot -- heavy, light | |
| 10528071 | Spondee | A poetic foot -- heavy, heavy | |
| 10528072 | Pyrrhie | A poetic foot -- light, light | |
| 10528073 | Anapest | A poetic foot -- light, light, heavy | |
| 10528074 | Ambibranch | A poetic foot -- light, heavy, light | |
| 10528075 | Dactyl | A poetic foot -- heavy, light, light | |
| 10528076 | Imperfect | A poetic foot -- single light or single heavy | |
| 10528077 | Pentameter | A poetic line with five feet. | |
| 10528078 | Tetrameter | A poetic line with four feet | |
| 10528079 | Trimeter | A poetic line with three feet | |
| 10528080 | Blank Verse | unrhymed iambic pentameter. |
