Ambiguity – allows two or more simultaneous interpretations of a word, phrase, action, or situation

Allegory – a narration or description usually restricted to a single meaning because its events, actions, and
characters represent specific abstraction or ideas
Allusion – a brief reference to a person, place, or thing, event, or idea in history or literature
Alliteration – when the initial sound of a word, beginning either with a consonant or a vowel, are repeated in
close succession
Assonance – when the vowel sound within a word matches the same sound in a nearby word, but the
surrounding consonants are different
Aside - a speech directed only to the audience
Apostrophe – an address either to someone who is absent or to something nonhuman
Chatarsis - 'puration' of the emotions of 'pity and fear' (the audience should also feel it)
Conceit – an ingenious comparison of two dissimilar things
Cosmic irony – when writer uses God, destiny, or fate to dash the hopes of human kind
Comic relief - a humorous scene or incident that alleviates tension in an otherwise serious work
Connotation – how the word has been used and the associations that people make with it
Denotation – literal, dictionary meaning of a word
Diction – language used by the speaker
Dramatic monologue – a character/speaker addresses a silent audience
Dramatic tragedy -
Didactic poetry – poetry designed to teach an ethnical, moral, or religious lesson
Elegy – lyric poem written to commemorate someone who is dead
Epigram – a brief, pointed, and witty
Found poem – the text unintentionally found in the non-poetic environment
Fixed forms – categorized by the patterns of its lines, meter, rhyme, stanzas…
Haiku – borrowed from the Japanese; 17 syllables organized into three unrhymed line of 5, 7, and 5 syllables
Hamartia - combination of wrong act and fatal flaw
History play - any drama based on historical materials
Hubris/hybris - excessive ambition, pride, temperament
Hyperbole – overstatement, exaggeration
Iambic – two syllable foot of one unstressed and one stressed syllable
Iambic pentameter – 10 syllables, 5 feet, 2 syllable iambs
Interludes - short plays and revels, performed at noble households and at court, especially at holidays
Irony – denotes something different (usually the opposite) from something that is expected to be said or
happened
Verbal irony – what is said is not what is intended
Situational irony – what happens is opposite of what is expected or desired
Dramatic irony – audience/readers knows things that the characters do not
Tragic irony - form of dramatic irony; ex. Oedipus hunts for the killer and hunts himself
Litotes – understatement – says less than intended; downplays importance of something
Limerick – a light and humorous poem
Mystery plays - 12th century non-secular dramas, refer to the mystery of Christ's redemption of mankind
Miracle plays - Non-secular, didactic plays about saints
Morality play - secular play that suppresed the performance of religious plays
Metaphor – an implicit comparison without words such as like or as or seems
Explicit metaphor – man is a mule standing his ground; explicitly compares
Implicit metaphor – man brayed his refusal to leave; hints or alludes on something
Extended metaphor – extended comparison in which part or all the poem consists of a series of related
metaphors
Controlling metaphor – comparison throughout the whole poem
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Metonymy - a figure of speech in which something closely associated with a subject is substituted for it
Naturalism - th works of E. Zola - critical laboratories, the importance of characterization as the measure of
truthfulness; represented a specific examination of people's vices and desires and the forces of heredity and
environment which have a great influence on their lives; returns to the char. analysis but the focus is on ordinary
(low-class) people in their natural environment and on physical and soc. influences; no supernatural, exotic
elementa and the themes were contemporary and indigenous)
Oedipus' irony - as a hunter (hunts the killer=hunts himself); as a sailor (considered to steer Thebes into right
direction); as a farmer ('plowing' and 'sowing' - euphemisms for sexual act; supposed to be the farmer of the city
and people, ensure happiness for all)
Onomatopoeia – words that imitate sounds from nature (or man-made objects)
Oxymoron – two contradictory words used together
Ode – a lyric poem typically of elaborate or irregular metric form and expressive of exalted or enthusiastic
emotion
Open poetic forms – use the arrangement of the words and phrases on the printed page, pauses, line lengths,
and other means to create unique forms and meanings
Parody – a humorous imitation of another, usually serious, work
Prose poem – printed as prose; the most clear opposite of fixed forms
Play - general term for a work of dramatic literature
Playwright - an author of a play
Playhouse - a place where plays are performed
Picture poem – the lines are arranged into particular shapes and they enhance the meaning of a poem
Paradox – a statement that initially appears to be self-contradictory but on closer inspection, turns out to make
sense
Personification – the attribution of human characteristic to nonhuman thing
Positivism - knowlledge comes through sensory faculties
Pun – a play on words
Realism - a literary technique that attempts to create the appearance of life as it actually experienced; created as
a strong reaction against Romanticism; Turgenev, Pisemsky, Tolstoy
Realist drama - emphasized those aspects of life which could be observed in the real world and what goes in
people's life behind the façade (language - we can hear it in daily life; characters - not larger than in life, reflect
the audence's lives, ordinary middle-class people; Setting - home, kitchen, the work place,...; Themes - rebellion
against soc. conventions, hypocrisy, and complacency, controversial issues; the objective is to open the
audience's eyes and make them aware of important soc. issues)
Reversal - change where an action performed by a character has the opposite of its indeed efect
Revenge tragedy - subgenre of tragedy in which a ghost demands revenge, fake madness, procrastination, a
best friend spy on a protagonist, a play within a play, very gory...
Rhyme scheme – the pattern of end rhymes
Symbol – an object, person, place, event, etc., or its absence can suggest more than its literal meaning
Conventional symbol – symbol widely recognized by a society or culture
Literary (contextual) symbol – a setting, character, action, object, name, or anything else in a specific
work that maintains its literal significance while suggesting other meanings
Sestina – 39 lines, any length, divided into six-lines stanzas and concluding three-line stanza
Script - the text of plays
Soliloquy - The actor, alone on stage
Sonnet – fourteen lines of iambic pentameter
Petrarchan sonnet – 14 lines divided into 2 parts, octave (8 lines) and sestet (6 lines)
Shakespearean sonnet – three quatrains (3x4 lines) and a couplet (2 lines)
Synaesthesia – poetic device which describes one sensory feeling in terms of another
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Structure of greek drama - prologue (exposition), parodos (The chorus' entrance song), episodia (char. engage
in dialogues that frequently consist of heated debates), stasimon (choral ode which follows each episoidia),
exodus (last scene, the resolution after char. leave the stage)
Subtext - the content beneath the dialogue; char. do not address their issues directly
Synecdoche – a figure of speech in which part of something is used to signify the whole
Satire – literary art of ridiculing a folly or vice in an effort to expose or correct it
Simile (usporedba) – an explicit comparison using words such as like/as/seems…
Stanza or verse – two or more lines of poetry separated into one whole
Stanza – grouping of lines
Couplet – stanza of two lines
Tercet – stanza of three lines
Quatrain – stanza of four lines
Sestet – stanza of six lines
No rhyme = blank verse
Couplet – two lines that usually rhyme and have the same meter
Heroic couplet – iambic pentameter that rhymes in pairs
Tercet – a three-line stanza
Triplet – when all three lines rhyme
Terza rima – consists of an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme ABA, BCB, CDC
Quatrain – a four-line stanza
The speaker – narrator of a poem – persona created by the author
Tragic hero - a great person descends from the state of happiness to agony
Villanelle – consists of 19 lines of any length divided into six stanzas