CLEP English Literature Exam Review

Successfully passing the CLEP English Literature exam can grant you significant college credit, bypassing a semester-long course and saving both time and tuition. This test assesses your ability to understand and analyze British literary works from the medieval period to the modern era. Mastering it requires a strategic blend of period knowledge, author recognition, and, most importantly, the application of critical reading skills to unfamiliar passages.

Foundational Knowledge: Literary Periods and Movements

The exam organizes literature chronologically, so building a mental timeline is your first strategic step. You don’t need to memorize every date, but you must recognize the defining characteristics, concerns, and stylistic shifts of each major era.

Begin with the Medieval period, characterized by religious themes, chivalric romance, and allegory. Key works often include excerpts from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, written in Middle English, and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. The Renaissance (or Early Modern period) follows, marked by a rediscovery of classical ideals, the rise of humanism, and the flourishing of drama. This is the age of William Shakespeare and the metaphysical poets like John Donne, whose work uses conceits—extended, elaborate metaphors. The Neoclassical period (Restoration and 18th Century) emphasizes order, reason, satire, and social critique, as seen in the works of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift.

The Romantic period rebels against Neoclassicism, prioritizing emotion, imagination, nature, and the individual experience. You’ll encounter the lyrical poetry of William Wordsworth and the revolutionary spirit of William Blake. The Victorian period grapples with industrialization, social reform, doubt, and moral earnestness in the works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning, a master of the dramatic monologue. Finally, the Modern period (20th century onward) embraces experimentation, fragmentation, stream-of-consciousness narrative, and themes of alienation, evident in the novels of Virginia Woolf and the poetry of T.S. Eliot.

Major Authors and Canonical Works

While the exam features unfamiliar passages, a strong working knowledge of major authors and their most famous works provides essential context. For the exam, focus on identifying an author’s typical style, themes, and historical placement rather than recalling plot details from memory.

Key authors to know include:

• William Shakespeare: Understand his major tragedies (Hamlet, King Lear), comedies, and histories. Be familiar with his use of iambic pentameter, soliloquies, and thematic depth.
• John Milton: Known for Paradise Lost, his epic style and exploration of theological themes are seminal.
• Jane Austen: Her novels of manners, like Pride and Prejudice, critique social class and gender roles with irony and free indirect discourse.
• Charles Dickens: A Victorian novelist famous for social criticism, vivid characters, and serialized narratives like Great Expectations.
• Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre is a pivotal Gothic and bildungsroman novel exploring passion, morality, and female independence.
• George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans): Her realist novels, such as Middlemarch, offer psychological depth and philosophical insight.

Mastering Poetic Form and Devices

A significant portion of the exam consists of poetry analysis. You must move beyond mere comprehension to analyze how form contributes to meaning. Key poetic forms to recognize include the sonnet (both Petrarchan and Shakespearean structures), the ode, the elegy, and the dramatic monologue.

Crucially, you must identify and interpret literary devices. Don’t just spot them—explain their effect. For example:

• Imagery: Language appealing to the senses. Is it pastoral, industrial, violent?
• Metaphor/Simile: Comparisons that reveal deeper thematic connections.
• Symbolism: An object or action that represents something beyond itself.
• Allusion: A reference to another historical, biblical, or literary work.
• Irony: A disconnect between expectation and reality, often used for critique.
• Meter and Rhyme Scheme: The poem’s rhythm and sound pattern. Iambic pentameter creates a natural, speech-like rhythm, while a broken meter might indicate distress.

Your test strategy here is to read the poem twice: once for general meaning and tone, and a second time to annotate devices and structural choices that create that meaning.

Analyzing Prose Fiction and Drama

For prose passages (from novels or essays) and drama excerpts, your focus shifts to narrative technique, characterization, and theme. Pay close attention to:

• Narrative Point of View: Is it first-person, third-person omniscient, or third-person limited? How does this perspective shape your understanding?
• Characterization: How are characters revealed—through dialogue, action, or description?
• Setting: How does the time and place influence the plot or mood?
• Dramatic Conventions: In plays, note the use of soliloquy, aside, stage directions, and dramatic irony.
• Theme: The central idea or insight about human experience. Your goal is to identify the theme supported by the specific passage, not a general theme of the entire work.

The exam will ask questions that require inference. You must deduce a character’s motive, the narrator’s attitude, or the symbolic significance of a detail based solely on the text provided.

Critical Reading and Test-Taking Strategy

The CLEP English Literature exam is a skills-based test. Your ultimate task is to demonstrate close reading—the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage. Every answer must be justified by the text itself.

Apply this process:

1. Skim the Questions First: Before reading the passage, glance at the questions. This tells you what to look for (e.g., “the narrator’s attitude,” “the function of the metaphor in line 5”).
2. Read Actively: Annotate mentally or on scratch paper. Underline key images, circle shifts in tone, and note the overall subject and argument.
3. Eliminate Wrong Answers: The test often includes tempting distractors.

• Extreme Language: Answers containing words like “always” or “never” are often incorrect.
• Outside Knowledge Traps: An answer might be true historically but is not supported by the passage.
• Over-Literal Interpretations: Avoid answers that summarize plot without analyzing meaning.

1. Support Your Choice: The correct answer will be the one most directly and fully supported by the evidence in the text.

Common Pitfalls

1. Summarizing Instead of Analyzing: The exam tests analysis, not plot recall. If a question asks for the “effect” or “purpose” of a detail, don’t just describe what it is; explain what it does.

• Correction: Always ask yourself: “What is the author achieving with this choice?”

1. Misidentifying the Literary Period: Confusing Romantic pastoral imagery with Neoclassical formal critique can lead you astray.

• Correction: Use the author’s name (if provided) and the passage’s stylistic hallmarks (diction, form, themes) to anchor it in the correct era.

1. Ignoring the Question’s Scope: Some questions refer to specific lines; others ask about the whole passage. Answering a whole-passage question with evidence from only one line is a mistake.

• Correction: Match the scope of your evidence to the scope of the question.

1. Rushing Through Poetry: Poetry is dense. Skipping a careful read of a complex stanza is the fastest way to miss the meaning.

• Correction: Budget your time to allow for a second, slower reading of poetic passages. Paraphrase difficult lines in your own words.

Summary

• Build a Chronological Framework: Understand the defining features of British literary periods from Medieval to Modern to quickly contextualize any passage.
• Focus on Skills Over Memorization: The exam tests your ability to analyze unfamiliar texts. Author and period knowledge supports this analysis but does not replace close reading.
• Master Poetic and Literary Devices: Be able to identify devices like metaphor, imagery, and symbolism and, crucially, explain their contribution to a work’s meaning and tone.
• Analyze Narrative Technique: In prose and drama, pay close attention to point of view, characterization, and how setting shapes the narrative.
• Employ Strategic Test-Taking: Pre-read questions, eliminate wrong answers (especially extreme or unsupported ones), and always base your final choice on evidence from the passage itself.