Chapter 1: World Literature

Literary Terms
The literature section of the Humanities
exam is designed first and foremost to
test your familiarity with great works of
literature and their authors.
Thus there is tremendous value in
committing to memory the titles of
works and the authors who wrote
them, and in the case of plays and
novels the major characters and plot
lines.
Since many of the questions from the
exam are "identification" in nature,
the more thorough your
understanding of major authors and
works, the better your chances of
recognizing them by theme, plot
description, character, and even by
excerpt. It might not hurt, then, to
make a list of major authors and their
works and commit them to memory.
Not all of the questions on the
literature portion of the Humanities
this portion of the exam are
identification, however.
Many of them are interpretive in
nature, often giving you a passage or
a few lines of poetry (sometimes the
entire poem itself) and asking you to
evaluate it.
It is important you practice the art of
literary interpretation on some of the
works addressed in the tutorial. In
other words, read individual poems
and passages from longer works and
think about the possible meanings
they contain, ask yourself what issues
or themes the work is addressing and
what effect it has on you, the reader.
In analyzing literature it is crucial to
understand the terminology used in
the field (especially as such terms are
asked about directly on this exam).
 Key Terms
The following are some of the most important terms in literary studies. You should commit them to
memory and understand the meaning of each one. In the test they can come out as a direct question or to
be recognized in a given paragraph or poem.

Allegory Foreshadowing Proscenium

Alliteration Hyperbole Protagonist
Antagonist Imagery Rhyme
Antithesis Irony Rhyme Scheme
Archetype Metaphor Rhythm & Rhyme
Assonance Narrator Satire
Backdrop Nemesis Scheme
Bildungsroman Onomatopoeia Setting
Caesura Oxymoron Simile
Canon Parable Stanza
Climax Paradox Stream of Consciousness
Doppelganger Personification Theme
Epilogue Plot Tone
Euphemism Poetic Speaker Tragedy
Flashback Prologue Verse
Allegory Foreshadowing Proscenium
Allegory

Allegory is a form of extended metaphor, in which objects,

persons, and actions in a narrative, are equated with meanings
that lie outside the narrative itself.

Thus an allegory is a story with two meanings, a literal meaning

and a symbolic meaning. The underlying meaning has moral,
social, religious, or political significance, and characters are
often personifications of abstract ideas as charity, greed, or envy.

Examples: Fairie Queen by Spenser; Pilgrim's Progress by John

Bunyan; Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Alliteration
The repetition of an initial consonant sound, as in "a peck of pickled peppers. It
has two forms: Assonance and Consonance
Assonance
Identity or similarity in sound between internal vowels in neighboring words.
In this example by Carl Sandburg, in Early Moon, the long “O” sounds of old or
mysterious.
"Poetry is old, ancient, goes back far. It is among the oldest of living things. So
old it is that no man knows how and why the first poems came."
Consonance
Broadly, the repetition of consonant sounds; more specifically, the repetition of
the final consonant sounds of accented syllables or important words.
Example:
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.

Here the emphasis is laid on 'w' and 'h”.

Narrator Voice non-fictional or fictional,
personal or impersonal entity
who tells the story to
the audience or the reader.
This is not always the
protagonist.
May be reliable or unreliable,
omniscient (knows all) or
limited (knows only what one
character knows)
Poetic speaker Voice of the poem, sometimes clearly
defined. Speaker and author are often
not the same.
For instance, consider the poet Lord
Byron's mock epic Don Juan. Lord Byron
wrote the poem as a young man in his
late twenties. However, the speaker of
the poem depicts himself as being an
elderly man looking back cynically on
the days of youth.
Prologue It is an opening to a story that
establishes the setting and gives
background details, often some
earlier story that ties into the
main one, and other
miscellaneous information.
Protagonist The main character (the central or
primary personal figure) of a
literary, theatrical, cinematic, or
musical narrative, which ends up in
conflict because of the antagonist
and whom the audience is intended
to most identify with.
The main character is at center of
conflict and is often the hero.
Nemesis It is a term to describe one's worst
enemy, normally someone or
something that is the exact
opposite of one but is also
somehow similar.
For example, Professor Moriarty is
frequently described as the
nemesis of Sherlock Holmes.
Onomatopoeia
Onomatopoeia is a word that imitates the sound it
represents. The concept of onomatopoeia words can be
difficult to understand without examples.
• Words Related to Water: splash
• Words Related to the Voice: grunt
• Words Related to Collisions: bang
• Words Related to Air: gasp
• Animal Sounds: meow
• Miscellaneous: "Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it
is." (slogan of Alka Seltzer, U.S.)
Oxymoron An Oxymoron is a combination
of contradictory or incongruous
words, such as
• Sad joy
• Clearly confused
• Small crowd
Parable Short allegorical story designed
to illustrate or teach some truth,
religious principle, or moral
lesson.
Good Samaritan.
Prodigal Son
Paradox A statement that is seemingly
contradictory or opposed to
common sense and yet is
perhaps true.
Example. “I can resist anything
but temptation” Oscar Wilde
Personification Personification is giving human
traits (qualities, feelings, action,
or characteristics) to non-living
objects (things, colors, qualities,
or ideas).
For example: “The window
winked at me”
The verb, wink, is a human
action. A window is a non-living
object.
Plot Sequence and interaction of
events in a narrative, building to a
climax and then a resolution.
This pattern of events
accomplishes some artistic or
emotional effect.
An intricate, complicated plot is
called an imbroglio,
Rhyme In poetry, a repetition of similar
sounds in two or more words,
most often at the end of lines
in poems and songs
Rhyme scheme Pattern of rhyme in a poem usually
marked using letters to indicate
sounds at end of lines.
It is usually referred to by using
letters to indicate which lines
rhyme; lines designated with the
same letter all rhyme with each
other.
Bid me to weep, and I will weep A
While I have eyes to see; B
And having none, and yet I will keep A
A heart to weep for thee. B
 Stream of consciousness writing aims to provide
Stream of a textual equivalent to the stream of a fictional
Consciousness character’s consciousness.
It creates the impression that the reader is
eavesdropping on the flow of conscious
experience in the character’s mind, gaining
intimate access to their private “thoughts”.
It involves presenting in the form of written text
something that is neither entirely verbal nor
textual. Stream of consciousness writing was
developed in the early decades of the twentieth
century when writers became interested in
finding ways of laying open for readers’
inspection, in a way impossible in real life, the
imagined inner lives of their fictional characters.
Tone General attitude of an author or work to its
subject matter.
Tone may be formal, informal, intimate,
solemn, somber, playful, serious, ironic,
from guilty, to condescending, or many
other possible attitudes.
Each piece of literature has at least one
theme, or central question about a topic,
and how the theme is approached within
the work is known as the tone.
Tragedy Branch of drama that treats in a
serious and dignified style the
sorrowful or terrible events
encountered or caused by a heroic
individual, due to a personal
weakness or character flaw such as
envy, greed, dishonesty, selfishness
etc. By extension the term may be
applied to other literary works, such
as the novel
 Verisimilitude is achieved
Verisimilitude
by a writer or storyteller
when he presents striking
details which lend an air of
authenticity to a tale.
In 1984 Orwell uses artifacts
from the past to layer his
dystopian novel with
verisimilitude.
Passage-Based Questions

When presented with a poem or passage on the

exam and asked more interpretive questions, be
sure to do the following:
• Read the poem once through.
• Determine the rhyme scheme if there is one
and/or scan the poem to establish its meter.
• Figure out the overall mood of the poem.
• Try to ascertain whether it is a familiar genre of poetry:
i.e. if it has fourteen rhyming lines and a set meter it
must be a sonnet.
• You are also often asked to identify the speaker
(especially if it is an excerpt from a play or a novel). If
you don’t know, try to figure it out based on the other
questions being asked about the poem or on
contextual clues imbedded in the excerpt itself.
• Sometimes a second question will contain the
answer or a hint of an answer of an earlier
question.
• Identify any metaphors, similes, symbols or
images that stick out. Look especially for any
words that have multiple meanings. Pay
attention to the connotations (the implied
meanings) of those words within the mood
and context of the poem.
• Look over the questions being asked about the poem on
the exam. They will inevitably ask you who the author is
or what work it comes from, what period it was written in
or what kind of poetry it is. Often they will ask you
about a particular line or a particular choice of word. Do
not simply try to decipher the meaning of the line in and
of itself—always put it within the context of the poem as
a whole
• Remember, most poems contain tension and contrast,
many of them go so far as to make an argument of sorts,
and the line the test makers are pointing out will always
be working on more than just a literal level.
• Apply what you know about the author—or, if it is
an excerpt, the work as a whole—to the questions
being asked.
For example, if it is a poem you haven’t read, but
you can tell the poet is Emily Dickinson by the
way it is written; remember that Dickinson is often
witty, playful and ironic as you answer the
questions. For this reason it is good to be
familiar with certain authors’ distinctive styles.
• Finally, know your terms. Know what a soliloquy is and
what a haiku looks like.
Be able to tell the difference between a Shakespearean
and a Petrarchian sonnet.
Understand what a stanza is and what a couplet looks
like, how iambic pentameter sounds and what
onomatopoeia means.
Don’t be afraid to annotate (make
notes in your text) your tutorial,
highlighting anything you feel is
important, and be sure to make plenty
of notes and flashcards of your own.