Lit Terms

Rising Action: plot build up, caused by conflict and complications, advancement towards climax.


Romanticism: movement in western culture beginning in the eighteenth and peaking in the nineteenth century as a revolt against Classicism; imagination was valued over reason and fact.

Satire: ridicules or condemns the weakness and wrong doings of individuals, groups, institutions, or humanity in general.


Scansion: the analysis of verse in terms of meter.



Setting: the time and place in which events in a short story, novel, play, or narrative poem occur.

Simile: a figure of speech comparing two essentially unlike things through the use of a specific word of comparison.


Soliloquy: an extended speech, usually in a drama, delivered by a character alone on stage.


Spiritual: a folk song, usually on a religious theme.

Speaker: a narrator, the one speaking.


Stereotype: cliché; a simplified, standardized conception with a special meaning and appeal for members of a group; a formula story.

Stream of Consciousness: the style of writing that attempts to imitate the natural flow of a character’s thoughts, feelings, reflections, memories, and mental images, as the character experiences them.

Structure: the planned framework of a literary selection; its apparent organization.


Style: the manner of putting thoughts into words; a characteristic way of writing or speaking.

Subordination: the couching of less important ideas in less important structures of language.

Surrealism: a style in literature and painting that stresses the subconscious or the nonrational aspects of man’s existence characterized by the juxtaposition of the bizarre and the banal


Suspension of Disbelief: suspend not believing in order to enjoy it.

Symbol: something which stands for something else, yet has a meaning of its own.


Synesthesia: the use of one sense to convey the experience of another sense.


Synecdoche: another form of name changing, in which a part stands for the whole.


Syntax: the arrangement and grammatical relations of words in a sentence.


Theme: main idea of the story; its message(s).

Thesis: a proposition for consideration, especially one to be discussed and proved
 or disproved; the main idea.

Tone: the devices used to create the mood and atmosphere of a literary work; the        
author’s perceived point of view.

Tongue in Cheek: a type of humor in which the speaker feigns seriousness; a.k.a. “dry” or “dead pan”

Tragedy: in literature: any composition with a somber theme carried to a disastrous conclusion; a fatal event; protagonist usually is heroic but tragically (fatally) flawed

Understatement: opposite of hyperbole; saying less than you mean for emphasis

Vernacular: everyday speech

Voice: The textual features, such as diction and sentence structures, that convey a writer’s or speaker’s pesona.

Zeitgeist: the feeling of a particular era in history