LITERARY TERMS LIST: PRE-AP ENGLISH II
Mikayla Bush
ALLEGORY: a story, poem, or picture that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one.
ALLITERATION: Repeating a consonant sound in close proximity to others, or beginning several words with the same vowel sound.
ALLUSION: A casual reference in literature to a person, place, event, or another passage of literature, often without explicit identification.
ANALOGY: A comparison between two things, typically on the basis of their structure and for the purpose of explanation or clarification.
ANTAGONIST: The character against whom the protagonist struggles or contends (if there is one).
ANTITHESIS: A person or thing that is the direct opposite of someone or something else.
APOSTROPHE: An exclamatory passage in a speech or poem addressed to a person (typically one who is dead or absent) or thing (typically one that is personified).
ASSONANCE: Repeating identical or similar vowels (especially in stressed syllables) in nearby words.
ASYNDETON: The artistic elimination of conjunctions in a sentence to create a particular effect.
ATMOSPHERE: The emotional feelings inspired by a work. (Mood)
BLANK VERSE: Unrhymed lines of ten syllables each with the even-numbered syllables bearing the accents.
CHARACTERIZATION: An author or poet's use of description, dialogue, dialect, and action to create in the reader an emotional or intellectual reaction to a character or to make the character more vivid and realistic. ROUND CHARACTER: is extremely realistic, behaving and speaking in a "real life" manner. DYNAMIC CHARACTER: someone who undergoes an important, internal change because of the action in the plot
FLAT CHARACTER:are two-dimensional in that they are relatively uncomplicated and do not change throughout the course of a work.
STATIC CHARACTER: literary or dramatic character who undergoes little or no inner change; a character who does not grow or develop.
CONNOTATION: The extra tinge or taint of meaning each word carries beyond the minimal, strict definition found in a dictionary.
CONSONANCE: A special type of alliteration in which the repeated pattern of consonants is marked by changes in the intervening vowels--i.e., the final consonants of the stressed syllables match each other but the vowels differ.
DENOTATION: The minimal, strict definition of a word as found in a dictionary, disregarding any historical or emotional connotation.
DIALOGUE: conversation between two or more people as a feature of a book, play, or movie
DICTION: The choice of a particular word as opposed to others.
DRAMATIC POETRY: Verse drama is any drama written as verse to be spoken; another possible general term is poetic drama.
EUPHEMISM: a mild or indirect word or expression substituted for one considered to be too harsh or blunt when referring to something unpleasant or embarrassing.
FABLE: a short story, typically with animals as characters, conveying a moral.
FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE: A deviation from what speakers of a language understood as the ordinary or standard use of words in order to achieve some special meaning or effect.
FLASHBACK: A method of narration in which present action is temporarily interrupted so that the reader can witness past events
FORESHADOWING: Suggesting, hinting, indicating, or showing what will occur later in a narrative.
FREE VERSE: Poetry based on the natural rhythms of phrases and normal pauses rather than the artificial constraints of metrical feet.
GENRE: A type or category of literature or film marked by certain shared features or conventions.
HYPERBOLE: the trope of exaggeration or overstatement.
IAMBIC PENTAMETER: is a commonly used type of metrical line in traditional poetry and verse drama
IDIOM: a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words
IMAGERY: A common term of variable meaning, imagery includes the "mental pictures" that readers experience with a passage of
