Cambridge IAL English Literature flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Homodiegetic narrator

A narrator who is a character inside the story world, telling events they experienced or witnessed; their knowledge and judgements are limited by their position.

Free indirect discourse

A technique blending third-person narration with a character's idiom, opinions, and syntax without reporting clauses, creating intimacy and permitting ironic distance simultaneously.

Internal focalisation

Narration filtered through one character's perception and knowledge, so the reader learns only what that character sees, feels, or infers at that moment.

Analepsis and prolepsis

Analepsis is a narrative flashback to earlier events; prolepsis is a flash-forward anticipating later events. Both disrupt chronological order to shape emphasis and suspense.

Unreliable narrator

A narrator whose account is compromised by ignorance, bias, self-interest, or instability, requiring the reader to test their version against other textual evidence.

Indirect characterisation

Revealing character through speech, action, appearance, setting, and other characters' reactions rather than explicit authorial statement, inviting inference from textual detail.

Setting as social code

The use of place, house, landscape, or weather to encode class, history, or psychology, so that environment constrains or expresses what characters can do and feel.

Framed narrative

A story enclosed within another narrator's account; the outer frame shapes how the inner tale is received, authorised, or ironised by its teller.

Iambic pentameter

A line of five iambic feet, each an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, giving ten syllables; the standard metre of much English verse and drama.

Enjambment

The continuation of a sentence beyond the end of a line or couplet without punctuation, creating momentum and setting syntax against lineation.

Caesura

A pause or break within a line, marked by punctuation or syntax, which controls pace and can isolate a phrase for emphasis.

Petrarchan sonnet

A fourteen-line poem in an octave and a sestet, typically rhyming abbaabba then cdecde; the volta often falls between octave and sestet.

Shakespearean sonnet

A fourteen-line poem in three quatrains and a final couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg, with the turn often at line nine or in the couplet.

Volta

The turn or shift in argument, mood, or perspective in a sonnet, often marked by a concessive conjunction such as 'but' or 'yet'.

Metonymy

A figure substituting an associated thing for the thing meant, as crown for monarchy or pen for writing, relying on contiguity rather than resemblance.

Synecdoche

A figure in which a part stands for the whole or the whole for a part, as hands for workers or England for its inhabitants.

Apostrophe

A direct address to an absent person, an abstraction, or an inanimate object, often signalling heightened emotion or a shift in rhetorical register.

Dramatic monologue

A poem spoken by a single character to an implied listener at a critical moment, revealing personality and self-deception through what the speaker chooses to say.

Villanelle

A nineteen-line fixed form of five tercets and a closing quatrain, using two rhymes and two refrains; repetition drives its obsessive, circular effect.

Sibilance

Repetition of sibilant consonants such as s, sh, and z, producing a hissing or whispering texture that can suggest secrecy, softness, or menace.

Elegy

A poem of mourning for the dead, often moving through grief, praise, and consolation; classical elegies use alternating hexameter and pentameter lines.

Soliloquy

A speech delivered by a character alone on stage, voicing private thought to the audience and giving access to motives hidden from other characters.

Aside

A brief remark spoken by a character and heard by the audience but not by others on stage, creating complicity or dramatic irony within dialogue.

Dramatic irony

A gap between what the audience knows and what a character understands, generating tension, suspense, or comic effect as the character acts in ignorance.

Hamartia

An error, misjudgement, or fatal flaw in a tragic protagonist that contributes to their downfall, distinct from simple moral wickedness.

Peripeteia

A reversal of fortune or intention in a plot, where an action produces the opposite of its expected result and drives the tragedy toward catastrophe.

Anagnorisis

A moment of recognition or discovery in which a character moves from ignorance to knowledge, often about identity, guilt, or the true state of affairs.

Blank verse

Unrhymed iambic pentameter, the dominant metre of English Renaissance drama, often marking elevated, aristocratic, or formally controlled speech.

Catastrophe

The final decisive event of a tragedy, usually involving death or ruin, after which the remaining order is acknowledged and authority transferred.

Discovery space

A recessed area at the back of the stage, often behind curtains, used to reveal concealed figures or tableaux to the audience at a chosen moment.

Comic union

The conventional ending of comedy in marriage, reconciliation, or communal festivity, resolving conflict and reaffirming social continuity after disruption.

Messenger report

A speech narrating off-stage action, such as battles or deaths, that the audience cannot see, shaping response through the reporter's selective and emotive account.