AP Literature and Composition Literary Terms Flashcards

10577014719	Allegory	A narrative or description having a second or symbolic meaning beneath the surface one	0
10577019958	Allusion	A reference, explicit or implicit, to something in previous literature or history	1
10577033813	Anecdote	A short account of an interesting or humorous incident	2
10577054956	Artistic Unity	That condition of a successful literary work whereby all its elements work together for the achievement of its central purpose	3
10577066683	Cacophony	A harsh, discordant, unpleasant-sounding choice and arrangement of sounds	4
10577075283	Euphony	A smooth, pleasant-sounding choice and arrangement of sounds	5
10577080438	Genre	A type or class, as poetry, drama, etc.	6
10577086369	Imagery	The representation through language of sensory experience	7
10577094339	Mood	The pervading impression of a work	8
10577096894	Moral	A rule of conduct or maxim for living expressed or implied as the "point" of a literary work.	9
10577101561	Prose	Non-metrical language; the opposite of verse	10
10577103552	Theme	The main idea or message of a literary work	11
10577108357	Tone	The writer's or speaker's attitude toward the subject, the audience, or herself or himself; the emotional coloring, or emotional meaning, of a work	12
10577120957	Topic	The subject matter or area of a literary work	13
10577132219	Setting	The context in time and place in which the action of a story occurs	14
10577136351	Symbol	Something that means more than what it is; an object, person, situation, or action that in addition to its literal meaning suggests other meanings as well, a figure of speech which may be read both literally and figuratively	15
10577149953	Verse	Metrical language; the opposite of prose	16
10577152337	Voice	The distinctive style or manner of expression of the writer	17
10577257696	Antagonist	Character in a story or poem who opposes the main character (protagonist). Sometimes the antagonist is an animal, an idea, or a thing	18
10577282683	Character	Any of the persons involved in a story or play	19
10577295805	Characterization	The process of conveying information about characters	20
10577312483	Deuteragonist	The second most important character, after the protagonist, often a foil or eventual antagonist	21
10577336432	Direct Presentation of Character	A method of characterization in which the author, by exposition or analysis, tells us directly what a character is like, or has someone else in the story do so	22
10577342820	Dynamic Character	A character who during the course of a story undergoes a permanent change in some aspect of character or outlook	23
10577347161	Flat Character	A character whose character is summed up in one or two traits	24
10577351103	Foil	A character who contrasts with another character (usually the protagonist) in order to highlight various features of that other character's personality, throwing these characteristics into sharper focus	25
10577390946	Hero	A man who is endowed with great courage and strength, celebrated for bold exploits, and favored by the gods	26
10577508401	Hubris	Overbearing and excessive pride	27
10577526387	Indirect Presentation of Character	That method of characterization in which the author shows us a character in action, compelling us to infer what the character is like from what is said or done by the character	28
10577530391	Protagonist	The main character of a novel, play, or film	29
10577535666	Round Character	A character whose character is complex and many sided	30
10577540344	Static Character	A character who is the same sort of person at the end of a story as at the beginning	31
10577556298	Stock Character	A stereotyped character	32
10577559268	Tragic Flaw	A flaw in the character of the protagonist of a tragedy that brings the protagonist to ruin or sorrow	33
10577578901	Aside	A brief speech in which a character turns from the person being addressed to speak directly to the audience; a dramatic device for letting the audience know what a character is really thinking or feeling as opposed to what the character pretends to think or feel	34
10577582137	Colloquial	Informal, conversational language	35
10577583949	Dialogue	Conversation between characters in a drama or narrative	36
10577599170	Dialect	A regional variety of a language distinguished by pronunciation, grammar, or vocabulary	37
10577610356	Diction	Word choice	38
10577612794	Euphemism	Substituting a mild, indirect, or vague term for a harsh, blunt, or offensive one	39
10577617715	Figure of Speech	Broadly, any way of saying something other than the ordinary way; more narrowly, a way of saying one thing and meaning another	40
10577624343	Hyperbole	A figure of speech in which exaggeration is used in the service of truth	41
10581422589	Invective	Denunciatory or abusive language	42
10581429878	Monologue	A dramatic soliloquy	43
10581434656	Proverb	A short, pithy saying that expresses a basic truth or practical precept	44
10581439969	Pun	A play on words, sometimes on different senses of the same word and sometimes on the similar sense or sound of different words	45
10581582005	Sarcasm	Bitter or cutting speech; speech intended by its speaker to give pain to the person addressed	46
10581445877	Soliloquy	A device often used in drama where by a character relates his or her thoughts and feelings to him/herself and to the audience without addressing any of the other characters	47
10581523330	Slang	A kind of language especially occurring in casual or playful speech, usually made up of short-lived coinages and figures of speech deliberately used in place of standard terms	48
10581528253	Understatement	a figure of speech that consists of saying less than one means, or of saying what one means with less force than the occasion warrants	49
10581609705	Exposition	The part of a play (usually at the beginning) that provides the background information needed to understand the characters and the actions	50
10581645819	Conflict	A clash of actions, desires, ideas, or goals in the plot of a story or drama	51
10581655945	Rising Action	That development of plot in a story that precedes and leads up to the climax	52
10582297285	Climax	The turning point or high point of a plot	53
10582304771	Falling Action	The falling action immediately follows the climax and shows the aftereffects of the events in the climax	54
10582318180	Denounement	The conclusion of the story	55
10582330145	Irony	A situation, or use of language, involving some kind of incongruity or discrepancy	56
10582339983	Dramatic Irony	An incongruity of discrepancy between what a character says or thinks and what the reader knows to be true (or between what a character perceives and what the author intends the reader to perceive)	57
10582357357	Irony of Situation	A situation in which there is an incongruity between appearance and reality, or between expectation and fulfillment, or between the actual situation and what would seem appropriate	58
10582364437	Verbal Irony	A figure of speech in which what is said is the opposite of what is meant	59
10582370145	Epistolary Novel	A novel written as a series of documents	60
10582375767	First Person Point of View	The story is told by one of its characters, using the first person	61
10582381692	Flashback	A literary device in which an earlier event is inserted into a narrative	62
10582393368	Flashforward	A literary device in which a later event is inserted into a narrative	63
10582408823	In medias res	(into the middle of things) is a Latin phrase denoting the literary and artistic narrative technique wherein the relation of a story begins either at the mid-point or at the conclusion, rather than at the beginning, establishing setting, character, and conflict via flashback and expository conversations	64
10582418665	Limited Omniscient Point of View	The author tells the story, using the third person, but is limited to a complete knowledge of one character in the story and tells us only what that one character thinks, feels, sees, or hears	65
10582422824	Linear Structure	A plot that follows a straight-moving, cause and effect, chronological order	66
10582493154	Objective Point of View	The author tells the story, using the third person, but is limited to reporting what the characters say or do; the author does not interpret their behavior or tell us their private thoughts or feelings	67
10582428502	Omniscient Point of View	The author tells the story, using the third person, knowing all and free to tell us anything, including what the characters are thinking or feeling and why they act as they do	68
10582438745	Narrator	The speaker or the "voice" of an oral or written work	69
10582444830	Nonlinear Structure	is when the plot is presented in a non-causal order, with events presented in a random series jumping to and from the main plot with flashbacks or flashforwards; or in any other manner that is either not chronological or not cause and effect, for example, in medias res	70
10582457922	Point of View	The angle of vision from which a story is told	71
10582464667	Stream of consciousness	Narrative which presents the private thoughts of a character without commentary or interpretation by the author	72
10582468050	Unreliable Narrator	A narrator whose credibility has been seriously compromised	73
10582528121	Anticlimax	A sudden descent from the impressive or significant to the ludicrous or inconsequential	74
10582528122	Catastrophe	The concluding action of a classical tragedy containing the resolution of the plot	75
10582530357	Comic Relief	A humorous incident introduced into a serious literary work in order to relieve dramatic tension or heighten emotional impact	76
10582530358	Dilemma	A situation in which a character must choose between two courses of action, both undesirable	77
10582533074	Deus ex machina	(god from the machine) The resolution of a plot by use of highly improbable chance or coincidence	78
10582535129	Indeterminate Ending	An ending in which the central problem or conflict is left unresolved	79
10582535130	Inversion	A reversal in order, nature, or effect	80
10582544556	Motivation	An emotion, desire, physiological need, or similar impulse that acts as an incitement to action	81
10582544557	Mystery	An unusual set of circumstances for which the reader craves an explanation; used to create suspense	82
10582547284	Paradox	a statement or situation containing apparently contradictory or incompatible elements	83
10582547285	Plot	The sequence of incidents or events of which a story is composed	84
10582549101	Plot Manipulation	A situation in which an author gives the plot a twist or turn unjustified by preceding action or by the characters involved	85
10582549102	Plot Device	An object, character, or event whose only reason for existing is to advance the story. Often breaks suspension of disbelief.	86
10582551214	Prologue	An introduction or preface, especially a poem recited to introduce a play.	87
10582551215	Red Herring	A literary tactic of diverting attention away from an item or person of significance	88
10582553376	Scene	A subdivision of an act in a dramatic presentation in which the setting is fixed and the time continuous	89
10582553377	Suspense	That quality in a story that makes the reader eager to discover what happens next and how it will end	90
10582556150	Suspension of Disbelief	An unspoken agreement between writer and reader: "I agree to believe your make-believe if it entertains me."	91
10582556151	Subplot	A plot subordinate to the main plot of a literary work	92
10582566136	Surprise	An unexpected turn in the development of a plot	93
10582682146	Comedy	A type of drama, opposed to tragedy, having usually a happy ending, and emphasizing human limitation rather than human greatness	94
10582687469	Comedy of Manners	Comedy that ridicules the manners (way of life, social customs, etc.) of a certain segment of society	95
10582694173	Satire	A kind of literature that ridicules human folly or vice with the purpose of bringing about reform or of keeping others from falling into similar folly or vice	96
10582704500	Scornful Comedy	A type of comedy whose main purpose is to expose and ridicule human folly, vanity, or hypocrisy	97
10582711513	Romantic Comedy	A type of comedy whose likable and sensible main characters are placed in difficulties from which they are rescued at the end of the play	98
10582723358	Farce	A type of comedy that relies on exaggeration, horseplay, and unrealistic or improbable situations to provoke laughter	99
10582733893	Escapist Literature	Literature written purely for entertainment, with little or no attempt to provide insights into the true nature of human life or behavior	100
10582737592	Fable	A short narrative making an edifying or cautionary point and often employing animal characters that act like human beings	101
10582743020	Fantasy	A kind of fiction that pictures creatures or events beyond the boundaries of known reality	102
10582748810	Interpretive Literature	Literature that provides valid insights into the nature of human life or behavior	103
10582751406	Myth	Any story that attempts to explain how the world was created or why the world is the way that it is	104
10582772470	Novel	A book of long narrative in literary prose	105
10582778705	Novella	(also called a short novel), a written, fictional, prose narrative longer than a novelette but shorter than a novel	106
10582785603	Parable	A simple story used to illustrate a moral or religious lesson	107
10582789261	Tragedy	Drama in which a noble protagonist -- a personal of unusual moral or intellectual stature or outstanding abilities -- falls to ruin during a struggle caused by a tragic flaw (or hamartia) in his character or an error in his rulings or judgments	108
10582835301	Apostrophe	A figure of speech in which someone absent or dead or something nonhuman is addressed as if it were alive and present and could reply	109
10582849998	Connotation	What a word suggests beyond its basic definition; a word's overtones of meaning	110
10582859451	Denotation	The basic definition or dictionary meaning of a word	111
10582863112	Ekphrasis	The poetic representation of a painting or sculpture in words	112
10582886789	Epigram	A short, witty poem expressing a single thought	113
10582898512	Extended Figure	(also knows as sustained figure) A figure of speech (usually metaphor, simile, personification, or apostrophe) sustained or developed through a considerable number of lines or through a whole poem	114
10582970507	Figurative Language	Language employing figures of speech; language that cannot be taken literally or only literally	115
10582981838	Juxtaposition	Positioning opposites next to each other to heighten the contrast	116
10582997676	Metaphor	A figure of speech in which an implicit comparison is made between two things essentially unlike	117
10583009419	Metonymy	A figure of speech in which some significant aspect or detail of an experience is used to represent the whole experience	118
10583019231	Onomatopeia	The use of words that supposedly mimic their meaning in their sound	119
10583027057	Personification	A figure of speech in which human attributes are given to an animal, an object, or a concept	120
10583035925	Rhythm	Any wavelike recurrence of motion or sound	121
10583043103	Sentimentality	Unmerited or contrived tender feeling; that quality in a story that elicits or seeks to elicit tears through an oversimplification or falsification of reality	122
10583049873	Simile	A figure of speech in which an explicit comparison is made between two things essentially unlike	123
10583058235	Synecdoche	A figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole	124
10583062126	Syntax	Word organization and order	125
10583154359	Alliteration	The repetition at close intervals of the initial consonant sounds of accented syllables or important words	126
10583164400	Anapest	A metrical foot consisting of two unaccented syllables followed by one accented syllable	127
10583172851	Anapestic Meter	A meter in which a majority of the feet are anapests	128
10583179171	Approximate Rhyme	A term used for words in a rhyming pattern that have some kind of sound correspondence but are not perfect rhymes	129
10583186330	Assonance	The repetition at close intervals of the vowel sounds of accented syllables or important words	130
10583193560	Ballad Meter	Stanzas formed of quatrains of iambs in which the first and third lines have four stresses (tetrameter) and the second and fourth lines have three stresses (trimeter). Usually, the second and fourth lines rhyme (abcb), although ballad meter is often not followed strictly	131
10583255583	Blank Verse	Poetry with a meter, but not rhymed, usually in iambic pentameter	132
10583258825	Consonance	The repetition at close intervals of the final consonant sounds of accented syllables or important words	133
10583268136	Couplet	Two successive lines, usually in the same meter, linked by rhyme	134
10583272483	Dactyl	A metrical foot consisting of one accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables	135
10583277117	Dactylic Meter	A meter in which a majority of the feet are dactyls	136
10583278953	End Rhyme	Rhymes that occur at the ends of lines	137
10583283497	End-stopped Line	A line that ends with a natural speech pause, usually marked by punctuation	138
10583287750	Enjambment	Or run-on line, a line which has no natural speech pause at its end, allowing the sense to flow uninterruptedly into the succeeding line	139
10583301254	English (or Shakespearean) Sonnet	A sonnet rhyming ababcdcdefefgg. Its content or structure ideally parallels the rhyme scheme, falling into three coordinate quatrains and a concluding couplet; but it is often structured, like the Italian sonnet, into octave and sestet, the principal break in thought coming at the end of the eighth line.	140
10583312980	Feminine Rhyme	A rhyme in which the stress is on the penultimate (second from last) syllable of the words (picky, tricky)	141
10583316941	Foot	The basic unit used in the scansion or measurement of verse. A foot usually contains one accented syllable and one or two unaccented syllables	142
10583323431	Free verse	Nonmetrical verse	143
10583325630	Half Rhyme	Is consonance on the final consonants of the words involved	144
10583333198	Heroic Couplet	Poems constructed by a sequence of two lines of (usually rhyming) verse in iambic pentameter. If these couplets do not rhyme, they are usually separated by extra white space	145
10583337453	Iamb	A metrical foot consisting of one unaccented syllable followed by one accented syllable	146
10583347941	Iambic Meter	A meter in which the majority of feet are iambs, the most common English meter	147
10583351198	Internal Rhyme	A rhyme in which one or both of the rhyme-words occur within the line	148
10583358261	Italian (or Petrarchan) Sonnet	A sonnet consisting of an octave rhyming abbaabba and of a sestet using any arrangement of two or three additional rhymes, such as cdcdcd or cdecde	149
10583362609	Masculine Rhyme	A rhyme in which the stress is on the final syllable of the words	150
10583367002	Meter	Regularized rhythm; an arrangement of language in which the accents occur at apparently equal intervals in time	151
10583376797	Octave	An eight-line stanza	152
10583382228	Perfect Rhyme	A rhyme in which is when the later part of the word or phrase is identical sounding to another. Types include masculine and feminine, among others	153
10583385414	Pentameter	A metrical line containing five feet	154
10583390655	Quatrain	A four-line stanza	155
10583392488	Refrain	A repeated word, phrase, line, or group of lines, normally at some fixed position in a poem written in stanzaic form	156
10583398290	Rhyme	The repetition of an identical or similarly accented sound or sounds in a work	157
10583403175	Rhyme Scheme	Any fixed pattern of rhymes characterizing a whole poem or its stanzas	158
10583404598	Scansion	The process of measuring verse, that is, of marking accented and unaccented syllables, dividing the lines into feet, identifying the metrical pattern, and noting significant variations from that pattern	159
10583412292	Sestet	A six-line stanza	160
10583414922	Spondee	A metrical foot consisting of two syllables equally or almost equally accented	161
10583428404	Stanza	A group of lines whose metrical pattern (and usually its rhyme scheme as well) is repeated throughout a poem	162
10583456948	Terza Rima	A three-line stanza form borrowed from the Italian poets. The rhyme scheme is: aba, bcb, cdc, ded, etc.	163
10583472268	Tetrameter	A metrical line containing four feet	164
10583475179	Trimeter	A metrical line containing three feet	165
10583481306	Trochaic Meter	A meter in which the majority of feet are trochees	166
10583483714	Trochee	A metrical foot consisting of one accented syllable followed by one unaccented syllable	167
10583515146	Ballad	A narrative folk song	168
10583519268	Elegy	A type of literature defined as a song or poem that expresses sorrow or lamentation, usually for one who has died	169
10583523198	Epic	A long poem in a lofty style about the exploits of heroic figures	170
10583526699	Lyric	A song-like poem written mainly to express the feelings of emotions or thought from a particular person, thus separating it from narrative poems. These poems are generally short, averaging roughly twelve to thirty lines, and rarely go beyond sixty lines. These poems express vivid imagination as well as emotion and all flow fairly concisely	171
10583530800	Narrative Poem	A poem that tells a story	172
10583532403	Ode	Usually a lyric poem of moderate length, with a serious subject, an elevated style, and an elaborate stanza pattern	173
10583538972	Sonnet	A fixed form of fourteen lines, normally iambic pentameter, with a rhyme scheme conforming to or approximating one of two main types—the Italian or the English	174