AP Literature Terminology Flashcards

6459185989	prosody	the patterns of rhythm and sounds used in poetry; patterns of stress and intonation	0
6459215229	onomatopoeia	verbal sounds that are meant to mimic things imaginatively heard in the world ex: Dickinson's repeated short "u" sound to mimic buzzing	1
6459230039	euphony	the impression of sounds that are pleasing to the ear	2
6459230970	cacophony	sounds that are unpleasant and grating	3
6459233842	liquids	"r" and "l" sounds that roll in a flowing movement off the tongue ex: I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore.	4
6459240908	nasals	"m", "n", and "ng" sounds ex: The murmuring of innumerable bees.	5
6459246690	fricatives	"h", "f", "c", "th", "dh" harsh, rasping sounds	6
6459261042	sibilants	"s", "z", "sh", "zh" sounds	7
6459265919	stops and plosives	hard "p", "h", "t", "d", "k", "g" sounds ex: "bend/Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new"	8
6459272181	alliteration	The repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of successive words (internal) and within adjacent words (external).	9
6459274589	assonance	The repetition of vowel sounds in a line. Bears a more aural character than its compliment.	10
6459315407	pure rhyme	heard likenesses and difference linking two or more words; exact match of vowel sounds	11
6459318338	masculine rhyme	monosyllabic rhyme when rhyming sounds falls on final, unstressed syllable ex: desire/aspire	12
6459324852	feminine rhyme	rhyming words with two syllables, where second syllable is unstressed ex: sleeping/peeping	13
6459330803	end rhyme	rhyming at the end of a line	14
6459336759	internal rhyme	rhyming words within lines and across adjacent lines ex: "Double, double toil and trouble;/ Fire burn, and cauldron bubble."	15
6459358357	half, near or slant rhyme	used to express minor and dissonant tonalities	16
6459361445	consonance	repetition of the initial and terminal consonants surrounding a medial vowel to create echoing effect ex: blade/blood, flash/flesh, leads/lads	17
6459377168	meter	the particular kinds of rhythm found in verse i.e. iambic pentameter	18
6459379162	rhyme	general pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables found in verse; describes the flow of the stresses within the dominant meter of the line	19
6459467845	accentual (strong-stress) meter	characterizes Old English poetry; two stresses in first and second half of hemistich, middle of lines marked by caesural pause (\|\|), 3/4 stresses are alliterations	20
6459483280	hemistich	a half of a line of verse; characteristic of accentual meter	21
6459747596	caesura	a break between words within a metrical foot; a pause near the middle of a line	22
6459500802	accentual-syllabic meter	Verse whose meter is determined by the number and alternation of its stressed and unstressed syllables, organized into poetic feet.	23
6459509216	poetic foot	basic unit of measurement of accentual-syllabic meter; contains one stressed syllable and at least one unstressed syllable	24
6459518927	iambic foot	made up of an unaccented and an accented syllable	25
6459532049	scansion	a diagram interpreting the measure of poetic feet-- including the accented an unaccented syllables-- in a given line, stanza, or poem	26
6459626300	iambic penamter	most typical metric line in which sonnets are generally written	27
6459641413	trope	A word or expression used in a figurative sense. ex: figures of speech such as "making a killing"	28
6459651555	metaphor	a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable	29
6459675195	extended metaphor	The use of a metaphor throughout a long passage or poem.	30
6459680907	simile	A type of figurative language that renders likenesses more explicit than metaphor through the linking terms like or as.	31
6459688098	personification	Used for dramatic effect to attribute life or human aspects to what are otherwise inanimate objects, abstractions, or nonhuman creatures.	32
6459699428	prosopopoeia	a rhetorical device in which a speaker or writer communicates to the audience by speaking as another person or object. ex: wisdom is personified and speaks to reader	33
6459703792	apostrophe	special, performative instance of prosopopoeia which invokes personified meaning by addressing an abstract thing as present in human terms ex: Death	34
6459714867	synesthesia	a blending of physical sensation where one of the perceptual senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch is described in the terms of another	35
6459722167	metonymy	a word substituted for another word or thing we associate with it i.e. substitute throne for term king	36
6459725369	synecdoche	a type of metonymy that substitutes a part of something for the whole designated i.e. hired hands refers to workmen or head to cattle	37
6459735259	setting	the physical, environmental, social, historical, and cultural contexts described in a story as the scene of its action	38
6459759779	protagonist	characters who serve as he primary actors in a story and with whom readers are invited to sympathize; tells a lot about story's plot and themes	39
6459768015	antagonist	character who opposes the protagonist or whose actions conflict with the protagonist's aims or desires	40
6459776194	minor character	produces a sense of time, place, and atmosphere or help with development of plot details; often emphasize a main character's idiosyncrasies	41
6459783287	stereotypical (stock) character	presents a familiar type	42
6459783288	allegorical character	a character that stands for a concept, position, or aspect of personality	43
6459787199	structural character	serves as protagonist, antagonist, or narrator	44
6459796207	dynamic character		45
6459796208	flat character	an easily recognized character type in fiction who may not be fully delineated but is useful in carrying out some narrative purpose of the author.	46
6459801328	round character	A character who demonstrates some complexity and who develops or changes in the course of a work	47
6459801329	static character	a literary or dramatic character who undergoes little or no inner change; a character who does not grow or develop.	48
6459803241	archetype	the basic model for a a particular character in a myth	49
6459855864	foil	A character that shows qualities that are in contrast with the qualities of another character with the objective to highlight the traits of the other character.	50
6459855865	hubris	Excessive pride or arrogance that results in the downfall of the protagonist of a tragedy ex: hubris of man	51
6459857146	climax	Moment of great emotional intensity or suspense in a plot	52
6459857147	rising action	Events leading up to the climax	53
6459858195	falling action	Events after the climax, leading to the resolution	54
6459858196	connotation	All the meanings, associations, or emotions that a word suggests; an idea or feeling that a word invokes in addition to its literal or primary meaning	55
6459858197	denotation	Literal meaning of a word	56
6459860003	dialect	A regional variety of a language distinguished by vocabulary, spelling, and pronunciation.	57
6459860004	diction	An author's choice of words, phrases, sentence structures and figurative language, which combine to help create meaning and tone.	58
6459860005	epigram	A brief witty poem or statement, often satirical.	59
6459860006	inversion	A sentence in which the verb precedes the subject.	60
6459861226	dramatic irony	Irony that occurs when the meaning of the situation is understood by the audience but not by the characters in the play.	61
6459861227	situational irony	contrast between what a reader or character expects and what actually exists or happens	62
6459862796	verbal irony	Irony in which a person says or writes one thing and means another, or uses words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of the literal meaning.	63
6459862797	mood	Feeling created in the reader by a literary work or passage	64
6459862798	paradox	A statement that appears to be self-contradictory or opposed to common sense but upon closer inspection contains some degree of truth or validity.	65
6459864468	satire	A literary work that criticizes human misconduct and ridicules vices, stupidities, and follies.	66
6459864469	tone	A writer's attitude toward his or her subject matter revealed through diction, figurative language, and organization on the sentence and global levels.	67
6459864470	voice	The fluency, rhythm, and liveliness in a text that make it unique to the author and gives personality.	68
6459866517	anticlimax	letdown in thought or emotion; something unexciting, ordinary, or disappointing coming after something important or exciting	69
6459868152	flashback	A scene that interrupts the normal chronological sequence of events in a story to depict something that happened at an earlier time	70
6459868153	narrative voice, narrator	creates sense of the scene of the story's telling; part of the story itself	71
6459869459	point of view	when a third-person limited narrator narrates as if from the perspective of a single character; sense that we are seeing events as though a particular character in a story	72
6459869460	first person narrator	narrator that is present in the story as a participating character	73
6459870770	subjective	term to describe when a narrator's telling of events is not detached and unbiased, especially characteristic in 1st person	74
6459870771	third-person omniscient	narrators who have a complete range of knowledge (important to consider why such a range of knowledge necessary)	75
6459874376	third-person limited	unlimited knowledge limited to a few characters' subjective experiences	76
6459878667	stream-of-consciousness	a literary style in which a character's thoughts, feelings, and reactions are depicted in a continuous flow uninterrupted by objective description or conventional dialogue	77
6459878668	subplot	a minor plot that relates in some way to the main story	78
6459878669	theme	the central message of a literary work. It is expressed as a sentence or general statement about life or human nature. A literary work can have more than one theme, and most themes are not directly stated but are implied: e.g., pride often precedes a fall.	79
6459878684	allusion	A direct or indirect reference to something which is presumably commonly known, such as an event, book, myth, place, or work of art.	80
6459880654	euphemism	An indirect, less offensive way of saying something that is considered unpleasant	81
6459880655	hyperbole	A figure of speech using deliberate exaggeration or overstatement, often producing irony.	82
6459882179	litotes	ironical understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of its contrary ex: you won't be sorry	83
6459882180	symbol	A thing that represents or stands for something else (larger than itself), especially a material object representing something abstract. Often a thematic device.	84
6459884468	allegory	A story, poem, or picture that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one.	85
6459884469	prose	written or spoken language in its ordinary form, without metrical structure (anything that is not poetry).	86
6459886138	verse	A single line of poetry	87
6459886139	blank verse	Unrhymed iambic pentameter	88
6459886140	cadence	rhythm; the rise and fall of sounds	89
6459889189	enjambment	The continuation of a syntactic unit from one line or couplet of a poem to the next with no pause.	90
6459889190	imagery	Descriptive or figurative language in a literary work; the use of language to create sensory impressions.	91
6459890867	in media res	A piece of writing that begins in the middle of the action	92
6459890868	lyric (poetry)	A short poem in which a single speaker expresses personal thoughts and feelings.	93
6459892609	measure	meter (the unit of measure where the beats on the lines of the staff are divided up into two, three, four beats to a measure.)	94
6459895046	couplet	Two consecutive lines of poetry that rhyme.	95
6459898572	English (Shakespearean) sonnet	condenses the 14 lines in one stanza of three quatrains and a concluding couplet, with a rhyme scheme of ABABCDCDEFEFGG	96
6459898573	Italian sonnet	A sonnet (14 lines of rhyming iambic pentameter) that divides into an octave (8) and sestet (6) with a rhyme of ABBA ABBA CDCDCD. There is a "volta," or "turning" of the subject matter between	97
6459898574	stanza	A group of lines forming the basic recurring metrical unit in a poem	98
6459901093	trochee	/u (opposite of iamb)	99
6459901094	antithesis	A rhetorical device in which two opposite ideas are put together in a sentence to achieve a contrasting effect.	100
6459902856	complex sentence	A sentence with one independent clause and at least one dependent clause. The human brain never stops working until you stand up to speak in public.	101
6459902857	ellipsis	the omission of a word or phrase, replaced by three periods, which is grammatically necessary but can be deduced from the context.	102
6459904810	balanced sentence	a sentence in which words, phrases, or clauses are set off against each other to emphasize a contrast ex: George Orwell: "If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."	103
6459907077	inverted sentence	A sentence in which the subject follows the verb	104
6460118569	frame narration	story begins with one narrator who describes another narrator telling the story	105
6460184304	digesis	Narrator is explicitly present in a story	106
6460662970	idiom	an accepted phrase or expression having a meaning different from the literal e.g., to drive someone up the wall.	107
6460669386	oxymoron	a form of paradox that combines a pair of opposite terms into a single unusual expression: e.g., "sweet sorrow" or "cold fire."	108
6460671234	foreshadowing	the use of hints or clues in a narrative to suggest future action	109
6460674628	rhetoric	the art of using words to persuade in writing or speaking	110
6460676907	suspense	a quality that makes the reader or audience uncertain or tense about the outcome of events.	111
6460986722	simple sentence	sentence that has just one independent clause ex: Curiosity killed the cat.	112
6460990695	compound-complex sentence	sentence that has at least two independent clauses and at least one dependent clause. ex: I stopped believing in Santa Claus when he asked for my autograph in a department store, but I still want to believe in him.	113
6460999389	compound sentence	sentence that has at least two dependent clauses ex: I always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific.	114