kim woods

Alliteration :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."

Assonance: The repetition of similar vowel sounds in a sentence or a line of poetry or prose, as in "I rose and told him of my woe."

Caesura: A strong pause within a line of verse.

Denouement: The resolution of the plot of a literary work. The denouement of Hamlet takes place after the catastrophe , with the stage littered with corpses. During the denouement Fortinbras makes an entrance and a speech.

Enjambment: A run-on line of poetry in which logical and grammatical sense carries over from one line into the next. An enjambed line differs from an end-stopped line in which the grammatical and logical sense is completed within the line.

Exposition: The first stage of a fictional or dramatic plot, in which necessary background information is provided.

Falling action: In the plot of a story or play, the action following the climax of the work that moves it towards its denouement or resolution.

Falling meter: Poetic meters such as trochaic and dactylic that move or fall from a stressed to an unstressed syllable. The nonsense line, "Higgledy, piggledy," is dactylic, with the accent on the first syllable and the two syllables following falling off from that accent in each word. Trochaic meter is represented by this line: "Hip-hop, be-bop, treetop--freedom."

Figurative language: A form of language use in which writers and speakers convey something other than the literal meaning of their words. Examples include hyperbole or exaggeration, litotes or understatement, simile and metaphor, which employ comparison, and synecdoche and metonymy, in which a part of a thing stands for the whole.

Foot: A metrical unit composed of stressed and unstressed syllables. Frost's line "Whose woods these are I think I know" contains four iambs, and is thus an iambic foot.

Foreshadowing: Hints of what is to come in the action of a play or a story.

Hyperbole: A figure of speech involving exaggeration. John Donne uses hyperbole in his poem: "Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star."

Image: A concrete representation of a sense impression, a feeling, or an idea. Imagery refers to the pattern of related details in a work. In some works one image predominates either by recurring throughout the work or by appearing at a critical point in the plot. Often writers use multiple images throughout a work to suggest states of feeling and to convey implications of thought and action

Imagery: The pattern of related comparative aspects of language, particularly of images, in a literary work. Imagery of light and darkness pervade “Hamlet.” So, too, does religious imagery.

Irony: A contrast or discrepancy between what is said and what is meant or between what happens and what is expected to happen in life and in literature. In verbal irony, characters say the opposite of what they mean. In irony of circumstance or situation, the opposite of what is expected occurs. In dramatic irony, a character speaks in ignorance of a situation or event known to the audience or to the other characters.

Meter: The measured pattern of rhythmic accents in poems. See Foot and Iamb .

Ode: A long, stately poem in stanzas of varied length, meter , and form. Usually a serious poem on an exalted subject, such as Horace's "Eheu fugaces," but sometimes a more lighthearted work, such as Neruda's "Ode to My Socks."

Personification: The endowment of inanimate objects or abstract concepts with animate or living qualities. An example: "The yellow leaves flaunted their color gaily in the breeze."

Point of view: The angle of vision from which a story is narrated. See Narrator . A work's point of view can be: first person, in which the narrator is a character or an observer, respectively; objective, in which the narrator knows or appears to know no more than the reader; 3rd person omniscient, in which the narrator knows everything about the characters; and limited omniscient, which allows the narrator to know some things about the characters but not everything.

Rhyme: The matching of final vowel or consonant sounds in two or more words.

Rhythm: The recurrence of accent or stress in lines of verse in the overall poem.

Rising action: A set of conflicts and crises that constitute the part of a play's or story's plot leading up to the climax . See Climax , Denouement , and Plot .

Rising meter: Poetic meters such as iambic and anapestic that move or ascend from an unstressed to a stressed syllable. See Anapest , Iamb , and Falling meter .

Setting: The time and place of a literary work that establish its context. The stories of Sandra Cisneros are set in the American southwest in the mid to late 20th century, those of James Joyce in Dublin, Ireland in the early 20th century.

Simile: A figure of speech involving a comparison between unlike things using like, as, or as though. An example: "My love is like a red, red rose."

Stanza: A division or unit of a poem that is repeated in the same form--either with similar or identical patterns or rhyme and meter , or with variations from one stanza to another. The stanzas of Gertrude Schnackenberg's "Signs" are regular; those of Rita Dove's "Canary" are irregular.

Symbol: An object or action in a literary work that means more than itself, that stands for something beyond itself. The glass unicorn in The Glass Menagerie, the rocking horse in "The Rocking-Horse Winner," the road in Frost's "The Road Not Taken"--all are symbols in this sense.

Theme: The idea of a literary work abstracted from its details of language, character, and action, and cast in the form of a generalization. See discussion of Dickinson's "Crumbling is not an instant's Act."

Tone: The implied attitude of a writer toward the subject and characters of a work, as, for example, Flannery O'Connor's ironic tone in her "Good Country People." See Irony .