Final Lit Terms

Rising Action:  plot build up, caused by conflict and complications, advancement towards climax


Romanticism:  movement in western culture beginning in the eighteenth and peaking in the nineteenth century as a revolt against Classicism; imagination was valued over reason and fact


Satire:  ridicules or condemns the weakness and wrong doings of individuals, groups, institutions, or humanity in general


Scansion:  the analysis of verse in terms of meter


Setting:  the time and place in which events in a short story, novel, play, or narrative poem occur

Simile: a figure of speech comparing two essentially unlike things through the use of a specific word of comparison


Soliloquy: an extended speech, usually in a drama, delivered by a character alone on stage


Spiritual:  a folk song, usually religious theme


Speaker:  a narrator, the one speaking


Stereotype:  cliche, a simplified, standardized conception with a special meaning and appeal for members of a group; a formula story


Stream of Consciousness: the style of writing that attempts to imitate the natural flow of a character's thoughts, feelings, reflections, memories, and mental images, as the character experiences them


Structure: the planned framework of a literary selection; its apparent organization


Style: the manner of putting thoughts into words; a characteristic way of writing or speaking


Subordination: the couching of less important ideas in less important structures of language


Surrealism: a style of literature and painting that stresses the subconscious or the non-rational aspects of man's existence characterized by the juxtaposition of the bizarre and banal


Suspension of Disbelief: suspend not believing in order to enjoy it


Symbol: something which stands for something else, yet has a meaning of its own


Synesthesia: the use of one sense to convey the experience of another sense

Synecdoche: another form of name changing, in which a part stands for the whole


Syntax: the arrangement and grammatical relations of words in a sentence


Theme: main idea of the story; its message(s)


Thesis: a proposition for consideration, especially one to be discussed and proved or disproved; the main idea


Tone: the devices used to create the mood and atmosphere of a literary work; the author's perceived point of view


Tongue in Cheek: a type of humor in which the speaker feigns seriousness; aka "dry" or "dead pan"


Tragedy: in literature any composition with a somber theme carried to a disastrous conclusion; a fatal event; protagonist usually is heroic but tragically (fatally) flawed


Understatement: opposite of hyperbole; saying less than you mean for emphasis

Vernacular: everyday speech


Voice: the textual features, such as diction and sentence structures, that convey the writer's or speaker's persona

Zeitgeist: the feeling of a particular era in history