Basic Literary Terms - Lucia

Symbol

A _____ is any object, person, place, or action that has both a meaning in itself and that stands for something larger than itself, such as a quality, attitude, belief, or value: e.g., the land turtle in Steinbeck' s The Grapes of Wrath suggests or reflects the toughness and resilience of the migrant workers.

Protagonist; Antagonist

The ______ is the central character of a drama, novel, short story, or narrative poem. Conversely, the ______ is the character who stands directly opposed to the protagonist.

Onomatopoeia; Imitative Harmony

____ (imitative harmony) is the use of words that mimic the sounds they describe: e.g., "hiss," "buzz," and "bang." When onomatopoeia is used on an extended scale in a poem, it is called ________.

Sound devices

____ are stylistic techniques that convey meaning through sounds. Some examples of sound devices are rhyme (two words having the same sound), assonance (repetition of similar vowel sounds), consonance (repetition of similar consonant sounds in the middle or at the end of words), alliteration (words beginning with the same consonant sounds), and onomatopoeia (words that sound like their meaning).

Details

____ are the facts revealed by the author or speaker that support the attitude or tone in a piece of poetry or prose.

Figures of speech

____ are words or phrases that describe one thing in terms of something else. They always involve some sort of imaginative comparison between seemingly unlike things. Not meant to be taken literally, figurative language is used to produce images in a reader's mind and to express ideas in fresh, vivid, and imaginative ways. The most common examples of figurative language, or ________, used in both prose and poetry, are simile, metaphor, and personification.

Imagery

____ consists of the words or phrases a writer uses to represent persons, objects, actions, feelings, and ideas descriptively by appealing to the senses.

Motivation

____ is a circumstance or set of circumstances that prompts a character to act in a certain way or that determines the outcome of a situation or work.

Simile

____ is a comparison of two different things or ideas through the use of the words "like" or "as." It is a definitely stated comparison in which the post says one thing is like another: e.g., "The warrior fought like a lion."

Metaphor

____ is a comparison of two unlike things not using "like" or "as": e.g., "Time is money."

Hyperbole

____ is a deliberate, extravagant, and often outrageous exaggeration: e.g., "The shot heard 'round the world." It may be used for either serious or comic effect.

Antithesis

____ is a direct juxtaposition of structurally parallel words, phrases, or clauses for the purpose of contrast" e.g., "Sink or swim."

Synecdoche (metonymy)

____ is a form of metaphor. In synecdoche, a part of something is used to signify the whole: e.g., "All hands on deck." Also, the reverse, whereby the whole can represent a part, Is ________: e.g., "Canada played the United States in the Olympic hockey finals." Another form of synecdoche involves the container representing the thing being contained: e.g., "The pot is boiling." In one last form of ______, the material from which an object is made stands for the object itself: e.g., "The quarterback tossed the pigskin." In metonymy, the name of one thing is applied to another thing with which it is closely associated: e.g., "I love Shakespeare."

Oxymoron

____ is a form of paradox that combines a pair of opposite terms into a single unusual expression: e.g., "sweet sorrow" or "cold fire."

Apostrophe

____ is a form of personification in which the absent or dead are spoken to as if present and the inanimate, as if animate. These are all addressed directly: e.g., "Milton! Thou shoulds't be living at this hour."

Personification

____ is a kind of metaphor that gives inanimate objects or abstract ideas human characteristics: e.g., "The wind cried in the dark."

Pun

____ is a play on words that are identical or similar in sound but have sharply diverse meanings. _____s can have serious as well as humorous uses: e.g., when Mercutio is bleeding to death in Romeo and Juliet, he says to his friends, "Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man."

Allusion

____ is a reference to a mythological, literary, or historical person, place, or thing: e.g., "He met his Waterloo."

Flashback

____ is a scene that interrupts the action of a work to show a previous event.

Mood

____ is the atmosphere or predominant emotion in a literary work.

Theme

____ is the central message of a literary work. It is not the same as a subject, which can be expressed in a word or two: courage, survival, war, pride, etc. The _____ is the idea the author wished to convey about that subject. It is expressed as a sentence or general statement about life or human nature. A literary work can have more than one _____, and most ______s are not directly stated but are implied. The reader must think about all the elements of the work and use them to make inferences, or reasonable guesses, as to which ______s seem to be implied. An example of a _____ on the subject of pride might be that pride often precedes a fall.

Repetition

____ is the deliberate use of any element of language more than once—sound, word, phrase, sentence, grammatical pattern, or rhythmical pattern.

Structure

____ is the framework or organization of a literary selection. For example, the _______ of fiction is usually determined by plot and by chapter division; the ______ of drama depends upon its division into acts and scenes; the ______ of an essay depends upon the organization of ideas; the _______ of poetry is determined by its rhyme scheme and stanzaic form.

Understatement (meiosis, litotes)

____ is the opposite of hyperbole. It is a kind of irony that deliberately represents something as being less than it really is: e.g., "I could probably manage to survive on a salary of two million dollars per year."

Point of view

____ is the perspective from which a narrative is told.

Alliteration

____ is the practice of beginning several consecutive or neighboring words with the same sound: e.g., "The twisting trout twinkled below."

Suspense

____ is the quality of a short story, novel, play, or narrative poem that makes the reader or audience uncertain or tense about the outcome of events.

Consonance

____ is the repetition of a consonant sound within a series of words to produce a harmonious effect: e.g., "And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds." The "d" sound is in consonance. The "s" sound is also in _______.

Assonance

____ is the repetition of accented vowel sounds in a series of words: e.g., the words "cry" and "side" have the same vowel sound and so are said to be in ______.

Rhyme; End Rhyme; Internal Rhyme; Slant Rhyme; Rhyme Scheme

____ is the repetition of sounds in two or more words or phrases that appear close to each other in a poem. ____ occurs at the end of lines; _______, within a line. _______ is approximate rhyme. A _____ is the pattern of end rhymes.

Plot

____ is the sequence of events or actions in a short story, novel, play, or narrative poem.

Prosody

____ is the study of sound and rhythm in poetry.

Narration

____ is the telling of a story in writing or speaking.

Setting

____ is the time and place in which events in a short story, novel, play, or narrative poem take place.

Foreshadowing

____ is the use of hints or clues in a narrative to suggest future action.

Sarcasm

____ is the use of verbal irony in which a person appears to be praising something but is actually insulting it: e.g., "As I fell down the stairs headfirst, I heard her say, 'Look at that coordination.'"

Style

____ is the writer's characteristic manner of employing language.

Tone

____ is the writer's or speaker's attitude toward a subject, character, or audience, and it is conveyed through the author's choice of words (diction) and detail. _____ can be serious, humorous, sarcastic, indignant, objective, etc.

Diction

____ is word choice intended to convey a certain effect.

Syntax

____ means the arrangement of words and the order of grammatical elements in a sentence.

Irony; Verbal Irony; Situational Irony; Dramatic Irony

____ occurs in three types. _______ occurs when a speaker or narrator says one thing while meaning the opposite. An example of verbal irony occurs in the statement, "It is easy to stop smoking. I've done it many times." ______ occurs when a situation turns out differently from what one would normally expect—though often the twist is oddly appropriate: e.g., a deep sea diver drowning in a bathtub is ironic. ______ occurs when a character or speaker says or does something that has different meanings from what he or she thinks it means, though the audience and other characters understand the full implications of the speech or action: e.g., Oedipus curses the murderer of Laius, not realizing that he is himself the murderer and so is cursing himself.

Paradox

____ occurs when the elements of a statement contradict each other. Although the statement may appear illogical, impossible, or absurd, it turns out to have a coherent meaning that reveals a hidden truth: e.g., " Much madness is divinest sense."

Shift; Turn

____ or _____ refers to a change or movement in a piece resulting from an epiphany, realization, or insight gained by the speaker, a character, or the reader.