AP Literature Terms Flashcards

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

9889278012	Abstract	Complex, discusses intangible qualities like good and evil, seldom uses examples to support its points.	0
9889278013	Academic	Dry and rhetorical writing; sucking all the life out of its subject with analysis.	1
9889278014	Accent	In poetry, the stressed portion of a word.	2
9889278015	Aesthetic	Appealing to the senses; a coherent sense of taste.	3
9889278016	Allegory	a story, poem, or picture that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one.	4
9889278017	Alliteration	The repetition of initial consonant sounds.	5
9889278018	Allusion	A reference to another work or famous figure.	6
9889278019	Anachronism	"Misplaced in time." An aspect of a story that doesn't belong in its supposed time setting.	7
9889278020	Analogy	A comparison, usually involving two or more symbolic parts, employed to clarify an action or a relationship.	8
9889278021	Anecdote	A Short Narrative	9
9889278022	Antecedent	The word, phrase, or clause that determines what a pronoun refers to.	10
9889278023	Anthropomorphism	When inanimate objects are given human characteristics. Often confused with personification. aka Lumiere from Beauty and the Beast	11
9889278024	Anticlimax	Occurs when an action produces far smaller results than one had been led to expect. aka disappointment	12
9889278025	Antihero	A protagonist who is markedly unheroic: morally weak, cowardly, dishonest, or any number of other unsavory qualities. Ex: Yeden from Mistborn	13
9889278026	Aphorism	A short and usually witty saying. Ex: If it ain't broke, don't fix it"	14
9889278027	Apostrophe	A figure of speech wherein the speaker talks directly to something that is nonhuman. ex: "Oh, Starbucks, how I love you! Your medium dark roast allowed me to survive that meeting!"	15
9889278028	Archaism	The use of deliberately old-fashioned language.	16
9889278029	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
9889278030	Aspect	A trait or characteristic	18
9889278031	Assonance	The repeated use of vowel sounds: "Old king Cole was a merry old soul."	19
9889278032	Atmosphere	The emotional tone or background that surrounds a scene	20
9889278033	Ballad	A long, narrative poem, usually in meter and rhyme. Typically has a naive folksy quality.	21
9889278034	Bathos	Writing strains for grandeur it can't support and tries too hard to be a tear jerker. aka: fake pathos	22
9889278035	Pathos	Writing evokes feelings of dignified pity and sympathy.	23
9889278036	Black humor	The use of disturbing themes in comedy. note: my type of humor	24
9889278037	Bombast	Pretentious, exaggeratedly learned language.	25
9889278038	Burlesque	Broad parody, one that takes a style or form and exaggerates it into ridiculousness.	26
9889278039	Cacophony	In poetry, using deliberately harsh, awkward sounds.	27
9889278040	Cadence	The beat or rhythm or poetry in a general sense.	28
9889278041	Canto	The name for a section division in a long work of poetry.	29
9889278042	Caricature	A portrait (verbal or otherwise) that exaggerates a facet of personality.	30
9889278043	Catharsis	Drawn from Aristotle's writings on tragedy. Refers to the "cleansing" of emotion an audience member experiences during a play	31
9889278044	Chorus	In Greek drama, the group of citizens who stand outside the main action on stage and comment on it.	32
9889278045	Classic	Typical, or an accepted masterpiece.	33
9889278046	Coinage (neologism)	A new word, usually one invented on the spot. MR. BUNBURY HECK YEAH	34
9889278047	Colloquialism	A word or phrase used in everyday conversational English that isn't a part of accepted "school-book" English.	35
9889278048	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
9889278049	Conceit (Controlling Image)	A startling or unusual metaphor, or to a metaphor developed and expanded upon several lines.	37
9889278050	Denotation	A word's literal meaning.	38
9889278051	Connotation	Everything other than the literal meaning that a word suggests or implies.	39
9889278052	Consonance	The repetition of consonant sounds within words (rather than at their beginnings)	40
9889278053	Couplet	A pair of lines that end in rhyme	41
9889278054	Decorum	A character's speech must be styled according to her social station, and in accordance to the situation.	42
9889278055	Diction	The words an author chooses to use.	43
9889278056	Syntax	The ordering and structuring of words.	44
9889278057	Dirge	A song for the dead. Its tone is typically slow, heavy, depressed, and melancholy	45
9889278058	Dissonance	Refers to the grating of incompatible sounds.	46
9889278059	Doggerel	Crude, simplistic verse, often in sing-song rhyme, like limericks.	47
9889278060	Dramatic Irony	When the audience knows something that the characters in the drama do not	48
9889278061	Dramatic Monologue	When a single speaker in literature says something to a silent audience.	49
9889278062	Elegy	A type of poem that meditates on death or mortality in a serious, thoughtful manner.	50
9889278063	Elements	Basic techniques of each genre of literature	51
9889278064	Enjambment	The continuation of a syntactic unit from one line or couplet of a poem to the next with no pause.	52
9889278065	Epic	A very long narrative poem on a serious theme in a dignified style; typically deal with glorious or profound subject matter.	53
9889278066	Epitaph	Lines that commemorate the dead at their burial place.	54
9889278067	Euphemism	A word or phrase that takes the place of a harsh, unpleasant, or impolite reality.	55
9889278068	Euphony	When sounds blend harmoniously.	56
9889278069	Explicit	To say or write something directly and clearly.	57
9889278070	Farce	Extremely broad humor; in earlier times, a funny play or a comedy.	58
9889278071	Feminine rhyme	Lines rhymed by their final two syllables. Properly, the penultimate syllables are stressed and the final syllables are unstressed.	59
9889278072	Foil	A secondary character whose purpose is to highlight the characteristics of a main character, usually by contrast.	60
9889278073	Foot	The basic rhythmic unit of a line of poetry, formed by a combination of two or three syllables, either stressed or unstressed.	61
9889278074	Foreshadowing	An event of statement in a narrative that in miniature suggests a larger event that comes later.	62
9889278075	Free verse	poetry written without a regular rhyme scheme or metrical pattern	63
9889278076	Genre	A sub-category of literature.	64
9889278077	Gothic	A sensibility that includes such features as dark, gloomy castles and weird screams from the attic each night.	65
9889278078	Hubris	The excessive pride or ambition that leads to the main character's downfall	66
9889278079	Hyperbole	Exaggeration or deliberate overstatement.	67
9889278080	Implicit	To say or write something that suggests and implies but never says it directly or clearly.	68
9889278081	In media res	Latin for "in the midst of things," i.e. beginning an epic poem in the middle of the action.	69
9889278082	Interior Monologue	Refers to writing that records the mental talking that goes on inside a character's head; tends to be coherent.	70
9889278083	Inversion	Switching the customary order of elements in a sentence or phrase.	71
9889278084	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
9889278085	Lament	A poem of sadness or grief over the death of a loved one or over some other intense loss.	73
9889278086	Lampoon	A satire.	74
9889278087	Loose sentence	A sentence that is complete before its end: Jack loved Barbara despite her irritating snorting laugh.	75
9889278088	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
9889278089	Lyric	A type of poetry that explores the poet's personal interpretation of and feelings about the world.	77
9889278090	Masculine rhyme	A rhyme ending on the final stressed syllable (regular old rhyme)	78
9889278091	Meaning	What makes sense, what's important.	79
9889278092	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
9889278093	Metaphor	A comparison or analogy that states one thing IS another.	81
9889278094	Simile	A comparison or analogy that typically uses like or as.	82
9889278095	Metonymy	A word that is used to stand for something else that it has attributes of or is associated with. e.g. Ears - for giving attention ("Lend me your ears!" from Mark Antony in Julius Caesar)	83
9889278096	Nemesis	The protagonist's arch enemy or supreme and persistent difficulty.	84
9889278097	Objectivity	Treatment of subject matter in an impersonal manner or from an outside view.	85
9889278098	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
9889278099	Onomatopoeia	Words that sound like what they mean	87
9889278100	Opposition	A pairing of images whereby each becomes more striking and informative because it's placed in contrast to the other one.	88
9889278101	Oxymoron	A phrase composed of opposites; a contradiction.	89
9889278102	Parable	A story that instructs.	90
9889278103	Paradox	A situation or statement that seems to contradict itself, but on closer inspection, does not.	91
9889278104	Parallelism	Repeated syntactical similarities used for effect.	92
9889278105	Paraphrase	To restate phrases and sentences in your own words.	93
9889278106	Parenthetical phrase	A phrase set off by commas that interrupts the flow of a sentence with some commentary or added detail.	94
9889278107	Parody	The work that results when a specific work is exaggerated to ridiculousness.	95
9889278108	Pastoral	A poem set in tranquil nature or even more specifically, one about shepherds.	96
9889278109	Persona	The narrator in a non first-person novel.	97
9889278110	Personification	When an inanimate object takes on human shape.	98
9889278111	Plaint	A poem or speech expressing sorrow.	99
9889278112	Point of View	The perspective from which the action of a novel is presented.	100
9889278113	Omniscient	A third person narrator who sees into each character's mind and understands all the action going on.	101
9889278114	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
9889278115	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
9889278116	First person	A narrator who is a character in the story and tells the tale from his or her point of view.	104
9889278117	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
9889278118	Prelude	An introductory poem to a longer work of verse	106
9889278119	Protagonist	The main character of a novel or play	107
9889278120	Pun	The usually humorous use of a word in such a way to suggest two or more meanings	108
9889278121	Refrain	A line or set of lines repeated several times over the course of a poem.	109
9889278122	Requiem	A song of prayer for the dead.	110
9889278123	Rhapsody	An intensely passionate verse or section of verse, usually of love or praise.	111
9889278124	Rhetorical question	A question that suggests an answer.	112
9889278125	Satire	Attempts to improve things by pointing out people's mistakes in the hope that once exposed, such behavior will become less common.	113
9889278126	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
9889278127	Stanza	A group of lines roughly analogous in function in verse to the paragraphs function in prose.	115
9889278128	Stock characters	Standard or cliched character types.	116
9889278129	Subjunctive Mood	A grammatical situation involving the words "if" and "were," setting up a hypothetical situation.	117
9889278130	Suggest	To imply, infer, indicate.	118
9889278131	Summary	A simple retelling of what you've just read.	119
9889278132	Suspension of disbelief	The demand made of a theater audience to accept the limitations of staging and supply the details with their imagination.	120
9889278133	Symbolism	A device in literature where an object represents an idea.	121
9889278134	Technique	The methods and tools of the author.	122
9889278135	Theme	The main idea of the overall work; the central idea.	123
9889278136	Thesis	The main position of an argument. The central contention that will be supported.	124
9889278137	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
9889278138	Travesty	A grotesque parody	126
9889278139	Truism	A way-too obvious truth	127
9889278140	Unreliable narrator	When the first person narrator is crazy, a liar, very young, or for some reason not entirely credible	128
9889278141	Utopia	An idealized place. Imaginary communities in which people are able to live in happiness, prosperity, and peace.	129
9889278142	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
9889278143	Ode	A poem in praise of something divine or noble	131
9889278144	Iamb	A poetic foot -- light, heavy	132
9889278145	Trochee	A poetic foot -- heavy, light	133
9889278146	Spondee	A poetic foot -- heavy, heavy	134
9889278147	Pyrrhie	A poetic foot -- light, light	135
9889278148	Anapest	A poetic foot -- light, light, heavy	136
9889278149	Ambibranch	A poetic foot -- light, heavy, light	137
9889278150	Dactyl	A poetic foot -- heavy, light, light	138
9889278151	Imperfect	A poetic foot -- single light or single heavy	139
9889278152	Pentameter	A poetic line with five feet.	140
9889278153	Tetrameter	A poetic line with four feet	141
9889278154	Trimeter	A poetic line with three feet	142
9889278155	Blank Verse	unrhymed iambic pentameter.	143