BGCSE Literature in English flashcards
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32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.
- Free indirect discourse
- A narrative technique blending third-person narration with a character's inner voice, without quotation marks or reporting clauses, letting the reader hear thoughts while the narrator's perspective remains present.
- Inciting incident
- The event early in a narrative that disrupts the initial situation and sets the central conflict in motion, giving the plot its forward momentum.
- Round character
- A complex, fully developed character with varied traits and internal contradictions, capable of surprising the reader and often changing across the narrative.
- Dramatic irony
- A situation where the audience or reader possesses knowledge that a character lacks, so the character's words or actions carry meaning they cannot perceive.
- Motif
- A recurring image, phrase, object or idea that appears throughout a text and reinforces its themes by accumulating significance with each repetition.
- Epiphany
- A moment of sudden insight or revelation in which a character grasps a truth about themselves or their situation, often crystallising the story's theme.
- Iambic pentameter
- A metrical line of five feet, each foot an iamb of one unstressed followed by one stressed syllable, producing ten syllables and a rising rhythm.
- Enjambment
- The continuation of a sentence beyond the end of a line or couplet without punctuation, creating momentum and drawing attention to the opening word of the next line.
- Volta
- The turn or shift in argument, tone or feeling in a poem, especially a sonnet, typically occurring between the octave and sestet or before the final couplet.
- Assonance
- The repetition of similar vowel sounds within nearby words, often in stressed syllables, creating internal resonance and contributing to a poem's musical texture.
- Caesura
- A deliberate pause or break within a line of verse, marked by punctuation or syntax, which can slow rhythm or isolate a word for emphasis.
- Synecdoche
- A figure of speech in which a part stands for the whole, or the whole for a part, such as referring to workers as hands.
- Petrarchan sonnet
- A fourteen-line poem in two parts: an octave rhyming abbaabba presenting a problem, and a sestet rhyming cdecde or similar resolving or complicating it.
- Speaker
- The constructed voice that utters a poem, distinct from the poet, whose attitudes and situation the reader infers from diction, tone and address.
- Hamartia
- In tragedy, the protagonist's error, misjudgement or flaw of character that contributes to their downfall, often combined with circumstance rather than pure guilt.
- Soliloquy
- A speech delivered by a character alone on stage, revealing private thoughts and motives to the audience rather than to other characters present in the fiction.
- Aside
- A brief remark spoken by a character that the audience hears but other characters on stage do not, creating intimacy or dramatic irony.
- Foil
- A character whose qualities contrast with those of another, usually the protagonist, so that the protagonist's distinctive traits become clearer by comparison.
- Catharsis
- The emotional purgation or release experienced by an audience at the close of a tragedy, produced by pity and fear aroused through the protagonist's suffering.
- Peripeteia
- The reversal of fortune in a tragedy, a sudden change in circumstances that turns the protagonist's prospects from good to disastrous.
- Anagnorisis
- The moment of recognition or discovery in tragedy when a character moves from ignorance to knowledge, often about their own identity or actions.
- Stage directions
- Authorial instructions in a play script concerning setting, movement, gesture, lighting or tone, which guide staging and can carry symbolic or thematic significance.
- Connotation
- The associations and emotional overtones a word carries beyond its dictionary meaning, shaped by usage and culture, which influence a text's tone.
- Inference
- A conclusion drawn from textual clues rather than stated directly, requiring the reader to connect evidence to meaning through reasoning.
- Thesis statement
- A concise, arguable claim that states the central interpretation of a text and previews the line of reasoning the essay will develop.
- Embedded quotation
- A short quotation woven into the grammar of the writer's own sentence, allowing analysis to flow without breaking syntax or padding the essay.
- Close analysis
- Sustained examination of a short passage's language, structure and technique, explaining how specific choices produce meaning and effect for the reader.
- Topic sentence
- The opening sentence of a body paragraph that states its controlling claim and connects it to the essay's overall thesis and argument.
- Comparative essay
- An essay that examines two or more texts together, organising paragraphs around shared points of comparison rather than treating each text separately.
- Bildungsroman
- A novel of formation tracing a protagonist's psychological and moral growth from youth to maturity, often through crisis and a resulting change in values.
- Context of production
- The historical, social and biographical circumstances in which a text was written, which shape its assumptions, vocabulary and available conventions.
- Subversion of genre
- A deliberate departure from the conventions a text appears to invoke, producing surprise or critique by refusing the expected resolution or character type.