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AP Lit Vocab P-Z
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Paraphrase | a prose restatement of the central ideas of a poem, in your language. |
| Parody | a humorous imitation of another, usually serious, work; takes any fixed or open form because parodists use the original tone of the work to deflate the subject matter into something absurd. |
| Persona | a mask; a speaker created by a writer to tell a story or to speak in a poem, a separate self created and distinct from the author, not a character in the story or narrative |
| Personification | a form of metaphor in which human characteristics are attributed to nonhuman things; offers the writer a way to give the world life and motion by assigning familiar human behaviors and emotions to animals, inanimate objects, and abstract ideas. |
| Petrarchan sonnet | divided into an octave and a sestet; octave presents a situation and sestet comments on or resolves it (John Keats' "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer"). |
| Picture poem | a type of open form poetry in which the poet arranges the lines of the poem so as to create a particular shape on the page; shape of the poem embodies its subject (Michael McFee's "In Medias Res"). |
| Plausible action | action by a character in a story that seems reasonable, given the motivations presented. |
| Play | general term for a work of dramatic literature. |
| Playwright | a writer who makes plays. |
| Plot | an author's selection and arrangement of incidents in a story to shape the action and give the story a particular focus; not just what happens but also how and why things happen the way they do. |
| Poetic diction | the way poets sometimes employ an elevated diction that deviates significantly from the common speech and writing of their time; no longer an automatic distinction between the language of a poet and the language of everyday speech. |
| Point of view | who tells us a story and how it is told; what we know and how we feel about events are shaped by this. |
| Postcolonial criticism | approach to literature that focuses on study of cultural behavior and expression in relationship to the colonized world. |
| Problem play | a type of drama that presents a social issue in order to awaken the audience to it; reject romantic plots and instead shows what the playwright sees in the audience, proposing an unorthodox solution to a problem; popularized by Henrik Ibsen |
| Prologue | opening speech or dialogue of a play, especially a classic Greek play, usually gives the exposition necessary to follow the subsequent action; also refers to the introduction to any literary work. |
| Prose poem | open form poetry that is printed as prose and represents the most clear opposite of fixed form poetry; densely compact and make use of striking imagery and figures of speech. |
| Prosody | overall metric structure of a poem. |
| Protagonist | main character of a narrative; central character who engages the reader's interest and empathy. |
| Psychological criticism | approach to literature that draws upon psychoanalytic theories, especially from Sigmund Freud or Jacques Lacan to understand more fully the text, the writer, and the reader; the idea of the existence of a human unconscious. |
| Pun | a play on words that relies on a word's having more than one meaning or sounding like another word; Shakespeare used this for both serious and comic purposes. |
| Pyramidal pattern | stories dividing the plot into three essential parts: rising action, climax, and falling action/resolution; "sweet sorrow." |
| Quatrain | a four-line stanza; most common stanzaic form in the English language with various meters and rhyme schemes. |
| Reader-response criticism | approach to literature that focuses on the reader rather than the work itself, by attempting to describe what goes on in the reader's mind during the reading of a text; interested in reader's individual experience with a text. |
| Recognition | the moment in the story when previously unknown or withheld information is revealed to the protagonist, resulting in the discovery of the truth of their situation and a decisive change in course; Oedipus Rex upon finding the prophecy came true. |
| Resolution | the conclusion of a plot's conflicts and complications. |
| Revenge tragedy | a story in which the theme focuses on revenge and its fatal consequences. |
| Reversal | the point in a story when the protagonist's fortunes turn in an unexpected direction. |
| Rhyme | the repetition of identical or similar concluding syllables in different words, most often at the ends of lines. |
| Rhyme scheme | mapped out by noting patterns of rhyme with small letters; first rhyme sound is a, second is b, third is c, etc. |
| Rhythm | used to refer to the recurrence of stressed and unstressed sounds in poetry; depending on how sounds are arranged, this could be fast or slow, choppy or smooth. |
| Rising action | complication creates some sort of conflict for the protagonist. |
| Rising meter | metrical feet which move from unstressed to stressed sounds, such as the iambic foot and the anapestic foot. |
| Romantic comedy | a love affair that meets with various obstacles but overcomes them to end in a blissful union; i.e. disapproving parents, mistaken identities, deceptions, other misunderstands. |
| Round character | more complex than flat or stock characters, and often display the inconsistencies and internal conflicts found in most real people; more fully developed and harder to summarize. |
| Run-on line | in poetry, when one line ends without a pause and continues into the next line for its meaning, also known as an enjambment; Wordsworth's poem "My Heart Leaps Up." |
| Sarcasm | strong form of verbal irony that is calculated to hurt someone through, for example, false praise. |
| Satire | literary art of ridiculing a folly or vice in order to expose or correct it; usually some human frailty like people, institutions, ideas, and things that evoke amusement, contempt, scorn, or indignation toward something in order to correct it. |
| Scansion | the process of measuring the stresses in a line or verse in order to determine the metrical pattern of the line. |
| Scene | in drama, a subdivision of an act; consist of units of action in which there are no changes in the setting or breaks in the continuity of time but traditional conventions state this changes when location shifts or new character enters. |
| Script | the written text of a play, which includes the dialogue between characters, stage directions, and often expository information. |
| Sentimentality | a pejorative term used to describe the effort by an author to induce emotional responses in the reader that exceed what the situation warrants; pertains to such emotions as pathos and sympathy, cliches and stock responses crucial. |
| Sestet | a stanza consisting of exactly six lines. |
| Sestina | fixed form poetry consisting of thirty-six lines of any length divided into six sestets and a three-line concluding stanza called an envoy; six words at the end of the first sestet's lines must also appear at the ends of the other five sestets (E. Bishop) |
| Setting | physical and social context in which the action of a story occurs; time, place, and social environment framing the characters which evokes a mood or atmosphere that will prepare the reader for what is to come (Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown"). |
| Shakespearean sonnet | organized into three quatrains and a couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg. |
| Showing | allows the author to present a character talking and acting, and lets the reader infer what kind of person the character is. |
| Simile | a common figure of speech that makes an explicit comparison between two things by using words such as like, as, than, appears, and seems. |
| Situational irony | when there is an incongruity between what is expected to happen and what actually happens due to forces beyond human comprehension or control; suicide of successful main character in Edwin Arlington Robinson's poem "Richard Cory." |
| Slant rhyme | sounds are almost but not exactly alike. |
| Sociological criticism | approach to literature that examines social groups, relationships, and values as they are manifested in literature; emphasize nature and effect of the social forces that shape power relationships between groups or classes of people. |
| Soliloquy | a dramatic convention by means of which a character, alone onstage, utters his or her thoughts aloud; convenient way to inform the audience about a character's motivations and state of mind (Shakespeare's Hamlet). |
| Sonnet | fixed form of lyric poetry that consists of fourteen lines, usually written in iambic pentameter. |
| Speaker | voice used by an author to tell a story or speak a poem; often a created identity and should not automatically be equated with the author's self. |
| Spondee | a foot consisting of two stressed syllables but is not a sustained metrical foot and is used mainly for variety or emphasis. |
| Stage directions | a playwright's written instructions about how the actors are to move and behave in a play; explains in which direction characters should move, what facial expressions they should assume, and so on. |
| Stanza | a group of lines in the formal pattern of a poem. |
| Stereotype | preconceived, generic notions of people, places, or things. |
| Stock character | embody basic stereotypes. |
| Style | an author's characteristic manner of expression. |
| Subjectivity | a personal presentation of events and characters, influenced by the author's feelings and opinions. |
| Suspension of disbelief | the demand made of a theater audience to provide some details with their imagination and to accept the limitations of reality and staging; acceptance of the incidents of the plot by a reader or audience. |
| Symbolism | the use of symbols, or anything that is meant to be taken both literally and as representative of a higher and more complex significance. |
| Synecdoche | a figure of speech in which a part of something is used to represent the whole, such as using "boards" to mean "a stage" or "wheels" to mean "a car." |
| Syntax | word choices. |
| Theme | central idea or "message" of a literary work. |
| Tone | the characteristic emotion or attitude of an author toward the characters, subject, and/or audience. |
| Tragic flaw | the one weakness that causes the downfall of the hero in a tragedy. |
| Villanelle | a lyric poem consisting of five tercets and a final quatrain. |
| Voice | the way a written work conveys an author's attitude. |
Created by:
cramdel37
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