Literary Terms: B - Cl

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Ballad stanza –

a stanza of four lines (quatrain) with the second and fourth lines rhyming

Ballad –

a narrative poem telling a story a person or event often about love usually told in rhymed stanzas and which includes a repeated refrain.  Ballads are often sung.

Beast fable –

a fable that has animals with human qualities as characters

Beat poets –

a movement beginning in the late 1940s where poets turned to use of psychogenic drugs for mind expansion and where social and political criticism was a common theme.

Biography –

a factual story written about a person by a another person

Black Arts Movement –

a movement beginning in the 1960s where poets focused on social and political situation of African-Americans.

Black Mountain poets –

a movement during the 1930s starting in Black Mountain, North Carolina which stressed the process of writing instead of the completed poem

Blank verse –

unrhymed iambi pentameter

Cacophony –

unrhymed or discordant sounds

Caesura –

a pause or stop in the middle of a verse

Capture narrative –

a journal kept by a person who was captured and held against his or her will and forced to live in another culture; generally associated with stories white people have written about being captured and living with the Indians in early American history

Caricatures –

a character presented with an exaggeration of prominent features; a type of stock character

Carpe diem –

“seize the day”; sometimes, a theme in a fiction or poem

Character analysis –

the analysis of a character’s personality based on the behavior described in the work of literature; may be described in everyday language such as selfish, kind, thoughtful, or mean or in psychological terms such as having a narcissistic personality disorder or depressed.

Character –

a person in a piece of literature

Chivalric romance –

a romance popular from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance involving the romantic exploits of chivalric heroes, men who lived by the Code of Chivalry

Chorogos –

the leader of the chorus

Chorus –

in staged performances, a group of “townspeople” who articulate different perspectives; from the Greek chorus

Chronological order –

the presentation of events in the order they occurred in time

Classical Greek Drama –

the period from about 550 BC to 323 BC highlighted by dramatists such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides where the art forms of tragedy and comedy began.

Cliché –

a worn-out phrase purporting to tell some general truth which no longer has meaning because of his overuse

Climax –  

the highest point of conflict; the point at which the action begins to fall to resolution (denouement)

Closed form (fixed form) –

poetry which follows a pattern of sounds, rhyme, or meter