CLEP English Literature cheat sheet
CLEP English Literature · Keep the key ideas within reach.
Middle Ages (c. 450–1500)
Old English alliterative verse: four stressed syllables per line, caesura in the middle, no end rhyme; Beowulf (c. 700–1000) is the chief example.
Middle English romance and dream vision: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight uses alliteration plus bob-and-wheel; Langland's Piers Plowman is an alliterative dream vision.
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (c. 1387–1400) frames tales by social estate: Knight (romance), Miller (fabliau), Pardoner (exemplum), Wife of Bath (romance/confession).
Fabliau markers: low-status characters, trickery, sexual and scatological humor, poetic justice; see the Miller's, Reeve's, and Shipman's tales.
Medieval allegory reads persons as abstractions: Everyman (morality play) and Pearl (dream vision) treat Death, Good Deeds, and the Pearl-maiden symbolically.
Courtly love conventions: distant lady, secret devotion, service, and suffering; traceable in Troilus and Criseyde and Gawain.
Mystery plays dramatize biblical cycles by trade guilds; miracle plays dramatize saints' lives; both staged in cycles such as York and Wakefield.
Identify period by language: Old English (before 1100), Middle English (1100–1500), with French and Latin loanwords entering after 1066.
16th and Early 17th Century (1500–1660)
Sonnet sequences: Wyatt and Surrey import the Petrarchan form; Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, Spenser's Amoretti, and Shakespeare's 1609 sequence follow.
Shakespearean sonnet: three quatrains and a couplet, rhyme abab cdcd efef gg; the Petrarchan octave/sestet turns at line 9.
Spenserian stanza: nine lines, rhyme ababbcbcc, final alexandrine; used in The Faerie Queene.
Revenge tragedy conventions: ghost, delayed revenge, play-within-a-play, escalating body count; Kyd's Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Metaphysical poetry: extended conceits, colloquial diction, argumentative structure; Donne, Herbert, Marvell, Vaughan.
Jonson's classicism and the country-house poem (To Penshurst) contrast with Donne's metaphysical style; Cavalier poets write courtly, elegant lyrics.
Milton's Paradise Lost: blank verse epic in twelve books, invokes the muse, justifies God's ways to men; Restoration date 1667 places it just past this period.
Prose: Bacon's Essays model aphoristic plain style; Browne and Donne's sermons show Baroque prose; the King James Bible (1611) shapes English rhythm.
Restoration and 18th Century (1660–1798)
Restoration comedy (comedy of manners): witty, sexually frank dialogue, fops and rakes; Congreve's The Way of the World, Wycherley's The Country Wife.
Heroic drama in rhymed couplets: Dryden's All for Love and Conquest of Granada; the closed couplet becomes the age's dominant verse form.
Satire modes: Horatian (mild, urbane; Pope's Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot) versus Juvenalian (harsh, indignant; Swift's A Modest Proposal).
Mock-epic machinery: trivial subject inflated with epic conventions; Pope's The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad, Dryden's Mac Flecknoe.
Periodical essay: Addison and Steele's Tatler and Spectator refine manners; Johnson's Rambler and Idler continue the form.
Rise of the novel: Defoe (Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders), Richardson (Pamela, epistolary), Fielding (Tom Jones, comic epic), Sterne (Tristram Shandy, experimental).
Graveyard poets (Young, Gray's Elegy) and sensibility foreshadow Romanticism; Gray's Elegy uses elegiac quatrains.
Johnson's Dictionary (1755) and his Lives of the Poets codify neoclassical judgment: wit, nature, decorum, general truth.
Romantic (1798–1832)
Lyrical Ballads (1798) by Wordsworth and Coleridge opens the period; the Preface (1800) defines poetry as emotion recollected in tranquility and champions common language.
First generation: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake; second generation: Byron, Shelley, Keats, all dead young and abroad.
Romantic features: imagination over reason, nature as teacher, the sublime, the solitary figure, the supernatural and the commonplace made strange.
Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience use paired poems to contrast childlike vision with social corruption.
Keats's negative capability and his odes (Grecian Urn, Nightingale) explore transience; the odes use a ten-line stanza form.
Byron's Don Juan is ottava rima satire; the Byronic hero is brooding, defiant, and guilt-laden.
Gothic novel: Walpole's Castle of Otranto, Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; terror, ruins, and the past.
Wordsworth's The Prelude is a blank-verse autobiographical epic in fourteen books, tracing the growth of a poet's mind.
Victorian (1832–1901)
Serial publication and the three-decker novel shape plot pacing; Gaskell, Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, and Hardy dominate fiction.
Dramatic monologue: Browning (My Last Duchess) and Tennyson (Ulysses) reveal character through a single speaker addressing a silent listener.
Tennyson's In Memoriam uses the abba quatrain and elegiac sequence to question faith and doubt.
Pre-Raphaelite poetry (Rossetti, Morris) favors medieval subjects and sensuous detail; the dramatic lyric and ballad revival follow.
Novel of social critique: Dickens's Bleak House (Chancery, fog), Gaskell's North and South (industrial conflict), Eliot's Middlemarch (provincial lives).
Victorian doubt and evolution: Tennyson, Arnold's Dover Beach, and Hardy's later novels register loss of faith and Darwinian pressure.
Aestheticism and decadence: Pater's Conclusion, Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, and The Importance of Being Earnest value beauty over moral instruction.
Nonsense and children's literature: Carroll's Alice books and Lear's limericks use logic play and linguistic invention.
20th Century to the Present
Modernism (c. 1910–1940): fragmentation, allusion, stream of consciousness; Eliot's The Waste Land, Joyce's Ulysses, Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, Pound's Cantos.
Imagism: Pound and H.D. demand direct treatment of the thing, no superfluous words, and free-verse rhythm.
War poetry: Owen's pararhyme and pity, Sassoon's satire, Rosenberg's directness contrast with Rupert Brooke's patriotic sonnets.
Post-war movements: the Movement (Larkin, Amis) favors plain diction and empiricism; the Beats favor spontaneous prose and free verse.
Postcolonial and diaspora writing: Achebe, Naipaul, Rushdie, Walcott, and Heaney reframe English as a global medium.
Postmodern fiction: metafiction, pastiche, unreliable narration; Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, Carter, and Rushdie's Midnight's Children.
Contemporary British poetry: Heaney's bog poems, Duffy's dramatic monologues, and Hughes's animal poems extend the lyric tradition.
Drama: Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956) opens the angry-young-man era; Pinter's pauses and Stoppard's wordplay define later stages.
Middle Ages
Beowulf: Old English alliterative epic, three monsters, Christian narrator on pagan material, composed c. 700–1000.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Arthurian romance testing chivalric honor; beheading game, green girdle, alliterative verse.
Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde: rhyme royal (ababbcc) tragedy of fortune and betrayal.
Everyman: morality play staging Death's summons and the failure of worldly companions.
Pearl: dream vision elegy in alliterative verse, allegorizing grief and heavenly consolation.
Mystery cycles: York and Wakefield plays performed by craft guilds on feast days.
Malory's Le Morte Darthur: prose compilation of Arthurian legend printed by Caxton in 1485.
16th and Early 17th Century
Marlowe's Doctor Faustus: blank-verse tragedy of damnation; the good and evil angels dramatize the psychomachia.
Spenser's The Faerie Queene: allegorical epic in Spenserian stanzas, books on holiness, temperance, chastity.
Donne's Holy Sonnets: metaphysical devotional verse using paradox, conceit, and direct address to God.
Herbert's The Temple: shaped poems and emblematic titles map the soul's struggle toward God.
Jonson's Volpone: satiric city comedy of greed, with animal-named characters.
Webster's The Duchess of Malfi: Jacobean revenge tragedy with a defiant heroine and lycanthropic imagery.
Bacon's New Atlantis: utopian scientific narrative; the Essays model aphoristic prose.
Restoration and 18th Century
Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel: political satire in heroic couplets allegorizing the Exclusion Crisis.
Swift's Gulliver's Travels: four-book satiric travelogue attacking pride, faction, and abstract reason.
Pope's An Essay on Criticism: verse essay in couplets codifying neoclassical rules of wit and judgment.
Sheridan's The School for Scandal: comedy of manners with scandal school, screen scene, and witty repartee.
Richardson's Clarissa: epistolary tragedy of a virtuous heroine pursued by Lovelace.
Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard: elegiac quatrains meditating on obscure rural lives.
Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry: defines the sublime as terror and the beautiful as social affection.
Romantic
Coleridge's Biographia Literaria: distinguishes fancy from imagination and explains the Lyrical Ballads plan.
Shelley's Prometheus Unbound: lyrical drama of liberation; Defence of Poetry calls poets unacknowledged legislators.
Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: prose-poem aphorisms reversing conventional good and evil.
Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey: blank-verse meditation on memory and nature's restorative power.
Keats's The Eve of St Agnes: Spenserian stanzas, romance and sensuous detail.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: Gothic frame narrative on creation, responsibility, and alienation.
Scott's Waverley: historical novel opening the Scottish romance vogue.
Victorian
Arnold's Culture and Anarchy: prose defense of culture as pursuit of perfection against philistinism.
Brontë's Wuthering Heights: framed, multi-narrator Gothic novel of passion and revenge on the moors.
Dickens's Great Expectations: first-person bildungsroman of class, guilt, and false values.
Eliot's Middlemarch: multiplot provincial novel with web-of-affinity structure and Dorothea's idealism.
Hopkins's The Windhover: sprung rhythm and inscape, devotional sonnet of praise.
Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest: farce of mistaken identity and epigrammatic wit satirizing earnestness.
Hardy's Jude the Obscure: late-Victorian tragedy of aspiration blocked by class and convention.
20th Century to the Present
Eliot's The Waste Land: five-part modernist collage of allusion, myth, and fragmented voices.
Joyce's Ulysses: stream-of-consciousness epic mapping Homeric episodes onto a Dublin day.
Woolf's To the Lighthouse: interior monologue and time passing between the Ramsays' visits.
Beckett's Waiting for Godot: absurdist two-act play of stasis, repetition, and vaudeville exchange.
Larkin's Church Going: Movement plain style, agnostic meditation in a country church.
Heaney's Digging: opening poem of Death of a Naturalist, aligning pen with spade.
Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: metatheatrical tragicomedy reworking Hamlet's minor characters.