Glossary

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parable
a short fiction that illustrates an explicit moral lesson.

paradox
a statement that seems contradictory but may actually be true, such as "That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me" in Donne’s "Batter My Heart."

parody
a work that imitates another work for comic effect by exaggerating the style and changing the content of the original.

pastoral
a poem (also called an eclogue, a bucolic, or an idyll) that describes the simple life of country folk, usually shepherds who live a timeless, painless (and sheep-less) life in a world full of beauty, music, and love.

pastoral play
a play that features the sort of idyllic world described in the definition for pastoral.

pentameter
a line of poetry with five feet: "Nuns fret | not at | their con | vent’s nar | row room" (Wordsworth).

persona
the voice or figure of the author who tells and structures the story and who may or may not share the values of the actual author.

personality
that which distinguishes or individualizes a person; its qualities are judged not so much in terms of their moral value, as in "character," but as to whether they are "pleasing" or "unpleasing."

personification
(or prosopopeia) treating an abstraction as if it were a person by endowing it with humanlike qualities.

Petrarchan sonnet
also called Italian sonnet; a sonnet form that divides the poem into one section of eight lines (octave) and a second section of six lines (sestet), usually following the abbaabba cdecde rhyme scheme or, more loosely, an abbacddc pattern.

plot/plot structure
the arrangement of the action.

plot summary
a description of the arrangement of the action in the order in which it actually appears in a story. The term is popularly used to mean the description of the history, or chronological order, of the action as it would have appeared in reality. It is important to indicate exactly in which sense you are using the term.

plot time
the temporal setting in which the action takes place in a story or play.

point of view
also called focus; the point from which people, events, and other details in a story are viewed. This term is sometimes used to include both focus and voice.

precision
exactness, accuracy of language or description.

presentation
the second step in the creation of a character for the written text and the performed play; the representation of the character by the playwright in the words and actions specified in the text.

props
articles and objects used on the stage.

proscenium arch
an arch over the front of a stage; the proscenium serves as a "frame" for the action on stage.

protagonist
the main character in a work, who may be male or female, heroic or not heroic. See antagonist, antihero, and hero/ heroine. Protagonist is the most neutral term.

protest poem
a poetic attack, usually quite direct, on allegedly unjust institutions or social injustices.

psychological realism
a modification of the concept of realism, or telling it like it is, which recognizes that what is real to the individual is that which he or she perceives. It is the ground for the use of the centered consciousness, or the first-person narrator, since both of these present reality only as something perceived by the focal character.