Honors World LIterature II Final Exam Review

Who wrote Irish Airman Foresees His Death?

William Butler Yeats

Who wrote Hay for the Horses?

Gary Snyder

Who wrote How Much Land Does a Man Need?

Leo Tolstoy

Who wrote The Terrorist, He Watches?

Wislawa Szymborska

Who wrote Ode on a Grecian Urn?

John Keats

Who wrote Sound of Thunder?

Ray Bradbury

Who wrote Things Fall Apart?

Chinua Achebe

Who wrote Second Coming (Epigraph)?

William Butler Yeats

Who wrote Sonnet 29?

William Shakespeare

Who wrote Serene Words?

Gabriela Mistral

Who wrote Snake?

D.H. Lawrence

Who wrote The Guest?

Albert Camus

Who wrote False Gems?

Guy de Maupassant

Who wrote My Last Duchess?

Robert Browning

Who wrote Love and Bread?

August Strindburg

Who wrote Sonnet 116?

William Shakespeare

Who wrote A Poison Tree?

William Blake

Allegory

A story, poem, or picture that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one by use of symbolism (Ex. Dante’s Inferno)

Allusion

An implied or indirect reference to a person, event, or thing or to a part of another text.

Alliteration

Alliteration is the repetition of the same sound at the start of a series of words in succession whose purpose is to provide an audible pulse that gives a piece of writing a lulling, lyrical, and/or emotive effect.

Anaphora

The repetition of a word or sequence of words at the beginning of successive clauses, phrases, or sentences. (Ex. Irish Airman Foresees his Death)

Anastrophe

A literary device where the writer will rearrange the normal word order to create a new effect with the sentence, saying, or idea. “Yoda Talk” (Ex. Ode on a Grecian Urn)

Antithesis

A rhetorical and literary device with parallel grammar structure but which establishes a nearly complete or exact opposition in ideas or characters. \[In Hamlet, it says “Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice.”\]

Apostraphe

A speech or address to a person who is not present or to a personified object. (Ex. Ode on a Grecian Urn)

Archetype

An image, character, or pattern of circumstances that recurs throughout literature and thought consistently enough to be considered a universal concept or situation. \[Dante’s Inferno CREATES many Archetypes\]

Blank Verse

Refers to poetry written in unrhymed but metered lines. (Typically Iambic)

Caesura

A stop or pause in a metrical line, often marked by punctuation or by a grammatical boundary, such as a phrase or clause. (Ex. My Last Duchess)

Climax

The point at which the highest level of interest and emotional response is achieved in literture.

Couplet

A pair (2) of consecutive lines of poetry that create a complete thought or idea.

Consonance

The repetition of identical or similar consonants in neighboring words whose vowel sounds are different. \[“Mike likes his new bike.”\]

Connotation

The feeling or implied definition when a word or phrase is used in literature.

Denotation

The official, dictionary definition of a word; the literal meaning.

How many lines are in a Sonnet?

Fourteen

Dramatic Monologue

An (emotional) poem written in the form of a speech of an individual character. (Ex. My Last Duchess)

Dramatic Irony

A literary and theatrical device in which the reader or audience knows more than the characters they are following.

Epigraph

An epigraph is a short standalone quote, line, or paragraph that appears at the beginning of a book. (Ex. William Butler Yeats’ *Second Coming* at the beginning of Chinua Achebe’s *Things Fall Apart)*

Epitaph

A short poem intended for (or imagined as) an inscription on a tombstone and often serving as a brief elegy.

Enjambment

A poetic term for the continuation of a sentence or phrase from one line of poetry to the next.

Epic Poem

An epic is a long, often book-length, narrative in verse form that retells the heroic journey of a single person or a group of persons. (Ex. The Divine Comedy)

Existentialism

Existential literature, typically characterized by an individual who exists in a chaotic and seemingly meaningless environment. There are often motifs of isolation and the idea of living outside of societal norms. (Ex. The Guest)

Foot

A poetic foot is a basic repeated sequence of meter composed of two accented or unaccented syllables.

Free Verse

Without a rhyme pattern or scheme.

Foreshadowing

A literary device used to give an indication or hint of what is to come later in the story.

Foil

A literary foil is a character whose purpose is to accentuate or draw attention to the qualities of another character, most often the protagonist. (Ex. Okonkwo and Unoka)

Prosody

When you look for meter or rhythm in literature. \[Mrs. Wilkerson’s tapping lesson!\]

Terza Rima

“Three Rhyme” ABA BCB CDC

Aside

A short line where the speaker or narrator quickly breaks the wall to talk to the reader directly. (Ex. Love and Bread)

Hyperbole

A rhetorical and literary technique where an author or speaker intentionally uses exaggeration and overstatement for emphasis and effect.

Iambic Pentameter

A rhythm structure, used most commonly in poetry, that combines unstressed syllables and stressed syllables in groups of five.

Trochaic Pentamer

Lines of verse that contain five sets of two beats, the first of which is stressed and the second is unstressed.

Imagery

The use of description to appeal to a readers' senses and create an image or idea in their head.

Irony

A literary device is a situation in which there is a contrast between expectation and reality.

Absurdism

A type of existentialism that explores non-chronological storytelling, surrealism, and comedy.

Juxtaposition

Placing two things side by side so as to highlight their differences.

Logos

Credit used appeal to the audiences' sense of reason or logic.

Meter

The rhythmic pattern of a poetic line.

Metaphor

A comparison between two things that are otherwise unrelated.

Motif

Reoccurring ideas that build thematic ideas, and furthermore, the theme(s).

Naturalism

A literary movement taking place from 1865 to 1900 that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character.

Ode

A short lyric poem that praises an individual, an idea, or an event.

Oxymoron

A literary device that combines words with contradictory definitions to form a new word or phrase

Octave

A verse form consisting of eight lines of iambic pentameter.

Paradox

A statement, pair of statements, or even the exploration of an idea that seems contradictory upon first glance.

Parable

A succinct, didactic story, in prose or verse, that illustrates one or more instructive lessons or principles.

Personification

A literary device that uses non-literal language to convey abstract ideas in a relatable way.

Pathetic Fallacy

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

Pathos

The appeal to emotion, means to persuade an audience by purposely evoking certain emotions to make them feel the way the author wants them to feel.

Psychonym

A word or name with a second, or hidden meaning. (Ex. Travis in Sound of Thunder)

Romanticism

A literary movement spanning roughly 1790–1850 characterized by the elebration of nature and the common man, a focus on individual experience, an idealization of women, and an embrace of isolation and melancholy.

Quatrain

A piece of verse complete in four rhymed lines.

Scansion

The act of using prosody to determine meter.

Sestet

A six-line stanza, or the final six lines of a 14-line Italian or Petrarchan sonnet.

Soliloquy

A monologue that is delivered when the character is alone, often directly to the reader/audience.

Setting

The time and place in which a story is told.

Simile

A figure of speech that compares two unlike things using the words “like” or “as.”

Theme

The meaning of the work as a whole; central and unifying idea.

Truncation

The shortening of a search term so as to bring up words that share a root word but have different endings.

Understatement

The use of a transitive verb used by writers or speakers in order to intentionally make a situation seem less important or smaller than it is; these often have ironic effects because the intensity of the situation is not adequately expressed.