Allegory: A story whose characters and events stand for deeper ideas
Alliteration: Repeating beginning consonant sounds
Allusion: A brief reference to a known person, place or work
Ambiguity: Deliberate use of more than one possible meaning
Anachronism: Something placed in the wrong time period
Analogy: A comparison to explain something by likeness
Anaphora: Repeating a word or phrase at the start of successive lines or sentences
Antagonist: The character or force opposing the protagonist
Antithesis: Placing opposite ideas in balanced phrases
Aphorism: A short statement of a general truth
Apostrophe: Directly addressing an absent person or thing
Assonance: Repetition of vowel sounds
Bildungsroman: A novel about a character's growth to adulthood
Blank verse: Unrhymed iambic pentameter
Caesura: A pause within a line of poetry
Characterization: How an author creates and develops a character
Climax: The turning point of highest tension
Colloquialism: Informal everyday expression
Conceit: An elaborate, extended metaphor
Connotation: The feelings a word suggests beyond its literal meaning
Denotation: The literal dictionary meaning
Consonance: Repetition of consonant sounds within or at ends of words
Couplet: Two rhymed lines
Deus ex machina: A sudden unexpected event that solves a plot problem
Diction: An author's word choice
Didactic: Intended to teach a lesson
Dramatic irony: The audience knows something the characters do not
Elegy: A poem of mourning
Ellipsis: The omission of words, or the three dots marking it
End-stopped line: A line whose thought ends with the line
Enjambment: A sentence continuing past the end of a line
Epic: A long narrative poem about heroic deeds
Epigraph: A quotation placed at the start of a work
Epistolary novel: A novel told through letters or documents
Euphemism: A mild word replacing a harsh one
Exposition: Background information at a story's start
Extended metaphor: A metaphor developed over several lines
Falling action: Events after the climax
Figurative language: Language meant to be understood beyond its literal sense
First-person narrator: A narrator who tells the story as 'I'
Flashback: A scene from an earlier time
Foil: A character who contrasts with another to highlight traits
Foreshadowing: Hints about what will happen later
Frame story: A story that contains other stories
Free verse: Poetry without regular rhyme or meter
Genre: A category of literature
Gothic: Fiction with gloomy settings and mystery
Hyperbole: Deliberate exaggeration
Iambic pentameter: Ten-syllable line of five unstressed-stressed pairs
Imagery: Language appealing to the senses
In medias res: Beginning a story in the middle of the action
Irony: A contrast between expectation and reality
Juxtaposition: Placing contrasting things side by side
Litotes: Understatement using a negative, like 'not bad'
Metaphor: A direct comparison without 'like' or 'as'
Metonymy: Using a related thing to stand for something, like 'the crown' for a king
Mood: The feeling a work creates in the reader
Motif: A recurring element that supports a theme
Narrative arc: The shape of a story's development
Ode: A lyric poem praising a subject
Onomatopoeia: A word that imitates a sound
Oxymoron: Two contradictory words together
Parable: A short story teaching a moral lesson
Paradox: A statement that seems contradictory but reveals truth
Parallelism: Repeating similar grammatical structure
Parody: An imitation meant to mock or amuse
Pathos: An appeal to emotion
Ethos: An appeal based on credibility
Logos: An appeal based on logic
Personification: Giving human traits to non-human things
Point of view: The perspective from which a story is told
Third-person omniscient: A narrator who knows all characters' thoughts
Third-person limited: A narrator who knows one character's thoughts
Protagonist: The main character
Pun: A play on words
Quatrain: A four-line stanza
Refrain: A repeated line or phrase
Rhetorical question: A question asked for effect, not an answer
Rhyme scheme: The pattern of rhymes at line ends
Rising action: Events building toward the climax
Satire: Using humor and exaggeration to criticize
Setting: The time and place of a story
Simile: A comparison using 'like' or 'as'
Soliloquy: A speech in which a character speaks thoughts aloud alone
Sonnet: A fourteen-line poem
Stanza: A group of lines in a poem
Stream of consciousness: A narrative style following a character's flowing thoughts
Symbol: An object that stands for a larger idea
Synecdoche: A part standing for the whole, like 'hands' for workers
Syntax: The arrangement of words in sentences
Theme: A central idea of a work
Tone: The author's attitude toward the subject
Tragedy: A drama of a hero's downfall
Tragic flaw: A trait that leads to a hero's ruin
Understatement: Describing something as less than it is
Unreliable narrator: A narrator whose account cannot be fully trusted
Utopia: An imagined perfect society
Dystopia: An imagined society marked by suffering or oppression
Voice: The distinctive style of a writer or narrator
Zeugma: One word applied to two others in different senses

Free flashcards from Peabody at peabody.kids/flashcards/tp-literary-terms