UIL Literary Criticism Exam Study Guide 2024.
Absolute - ANSWER a word free from limitations or qualifications
("best," "all," "unique,"
... [Show More] "perfect")
Accismus - ANSWER a form of irony in which a person feigns
indifference to or pretends to refusesomething he or she desires
Acronym - ANSWER a word formed from the initial letters of words
and pronounced as a separate word
Acrostic - ANSWER verse in which certain letters such as the first in
each line form a word or message
Adage - ANSWER a familiar proverb or wise saying
Ad Hominem Argument - ANSWER an argument attacking an
individual's character rather than his or her position on an issue
Agroikos - ANSWER Rustic, straight-talking, unsophisticated, not
anxious about his image, unfazed by others' joking.
Allegory - ANSWER a literary work in which characters, objects, or
actions represent abstractions
Alliteration - ANSWER the repetition of initial sounds in successive
or neighboring words
Allusion - ANSWER a reference to something literary, mythological,
or historical that the author assumes the reader will recognize
Alterity - ANSWER the state of being other or different; otherness
Ambiguity - ANSWER An event or situation that may be interpreted
in more than one way.
Analogy - ANSWER a comparison between different things that are
similar in some way
Anaphora - ANSWER A rhetorical figure of repetition in which the
UIL Literary Criticism Exam Study Guide 2024
same word or phrase is repeated in (and usually at the beginning of)
successive lines, clauses, or sentences.
Anecdote - ANSWER a brief narrative that focuses on a particular
incident or event
Anglo-Norman Period - ANSWER the period in English literature
between 1100 and 1350, which is also often called the Early Middle
English Period and is frequently dated from the Conquest in 1066
Anthology - ANSWER A collection of various writings, such as
songs, stories, or poems
Antithesis - ANSWER a statement in which two opposing ideas are
balanced
Aphorism - ANSWER a concise statement that expresses succinctly
a general truth or idea, often using rhyme or balance
Apostrophe - ANSWER a figure of speech in which one directly
addresses an absent or imaginary person, or some abstraction
Archetype - ANSWER a detail, image, or character type that occurs
frequently in literature and myth and is thought to appeal in a
universal way to the unconscious and to evoke a response
Argument - ANSWER a statement of the meaning or main point of a
literary work
Asyndeton - ANSWER a constructions in which elements are
presented in a series without conjunctions
Auditory - ANSWER Having to do with the sense of hearing
Augustan Age - ANSWER is a style of English literature produced
during the reigns of Queen Anne, King George I, and George II in the
first half of the 18th century, ending in the 1740s with the deaths of
Pope and Swift (1744 and 1745, respectively)
Balanced Sentence - ANSWER a sentence in which words, phrases,
or clauses are set off against each other to emphasize a point
Ballad - ANSWER A narrative poem written in four-line stanzas,
characterized by swift action and narrated in a direct style. [Show Less]