A-Level English Literature · Topic 1
Critical terms, form and literary theory: every key term you need (+ practice quiz)
16 flashcard terms for A-Level English Literature Topic 1, written to match the course framework. Study them here, then drill them as interactive flashcards, or test yourself with the 8-question quiz — free, no account needed.
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Iambic pentameter Five unstressed-stressed pairs per line. Its closeness to natural English speech is why it dominates Shakespeare and much later verse.
Caesura A pause within a line, often marked by punctuation. Breaks metrical momentum and can enact hesitation or rupture.
Enjambment A sentence running past the line ending without pause, creating momentum or setting the sense against the line break.
Volta The turn in a sonnet where argument or tone shifts — after the octave in a Petrarchan sonnet, at the couplet in a Shakespearean one.
Free indirect discourse Third-person narration that takes on a character's idiom and viewpoint, blurring narrator and character without quotation marks.
Unreliable narrator A narrator whose account the reader has reason to distrust, forcing interpretation against rather than through the telling.
Dramatic irony The audience knows what a character does not, so ordinary lines carry a second meaning the speaker cannot hear.
Pathetic fallacy Attributing human feeling to nature or weather so that setting mirrors emotional state. A subset of personification.
Motif A recurring image, phrase or idea that accumulates meaning across a text, distinct from a theme, which is the abstract concern it serves.
Bildungsroman A novel tracing a protagonist's psychological and moral development from youth to maturity.
Gothic convention Confinement, the uncanny, transgression, the doubled self and a haunting past intruding on the present.
Tragic hero A protagonist of stature whose flaw or error drives a reversal of fortune, producing recognition and catharsis in the audience.
Marxist criticism Reads literature through class, labour and material conditions, asking whose interests a text's assumptions ultimately serve.
Feminist criticism Examines how texts construct gender, whose voice carries authority, and what a work's silences reveal about its assumptions.
Postcolonial criticism Reads texts through empire and its aftermath, attending to othering, hybridity and who is granted the power to narrate.
Intertextuality How texts refer to and depend on other texts through allusion, parody or reworking, so meaning is made across works, not within one.
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