৩৮ তম বিসিএস প্রিলি স্পেশাল সাজেশনঃ Some Important English Literary Term

02 May 2021

1. Allegory: - is a literary work that has an implied meaning.

2. Act: - is the major division of a drama.

3. Antithesis: -is contrast or polarity in meaning.
4. Allusion: -is a reference to an idea, place, person or text existing outside the literary work.

5. Auto-Biography: -is the history of one’s life written by one self.

6. Alliteration:-the repetition of a consonant in two or more words. 

7. Ballad: -is a song which tells a story.

8. Biography: -is the history of a person’s life by one else.

9. Blank Verse: -Verses written in iambic pentameter without any rhyme pattern is called blank verse.
10. Comedy:-is a play written to entertain its audience ends happily.

11. Classical:-means any writing that conforms to the rules and modes of old Greek and Latin written.

12. Canto:-is a sub-division of an epic or a narrative poem comparable to a chapter in a novel.

13. Chorus:-is a group of singers who stand alongside the stage in a drama.

14. Catharsis:-is emotional release of pity and fear that the tragic incidences in a tragedy arouse to an

audience.

 

15. Comic relief:-a humorous scene in a tragedy to eliminate the tragic effect from audience.

16. Couplet:-To lines of the same material length usually found in Shakespearean sonnet.

17. Catastrophe:-Catastrophe is the downfall of the protagonist in a tragedy.

18. Didactic:-is a literary work which aims at teaching and instructing it readers.

19. Dirge:-is a short functional terms.

20. Diction:-is the selection of words in literary work.

21. Dialect:-is the language of particular district; class or a group of people.

22. Drammatical Monologue:-In a poem when a single person speaks along with or without an audience is

called drammatical monologue. Example “My last Duchess”-----Browning.

23. Difference between drama and novel:-A drama is meant to perform whereas a novel is meant to read.

24. Difference between stanza and paragraph:-A stanza contains verses whereas a paragraph contains

 

prosaic lines.

25. Epic:-is a long narrative poem composed on a grand scale and is exalted style. Example “Paradise

Last”-------Milton.

26. Epilogue:-is the concluding part of a longer poem or a novel or a drama.

27. Fable:-is a brief story illustrating a moral.

28. Farce:-A form of low comedy designed to provoke laughter.

 

29. Foot:-A basic unit of meter.

30. Fiction:-A fiction is an imaginative narrative in prose e.g. Lord of the fly—by Golding.

31. Elegy is a poem mourning to the death of an individual or a lament for a tragic event. 

32. Genre:-means category or types of literature-epic, ode, ballad etc.

33. Hyperbole:-An overstatement or exaggeration.

34. Image:-is the mental picture connected with metaphor, smile and symbol.

35. Limerick:-is a short poem of a five-line stanza rhyming aaba.

36. Lyric:-A lyric is a short poem expressing a simple mood. It is usually personal and musical e.g. Keats’s

odes. 

37. Linguistic:-is the scientific and systematic study of language.

38. Melodrama:-A highly sensational drama with happy ending. Example ‘The Spanish Tragedy’ –Kyd.

39. Metaphysical Poetry:-Meta means beyond and physical is related to body . . . . . . . . .

40. Mock-epic:-It is a long satirical poem dealing with a trivial theme. Example: “The rape of the lock”-

Alexander Pope.

41. Metaphor:-A metaphor is an implicit comparison between two different things.

42. Metre:-The recurrence of similar stress pattern in some lines of a poem.

43. Novel:-is a long prose narrative fiction with plot characters etc.

44. Novelette:-is longer than a short story and shorter than a novel.

45. Ode:-is a long narrative poem of varying, line length dealing with serious subject matter.

46. Objectivity:-We have objectivity in a literary piece when the author focuses on an object from broadened

point of view.

47. Octave:-is the firs part of Italian sonnet.

48. Oxymoron:-is apparently a physical contrast which oddly makes sense on a deeper level. 
4

9. Prologue:-is the beginning part of a novel or a play or a novel.
50. Prose:-Any material that is not written in a regular meter like a poetry.

51. Prosody:-Prosody is the mechanics or grammar of verse.

52. Protagonist:-Protagonist is the main character in a literary work

53. Plot:-The arrangement of incidents is called plot.

54. Pun:-A pun is playing with words.

55. Periods of English literature:-The Anglo-Saxon, Middle English Renaissance, Restoration, Neoclassical

Romantic, Victorian, Modern, Post-Modern.

56. Romanticism:-was a literary movement. It stands Opposite to reason and focuses on emotion.
57. Rhetoric:-Rhetoric is the art of persuasive argument through writing.

58. Symbol:-A symbol is anything that stands for something else.

59. Sonnet:-is a lyric poem consisting of fourteen rhymed lines dealing with a lofty theme.

60. Satire:-is ridiculing the vices and follies of an individual or a society with a corrective design. E.g. “The

rape of the lock”---Pope.

61. Short-story:-A short story is a prose narrative considerable length. It is shorter than a novel.

62. Stanza:-is a group of verses having a rhyme scheme pattern.

63. Subjectivity:-We find subjectivity in a literary work in which the writer’s personal intrusion takes place.

64. Soliloquy:-It means speaking alone when in a play a character is found speaking alone on the stage it is

called soliloquy.