Terms : Hide Images
| 9571522838 | Antagonist | a person who actively opposes or is hostile to someone or something; an adversary. | 0 | |
| 9571522839 | Character | a person in a novel, play, or movie. | 1 | |
| 9571522840 | Diction | the choice and use of words and phrases in speech or writing. | 2 | |
| 9571522841 | Dynamic character | a literary or dramatic character who undergoes an important inner change, as a change in personality or attitude. | 3 | |
| 9571522842 | External conflict | struggle between a literary or dramatic character and an outside force such as nature or another character, which drives the dramatic action of the plot. | 4 | |
| 9571522843 | Figurative language | language that uses words or expressions with a meaning that is different from the literal interpretation. | 5 | |
| 9571522844 | First person p.o.v | describes the perspective from which the story is told. This implies that the narrator is a character within the story and is describing the events as they occur to him or her. | 6 | |
| 9571522845 | Flat character | are two-dimensional in that they are relatively uncomplicated and do not change throughout the course of a work. | 7 | |
| 9571522846 | Foil | is a character who contrasts with another character —usually the protagonist— to highlight particular qualities of the other character | 8 | |
| 9571522847 | Alliteration | the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words. "She sells seashells down by the sea-shore" | 9 | |
| 9571522848 | Allusion | an expression designed to call something to mind without mentioning it explicitly; an indirect or passing reference. | 10 | |
| 9571522849 | Ambiguity | the quality of being open to more than one interpretation; inexactness. Ex. Sarah gave a bath to her dog wearing a pink t-shirt. Ambiguity: Is the dog wearing the pink t-shirt? | 11 | |
| 9571522850 | Anadiplosis | the repetition of a word or words in successive clauses in such a way that the second clause starts with the same word which marks the end of the previous clause. "They call for you: The general who became a slave; the slave who became a gladiator; the gladiator who defied an Emperor. Striking story." | 12 | |
| 9571522851 | Anastrophe | the inversion of the usual order of words or clauses. Ex. Excited the children were when Santa entered the room. | 13 | |
| 9571522852 | Antithesis | a figure of speech in which an opposition or contrast of ideas is expressed by parallelism of words that are the opposites of, or strongly contrasted with, each other. "hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all sins "Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing." | 14 | |
| 9571522853 | Aphorism | a pithy observation that contains a general truth "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."All for one and one for all. | 15 | |
| 9571522854 | Apostrophe | is a figure of speech in which the poet addresses an absent person, an abstract idea, or a thing."Twinkle, twinkle, little star,/How I wonder what you are./Up above the world so high,/Like a diamond in the sky." | 16 | |
| 9571522855 | Apposition | grammatical construction in which two usually adjacent nouns having the same referent stand in the same syntactical relation to the rest of a sentence.ex. John, my friend, likes to eat chocolates. | 17 | |
| 9571522856 | Approximate/slant rhyme | It is also called an imperfect rhyme, slant rhyme, near rhyme or oblique rhyme. It can be defined as a rhyme in which the stressed syllables of ending consonants match, however the preceding vowel sounds do not match. "If love is like a bridge/or maybe like a grudge.." | 18 | |
| 9571522857 | Assonance | the repetition of the sound of a vowel or diphthong in non rhyming stressed syllables near enough to each other for the echo to be discernible. "Hear the mellow wedding bells" | 19 | |
| 9571522858 | Audience | the assembled spectators or listeners at a public event, such as a play, movie, concert, or meeting. | 20 | |
| 9571522859 | Cacophony | a harsh, discordant mixture of sounds. "I detest war because cause of war is always trivial." | 21 | |
| 9571522860 | Caesura | a break between words within a metrical foot. "I hear lake water lapping || with low sounds by the shore..." | 22 | |
| 9571522861 | Carpe diem | Theme in classical literature that the reader should make the most out of life and should enjoy it before it ends. "Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin!" | 23 | |
| 9571522862 | Chiasmus | a rhetorical or literary figure in which words, grammatical constructions, or concepts are repeated in reverse order, in the same or a modified form. "Never let a Fool Kiss You or a Kiss Fool You." | 24 | |
| 9571522863 | Climax | the highest or most intense point in the development or resolution of something; culmination. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—/I took the one less traveled by,/And that has made all the difference. | 25 | |
| 9571522864 | Conceit | uses an extended metaphor that compares two very dissimilar things. "Oh stay! three lives in one flea spare/ Where we almost, yea more than married are./This flea is you and I, and this/ Our marriage-bed and marriage-temple is" | 26 | |
| 9571522865 | Connotation | an idea or feeling that a word invokes in addition to its literal or primary meaning. A dove implies peace or gentility. | 27 | |
| 9571522866 | Consonance | repetitive sounds produced by consonants within a sentence or phrase. Pitter Patter, Pitter Patter- | 28 | |
| 9571522867 | Couplet | two lines of verse, usually in the same meter and joined by rhyme, that form a unit./"Blessed are you whose worthiness gives scope,/Being had, to triumph; being lacked, to hope." | 29 | |
| 9571522868 | Denotation | the literal or primary meaning of a word, in contrast to the feelings or ideas that the word suggests. Gay-literally means "lighthearted and carefree." Only more recently has it come to be a reference for homosexuality. | 30 | |
| 9571522869 | Ellipsis | the omission from speech or writing of a word or words that are superfluous or able to be understood from contextual clues. . . . I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands. "Beauty and the Beast...Loneliness...Old Grocery House...Brook'n Bridge...." | 31 | |
| 9571522870 | End-stopped line | when a line of poetry ends with a period or definite punctuation mark, such as a colon. | 32 | |
| 9571522871 | English/Shakespearean/Elizabethan sonnet | three quatrains and a couplet follow this rhyme scheme: abab, cdcd, efef, gg | 33 | |
| 9571522872 | Enjambment | (in verse) the continuation of a sentence without a pause beyond the end of a line, couplet, or stanza. | 34 | |
| 9571522873 | Epithet | the application of a word or phrase to someone that describes that person's attributes or qualities. Catherine the Great/Richard the Lion-Heart/The Great Emancipator/The Piano Man | 35 | |
| 9571522874 | Euphony | the tendency to make phonetic change for ease of pronunciation. "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,/Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; | 36 | |
| 9571522875 | Exact rhyme | repetition of the same stressed vowel sound as well as any consonant sounds that follow the vowel. Ex. cat and hat | 37 | |
| 9571522876 | Extended metaphor | a comparison between two unlike things that continues throughout a series of sentences in a paragraph, or lines in a poem. "But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?/It is the East, and Juliet is the sun!/Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,/Who is already sick and pale with grief." | 38 | |
| 9571522877 | Eye rhyme | a similarity between words in spelling but not in pronunciation love and move. | 39 | |
| 9571522878 | Hyperbole | exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally.It was so cold I saw polar bears wearing jackets | 40 | |
| 9571522879 | Iambic pentameter | da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM ex. When I do count the clock that tells the time | 41 | |
| 9571522880 | Internal rhyme | a rhyme involving a word in the middle of a line and another at the end of the line or in the middle of the next. ex. While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,/As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. " | 42 | |
| 9571522881 | Irony | the use of words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of its literal meaning "Go ask his name: if he be married. My grave is like to be my wedding bed." | 43 | |
| 9571522882 | Isocolon | succession of sentences, phrases, and clauses of grammatically equal length. "What the hammer? what the chain?/In what furnace was thy brain? | 44 | |
| 9571522883 | italian/Petrarchan sonnet | a sonnet consisting of an octave rhyming abba abba and a sestet rhyming in any of various patterns (such as cde cde or cdc dcd) | 45 | |
| 9571522884 | Litotes | ironic understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of its contrary "Indeed, it is not uncommon for slaves even to fall out and quarrel among themselves about the relative goodness of their masters, each contending for the superior goodness of his own over that of the others." | 46 | |
| 9571522885 | Metaphor | a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable. "She is all states, and all princes, I." | 47 | |
| 9571522886 | Metonymy | the substitution of the name of an attribute or adjunct for that of the thing meant. suit for business executive, or the track for horse racing. | 48 | |
| 9571522887 | Octave | a poem or stanza of eight lines; an octet. | 49 | |
| 9571522888 | Onomatopoeia | the formation of a word from a sound associated with what is named (e.g., cuckoo, sizzle ). slam, splash, bam, babble, warble, gurgle, mumble and belch. | 50 | |
| 9571522889 | Oxymoron | a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction ex. faith unfaithful kept him falsely true | 51 | |
| 9571522890 | Paradox | statement that contradicts itself and still seems true somehow. "I must be cruel to be kind." | 52 | |
| 9571522891 | Parallelism | sentence are grammatically the same, or are similar in construction. Ex. I came, I saw, I conquered | 53 | |
| 9571522892 | Parenthesis | a word, clause, or sentence inserted as an explanation or afterthought into a passage that is grammatically complete without it, in writing usually marked off by curved brackets, dashes, or commas. "—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture/I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident/the art of losing's not too hard to master/though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster" | 54 | |
| 9571522893 | Pathetic fallacy | the attribution of human feelings and responses to inanimate things or animals, especially in art and literature. "I wandered lonely as a cloud/That floats on high o'er vales and hills," | 55 | |
| 9571522894 | Periphrasis | use of excessive and longer words to convey a meaning which could have been conveyed with a shorter expression. Ex. Or lose your heart, or your chaste treasure open / To his unmast'red importunity. | 56 | |
| 9571522895 | Personification | the attribution of a personal nature or human characteristics to something nonhuman, or the representation of an abstract quality in human form. Ex. the Sun smiled at us | 57 | |
| 9571522896 | Polyptoton | rhetorical repetition of the same root word. However, each time the word is repeated in a different way. "The Greeks are strong, and skillful to their strength, fierce to their skill, and to their fierceness valiant ..." | 58 | |
| 9571522897 | Polysyndeton | conjunctions (e.g. and, but, or) are used repeatedly in quick succession, often with no commas, even when the conjunctions could be removed."Let the white folks have their money and power and segregation and sarcasm and big houses and schools and lawns like carpets, and books, and mostly-mostly-let them have their whiteness." | 59 | |
| 9571522898 | Quatrain | a stanza of four lines, especially one having alternate rhymes. | 60 | |
| 9571522899 | Quartet | something related with 4? | 61 | |
| 9571522900 | Rhetorical question | a question asked in order to create a dramatic effect or to make a point rather than to get an answer. Ex. If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? | 62 | |
| 9571522901 | Spondere | a foot consisting of two long (or stressed) syllables. "Break, break, break,/On thy cold grey stones, O Sea! | 63 | |
| 9571522902 | Sonnet | poem of fourteen lines, usually in iambic pentameter, that has one of two regular rhyme schemes | 64 | |
| 9571522903 | Stanza | a group of lines forming the basic recurring metrical unit in a poem; a verse. | 65 | |
| 9571522904 | Synecdoche | a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa "His eye met hers as she sat there paler and whiter than anyone in the vast ocean of anxious faces about her." | 66 | |
| 9571522905 | Tercet | a set or group of three lines of verse rhyming together or connected by rhyme with an adjacent tercet. | 67 | |
| 9571522906 | Zeugma | a figure of speech in which a word applies to two others in different senses "She lowered her standards by raising her glass,/Her courage, her eyes and his hopes." | 68 | |
| 9571617206 | Aestheticsm | term given to a movement, a cult, a mode of sensibility. Fundamentally, it entailed the point of view that art is self-sufficient and need serve no other purpose than its own ends. I | 69 | |
| 9571631721 | Allegory | a story, poem, or picture that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one. | 70 | |
| 9571638077 | Analogy | a comparison between two things, typically for the purpose of explanation or clarification. | 71 | |
| 9571641286 | Anapest | a metrical foot consisting of two short or unstressed syllables followed by one long or stressed syllable. | 72 | |
| 9571646356 | Anaphora | the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses. | 73 | |
| 9571657228 | Anastrophe | the inversion of the usual order of words or clauses. | 74 | |
| 9571664104 | Antanaclasis | phrase or word is repeatedly used, though the meaning of the word changes in each case. | 75 | |
| 9571670934 | Anthimera | involves using one part of speech as another part of speech, such as using a noun as if it were a verb: "The little old lady turtled along the road." | 76 | |
| 9571677567 | Anti-hero | a central character in a story, movie, or drama who lacks conventional heroic attributes. | 77 | |
| 9571688246 | Antimetabole | a phrase or sentence is repeated, but in reverse order. | 78 | |
| 9571692986 | Antistrophe | rhetorical device that involves the repetition of the same words at the end of consecutive phrases, clauses, sentences, and paragraphs. | 79 | |
| 9571706893 | Aside | when a character's dialogue is spoken but not heard by the other actors on the stage | 80 | |
| 9571717300 | Asyndeton | the omission or absence of a conjunction between parts of a sentence. | 81 | |
| 9571720448 | Balance | A balanced sentence is made up of two segments which are equal, not only in length, but also in grammatical structure and meaning. | 82 | |
| 9571726059 | Ballad | poem that is typically arranged in quatrains with the rhyme scheme ABAB. Ballads are usually narrative, which means they tell a story. Ballads began as folk songs and continue to be used today in modern music | 83 | |
| 9571737088 | Black Humor | a form of humor that regards human suffering as absurd rather than pitiable, or that considers human existence as ironic and pointless but somehow comic. | 84 | |
| 9571744502 | Blank Verse | verse without rhyme, especially that which uses iambic pentameter. | 85 | |
| 9571751256 | Blocking Agent | A person, circumstance, or mentality that prevents two potential lovers from being together romantically. | 86 | |
| 9571756982 | Brachylogia | Concision of speech or writing; thus also any condensed form of expression | 87 | |
| 9571779536 | Catalyst | An event or person causing a change. | 88 | |
| 9571787028 | Catastrophe | final action that completes the unraveling of the plot in a play, especially in a tragedy. Catastrophe is a synonym of denouement | 89 | |
| 9571790232 | Catharsis | emotional discharge through which one can achieve a state of moral or spiritual renewal, or achieve a state of liberation from anxiety and stress. | 90 | |
| 9571794102 | Chorus | a group of actors who described and commented upon the main action of a play with song, dance, and recitation | 91 | |
| 9571798773 | cinquain | is a verse of five lines that do not rhyme. | 92 | |
| 9575346255 | Comedia d'ell arte | a form of theatre characterized by masked "types" which began in Italy in the 16th century and was responsible for the advent of the actresses and improvised performances based on sketches or scenarios. | 93 | |
| 9575349425 | Comedy of manners | a comedy that satirizes behavior in a particular social group, especially the upper classes | 94 | |
| 9575351956 | complication | An intensification of the conflict in a story or play. | 95 | |
| 9575356396 | Epic | is a long, serious, poetic narrative about a significant event, often featuring a hero. Before the development of writing, epic poems were memorized and played an important part in maintaining a record of the great deeds and history of a culture | 96 | |
| 9575364137 | Lyric poem | is a collection of verses and choruses, making up a complete song, or a short and non-narrative poem. A lyric uses a single speaker, who expresses personal emotions or thoughts. Lyrical poems, which are often popular for their musical quality and rhythm, are pleasing to the ear, and are easily put to music. | 97 | |
| 9575368818 | Dramatic monologue | a poem in the form of a speech or narrative by an imagined person, in which the speaker inadvertently reveals aspects of their character while describing a particular situation or series of events. | 98 | |
| 9575373300 | Ode | is a form of poetry such as sonnet or elegy. You have often read odes in which poets praise people, natural scenes, and abstract ideas. It is highly solemn and serious in its tone and subject matter, and usually is used with elaborate patterns of stanzas. | 99 | |
| 9575377376 | Free verse | is a literary device that can be defined as poetry that is free from limitations of regular meter or rhythm, and does not rhyme with fixed forms | 100 | |
| 9575379741 | Concrete Poem | a poem whose meaning is conveyed through its graphic shape or pattern on the printed page; also called shaped verse | 101 | |
| 9575381699 | Haiku | Short japanese poem with the element of cutting | 102 | |
| 9575384128 | Limerick | comedic poem | 103 | |
| 9575388438 | Terza rima | Three line poetry that forms a stanza or complete poem | 104 | |
| 9575390250 | Villanelle | nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain | 105 | |
| 9575391962 | Conventional symbol | signs or sign systems that signify a concept or idea that all members of a group understand based on a common cultural understanding. | 106 | |
| 9575394542 | Cosmic irony | the idea that fate, destiny, or a god controls and toys with human hopes and expectations; also, the belief that the universe is so large and man is so small that the universe is indifferent to the plight of man | 107 | |
| 9575397684 | Dactyl | metrical foot, or a beat in a line, containing three syllables in which first one is accented followed by second and third unaccented syllables (accented/unaccented/unaccented) in quantitative meter such as in the word "humanly" | 108 | |
| 9575401981 | Dadaism | A European artistic and literary movement (1916-1923) that flouted conventional aesthetic and cultural values by producing works marked by nonsense, travesty, and incongruity. | 109 | |
| 9575405450 | Dark romantics | is a literary subgenre of Romanticism. From its very inception in the late eighteenth century, Romanticism's celebration of euphoria and sublimity had been dogged by an equally intense fascination with melancholia, insanity, crime, the grotesque and the irrational. | 110 | |
| 9575408218 | dead metaphor | a figure of speech which has lost the original imagery of its meaning due to extensive, repetitive, and popular usage. | 111 | |
| 9575412295 | denouenment | the final part of a play, movie, or narrative in which the strands of the plot are drawn together and matters are explained or resolved. | 112 | |
| 9575416417 | deux ex machina | is Latin calque from Greek, meaning "god from the machine". The term has evolved to mean a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem is suddenly and abruptly resolved by the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability or object. | 113 | |
| 9608522978 | Dialect | a variety of a language that is distinguished from other varieties of the same language by features of phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, and by its use by a group of speakers who are set off from others geographically or socially. | 114 | |
| 9608535143 | Dialogue | conversation between two or more persons. | 115 | |
| 9608548106 | Dimeter | a line of verse consisting of two metrical feet. | 116 | |
| 9608552144 | Donnee | a subject or theme of a narrative. a basic fact or assumption. | 117 | |
| 9608570313 | Dramatic Irony | a literary technique, originally used in Greek tragedy, by which the full significance of a character's words or actions are clear to the audience or reader although unknown to the character. | 118 | |
| 9608572179 | Edwardian | period of British history covers the brief reign of King Edward VII, 1901 to 1910, and is sometimes extended in both directions to capture long-term trends from the 1890s to the First World War. The death of Queen Victoria in January 1901 marked the end of the Victorian era. | 119 | |
| 9608580919 | Elegy | a poem of serious reflection, typically a lament for the dead. | 120 | |
| 9608592026 | Elizabethan age | epoch in the Tudor period of the history of England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603). Historians often depict it as the golden age in English history. | 121 | |
| 9608596284 | End rhyme | when a poem has lines ending with words that sound the same. An example of end rhyme is the poem, Star Light, Star Bright. | 122 | |
| 9608600656 | Envoy | a short stanza at the end of a poem such as ballad used either to address an imagined or actual person or to comment on the preceding body of the poem. | 123 | |
| 9608616635 | Epanalepsis | is a figure of speech in which the beginning of a clause or sentence is repeated at the end of that same clause or sentence, with words intervening. The sentence "The king is dead, long live the king!" | 124 | |
| 9608624430 | Epigram | a rhetorical device that is a memorable, brief, interesting, and surprising satirical statement. | 125 | |
| 9608633103 | Episodia | an interlude or section alternating with the stasimon, especially in tragedy, varying in number from three to six and containing the main action of the drama. | 126 | |
| 9608645188 | Epistrophe | the repetition of a word at the end of successive clauses or sentences. | 127 | |
| 9608652978 | Epitaph | a phrase or statement written in memory of a person who has died, especially as an inscription on a tombstone. | 128 | |
| 9608660092 | Existentialism | a philosophical theory or approach that emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will. | 129 | |
| 9608664661 | Exodus | the founding myth of Israel, telling how the Israelites were delivered from slavery by their god Yahweh and therefore belong to him through the Mosaic covenant. | 130 | |
| 9608672963 | Exposition | a device used in television programs, films, literature, poetry, plays and even music. It is the writer's way to give background information to the audience about the setting and the characters of the story. | 131 | |
| 9608681461 | expressionistic | a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas. | 132 | |
| 9608685374 | farce | a literary genre and type of comedy that makes use of highly exaggerated and funny situations aimed at entertaining the audience | 133 | |
| 9608692908 | feminine rhyme | a rhyme between stressed syllables followed by one or more unstressed syllables (e.g., stocking / shocking, glamorous / amorous .). | 134 | |
| 9608699839 | feminist criticism | fiction or nonfiction which supports the feminist goals of defining, establishing and defending equal civil, political, economic and social rights for women | 135 | |
| 9608707677 | fixed form | Poems that have a set number of lines, rhymes, and/or metrical arrangements per line. | 136 | |
| 9608721781 | flashback | 137 |
