These 53 vocabulary words are from the first seven chapters of the ninth edition of Perrine's Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense. Also includes "existentialism," a term/idea not in Perrine's that is associated with "The Guest."
Terms : Hide Images
| 110695566 | commercial fiction | Fiction written to meet the taste of a wide popular audience and relying usually on tested formulas for satisfying such taste. | 0 | |
| 110695568 | literary fiction | Fiction written with serious artistic intentions, providing an imagined experience yielding authentic insights into some significant aspect of life. | 1 | |
| 110695570 | plot | The sequence of incidents or events of which a story or play is composed. | 2 | |
| 110695572 | structure | The sequential arrangement of plot elements in fiction or drama. | 3 | |
| 110695573 | conflict | A clash of actions, desires, ideas, or goals in the plot of a story or drama. May exist between the main character and some other person or persons; between the main character and some external force - physical nature, society, or "fate"; or between the main character and some destructive element in his or her own nature. | 4 | |
| 110695574 | protagonist | The central character in a story or play. | 5 | |
| 110695575 | antagonist | Any force in a story that is in conflict with the protagonist; May be another person, an aspect of the physical or social environment, or a destructive element in the protagonist's own nature. | 6 | |
| 110695576 | suspense | That quality in a story or play that makes the reader eager to discover what happens next and how it will end. | 7 | |
| 110695578 | mystery | An unusual set of circumstances for which the reader craves an explanation; used to create suspense. | 8 | |
| 110695579 | dilemma | A situation in which a character must choose between two courses of action, both undesirable. | 9 | |
| 110695582 | surprise | An unexpected turn in the development of a plot. | 10 | |
| 110695584 | surprise ending | A completely unexpected revelation or turn of plot at the conclusion of a story or play. | 11 | |
| 110695587 | happy ending | An ending in which events turn out well for a sympathetic protagonist. | 12 | |
| 110695590 | unhappy ending | An ending that turns out unhappily for a sympathetic protagonist. | 13 | |
| 110695593 | indeterminate ending | An ending in which the central problem or conflict is left unresolved. | 14 | |
| 110695596 | artistic unity | That condition of a successful literary work whereby all its elements work together for the achievement of its central purpose. In an artistically unified work nothing is included that is irrelevant to the central purpose, nothing is omitted that is essential to it, and the parts are arranged in the most effective order for the achievement of that purpose. | 15 | |
| 110695612 | plot manipulation | A situation in which an author gives the plot a twist or turn unjustified by preceded action or by the characters involved. | 16 | |
| 110695614 | deus ex machina | ("god from the machine") The resolution of a plot by use of a highly improbable chance or coincidence (so named from the practice of some Greek dramatists of having a god descend from heaven at the last possible minute - in the theater by means of a stage machine - to rescue the protagonist from an impossible situation). | 17 | |
| 110695616 | chance | The occurrence of an event that has no apparent cause in antecedent events or in predisposition of character. | 18 | |
| 110695619 | coincidence | The chance concurrence of two events having a peculiar correspondence between them. | 19 | |
| 110695630 | rising action | That development of plot in a story or play that precedes and leads up to the climax. | 20 | |
| 110695632 | climax | The turning point or high point in a plot. | 21 | |
| 110695635 | falling action | The segment of the plot that comes between the climax and the conclusion. | 22 | |
| 110695636 | characterization | The various literary means by which characters are presented. | 23 | |
| 110695637 | direct presentation | That method of characterization in which the author, by exposition or analysis, tells us directly what a character is like, or has someone else in the story do so. | 24 | |
| 110695638 | indirect presentation | That method of characterization in which the author shows us a character in action, compelling us to infer what the character is like from what is said or done by the character. | 25 | |
| 110695639 | dramatization | The presentation of character or of emotion through the speech or action of characters rather than through exposition, analyses, or description by the author. | 26 | |
| 110695640 | flat character | A character whose distinguishing moral qualities or personal traits are summed up in one or two traits. | 27 | |
| 110695641 | round character | A character whose distinguishing moral qualities or personal traits are complex and many-sided. | 28 | |
| 110695642 | stock character | A stereotyped character: one whose nature is familiar to us from prototypes in previous literature. | 29 | |
| 110695643 | static character | A character who is the same sort of person at the end of a work as at the beginning. | 30 | |
| 110695644 | developing (dynamic) character | A character who during the course of a work undergoes a permanent change in some distinguishing moral qualities or personal traits or outlook. | 31 | |
| 110695645 | epiphany | A moment or event in which a character achieves a spiritual insight into life or into her or his own circumstances. | 32 | |
| 110695646 | theme | The central idea or unifying generalization implied or stated by a literary work. | 33 | |
| 110695647 | point of view | The angle of vision from which a story is told. | 34 | |
| 110695648 | omniscient | The author tells the story using the third-person, knowing all and free to tell us anything, including what the characters are thinking or feeling and why they act as they do. | 35 | |
| 110695649 | third person limited | The author tells the story using the third person, but is limited to a complete knowledge of one character in the story and tells us only what that one character thinks, feels, sees, and hears. | 36 | |
| 110695650 | stream of consciousness | Narrative that presents the private thoughts of a character without commentary or interpretation by the author. | 37 | |
| 110695651 | first person | The story is told by one of its characters. | 38 | |
| 110695652 | objective (dramatic) | The author tells the story using the third person, but is limited to reporting what the characters say or do; the author does not interpret their behavior or tells us their private thoughts or feelings. | 39 | |
| 110695653 | symbol | Something that means more than what it is; an object, person, situation, or action that in addition to its literal meaning suggests other meanings as well. | 40 | |
| 110695654 | allegory | A narrative or description that has a second meaning beneath the surface, often relating each literal term to a fixed, corresponding abstract idea or moral principle; usually, the ulterior meanings belong to a pre-existing system of ideas or principles. | 41 | |
| 110695655 | fantasy | A kind of fiction that pictures creatures or events beyond the boundaries of known reality. | 42 | |
| 110695656 | irony | A situation or use of language involving some kind of incongruity or discrepancy. | 43 | |
| 110695657 | verbal irony | A figure of speech in which what is said is the opposite of what is meant. | 44 | |
| 110695658 | dramatic irony | An incongruity or discrepancy between what a character says or thinks and what a reader knows to be true (or between what a character perceives and what the author intends the reader to perceive). | 45 | |
| 110695659 | irony of situation | A situation in which there is an incongruity between appearance and reality, or between expectation and fulfillment, or between the actual situation and what would seem appropriate. | 46 | |
| 110695660 | sentimentality | Unmerited or contrived tender feeling; that quality in a work that elicits or seeks to elicit tears through an oversimplification or falsification of reality. | 47 | |
| 110695661 | editorializing | Writing that departs from the narrative or dramatic mode and instructs the reader how to think or feel about the events of a story or the behavior of a character. | 48 | |
| 110695662 | poeticizing | Writing that uses immoderately heightened or distended language to sway the reader's feelings. | 49 | |
| 111198507 | existentialism | 1. Stresses that people are entirely free and therefore responsible for what they make of themselves. 2. A philosophical attitude that stresses the individual's unique position as a self-determining agent responsible for the authenticity of his or her choices.(Associated with Heidegger, Jaspers, Marcel, and Sartre, and opposed to rationalism and empiricism). | 50 | |
| 581695384 | magical realism | A form of fantasy in which fantastic and magical events are woven into mundane and ordinary situations, creating striking and memorable effects unavailable to either realism or fantasy alone. | 51 | |
| 581695385 | compression | A characteristic of most successful stories, in which the writer's aim is to say as much as possible as briefly as possible. The author chooses each word and detail carefully for maximum effectiveness. | 52 |
