Studied by 9 people
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.
Note
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