| A | B |
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| Dissonance | a harsh, discordant combination of sounds (also called cacophony |
| Dramatic Monologue | a poem in which a character addresses one or more listeners who remain silent or whose replies are not revealed. |
| Elegy | a poem that mourns the death of a person or laments something lost. |
| Epic | a long narrative poem that relates great deeds of a larger-than-life hero who embodies the values of a particular society. |
| Epigram | a clever and usually memorable statement |
| Epiphany | in a literary work, a moment of sudden insight or revelation that a character experiences. |
| Epitaph | an inscription on a tombstone |
| Epithet | an adjective or descriptive phrase that is regularly used to characterize a person, place or thing. |
| Essay | a short piece of nonfiction prose that examines a single subject from a limited point of view. |
| Exposition | A statement or rhetorical discourse intended to give information about or an explanation of difficult material. |
| Fable | a brief story in prose or verse that teaches a moral about life |
| Falling Action | the events after the climax |
| Farce | a type of comedy in which ridiculous and often stereotyped characters are involved in farfetched, silly situations. |
| Flashback | a scene in movie, play, novel…that interrupts the present action of the plot to “flash backward” and tell what happened at an earlier time. |
| Foil | a character who is used as a contrast to another character. |
| Foreshadowing | use of clues to hint at what is going to happen later in the plot |
| Free Verse | poetry that has no regular meter or rhyme scheme. |
| Hyperbole | extreme exaggeration |
| Iambic Pentameter | a line of poetry made up of five iambs. |
| Imagery | language that appeals to the senses. |
| In Medias Res | starting the story in the middle and then using a flashback to tell what happened. |
| Verbal Irony | speaker says one thing but means the opposite. |
| Situational Irony | what actually happens is the opposite of what is expected to happen |
| Dramatic Irony | the audience or the reader knows something that the character in a play or story does not. |
| Kenning | in Anglo-Saxon poetry, a phrase or compound word used to name a person, place, thing, or event indirectly. |
| Lyric Poetry | poetry that focuses on expressing emotions or thoughts, rather than on telling a story. |
| Metaphor | comparison between two dissimilar things without using like or as. |
| Meter | pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry. |
| Metonymy | figure of speech where something closely related to a thing or suggested by it is substituted for the thing itself |
| Mock Epic | a comic narrative poem that parodies the epic by treating a trivial subject in a lofty manner (“Rape of the Lock”) |
| Motif | a word, character, object, image, or idea that recurs in a work or in several works. |
