CLEP English Literature study guide
CLEP English Literature · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The CLEP English Literature exam is a College Board credit-by-examination test covering material usually taught in a college-level survey of British, Commonwealth, and postcolonial literature. It is aimed at candidates who have read widely, know the basic literary periods, and understand the historical development of English literature; it is not limited to majors, but the reading load assumes genuine familiarity rather than cramming. The CLEP English Literature study guide has 6 sections and about 2,906 words.
01Middle Ages
For the CLEP English Literature exam, the Middle Ages runs from roughly 450 to 1500: Old English verse composed before the Norman Conquest and Middle English literature written after it. Passages are usually excerpted at 30–60 lines, and questions ask you to identify form (alliterative long line, rime royal, ballad quatrain), rhetorical strategy (allegory, estates satire, dream vision), and the worldview the text implies - not merely to name an author.
508 words, about 3 min0216th and early 17th Century
Roughly 1500–1660: the English Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Civil War. The exam samples sonnets, verse epistles, dramatic verse and prose, asking about form, rhetorical figure, genre (revenge tragedy, city comedy, masque), and the period's religious and political pressures.
500 words, about 3 min03Restoration and 18th Century
1660, the Restoration of Charles II, to about 1798. The exam asks about satire's modes, the heroic couplet, periodical prose, the emerging novel, and genre terms (mock epic, comedy of manners, elegy, ode), plus the period's arguments about wit, taste and moral correction.
527 words, about 3 min04Romantic
The exam samples lyric poetry and short prose and asks about the imagination as a faculty, the poet's relation to nature and to ordinary life, the ode and ballad forms, and how Romantic theory describes its own practice. Novels of the period - Austen, Mary Shelley, Scott - also appear.
448 words, about 2 min05Victorian
1832, the first Reform Act, to 1901. The exam asks about the dramatic monologue, the novel of social problem, the pressure of science on faith, and the aestheticist reaction - and expects you to connect technique to the period's anxieties rather than summarize plots.
447 words, about 2 min0620th Century to the Present
1900 to the present. The exam samples modernist and post-1945 texts and asks you to identify technique (interior monologue, free verse, juxtaposition without connective tissue, allusion), movement, and historical pressure - world wars, empire and decolonization, gender and identity.
476 words, about 2 min