| A | B |
|---|
| theme | thethe central idea or insight of a work of literature |
| internal conflict | struggle between opposing needs, desires, or emotions within a character |
| parable | a story that teaches a lesson |
| aside | private words that a character in a play speaks to the audience or another character - not supposed to be overheard by others onstate |
| exposition | a kind of writing that explains a subject, gives information, or clarifies an idea |
| allusion | a reference to a statement, person, place, or thing that is known from literature, history, etc. |
| imagery | language that appeals to the senses |
| irony | a contrast between expectation and reality |
| foil | a character who is used as a contrast to another |
| external conflict | a character struggles against some outside force |
| protagonist | the main character in fiction or drama |
| symbol | a person, place, thing, or event that stands both for itself and for something beyond itself |
| personification | a kind of metaphor in which a nonhuman thing or quality is talked about as if it were human |
| soliloquy | a long speech in which a character who is alone onstage expresses private thoughts or feelints |
| narration | a kind of writing that tells a story |
| connotation | the suggested or implied meaning of a word beyond its literal definition |
| denotation | the exact literal definition of a word |
| satire | writing which ridicules society or personalities; the goal of this writing is to change the actions and behaviors being ridiculed |
| biography | a nonfiction work about another person |
| autobiography | a nonfiction work about ones' self |
| persuasion | a kind of writing that attempts to convince readers to think or act a certain way |
| conflict | the struggle between opposing forces in story or plotl |
| symbol | an object, person, place, or thing that stands for or means more than what it is (in literature) |
| meter | a regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables that gives line of poetry a pattern or rhyme |
| refrain | line or lines repeated at intervals in a poem or song |
| parody | an often humorous imitation of another more serious work |
| satire | writing that exposes and ridicules the vices or mistakes of people or societies. Its purpose is to make change in society |
| comedy | humorous drama or story that ends happily |
| tragedy | play in which the main character suffers a downfall usually due to some fault of his own |
| flashback | an account of event that happens before the story began |
| point of view | the relationship of author to the story - vantage point from which story is told |
| essay | short work of nonfiction on a single topic |
