Vocab 101-120

1. pastoral: a poem, play, or story that celebrates and idealizes the simple life of shepherds and shepherdesses.

2. pathos: The quality of a literary work or passage which appeals to the reader's or viewer's emotions- especially

3. periodic sentence: A sentence that delivers its point at the end; usually constructed as a subordinate clause followed by a main clause. ex. At the piano she practiced scales.

4. personification: The attribution of human characteristics to an animal or to an inanimate object. Wordsworth's daffodils 'tossing their heads in a sprightly dance' in 'I Wandered Lonely as a cloud'

5. point of view: Perspective of the speaker or narrator in a literary work.

6. polysyndeton: repetition of conjunctions in close succession (as in we have ships and men and money).

7. prose: the ordinary language people use to express themselves; the opposite of poetry.

8. protagonist: The main or principal character in a work; often considered the hero or heroine. Hamlet, Macbeth Oedipus, Anna Karenina, and Tom Sawyer are the protagonists of the eponymous works in which they appear.

9. physiognomy: The assessment of a person's character or personality from his or her outer appearance, especially the face. The term can also refer to the general appearance of a person, object or terrain.

10. pun: Humorous play on words that have several meanings or words that sound the same but have different meanings. In Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio's 'You will find me a grave man' refers both to the seriousness of his words and the fact that he is dying.

11. quatrain: Four-line stanza.

12. refrain: Repetition of a line, stanza, or phrase.

13. repetition: A word or phrase used more than once to emphasize an idea.

14. rhetorical question: A question with an obvious answer, so no one response is expected; used for emphasis or to make a point.

15. satire: The use of humor to ridicule and expose the shortcomings and failings of society, individuals, and institutions, often in the hope that change and reform are possible. Swift's suggestion in 'A Modest Proposal' that Irish babies be butchered and sold as food to wealthy English landlords in order to alleviate poverty in Ireland is a classic example of satire because Swift was really savagely attacking the English for exploiting the Irish. Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest satirizes Victorian social hypocrisy.

16. scansion: the process of measuring metrical verse, this is, of marking accented and unaccented syllables, dividing the lines into feet, identifying the metrical pattern, and noting significant variations from that pattern.

17. sestet: A six-line stanza of poetry; also, the last six lines of an Italian/Petrarchan sonnet. 18. shift: In writing, a movement from one thought or idea to another; a change.

19. simile: A comparison of unlike things using the word like, as, or so.

20. soliloquy: A dramatic or literary form of discourse in which a character talks to himself or herself or reveals his or her thoughts without addressing a listener.