Literary Terminology Flashcards
Allusion
The act or practice of making a casual or indirect reference to something; the act of alluding
Alliteration
Commencement of two or more stressed syllables of a word group either with the same consonant sound or sound group
Anachronism
An error in chronology in which a person, object, event, etc., is assigned a date or period other than the correct one
Anaphora
Rhetoric repetition of a word or words at the beginning of two or more successive verses, clauses, or sentences
Apostrophe
A digression in the form of an address to someone not present, or to a personified object or idea, as “O Death, where is thy sting?”
Assonance
Prosody rhyme in which the same vowel sounds are used with different consonants in the stressed syllables of the rhyming words, as in penitent and reticence
Consonance
The correspondence and recurrence of consonants, especially those at the end of a word, in a passage of prose or a verse
Epimone
A rhetorical term for the frequent repetition of a phrase or question; dwelling on a point
Hyperbole
An extravagant statement or figure of speech not intended to be taken literally
Metaphor
A figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance
Personification
The act of attributing human qualities to an animal, object, or abstraction; the act of personifying
Simile
A figure of speech in which two unlike things are explicitly compared
Synechdoche
A figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole or the whole for a part
Verbal Irony
Irony in which a person says or writes one thing and means another, or uses words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of the literal meaning
