GRE: Literary Terms, Verse Forms, and Schools of Criticism

A line of iambic hexameter. the final line of a Spenserian stanza is an alexandrine.
Ex. "a needless alexandrine ends the song/ that like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along." Alexander Pope's "Essay on Criticism."

The use of a repeated consonant or sound, usually at the beginnin of a series of words.

A reference to someone or something, usually literary.

The main character opposing the protagonist. Usually the villain.

The assigning of human attributes, such as emotions or physical characteristics to nonhumans, most often plants and animals. It differs from personification in that it is an intrinsic premise and an ongoing pattern applied to a nonhuman character throughout a literary work.

A speech addressed to someone not present, or to an abstraction. "History! You will remember me..." is an example of an apostrophe. The inante grandiosity of apostrophe lends itself to parody.

A Gernam term meaning a "novel of education." It typically follows a young person over a period of years, from naivete and inexperience through the first struggles with the harsher realities and hypocricies of the adult world.

The pause that breaks a line of Old English verse. Also, any particularly deep pause in a lone of verse.

One of the neoclassical principles of drama. Decorum is the relation of style to content in the speech of dramatic characters. For example, a character's speech should be appropriate to his or her social station.

A derogatory term used to describe poorly written poetry of little or no literary value.

A work, especially a poem, written to celebrate a wedding.

A word derived from Lyly's "Eupues"(1580) to characterize writing htat is self-consciously laden with elaborate figures of speech. This was a popular and influential mode of speech and writing in the late sixteenth century.

Lines rhymed by their final two syllables. A pair of lines ending "running" and "gunning" would be an example of feminine rhyme. Properly, in a feminine rhyme )and not simply a "double rhyme") the penultimate syllables are stressed and the final syllables unstressed.

Terms coined by e.M. forester to describe characters built around a single dominant trait(flat). and those shaded and developed with greater psychological complexity (round).

Not to be confused with pastoral poetry, which idealizes life in the countryside, georgic poems deal with people laboring in the countryside, pushing plows, raising crops, etc.