Lit Terms
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| 225403897 | Denotation | Dictionary definition of a word | |
| 225403898 | dramatic irony | The reader/audience knows something that a character or characters do not | |
| 225403899 | tragedy | A form of drama exciting the emotions of pity and fear. Its action should be single and complete, presenting a reversal of fortune, involving persons renowned and of superior attainments, and it should be written in poetry embellished with every kind of artistic expression. | |
| 225403900 | aside | A dramatic device in which a character speaks to the audience (usually for a brief moment) in a way in which the audience, suspending their disbelief, assumes that other characters on stage cannot hear. | |
| 225403901 | speaker | The narrative or elegiac voice in a poem. It is a convention in poetry that the _____ is not the same individual as the historical author of the poem. | |
| 225403902 | pun | A play on two words similar in sound but different in meaning. | |
| 225403903 | apostrophe | The act of addressing some abstraction or personification that is not physically present or that cannot respond. | |
| 225403904 | simile | An analogy or comparison implied by using like or as. | |
| 225403905 | sonnet | A lyric poem of fourteen lines, usually in iambic pentameter, with rhymes arranged according to certain definite patterns. It usually expresses a single, complete idea or thought with a reversal, twist, or change of direction in the concluding lines. | |
| 225403906 | connotation | The extra tinge or taint of cultural meaning each word carries beyond the minimal, strict definition found in a dictionary. | |
| 225403907 | 3rd person narrator | The narrator seems to be someone standing outside the story who refers to all the characters by name or as he, she, they, and so on. | |
| 225403908 | omniscient narrator | A characteristic of the narrator: having complete or unlimited knowledge, awareness, or understanding; perceiving all things. | |
| 225403909 | stream of consciousness | Writing in which a character's perceptions, thoughts, and memories are presented in an apparently random form, without regard for logical sequence, chronology, or syntax. Often such writing makes no distinction between various levels of reality--such as dreams, memories, imaginative thoughts or real sensory perception. The technique has been used by several authors and poets: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, T. S. Eliot, and William Faulkner. | |
| 225403910 | paradox | Using contradiction in a manner that oddly makes sense on a deeper level. Oftentimes a _____ seems to reveal a deeper truth through its contradiction. | |
| 225403911 | stanza | An arrangement of lines of verse constituting a "paragraph" of poetry | |
| 225403912 | alliteration | Repeating a sound (usually an initial sound) for an effect. | |
| 225403913 | consonance | Repeating identical or similar consonant sounds. | |
| 225403914 | hyperbole | An exaggeration or overstatement. | |
| 225403915 | repetition | An author's decision to repeat certain images, descriptions, ideas, etc. for a desired effect. | |
| 225403916 | personification | Giving human characteristics to something nonhuman. | |
| 225403917 | symbol | Words, places, characters, or objects that are what they are but also mean something beyond what they are on a literal level. | |
| 225403918 | Gothic | Poetry, short stories, or novels designed to thrill readers by providing mystery and blood-curdling accounts of villainy, murder, and the supernatural. As J. A. Cuddon suggests, the conventions of ____ literature include wild and desolate landscapes, ancient buildings such as ruined monasteries; cathedrals; castles with dungeons, torture chambers, secret doors, and winding stairways; apparitions, phantoms, demons, and necromancers; an atmosphere of brooding gloom; and youthful, handsome heroes and fainting (or screaming!) heroines who face off against corrupt aristocrats, wicked witches, and hideous monsters. | |
| 225403919 | satire | An attack on or criticism of any stupidity or vice in the form of scathing humor, or a critique of what the author sees as dangerous religious, political, moral, or social standards. _____ became an especially popular technique used during the Enlightenment, in which it was believed that an artist could correct folly by using art as a mirror to reflect society. | |
| 225403920 | imagery | Words that invoke the 5 senses in a poem, whether by literal description, allusion, simile, or metaphor. | |
| 225403921 | point of view | The way a story gets told and who tells it. It is the method of narration that determines the position, or angle of vision, from which the story unfolds. | |
| 225403922 | assonance | Repeating identical or similar vowel sounds. | |
| 225403923 | colloquialism | A word or phrase used everyday in plain and relaxed speech, but rarely found in formal writing. | |
| 225403924 | juxtaposition | The arrangement of two or more ideas, characters, actions, settings, phrases, or words side-by-side or in similar narrative moments for the purpose of comparison, contrast, rhetorical effect, suspense, or character development. | |
| 225403925 | metaphor | A comparison or analogy stated in such a way as to imply that one object is another one, figuratively speaking. | |
| 225403926 | verbal irony | Saying one thing but meaning another. | |
| 225403927 | theme | A central idea or statement that unifies and controls a literary work. | |
| 225403928 | 1st person point of view | The narrator speaks as "I" and the narrator is a character in the story who may or may not influence events within it. | |
| 225403929 | ambiguity | Leaving something undetermined in order to open up multiple possible meanings. When we refer to literary ______, we refer to any wording, action, or symbol that can be read in divergent ways. | |
| 225403930 | direct characterization | Process of an author divulging traits of his/her characters through overt, telling statements. | |
| 225403931 | allusion | A casual reference in literature to a person, place, event, or another passage of literature, often without explicit identification. | |
| 225403932 | conflict | The tension between two opposing forces in a piece of literature. | |
| 225403933 | situational irony | When the unexpected occurs - often in a layering of coincidences. | |
| 225403934 | tone | The attitude of the piece of literature created by the choices an author makes: characters, incidents, setting, stylistic choices and diction. | |
| 225403935 | comedy | A form of drama that usually ends in marriage and centers on individuals lesser than the greatest and noblest. It moves from chaos to order in an attempt to both teach and incite laughter. | |
| 225403936 | soliloquy | A dramatic device in which one character alone on stage reveals to the audience her or his inner thoughts. Some assume that during a ____, the character honestly reveals inner feelings; however, some challenge the fact that they are always honest with us. | |
| 225403937 | diction | Word choice. | |
| 225403938 | indirect characterization | Process of an author divulging traits of his/her characters through showing (dialogue and action). | |
| 225403939 | narrator | The voice or storyteller in a novel, short story, or other example of prose | |
| 225403940 | figurative language | Language that cannot be taken literally. It includes phrases such as similes, metaphors, personifications, metonymies, verbal ironies, etc. | |
| 225403941 | limited narration | the narrator cannot tell the reader things that the focal character does not know | |
| 311340599 | catalog | an author's technique of listing items or descriptors |
