AP Lit Exam: Terms to know!!

Abstract	Complex, discusses intangible qualities like good and evil, seldom uses examples to support its points.
Academic	Dry and rhetorical writing; sucking all the life out of its subject with analysis.
Accent	In poetry, the stressed portion of a word.
Aesthetic	Appealing to the senses; a coherent sense of taste.
Allegory	A story in which each aspect of the story has a symbolic meaning outside the tale itself.
Alliteration	The repetition of initial consonant sounds.
Allusion	A reference to another work or famous figure.
Anachronism	"Misplaced in time." An aspect of a story that doesn't belong in its supposed time setting.
Analogy	A comparison, usually involving two or more symbolic parts, employed to clarify an action or a relationship.
Anecdote	A Short Narrative
Antecedent	The word, phrase, or clause that determines what a pronoun refers to.
Anthropomorphism	When inanimate objects are given human characteristics. Often confused with personification.
Anticlimax	Occurs when an action produces far smaller results than one had been led to expect.
Antihero	A protagonist who is markedly unheroic: morally weak, cowardly, dishonest, or any number of other unsavory qualities.
Aphorism	A short and usually witty saying.
Apostrophe	A figure of speech wherein the speaker talks directly to something that is nonhuman.
Archaism	The use of deliberately old-fashioned language.
Aside	A speech (usually just a short comment) made by an actor to the audience, as though momentarily stepping outside of the action on stage.
Aspect	A trait or characteristic
Assonance	The repeated use of vowel sounds: "Old king Cole was a merry old soul."
Atmosphere	The emotional tone or background that surrounds a scene
Ballad	A long, narrative poem, usually in meter and rhyme. Typically has a naive folksy quality.
Bathos	Writing strains for grandeur it can't support and tries too hard to be a tear jerker.
Pathos	Writing evokes feelings of dignified pity and sympathy.
Black humor	The use of disturbing themes in comedy.
Bombast	Pretentious, exaggeratedly learned language.
Burlesque	Broad parody, one that takes a style or form and exaggerates it into ridiculousness.
Cacophony	In poetry, using deliberately harsh, awkward sounds.
Cadence	The beat or rhythm or poetry in a general sense.
Canto	The name for a section division in a long work of poetry.
Caricature	A portrait (verbal or otherwise) that exaggerates a facet of personality.
Catharsis	Drawn from Aristotle's writings on tragedy. Refers to the "cleansing" of emotion an audience member experiences during a play
Chorus	In Greek drama, the group of citizens who stand outside the main action on stage and comment on it.
Classic	Typical, or an accepted masterpiece.
Coinage (neologism)	A new word, usually one invented on the spot.
Colloquialism	A word or phrase used in everyday conversational English that isn't a part of accepted "school-book" English.
Complex (Dense)	Suggesting that there is more than one possibility in the meaning of words; subtleties and variations; multiple layers of interpretation; meaning both explicit and implicit
Conceit (Controlling Image)	A startling or unusual metaphor, or to a metaphor developed and expanded upon several lines.
Denotation	A word's literal meaning.
Connotation	Everything other than the literal meaning that a word suggests or implies.
Consonance	The repetition of consonant sounds within words (rather than at their beginnings)
Couplet	A pair of lines that end in rhyme
Decorum	A character's speech must be styled according to her social station, and in accordance to the situation.
Diction	The words an author chooses to use.
Syntax	The ordering and structuring of words.
Dirge	A song for the dead. Its tone is typically slow, heavy, depressed, and melancholy
Dissonance	Refers to the grating of incompatible sounds.
Doggerel	Crude, simplistic verse, often in sing-song rhyme, like limericks.
Dramatic Irony	When the audience knows something that the characters in the drama do not
Dramatic Monologue	When a single speaker in literature says something to a silent audience.
Elegy	A type of poem that meditates on death or mortality in a serious, thoughtful manner.
Elements	Basic techniques of each genre of literature
Enjambment	The continuation of a syntactic unit from one line or couplet of a poem to the next with no pause.
Epic	A very long narrative poem on a serious theme in a dignified style; typically deal with glorious or profound subject matter.
Epitaph	Lines that commemorate the dead at their burial place.
Euphemism	A word or phrase that takes the place of a harsh, unpleasant, or impolite reality.
Euphony	When sounds blend harmoniously.
Explicit	To say or write something directly and clearly.
Farce	Extremely broad humor; in earlier times, a funny play or a comedy.
Feminine rhyme	Lines rhymed by their final two syllables. Properly, the penultimate syllables are stressed and the final syllables are unstressed.
Foil	A secondary character whose purpose is to highlight the characteristics of a main character, usually by contrast.
Foot	The basic rhythmic unit of a line of poetry, formed by a combination of two or three syllables, either stressed or unstressed.
Foreshadowing	An event of statement in a narrative that in miniature suggests a larger event that comes later.
Free verse	poetry written without a regular rhyme scheme or metrical pattern
Genre	A sub-category of literature.
Gothic	A sensibility that includes such features as dark, gloomy castles and weird screams from the attic each night.
Hubris	The excessive pride or ambition that leads to the main character's downfall
Hyperbole	Exaggeration or deliberate overstatement.
Implicit	To say or write something that suggests and implies but never says it directly or clearly.
In media res	Latin for "in the midst of things," i.e. beginning an epic poem in the middle of the action.
Interior Monologue	Refers to writing that records the mental talking that goes on inside a character's head; tends to be coherent.
Inversion	Switching the customary order of elements in a sentence or phrase.
Irony	A statement that means the opposite of what it seems to mean; uses an undertow of meaning, sliding against the literal a la Jane Austen.
Lament	A poem of sadness or grief over the death of a loved one or over some other intense loss.
Lampoon	A satire.
Loose sentence	A sentence that is complete before its end: Jack loved Barbara despite her irritating snorting laugh.
Periodic Sentence	A sentence that is not grammatically complete until it has reached it s final phrase: Despite Barbara's irritation at Jack, she loved him.
Lyric	A type of poetry that explores the poet's personal interpretation of and feelings about the world.
Masculine rhyme	A rhyme ending on the final stressed syllable (regular old rhyme)
Meaning	What makes sense, what's important.
Melodrama	A form of cheesy theater in which the hero is very, very good, the villain mean and rotten, and the heroine oh-so-pure.
Metaphor	A comparison or analogy that states one thing IS another.
Simile	A comparison or analogy that typically uses like or as.
Metonymy	A word that is used to stand for something else that it has attributes of or is associated with.
Nemesis	The protagonist's arch enemy or supreme and persistent difficulty.
Objectivity	Treatment of subject matter in an impersonal manner or from an outside view.
Subjectivity	A treatment of subject matter that uses the interior or personal view of a single observer and is typically colored with that observer's emotional responses.
Onomatopoeia	Words that sound like what they mean
Opposition	A pairing of images whereby each becomes more striking and informative because it's placed in contrast to the other one.
Oxymoron	A phrase composed of opposites; a contradiction.
Parable	A story that instructs.
Paradox	A situation or statement that seems to contradict itself, but on closer inspection, does not.
Parallelism	Repeated syntactical similarities used for effect.
Paraphrase	To restate phrases and sentences in your own words.
Parenthetical phrase	A phrase set off by commas that interrupts the flow of a sentence with some commentary or added detail.
Parody	The work that results when a specific work is exaggerated to ridiculousness.
Pastoral	A poem set in tranquil nature or even more specifically, one about shepherds.
Persona	The narrator in a non first-person novel.
Personification	When an inanimate object takes on human shape.
Plaint	A poem or speech expressing sorrow.
Point of View	The perspective from which the action of a novel is presented.
Omniscient	A third person narrator who sees into each character's mind and understands all the action going on.
Limited Omniscient	A Third person narrator who generally reports only what one character sees, and who only reports the thoughts of that one privileged character.
Objective	A thrid person narrator who only reports on what would be visible to a camera. Does not know what the character is thinking unless the character speaks it.
First person	A narrator who is a character in the story and tells the tale from his or her point of view.
Stream of Consciousness	Author places the reader inside the main character's head and makes the reader privy to all of the character's thoughts as they scroll through her consciousness.
Prelude	An introductory poem to a longer work of verse
Protagonist	The main character of a novel or play
Pun	The usually humorous use of a word in such a way to suggest two or more meanings
Refrain	A line or set of lines repeated several times over the course of a poem.
Requiem	A song of prayer for the dead.
Rhapsody	An intensely passionate verse or section of verse, usually of love or praise.
Rhetorical question	A question that suggests an answer.
Satire	Attempts to improve things by pointing out people's mistakes in the hope that once exposed, such behavior will become less common.
Soliloquy	A speech spoken by a character alone on stage, meant to convey the impression that the audience is listening to the character's thoughts.
Stanza	A group of lines roughly analogous in function in verse to the paragraphs function in prose.
Stock characters	Standard or cliched character types.
Subjunctive Mood	A grammatical situation involving the words "if" and "were," setting up a hypothetical situation.
Suggest	To imply, infer, indicate.
Summary	A simple retelling of what you've just read.
Suspension of disbelief	The demand made of a theater audience to accept the limitations of staging and supply the details with their imagination.
Symbolism	A device in literature where an object represents an idea.
Technique	The methods and tools of the author.
Theme	The main idea of the overall work; the central idea.
Thesis	The main position of an argument. The central contention that will be supported.
Tragic flaw	In a tragedy, this is the weakness of a character in an otherwise good (or even great) individual that ultimately leads to his demise.
Travesty	A grotesque parody
Truism	A way-too obvious truth
Unreliable narrator	When the first person narrator is crazy, a liar, very young, or for some reason not entirely credible
Utopia	An idealized place. Imaginary communities in which people are able to live in happiness, prosperity, and peace.
Zeugma	The use of a word to modify two or more words, but used for different meanings. He closed the door and his heart on his lost love.
Ode	A poem in praise of something divine or noble
Iamb	A poetic foot -- light, heavy
Trochee	A poetic foot -- heavy, light
Spondee	A poetic foot -- heavy, heavy
Pyrrhie	A poetic foot -- light, light
Anapest	A poetic foot -- light, light, heavy
Ambibranch	A poetic foot -- light, heavy, light
Dactyl	A poetic foot -- heavy, light, light
Imperfect	A poetic foot -- single light or single heavy
Pentameter	A poetic line with five feet.
Tetrameter	A poetic line with four feet
Trimeter	A poetic line with three feet
Blank Verse	unrhymed iambic pentameter.