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Allegory
A narrative in which characters, action, and sometimes setting represent abstract concepts or moral qualities.
Alliteration
The repetition of same or similar consonant sounds in words that are close together.
Allusion
A seemingly brief reference to something in history, politics, literature, art, or music which the writer expects the reader to understand and relate to the work.
Anagnorisis
A moment of recognition or discovery, primarily used in Greek tragedy.
Antagonist
The character that opposes the hero.
Antithesis
A figure of speech in which an opposition or contrast of ideas is expressed by parallelism of words that are the opposites of, or strongly contrasted with, each other.
Aphorism
A short, often witty statement of a principle or a truth about life.
Atmosphere
The mood or prevailing feeling created in a literary work.
Binary opposition
A pair of related terms or concepts that are opposite in meaning.
Caricature
Exaggeration or distortion of a character’s physical, emotional, and moral characteristics, for the purpose of comic criticism.
Catharsis
An emotional discharge through which one can achieve a state of moral or spiritual renewal or achieve a state of liberation from anxiety and stress.
Character
An imaginary person in a literary work.
Static character
A character that does not change in the course of the story.
Dynamic character
A character that changes in some important way as a result of the story’s action.
Flat character
A character that has few personality traits and can be summed up by a single phrase.
Round character
A character that has more dimension to their personalities and is complex like real people.
Characterization
The creation of believable fictitious personalities.
Cliché
An overused phrase which has lost its freshness.
Close reading
A careful reading that is attentive to organization, figurative language, sentence structure, vocabulary, and other literary and structural elements of a text.
Colloquial
Informal language of a region, the vernacular.
Confidant
A character in a novel or a drama who takes little part in the action but is a close friend of the main character and who receives the confidences and intimate thoughts of the main character.
Conflict
The struggle between opposing forces in a story.
Internal conflict
Involves opposing forces within a person’s mind.
External conflict
Exists between two people, between a person and a force of nature or a machine, or between a person and a whole society.
Connotation
The implied meaning of a word or phrase.
Crisis
A significant action which changes inevitably the course of the literary work.
Denouement
The final part of a play, movie, or narrative in which the strands of the plot are drawn together and matters are explained or resolved.
Denotation
The literal (dictionary) meaning of a word or phrase.
Dialect
A way of speaking that is characteristic of a certain group or of the inhabitants of a certain geographical area.
Dialogue
The conversation of characters in a story.
Diction
The choice or use of words in oral and written discourse.
Epiphany
A sudden, powerful and spiritual realization.
Euphemism
The use of a mild, delicate, inoffensive, or vague word or expression for one thought to be coarse, unpleasant, offensive, or blunt.
Figurative language
A form of language in which writers and speakers mean something other than the literal meaning of their words.
Flashback
An interruption of a story's chronology to describe an incident that occurred prior to the main time frame of the action.
Foil
A character whose traits are the opposite of those of another character and who thus points up the strengths or weaknesses of another character.
Foreshadowing
Implication by the author of events to come later in a literary work.
Hyperbole
An exaggeration for the sake of emphasis and is not to be taken literally.
Idiom
Phrase or expression that means something different from what the words actually say.
Imagery
The use of vivid, concrete sensory details.
In media res
Starting a narrative in the middle of the action.
Intertextuality
A textual reference within some text that reflects the text used as a reference.
Irony
The contrast between what appears to be on the surface and what actually is.
Verbal irony
Occurs when someone says one thing and means something else.
Situational irony
Occurs when the opposite of what the characters or reader expects happens.
Dramatic irony
Occurs when an audience or reader knows some crucial piece of information that the characters do not know.
Jargon
Specialized or technical language of a trade, profession, or similar group.
Malapropism
The act or habit of misusing words to comic effect.
Metaphor
A figure of speech involving an implied comparison between two essentially unlike things.
Mixed metaphor
A metaphor that does not make a logical comparison.
Microcosm
A tiny world within the macrocosm.
Mood
The atmosphere or predominant emotion in a literary work.
Motif
A central theme or idea that is repeated in a work.
Motivation
A circumstance or set of circumstances that prompts a character to act in a certain way or that determines the outcome of a situation or literary work.
Non-linear narrative
A story that is not told in chronological order.
Onomatopoeia
Words which imitate sounds.
Oxymoron
A figure of speech that combines opposite or contradictory ideas or terms.
Paradox
A statement or situation that seems contradictory or mistaken on the surface, yet turns out to make sense when carefully examined.
Parallel structure
The use of similar forms in writing for nouns, verbs, phrases, or thoughts.
Parallelism
Similarities between elements (themes, symbols, characters) in a narrative.
Pathetic fallacy
The attribution of human feeling or motivation to a nonhuman object, mostly nature.
Pathos
The quality of work that evokes high emotion (sorry, pity, compassion) in the reader or audience.
Pattern
Any significant recurrences within a literary work.
Persona
The mask which covers the direct voice of the author.
Personification
The giving of human characteristics to something which is essentially non-human.
Plot
The progression of events in a literary work.
Exposition
Opening information in a literary work; usually provides background information, establishes the setting, and introduces the characters.
Rising action
A set of conflicts and crises which lead up to the climax.
Climax
The turning point or highest peak of the action in the plot.
Falling action
The action following the climax.
Resolution (or denouement)
The final unraveling of the plot, solution of mystery, explanation or outcome, or untying of the knot of intrigue.
Point of view
The perspective from which the author conveys the story to the reader.
First person point of view
The narrator is the one telling the story from their point of view using the pronoun "I".
Third person limited point of view
The narration is outside the characters but the motivations and thoughts of all characters are not understood but rather, ONE character's motivations and thoughts are revealed and drive the story.
Third person omniscient point of view
An all-knowing narrator knows every character's thoughts, feelings, and motivations.
Prose
The normal pattern of speech and writing (any writing other than poetry).
Protagonist
The main character in a literary work, who may or may not be heroic.
Pun
A play on words or the humorous use of a word emphasizing a different meaning or application.
Sarcasm
The use of verbal irony in which a person appears to be praising something but is actually insulting it.
Setting
The environment in which a story unfolds.
Simile
Direct comparison of one thing with another, announced by the words "like" or "as".
Suspense
The poised anticipation of the reader or audience as to the outcome of the events of a short story, a novel, or a drama.
Style
The way an author chooses words, arranges them in sentences and dialogue, and develops ideas and action with description and summary by means of imagery and other literary techniques.
Symbol/symbolism
Something relatively concrete, such as an object, action, character, or scene, which signifies something relatively abstract, such as a concept or an idea.
Synaesthesia
The use of one kind of sensory experience to describe another.
Syntax
The arrangement of words to form phrases, clauses, and sentences; sentence construction.
Theme
The main idea of a literary work.
Tone
The writer's or speaker's implied attitude toward his subject, characters, and audience, and sometimes toward himself.
Tragedy
In its most general sense, a term referring to any narrative writing in which the protagonist suffers disaster after a serious and significant struggle, but faces his downfall in such a way as to attain heroic stature.