Literary Terms 2

40. Limerick - a very short humorous or nonsensical poem
41. Lyric Poem - a poem that expresses the feeling or thoughts of a speaker rather than telling a story
42. Metamorphosis - a change from one shape or form to another
43. Metaphor - an imaginative comparison between two unlike things in which one thing is said to be another thing
44. Meter - a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry
45. Mood - see atmosphere
46. Motif - see folk tale
47. Motivation - the reasons a character behaves in a certain way
48. Myth - a story that explains something about the world and typically involves gods or other supernatural forces
49. Narration - the kind of writing that tells a story
50. Narrative poem - a poem that tells a story
51. Nonfiction - prose writing that deals with real people, thing, events, and places
52. Novel - a long fictional story whose length is usually somewhere between one hundred and five hundred book pages
53. Objective writing - writing that presents fact without revealing the writer feelings and opinions
54. Onomatopoeia - the use of words whose sounds imitate or suggest their meaning
55. Personification - a figure of speech in which an object or an animal is spoken of as if it had human feelings, thoughts, or attitudes
56. Persuasion - a kind of writing intended to convince a reader to think or act in a certain way
57. Playwright - the authors of a play, or drama
58. Plot - the series of related events that make up a story
59. Poetry - a kind of rhythmic, compressed language that uses figures of speech and imagery designed to appeal to our emotions and imagination
60. Point of view - the vantage point from which a story is told
61. Prose - any writing that is not poetry
62. Protagonist - the main character in a work of literature
63. Pun - a play on the multiply meanings of a word or on two words that sound alike but have different meaning
64. Refrain - a repeated sound, word, phrase, line, or group of line
65. Rhyme - the repetition of accented vowel sounds in words that are close together in a poem
66. Rhythm - a musical quality produced by the repetition of stressed and unstressed syllables or by the repetition of certain other sound patterns
67. Satire - writing that ridicules something often in order to bring about change
68. Setting - the time and place of a story, play, or narrative poem
69. Short story - a short fictional prose narrative
70. Simile - a comparison between two unlike things, using a word such as like, as, than, or resembles
71. Speaker - the voice talking to us in a poem
72. Stanza - a group of consecutive lines in a poem that form a single unit
73. Stereotype - a fixed idea about the members of a particular group of people that does not allow for any individuality
74. Style - the way a writer uses language
75. Subjective writing - writing in which the feeling and opinions of the writer are revealed
76. Suspense - the uncertainty or anxiety that a reader feels about what will happen next in a story, novel, or drama
77. Symbol - a person, a place, a thing, or an event that has meaning in itself and stands for something beyond itself as well
78. Tall tale - an exaggerated, far-fetched story that is obviously untrue but is told as though it should be believed
79. Theme - the general idea of insight about life that a work of literature reveals
80. Tone - the attitude a writer takes toward his or her subject, characters, and audience