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Literary
Terms
There
are many literary terms that you should have in your literary arsenal.
These terms can (and should) be used in academic discourse and when
writing formal essays or reports. Whether
or not you memorize them all in order to use them in casual conversation
with your friends, you need to know them for standardized test, the AP
Exam, for college courses, and for this course.
The
AP Program recommends that you are familiar with the following terms. Read through the list below and star those terms with which
you are unfamiliar (in other words, you can’t come up with a definition
or example without a dictionary or you Lit book); these are the terms you
need to review.
Drama
Many
of the following terms are applicable to both drama and fiction:
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Act
Antagonist
Aside
Catastrophe
Catharsis
Character:
dynamic, flat, round, static, stock
Climax
Comic
relief
Conflict:
internal (man v. self). External (man v. man, man v. nature, man v.
society)
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Crisis
Denouement
Deus
ex machina
Epilogue
Exposition
Falling
action
Farce
Foil
Hamartia
Hero
Hubris
Monologue
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Prologue
Protagonist
Rising
action
Scene
Soliloquy
Tragedy
Tragic
flaw
Villain
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Fiction
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Anecdote
Anticlimax
Character
Flashback
Incident
Motivation
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Narrative
voice
Point
of view: first person, omniscient, objective, limited, third person,
second person
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Stream-of-consciousness
Subplot
Theme
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Poetry
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Alliteration
Assonance
Blank
verse
Cacophony
Cadence
Caesura
Conceit
Connotation
Consonance
Controlling
image
Couplet
Dirge
Dissonance
Dramatic
monologue
Elegy
End-stop
line
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Enjambment
Euphony
Foot
Free
verse
Iamb
Image
In
medias res
Lyric
Measure
Meter
Octave
Ode
Pentameter
Persona
Quatrain
Refrain
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Repetition
Rhyme:
end, external, feminine, internal, masculine
Scansion
Sestet
Sonnet:
English, Italian
Stanza
Stress
Trochee
Volta
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Elements
of Style
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Atmosphere
Colloquial
Connotation
Denotation
Dialect
Dialogue
Diction
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Epigram
Invective
Inversion
Irony:
dramatic, situational, verbal
Mood
Paradox
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Proverb
Pun
Sarcasm
Satire
Slang
Tone
Voice
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Form
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Allegory
Anecdote
Diary
Discourse:
argumentation, descriptive, exposition, narration
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Essay:
formal, humorous, informal, personal
Fable
Genre
Novel
Novella
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Parable
Prose
Verse
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Syntax
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Antithesis
Balance
Coherence
Complex
sentence
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Compound-complex
sentence
Ellipsis
Inverted
sentence
Loose
sentence
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Figures
of Speech
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Allusion
Apostrophe
Euphemism
Hyperbole
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Litotes
Metaphor
Onomatopoeia
Personification
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Simile
Symbol
Synecdoche
Understatement
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