AP English Literature Summer Vocab Flashcards
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| 7157547058 | allegory | A form of extended metaphor in which objects and persons in a narrative, either in prose or verse, are equated with meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. Many works contain these or are this in part but not many are entirely this. | 0 | |
| 7157550905 | alliteration | the repetition of identical or similar consonant sounds, normally at the beginnings or words. "Gnus never know pneumonia" is an example of this since all four words begin with the "n" sound. | 1 | |
| 7157553805 | allusion | a reference in a work of literature to something outside the work, especially to a well known historical or literary event, person, or work. When T.S Eliot writes, "To have squeezed the universe into a ball" in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" he is making one of these to the lines "Let us roll our strength and all/ Our sweetness up into one ball" in Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress." | 2 | |
| 7157558182 | anastrophe | a figure of speech in which the syntactically correct order of subject, object, and verb might be changed to objects - subject - verb, as in saying "potatoes I like" to mean "I like potatoes." | 3 | |
| 7157560174 | anaphora | a rhetorical device that consists of repeating a sequence of words at the beginnings of neighboring clauses, thereby lending them emphasis | 4 | |
| 7157562110 | antithesis | a figure of speech characterized by strongly contrasting words, clauses, sentences, or ideas, as in "Man proposes; God disposes." This is a balancing of one term against another for emphasis or stylistic effectiveness. The second line of the following couplet by Alexander Pope is an example of antithesis. The hungry judges soon the sentence sign, And wretches hang that jury-men may dine. | 5 | |
| 7157574179 | aphorism | Brief, cleverly worded statement that makes a wise observation about life, or of a principle of accepted general truth. (maxim, epigram) | 6 | |
| 7157575883 | apostrophe | a figure of speech in which someone (usually, but not always absent), some abstract quality, or a nonexistent personage is directly addressed as though present. Following are two examples of this: Papa Above!/Regard a Mouse - Emily Dickinson Milton! Thou shouldst be living in this hour;/England hath need of the... -William Wordsworth | 7 | |
| 7157581970 | assonance | the repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds. "A land laid waste with all its young men slain" repeats the same "a" sound in "laid," waste," and "slain" | 8 | |
| 7157584748 | asyndeton | a figure of speech in which one or several conjunctions are omitted from a series of related clauses. Examples are veni, vidi, vici, and its English translation "I came, I saw, I conquered." Its use can have the effect of speeding up the rhythm of a passage and making a single idea more memorable. This may be contrasted with syndeton and polysyndeton, which describe the use of one or multiple coordinating conjunctions, respectively. | 9 | |
| 7157591017 | ballad meter | a four-line stanza rhymed abcd with four feet in lines one and three and three feet in lines two and four: O mother, mother make my bed/ O make it soft and narrow./Since my love died for me today/ I'll die for him tomorrow. | 10 | |
| 7157595408 | blank verse | unrhymed iambic pentameter. This is the meter of most of Shakespeare's plays, as well as that of Milton's 'Paradise Lost'. | 11 | |
| 7157598713 | cacophony | a harsh, unpleasant combinations of sounds or tones. It may be an unconscious flaw in the poet's music, resulting in harshness of sound or difficulty of articulation, or it may be used consciously for effect, as Browning and Eliot often use it. See, for example, the following line from Browning's "Rabbi Ben Ezra.": Irks care the crop - full bird? Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast? | 12 | |
| 7157607141 | caesura | a pause, usually near the middle of a line of verse, usually indicated by the sense of the line, and often greater than the normal pause. For example, one would naturally pause after " human" in the following line from Alexander Pope: To err is human, to forgive divine. | 13 | |
| 7157615672 | conceit | an ingenious and fanciful notion of conception, usually expressed through an elaborate analogy, and pointing to a striking parallel between two seemingly dissimilar things. This may be a brief metaphor, but it also may form the framework of an entire poem. A famous example of this occurs in John Donne's poem " A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," in which he compares his soul and his wife's to legs of a mathematical compass. | 14 | |
| 7157622673 | consonance | the repetition of similar consonant sounds in a group of words. The term usually refers to words in which the ending consonants are the same but the vowels that precede them are different. This is found in the following pairs of words:" add" and "read," "bill and ball," and "born" and "burn" | 15 | |
| 7157630956 | couplet | a two-line stanza, usually with end-rhymes the same. | 16 | |
| 7157632424 | device of sound | the techniques of deploying the sound of words, especially in poetry. Among these are rhyme, alliteration, assonance, consonance, and onomatopoeia. These are used for many reasons, including to create a general effect of pleasant or of discordant sounds, to imitate another sound, or to reflect a meaning. | 17 | |
| 7157638820 | diction | the use of words in a literary work. This may be described as formal discourse), informal (the level of usage found in the relaxed but polite conversation of cultivated people), colloquial (the everyday usage of a group, possibly including terms and constructions accepted in that group but not universally acceptable), or slang (a group of newly coined words which are not acceptable for formal usage as yet). Authors make certain choices when selecting this to use in a literary work. The choices made help contribute to the work's tone. | 18 | |
| 7157648157 | didactic | literature which is intended primarily to teach a lesson. The distinction between this kind of poetry and not this kind of poetry is difficult to make and usually involves a subjective judgement of the author's purpose on the part of the critic or the reader. Alexander Pope's "Essay on Criticism" is a good example of this kind of poetry. | 19 | |
| 7157654465 | dramatic poem | a work which employs a dramatic form of some element or elements of dramatic techniques as a means of achieving poetic ends. The dramatic monologue is an example. | 20 | |
| 7157656909 | elegy | a sustained and formal poem setting forth the poet's meditations upon death or another solemn theme. Examples include Thomas Gray's "'This' Written in a Country Churchyard", Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "In Memoriuam" and Walt Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" | 21 | |
| 7157662481 | end-stopped | a line with a pause at the end. Lines that end with a period, a comma, a colon, a semicolon, an exclamation point, or a question mark are end-stopped lines. True Ease in writing comes from Art, not Chance/ As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance. | 22 | |
| 7157665199 | enjambment | the continuation of the sense and grammatical construction from one line of poetry to the next. Milton's "Paradise Lost" is notable for its use of this, as seen in the following lines: ... Or if Sion hill/ Delight thee more, and Siloa's brook that flow'd/ Fast by the oracle of God... | 23 | |
| 7157670677 | extended metaphor | an implied analogy, or comparison, which is carried throughout a stanza or an entire poem. In "The Bait," John Donne compares a beautiful woman to fish bait and men to fish who want to be caught by the woman. Since he carries these comparisons all the way through the poem , these are considered "this." | 24 | |
| 7157674563 | Euphony | a style in which combinations of words pleasant to the ear predominate. The following lines from John Keats' "Endymion" are this: A thing of beauty is a joy for ever/Its loveliness increases; it will never/Pass into nothingness;but still will keep/ A bower quiet for us, and a sleep/ Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. | 25 | |
| 7157680484 | eye rhyme | rhyme that appears correct from spelling, but is half rhyme or slant rhyme from the pronunciation. Examples include "watch" and "match" and "love" and "move" | 26 | |
| 7157682828 | feminine rhyme | a rhyme of two syllables, one stressed and one unstressed, as "waken" and "forsaken" and "audition" and "rendition." is sometimes called double rhyme. | 27 | |
| 7157685472 | figurative language | writing that uses figures of speech (as opposed to literal language or that which is actual or specifically denoted) such as metaphor, irony, and simile. This uses words to mean something other than their literal meaning. "The black bat night has flown" is figurative, with the metaphor comparing night and bat. "Night is over" says the same thing without this. | 28 | |
| 7157690672 | foil | in fiction, a character who contrasts with another character (usually the protagonist) in order to highlight particular qualities of the other character. | 29 | |
| 7157692430 | frame story | a literary technique that sometimes serves as a companion piece to a story with in a story, whereby an introductory or main narrative is presented, at least in part, for the purpose of setting the stage either for a more emphasized second narrative or for a set for shorter stories. The frame story leads readers from a first story into another, smaller one ) or several ones) within it. | 30 | |
| 7313820658 | free verse | poetry which is not written in a traditional meter but is still rhythmical | 31 | |
| 7313827307 | heroic couplet | two end stopped iambic pentameter lines rhymed aa,bb,cc with the thought usually completed in the two line unit | 32 | |
| 7313837780 | hyperbole | a deliberate , extravagant and often outrageous exaggeration. It may be used for serious or comic effect | 33 | |
| 7313841455 | imagery | the images of a literary work; the sensory details of a work; the figurative language of a work | 34 | |
| 7313847500 | Internal rhyme | rhyme that occurs with a line, rather than at the end | 35 | |
| 7313849395 | in media res | the literary and artistic narrative technique of relating a story from the midpoint, rather than the beginning, dramatic opening | 36 | |
| 7313856140 | irony | the contrast between actual meaning and the suggestion of another meaning | 37 | |
| 7313861635 | verbal irony | a figure of speech in which the actual intent is expressed in words which carry the opposite meaning | 38 | |
| 7313867704 | dramatic irony | when a character in the play or story thinks one thing is true, but the audience or reader knows better | 39 | |
| 7313872787 | situational irony | describes a sharp discrepancy between the expected result and actual results in a certain situation | 40 | |
| 7313876830 | lyric poem | only short poem that presents a single speaker who expresses thoughts and feelings i.e sonnets and odes | 41 | |
| 7313882981 | masculine rhyme | rhyme that falls on the stressed and concluding syllables of the rhyme - words | 42 | |
| 7313887126 | metaphor | a figurative use of language in which a comparison is expressed without the use of a comparative term | 43 | |
| 7313895074 | meter | the repetition of a regular rhythmic unit in a line of poetry | 44 | |
| 7313898417 | mentonymy | a figure of speech which is characterized by the substitution of a term naming an object closely associated with the word in mind for the word itself. | 45 | |
| 7313906644 | mixed metaphor | the mingling of one metaphor with another immediately following with which the first is incongruous | 46 | |
| 7313912083 | narrative poem | a non dramatic poem which tells a story or presents a narrative, whether simple or complex, long or short ex. epics and ballads | 47 | |
| 7313916088 | octave | an eight- line stanza; the first division of an Italian sonnets | 48 | |
| 7313919615 | onomatopoeia | the use of words whose sound suggests their meaning | 49 | |
| 7313921986 | oxymoron | a form of paradox that combines a pair of contrary terms into a single expression. shocking the reader into awareness | 50 | |
| 7313929208 | paradox | a situation or action or feeling that appears to be contradictory but on inspection turns out to be true or at least to make sense | 51 | |
| 7313933114 | parallelism` | a similar grammatical structure within a line or lines of poetry; characteristic of Asian poetry | 52 | |
| 7313940465 | paraphrase | a restatement of an idea in such a way as to retain the meaning while changing the diction and form | 53 | |
| 7313945250 | personification | a kind of metaphor that gives inanimate objects or abstract ideas human characteristics | 54 | |
| 7313948928 | poetic foot | a group of syllables in verse usually consisting of one accented syllable and one or two unaccented syllables associated with it | 55 | |
| 7313959936 | polysyndeton | the use of several conjunctions in close succession, especially where some could otherwise be omitted | 56 | |
| 7313963355 | pun | a play on words that is identical or similar in sound but have sharply diverse meanings | 57 | |
| 7313967221 | quatrain | a four line stanza with any combination of rhymes | 58 | |
| 7313972783 | refrain | a group of wards forming a phrase or sentences and consisting of one or more lines repeated at intervals in a poem usually at the end of a stanza | 59 | |
| 7313979922 | rhyme | close similarity of identity of sound between accented syllables occupying corresponding positions in two or more lines of verse | 60 | |
| 7313985256 | rhyme royal | a seven - line stanza of iambic pentameter rhymed ababbcc | 61 | |
| 7313988835 | rythm | the recurrence of stressed and unstressed syllables, leads to pleasure and heightened emotional response | 62 | |
| 7313996575 | sarcasm | a type of irony in which a person appears to be praising something but its actually insulting it. Its purpose it to injure or hurt | 63 | |
| 7314000649 | satire | writing that seeks to arouse a reader's disapproval of an object by ridicule. Comedy that exposes errors. | 64 | |
| 7314006286 | scansion | a system for describing the meter of a poem by identifying the number and the types of feet per line | 65 | |
| 7314009341 | sestet | a six line stanza. Second division of an Italian sonnet. | 66 | |
| 7314013471 | simile | a directly expressed comparison; a figure of speech comparing two objects, usually with "like", "as", or "than" | 67 | |
| 7314027126 | sonnet | normally a 14 line iambic pentameter poem italian: abba, abba, cde english: abab, cdcd, efef, gg | 68 | |
| 7314035496 | stanza | usually a repeated grouping of three or more lines with the same meter and rhyme scheme | 69 | |
| 7314038797 | structure | the arrangement of materials within a work; the relationship of parts of a work to the whole; the logical divisions of a work | 70 | |
| 7314047695 | style | the made of expression in language; the characteristic manner of expression of an author | 71 | |
| 7314051108 | symbol | something that is simultaneously itself and a sigh of something else | 72 | |
| 7314055103 | synecdoche | a form of metaphor which in mentioning a part signifies a whole | 73 | |
| 7314058268 | syntax | the ordering of words into patterns or sentences | 74 | |
| 7314061252 | tercet | a stanza of 3 lines in which each line ends with the same rhyme | 75 | |
| 7314064052 | terza rima | a 3 line stanza rhymed aba, bcb, cdc, etc. | 76 | |
| 7314066539 | theme | the main thought expressed by a work | 77 | |
| 7314067988 | tone | the manner in which an author expresses his or her attitude; the intonation of the voice that expresses meaning | 78 | |
| 7314070777 | understatement | the opposite of hyperbole. A kind of irony that deliberately represents something as being much less than it really is | 79 | |
| 7314076954 | villanelle | a 19 line poem divided into five tercets and a final quatrain aba,aba,aba,aba,aba,abaa | 80 |