AP English Literature and Composition Comprehensive Study Guide
AP Exam Review: Exam Structure
The AP Literature exam is a -hour test consisting of two major sections:
An hour-long multiple-choice section based on prose and poetry passages with a total of questions.
A -hour free-response section consisting of essays: - One essay analyzing a poetry passage. - One essay analyzing a prose passage. - One essay analyzing a literary work chosen by the student.
Background: Homeric and Biblical Foundations
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey: - Archetypes: Achilles vs. Odysseus. - Literary Devices: Homeric or epic simile; the epithet.
The Bible: - Creation myth. - The Garden of Eden involving Eve, Adam, and The Serpent. - The story of Cain & Abel. - Moses. - Abraham and Isaac. - The Savior archetype as embodied by Christ.
Classical Literature
Sophocles: Oedipus the King: - The role of tyche (Chance). - The character of the blind prophet Teiresias. - Hubris (excessive pride or defiance toward the gods).
Aristotle’s Poetics: - Catharsis: The purification or purgation of emotions (especially pity and fear). - Anagnorisis: Recognition or discovery. - Peripeteia: A sudden reversal of fortune or change in circumstances.
Anglo-Saxon Period
Key Text: Beowulf.
Literary Devices: - Kenning: A compressed metaphor used as a name for a thing (e.g., "whale-road" for sea). - Alliteration: The repetition of initial consonant sounds. - Caesura: A pause or break within a line of poetry.
Characters and Settings: - Mythic and archetypal figures: Beowulf, Unferth, Wealtheow, and Hrothgar. - Grendel (the archetypal outcast), the haunted mere, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon with his cave and hoard.
Worldview: The text represents dual epistemologies—pre-Christian Norse traditions and Christian perspectives.
Medieval Period
Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (specifically the General Prologue, The Pardoner’s Tale, and The Wife of Bath’s Tale): - Use of end rhyme and iambic pentameter. - Frame narrative: A story within a story structure. - Unreliable narrator: A narrator whose credibility is compromised.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: - Genre: Romance. - The Alliterative revival. - Arthurian legend and Celtic myth influences (e.g., faerie, the Green Man).
Renaissance aka Early Modern Period
Edmund Spenser: The Faerie Queene: - Allegory. - Spenserian stanza: This is a verse form that consists of iambic pentameter lines followed by a line of iambic feet (an alexandrine). The rhyme scheme is ababbcbcc. The first lines produce an effect of formal unity, while the hexameter completes the thought of the stanza.
Sonnets and Sonnet Forms: - Italian/Petrarchean: Perfected by the Italian poet Petrarch; it divides the lines into two sections: an -line stanza (octave) rhyming ABBAABBA, and a -line stanza (sestet) rhyming CDCDCD or CDECDE. - English/Shakespearean: A variation comprised of three quatrains and a concluding couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg. This structure allows for more space to be devoted to the buildup of a subject or problem than the Italian form, followed by just two lines to resolve the poem in a rhyming couplet.
William Shakespeare: Hamlet: - Iambic pentameter and blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter). - Soliloquy: A speech delivered while a character is alone. - Anastrophe: Inverted word order.
John Milton: Paradise Lost: - Satan is presented as a proto-Byronic hero or antihero.
John Donne and the Metaphysicals: - Use of the conceit (an extended, complex metaphor).
Historical Context: - Beginnings of Colonialism and capitalism, impacting people outside Europe. - The "shadow side" of European wealth, knowledge, and civilization.
Age of Reason / 18th Century
Dominant Figures: Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope.
Satire and the Ideal of Wit.
Augustan emphases: Decorum, literary rules, style, classical unities, and poetic diction.
Thomas Gray: Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard: Acts as a tip toward Romanticism through its lyrical nature and place-based meditation on humanity.
Romanticism
Major Authors: Smith, Burns, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Keats.
Core Themes: Emotion, nature, childhood, imagination, solitude, and the Sublime.
Historical Context: Industrial Revolution, French Revolution, and American Revolution.
Form: Lyric odes, sonnets, and place-based meditation.
The Ballad: - Verbatim Definition: A popular narrative song passed down orally. In the English tradition, it usually follows a form of rhymed (abcb) quatrains alternating four-stress and three-stress lines. Folk (or traditional) ballads are anonymous and recount tragic, comic, or heroic stories with emphasis on a central dramatic event (e.g., Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Keats’ "La Belle Dame Sans Merci").
Specific Author Contributions: - Robert Burns: Romanticization of Nature and rustics; using natural subjects for meditations on humanity. - William Blake: Presentation of Satan as a hero; infernal wisdom and progress via opposites. - William Wordsworth: Use of "ordinary language," primitivism, the Sublime, and the central importance of childhood. - Percy Bysshe Shelley: Use of terza rima, passion, imagination; the poet as saint/sage (Orphic tradition, Titans as ancestors, Prometheanism), and apostrophe. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Altered states of consciousness, dream visions, recasting of Christian myth, ballad form, and intentionally archaic diction. - Lord Byron: Use of terza rima and the creation of the Byronic hero. - John Keats: Classical allusions, apostrophe, odes, and a preoccupation with death and mortality. Notable for a unique -line stanza form; "To Autumn" is described as his most perfect ode.
Gothicism: - Texts: Frankenstein and Jane Eyre. - Themes: The double/shadow.
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein: - Frames: Frame narrative and epistolary novel. - Themes: Orientalism, the Promethean archetype, the Sublime, and the doppleganger. - Critique: A feminist critique of the male pursuit of knowledge, power, and the scientific method; reflections on the Industrial Revolution.
Victorians
Robert Browning: Known for the dramatic monologue and interest in extreme psychological states such as madness, criminality, and perversion. Often utilizes an unreliable narrator.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Seen as the last heir to the poetic line running through Keats prior to the break toward Modernism; noted for euphony and elegy.
Matthew Arnold: Characterized by pessimism and nihilism.
New Directions and the Bridge to Modernism
French Symbolism: Baudelaire and others; proto-existentialist visions of despair and decadence (Rimbaud, Wilde); themes of Mallarmé, Verlaine, and ennui.
Oscar Wilde: Interrogation and critique of Victorian hypocrisy, social norms, and the moral order (especially marriage); iconoclastic attitude toward social institutions and usage of the shadow/doppelganger.
Intellectual Influences: Darwin, Nietzsche, and Marx. The conflict between science and religion; the concept of an expanding cosmos vs. a diminishing man.
Other Figures: Thomas Hardy and Gerard Manley Hopkins (sprung rhythm).
W.B. Yeats: Focus on mysticism, psychological symbolism, and the influence of Jung.
World War I Poets: Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, who challenged the "dulce et decorum est" ideal of heroic war.
Other Voices: Rilke and Apollinaire.
Modernism
Major Figures: T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.
Philosophy: Responses to the challenge of meaninglessness and an encounter with the void. Visions of despair paired with a turn toward the "here and now" and the people with us (Samuel Beckett).
Themes: Cycles, circles, images of pointless routine; the resuscitation of old mythologies to invigorate a moribund tradition.
Freud’s Influence: Obsession/mania, return of the repressed, and the "family romance."
Stylistic Features: Fragmentation, collage, juxtaposition, preoccupation with time, and stream of consciousness.
Social Climate: Narrative breakdown, lack of cohesion, and the disintegration of the world.
Existentialism & Literature of the Absurd
Philosophical Core: Existence precedes essence (a reversal of traditional Western philosophical views).
Authors: Kafka, Camus, Beckett, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Ellison.
Themes: The Absurd, alienation, meaninglessness, contingency, anguish, choice, authenticity, and scorn.
Literary Devices: Interior monologue, unreliable narrator, the "pratfall," and Southern Gothic tradition.
Postmodern and Post-Colonial
Chinua Achebe: Critique of colonialism, focusing on the racist dehumanization and objectification of non-European humanity.
N. Scott Momaday: The Way to Rainy Mountain.
Sandra Cisneros: The House on Mango Street, featuring vignettes and a fragmented narrative structure.