Vocabulary
The Scarlet Letter
Authors
Poetry and Literary terms
Worldview & Misc
100

Property, especially a slave that is considered property

Chattel

100

This character's name alluded to a Bible parable about an object "of great price."

Pearl

100

This author was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens and took his pen name from a nautical term. 

Mark Twain

100

This is the most common meter/rhythm in English poetry. 

iambic (pentameter)

100

This is the worldview of Puritan literature and most writing, even lingering into writing into the mid-1800s. 

Theism

200

One's strong point

forte

200

This symbol appeared frequently in the SL, meant to symbolize truth or innocence, while its opposite symbolized sin, shame, or hiding. 

Light (light/dark)

200

This author of several autobiographies became a renowned orator and abolitionist after escaping slavery. 

Frederick Douglass

200

This is unrhymed iambic pentameter.

blank verse
200

This worldview of God as the Great Clockwinder was seen mainly in the founding documents of the United States. 

Deism

300

conflicted; having opposing feelings

ambivalent

300

This nickname was used for Roger Chillingworth, symbolizing his profession. 

Leech

300

This author claimed the inspiration for his story came from documents found in a trunk in the custom house where he worked.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

300

This is a reference to something outside the work, often to other literature, the Bible, or mythology. 

allusion

300

These are three characteristics of Romanticism. 

    Emotion and passion; The critique of progress; A return to the past; An awe of nature; The idealization of women; The purity of childhood; The search for subjective truth; The celebration of the individual; A break from convention; Spirituality and the occult
400

deep disgrace; dishonor

ignominy

400

This place symbolized both freedom and evil in the SL.

the forest

400

This man was considered the first truly modern American poet. 

Walt Whitman

400

This is the term for two rhyming lines of poetry. 

couplet

400

This worldview "tells it like it is" and relies on common experience, character, and human control of one's destiny. 

Realism

500

acts of self-abasement meant to atone for sin

penance

500

Hester took on this occupation that both earned her money and was a form of penance for her wrongdoing. 

What is sewing (clothes for the poor)

500

This reclusive author wrote nearly 1,800 poems, most of which were published only after her death. 

Emily Dickinson

500

This is the term for the divisions of poems, like paragraphs in prose. 

stanza

500

This was Jonathan Edwards's most famous sermon. 

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

600

capable of feeling; conscious

sentient

600

After many years, the meaning of the Scarlet "A" according to some townspeople changed from adultery to __________.

Able

600

This author claimed to end his experimental living situation because he thought he "had several more lives to live , and could not spare any more time for that one."

Henry David Thoreau

600

This is non-literal poetic language, such as metaphor, simile, or personification. 

figurative language

600

These are three of the four Fireside Poets.

Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes (Bryant)

700

doubt or uncertainty about the existence of God

agnosticism

700

At the end of the novel, Boston was celebrating this festive holiday of the Puritan people. 

Election Day

700

This man wrote Nature, considered the "Bible" of Transcendentalism. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson

700

A device in which an author creates a “story within a story”

framing

700

This is what Puritan John Winthrop wanted his Puritan settlement to be to the world. 

a City on a Hill

800

fixed; unchanging

static

800

Dimmesdale finally did this at the end of his life, which he had denied Pearl before. 

Stand on the scaffold with her in public

800

He was the author of stories supposedly told by Deitrich Knickerbocker and set in Dutch-settled New York state. 

Washington Irving
800

What is another word for the atmosphere an author creates through word choice and description?

mood

800

She was the presidential wife who made the best of life in the wilderness in which the White House was first located. 

Abigail Adams

900

true sorrow for sins

penitence

900

Chillingworth said that this place was the only place in the world Dimmesdale could have escaped him. 

the scaffold

900

This author created the modern detective story genre. 

Edgar Allen Poe

900

This is the author’s attitude toward his or her subject.

Tone

900

This is the church or religion from which Transcendentalism was first associated. 

Unitarian

1000

natural change; changeability

vicissitude

1000

This was one thing that was said about the supposed scarlet "A" seen on Dimmesdale's chest. 

There wasn't one.

He had tortured it onto himself.

Chillingworth did it with magic and drugs.

It was eaten there by the tooth of remorse from the inside out.   


1000

This African-American slave poet argued in her poetry for the humanity of African people. 

Phillis Wheatley

1000

This kind of poetic meter has 8/6/8/6 syllables and is in iambic tetrameter/iambic trimeter. (And can be sung to the tune of Amazing Grace, Gilligan's Island theme song, or the Pokemon theme song!)

Common meter

1000

This is who took Huck in to "sivilize" him. 

Widow Douglas

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