English Literary Terms
Terms
undefined, object
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- litote
- a kind of understatement
- aside
- when a character speaks directly to the reader, and other characters can't hear him
- allegory
- a story told on 2 levels (Animal Farm)
- metonomy
- name for another thing that it is closely related with
- olefactory
- sense of smell
- ambiguity
- a passage that can result in 2 different interpretations
- exposition
- introduction of characters and setting
- gustatory
- sense of taste
- symbol
- a physical object in which meanings ray out
- apostrophe
- an adress to an inanimate object
- synecdoche
- a part for a hole (heads of cattle)
- oxymoron
- two contradictory terms next to eachother
- Synesthesia
- describe a thing with the wrong sense (loud shirt)
- tactile
- sense of touch
- alliteration
- words in a series that start with the same sound
- hyperbole
- an over statement
- visual
- sense of sight
- ambivilant
- drawn to and repelled against at the same time
- dramatic irony
- the audience knows what is going to happen but the characters don't
- auditory
- sense of hearing
- conceit
- an extended metaphor
- soliloquy
- a character express his thoughts aloud (voice over)
- allusion
- a reference to something outside the novel that the reader is supposed to know
- verbal irony
- the speaker says something that the audience knows is not true
- cosmic irony
- when a higher being or force interferes in a character's life, creating ironic settings
- Onomatopoeia
- a sound word
- Fable
- a story in which animals act like human beings
- pun
- a word that has more than one meaning in a single context