AP Literature Flashcards

4547292007	action	any event or series of events depicted in a literary work; an event may be verbal as well as physical, so that saying something or telling a story within the story may be an event	0
4547296099	alexandrine	a line of verse in iambic hexameter, often with a caesura after the third iambic foot	1
4547296854	allegory	a literary work, whether in verse or prose, in which characters, action, and even aspects of setting signify a second, correlated order of concepts, persons, and actions	2
4547300670	alliteration	the repetition of usually initial consonant sounds through a sequence of words	3
4547301762	allusion	a brief, often implicit and indirect reference within a literary text to something outside the text, whether another text or any imaginary or historical person, place, or thing.	4
4547305206	amphitheater	a theater consisting of a stage area surrounded by a semicircle of tiered seats	5
4547307259	anapestic	referring to a metrical form in which each foot consists of two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one	6
4547310383	antagonist	a character or a nonhuman force that opposes or is in conflict with the protagonist	7
4547311223	antihero	a protagonist who is in one way or another the very opposite of a traditional hero	8
4547314325	archetype	a character, ritual, symbol, or plot pattern that recurs in the myth and literature of many cultures	9
4547316190	arena stage	a stage design in which the audience is seated all the way around the acting area	10
4547319575	assonance	the repetition of vowel sounds in a sequence of words with different endings	11
4547321420	aubade	a poem in which the coming of dawn is either celebrated or denounced as a nuisance	12
4547323405	auditor	an imaginary listener within a literary work, as opposed to the reader or audience outside the work	13
4547324343	author	the person who actually wrote the story	14
4547328362	ballad	a verse narrative that is, or originally was, meant to be sung	15
4547329136	ballad stanza	a common stanza form, consisting of a quatrain that alternates four-foot and three-foot lines	16
4547330766	bildungsroman	a novel that depicts the intellectual, emotional, and moral development of its protagonist from childhood into adulthood	17
4547333701	biography	a work of nonfiction that recounts the life of a real person	18
4547334319	blank verse	the metrical verse form most like everyday human speech; unrhymed lines	19
4547335791	caesura	a short pause within a line of poetry; often but not always signaled by punctuation	20
4547336961	canon	thee range of works that a consensus of scholars, teachers, and readers of a particular time and culture consider "great" or "major"	21
4547338945	carpe diem	literally, "seize the day" in Latin; emphasizes the brevity of life and the need to make the most of the present	22
4547340698	central consciousness	a character whose inner thoughts, perceptions, and feelings are revealed by a third-person limited narrator	23
4547343667	character	an imaginary person who acts, appears, or is referred to in a literary work	24
4547344396	characterization	the presentation of a fictional person	25
4547345704	chorus	a group of actors in a drama who comment on and describe the action	26
4547346757	classical unities	the three principles of structure that require a play to have one plot that occurs in one place and within one day	27
4547349065	climax	the third part of plot, the point at which the action stops rising and begins falling or reversing	28
4547351218	comedy	works intended primarily to entertain and amuse an audience	29
4547353692	complication	an action or event that introduces a new conflict or intensifies the existing one, especially during the rising action phase of plot	30
4547355109	conclusion	the fifth and last part of plot, the point at which the situation that was destabilized at the beginning becomes stable once more and the conflict is resolved	31
4547357793	concrete poetry	poetry in which the words on the page are arranged to look like an object	32
4547358997	conflict	a struggle between opposing forces	33
4547359667	connotation	what is suggested by a word, apart from what it literally means	34
4547360593	convention	a standard or traditional way of presenting or expressing something	35
4547362265	couplet	two consecutive lines of verse linked by rhyme and meter	36
4547363504	crisis	the moment when the conflict comes to a head, often requiring the character to make a decision	37
4547364382	dactylic	referring to the metrical pattern in which each foot consists of a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones	38
4547365843	denotation	a word's direct and literal meaning	39
4547366471	dénouement	literally, "untying"; a synonym for falling action, a synonym for conclusion or resolution, the label for a phase following the conclusion in which any loose ends are tied up	40
4547371375	descriptive poem/structure	a poem organized as a description of someone or something	41
4547372024	deus ex machina	literally, "god out of the machine"; any improbably, unprepared for plot contrivance introduced late in a literary work to resolve the conflict	42
4547373818	dialogue	words spoken by characters in a literary work	43
4547374259	diction	choice of words	44
4547375692	discriminated occasion	a specific, discrete moment portrayed in a fictional work	45
4547377656	discursive poem/structure	a poem structured like a treatise, argument, or essay	46
4547378398	drama	a genre consisting of works in which action is performed and all words are spoken before an audience by actors impersonating the characters	47
4547380957	dramatic monologue	a type of poetry in which a speaker addresses a silent auditor in a specific situation and setting that is revealed entirely through the speaker's words	48
4547382775	dramatic poem/structure	a poem structured so as to present a scene or series of scenes, as in a work of drama	49
4547385502	dramatis personae	literally, "persons of the drama"; the list of characters that appears either in a play's program or at the top of the first page of the written play	50
4547387824	elegy	usually a formal lament on the death of a particular person, but focusing mainly on the speaker's efforts to come to terms with their grief; any lyric in sorrowful mood that takes death as its primary subject	51
4547390848	end-stopped line	a line of verse that contains or concludes a complete clause and usually ends with a punctuation mark	52
4547401180	enjambment	in poetry, the technique of running over from one line to the next without stop	53
4547402944	epic	a long poem that celebrates, in a continuous narrative, the achievements of mighty heroes and heroines	54
4547405596	epigram	a very short, usually witty verse with a quick turn at the end	55
4547406289	epigraph	a quotation appearing at the beginning of a literary work or of one section of such a work	56
4547407536	epilogue	in fiction, a short section or chapter that comes after the conclusion; in drama, a short speech, often addressed directly to the audience, at the end of a play	57
4547409226	epiphany	a sudden revelation of truth	58
4547409246	episode	a distinct action or series of actions with a plot	59
4547409941	epithet	a characterizing word or phrase that precedes, follows, or substitutes for the name of a person or thing	60
4547411506	epitaph	an inscription on a tombstone or grave marker	61
4547806256	eponymous	having a name used in the title of a literary work	62
4547806713	exposition	the first phase or part of plot	63
4547807166	fable	an ancient type of short fiction illustrating a moral or satirizing human beings	64
4547809121	falling action	the fourth of the five parts of plot, in which the conflict or conflicts move toward resolution	65
4547810337	fantasy	a genre of literary work featuring strange settings and characters and often involving magic or the supernatural	66
4547812273	farce	a literary work characterized by broad humor, wild antics, and often physical humor	67
4547813516	fiction	any narrative about invented or imagined characters and action	68
4547814434	figurative language	language that uses figures of speech	69
4547814435	figure of speech	any word or phrase that creates a "figure" in the mind of the reader	70
4547816832	flashback	a plot device whereby a scene from the past is inserted into the present	71
4547818402	flashforward	a plot device whereby a scene from the future is inserted into the present	72
4547819840	focus	the visual component of point of view	73
4547820435	foil	a character that serves as a contrast to another	74
4547820436	foot	the basic unit of poetic meter, consisting of any of various fixed patterns of one to three stressed and unstressed syllables	75
4547822169	foreshadowing	a hint or clue about what will happen at a later moment	76
4547822945	free verse	poetry characterized by varying line lengths, lack of traditional meter, and non-rhyming lines	77
4547824669	Freytag's pyramid	a diagram of plot structure	78
4547825328	genre	a category of works sharing particular formal or textual features	79
4547827236	gothic fiction	a subgenre of fiction conventionally featuring plots that involve secrets, mystery, and the supernatural	80
4547830485	haiku	a poetic form that consists of seventeen syllables arranged in three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables	81
4547831818	hero/heroine	a character who is especially virtuous usually larger than life	82
4547833053	hexameter	a line of poetry with six feet	83
4547834648	historical fiction	a subgenre of fiction in which the time is significantly earlier than the time in which the work was written	84
4547836390	iambic	referring to a metrical form in which each foot consists of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one	85
4547837630	image/imagery	any sensory detail or evocation in a work	86
4547838621	imitative poem/structure	a poem structured so as to mirror as exactly as possible the structure of something that already exists and can be seen	87
4547840326	inciting incident	an action that sets a plot in motion by creating conflict	88
4547840934	initiation story	a kind of short story in which a character, often a child, first learns a significant truth about the universe	89
4547842996	in medias res	"in the midst of things"; refers to opening a plot in the middle of the action	90
4547844294	irony	a situation characterized by a significant difference between what is expected and what actually happens	91
4547845195	legend	a type of tale conventionally set in the real world based on historical events, and offering an exaggerated version of the truth about the events	92
4547847375	limerick	a light or humorous verse form consisting of mainly anapestic lines of which the first, second, and fifth are of three feet; the third and fourth lines are of two feet; and the rhyme scheme is AABBA	93
4547850885	literary criticism	the interpretive work written by readers of literary texts	94
4547852929	litotes	a form of understatement in which one negates the contrary of what one means	95
4547854416	lyric	a poem meant to be sung; any short poem in which the speaker expresses their thoughts and feelings in first person	96