Literature Terms

LITERATURE TERMS allegory: story conveying a meaning other than the literal; abstract principles represented by characters or figures alliteration: repetition of initial consonant sounds anagnorisis: discovery; hero suddenly becoming aware of a situation or true character anaphora: repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of neighboring clauses for emphasis antecedent: word, phrase, or clause that a pronoun replaces apologue: short story with a moral, often involving talking animals or objects; a fable; short allegory apostrophe: speaker addresses an inanimate object assonance: repetition of vowel sounds ballad: relatively short narrative poem written in song-like stanza form bildungsroman: novel tracing the spiritual, moral, psychological, or social development and growth of the main character usually from childhood to maturity blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter cacophony: deliberate use of harsh and awkward sounds caesura: pause or interruption in a poem; opposite of enjambment canon: works of a writer caricature: portrait that exaggerates a human trait catharsis: emotional release of an audience at the end of a successful tragedy clerihew: rhyme of four lines, usually regarding a subject mentioned in the first line colloquialism: informal speech comedy of manners: play that satirizes the manners and affectations of a social class, often using stereotypes conceit: extended metaphor that compares two seemingly dissimilar things connotation: implied meaning of a word consonance: repetition of consonant sounds within words controlling image: metaphor that dominates an entire work couplet: rhyming pair of lines dactyl: poetical foot with three syllables, one stressed and two short or unstressed denotation: literal meaning of a word; dictionary definition deus ex machina: literally “god out of a machine;” sudden artificial or improbable resolution to a story, often implying a lack of skill on the part of the writer diction: word choice dramatic monologue: poem in which a character delivers a speech explaining his/her feelings, actions, or motives elegy: mournful or melancholic poem English sonnet: sonnet divided into 3 quatrains and a final couplet, using the rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg; Shakespearean sonnet enjambment: continuation of a phrase or clause to another line without pause (punctuation); opposite of caesura epigram: short, clever poem with a witty turn of thought farce: extremely broad humor foil: character that contrasts with another character, usually the protagonist, to emphasize the other character’s traits foot: combination of stressed and unstressed syllables foreshadowing: event or statement that suggests a future event free verse: poetry without a regular rhyme scheme or metrical pattern hamartia: fatal flaw of a tragic hero hubris: excessive pride that leads to a protagonist’s downfall hyperbole: exaggeration or overstatement; opposite of understatement iamb: poetical foot with two syllables– first unstressed and second stressed implicit: implied meaning; opposite of explicit lyric: expression of observations and feelings of a single speaker magical realism: combination of realistic details with surreal, dreamlike, or magical elements metaphor: analogy that states one thing is another metonymy: use of a part to mean a whole object (i.e. hands to mean laborers); related to synecdoche motif: recurring or dominant element in a work objectivity: impersonal view of events onomatopoeia: word that sounds like what it represents opposition: contrasting pairs of elements paradox: seemingly apparent contradiction which is accurate on closer inspection parallelism: repeated words, phrases, clauses, or grammatical structure used for effect pastoral: work idealizing the simple life of shepherds or of tranquil nature peripeteia: reversal of fortune or character persona: narrator in a non-first-person novel personification: giving human qualities or form to inanimate objects protagonist: main character quatrain: four-line stanza satire: genre which ridicules its subject by exposing flaws, often to provoke or prevent change sestina: poem consisting of six six-line stanzas followed by a tercet (three-line stanza), for a total of thirty-nine lines (same set of six words ends the lines of each of the six-line stanzas, but in a different order) simile: “weak” metaphor, often uses “like” or “as” stanza: group of lines in verse; poetical equivalent of a paragraph subjectivity: personal view of events subjunctive mood: mood (grammar) that sets up a hypothetical situation (i.e. if __ were __ ) symbol: word, place, character, or object that means something beyond what it is on a literal level synecdoche: metaphor in which a part is spoken of as the whole object; related to metonymy synesthesia: one kind of sensation is described in the terms of another; mixing of senses syntax: word order theme: central idea of a work terza rima: poem with verses of three lines and rhyme scheme aba bcb cdc tragic flaw: weakness of an otherwise good or great individual that leads to his/her downfall