CLEP® practice test

Free CLEP English Literature Practice Test (2026)

This is a set of 25 original practice questions that follow the official CLEP English Literature content outline and its topic weights, each with a short explanation.

  • 25 questions
  • 6 topics from the official outline
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25 questions

Question 1 of 25Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1989) is narrated by Stevens, an English butler who defends his former employer, Lord Darlington, and insists he felt nothing more than respect for Miss Kenton. Readers come to see Stevens as
Question 2 of 25W. H. Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" (1938) describes Brueghel's painting of Icarus, in which a ploughman and a passing ship go calmly on while the boy falls into the sea. The poem's main point is that
Question 3 of 25Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" begins "Come live with me and be my love." Sir Walter Ralegh answered it with "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd," in which the nymph
Question 4 of 25Sir Walter Scott's Waverley (1814), in which a young Englishman is caught up in the Jacobite rising of 1745, is often called the first
Question 5 of 25Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" (1862) tells of Laura, who eats the goblins' fruit and begins to waste away, and her sister Lizzie, who
Question 6 of 25In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Green Knight's axe only nicks Gawain's neck on the third stroke. The small wound is a punishment for
Question 7 of 25In Charles Dickens's Great Expectations (1861), Pip learns that the secret source of his fortune is
Question 8 of 25In King Lear, the story of the Earl of Gloucester, who trusts his scheming son Edmund and turns against his loyal son Edgar, mainly serves to
Question 9 of 25John Osborne's 1956 play, whose hero Jimmy Porter rages against the class system and the dullness of postwar Britain from a shabby one-room flat, is
Question 10 of 25Lord Byron's Don Juan, with its comic rhymes and sudden drops from the lofty to the ridiculous, is written in ottava rima, a stanza of eight lines rhymed
Question 11 of 25Alexander Pope writes in An Essay on Criticism (1711): "True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, / As those move easiest who have learned to dance." These lines are written as
Question 12 of 25In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth says that poetry "takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity." He means that a poem is written
Question 13 of 25W. B. Yeats's "The Second Coming" (1920) begins: "Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;" The falcon that cannot hear the falconer is best read as an image of
Question 14 of 25In the Wakefield Second Shepherds' Play, the thief Mak and his wife hide a stolen sheep in a cradle and pretend it is their newborn baby. This comic scene
Question 15 of 25In A Room of One's Own (1929), Virginia Woolf invents Judith Shakespeare, the playwright's imaginary sister, to show that
Question 16 of 25Read the opening of Shakespeare's Sonnet 73: "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." The phrase "Bare ruined choirs" refers to
Question 17 of 25In Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), Jane's wedding to Mr. Rochester is stopped when it is revealed that
Question 18 of 25William Congreve's The Way of the World (1700), with its witty lovers Mirabell and Millamant and their famous scene of bargaining over the terms of marriage, is a classic example of
Question 19 of 25In Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), Jack says his story is "the whole truth pure and simple," and Algernon replies, "The truth is rarely pure and never simple." This reply is typical of Wilde's
Question 20 of 25Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, a long prose retelling of the legends of King Arthur and his knights, was first printed in 1485 by
Question 21 of 25Edmund Spenser wrote The Faerie Queene in a stanza he invented: nine lines rhymed ababbcbcc, the first eight in iambic pentameter and the ninth in
Question 22 of 25Read these lines from William Blake's "London" (1794): "I wander through each chartered street, / Near where the chartered Thames does flow," and, later, "In every voice, in every ban, / The mind-forged manacles I hear". The word "chartered" suggests that
Question 23 of 25Read the sestet of John Keats's "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" (1816): "Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken; / Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes / He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men / Look'd at each other with a wild surmise— / Silent, upon a peak in Darien." The astronomer and the explorer convey
Question 24 of 25Thomas Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush," written at the close of the 19th century, ends with a thrush singing in a bleak winter landscape: "So little cause for carollings / Of such ecstatic sound / Was written on terrestrial things / Afar or nigh around, / That I could think there trembled through / His happy good-night air / Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware." The speaker's attitude is best described as
Question 25 of 25At the end of James Joyce's "Araby" (Dubliners, 1914), the boy stands in the darkened bazaar: "Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger." Joyce's term for such a moment of sudden insight is

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