Use these CLEP English Literature sample questions to review major British, Commonwealth, and postcolonial authors, literary periods, forms, movements, and passage-analysis skills. The set ranges from medieval literature through twentieth-century and contemporary writing.
Topics Covered
- Medieval literature and Middle English
- Renaissance poetry and the Shakespearean sonnet
- Restoration and eighteenth-century satire
- Romantic poetry
- Victorian poetry
- British Modernism
- Commonwealth and postcolonial literature
- Twentieth-century drama
- Imagery, metaphor, tone, and literary form
Sample Questions
Read the passage and answer Question 1.
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
- A. Beowulf
- B. The Canterbury Tales
- C. Le Morte Darthur
- D. Piers Plowman
- E. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Show Answer
The lines open the General Prologue to Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.
The Middle English passage describes April rain renewing the land before introducing the spring pilgrimage to Canterbury.
Read the passage and answer Questions 2–3.
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
- A. The renewal of political power
- B. The beginning of a journey
- C. The speaker’s increasing wealth
- D. The speaker’s aging and approach toward death
- E. The beloved’s failure to recognize the speaker
Show Answer
Late autumn and fading twilight both represent stages nearing an end.
By applying these images to himself, the speaker presents aging as a gradual movement toward death.
- A. Shakespearean sonnet
- B. Villanelle
- C. Ballad
- D. Heroic couplet
- E. Blank-verse monologue
Show Answer
Sonnet 73 is a fourteen-line English, or Shakespearean, sonnet.
The form uses three quatrains followed by a concluding rhymed couplet.
- A. To offer a practical plan that Swift expects the government to adopt
- B. To praise the economic policies of wealthy landowners
- C. To expose social cruelty and indifference through satire
- D. To defend the narrator’s personal business interests
- E. To argue that poverty is caused entirely by population growth
Show Answer
Swift’s deliberately horrifying proposal is not intended as a sincere policy recommendation.
The extreme argument satirizes the dehumanizing treatment of impoverished Irish people and the cold economic reasoning used to discuss their suffering.
Read the passage and answer Questions 5–6.
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?
- A. They make the speaker sound certain that the tiger is harmless.
- B. They create a tone of awe and fear toward the tiger and its creator.
- C. They establish a comic disagreement between two speakers.
- D. They provide a scientific explanation of the tiger’s anatomy.
- E. They show that the speaker has lost interest in the subject.
Show Answer
The speaker repeatedly asks what kind of immortal creator could form such a powerful and frightening creature.
The unanswered questions combine admiration with dread and emphasize the mystery of creation.
- A. City life and rural life
- B. Reason and political authority
- C. Youth and old age
- D. Speech and silence
- E. Innocence and terrifying experience
Show Answer
The poem’s tiger represents fearful power and belongs to Blake’s Songs of Experience.
The poem later asks whether the same creator made both the tiger and the lamb, establishing a contrast between terrifying experience and gentle innocence.
Read the passage and answer Question 7.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
- A. The physical destruction of the English coastline
- B. The speaker’s desire to become a sailor
- C. The retreat of religious certainty in the modern world
- D. The growth of the British Empire
- E. The return of classical mythology
Show Answer
The speaker imagines faith as a sea that once surrounded the world but is now receding.
The metaphor expresses a Victorian sense of spiritual loss and declining religious certainty.
- A. It is a medieval romance centered on a knight’s pilgrimage.
- B. It is a Restoration comedy written primarily in rhymed couplets.
- C. It is a Victorian novel narrated entirely through letters.
- D. It is a modernist novel that closely follows characters’ shifting thoughts during a single day.
- E. It is a postcolonial novel about the collapse of an African village.
Show Answer
Mrs. Dalloway is a modernist novel by Virginia Woolf set largely during one day in London.
Its narration moves through the memories, perceptions, and interior thoughts of several characters.
- A. Doris Lessing
- B. Chinua Achebe
- C. V. S. Naipaul
- D. Salman Rushdie
- E. Wole Soyinka
Show Answer
Chinua Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart.
The novel portrays Igbo life through Okonkwo’s story and examines the effects of missionary activity and British colonial rule.
- A. The Theatre of the Absurd
- B. Restoration comedy of manners
- C. Elizabethan revenge tragedy
- D. Medieval morality drama
- E. Romantic closet drama
Show Answer
Waiting for Godot is a central example of the Theatre of the Absurd.
Its repetitive action, uncertain setting, circular dialogue, and unresolved waiting challenge conventional expectations about plot and meaning.
How to Use These Questions
For passage questions, support your answer with specific imagery, diction, structure, sound, or figurative language. For knowledge questions, connect authors and works with their periods, genres, themes, and literary movements.
These practice questions are not official CLEP questions and are not endorsed by the College Board.
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