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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