CLEP American Literature study guide
CLEP American Literature · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The CLEP American Literature exam is a standardized, multiple-choice credit-by-examination test covering prose and poetry written in the United States from precolonial times to the present. It is designed for candidates who have read widely in American literature, know the basic literary periods, and can place works in their historical development-typically students seeking college credit for a survey course they have not taken, or independent learners who have studied on their own. The CLEP American Literature study guide has 5 sections and about 2,366 words.
01The Precolonial, Colonial and Early National Period: Plain Style, Providence, and Revolution
This domain runs from Native American oral material through the early republic. Questions usually ask you to match a text to its author, date, or rhetorical mode, and to read a short passage for argument and style: Puritan plain style, typology, the jeremiad, Enlightenment reason, and revolutionary pamphlet rhetoric.
493 words, about 2 min02The Romantic Period: Transcendentalism, Dark Romanticism, and the American Renaissance
1800–1865: the arrival of Romanticism, the American Renaissance of roughly 1850–55, Transcendentalism, dark romanticism, the poetic revolution of Whitman and Dickinson, and the literature of abolition. Expect author–text–date matching and passages that ask you to distinguish transcendental optimism from gothic doubt.
457 words, about 2 min03Realism and Naturalism: Verisimilitude, Determinism, and the Color Line
1865–1910: realism, regionalism or local color, and naturalism, together with the period's African American and women's writing. Passages tend to ask you to classify a narrative's method - realist observation versus naturalist determinism - and to identify authors with their signature subjects.
468 words, about 2 min04The Modernist Period: Imagism, Lost Generation, and Harlem Renaissance
1910–1945: modernism in verse and prose, the Lost Generation, the Harlem Renaissance, the Southern Renaissance, and Depression-era writing. Expect questions on technique - fragmentation, allusion, stream of consciousness - and on the manifestos and little magazines that promoted them.
489 words, about 2 min05The Contemporary Period: Postmodernism, Identity, and the Postwar Stage
1945 to the present: postwar fiction, the postmodern turn, identity-based movements, the Native American Renaissance, contemporary drama, and confessional and protest poetry. The exam usually asks you to apply a period label carefully to a specific book rather than to a decade in general.
459 words, about 2 min