Yellow Pages

Literary Terms:

Antagonist: The thing that opposes the protagonist. The antagonist may be another
character, society itself, a force of nature, or even a conflicting impulse within the
protagonist.

Author’s Purpose: the author’s reason for writing. Authors generally write with one or
more of these purposes in mind: to explain or inform, to entertain, to persuade, or to
enlighten.

Character Motivation: What a character wants, the reasons an author provides for a
character’s actions. Motivation can be either explicit (in which reasons are specifically
stated in a story) or implicit (in which the reasons are only hinted at or partially revealed).

Conflict: In literature, conflict is the opposition of persons or forces that brings about
dramatic action central to the plot of a story; conflict may be internal, as a psychological
conflict within a character, or external (e.g. man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs.
society).

Dynamic character: A character that, during the course of the narrative, grows or
changes in some significant way.

Flashback: A scene in a drama or narrative that recounts a prior event.

Flat character: A character with only one prominent trait.

Foreshadowing: The technique of arranging events and information in such a way that
the subsequent doings are prepared for, or “shadowed” beforehand. An author may
introduce specific words, images, or actions in order to suggest significant later events.

Genre: The type or class of a work, usually categorized by form, technique, or content.
Some examples of literary genres are epic, tragedy, comedy, poetry, novel, short story,
and creative nonfiction.

Imagery: The use of language to create mental images and sensory impressions (e.g. the
imagery of the phrase such sweet sorrow). Imagery can be used for emotional effect and
to intensify the impact on the reader.

Mood: The atmosphere or feeling created by the writer in a literary work or passage.
Mood can be expressed through imagery, word choice, setting, voice, and theme. For
example, mood evoked by Edgar Allen Poe’s work is gloomy and dark.
Paradox: A statement that seems self-contradictory or nonsensical on the surface but
that, upon closer examination, may be seen to contain an underlying truth. Paradox is
used to grab the reader’s attention and to direct it to a specific point or image that
provokes the reader to see something in a new way.

Personification: When something non-human is given a human-like quality. Example:

The wind tossed her hair around.

Plot: The basic sequence of events in a story. In conventional stories, plot has three main
parts: rising action, climax, and falling action.

Protagonist: The central character in a literary work. The protagonist usually initiates the
main action of the story, often in conflict with the antagonist.

Round character: A character that is fully developed.

Static character: A character that, during the course of the narrative, DOES NOT grow
or change.

Suspense: The sustained interest created by the buildup of events and delayed resolution
of the plot’s conflict.

Symbol: A person, place, or thing in a narrative that suggests meanings beyond its literal
sense.

Theme: The central or universal idea of a piece of fiction or the main idea of a nonfiction
essay. A universal theme transcends social and cultural boundaries and speaks to a
common human experience. A theme may be explicit or implicit. In a work with an
explicit theme, the author overtly states the theme somewhere within the work. Implicit
theme refers to the author’s ability to construct a piece in such a way that through
inference the reader understands the theme.