English Literary Terms

English Literary Terms

1. Auto-Biography: -is the history of one’s life written by one self.
2. Act: - is the major division of a drama.
3. Antithesis: -is contrast or polarity in meaning.
4. Allusion: -is a reference to an idea, place, person or text existing outside the literary work.
5. Allegory: - is a literary work that has an implied meaning.
6. Alliteration:-the repetition of a consonant in two or more words.
7. Ballad: -is a song which tells a story.
8. Biography: -is the history of a person’s life by one else.
9. Blank Verse: -Verses written in iambic pentameter without any rhyme pattern are called blank verse.
10. Comedy:-is a play written to entertain its audience, ends happily.
11. Classical:-means any writing that conforms to the rules and modes of old Greek and Latin writings.
12. Canto:-is a sub-division of an epic or a narrative poem comparable to a chapter in a novel.
13. Chorus:-is a group of singers who stand alongside the stage in a drama.
14. Catharsis:-is emotional release of pity and fear that the tragic incidences in a tragedy arouse to an audience.
15. Comic relief:-a humorous scene in a tragedy to eliminate the tragic effect from audience.
16. Couplet:-To lines of the same material length usually found in Shakespearean sonnets.
17. Catastrophe:-Catastrophe is the downfall of the protagonist in a tragedy.
18. Didactic:-is a literary work which aims at teaching and instructing its readers.
19. Dirge:-is a short functional term.
20. Diction:-is the selection of words in literary work.
21. Dialect:-is the language of particular district; class or a group of people.
22. Drammatical Monologue:-In a poem when a single person speaks along with or without an audience is called drammatical monologue. Example “My last Duchess”-----Br
owning.
23. Difference between drama and novel:-A drama is meant to be performed whereas a novel is meant to be read.
24. Difference between stanza and paragraph:-A stanza contains verses whereas a paragraph contains prosaic lines.
25. Epic:-is a long narrative poem composed on a grand scale and is exalted style. Example “Paradise Lost”-------Milton.
26. Epilogue:-is the concluding part of a longer poem or a novel or a drama.
27. Fable:-is a brief story illustrating a moral.
28. Farce:-A form of low comedy designed to provoke laughter.
29. Foot:-A basic unit of meter.
30. Fiction:-A fiction is an imaginative narrative in prose e.g.
Lord of the fly—by Golding.
31. Elegy:- is a poem mourning to the death of an individual or a lament for a tragic event.
32. Genre:-means category or types of literature-epic, ode, ballad etc.
33. Hyperbole:-An overstatement or exaggeration.
34. Image:-is the mental picture connected with metaphor, smile and symbol.
35. Limerick:-is a short poem of a five-line stanza rhyming aaba.
36. Lyric:-A lyric is a short poem expressing a simple mood. It is usually personal and musical e.g. Keats’s odes.
37. Linguistic:-is the scientific and systematic study of language.
38. Melodrama:-A highly sensational drama with happy ending.
Example ‘The Spanish Tragedy’ –Kyd.
39. Metaphysical Poetry:-Meta means beyond and physical is related to body . . . . . . . . .
40. Mock-epic:-It is a long satirical poem dealing with a trivial theme. Example: “The rape of the lock”-Alexander Pope.
41. Metaphor:-A metaphor is an implicit comparison between two different things.
42. Metre:-The recurrence of similar stress pattern in some lines of a poem.
43. Novel:-is a long prose narrative fiction with plot, characters, etc.
44. Novelette:-is longer than a short story and shorter than a novel.
45. Ode:-is a long narrative poem of varying, line length dealing with serious subject matter.
46. Objectivity:-We have objectivity in a literary piece when the author focuses on an object from broadened point of view.
47. Octave:-is the firs part of Italian sonnet.
48. Oxymoron:-is apparently a physical contrast which oddly makes sense on a deeper level.
49. Prologue:-is the beginning part of a novel or a play or a novel.
50. Prose:-Any material that is not written in a regular meter like a poetry.
51. Prosody:-Prosody is the mechanics or grammar of verse.
52. Protagonist:-Protagonist is the main character in a literary work
53. Plot:-The arrangement of incidents is called plot.
54. Pun:-A pun is playing with words.
55. Periods of English literature:-The Anglo-Saxon, Middle English Renaissance, Restoration, Neoclassical Romantic,
Victorian, Modern, Post-Modern.
56. Romanticism:-was a literary movement. It stands Opposite to reason and focuses on emotion.
57. Rhetoric:-Rhetoric is the art of persuasive argument through writing.
58. Symbol:-A symbol is anything that stands for something else.
59. Sonnet:-is a lyric poem consisting of fourteen rhymed lines dealing with a lofty theme.
60. Satire:-is ridiculing the vices and follies of an individual or a society with a corrective design. E.g. “The rape of the lock”---Pope.
61. A Short Story:- is a prose narrative of a considerable length. It is shorter than a novel.
62. Stanza:-is a group of verses having a rhyme scheme pattern.
63. Subjectivity:-We find subjectivity in a literary work in which the writer’s personal intrusion takes place.
64. Soliloquy:-It means speaking alone. When in a play a character is found speaking alone on the stage it is called soliloquy.