AP Lit Literary Terms

Allegory

A narrative that uses symbolic figures and actions to convey a deeper moral or political meaning, often representing abstract ideas or principles.

Allusion

A reference to a well-known person, place, event, literary work, or work of art, used to enrich the meaning of a text.

Alliteration

The repetition of initial consonant sounds in closely positioned words or phrases, often used for emphasis or rhythm in poetry and prose.

Anaphora

The deliberate repetition of the first part of successive sentences or phrases, often used to create emphasis and rhythm in speech and writing.

Anastrophe

A rhetorical device involving the inversion of the usual order of words or phrases, often used to create a distinctive style or emphasis.

Apostrophe

A figure of speech in which a speaker directly addresses an absent person, an abstract idea, or a thing, often used to convey emotion or a sense of longing.

Assonance

The repetition of vowel sounds in closely positioned words or phrases, often used to create internal rhyming and musicality in poetry and prose.

Blank verse

Unrhymed iambic pentameter commonly used in English dramatic and narrative poetry.

Cacophony

A harsh, discordant mixture of sounds, often used in literature to convey chaos or discomfort, contrasting with euphony.

Caesura

A pause or break in a line of poetry, often occurring mid-line, which adds a rhythmic variety and emphasizes certain words or phrases.

Carpe diem

Thene encouraging people to “seize the day”

Characterization

Development of characters

Chiasmus

Reversed grammatical structure in successive phrases.

Closed poetic form

Poetry with a fixed structure in rhyme, meter, and structure.

Conceit

Extended comparison between two different things.

Connotation

Emotional or cultural associations of a word beyond its original meaning.

Consonance

Repetition of consonant sounds within or at the ends of nearby words.

Couplet

Two consecutive lines of poetry that rhyme.

Denotation

The literal dictionary definition of a word.

Diction

Specific choice of words.

Elegy

poem expressing sorrow

Ellipsis

Omission of words that are understood from context.

End rhyme

Rhyming words occurring at the ends of lines.

Euphony

Pleasant harmonious sounds in language

Exact rhyme

words whose ending sounds are identical.

Foil

Character whose qualities contract with another to highlight differences.

Frame narrative

story containing another story within.

Hyperbole

Exaggeration for emphasis or effect.

Imagery

Descriptive language that appeals to the senses

Inexact rhyme

similar but not identical ending sounds.

Internal rhyme

Rhyming words within the same line in poetry.

Irony

Contrasts between expectation and reality.

Juxtaposition

Two things being placed side by side to emphasize their differences or similarities.

Metaphor

Comparison between two unlike things using “like” or “as”

Meter

Rhythmic pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry.

Metonymy

Referring to something by the name of something else that is associated with it.

Onomatopoeia

Word that imitates a sound it describes.

Oxymoron

phrase combining contradictory terms

Periodic sentence

sentence in which the main idea appears in the end.

Personification

Human qualities in animals, objects, or ideas.

Point of View

Perspective of a narrative.

Quatrain

Stanza of four lines.

Rhyme

Repetition of similar ending sounds.

Stanza

groupes set of lines in a poem.

Synecdoche

figure of speech where a part represents the while or the whole represents a part.

Syntax

Arrangement of words and sentences.

Tercet

A stanza of three lines.

Tone

attitude towards the subject or the audience.

Villanelle

Fixed poem of 19 lines, repeating refrains, and a specific rhyme scheme.