literary terms.doc

A Glossary of Major Literary TermsGeneral Literary TermsGenre denotes a type or species of literature.Diction signifies the kinds of words, phrases, sentence structures, and figurative language in a work of literature.Myth is one story in a mythologya system of hereditary stories which were once believed to be true by a particular cultural group, and which served to explain why the world is as it is and things happen as they do, as well as to establish the rationale for social customs and observances, and the sanctions for the rules by which people conduct their lives.Prose is often used as an inclusive term for all discourse, spoken or written, which is not patterned into the lines and rhythms either of metric verse or of free verse.Essay is the brief nonfiction reflections in proseTerms of Novel Novel is now applied to a great variety of writings that have in common only the attribute of being extended works of fiction written in prose.Plot is the structure of its actions, as these are rendered and ordered toward achieving particular emotional and artistic effectsFlashback a narrative or scene which represent events that happened before the time at which the work opened.Foreshadow is to indicate what is to happen.Character is the person presented in a dramatic or narrative work.Flat Character is built around “a single idea or quality” and is presented without much individualizing detail, and therefore can be fairly adequately described in a single phrase or sentence.Round Character is complex in temperament and motivation and is represented with subtle particularity.Characterization is to establish the distinctive characters of the persons in a narrative.Protagonist the chief character in a work, on whom our interest centers.Antagonist the minor character who is pitted against an important opponent.Point of View signifies the way a story gets toldthe mode or perspective established by an author by means of which the reader is presented with the characters, actions, setting, and events which constitute the narrative in a work of fiction.Third-person narrative the narrator is someone outside the story proper, who refers to all the characters in the story by name, or as “he”, “she”, “they”First-person narrative the narrator speaks as “I”, and is himself a participant in the story.Omniscient point of view in a work of fiction that the narrator knows everything that needs to be known about the agents and events.Limited point of view the narrator tells the story in the third person, but within the confines of what is experienced, thought, and felt by a single character within the story.Setting is the general locale, historical time , and social circumstances in which its action occurs. Atmosphere (mood) is the tonality pervading a literary work, which fosters in the reader expectations as to the course of events, whether happy or terrifying or disastrous.Style is the manner of linguistic expression in prose or verseit is how speakers or writers say whatever it is that they say.Symbol is applied to a word or phrase that signifies an object or event which in turn signifies something, or has a range of reference, beyond itself.Theme is sometimes used interchangeable with “motif”, but the term is more usefully applied to a general claim, or doctrine, whether implicit or asserted, which an imaginative work is designed to incorporate and make persuasive to the reader.Motif is an elementa type of incident, device, reference, or formulawhich recurs frequently in literature.Stream of Consciousness is to describe the unbroken flow of thought and awareness in the waking mind.Terms of Poetry Verse metrical language; the opposite of proseBlank Verse consists of lines iambic pentameter which are unrhymed.Free Verse is printed in short lines instead of with the continuity of prose, and has a more controlled rhythmic pattern than ordinary prose; but it lacks the regular syllabic stress pattern, organized into recurrent feet, of traditional meter.Stanza is a grouping of the verse-lines in a poem, set off by a space in the printed text.Run-on line a line which has no natural speech pause at its end, allowing the sense to flow uninterruptedly into the succeeding line.Alliteration is the repetition of speech sounds in a sequence of nearby words; the term is usually applied only to consonants, and especially when the recurrent sound occurs in a conspicuous position at the beginning either of a word or of a stressed syllable within a word.Consonance is the repetition of a sequence of two or more consonants, but with a change in the intervening vowel: live-love, lean-alone, pitter-patter.Assonance is the repetition of identical or similar vowel soundsespecially in a stressed syllablesin a sequence of nearby words.Simile a comparison between two distinctly different things is indicated by the word “like” or “as”.Metaphor a word or expression which in literal usage denotes one kind of thing or action is applied to a distinctly different kind of thing or action, without asserting a comparison.Metonymy the literal term for one thing is applied to another with which it has become closely associated.Synecdoche a part of something is used to signify the whole, or the whole is used to signify a part.Personification a term in which either an inanimate object or an abstract concept is spoken of as though it were endowed with life or with human attributes or feelings.Overstatement (hyperbole) a figure of speech in which exaggeration is used in the service of truth.Understatement: a figure of speech that consists of saying less than one means, or of saying what one means with less force than the occasion warrantsPun a play on words that either identical in sound or very similar sound, but are sharply diverse in meaning.Irony is to dissemble or hide what is actually the case , not in order to deceive but to achieve special rhetorical or artistic effectsParadox a statement or situation containing apparently contradictory or incompatible elements.Allusion in a literary text is a reference, explicit or indirect, to a well-know person, place, or event, or to another literary work or passage.Rhyme the standard rhyme consists in the identity, in rhyming words, of the last stressed vowel and of all the speech sounds following that vowel.End rhyme occurs at the end of a verse-line Internal rhyme occurs within a verse-lineRhythm a recognizable though variable pattern in the beat of the stresses in the stream of sound.Foot the basic unit used in the scansion or measurement of verse. A foot usually contains one accented syllable and one or two unaccented syllables.Meter the rhythm of stresses is structured into a recurrence of regularthat is , approximately equivalentunits. Iambic a light followed by a stressed syllableAnapestic two light syllables followed by a stressed syllableTrochaic a stressed followed by a light syllableDactylic a stressed syllable followed by two light syllables.Monometer: one foot Dimeter: two feet Trimeter: three feet tetrameter: four feetPentameter: five feet Hexameter six feet Heptameter: seven feet octameter: eight feetImage is a picture out of wordsImagery the representation through language of sense experience.Tone the writers or speakers attitude toward his subject, his audience, or himself.Couplet two successive lines, usually in the same meter, linked by rhyme.Refrain a repeated word, phrase, line or group of lines, normally at some fixed position in a poem written in stanzaic form.Sonnet a lyric poem in a single stanza consisting of fourteen iambic pentameter lines linked by an intricate rhyme scheme.Ballad is a song, tra