CLEP English Literature key terms

Repetition of the same initial consonant sound in nearby stressed syllables, as in "the furrow followed free." Old English verse was built on it rather than on rhyme.

A compressed poetic substitute for a common noun, common in Old Norse and Old English verse, such as "whale-road" for the sea or "ring-giver" for a king.

A pause or break inside a line of verse, often near the middle. In Old English alliterative lines it separates the two halves that alliteration links.

A poem of mourning or solemn meditation on loss and mortality. "The Wanderer" is an Old English example; later English elegies include Milton's "Lycidas" and Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard."

A late-medieval drama in which allegorical figures such as Fellowship, Goods, and Death contend for a human protagonist's soul. "Everyman" is the best-known English example.

A narrative whose concrete characters and events systematically stand for abstract ideas or moral truths, so that the story carries a second, consistent level of meaning.

A story that encloses other stories told by characters within it. Chaucer's pilgrims tell tales inside the frame of their journey to Canterbury.

Comedy that exposes the failings of each social rank or profession in turn - clergy, nobility, merchants, peasants. The General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales uses it.

Unrhymed iambic pentameter. Introduced to English by Surrey and made the standard medium of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and of Milton's Paradise Lost.

A line of five metrical feet, each an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, producing the familiar ten-syllable da-DUM rhythm of much English poetry.

A fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter. The Petrarchan form divides into octave and sestet; the English or Shakespearean form uses three quatrains and a closing couplet.

The turn or pivot in a sonnet where argument or feeling shifts, typically after the eighth line in the Petrarchan form or at the final couplet in the English form.

An extended, intellectually ingenious comparison that yokes together strikingly unlike things, as Donne compares parted lovers to a drafting compass in "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning."

Verse by Donne, Herbert, Marvell and others, marked by colloquial diction, abrupt openings, argumentative structure, and elaborate conceits rather than smooth musical ornament.

A speech in which a character, alone on stage, voices private thoughts aloud. Hamlet's "To be, or not to be" is the most quoted English example.

A drama in which a wronged protagonist pursues vengeance, often with feigned madness, ghostly prompting, and mounting bloodshed. Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet are central.

A comedy built on characters dominated by one ruling trait or bodily "humour," as in Jonson's Volpone and Every Man in His Humour.

Two rhymed lines of iambic pentameter forming a closed unit of sense. Perfected by Dryden and Pope, it became the dominant form of Restoration and Augustan satire.

A poem that applies the grand conventions of epic - invocation, battles, supernatural machinery - to trivial subjects for satiric effect. Pope's The Rape of the Lock is the classic instance.

The period roughly 1700–1745 in English letters, named for the Roman emperor Augustus, when writers prized wit, order, urbanity, and imitation of classical models.

A short prose essay published in a recurring journal such as The Tatler or The Spectator, addressing manners, morals, and taste for a growing middle-class readership.

Comedy of the 1660s–1700s featuring witty repartee, libertine gallants, and intricate plots of intrigue, as in Congreve's The Way of the World.

Drama whose humor arises from the social behavior, affectations, and verbal duels of a fashionable class rather than from farce or physical action.

A four-line stanza alternating four-stress and three-stress lines, usually rhyming abcb, characteristic of traditional folk ballads and imitated by later poets.

A poem, especially in Wordsworth and Coleridge's 1798 collection, that uses simple diction and ballad forms to render ordinary life and feeling.

The aesthetic quality of awe, vastness, and terror aroused by wild nature or overwhelming power, a central category for Romantic criticism and poetry.

Keats's phrase for the capacity to remain in uncertainties and doubts without irritably reaching after fact and reason, a quality he prized in Shakespeare.

A formal lyric poem of elevated address and feeling, often irregular in English practice. Keats's odes and Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" are canonical.

A short poem expressing a single speaker's thought or emotion, valued for musicality and intensity rather than narrative, and central to Romantic and later poetry.

A poem spoken by a single character to an implied listener, revealing personality and situation through the speech itself. Browning and Tennyson made it a Victorian hallmark.

A gap between what a character understands and what the audience or reader knows, producing effects from suspense to tragic pathos.

Fiction that examines the customs, values, and conversation of a social class, often with irony, as in Austen's and later Thackeray's work.

Victorian fiction dramatizing factories, class conflict, and urban poverty, such as Gaskell's Mary Barton and Dickens's Hard Times.

A mode that represents ordinary life, plausible settings, and social conditions with apparent objectivity, avoiding romance and idealization. It dominates nineteenth-century fiction.

Poetry organized by rhythm, line breaks, and cadence rather than fixed meter or rhyme, a defining technique of modernist and later verse.

An early twentieth-century movement, associated with Pound and H. D., favoring precise concrete images, spare diction, and freedom from conventional meter.

A narrative technique that renders a character's unbroken flow of thought and perception, as in Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and Joyce's Ulysses.

The experimental literature of roughly 1910–1940, marked by fragmented form, allusion, interiority, and skepticism toward Victorian conventions and realist narrative.

Writing from or about formerly colonized nations that engages colonial history, language, identity, and resistance, exemplified by Achebe, Rhys, and Rushdie.

The study and analysis of versification: meter, rhythm, rhyme, stanza form, and line structure - the technical vocabulary for describing how a poem is built.