The repetition of vowel sounds, usually within words
What is assonance?
100
The rhyming of words within a line of poetry.
What is internal rhyme?
100
The repetition of consonant sounds, usually at the beginning of words.
What is alliteration?
100
The atmosphere in a literary work.
What is mood?
100
The attitude of the author toward his or her subject or audience.
What is tone?
200
A literary work where the setting, characters, or action makes sense on a literal level, but also conveys an abstract level of meaning, which is usually religious or political in nature.
What is allegory?
200
An intentional contradiction between what something appears to mean and what it really means. Three major types are verbal, situational, and dramatic.
What is irony?
200
Something that stands for something else. It is multi-dimensional – may convey a number of meanings.
What is a symbol?
200
The general idea or meaning of a literary work. It may not always be explicit (plainly told) or easy to state, and a work of literature may contain more than one.
What is theme?
200
The use of pictures, description, or figures of speech such as SIMILES and METAPHORS to visualize (depict) a mood, idea or CHARACTER. It may involve all the senses, but usually involves the sense of sight
What is imagery?
300
The speaker in a work of prose.
What is narrator?
300
The perspective held by a NARRATOR or PERSONA. First-person, second-person, or third-person.
What is point of view?
300
A comparison of two different things which states that the two are actually the same thing, often through a form of the verb "to be,” e.g. "my father is a BEAR today."
What is metaphor?
300
Commas used (with no conjunction) to separate a series of words. The parts are emphasized equally when the conjunction is omitted; in addition, the use of commas with no intervening conjunction speeds up the flow of the sentence.
What is asyndeton?
300
A comparison between two pairs of things in which the more complex is explained in terms of the more
simple.
What is analogy?
400
A brief quotation which appears at the beginning of a literary work.
What is an epigraph?
400
Any structure which brings together parallel elements, be these nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, or larger structures to show that the ideas in the parts or sentences are equal in importance. Adds balance, rhythm, clarity.
What is parallelism?
400
The sense that what one reads is "real," or at least realistic and believable.
What is verisimilitude?
400
The repetition of introductory words or phrases for effect.
What is anaphora?
400
Also known as The Double. A literary technique by which a character is duplicated (usually in the form of an alter ego, though sometimes as a ghostly counterpart) or divided into two distinct, usually opposite personalities.
What is doppelganger?
500
A sentence which uses and or another conjunction to separate the items in a series. Can appear in the form of X and Y and Z, stressing equally each member of a series. It makes the sentence slower and the items more emphatic than in the asyndeton.
What is polysyndeton?
500
The pattern of rhyme.
What is rhyme scheme?
500
The locale, time, and CONTEXT in which the ACTION of a literary work takes place. "It was a dark and stormy night . . ." is a cliche example of this.
What is setting?
500
The audience’s complicity in accepting stage events or plot actions that they know are not real as if they were real during the performance or story. The audience does not “believe” the stage events are reality, but rather agrees not to “disbelieve” them to become imaginatively engaged.
What is What is willing suspension of disbelief?
500
Reasoning, conscious deliberate inference; the activity or process of reasoning.