1. dactyl - A three-syllable metrical foot consisting of a heavy stress. 2. Dadaism - A literary movement ( ) that flouted conventional

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1 set 5 1. dactyl - A three-syllable metrical foot consisting of a heavy stress followed by two light stresses. 2. Dadaism - A literary movement ( ) that flouted conventional aesthetic and cultural values by producing works marked by nonsense, travesty, and incongruity. 3. denotation - The strict, literal, dictionary definition of a word, devoid of any emotion, attitude, or color. 4. denouement -The outcome or result of a complex situation or sequence of events, an aftermath or resolution that usually occurs near the final stages of the plot. It is the unraveling of the main dramatic complications in a play, novel or other work of literature. 5. Deus ex machina - An unrealistic or unexpected intervention to rescue the protagonists or resolve the story's conflict. 6. dialogue -The lines spoken by a character or characters in a play, essay, story, or novel, especially a conversation between two characters, or a literary work that takes the form of such a discussion. 7. diction - The author s choice and use of words in a text. 8. direct characterization - The narrator explains the character to the reader. 9. dramatic irony - A situation in a narrative in which the reader knows something about present or future circumstances that the character does not know. 10.dramatic monologue - a poem in the form of a speech or narrative by an imagined person, in which the speaker inadvertently reveals

2 aspects of their character while describing a particular situation or series of events. Set 6 1. dynamic character - A character who undergoes an important and basic change in personality or outlook through the course of a literary work. 2. elegy - A poem that expresses sorrow or lamentation, usually for one who has died; comprised of elegiac couplets. 3. Elizabethan Era - a time associated with Queen Elizabeth I's reign ( ) and is often considered to be the golden age in English history. It was the height of the English Renaissance and saw the flowering of English poetry, music and literature. This was also the time during which Elizabethan theatre flourished, and William Shakespeare and many others composed plays that broke free of England's past style of plays and theatre. 4. emblem - an object or representation that functions as a symbol, frequently allegorical in nature. 5. end rhyme - rhyme occurring at the ends of verse lines, as opposed to internal rhyme (rhyming within lines of verse) and headrhyme (alliteration). 6. enjambment - occurs when a phrase carries over a line-break without a major pause. In French, the word means "straddling," which we think is a perfect way to envision an enjambed line. When you read an enjambed line, the sense of it encourages you to keep right on reading the next line, without stopping for a breather. 7. Enlightenment - The period known as the Enlightenment runs from somewhere around 1660, with the Restoration, or the crowning of the

3 exiled Charles II, until the beginning of the nineteenth century and the reign of Victoria; marked by neoclassicism and the rise of the novel in literature. 8. epigram -A short, witty poem expressing a single thought or observation. 9. epiphany - Christian thinkers used this term to signify a manifestation of God's presence in the world. It has since become in modern fiction and poetry the standard term for the sudden flare into revelation of an ordinary object or scene. In particular, the epiphany is a revelation of such power and insight that it alters the entire worldview of the thinker who experiences it. 10.epistolary - Taking the form of a letter, or actually consisting of a letter written to another. For instance, several books in the New Testament written by Saint Paul are epistolary--they were originally letters written to newly founded Christian churches. Sometimes, novelists will write an epistolary novel, in which the story is unveiled as a series of letters between the characters. Set 7 1. euphemism - Using a mild or gentle phrase instead of a blunt, embarrassing, or painful one. 2. euphony - A harmonious grouping of words, so that the consonants permit an easy and pleasing flow of sound when spoken. 3. exact rhyme - Rhyming two words in which both the consonant sounds and vowel sounds match. 4. feminine rhyme - A rhyming line which ends in a lightly stressed syllable.

4 5. figurative language - A deviation from what speakers of a language understand as the ordinary or standard use of words in order to achieve some special meaning or effect. 6. flashback - A narrative technique that allows a writer to present past events during current events, in order to provide background for the current narration. 7. flat character - Characters that are two-dimensional, in that they are relatively uncomplicated and do not change throughout the course of a work. 8. foil - A character that serves by contrast to highlight or emphasize opposing traits in another character. 9. foreshadowing - Suggesting, hinting, indicating, or showing what will occur later in a narrative. 10.free verse - Poetry based on the natural rhythms of phrases and normal pauses rather than the artificial constraints of metrical feet. Set 8 1. genre - The major category into which a literary work fits. The basic divisions of literature are prose, poetry, and drama. 2. imagery -A description of an experience, object, or person using sensory details, usually more than one. 3. mood - The prevailing atmosphere or emotional aura of a work. 4. gothic - Poetry, short stories, or novels designed to thrill readers by providing mystery and blood-curdling accounts of villainy, murder, and the supernatural.

5 5. Gothic Fiction - A genre of fiction characterized by mystery and supernatural horror, often set in a dark castle or other medieval setting. 6. Harlem Renaissance - A renewal and flourishing of black literary culture during the years after World War I in a section of New York City. 7. hyperbole - The trope of exaggeration or overstatement. 8. iamb - A two syllable metrical foot consisting of an accented syllable followed by an unaccented one. 9. iambic pentameter - A line of verse that consists of five iambs. 10.idiom - A construction or expression in one language that cannot be matched or directly translated word-for-word in another language. Set 9 1. in medias res - The classical tradition of opening at the midway point of a story. 2. indirect characterization - The reader infers what the character is like through his actions and the reactions of other characters. 3. internal rhyme - Rhyme which occurs within a line of verse 4. irony - The difference between what appears to be and what is actually true. 5. Literature of the Absurd - An avant-garde style in which structure, plot, and characterization are disregarded or garbled in order to stress the lack of logic in nature and man s isolation in a universe which has no meaning or value. 6. litotes - Understatement, the opposite of exaggeration.

6 7. Lost Generation - Group of U.S. writers who came of age during World War I and established their reputations in the 1920s; more broadly, the entire post World War I American generation. The term was coined by Gertrude Stein in a remark to Ernest Hemingway. 8. lyric - A short poem (usually no more than lines, and often only a dozen lines long) written in a repeating stanzaic form, often designed to be set to music. Unlike a ballad, it usually does not have a plot. 9. masculine rhyme - a rhyme on a single stressed syllable at the end of a line of poetry. 10.melodrama - dramatic form characterized by excessive sentiment, exaggerated emotion, sensational and thrilling action, and an artificially happy ending. Set metaphor - A figure of speech using implied comparison of seemingly unlike things. 2. meter - A recognizable though varying pattern of stressed syllables alternating with syllables of less stress. 3. metonymy - A figure of speech in which the name of one object is substituted for that of another closely associated with it. 4. mood - The prevailing atmosphere or emotional aura of a work. 5. motif - A conspicuous recurring element, such as a type of incident, a device, a reference, or verbal formula. 6. narrative poem - A poem that tells a story, which includes many forms and styles, both complex and simple, short or long, as long as it

7 tells a story. A few examples are epics, ballads, and metrical romances. 7. narrator point of view - The perspective from which a story is told. 8. objective narration - The narrator is an observer, a "fly on the wall," but cannot enter into the minds of the other characters except in a speculative way. Such a narrator is trapped by the chronology and immediacy of the story, like a reporter "on the scene" of an event transpiring. 9. onomatopoeia - The use of sounds that are similar to the noise they represent for a rhetorical or artistic effect. 10. oxymoron - A rhetorical figure in which incongruous or contradictory terms are combined. Set parable - a brief and often simple narrative that illustrates a moral or religious lesson. 2. paradox - Using contradiction in a manner that makes sense on a deeper level, and seem to reveal a deeper truth through the contradictions. 3. parallelism - similar patterns of grammatical structure and length. For instance, "King Alfred tried to make the law clear, precise, and equitable." 4. parody - imitates the serious manner and characteristic features of a particular literary work in order to make fun of those same features. 5. pathetic fallacy -A type of often accidental or awkward personification in which a writer ascribes the human feelings of his or

8 her characters to inanimate objects or non-human phenomena surrounding them in the natural world. 6. pathos -a writer or speaker's attempt to inspire an emotional reaction in an audience--usually a deep feeling of suffering, but sometimes joy, pride, anger, humor, or patriotism. 7. persona - the narrator of or a character in a literary work, sometimes identified with the author. 8. personification - A figure of speech where animals, ideas or inorganic objects are given human characteristics. 9. poetic license - The freedom of a poet or other literary writer to depart from the norms of common discourse, literal reality, or historical truth in order to create a special effect in or for the reader. When applied to prose writers, the term is often called "artistic license." 10.pun - A play on two words similar in sound but different in meaning. Set pyrrhic - A metrical foot which consists of two unaccented syllables. 2. quatrain - A stanza of four lines, often rhyming in an ABAB pattern. 3. refrain - A line or set of lines at the end of a stanza or section of a longer poem or song--these lines repeat at regular intervals in other stanzas or sections of the same work. 4. rhetorical question - A question to which no answer is required: used especially for dramatic and/or rhetorical effect. 5. rhyme - A similarity of sounds in two or more words. 6. rhyme scheme - The pattern of rhyme.

9 7. romantic irony - The narrator of a literary work creates an illusion of reality but then destroys the illusion by revealing that he is arbitrarily making up the story as he goes. 8. round character - Characters that are complex and undergo development, sometimes sufficiently to surprise the reader. 9. sarcasm - One kind of irony; it is praise which is really an insult; generally involves malice. 10. satire - An attack on or criticism of any stupidity or vice in the form of scathing humor, or a critique of what the author sees as dangerous religious, political, moral, or social standards.

Allegory. Convention. Soliloquy. Parody. Tone. A work that functions on a symbolic level

Allegory. Convention. Soliloquy. Parody. Tone. A work that functions on a symbolic level Allegory A work that functions on a symbolic level Convention A traditional aspect of literary work such as a soliloquy in a Shakespearean play or tragic hero in a Greek tragedy. Soliloquy A speech in