ap lit 100 summer terms to know

Alliteration

Repetition of initial consonant sounds or letters, mainly for tonal effects.

Allegory

A literary form in which elements of actions, character, and setting stand for general concepts or parallel elements in life.

Ambiguity

A situation in which something can be understood in more than one way and it is not clear which meaning is intended.

Anaphora

Repetition of the same words at the beginning of several consecutive sentences.

Anastrophe

The natural order of words is inverted to emphasize the phrase that is displaced.

Analogy

Sustained comparison, usually to clarify complex or abstract idea

Anglo-Saxon

Old English. A low Germanic language.

Anecdote

Very short, unadorned narrative, usually to illustrate character or personality.

Antithesis

A rhetorical pattern in which contrasting ideas are emphasized by the balance or parallelism of words.

Antihero

Somebody who is the central character in a story but who is not brave, noble, or morally good as heroes traditionally are.

Aphorism

A concise, pointed epigrammatic statement that purports to reveal a truth or principle.

Aposiopesis

When the speaker deliberately stops the sentences short to leave something unexpressed that is, or should be, obvious to the reader

Apostrophe

A direct address to an absent, imaginary, or dead person, or to an object, quality, or idea.

Apotheosis

Elevation to divine status; the perfect example.

Apposition

The writer places two elements side by side; the second element is used to define or modify the first.

Archetype

A term describing certain characters or plot elements representing recurrent patterns of experience in man's inheritance and appearing in myth, legend, dream, and literature

Aristeia

A series of exploits, or deeds of bravery, centered on a single hero.

Assonance

The repetition of similar vowel sounds in a sequence of nearby words

Aside

A remark made by an actor, usually to the audience, that the other characters on stage supposedly cannot hear.

Asyndeton

Conjunctions are omitted from the text in order to speed up the rhythm of the passage.

Atmosphere

A prevailing emotional tone or attitude, especially one associated with a specific place or time.

Aubade

A short lyric expressive of one's feelings at daybreak.

Ballad

Traditionally, a folk song telling a story or legend in simple language, often with a refrain.

Bildungsroman

A novel of formation or of education; the subject is the development of protagonist's mind and character in passage from childhood into maturity.

Blank Verse

Unrhymed iambic pentameter.

Caesura

A pause in a line of poetry.

Canto

A division of a long poem.

Caricature

A drawing, description, or performance that exaggerates somebody's or something's characteristics, for example, somebody's physical features, for humorous or satirical effect.

Chronicle Plays

A play the deals with historical scenes and characters. Popular in 16th century England

Conceit

An elaborate parallel between two seemingly dissimilar object or ideas; common in metaphysical poetry

Comedy of Manners

A satiric form of comedy, most often associated with Restoration-Age drama. Usually takes the artificial and sophisticated habits and doings of aristocratic or high society as its general settings and love or amorous intrigues as its subject.

Connotation

All other associations other than the dictionary meaning, sometimes even unconscious ones, that are conveyed by a word.

Consonance

The repetition of a final consonant sound or sounds following different vowel sounds.

Couplet

Two successive lines of rhyming verse

Denotation

The dictionary meaning of a word; it's straightforward significance

Denouement

French for "unknotting", both refers to events following climax and implies some ingenious resolution of conflict

Deus ex machina

Latin for "god from a machine", the intervention of a nonhuman force to resolve a seemingly irresolvable conflict

Dialect

A regional variety of a language, with differences in vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation.

Diction

Author's word choice

Double entendre

A remark that is ambiguous and sometimes sexually suggestive

Dystopia

The opposite of an utopia; Greek for “bad place”. Usually set in the future and describes an unpleasant, disastrous, or terrifying society or world.

Elegy

A formal poem that laments the death of a friend or public figure, or occasionally a meditation on death itself.

Elegiac

Expressing sorrow or regret; characteristic of a poetic elegy in form or content

Epic

A lengthy narrative that describes the deeds of a heroic figure, often of national or cultural importance, in elevated language

Epithet

An adjective or phrase applied to a noun to accentuate a certain characteristic.

Epiphany

A moment of sudden insight or revelation that a character experiences

End Rhyme

Rhymes appearing at the end of lines of poetry

Enjambment

A poetic expression that spans more than one line.

Epistolary Novel

Narrative told through letters written by one or more characters.

Farce

A comic play in which authority, order, and morality are at risk and ordinary people are caught up in extraordinary goings on.

Foil

Character who, by his contrast with the protagonist, serves to accentuate that character's distinctive qualities or characteristics.

Foot

The basic unit of the accentual-syllabic line.

Framed narrative

A story enclosed with in an embedded narrative, a tale within a tale.

Free Verse

Verse without fixed meter or rhyme, but using formal elements of patterned verse (e.g. assonance, alliteration)

Genre

The classification of literary works on the basis of their content, form, or technique.

Heroic Couplet

Two successive lines of rhymed poetry in iambic pentameter

Hubris

Pride; especially in Greek tragedy, the pride that sets man at variance with the gods.

Hyperbole

Extravagant overstatement, not intended to be taken literally.

Iamb

Two syllables; unstressed, stressed.

Iambic Pentameter

The most common rhythm in English poetry, consisting of five iambs in each line.

Imagery

Words or phrases a writer selects to create a picture in the reader's mind. Usually based on sensory detail.

In medias res

At a critical point in the development of the action: referring to the principle that epics and other narratives should begin literally in the middle of things and postpone previous events to later in the story.

Internal Rhyme

Rhymes before the end of a line of poetry.

Irony

Rhetorically, the use of words to imply a meaning opposite to that literally stated, humor or mockery is involved.

Juxtaposition

The act or an instance of placing two or more things side by side.

Kenning

Metaphorical compound used in the place of a noun; common in Anglo-Saxon poetry.

Local color

Use of details that are common in a certain region of the country.

Lyric

Short poetic composition that describes the thought of a single speaker.

Melodrama

Drama that emphasizes conflict between good and evil; relies on sensational events and improbabilities form dramatic effect.

Metonymy

Substitution of one term for another that is generally associated with it

Meter

The pattern created in a line of poetry by its structure of sounds and stressed syllables.

Mood

The feeling a text arouses in the reader: happiness, sadness, peacefulness, ect.

Momento mori

A reminder of death; a special type of emblem.

Monologue

In drama a speech given by an actor by himself, and not part of the chorus or dialogue.

Motif

An important and repeated theme or element in a text.

Onomatopoeia

Use of words such as “pop”, “buzz”, “hiss”, that sound like the thing they refer to.

Oxymoron

An association of two contrary terms, as in "same difference" or "wise fool".

Paradox

Statement that seems absurd or even contradictory, but often expresses a deeper truth

Parody

A literary form that imitates a specific literary work or the style of an author for comic effect.

Pathos

From the Greek meaning strong emotion often suffering or, in a tragedy, a calamity causing suffering

Persona

An identity or role that somebody assumes.

Personification

The attributing of human qualities to animals, to abstractions, or to inanimate objects.

Picaresque Novel

A type of prose fiction that features the adventures of a roguish hero and usually has a simple plot divided into separate episodes.

Poetic Justice

Idea that virtuous and evil actions are ultimately dealt with justly; virtue is rewarded and evil is punished.

Polysyndeton

Using conjunctions in close succession in order to slow the rhythm of the passage and add solemnity

Refrain

A line or lines that recur throughout a poem or the lyrics of a song.

Rhymed Verse

Poetry that follows a rhyme scheme as opposed to free verse without rhyme.

Rhythm

A term referring to a measured flow of words and signifying the basic beat or pattern established by stressed syllables, unstressed syllables and pauses.

Satire

A literary genre that uses irony, wit, and sometimes sarcasm to expose humanity's vices & foibles, giving impetus to reform through ridicule.

Soliloquy

Lines in a play in which a character reveals thoughts to the audience but not to the other characters; it is usually longer than an aside and not directed at the audience

Sonnet

A lyric poem that almost always consists of fourteen lines (usually printed as a single stanza) and that typically follows one of the conventional rhyme schemes.

Stream of Consciousness

The continuous flow of sense perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and memories in the human mind; a literary method of representing such a blending of mental processes in fictional characters.

Synecdoche

A figure of speech that refers to a whole entity by identifying only a part of it.

Syntax

The manner in which words are arranged into sentences

Tableau

A dramatic, often symbolic arrangement of characters on a stage.

Tone

The attitude of the author toward the reader or the subject matter of a literary work

Understatement

A statement, or a way of expressing yourself, that is deliberately less forceful or dramatic than the subject would seem to justify or require

Unreliable Narrator

One whose perception, interpretation, and evaluation of the matters s/he narrates do not coincide with the implicit opinions and norms of the author or those the author expects the reader to share

Verse

Poetry or an individual poem, that is any metrical composition

Voice

Awareness of a voice behind the fictitious voices that speak in a text. Sense of a pervasive authorial presence, intelligence, and moral sensibility which invented and ordered the literary characters.