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CLEP American Literature study materials
CLEP American Literature study resources

CLEP American Literature: The Precolonial, Colonial and Early National Period: Plain Style, Providence, and Revolution

CLEP American Literature · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.

All guide sections

The Precolonial, Colonial and Early National Period: Plain Style, Providence, and Revolution

What this domain tests

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.

Core rules and concepts

  • Native oral traditions (trickster cycles, emergence and origin stories) survive mainly through later transcriptions, so "author" means the teller or the recorder.
  • Exploration narrative: John Smith's General History of Virginia (1624) contains the Pocahontas rescue; his 1608 letter does not, which grounds the doubt about embellishment.
  • Puritan prose: Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation uses plain style with providential framing; Winthrop's "A Model of Christian Charity" supplies "a city upon a hill."
  • Puritan poetry: Bradstreet's The Tenth Muse (1650); "Verses upon the Burning of Our House" replaces the earthly house with a heavenly one. Taylor's Preparatory Meditations use metaphysical conceits: in "Huswifery" the spinning wheel is the soul, the loom the Word.
  • Captivity narrative: Rowlandson (1682) shapes suffering as testing, humiliation, and deliverance.
  • Great Awakening: Edwards's 1741 Enfield sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" dangles sinners over hell as "a spider or some loathsome insect."
  • Revolution and Enlightenment: Franklin's Autobiography (errata, thirteen virtues); Paine's Common Sense (1776) and The American Crisis; Jefferson's Declaration ("self-evident" truths, "unalienable" rights); The Federalist, by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay.
  • Wheatley's 1773 Poems on Various Subjects works in neoclassical couplets, turning Christian doctrine against Christian hypocrisy in "On Being Brought from Africa to America."

Worked example

A passage asks what Edwards is doing rhetorically. Step 1: catalog the imagery - flames, black clouds, a bent bow, an insect held over fire. Step 2: notice the conditional logic: "nothing that you can do" can save you. Step 3: test the answers. "He rejects predestination" fails, since the sermon depends on it. "He uses sensory terror to make Calvinist doctrine felt" fits imagery and theology alike. Step 4: name the mode - the jeremiad, a sermon that laments decline and demands repentance.

Traps that cost marks

  • Swapping Winthrop and Bradford; the "city upon a hill" is Winthrop's.
  • Assuming Puritan prose is ornamental when plain style is the ideal.
  • Mis-dating Common Sense (1776) or the Declaration (1776).
  • Reading Wheatley as merely pious; her couplets are doing argumentative work.
  • Calling Rowlandson's captivity narrative a novel.