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






2. The nonfictional story of a person's life - told by that person.






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






4. Fiction that is set in an alternative reality






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






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






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






8. A work of fiction of middle length - often divided into a few short chapters - such as Henry James's Daisy Miller.






9. The nonfictional story of a person's life. James Boswell's Life of Johnson is one of the most celebrated examples.






10. Disturbing or absurd material presented in a humorous manner - usually with the intention to confront uncomfortable truths. Joseph Heller's Catch-22 is a notable example.






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






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






13. A lengthy narrative that describes the deeds of a heroic figure - often of national or cultural importance - in elevated language. Strictly - the term applies only to verse narratives like Beowulf or Virgil's Aeneid - but it is used to describe prose






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






15. A humorous and often satirical imitation of the style or particular work of another author.






16. 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






17. A novel in which the author's aim is to tell a story that illuminates and draws attention to contemporary social problems with the goal of inciting change for the better. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin - which exposed the horrors of Africa






18. 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.






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






20. 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.






21. 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






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






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






24. 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.






25. 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.






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






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






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






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






30. A short narrative that illustrates a moral by means of allegory.






31. A short poetic composition that describes the thoughts of a single speaker.






32. A play that confronts a contemporary social problem with the intent of changing public opinion on the matter.






33. A genre of fiction that presents an imagined future society that purports to be perfect and utopian but that the author presents to the reader as horrifyingly inhuman.






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






35. 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.






36. 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.






37. A work of didactic literature that aims to influence the reader on a specific social or political issue.






38. 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






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






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






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






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






43. A fictional prose narrative of significant length.






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






45. 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.






46. Fiction that concerns the nature of fiction itself - either by reinterpreting a previous fictional work or by drawing attention to its own fictional status.






47. 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).






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






49. An autobiographical work. Rather than focus exclusively on the author's life - it pays significant attention to the author's involvement in historical events and the characterization of individuals other than the author.






50. A narrative work that reports true events.






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