LITERARY TERMS

CHARACTERIZATION

• A way to highlight and explain the details about a character in a story
• The patient boy and quiet girl were both well mannered and did not disobey their mother.
• She gently knelt down and stretched out her hand to help her friend return to her feet after her friend fell on the ground.
• The old lady twisted her fingers in her hands and bit her lip as she waited for her first grandchild to be born.

MOOD

• An element that evokes certain feelings or vibes in readers through words and descriptions.
• Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering and it's over way too soon.
• What a nice day!
• My sister was very excited and hopeful to finally have a chance to meet her favorite actor.

TONE

• The perspective or attitude that the author adapts with regards to a specific character, place, or description.
• He has a commanding presence and an authoritative voice.
• The painting was bold, brash, and modern.
• The riots ended in the violent deaths of three teenagers.

CONFLICT

• A serious disagreement or argument, typically a protracted one.
• The neighbors fought because one wanted trees in the back yard and the other didn't.
• He had a dispute with his wife over buying a new car.
• My mother screamed at me for skipping school yesterday.

CANNOTATION

• An idea or feeling that a word invokes in addition to its literal or primary meaning.
• Every morning my neighbor takes his mutt to the park.
• You need to be pushy when looking for a job.
• In the real world, procrastination can have a bad cannotation.

SOLILOQUY

• An act of speaking one's thoughts aloud when by oneself or regardless of any hearers.
• The soliloquy at the end showed a man still puzzled by his continuing inability to ever see anything more than the facts.
• The opening soliloquy which appears below establishes the character at the outset of the play.
• The politician spoke at the college campus, expressing his thoughts in a long-winded soliloquy.

ARCHETYPE

• A very typical example of a certain person or thing.
• As the great Mother pertains to nature, matter and Earth, the great Father archetype pertains to the ream of light and spirit.
• We resolved to build a temple on Earth, as a sort of copy of its spiritual archetype.
• He was the archetype of the individual man, the lone venturer, who against the odds makes out.

AUTHOR'S PURPOSE

• The reason an author decides to write about a specific topic.
• To persuade
• To inform
• To entertain

THEME

• The subject of a talk, a piece of writing, a person's thoughts, or an exhibition.
• Fate and free will
• Fear of failure
• Good versus bad

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

• The characters of a play, novel, or narrative.
• Hamlet
• Roderick Usher
• Madeline Usher

PERSONIFICATION

• A personal nature or human characteristic to something nonhuman.
• The stars danced playfully in the moonlit sky.
• The first rays of morning tiptoed through the meadow.
• The flowers waltzed in the gentle breeze.

PROSE

• Written or spoken language in its ordinary form, without metrical structure.
• The cheetah is the fastest land animal
• Tomorrow we have a sixty percent chance of snow with a high temperature around 34 degrees.
• Call me Ishmael. - Moby Dick

ANTAGONIST

• A person who actively opposes or is hostile to someone or something.
• Darth Vader
• Lord Farquaad from Shrek
• P. Sherman or The Dentist from Finding Nemo

PROTAGONIST

• The leading character or one of the major characters in a drama, movie, novel, or other fiction text.
• Marlin and Nemo from Finding Nemo
• Katniss from The Hunger Games
• Jack Dawson from Titanic

TRAGEDY

• An event causing a great suffering, destruction, and distress.
• A serious accident
• A crime
• A natural catastrophe

TRAGIC FLAW

• A trait in a character leading to his downfall and the character is often the hero of the literary piece.
• Hamlet and Captain Ahab
• The Tortoise and The Hare
• Romeo's impulsive behavior

APOSTROPHE

• A punctuation mark used to indicate either possession or the omission of letters or numbers.
• My neighbor's house.
• She's my best friend.
• The boy's teeth were very white.

FOIL

• Prevent from succeeding.
• Hamlet
• Harry Potter
• Divergent

MONOLOGUE

• A long speech by one actor in a play or movie
• The speech in Hamlet
• The speech in Jaws
• The speech in Charlie Brown

ASIDE

• A remark or passage by a character in a play that isn't intended to be heard by other characters.
• When Juliet speaks to herself in Romeo and Juliet

METAPHOR

• A figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action
• The curtain of night
• All the worlds a stage
• She is fishing in troubled waters

ALLUSION

• An expression designed to call something to mind without mentioning it explicitly.
• I was surprised his nose didn't grow like Pinocchio's
• He was a real Romeo with the ladies
• This place is like a Garden of Eden

PUN

• A joke exploiting the different possible meanings of a word
• I had abank account in the North Pole, but they froze all of my assets.
• A good pun is its own reword.
• A horse is a very stable animal.

IRNOY

• The expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite.
• A traffic cop gets his licenses suspended for unpaid parking tickets.
• A no smoking sign on your cigarette break.
• A traffic jam when you're already late.

IAMBIC PENTAMETER

• A certain kind of line of poetry that has to do with the number of shllables in the line and the emohasis placed on thise syllables.