1.A novel is a highly stylized prose account of fictional reality in the form of story with profundity for the purpose of changing the reader’s mind by the aid of the reader’s active involvement while providing entertainment and superior truth of life.
2.Character is an invented personality to resemble but never to equal a real person in life. Characters refer to people, animals, things, etc. in a literary work presented as people.
3.A plot is a particular arrangement of happenings in a novel that is aimed at revealing their causal relationships or at conveying the novelist’s ideas.
4.The theme of a novel is its controlling idea or its central insight about human beings and life.
5.Epistolary novel is a novel which consists of the letters the characters write to each other.
6.Roman a Clef is a novel with a key, and the key is usually a famous figure or, in some cases, the author.
7.Nonfictional novel is a novel that depicts real events with techniques of fiction.
8.Anagnorisis refers to the recognition by the tragic hero of some truth about his or her identity or actions that accompanies the reversal of the situation in the plot, the peripeteia.
9.Catharsis refers to the the purging of the emotions of pity and fear that are aroused in the viewer of a tragedy.
10.Hamartia refers to the "tragic flaw" of the hero such as "sin," "error," "trespass,“and "missing the mark".
11.A ballad refers to a short simple narrative poem often relating a dramatic event (folk and literary).
12.A narrative poem is one that mainly tells a relatively complete story.
13.A sonnet is a lyric invariably of 14 lines, usually in iambic pentameter, restricted to a definite rhyme scheme.
1）Petrarchan Sonnet: Italian sonnet; Named after Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374), the Italian poet; Introduced into English poetry in the early 16th century by Sir Thomas Wyatt; Structure: an octave with the rhyme pattern abbaabba and a sestet of various rhyme patterns such as cdecde, cdcdcd or cde edc.; Octave: projecting and developing a subject in the octave; sestet: executing a turn
2）Shakespearean Sonnet: Elizabethan sonnet; English sonnet; Developed first by Henry Howard (1517-1547) ; Structure: 3 quatrains and a terminal couplet in iambic pentameter with the rhyme pattern abab cdcd efef gg; 1st quatrain: introducing an idea; 2nd quatrain: complicating it; 3rd quatrain: complicating it still further; final epigrammatic couplet: resolving the whole thing
3）Spenserian Sonnet: a variant on the English Sonnet; Named after the 16th Century poet Edmund Spenser; Structure: 3 quatrains and a couplet in iambic pentameter with the rhyme scheme abab bcbc cdcd ee.
14.Rhyme refers to the repetition of the stressed vowel sound and all succeeding sounds.
15.Rhythm is communicated by the arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables
16.Image refers to the element in a poem that sparks off the senses, the representation of sense experience through language。