Ideas, Periods and Movements

Important Literary Terms (Revised October 2012)

Ideas, Periods and Movements  Interior Monologue  Metafiction  Aesthetic Movement  Narrator  Augustan  Novel of Manners  Elizabethan  Omniscient  Enlightenment  Picaresque Novel  Expressionism  Plot  Fin de Sicele  Point of View (see focalizing)  Harlem Renaissance  Polyglossia  Humanism  Romance (narrative)  Imagism  Round Character  Impressionism  Stream of Consciousness  Jacobean  Third Person  Magical Realism  Unreliable Narrator  Modernism  Naturalism Drama  Neoclassicism  Neoplatonism  Aside  Platonism  Catharsis  Postmodernism  Chorus  Pre-Raphaelitism  Closet Drama  Realism  Comedy  Reformation  Comedy of Humors  Renaissance  Comedy of Manners  Restoration  Deus ex machina  Romanticism  Dramatic Irony  Sentimentalism  Epilogue  Surrealism  Farce  Symbolist movement  Hamartia  Transcendentalism  Masque  Victorian  Melodrama  Mime Fiction  Morality Play  Mystery Cycle  Bildungsroman  New Comedy (Greek)  Episodic plot  Ode (Greek drama)  Epistolary Novel  Old Comedy (Greek)  First Person  Prologue  Flat Character  Protagonist  Focalizing (see Point of View)  Sentimental Comedy  Frame Tale  Soliloquy  Free Indirect Style or Discourse  Stock Character  Gothic Novel  Strophe/Antistrophe

1  Tragedy  Stanza  Tragicomedy  Syllabic Verse  Unities  Tercet  Terza Rima Poetry  Tetrameter  Trochaic  Accent or beat  Verse  Accentual-Syllabic Verse  Accentual Verse Rhetoric & Style  Alexandrine  Anapestic  Allusions  Alliteration  Anticlimax  Ballad  Antithesis  Ballad Stanza  Aphorism  Blank Verse  Apostrophe  Caesura  Bathos  Carpe Diem  Epic  Confessional Poetry  Epigram  Dactylic  Ethos  Dramatic Monologue  Hyperbole  Eclogue  Logos  Elegy  Metaphor  Enjambment  Metonymy  Epic  Mock Heroic  Feminine or Double Rhyme  Onomatopoeia  Foot  Oxymoron  Free Verse  Paradox  Heroic Couplet  Pathos  Hexameter  Persona  Iambic  Personification  Internal Rhyme  Rhetoric  Incremental Repetition  Rhetorical Appeal  Lyric  Satire  Metaphysical Poetry  Simile and Epic Simile  Meter  Symbol  Ode (nondramatic)  Pastoral General Theoretical Terms  Pentameter  Quatrain  Archetype  Refrain  Author Function  Rhyme  Canon  Rhyme Scheme  Conventions  Rhythm  Deconstruction  Slant Rhyme  Dialogic  Sonnet (English v. Italian Forms)  Discourse  Spenserian Stanza  Feminist Criticism  Spondaic  Genre

2  Grotesque  Hermeneutics  Hybridity (postcolonial)  Intentional Fallacy  Intertextuality  Irony  Linguistics  Marxist Criticism  Metanarrative  Mimesis  Myth  Narratology  New Criticism  New Historicism  Orientalism  Pathetic Fallacy  Parody  Pastiche  Postcolonial  Poststructuralism  Psychoalytical Criticism  Queer Theory  Reader-Response Criticism  Semiotics  Signifier/Signified  Simulacra  Speech Act Theory  Structuralism  Subaltern  Verisimilitude