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AP Literature Terms

The Glossary of Literary Terms for the AP English Literature and Composition Test

Terms

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Caricature
A portrait (verbal or otherwise) that exaggerates a facet of personality.
Satire
Attempts to improve things by pointing out people's mistakes in the hope that once exposed, such behavior will become less common.
Accent
In poetry, the stressed portion of a word.
Loose sentence
A sentence that is complete before its end: Jack loved Barbara despite her irritating snorting laugh.
Imperfect
A poetic foot -- single light or single heavy
Prelude
An introductory poem to a longer work of verse
Elements
Basic techniques of each genre of literature
Zeugma
The use of a word to modify two or more words, but used for different meanings. He closed the door and his heart on his lost love.
Alliteration
The repetition of initial consonant sounds.
Ballad
A long, narrative poem, usually in meter and rhyme. Typically has a naive folksy quality.
Pathos
Writing evokes feelings of dignified pity and sympathy.
Rhetorical question
A question that suggests an answer.
Spondee
A poetic foot -- heavy, heavy
Tetrameter
A poetic line with four feet
Allegory
A story in which each aspect of the story has a symbolic meaning outside the tale itself.
Aesthetic
Appealing to the senses; a coherent sense of taste.
Antihero
A protagonist who is markedly unheroic: morally weak, cowardly, dishonest, or any number of other unsavory qualities.
Blank Verse
unrhymed iambic pentameter.
Coinage (neologism)
A new word, usually one invented on the spot.
Ambibranch
A poetic foot -- light, heavy, light
Rhapsody
An intensely passionate verse or section of verse, usually of love or praise.
Dramatic Irony
When the audience knows something that the characters in the drama do not
Stock characters
Standard or cliched character types.
Tragic flaw
In a tragedy, this is the weakness of a character in an otherwise good (or even great) individual that ultimately leads to his demise.
Paraphrase
To restate phrases and sentences in your own words.
Chorus
In Greek drama, the group of citizens who stand outside the main action on stage and comment on it.
Pentameter
A poetic line with five feet.
Dirge
A song for the dead. Its tone is typically slow, heavy, depressed, and melancholy
Parable
A story that instructs.
Cacophony
In poetry, using deliberately harsh, awkward sounds.
Feminine rhyme
Lines rhymed by their final two syllables. Properly, the penultimate syllables are stressed and the final syllables are unstressed.
Catharsis
Drawn from Aristotle's writings on tragedy. Refers to the "cleansing" of emotion an audience member experiences during a play
Dissonance
Refers to the grating of incompatible sounds.
Classic
Typical, or an accepted masterpiece.
Antecedent
The word, phrase, or clause that determines what a pronoun refers to.
Anecdote
A Short Narrative
Subjectivity
A treatment of subject matter that uses the interior or personal view of a single observer and is typically colored with that observer's emotional responses.
Abstract
Complex, discusses intangible qualities like good and evil, seldom uses examples to support its points.
Aphorism
A short and usually witty saying.
Epitaph
Lines that commemorate the dead at their burial place.
Pun
The usually humorous use of a word in such a way to suggest two or more meanings
Requiem
A song of prayer for the dead.
Trimeter
A poetic line with three feet
Syntax
The ordering and structuring of words.
Elegy
A type of poem that meditates on death or mortality in a serious, thoughtful manner.
Nemesis
The protagonist's arch enemy or supreme and persistent difficulty.
Archaism
The use of deliberately old-fashioned language.
Oxymoron
A phrase composed of opposites; a contradiction.
Implicit
To say or write something that suggests and implies but never says it directly or clearly.
Personification
When an inanimate object takes on human shape.
Foreshadowing
An event of statement in a narrative that in miniature suggests a larger event that comes later.
Pastoral
A poem set in tranquil nature or even more specifically, one about shepherds.
Allusion
A reference to another work or famous figure.
Epic
A very long narrative poem on a serious theme in a dignified style; typically deal with glorious or profound subject matter.
Aside
A speech (usually just a short comment) made by an actor to the audience, as though momentarily stepping outside of the action on stage.
Lyric
A type of poetry that explores the poet's personal interpretation of and feelings about the world.
Connotation
Everything other than the literal meaning that a word suggests or implies.
Bathos
Writing strains for grandeur it can't support and tries too hard to be a tear jerker.
Consonance
The repetition of consonant sounds within words (rather than at their beginnings)
Utopia
An idealized place. Imaginary communities in which people are able to live in happiness, prosperity, and peace.
Anthropomorphism
When inanimate objects are given human characteristics. Often confused with personification.
Doggerel
Crude, simplistic verse, often in sing-song rhyme, like limericks.
Conceit (Controlling Image)
A startling or unusual metaphor, or to a metaphor developed and expanded upon several lines.
Colloquialism
A word or phrase used in everyday conversational English that isn't a part of accepted "school-book" English.
Opposition
A pairing of images whereby each becomes more striking and informative because it's placed in contrast to the other one.
Ode
A poem in praise of something divine or noble
Hyperbole
Exaggeration or deliberate overstatement.
Omniscient
A third person narrator who sees into each character's mind and understands all the action going on.
Objective
A thrid person narrator who only reports on what would be visible to a camera. Does not know what the character is thinking unless the character speaks it.
Bombast
Pretentious, exaggeratedly learned language.
Assonance
The repeated use of vowel sounds: "Old king Cole was a merry old soul."
Euphemism
A word or phrase that takes the place of a harsh, unpleasant, or impolite reality.
Inversion
Switching the customary order of elements in a sentence or phrase.
Parody
The work that results when a specific work is exaggerated to ridiculousness.
Gothic
A sensibility that includes such features as dark, gloomy castles and weird screams from the attic each night.
Symbolism
A device in literature where an object represents an idea.
Foil
A secondary character whose purpose is to highlight the characteristics of a main character, usually by contrast.
Farce
Extremely broad humor; in earlier times, a funny play or a comedy.
Limited Omniscient
A Third person narrator who generally reports only what one character sees, and who only reports the thoughts of that one privileged character.
Suggest
To imply, infer, indicate.
Refrain
A line or set of lines repeated several times over the course of a poem.
Dactyl
A poetic foot -- heavy, light, light
Stanza
A group of lines roughly analogous in function in verse to the paragraphs function in prose.
Couplet
A pair of lines that end in rhyme
Plaint
A poem or speech expressing sorrow.
Aspect
A trait or characteristic
Cadence
The beat or rhythm or poetry in a general sense.
Anachronism
"Misplaced in time." An aspect of a story that doesn't belong in its supposed time setting.
Academic
Dry and rhetorical writing; sucking all the life out of its subject with analysis.
Onomatopoeia
Words that sound like what they mean
Canto
The name for a section division in a long work of poetry.
Periodic Sentence
A sentence that is not grammatically complete until it has reached it s final phrase: Despite Barbara's irritation at Jack, she loved him.
Enjambment
The continuation of a syntactic unit from one line or couplet of a poem to the next with no pause.
Free verse
poetry written without a regular rhyme scheme or metrical pattern
Decorum
A character's speech must be styled according to her social station, and in accordance to the situation.
Technique
The methods and tools of the author.
Apostrophe
A figure of speech wherein the speaker talks directly to something that is nonhuman.
Irony
A statement that means the opposite of what it seems to mean; uses an undertow of meaning, sliding against the literal a la Jane Austen.
Trochee
A poetic foot -- heavy, light
Burlesque
Broad parody, one that takes a style or form and exaggerates it into ridiculousness.
Iamb
A poetic foot -- light, heavy
Parenthetical phrase
A phrase set off by commas that interrupts the flow of a sentence with some commentary or added detail.
Genre
A sub-category of literature.
Metonymy
A word that is used to stand for something else that it has attributes of or is associated with.
Lament
A poem of sadness or grief over the death of a loved one or over some other intense loss.
Travesty
A grotesque parody
Black humor
The use of disturbing themes in comedy.
Paradox
A situation or statement that seems to contradict itself, but on closer inspection, does not.
Persona
The narrator in a non first-person novel.
First person
A narrator who is a character in the story and tells the tale from his or her point of view.
Foot
The basic rhythmic unit of a line of poetry, formed by a combination of two or three syllables, either stressed or unstressed.
Explicit
To say or write something directly and clearly.
Denotation
A word's literal meaning.
Unreliable narrator
When the first person narrator is crazy, a liar, very young, or for some reason not entirely credible
Theme
The main idea of the overall work; the central idea.
Interior Monologue
Refers to writing that records the mental talking that goes on inside a character's head; tends to be coherent.
Masculine rhyme
A rhyme ending on the final stressed syllable (regular old rhyme)
Pyrrhie
A poetic foot -- light, light
Parallelism
Repeated syntactical similarities used for effect.
Complex (Dense)
Suggesting that there is more than one possibility in the meaning of words; subtleties and variations; multiple layers of interpretation; meaning both explicit and implicit
Atmosphere
The emotional tone or background that surrounds a scene
Metaphor
A comparison or analogy that states one thing IS another.
Protagonist
The main character of a novel or play
Soliloquy
A speech spoken by a character alone on stage, meant to convey the impression that the audience is listening to the character's thoughts.
Diction
The words an author chooses to use.
Analogy
A comparison, usually involving two or more symbolic parts, employed to clarify an action or a relationship.
Summary
A simple retelling of what you've just read.
Dramatic Monologue
When a single speaker in literature says something to a silent audience.
Lampoon
A satire.
Anticlimax
Occurs when an action produces far smaller results than one had been led to expect.
In media res
Latin for "in the midst of things," i.e. beginning an epic poem in the middle of the action.
Point of View
The perspective from which the action of a novel is presented.
Objectivity
Treatment of subject matter in an impersonal manner or from an outside view.
Subjunctive Mood
A grammatical situation involving the words "if" and "were," setting up a hypothetical situation.
Truism
A way-too obvious truth
Suspension of disbelief
The demand made of a theater audience to accept the limitations of staging and supply the details with their imagination.
Simile
A comparison or analogy that typically uses like or as.
Anapest
A poetic foot -- light, light, heavy
Melodrama
A form of cheesy theater in which the hero is very, very good, the villain mean and rotten, and the heroine oh-so-pure.
Stream of Consciousness
Author places the reader inside the main character's head and makes the reader privy to all of the character's thoughts as they scroll through her consciousness.
Thesis
The main position of an argument. The central contention that will be supported.
Meaning
What makes sense, what's important.
Euphony
When sounds blend harmoniously.
Hubris
The excessive pride or ambition that leads to the main character's downfall

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