CLEP English Literature flashcards
CLEP English Literature · Build recall with a focused review session.
32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.
- Caesura
- A pause or break within a line of verse, especially the mid-line pause dividing the two halves of an Old English alliterative line such as those in Beowulf.
- Fabliau
- A short, comic medieval tale in verse featuring trickery, sexual intrigue, and poetic justice among ordinary townspeople, as in Chaucer's Miller's Tale.
- Morality play
- A late-medieval drama allegorizing the soul's struggle for salvation through personified abstractions such as Death, Good Deeds, and Fellowship, exemplified by Everyman.
- Rhyme royal
- A seven-line iambic pentameter stanza rhyming ababbcc, used by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde and later by Scottish and Renaissance poets.
- Petrarchan conceit
- An elaborate, extended comparison drawn from Petrarch's love poetry, such as eyes as suns or hair as gold wire, imitated and parodied by English sonneteers.
- Spenserian stanza
- A nine-line stanza rhyming ababbcbcc, with the first eight lines in iambic pentameter and the ninth an alexandrine, used throughout The Faerie Queene.
- Metaphysical conceit
- An ingenious, often startling extended comparison yoking unlike things, such as Donne's compass in A Valediction, characteristic of metaphysical poetry's argumentative style.
- Blank verse
- Unrhymed iambic pentameter, the dominant medium of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and of Milton's Paradise Lost.
- Revenge tragedy
- A dramatic genre featuring a wronged protagonist, a ghost demanding vengeance, delayed action, and mounting deaths, exemplified by Kyd's Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet.
- Comedy of manners
- Restoration comic drama satirizing fashionable society through witty repartee, rakes, and fops, as in Congreve's The Way of the World.
- Mock epic
- A poem treating a trivial subject with the elevated conventions of epic, producing satire, as in Pope's Rape of the Lock.
- Heroic couplet
- Two rhymed lines of iambic pentameter, usually closed and end-stopped, the standard verse form of Augustan satire and essay poetry.
- Periodical essay
- A short prose piece on manners and morals published in a recurring journal, developed by Addison and Steele in the Tatler and Spectator.
- Epistolary novel
- A novel told through letters exchanged among characters, allowing intimate access to feeling, as in Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa.
- Graveyard poetry
- Mid-eighteenth-century verse meditating on death, night, and mortality in churchyard settings, exemplified by Gray's Elegy.
- Negative capability
- Keats's phrase for the capacity to remain in uncertainties and doubts without reaching after fact and reason, a quality he prized in Shakespeare.
- Sublime
- In Romantic aesthetics, the overwhelming feeling of awe and terror aroused by vast, wild, or threatening natural phenomena, as theorized by Burke.
- Byronic hero
- A brooding, defiant, guilt-haunted outsider of great passion and intelligence, derived from characters in Byron's narrative poems.
- Ottava rima
- An eight-line stanza rhyming abababcc in iambic pentameter, used by Byron for the satiric digressions of Don Juan.
- Gothic novel
- A late-eighteenth-century prose genre of terror, ruined castles, and supernatural hints, exemplified by Radcliffe and by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
- Dramatic monologue
- A poem spoken by a single character to an implied listener, revealing personality through speech, as in Browning's My Last Duchess.
- Sprung rhythm
- Hopkins's verse technique counting stressed syllables and allowing variable unstressed syllables, producing dense, chant-like rhythms.
- In Memoriam stanza
- A four-line iambic tetrameter stanza rhyming abba, used throughout Tennyson's elegy for Arthur Hallam.
- Bildungsroman
- A novel tracing a protagonist's growth from youth to maturity through formative experience, as in Dickens's Great Expectations.
- Aestheticism
- The late-Victorian doctrine that art exists for beauty's sake rather than moral instruction, associated with Pater and Wilde.
- Stream of consciousness
- A narrative technique rendering uninterrupted inner thought and sensation, used by Joyce in Ulysses and Woolf in Mrs Dalloway.
- Imagism
- An early twentieth-century movement demanding direct treatment of the thing, economy of language, and free-verse rhythm, led by Pound and H.D.
- Pararhyme
- Owen's device of rhyming words that share consonants but differ in vowels, such as killed and cold, producing dissonant, unresolved sound.
- The Movement
- A 1950s British poetic grouping, including Larkin and Amis, favoring plain diction, irony, and empirical observation over modernist experiment.
- Postcolonial literature
- Writing from formerly colonized nations engaging empire, identity, and language, exemplified by Achebe, Rushdie, and Walcott.
- Metafiction
- Fiction that draws attention to its own constructedness through commentary, parody, or disrupted frames, common in postmodern novels.
- Theatre of the Absurd
- Postwar drama presenting a purposeless universe through circular dialogue and static action, exemplified by Beckett's Waiting for Godot.