AP English Literary Terms #2 words
Terms
undefined, object
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- Allegory
- Device of using a character or story elements symbollically to represent an abstraction in addition to the literal meaning. *Usualy deals with moral truth or generalization about human existance*
- Ambiguity
- Multiple meanings, intentional or unintentional, of a word, phrase, sentence, or passage
- Analogy
- Similarity or comparison between two different things or the relationship between them. *Metaphores and similies are analogies*
- Anecdote
- A short narrative detailing particulars of an interesting episode or event.
- Antecedent
- Word, phrase, or clause referred to by a pronoun.
- Atmosphere
- Emotional mood created by the entirety of a literary work, established partly by the setting and partly by the author's choice of objects that are described.
- Colloquial/Colloquialism
- The use of slang or informalities in speech or writing *vernacular is everyday speech*
- Conceit
- A fanciful expression, usually in the form of an extended metaphoror surprising analogy between dissimilar objects. It displays intellectual cleverness.
- Genre
- The major catagory into which a literary work fits. Basic divisions are prose, poetry, and drama. But genre is a flexible term and each division has subdivisions.
- Hyperbole
- A figure of speech using deliberate exaggeration or overstatement. Often produces irony.
- Loose sentence
- A type of sentence in which the main idea, independent clause, comes first followed by dependent grammatical units such as phrases or clauses. *Central meaning at beginning*
- Narrative
- The telling of a story or an account of an event or series of events.
- Periodic Sentence
- A sentence that presents its central meaning in a main clause at the end.
- Prose
- One of the major divisions of genre...it refers to fiction and nonfiction
- Rhetorical Modes
- Describes the variety and purposes of the major kinds of writing. Four most common are exposition, argumentation, description, and narration.*these four are often called modes of discourse*
- Style
- Either evaluates the sum of choices that an author makes in blending diction, syntax, figurative language, and other literery devices or helps to classify authors to a group and then compare to similar authors.
- Subject complement
- Word or clauses following a linking verb and completes subject of sentence
- Symbol
- Anything that represents itself and stands for something else. Three categories: Natural, Conventional, and Literary
- Syntax
- The way an author chooses to join words into phrases, clauses, and sentences. Similar to diction but syntax is a group of words.
- Thesis
- Thesis statement is a sentence or group of sentences that directly expresses the author's opinion, purpose, or position.
- Understatement
- The ironic minimizing of fact, it presents something as less significant than it is.