| A | B |
|---|
| aesthetics | study of the beautiful; a branch of philosophy which attempts to define the criteria by which art is defined |
| allegory | narrative that attempts to reinforce its thesis by making its characters represent specific abstract ideas |
| alliteration | repetition of the same coonsonant sound especially at the beginning of stressed words or syllables |
| allusion | reference to a person, place, thing, or event that allows compressing a great deal of meaning into a very few words |
| analogy | a correlatioon between two unlike things which share one or more common features |
| concrete terms | words that refer to material objects rather than to ideas or concepts |
| connotation | acquired meaning of a word |
| denotation | the dictionary meaning of a word |
| diction | the artistic arrangement of words |
| dramatic monologue | a poem that is given over entirely to the speech of a single character, that reveal his or her personality |
| elegy | a poem meditating on death of a specific person or a group |
| genre | a form, class, type of literary work |
| imagery | use of words that appeal to the senses |
| irony | contrast in the appearance and the reality |
| verbal irony | discrepancy between what is said and what is meant |
| situational irony | circumstances in reverse or what is expected or is appropriate |
| metaphor | figure of speech that compares two unrelated things that share common features |
| personification | a metaphor that assigns human qualities to nonhuman things |
| satire | literay work that ridicules or rebukes human vice |
| tone | attitude of the poet/persona tooward the subject of the poem or the audience |
| idiom | expression whose "accepted" meaning can't be determined from the words it contains |
| assonance | in poetry, repetition of vowel sounds in words that do not rhyme |
| onomatopoeia | a words whose pronunciation suggests its meaning |
| simile | a figure of speech that makes a direct comparison between things using the words "like" or "as" |
| motivation | in literature, why characters do the things they do |
