Literary Terms Vocabulary
Terms
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- Flashback
- Literary work that interrupts the sequence of events to relate an event from and earlier time
- Foreshadowing
- literary work of clues that suggest events that have yet to occur
- Hyperbole
- a deliberate exaggeration or overstatement
- Image
- a word or phrase that appeals to one or more of the give senses-- sight, hearing, touch, taste, or smell.
- Imagery
- The description or figurative language used in literature to create word pictures
- Indirect characterization
- author tells what a charactor looks like, does, and says how other characters react to him or her, readers draw conclusions about character
- Inversion
- a change in the normal word order
- Irony
- involve differences between appearance and reality, expectation and result, or meaning and intention
- Irony of situation
- an event occurs that contrasts the expectations of the caracters, the reader, or the audience
- Juxtaposition
- poetic or rhetorical device in which normally unassociated ideas, words, or phrases are placed next to one another
- Literal language
- uses words in their ordinary senes, the opposite of figurative language
- Metaphor
- a figure of speech in which one thing is spoken of as though it were something else
- Metonymy
- the name of one object is substituted for that of another closely associated with it
- Monologue
- a speech by one character in a play, story, or poem
- Motif
- serves as a basis for an expanded narractive and is a recurring feature in the word
- Motivation
- a reason that explains or partially explains a character's thoughts, feelings, actions, or behavior
- Narrator
- a speaker or character who tells a story
- Omniscient narrator
- an all-knowing third person narrator and can reveal to readers what the characters think and feel
- Onomatopoeia
- the use of words that imitate sounds
- Oxymoron
- combines two opposing or contradictory ideas (freezing fire)