Keywords of literature

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1.      Character

Ø  An imaginary person that inhabits a literary work. Literary characters may be major or minor, static (unchanging) or dynamic (capable of change). In Shakespeare's Othello, Desdemona is a major character, but one who is static, like the minor character Bianca. Othello is a major character who is dynamic, exhibiting an ability to change.

Ø  Character is the person who is involved in the field of speech, conveying message

Ø  Person in a novel, play, etc.

2.      Hero

Ø  The main typically male character in a story, play, etc.

3.      Heroine

Ø  Main female character in a story, play, etc.

4.      Character Speech

Ø  The person who is involved in the field and conveys the message that is character speech. We can find character speech in short story, in drama and in novels.

5.      CHARACTERIZATION

Ø  Characterization is the method used by a writer to develop a character. The method includes (1) showing the character's appearance, (2) displaying the character's actions, (3) revealing the character's thoughts, (4) letting the character speak, and (5) getting the reactions of others.

Ø 
The means by which writers present and reveal character. Although techniques of characterization are complex, writers typically reveal characters through their speech, dress, manner, and actions. Readers come to understand the character Miss Emily in Faulkner's story "A Rose for Emily" through what she says, how she lives, and what she does.

6.      Characteristics

Ø  a typical or noticeable quality of someone or something

Ex:-

Unfortunately a big nose is a family characteristic.

Sentimentality seems a characteristic of all the writers of that period.

The male bird displays (= has) several characteristics which distinguish him from the female.

7.      THEME

Ø  Theme is the general idea or insight about life that a writer wishes to express. All of the elements of literary terms contribute to theme. A simple theme can often be stated in a single sentence.

Ø 
The idea of a literary work abstracted from its details of language, character, and action, and cast in the form of a generalization. See discussion of Dickinson's "Crumbling is not an instant's Act."

Ø  Theme is main idea or point. We can see one theme or more than one and also we can find miner themes too. In short story we can find only one main theme. There may be minor themes. In drama also.

8.      Subject

Ø  What a story or play is about; to be distinguished from plot and theme.

Ex:-

Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" is about the decline of a particular way of life endemic to the American south before the civil war. Its plot concerns how Faulkner describes and organizes the actions of the story's characters. Its theme is the overall meaning Faulkner conveys.

Ø  The title is subject. The thing that is used to convey the main idea is called subject.

9.      Ballad

Ø  A narrative poem written in four-line stanzas, characterized by swift action and narrated in a direct style. The Anonymous medieval ballad, "Barbara Allan," exemplifies the genre.

Ø  A song or poem that tells a story, or (in popular music) a slow love song. All ballads don’t have writers these are come from generation to generation but modern ballads have writers.

Ø  There are 2 types of ballads modern and old

10. Narrative poem

Ø  a poem that tells a story. See Ballad.

11. Narrative

Ø  Story or account of events

12. Narrator

Ø  The voice and implied speaker of a fictional work, to be distinguished from the actual living author.

Ex:-

The narrator of Joyce's "Araby" is not James Joyce himself, but a literary fictional character created expressly to tell the story. Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" contains a communal narrator, identified only as "we." See Point of view.

Ø  The character who tells you what is happening in a book or film

13. Point of view

Ø  the angle of vision from which a story is narrated. See Narrator. A work's point of view can be: first person, in which the narrator is a character or an observer, respectively; objective, in which the narrator knows or appears to know no more than the reader; omniscient, in which the narrator knows everything about the characters; and limited omniscient, which allows the narrator to know some things about the characters but not everything.

Ø  A way of considering something

14. Sonnet

Ø  A fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter. The Shakespearean or English sonnet is arranged as three quatrains and a final couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg. The Petrarch an or Italian sonnet divides into two parts: an eight-line octave and a six-line sestet, rhyming abba abba cde cde or abba abba cd cd cd.

Ø  A poem that has 14 lines and a particular pattern of rhyme

Ø  Poem which have 14 lines. Each has mostly then syllabus and a fetched pattern of rhyme and rhythm.

Ø  Poem of 14 lines

15. Ode

Ø  A long, stately poem in stanzas of varied length, meter, and form. Usually a serious poem on an exalted subject, such as Horace's "Eheu fugaces," but sometimes a more lighthearted work, such as Neruda's "Ode to My Socks."

Ø  A poem expressing the writer's thoughts and feelings about a particular person or subject, usually written to that person or subject

Ø  A poem that speech two person or thing

16. Lyric

Ø  The words of a song, especially a pop song. (Especially of poetry and songs) expressing personal thoughts and feelings.

Ø  a poem expresses the personal feelings and thoughts of a Person

17. Lyric poem

Ø  A type of poem characterized by brevity, compression, and the expression of feeling. Most of the poems in this book are lyrics. The anonymous "Western Wind" epitomizes the genre:

Western wind, when will thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Christ, if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!

18. Free verse

Ø  Poetry without a regular pattern of meter or rhyme. The verse is "free" in not being bound by earlier poetic conventions requiring poems to adhere to an explicit and identifiable meter and rhyme scheme in a form such as the sonnet or ballad. Modern and contemporary poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries often employ free verse. Williams's "This Is Just to Say" is one of many examples.

Ø  Poetry whose lines do not have a regular pattern

Ø  Poems are written without regular rhyme or rhythm

19. Blank verse

Ø  a line of poetry or prose in unrhymed iambic pentameter.

Ex:-

 Shakespeare's sonnets, Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost, and Robert Frost's meditative poems such as "Birches" include many lines of blank verse. Here are the opening blank verse lines of "Birches": When I see birches bend to left and right / Across the lines of straighter darker trees, / I like to think some boy's been swinging them.

Ø  A type of poetry that does not rhyme, usually with ten syllables in each line

20. VERSE

Ø  Verse is a line of poetry.

Ø  Writing which is arranged in short lines with a regular rhythm; poetry

21. Prose

Ø  Ordinary language as distinguished from verse

Ø  Written language in its ordinary form rather than poetry

Ex:-

I've always preferred reading prose to poetry.

22. Stanza

Ø  A division or unit of a poem that is repeated in the same form--either with similar or identical patterns or rhyme and meter, or with variations from one stanza to another. The stanzas of Gertrude Schnackenberg's "Signs" are regular; those of Rita Dove's "Canary" are irregular.

Ø  Division of a poem

Ø  Stanza is a unified group of lines in poetry.

Ø  A group of lines of poetry forming a unit

23. Plot

Ø  The unified structure of incidents in a literary work. See Conflict, Climax, Denouement, and Flashback.

Ø  The story of a book, film, plays, etc

Ex:-

The film has a very simple plot.

Ø  The main story of a novel, play, etc.

24. Subplot

Ø  A subsidiary or subordinate or parallel plot in a play or story that coexists with the main plot. The story of Hamlet.

Ø  A part of the story of a book or play which develops separately from the main story

25. Protagonist

Ø  The main character of a literary work--Hamlet and Othello in the plays named after them, Gregor Samsa in Kafka's Metamorphosis, Paul in Lawrence's "Rocking-Horse Winner."

Ø  formal one of the main characters in a story or a play

Ø  The main character

26. Antagonist

Ø  A character or force against which another character struggles. Creon is Antigone's antagonist in Sophocles' play Antigone; Teiresias is the antagonist of Oedipus in Sophocles' Oedipus the King.

Ø  A person who is strongly opposed to something or someone

Ø  The antagonists in this dispute are quite unwilling to compromise.

27. Rhyme

Ø  the matching of final vowel or consonant sounds in two or more words. The following stanza of "Richard Cory" employs alternate rhyme, with the third line rhyming with the first and the fourth with the second:

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him;
He was a gentleman from sole to crown
Clean favored and imperially slim.

Ø  Rhyme is a pattern of words that contain similar sounds.

Example:
go/show/glow/know/though

Ø  Agreement in the end sounds of lines or words

Ø  A word which has the same last sound as another word

28. INTERNAL RHYME

Ø  Internal Rhyme is rhyming within a line.

Example:
I awoke to black flak.

29. RHYME SCHEME

Ø  Rhyme Scheme is rhymed words at the ends of lines.

Roses are red
Violets are blue

Sugar is sweet
And so are you.

30. Rhythm

Ø  The recurrence of accent or stress in lines of verse. In the following lines from "Same in Blues" by Langston Hughes, the accented words and syllables are underlined:

I said to my baby,
Baby take it slow....
Lulu said to Leonard
I want a diamond ring

Ø  Rhythm: The dictionary tells us it is "a movement with uniform recurrence of a beat or accent." In its crudest form rhythm has a beat with little or no meaning. Children use them in games and counting-out rhymes. In poetry, rhythm, broadly speaking, is a recognizable pulse, or "recurrence," which gives a distinct beat to a line and also gives it a shape.

Ø  A strong pattern of sounds, words or musical notes which is used in music, poetry and dancing

31. Simile

Ø  A figure of speech involving a comparison between unlike things using like, as, or as though. An example: "My love is like a red, red rose."

Ø  (The use of) an expression comparing one thing with another, always including the words `as' or `like'

Ex:-

The lines 'She walks in beauty, like the night...' from Byron's poem contain a simile.

32. Villanelle

Ø  A nineteen-line lyric poem that relies heavily on repetition. The first and third lines alternate throughout the poem, which is structured in six stanzas --five tercets and a concluding quatrain. Examples include Bishop's "One Art," Roethke's "The Waking," and Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night."

33. Tone

Ø  The implied attitude of a writer toward the subject and characters of a work, as, for example, Flannery O'Connor's ironic tone in her "Good Country People." See Irony.

Ø  Tone is the attitude a writer takes towards a subject or character: serious, humorous, sarcastic, ironic, satirical, tongue-in-cheek, solemn, objective. Similar to Mood

The tone set by the mayor, made the city a very tense and angry place to live and

Ø  The quality of someone's voice

Ex:-

She recounted the story to me in shocked tones (= in a shocked voice) .

34. Tercet

Ø  A three-line stanza, as the stanzas in Frost's "Acquainted With the Night" and Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind." The three-line stanzas or sections that together constitute the sestet of a Petrarchan or Italian sonnet.

35. Syntax

Ø  The grammatical order of words in a sentence or line of verse or dialogue. The organization of words and phrases and clauses in sentences of prose, verse, and dialogue. In the following example, normal syntax (subject, verb, object order) is inverted:

"Whose woods these are I think I know."

Ø  The grammatical arrangement of words in a sentence

36. Style

Ø  The way an author chooses words, arranges them in sentences or in lines of dialogue or verse, and develops ideas and actions with description, imagery, and other literary techniques. See Connotation, Denotation, Diction, Figurative language, Image, Imagery, Irony, Metaphor, Narrator, Point of view, Syntax, and Tone.

37. Flashback

Ø  An interruption of a work's chronology to describe or present an incident that occurred prior to the main time frame of a work's action. Writers use flashbacks to complicate the sense of chronology in the plot of their works and to convey the richness of the experience of human time. Faulkner's story "A Rose for Emily" includes flashbacks.

Ø  Flashback is action that interrupts to show an event that happened at an earlier time which is necessary to better understanding.

Ø  A short part of a film, story or play that goes back to events in the past

38. Dialogue

Ø  the conversation of characters in a literary work. In fiction, dialogue is typically enclosed within quotation marks. In plays, characters' speech is preceded by their names.

Ø  Conversation which is written for a book, play or film

39. Conflict

Ø  a struggle between opposing forces in a story or play, usually resolved by the end of the work. The conflict may occur within a character as well as between characters. Lady Gregory's one-act play The Rising of the Moon exemplifies both types of conflict as the Policeman wrestles with his conscience in an inner conflict and confronts an antagonist in the person of the ballad singer.

Ø  An active disagreement between people with opposing opinions or principles

Ex:-

There was a lot of conflict between him and his father.

40. Conflict/Plot is the struggle found in fiction. Conflict/Plot may be internal or external and is best seen in (1) Man in conflict with another Man: (2) Man in conflict in Nature; (3) Man in conflict with self.

41. Climax

Ø  the turning point of the action in the plot of a play or story. The climax represents the point of greatest tension in the work.

Ex:-

The climax of John Updike's "A&P," for example, occurs when Sammy quits his job as a cashier.

Decisive moment in a plot

Ø  The most important or exciting point in a story or situation, which usually happens near the end

42. Connotation

Ø  The associations called up by a word that goes beyond its dictionary meaning. Poets, especially, tend to use words rich in connotation. Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" includes intensely connotative language, as in these lines: "Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright / Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, / Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

Ø  Associated meanings of a word in addition to its explicit or dictionary definition

Ø  a feeling or idea that is suggested by a particular word although it need not be a part of the word's meaning, or something suggested by an object or situation

43. Tragedy

v Aristotelian Definition of Tragedy

Ø  Aristotelean defined tragedy as "the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself." It incorporates “incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish the catharsis of such emotions."

Ø  Serious drama with an unhappy ending

Ø  A very sad event or situation, especially one involving death or suffering