CLEP 
English Literature
College · CLEP English Literature · Certificate available
644 lessons 5.8h runtime 20 units 968 links between lessons Test yourself · 20 quizzes, a mid exam, and a final
StudyWalks exists to make learning clear, accessible, and free.
Short lessons. In order. Built for people who want to understand.
Begin with Unit 1: Reading a Poem: Sound, Meter and Form. It sets the foundation for everything that follows.
Nothing watched yet
Unit 1: Reading a Poem: Sound, Meter and Form 40 lessons, 2 lecture parts
- 0001 What This Exam Asks of a Poem
- 0002 Speaker and Poet
- 0003 Tone: The Attitude Toward the Subject
- 0004 Mood: The Feeling a Poem Creates
- 0005 Diction: Latinate and Anglo-Saxon Words
- 0006 Syntax and Inversion in Verse
- 0007 The Line, Enjambment and the End-Stopped Line
- 0008 The Caesura
- 0009 Meter: Stress, Foot and Line
- 0010 Iambic Pentameter
- 0011 Trochee, Anapest, Dactyl, Spondee
- 0012 Line Lengths: Tetrameter to Hexameter
- 0013 Scanning a Line worked example
- 0014 Accentual Verse and the Old English Line
- 0015 Sprung Rhythm
- 0016 Blank Verse
- 0017 Free Verse
- 0018 Rhyme: End, Internal, Slant, Eye
- 0019 Masculine and Feminine Rhyme
- 0020 Lettering a Rhyme Scheme worked example
- 0021 Alliteration, Assonance, Consonance
- 0022 Onomatopoeia, Euphony, Cacophony
- 0023 Couplet and Heroic Couplet
- 0024 Tercet, Terza Rima, Quatrain
- 0025 Rhyme Royal, Ottava Rima, the Spenserian Stanza
- 0026 The Petrarchan Sonnet
- 0027 The Shakespearean Sonnet
- 0028 The Spenserian Sonnet and the Sonnet Sequence
- 0029 The Volta
- 0030 The Ballad and the Ballad Stanza
- 0031 The Ode: Pindaric, Horatian, Irregular
- 0032 Elegy and Pastoral Elegy
- 0033 Lyric, Song and Aubade
- 0034 Epic and Mock Epic
- 0035 The Dramatic Monologue
- 0036 Villanelle and Other Fixed Forms
- 0037 Naming a Form From the Shape on the Page worked example
- 0038 Hearing Meter in a Passage Under Time worked example
- 0039 The Traps in Form and Meter Questions
- 0040 What a Poem's Form Tells You review
Unit 2: Reading for Meaning: Figure, Tone, Style, Drama and Narrative 38 lessons, 2 lecture parts
- 0101 Simile and Metaphor: Tenor and Vehicle
- 0102 The Conceit and the Metaphysical Conceit
- 0103 Personification and Apostrophe
- 0104 Metonymy and Synecdoche
- 0105 Symbol and Allegory
- 0106 Imagery and Patterns of Imagery
- 0107 Irony: Verbal, Situational, Dramatic
- 0108 Paradox, Oxymoron, Hyperbole, Litotes
- 0109 Allusion
- 0110 Ambiguity and the Pun
- 0111 Following a Pattern of Imagery worked example
- 0112 Tone Words the Exam Uses
- 0113 Reading Tone From Diction worked example
- 0114 Style: What Makes a Writer Recognizable
- 0115 Satire: Horatian and Juvenalian
- 0116 Parody, Burlesque and Mock-Heroic
- 0117 Pastoral
- 0118 Tragedy and the Tragic Hero
- 0119 Comedy: Romantic, Satiric, of Manners
- 0120 Tragicomedy, Masque and Interlude
- 0121 Soliloquy, Aside and Dramatic Irony on Stage
- 0122 Plot, Exposition and Climax
- 0123 Point of View: First Person, Omniscient, Limited
- 0124 Free Indirect Discourse
- 0125 Stream of Consciousness
- 0126 The Unreliable Narrator
- 0127 Epistolary, Picaresque and Gothic Novels
- 0128 The Bildungsroman
- 0129 The Short Story as a Form
- 0130 The Essay, Memoir and Diary
- 0131 What Literary Criticism Is
- 0132 Reading a Passage of Criticism for Its Claim worked example
- 0133 Identifying an Author From a Quotation worked example
- 0134 Recognizing the Period of an Excerpt worked example
- 0135 Answering a "Best Describes" Question
- 0136 Except, Not and Least Questions
- 0137 Reading a Prose Passage in Five Moves worked example
- 0138 How Meaning Questions Are Built review
Unit 3: Old English Literature 18 lessons, 1 lecture part
Lecture: Watch · 23:22
- 0201 The Middle Ages on This Exam
- 0202 Anglo-Saxon England and Its Languages
- 0203 The Scop and Oral Poetry
- 0204 The Old English Line and the Kenning
- 0205 Cædmon's Hymn and Bede's Story of It
- 0206 Bede's Ecclesiastical History
- 0207 Beowulf: The Poem and Its Manuscript
- 0208 Beowulf: Grendel and Heorot
- 0209 Beowulf: Grendel's Mother and the Dragon
- 0210 The Heroic Code: Comitatus, Wergild, Fame
- 0211 Christian and Pagan in Beowulf
- 0212 The Dream of the Rood
- 0213 The Wanderer and the Elegy
- 0214 The Wife's Lament
- 0215 Judith
- 0216 The Anglo-Saxon Riddles
- 0217 Reading an Old English Passage in Translation worked example
- 0218 What Old English Poetry Values review
Unit 4: Geoffrey Chaucer 20 lessons, 1 lecture part
Lecture: Watch · 24:33
- 0301 After 1066: French, Latin and English
- 0302 Middle English and How to Read It
- 0303 Chaucer's Life and Career
- 0304 The Parliament of Fowls and the Dream Vision
- 0305 The Canterbury Tales: Frame and Pilgrimage
- 0306 The General Prologue: The Opening Lines
- 0307 The General Prologue: Portraits and Estates
- 0308 The Knight's Tale and the Miller's Answer
- 0309 The Miller's Tale and the Fabliau
- 0310 The Wife of Bath's Prologue
- 0311 The Wife of Bath's Tale
- 0312 The Franklin's Tale
- 0313 The Pardoner and His Tale
- 0314 The Prioress, the Monk and the Friar
- 0315 Chaucer the Pilgrim and Chaucer the Poet
- 0316 Irony in the General Prologue
- 0317 Chaucer's Verse: Couplet and Rhyme Royal
- 0318 Troilus and Criseyde and the Retraction
- 0319 Reading a Chaucer Portrait worked example
- 0320 What Chaucer Made Possible review
Unit 5: Middle English Beyond Chaucer 16 lessons, 1 lecture part
Lecture: Watch · 21:01
- 0401 Romance and the Matter of Britain
- 0402 Marie de France and the Lai
- 0403 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: The Challenge
- 0404 Gawain: The Temptations and the Girdle
- 0405 Gawain: Pentangle, Bob and Wheel
- 0406 The Alliterative Revival and Piers Plowman
- 0407 Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur
- 0408 Middle English Lyrics
- 0409 The Popular Ballad
- 0410 Mystery Plays and the Cycles
- 0411 The Second Shepherds' Play
- 0412 Everyman and the Morality Play
- 0413 Julian of Norwich
- 0414 Margery Kempe
- 0415 Telling Medieval Genres Apart worked example
- 0416 The Medieval Inheritance review
Unit 6: The Sixteenth Century 22 lessons, 1 lecture part
Lecture: Watch · 26:05
- 0501 The Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Century on This Exam
- 0502 Humanism and the English Renaissance
- 0503 Thomas More's Utopia
- 0504 Wyatt and the English Petrarchan Sonnet
- 0505 "They Flee From Me"
- 0506 Surrey, Blank Verse and the English Sonnet
- 0507 "The Means to Attain Happy Life"
- 0508 Elizabeth I as Writer
- 0509 Sidney's Astrophil and Stella
- 0510 Sidney's Defence of Poesy
- 0511 Spenser's Faerie Queene: Plan and Allegory
- 0512 The Faerie Queene, Book One: Redcrosse
- 0513 Spenser's Amoretti and Epithalamion
- 0514 Marlowe and the Mighty Line
- 0515 Doctor Faustus
- 0516 "The Passionate Shepherd" and Raleigh's Reply
- 0517 Mary Sidney Herbert and the Psalms
- 0518 The Elizabethan Stage and Its Playwrights
- 0519 Kyd and the Revenge Tragedy
- 0520 Reading an Elizabethan Sonnet worked example
- 0521 Allegory in Spenser: A Worked Reading worked example
- 0522 What the Sixteenth Century Built review
Unit 7: William Shakespeare 26 lessons, 1 lecture part
Lecture: Watch · 31:32
- 0601 Shakespeare's Life and the First Folio
- 0602 The Kinds of Play: Comedy, History, Tragedy, Romance
- 0603 The Sonnets: Fair Youth and Dark Lady
- 0604 Sonnet 18
- 0605 Sonnet 73
- 0606 Sonnet 130 and the Anti-Petrarchan Turn
- 0607 A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night
- 0608 Much Ado About Nothing
- 0609 The Merchant of Venice
- 0610 The History Plays: Richard II to Henry V
- 0611 Romeo and Juliet
- 0612 Hamlet: Plot and Problem
- 0613 Hamlet's Soliloquies
- 0614 Othello and Iago
- 0615 King Lear
- 0616 Macbeth
- 0617 Antony and Cleopatra
- 0618 The Tempest and the Romances
- 0619 Shakespeare's Verse and Prose
- 0620 The Fool and the Clown
- 0621 Famous Lines and Their Plays
- 0622 Ben Jonson on Shakespeare
- 0623 Identifying a Shakespeare Play From a Speech worked example
- 0624 Reading a Soliloquy worked example
- 0625 Shakespeare's Comic and Tragic Structures worked example
- 0626 Shakespeare's Place in the Exam review
Unit 8: Donne, Jonson and the Early Seventeenth Century 18 lessons, 1 lecture part
Lecture: Watch · 22:17
- 0701 The Early Seventeenth Century
- 0702 John Donne and Metaphysical Poetry
- 0703 "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"
- 0704 The Holy Sonnets: "Death, Be Not Proud"
- 0705 George Herbert and The Temple
- 0706 Ben Jonson: Poems and Plays
- 0707 The Alchemist and the Comedy of Humours
- 0708 The Cavalier Poets and Carpe Diem
- 0709 Herrick: "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time"
- 0710 Andrew Marvell: "To His Coy Mistress"
- 0711 Aemilia Lanyer
- 0712 Margaret Cavendish
- 0713 Francis Bacon's Essays
- 0714 The King James Bible
- 0715 Jacobean Tragedy: Webster
- 0716 Reading a Metaphysical Conceit worked example
- 0717 Metaphysical or Cavalier? worked example
- 0718 What the Early Seventeenth Century Leaves review
Unit 9: John Milton 14 lessons, 1 lecture part
Lecture: Watch · 18:38
- 0801 Milton's Life, Politics and Blindness
- 0802 "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso"
- 0803 "Lycidas"
- 0804 The Sonnets: "When I Consider"
- 0805 Areopagitica
- 0806 Paradise Lost: Subject, Form and Invocation
- 0807 Paradise Lost: Satan
- 0808 Paradise Lost: Adam, Eve and the Fall
- 0809 Milton's Grand Style
- 0810 Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes
- 0811 The Epic Conventions in Paradise Lost
- 0812 Reading a Passage of Paradise Lost worked example
- 0813 Satan's Readers: The Romantic Reading and Its Critics
- 0814 Why Milton Stands Between Two Periods review
Unit 10: The Restoration 18 lessons, 1 lecture part
Lecture: Watch · 22:53
- 0901 The Restoration and Eighteenth Century on This Exam
- 0902 1660: The Return of the King and the Theatres
- 0903 John Dryden and the Heroic Couplet
- 0904 "Mac Flecknoe"
- 0905 Absalom and Achitophel
- 0906 Dryden as Critic
- 0907 Samuel Pepys's Diary
- 0908 Aphra Behn: Oroonoko
- 0909 Behn the Playwright: The Rover
- 0910 Restoration Comedy of Manners
- 0911 Congreve's The Way of the World
- 0912 Wycherley and The Country Wife
- 0913 Rochester and the Libertine Lyric
- 0914 Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress
- 0915 Women Writers After 1660
- 0916 Reading Restoration Wit worked example
- 0917 Matching Restoration Authors and Works worked example
- 0918 What the Restoration Changed review
Unit 11: The Eighteenth Century 34 lessons, 2 lecture parts
- 1001 The Augustan Age and Neoclassicism
- 1002 Jonathan Swift
- 1003 Gulliver's Travels
- 1004 "A Modest Proposal"
- 1005 Addison, Steele and the Periodical Essay
- 1006 Alexander Pope
- 1007 The Rape of the Lock
- 1008 An Essay on Criticism
- 1009 An Essay on Man
- 1010 Anne Finch
- 1011 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
- 1012 Daniel Defoe and Robinson Crusoe
- 1013 Moll Flanders
- 1014 Samuel Richardson: Pamela and Clarissa
- 1015 Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones
- 1016 Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy
- 1017 The Rise of the Novel
- 1018 Samuel Johnson
- 1019 Johnson's Dictionary
- 1020 Rasselas and The Vanity of Human Wishes
- 1021 Johnson the Critic: The Preface to Shakespeare
- 1022 Boswell's Life of Johnson
- 1023 Oliver Goldsmith
- 1024 Sheridan and The School for Scandal
- 1025 Gay and The Beggar's Opera
- 1026 Thomas Gray's Elegy
- 1027 The Graveyard Poets and the Cult of Sensibility
- 1028 Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative
- 1029 Fanny Burney: Evelina
- 1030 The Gothic Novel Begins
- 1031 Reading a Heroic Couplet Passage worked example
- 1032 Reading Eighteenth-Century Satire worked example
- 1033 Matching Eighteenth-Century Authors and Works worked example
- 1034 The Age of Reason and Its Limits review
Unit 12: The First Romantics 50 lessons, 2 lecture parts
- 1101 The Romantic Period on This Exam
- 1102 Romanticism: What the Word Names
- 1103 Revolution, War and Reform
- 1104 Imagination Against Reason
- 1105 Nature in Romantic Poetry
- 1106 William Blake: Engraver and Poet
- 1107 Songs of Innocence and of Experience
- 1108 "The Lamb" and "The Tyger"
- 1109 The Two Chimney Sweepers
- 1110 "London"
- 1111 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
- 1112 Robert Burns and the Scots Lyric
- 1113 "To a Mouse" and "A Red, Red Rose"
- 1114 Charlotte Smith's Sonnets
- 1115 Anna Laetitia Barbauld
- 1116 Mary Wollstonecraft
- 1117 Lyrical Ballads, 1798
- 1118 The Preface to Lyrical Ballads
- 1119 "Spontaneous Overflow of Powerful Feelings"
- 1120 William Wordsworth's Life
- 1121 "Tintern Abbey"
- 1122 "Tintern Abbey": Memory and Return
- 1123 The Lucy Poems
- 1124 "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"
- 1125 "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge"
- 1126 "The World Is Too Much With Us"
- 1127 The Intimations Ode
- 1128 The Prelude
- 1129 The Prelude and the Revolution
- 1130 Dorothy Wordsworth's Journals
- 1131 Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- 1132 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
- 1133 The Mariner: Albatross and Ballad Form
- 1134 "Kubla Khan"
- 1135 "Frost at Midnight" and the Conversation Poem
- 1136 Christabel
- 1137 Biographia Literaria: Fancy and Imagination
- 1138 Coleridge on Willing Suspension of Disbelief
- 1139 Walter Scott: Poet and Novelist
- 1140 The Romantic Essayists: Lamb, Hazlitt, De Quincey
- 1141 John Clare
- 1142 Blake or Wordsworth? Reading the Difference worked example
- 1143 Reading a Romantic Nature Poem worked example
- 1144 Reading a Blake Lyric worked example
- 1145 The Ballad Revived
- 1146 The Sublime and the Picturesque
- 1147 Matching First-Generation Romantic Works worked example
- 1148 Common Errors About Romanticism
- 1149 The Lake Poets
- 1150 What the First Romantics Claimed for Poetry review
Unit 13: The Second Romantics and Romantic Prose 52 lessons, 2 lecture parts
- 1201 The Second Generation
- 1202 Lord Byron: Life and Legend
- 1203 The Byronic Hero
- 1204 Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
- 1205 Don Juan and Ottava Rima
- 1206 "She Walks in Beauty"
- 1207 Percy Bysshe Shelley
- 1208 "Ozymandias"
- 1209 "Ode to the West Wind"
- 1210 "To a Skylark"
- 1211 Prometheus Unbound
- 1212 Adonais
- 1213 A Defence of Poetry
- 1214 John Keats: Life and Letters
- 1215 Negative Capability
- 1216 "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer"
- 1217 "When I Have Fears"
- 1218 "La Belle Dame sans Merci"
- 1219 The Eve of St. Agnes
- 1220 The Great Odes of 1819
- 1221 "Ode to a Nightingale"
- 1222 "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
- 1223 "Beauty Is Truth, Truth Beauty"
- 1224 "To Autumn"
- 1225 Felicia Hemans
- 1226 Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
- 1227 Frankenstein: Frame and Creature
- 1228 Jane Austen
- 1229 Pride and Prejudice
- 1230 Emma and Persuasion
- 1231 Austen's Irony and Free Indirect Style
- 1232 Northanger Abbey and the Gothic
- 1233 Scott and the Historical Novel
- 1234 Hazlitt's Familiar Essay
- 1235 De Quincey's Confessions
- 1236 Lamb's Essays of Elia
- 1237 Women Poets of the Romantic Era
- 1238 Romantic Hellenism
- 1239 The Romantic Fragment
- 1240 Romantic Irony
- 1241 Reading a Keats Ode worked example
- 1242 Reading a Shelley Lyric worked example
- 1243 Byron's Satiric Voice worked example
- 1244 Austen's Narrator at Work worked example
- 1245 Identifying Romantic Poets From Their Lines worked example
- 1246 Common Errors About the Second Generation
- 1247 The Romantics and Death
- 1248 Keats, Shelley and Byron Abroad
- 1249 The End of the Romantic Period
- 1250 Romantic Prose Beyond the Novel
- 1251 Matching Second-Generation Works worked example
- 1252 Romanticism Weighed review
Unit 14: Victorian Poetry 50 lessons, 2 lecture parts
- 1301 The Victorian Period on This Exam
- 1302 Victoria's Britain: Industry, Empire, Reform
- 1303 Faith and Doubt After Darwin
- 1304 Alfred, Lord Tennyson
- 1305 "Ulysses"
- 1306 "The Lady of Shalott"
- 1307 In Memoriam A.H.H.
- 1308 "Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw"
- 1309 "Break, Break, Break" and "Crossing the Bar"
- 1310 "The Charge of the Light Brigade"
- 1311 Idylls of the King
- 1312 Robert Browning
- 1313 "My Last Duchess"
- 1314 "Porphyria's Lover"
- 1315 "The Bishop Orders His Tomb"
- 1316 "Fra Lippo Lippi" and "Andrea del Sarto"
- 1317 The Ring and the Book
- 1318 Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- 1319 Sonnets From the Portuguese
- 1320 Aurora Leigh
- 1321 "The Cry of the Children"
- 1322 Matthew Arnold the Poet
- 1323 "Dover Beach"
- 1324 Emily Brontë's Poems
- 1325 The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
- 1326 Dante Gabriel Rossetti
- 1327 Christina Rossetti
- 1328 "Goblin Market"
- 1329 William Morris
- 1330 Algernon Charles Swinburne
- 1331 Gerard Manley Hopkins
- 1332 "The Windhover" and "Pied Beauty"
- 1333 "God's Grandeur" and the Terrible Sonnets
- 1334 Thomas Hardy the Poet
- 1335 A. E. Housman: A Shropshire Lad
- 1336 Rudyard Kipling's Verse
- 1337 Edward FitzGerald's Rubaiyat
- 1338 Lewis Carroll and Nonsense Verse
- 1339 Arthur Hugh Clough
- 1340 The Aesthetic Movement in Verse
- 1341 Reading a Dramatic Monologue worked example
- 1342 Reading a Hopkins Poem worked example
- 1343 Tennyson or Browning? worked example
- 1344 Identifying Victorian Poets From Their Lines worked example
- 1345 Victorian Poetry and Doubt
- 1346 Victorian Women Poets
- 1347 Medievalism in Victorian Verse
- 1348 Common Errors About Victorian Poetry
- 1349 Matching Victorian Poems and Poets worked example
- 1350 The Victorian Poem Weighed review
Unit 15: Victorian Fiction, Prose and Drama 52 lessons, 2 lecture parts
- 1401 The Victorian Novel and Its Readers
- 1402 Serial Publication and the Three-Volume Novel
- 1403 Charles Dickens
- 1404 Oliver Twist and the Social Novel
- 1405 David Copperfield and Great Expectations
- 1406 Bleak House and Hard Times
- 1407 A Christmas Carol
- 1408 Dickens's Style and Characters
- 1409 Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre
- 1410 Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights
- 1411 Anne Brontë
- 1412 William Makepeace Thackeray: Vanity Fair
- 1413 Elizabeth Gaskell: Mary Barton and North and South
- 1414 George Eliot
- 1415 Middlemarch
- 1416 Silas Marner and The Mill on the Floss
- 1417 Anthony Trollope
- 1418 Wilkie Collins and the Sensation Novel
- 1419 Thomas Hardy the Novelist
- 1420 Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure
- 1421 Robert Louis Stevenson
- 1422 Lewis Carroll's Alice
- 1423 Thomas Carlyle
- 1424 John Ruskin
- 1425 John Stuart Mill
- 1426 John Henry Newman
- 1427 Matthew Arnold the Critic
- 1428 Culture and Anarchy
- 1429 Walter Pater and Aestheticism
- 1430 Charles Darwin as a Writer
- 1431 Oscar Wilde
- 1432 The Importance of Being Earnest
- 1433 The Picture of Dorian Gray
- 1434 George Bernard Shaw
- 1435 Arms and the Man and Pygmalion
- 1436 Kipling's Fiction
- 1437 The Victorian Short Story
- 1438 The Condition-of-England Question
- 1439 The Woman Question
- 1440 Realism and the Victorian Novel
- 1441 Reading a Victorian Fiction Passage worked example
- 1442 Reading a Victorian Prose Argument worked example
- 1443 Identifying a Victorian Novelist From a Passage worked example
- 1444 Matching Victorian Novels and Novelists worked example
- 1445 The Gothic in Victorian Fiction
- 1446 The End of the Century: Decadence
- 1447 Common Errors About Victorian Fiction
- 1448 Victorian Drama Before Wilde
- 1449 Dickens's Women and the Critics
- 1450 Children's Literature
- 1451 Reading an Epigram in Wilde worked example
- 1452 The Victorian Achievement in Prose review
Unit 16: Modernism 50 lessons, 2 lecture parts
- 1501 The Twentieth Century on This Exam
- 1502 Modernism: The Break and Its Causes
- 1503 Joseph Conrad
- 1504 Heart of Darkness
- 1505 Heart of Darkness: Marlow and the Frame
- 1506 Achebe's Critique of Heart of Darkness
- 1507 W. B. Yeats: Life and Phases
- 1508 Early Yeats: "The Lake Isle of Innisfree"
- 1509 "Easter 1916"
- 1510 "The Second Coming"
- 1511 "Sailing to Byzantium"
- 1512 "Leda and the Swan" and "The Wild Swans at Coole"
- 1513 James Joyce
- 1514 Dubliners and Epiphany
- 1515 "Araby" and "The Dead"
- 1516 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- 1517 Ulysses
- 1518 Virginia Woolf
- 1519 Mrs. Dalloway
- 1520 To the Lighthouse
- 1521 A Room of One's Own
- 1522 D. H. Lawrence
- 1523 Sons and Lovers
- 1524 E. M. Forster
- 1525 A Passage to India and Howards End
- 1526 Katherine Mansfield
- 1527 T. S. Eliot
- 1528 "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
- 1529 The Waste Land
- 1530 The Waste Land: Method and Allusion
- 1531 "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
- 1532 Four Quartets
- 1533 The War Poets
- 1534 Wilfred Owen: "Dulce et Decorum Est"
- 1535 Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke
- 1536 Isaac Rosenberg and Edward Thomas
- 1537 Imagism and Ezra Pound in London
- 1538 The Georgian Poets
- 1539 Modernist Fiction's Techniques
- 1540 The Irish Literary Revival
- 1541 J. M. Synge and Sean O'Casey
- 1542 Reading a Modernist Poem worked example
- 1543 Reading Stream of Consciousness worked example
- 1544 Reading a War Poem worked example
- 1545 Identifying a Modernist From a Passage worked example
- 1546 Matching Modernist Works and Authors worked example
- 1547 Common Errors About Modernism
- 1548 Modernism and the City
- 1549 Bloomsbury
- 1550 What Modernism Broke and Kept review
Unit 17: After Modernism: Britain and Ireland 44 lessons, 2 lecture parts
- 1601 Britain After 1930
- 1602 W. H. Auden
- 1603 "Musée des Beaux Arts" and "September 1, 1939"
- 1604 Louis MacNeice and the Thirties Poets
- 1605 Dylan Thomas
- 1606 Stevie Smith
- 1607 George Orwell
- 1608 Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm
- 1609 Orwell's Essays
- 1610 Aldous Huxley: Brave New World
- 1611 Evelyn Waugh
- 1612 Graham Greene
- 1613 William Golding: Lord of the Flies
- 1614 Samuel Beckett
- 1615 Waiting for Godot
- 1616 The Theatre of the Absurd
- 1617 John Osborne and the Angry Young Men
- 1618 Harold Pinter
- 1619 Tom Stoppard
- 1620 Caryl Churchill
- 1621 Philip Larkin
- 1622 The Movement
- 1623 Ted Hughes
- 1624 Sylvia Plath in England
- 1625 Seamus Heaney
- 1626 "Digging" and the Bog Poems
- 1627 Northern Irish Poetry After Heaney
- 1628 Doris Lessing
- 1629 Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark
- 1630 Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange
- 1631 Angela Carter
- 1632 Kazuo Ishiguro
- 1633 Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes
- 1634 Carol Ann Duffy and Contemporary Poetry
- 1635 Fleur Adcock
- 1636 Postmodernism in British Fiction
- 1637 Reading a Post-1945 Poem by Description worked example
- 1638 Matching Post-1930 Works and Authors worked example
- 1639 Absurd or Realist? Reading Postwar Drama worked example
- 1640 Identifying a Twentieth-Century Writer From a Description worked example
- 1641 Common Errors About Post-1930 Writing
- 1642 Dystopia
- 1643 The Booker Prize Era
- 1644 After Modernism Weighed review
Unit 18: Commonwealth and Postcolonial Writing in English 34 lessons, 2 lecture parts
- 1701 What "Postcolonial" Means on This Exam
- 1702 Empire, Independence and English
- 1703 Chinua Achebe
- 1704 Things Fall Apart
- 1705 Wole Soyinka
- 1706 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and the Language Question
- 1707 Nadine Gordimer
- 1708 J. M. Coetzee
- 1709 Derek Walcott
- 1710 Omeros
- 1711 V. S. Naipaul
- 1712 Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea
- 1713 Kamau Brathwaite and Caribbean Poetry
- 1714 Salman Rushdie
- 1715 Midnight's Children
- 1716 Anita Desai
- 1717 R. K. Narayan and Indian Writing in English
- 1718 Arundhati Roy
- 1719 Margaret Atwood
- 1720 Alice Munro
- 1721 Patrick White and Australian Writing
- 1722 New Zealand: Mansfield to Adcock
- 1723 Writing Back: Rewriting the Classics
- 1724 Hybridity and the Migrant Novel
- 1725 Zadie Smith and Black British Writing
- 1726 Ireland as a Postcolonial Case
- 1727 Doris Lessing's Africa
- 1728 The Nobel Laureates in English Since 1980
- 1729 Reading a Postcolonial Work by Description worked example
- 1730 Matching Postcolonial Authors, Works and Places worked example
- 1731 Writing Back: Three Pairs worked example
- 1732 Common Errors About Postcolonial Writing
- 1733 Kipling Read Back
- 1734 English Literature Beyond England review
Unit 19: Reading Criticism and Identifying Periods 30 lessons, 2 lecture parts
- 1801 The Criticism Question on This Exam
- 1802 Sidney: Poetry Teaches and Delights
- 1803 Dryden and Johnson: Judgment and Nature
- 1804 Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Romantic Theory
- 1805 Shelley's Defence and Keats's Letters
- 1806 Arnold: Criticism and Touchstones
- 1807 Pater and Wilde: Art for Art's Sake
- 1808 Eliot: Tradition and the Objective Correlative
- 1809 Woolf as Critic
- 1810 Close Reading and the New Criticism
- 1811 Feminist Criticism
- 1812 Postcolonial Criticism
- 1813 Reading a Critical Excerpt: Claim, Evidence, Turn worked example
- 1814 Agreeing and Disagreeing With a Critic worked example
- 1815 The Signature of Old English
- 1816 The Signature of Middle English
- 1817 The Signature of Elizabethan Verse
- 1818 The Signature of Metaphysical Verse
- 1819 The Signature of Augustan Verse
- 1820 The Signature of Romantic Verse
- 1821 The Signature of Victorian Verse
- 1822 The Signature of Modernist Writing
- 1823 Spelling, Diction and Date
- 1824 Putting Works in Order worked example
- 1825 Dating an Unfamiliar Passage worked example
- 1826 Which Period? Ten Openings worked example
- 1827 Who Wrote It? Ten Lines worked example
- 1828 The Knowledge Questions: Authors and Works worked example
- 1829 Common Errors on Identification Questions
- 1830 What the Criticism and Period Questions Reward review
Unit 20: Capstone and Course Close 18 lessons, 1 lecture part
Lecture: Watch · 32:13
- 1901 How the Exam Fits Together
- 1902 Timing Ninety-Five Questions in Ninety Minutes
- 1903 The Middle Ages in Review worked example
- 1904 The Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Century in Review worked example
- 1905 The Restoration and Eighteenth Century in Review worked example
- 1906 The Romantic Period in Review worked example
- 1907 The Victorian Period in Review worked example
- 1908 The Twentieth Century in Review worked example
- 1909 Poetry Questions in Review worked example
- 1910 Drama Questions in Review worked example
- 1911 Fiction and Nonfiction Questions in Review worked example
- 1912 A Chronology to Carry worked example
- 1913 Working a Poem Set: A Full Walk-Through review
- 1914 Working a Prose Set: A Full Walk-Through review
- 1915 The Writers This Course Teaches by Description
- 1916 What This Course Does Not Cover
- 1917 Credit, Scores and What Comes Next
- 1918 The Literature After the Exam review
Who this subject is for
- Students preparing for the CLEP English Literature exam
- English and humanities students
- Education majors preparing to teach literature
- Adult learners finishing a degree
- Homeschool students
- Anyone who wants a guided tour of British writing
Why English Literature matters
English Literature follows British writing from Beowulf to the present, and teaches you to read a passage closely enough to place it. It prepares you for:
- Upper-level literature courses
- Shakespeare and period surveys
- Literary analysis and criticism
- Composition and writing
Time to complete
- of lessons (644, measured)
- 5.8 h
- of lectures (31)
- 12.6 h
- learning hours on the certificate, with quizzes and the final
- 25.5 h
Times are measured from the recordings and the exam time limits. Go at your own pace; nothing expires.
Featured pathway · $35
AI Foundations Pathway
Five micro-certificates (AI Literacy, Data Literacy, Critical Thinking, Cybersecurity Essentials and STEM Foundations) plus the Full Certificate in Computer Science. Hold all six and claim the pathway certificate, the badge and a verification number.
Explore the AI Foundations Pathway →Sources for English Literature — the textbook it was written against, and the second source it was checked against.
This is free, and stays free. If it helped, here is what keeps it running.