| A | B |
|---|
| parable | a short tale that teaches a moral; similar to but shorter than an allegory |
| paradox | statement that seems to contradict itself but turns out to have a rational meaning eg "I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude |
| parallelism | technique of arranging words, phrases, clauses, or larger structures by placing them side to side, making them similar in form |
| parody | a work that ridicules the style of another work by imitating and exaggerating its elements |
| pastoral | poem about idealized rural life, or shepherds, or both; also called an idyll |
| personification | attribution of human qualities to a nonhuman or an inanimate object |
| persuasion | one of four modes of discourse; language intended to convince through appeals to reason or emotion; also called argument |
| Petrarchan sonnet | Italian; composed of octave with abba abba rhyme scheme, ending with sestet of cde cde rhyme scheme |
| point of view | perspective from which a story is presented |
| first person point of view | narrator, referred to as "I" who is character in story and relates actions through his or her own perspective, also revealing his or her own thoughts |
| stream of consciousness | like first person narrator, but instead placing reader inside character's head, making reader privy to continuous, chaotic flow of disconnected, half-formed thoughts and impressions as they flow |
| omniscient point of view | third person narrator, referred to as "he," "she," or "they," who is able to see into each character's mind and understands all the action |
| limited omniscient narrator | third person narrator who only reports the thoughts of one character, and generally only what that one character sees |
| objective narrator | third person narrator who only reports what would be visible to a camera; thoughts and feelings are only revealed if a character speaks them |
| protagonist | main character of a literary work |
| realism | 19th century literary movement in Europe and US that stressed accuracy in the portrayal of life, focusing on characters with whom middle-class readers could easily identify; direct contrast to romanticism |
| refrain | line or group of lines that are periodically repeated throughout a poem |
| rhyme | similarity of accented sounds between two words, such as sad/mad; rhymes can be masculine or feminine |
| masculine rhyme | rhyme sound is last syllable of a line eg. profound/bound |
| feminine rhyme | accented syllable is followed by an unaccented syllable eg. banding/landing |
| sarcasm | harsh, caustic personal remarks to or about someone; verbal; less subtle than irony (literary) |
| simile | figure of speech that uses like, as, or as if to make a direct comparison between two essentially different objects, actions, or qualities eg. "the sky looked like an artist's canvas" |
| soliloquy | speech spoken by character alone on stage, giving impression that the audience is listening to character's thoughts eg. Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech |
| sonnet | 14-line lyric poem in iambic pentameter |
| speaker | the voice of a poem; an author may speak as himself/herself or as a fictitious character |
| stanza | group of lines in formal pattern of a poem |
| stereotype | character who represents a trait that is usually attributed to particular social or racial group and lacks individuality |
| stock character | standard character who may be stereotyped, such as the miser or the fool |
| style | an author's characteristic manner of expression |
| subjectivity | personal presentation of events and characters, influenced by the author's feelings and opinions |
| suspension of disbelief | demand made of a theater audience to provide some details with their imagination and to accept the limitations of reality and staging; the acceptance of the incidents of the plot by a reader or audience |
| symbolism | use of symbols, or anything that is meant to be taken both literally and as representative of a higher and more complex significance |
| synecdoche | figure of speech in which a part of something is used to represent a whole eg. "wheels" mean "a car" |
| syntax | word choice or diction |
| theme | central idea or "message" of a literary work |
| tone | characteristic emotion or attitude of an author toward characters, subject, audience |
| tragic flaw | one weakness that causes the downfall of the hero in a tragedy |
| villanelle | lyric poem consisting of five tercets and a final quatrain |
| voice | the way a written work conveys an author's attitude |
| static character | a character that doesn't change |
| traits | permanent qualities of the character's personality |
| symbol | a person, place, thing, or event that has meaning in itself and stands for something beyond itself as well |
| science fiction | fiction that deals with the influence of real or imagined science on society or individuals; many of the events recounted are within the realm of future possibility |
| resolution | the last part of the story when the characters' problems are solved and the story ends |
