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| When characters are often alienated from themselves and their environment in an irrational world. |
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| The emphasis, or stress, given a syllable in pronunciation. Accents can also be used to emphasize a particular word in a sentence. |
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| A major division in the action of a play. Acts can also be divided into scenes. |
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| A narration or description usually restricted to a single meaning because its events, actions, characters, settings, and objects represent specific abstractions or ideas. |
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| The repetition of the same consonant sounds in a sequence of words, usually at the beginning of a word or stressed syllable: "Descending dew drops." Alliteration is based on the sounds of letters rather than the spelling of words. |
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| A brief reference to a person, place, thing event, or idea in history or literature. |
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| Allows for two or more simultaneous interpretations of a word, phrase, action, or situation, all of which can be supported by the context of a work. |
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| A word or phrase made from the letters of another word or phrase. |
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| 2 unstressed one stressed |
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| The character, force, or collection of forces in fiction or drama that opposes the protagonist and gives rise to the conflict of the story; an opponent of the protagonist. |
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| A protagonist who has the opposite of most of the traditional attributes of a hero. He or she may be bewildered, ineffectual, deluded, or merely pathetic. Often what antiheroes learn, if they learn anything at all, is that the world isolates them in an existence devoid of God and absolute values. |
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| An address, either to someone who is absent and therefore cannot hear the speaker or to something nonhuman that cannot comprehend. Apostrophe often provides a speaker the opportunity to think aloud. |
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| Sounds are almost but not exactly a like. Consonance |
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| A term used to describe universal symbols that evoke deep and sometimes unconscious responses in a reader. |
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| In a drama, a speech directed to the audience that supposedly is not audible to the other characters onstage at the time. |
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| The repetition of internal vowel sounds in nearby words that do not end the same, "asleep under a tree." Rhyme |
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| Traditionally, a song transmitted orally from generation to generation, that tells a story and that eventually is written down. Typically, condensed and impersonal narratives. |
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| 4 line stanza (quatrain) consisting of alternating 8 and 6 syllable lines. Usually only the 2nd and 4th lines rhyme. |
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| Biographical Strategies/Criticism |
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| An approach to literature which suggests that knowledge of the author's life experiences can aid in the understanding of his or her work. |
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| Unrhymed iambic pentameter. Blank verse is the English verse form closest ot the natural rhythms of English speech and therefore is the most common pattern found in traditional English narrative and dramatic poetry from Shakespeare on. |
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| Language that is discordant and difficult to pronouce.(Tongue Twister?) |
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| A pause within a line of poetry that contributes to the rhythm of the line. |
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| Works generally considered by scholars, critics, and teachers to be the most important to read and study, which collectively constitute the masterpieces of literature. |
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| "Seize the Day," a common literary theme that emphasizes that life is short. |
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| The release of the emotions of pity and fear by the audience at the end of a tragedy. |
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| Person presented in a dramatic or narrative work. |
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| Process by which a writer makes that character seem real to the reader |
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| In Greek tragedies, a group of people who serve mainly as commentators on the characters and events. |
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| An idea or expression that has become tired and trite from overuse. |
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| Moment of greatest emotional tension in the narrative. |
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| A play that is written to be read rather than performed onstage. |
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| Refers to a type of informal diction that reflects casual, conversational language and often includes slang expressions. |
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| Work intended to interest, involve, and amuse the reader or audience, in which no terrible disaster occurs and that ends happily for the main characters. |
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| A humorous scene or incident that alleviates tension in an otherwise serious work. |
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| The struggle within the plot between opposing forces. |
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| Associations and implications that go beyond the literal meaning of a word, which derive from how the word has been commonly used and the associations people make with it. |
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| A common type of near rhyme that consists of identical consonant sounds preceded by different vowel sounds: home same. |
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| Setting, character, action, object, name or anything else in a work that maintains its literal significance while suggesting other meanings. |
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| Runs through an entire work and determines the form or nature of that work. |
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| Meanings widely recognized y social culture. |
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| A characteristic of a literary genre that is understood and accepted by audiences because it has come, through usage and time, to be recognized as a familiar technique. |
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| When a writer uses God, destiny, or fate the dash the hopes and expectations of a character or of humankind in general. |
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| Costumes the Greek actors wore. |
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| Two consecutive lines of poetry that usually rhyme and have the same meter. |
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| A turning point in the action of a story that has a powerful effect on the protagonist. |
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| An approach to literature that focuses on the historical as well as social, political, and economic contexts of a work. |
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| People who use widely eclectic strategies such as new historicism, psychology, gender studies, and deconstructionism to analyze not only literary texts but everything from radio talk shows, comic strips, calendar art, commercials, to travel guides and baseball cards. |
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| One stressed, two unstressed |
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| An approach to literature which suggests that literary works do not yield fixed, single meanings, because language can never say exactly what we intend it to mean. |
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| Deconstructionist Critics |
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| Pay close attention to language in order to discover and describe how a variety of possible readings are generated by the elements of a text. |
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| The dictionary meaning of a word. |
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| Unraveling or unknotting. Term is used to describe the resolution of the plot following the climax. |
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| Method of rescuing characters from complications beyond their abilities to resolve |
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| Type of informational diction. |
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| Verbal exchanges between characters. |
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| Writer's choice of words, phrases, sentence structures, and figurative language which combine to help creat meaning. |
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| Poetry designed to teach an ethical, moral, or religious lesson. |
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| Derogatory term used to describe poetry whose subject is trite and whose rhythm and sounds are monotonously heavy-handed. |
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| May refer to a single play, a group of plays, or to all plays. |
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| Discrepancy between what a character believes or says and what the reader or audience member knows to be true. |
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| Type of lyric poem in which a character addresses a distinct but silent audience imagined to be present in the poem in such a way as to reveal a dramatic situation and, often unintentionally, some aspect of his or her temperament or personality. |
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| Undergoes some kind of change because of the action in the plot. |
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