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Literary Terms A-G
1.
allegory: a literary work that has a second meaning beneath the
surface, often relating to a fixed, corresponding idea or moral principle.
2.
alliteration: repetition of initial consonant sounds. It serves
to please the ear and bind verses
verses together, to make lines
more memorable, and for humorous effect.
·
Already American vessels had been searched, seized, and sunk.
–John F. Kennedy
·
I should like to hear him fly with the high fields/ And wake to
the farm forever fled
from the
childless land. –Dylan Thomas, “Fern Hill”
3.
allusion: A casual reference in literature to a person, place,
event, or another passage of literature, often without explicit
identification. Allusions can originate in mythology, biblical references,
historical events, legends, geography, or earlier literary works. Authors
often use allusion to establish a tone, create an implied association,
contrast two objects or people, make an unusual juxtaposition of references,
or bring the reader into a world of experience outside the limitations of the
story itself. Authors assume that the readers will recognize the original
sources and relate their meaning to the new context.
·
Brightness falls from the air/ Queens have died young and
fair/Dust hath closed
Helen’s eye. –from
Thomas Nashe’s “Litany in Time of Plague;” refers to Helen of Troy.
4.
alter ego: A literary character or narrator who is a
thinly disguised representation of the author, poet, or playwright creating a
work.
5.
anaphora: repetition of the same word or group of words
at the beginnings of successive clauses.
·
The Lord sits above the water floods. The Lord remains a King
forever. The Lord
shall give strength to his
people. The lord shall give his people the blessings of peace. –Ps. 29
·
“Let us march to the realization of the American dream. Let us
march on segregated housing.
Let us march on segregated
schools. Let us march on poverty. Let us march on ballot boxes….
--Martin Luther King, Jr.
·
Mad world ! Mad king! Mad composition !
6.
antagonist: the character or force opposing the protagonist in
a narrative; a rival of the hero
7.
apostrophe: addressing an absent or dead person or a personified
abstraction
·
“Eloquent, just, and mighty Death ! whom none could advise….”
·
O WORLD, I cannot hold thee close enough!
8.
approximate rhyme: also known as imperfect rhyme, near rhyme,
slant rhyme, or oblique rhyme. A term used for words in a rhyming pattern
that have some kind of sound correspondence but are not perfect rhymes. Often
words at the end of lines at first LOOK like they will rhyme but are not
pronounced in perfect rhyme. Emily Dickinson’s poems are famous for her use of
approximate rhyme.
9.
assonance: the repetition of vowel sounds
·
The child of mine was lying on her
side. [i]
·
"Over the mountains / Of the moon, /
Down the valley of the shadow, / Ride, boldly ride,/The shade
replied,-- / "If you seek for Eldorado!" [o sound]
10.
asyndeton: deliberate omission of conjunctions between
series of related clauses.
·
I came, I saw, I conquered. -- Julius Caesar
·
The infantry plodded forward, the tanks rattled into position,
the big guns swung their snouts toward the rim of the hills, the planes raked
the underbrush with gunfire.
·
..and that government of the people, by the people, for the
people, shall not perish from the earth.
–Abraham Lincoln
11.
aubade: a poem about dawn; a morning love-song; or a poem about
the parting of lovers at dawn
12.
ballad: a song, transmitted orally, which tells a story.
Usually narrator begins with a climactic or traumatic
episode, tells the story
tersely by means of action and dialogue and tells it without self-reference
or the expression of personal
attitudes or feelings. Many ballads employ (1) stock repetitive phrases such
as “blood-red wine” and “milk white steed,” (2) a refrain in each stanza,
and (3) incremental repetition, in which a line or stanza is repeated, but
with an additional verse that advances the story, 4) dialogue between at least
2 characters, 5) quatrains or ballad stanzas that rhyme of on lines 2
and 4. A literary ballad was a favorite form of the Romantic period.
Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner” is a good example, and “The Ballad of
Birmingham” is an American example.
·
“It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
'By thy long gray beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?'"
13.
blank verse: poetry written in meter but containing no ending
rhyme. Lines of verse contain forms
closest to that of natural
speaking, yet are flexible and adaptive.
14.
characterization principles: characters should be 1) consistent
in their behaviors, 2)their words and actions should spring from motivations
the reader can understand, and 3) plausible and lifelike
15.
cinquain: a five line stanza
16.
conceit: in literature, fanciful or unusual image in which
apparently dissimilar things are shown to have a relationship. The device was
often used by the
metaphysical poets, who fashioned
conceits that were witty, complex, intellectual, and often startling, e.g.,
John Donne's comparison of two souls with two bullets in “The Dissolution.”
17.
conflict: a struggle between two opposing forces in a short
story, novel, play, or narrative poem.
18.
connotation: all the emotions and associations that a word or
phrase may arouse; what a word suggests beyond its basic definitions; a word’s
overtones of meaning.
19.
consonance: repetition of consonant sounds in the middle or at
the end of words
20.
continuous form: the form of a poem in which the lines follow
each other without formal grouping, the only breaks being dictated by units of
meaning.
21.
couplet: two successive lines of poetry in which the ending
words rhyme
22.
denotation: the literal or "dictionary" meaning of a word or
phrase.
23.
doppelganger: in German, this word means “double-goer,” the
ghostly shadow that haunts and follows its earthly counterpart; the negative
or evil manifestation of what is actually on the “inside” of the haunted
character. The Creature is Victor Frankenstein’s doppelganger.
24.
dramatic monologue: a kind of lyric poem which has the
following elements: 1) a single person, a speaker
(patently not the poet) utters
the entire poem in a specific situation at a critical moment; and 2) this
person addresses and interacts with one or more other people, but we know of
the auditor’s presence and what they say and do only from clues in the
discourse of the single speaker. Examples include Tennyson’s “Ulysses” and
Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess.”
25.
dramatic poem: a narrative poem in which one or more characters
speak. The dramatic poem consists of the thoughts or spoken statements (or
both) of one or more characters other than the poet himself in a particular
life situation. It is dramatic rather than narrative since the character is
not "written about" by the poet; rather, the poem consists of the character's
own thoughts or spoken statements. He may be thinking (or talking) to himself;
a poem recording his thoughts or speech to himself is called a soliloquy.
Or a character may be speaking to one or more other characters in a given
situation; a poem recording his speech is called a dramatic monologue.
26.
elegy: a poem of mourning, usually over the death of an
individual, usually ending in a consolation.
Originally it included
mournful love poems, such as John Donne’s elegies.
27.
ellipsis: deliberate omission of a word or of words which are
readily implied by the context.
·
And he to England shall along with you. from Hamlet, Act 3,
Scene 3
·
Red light means stop; a green light, go.
28.
end rhyme: rhymes that occur at the ends of lines
29.
end-stopped line: a line that ends with a natural speech pause,
usually marked by punctuation.
30.
fixed form: a poem in which the length and pattern are
prescribed by previous usage or tradition, such as sonnet, limerick, and
villanelle.
31.
flashback: a scene in a short story, novel, play, or narrative
poem that interrupts the chronological action and provides information about
the past. Often a character’s recollections of the past
32.
foil: a foil is a character who provides a contrast to another
character. In Frankenstein, Robert Walton and Victor Frankenstein are foils.
33.
foot: basic unit used in measurement of a line of verse. A foot
usually contains one accented syllable and one or two unaccented syllables.
34.
foreshadowing: clues in a literary work that suggest events that
have yet to occur.
35.
form: external pattern or shape of a poem, describable without
reference to its content, such as: continuous form, fixed form, and free
verse.
36.
frame narrative: The result of inserting one or more small
stories within the body of a larger story that encompasses the smaller ones.
Often this term is used interchangeably with both the literary technique and
the larger story itself that contains the smaller ones, which are called
"framed narratives" or "embedded narratives." The most famous example is
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, in which the
overarching frame narrative is the story of a band of pilgrims traveling to
the shrine of Thomas a Becket in Canterbury. The band passes the time in a
storytelling contest. The framed narratives are the individual stories told by
the pilgrims who participate. Frankenstein is a frame narrative.
37.
framing method: Using same features, wording, setting,
situation, or topic at both the beginning and end of a literary work so as to
"frame" it or "enclose it." This technique often provides a sense of cyclical
completeness or closure. This is also called an envelope structure or
circular structure.
38.
free verse: poetry not written in a regular rhythmical pattern;
non-metrical poetry in which the basic rhythmic unit is the line and in which
pauses, line breaks, and formal patterns develop organically from the
requirements of the individual poem rather than from established poetic forms.
39.
heptastich: a seven line stanza
Literary Terms H-Z
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