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Character

A person who appears, or is referred to, in a work of literature. A character described in detail and/or who changes over the course of the work is usually referred to as "round." A "flat" character is generally one-dimensional, and changes little over time. Character can also refer to an individual's moral, social, or ethical qualities (e.g., good/bad).

EDSITEment Lesson Plans that use "Character":

• American Literary Humor: Mark Twain, George Harris, and Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper"--Writing Women
• Fairy Tales Around the World
• Introducing Jane Eyre: An Unlikely Victorian Heroine
• Kate Chopin's The Awakening: No Choice but Under?
• Profiles in Courage: Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird
• Rudyard Kipling's "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi": Mixing Fact and Fiction
• Rudyard Kipling's "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi": Mixing Words and Pictures
• Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat"
• The "Secret Society" and FitzGerald's The Great Gatsby
• The Red Badge of Courage: A New Kind of Courage
• William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury: Narrating the Compson Family Decline and the Changing South

Comedy

A story, often light in tone, that ends with a happy resolution of the central conflict. In classic Greek drama, a comedy is the opposite of a tragedy.

EDSITEment Lesson Plans that use "Comedy":

• A Storybook Romance: Dante's Paolo and Francesca
• Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice: The Novel as Historical Source

Connotation

Ideas or qualities associated with or implied by a word or expression beyond that word or expression’s explicit or primary meaning (See Denotation) 

EDSITEment Lesson Plans that use "Connotation":

• From Courage to Freedom: Frederick Douglass's 1845 Autobiography

• Preparing for Poetry: A Reader's First Steps
• The Impact of a Poem's Line Breaks
• Animal Farm: Allegory and the Art of Persuasion
• Esperanza Rising
• What's in a Picture?

Consonance

The repetition of consonant sounds in a sequence of words, as in the following example from Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" (note the hard "c" sound). Unlike alliteration, the consonant sounds need not be in the initial syllable of each word.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

EDSITEment Lesson Plans that use "consonance"

• Analyzing Poetic Devices: Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays" and Theodore Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz"
• Poetry of The Great War: 'From Darkness to Light'?

Decadent

A term describing a movement in literature that has its beginnings in 19th- century Symbolist-Romantic poets in France, such as Charles Baudelaire. This literature and poetry is characterized by a fascination with the morbid and macabre and emanates from the belief that life is meaningless.

EDSITEment Lesson Plans that use "Decadent"

•   Charles Baudelaire: Poète Maudit (The Cursed Poet)

Dialect

A regional or local variation of a language, complete with unique idioms and pronunciations.

EDSITEment Lesson Plans that use "Dialect":

• Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find": Who's the Real Misfit?
• Folklore in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God
• Kate Chopin's The Awakening: No Choice but Under?

Denotation

An actual or direct meaning for a word or expression as distinguished from the ideas or meanings associated with it or implied by it. (See Connotation)

EDSITEment Lesson Plans that use "Denotation":

• From Courage to Freedom: Frederick Douglass's 1845 Autobiography

• George Orwell's Essay on his Life in Burma: "Shooting An Elephant ...
• Preparing for Poetry: A Reader's First Steps  
• Seeing Sense in Photographs & Poems

Drama

A literary genre in which actors adopt roles of characters and perform, usually on a stage.

EDSITEment Lesson Plans that use "drama"

• 'You Kiss by the Book': Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet
• Being in the Noh: An Introduction to Japanese Noh Plays
• Live From Antiquity!
• Quest for the American Dream in A Raisin in the Sun
• Shakespeare's Macbeth: Fear and the "Dagger of the Mind"
• Shakespeare's Macbeth: Fear and the Motives of Evil
• Shakespeare's Othello and the Power of Language
• Thornton Wilder's Our Town: the Reader as Writer

Dramatic Monologue

A poetic form in which a speaker addresses an implied listener, and in which the reader perceives a gap between what the speaker says speaker says and what the speaker actually reveals. Robert Browning’s "My Last Duchess" is a superb example of the form.

EDSITEment Lesson Plans that use "Dramatic Monologue"

•  Browning’s "My Last Duchess" and Dramatic Monologue

Dystopia

A society real or imagined in a repressive and controlled state, often depicted under the guise of being utopian

EDSITEment Lesson Plans that use "Dystopia"

• A Wrinkle in Time: The Board Game