American Literature Final Exam Review Flashcards

Flashcards to help review authors, titles, literary terms, and essay prompts for the American Literature final exam.

Blank Verse

A poem written with a specific meter but no rhyme scheme.

Harlem Renaissance

A flourishing of African American art, literature, and music in the 1920s and 1930s.

Stanza

A group of lines forming a unit in a poem.

Couplet

Two lines of verse, usually in the same meter and joined by rhyme, that form a unit.

Sestet

A six-line stanza or poem.

Quatrain

A four-line stanza.

Octave

An eight-line stanza.

Imagery

Visually descriptive or figurative language, especially in a literary work.

Dialogue

Conversation between two or more people as a feature of a book, play, or movie.

Dialect

A particular form of a language which is peculiar to a specific region or social group.

Modernism

A period characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional ways of writing, in both poetry and prose fiction.

Perspective

A particular attitude toward or way of regarding something; a point of view.

Grotesque character

A character who induces both empathy and disgust.

Gothic

A style of writing that is characterized by elements of fear, horror, death, and gloom, as well as romantic elements, such as nature, individuality, and very high emotion.

Plot

The main events of a play, novel, movie, or similar work, presented by the writer as an interrelated sequence.

Exposition

The background information about events, settings, characters, or other elements of a work.

Inciting incident

An event or decision that begins a story's problem.

Development

Events that form the rising action of a story in which the conflict becomes clear.

Climax

The most intense, exciting, or important point of something; a culmination or apex.

Resolution

The part of the story’s plot line in which the problems faced by the characters are resolved.

Epiphany

The moment in the story where a character achieves realization, awareness, or a feeling of knowledge, after which events are seen through the prism of this new understanding.

Rising action

A related series of incidents in a literary plot that build toward the point of greatest interest.

Falling action

Occurs after the climax, as the story approaches its end.

Foreshadowing

A literary device in which a writer gives an advance hint of what is to come later in the story.

Extended metaphor

A comparison between two unlike things that continues throughout a series of sentences in a paragraph or lines in a poem.

Simile

A figure of speech involving the comparison of one thing with another thing of a different kind, used to make a description more emphatic or vivid. Uses is, as

Metaphor

A figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.

Alliteration

The occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words.

Assonance

The repetition of the sound of a vowel or diphthong in nonrhyming stressed syllables near enough to each other for the echo to be discernible.

Consonance

The recurrence of similar sounds, especially consonants, in close proximity.

Parallelism

The use of successive verbal constructions in poetry or prose which correspond in grammatical structure, sound, meter, meaning, etc.

Antithesis

A person or thing that is directly opposite to someone or something else.

In medias res

Into the middle of a narrative; without preamble.

Flashback

An interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point.

Frame story

A story within a story.

Lyric Poem

A formal type of poetry which expresses personal emotions or feelings, typically spoken in the first person.

Epiphany

A moment of sudden revelation or insight.

Free verse

Poetry that does not rhyme or have a regular meter.

End-stopped

A metrical line ending at a grammatical boundary or break.

Enjambed

The running over of a sentence or phrase from one verse into the next, without a major pause or break.

John Steinbeck

Who wrote "The Turtle"?

John F. Kennedy

Who wrote "Inaugural Address"?

Martin Luther King Jr.

Who wrote "Letter from Birmingham Jail"?

Langston Hughes

Who wrote "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "Harlem," and "I, Too"?

Lorraine Hansberry

Who wrote "A Raisin in the Sun"?

John Hersey

Who wrote "Hiroshima"?

Bernard Malamud

Who wrote “The First Seven Years”?

Flannery O'Connor

Who wrote "The Life You Save May Be Your Own"?

Robert Frost

Who wrote "Birches" and "Mending Wall"?

Raymond Carver

Who wrote "Everything Stuck to Him"?

William Stafford

Who wrote "Traveling in the Dark"?

Denise Levertov

Who wrote "The Secret"?

Li-Young Lee

Who wrote "The Gift"?

Stanley Kunitz

Who wrote "Halley's Comet"?

Martin Espada

Who wrote "Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper"?

Yusef Komunjakaa

Who wrote "Camouflaging the Chimera"?

Naomi Shihab Nye

Who wrote "Streets"?

Judith Ortiz Cofer

Who wrote "The Latin Deli: An Ars Poetica"?

Julia Alvarez

Who wrote "Antojos"?

United States

emerged from WW1 as the world’s most powerful nation.

The Cold War

The period of geopolitical tension between the Soviet Union and the United States following World War II.

Joseph McCarthy

A U.S. Senator known for his anti-communist efforts and leading a campaign against alleged communists in the government during the 1950s.