AP Literature and Composition Literary Terms of Note

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering the key literary terms, devices, and definitions for AP Literature and Composition.

Allusion

A reference, explicit or implicit, to something in previous literature or history.

Anaphora

Repetition of an opening word or phrase in a series of lines.

Analogy

A device that makes use of something already well known to explain something that is not well known.

Antagonist

Any force in a story that is in conflict with the protagonist.

Apostrophe

A figure of speech in which someone absent or dead or something nonhuman is addressed as if it were alive and present and could reply.

Asyndeton

The leaving out of conjunctions between items in a list or clauses.

Bathos

Insincere or overly sentimental quality of writing/speech intended to evoke pity.

Catharsis

A term used by Aristotle to describe some sort of emotional release experienced by the audience at the end of a successful tragedy.

Character

Any of the persons presented in a story or play.

Developing/Dynamic Character

A character who, during the course of a work, undergoes a permanent change in some distinguishing moral quality, personal trait, or outlook.

Flat Character

A character whose distinguishing moral qualities or personal traits are summed up in one or two traits.

Foil Character

A minor character whose situation or actions parallel those of a major character, and thus by contrast sets off or illuminates the major character; most often the contrast is complimentary to the main character.

Round character

A character whose distinguishing moral qualities or personal traits are complex and many sided.

Static Character

A character who is the same sort of person at the end of the work as at the beginning.

Stock Character

A stereotyped character: one whose nature is familiar to the reader from prototypes in previous literature.

Characterization

The various literary means by which characters are presented.

Climax

The turning point or high point in a plot.

Coincidence

The chance occurrence of two events having a peculiar correspondence between them.

Commercial Fiction

Fiction written to meet the taste of a wide popular audience and relying on tested formulas for satisfying such tastes.

Conceit

A fanciful, particularly clever extended metaphor.

Conflict

A clash of actions, desires, ideas, or goals in the plot of a story or drama.

Connotation

What a word suggests beyond its basic dictionary definition; a word's overtone of meaning; a meaning in context.

Denotation

The basic dictionary definition of a word.

Denouement

The portion of a plot that reveals the final outcome of its conflicts or the solution of its mysteries.

Dues ex Machina

“God from the machine”. The resolution of a plot by use of a highly improbable chance or coincidence.

Didactic writing

Poetry, fiction, or drama having as a primary purpose to teach or preach.

Editorializing

Writing that departs from the narrative or dramatic mode and instructs the reader how to think or feel about the events of a story or the behavior of a character.

Epiphany

A moment or event in which a character achieves a spiritual insight into life or into his/her own circumstances.

Epistolary

Refers to the works of fiction that are written in the form of letters or other documents.

Epistrophe

A device in which the same word or phrase is repeated at the end of multiple clauses or sentences.

Exposition

The presentation of background information that helps place the setting, characters, and plot into context so that the reader understands the larger dimensions of the story.

Extended Metaphor

A metaphor sustained or developed through a considerable number of lines or through a whole poem.

Falling Action

The segment of the plot that comes between the climax and the conclusion.

Farce

A type of drama related to comedy but emphasizing improbable situations, violent conflicts, physical action and coarse wit over characterization and plot.

Figurative Language

Language employing figures of speech, language that cannot be taken literally or only literally.

Figure of Speech

Broadly, any way of saying something other than the ordinary way; a way of saying one thing and meaning another.

Frame Device

A story within a story.

Imagery

The representation through language of sense experience.

Indeterminate Ending

An ending in which the central problem or conflict is left unresolved.

Indirect presentation of character

That method of characterization in which the author shows us a character in action, compelling us to infer what the character is like from what is said or done by the character.

Irony

A situation or a use of language involving some kind of incongruity or discrepancy.

Dramatic Irony

An incongruity or discrepancy between what a character says or thinks and what the reader knows to be true.

Situational Irony

A situation in which there is an incongruity between appearance and reality, or between expectation and fulfillment, or between the actual situation and what would seem appropriate.

Verbal Irony

A figure of speech in which what is said is the opposite of what is meant.

Literary Fiction

Fiction written with serious artistic intentions, providing an imagined experience yielding authentic insights into some significant aspect of life.

Litotes

Emphasizes a point by using a word opposite the condition.

Metaphor

A figure of speech in which an implicit comparison is made between two things that are essentially unlike.

Moral

A rule of conduct or maxim for living expressed or implied as the “point” of a literary work.

Oxymoron

A compact verbal paradox in which two successive words seemingly contradict one another.

Paradox

A statement or situation containing apparently contradictory or incompatible elements.

Paradoxical Situation

A situation containing apparently but not actually incompatible elements.

Paradoxical Statement

A figure of speech in which an apparently self-contradictory statement is nevertheless found to be true.

Pathetic Fallacy

The attribution of human feelings and responses to inanimate things or animals, especially in art and literature.

Parallelism

A device that uses the same general structure in multiple parts of a sentence for multiple sentences in order to link them.

Plot Manipulation

A situation in which the author gives the plot a twist or turn unjustified by preceding action or by characters involved.

Point of View

The angle of vision from which a story is told.

First Person

A point of view where the story is told by one of its characters, using the first person.

Objective/Dramatic

A point of view where the author tells the story using the third person, but is limited to reporting what the characters say or do; the author does not interpret the character’s behavior or tell us their private thoughts or feelings.

Omniscient

A point of view where the author tells the story using the third person, knowing all and free to tell us anything, including what the characters are thinking or feeling and why they act as they do.

Third Person Limited

A point of view where the author tells the story using the third person but is limited to a complete knowledge of one character in the story and tells us only what one character thinks, feels, sees, or hears.

Polysyndeton

The putting of a conjunction between every item in a list or multiple clauses.

Prose Meaning

The part of a poem’s total meaning that can be separated out and expressed through paraphrase.

Prose Poem

Usually, a short composition having the intentions of poetry but written in prose rather than verse.

Sarcasm

Bitter or cutting speech; speech intended by its speaker to give pain to the person addressed.

Satire

A kind of literature that ridicules human folly or vice with the purpose of bringing about reform or of keeping others from falling into similar folly or vice.

Sentimentality

Unmerited or contrived tender feeling; that quality in a work that elicits or seeks to elicit tears through an oversimplification or falsification of reality.

Simile

A figure of speech in which an explicit comparison is made between two things especially unalike, explicit by some such word or phrase as like, as, than, similar to, resembles, or seems.

Stream of Consciousness

Narrative that presents the private thoughts of a character without commentary or interpretation by the author.

Structure

The sequential arrangement of plot elements in fiction or drama. In poetry, the internal organization of content.

Surprise Ending

A completely unexpected revelation or turn of plot at the end of a story or play.

Symbol

Something that means more than what it is; an object, person, or action that in addition to its literal meaning suggests other meanings as well.

Synesthesia

Presentation of one sense experience in terms usually associated with another sensation.

Theme

The central idea or unifying generalization implied or stated by a literary work.

Tone

The writer’s or speaker’s attitude toward the subject, the audience, or themselves; the emotional coloring, or emotional meaning of a work.

Understatement

A figure of speech that consists of saying less than one means, or of saying what one means with less force than the occasion warrants.