The Glossary of Literary Terms for the AP English Literature and Composition Test
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| 4791661141 | Abstract | Complex, discusses intangible qualities like good and evil, seldom uses examples to support its points. | 0 | |
| 4791661142 | Academic | Dry and rhetorical writing; sucking all the life out of its subject with analysis. | 1 | |
| 4791661143 | Accent | In poetry, the stressed portion of a word. | 2 | |
| 4791661144 | Aesthetic | Appealing to the senses; a coherent sense of taste. | 3 | |
| 4791661145 | Allegory | A story in which each aspect of the story has a symbolic meaning outside the tale itself. | 4 | |
| 4791661146 | Alliteration | The repetition of initial consonant sounds. | 5 | |
| 4791661147 | Allusion | A reference to another work or famous figure. | 6 | |
| 4791661148 | Anachronism | "Misplaced in time." An aspect of a story that doesn't belong in its supposed time setting. | 7 | |
| 4791661149 | Analogy | A comparison, usually involving two or more symbolic parts, employed to clarify an action or a relationship. | 8 | |
| 4791661150 | Anecdote | A Short Narrative | 9 | |
| 4791661151 | Antecedent | The word, phrase, or clause that determines what a pronoun refers to. | 10 | |
| 4791661152 | Anthropomorphism | When inanimate objects are given human characteristics. Often confused with personification. | 11 | |
| 4791661153 | Anticlimax | Occurs when an action produces far smaller results than one had been led to expect. | 12 | |
| 4791661154 | Antihero | A protagonist who is markedly unheroic: morally weak, cowardly, dishonest, or any number of other unsavory qualities. | 13 | |
| 4791661155 | Aphorism | A short and usually witty saying. | 14 | |
| 4791661156 | Apostrophe | A figure of speech wherein the speaker talks directly to something that is nonhuman. | 15 | |
| 4791661157 | Archaism | The use of deliberately old-fashioned language. | 16 | |
| 4791661158 | 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. | 17 | |
| 4791661160 | Assonance | The repeated use of vowel sounds: "Old king Cole was a merry old soul." | 18 | |
| 4791661161 | Atmosphere | The emotional tone or background that surrounds a scene | 19 | |
| 4791661163 | Bathos | Writing strains for grandeur it can't support and tries too hard to be a tear jerker. | 20 | |
| 4791661164 | Pathos | Writing evokes feelings of dignified pity and sympathy. | 21 | |
| 4791661165 | Black humor | The use of disturbing themes in comedy. | 22 | |
| 4791661166 | Bombast | Pretentious, exaggeratedly learned language. | 23 | |
| 4791661167 | Burlesque | Broad parody, one that takes a style or form and exaggerates it into ridiculousness. | 24 | |
| 4791661168 | Cacophony | In poetry, using deliberately harsh, awkward sounds. | 25 | |
| 4791661169 | Cadence | The beat or rhythm or poetry in a general sense. | 26 | |
| 4791661170 | Canto | The name for a section division in a long work of poetry. | 27 | |
| 4791661171 | Caricature | A portrait (verbal or otherwise) that exaggerates a facet of personality. | 28 | |
| 4791661172 | Catharsis | Drawn from Aristotle's writings on tragedy. Refers to the "cleansing" of emotion an audience member experiences during a play | 29 | |
| 4791661173 | Chorus | In Greek drama, the group of citizens who stand outside the main action on stage and comment on it. | 30 | |
| 4791661174 | Classic | Typical, or an accepted masterpiece. | 31 | |
| 4791661175 | Coinage (neologism) | A new word, usually one invented on the spot. | 32 | |
| 4791661176 | Colloquialism | A word or phrase used in everyday conversational English that isn't a part of accepted "school-book" English. | 33 | |
| 4791661178 | Conceit (Controlling Image) | A startling or unusual metaphor, or to a metaphor developed and expanded upon several lines. | 34 | |
| 4791661179 | Denotation | A word's literal meaning. | 35 | |
| 4791661180 | Connotation | Everything other than the literal meaning that a word suggests or implies. | 36 | |
| 4791661181 | Consonance | The repetition of consonant sounds within words (rather than at their beginnings) | 37 | |
| 4791661182 | Couplet | A pair of lines that end in rhyme | 38 | |
| 4791661183 | Decorum | A character's speech must be styled according to her social station, and in accordance to the situation. | 39 | |
| 4791661184 | Diction | The words an author chooses to use. | 40 | |
| 4791661185 | Syntax | The ordering and structuring of words. | 41 | |
| 4791661186 | Dirge | A song for the dead. Its tone is typically slow, heavy, depressed, and melancholy | 42 | |
| 4791661189 | Dramatic Irony | When the audience knows something that the characters in the drama do not | 43 | |
| 4791661190 | Dramatic Monologue | When a single speaker in literature says something to a silent audience. | 44 | |
| 4791661191 | Elegy | A type of poem that meditates on death or mortality in a serious, thoughtful manner. | 45 | |
| 4791661193 | Enjambment | The continuation of a syntactic unit from one line or couplet of a poem to the next with no pause. | 46 | |
| 4791661194 | Epic | A very long narrative poem on a serious theme in a dignified style; typically deal with glorious or profound subject matter. | 47 | |
| 4791661195 | Epitaph | Lines that commemorate the dead at their burial place. | 48 | |
| 4791661196 | Euphemism | A word or phrase that takes the place of a harsh, unpleasant, or impolite reality. | 49 | |
| 4791661197 | Euphony | When sounds blend harmoniously. | 50 | |
| 4791661198 | Explicit | To say or write something directly and clearly. | 51 | |
| 4791661201 | Foil | A secondary character whose purpose is to highlight the characteristics of a main character, usually by contrast. | 52 | |
| 4791661203 | Foreshadowing | An event of statement in a narrative that in miniature suggests a larger event that comes later. | 53 | |
| 4791661204 | Free verse | poetry written without a regular rhyme scheme or metrical pattern | 54 | |
| 4791661205 | Genre | A sub-category of literature. | 55 | |
| 4791661206 | Gothic | A sensibility that includes such features as dark, gloomy castles and weird screams from the attic each night. | 56 | |
| 4791661207 | Hubris | The excessive pride or ambition that leads to the main character's downfall | 57 | |
| 4791661208 | Hyperbole | Exaggeration or deliberate overstatement. | 58 | |
| 4791661210 | In media res | Latin for "in the midst of things," i.e. beginning an epic poem in the middle of the action. | 59 | |
| 4791661211 | Interior Monologue | Refers to writing that records the mental talking that goes on inside a character's head; tends to be coherent. | 60 | |
| 4791661212 | Inversion | Switching the customary order of elements in a sentence or phrase. | 61 | |
| 4791661213 | 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. | 62 | |
| 4791661214 | Lament | A poem of sadness or grief over the death of a loved one or over some other intense loss. | 63 | |
| 4791661215 | Lampoon | A satire. | 64 | |
| 4791661216 | Loose sentence | A sentence that is complete before its end: Jack loved Barbara despite her irritating snorting laugh. | 65 | |
| 4791661217 | 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. | 66 | |
| 4791661218 | Lyric | A type of poetry that explores the poet's personal interpretation of and feelings about the world. | 67 | |
| 4791661219 | Masculine rhyme | A rhyme ending on the final stressed syllable (regular old rhyme) | 68 | |
| 4791661221 | 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. | 69 | |
| 4791661222 | Metaphor | A comparison or analogy that states one thing IS another. | 70 | |
| 4791661223 | Simile | A comparison or analogy that typically uses like or as. | 71 | |
| 4791661224 | Metonymy | A word that is used to stand for something else that it has attributes of or is associated with. | 72 | |
| 4791661225 | Nemesis | The protagonist's arch enemy or supreme and persistent difficulty. | 73 | |
| 4791661226 | Objectivity | Treatment of subject matter in an impersonal manner or from an outside view. | 74 | |
| 4791661227 | 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. | 75 | |
| 4791661228 | Onomatopoeia | Words that sound like what they mean | 76 | |
| 4791661230 | Oxymoron | A phrase composed of opposites; a contradiction. | 77 | |
| 4791661231 | Parable | A story that instructs. | 78 | |
| 4791661232 | Paradox | A situation or statement that seems to contradict itself, but on closer inspection, does not. | 79 | |
| 4791661233 | Parallelism | Repeated syntactical similarities used for effect. | 80 | |
| 4791661234 | Paraphrase | To restate phrases and sentences in your own words. | 81 | |
| 4791661235 | Parenthetical phrase | A phrase set off by commas that interrupts the flow of a sentence with some commentary or added detail. | 82 | |
| 4791661236 | Parody | The work that results when a specific work is exaggerated to ridiculousness. | 83 | |
| 4791661237 | Pastoral | A poem set in tranquil nature or even more specifically, one about shepherds. | 84 | |
| 4791661239 | Personification | When an inanimate object takes on human shape. | 85 | |
| 4791661241 | Point of View | The perspective from which the action of a novel is presented. | 86 | |
| 4791661242 | Omniscient | A third person narrator who sees into each character's mind and understands all the action going on. | 87 | |
| 4791661243 | 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. | 88 | |
| 4791661244 | 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. | 89 | |
| 4791661245 | First person | A narrator who is a character in the story and tells the tale from his or her point of view. | 90 | |
| 4791661246 | 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. | 91 | |
| 4791661247 | Prelude | An introductory poem to a longer work of verse | 92 | |
| 4791661248 | Protagonist | The main character of a novel or play | 93 | |
| 4791661249 | Pun | The usually humorous use of a word in such a way to suggest two or more meanings | 94 | |
| 4791661250 | Refrain | A line or set of lines repeated several times over the course of a poem. | 95 | |
| 4791661251 | Requiem | A song of prayer for the dead. | 96 | |
| 4791661253 | Rhetorical question | A question that suggests an answer. | 97 | |
| 4791661254 | Satire | Attempts to improve things by pointing out people's mistakes in the hope that once exposed, such behavior will become less common. | 98 | |
| 4791661255 | 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. | 99 | |
| 4791661256 | Stanza | A group of lines roughly analogous in function in verse to the paragraphs function in prose. | 100 | |
| 4791661257 | Stock characters | Standard or cliched character types. | 101 | |
| 4791661258 | Subjunctive Mood | A grammatical situation involving the words "if" and "were," setting up a hypothetical situation. | 102 | |
| 4791661261 | Suspension of disbelief | The demand made of a theater audience to accept the limitations of staging and supply the details with their imagination. | 103 | |
| 4791661262 | Symbolism | A device in literature where an object represents an idea. | 104 | |
| 4791661264 | Theme | The main idea of the overall work; the central idea. | 105 | |
| 4791661265 | Thesis | The main position of an argument. The central contention that will be supported. | 106 | |
| 4791661266 | 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. | 107 | |
| 4791661268 | Truism | A way-too obvious truth | 108 | |
| 4791661269 | Unreliable narrator | When the first person narrator is crazy, a liar, very young, or for some reason not entirely credible | 109 | |
| 4791661270 | Utopia | An idealized place. Imaginary communities in which people are able to live in happiness, prosperity, and peace. | 110 | |
| 4791661271 | 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. | 111 |
