| 6598034298 | abstract | a style in writing that is typically complex, discusses intangible qualities like good and evil, and seldom uses examples to support its points | | 0 |
| 6598034299 | academic | an adjective describing style; dry and theoretical writing; piece of writing seems to be sucking all the life out of its subject with analysis | | 1 |
| 6598034300 | accent | in poetry, the stressed portion of a word; sometimes set, often a matter of opinion | | 2 |
| 6598034301 | aesthetic | adj.: "appealing to the senses"; noun: coherent (logically connected) sense of taste | | 3 |
| 6598034302 | aesthetics | the study of beauty; "What is beauty?" "Is the beautiful always good?" | | 4 |
| 6598034303 | allegory | a story in which each aspect of the story has a symbolic meaning outside the tale itself; many fables have this quality; true ones are even more hard and fast; example: Orwell's Animal Farm | | 5 |
| 6598034304 | alliteration | the repetition of INITIAL consonant sounds; consonant clusters coming closely cramped and compressed | | 6 |
| 6598034305 | allusion | a reference to another work or famous figures; can be classical (refers to Greek and Roman mythology or literature), topical (refers to current event), or popular (refers to something from pop culture--TV show or hit movie) | | 7 |
| 6598034306 | anachronism | Greek for "misplaced in time"; something or someone that isn't in its correct historical or chronological time--i.e., Brutus wearing a watch | | 8 |
| 6598034307 | analogy | a comparison usually involving two or more symbolic parts; employed to clarify an action or relationship | | 9 |
| 6598034308 | anecdote | a short narrative | | 10 |
| 6598034309 | antecedent | the word, phrase, or clause that determines what a pronoun refers to | | 11 |
| 6598034310 | anthropomorphism | when inanimate objects, animals, or natural phenomena are given human characteristics, behaviour, or motivation--"In the forest, the darkness waited for me, I could hear its patient breathing." | | 12 |
| 6598034311 | anticlimax | occurs when an action produces far smaller results than one had been led to expect; frequently comic | | 13 |
| 6598034312 | antihero | a protagonist who is markedly unheroic: morally weak, cowardly, dishonest, or any number of other unsavory qualities | | 14 |
| 6598034313 | aphorism | a short and usually witty saying; astute observation--"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." (Lord Acton) | | 15 |
| 6598034314 | apostrophe | a figure of speech wherein the speaker talks directly to something that is nonhuman, absent, or dead | | 16 |
| 6598034315 | archaism | the use of deliberately old-fashioned language, used to create a feeling of antiquity | | 17 |
| 6598034316 | 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 | | 18 |
| 6598034317 | aspect | a trait or characteristic | | 19 |
| 6598034318 | assonance | the repeated use of vowel sounds--"Old king Cole was a merry old soul." | | 20 |
| 6598034319 | atmosphere | the emotional tone or background that surrounds a scene | | 21 |
| 6598034320 | ballad | a long, narrative poem, usually in regular meter and rhyme; typically has a naive folksy quality that sets it apart from epic poetry | | 22 |
| 6598034321 | bathos | when the writing of a scene strains for grandeur it can't support and tries to jerk tears from every little hiccup; intends to be dramatic but goes to the extreme of becoming ridiculous | | 23 |
| 6598034322 | pathos | when the writing of a scene evokes feelings of dignified pity and sympathy | | 24 |
| 6598034323 | black humor | the use of disturbing themes in comedy; morbid humor used to express the absurdity, insensitivity, paradox, and cruelty of the modern world, ordinary characters or situations exaggerated beyond normal limits of satire or irony | | 25 |
| 6598034324 | bombast | pretentious, exaggeratedly learned language; one tries to be eloquent by using the largest, most uncommon words | | 26 |
| 6598034325 | burlesque | broad parody, one that takes a style or form, such as tragic drama, and exaggerates it into ridiculousness; achieves its effects through caricature, ridicule, and distortion, devoid of any ethical element; interchangeable with parody | | 27 |
| 6598034326 | cacophony | using deliberately harsh, awkward sounds--the sound of midday traffic | | 28 |
| 6598034327 | cadence | the beat or rhythm of poetry in a general sense e.g., iambic pentameter; can be gentle and pulsing, conversational, and even vigorous, marching | | 29 |
| 6598034328 | canto | the name for a section division in a long work of poetry; divides a long poem into parts the way chapters divide a novel--like in Dante's Inferno | | 30 |
| 6598034329 | caricature | a portrait (verbal or otherwise) that exaggerates a facet of personality | | 31 |
| 6598034330 | catharsis | drawn from Aristotle's writings on tragedy; refers to the "cleansing" of emotion an audience member experiences, having lived (vicariously) through the experiences presented on stage; purging of emotions through a form of art, in this case, literature | | 32 |
| 6598034331 | chorus | the group of citizens who stand outside the main action on stage and comment on it | | 33 |
| 6598034332 | classic | typical; an accepted masterpiece | | 34 |
| 6598034333 | classical | refers to the arts of ancient Greece and Rome and the qualities of those arts | | 35 |
| 6598034334 | coinage (tech. term: neologism) | a new word, usually one invented on the spot | | 36 |
| 6598034335 | colloquialism | a word or phrase used in everyday conversational English that isn't a part of accepted "schoolbook" English; slang words, informal English | | 37 |
| 6598034336 | complex, dense | two terms carrying the similar meaning of suggesting that there is more than one posibilty in the meaning of words (image, idea, opposition); there are subtleties and variations; there are multiple layers of interpretation; the meaning is both explicit and implicit | | 38 |
| 6598034337 | conceit | refers to a startling or unusual metaphor, or to a metaphor developed and expanded upon over several lines | | 39 |
| 6598034338 | controlling image | when the image of conceit dominates and shapes the entire work | | 40 |
| 6598034339 | connotation | what a word suggests or implies, not its literal meaning--i.e., dark meaning dangerous instead lacking of light | | 41 |
| 6598034340 | denotation | the literal meaning of a word | | 42 |
| 6598034341 | consonance | the repetition of consonant sounds WITHIN words--"A flock of sick, black-checkered ducks." | | 43 |
| 6598034342 | couplet | a pair of lines that end in rhyme | | 44 |
| 6598034343 | decorum | in order to observe, a character's speech must be styled according to his or her social station, and in accordance with the occasion--bum speaks like a bum about bumly things | | 45 |
| 6598034344 | diction | author's choice of words, choice of specific words | | 46 |
| 6598034345 | syntax | author's choice of words; refers to the ordering and structuring of the words | | 47 |
| 6598034346 | dirge | a song for the dead, tone is typically slow, heavy, and melancholy | | 48 |
| 6598034347 | dissonance | the grating of incompatible sounds | | 49 |
| 6598034348 | doggerel | crude, simplistic verse, often in sing-song rhyme--i.e., limericks | | 50 |
| 6598034349 | dramatic irony | when the audience knows something that the characters in the drama do not | | 51 |
| 6598034350 | dramatic monologue | when a single speaker in literature says something to a silent audience | | 52 |
| 6598034351 | elegy | a type of poem that meditates on death or mortality in a serious, thoughtful manner; often use the recent death of a noted or loved person as a starting point; also memorialize specific dead people | | 53 |
| 6598034352 | elements | the basic techniques of each genre of literature | | 54 |
| 6598034353 | enjambment | the continuation of a syntactic unit from one line or couplet of a poem to the next with no pause--i.e., | | 55 |
| 6598034354 | epic | a very long narrative poem on a serious theme in a dignified style; typically deal with glorious or profound subject matter--i.e., great war, heroic journey, battle with supernatural, etc. | | 56 |
| 6598034355 | mock-epic | parody form that deals with mundane events and ironically treats them as worthy of epic poetry | | 57 |
| 6598034356 | epitaph | lines that commemorate the dead at their burial place; usually a line or a handful of lines, often serious or religious, but sometimes witty and even irreverent | | 58 |
| 6598034357 | euphemism | a word or phrase that takes the place of a harsh, unpleasant, or impolite reality--i.e., passed away for died, let go for fired | | 59 |
| 6598034358 | euphony | when sounds blend harmoniously | | 60 |
| 6598034359 | explicit | to say or write something directly and clearly | | 61 |
| 6598034360 | farce | today it's used to refer to extremely broad humor; in earlier times, it was used to mean a simply funny play; a comedy (generic term for play then, btw, no implication of humor) | | 62 |
| 6598034361 | feminine rhyme | lines rhymed by their final two syllables--running, gunning; properly, the penultimate syllables are stressed and the final syllables are unstressed | | 63 |
| 6598034362 | foil | a secondary character whose purpose is to highlight the characteristics of a main character, usually by contrast | | 64 |
| 6598034363 | foot | the basic rhythmic unit of a line of poetry, formed by a combination of two or three syllables, either stressed or unstressed | | 65 |
| 6598034364 | foreshadowing | an event or statement in a narrative that in miniature suggests a larger event that comes later | | 66 |
| 6598034365 | free verse | poetry written without a regular rhyme scheme or metrical pattern | | 67 |
| 6598034366 | genre | a subcategory of literature--i.e., scientific fiction, detective stories->types of fiction | | 68 |
| 6598034367 | Gothic, Gothic novel | form first showed up in the middle of the 1700s, heyday of popularity for sixty years; sensibility: mysterious, gloomy, sinister | | 69 |
| 6598034368 | hubris | the excessive pride or ambition that leads to the main character's downfall--like Caesar | | 70 |
| 6598034369 | hyperbole | exaggeration or deliberate overstatement: He has a watermelon head. | | 71 |
| 6598034370 | implicit | to say or write something that suggests and implies but never says it directly or clearly; reading between the lines | | 72 |
| 6598034371 | in medias res | Latin for "in the midst of things;" one of the conventions of epic poetry | | 73 |
| 6598034372 | interior monologue | a term for novels and poetry, not dramatic literature; refers to writing that records the mental talking that goes on inside a character's head; related, but not identical to the stream of consciousness; tends to be coherent, as though the character is actually talking | | 74 |
| 6598034373 | inversion | switching the customary order of elements in a sentence or phrase--Yoda speech! | | 75 |
| 6598034374 | *irony | comes in a variety of forms; a statement that means the opposite of what it seems to mean, deeper than sarcasm though; an undertow of meaning | | 76 |
| 6598034375 | lament | a poem of sadness or grief over the death of a loved one or over some other intense loss | | 77 |
| 6598034376 | lampoon | a satire | | 78 |
| 6598034377 | loose sentence | sentence is clear in the beginning, begins with main clause, followed by subordinates and modifiers | | 79 |
| 6598034378 | periodic sentence | leaves the completion of its main clause to the end, often produces effect of suspense | | 80 |
| 6598034379 | lyric | a type of poetry that explores the poet's personal interpretation of and feelings about the world; when used to describe a tone, refers to a sweet, emotional melodiousness | | 81 |
| 6598034380 | masculine rhyme | a rhyme ending on the final stressed syllable--spent, went | | 82 |
| 6598034381 | means, meaning | literal meaning-concrete and explicit; emotional meaning | | 83 |
| 6598034382 | 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 | | 84 |
| 6598034383 | metaphor | a comparison, or analogy that states one thing IS another--His eyes were burning coals. | | 85 |
| 6598034384 | metonym | a word that is used to stand for something else that it has attributes of or is associated with---"the crown" referring to the king, "The pen is mightier than the sword." (pen reps writers and ideas, sword reps war) | | 86 |
| 6598034385 | nemesis | the protagonist's archenemy or supreme and persistent difficulty | | 87 |
| 6598034386 | objectivity | treatment of a matter as impersonal or as an outside view of events | | 88 |
| 6598034387 | subjectivity | treatment of a matter using the interior personal view of a single observer and is typically coloured with that observer's emotional responses | | 89 |
| 6598034388 | onomatopoeia | words that sound how they're spelled--boom, splat | | 90 |
| 6598034389 | opposition | a pair of elements that contrast sharply, not necessarily "conflict," rather a pairing of images, each becomes more striking and informative because it's placed in contrast to the other one; creates mystery and tension, can be obvious or lead to irony, not always though | | 91 |
| 6598034390 | oxymoron | a phrase composed of opposites; a contradiction | | 92 |
| 6598034391 | parable | a story that instructs like a fable or an allegory | | 93 |
| 6598034392 | paradox | a situation or statement that seems to contradict itself, but on closer inspection, it does not---"It's raining, but I don't believe that it is." | | 94 |
| 6598034393 | parallelism | repeated syntactical similarities used for effect--He likes playing the piano, eating cookies, and reading lengthy novels. | | 95 |
| 6598034394 | paraphrase | to restate phrases and sentences in your own words, to rephrase; not an analysis or interpretation | | 96 |
| 6598034395 | parenthetical phrase | a phrase set off by commas that interrupts the flow of a sentence with some commentary or added detail | | 97 |
| 6598034396 | parody | when a specific work is exaggerated to ridiculousness | | 98 |
| 6598034397 | pastoral | a poem set in a tranquil nature or even more specifically, one about shepherds | | 99 |
| 6598034398 | persona | the narrator in a non-first-person novel. in third person, get an idea of author's personality, but isn't really the author's personality; shadow-author | | 100 |
| 6598034399 | personification | giving an inanimate object human qualities or form--The darkness of the forest became the figure of a beautiful, pake-skinned woman in night-black clothes. | | 101 |
| 6598034400 | plaint | a poem or speech expressing sorrow | | 102 |
| 6598034401 | point of view | the perspective from which the action of a novel (or narrative poem) is presented | | 103 |
| 6598034402 | omniscient narrator | third-person narrator who sees into each character's mind and understands all the action that's going on | | 104 |
| 6598034403 | limited omniscient narrator | third-person narrator who generally reports only what one character (usually main character) sees, reports only thoughts of that one character | | 105 |
| 6598034404 | objective/camera-eye narrator | third-person narrator who only reports on what would be visible to a camera, doesn't know what the character is thinking unless character speaks of it | | 106 |
| 6598034405 | first-person narrator | narrator who is a character in the story and tells the story from his or her point of view; when crazy, a liar, or very young, narrator is unreliable | | 107 |
| 6598034406 | stream of consciousness technique | method is like first-person, but instead of the character telling the story, the author puts the reader in the character's head | | 108 |
| 6598034407 | prelude | an intro poem to a longer work or verse | | 109 |
| 6598034408 | protagonist | the main character of a novel or play | | 110 |
| 6598034409 | pun | usually humorous use of a word in such a way to suggest two or more meanings | | 111 |
| 6598034410 | refrain | a line or set of lines repeated several times over the course of a poem | | 112 |
| 6598034411 | requiem | a song or prayer for the dead | | 113 |
| 6598034412 | rhapsody | an intensely passionate verse or section of verse, usually of love or praise | | 114 |
| 6598034413 | rhetorical question | a question that suggests an answer | | 115 |
| 6598034414 | satire | exposes common character flaws to humor; attempts to improve things by pointing out people's mistakes in the hope that once exposed, such behaviours will become less common--hypocrisy, vanity, greed | | 116 |
| 6598034415 | simile | like a metaphor but softens the full-out equation of things, often, but not always, by using like or as | | 117 |
| 6598034416 | 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; not meant to imply that the actor acknowledges the audience is listening | | 118 |
| 6598034417 | stanza | a group of lines roughly analogues in function in verse to the paragraph's function in prose | | 119 |
| 6598034418 | stock characters | standard or cliched character types: the drunk, the miser, the foolish girl, etc. | | 120 |
| 6598034419 | subjunctive mood | a mood that represents an act or state (not as a fact but) as contingent or possible; wishful thinking--if I were you, if he were honest | | 121 |
| 6598034420 | suggest | to imply, infer, indicate; you have to pull out the meaning yourself | | 122 |
| 6598034421 | summary | a simple retelling of what you've just read; covers more material than paraphrase, more general, includes all the facts | | 123 |
| 6598034422 | suspension of disbelief | demand made of a theater audience to accept the limitations of staging and supply the details with imagination | | 124 |
| 6598034423 | symbolism | a device in literature where an object reps an idea | | 125 |
| 6598034424 | technique | the methods, the tools, "how-you-do-it" ways of the author | | 126 |
| 6598034425 | theme | the main idea of the overall work; the central idea; topic of discourse or discussion | | 127 |
| 6598034426 | thesis | the main position of an argument; the central contention that will be supported | | 128 |
| 6598034427 | tragic flaw | in tragedy, weakness of character in an other wise good/great individual that leads to his demise | | 129 |
| 6598034428 | travesty | a grotesque parody | | 130 |
| 6598034429 | truism | a way-too-obvious truth | | 131 |
| 6598034430 | utopia | an idealized place; paradise | | 132 |
| 6598034431 | zeugma | the use of a word to modify two or more words, but used for different meanings--On the fishing trip, he caught three trout and a cold. | | 133 |
