CLEP American Literature flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Plain style

Puritan prose mode using short sentences, plain diction, and biblical allusion to instruct and persuade. Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation and Winthrop's sermons exemplify it; it rejects ornamental rhetoric.

Captivity narrative

Colonial genre recounting a settler's capture, usually by Native Americans, as a spiritual trial. Rowlandson's 1682 narrative follows the pattern of sin, affliction, and providential restoration.

City upon a hill

Image from John Winthrop's 1630 sermon 'A Model of Christian Charity,' warning that the Massachusetts colony would be judged by the world. It became a recurring American self-description.

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

Jonathan Edwards's 1741 sermon of the Great Awakening, using sensory imagery of the sinner suspended over hell to press for conversion. It is a landmark of Puritan sermon rhetoric.

The Federalist Papers

Eighty-five essays by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay (1787-88) arguing for ratification of the Constitution. They are classics of American political prose and republican theory.

Transcendentalism

American movement centered on Emerson and Thoreau holding that divinity is immanent in nature and intuition outranks institutions. Key texts: Nature (1836), 'Self-Reliance,' and Walden (1854).

Dark Romanticism

Strand of American Romanticism stressing sin, guilt, and the irrational rather than transcendental optimism. Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Melville's Moby-Dick are central examples.

Leaves of Grass

Whitman's lifelong poetry collection, first published 1855, using free verse and catalogs to celebrate the body, democracy, and the self. 'Song of Myself' is its core poem.

Dickinson's poetic form

Compact lyrics using slant rhyme, dashes, and unconventional capitalization. Her poems explore death, immortality, nature, and the mind; almost all were published after her death.

Slave narrative

Autobiographical genre written by formerly enslaved people to document bondage and argue for abolition. Douglass's 1845 Narrative centers literacy as the route to freedom.

Uncle Tom's Cabin

Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 antislavery novel, the era's most widely read American fiction. It dramatized slavery's cruelty for a mass audience and intensified sectional conflict.

American Renaissance

Term (from F.O. Matthiessen) for the 1850-55 flowering of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman. It names the period's central canonical works.

Howellsian realism

William Dean Howells's program for fiction about ordinary life, arguing that American novels should report the 'smiling aspects' of society rather than romantic idealization.

Local color fiction

Realist mode emphasizing a region's dialect, customs, and landscape. Examples include Twain's Missouri, Jewett's Maine, and Chopin's Louisiana.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Twain's 1885 novel narrated in Huck's vernacular first person, tracing a raft journey down the Mississippi. It is a landmark of American realism and dialect writing.

Naturalism

Literary mode applying determinism to fiction: heredity, environment, and social forces shape characters. Crane's Maggie, Dreiser's Sister Carrie, and Norris's McTeague exemplify it.

The Awakening

Kate Chopin's 1899 novel of a woman's sexual and artistic awakening in Louisiana and her final suicide. Condemned on publication, it was later recovered by feminist criticism.

The Open Boat

Crane's 1897 story based on his own shipwreck, in which four men face an indifferent sea. Its irony and imagery mark it as a naturalist classic.

International theme

Henry James's recurring subject: Americans encountering European culture, manners, and moral complexity. The Portrait of a Lady and Daisy Miller develop it.

Imagism

Early modernist movement (Pound, H.D.) calling for direct treatment of the thing, economy of language, and musical rhythm over meter. Pound's 'In a Station of the Metro' is its emblem.

The Waste Land

T.S. Eliot's 1922 collage poem of allusion, shifting voices, and mythic fragments, expressing postwar spiritual sterility. It is a defining text of literary modernism.

Harlem Renaissance

African American literary and artistic flowering centered in 1920s Harlem. Hughes, Cullen, McKay, Toomer, and Hurston produced its central poetry and fiction.

The Great Gatsby

Fitzgerald's 1925 novel narrated by Nick Carraway, tracing Gatsby's self-invention and the failure of the American dream. It is a canonical Lost Generation text.

Iceberg theory

Hemingway's principle that a story's meaning lies in what is omitted, with the writer showing only the surface. His plain declarative prose embodies it.

Yoknapatawpha

Faulkner's invented Mississippi county, setting for The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Absalom, Absalom! Those novels use multiple narrators and disrupted chronology.

Stream of consciousness

Narrative technique rendering unedited inner thought and association. Faulkner and Woolf use it; in American fiction The Sound and the Fury is a principal example.

Invisible Man

Ellison's 1952 novel, narrated by an unnamed Black man whose invisibility names his social erasure. It won the National Book Award and is a landmark of postwar fiction.

Confessional poetry

Postwar mode making private trauma, family, and mental illness the poem's subject. Lowell's Life Studies, Plath's Ariel, and Sexton's work define it.

Postmodern metafiction

Fiction that foregrounds its own artificiality through parody, fragmentation, and self-reference. Barth's 'Lost in the Funhouse' and Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 exemplify it.

Beloved

Toni Morrison's 1987 novel, based on a historical infanticide case, exploring slavery's aftermath through memory and the ghost of a murdered child. It won the Pulitzer Prize.

Black Arts Movement

1960s-70s movement joining Black aesthetics and political activism. Baraka and Giovanni wrote poetry for performance and addressed Black audiences directly.

Death of a Salesman

Arthur Miller's 1949 tragedy of Willy Loman, whose faith in the American dream collapses. It mixes realistic staging with memory sequences and won the Pulitzer Prize.