AP Literature Terms Flashcards

6249433466	Allegory	A story or poem in which characters, settings, and events stand for other people or events of for abstract ideas or qualities	0
6249433467	Ambiguity	Deliberately suggesting 2 or more different meanings in a work. An event or situation that may be interpreted in more than one way	1
6249433468	Allusion	Reference to someone or something that is known from history, literature, religion, etc.	2
6249433469	Analogy	Comparison made between 2 things to show how they are alike	3
6249433470	Anaphora	Repition of a word, phrase, or clause at the beginning of 2 or more sentences in a row	4
6249433471	Anastrophe	Inversion of the usual, normal, or logical order of the parts of a sentence	5
6249433472	Anecdote	Brief story, told to illustrate a point or serve as an example of something	6
6249433473	Antimetabole	Repetition of words in successive clauses in reverse grammatical order	7
6249433474	Antithesis	Balancing words, phrases, or ideas that are strongly contrasted, often by means of grammatical structure	8
6249433475	Antihero	Central character who lacks all the qualities traditionally associated with heroes	9
6249433476	Anthropomorphism	Attributing human characteristics to an animal or inanimate object	10
6249433477	Aphorism	Brief, cleverly worded statement that makes a wise observation about life, or of a principle or accepted general truth	11
6249433478	Apostrophe	Calling out to an imaginary, dead, or absent person, or to a place or thing, or a personified abstract idea	12
6249433479	Apposition	Placing an immediately succeeding order of 2 or more coordinate elements, latter of which is an explanation, qualification, or modification of the first.	13
6249433480	Asyndeton	Commas used without conjunction to separate a series of words	14
6249433481	Balance	Constructing a sentence so that both halves are about the same length and importance	15
6249433482	Indirect characterization	Author reveals to the reader what the character is like by describing how the character looks and dresses, hear what the character says, revealing their private thoughts and feelings, etc	16
6249433483	Direct characterization	Author tells us directly what the character is like	17
6249433484	Static character	One who does not change much in the course of a story	18
6249433485	Dynamic character	One who changes in some important way as a result of the story's action	19
6249433486	Flat character	Has only 1 or 2 personality traits	20
6249433487	Round character	Has more dimensions to their personalities-they are complex	21
6249433488	Chiasmus	In poetry, a type of rhetorical balance in which the second part is syntactically balanced against the first, but with the parts reversed	22
6249433489	Colloquialism	A word or phrase in everyday use in conversation and informal writing but is inappropriate for formal situations	23
6249433490	Comedy	A story that ends with a happy resolution of the conflicts faced by the main character(s)	24
6249433491	Conceit	An elaborate metaphor that compares 2 things that are startlingly different	25
6249433492	Confessional poetry	A 20th century term used to describe poetry that uses intimate material from the poet's life	26
6249433493	External conflict	Conflict between 2 people, person and nature or a machine, or a person and a whole society	27
6249433494	Internal conflict	Involving opposing forces within a person's mind	28
6249433495	Connotation	The associations and emotional overtones that have become attached to a word or phrase, in addition to its strict dictionary definition	29
6249433496	Couplet	Two consecutive rhyming line software poetry	30
6249433497	Dialect	A way of speaking that is characteristic of a certain social group or of the inhabitants of a certain geographical area	31
6249433498	Diction	A speaker or writer's choice of words	32
6249433499	Didactic	Form of fiction or nonfiction that teaches a specific lesson or moral or provides a model of correct behavior or thinking	33
6249433500	Elegy	A poem of mourning, usually about someone who has died	34
6249433501	Epanalepsis	Device of repetition in which the same expression is repeated both at the beginning and at the end of the line, clause, or sentence ("common sense is not so common")	35
6249433502	Epic	A long narrative poem, written in heightened language, which recounts the deeds of a heroic character who embodies the values of a particular society	36
6249433503	Epigraph	A quotation or aphorism at the beginning of a literary work suggestive of the theme	37
6249433504	Epistrophe	Device of repetiton in which the same expression is repeated at the end of 2 or more lines, clauses, or sentences	38
6249433505	Epithet	An adjective or adjective phrase applied to a person or thing that is frequently used to emphasize a characteristic quality	39
6249433506	Essay	A short piece of nonfiction prose in which the writer discusses some aspect of a subject	40
6249433507	Argumentation	An essay that uses logic, ethics, and emotional appeals to develop an effective means to convince the reader to think or act in a certain way	41
6249433508	Casual relationship	Form of argumentation on which the writer claims that one thing results from another, often used as part of a logical argument	42
6249433509	Exposition	Something is explained or "set forth"	43
6249433510	Description	A form of discourse that uses language to create a mood or emotion	44
6249433511	Explication	Act of interpreting or discovering the meaning of a text, usually involves close reading and special attention to figurative language	45
6260854651	Fable	A very short story told in prose or poetry that teaches a practical lesson about how to succeed in life	46
6260854652	Farce	A type of comedy in which ridiculous and often stereotyped characters are involved in silly, far-fetched situations	47
6260854653	Foil	A character who acts as contrast to another character. Often a funny sidekick to the dashing hero, or a villain contrasting a hero	48
6260854654	Free verse	Poetry that does not conform to a regular meter or rhyme scheme	49
6260854655	Hyperbole	Incredible exaggeration	50
6260854656	Hypotactic	Sentence marked by use of connecting words between clauses or sentences, explicitly showing the logical or other relationships between them	51
6260854657	Inversion	The reversal of the normal word order in a sentence or phrase	52
6260854658	Verbal irony	Occurs when someone says one thing but really means something else	53
6260854659	Situational irony	Takes place when there is discrepancy between what is expected to happen, and what would be appropriate to happen, and what really does happen.	54
6260854660	Dramatic irony	The audience knows something that the character does not	55
6260854661	Juxtaposition	A form of contrast by which writers call attention to dissimilar ideas or images or metaphors	56
6260854662	Litotes	A form of understatement in which the positive form is emphasized through the negation of a negative form	57
6260854663	Local color	A term applied to fiction or poetry which tends to place special emphasis on a particular setting	58
6260854664	Loose sentence	One in which the main clause comes first, followed by further dependent grammatical units	59
6260854665	Lyric poem	A poem that does not tell a story but expresses the personal feelings or thoughts of the speaker	60
6260854666	Metonymy	A figure of speech in which a person, place, or thing, is referred to by something closely associated with it	61
6260854667	Mood	An atmosphere created by a writer's diction and the details selected	62
6260854668	Motif	A recurring image, word, phrase, action, idea, object, or situation used throughout a work, unifying the work by trying the current situation to previous ones, or new ideas to the theme	63
6260854669	Oxymoron	A figure of speech that combines opposite or contradictory terms in a brief phrase (pretty ugly)	64
6260854670	Paradox	A statement that appears self-contradictory, but that reveals a kind of truth	65
6260854671	Parallelism	The repition of words or phrases that have similar grammatical structures	66
6260854672	Paratactic sentence	Simply juxtaposes clauses or sentences (I am tired: it is hot)	67
6260854673	Parody	A work that makes fun of another work by imitating some aspect of the writer's style	68
6260854674	Periodic	Sentence that places the main idea or central complete thought at the end of the sentence, after all introductory elements	69
6260854675	Exposition	Introduces characters, situations, and setting	70
6260854676	Rising action	Complications in conflict and situations	71
6260854677	1st person POV	One of the characters tells the story	72
6260854678	3rd person POV	An unknown narrator, tells the story, but this narrator zooms in to focus on the thoughts and feelings of only one character	73
6260854679	Omniscient POV	An all-knowing narrator tells the story, also using the third person pronouns	74
6260854680	Objective POV	A narrator who is totally impersonal and objective tells the story, with no comment on any characters or events	75
6260854681	Polysyndeton	Sentence which uses a conjunction with NO commas to separate the items in a series	76
6260854682	Quatrain	A poem consisting of four lines, or four lines of a poem that can be considered a unit	77
6260854683	Rhetoric	Art of effective communication, especially persuasive discourse	78
6260854684	Rhetorical question	A question asked for an effect, and not actually requiring an answer	79
6260854685	Romance	In general, a story in which an idealized hero or heroine undertakes a quest and is successful	80
6260854686	Satire	A type of writing that ridicules the shortcomings of people or institutions in an attempt to bring about change	81
6260854687	Soliloquy	A long speech made by a character in a play while no other characters are on stage	82
6260854688	Stream of consciousness	A style of writing that portrays the inner (often chaotic) workings of a characters mind	83
6269283375	Synecdoche	A figure of speech in which a part represents the whole.	84
6269283376	Syntactic fluency	Ability to create a variety of sentence structures, appropriately complex and/or simple and varied in length	85
6269283377	Syntactic permutation	Sentence structures that are extraordinarily complex and involved.	86
6269283378	Telegraphic sentence	A sentence shorter than five words in length	87
6269283379	Tone	Attitude of the writer toward the subject of a work, the characters in it, or the audience	88
6269283380	Tricolon	Sentence of three parts of equal importance and length, usually three independent clauses	89
6269283381	Vernacular	The languages spoken by the people who live in a particular locality	90