The Glossary of Literary Terms for the AP English Literature and Composition Test
Terms : Hide Images
| 4385950178 | Abstract | Complex, discusses intangible qualities like good and evil, seldom uses examples to support its points. | 0 | |
| 4385950179 | Academic | Dry and rhetorical writing; sucking all the life out of its subject with analysis. | 1 | |
| 4385950180 | Accent | In poetry, the stressed portion of a word. | 2 | |
| 4385950181 | Aesthetic | Appealing to the senses; a coherent sense of taste. | 3 | |
| 4385950182 | Allegory | A story in which each aspect of the story has a symbolic meaning outside the tale itself. | 4 | |
| 4385950185 | Anachronism | "Misplaced in time." An aspect of a story that doesn't belong in its supposed time setting. | 5 | |
| 4385950186 | Analogy | A comparison, usually involving two or more symbolic parts, employed to clarify an action or a relationship. | 6 | |
| 4385950188 | Antecedent | The word, phrase, or clause that determines what a pronoun refers to. | 7 | |
| 4385950189 | Anthropomorphism | When inanimate objects are given human characteristics. Often confused with personification. | 8 | |
| 4385950190 | Anticlimax | Occurs when an action produces far smaller results than one had been led to expect. | 9 | |
| 4385950191 | Antihero | A protagonist who is markedly unheroic: morally weak, cowardly, dishonest, or any number of other unsavory qualities. | 10 | |
| 4385950192 | Aphorism | A short and usually witty saying. | 11 | |
| 4385950193 | Apostrophe | A figure of speech wherein the speaker talks directly to something that is nonhuman. | 12 | |
| 4385950194 | Archaism | The use of deliberately old-fashioned language. | 13 | |
| 4385950195 | 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. | 14 | |
| 4385950199 | Ballad | A long, narrative poem, usually in meter and rhyme. Typically has a naive folksy quality. | 15 | |
| 4385950200 | Bathos | Writing strains for grandeur it can't support and tries too hard to be a tear jerker. | 16 | |
| 4385950201 | Pathos | Writing evokes feelings of dignified pity and sympathy. | 17 | |
| 4385950202 | Black humor | The use of disturbing themes in comedy. | 18 | |
| 4385950203 | Bombast | Pretentious, exaggeratedly learned language. | 19 | |
| 4385950204 | Burlesque | Broad parody, one that takes a style or form and exaggerates it into ridiculousness. | 20 | |
| 4385950205 | Cacophony | In poetry, using deliberately harsh, awkward sounds. | 21 | |
| 4385950206 | Cadence | The beat or rhythm or poetry in a general sense. | 22 | |
| 4385950207 | Canto | The name for a section division in a long work of poetry. | 23 | |
| 4385950208 | Caricature | A portrait (verbal or otherwise) that exaggerates a facet of personality. | 24 | |
| 4385950209 | Catharsis | Drawn from Aristotle's writings on tragedy. Refers to the "cleansing" of emotion an audience member experiences during a play | 25 | |
| 4385950210 | Chorus | In Greek drama, the group of citizens who stand outside the main action on stage and comment on it. | 26 | |
| 4385950212 | Coinage (neologism) | A new word, usually one invented on the spot. | 27 | |
| 4385950215 | Conceit (Controlling Image) | A startling or unusual metaphor, or to a metaphor developed and expanded upon several lines. | 28 | |
| 4385950223 | Dirge | A song for the dead. Its tone is typically slow, heavy, depressed, and melancholy | 29 | |
| 4385950224 | Dissonance | Refers to the grating of incompatible sounds. | 30 | |
| 4385950225 | Doggerel | Crude, simplistic verse, often in sing-song rhyme, like limericks. | 31 | |
| 4385950227 | Dramatic Monologue | When a single speaker in literature says something to a silent audience. | 32 | |
| 4385950228 | Elegy | A type of poem that meditates on death or mortality in a serious, thoughtful manner. | 33 | |
| 4385950230 | Enjambment | The continuation of a syntactic unit from one line or couplet of a poem to the next with no pause. | 34 | |
| 4385950231 | Epic | A very long narrative poem on a serious theme in a dignified style; typically deal with glorious or profound subject matter. | 35 | |
| 4385950232 | Epitaph | Lines that commemorate the dead at their burial place. | 36 | |
| 4385950234 | Euphony | When sounds blend harmoniously. | 37 | |
| 4385950236 | Farce | Extremely broad humor; in earlier times, a funny play or a comedy. | 38 | |
| 4385950237 | Feminine rhyme | Lines rhymed by their final two syllables. Properly, the penultimate syllables are stressed and the final syllables are unstressed. | 39 | |
| 4385950238 | Foil | A secondary character whose purpose is to highlight the characteristics of a main character, usually by contrast. | 40 | |
| 4385950239 | Foot | The basic rhythmic unit of a line of poetry, formed by a combination of two or three syllables, either stressed or unstressed. | 41 | |
| 4385950243 | Gothic | A sensibility that includes such features as dark, gloomy castles and weird screams from the attic each night. | 42 | |
| 4385950246 | Implicit | To say or write something that suggests and implies but never says it directly or clearly. | 43 | |
| 4385950247 | In media res | Latin for "in the midst of things," i.e. beginning an epic poem in the middle of the action. | 44 | |
| 4385950248 | Interior Monologue | Refers to writing that records the mental talking that goes on inside a character's head; tends to be coherent. | 45 | |
| 4385950249 | Inversion | Switching the customary order of elements in a sentence or phrase. | 46 | |
| 4385950251 | Lament | A poem of sadness or grief over the death of a loved one or over some other intense loss. | 47 | |
| 4385950252 | Lampoon | A satire. | 48 | |
| 4385950253 | Loose sentence | A sentence that is complete before its end: Jack loved Barbara despite her irritating snorting laugh. | 49 | |
| 4385950254 | 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. | 50 | |
| 4385950255 | Lyric | A type of poetry that explores the poet's personal interpretation of and feelings about the world. | 51 | |
| 4385950256 | Masculine rhyme | A rhyme ending on the final stressed syllable (regular old rhyme) | 52 | |
| 4385950258 | 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. | 53 | |
| 4385950261 | Metonymy | A word that is used to stand for something else that it has attributes of or is associated with. | 54 | |
| 4385950263 | Objectivity | Treatment of subject matter in an impersonal manner or from an outside view. | 55 | |
| 4385950264 | 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. | 56 | |
| 4385950266 | Opposition | A pairing of images whereby each becomes more striking and informative because it's placed in contrast to the other one. | 57 | |
| 4385950267 | Oxymoron | A phrase composed of opposites; a contradiction. Jumbo shrimp | 58 | |
| 4385950268 | Parable | A story that instructs. | 59 | |
| 4385950269 | Paradox | A situation or statement that seems to contradict itself, but on closer inspection, does not. | 60 | |
| 4385950270 | Parallelism | Repeated syntactical similarities used for effect. | 61 | |
| 4385950272 | Parenthetical phrase | A phrase set off by commas that interrupts the flow of a sentence with some commentary or added detail. | 62 | |
| 4385950274 | Pastoral | A poem set in tranquil nature or even more specifically, one about shepherds. | 63 | |
| 4385950275 | Persona | The narrator in a non first-person novel. | 64 | |
| 4385950277 | Plaint | A poem or speech expressing sorrow. | 65 | |
| 4385950278 | Point of View | The perspective from which the action of a novel is presented. | 66 | |
| 4385950279 | Omniscient | A third person narrator who sees into each character's mind and understands all the action going on. | 67 | |
| 4385950280 | 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. | 68 | |
| 4385950281 | 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. | 69 | |
| 4385950282 | First person | A narrator who is a character in the story and tells the tale from his or her point of view. | 70 | |
| 4385950283 | 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. | 71 | |
| 4385950287 | Refrain | A line or set of lines repeated several times over the course of a poem. | 72 | |
| 4385950288 | Requiem | A song of prayer for the dead. | 73 | |
| 4385950289 | Rhapsody | An intensely passionate verse or section of verse, usually of love or praise. | 74 | |
| 4385950290 | Rhetorical question | A question that suggests an answer. | 75 | |
| 4385950292 | 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. | 76 | |
| 4385950293 | Stanza | A group of lines roughly analogous in function in verse to the paragraphs function in prose. | 77 | |
| 4385950295 | Subjunctive Mood | A grammatical situation involving the words "if" and "were," setting up a hypothetical situation. | 78 | |
| 4385950298 | Suspension of disbelief | The demand made of a theater audience to accept the limitations of staging and supply the details with their imagination. | 79 | |
| 4385950303 | 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. | 80 | |
| 4385950304 | Travesty | A grotesque parody | 81 | |
| 4385950305 | Truism | A way-too obvious truth | 82 | |
| 4385950306 | Unreliable narrator | When the first person narrator is crazy, a liar, very young, or for some reason not entirely credible | 83 | |
| 4385950307 | Utopia | An idealized place. Imaginary communities in which people are able to live in happiness, prosperity, and peace. | 84 | |
| 4385950308 | 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. | 85 | |
| 4386076339 | Ballad stanza | A common stanza form consisting of a quatrain that alternates 4-beat and 3-beat lines: 1 and 3 are unrhymed with 4 beats and lines 2 and 4 are rhymed with 3 beats | 86 | |
| 4385950309 | Ode | A poem in praise of something divine or noble | 87 | |
| 4385950310 | Iamb | A poetic foot -- light, heavy | 88 | |
| 4385950311 | Trochee | A poetic foot -- heavy, light | 89 | |
| 4385950312 | Spondee | A poetic foot with two stressed syllables | 90 | |
| 4385950313 | Pyrrhic | A poetic foot with two unstressed syllables | 91 | |
| 4385950314 | Anapest | A poetic foot -- light, light, heavy | 92 | |
| 4385950316 | Dactyl | A poetic foot -- heavy, light, light | 93 | |
| 4385950318 | Pentameter | A poetic line with five feet. | 94 | |
| 4385950319 | Tetrameter | A poetic line with four feet | 95 | |
| 4385950320 | Trimeter | A poetic line with three feet | 96 | |
| 4385950321 | Blank Verse | unrhymed iambic pentameter. | 97 |
