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Test your basic knowledge |
GRE Literature: Literary Terms
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Subjects
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gre
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literature
Instructions:
Answer 50 questions in 15 minutes.
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Match each statement with the correct term.
Don't refresh. All questions and answers are randomly picked and ordered every time you load a test.
This is a study tool. The 3 wrong answers for each question are randomly chosen from answers to other questions. So, you might find at times the answers obvious, but you will see it re-enforces your understanding as you take the test each time.
1. A pause or break within a line of poetry - esp. in Old English verse.
Caesura
Metonymy
Villanelle
Hamartia
2. A repeated descriptive phrase - as found in Homer'S epics. Example: 'The wine dark sea'
Apostrophe
Hamartia
Homeric Epithet
First-person plural
3. A reference to another work of literature - person - or event Example: title of Faulkner'S novel The Sound and the Fury is an allusion to Shakespeare'S Macbeth: '...it is a tale / told by an idiot - full of sound and fury - / signifying nothing'
Pathetic Fallacy
Allusion
Hyperbole
Antagonist
4. Work narrated using a name or third-person pronoun (he - she - etc). Example: Most of Jane Austen'S novels - including Pride and Prejudice
Homeric Epithet
Feminine Rhyme
Flat and Round Characters
Third Person Voice
5. A novel - typically loosely constructed along an incident-to-incident basis - that follows the adventures of a more or less scurrilous rogue whose primary concerns are filling his belly and staying out of jail. Examples: Twain'S Huckleberry Finn; Def
Hyperbole
Rhyme Royal
Picaresque
Allusion
6. Terms coined by EM Forster to describe characters built around a single dominant trait (flat characters) - and those shaded and developed with greater psychological complexity (round characters). Example of flat: Mrs Micawber in Dickens' David Copper
Spenserian Sonnet
Personification
Flat and Round Characters
Antagonist
7. A term coined by John Ruskin. It refers to ascribing emotion and agency to inanimate objects Example: Ruskin'S famous line: 'The cruel crawling foam.'
Spenserian Sonnet
Pathetic Fallacy
Free Verse
Spenserian stanza
8. Unrhymed iambic pentameter Example: Alfred Lord Tennyson'S 'Ulysses'; John Milton'S Paradise Lost
Second Person Voice
Synecdoche
Blank Verse
Italian - or Petrarchan - Sonnet
9. A form of humorous poetry - using very short - rhymed lines and a pronounced rhythm - made popular by John Skelton. The only real difference between a skeltonic and doggerel is the quality of the though expressed. Example: 'How the Doughty Duke of Al
In Memoriam stanza
Terza Rima
Skeltonics
Protagonist
10. Used in folk ballad. Length determined by stressed syllables only. Rhyme scheme: abcb Example: 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' by Coleridge
Ottava Rima
Hudibrastic
Euphuism
Ballad stanza
11. The rhythm created and used in the 19th century by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Like Old English verse - sprung rhythm fits a varying number of unstressed syllables in a line - only stresses count in scansion Example: 'Pied Beauty' by Hopkins
Sprung Rhythm
Third Person Voice
Pastoral Elegy
Neoclassical Unities
12. A deliberate exaggeration Example: 'Her once embattled farmers stood / And fired the shot heard round the world' (Emerson'S 'The Concord Hymn)
Sprung Rhythm
Epithalamium
Allusion
Hyperbole
13. A word derived from Lyly'S Euphues (1580) to characterize writing that is self-consciously laden with elaborate figures of speech. This was a popular and influential mode of speech and writing in the late sixteenth century. Example: Polonius in Hamle
Euphuism
Bildungsroman
Homeric Epithet
Caesura
14. A derogatory term used to describe poetry whose subject is trite and whose rhythm and sounds are monotonously heavy-handed.
Georgic
Doggerel
Euphuism
Hyperbole
15. One of the neoclassical principles of drama - calling for a relation of style to content in the speech of dramatic characters. For example - a character'S speech must be styled according to her social station - and in accordance to the situation. Exa
Pathetic Fallacy
Synaesthesia
Doggerel
Decorum
16. German: 'novel of education.' It typically follows a young person over a period of years - from naivete and inexperience through the first struggles with the harsher realities and hypocrisies of the adult world. Example: A Portrait of the Artist as a
Metonymy
Doggerel
Bildungsroman
Synecdoche
17. Verse characterized by the internal alliteration of lines and a strong midline pause called a caesura Example: Beowulf
Antagonist
Rhyme Royal
Anthropomorphism
Old English Verse
18. The repetition of initial consonant sounds Example: 'I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet' (Robert Frost 'Acquainted with the Night')
Alliteration
Third Person Voice
Italian - or Petrarchan - Sonnet
Alexandrine
19. The character who works against the protagonist in the story Example: Iago in Othello
Neoclassical Unities
Pastoral Elegy
Flat and Round Characters
Antagonist
20. 39-line poem of six stanzas of six lines each and a final stanza (called an envoi) of three lines. Rhyme plays no part in the sestina. Instead - one of six words is used as the end word of each of the poem'S lines according to a fixed pattern. Examp
Sestina
Bildungsroman
Old English Verse
Pastoral Literature
21. A term for a phrase that refers to a person or object by a single important feature of the person - Example: 'The pen is mightier than the sword' - pen=written word; sword=violent acts
Metonymy
Blank Verse
Spenserian stanza
First Person Voice
22. A term referring to phrases that suggest an interplay of senses. Example: 'Hot pink' and 'golden tones'
Sestina
Synaesthesia
Litotes
English - or Shakespearean - Sonnet
23. A poem written to celebrate a wedding. Example: Edmund Spenser'S 'Epithalamium'
Protagonist
Hudibrastic
Apostrophe
Epithalamium
24. A work that deals with the lives of people - especially shepherds - in the country or in nature Example: Marlow'S 'The Passionate Shepherd to his Love'
Pastoral Literature
Personification
Third Person Voice
Free Verse
25. A phrase that refers to a person or object by a single important feature of that object or person Example: 'I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas' (TS Eliot'S 'Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock'). The cla
Euphuism
Feminine Rhyme
Synecdoche
In Memoriam stanza
26. 9-line stanza. First 8 are iambic pentameter. The final line - in iambic hexameter - is an alexandrine. Rhyme scheme: ababbcbcc Example: The Faerie Queene - by Edmund Spenser
Third Person Voice
Hudibrastic
Spenserian Sonnet
Spenserian stanza
27. Understatement for rhetorical effect (especially when expressing an affirmative by negating its contrary - 'a citizen of no ordinary city' (Paul in the book of Acts)
Doggerel
Litotes
Alexandrine
Italian - or Petrarchan - Sonnet
28. 14-line poem rhyming abab cdcd efef gg Example: Shakespeare'S sonnets
Metonymy
Italian - or Petrarchan - Sonnet
English - or Shakespearean - Sonnet
Old English Verse
29. Giving human characteristics to inanimate objects
Apostrophe
First Person Voice
Personification
Doggerel
30. Line of iambic hexameter Example: 'That like a wounded snake - drags its slow length along' (Pope'S 'Essay on Criticism')
Hudibrastic
Euphuism
Bildungsroman
Alexandrine
31. Aristotle'S principles of dramatic structure applied (perhaps too rigidly) in neoclassical drama of the 17th 18th centuries. The essential unities are time - place - and action: To observe unity of time - a work should take place within the span of o
Neoclassical Unities
Decorum
First-person plural
Sprung Rhythm
32. Unrhymed verse without a strict meter Example: 'Song of Myself' by Walt Whitman
Villanelle
Free Verse
Pathetic Fallacy
Neoclassical Unities
33. 19-line form rhyming aba aba aba aba aba abaa. Repetition of first and third lines throughout: aba ab1 ab3 ab1 ab3 ab13 Example: Dylan Thomas'S 'Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night'
Protagonist
Synecdoche
English - or Shakespearean - Sonnet
Villanelle
34. The assigning of human attributes - such as emotions or physical characteristics - to nonhumans - most often plants and animals. It differs from personification in that it is an intrinsic premise and an ongoing pattern applied to a nonhuman character
Rhyme Royal
Pastoral Elegy
Anthropomorphism
Blank Verse
35. A type of poem that takes the form of an elegy (a lament for the dead) sung by a shepherd. The shepherd who sings the elegy is a stand-in for the poet - and the elegy is for another poet Example: Milton'S 'Lycidas' and Shelley'S 'Adonais' (lament for
Picaresque
Anthropomorphism
Rhyme Royal
Pastoral Elegy
36. Not to be confused with pastoral poetry - which idealizes life in the countryside - georgic poems deal with people laboring in the countryside - pushing plows - raising crops - etc. Example: Virgil'S Georgics
Georgic
Ballad stanza
Litotes
Italian - or Petrarchan - Sonnet
37. Four lines of iambic tetrameter rhyming abba Example: can be found in a stanza of Tennyson'S 'In Memoriam A.H.H.'
In Memoriam stanza
English - or Shakespearean - Sonnet
Second Person Voice
Feminine Rhyme
38. Narrator uses pronoun 'we.' This voice forces the reader to concentrate more on what the story is about than who is telling it.
Litotes
First-person plural
Neoclassical Unities
Synaesthesia
39. Verse form that consists of 3-line stanzas with interlocking rhyme scheme: aba bcb cdc ded - etc Example: Dante'S Divine Comedy
Terza Rima
Alexandrine
Pastoral Elegy
Personification
40. A rhyme ending on the final stressed syllable (aka regular old rhyme) Example: 'Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening' by Robert Frost
Metonymy
English - or Shakespearean - Sonnet
Apostrophe
Masculine Rhyme
41. A term coined by Aristotle to describe some error or frailty in character which brings about misfortune in Greek tragedy. Roughly equivalent to a tragic flaw - except that hamartia implies fate. Example: Oedipus; Macbeth
Picaresque
Doggerel
First-person plural
Hamartia
42. Narrator speaks using pronoun 'you -' thereby making reader an active participant in the work. Rarely used.
Doggerel
Second Person Voice
Metonymy
Hudibrastic
43. A figure of speech in which one directly addresses an absent or imaginary person - or some abstraction Example: 'Busy old fool - unruly sun - / Why does thou thus - / Through windows - and through curtains call on us?' (John Donne'S 'The Sun Rising')
Sestina
Apostrophe
Bildungsroman
Spenserian stanza
44. 14-line poem rhyming abab bcbc cdcd ee Example: 'One Day I Wrote Her Name Upon the Strand' by Edmund Spenser
In Memoriam stanza
Protagonist
Apostrophe
Spenserian Sonnet
45. Work narrated using pronoun 'I.' Narrator can be protagonist - or an omniscient speaker who is not even a clear character in the story. Example: Edgar Allan Poe'S 'The Tell-Tale Heart'
Decorum
Picaresque
Allusion
First Person Voice
46. Couplets of rhymed tetrameter lines (Samuel Butler) or to any deliberate - humorous - ill-rhythmed - ill-rhymed couplets. From Butler'S Hudibras
Hudibrastic
Metonymy
Terza Rima
Pathetic Fallacy
47. The principal character in a work of fiction Example: Othello in Othello
Georgic
Protagonist
Hyperbole
Second Person Voice
48. 14-line poem rhyming abbaabba cdecde. First 8 lines called octave. Last six called sestet. Example: John Milton'S 'When I Consider How My Light Is Spent'
Feminine Rhyme
Synecdoche
Pastoral Elegy
Italian - or Petrarchan - Sonnet
49. 7-line iambic pentameter stanza rhyming ababbcc Example: 'They Flee from Me That Sometime Did Seek: by Sir Thomas Wyatt
Homeric Epithet
Sprung Rhythm
Bildungsroman
Rhyme Royal
50. Lines rhymed by their final two syllables. Properly - the penultimate syllables are stressed and the final syllables are unstressed. Example: Shakespeare'S Sonnet 20
Flat and Round Characters
Spenserian stanza
Sestina
Feminine Rhyme