AP Literature Terms Flashcards

The Glossary of Literary Terms for the AP English Literature and Composition Test

334705587	Abstract	Complex, discusses intangible qualities like good and evil, seldom uses examples to support its points.	0
334705588	Academic	Dry and rhetorical writing; sucking all the life out of its subject with analysis.	1
334705589	Accent	In poetry, the stressed portion of a word.	2
334705593	Aesthetic	Appealing to the senses; a coherent sense of taste.	3
334705594	Allegory	A story in which each aspect of the story has a symbolic meaning outside the tale itself.	4
334705595	Alliteration	The repetition of initial consonant sounds.	5
334705597	Allusion	A reference to another work or famous figure.	6
334705598	Anachronism	"Misplaced in time." An aspect of a story that doesn't belong in its supposed time setting.	7
334705599	Analogy	A comparison, usually involving two or more symbolic parts, employed to clarify an action or a relationship.	8
334705600	Anecdote	A Short Narrative	9
334705601	Antecedent	The word, phrase, or clause that determines what a pronoun refers to.	10
334705602	Anthropomorphism	When inanimate objects are given human characteristics. Often confused with personification.	11
334705604	Anticlimax	Occurs when an action produces far smaller results than one had been led to expect.	12
334705605	Antihero	A protagonist who is markedly unheroic: morally weak, cowardly, dishonest, or any number of other unsavory qualities.	13
334705606	Aphorism	A short and usually witty saying.	14
334705607	Apostrophe	A figure of speech wherein the speaker talks directly to something that is nonhuman.	15
334705608	Archaism	The use of deliberately old-fashioned language.	16
334705609	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.	17
334705610	Aspect	A trait or characteristic	18
334705612	Assonance	The repeated use of vowel sounds: "Old king Cole was a merry old soul."	19
334705873	Atmosphere	The emotional tone or background that surrounds a scene	20
334705886	Ballad	A long, narrative poem, usually in meter and rhyme. Typically has a naive folksy quality.	21
334705887	Bathos	Writing strains for grandeur it can't support and tries too hard to be a tear jerker.	22
334705888	Pathos	Writing evokes feelings of dignified pity and sympathy.	23
334705889	Black humor	The use of disturbing themes in comedy.	24
334705902	Bombast	Pretentious, exaggeratedly learned language.	25
334705904	Burlesque	Broad parody, one that takes a style or form and exaggerates it into ridiculousness.	26
334705905	Cacophony	In poetry, using deliberately harsh, awkward sounds.	27
334705906	Cadence	The beat or rhythm or poetry in a general sense.	28
334705907	Canto	The name for a section division in a long work of poetry.	29
334705908	Caricature	A portrait (verbal or otherwise) that exaggerates a facet of personality.	30
334705911	Catharsis	Drawn from Aristotle's writings on tragedy. Refers to the "cleansing" of emotion an audience member experiences during a play	31
334706067	Chorus	In Greek drama, the group of citizens who stand outside the main action on stage and comment on it.	32
334706068	Classic	Typical, or an accepted masterpiece.	33
334706238	Coinage (neologism)	A new word, usually one invented on the spot.	34
334706239	Colloquialism	A word or phrase used in everyday conversational English that isn't a part of accepted "school-book" English.	35
334706240	Complex (Dense)	Suggesting that there is more than one possibility in the meaning of words; subtleties and variations; multiple layers of interpretation; meaning both explicit and implicit	36
334706269	Conceit (Controlling Image)	A startling or unusual metaphor, or to a metaphor developed and expanded upon several lines.	37
334706270	Denotation	A word's literal meaning.	38
334706271	Connotation	Everything other than the literal meaning that a word suggests or implies.	39
334706272	Consonance	The repetition of consonant sounds within words (rather than at their beginnings)	40
334706273	Couplet	A pair of lines that end in rhyme	41
334706274	Decorum	A character's speech must be styled according to her social station, and in accordance to the situation.	42
334706277	Diction	The words an author chooses to use.	43
334706278	Syntax	The ordering and structuring of words.	44
334706572	Dirge	A song for the dead. Its tone is typically slow, heavy, depressed, and melancholy	45
334706573	Dissonance	Refers to the grating of incompatible sounds.	46
334706574	Doggerel	Crude, simplistic verse, often in sing-song rhyme, like limericks.	47
334706575	Dramatic Irony	When the audience knows something that the characters in the drama do not	48
334706578	Dramatic Monologue	When a single speaker in literature says something to a silent audience.	49
334706579	Elegy	A type of poem that meditates on death or mortality in a serious, thoughtful manner.	50
334706580	Elements	Basic techniques of each genre of literature	51
334706582	Enjambment	The continuation of a syntactic unit from one line or couplet of a poem to the next with no pause.	52
334706583	Epic	A very long narrative poem on a serious theme in a dignified style; typically deal with glorious or profound subject matter.	53
334706586	Epitaph	Lines that commemorate the dead at their burial place.	54
334706587	Euphemism	A word or phrase that takes the place of a harsh, unpleasant, or impolite reality.	55
334706588	Euphony	When sounds blend harmoniously.	56
334706589	Explicit	To say or write something directly and clearly.	57
334706590	Farce	Extremely broad humor; in earlier times, a funny play or a comedy.	58
334706654	Feminine rhyme	Lines rhymed by their final two syllables. Properly, the penultimate syllables are stressed and the final syllables are unstressed.	59
334706655	Foil	A secondary character whose purpose is to highlight the characteristics of a main character, usually by contrast.	60
334706733	Foot	The basic rhythmic unit of a line of poetry, formed by a combination of two or three syllables, either stressed or unstressed.	61
334706734	Foreshadowing	An event of statement in a narrative that in miniature suggests a larger event that comes later.	62
334706735	Free verse	poetry written without a regular rhyme scheme or metrical pattern	63
334706736	Genre	A sub-category of literature.	64
334706738	Gothic	A sensibility that includes such features as dark, gloomy castles and weird screams from the attic each night.	65
334706740	Hubris	The excessive pride or ambition that leads to the main character's downfall	66
334706741	Hyperbole	Exaggeration or deliberate overstatement.	67
334706742	Implicit	To say or write something that suggests and implies but never says it directly or clearly.	68
334706743	In media res	Latin for "in the midst of things," i.e. beginning an epic poem in the middle of the action.	69
334706744	Interior Monologue	Refers to writing that records the mental talking that goes on inside a character's head; tends to be coherent.	70
334706747	Inversion	Switching the customary order of elements in a sentence or phrase.	71
334706749	Irony	A statement that means the opposite of what it seems to mean; uses an undertow of meaning, sliding against the literal a la Jane Austen.	72
334706750	Lament	A poem of sadness or grief over the death of a loved one or over some other intense loss.	73
334706752	Lampoon	A satire.	74
334706753	Loose sentence	A sentence that is complete before its end: Jack loved Barbara despite her irritating snorting laugh.	75
334706778	Periodic Sentence	A sentence that is not grammatically complete until it has reached it s final phrase: Despite Barbara's irritation at Jack, she loved him.	76
334706779	Lyric	A type of poetry that explores the poet's personal interpretation of and feelings about the world.	77
334706781	Masculine rhyme	A rhyme ending on the final stressed syllable (regular old rhyme)	78
334706782	Meaning	What makes sense, what's important.	79
334706783	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.	80
334706784	Metaphor	A comparison or analogy that states one thing IS another.	81
334706785	Simile	A comparison or analogy that typically uses like or as.	82
334706786	Metonymy	A word that is used to stand for something else that it has attributes of or is associated with.	83
334706787	Nemesis	The protagonist's arch enemy or supreme and persistent difficulty.	84
334706792	Objectivity	Treatment of subject matter in an impersonal manner or from an outside view.	85
334706793	Subjectivity	A treatment of subject matter that uses the interior or personal view of a single observer and is typically colored with that observer's emotional responses.	86
334707152	Onomatopoeia	Words that sound like what they mean	87
334707154	Opposition	A pairing of images whereby each becomes more striking and informative because it's placed in contrast to the other one.	88
334707541	Oxymoron	A phrase composed of opposites; a contradiction.	89
334707542	Parable	A story that instructs.	90
334707545	Paradox	A situation or statement that seems to contradict itself, but on closer inspection, does not.	91
334707546	Parallelism	Repeated syntactical similarities used for effect.	92
334707550	Paraphrase	To restate phrases and sentences in your own words.	93
334707551	Parenthetical phrase	A phrase set off by commas that interrupts the flow of a sentence with some commentary or added detail.	94
334707904	Parody	The work that results when a specific work is exaggerated to ridiculousness.	95
334707960	Pastoral	A poem set in tranquil nature or even more specifically, one about shepherds.	96
334707994	Persona	The narrator in a non first-person novel.	97
334708359	Personification	When an inanimate object takes on human shape.	98
334708364	Plaint	A poem or speech expressing sorrow.	99
334708365	Point of View	The perspective from which the action of a novel is presented.	100
334708366	Omniscient	A third person narrator who sees into each character's mind and understands all the action going on.	101
334708367	Limited Omniscient	A Third person narrator who generally reports only what one character sees, and who only reports the thoughts of that one privileged character.	102
334708594	Objective	A thrid person narrator who only reports on what would be visible to a camera. Does not know what the character is thinking unless the character speaks it.	103
334708595	First person	A narrator who is a character in the story and tells the tale from his or her point of view.	104
334708597	Stream of Consciousness	Author places the reader inside the main character's head and makes the reader privy to all of the character's thoughts as they scroll through her consciousness.	105
334708602	Prelude	An introductory poem to a longer work of verse	106
334708603	Protagonist	The main character of a novel or play	107
334708774	Pun	The usually humorous use of a word in such a way to suggest two or more meanings	108
334708775	Refrain	A line or set of lines repeated several times over the course of a poem.	109
334708776	Requiem	A song of prayer for the dead.	110
334708777	Rhapsody	An intensely passionate verse or section of verse, usually of love or praise.	111
334708778	Rhetorical question	A question that suggests an answer.	112
334708779	Satire	Attempts to improve things by pointing out people's mistakes in the hope that once exposed, such behavior will become less common.	113
334708780	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.	114
334708781	Stanza	A group of lines roughly analogous in function in verse to the paragraphs function in prose.	115
334708782	Stock characters	Standard or cliched character types.	116
334708783	Subjunctive Mood	A grammatical situation involving the words "if" and "were," setting up a hypothetical situation.	117
334708784	Suggest	To imply, infer, indicate.	118
334708785	Summary	A simple retelling of what you've just read.	119
334708786	Suspension of disbelief	The demand made of a theater audience to accept the limitations of staging and supply the details with their imagination.	120
334708787	Symbolism	A device in literature where an object represents an idea.	121
334708792	Technique	The methods and tools of the author.	122
334708793	Theme	The main idea of the overall work; the central idea.	123
334708794	Thesis	The main position of an argument. The central contention that will be supported.	124
334708796	Tragic flaw	In a tragedy, this is the weakness of a character in an otherwise good (or even great) individual that ultimately leads to his demise.	125
334708852	Travesty	A grotesque parody	126
334708853	Truism	A way-too obvious truth	127
334708951	Unreliable narrator	When the first person narrator is crazy, a liar, very young, or for some reason not entirely credible	128
334708952	Utopia	An idealized place. Imaginary communities in which people are able to live in happiness, prosperity, and peace.	129
334708953	Zeugma	The use of a word to modify two or more words, but used for different meanings. He closed the door and his heart on his lost love.	130
334708954	Ode	A poem in praise of something divine or noble	131
334708955	Iamb	A poetic foot -- light, heavy	132
334708956	Trochee	A poetic foot -- heavy, light	133
334708957	Spondee	A poetic foot -- heavy, heavy	134
334708958	Pyrrhie	A poetic foot -- light, light	135
334708959	Anapest	A poetic foot -- light, light, heavy	136
334708963	Ambibranch	A poetic foot -- light, heavy, light	137
334708964	Dactyl	A poetic foot -- heavy, light, light	138
334709319	Imperfect	A poetic foot -- single light or single heavy	139
334709320	Pentameter	A poetic line with five feet.	140
334709328	Tetrameter	A poetic line with four feet	141
334709329	Trimeter	A poetic line with three feet	142
334709330	Blank Verse	unrhymed iambic pentameter.	143