AP Literature Vocabulary

the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices

• satire

• tragic flaw

• parody

• personification

beginning an epic or other narrative by plunging into a crucial situation that is part of a related chain of events

• aphorism

• euphemism

• enjambment

• in media res

a word or expression used in lieu of a harsher alternative

• cadence

• motif

• euphemism

• irony

an audience's awareness of the situation in which a work's characters exist differs substantially from that of the characters'

• dramatic irony

• irony

• situational irony

• verbal irony

a figure of speech that references a person, place, thing, or event

• aside

• hubris

• allusion

• euphemism

the repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words or stressed syllables

• alliteration

• parallelism

• synecdoche

• rhapsody

a narrator whose credibility is compromised

• narrator

• tragic flaw

• unreliable narrator

• anthropomorphism

the main idea or underlying meaning

• motif

• cadence

• theme

• irony

a part is made to represent the whole

• connotation

• irony

• metonymy

• synecdoche

something that represents something else

• symbolism

• motif

• cacophony

• colloquialism