The Glossary of Literary Terms for the AP English Literature and Composition Test
Terms : Hide Images
| 3604664038 | Aesthetic | Appealing to the senses; pertaining to beauty. | 0 | |
| 3604664039 | Allegory | A story in which each aspect of the story has a symbolic meaning outside the tale itself. | 1 | |
| 3604664040 | Alliteration | The repetition of initial consonant sounds. | 2 | |
| 3604664041 | Allusion | A reference to another work or famous figure. | 3 | |
| 3604664043 | Analogy | A comparison, usually involving two or more symbolic parts, employed to clarify an action or a relationship. | 4 | |
| 3604664044 | Anecdote | A Short narrative or story used to make a point or further explain a situation. | 5 | |
| 3604664052 | 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. | 6 | |
| 3604664055 | Atmosphere | The emotional tone or background that surrounds a scene | 7 | |
| 3604664063 | Cadence | The beat or rhythm or poetry in a general sense. | 8 | |
| 3604664066 | Catharsis | Drawn from Aristotle's writings on tragedy. Refers to the "cleansing" of emotion an audience member experiences during a play | 9 | |
| 3604664070 | Colloquialism | A word or phrase used in everyday conversational English that isn't a part of accepted "school-book" English. | 10 | |
| 3604664073 | Denotation | A word's literal meaning. | 11 | |
| 3604664074 | Connotation | Everything other than the literal meaning that a word suggests or implies. | 12 | |
| 3604664076 | Couplet | A pair of lines that end in rhyme | 13 | |
| 3604664078 | Diction | The words an author chooses to use. | 14 | |
| 3604664079 | Syntax | The ordering and structuring of words. | 15 | |
| 3604664084 | Dramatic Monologue | When a single speaker in literature says something to a silent audience. | 16 | |
| 3604664087 | Enjambment | The continuation of a syntactic unit from one line or couplet of a poem to the next with no pause. | 17 | |
| 3604664088 | Epic | A very long narrative poem on a serious theme in a dignified style; typically deal with glorious or profound subject matter. | 18 | |
| 3604664090 | Euphemism | A word or phrase that takes the place of a harsh, unpleasant, or impolite reality. | 19 | |
| 3604664095 | Foil | A secondary character whose purpose is to highlight the characteristics of a main character, usually by contrast. | 20 | |
| 3604664097 | Foreshadowing | An event of statement in a narrative that in miniature suggests a larger event that comes later. | 21 | |
| 3604664098 | Free verse | poetry written without a regular rhyme scheme or metrical pattern | 22 | |
| 3604664099 | Genre | A sub-category of literature. | 23 | |
| 3604664101 | Hubris | The excessive pride or ambition that leads to the main character's downfall | 24 | |
| 3604664102 | Hyperbole | Exaggeration or deliberate overstatement. | 25 | |
| 3604664107 | Irony | A statement that means the opposite of what it seems to mean; uses an undertow of meaning. This includes dramatic, verbal, and situational ironies. | 26 | |
| 3604664116 | Metaphor | A comparison or analogy that states one thing IS another. | 27 | |
| 3604664117 | Simile | A comparison or analogy that typically uses like or as. | 28 | |
| 3604664120 | Objectivity | Treatment of subject matter in an impersonal manner or from an outside view. | 29 | |
| 3604664121 | 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. | 30 | |
| 3604664122 | Onomatopoeia | Words that sound like what they mean | 31 | |
| 3604664124 | Oxymoron | A phrase composed of opposites; a contradiction. | 32 | |
| 3604664125 | Parable | A story that instructs. | 33 | |
| 3604664126 | Paradox | A situation or statement that seems to contradict itself, but on closer inspection, does not. | 34 | |
| 3604664127 | Parallelism | Repeated syntactical similarities used for effect. | 35 | |
| 3604664130 | Parody | The work that results when a specific work is exaggerated to ridiculousness. | 36 | |
| 3604664131 | Pastoral | A poem set in tranquil nature or even more specifically, one about shepherds. | 37 | |
| 3604664132 | Persona | The narrator in a non first-person novel. | 38 | |
| 3604664133 | Personification | When an inanimate object takes on human attributes. | 39 | |
| 3604664135 | Point of View | The perspective from which the action of a novel is presented. This includes 1st person, 3rd person omniscient, 3rd person limited, and 3rd person objective. | 40 | |
| 3604664142 | Protagonist | The main character of a novel or play | 41 | |
| 3604664143 | Pun | The usually humorous use of a word in such a way to suggest two or more meanings | 42 | |
| 3604664148 | Satire | Attempts to improve things by pointing out people's mistakes in the hope that once exposed, such behavior will become less common. | 43 | |
| 3604664149 | 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. | 44 | |
| 3604664150 | Stanza | A group of lines roughly analogous in function in verse to the paragraphs function in prose. | 45 | |
| 3604664156 | Symbolism | A device in literature where an object represents an idea. | 46 | |
| 3604664160 | 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. | 47 | |
| 3604664163 | Unreliable narrator | When the first person narrator is crazy, a liar, very young, or for some reason not entirely credible | 48 | |
| 3604664164 | Utopia | An idealized place. Imaginary communities in which people are able to live in happiness, prosperity, and peace. | 49 |
