1 12 AP Literature Glossary of Terms Ms. Sutton ALLEGORY story or poem in which characters ...

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12 AP Literature Glossary of Terms
Ms. Sutton

ALLEGORY story or poem in which characters, settings, and events stand for other people or events or
for abstract ideas or qualities.
EXAMPLE: Animal Farm; Dante’s Inferno; Lord of the Flies

ALLITERATION repetition of the same or similar consonant sounds in words that are close together.
EXAMPLE: “When the two youths turned with the flag they saw that much of the regiment had
crumbled away, and the dejected remnant was coming slowly back.” –Stephen Crane (Note how
regiment and remnant are being used; the regiment is gone, a remnant remains…)

ALLUSION reference to someone or something that is known from history, literature, religion, politics,
sports, science, or another branch of culture. An indirect reference to something (usually from
literature, etc.).

AMBIGUITY deliberately suggesting two or more different, and sometimes conflicting, meanings in a
work. An event or situation that may be interpreted in more than one way-- this is done on purpose by
the author, when it is not done on purpose, it is vagueness, and detracts from the work.

ANALOGY Comparison made between two things to show how they are alike

ANAPHORA Repetition of a word, phrase, or clause at the beginning of two or more sentences in a row.
This is a deliberate form of repetition and helps make the writer’s point more coherent.

ANASTROPHE Inversion of the usual, normal, or logical order of the parts of a sentence. Purpose is
rhythm or emphasis or euphony. It is a fancy word for inversion.

ANECDOTE Brief story, told to illustrate a point or serve as an example of something, often shows
character of an individual

ANTAGONIST Opponent who struggles against or blocks the hero, or protagonist, in a story.

ANTIMETABOLE Repetition of words in successive clauses in reverse grammatical order.
Moliere: “One should eat to live, not live to eat.” In poetry, this is called chiasmus.

ANTITHESIS Balancing words, phrases, or ideas that are strongly contrasted, often by means of
grammatical structure. A figure of speech characterized by strongly contrasting words, clauses,
sentences, or ideas, as in “Man proposes; God disposes.” Antithesis is a balancing of one term against
another for emphasis or stylistic effectiveness. The second line of the following couplet by Alexander
Pope is an example of antithesis:
The hungry judges soon the sentence sign,
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And wretches hang that jury-men may dine.

ANTIHERO Central character who lacks all the qualities traditionally associated with heroes. may lack
courage, grace, intelligence, or moral scruples.

ANTHROPOMORPHISM attributing human characteristics to an animal or inanimate object
(Personification)

APHORISM brief, cleverly worded statement that makes a wise observation about life, or of a principle
or accepted general truth. Also called maxim, epigram.

APOSTROPHE a figure of speech in which someone (usually, but not always absent), some abstract
quality, or a nonexistent personage is directly addressed as though present; calling out to an imaginary,
dead, or absent person, or to a place or thing, or a personified abstract idea. If the character is asking a
god or goddess for inspiration it is called an invocation.
Josiah Holland ---“Loacöon! Thou great embodiment/ Of human life and human history!”
Papa Above!
Regard a Mouse.
-Emily Dickinson

Milton! Thou shouldst be living in this hour;
England hath need of thee . . ..
-William Wordsworth

APPOSITION Placing in immediately succeeding order of two or more coordinate elements, the latter of
which is an explanation, qualification, or modification of the first (often set off by a colon). Paine: “These
are the times that try men’s souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will in this crisis, shrink
from the service of his country; but he that stands it Now, deserves the love and thanks of man and
woman.”

ASSONANCE the repetition of similar vowel sounds followed by different consonant sounds especially in
words that are together. “A land laid waste with all its young men slain” repeats the same “a” sound in
“laid,” “waste,” and “slain.”

ASYNDETON Commas used without conjunction to separate a series of words, thus emphasizing the
parts equally: instead of X, Y, and Z... the writer uses X,Y,Z.... see polysyndeton.

AUBADE A love lyric in which the speaker complains about the arrival of the dawn, when he must part
from his lover. John Donne's "The Sun Rising" exemplifies this poetic genre.

BALANCE Constructing a sentence so that both halves are about the same length and importance.
Sentences can be unbalanced to serve a special effect as well.
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BALLAD METER (also known as hymn meter) a four-line stanza rhymed abcd with four feet in lines one
and three and three feet in lines two and four. Iambic tetrameter alternating with iambic trimeter.
O mother, mother make my bed.
O make it soft and narrow.
Since my love died for me today,
I’ll die for him tomorrow.

BLANK VERSE unrhymed iambic pentameter. Blank verse is the meter of most of Shakespeare’s plays, as
well as that of Milton’s Paradise Lost.

CACAPHONY a harsh, unpleasant combination of sounds or tones. It may be an unconscious flaw in the
poet’s music, resulting in harshness of sound or difficulty of articulation, or it may be used consciously
for effect, as Browning and Eliot often use it. See, for example, the following line from Browning’s
“Rabbi Ben Ezra”:
Irks care the crop-full bird? Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?
See “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden

CAESURA a pause, usually near the middle of a line of verse, usually indicated by the sense of the line,
and often greater than the normal pause. For example, one would naturally pause after “human’ in the
following line from Alexander Pope:
To err is human, to forgive divine.

CHARACTERIZATION the process by which the writer reveals the personality of a character.
INDIRECT CHARACTERIZATION the author reveals to the reader what the character is like by describing
how the character looks and dresses, by letting the reader hear what the character says, by revealing
the character’s private thoughts and feelings, by revealing the characters effect on other people
(showing how other characters feel or behave toward the character), or by showing the character
in action. Common in modern literature
DIRECT CHARACTERIZATION the author tells us directly what the character is like: sneaky, generous,
mean to pets and so on. Romantic style literature relied more heavily on this form.
STATIC CHARACTER is one who does not change much in the course of a story.
DYNAMIC CHARACTER is one who changes in some important way as a result of the story’s action.
FLAT CHARACTER has only one or two personality traits. They are one dimensional, like a piece of
cardboard. They can be summed up in one phrase.
ROUND CHARACTER has more dimensions to their personalities---they are complex, just a real people
are.

CHIASMUS In poetry, a type of rhetorical balance in which the second part is syntactically balanced
against the first, but with the parts reversed. Coleridge: “Flowers are lovely, love is flowerlike.” In prose
this is called antimetabole.

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CLICHE is a word or phrase, often a figure of speech, that has become lifeless because of overuse. Avoid
clichés like the plague. (That cliché is intended.)

CLOSED FORM A type of form or structure in poetry characterized by regularity and consistency in such
elements as rhyme, line length, and metrical pattern. Frost's "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening"
provides one of many examples. A single stanza illustrates some of the features of closed form:
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though.
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

COLLOQUIALISM a word or phrase in everyday use in conversation and informal writing but is
inappropriate for formal situations.
Example: “He’s out of his head if he thinks I’m gonna go for such a stupid idea.

COMEDY in general, a story that ends with a happy resolution of the conflicts faced by the main
character or characters.

CONCEIT an elaborate metaphor that compares two things that are startlingly different. An ingenious
and fanciful notion or conception, usually expressed through an elaborate analogy, and pointing to a
striking parallel between two seemingly dissimilar things. A conceit may be a brief metaphor, but it also
may form the framework of an entire poem, which often makes it an extended metaphor. A famous
example of a conceit occurs in John Donne’s poem “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” in which he
compares his soul and his wife’s to legs of a mathematical compass.

CONFESSIONAL POETRY a twentieth century term used to describe poetry that uses intimate material
from the poet’s life.

CONFLICT the struggle between opposing forces or characters in a story.
EXTERNAL CONFLICT conflicts can exist between two people, between a person and nature or a machine
or between a person a whole society.
INTERNAL CONFLICT a conflict can be internal, involving opposing forces within a person’s mind.

CONNOTATION the associations and emotional overtones that have become attached to a word or
phrase, in addition to its strict dictionary definition.

CONSONANCE the repetition of similar consonant sounds in a group of words. The term usually refers
to words in which the ending consonants are the same but the vowels that precede them are different.
Consonance is found in the following pairs of words: “add” and “read,” “bill and ball,” and “born” and
“burn.”

COUPLET two consecutive rhyming lines of poetry.
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DEUS EX MACHINA: A plot device dating back to ancient Greek drama, when a conflict was resolved
through a means that seems unrelated to the story (e.g. when a god suddenly appeared, without
warning, and solves everything). The term is used negatively, as a criticism, when an author’s solution
to a conflict seems artificial, forced, improbable, clumsy or otherwise unjustified. From Latin: “God out
of the machine” (pron.: “DEH-oos eks MAW-kih-naw).

DIALECT a way of speaking that is characteristic of a certain social group or of the inhabitants of a
certain geographical area.

DIALOGUE: The lines which are spoken by, or between, the characters in a narrative. The dialogue is
important to reveal their CHARACTERIZATION and/or advance the PLOT. The dialogue may take place in
a play, essay, story, or novel. Some literary works takes the form of such a discussion (e.g., Plato's
Republic). In plays, dialogue often includes references to changes in the setting. Noticing such details is
particularly important in classical drama and in Shakespeare's plays since explicit stage directions are
often missing.

DICTION a speaker or writer’s choice of words. Diction may be described as formal (the level of usage
common in serious books and formal discourse), informal (the level of usage found in the relaxed but
polite conversation of cultivated people), colloquial (the everyday usage of a group, possibly including
terms and constructions accepted in that group but not universally acceptable), or slang (a group of
newly coined words which are not acceptable for formal usage as yet).

DIDACTIC form of fiction or nonfiction that teaches a specific lesson or moral or provides a model of
correct behavior or thinking.

DIDACTIC POEM a poem which is intended primarily to teach a lesson. The distinction between didactic
poetry and non-didactic poetry is difficult to make and usually involves a subjective judgment of the
author’s purpose on the part of the critic or the reader.

DIGRESSION: A literary device in which the author creates a temporary departure from the main subject
or narrative in order to focus on a related matter. There are several famous digressions in Homer, such
as the "wall scene" in Book 3 of the Iliad when Helen surveys the armies from the top of the Trojan Wall.
In Midsummer Night’s Dream the central plot deals with the two couples: Lysander and Hermia;
Demetrius and Helena. Therefore, every scene which switches over to Theseus and Hippolyta, or to
Oberon and Titania (and the fairies, etc.), could be considered a "digression."

DOUBLE-ENTENDRE: From the French: “double meaning” (pron.: “DOO-bluh on-TAWN-dreh). A literary
device which consists of a double meaning, especially when the second meaning is impolite or risqué.
For example, when Guildenstern says: "her [Fortune’s] privates we," his words can be interpreted either
to mean, “ordinary men” (as in “private soldiers”) or as “sexual confidants” (with a pun on “private
parts”).
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DRAMA: A composition in prose or verse presenting, in pantomime and dialogue, a narrative involving
conflict between a character or characters and some external or internal force (see conflict). Playwrights
usually design dramas for presentation on a stage in front of an audience. Aristotle called drama
"imitated human action." Drama may have originated in religious ceremonies. Thespis of Attica (sixth
century BCE) was the first recorded composer of a tragedy. Tragedies in their earliest stage were
performed by a single actor who interacted with the chorus. The playwright Aeschylus added a second
actor on the stage (deuteragonist) to allow additional conflict and dialogue. Sophocles and Euripides
added a third (tritagonist). Medieval drama may have evolved independently from rites commemorating
the birth and death of Christ. During the late medieval period and the early Renaissance, drama
gradually altered to the form we know today. The mid-sixteenth century in England in particular was one
of the greatest periods of world drama. In traditional Greek drama, as defined by Aristotle, a play was to
consist of five acts and follow the three dramatic unities. In more recent drama (i.e., during the last two
centuries), plays have frequently consisted of three acts, and playwrights have felt more comfortable
disregarding the confines of Aristotelian rules involving verisimilitude. See also unities, comedy, tragedy,
revenge play, miracle play, morality play, and mystery play. An individual work of drama is called a play.

DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE A poem in which a poetic speaker addresses either the reader or an internal
listener at length. It is similar to the soliloquy in theater, in that both a dramatic monologue and a
soliloquy often involve the revelation of the innermost thoughts and feelings of the speaker. Two
famous examples are Browning's "My Last Duchess" and "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister."

DRAMATIC POETRY poems that employ a dramatic form or some element or elements of dramatic
techniques as a means of achieving poetic ends. See also lyric poetry and narrative poetry

ELEGY a poem of mourning, usually about someone who has died. A Eulogy is great praise or
commendation, a laudatory speech, often about someone who has died. A sustained and formal poem
setting forth the poet’s meditations upon death or another solemn theme. Examples include Thomas
Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”; Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam; and Walt
Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”

ELISION The omission of an unstressed vowel or syllable to preserve the meter of a line of poetry.
Alexander uses elision in "Sound and Sense": "Flies o'er th' unbending corn...."

END-STOPPED a line of poetry with a pause at the end. Lines that end with a period, a comma, a colon,
a semicolon, an exclamation point, or a question mark are end-stopped lines.
True ease in writing comes from Art, not Chance,
As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.

ENJAMBMENT the continuation of the sense and grammatical construction from one line of poetry to
the next. Milton’s Paradise Lost is notable for its use of enjambment, as seen in the following lines:
. . . .Or if Sion hill
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Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flow’d
Fast by the oracle of God, . . . .

EPANALEPSIS device of repetition in which the same expression (single word or phrase) is repeated both
at the beginning and at the end of the line, clause, or sentence.
Voltaire: “Common sense is not so common.”

EPIC a long narrative poem, written in heightened language , which recounts the deeds of a heroic
character who embodies the values of a particular society.

EPIGRAM (from Greek epigramma "an inscription"): (1) An inscription in verse or prose on a building,
tomb, or coin. (2) a short verse or motto appearing at the beginning of a longer poem or the title page of
a novel, at the heading of a new section or paragraph of an essay or other literary work to establish
mood or raise thematic concerns. The opening epigram to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of
Usher" is one such example. (3) A short, humorous poem, often written in couplets, that makes a satiric
point. Coleridge once described this third type of epigram using an epigram himself: "A dwarfish whole,
/ Its body brevity, / and wit its soul."

EPIGRAPH a quotation or aphorism at the beginning of a literary work suggestive of the theme.

EPILOGUE: A conclusion added to a literary work such as a novel, play, or long poem. It is the opposite of
a prologue. Often, the epilogue refers to the moral of a fable. Sometimes, it is a speech made by one of
the actors at the end of a play asking for the indulgence of the critics and the audience. Shakespeare's A
Midsummer Night's Dream contains one of the most famous epilogues. Contrast with prologue.

EPIPHANY: Christian thinkers used this term to signify a manifestation of God's presence in the world. It
has since become in modern fiction and poetry the standard term for the sudden flare into revelation of
an ordinary object or scene. In particular, the epiphany is a revelation of such power and insight that it
alters the entire world-view of the thinker who experiences it. (In this sense, it is similar to what a
scientist might call a "paradigm shift.") Shakespeare's Twelfth Night takes place on the Feast of the
Epiphany, and the theme of revelation is prevalent in the work. James Joyce used the term epiphany to
describe personal revelations such as that of Gabriel Conroy in the short story "The Dead" in Dubliners.

EPISTOLARY NOVEL: A novel which takes the form of letters which pass between the main characters;
e.g. The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis.

EPISTROPHE Device of repetition in which the same expression (single word or phrase) is repeated at the
end of two or more lines, clauses, or sentences (it is the opposite of anaphora).

EPITHALAMION (Greek, "at the Bridal Chamber," plural epithalamia): A wedding hymn sung in classical
Greece outside the bride's room on her wedding night. Sappho is traditionally believed to have been the
first poet to begin the tradition. Renaissance poets revived the custom, including Sir Philip Sidney,
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Spenser, Donne, Ben Jonson, Herrick, Crashaw, Dryden, and Marvell. The genre largely fell out of favor
during the Enlightenment, but it enjoyed a brief respite during the Romantic period. The Latin
equivalent is called an epithalamium.

EPITHET an adjective or adjective phrase applied to a person or thing that is frequently used to
emphasize a characteristic quality. “Father of our country” and “the great Emancipator” are examples. A
Homeric epithet is a compound adjective used with a person or thing: “swift-footed Achilles”; “rosy-
fingered dawn.”

EPONYM: the person for whom something is named, such as the central characters of Hamlet and King
Lear, from whom those plays take their titles.

EUPHONY a style in which combinations of words pleasant to the ear predominate. Its opposite is
cacophony. The following lines from John Keats’ Endymion are euphonious:
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

EYE RHYME rhyme that appears correct from spelling, but is half-rhyme or slant rhyme from the
pronunciation. Examples include “watch” and “match,” and “love” and “move.”

ESSAY a short piece of nonfiction prose in which the writer discusses some aspect of a subject.
ESSAY TYPES TO KNOW:
ARGUMENTATION one of the four forms of discourse which uses logic, ethics, and emotional appeals
(logos, ethos, pathos) to develop an effective means to convince the reader to think or act in a certain
way.
PERSUASION relies more on emotional appeals than on facts
ARGUMENT form of persuasion that appeals to reason instead of emotion to convince an audience to
think or act in a certain way.
CAUSAL RELATIONSHIP Form of argumentation in which the writer claims that one thing results from
another, often used as part of a logical argument.
DESCRIPTION a form of discourse that uses language to create a mood or emotion.
EXPOSITION one of the four major forms of discourse, in which something is explained or “set forth.”
NARRATIVE the form of discourse that tells about a series of events.

EUPHEMISM A figure of speech using indirection to avoid offensive bluntness, such as "deceased" for
"dead" or "remains" for "corpse."

EXPLICATION act of interpreting or discovering the meaning of a text, usually involves close reading and
special attention to figurative language.
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FABLE a very short story told in prose or poetry that teaches a practical lesson about how to succeed in
life.

FARCE a type of comedy in which ridiculous and often stereotyped characters are involved in silly, far-
fetched situations.

FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE Words which are inaccurate if interpreted literally, but are used to describe.
Similes and metaphors are common forms. A deviation from what speakers of a language understand as
the ordinary or standard use of words in order to achieve some special meaning or effect. Perhaps the
two most common figurative devices are the simile--a comparison between two distinctly different
things using "like" or "as" ("My love's like a red, red rose")--and the metaphor--a figure of speech in
which two unlike objects are implicitly compared without the use of "like" or "as." These are both
examples of tropes. Any figure of speech that results in a change of meaning is called a trope. Any figure
of speech that creates its effect in patterns of words or letters in a sentence, rather than twisting the
meaning of words, is called a scheme. Perhaps the most common scheme is parallelism.

FLASHBACK a scene that interrupts the normal chronological sequence of events in a story to depict
something that happened at an earlier time.

FOIL A character who acts as contrast to another character. Often a funny side kick to the dashing hero,
or a villain contrasting the hero.

FORESHADOWING the use of hints and clues to suggest what will happen later in a plot. Hints of future
events through unusual circumstances in the present; e.g. the appearance of the ghost at the beginning
of Hamlet, the witches in Macbeth, the foul weather in King Lear, or the bird-signs in the Iliad.

FRAME STORY: The literary device of creating a larger story for the purpose of combining a number of
shorter stories in a unity. The result of inserting one or more small stories within the body of a larger
story that encompasses the smaller ones. Often this term is used interchangeably with both the literary
technique and the larger story itself that contains the smaller ones, which are called pericopes, "framed
narratives" or "embedded narratives." The most famous example is Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, in which
the overarching frame narrative is the story of a band of pilgrims traveling to the shrine of Thomas a
Becket in Canterbury. The band passes the time in a storytelling contest. The framed narratives are the
individual stories told by the pilgrims who participate. Another example is Boccaccio's Decameron, in
which the frame narrative consists of a group of Italian noblemen and women fleeing the plague, and
the framed narratives consist of the tales they tell each other to pass the time while they await the
disease's passing. The 1001 Arabian Nights is probably the most famous Middle Eastern frame narrative.
Here, in Bagdad, Scheherazade must delay her execution by beguiling her Caliph with a series of
cliffhangers.

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FRANKENSTEIN MOTIF A motif in which a created being turns upon its creator in what seems to be an
inevitable fashion. The term comes from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a nineteenth-century novel in
which Victor Frankenstein stiches together the body parts of condemned criminals and then reanimates
the resulting patchwork creature using electricity. However, the motif itself dates back much earlier to
medieval legends of the Golem, an animated clay figure controlled by Hebrew kabbalists. The
Frankenstein motif warns against hubris in human creators. This admonishment occasionally appears in
thoughtful science fiction exploring the ethical responsibility of creating new life, but it even more
frequently appears in anti-intellectual diatribes against knowledge "mankind was not meant to know."
In the later case, the Frankenstein motif expresses general anxieties about the rapidity of technological
change. Examples of the Frankenstein motif appear in H. G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau,
Crichton's Jurassic Park, and Greg Bear's novella Blood Music.

FREE VERSE poetry that does not conform to a regular meter or rhyme scheme.

GEMEL A final couplet that appears at the end of a sonnet.

GENRE A distinct classification in literature. From the Lat., "genus:" "type, kind;" pron.: “Zhawn-reh.” A
classification according to what different works have in common, in their structure and treatment of a
subject. By correctly identifying the genre of a text, we can get a better idea of its author's intention
and purpose. We can also deepen our sense of the value of any single text, by allowing us to view it
comparatively, alongside other texts of the same type. In ancient Greece and Rome the primary genres
were: epic; lyric (ode and ballad); drama (tragedy and comedy) and satire. Today the novel and short
story have been added to those major classical genres, as well as numerous minor categories. The
literary genres used by the College Board in their AP study guides are the following: autobiography and
diary; biography and history; criticism; drama; essay and fiction (novel and short story); expository
prose; journalism; political writing; science and nature writing.

HAMARTIA A term from Greek tragedy that literally means "missing the mark." Originally applied to an
archer who misses the target, a hamartia came to signify a tragic flaw, especially a misperception, a lack
of some important insight, or some blindness that ironically results from one's own strengths and
abilities. In Greek tragedy, the protagonist frequently possesses some sort of hamartia that causes
catastrophic results after he fails to recognize some fact or truth that could have saved him if he
recognized it earlier. The idea of hamartia is often ironic; it frequently implies the very trait that makes
the individual noteworthy is what ultimately causes the protagonist's decline into disaster. For instance,
for the character of Macbeth, the same ambition that makes him so admired is the trait that also allows
Lady Macbeth to lure him to murder and treason. Similarly, what ennobles Brutus is his unstinting love
of the Roman Republic, but this same patriotism causes him to kill his best friend, Julius Caesar. These
normally positive traits of self-motivation and patriotism caused the two protagonists to "miss the
mark" and realize too late the ethical and spiritual consequences of their actions.

HEROIC COUPLET two end-stopped iambic pentameter lines rhymed aa, bb, cc with the thought usually
completed in the two-line unit. See the following example from Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock:
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