LITERARY TERMS 1

• Allegory: a symbolical narrative; extended metaphor
• Alliteration: repeating a consonant sound in close proximity to others, or beginning several words with the same vowel sound
• Allusion: a casual reference in literature to a person, place, event, or another passage of literature, often without explicit identification
• Ambiguity: in common conversation, it is a negative term applied to a vague or equivocal expression when precision would be more useful
• Anachronism: placing an event, person, item, or verbal expression in the wrong historical period
• Analogy: a similarity between like features of two things, on which a comparison may be based
• Analysis: a philosophical method of exhibiting complex concepts or propositions as compounds or functions of more basic ones
• Anaphora: the intentional repetition of beginning clauses in order to create an artistic effect; 
• "We shall not fail.  We shall not falter.  We shall not flag."
• Anecdote:  a short narrative account of an amusing, unusual, revealing, or interesting event
• Antagonist: a character or force that opposes the protagonist; the bad guy
• Antithesis: using opposite phrases in close conjunction
• Aphorism: a terse saying embodying a general truth, or astute observation, as “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”
• Apologia:  a work written as an explanation or justification of one's motives, convictions, or acts
• Apostrophe: the act of addressing some abstraction or personification that is not physically present like speaking to Death as if it were a person
• Argument: a statement of a poem's major point--usually appearing in the introduction of the poem
• Assumption: hypothesis, conjecture, guess, postulate, theory
• Audience: the person(s) reading a text, listening to a speaker, or observing a performance
• Characterization: an author or poet's use of description, dialogue, dialect, and action to create in the reader an emotional or intellectual reaction to a character or to make the character more vivid and realistic
• Chiasmus:  a literary scheme in which the author introduces words or concepts in a particular order, then later repeats those terms or similar ones in reversed or backwards order