1. Allegory: A tale in verse or prose in which characters, actions, or settings represent abstract ideas or moral qualities. An allegory is a story with two meanings, a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning.
2. Alliteration: The repetition of the initial consonant sounds in poetry.
3. Allusion: A reference to a person, a place, an event, or a literary work that a writer expects the reader to recognize and respond to. An allusion may be drawn from history, geography, literature, or religion.
4. American Naturalism: American naturalism was a new and harsher realism. American naturalism had been shaped by the war; by the social upheavals that undermined the comforting faith of an earlier age. America’s literary naturalists dismissed the validity of comforting moral truths. They attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes who were determined by their environment and heredity. In presenting the extremes of life, the naturalists sometimes displayed an affinity to the sensationalism of early romanticism, but unlike their romantic predecessors, the naturalists emphasized that the world was amoral, that men and women had no free will, that lives were controlled by heredity and environment, that the destiny of humanity was misery in life and oblivion in death. Although naturalist literature described the world with sometimes brutal realism, it sometimes also aimed at bettering the world through social reform.
5. American Puritanism: Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of the Puritans. The Puritans were originally members of a division of the Protestant Church. The first settlers who became the founding fathers of the American nation were quite a few of them. They were a group of serious, religious people, advocating highly religious and moral principles. As the word itself hints, Puritans wanted to purity their religious beliefs and practices. They accepted the doctrine of predestination, original sin and total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace form God. As a culture heritage, Puritanism did have a profound influence on the early American mind. American Puritanism also had an enduring influence on American literature.
6. American Realism: in American literature, the Civil War brought the Romantic Period to an end. The Age of Realism came into existence. It came as a reaction against the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism. Realism turned from an emphasis on the strange toward a faithful rendering of the ordinary, a slice of life as it is really lived. It expresses the concern for commonplace and the low, and it offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience.
7. American Romanticism: The Romantic Period covers the first half of the 19th century. A rising America with its ideals of democracy and equality, its industrialization, its westward expansion, and a variety of foreign influences were among the important factors which made literary expansion and expression not only possible but also inevitable in the period immediately following the nation’s political independence. Yet, romantics frequently shared certain general characteristics: moral enthusiasm, faith in value of individualism and intuitive perception, and a presumption that the natural world was a source of goodness and man’s societies a source of corruption. Romantic values were prominent in American politics, art, and philosophy until the Civil War. The romantic exaltation of the individual suited the nation’s revolutionary heritage and its frontier egalitarianism.
8. American Transcendentalism: Transcendentalists terrors from the romantic literature of Europe. They spoke for cultural rejuvenation and against the materialism of Americagogopirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the Universe. They stressed the importance of the individual. To them, the individual was the most important element of society. They offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God. Nature was, to them, alive, filled with God’s overwhelming presence. Transcendentalism is based on the belief that the most fundamental truths about life and death can be reached only by going beyond the world of the senses. Emerson’s Nature has been called the “Manifesto of American Transcendentalism” and his The American Scholar has been rightly regarded as America’s “Declaration of Intellectual Independence”.
9. Analogy: (a figure of speech) A comparison made between tow things to show the similarities between them. Analogies are often used for illustration or for argument.
10. Anapest抑抑扬: It’s made up of two unstressed and one stressed syllables, with the two unstressed ones in front.
11. Antagonist: A person or force opposing the protagonist in a narrative; a rival of the hero or heroine.
12. Antithesis: (a figure of speech) The balancing of two contrasting ideas, words phrases, or sentences. An antithesis is often expressed in a balanced sentence, that is, a sentence in which identical or similar grammatical structure is used to express contrasting ideas.
13. Aphorism: A concise, pointed statement expressing a wise or clever observation about life.
14. Apostrophe顿呼法: A figure of speech in which an absent or a dead person, an abstract quality, or something nonhuman is addressed directly.
15. Argument: A form of discourse in which reason is used to influence or change people’s idea or actions. Writers practice argument most often when writing nonfiction, particularly essays or speeches.
16. Aside: In drama, lines spoken by a character in an undertone or directly to the audience. An aside is meant to be heard by the other characters onstage.
17. Assonance: The repetition of similar vowel sounds, especially in poetry. Assonance is often employed to please the ear or emphasize certain sounds.
18. Atmosphere: The prevailing mood or feeling of a literary work. Atmosphere is often developed, at least in part, through descriptions of setting. Such descriptions help to create an emotional climate for the werrors to establish the reader’s expectations and attitudes.
19. Autobiography: A person’s account of his or her own life. An autobiography is generally written in narrative form and includes some introspection.
20. Ballad: A story told in verse and usually meant to be sung. In many countries, the folk ballad was one of the earliest forms of literature. Folk ballads have no known authors. They were transmitted orally from generation to generation and were not set down in writing until centuries after they were first sung. The subject matter of folk ballads stems from the everyday life of the common people. Devices commonly used in ballads are the refrain, incremental repetition, and code language. A later form of ballad is the literary ballad, which imitates the style of the folk ballad.
21. Ballad stanza: A type of four-line stanza. The first and third lines have four stressed words or syllables; the second and fourth lines have three stresses. Ballad meter is usually iambic. The number of unstressed syllables in each line may vary. The second and fourth lines rhyme.
22. Biography: A detailed account of a person’s life written by another person.
23. Blank verse: Verse written in unrhymed iambic pentameter.
24. Caesura诗间休止: A break or pause in a line of poetry.
25. Canto: A section or division of a long poem.
26. Caricature: The use of exaggeration or distortion to make a figure appear comic or ridiculous. A physical characteristic, an eccentricity, a personality trait, or an act may be exaggerated.
27. Character: In appreciating a short story, characters are an indispensable element. Characters are the persons presented in a dramatic or narrative work. Forst divides characters into two types: flat character, which is presented without much individualizing detail; and round character, which is complex in temperament and motivation and is represented with subtle particularity.
28. Characterizatiogogoo, the means by which a writer reveals that personality.
29. Classicism: A movement or tendency in art, literature, or music that reflects the principles manifested in the art of ancient Greece and Rome. Classicism emphasizes the traditional and the universal, and places value on reason, clarity, balance, and order. Classicism, with its concern for reason and universal themes, is traditionally opposed to Romanticism, which is concerned with emotions and personal themes.
30. Climax: The point of greatest intensity, interest, or suspense in a gogotory’s turning point. The action leading to the climax and the simultaneous increase of tension in the plot are known as the rising action. All action after the climax is referred to as the falling action, or resolution. The term crisis is sometimes used interchangeably with climax.
31. Comedy: in general, a literary work that ends happily with a healthy, amicable armistice between the protagonist and society.
32. Conceit: A kind of metaphor that makes a comparison between two startlingly different things. A conceit may be a brief metaphor, but it usually provides the framework for an entire poem. An especially unusual and intellectual kind of conceit is the metaphysical conceit.
33. Conflict: A struggle between two opposing forces or characters in a short story, novel, play, or narrative poem. Usually the events of the story are all related to the conflict, and the conflict is resolved in some way by the story’s end.
34. Connotation: All the emotions and associations that a word or phrase may arouse. Connotation is distinct from denotation, which is the literal or “ dictionary” meaning of a word or phrase.
35. Consonance: The repetition of similar consonant sounds in the middle or at the end of words.
36. Couplet: Two consecutive lines of poetry that rhyme. A heroic couplet is an iambic pentameter couplet.
37. Critical Realism: The critical realism of the 19th century flourished in the fouties and in the beginning of fifties. The realists first and foremost set themselves the task of criticizing capitalist society from a democratic viewpoint and delineated the crying contradictions of bourgeois reality. But they did not find a way to eradicate social evils.
38. Dactyl扬抑抑: It’s made up of one stressed and two unstressed syllables, with the stressed in front.
39. Denotation: The literal or “dictionary” meaning of a word.
40. Denouement结局: The outcome of a plot. The denouement is that part of a play, short story, novel, or narrative poem in which conflicts are resolved or unraveled, and mysteries and secrets connected with the plot are explained.
41. Description: It is a great part of conversation and of almost all writing. It is a part of autobiography, storytelling. With description, the writer tries terror, feel, and hear by showing rather than by merely telling. It’s through the use of specific details and concrete language that abstract ideas and half-formed thoughts are make vividly real. We have objective and subjective description.
42. Diction: A writer’s choice of words, particularly for clarity, effectiveness, and precision.
43. Dissonance: A harsh or disagreeable combination of sounds; discord.
44. Dramatic monologue: A kind of narrative poem in which one character speaks to one or more listeners whose replies are not given in the poem. The occasion is usually a crucial one in the speaker’s personality as well as the incident that is the subject of the poem.
45. Elegy: A poem of mourning, usually over the death of an individual. An elegy is a type of lyric poem, usually formal in language and structure, and solemn or even melancholy in tone.
46. Emblematic image: A verbal picture or figure with a long tradition of moral or religious meaning attached to it.
47. Enlightenment: With the advent of the 18th century, in England, as in other European countries, there sprang into life a public movement known as the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment on the whole, was an expression of struggle of the then progressive class of bourgeois against feudalism. The egogo inequality, stagnation, prejudices and other survivals of feudalism. The attempted to place all branches of science at the service of mankind by connecting them with the actual deeds and requirements of the people.
48. Epic: A long narrative poem telling about the deeds of a great hero and reflecting the values of the society from which it originated. Many epics were drawn from an oral tradition and were transmitted by song and recitation before they were written down.
49. Epigram: A short, witty, pointed statement often in the form of a poem.
50. Epigraph: A quotation or motto at the beginning of a chapter, book, short story, or poem that makes some point about the work.
51. Epilogue收场白: A short addition or conclusion at the end of a literary work.
52. Epiphany主显节: A moment of illumination, usually occurring at or near the end of a work.
53. Epitaph: An inscription on a gravestone or a short poem written in memory of someone who has died.
54. Epithet称号: A descriptive name or phrase used to characterize someone or something.
55. Era of Modernism: The years from 1910 to 1930 are often called the Era of Modernism, for there seems to have been in both Europe and America a strong awareness of some sort of “break” with the past. The new artists shared a desire to capture the complexity of modern life, to focus on the variety and confusion of the 20th century by reshaping and sometimes discarding the ideas and habits of the 19th century. The Era of Modernism was indeed the era of the New.
56. Essay: A piece of prose writing, usually short, that deals with a subject in a limited way and expresses a particular point or view. An essay may be serious or humorous, tightly organized or rambling, restrained or emotional. The two general classifications of essay are the informal essay and the formal essay. An informal essay is usually brief and is written as if the writer is talking informally to the reader about some topic, using a conversational style and a personal or humorous tone. By contrast, a formal essay is tightly organized, dignified in style, and serious in tone.
57. Exemplum说教故事: A tale, usually inserted into the text of a sermon that illustrates a moral principle.
58. Exposition: (1) That part of a narrative or drama in which important background information is revealed. (2) It is the kind of writing that is intended primarily to present information. Exposition is one of the major forms of discourse. The most familiar form it takes is in essays. Exposition is also that part of a play in which important background information is revealed to the audience.
59. Fable: A fable is a short story, often with animals as its characters, which illustrate a moral.
60. Farce: A type of comedy based on a ridiculous situation, often with stereotyped characters. The humor in a farce is largely slapstick—that is, it often involves crude physical action. The characters in a farce are often the butts of practical jokes.
61. Figurative language: Language that is not intended to be interpreted in a literal sense. By appealing to the imagination, figurative language provides new ways of looking at the world. Figurative language consists of such figures of speech as hyperbole, metaphor, metonymy, oxymoron矛盾修饰法, personification, simile, and synecdoche.
62. Figure of speech: A word or an expression that is not meant to be interpreted in a literal sense. The most common kinds of figures of speech—simile, metaphor, personification, and metonymy—involve a comparison between unlike things.
63. Flashback: A scene in a short story, novel, play, or narrative poem that interrupts the action to show an event that happened earlier.
64. Foil衬托: A character who sets off another character by contrast.
65. Foot: It is a rhythmic unit, a specific combination of stressed and unstressed syllables.
66. Foreshadowing: The use of hints or clues in a narrative to suggest what will happen later. Writers use foreshadowing to create interest and to build suspense. Sometimes foreshadowing also prepares the reader for the ending of the story.
67. Free Verse: Verse that has either no metrical pattern or an irregular pattern.
68. Hyperbole: A figure of speech using exaggeration, or overstatement, for special effect.
69. Iamb抑扬格: It is the most commonly used foot in English poetry, in which an unstressed syllable comes first, followed by a stressed syllable.
70. Iambic pentameter: A poetic line consisting of five verse feet, with each foot an iamb—that is, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. Iambic pentameter is the most common verse line in English poetry.
71. Image: We usually think with words, many of our thoughts come to us as pictures or imagined sensations in our mind. Such imagined pictures or sensations are called images.
72. Imagery: Words or phrases that create pictures, or images, in the reader’s mind. Images can appeal to other senses as well: touch, taste, smell, and hearing.
73. Imagism: It’s a poetic movement of England and the U.S. flourished from 1909 to 1917.The movement insists on the creation of images in poetry by “the direct treatment of the thing” and the economy of wording. The leaders of this movement were Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell.
74. Incremental repetition: The repetition of a previous line, or lines but with a slight variation each time that advances the narrative stanza by stanza. This device is commonly used in ballads.
75. In medias res: A technique of plunging into the middle of a story and only later using a flashback to tell what has happened previously. In medias res is Latin for “in the middle of things”.
76. Inversion: The technique of reversing, or inverting, the normal word order of a sentence. Writers may use inversion to create a certain tone or to emphasize a particular word or idea. A poet may invert a line so that it fits into a particular meter or rhyme scheme.
77. Invocation: At the beginning of an epic (or other poem) a call to a muse, god, or spirit for inspiration.
78. Irony: A contrast or an incongruity between what is stated and what is really meant, or between what is expected to happen and what actually happens. Three kinds of irony are (1) verbal irony, in which a writer or speaker says one thing and means something entirely different; (2) dramatic irony, in which a reader or an audience perceives something that a character in the story or play does not know; (3) irony of situation, in which the writer shows a discrepancy between the expected results of some action or situation and its actual results.
79. Kenning代称: In Old English poetry, an elaborate phrase that describes persons, things, or events in a metaphorical and indirect way.
80. Local Colorism: Local Colorism or Regionalism as a trend first made its presence felt in the late 1860s and early seventies in America. It may be defined as the careful attegogoms in speech, dress or behavior peculiar to a geographical locality. The ultimate aim of the local colorists is to create the illusion of an indigenous little world with qualities that tell it apart from the world outside. The social and intellectual climate of the country provided a stimulating milieu for the growth of local color fiction in America. Local colorists concerned themselves with presenting and interpreting the local character of their regions. They tended to idealize and glorify, but they never forgot to keep an eye on the truthful color of local life. They formed an important part of the realistic movement. Although it lost its momentum toward the end of the 19th century, the local spirit continued to inspire and fertilize the imagination of author.
81. Lost Generation: This term has been used again and again to describe the people of the postwar years. It describes the Americans who remained in Paris as a colony of “ expatriates” or exiles. It describes the writers like Hemingway who lived in semi poverty. It describes the Americans who returned to their native land with an intense awareness of living in an unfamiliar changing world. The young English and American expatriates, men and women, were caught in the war and cut off from the old values and yet unable to come to terms with the new era when civilization had gone mad. They wandered pointlessly and restlessly, enjoying things like fishing, swimming, bullfight and beauties of nature, but they were aware all the while that the world is crazy and meaningless and futile. Their whole life is undercut and defeated.
82. Lyric: A poem, usually a short one, that expresses a speaker’s personal thoughts or feelings. The elegy, ode, and sonnet are all forms of the lyric.
83. Masque: An elaborate and spectacular dramatic entertainment that was popular among the English aristocracy in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Masques were written as dramatic poems and make use of songs, dances, colorful costumes, and startling stage effects.
84. Melodrama通俗剧: A drama that has stereotyped characters, exaggerated emotions, and a conflict that pits an all-good hero or heroine against an all-evil villain. The good characters always win and the evil ones are always punished. Also, each character in a melodrama had a theme melody, which was played each time he or she made an appearance on stage.
85. Metaphor: A figure of speech that makes a comparison between two things that are basically dissimilar. Unlike simile, a metaphor does not use a connective word such as like, as, or resembles in making the comparison.
86. Metaphysical poetry: The poetry of John Donne and other 17th century poets who wrote in a similar style. Metaphysical poetry is characterized by verbal wit and excess, ingenious structure, irregular meter, colloquial language, elaborate imagery, and a drawing together of dissimilar ideas.
87. Meter音步: A generally regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry.
88. Metonymy: A figure of speech in which something very closely associated with a thing is used to stand for or suggest the thing itself.
89. Miracle play: A popular religious drama of medieval England. Miracle plays were based on stories of the saints or on sacred history.
90. Mock epic: A comic literary form that treats a trivial subject in the grand, heroic style of the epic. A mock epic is also referred to as a mock-heroic poem.
91. Morality play: An outgrowth of miracle plays. Morality plays were popular in the 15th and 16th centuries. In them, virtues and vices were personified.
92. Motif: A recurring feature (such as a name, an image, or a phrase) in a work of literature. A motif generally contributes in some way to the theme of a short story, novel, poem, or play. At times, motif is used to refer to some commonly used plot or character type in literature.
93. Motivation: The reasons, either stated or implied, for a character’s behavior. To make a story believable, a writer must provide characters with motivation sufficient to explain what they do. Characters may be motivated by outside events, or they may be motivated by inner needs or fears.
94. Multiple Point of View: It is one of the literary techniques William Faulkner used, which shows within the same story how the characters reacted differently to the same person or the same situation. The use of this technique gave the story a circular form wherein one event was the center, with various points of view radiating from it. The multiple points of view technique makes the reader recognize the difficulty of arriving at a true judgment.
95. Myth: A story, often about immortals and sometimes connected with religious rituals, that is intended to give meaning to the mysteries of the world. Myths make it possible for people to understand and deal with things that they cannot control and often cannot see. A body of related myths that is accepted by a people is known as its mythology. A mythology tells a people what it is most concerned about.
96. Narration: Like description, narration is a part of conversation and writing. Narration is the major technique used in expository writing. Such as autobiography. Successful narration must grow out of good observation, to-the-point selection from observation, and clear arrangement of details in logical sequence, which is usually chronological. Narration gives an exact picture of things as they occur.
97. Narrative poem: A poem that tells a story. One kind of narrative poem is the epic, a long poem that sets forth the heroic ideals of a particular society.
98. Narrator: One who narrates, or tells, a story. A story may be told by a first-person narrator, someone who is either a major or minor character in the story. Or a story may be told by a third-person narrator, someone who is not in the story at all. The word narrator can also refer to a character in a drama who guides the audience through the play, often commenting on the action and sometimes participating in it.
99. Naturalism: An extreme form of realism. Naturalistic writers usually depict the sordid side of life and show characters who are severely, if not hopelessly, limited by their environment or heredity.
100. Neoclassicism: A revival in the 17th agogo of order, balance, and harmony in literature.
101. Nonet: the nine-line stanza. Spenserian stanza: ababbcbcc.
102. Nonfiction: It refers to any prose narrative that tells about things as the actually happened or that presents factual information about something. The purpose of this kind of writing is to give a presumably accurate accounting of a person’s life. Writers of nonfiction use the major forms of discourse: description (an impression of the subject); narration (the telling of the story); exposition (explanatory information); persuasion (an argument to influence people’s thinking). Forms: autobiography, biography, essay, story, editorial, letters to the editor found in newspaper, diary, journal, travel literature.
103. Novel: A book-length fictional prose narrative, having may characters and often a complex plot.
104. Octava: the eight-line stanza. 2 quatrains/ 2 triplets + 1 couplet.
105. Ode: A complex and often lengthy lyric poem, written in a dignified formal style on some lofty or serious subject. Odes are often written for a special occasion, to honor a person or a season or to commemorate an event.
106. Onomatopoeia: The use of a word whose sound in some degree imitates or suggests its meaning.
107. Oxymoron: a figure of speech that combines opposite or contradictory ideas or terms. An oxymoron suggests a paradox, but it does so very briefly, usually in two or three words.
108. Paradox: A statement that reveals a kind of truth, although it seems at first to be self-contradictory and untrue.
109. Parallelism: (a figure of speech) The use of phrases, clauses, or sentences that are similar or complementary in structure or in meaning. Parallelism is a form of repetition.
110. Parody: The humorous imitation of a work of literature, art, or music. A parody often achieves its humorous effect through the use of exaggeration or mockery. In literature, parody can be make of a plot, a character, a writing style, or a sentiment or theme.
111. Pastoral: A type of poem that deals in an idealized way with shepherds and rustic life.
112. Pathos: The quality in a work of literature or art that arouses the reader’s feelings of pity, sorrow, or compassion for a character. The term is usually used to refer to situations in which innocent characters suffer through no fault of their own.
113. Persuasion: It’s the type of speaking or writing that is intended to make its audience adopt a certain opinion or perform an action or do both. Persuasion is one of the major forms of discourse.
114. Pictorialism: It’s an important poetic device characterized by efforts to achieve striking visual effects. Among its features are irregularity of line, contrast or enchantment of light, color and image. Other means of pictorialism include personification, juxtaposition and the matching of colors with verbs of action.
115. Plot: Plot is the first and most obvious quality of a story. It is the sequence of events or actions in a short story, novel, play, or narrative poem. For the reader, the plot is the underlying pattern in a work of fiction, the structural element that gives it unity and order. For the writer, the plot is the guiding principle of selection and arrangement. Conflict, a struggle of some kind, is the most important element of plot. Each event in the plot is related to the conflict, the struggle that the main character undergoes. Conflict may be external or internal, and there may be more than one form of conflict in a work. As the plot advances, we learn how the conflict is resolved. Action is generally introduced by the exposition, information essential to understanding the situation. The action rises to a crisis, or climax. This movement is called the rising action. The falling action, which follows the crisis, shows a reversal of fortune for the protagonist. The denouement or resolution is the moment when the conflict ends and the outcome of the action is clear.
116. Poetry: The most distinctive characteristic of poetry is form and music. Poetry is concerned with not only what is said but how it is said. Poetry evokes emotions rather than express facts. Poetry means having a poetic experience. Imagination is also an essential quality of poetry. Poetry often leads us to new perceptions, new feelings and experiences of which we have not previously been aware.
117. Point of view: The vantage point from which a narrative is told. There are two basic points of view: first-person and third-person. In the first-person point of view, the story is told by one of the characters in his or her own words. The first-person point of view is limited. In the third-person point of view, the narrator is not a character in the story. The narrator may be an omniscient. On the other hand, the third-person narrator might tell a story from the point of view of only one character in the story.
118. Pre-Romanticism: It originated among the conservative groups of men and letters as a reaction against Enlightenment and found its most manifest expression in the “Gothic novel”. The term arising from the fact that the greater part of such romances were devoted to the medieval times.
119. Protagonist: The central character of a drama, novel, short story, or narrative poem. The protagonist is the character on whom the action centers and with whom the reader sympathizes most. Usually the protagonist strives against an opposing force, or antagonist , to accomplish something.
120. Psalm: A song or lyric poem in praise of God.
121. Psychological Realism: It is the realistic writing that probes deeply into the complexities of characters’ thoughts and motivations. Henry James is considered the founder of psychological realism. His novel The Ambassadors is considered to be a masterpiece of psychological realism.
122. Pun: The use of a word or phrase to suggest tow or more meaning at the same time. Puns are generally humorous.
123. Quatrain: Usually a stanza or poem of four lines. A quatrain may also be any group of four lines unified by a rhyme scheme. Quatrains usually follow an abab, abba, or abcb rhyme scheme.
124. Quintain: the five-line stanza.
125. Realism: The attempt in literature and art to represent life as it really is, without sentimentalizing or idealizing it. Realistic writing often depicts the everyday life and speech of ordinary people. This has led, sometimes, to an emphasis on sordid details.
126. Refrain: 叠句: A word phrase, line or group of lines repeated regularly in a poem, usually at the end of each stanza. Refrains are often used in ballads and narrative poems to create a songlike rhythm and to help build suspense. Refrains can also serve to emphasize a particular idea.
127. Renaissance: The term originally indicated a revival of classical (Greek and Roman) arts and sciences after the dark ages of medieval obscurantism.
128. Rhyme: It’s one of the three basic elements of traditional poetry. It is the repetition of sounds in two or more words or phrases that appear close to each other in a poem. If the rhyme occurs at the ends of lines, it is called end rhyme. If the rhyme occurs within a line, it is called internal rhyme. Approximate rhyme is rhyme in which only the final consonant sounds of the words are identical. A rhyme scheme is the pattern of rhymes in a poem. Interlocking rhyme is a rhyme scheme in which an unrhymed line in one stanza rhymes with a line in the following stanza. Interlocking rhyme occurs in an Italian verse form called terza rima.
129. Rhythm: It is one of the three basic elements of traditional poetry. It is the arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables into a pattern. Rhythm often gives a poem a distinct musical quality. Poets also use rhythm to echo meaning.
130. Romance: Any imagination literature that is set in an idealized world and that deals with a heroic adventures and battles between good characters and villains or monsters.
131. Romanticism: A movement that flourished in literature, philosophy, music, and art in Western culture during most of the 19th century, beginnigogom.
132. Satire: A kind of writing that holds up to ridicule or contempt the weaknesses and wrongdoings of individuals, groups, institutions, or humanity in general. The aim of satirists is to set a moral standard for society, and they attempt to persuade the reader to see their point of view through the force of laughter.
133. Scansion诗的韵律分析: The analysis of verse in terms of meter.
134. Sentimentalism: Sentimentalism came into being as a result of a bitter discontent on the part of certain enlighteners in social reality.
135. Septet: the seven-line stanza. Chaucerian stanza: ababbcc.
136. Sestet: the six-line stanza. 3couplets/ a quatrain + a couplet/ 2 triplets.
137. Setting: The time and place in which the events in a short story, novel, play or narrative poem occur. Setting can give us information, vital to plot and theme. Often, setting and character will reveal each other.
138. Short Story: A short story is a brief prose fiction, usually one that can be read in a single sitting. It generally contains the six major elements of fiction—characterization, setting, theme, plot, point of view, and style.
139. Simile: (a figure of speech) A comparison make between two things through the use of a specific word of comparison, such as like, as than, or resembles. The comparison must be between two essentially unlike things.
140. Skaz: It’s a Russian word used to designate a type of first person narration that has the characteristics of the spoken rather than the written word. In this kind of novel, the narrator is a character who refers to himself as “I” and addresses the reader as “you”. He or she uses vocabulary and syntax characteristic of colloquial speech, and appears to be relating the story spontaneously rather than delivering a carefully constructed and polished written account.
141. Soliloquy: In drama, an extended speech delivered by a character alone onstage. The character reveals his or her innermost thoughts and feelings directly to the audience, as if thinking aloud.
142. Song: A short lyric poem with distinct musical qualities, normally written to be set to music. In expresses a simple but intense emotion.
143. Sonnet: A fourteen-line lyric poem, usually written in rhymed iambic pentameter. A sonnet generally expresses a single theme or idea.
144. Speech: It was defined by Aristotle as the faculty of observing all the available means of persuasion.
145. Spenserian stanza: A nine-line stanza with the following rhyme scheme: ababbabcc. The first eight lines are written in iambic pentameter. The ninth line is written in iambic hexameter and is called an alexandrine.
146. Spondee扬扬: It consists of two stressed syllables.
147. Sprung Rhythm: A term created by the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins to designate a variable kind of poetic meter in which a stressed syllable may be combined with any number of unstressed syllables. Poems with sprung rhythm have an irregular meter and are meant to sound like natural speech.
148. Stanza: It’s a structural division of a poem, consisting of a series of verse lines which usually comprise a recurring pattern of meter and thyme.
149. Stereotype: A commonplace type or character that appears so often in literature that his or her nature is immediately familiar to the reader. Stereotypes, also called stock characters, always look and act the same way and reveal the same traits of character.
150. Stream of consciousness: “Stream-of-Consciousness” or “interior monologue”, is one of the modern literary techniques. It is the style of writing that attempts to imitate the natural flow of a character’s thoughts, feelings, reflections, memories, and mental images as the character experiences them. It was first used in 1922 by the Irish novelist James Joyce. Those novels broke through the bounds of time and space, and depicted vividly and skillfully the unconscious activity of the mind fast changing and flowing incessantly, particularly the hesitant, misted, distracted and illusory psychology people had when they faced reality. The modern American writer William Faulkner successfully advanced this technique. In his stories, action and plots were less important than the reactions and inner musings of the narrators. Time sequences were often dislocated. The reader feels himself to be a participant in the stories, rather than an observer. A high degree of emotion can be achieved by this technique.
151. Style: An author’s characteristic way of writing, determined by the choice of words, the arrangement of words in sentences, and the relationship of the sentences to one another.
152. Suspense: The quality of a story, novel, or drama that makes the reader or audience uncertain or tense about the outcome of events.
153. Symbol: A symbol is a sign which suggests more than its literal meaning. In other words, a symbol is both literal and figurative. A symbol is a way of telling a story and a way of conveying meaning. The best symbols are those that are believable in the lives of the characters and also convincing as they convey a meaning beyond the literal level of the story. If the symbol is obscure or ambiguous, then the very obscurity and the ambiguity may also be part of the meaning of the story.
154. Symbolism: Symbolism is the writing technique of using symbols. It’s a literary movement that arose in France in the last half of the 19th century and that greatly influenced many English writers, particularly poets, of the 20th century. It enables poets to compress a very complex idea or set of ideas into one image or even one word. It’s one of the most powerful devices that poets employ in creation.
155. Synecdoche: A figure of speech that substitutes a part for a whole.
156. Terza rima: An Italian verse form consisting of a series of three-line stanzas in which the middle line of each stanza rhymes with the first and third lines of the following stanza.
157. Theme; The general idea or insight about life that a writer wishes to express in a literary work. All the elements of a literary work-plot, setting, characterization, and figurative language-contribute to the development of its theme.
158. Tone: The attitude a writer takes toward his or her subject, characters, or audience. The tone of a speech or a piece of writing can be formal or intimate; outspoken or reticent; abstruse or simple; solemn or playful; angry or loving; serious or ironic.
159. Tragedy: In general, a literary work in which the protagonist meets an unhappy or disastrous end. Unlike comedy, tragedy depicts the actions of a central character who is usually dignified or heroic.
160. Triplet: The three-line stanza. Tercet: aaa, bbb, ccc, and so on; terza rima: aba, bcb cdc, and so on.
161. Trochee扬抑格: The reverse of the iambic foot.
162. Villanelle维拉内拉诗: An intricate verse form of French origin, consisting of several three-line stanzas and a concluding four-line stanza.
163. Wit: A brilliance and quickness of perception combined with a cleverness of expression. In the 18th century, wit and nature were related-nature provided the rules of the universe; wit allowed these rules to be interpreted and expressed.
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