CLEP American Literature cheat sheet

Native American oral traditions (creation stories, trickster tales, oratory) survive mainly through transcriptions by colonists; they are communal, performative, and non-fixed in form, so printed versions are mediated texts.

Puritan plain style: short declarative sentences, biblical allusion, and a didactic purpose. William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation uses it for providential history; John Winthrop's "A Model of Christian Charity" supplies the "city upon a hill" image.

Anne Bradstreet's The Tenth Muse (1650) was the first book of poems published by an English colonist in America; her later domestic elegies (e.g., on her grandchildren) mix Puritan resignation with personal grief.

Edward Taylor's Preparatory Meditations were manuscript devotional poems not printed until the 20th century; they use metaphysical conceits and typology in service of Puritan self-examination.

Captivity narratives (Mary Rowlandson, 1682) follow a pattern: capture, trial as spiritual testing, scriptural interpretation of events, and eventual redemption or return.

The Great Awakening (1730s–1740s) produced Jonathan Edwards's "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (1741), a sermon using vivid sensory imagery and the doctrine of absolute divine sovereignty.

Revolutionary political writing: Thomas Paine's Common Sense (1776) and The American Crisis use plain vernacular and direct address; the Declaration of Independence (1776) draws on Locke's natural rights and social contract.

The Federalist Papers (Hamilton, Madison, Jay, 1787–88) are persuasive essays in classical republican argument, while the Anti-Federalist writings warn of centralized power and demand a bill of rights.

Early national belles-lettres: Philip Freneau's poetry and Charles Brockden Brown's gothic novels (Wieland, 1798) mark the shift from sermon and tract toward secular literary forms; Royall Tyler's The Contrast (1787) is an early American comedy of manners.

Transcendentalism (Emerson's Nature, 1836; "Self-Reliance"; Thoreau's Walden, 1854) holds that divinity is immanent in nature and the individual, and that intuition outranks inherited institutions.

Emerson's "The American Scholar" (1837) is a call for intellectual independence from Europe; it is often called America's "intellectual declaration of independence."

Dark Romanticism (Hawthorne, Melville, Poe) inverts transcendental optimism: sin, guilt, and the irrational are central. The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Moby-Dick (1851) are canonical examples.

Hawthorne's fiction uses allegory, symbolism, and a colonial New England setting; "Young Goodman Brown" and "The Minister's Black Veil" test hidden sin and ambiguity rather than resolve them.

Poe codified the short story as a unified effect (review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales, 1842) and wrote the detective story ("The Murders in the Rue Morgue") and analytic Gothic ("The Fall of the House of Usher").

Whitman's Leaves of Songs-Leaves of Grass (1855) uses free verse, catalogs, an inclusive first-person voice, and the body as sacred; "Song of Myself" is its core poem.

Dickinson's compact lyrics use slant rhyme, dashes, and riddling capitalization; her themes are death, immortality, nature, and the mind. Most were published posthumously.

Abolitionist literature: Frederick Douglass's Narrative (1845) is a slave narrative structured around literacy as the path to freedom; Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) was the era's most influential antislavery novel.

Fireside poets (Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes) wrote formal, widely memorized verse; Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride" and The Song of Hiawatha exemplify the national-myth impulse.

Realism favors verisimilitude, ordinary characters, and restrained narration; William Dean Howells's Criticism and Fiction (1891) argues for the "smiling aspects" of American life and against romantic idealization.

Regionalism/local color uses dialect, setting, and customs as its signature: Twain's Missouri, Sarah Orne Jewett's Maine, Kate Chopin's Louisiana, Bret Harte's California.

Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) uses first-person vernacular narration; Twain's "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" and Life on the Mississippi established Southwestern humor and the tall tale.

Henry James's psychological realism centers on consciousness and point of view; The Portrait of a Lady and The Turn of the Screw show the "international theme" and unreliable narration.

Naturalism applies determinism (heredity, environment, social forces) to fiction: Crane's Maggie (1893) and The Red Badge of Courage (1895), Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900), Norris's McTeague (1899).

Crane's imagery and irony in "The Open Boat" (1897) reflect a naturalist view of nature as indifferent to human need; the story is based on his own 1896 shipwreck.

Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899) depicts a woman's sexual and artistic awakening and suicide; it was condemned on publication and recovered by later feminist criticism.

Local-color and dialect fiction by women (Jewett, Freeman's "A New England Nun," Chesnutt's conjure stories) documents regional speech and social constraint; Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901) fictionalizes the Wilmington race massacre.

Literary naturalism's hallmarks: lower-class protagonists, episodic plots, documentary detail, and a narrator who observes rather than judges; Jack London's "To Build a Fire" is a compact example.

Modernist poetics: imagism (Pound's "In a Station of the Metro"), free verse, collage, and allusion. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) is the central collage poem; "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915) uses dramatic monologue and irony.

Frost's "Mending Wall" and "The Road Not Taken" use New England speech and regular form; Frost is often read as a modernist who kept traditional meters.

The Harlem Renaissance (roughly 1919–1935): Hughes's "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and "Harlem," Cullen's sonnets, Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), McKay's sonnets, Toomer's Cane (1923).

Hughes's "Theme for English B" and "I, Too" address race and American identity directly; Cullen preferred traditional forms and resisted being read only as a "race poet."

Lost Generation fiction: Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) and Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) treat expatriation, disillusion, and the failure of the American dream.

Hemingway's iceberg theory (the omitted is stronger than the stated) and his plain declarative prose mark The Old Man and the Sea (1952) and the Nick Adams stories.

Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels (The Sound and the Fury, 1929; As I Lay Dying, 1930; Absalom, Absalom!, 1936) use multiple narrators, stream of consciousness, and disrupted chronology.

Southern Renaissance and social fiction: Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel (1929), Wright's Native Son (1940), Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which mixes naturalist detail with Dust Bowl migration.

Drama and essay: O'Neill's experimental plays (The Hairy Ape, Long Day's Journey into Night), and the New Criticism of Eliot, Pound, and later Brooks, which privileged close reading of the text over biography.

Postwar alienation fiction: Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Kerouac's On the Road (1957).

Ellison's Invisible Man uses a nameless narrator and the metaphor of invisibility to analyze race and identity; it won the 1953 National Book Award.

Confessional poetry (Lowell's Life Studies, 1959; Plath's Ariel, 1965; Sexton; Berryman) makes private trauma, family, and mental illness the poem's subject.

Postmodern metafiction and self-consciousness: Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse," Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), DeLillo's White Noise (1985).

Minority and identity movements: Morrison's Beloved (1987) and Song of Solomon (1977); Walker's The Color Purple (1982); Cisneros's The House on Mango Street (1984); Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976); Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007).

Poetic schools after 1945: the Black Arts Movement (Baraka, Giovanni), the Beats (Ginsberg's Howl, 1956), the New York School (O'Hara), and language poetry; Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror won the 1976 Pulitzer.

Drama: Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949) and The Crucible (1953), Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), Wilson's Fences (1985).

Nonfiction and memoir as literary forms: Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (1963), Mailer's The Armies of the Night (1968, "new journalism"), Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968).

Award landmarks: Morrison's Nobel Prize (1993); Frost's four Pulitzer Prizes for poetry; the National Book Award and Pulitzer are the standard markers of contemporary canonization.