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Allegory
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A symbolic narrative in which the surface details imply a secondary meaning.
Allegory often takes the form of a story in which the characters represent moral qualities. The most famous example in English is John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, in which the name of the central character, Pilgrim, epitomizes the book's allegorical nature. Kay Boyle's story "Astronomer's Wife" and Christina Rossetti's poem "Up-Hill" both contain allegorical elements.
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Alliteration
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The repetition of consonant sounds, especially at the beginning of words.
Example: "Fetched fresh, as I suppose, off some sweet wood." Hopkins, "In the Valley of the Elwy."
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Anapest
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Two unaccented syllables followed by an accented one, as in com-pre-HEND or in-ter-VENE.
An anapestic meter rises to the accented beat as in Byron's lines from "The Destruction of Sennacherib": "And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea, / When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee."
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Antagonist
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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.
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Assonance
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The repetition of similar vowel sounds in a sentence or a line of poetry or prose.
"I rose and told him of my woe." Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" contains assonantal "I's" in the following lines: "How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, / Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself."
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Aubade
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A love lyric in which the speaker complains about the arrival of the dawn, when he must part from his lover.
John Donne's "The Sun Rising" exemplifies this poetic genre.
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Ballad
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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.
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Blank verse
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A line of poetry or prose in unrhymed iambic pentameter.
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.
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Caesura
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A strong pause within a line of verse.
The following stanza from Hardy's "The Man He Killed" contains caesuras in the middle two lines:
He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,
Off-hand-like--just as I-- Was out of work-had sold his traps-- No other reason why. |
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Character
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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.
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Characterization
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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.
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Climax
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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.
The climax of John Updike's "A&P," for example, occurs when Sammy quits his job as a cashier.
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Closed form
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A type of form or structure in poetry characterized by regularity and consistency in such elements as rhyme, line length, and metrical pattern.
Frost's "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" provides one of many examples. A single stanza illustrates some of the features of closed form:
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though. He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. |
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Complication
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An intensification of the conflict in a story or play. Complication builds up, accumulates, and develops the primary or central conflict in a literary work.
Frank O'Connor's story "Guests of the Nation" provides a striking example, as does Ralph Ellison's "Battle Royal."
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Conflict
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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.
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