english lit terms 5

Satire

The use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.

Parody

The imitative use of the words, style, attitude, tone, and ideas of an author in such a way as to make them ridiculous, usually achieved by exaggerating certain traits.

Euphemism

A device in which indirectness replaces directness of statement, usually in an effort to avoid offensiveness.

Allegory

A story or visual image with a second distinct meaning partially hidden, typically utilizing personification.

Fable

A brief tale in verse or prose that conveys a moral lesson, often giving human speech and manners to animals.

Moral

The lesson to be learned from a story, poem, fable, or play, aiming to teach directly or obliquely.

Invective

Abusive writing directed against a person, group, institution, or life itself.

Anthropomorphism

The showing or treating of animals, gods, and objects as if they are human in appearance, character, or behavior.

Active Voice

An active sentence is when the subject of the sentence is the one doing the action expressed by the verb.

Passive Voice

A passive sentence is when the subject is being acted upon by the verb, intentionally obscuring who is acting.

Dependent Clause

A group of words that contains both a subject and a verb but is still a sentence fragment, beginning with a subordinating conjunction or relative pronoun.

Subordinating Conjunction

A word that introduces a dependent clause and connects it with an independent clause, making one clause dependent upon the other.

Relative Pronouns

Words that refer to antecedents and begin dependent clauses, often serving as the subject of the dependent clause.

Complex Sentence

A sentence that includes both an independent clause and a dependent clause, joined by a conjunction or pronoun.