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| 15120781789 | Allegory | a literary work with two or more levels of meaning: one literal level and one or more symbolic levels. The events, settings, objects or characters in an allegory stand for ideas of qualities beyond themselves. (Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory of the spiritual journey.) | 0 | |
| 15120802804 | Antecedent | means going before or preceding. It is also a word, phrase or clause that a relative pronoun refers to. | 1 | |
| 15120811171 | Aphorism | a general truth or observation about life, usually stated concisely and pointedly. It can be witty or wise. (Francis Bacon - "Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.") | 2 | |
| 15120826491 | Archaism | A word, expression, spelling, or phrase that is out of date in the common speech of an era, but still deliberately used by a writer, poet, or playwright for artistic purposes | 3 | |
| 15120841373 | Couplet | a pair of rhyming lines written in the same meter. Shakespeare ended his sonnets with couplets. ("So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee." Sonnet XVIII - Shakespeare) | 4 | |
| 15120860211 | Dramatic Irony | when there is a contradiction between what a character thinks and what the reader or audience knows to be true (Oedipus is unaware that he killed his own father and married his mother.) | 5 | |
| 15120868229 | Euphony | a term that denotes sounds pleasing to the ear; it is the opposite of cacophony | 6 | |
| 15120883186 | Foreshadowing | is the use, in a literary work, of clues that suggest events that have yet to occur. Writers use this to create suspense or to prepare the audience for the eventual outcome of events. | 7 | |
| 15120893691 | Gothic Novel | an English genre of fiction popular in the 18th to early 19th centuries, characterized by an atmosphere of mystery and horror and having a pseudomedieval setting. | 8 | |
| 15120913386 | Inversion | a reversal or change in the regular word order of a sentence | 9 | |
| 15120924939 | Masculine Rhyme | A rhyme ending on the final stressed syllable | 10 | |
| 15120933471 | Melodrama | a play spoken with musical accompaniment. At one time it meant an opera, but today it indicates a play, with or without music, with a romantic plot and appealing to the emotions of the spectators. | 11 | |
| 15120950444 | Rhetorical Question | It implies that the answer is obvious—the kind of question that does not need to be answered. It is used for rhetorically persuading someone of a truth without argument or to give emphasis to a supposed truth by stating its opposite ironically. Rhetorical questions are often used for comic effect as in Henry IV when Falstaff lies about fighting off eleven men single- handedly, then responds to the prince's doubts, "Art thou mad? Is not the truth the truth?" On the other hand, Iago in Othello uses rhetorical questions for sinister ends, persuading Othello that his loving wife is a wh0re. Iago hints with questions ("Honest, my lord?" "Is't possible, my lord?") | 12 | |
| 15120993126 | Theme | is a central idea or message in a work of literature. Theme should not be confused with subject or what the work is about. Rather, theme is a perception about life or human nature shared with the reader. Sometimes the theme is directly stated within a work; at other times it is implied, and the reader must infer the theme. (In Macbeth, some themes are the corrupting effect of unbridled ambition, guilt, and the lure of supernatural forces.) To discover theme, consider what happens to the central characters. The importance of those events, stated in terms that apply to all human beings, is the theme. In poetry, imagery and figurative language also help convey theme. (In Chaucer's "The Pardoner's Tale," what happens to the three young men illustrates the theme that "the love of money is the root of all evil.") A "light' work, one written strictly for entertainment, may not have a theme. | 13 | |
| 15121007892 | Utopia | an imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect | 14 |
