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CLEP Common Literary Forms And Genres

Subjects : clep, literature
Instructions:
  • Answer 50 questions in 15 minutes.
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  • Match each statement with the correct term.
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This is a study tool. The 3 wrong answers for each question are randomly chosen from answers to other questions. So, you might find at times the answers obvious, but you will see it re-enforces your understanding as you take the test each time.
1. A humorous and often satirical imitation of the style or particular work of another author.






2. Bertolt Brecht's Marxist approach to theater - which rejects emotional and psychological engagement in favor of critical detachment.






3. Works that express a preference for the natural over the artificial in human culture - and a belief that the life of primitive cultures is preferable to modern lifestyles.






4. A short prose or verse narrative - such as those by Aesop - that illustrates a moral - which often is stated explicitly at the end.






5. Originally - a realistic novel detailing a scoundrel's exploits. The term grew to refer more generally to any novel with a loosely structured - episodic plot that revolves around the adventures of a central character.






6. A poetic work that features the strong rhythms of free versebut is presented on the page in the form of prose - without line breaks.






7. A succinct - witty statement - often in verse. For example - William Wordsworth's observation 'The child is the father of the man.'






8. A story about a heroic figure derived from oral tradition and based partly on fact and partly on fiction.






9. A serious play that ends unhappily for the protagonist.






10. A play consisting of a single act - without intermission and running usually less than an hour.






11. A narrative in which literal meaning corresponds clearly and directly to symbolic meaning. For example - the literal story in John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress






12. A short play based on a biblical story.






13. A particularly compressed and truncated short story. They are rarely longer than 1 -000 words.






14. A story meant to be performed in a theater before an audience. Most are written in dialogue form and are divided into several acts. Many include stage directions and instructions for sets and costumes.






15. An autobiographical poetic genre in which the poet discusses intensely personal subject matter with unusual frankness.






16. An invented narrative - as opposed to one that reports true events.






17. A work that exposes to ridicule the shortcomings of individuals - institutions - or society - often to make a political point. Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels is one of the most well known examples in English.






18. A composition that is meant to be performed. The term often is used interchangeably with play.






19. Traditionally - a folk song telling a story or legend in simple language - often with a refrain.






20. A novel written in the form of letters exchanged by characters in the story - such as Samuel Richardson's Clarissa or Alice Walker's The Color Purple. This form was especially popular in the 1700s.






21. The brief narration of a single event or incident.






22. A nonrealistic story - in verse or prose - that features idealized characters - improbable adventures - and exotic settings.






23. A play from the Middle Ages featuring saints or miraculous appearances by the Virgin Mary.






24. A concise expression of insight or wisdom: 'The vanity of others offends our taste only when it offends our vanity' (Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil).






25. A speech - often in verse - by a lone character. The most famous example being the 'To be or not to be' speech in Shakespeare's Hamlet.






26. Literature intended to instruct or educate. For example - Virgil's Georgics contains farming advice in verse form.






27. A play written in the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries that presents an allegory of the Christian struggle for salvation.






28. A ritualized form of Japanese drama that evolved in the 1300s involving masks and slow - stylized movement.






29. A fiction genre - popularized in the 1940s - with a cynical - disillusioned - loner protagonist.






30. A form of high-energy comedy that plays on confusions and deceptions between characters and features a convoluted and fast-paced plot.






31. Fiction that is set in an alternative reality






32. A work that imitates the style of a previous author - work - or literary genre. Alternatively - the term may refer to a work that contains a hodgepodge of elements or fragments from different sources or influences. It differs from parody in that its






33. A novel that focuses on the social customs of a certain class of people - often with a sharp eye for irony. Jane Austen's novels are prime examples of this genre.






34. A short poetic expression of grief. It differs from an elegy in that it often is embedded within a larger work - is less highly structured - and is meant to be sung.






35. A work of prose fiction that is much shorter than a novel (rarely more than forty pages) and focused more tightly on a single event.






36. A lighthearted play characterized by humor and a happy ending.






37. A celebration of the simple - rustic life of shepherds and shepherdesses - usually written by a sophisticated - urban writer.






38. A novel set in an earlier historical period that features a plot shaped by the historical circumstances of that period.






39. A humorous imitation of a serious work of literature. The humor often arises from the incongruity between the imitation and the work being imitated. For example - Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock uses the high diction of epic poetry to talk abou






40. A formal poem that laments the death of a friend or public figure - or - occasionally - a meditation on death itself. In Greek and Latin poetry - the term applies to a specific type of meter (alternating hexameters and pentameters) regardless of cont






41. A story about the origins of a culture's beliefs and practices - or of supernatural phenomena - usually derived from oral tradition and set in an imagined supernatural past.






42. A narrative work that reports true events.






43. A full-length fictional work that is novelistic in nature but written in verse rather than prose. Examples include Aleksandr Pushkin's Eugene Onegin and Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate.






44. A short pastoral poem in the form of a dialogue between two shepherds. Virgil's Eclogues is the most famous example of this genre.






45. Any composition not written in verse.






46. A form of nonfictional discussion or argument that Michel de Montaigne pioneered in the 1500s.






47. A romance that describes the adventures of medieval knights and celebrates their strict code of honor - loyalty - and respectful devotion to women.






48. A serious lyric poem - often of significant length - that usually conforms to an elaborate metrical structure.






49. A fictional prose narrative of significant length.






50. A German term - meaning 'formation novel -' for a novel about a child or adolescent's development into maturity - with special focus on the protagonist's quest for identity. James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a notable example.