Study AP English Literature and Composition with flashcards covering the literary devices and terms you'll need for the MCQ and all three essay types.
Must-Know AP Lit Literary Terms
- Dramatic Irony: The audience knows something that a character does not. Creates tension, suspense, or dark humor. Distinct from situational irony (unexpected outcome) and verbal irony (saying the opposite of what is meant).
- Free Indirect Discourse: Narrative technique where the narrator's voice blends with a character's thoughts without explicit dialogue tags. Common in 19th-century novels (Jane Austen).
- Extended Metaphor (Conceit): A metaphor that runs throughout an entire poem or passage, developing the comparison in detail. Common in metaphysical poetry (John Donne).
- Enjambment: Continuation of a sentence across a line break in poetry without punctuation. Creates momentum and can create tension between syntax and line.
- Foil: A character whose traits contrast with another character to highlight the other's qualities. A foil need not be a villain.
- Bildungsroman: Coming-of-age novel tracing a protagonist's moral, psychological, and intellectual development from youth to adulthood (Great Expectations, Jane Eyre).
- Apostrophe: Direct address to an absent, dead, or imaginary person, or to an abstract concept ("O Death, where is thy sting?").
- Stream of Consciousness: Narrative technique representing the continuous flow of a character's thoughts and perceptions without conventional structure (Woolf, Joyce).
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