AP Literature Vocabulary Flashcards
Terms : Hide Images [1]
| 9620098552 | allegory | universal symbol or personified abstraction (ex: Death being portrayed as cloaked in black with a scythe and hourglass) | 0 | |
| 9620197675 | alliteration | sequential repetition of a similar sound (consonants) (ex: peter piper picked a peck of pickled peppers) | 1 | |
| 9620267488 | allusion | a reference to a literary or historical event, person, or place (Scar from the Lion King represents Claudius from Hamlet) | 2 | |
| 9620288718 | Anapestic | a measurement in poetry of two unstressed and one stressed syllable | 3 | |
| 9620313473 | Anaphora | the regular repetition of the same word or phase at the beginning of successive phrases (ex: starting every sentence with the same word) | 4 | |
| 9620426528 | anecdote | a brief story told by a character in a piece of literature | 5 | |
| 9620479370 | antagonist | any force that is in opposition to the main character/protagonist (does not have to be a person, ex: nature) | 6 | |
| 9620526272 | antithesis | the juxtaposition of sharply contrasting ideas in balanced/parallel words, phrases, grammatical structure, or ideas (ex: "beauty is truth, truth beauty") | 7 | |
| 9620566854 | apostrophe | an address to something inanimate | 8 | |
| 9620580984 | archetype | recurrent themes/images that are identifiable in a wide range of literature (ex: water symbolizing renewal, femme fatale) | 9 | |
| 9620664497 | assonance | a repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds | 10 | |
| 9620678058 | asyndeton | a style in which conjunctions are omitted, creating a fast pace prose (ex: "I came, I saw, I conquered") | 11 | |
| 9620696895 | attitude | the sense expressed by the tone of voice/mood of the piece writing; the feelings the author holds toward a subject/people/events/setting/reader | 12 | |
| 9620762023 | ballad | a narrative poem that was originally meant to be sung, usually characterized by a reoccurring phrase | 13 | |
| 9620804628 | ballad stanza | a common stanza (4 lines in iambic that alternate 3 beat and 4 beat lines, lines 1 and 3 do not rhyme, lines 2 and 4 rhyme) | 14 | |
| 9620837124 | blank verse | form of verse that resembles common speech (unrhymed lines in iambic pentameter) (ex: Shakespeare's plays) | 15 | |
| 9620859199 | Caesura | a pause in a line of verse indicated by natural speech patterns (ex: Alas how changed! II What sudden horrors rise!) | 16 | |
| 9620877190 | caricature | a depiction in which a character's traits are exaggerated to render them absurd (ex: political cartoons) | 17 | |
| 9620892641 | chiasmus | a figure of speech by which the order of the terms are switched (ex: "beauty is truth, truth beauty" or "pleasure's a sin, and sometimes sin's a pleasure") | 18 | |
| 9620918387 | colloquial | ordinary language, the vernacular (ex: north = "soda", south = "pop") | 19 | |
| 9620941329 | conceit | a comparison of two unlikely things, an extended metaphor within a poem (ex: love affair can be describes as a flower growing, budding, fruiting, and dying) | 20 | |
| 9620966299 | connotation | what is suggested by a word (apart from what it actually means), the implied meaning of a word (ex: awesome, sweet, wicked mean different things now than they used to) | 21 | |
| 9620988541 | consonance | the repetition of a sequence of two or more consonants, but with a change in the vowels (ex: pitter-patter, cling-clang) | 22 | |
| 9621015513 | couplet | two rhyming lines of iambic pentameter that together present a single idea/connection (ex: "So long as men can breath or eyes can see / So long lives this and this gives life to thee") | 23 | |
| 9621048211 | dactylic | measurement in poetry that consists of 2 stressed syllables followed by 1 unstressed syllable | 24 | |
| 9621061623 | denotation | a direct and specific meaning, referring to the dictionary meaning of a word | 25 | |
| 9621069506 | dialect | the language/speech of a specific region/people (ex: Mark Twain captures southern dialect in Huck Finn) | 26 | |
| 9621085793 | diction | the specific word choice an author uses to persuade or convey tone/purpose/effect (ex: "I hadn't so much forgot as I couldn't bring myself to remember" has more impact than "I chose not to remember") | 27 | |
| 9621115340 | dramatic monologue | a monologue set in a specific situation and spoken to an imaginary audience (ex: "to be or not to be" speech in Hamlet) | 28 | |
| 9621128449 | elegy | 29 |