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AP® English Literature & Composition
Poetry, prose, and literary argument: the moves that earn the 5, with original analysis frameworks and craft vocabulary.
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1. Literary Elements: The Building Blocks
THE BIG PICTURE. AP English Literature and Composition is built on six Big Ideas: Character (CHR), Setting (SET), Structure (STR), Narration (NAR), Figurative Language (FIG), and Literary Argumentation (LAN). The first five are the analytical lenses through which you read; the sixth is the work you produce. The course spans three genre cycles, Short Fiction, Poetry, Longer Fiction or Drama, and each Big Idea spirals across all nine units. Mastery is not memorizing definitions; it is recognizing how each element WORKS to produce meaning in a specific text.
Six big ideas, seven skill categories Character, setting, structure, narration, and figurative language are the lenses you read with; literary argumentation is what you write. The percentages are the CED's multiple-choice weights, and all three essays are literary arguments.
PRACTICE: WHICH SKILL CATEGORY IS THIS QUESTION TESTING?
The multiple-choice stems below are our own, written in the style of Section I. Each targets one of the CED's seven skill categories. Cover the right two columns and name the big idea and skill before you check.
| Question stem | Big idea | Skill category |
|---|---|---|
| "The contrast between the two sisters in the second paragraph primarily serves to..." | CHR | 1: character (1.C, contrasting characters) |
| "The description of the house in the opening lines chiefly conveys..." | SET | 2: setting |
| "The shift from past to present tense in the final stanza signals..." | STR | 3: plot and structure |
| "The narrator's aside in line 14 suggests that the narrator..." | NAR | 4: narrator or speaker |
| "In context, the word 'harvest' in line 9 most nearly suggests..." | FIG | 5: word choice, imagery, symbols |
| "The simile in line 3 compares the speaker's memory to..." | FIG | 6: comparison (6.A, simile) |
| "Which of the following best states an interpretation supported by the passage as a whole?" | LAN | 7: textually substantiated arguments |
Narration carries the most weight on Section I (21–26%) and setting the least (3–6%), so practice reading narrators and speakers closely.
CHARACTER (CHR)
Characters embody values, beliefs, assumptions, biases, and cultural norms. The exam tests how writers construct characters and how those constructions invite interpretation.
Types and roles:
- PROTAGONIST: central figure whose journey drives the work.
- ANTAGONIST: opposes the protagonist (a person, force, system, or even an aspect of the protagonist's own self).
- FOIL: character who contrasts with another to highlight specific traits (Laertes foils Hamlet; Banquo foils Macbeth).
- DYNAMIC vs. STATIC: character changes vs. doesn't change.
- ROUND vs. FLAT: complex (multiple, sometimes contradictory traits) vs. simple (one or two defining qualities).
- STOCK / ARCHETYPAL: recognizable pattern (the wise mentor, the trickster, the femme fatale).
- TRAGIC HERO, virtue + flaw → fall (often by HAMARTIA, error in judgment: and HUBRIS: excessive pride).
- ANTI-HERO: protagonist lacking conventional heroic virtues.
Characterization techniques:
- DIRECT: the narrator tells us ("She was bitter").
- INDIRECT: we INFER from action, dialogue, thought, appearance, others' reactions, name, choice of detail. Most literary characterization is indirect.
- DEVELOPMENT through CONTRADICTION: characters who say one thing and do another, or whose surface and depth diverge, are the richest material for AP analysis.
SETTING (SET)
Setting is more than background. It conveys values, shapes character, and often becomes a thematic force.
- TIME and PLACE: historical era, geographical location, season, time of day. Each carries cultural weight.
- SOCIAL CONTEXT: class, race, gender norms, economic conditions.
- PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT: weather, landscape, architecture. (A confining house in Charlotte Perkins Gilman; an indifferent city in Joyce; a hostile sea in Crane.)
- PATHETIC FALLACY: when nature mirrors a character's emotional state (the storm during Lear's madness).
- SETTING as CHARACTER: when the place exerts will or pressure (the Mississippi in Twain; Egdon Heath in Hardy).
Reading move: ask what the setting is FOR in the work: what it enables, constrains, exposes, or symbolizes.
WORKED EXAMPLE: SETTING AT THE END OF JOYCE'S "ARABY"
"Araby" (in Dubliners, 1914) is narrated by an adult looking back on a boy's crush on a friend's older sister. He promises to bring her something from a bazaar called Araby, arrives late, and finds it closing; the young woman at the stall he visits is chatting with two young men and barely serves him. The story's last two paragraphs, from Project Gutenberg eBook #2814 (sentences numbered for reference):
[1] I lingered before her stall, though I knew my stay was useless, to
make my interest in her wares seem the more real.
[2] Then I turned away slowly and walked down the middle of the bazaar.
[3] I allowed the two pennies to fall against the sixpence in my pocket.
[4] I heard a voice call from one end of the gallery that the light was
out.
[5] The upper part of the hall was now completely dark.
[6] Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and
derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.| Sentence | Detail | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| [2] | "walked down the middle of the bazaar" | The exotic "Araby" of his imagination is now an emptying hall he crosses alone |
| [3] | "two pennies ... against the sixpence" | Coins, not a gift: the romantic quest shrinks to small change he never spends |
| [4]–[5] | "the light was out"; "completely dark" | The setting goes dark at the moment the illusion does |
| [6] | "Gazing up into the darkness" | The outer darkness becomes a screen on which he sees himself: setting turns into self-recognition |
| [6] | "driven and derided by vanity" | Harsh, alliterative self-judgment in the adult narrator's vocabulary, not a child's |
Model claim (skills 2.C and 4.C): "Joyce stages the boy's recognition as a blackout: when the bazaar's lights go out, the place that had promised Eastern romance becomes a dark hall of commerce, and the adult narrator turns that darkness into a mirror that shows the boy his own vanity."
Why it works: it quotes the setting details, explains their function (mirroring and exposing), and ties them to narration (the older narrator's diction). A weaker version, "The setting is dark to show that the boy is sad," names a mood but never explains what the setting reveals or how.
CASE STUDY: DUBLINERS AND ITS LONG ROAD TO PRINT
Joyce first submitted his collection of Dublin stories to the London publisher Grant Richards in 1905, when it held twelve stories, but the printer refused to proceed because of objections to its content. A Dublin firm, Maunsel & Company, accepted a fifteen-story version in 1909, and that deal also fell through. Grant Richards finally published Dubliners in 1914.
- Concept: setting conveys values (the CED's enduring understanding SET-1). Every story in the book shares one real city, so place itself becomes a subject.
- Where it shows up: "Araby" ends in a darkened bazaar; across the collection, characters' limits are tied to the streets and rooms around them.
- Lesson: when a whole book shares one setting, ask what that place allows and forbids its people. That is where setting becomes theme.
STRUCTURE (STR)
The arrangement of parts: and the sequence in which information is revealed: is itself an interpretive choice. Writers control what we know and when.
Traditional plot arc (Freytag's Pyramid):
- EXPOSITION: establishes setting, character, situation.
- INCITING INCIDENT / RISING ACTION: the event that sets the conflict in motion; tensions escalate.
- CLIMAX: the highest point of tension; the turning point.
- FALLING ACTION: consequences play out.
- RESOLUTION (denouement): outcome, new equilibrium.
Disruptions of traditional structure:
- IN MEDIAS RES: beginning in the middle of the action.
- FRAME NARRATIVE: story within a story (Heart of Darkness, Wuthering Heights).
- NON-LINEAR / FRAGMENTED CHRONOLOGY: flashbacks, flash-forwards, multiple timelines.
- CIRCULAR STRUCTURE: the ending returns to the beginning, often with new meaning.
- OPEN / UNRESOLVED ENDING: refuses closure.
- EPISODIC: loosely connected scenes rather than rising arc.
Smaller structural moves:
- JUXTAPOSITION of scenes (a tender memory next to a brutal present).
- REPETITION of a scene, image, or phrase across the work.
- TURNING POINTS that mark a character's recognition (ANAGNORISIS in tragedy) or reversal (PERIPETEIA).
Plot order vs. telling order The events of a story (A to E) can be told in many orders. Starting at the climax, flashing back, or wrapping the story in a frame changes what readers know, and when.
PRACTICE: WHAT DOES THIS STRUCTURAL CHOICE DO?
| Structural choice | What the reader knows early | Typical effect to explain |
|---|---|---|
| Chronological order | Only what has happened so far | Suspense grows with the character's own experience |
| In medias res | The crisis, but not its causes | Curiosity: the reader reads backward for causes |
| Flashback (analepsis) | A past event, set beside the present | Comparison: how the past explains or haunts the present |
| Frame narrative | That someone is telling this story, and to whom | Questions of reliability and of why the tale is being told |
| A late reveal (withheld information) | Less than the ending will show | A reversal that forces rereading, as in the last paragraphs of Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" |
NARRATION (NAR)
A narrator's or speaker's perspective controls what we know, when we know it, and how we feel about it.
Major points of view:
- FIRST-PERSON (I): limited to one consciousness. Watch for RELIABILITY: narrators may be biased, naive, deceived, or actively dishonest.
- SECOND-PERSON (YOU): rare. Creates intimacy or accusatory distance.
- THIRD-PERSON LIMITED: we know one character's thoughts; outside others'.
- THIRD-PERSON OMNISCIENT: the narrator knows all characters' inner lives, often comments on them.
- THIRD-PERSON OBJECTIVE / DRAMATIC: no internal access; we see only what could be observed (Hemingway).
Specialized techniques:
- STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS: attempts to render a character's flowing thoughts (Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner).
- FREE INDIRECT DISCOURSE: third-person narration that adopts a character's idiom and consciousness without quotation marks. Strongly associated with Austen and Flaubert, and later central to modernist fiction. The narrator's voice and the character's voice merge: letting us occupy the character without surrendering authorial control.
- FRAMED / NESTED narration: multiple narrators at different distances from the events.
- UNRELIABLE NARRATOR: explicit (the narrator admits limits) or implicit (the reader detects gaps between what the narrator says and what the text shows).
Point of view as distance Each point of view decides how close the telling sits to a character's mind. Name where a passage sits, and notice when it moves, especially into and out of free indirect discourse.
Why POV matters: the same event told by Jane vs. Rochester, or Nick vs. Gatsby, or Stevens vs. Miss Kenton, becomes a different event. Strong AP analysis NAMES the POV and explains how it shapes interpretation.
WORKED EXAMPLE: WHO IS SPEAKING IN AUSTEN'S FIRST SENTENCE?
The opening of Pride and Prejudice (1813), from Project Gutenberg eBook #1342:
[1] It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession
of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
[2] However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his
first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds
of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful
property of some one or other of their daughters.| Words | The move | Effect on the reader |
|---|---|---|
| "a truth universally acknowledged" | Proverb-like diction from a narrator who sounds all-knowing | Builds an authority that the next sentence undercuts |
| "must be in want of a wife" | Claims to know what the rich man wants | Readers begin to suspect the "truth" is someone else's wish |
| "so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families" | Moves the "truth" from the universe to one neighborhood's opinion | Verbal irony: a universal law shrinks to local gossip |
| "rightful property" | Legal, economic diction applied to a person | Marriage appears as a market in which the man is the prize to be claimed |
Model thesis (skills 4.B and 4.C): "Austen's narrator opens with the voice of universal wisdom, then reveals within a sentence that this 'truth' belongs to the neighborhood's families, an irony that teaches readers to hear the narration as standing both inside and above its community's assumptions about marriage and money."
Model commentary: "The phrase 'universally acknowledged' sounds like a law of nature, but the second sentence locates the belief only 'in the minds of the surrounding families,' who have decided what a stranger wants before learning his 'feelings or views.' The narrator repeats the community's logic in order to expose it: the man becomes 'rightful property,' a legal term that turns courtship into a claim on goods. From its first paragraph, the novel trains readers to distrust confident generalizations, including the ones its characters will soon make about each other."
Weaker version (for contrast): "Austen uses irony in the first sentence to show that rich men want wives. This is important because the novel is about marriage." It takes the ironic claim at face value, names a device without explaining how it works, and states a topic rather than an interpretation.
CASE STUDY: FROM FIRST IMPRESSIONS TO PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
Austen began the novel, then titled First Impressions, in October 1796, when she was 20, and finished it in August 1797. Her father offered it to the London publisher Cadell & Davies on November 1, 1797, and the offer was rejected by return of post. Revised, it appeared as Pride and Prejudice on January 28, 1813, published by Thomas Egerton. Austen's name was not on it: the title page credited "the Author of Sense and Sensibility."
- Concept: narration (NAR). The confident voice of the first sentence is a constructed narrator, not a self-portrait of the author.
- Connection: the working title names the plot's engine: judgments formed too early and revised later.
- Lesson: separate narrator from author, and watch how a narrator's generalizations are tested by the story.
FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE (FIG)
Comparisons, representations, and associations shift meaning from the literal to the figurative: and INVITE readers to interpret. (See section 5, "Literary Craft Vocabulary," for the full taxonomy.) Key working categories:
- METAPHOR and SIMILE: direct vs. like/as comparison.
- PERSONIFICATION: human qualities given to nonhuman things.
- SYMBOL: concrete object/image that carries broader meaning. MOTIF is a recurring symbol or image across a work.
- IMAGERY: sensory language (visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, gustatory).
- ALLUSION: reference to another work, figure, or event (Biblical, classical, literary, historical).
- IRONY: verbal (saying opposite of meant), situational (outcome contrary to expectation), dramatic (reader knows what character doesn't).
- PARADOX: apparent contradiction that contains truth.
CONFLICT
Conflict is the engine of narrative. Many serious works use both kinds, and often the external surfaces or intensifies the internal:
- EXTERNAL: character vs. character, vs. nature, vs. society, vs. fate, vs. supernatural.
- INTERNAL: character vs. self (warring desires, moral struggle, repressed knowledge).
When they appear together, external conflict typically SURFACES the internal: Hamlet's external revenge plot dramatizes his internal paralysis; Janie's three marriages in Their Eyes Were Watching God externalize her search for self.
THEME
Theme is the underlying idea or insight the work explores: not the subject. Themes are NOT one-word topics ("love," "death") but full propositions the work invites you to consider.
- WEAK theme statement: "The novel is about love."
- STRONG theme statement: "The novel suggests that romantic love does not exempt people from cruelty toward each other: and may, by intensifying expectation, supply its motive."
A work usually has multiple themes that interact. The strongest AP responses identify the SPECIFIC PROPOSITION the text develops, not just the topic it addresses.
PRACTICE: TURN A TOPIC INTO A THEME
| Work | Topic (too broad) | Theme statement (a proposition you could defend) |
|---|---|---|
| Chopin, "The Story of an Hour" (1894) | marriage | Even a kind marriage can confine a person, and the discovery of freedom can arrive as suddenly as grief |
| Shelley, Frankenstein (1818) | science | Creation without responsibility turns both maker and made into victims of the maker's ambition |
| Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925) | the American Dream | A dream fixed on recovering the past cannot survive contact with the present it was meant to redeem |
| Joyce, "Araby" (1914) | first love | Romantic idealism can be a form of vanity that the idealist recognizes only when it collapses |
TONE vs. MOOD
Often confused, distinct in practice:
- TONE: the AUTHOR'S/narrator's attitude toward the subject (ironic, reverent, scornful, elegiac, defiant). Conveyed through diction, syntax, imagery, detail.
- MOOD: the FEELING evoked in the reader (eerie, hopeful, melancholic, claustrophobic).
Tone and mood often align but can DIVERGE for effect. A darkly comic narrator may have a wry tone while the mood of the passage is grief. Identifying that gap is a sophisticated reading move.
EXAM CONNECTIONS. The five reading-focused Big Ideas (CHR, SET, STR, NAR, FIG) appear across every passage on Section I (multiple choice) and frame the reading work of every FRQ. Q1 (Poetry) typically foregrounds FIG and STR; Q2 (Prose Fiction) typically foregrounds CHR, NAR, SET; Q3 (Literary Argument) demands all of them in service of LAN. Strong AP students learn to read with all five lenses simultaneously, then choose the most productive lens for the specific question on the page.
Key Terms
Foil
A character whose traits contrast with another's, illuminating the second character's qualities by juxtaposition. Laertes is a foil to Hamlet: both lose fathers, both seek revenge, but their methods reveal who Hamlet is.
Dynamic vs. Static Character
Dynamic characters undergo significant internal change across the work. Static characters do not. Both can be central: a static character can show what the dynamic one is rejecting or moving toward.
Indirect Characterization
Inferring traits from a character's actions, dialogue, thought, appearance, and effect on others: rather than the narrator stating them outright. Strong analysis cites the specific evidence and names the trait revealed.
Unreliable Narrator
A first-person narrator whose account we have reason to distrust: through self-deception, limited knowledge, age, mental state, or motive to lie. Creates a layer between the reader and the truth of the story.
Stream of Consciousness
Narrative technique mimicking unedited thought: associative leaps, fragmentary syntax, sensory drift. Used by Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner.
Frame Narrative
A story within a story: the outer frame brackets and contextualizes the inner tale. Heart of Darkness is told by a man on a boat about another man telling about Africa.
Theme
A complete proposition about life or human experience that a work explores: not a topic. "Memory and identity are inseparable" is a theme; "memory" alone is a topic.
Tone
The author's attitude toward the subject, conveyed through diction, syntax, and detail.
Mood
The emotional atmosphere evoked in the reader by setting, imagery, and rhythm.
Motif
A recurring element (image, phrase, situation) that gains meaning through repetition. Distinct from symbol: a motif accumulates significance; a symbol is a single element with figurative meaning.
Exam Tips
- Always express theme as a COMPLETE STATEMENT, not a topic. A thesis built on a topic ("the theme of memory") caps your score; a thesis built on a thematic claim ("memory both creates and corrupts identity") opens the door to high marks.
- When asked about characterization, distinguish DIRECT (narrator states) from INDIRECT (we infer). Cite specific evidence: a line of dialogue, a gesture, a physical detail.
- Don't confuse tone and mood. Tone = author/narrator's attitude. Mood = reader's feeling. Both can be analyzed in the same passage.
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