Terminology

Question	Answer
Allegory	A symbolic narrative in which the surface details imply a secondary meaning. Allegory often takes the form of a story in which the characters represent moral qualities.
Alliteration	The repetition of consonant sounds, especially at the beginning of words.
Antagonist	A character or force against which another character struggles.
Aside	Words spoken by an actor directly to the audience, which are not "heard" by the other characters on stage during a play.
Assonance	The repetition of similar vowel sounds in a sentence or a line of poetry or prose
Catastrophe	The action at the end of a tragedy that initiates the denouement or falling action of a play.
Characterization	The means by which writers present and reveal character. Although techniques of characterization are complex, writers typically reveal characters through their speech, dress, manner, and actions.
Chorus	A group of characters in Greek tragedy (and in later forms of drama), who comment on the action of a play without participation in it.
Climax	The turning point of the action in the plot of a play or story. The climax represents the point of greatest tension in the work.
Comedy	A type of drama in which the characters experience reversals of fortune, usually for the better.
Connotation	The associations called up by a word that goes beyond its dictionary meaning.
Denouement	The resolution of the plot of a literary work.
Figurative language	A form of language use in which writers and speakers convey something other than the literal meaning of their words.
Flashback	An interruption of a work's chronology to describe or present an incident that occurred prior to the main time frame of a work's action.
Hyperbole	A figure of speech involving exaggeration.
Irony	A contrast or discrepancy between what is said and what is meant or between what happens and what is expected to happen in life and in literature.
Metaphor	A comparison between essentially unlike things without an explicitly comparative word such as like or as.
Onomatopoeia	The use of words to imitate the sounds they describe.
Pathos	A quality of a play's action that stimulates the audience to feel pity for a character.
Personification	The endowment of inanimate objects or abstract concepts with animate or living qualities.
Protagonist	The main character of a literary work
Satire	A literary work that criticizes human misconduct and ridicules vices, stupidities, and follies.
Simile	A figure of speech involving a comparison between unlike things using like, as, or as though.
Soliloquy	A speech in a play that is meant to be heard by the audience but not by other characters on the stage.
Stage direction	A playwright's descriptive or interpretive comments that provide readers (and actors) with information about the dialogue, setting, and action of a play.
Syntax	The grammatical order of words in a sentence or line of verse or dialogue.
Tragic Hero	A privileged, exalted character of high repute, who, by virtue of a tragic flaw and fate, suffers a fall from glory into suffering.

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	Created by nataliecoley992 about 9 years ago