Literature glossary
Terms
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- Allegory
- Symbolic narrative in which characters have no individual personality, but embody moral qualities and abstractions
- Alliteration
- Repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of a word
- Protagonist
- Main character of a literary work
- Antagonist
- Character or force against which another character struggles
- Assonance
- Repetition of similar vowel sound in a sentence of prose or poetry
- Characterization
- The means by which an author presents and reveals characters: speech, dress, dialogue, manners
- Narrator
- Voice and implied speaker of a fictional work
- Personification
- Endowment of animals or things with human or living qualities
- Connotation
- Associations beyond dictionary meaning
- Apostrophe
- Figure of speech in which an absent person or abstraction is addressed as they being present
- Metaphor
- Figure of speech where two unlike things are compared without the use of "as" or "like"
- Simile
- Figure of speech in which two unlike things are compared using "as" or "like"
- Hyperbole
- Figure of speech involving exaggeration
- Synecdoche
- Figure of speech in which a part is substituted for the whole
- Understatement
- Figure of speech in which author says less than he or she means
- Metonymy
- Figure of speech in which an attribute or closely related term is substituted for an object or an idea (ex: "Loyal to the Crown.")
- Litote
- Figure of speech indicating negative of opposite (ex: "not many")
- Antithesis
- Figure of speech containing two seemingly contradictory ideas within a balanced grammatical structure emphasized by parallelism
- Denotation
- Dictionary meaning of a word
- Figurative language
- Language that conveys something other than the literal meaning of the words
- Literal language
- Language that conveys exactly what the author means
- Subject
- What a play or story is about
- Plot
- Unified structure of events in a literary work
- Theme
- The idea of literary work extracted from its details of language, character, and action
- Point of view
- Angle or vision from which a story is narrated
- Exposition
- First stage of a plot in which background information is provided
- Complication
- Intensification of conflict in a story
- Climax
- Turning point of action in a plot; greatest point of tension
- Reversal
- Point in plot when action goes in an unexpected direction
- Foreshadowing
- Hints as to what is to come in a plot
- Falling action
- Point in a story after climax, moving toward denouement
- Denouement
- Resolution of a plot
- Recognition
- Point at which character understands his or her situation
- Flashback
- Interruption of a literary work's chronology to describe or present an incident that occurred priort to the timeframe of the work's action
- Resolution
- Sorting out of the plot and ending of a play
- Round character
- A character that may change and is realistic (usually a major character)
- Flat character
- Minor character that is defined more by audience's perconceptions, does not change