Literature
This is the broad term for written works — including fiction, poetry, and drama — considered to have artistic or intellectual value.
What is Literature?
This is the term for a single unit of poetry made up of grouped lines, similar to a paragraph in prose.
What is a stanza?
This sound device is the repetition of the same initial consonant sound in neighboring words, as in "Peter Piper picked a peck."
What is alliteration?
This figure of speech makes a direct comparison between two unlike things without using "like" or "as," as in "Life is a journey."
What is a metaphor?
This critical approach analyzes literature by examining the historical, social, and biographical context in which it was written.
What is historical criticism?
Literature is divided into four major types: fiction, poetry, drama, and this fourth form.
What is nonfiction?
This 14-line fixed poetic form comes in two major varieties — Shakespearean and Petrarchan — and traditionally ends with a shift in argument called a volta.
What is a sonnet?
This is the term for the repetition of vowel sounds within nearby words, as in "The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain."
What is assonance?
This figure of speech compares two unlike things using "like" or "as," as in "My love is like a red, red rose" (Burns)
What is a simile?
This critical lens examines how gender, power, and the representation of women shape the meaning of a literary text
What is feminist criticism?
According to course concepts, literature serves this dual purpose described by the Latin phrase aut prodesse aut delectare.
What is to instruct and delight?
This term describes the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of poetry, used to give verse its musical rhythm.
What is meter?
Poe's "The Raven" uses this sound device extensively — the repetition of the same end sounds at the close of two or more lines — creating its hypnotic, mournful effect.
What is rhyme?
This device gives human qualities, feelings, or actions to non-human things, as when Angelou writes of the caged bird whose "wings are clipped and his feet are tied."
What is personification?
This critical approach — often applied to texts from colonized nations — examines themes of identity, displacement, power, and resistance to colonial rule.
What is postcolonial criticism?
This concept holds that a text's meaning is not fixed by the author, but is actively constructed by the reader during the reading process.
What is reader-response theory?
A line of iambic pentameter contains five of these metrical units, each made up of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable.
What is an iamb?
This sound device refers to words whose pronunciation imitates the sound they describe, such as buzz, hiss, or crash.
What is an onomatopoeia?
This is the term for a figure of speech in which contradictory terms are combined to create a new meaning, as in "deafening silence" or "sweet sorrow."
What is an oxymoron?
Unlike biographical or historical approaches, this critical method focuses on the text alone — analyzing only its language, structure, imagery, and internal patterns.
What is New Criticism/Formalism?
Scholars debate whether literature must meet two criteria: aesthetic quality and this second quality that relates to its ability to speak beyond its specific time and place.
What is universality?
This is the term for the process of marking a poem's stressed and unstressed syllables — dividing lines into feet — in order to identify its metrical pattern.
What is scansion?
Emily Dickinson famously used this type of imperfect rhyme — where end sounds are similar but not identical, as in "death" and "breath" — giving her poems a sense of unresolved tension.
What is slant rhyme?
In Spenser's Amoretti, the beloved is compared to a series of grand natural and regal images — a technique in which an extended or elaborate comparison is sustained across multiple lines or even an entire poem.
What is an extended metaphor?
This critical approach argues that all literature reflects the economic interests of the ruling class, and that characters, conflicts, and themes can be read as expressions of class struggle and capitalist ideology.
What is Marxist Criticism?