vocabulary
mrs.lin
Terms
undefined, object
copy deck
- Oxymoron
- A combination of contradictory terms, such as used by Romeo in Act 1, scene 1 of Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet
- Hyperbole
- A figure of speech in which an overstatement or exaggeration occurs as in the following lines from Act 2, scene 2 of Shakespeare's "Macbeth." In this scene, Macbeth has murdered King Duncan. Horrified at the blood on his hands, he asks:
- Point of View
- A piece of literature contains a speaker who is speaking either in the first person, telling things from his or her own perspective, or in the third person, telling things from the perspective of an onlooker
- Short Story
- A short fictional narrative
- Anthropomorphism
- used with God or gods. The act of attributing human forms or qualities to an entities which are not human. Specifically, anthropomorphism is the describing of gods or goddesses in human forms and possessing human characteristics such as jealousy, hatred, or love.
- Pun
- A play on words wherein a word is used to convey two meanings at the same time
- Eye rhyme
- a form of rhyme wherein the look rather than the sound is important
- Metonymy
- A figure of speech in which a word represents something else which it suggests. For example in a herd of fifty cows, the herd might be referred to as fifty head of cattle. The word "head" is the word representing the herd.
- Novel
- A fictional prose work of substantial length
- Rising Action
- The part of a drama which begins with the exposition and sets the stage for the climax
- Scansion
- A close, critical reading of a poem, examining the work for meter
- Anaphora
- The deliberate repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of several successive verses, clauses, or paragraphs.
- Narrative Poem
- A poem which tells a story. Usually a long poem, sometimes even book length, the narrative may take the form of a plotless dialogue as in Robert Frost's "The Death of the Hired Man." In other instances the narrative may consist of a series of incidents
- Allusion
- is a brief reference to a person, event, or place, real or ficticious, or to a work of art. Casual reference to a famous historical or literary figure or event.
- Parallel Structure
- A repetition of sentences using the same structure
- Paradox
- A situation or a statement that seems to contradict itself, but on closer inspection, does not. This line from John Donne's
- Foil
- A character in a play who sets off the main character or other characters by comparison. In Shakespeare's "Hamlet" Hamlet and Laertes are young men who behave very differently. While Hamlet delays in carrying out his mission to avenge the death of his father, Laertes is quick and bold in his challenge of the king over the death of his father. Much can be learned about each by comparing and contrasting the actions of the two
- Onomatopoeia
- A literary device wherein the sound of a word echoes the sound it represents
- Plot
- The structure of a story. The sequence in which the author arranges events in a story.
- Parable
- A brief story, told or written in order to teach a moral lesson. Christ's tale of the Good Smamritan (Luke 10: 30-7)
- Lyric Poem
- A short poem wherein the poet expresses an emotion or illuminates some life principle. Emily Dickinson's "I Heard a Fly Buzz-When I Died" is a lyric poem wherein the speaker, on a deathbed expecting death to appear in all its grandeur, encounters a common housefly instead
- anastrophe
- Inversion of the normal syntactic order of words
- Iamb
- A metrical pattern of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable.
- Pastoral
- A literary work that has to do with shephards and rustic settings
- Personification
- A figure of speech in which something nonhuman is given human characteristics
- Ode
- A poem in praise of something divine or expressing some noble idea.
- Parody
- A literary work that imitates the style of another literary work.
- Mood
- The atmosphere or feeling created by a literary work, partly by a description of the objects or by the style of the descriptions. A work may contain a mood of horror, mystery, holiness, or childlike simplicity, to name a few, depending on the author's treatment of the work
- Metaphor
- A figure of speech wherein a comparison is made between two unlike quantities without the use of the words "like" or "as." Jonathan Edwards, in his sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," has this to say about the moral condition of his parishoners:
- Flashback
- A reference to an event which took place prior to the beginning of a story or play. In Ernest Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilamanjaro," the protagonist, Harry Street, has been injured on a hunt in Africa. Dying, his mind becomes preoccupied with incidents in his past. In a flashback Street remembers one of his wartime comrades dying painfully on barbed wire on a battlefield in Spain
- Protagonist
- The hero or central character of a literary work
- Irony
- Irony takes many forms. In irony of situation, the result of an action is the reverse of what the actor expected. Macbeth murders his king hoping that in becoming king he will achieve great happiness.
- Imagery
- A word or group of words in a literary work which appeal to one or more of the senses: sight, taste, touch, hearing, and smell. The use of images serves to intensify the impact of the work. The following example of imagery in T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
- Inference
- A judgement based on reasoning rather than on direct or explicit statement. A conclusion based on facts or circumstances. For example, advised not to travel alone in temperatures exceeding fifty degrees below zero, the man in Jack London's "To Build a Fire" sets out anyway. One may infer arrogance from such an action.
- Local Color
- A detailed setting forth of the characteristics of a particular locality, enabling the reader to "see" the setting
- Alliteration
- is the repetition of initial sounds in neighboring words.
- Allegory
- a form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative, are equated with the meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. The underlying meaning has moral, social, religious, or political significance, and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas as charity, greed, or envy.
- Quatrain
- A four-line stanza which may be rhymed or unrhymed
- Pathetic Fallacy
- A fallacy of reason in suggesting that nonhuman phenomena act from human feelings, as suggested by the word "pathetic" from the Greek pathos; a literary device wherein something nonhuman found in nature-a beast, plant, stream, natural force, etc.-performs as though from human feeling or motivation
- Meter
- A regular pattern of unstressed and stressed syllables in a line or lines of poetry. Below is an illustration of some commonly used metrical patterns
- Myth
- An unverifiable story based on a religious belief. The characters of myths are gods and goddesses, or the offspring of the mating of gods or godesses and humans
- Amplification
- is use of bare expressions, likely to be ignored or misunderstood by a hearer or reader because of the bluntness. Emphasis through restatement with additional details.
- Genre
- A literary type or form. Drama is a genre of literature. Within drama, genre include tragedy, comedy and other forms
- Resolution
- The part of a story or drama which occurs after the climax and which establishes a new norm, a new state of affairs-the way things are going to be from then on
- Setting
- The time and place in which a story unfolds
- Rhyme
- In poetry, a pattern of repeated sounds. In end rhyme, the rhyme is at the end of the line, as in these lines from
- Rhyme Scheme
- The pattern of rhymed words in a stanza or generalized throughout a poem, expressed in alphabetic terms
- Satire
- A piece of literature designed to ridicule the subject of the work
- Anagram
- a word or phrase made by transposing the letters
- Analogy
- the comparison of two pairs which have the same relationship. The key is to ascertain the relationship between the first so you can choose the correct second pair. Part to whole, opposites, results of are types of relationships you should find.