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Terms for subject Literature (1061 entries)

understatement	To state something less strongly than the situation would suggest.
universality	The quality that means a work has appeal outside the time and culture it is written in.
unreliable narrator	Usually in a novel, it refers to a narrator who lacks credibility. This usually occurs in order to deceive the reader. Both a first person and a third person narrator can be unreliable.
unstressed	Lightly stressed as opposed to heavily stressed, i.e. a syllable that has modest distinction when spoken aloud. See stressed, foot and meter.
utopia	An imaginary location or government where political and social perfection has been reached: The people of such utopias are generally clean, virtuous, healthy, and happy. In essence, a utopian society is one that has been cured of all its social ills.
utopian literature	A utopia refers to both a perfect society, yet an impossible one. Utopian literature is any text that offers the reader, or investigates the concept of, a perfect society in the physical world (opposed to an ideal society in an afterlife)
vehicle	In literature, the term vehicle refers to the technique by which an author achieves her purpose. For example, chilling diction could be identified as a vehicle to depict a murder scene.
vellum	Animal skin, usually calf or kid, used for manuscripts in the Middle Ages.
verb	A verb "does" the subject's action in a sentence. For example, "She ate the apple" - ate is the verb. In English language verbs can take various tenses – for instance, past, present, or future.
vernacular	From the Latin vernaculus, meaning 'native, indigenous', vernacular refers to the common or everyday language of a geographic area. It can also be described as the native language of the common people in a region or country, rather than an esteemed dead language (eg. Latin) which is preserved artificially in schools or through literary texts.
verse	Verse is a line of metrical text, a stanza, or any text written in meter.
Vice President, Education	VPE
Vice President, Membership	VPM
Vice President, Public Relations	VPPR
Victorian Period	The period during the late nineteenth century, specifically from 1837-1901 - the years Queen Victoria ruled the growing British Empire.
vignette	A short incident in a book or movie, usually descriptive.
villain	the bad person in a work of fiction, often the main antagonist of the hero
Virginia Advanced Speakers Toastmasters Club	VAST
visual imagery	Imagery that appeals to anything that can be seen, e.g colours and shapes.
vocabulary	The collection of words available in a given language, or a speaker of that language.