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Test your basic knowledge |
CLEP American Literature
Start Test
Study First
Subjects
:
clep
,
literature
Instructions:
Answer 50 questions in 15 minutes.
If you are not ready to take this test, you can
study here
.
Match each statement with the correct term.
Don't refresh. All questions and answers are randomly picked and ordered every time you load a test.
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. Major theme of 20th Century literature.
John Steinbeck
Monologue
Loss of Traditional Values
Thomas Jefferson
2. Unorthodox writers who hung around the bars and coffee houses of San Francisco's North Beach.
Jack London
Beat Writers
Mary Wilkins Freeman
Refrain
3. Famous Poet and Novelist - 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings'
Scientism
Maya Angelou
Prose
Edgar Allen Poe
4. Wrote 'Native Son -' and 'Black Boy' - First Black Best-Seller - Staunch Communist : Believed it was black America's best hope for equality.
Richard Wright
Naturalism
Claude McKay
Foot
5. American novelist - essayist - social critic - painter and spoken performer. Most of his works are autobiographical. Frequently experimented with drugs. He wrote the 'Naked Lunch' and the 'Cities of Red Night'
Vachel Lindsay
Phillip Roth
Jack London
William S. Burroughs
6. Wrote 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' - first American novel to sell a million copies. The most influential book of the 19th century. Credited with starting the Civil War. Most famous American woman of her day.
Ralph Ellison
Calvinism
Maya Angelou
Harriet Beecher Stowe
7. Used to describe literature that was pandered to the polite - refined - and delicate elements of society. Denied the unsavory underbelly of life.
Genteel Tradition
Ernest Hemmingway
Cotton Mather
Monologue
8. Southern Gothic writer. Creates stories that simultaneously shock readers and reflect her strong Catholic faith.
9. A literary mask a writer assumes for the purpose of creating a character in a poem.
Prose
Ezra Pound
Persona
Wonders of the Invisible World
10. (Colonial Period) Stands in direct opposition to the principles - personalities and literary styles of William Bradford and John Winthrop. Did not come to settle the land and establish God's Kingdom - but to trade beaver pelts and live pleasantly. Es
The Day of Doom
John Winthrop
Thomas Morton
Rhythm
11. Chicago School - Work bridges folk poetry and modernist poems. Used music and strong rhythm - Wrote 'The Congo'
Toni Morrison
William Bradford
Robert Lowell
Vachel Lindsay
12. (Colonial Period) Only person to publicly repent his part in the Salem Witch Trials. Published America's first anti-slavery tract.
Samuel Sewall
Booker T. Washington
Beat Movement
Jean Toomer
13. A 14-line poem with a set rhythm and rhyme scheme.
Iambic Pentameter
Sonnet
Persona
Robert Frost
14. New England local color writer - is known primarily for her two collections of stories. 'A Humble Romance' and 'A New England Nun'
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Ernest Hemmingway
Mary Wilkins Freeman
Edward Teller
15. Recluse - agoraphobic - Didn't title her poems. All are designated by numbers. Paved the way for the Imagist movement of the 1920s. Considered on of the founders of Modern American Poetry. Concrete imagery - forceful language - and unique style usher
Countee Cullen
Allen Ginsberg
Emily Dickinson
Loss of Traditional Values
16. A group of lines in a poem. - Lines of poems are grouped into _______s - just as sentences of prose are grouped into paragraphs.
Calvinism
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Stanza
Flannery O'Connor
17. Unrhymed poetry Captures natural rhythm of speech.
Transcendentalism
Blank Verse
Booker T. Washington
Drama
18. (Colonial Period) One of the most brilliant of American thinkers. Theologian and philosopher; vigorous defender of Calvinistic orthodoxy at the end of the Puritan era. Influenced major nineteenth century writers such as Emerson - Hawthorne - Melville
Sarah Orne Jewett
Jonathan Edwards
Edward Teller
Edgar Allen Poe
19. First vice president and second president. Member of the First and Second Continental Congresses. Helped draft the Declaration of Independence. Husband of Abigail Adams.
W.E.B Du Bois
Vachel Lindsay
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
John Adams
20. Wrote 'The Call of the Wild -' 'White Fang -' ' Sea Wolf -' and 'To Build a Fire.' Socialist. Naturalist
Gothic
Melting Pot
Jack London
Loaded Words
21. Wrote 'since feeling is first -' 'somewhere i have never traveled - gladly beyond -' and 'The Enormous Room' - Experimented with : form - punctuation - spelling - typography - grammar - imagery - rhythm - and syntax.
Blank Verse
Puritans (Saints - Separatists)
e.e cummings
Rhyme
22. Wrote 'Richard Cory' - Created poems dealing with historic myths and characters. Known primarily for short - ironic characteristics of ordinary individuals. Won 3 Pulitzers : 'Collected Poems -' 'The Man Who Died Twice -' and 'Tristram'
e.e cummings
Poetry
Edwin Arlington Robinson
William Faulkner
23. (Colonial Period) One of colonial New England's most eminent clergyman. Greatest achievement was as an historian of the Puritan experience. 'Diary of Cotton Mather' - Account of Mather wrestling with sexual temptation to marry a much younger women di
Cotton Mather
T.S Eliot
Transcendental Club
Jonathan Edwards
24. Famous for writing - marriages - divorces and media hype. Wrote 'The Executioner's Song.'
J.D Salinger
Meter
Norman Mailer
End Rhyme vs Internal Rhyme
25. Imagist Poet - Wrote 'In a Station of the Metro -' ' The Pisan Cantos -' 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberly -' and 'Mauberly.' Modeled 'Cantos' after Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass' - Infamous traitor; Staunch supporter of Mussolini during WWII. Didn't speak for the
Beat Writers
William Byrd
Ezra Pound
Edward Teller
26. A regular pattern of words that end with the same sound.
Allegory
Richard Wright
Rhyme Scheme
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
27. Work did not have a political agenda. Wrote 'Their Eyes Were Watching God -' 'Mules and Men -' and 'Jonahs Gourd Vine.' Considered one of the key black writers of the 20th Century.
Lyric Poem
Atavism
Zora Neal Hurston
Emily Dickinson
28. A single sheet of paper printed on one or both sides. 'The Dying Redcoat'
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Realism
Cotton Mather
Broadside
29. A long narrative that represents characters in a high position who take part in a series of adventures of significance.
Epic Story
Benjamin Franklin
John Adams
Narrative Poem
30. Local Colorist Wrote 'The Country of the Pointed Firs' Famous for use of idiomatic language - conservative values and imagery and vivid descriptions of rural New England.
Nativism
Sarah Orne Jewett
Loaded Words
Scientism
31. Father of American Literature - First American writer to achieve an international reputation. Rip Van Winkle (antihero). Legend of Sleepy Hollow. The Devil and Tom Walker. Was 50 years old before his real name appeared on any of his books. Used alias
Aphorisms
Washington Irving
Lyric Poem
Edith Wharton
32. Confessional Poet - Won a Pulitzer for 'Live or Die'
Countee Cullen
Lyric Poem
Anne Sexton
Frank Norris
33. Key intellectual and philosophical voice of 19th-century America. Key player in the transcendentalist movement. First to define what made American poetry American - it is verse that celebrates ordinary experience rather than the epic themes of the pa
T.S Eliot
Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)
Aphorisms
Ralph Waldo Emerson
34. Brief - musical poems that convey a speaker's feelings.
Frederick Douglass
Edith Wharton
The Declaration of Independence
Lyric Poem
35. End : occurs when words at the ends of lines of poetry rhyme. Internal: occurs when words within a sentences share the same sound - such as 'Each narrow cell in which we dwell.'
Robert Benchley - Will Rogers and the Marx Brothers
End Rhyme vs Internal Rhyme
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Allen Ginsberg
36. Won 4 Pulitzers - Top 20th Century Poet - Wrote 'The Road Not Taken -' ' Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening -' and 'Mending Wall'
Mayflower Compact
Robert Frost
Naturalism
Sylvia Plath
37. Produced a number of sketches - poems - and a one-act pay titled 'Cane.'
Jean Toomer
Sylvia Plath
T.S Eliot
The Declaration of Independence
38. Leader of naturalism in American writing. Wrote 'An American Tragedy'
Melting Pot
Saul Bellow
Claude McKay
Theodore Dreiser
39. An organization of the leading transcendentalists living around Boston. They were interested in new developments in theology - philosophy - and literature. Major writers: Ripley - Emerson - Alcott - Fuller - Hawthorne - Thoreau - Channing - Hedge - P
Transcendental Club
Abigail Adams
Darwinism
William Faulkner
40. Wrote 'The House of Mirth -' and 'The Age of Innocence' most famous for 'Ethan Frome' Noted use of indirection and allusion. First women to win a Pulitzer for 'The Age of Innocence' Main themes were upper-class life and the constraints it placed on b
Abigail Adams
Jean Toomer
Edith Wharton
James Fenimore Cooper
41. (Colonial Period) First writer of American Literature. Wrote 'The Generall Historie of Virginia - New England - and The Summer Isles.' Archetypal American.
John Smith
Racialism
Frederick Douglass
Anne Sexton
42. (Colonial Period) Best-known Southern colonial writer. Famous for 'The History of the Dividing Line' and 'The Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover'
Sylvia Plath
Jonathan Edwards
William Byrd
Claude McKay
43. An artistic and intellectual movement originating in Europe in the late 18th Century and characterized by a heightened interest in nature - emphasis on the individual's expression of emotion and imagination - departure from the attitudes and forms of
Stanza
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Romanticism
Carl Sandburg
44. People who sang lyrics as they played string-like instruments.
Henry David Thoreau
Erica Jong
Lyres
Maya Angelou
45. Coined the term 'Beat Generation' - Wrote 'On the Road' - All of his books are Autobiographical
Stephen Crane
Three main colonial era poets
Vachel Lindsay
Jack Kerouac
46. Wrote 'Grapes of Wrath -' 'Of Mice and Men -' and 'East of Eden -' and 'Winter of Our Discontent.' Awarded Nobel Prize for Literature - Pulitzer and and the National Book Award.
John Steinbeck
William S. Burroughs
James Thurbur
Nathaniel Hawthorne
47. Ezra Pound and T.S Eliot
Herman Melville
Flannery O'Connor
Two Most Famous Poets of the 20th Century
Edgar Allen Poe
48. Ranked as top American novelist - even though few of his contemporaries recognized his genius. Moby Dick is considered to be America's greatest prose epic. It is also top contender for best American novel. Wrote the first great romance about the Sout
Herman Melville
Rhythm
Cotton Mather
Flannery O'Connor
49. A group of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of poetry.
Foot
Alice Walker
Cotton Mather
End Rhyme vs Internal Rhyme
50. Clever - memorable sayings.
Three main colonial era poets
Aphorisms
Ralph Ellison
Phillip Roth