06/12 6. Short Fiction and the Novel Free Online FlashCards

What is prose fiction?

Prose fiction tells stories through ordinary written sentences rather than verse.

How do short stories and novels differ in scope?

A short story concentrates on a limited action or experience, while a novel has room for more characters, settings, conflicts, and subplots.

What makes a sequence of events a narrative?

Narrative represents events connected by time, cause, and meaning.

What is plot?

The plot is the arrangement of events, emphasizing cause, consequence, tension, and discovery rather than merely listing what happens.

What does an inciting incident do?

The inciting incident begins the central conflict and sets the main action in motion.

What is characterization?

Characterization is the way an author creates and develops characters through details such as actions, speech, thoughts, appearance, and relationships.

How do dynamic and static characters differ?

A dynamic character changes substantially, whereas a static character remains substantially the same.

What elements make up setting?

Setting includes the time, place, physical environment, social conditions, and cultural atmosphere of a narrative.

What is a key effect of first-person narration?

First-person narration uses “I” or “we”; it can create intimacy but may limit the reader’s knowledge.

What is an unreliable narrator?

An unreliable narrator gives an account that may be incomplete, biased, mistaken, self-deceived, or deliberately deceptive.

What is a literary theme?

A theme is a central idea or recurring concern that emerges from patterns in plot, character, setting, imagery, symbols, and language.

How does realist fiction create plausibility?

Realism creates an effect of plausibility through recognizable people, institutions, environments, and social or psychological pressures.