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| A story in which people, things, or actions represent an idea or generalization about life. Allegories usually have a strong lesson or moral. |
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| The repetition of initial consonant sound in words, such a "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers." |
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| An reference to a reference to a familiar person, place, thing, or event--for example, Don Juan, brave new world, Everyman, Machiavellian, utopia. |
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| A comparison of objects or ideas that appear to be different but are like in some important way. |
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| Meter that is composed of feet that are short-short-long or unaccented-unaccented-accented. |
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| A brief story that illustrates or makes a point. |
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| A person or thing working against the hero of literary work the protagonist. |
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| A wise saying, usually short written. |
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| A turn from the general audience to address a specific group of persons (or personified abstraction) who is present or absent. For example, in a recent performance of Shakespeare's Hamlet, Hamlet turned turned to the audience and spoke directly to one woman about his father's death. |
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| A wise saying, usually short written. |
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| A repetition of the same sound in words close to one another--for example, white stripes. |
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| Unrhymed verse, often occurring in iambic pentameter. |
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| A break in the rhythm of language, particularly a natural pause in a line or verse, marked in prosody by a double vertical line. |
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| A method an author uses to let readers know more about the characters and their personal traits. |
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| An expression that has been used so often that it loses its expressive power--for example, "dead as a doornail" or "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse." |
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| Repetition of the final consonant sound in words containing different vowels--for example, "stroke of luck." |
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| A stanza made up of two rhyming lines. |
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| Rhyming of the end of lines of verse. |
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| Also known as a run-on line in poetry, enjambment occurs when one line ends and continues onto the next line of complete meaning. For example, in Thoreau's poem "My life has been the poem I would have writ," the first line is the "My life has been the poem I would have writ," and the second line completes the meaning--"but I could not bout live and utter it." |
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| A philosophy that values human freedom and personal responsibility. Jean-Paul Sartre is the foremost existentialist Other famous existentialist writers include Soren Kierkegaard, Albert Camus, Freidrick Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, and Simone de Beauvoir. |
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| A category of literature defined by its style, form, and content. |
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| A rhythmical pattern in verse that is made up of stressed and unstressed syllables. |
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| A pair of lines of poetic verse written in iambic pentameter. |
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| The flaw that leads to the downfall of a tragic hero: this term come from the Greek word hybris, which means "excessive pride." |
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| An exaggeration for emphasis or rhetorical effect. |
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| The use of words to create pictures in the reader's mind. |
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| Rhyme that occur within a line. |
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| A type of pun, or play on words, that results when two words become mixed up in the speaker's mind--for example, "Don't I put the horse before the cart." |
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| The feeling a text evokes in the read, such as sadness, tranquility, or elation. |
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| A figure of speech in which a comparison is implied but not stated, such as "This winter is a bear." |
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