| A | B |
|---|
| allegory | a narrative in which characters and settings stand for abstract ideas or moral qualities |
| allusion | reference to a statement, a person, a place, or an event from literature, history, religion, mythology, politics, sports, science, or pop culture |
| author | the writer of a literary work |
| autobiography | an account of the writer's own life |
| biography | an account of a person's life written or told by another person |
| character | person in a story, poem, or play |
| climax | moment of great emotional intensity or suspense in a plot. |
| external conflict | a character struggles against outside forces |
| internal conflict | takes place entirely within a character's own mind |
| dialogue | the conversation between characters in a story or play |
| flashback | scene in a movie, play, short story, novel, or narrative poem that interrupts the present action of the plot to flash backward and tell what happened at an earlier time |
| flash-forward | a scene in a movie, play, short story, novel, or narrative program that interrupts the present action of the plot to shift into the future. |
| foreshadowing | the use of clues to hint at events that will occur later in the plot |
| genre | the category that a work of literature is classified under. The categories are nonfiction, fiction, poetry, drama, and myth. |
| irony | contrast between expectation and reality-between what is said and what is really meant, between what is expected to happen and what really does happen, or between what appears to be true and what is really true. |
| mood | a story's atmosphere or the feeling it evokes |
| narration | type of writing or speaking that tells about a series of related events |
| narrator | the voice telling a story |
| nonfiction | prose writing that deals with real people, things, events, and places. |
| novel | fictional prose narrative usually consisting of more than fifty thousand words |
| plot | series of related events that make up a story or drama. Include the basic situation or exposition, conflict, main events, and climax |
| point of view | vantage point from which a writer tells a story. In broad terms there are three possible points of view: omniscient, first person, and third person limited |
| protagonist | main character in fiction or drama |
| setting | the time or place of a story or play |
| short story | short, concentrated, fictional prose narrative |
| suspense | uncertainty or anxiety the reader feels about what is going to happen next in a story |
| theme | central idea of a work of literature |
| tone | attitude a writer takes toward a subject, a character, or the audience |
