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Terms
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- allegory
- a form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative, are equated with the meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. The underlying meaning has moral, social, religious, or political significance, and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas as charity, greed, or envy. a story with two meanings, a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning.
- alliteration
- the repetition of initial sounds in neighboring words.
- allusion
- a brief reference to a person, event, or place, real or ficticious, or to a work of art. Casual reference to a famous historical or literary figure or event. An allusion may be drawn from history, geography, literature, or religion.
- amplification
- use of bare expressions, likely to be ignored or misunderstood by a hearer or reader because of the bluntness. Emphasis through restatement with additional details.
- anagram
- a word or phrase made by transposing the letters.
- analogy
- the comparison of two pairs which have the same relationship. The key is to ascertain the relationship between the first so you can choose the correct second pair. Part to whole, opposites, results of are types of relationships you should find.
- anaphora
- The deliberate repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of several successive verses, clauses, or paragraphs.
- anastrophe
- Inversion of the normal syntactic order of words
- animism
- the belief that non-human entities are spiritual beings, or at least embody some kind of life-principle
- anthropomorphism
- used with God or gods. The act of attributing human forms or qualities to an entities which are not human
- aphorism
- a brief saying embodying a moral, a concise statement of a principle or precept given in pointed words
- apostrophe
- when an absent person, an abstract concept, or an important object is directly addressed
- archetype
- the usage of any object or situation as it was originally made
- assonance
- the repetition of vowel sounds but not consonant sounds as in consonance
- asyndterm
- a stylistic scheme in which conjunctions are deliberately omitted from a series of related clauses.
- bibliomancy
- prediction based on a Bible verse or literary passage chosen at random
- bildengsroman
- a story in which the protagonist undergoes growth throughout the entire narrative, generally starting off by being removed or chased from their home. Their growth is often impeded by opposition of their desires by other characters.
- cacophony
- harsh, discordant sounds
- caesura
- a natural pause or break.
- characterization
- the method used by a writer to develop a character
- chiasmus
- A type of rhetoric in which the second part is syntactically balanced against the first
- circumlocution
- the use of a longer phrasing in place of a possible shorter form of expression; a roundabout or indirect manner of writing or speaking
- conflict
- the struggle found in fiction
- connotation
- an implied meaning of a word
- consonance
- the repetition of consonant sounds, but not vowels
- denotation
- literal dictionary definition of a word
- Deus ex Machina
- (literally "god out of a machine")) is an improbable contrivance in a story. The phrase describes an artificial, or improbable, character, device, or event introduced suddenly in a work of fiction or drama to resolve a situation or untangle a plot (such as an angel suddenly appearing to solve problems). The term is a negative one, and it often implies a lack of skill on the part of the writer
- doppleganger
- a ghostly double of another character, especially if it haunts its counterpart