Glossary
This is a list of common terms you may see throughout the year.

Themes
Realism - A writing style based on experiences from our lives. Relationships between people, society, and their scenic surroundings are addressed.

Romaticism - A theme present throughout American Literature during the Renaissance period. A writing style which involves several themes, including the beauty of people, the beauty of nature, and the ability to escape the problems present in life.

Literary Movements
Transcendentalism - It proposed such ideas of the natural world and its relationship to humanity, and the quest for understanding of the human spirit. Timeline: 1840 - 1855

Anti-Transcendentalism - It focused on the limitations and potential destructiveness of the human spirit rather than on its possibilities. Timeline: 1840 - 1855

Realism - The Realists sough to depict real life as faithfully and accurately as possible. Generally, the Realist presented everyday realities of a small group of people or a small portion of the world. The writings focused on the ordinary lives of people and characters in the lower and middle-class. Timeline: 1865 - 1915

Naturalism - This movement grew out of the Realism movement. The Naturalists focused on the same aspects of life as the Realists, however, the Naturalist possessed a scientific view of the universe. Also believed by the Naturalist that a person's fate is determined by environment, heredity, and chance. Timeline: 1865 - 1915

The Harlem Renaissance - During the late 1800s and early 1900s, southern blacks moved north, hoping to find opportunities in the northern industrial centers. The southern blacks brought with them their culture and writing styles. Timeline: 1865 - 1915

Modernism - The Modernist attempted to capture the essence of modern life in both the form and content of their work. Themes included uncertainty, bewilderment, and apparent meaninglessness of life, which were no directly stated, yet implied for the reader's own interpretation. Timeline: 1915 - 1946

Imagism - The Imagists concentrated on the direct presentation of images, or word pictures. An Imagist poem expressed the essence of an object, person, or incident, without explanation or generalization. Timeline: 1915 - 1946

Experiment Fiction - A movement in which writers abandoned traditional forms of writing, which included narrations, and adapted to a new form that includes mostly dialogue. Other forms of writing were pursued, such as new physical appearances of font, blank pages, and even new subjects. Timeline: 1946 - Present

Post-Modernism - The collection of literary movements that have developed in the decades following World War II. The movement focused on writers attempting to create new literature that captured the essence of the contemporary life. Timeline: 1946 - Present

Literary Forms
Jump to: Revolutionary Period - Growing Nation - New England Renaissance - Division, War, and Reconciliation - Realism and Frontier - Modern Age - Contemporary Writers


Revolutionary Period (1750 - 1800)
Aphorisms - A short, concise statement expressing a wise or clever observation or a general truth. (See Ben Franklin)

Oratory - The art of skilled, eloquent public speaking.
(See Thomas Paine & William Faulkner)

Devices
Rhetorical Questions, Repetition, Restatement, Parallelism

Personification - The attribution of human powers and characteristics to something that is not human, such as an object, an aspect of nature, or an abstract idea. (See Phyllis Wheatley)

Description - A style of writing that creates an impression of a person, place, or thing through the use of details appealing to one or more of the five senses -- sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch. (See Abigail Adams)

Epistles - A formal composition written in the form of a letter addressed to a distant person or group of people. (See Jean Michel Guillaume de Crevecoeur)

A Growing Nation (1800 - 1840)
Folk Tales - Stories handed down orally among the common people of a particular culture. (See Washington Irving)

Blank Verse - A poem not written in rhyme. The lines, however, still have a recurring pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, known as meter. (See William Cullen Bryant)

The Single Effect - A genre of writing where every character, detail, and incident in the story contribute to its unique effect. (See Edgar Allen Poe)

Sound Devices

Alliteration - The repetition of similar sounds, usually consonants, at the beginnings of words or accented syllables.

Consonance - The repetition of consonant sounds at the end of words or accented syllables.

Assonance - The repetition of vowel sounds.

Allusion - A reference to another literary work or a figure, a place, or an event from history, religion, or mythology. (See Edgar Allen Poe)

New England Renaissance (1840 - 1855)
Apostrophe - A literary device in which a writer directly addresses an inanimate object, an abstract idea, or an absent person. (See Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Style - The manner in which a writer puts his or her thoughts into words. (See Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, & E.E. Cummings)

Allegory - A work of literature in which events, characters, and details of setting have a symbolic meaning. (See Nathaniel Hawthorne)

Symbolism - A person, place, or thing that has meaning in itself and also represents something larger than itself. (See Herman Melville, Wallace Stevens & Robert Frost)

Stanza Forms - A unit of poetry consisting of two or more lines arranged in a pattern according to rhyme and meter, or rhythm. A stanza organizes ideas into units, like paragraphs, yet has a fixed length and pattern. (See Henry Longfellow)

Stanza Lengths

Couplet - Two Lines

Tercet - Three Lines

Quatrain - Four Lines

Cinquian - Five Lines

Sestet - Six Lines

Octave - Eight Lines

Meter and Scansion - A systematic arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry. The basic unit of meter is the foot. A foot is one stressed syllable followed by one or more unstressed syllables. The analysis of the meter of poetry is called scansion. (See Oliver Holmes)

Common Feet

Iamb - One unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.

Trochee - One unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.

Anapest - One unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.

Dactyl - One unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.

Tone - The writer's attitude toward his or her subject, characters, or audience. (See James Lowell & Chief Joseph)

Imagery - Words or phrases that create mental pictures, or images, that appeal to one or more of the five senses. Most often, images appeal to the reader's sense of sight. (See John Whittier, H.D. (Doolittle), Barry Lopez & Richard Wilbur)

Division, War, and Reconciliation (1855 - 1865)
Refrain - A word, phrase, line, or group of lines repeated at regular intervals in a poem or song. (See Spirituals)

Autobiography - A person's account of his or her own life. The writer presents a continuous narrative of what he or she feels are the most significant events in his or her life through his or her own point of view. (See Frederick Douglass & Zora Neale Hurston)

Journals - A personal record of events, conversations, thoughts, feelings, and observations written on a day-to-day basis for personal use and not with intentions to be published. (See Mary Chesnut)

Diction - A writer's choice of words that is appropriate to the subject, audience, occasion, and literary form. (See Robert E. Lee, Abraham Lincoln & John Updike)

Free Verse - A verse that has irregular meter and line length while still possessing rhythm. (See Walt Whitman & Carl Sandburg)

Realism and the Frontier (1865 - 1915)
Narration - A writing that tells a fictional or factual story. (See Mark Twain & Richard Wright)

Humor - A writing that is intended to evoke laughter. A writer must have the ability to perceive the ridiculous, comical, or ludicrous aspects of an incident, situation, or personality. (See Mark Twain & James Thurber)

Regionalism - The habits, speech, appearance, customs, and beliefs of people from one geographical region often differ from those of people from other areas. (See Bret Harte)

Point of View - The vantage point or perspective from which a narrative is told. Most stories are told from either a first-person or third-person point of view. (See Ambrose Bierce, Thomas Wolfe & Joyce Carol Oates)

Irony - A contrast between what is stated and what is meant, or between what is expected to happen and what actually happens. (See Kate Chopin & Flannery O'Connor)

Types of Irony

Situational - The actual result of an action or situation is quite different from the expected result.
i.e. "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"

Dramatic - Readers perceive something that a character in a literary work does not know.
i.e. Romeo and Juliet

Verbal - The literal meaning of a word or statement is different from the intended meaning.

Characterization - A writing that is intended to evoke laughter. A writer must have the ability to perceive the ridiculous, comical, or ludicrous aspects of an incident, situation, or personality. (See Mark Twain & James Thurber)

Conflict - A struggle between two opposing forces or characters that plays a vital role in the plot development of a literary work. (See Jack London)

The Sonnet - A fourteen-line lyric poem, usually written in rhymed iambic pentameter and usually expresses a single complete idea or theme. (See Paul Dunbar)

The Speaker - The voice of a poem. Usually the poet, but it could be a fictional character, or an inanimate object, or another type of nonhuman entity. (See Edgar Lee Masters & Langston Hughes)

The Modern Age (1915 - 1946)
Character - With well development and a possession of a variety of traits, he or she is referred to as a round character. One-dimensional caricatures are referred to as flat characters. (See Sherwood Anderson & Alice Walker)

Stream of Consciousness - An unorganized writing technique that an author using to capture the way the mind works by showing the random movement and natural flow of a character's thoughts. (See Katherine Anne Porter & T. S. Eliot)

Flashback - Interruptions in the narrative in which an earlier event is recalled or described. (See Katherine Anne Porter)

Ambiguity - An uncertainty of intention or meaning in a statement that leaves room for more than one conclusion. (See Eudora Welty)

Setting - The time and place in which the events in a work of literature occur. (See John Steinbeck & James Baldwin)

Theme - The central insight or idea about life that the story expresses.
(See William Faulkner, Edna St. Vincent Millay & Robert Lowell)

Biographies - An account of a person's life written by another person.

Personal Essays - An informal essay that focuses on a subject that is, at least to some extent, autobiographical. (See E. B. White)

Dramatic Monologue - A poem in which one character speaks to one or more silent listeners at a critical point in the speaker's life. (See Amy Lowell)

Rhythm - The arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables in a poem. (See William Carlos Williams, Throdore Roethke, Gwendolyn Brookes & Elizabeth Bishop)

Similes - An explicit comparison between two seemingly dissimilar things. (See Archibald MacLeish & Marianne Moore)

Satire - A kind of writing in which certain individuals, institutions, types of behavior, or humanity in general is ridiculed or criticized in a humorous manner. (See W.H. Auden)

Metaphor - A implied comparison between two seemingly dissimilar things without the use of connecting words. (See Jean Toomer & Arna Bontemps)

Contemporary Writers (1946 - Present)
Epiphany - A moment when a character has a flash of insight about himself or herself, another character, a situation, or life in general. (See Bernard Malamud)

Foreshadowing - A technique that writers frequently use in short stories and novels to build suspense about the outcome of events. (See Anne Tyler)

Argumentation - Writing that attempts to convince the reader to accept a specific opinion or point of view. (See Carson McCullers)

The Essay - A short prose work that generally focuses on a narrow topic. (See Ralph Ellison)

Exposition - A writing in which factual information is presented. (See Joan Didion)

Classification - The process of dividing a subject into categories, or classes. (See N. Scott Momaday)

Visual Poetry - Poems in which the letters, words, lines, and spaces are arranged to form a shape or create a visual effect. (See James Dickey & Denise Levertov)

Confessional Poetry - A type of poetry in which the poet speaks frankly and openly about his or her own life. (See Sylvia Plath, Robert Hayden & William Stafford)

Lyric Poetry - A poem that expresses the personal thoughts and feelings of the speaker. (See Colleen McElroy, Louise Erdrich & James Wright)

Parallelism - The repeated use of phrases, clauses, or sentences that are similar in structure. (See Adrienne Rich, Simon Ortiz & Diana Chang)