Literary Terms 1 (Credit P'New P'Pim P'Cherry)

1. Alliteration - the repetition of the same or very similar consonant sounds in words that are close together
2. Allusion - a reference to a statement, a person, a place, or an event from literature
3. Analogy - comparisons made between two unlike things to show how they are alike
4. Anecdote - a brief story told to illustrate a point
5. Assonance - the repetition of vowel sounds in words that are close together
6. Atmosphere - the overall mood or emotion of a work of literature
7. Author - people who write any literary work or document
8. Autobiography - a person's account of his or her own life or of part of it
9. Ballad - a song or song-like poem that tells a story
10. Biography - the story of a real person's life, written or told by another person
11. Character - a person or animal who takes part in the action of a story, play, or other literary work
12. Characterization - the way a writer reveals the personality of a character
13. Chronological Order - the arrangement of events in the order in which they occurred
14. Climax - the most important or exciting point in a story or situation, which usually happens near the end
15. Comedy - in general, a story that ends happily for its main characters
16. Conflict - a struggle or clash between opposing characters and opposing forces
17. Connotation - the meaning suggested by a word that is way beyond its dictionary definition
18. Denotation - the literal, dictionary definition of a word
19. Description - writing indented to re-create a person, a place, a thing, an event, or an experience
20. Dialect - a way of speaking that is characteristic of a particular region or group of people
21. Dialogue - the conversation between two or more characters
22. Diction - a writer or speaker choice of words
23. Drama - a story written to be acted in front of an audience
24. Essay - a short piece of nonfiction prose that examines a single subject
25. Exaggeration - overstating something usually for the purpose of creating a comic effect
26. Exposition - the kind of writing that explains or gives information
27. Fable - a brief story told in prose or poetry that contains a moral, a practical lesson about how to get along in life
28. Fiction - a prose account that is made up rather than true
29. Figure of Speech - a word or phrase that describes one thing in terms of something else and is not literally true
30. Flashback - an interruption in the action of a plot to tell what happened at an earlier time
31. Folk Tale - a story, with no known author, that originally was passed on from one generation to another by word of mouth
32. Foreshadowing - the use of clues to suggest events that will happen later in the plot
33. Free verse - poetry without a regular meter or a rhyme scheme
34. Historical Fiction - novel, stories, or plays set during a historical time
35. Idiom - an expression peculiar to a particular language that means something different from the literal meaning of the works
36. Imagery - language that appeals to the senses
37. Inversion - the reversal of the normal word order of a sentence
38. Irony - a contrast between expectation and reality
39. Legend - a story of extraordinary deeds that is handed down from one generation to the next