English Literature Important Multiple Choice Questions Answers

Christian writers like the Beowulf poet looked back on their pagan ancestors with which of the following?

(A) admiration and elegiac sympathy

(B) bewilderment and visceral loathing

(C) nostalgia and ill-concealed envy

(D) bigotry and shallow triumphalism

Question’s Answer: admiration and elegiac sympathy


The use of “whale-road” for sea and “life-house” for body are examples of what literary technique, popular in Old English poetry?

(A) symbolism

(B) metonymy

(C) appositive expression

(D) keening

Question’s Answer: keening


Who would be called the English Homer and father of English poetry?

(A) Geoffrey Chaucer

(B) Sir Thomas Malory

(C) Bede

(D) Caedmon

Question’s Answer: Geoffrey Chaucer


What was vellum?

(A) unrhymed iambie pentameter

(B) the service owed to a lord by his peasants (“villeins”)

(C) parchment made of animal skin

(D) a prized ink used in the illumination of prestigious manuscripts

Question’s Answer: parchment made of animal skin


Only a small proportion of medieval books survive, large numbers having been destroyed in:

(A) the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s

(B) the Peasant Uprising of 1381

(C) the Anglo-Saxon Conquest beginning in the 1450s

(D) the wave of contempt for manuscripts that followed the beginning of printing in 1476

Question’s Answer: the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s


What is the first extended written specimen of Old English?

(A) Boethius’s Consolidation of Philosophy

(B) Saint Jerome’s translation of the Bible

(C) a code of laws promulgated by King Ethelbert

(D) Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People

Question’s Answer: a code of laws promulgated by King Ethelbert


In Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry, what is the fate of those who fail to observe the sacred of blood vengeance?

(A) banishment to Asia

(B) conversion to Christianity

(C) everlasting shame

(D) being buried alive

Question’s Answer: everlasting shame


Which statements is not an accurate description of Old English poetry?

(A) Irony is a mode of perception, as much as it was a figure of speech.

(B) Its formal and dignified use of was distant from everyday use of language

(C) Romantic love is a guiding principle of moral conduct.

(D) Its idiom remained remarkably uniform for nearly three centuries.

Question’s Answer: Romantic love is a guiding principle of moral conduct.


Whose descriptive painting of social surroundings, is strong and vivid, rich in detail, of a less intense quality than that of Dickens and more faithful to average truth?

(a) Thomas Hardy

(b) William Makepeace Thackeray (British novelist)

(c) Jane Austen

(d)  Eliot (English novelist)

Question’s Answer: William Makepeace Thackeray (British novelist)


Which novelist was well-acquainted with the psychology of the Utilitarianism and had readily accepted the “Doctrine of Evolution”?

(a) Virginia Woolf

(b) Thomas Hardy

(c)  Eliot (English novelist)

(d) Charles Dickens

(e) None of these

Question’s Answer:  Eliot (English novelist)


Who has the most famous tragic- comedies to his credit?

(a) William Shakespeare

(b) Alexander Pope (English poet)

(c) Christopher Marlowe

(d) Jonathan Dr Jonathan Swift

(e) None of these

Question’s Answer: William Shakespeare


About whom it is said that his “work is among those in which the men and women of our time have found their own restlessness most accurately mirrored”?

(a) Charles Dickens

(b) Thomas Hardy

(c) David Herbert Lawrence

(d) Leigh Hunt

(e) None of these

Question’s Answer: David Herbert Lawrence


Who had placed the deeper vitality of the William Shakespearean plays in the creation of characters

(a) Dr. Johnson

(b) A.C. Bradley

(c) Dryden

(d) None of these

Question’s Answer: Dryden


Through which character of Paradise Lost, Milton personified his pride & temperament?

(a) Satan

(b) Adam

(c) Eve

(d) None of these

Question’s Answer: Satan

 

 

 


Which hero made his earliest appearance in Celtic literature before becoming a staple subject in French, English, and German lit- eratures?

(A) Beowulf

(B) Caedmon

(C) Arthur

(D) Augustine of Canterbury

Question’s Answer: Arthur


Toward the close of which century did English replace French as the language of conducting business in Parliament and in court of law?

(A) tenth

(B) fourteenth

(C) thirteenth

(D) twelfth

Question’s Answer: twelfth


Popular English adaptations of romances appealed primarily to

(A) the royal family and upper orders of the nobility

(B) agricultural laborers

(C) the lower orders of the nobility

(D) the clergy

Question’s Answer: the lower orders of the nobility


Which royal dynasty was established in the resolution of the so-called War of the Roses and continued through the reign of Elizabeth I ?

(A) Windsor

(B) Tudor

(C) York

(D) Lancaster

Question’s Answer: Tudor


From Which Italian texts might Tudor courtiers have learned the art of intrigue and the keys to gaining and keep- ing power?

(A) Dante’s “Divine Comedy”

(B) Machiavelli’s “The Prince”

(C) Boccaccio’s “Decameron”

(D) Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso”

Question’s Answer: Machiavelli’s “The Prince”


Who written II Cortigiano (The Courtier), a book that was highly influential in the En- glish court, providing subtle guidance on self-display?

(A) Machiavelli

(B) Pirandello

(C) Boccaccio

(D) Castiglione

Question’s Answer: Castiglione


Ancrene Riwl. is a manual of instruction for

(A) translators of French romances

(B) witch-hunters and exorcists

(C) knights preparing for their first tournament

(D) women who have chosen to live as religious recluses

Question’s Answer: women who have chosen to live as religious recluses


The styles of The Owl and the Nightingale and Ancrene Riwle show what about the poetry and prose written around the year 1200?

(A) They were written for sophisticated a d and well-educated readers.

(B) Writing continued to benefit only readers fluent in Latin and French.

(C) a and c only

(D) Their readers’ primary language was English.

Question’s Answer: a and c only


In addition to Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland, the “flowering” of Middle English literature is evident in the works of

Which writers?

(A) Geoffrey of Monmouth

(B) Chrétien de Troyes

(C) the Beowulf poet

(D) the Gawain poet

Question’s Answer: the Gawain poet


Which influential medieval text purported to reveal the secrets of the afterlife?

(A) Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women

(B) Boccaccio’s Decameron

(C) The Dream of the Rood

(D) Dante’s Divine Comedy

Question’s Answer: Dante’s Divine Comedy


Who wrote the book Piers Plowman?

(A) William Langland

(B) Margery Kempe

(C) Sir Thomas Malory

(D) Geoffrey of Monmouth

Question’s Answer: William Langland


Which literary form, developed in the fif- teenth century, personified vices and vir- tues?

(A) the morality play

(B) the heroic epic

(C) the short story

(D) the romance

Question’s Answer: the morality play


Which statements about Julian of Norwich is correct?

(A) She sought unsuccessfully to restore classical paganism

(B) She is the first known woman writer in the English vernacular

(C) She was a virgin martyr

(D) She made pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago

Question’s Answer: She is the first known woman writer in the English vernacular


Which authors is known as a devotee to chivalry, as it is personi- fied in Sir Lancelot?

(A) Julian of Norwich

(B) Sir Thomas Malory

(C) William Langland

(D) Margery Kempe

Question’s Answer: Sir Thomas Malory


Who introduced the art of printing into En- gland?

(A) Elizabeth Eisenstein

(B) Johannes Gutenberg

(C) William Caxton

(D) Henry VIII

Question’s Answer: William Caxton


What is the climax of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain?

(A) King John’s seal of the Magna Carta

(B) the coronation of Henry II

(C) the reign of King Arthur

(D) the marriage of Henry II to Eleanor of Aquitaine

Question’s Answer: the reign of King Arthur


Which sixteenth-century works of English literature was translated into the English language after its first pub- lication in Latin?

(A) Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus

(B) William William Shakespeare’s King Lear

(C) Thomas More’s Utopia

(D) Thomas More’s The History of King Richard III

Question’s Answer: Thomas More’s Utopia


To what does the phrase “the stigma of print” refer?

(A) lead poisoning contracted from handling printer’s ink

(B) the perception among court poets that printed verses were less exclusive

(C) the brutal punishment for printing without a license

(D) all of the above

Question’s Answer: the perception among court poets that printed verses were less exclusive


Which sixteenth-century poets was not a courtier?

(A) Thomas Wyatt

(B) Philip Sidney

(C) George Puttenham

(D) all of the above

Question’s Answer: George Puttenham


Which statements is not an accurate reflection of education during the English Renaissance?

(A) It was aimed primarily at sons of the nobility and gentry.

(B) It was ordered according to the medieval trivium and quadrivium.

(C) It was conducted by tutors in wealth families or in grammar schools.

(D) Its curriculum emphasized ancient Greek, the language of diplomacy, professions, and higher learning.

Question’s Answer: Its curriculum emphasized ancient Greek, the language of diplomacy, professions, and higher learning.


What impulse probably accounts for the rise of distinguished translations of works, such as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, into English

during the sixteenth century?

(A) human reverence for the classics

(B) the belief that the English were direct descendants of the ancient Greeks

(C) pride for the vernacular language

(D) a and c only

Question’s Answer: a and c only


What was the only acknowledged religion in England during the early sixteenth century?

(A) Atheism

(B) Catholicism

(C) Protestantism

(D) Judaism

Question’s Answer: Catholicism


Who began to ignite the embers of dissent against the Catholic church in November 1517 in a movement that came to be known as the Reformation?

(A) Anne Boleyn

(B) Ulrich Zwingli

(C) Martin Luther

(D) John Calvin

Question’s Answer: Martin Luther


In the Defense of Poesy, what did Sidney at- tribute to poetry?

(A) amagical power whereby poetry plays tricks on the reader

(B) a divine power whereby poetry transmits a message from God to the reader

(C) a defensive power whereby poetry and its figurative expressions allow the poet to avoid censorship

(D) a moral power whereby poetry encourages the reader to emulate virtuous models

Question’s Answer: a moral power whereby poetry encourages the reader to emulate virtuous models


The churchyard of St. Paul’s Cathedral was well-known for its:

(A) ruinous condition

(B) bookshops

(C) wine bars

(D) graffiti

Question’s Answer: bookshops


Who owned the rights to a theatrical script?

(A) the playwright(s)

(B) the acting company

(C) the printer

(D) the patron of the acting company, e.g the Lord Chamberlain

Question’s Answer: the acting company


Short plays called_____-staged dialogues on religious, moral, and political themes-were performed by playing compa- nies before the construction of public the- aters.

(A) spectacles

(B) interludes

(C) mysteries

(D) vaudeville

Question’s Answer: interludes


To what subgenre did the Senecan influence give rise, as evidenced in the first English tragedy Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex?

(A) villain tragedy

(B) revenge tragedy

(C) heroic tragedy

(D) poetic tragedy

Question’s Answer: revenge tragedy


What is blank verse?

(A) iambic pentameter in rhyming couplets

(B) free verse, without rhyme or regular meter

(C) unrhymed iambic pentameter

(D) alliterative iambic tetrameter

Question’s Answer: unrhymed iambic pentameter


Which is correct about public theaters in Elizabethan England?

(A) They relied on admission charges, an innovation of the period.

(B) They were located outside the city limits of London

(C) The seating structure was tiered, with placement correlating to ticket cost

(D) all of the above

Question’s Answer: all of the above


Which was not an objection raised against the public theaters in the Elizabethan pe- riod?

(A) They caused excessive noise and traf- fic.

(B) They drew young people away from work.

(C) They excited illicit sexual desires.

(D) They charged too much.

Question’s Answer: They charged too much.


Which writer was not active under both Elizabeth I and James 1?

(A) William William Shakespeare

(B) John Milton

(C) Francis Bacon

(D) John Donne

Question’s Answer: John Milton


What literary work best captures a sense of the political turmoil, particularly regarding the issue of religion, just after the Restora- tion?

(A) Gay’s Beggar’s Opera

(B) Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophe

(C) Pope’s Dunciad

(D) Butler’s Hudibras

Question’s Answer: Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel


In the late seventeenth century, a “battle of the books” erupted between which two groups?

(A) round-earthers and flat-earthers

(B) champions of ancient and modern learning

(C) the Welsh and the Scots

(D) Oxfordians and Baconians

Question’s Answer: champions of ancient and modern learning


Which was not one of the four bodily humours?

(A) cholesterol

(B) blood

(C) choler

(D) phlegm

Question’s Answer: cholesterol


Which poet was a member of the powerful and culturally influential Sidney family?

(A) Mary Wroth

(B) Samuel Daniel

(C) Aemilia Lanyer

(D) George Herbert

Question’s Answer: Mary Wroth


What was the licensing system?

(A) Poets were required to have a univer- sity diploma (the original “poetic li cense”).

(B) All books had to be submitted for offi- cial approval before publication.

(C) Books could be recalled and burned on the basis of anonymous complaints.

(D) All books had to be dedicated to a noble or royal patron.

Question’s Answer: All books had to be submitted for offi- cial approval before publication.


Which was not among the genres promoted by poets such as Jonson, Donne, and Herbert?

(A) the country-house poem

(B) the classical satire

(C) the Petrarchan sonnet

(D) the epigram

Question’s Answer: the Petrarchan sonnet


Which plays was no! written by William Shakespeare in the Jacobean period?

(A) Othello

(B) Antony and Cleopatra

(C) The Tempest

(D) Volpone

Question’s Answer: Volpone


Which poem testifies to the profound doubts and uncertainties attending Donne’s conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism?

(A) “Satire 3”

(B) “Air and Angels”

(C) The Apparition”

(D) “You Don’t Change Horses in the Middle of the Stream”

Question’s Answer: “Satire 3”


What major new prose genre emerged in the Jacobean era?

(A) the novel

(B) the sermon

(C) the intimate essay

(D) the familiar essay

Question’s Answer: the familiar essay


Which female authors of the Jacobean era wrote a work that became the “first” of its kind to be published by an English woman?

(A) Rachel Speght

(B) Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland

(C) Lady Mary Wroth

(D) all of the above

Question’s Answer: all of the above


Which group of radicals got their name from their penchant for prophecy?

(A) the 5th period Monarchists

(B) the Ranters

(C) the Quakers

(D) the Roarers

Question’s Answer: the Ranters


What was one of the first acts of Parliament after the outbreak of hostilities in the First Civil War?

(A) the consolidation of power in an abso- lute monarch

(B) the conversion of the English church to Catholicism

(C) the adoption of English as the official language

(D) the abolishment of public plays and sports

Question’s Answer: the abolishment of public plays and sports


Which themes or subjects was not common in the works of Cavalier poets, such as Thomas Carew, Sir John Denham, Edmund Walter, Sir John Suck- ling, James Shirely, Richard Lovelace, and Robert Herrick?

(A) courtly ideals of the good life

(B) pious devotion to religious virtues

(C) loyalty to the king

(D) carpe diem

Question’s Answer: pious devotion to religious virtues


What was the general subject of the Welsh poet Katherine Philips’s work?

(A) celebrations of the transience of all life and beauty

(B) celebrations of lesbian sexuality in terms that did not imply a male readership

(C) celebrations of religious ecstasy and divine inspiration

(D) celebrations of female friendship in Platonic terms normally reserved for male friendships

Question’s Answer: celebrations of female friendship in Platonic terms normally reserved for male friendships


What was the title of Thomas Hobbes’s defense of absolute sovereignty based on a theory of social contract?

(A) The Litany in a Time of Plague

(B) The Obedience of a Christian Man

(C) The Advancement of Learning

(D) Leviathan

Question’s Answer: Leviathan


What is the delicate balancing act of Marvell’s “Horatian Ode”?

(A) praising feminine virtue whilst mocking the fixation on chastity

(B) celebrating the Restoration whilst re- gretting the frivolity of the new regime

(C) celebrating Cromwell’s victories whilst inviting sympathy for the executed king

(D) satirizing John Milton whilst appearing to praise him

Question’s Answer: celebrating Cromwell’s victories whilst inviting sympathy for the executed king


Which did Milton not ad- vocate in print in the 1640s and 1650s?

(A) the disestablishment of the church and the removal of bishops

(B) the free circulation of ideas without prior censorship

(C) the restoration of the monarchy

(D) the right to divorce on the grounds of incompatibility

Question’s Answer: the restoration of the monarchy


Who written the scholarly biography, Life of Donne?

(A) Katherine Philips

(B) Izaak Walton

(C) John Skelton

(D) Isabella Whitney

Question’s Answer: Izaak Walton


What is the title to Milton’s blank-verse epic that assimilates and critiques the epic tra- dition?

(A) Lycidas

(B) The Beggar’s Opera

(C) The Divine Comedy

(D) Paradise Lost

Question’s Answer: Paradise Lost


Which best describes the doctrine of empiricism?

(A) The search for essential or ultimate principles of reality.

(B) Human perceptions are constructed and reflect structures of political power.

(C) All knowledge is derived from experience.

(D) God is the center of an ordered and just universe.

Question’s Answer: All knowledge is derived from experience.


Against Which principles did Jonathan Dr Jonathan Swift inveigh?

(A) theoretical science

(B) metaphysics

(C) abstract logical deductions

(D) a, b, and c

Question’s Answer: a, b, and c


Whose great Dictionary, published in 1755, included more than 114,000 quotations?

(A) Samuel Johnson

(B) Jonathan Dr Jonathan Swift

(C) William Hogarth

(D) James Boswell

Question’s Answer: Samuel Johnson


What drove William Cowper to break down and become a recluse?

(A) the loss of his fortune in the “South Sea Bubble”

(B) the conviction that he was damned forever

(C) condemnation of his work by Jeremy Collier

(D) his skewering in Pope’s Dunciad

Question’s Answer: the conviction that he was damned forever


According to Samuel Johnson, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for….

(A) love

(B) honor

(C) fun

(D) money

Question’s Answer: money


Which women exposed themselves to scandal by writing racy stories for the popular press?

(A) Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mary Wroth, and Elizabeth Cary

(B) Rachel Speght, Katherine Philips, and Frances Burney

(C) Anne Finch, Anne Killigrew, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

(D) Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood

Question’s Answer: Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood


What name is given to the English literary period that emulated the Rome of Virgil,Horace, and Ovid?

(A) Neo-Romantic

(B) Metaphysical

(C) Romantic

(D) Augusta

Question’s Answer: Augusta


With its forbidden themes of incest, murder,necrophilia, atheism, and torments of sexual

desire, Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto,created which literary genre?

(A) the revenge tragedy

(B) the comedy of manners

(C) the epistolary novel

(D) the Gothic romance

Question’s Answer: the Gothic romance


Which is not indebted to the Gothic genre?

(A) William Beckford’s Vathek

(B) Scottish poet “Tobias Smollett”’s Roderick Randsom

(C) Matthew Lewis’s The Monk

(D) Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian

Question’s Answer: Scottish poet “Tobias Smollett”’s Roderick Randsom


Horace’s doctrine “ut pictura poesis” was interpreted to mean:

(A) A picture is worth a thousand words.

(B) Poetry ought to be a visual as well as a verbal art.

(C) Art should hold a mirror up to nature.

(D) Poetry is the supreme artistic form.

Question’s Answer: Poetry ought to be a visual as well as a verbal art


What was most frequently known as a source of pleasure and an object of inquiry by Augustan poets?

(A) civilization

(B) nature

(C) alcohol

(D) woman

Question’s Answer: nature


What word did writers in this period use to express quickness of mind, inventiveness, a knack for conceiving images and meta phors and for perceiving resemblances be tween things apparently unlike?

(A) sprezzatura

(B) wit

(C) naturalism

(D) gusto

Question’s Answer: wit


Which was probably not a stock phrase in eighteenth-century poetry?

(A) checkered shade

(B) bounding main

(C) shining sword

(D) simian rivalry

Question’s Answer: simian rivalry


Which metrical form was Pope said to have brought to perfection?

(A) the ode

(B) blank verse

(C) the heroic couplet

(D) the sponder

Question’s Answer: the heroic couplet


Which poet, critic and translator brought England a modern literature between 1660 and 17007

(A) Addison

(B) Crabbe

(C) Equiano

(D) Dryden

Question’s Answer: Dryden


Which is not an example of Restoration comedy?

(A) Etherege’s The Man of Mode

(B) Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus

(C) Behn’s The Rover

(D) Wycherley’s The Country Wife

Question’s Answer: Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus


Which group of intellectual women estab- lished literary clubs of their own around 1750 under the leadership of Elizabeth Vesey and Elizabeth Montagu?

(A) the Behnites

(B) the coteries of plenty

(C) the bluestockings

(D) the tattlers and spectators

Question’s Answer: the bluestockings


Which work exposes the frivolity of fashionable London?

(A) Pope’s The Rape of the Lock

(B) Behn’s Oroonoko

(C) Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa

(D) Dr Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels

Question’s Answer: Pope’s The Rape of the Lock


While compiling what sort of book did Richardso7n  conceive of the idea for his Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded?

(A) an instructional manual for manners

(B) a history of everyday life

(C) a book of devotion

(D) a book of model letters

Question’s Answer: an instructional manual for manners


Who was the ancient Gaelic warrior-bard known as by Napoleon and Thomas Jefferson to have been greater than Homer?

(A) Merlin

(B) Taliesin

(C) Decameron

(D) Ossian

Question’s Answer: Decameron


Who wrote The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, a novel that abandons clock time for psychological time?

(A) Laurence Steme

(B) English novelist “Henry Fielding”

(C) Richardso7n

(D) Scottish poet “Tobias Smollett”

Question’s Answer: Laurence Steme


What served as the inspiration for Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poems to the working classes A Song: “Men of England” and En- gland in 1819?

(A) the organization of a working class men’s choral group in Southern En- gland

(B) the Battle of Waterloo

(C) the storming of the Bastille

(D) the Peterloo Massacre

Question’s Answer: the Peterloo Massacre


Who applied the term “Romantic” to the lit- erary period dating from 1785 to 1830?

(A) Wordsworth because he wanted to distinguish his poetry and the poetry of his friends from that of the ancien régime, especially satire

(B) English historians half a century after the period ended

(C) “The Satanic School” of Byron, Percy Shelley, and their followers

(D) Oliver Goldsmith in The Deserted Village (1770)

Question’s Answer: English historians half a century after the period ended


Which poets collaborated on the Lyrical Bal- lads of 1798?

(A) William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Samuel Taylor Coleridge

(B) Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley

(C) Mary Wollstonecraft and William Blake

(D) Dorothy Wordsworth and Sally Ashburner

Question’s Answer: William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Samuel Taylor Coleridge


Looking to the ancient past, many Roman- tic poets identified with the figure of the

(A) bard

(B) skald

(C) minstrel

(D) troubadour

Question’s Answer: bard


Which chilling novel of surveillance and en- trapment had the alternative title Things as They Are?

(A) Jane Austen’s Emma

(B) Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

(C) Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto

(D) William Godwin’s Caleb Williams

Question’s Answer: William Godwin’s Caleb Williams


Thomas and Henrietta Bowdler’s edition of The Family William Shakespeare gave rise to the verb “bowdlerize.” What does it mean?

(A) the misspelling of simple words like “the” and “and”

(B) the modernization of archaic vocabulary

(C) the expansion of female characters

(D) the expurgation of indelicate language

Question’s Answer: the expurgation of indelicate language


What did Byron deride with his scathing reference to “Peddlers,’ and ‘Boats, and “Wagons’!”?

(A) Wordsworth’s devotion to the ordinary and everyday

(B) the clumsiness of William Shakespeare’s plots

(C) the Orientalist fantasies of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

(D) the neo-classical influence of Pope and Dryden

Question’s Answer: Wordsworth’s devotion to the ordinary and everyday


Wordsworth described all good poetry as:

(A) the expression of moral intuition

(B) the polite patter of a corrupted age

(C) the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings

(D) the divine gift of grace

Question’s Answer: the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings


Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto initi- ated which literary tradition?

(A) epistolary novel

(B) Gothic fiction

(C) meta-novel

(D) medieval romance

Question’s Answer: Gothic fiction


Which was a typically Ro mantic means of achieving visionary states?

(A) opium

(B) dreams

(C) childhood

(D) a, b and c

Question’s Answer: a, b and c


Which texts published in the 1790s did not epitomize the radical so- cial thinking stimulated by the French Revo- lution?

(A) Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Men

(B) Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France

(C) Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice

(D) none of the above

Question’s Answer: Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France


Which philosopher had a particular influence on Samuel Taylor Coleridge?

(A) Immanuel Kant

(B) David Hume.

(C) Aristotle

(D) Bertrand Russell

Question’s Answer: Immanuel Kant


Which was not known as a type of the alienated, romantic visionary?

(A) Prometheus

(B) George III

(C) Napoleon

(D) Cain

Question’s Answer: George III


Which factors did not con- tribute to the growth of the reading public in 19th century?

(A) Innovations in retailing, such as the cut-price sale of remaindered books

(B) Technological developments, such as the steam-driven printing press

(C) The notoriety of the “Lake School”

(D) Increased literacy, thanks in large part to Sunday schools

Question’s Answer: The notoriety of the “Lake School”


Which periodical publica- tions (reviews and magazines) first ap- peared in the Romantic era?

(A) London Magazine

(B) The Spectator

(C) The Edinburgh Review

(D) a and c only

Question’s Answer: a and c only


According to a theater licensing act, repealed in 1843, what was meant by “legitimate” drama?

(A) All of the actors were male.

(B) All of the actors were British.

(C) The play was spoken.

(D) The play had to be a full musical or produced in full pantomime.

Question’s Answer: The play was spoken.


Which plays was actually performed on stage?

(A) Byron s Manfred

(B) Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound

(C) Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Remorse

(D) all of the above

Question’s Answer: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Remorse


Which charges were commonly levelled at the novel by its detractors at the dawn of the Romantic era?

(A) Too many of its readers were women.

(B) It required less skill than other genres.

(C) It lacked the classical pedigree of poetry and drama.

(D) all of the above

Question’s Answer: all of the above


Which two writers can be described as writing historical novels?

(A) Sir Walter Scott and Maria Edgeworth

(B) William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Samuel Taylor Coleridge

(C) Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley

(D) Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë

Question’s Answer: Sir Walter Scott and Maria Edgeworth


Which is a typically Ro- mantic poetic form?

(A) the fractal

(B) the figment

(C) the aubade

(D) the fragment

Question’s Answer: the fragment


Who exemplified the role of the “peasant poet”?

(A) John Clare

(B) John Keats (English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets)

(C) Robert Burns

(D) a and c only

Question’s Answer: a and c only


Who in the Romantic period developed a new novelistic language for the workings of the mind in flux?

(A) Maria Edgeworth

(B) Jane Austen

(C) Thomas De Quincey

(D) Sir Walter Scott

Question’s Answer: Jane Austen


What did Thomas Carlyle mean by “Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe”?

(A) Abandon the introspection of the Ro- mantics and turn to the higher moral purpose found in Goethe.

(B) Even a foreign author is better than a homegrown scoundrel.

(C) Britain’s preeminence as a global power will depend on mastery of foreign languages.

(D) In a carefully veiled critique of the mon- archy, Byron and Goethe stand in sym- bolically for Queen Victoria and Charles Darwin respectively.

Question’s Answer: Abandon the introspection of the Ro- mantics and turn to the higher moral purpose found in Goethe


Elizabeth Barrett’s poem The Cry of the Chil dren is concerned with which major issue attendant on the Time of Troubles during the 1830s and 1840s?

(A) chartism

(B) child labor

(C) the prudishness and old-fashioned ideals of her fellow Victorians

(D) insurrection in the colonies

Question’s Answer: child labor


Who were the “Two Nations” referred to in the subtitle of Disraeli’s Sybil (1845)?

(A) the industrial north and the agrarian south

(B) Anglicans and Methodists

(C) England and Ireland

(D) the rich and the poor

Question’s Answer: the rich and the poor


Which novelists best repre- sents the mid-Victorian period’s content- ment with the burgeoning economic prosperity and decreased restiveness over social and political change?

(A) Charles Dickens

(B) Anthony Trollope

(C) John Ruskin

(D) Friedrich Engels

Question’s Answer: Anthony Trollope


What does phrase “White Man’s Bur- den,” coined by Kipling, refer to?

(A) the moral responsibility to bring civilization and Christianity to the peoples of the world

(B) Britain’s manifest destiny to colonize the world

(C) the British need to improve technology and transportation in other parts of the world

(D) the importance of solving economic and social problems in England before tackling the world’s problems

Question’s Answer: Britain’s manifest destiny to colonize the world


What was the relationship between Victo- rian poets and the Romantics?

(A) The Victorians were disgusted by the immorality and narcissism of the Ro- mantics.

(B) The Romantics were seen as gifted but crude artists belonging to a distant, semi-barbarous age.

(C) The Victorians were strongly influenced by the Romantics and experi- enced a sense of belatedness.

(D) The Victorians were aware of no dis- tinction between themselves and the Romantics; the distinction

was only created by critics in the twentieth century.

Question’s Answer: The Victorians were strongly influenced by the Romantics and experi- enced a sense of belatedness.


Experimentation in Which areas of poetic expression characterize Victorian poetry

and allow Victorian poets to represent psychology in a different way?

(A) the use of pictorial description to con- struct visual images to represent the emotion or situation of the poem

(B) perspective, as in the dramatic monologue

(C) all of the above

(D) none of the above: Victorians were not experimental in their poetry.

Question’s Answer: all of the above


What type of writing did Walter Pater de- fine as “the special and opportune art of the modern world”?

(A) the novel

(B) nonfiction prose

(C) the lyric

(D) comic drama

Question’s Answer: nonfiction prose


Which best defines Utili- tarianism?

(A) a farming technique aimed at maximiz- ing productivity with the fewest tools

(B) a philosophy dictating that we should only keep what we use on a daily basis.

(C) a critical methodology stating that all words have a single meaningful function within a given piece of literature

(D) a moral arithmetic, which states that all humans aim to maximize the greatest pleasure to the greatest number

Question’s Answer: a moral arithmetic, which states that all humans aim to maximize the greatest pleasure to the greatest number


Which terms is defined as the application of a scientific attitude of

mind toward studying the Bible, seen as a mere text of history and not an infallibly sacred document?

(A) Critical Inquiry

(B) Higher Criticism

(C) Scientific Bibliology

(D) New Historicism:

Question’s Answer: Higher Criticism


Which authors promoted versions of socialism?

(A) William Morris

(B) John Ruskin

(C) Edward FitzGerald

(D) all but C

Question’s Answer: all but C


Which best describes the general feeling expressed in literature during the last decade of the Victorian era?

(A) raucous celebration mixed with self-congratulatory sophistication

(B) stupass away melancholy and aestheticism

(C) paranoid introspection and cryptic dissent

(D) all of the above

Question’s Answer: stupass away melancholy and aestheticism


Which contemporary discussions on women’s rights did Tennyson’s The Princess address?

(A) the debate on women’s suffrage

(B) the need to enlarge and improve educa- tional opportunities for women, resulting in the establishment of the first women’s college in London

(C)the question of monarchical succession and if a woman should hold royal power

(D) the establishment of a civil divorce court

Question’s Answer: the need to enlarge and improve educa- tional opportunities for women,=resulting in the establishment of the first women’s college in London


What did Victorian journalists mean by terrn- ing certain women “surplus” or “redun- dant”?

(A) They remained unhappily married due to a population imbalance between the sexes

(B) Their willingness to work for low wages resulted in a surplus of textiles, causing them to drop in price.

(C) They were women writers who wrote frequently about similar topics.

(D) They prostituted themselves as a way to make money in a market economy

Question’s Answer: that didn’t provide extensive job oppor tunities to women.They remained unhappily married due to a population imbalance between the sexes


Which Victorian writers regularly published their work in periodi- cals?

(A) Thomas Carlyle

(B) Charles Dickens

(C) Elizabeth Barrett Browning

(D) all of the above: In addition to short fiction,

most Victorian novels appeared se- rialized in periodicals.

Question’s Answer: all of the above: In addition to short fiction,

most Victorian novels appeared se- rialized in periodicals.


What best describes the subject of most Vic- torian novels?

(A) the representation of a large and com- prehensive social world in realistic de- tail

(B) a surrealist exploration of alternate states of consciousness

(C) the attempt of a protagonist to define his or her place in society

(D) a and c

Question’s Answer: a and c


Why did the novel seem a genre particularly well-suited to women?

(A) it did not carry the burden of an august tradition like poetry.

(B) It was seen as a frivolous form where one shouldn’t make serious statements about society.

(C) It often concerned the domestic world with which women were familiar.

(D) all but c

Question’s Answer: all but c


For what do Matthew Amold’s moral invest- ment in nonfiction and Walter Pater’s aes- thetic investment together pave the way?

(A) a renewed secularism in the twentieth century

(B) modern literary criticism

(C) late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century satirical drama

(D) none of the above: Victorian prose was mostly forgotten until recently and had little impact on literature of or after its time.

Question’s Answer: modern literary criticism


Which comic playwrights made fun of Victorian values and preten- sions?

(A) W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan

(B) George Bernard Shaw

(C) Robert Corrigan

(D) all but c

Question’s Answer: all but c


Which phrases best char- acterizes the late-nineteenth century aes- thetic movement which widened the breach between artists and the reading public, sow- ing the seeds of modernism?

(A) art for art’s sake

(B) art for the masses

(C) art for intellect’s sake

(D) art for sale

Question’s Answer: art for art’s sake


What was the impact on literature of the Education Act of 1870, which made elemen- tary schooling compulsory?

(A) the emergence of a mass literate popu- lation at whom a new mass-produced literature could be directed

(B) a new market for basic textbooks which paid better than sophisticated novels or plays

(C) a popular thirst for the “classics,” driv- ing contemporary writers to the margins

(D) none of the above

Question’s Answer: the emergence of a mass literate popu- lation at whom a new mass-produced literature could be directed


Which text exemplifies the anti-Victorianism prevalent in the early twentieth century?

(A) Eminent Victorians

(B) Philistine Victorians

(C) The Way of All Flesh

(D) both a and c

Question’s Answer: both a and c


With which enormously influential perspec- tive or practice is the early-twentieth-cen- tury thinker Sigmund Freud associated?

(A) psychoanalysis

(B) eugenics

(C) phrenology

(D) all of the above

Question’s Answer: psychoanalysis


Who wrote the dystopian novel Nineteen-Eighty-Four in which Newspeak demonstrates the heightened linguistic self consciousness of modernist writers?

(A) Virginia Woolf

(B) George Orwell

(C) Evelyn Waugh

(D) Orson Wells

Question’s Answer: George Orwell


Which novels display post- war nostalgia for past imperial glory?

(A) Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

(B) Paul Scott’s Staying On

(C) Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

(D) b and c

Question’s Answer: Paul Scott’s Staying On


Which thinker had a major impact on early- twentieth-century writers, leading them to reimagine human identity in radically new ways?

(A) Sigmund Freud

(B) Sir James Frazer

(C) Immanuel Kant

(D) all but C

Question’s Answer: all but C


What characteristics of seventeenth-century Metaphysical poetry sparked the enthusi- asm of modernist poets and critics?

(A) its intellectual complexity

(B) its union of thought and passion

(C) its uncompromising engagement with politics

(D) a and b

Question’s Answer: a and b


In the 1930s, younger writers such as W. H. Auden were more______but less_____than older modernists such as Eliot and Pound.

(A) radical; inventive

(B) brash; confident

(C) popular; reverenced

(D) anxious; haunting

Question’s Answer: radical; inventive


Which poet could be described as part of “The Movement” of the 1950s?

(A) Thom Gunn

(B) Dylan Thomas

(C) Philip Larkin

(D) both A and C

Question’s Answer: both A and C


Which writers did not come from Ireland?

(A) W. B. Yeats

(B) Seamus Heaney

(C) Oscar Wilde

(D) none of the above; all came from Ireland

Question’s Answer: none of the above; all came from Ireland


Which phrase indicates the interior flow of thought employed in high-modern literature?

(A) automatic writing

(B) stream of consciousness

(C) total recall

(D) confused daze

Question’s Answer: stream of consciousness


Which is not linked with high modernism in the novel?

(A) narrative realism

(B) free indirect style

(C) irresolute open endings

(D) stream of consciousness

Question’s Answer: narrative realism


Which novel did T. S. Eliot praise for utiliz- ing a new “mythical method” in place of the old

“narrative method” and demonstrates the use of ancient mythology in modernist fiction to think about

“making the modern world possible for art”?

(A) James Ulysses,a Novel  by James Joyce

(B) Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

(C) EM. “A Passage to India”, A Novel by E. M. Forster

(D) Virginia Woolf’s The Waves

Question’s Answer: James Ulysses,a Novel  by James Joyce


Which would be consid- ered post-colonial novelists, defined as com- ing historically after the era of England’s large-scale imperialism?

(A) Rabindranath Tagore

(B) Joseph Conrad

(C) Salman Rushdie

(D) a and c

Question’s Answer: Salman Rushdie


When was the ban finally lifted on David Herbert Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover,written in 1928.

(A) 1960

(C) 2000

(B) 1945

(D) The ban has not yet been formally lifted.

Question’s Answer: 1960


Which was originally the Irish Literary Theatre?

(A) the Irish National Theatre

(B) the Independent Theatre

(C) the Abbey Theatre

(D) both a and c

Question’s Answer: both a and c


What did T. S. Eliot attempt to combine, though not very successfully, in his plays Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party?

(A) lanibic pentameter and sexual innuendo

(B) religious symbolism and society comedy

(C) witty paradoxes and feminist diatribe

(D) all of the above

Question’s Answer: religious symbolism and society comedy


How did one critic sum up Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot?

(A) “kitchen sink drama”

(B) “political correctness gone mad

(C) happens-twice

(D) “better than Cats”

Question’s Answer: happens-twice


Who wrote the introductory Sonnet to Spencer’s Fairy Queen?

(A) Sir Walter Raleigh

(B) Leicester

(C) Sir Philip Sidney

(D) Spencer himself

Question’s Answer: Sir Walter Raleigh


He was a musician in the court of Henry VIII. His aim was to amuse and not moralise. His interludes were hilarious and they paved the way for comedy. Name the writer and his work.

(A) Bishop Bale-King John

(B) Skeleton-Magnificence

(C) John Heywood-The Four Ps

(D) Lindsay-Satire of the Three Estates

Question’s Answer: John Heywood-The Four Ps


Name the dramatist of Campuses, Edition, Love’s Metamorphoses.

(A) Thomas Nash

(B) Robert Greene

(C) Thomas Lodge

(D) John Lyly

Question’s Answer: John Lyly


In what decade did the “angry young men come to prominence on the theatrical scene?

(A) 1910s

(B) 1930s

(C) 1970s

(D) 1950s

Question’s Answer: 1950s


What event allowed mainstream theater companies to commission and perform work that was politically, socially, and sexu- ally controversial without fear of censor- ship?

(A) the abolition of the Lord Chamberlain’s office in 1968

(B) the illegal performance of work by Howard Brenton and Edward Bond

(C) the collapse of liberal humanist consensus in the late 1960s

(D) the foundation of the Field Day Theater Company in 1980

Question’s Answer: the abolition of the Lord Chamberlain’s office in 1968


Which events in and after the 1960s con- tributed significantly to the decentralization of England from London to a more regional focus, ultimately also making way for a less homogenous vision of England and the popularity of post-colonial fiction?

(A) Radio announcers were permitted to speak in regional dialects and multicultural accents.

(B) The Arts Council designated many of its resources to supporting regional arts councils.

(C) Regional radio and television stations appeared throughout the country.

(D) all of the above

Question’s Answer: all of the above


What did Henry James describe as “loose baggy monsters”?

(A) the English

(B) plays

(C) novels

(D) publishers

Question’s Answer: novels


Into how many periods can we divide Chaucer’s works?

(A) Two-French and English

(B) Three French, English and Italian

(C) One-English only

(D) Four-French, English, Italian and Latin

Question’s Answer: Four-French, English, Italian and Latin


Who in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet mumbles a song from the “Book of Songs and Sonnets” known as Total’s Miscellany?

(A) One of the two clowns, a grave-digger

(B) Hamlet himself

(C) Polonius

(D) Gertrude

Question’s Answer: One of the two clowns, a grave-digger


Name the castle where Spenser lived and finished the first three books of Fairy Queen.

(A) Leicester House

(B) Lord Grey’s Castle

(C) Kilcolman

(D) Harvey House

Question’s Answer: Kilcolman


William William Shakespeare was born on

(A) 26 April 1563

(B) 23 April 1563

(C) 23 April 1564

(D) 3 May 1564

Question’s Answer: 23 April 1564


Identify the first English comedy written by a headmaster of Eton.

(A) Grammar Gorton’s Needle

(B) Wit and Science

(C) The Pour Ps

(D) Ralph Roister Roister

Question’s Answer: Ralph Roister Roister


“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves that we are underlings.” Who said this and in which play?

(A) Antony in Julius Caesar

(B) Cassius in Julius Caesar

(C) Cali ban in The Tempest

(D) Antony in Antony and Cleopatra

Question’s Answer: Cassius in Julius Caesar


Whom would you assign the line “Drink to me only with thane eyes.”?

(A) John Lyly

(B) William William Shakespeare

(C) Thomas Nash

(D) Ben Jonson

Question’s Answer: Ben Jonson


One contemporary of Jonson had a bitter and extravagant style. In his Poetaster Jonson gives him a purge which makes him vomit his learned and bombastic words. Who is this poet?

(A) George Chapman

(B) Thomas Dekker

(C) Fournier

(D) Marston

Question’s Answer: Marston


About whom these words are uttered: “Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle: She pass away young.”

(A) Duchess in The Duchess of Mali (Webster)

(B) Juliet in Romeo and Juliet (William Shakespeare)

(C) Cordelier in King Lear (William Shakespeare)

(D) Anne in A Woman Killed with Kindness (Thomas Heywood)

Question’s Answer: Duchess in The Duchess of Mali (Webster)


Name the famous pair of writers who gained popularity by their joint ventures.

(A) Ben Jonson and George Chapman

(B) Beaumont and Fletcher

(C) Fournier and Webster

(D) George Chapman and Marston

Question’s Answer: Beaumont and Fletcher


“Farewell! Othello’s occupation’s gone”, What does this cry signify?

(A) The British Parliament closed the theatre as Puritans came to power

(B) The dramatists were taking other occu- pations

(C) There were no dramatists left after Ben Jonson

(D) People preferred poetry

Question’s Answer: The British Parliament closed the theatre as Puritans came to power


did Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar appear?

(A) 1596

(B) 1580

(C) 1570

(D) 1579

Question’s Answer: 1579


in which of William Shakespeare’s plays the follow- ing lines appear: “Blow, blow, thou winter wind Thou art not so unkind As man’s ingratitude…”?

(A) All’s Well That Ends Well

(B) King Lear

(C) Antony and Cleopatra

(D) As You Like It

Question’s Answer: As You Like It


Which work records Spenser’s experiences of his first visit to England in 1589-90 when he was introduced by Sir Walter Raleigh to the Queen?

(A) Strophes

(B) Amoretti

(C) Prothalamion

(D) Colin Clout’s Come Home Again

Question’s Answer: Colin Clout’s Come Home Again


Name the play in which William Shakespeare and Fletcher collaborated.

(A) The Two Noble Kinsmen

(B) Griselda

(C) Henry VIII

(D) The Maid’s Tragedy

Question’s Answer: Henry VIII


How would you classify The Knight of the Burning Pestle by Beaumont and Fletcher?

(A) Comedy

(B) Farce

(C) Tragic-comedy

(D) Tragedy

Question’s Answer: Farce


This public place was made famous and immortal by William Shakespeare, Seldon, Donne, Beaumont, Fletcher and Ben Jonson. Name it.

(A) The Friday Street Club

(B) Will’s Coffee House

(C) Bread Street Tavern

(D) Mermaid Tavern

Question’s Answer: Mermaid Tavern


Who wrote the book England from Noah to Elizabeth?

(A) William Warner

(B) Michael Drayton

(C) Daniel

(D) Christopher Marlowe

Question’s Answer: William Warner


Barabbas is ruined by Christians. He plans a revenge by resorting to incredible cruel- ties until he falls into a cauldron of boiling water prepared for his enemies. This is in short, the story of a play by Marlowe. Identify the play.

(A) Edward II

(B) The Massacre of Paris

(C) The Jew of Malta

(D) Dido

Question’s Answer: The Jew of Malta


How many books are contained in The Shepherd’s Calendar?

(A) 11

(B) 10

(C) 7

(D) 12

Question’s Answer: 12


In The Shepherd’s Calendar, England is rep- resented as a big sheep farm ruled by

(A) Queen Elizabeth

(B) Shepherded Queen Elisa

(C) Shepherd Queen Lisa

(D) Mother Nature

Question’s Answer: Shepherded Queen Elisa


Which poem of Spenser was praised by Samuel Taylor Coleridge for its “Swan-Like Movement”?

(A) Epithalamion

(B) Strophe

(C) Amoretti

(D) Prothalamjon

Question’s Answer: Prothalamjon


Edmund Spenser is known as the best poet of Elizabethan age. Identify his period,

(A) 1551-1560

(B) 1557-1590

(C) 1552-1599

(D) 1552-1596

Question’s Answer: 1552-1599


Who wrote the romance Rosalinda which supplied the plot for William Shakespeare’s As You Like It?

(A) Lodge

(B) Greene

(C) Lyly

(D) Nash

Question’s Answer: Lodge


Edmund Spenser dedicated his Shepherd’s Calendar to his friend describing him as “the distinguished and virtuous gentleman most worthy of all titles both of learning and chivalry.” Who was this friend?

(A) Sir Philip Sidney

(B) Leicester

(C) Harvey

(D) Sir Walter Raleigh

Question’s Answer: Sir Philip Sidney


Arcadia, a pastoral romance, was the creation of its author to entertain

(A) The queen

(B) His sister, the Countess of Pembroke

(C) His daughter

(D) His friend Spenser

Question’s Answer: His sister, the Countess of Pembroke


How many plays are attributed to William Shakespeare in toot?

(A) 21

(B) 36

(C) 37

(D) 154

Question’s Answer: 37


Which books marks the beginning of William Shakespeare’s success?

(A) Love’s Labor Lost

(B) Venus and Adonis

(C) The Merchant of Venice

(D) Sonnets

Question’s Answer: Venus and Adonis


Name the theatre in which William Shakespeare had shares.

(A) The Universe

(B) The Theatre

(C) The Black friars

(D) The Rose

Question’s Answer: The Black friars


Identify the work by Ruskin which began as a defence of contemporary landscape artist especially Turner?

(A) The Stones of Venice

(B) The Two Paths

(C) Modem Painters

(D) The Seven Lamps of Architecture

Question’s Answer: Modem Painters


Identify the writer who first used blank verse in English poetry?

(A) Sir Thomas Wyatt

(B) William William Shakespeare

(C) Milton

(D) Earl of Surrey

Question’s Answer: Earl of Surrey


The epigraph of The Waste Land is borrowed from?

(A) Virgil

(B) Homer

(C) Seneca

(D) Fetronius

Question’s Answer: Homer


William Shakespeare depended primarily on two sources for his legendary and historical plays. Which is the most important one?

(A) King Arthur’s legend

(B) Legends of Charlemagne

(C) Plutarch Lives

(D) Holinshed’s Chronicles

Question’s Answer: Holinshed’s Chronicles


How many sonnets has William Shakespeare written in toot?

(A) 150

(B) 130

(C) 120

(D) 154

Question’s Answer: 154


Name the romance which is known as by some critics as the first Elizabethan novel.

(A) Rosalinda by Lodge

(B) Jack Wilton or The Unfortunate Traveler by Nash

(C) Jack of Newbury by Delaney

(D) Euphuism’s Golden Legacy by Lodge

Question’s Answer: Jack Wilton or The Unfortunate Traveler by Nash


Queen Elizabeth, it is said, desired to see Falstaff in Love. So at her behest Shakes- peare wrote a comedy entitled.

(A) Taming of the Shrew

(B) Comedy of Errors

(C) Measure for Measure

(D) Merry Wives of Windsor

Question’s Answer: Merry Wives of Windsor


In which play does William Shakespeare introduced us to the world of fairies, with the roguish imp of folklore, Puck?

(A) Twelfth Night

(B) As You Like It

(C) The Tempest

(D) A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Question’s Answer: Twelfth Night


Name the writer of the Elizabethan period who completed Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and collaborated with Jonson and Marston in Eastward Hol

(A) Thomas Dekker

(B) Thomas Heywood

(C) John Webster

(D) George Chapman

Question’s Answer: George Chapman


Which of Ben Jonson’s work is a seething satire on false poets of the age?

(A) Vulpine, The Fox

(B) Cynthia’s Revel

(C) Poetaster

(D) Epicene or The Silent Woman

Question’s Answer: Poetaster


Who among the following was a friend of Edmund Spenser and offered hints for the perpetration of Spenser’s The Fairies Queen indicating a plan of 12 books in all that was never completed?

(A) Bacon

(B) Raleigh

(C) Drayton

(D) Daniel

Question’s Answer: Raleigh


Philoclea and Pamela in The Arcadia’ are the daughters of

(A) Basilisk

(B) Proclus

(C) Musidorus

(D) Earaches

Question’s Answer: Basilisk


Tennyson’s poem ‘In Memoriam was written in memory of?

(A) Wellington

(B) Edward King

(C) A.H. Hallam

(D) P.B. Shelley

Question’s Answer: A.H. Hallam


Who called ‘The Waste Land’ a music of ideas’?

(A) J. C. Ransom

(B) Allen Tate

(C) I. A. Richards

(D) F. R Leavis

Question’s Answer: Allen Tate


  1. S. Eliot has borrowed the term ‘Unreal City’ in the first and third sections from?

(A) Baudelaire

(B) Irving Babbit

(C) Laforgue

(D) Dante

Question’s Answer: Dante


Which myths does not fig- ure in The Waste Land?

(A) Oedipus

(B) Grail Legend of Fisher King

(C) Sysyphus

(D) Philomela

Question’s Answer: Sysyphus


Joe Gargery is Pip’s?

(A) guardian

(B) brother-in-Jaw

(C) brother

(D) cousin

Question’s Answer: guardian


Estella is the daughter of?

(A) Abel Magwitch

(B) Joe Gargery

(C) Miss Havisham

(D) Bentley Drumnile

Question’s Answer: Joe Gargery


Which book of John Ruskin influenced Mahatma Gandhi?

(A) Sesame and Lilies

(B) The Seven Lamps of Architecture

(C) Fors Clavigera

(D) Unto This Laist

Question’s Answer: Unto This Laist


The following lines are an example of ……… image. “The river sweats Oil and tar’

(A) visual

(B) kinetic

(C) sensual

(D) erotic

Question’s Answer: erotic


Which novels has the subtitle ‘A Novel Without a Hero’?

(A) Wuthering Heights

(B) Middlemarch

(C) Vanity Fair

(D) Oliver Twist

Question’s Answer: Vanity Fair


In ‘Leda and the Swan’, who wooes Leda in guise of a swan?

(A) Mars

(B) Bacchus

(C) Zeus

(D) Hercules

Question’s Answer: Bacchus


Graham Greene’s novels are marked by?

(A) Paganism

(B) Protestantism

(C) Catholicism

(D) Buddhism

Question’s Answer: Catholicism


One important feature of Jane Austen’s style is?

(A) boisterous humour

(B) stream of consciousness

(C) subtlety of irony

(D) humour and pathos

Question’s Answer: humour and pathos


The title of the poem “The Second Coming is taken from?

(A) The German mythology

(B) The Irish mythology

(C) The Bible

(D) The Greek mythology

Question’s Answer: The Bible


The main character in Paradise Lost Book 1 and Book II is?

(A) God

(B) Adam

(C) Satan

(D) Eve

Question’s Answer: Satan


In Sons and Lovers, Paul Morel’s mother’s name is?

(A) Susan

(B) Jane

(C) Emily

(D) Gertrude

Question’s Answer: Gertrude


The twins in Lord of the Flies are?

(A) Ralph and Eric

(8) Simon and Eric

(C) Ralph and Jack

(D) Simon and Jack

Question’s Answer: Ralph and Jack


Mr. Jaggers, in Great Expectations, is a

(A) postman

(B) lawyer

(C) Judge

(D) School teacher

Question’s Answer: lawyer


What does ‘I’ stand for in the following line? To Carthage then I came

(A) Buddha

(B) Augustine

(C) Smyrna Merchant

(D) Tiresias

Question’s Answer: Augustine


Who invented the term ‘Sprung rhythm”?

(A) Wordsworth

(B) Tennyson

(C) Browning

(D) Hopkins

Question’s Answer: Hopkins


Who wrote the poem ‘Defence of Lucknow’?

(A) Browning

(B) Tennyson

(C) Rossetti

(D) Swinburne

Question’s Answer: Swinburne


Which plays of William Shakespeare has an epilogue?

(A) Henry IV, PtI

(B) The Tempest

(C) Hamlet

(D) Twelfth Night

Question’s Answer: The Tempest


Hamlet’s famous speech “To be, or not to be; that is the question’ occurs in?

(A) Act II, Scene I

(B) Act III, Scene!

(C) Act IV, Scene III

(D) Act III, Scene III

Question’s Answer: Act III, Scene!


Identify the character in The Tempest who is referred to as an honest old counselor

(A) Gonzalo

(B) Ariel

(C) Alonso

(D) Stephano

Question’s Answer: Gonzalo


What is the sub-title of the play Twelfth Night?

(A) Or, What is you Will

(B) Or, What you Think

(C) Or, What you Like It

(D) Or, What you Will

Question’s Answer: Or, What you Will


Which plays of William Shakespeare, according to T. S. Eliot, is ‘artistic failure’?

(A) The Tempest

(B) Henry IV, Ptl

(C) Hamlet

(D) Twelfth Night

Question’s Answer: Hamlet


Shelley’s Adonais is an elegy on the death of?

(A) Milton

(B) Samuel Taylor Coleridge

(C) Johnson

(D) John Keats

Question’s Answer: John Keats


Which is the first novel of David Herbert Lawrence?

(A) Sons and Lovers

(B) The Trespasser

(C) The White Peacock

(D) Women in Love

Question’s Answer: The White Peacock


In the poem Tintern Abbey, ‘dearest friend” refers to?

(A) Nature

(B) Wye

(C) Samuel Taylor Coleridge

(D) Dorothy

Question’s Answer: Dorothy


Who is Thomas Percy in Henry IV, Pt I?

(A) Earl of Douglas

(B) Earl of March

(C) Earl of Northumberland

(D) Earl of Worcester

Question’s Answer: Earl of Northumberland


Paradise Lost was originally written in?

(A) ten books

(B) eight books

(C) nine books

(D) eleven books

Question’s Answer: eight books


In Pride and Prejudice, Lydia elopes with?

(A) Darcy

(B) William Collins

(C) Wickham

(D) Charles Bingley

Question’s Answer: Wickham


Who coined the phrase ‘Egotistical Sublime”?

(A) William Wordsworth

(B) P. B. Shelley

(C) John Keats (English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets)

(D) S. T. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Question’s Answer: S. T. Samuel Taylor Coleridge


Who is commonly known as ‘Pip’ in Great Expectations?

(A) Philip Pip

(B) Filip Pirip

(C) Philip Pirrip

(D) Philips Pirip

Question’s Answer: Philip Pip


The novel The Power and the Glory is set in?

(A) Germany

(B) Italy

(C) France

(D) Mexico

Question’s Answer: Mexico


Which is Golding’s first novel?

(A) The Inheritors

(B) Pyramid

(C) Pincher Martin

(D) Lord of the Flies

Question’s Answer: Lord of the Flies


Identify the character who is a supporter of Women’s Rights in Sons and Lovers?

(A) Miriam

(B) Annie

(C) Mrs. Morel

(D) Clara Dawes

Question’s Answer: Mrs. Morel


Vanity Fair is a novel by?

(A) W. M.William Makepeace Thackeray (British novelist)

(B) Charles Dickens

(C) Jane Austen

(D) Thomas Hardy

Question’s Answer: W. M.William Makepeace Thackeray (British novelist)


Who, among the following, is not the second generation of British Romantics?

(A) Wordsworth

(B) John Keats

(C) Shelley

(D) Byron

Question’s Answer: Wordsworth


Which poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge is a ballad?

(A) Work Without Hope

(B) Frost at Midnight

(C) Youth and Age

(D) The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Question’s Answer: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner


Identify the writer who was expelled from Oxford for circulating a pamphlet?

(A) Samuel Taylor Coleridge

(B) Charles Lamb (English essayist)

(C) William Hazlitt (English essayist)

(D) Percy Bysshe Shelley

Question’s Answer: Percy Bysshe Shelley


John Keats’s Endymion is dedicated to?

(A) Leigh Hunt

(B) Milton

(C) William Shakespeare

(D) Thomas Chatterton

Question’s Answer: Thomas Chatterton


When the second series of Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb (English essayist) was published?

(A) 1840

(B) 1833

(C) 1834

(D) 1826

Question’s Answer: 1833


Which poets does not belong to the ‘Lake School’?

(A) Robert Southey

(B) Samuel Taylor Coleridge

(C) Wordsworth

(D) John Keats

Question’s Answer: John Keats


___________  was not educated at Christ’s Hospital School, London.

(A) William Wordsworth

(B) S. T. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

(C) Leigh Hunt

(D) Charles Lamb (English essayist)

Question’s Answer: Charles Lamb (English essayist)


Which poem ends with the “I shall but love thee better after death”?

(A) In faith I do not love thee with mine eyes

(B) Ode to a Grecian urn

(C) Let me not to the marriage of correct minds

(D) How do I love thee

Question’s Answer: How do I love thee


Which poet is known as a national hero in Greece?

(A) John Keats (English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets)

(B) Lord Byron

(C) Solan

(D) Sappho

Question’s Answer: Lord Byron


Which kind of poem is Edward Lear linked with?

(A) Nature

(B) Epics

(C) Nonsense

(D) Sonnets

Question’s Answer: Nonsense


A poem that tells a story with plot,setting,and characters

(A) narrative

(B) free verse

(C) lyric

(D) ode

Question’s Answer: narrative


A poem with no meter or rhyme

(A) lyric

(B) ode

(C) narrative

(D) free verse

Question’s Answer: free verse


In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem The rime of the Ancient Mariner’ where were the three gallants going?

(A) A wedding

(B) A funeral

(C) Market

(D) To the races

Question’s Answer: A wedding


Harold Nicholson described which poet as “Very yellow and glum. Perfect manners?

(A) E. E. Cummings

(B) Walt Whitman

(C) John Greenleaf Whittier

(D) T.S. Elliot

Question’s Answer: T.S. Elliot


What was strange about Emily Dickinson?

(A) She wrote in code

(B) She rarely left home

(C) She never attempted to publish her poetry

(D) She wrote her poems in invisible ink

Question’s Answer: She rarely left home


Rupert Brooke wrote his poetry during which conflict?

(A) Boer War

(B) First World War

(C) Korean War

(D) Second World War

Question’s Answer: First World War


In 1996, “A Brave and Startling Truth” was written by which American author?

(A) Robert Hass

(B) Maya Angelou

(C) Jessica Hagdom

(D) Micheal Palmer

Question’s Answer: Maya Angelou


Who wrote about the idyllic ‘Isle of Innisfree?

(A) W. B. Yeats

(B) Ezra Pound

(C) Dylan Thomas

(D) E. E. Cummings

Question’s Answer: W. B. Yeats


The repetition of similar ending sounds is ___ .

(A) alliteration

(B) onomatopoeia

(C) assonance

(D) rhyme

Question’s Answer: rhyme


Applying human qualities to non-human things

(A) alliteration

(B) onomatopoeia

(C) personification

(D) inversion

Question’s Answer: personification


The repetition of beginning consonant sounds  is _______.

(A) rhyme

(B) onomatopoeia

(C) assonance

(D) alliteration

Question’s Answer: alliteration


A comparison of things that are not the same, without using a word like “like” or “as”

(A) personification

(B) simile

(C) metaphor

(D) analogy

Question’s Answer: metaphor


Using “like” or “as” to compare two things that are not alike

(A) simile

(B) metaphor

(C) personification

(D) analogy

Question’s Answer: simile


Using words or letters to imitate sounds

(A) alliteration

(B) simile

(C) onomatopoeia

(D) phonetics

Question’s Answer: onomatopoeia


A description that attracts to one of the five senses is the _________.

(A) visualization

(B) personification

(C) metaphor

(D) imagery

Question’s Answer: imagery


A poem that has meter and rhyme is ___.

(A) narrative

(B) free verse

(C) lyric

(D) ode

Question’s Answer: lyric


Carl Sandburg (American poet) ‘Planked whitefish  having what kind of imagery?

(A)  War

(B) Rural Idyll

(C) Sea scenes

(D) Innocent childhood

Question’s Answer: War


In 1960, The Colossus’ was the first book of poems published by ________ .

(A) Elizabeth Bishop

(B) Laura Jackson

(C) Marianne Moore (American poet)

(D) Sylvia Plath (American poet)

Question’s Answer: Sylvia Plath (American poet)


In his poem Kipling said ‘If you can meet 2 with triumph and……..?

(A) Disaster

(B) Ruin

(C) Glory

(D) victory

Question’s Answer: Disaster


Which of the following is not a literary device used to make poetry look good?

(A) Assonance

(B) Onomatopoeia

(C) Grammar

(D) Rhyme

Question’s Answer: Grammar


What is the earliest surviving European poem?

(A) The Gilgamesh epic

(B) The Homeric epic

(C) The Deluge epic

(D) The Hesiodic ode

Question’s Answer: The Homeric epic


Which is not a poetic tradition?

(B) The Comic

(A) The Occult

(C) The Epic

(D) The Tragic

Question’s Answer: The Occult


What is the study of poetry’s meter and form called?

(A) Rheumatology

(B) Potology

(C) Prosody

(D) Scansion

Question’s Answer: Prosody


Who wrote “The Hound of the Baskervilles” ?

(A) Agatha Christie

(B) Arthur Conan Doyle

(C) PD James

(D) HRyder-Haggard

Question’s Answer: Arthur Conan Doyle


William William Shakespeare is not the author of:

(A) Titus Andronicus

(B) White Devil

(C) Taming of the Shrew

(D) Hamlet

Question’s Answer: White Devil


William Shakespeare composed much of his plays in what sort of verse?

(A) Alliterative verse

(B) Sonnet form

(C) Dactylic hexameter

(D) lambic pentameter

Question’s Answer: lambic pentameter


Which poet invented the concept of the variable foot in poetry?

(A) Gerard Manly Hopkins

(B) Emily Dickinson

(C) William Carlos Williams

(D) Robert Frost.

Question’s Answer: William Carlos Williams


‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day/Thou art more lovely and more temperate… Who wrote this well-known quote?

(A) T.S Eliot

(B) William Shakespeare

(C) Charlotte Bronte

(D) Lord Tennyson

Question’s Answer: William Shakespeare


“the folk ballad date” is a type of poetry that dates back to what century?

(A) The 14th

(C) The 17th

(B) The 12th

(D) The 19th

Question’s Answer: The 12th


‘Did my heart love til now?/ Forswear it, sight/ For 1 never saw a correct beauty until this night’ This famous line comes from which of William Shakespeare’s plays:

(A) Romeo and Juliet

(B) Hamlet

(C) Othello

(D) A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Question’s Answer: Romeo and Juliet


What is a poem called whose first letters of each line spell out a word?

(A) Alliterative

(B) Acrostic

(C) Epic

(D) Haiku

Question’s Answer: Acrostic


Auld Lang Syne is a famous poem by whom?

(A) Sir Walter Scott

(B) Robert Burns

(C) Henry Longfellow

(D) William Butler Yeats

Question’s Answer: Robert Burns


How does “The Oxford Companion to 20th Century Poetry” describe Stephen Dunn?

(A) A poet of middleness

(B) Has some distinction as a critic

(C) One of the leading prairie poets

(D) Capturing a sense of spiritual marooness

Question’s Answer: A poet of middleness


The Cambridge school’ refers to a group who emerged in _____ .

(A) The 1960’s

(B) The 1900’s

(C) The 1920’s

(D) The 1930’s

Question’s Answer: The 1960’s


Which words best describe the way High-Modern Literature makes people feel?

(A) Skeptical

(B) Authoritative

(C) Impressionistic

(D) Both (A) & (C)

Question’s Answer: Both (A) & (C)


“Under Milk Wood” was written by _____.

(A) Anthony Hopkins

(B) Dylan Thomas

(C) Tom Jones

(D) Richard Burton

Question’s Answer: Dylan Thomas


Who wrote Canterbury Tales?

(A) Thomas Lancaster

(B) Dick Whittington

(C) Geoffrey Chaucer

(D) King Richard II

Question’s Answer: Geoffrey Chaucer


______is a late 20th century play written by a woman?

(A) Queen Cristina

(B) Camille

(C) Top Girls

(D) The Homecoming

Question’s Answer: Camille


Which writers wrote historical novels?

(A) Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte

(B) Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley

(C) William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Samuel Taylor Coleridge

(D) Sir Walter Scott and Maria Edgeworth

Question’s Answer: Sir Walter Scott and Maria Edgeworth


Who wrote “Ten Little Niggers?”

(A) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

(B) Agatha Christie

(C) Irvine Welsh

(D) None of above

Question’s Answer: Agatha Christie


Which is not a creation of John Keats (English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets)?

(A) Endymion

(B) To some ladies

(C) To hope

(D) None of above

Question’s Answer: None of above


Who wrote the poems, “On death” and “Women, Wine, and Snuff?”

(A) John Keats (English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets)

(B) John Milton

(C) P. B. Shelley

(D) William Wordsworth

Question’s Answer: John Keats (English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets)


Which is an example of a proverb?

(A) Get a “stake” in our business.

(B) You’re driving me crazy.

(C) The snow was white as cotton.

(D) You can’t have your cake and eat it, too

Question’s Answer: You can’t have your cake and eat it, too


Which is an exaggeration?

(A) Hyperbole

(B) Haiku

(C) Alliteration

(D) Prose

Question’s Answer: Hyperbole


“Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe, With loss of Eden.” This is an extract from which of the following?

(A) Paradise Lost

(B) Samson Agonistes

(C) Paradise Regained

(D) Divorce Tracts

Question’s Answer: Paradise Lost


Which is not a William Shakespeare tragedy?

(A) Titus Andronicus

(B) Othello

(C) Macbeth

(D) None of the above

Question’s Answer: None of the above


Who wrote The Winter’s Tale?’

(A) George Bernard Shaw

(B) William William Shakespeare

(C) Marlowe

(D) John Dryden

Question’s Answer: William William Shakespeare


What is the difference between a simile and a metaphor?

(A) No difference. Simply two different ways in referring to the same thing.

(B) A simile is more descriptive.

(C) A simile must use animals in the com- parison.

(D) A simile uses as or like to make a com- parison and a metaphor doesn’t.

Question’s Answer: A simile uses as or like to make a com- parison and a metaphor doesn’t.


What is the word for a “play on words”?

(A) simile

(B) pun

(C) haiku

(D) metaphor

Question’s Answer: pun


Which denotes an example of alliteration?

(A) Language Arts

(B) I like music.

(C) Peter Piper Picked Peppers

(D) A beautiful scenery with music

Question’s Answer: Peter Piper Picked Peppers


What is the imitation of natural sounds in word form?

(A) Onomatopoeia

(B) Hyperboles

(C) Alliteration

(D) Personification

Question’s Answer: Onomatopoeia


The theme is …??

(A) a plot

(B) the point a writer is trying to make about a subject.

(C) an address

(D) an character

Question’s Answer: the point a writer is trying to make about a subject.


Concentrate on these elements when writ ing a good poem.

(A) theme, purpose, form, and mood

(B) purpose and audience

(C) characters, main idea, and theme

(D) rhyme and reason

Question’s Answer: theme, purpose, form, and mood


Which is not a poetry form?

(A) epic

(B) sonnet

(C) ballad

(D) tale

Question’s Answer: tale


Which is not a poet?

(A) William William Shakespeare

(B) Elizabeth B. Browning

(C) Terry Saylor

(D) Emily Dickinson

Question’s Answer: Terry Saylor


Who has defined ‘poetry’ as a fundamental creative act using languages?

(A) H. W. Longfellow

(B) Ralph Waldo Emerson

(C) William Wordsworth

(D) Dylan Thomas

Question’s Answer: Dylan Thomas


What is a sonnet?

(A) A poem of six lines

(B) A poem of fourteen lines

(C) A poem of twelve lines

(D) A poem of eight lines

Question’s Answer: A poem of fourteen lines


Which is the study of meter, rhythm and intonation of a poem?

(A) Assonance

(B) Allegory

(C) Scansion

(D) Prosody

Question’s Answer: Prosody


Funny poem of five lines is  called as ________.

(A) Quartet

(B) Sextet

(C) Limerick

(D) Palindrome

Question’s Answer: Limerick


How did Wystan Hugh Auden describe poetry?

(A) An awful way to earn a living

(B) The soul exposed

(C) A game of knowledge

(D) An explosion of language

Question’s Answer: A game of knowledge


Which figure of speech is it when a statement is exaggerated in a poem?

(A) Onomatopoeia

(B) Metonymy

(C) Hyperbole

(D) Alliteration

Question’s Answer: Hyperbole


There was aware of her correct love, at length- come riding by – This is a couplet from the Bailiff’s Daughter of Islington. What figure of speech is used by the poet?

(A) Synecdoche

(B) Metaphor

(C) Euphemism

(D) Irony

Question’s Answer: Synecdoche


Which culture is known for their long, rhymic poetic known as Qasidas?

(A) Hindu

(B) Arabic

(C) Celtic

(D) Arameic

Question’s Answer: Arabic


Complete this William Shakespearean line – Let me not to the marriage of correct minds bring:

(A) Inconveniences

(B) Impediments

(C) Worries

(D) Troubles

Question’s Answer: Impediments


Which is a Japanese poetic form?

(A) Tanka

(B) Villanelle

(C) Ode

(D) Jintishi

Question’s Answer: Jintishi


What is the title of the poem that begins thus -‘What is this life, if full of care, we have no time to stand and stare”?

(A) Comfort

(B) Leisure

(C) Relaxation

(D) Tranquility

Question’s Answer: Leisure


Who was known as the Romantic Poet because so many of his poems were about nature?

(A) William Wordsworth

(B) William William Shakespeare

(C) William Morris

(D) William Blake

Question’s Answer: William Wordsworth


What kind of poetry was written by Sassoon and Brooke?

(A) War poems

(B) Romantic

(C) Political satire

(D) Light verse

Question’s Answer: War poems


Ted Hughes was happily married to which American poetess?

(A) Sylvia Plath (American poet)

(B) Mary Oliver

(C) Carolyn Kizer

(D) Marianne Moore (American poet)

Question’s Answer: Sylvia Plath (American poet)


In what form did Dylan Thomas’s ‘Under Milk Wood’ first become known?

(A) Book of poetry

(B) a short film

(C) A stage play

(D) A radio play

Question’s Answer: A radio play


The magazine ‘Contemporary Poetry and Prose’ was inspired by which exhibition?

(A) The Festival of Britain

(B) Drawing the 20th Century

(C) People of the 20th Century

(D) The Surrealist Exhibition

Question’s Answer: The Surrealist Exhibition


Why did ‘Poetry Quarterly’ cease publication in 1953?

(A) Rise in taxation on magazines

(B) Fall in Sales

(C) Owner convicted of fraud

(D) Shortage of paper

Question’s Answer: Owner convicted of fraud


Aldous Huxley was a poet, but was better known as what?

(A) Novelist

(B) Dramatist

(C) Politician

(D) Architect

Question’s Answer: Novelist


Ladies Coupe is a novel by.

(A) Amrita Pritam

(B) Jhumpa Lahiri

(C) Anita Nair

(D) Anita Desai

Question’s Answer: Anita Nair


Whom does Dryden’s Eugenius take up the case for?

(A) the French

(B) the Medievals

(C) the Ancients

(D) the Moderns

Question’s Answer: the Moderns


Of which poet was it said ‘Even if he’s not a great poet, he’s certainly a great something?

(A) Elliot

(B) Brooke

(C) Cummings

(D) Kipling

Question’s Answer: Kipling


“The Everlasting Yea” is linked with which of the following?

(A) Carlyle

(B) Browning

(C) Ruskin

(D) Macaulay

Question’s Answer: Carlyle


In which William Shakespearean play do you find the lines? Men must endure Their going hence, even as their coming hither: Ripeness is all.

(A) Horatio in Hamlet

(B) Brutus in Julius Caesar

(C) Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra

(D) Edgar in King Lear

Question’s Answer: Edgar in King Lear


“Marius, the Epicurean” was the creation of

(A) A.C. Ward

(B) TS. Eliot

(C) Walter Pater

(D) Saintsbury

Question’s Answer: Walter Pater


Whose philosophy is the following? “The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves or: nor all your Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.”

(A) Omar Khayyam

(B) Aristotle

(C) Russel

(D) Epicure

Question’s Answer: Omar Khayyam


Kunstleroman is a novel on the development of

(A) an individual

(B) a woman

(C) a thief

(D) an artist

Question’s Answer: an artist


The Georgian poets are called after______

(A) George V

(B) George IV

(C) George VI

(D)  Eliot (English novelist)

Question’s Answer: George V


Which writers is linked with the concept of ‘tension’ in poetry?

(A) Allen Tate

(B) John Crowe Ransom

(C) Cleanth Brooks

(D) Robert Penn Warren

Question’s Answer: Allen Tate


Who called Shelley A beautiful but ineffec- tual angel beating in a void his luminous wings in vain’?

(A) T.S. Eliot

(B) Cleanth Brooks

(C) Lockhart

(D) Arnold

Question’s Answer: Arnold


Who criticized Paradise Lost for its lack of human interest?

(A) Pope

(B) Arnold

(C) Johnson

(D) Eliot

Question’s Answer: Johnson


Asolando was the creation of______

(A) Browning

(B) Scott

(C) Shelley

(D) John Keats

Question’s Answer: Browning


Which novels ends with the word “Tomorrow”?

(A) The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

(B) God of Small Things

(C) Lady Chatterley’s Lover

(D) Jude the Obscure

Question’s Answer: God of Small Things


Morose and Cutbeard are characters in________

(A) The Silent Woman

(B) Everyman in His Humour

(C) Volpone

(D) The Alchemist

Question’s Answer: The Silent Woman


The Gunny Sack was the creation of______

(A) Rohinton Mistry

(B) Vikram Seth

(C) VS. Naipaul

(D) M.G. Vassanji

Question’s Answer: M.G. Vassanji


Eric Blair wrote under the pen name______

(A) George Orwell

(B) William Golding

(C) Oscar Wilde

(D) O.Henry

Question’s Answer: George Orwell


Who of the following did not belong to the “Lost Generation”?

(A) Henry James

(B) Ezra Pound

(C) F. Scott Fitzgerald

(D) Ernest Hemingway

Question’s Answer: Henry James


Name Salman Rushdie’s latest Novel.

(A) The Moor’s Last Sigh

(B) Satonic Verses

(C) The Ground beneath Her Feet

(D) Fury

Question’s Answer: Fury


Of the following novels one does not portray the Gandhian Age and the impact of Gandhi. Which one?

(A) KA. Abbas’s Inquilab

(B) R.K. Narayan’s The Dark Room

(C) Vena Chitale’s In Transit

(D) K Nagarajan’s Chronicles of Kedaram

Question’s Answer: R.K. Narayan’s The Dark Room


______introduced the concept of ‘defamiliarization’.

(A) Mikhail Bakhtin

(B) Roland Barthes

(C) Jan Mukarovsky

(D) Viktor Shklovsky

Question’s Answer: Viktor Shklovsky


Who introduced Rabindranath Tagore to European readers?

(A) T.S. Eliot

(B) W.B. Yeats

(C) Ezra Pound

(D) Harold Bloom

Question’s Answer: W.B. Yeats


Who wrote “A Tale of a Tub?”

(A) Dickens

(B) Defoe

(C) Hardy

(D) Dr Jonathan Swift

Question’s Answer: Dr Jonathan Swift


Which school of critics have been called Neo-Aristotleians?

(A) Myth Criticism

(B) Chicago Critics

(C) New Criticism

(D) New Historicism

Question’s Answer: Chicago Critics


Who made this statement “An aged man is a paltry thing”?

(A) Wystan Hugh Auden

(B) TS. Eliot

(C) W.B. Yeats

(D) Philip larkin

Question’s Answer: W.B. Yeats


Who wrote the book Raj?

(A) Shobha De

(B) Rama Mehta

(C) Geeta Mehta

(D) Nargis Dalai

Question’s Answer: Geeta Mehta


Dominique Lapierre wrote an appealing ac- count of the sordid squalor of an Indian city.Identify the city.

(B) Delhi

(A) Calcutta

(C) Udaipur

(D) Bombay

Question’s Answer: Bombay


Who wrote the book following poems? “The Gift of India”, “Bangle-seller”, “The Anthem of Love”, “Palanquin Bearers”

(A) Kamala Das

(B) Nissim Ezekiel

(C) Toru Dutt

(D) Sarojini Naidu

Question’s Answer: Sarojini Naidu


Who wrote the hard-hitting poem “Sita Speak” indicating the society for the injus- tice meted out to women down the ages

(A) Sarojini Naidu

(B) Kamala Das

(C) P.Lai

(D) Bina Agarwal

Question’s Answer: Bina Agarwal


In Which poems of Ezekiel do we get a moving picture of a mother’s suffering?

(A) The Couple’

(B) The Visitor’

(C) ‘Night of the Scorpion’

(D) ‘Philosophy’

Question’s Answer: ‘Night of the Scorpion


Who wrote the book Two Virgins?

(A) Kamala Markandaya

(B) Shastri Deshpande

(C) Anita Desai

(D) Kamala Das

Question’s Answer: Kamala Markandaya


Name the Indo-English novelist who wrote A Suitable Boy.

(A) Amitav Ghose

(B) Vikram Seth

(C) Upamanyu Chatterjee

(D) Anita Desai

Question’s Answer: Vikram Seth


Who wrote the books listed below?  The Foreigner, The Apprentice, The Last Laby rinth, The City and the River?

(A) Arun Joshi

(B) Amitav Ghose

(C) Dom Moraes

(D) Rath P. Jhabvala

Question’s Answer: Arun Joshi


Which of the following is the collection of short stories written by Bhabani Shattacharya?

(A) So Many Hungers

(B) A Dream in Hawaii

(C) Shadow from Ladakh

(D) Sen Hawk

Question’s Answer: Sen Hawk


In which novel does R.K. Narayan focus on family planning?

(A) The Painter of Signs

(B) Mr. Sampath

(C) Bachelor of Arts

(D) The Guide

Question’s Answer: The Painter of Signs


In the Guide we come across a dancer. What is her name?

(A) Rosie

(B) Bharati

(C) Daisy

(D) Savitri

Question’s Answer: Rosie


Who came up with these words? “Woman is the earth, air, ether, sound;woman is the microcosm of the mind “?

(A) Kamala Markandaya

(B) R.K. Narayan

(C) Raja Rao

(D) Kamala Das

Question’s Answer: Raja Rao


Arthur Symons wrote about this person, “All the life of the tiny figure seemed to concen- trate itself in the eyes: they turned towards beauty as the sunflower turns towards the sun.” Who is the person referred to?

(A) Toru Dutt

(B) Aru Dutt

(C) Rabindra Nath Tagore

(D) Sarojini Naidu

Question’s Answer: Sarojini Naidu


H.A.L. Fisher wrote about this person.”…. this child of the green valley of the Ganges has by sheer force of native genius earned for herself the right to be enrolled in the great fellowship of English poets.” Who is the poet?

(A) Sarojini Naidu

(B) Michael Madhusudan’

(C) Toru Dutt

(D) Manmohan Ghose

Question’s Answer: Toru Dutt


“The Lake of Palms”, “A History of Civilization of Ancient India”, “The Slave-Girl of Agra” are the works of ______.

(A) Romesh Chander Dutt

(B) Manmohan Ghose

(C) Bankim Chandra Chatterjee

(D) Sharat Chandra

Question’s Answer: Romesh Chander Dutt


Which of the following is a collection of Anita Desai’s short stories?

(A) Cry, the Peacock

(B) Games at Twilight

(C) Village by the Sea

(D) Voices in the City

Question’s Answer: Voices in the City


Who wrote Jejurithe Commonwealth Prize winner work?

(A) Shiv K. Kumar

(B) Jayant Mahapatra

(C) Keki N. Daruwala

(D) Arun Kolatkar

Question’s Answer: Arun Kolatkar


In which of Anita Desai’s novel an insane wife kills her husband?

(A) Cry, The Peacock

(B) In Custody

(C) Voices in The City

(D) Baumgartner’s Bombay

Question’s Answer: Cry, The Peacock


In which novel does the hero sing the refrain? “This is the machine age, sons This is the machine age

We are the men who will master it”?

(A) The Sword and The Sickle

(B) The Big Heart

(C) Two Leaves and a Bud

(D) The Road

Question’s Answer: The Big Heart


Who was the first recipient of the Sahitya Academi Award for English literature?

(A) Mulk Raj Anand

(B) Nayantara Sehgal

(C) Raja Rao

(D) RK. Narayan

Question’s Answer: RK. Narayan


Following novels except one, describe the condition of Westerners living in India Mark the one which does not.

(A) Heat and Dust

(B) “A Passage to India”, A Novel by E. M. Forster

(C) Coffer Dam

(D) The Princess

Question’s Answer: The Princess


Which novels focuses on the question of rape?

(A) Some Inner Fury

(B) Voices in The City

(C) The Bending Vine

(D) A Time to Be Happy

Question’s Answer: The Bending Vine


Who wrote the book the following novels: A Bend in The Ganges, The Princes, Distant Drums, Devil’s Wind, A Combat of Shadows?

(A) Manohar Malgaonkar

(B) Bhabani Bhattacharya

(C) Mulk Raj Anand

(D) Salman Rushdie

Question’s Answer: Manohar Malgaonkar


Who wrote “Our Casuarina Tree” a splendid John Keatsian poem?

(A) Sri Aurobindo

(B) Romesh Chander Dut

(C) Swami Vivekanand

(D) Toru Dutt

Question’s Answer: Toru Dutt


Browning’s The Ring and the Book is a long- poem having about 21,000 lines, but Aurobindo’s Savitri is longer. How many lines are there in the epic?

(A) 21,500

(B) 24,000

(C) 30,000

(D) 22,000

Question’s Answer: 24,000


Toru Dutt, Romesh Chander Dutt and Aurobindo, all wrote about one theme from the Mahabharata . Identify the story which the three found irresistible.

(A) Kama and Kunti

(B) Nal-Damyanti

(C) Gandhari

(D) Savitri

Question’s Answer: Savitri


Who of the following was highly influenced by French Romanticism, French language and literature?

(A) Romesh Chander Dutt

(B) Michael Madhusudan Dutt

(C) Govind Dutt

(D) Toru Dutt

Question’s Answer: Toru Dutt


The “Fakir of hungheera”  is a long poem  of the _________. The poem is

often hailed as a “Competent narrative verse with Byronic echoes.”

(A) Toru Dutt

(B) Michael Madhusudan Dutt

(C) Henry Derozio

(D) Hasan Ali

Question’s Answer: Henry Derozio


He was the first Indian poet to put out a regular collection of English poetry.

He also ran an English newspaper called “The Hindu.”

(A) Kashiprasad Ghose

(B) Mohan Lai

(C) Romesh Chander Dutt

(D) Michael Madhusudan Dutt

Question’s Answer: Kashiprasad Ghose


__________  is the creation of Michael Madhusudan Dutt.

(A) The Captive Ladie

(B) The Shair and Other Poems

(C) Bianca

(D) Lays of Ancient India

Question’s Answer: The Captive Ladie


What is the full title of “Aurobindo’s Savitri”?

(A) Savitri-An Epic

(B) Savitri

(C) Savitri-A Poem in Three Parts

(D) Savitri-A and a Symbol

Question’s Answer: Savitri-A and a Symbol


Who is the poet of “Kali, the Mother.”?

(A) Sri Aurobindo

(B) Subramaniam Bharathi

(C) Swami Ramakrishna Paramhans

(D) Swami Vivekanand

Question’s Answer: Swami Vivekanand


He is a Sahitya Akademi Award Winner and he loves to write for children. Who is he?

(A) R. K. Narayan

(B) Ruskin Bond

(C) Manohar Malgaonkar

(D) Upamanyu Chatterjee

Question’s Answer: Ruskin Bond


Whose autobiography is entitled My Father’s Son?

(A) Nirad Chaudhury

(B) Frank Moraes

(C) Dom Moraes

(D) V.S. Naipaul

Question’s Answer: Dom Moraes


Mulk Raj Anand, about one of his female characters says, “Gauri is my tribute to In- In which novel does

dian womanhood” Gauri appear?

(A) The Road

(B) The Sword and The Sickle

(C) Untouchable

(D) The Old Woman and The Cow

Question’s Answer: The Old Woman and The Cow


Name the author who has been described by a critic as an “outsider inside.”

(A) Ruth Jhabvala

(B) Salman Rushdie

(C) Nirad C.Chaudhary

(D)  Anita Desai

Question’s Answer: Ruth Jhabvala


Following novels, except one, describes the condition of Indians settled abroad Mark the one which does not.

(A) The Nowhere Man

(B) The Guide

(C) The Serpent And The Rope

(D) Bye-Bye, Blackbird

Question’s Answer: The Guide


The Angel of Misfortune is a poem of about 5000 lines, written by Nagesh Vishwanath Pai. Whose story is narrated in this book?

(A) Saturn, the Dark Angel

(B) King Vikramaditya

(C) King Arthur of the Holy Grail

(D) Kamadeva

Question’s Answer: King Vikramaditya


Name the author of The Gardener, The Fugitive, Chitra, Sacrifice, The Post Office.

(A) Romesh Chander Dutt

(B) Bankim Chandra

(C) Aurobindo Ghose

(D) Rabindra Nath Tagore

Question’s Answer: Rabindra Nath Tagore


Name the two prizes, one in literature and another in History, awarded to young Aurobindo while studying in England

(A) Butterworth in Literature and Bedford in History

(B) Bookers in Literature and Butterworth in History

(C) Pulitzer Prizes in Literature and Bedford Prize in History

Question’s Answer: Pulitzer Prizes in Literature and Bedford Prize in History


Who Murugan, The Tiller and Kandan, the Patriot, Jatadharan and The Next Rung?

(A) ShankerRam

(B) K.S. Venkataramani

(C) Humayun Kabir

(D) K. Subba Rao

Question’s Answer: K.S. Venkataramani


The Devil’s Wind is a historical novel by _________ and depicts the events of our First War of Independence (1857 mutiny). Who wrote the book this novel?

(A) Shanker Ram

(B) Sasthi Brata

(C) R.K. Narayan

(D) Manohar Malgaonkar

Question’s Answer: Manohar Malgaonkar


Which novel tells  the Bengal famine?

(A) A Time to be Happy

(B) A Handful of

(C) So Many Hungers

(D) Athawar House

Question’s Answer: So Many Hungers


Who wrote Ilion?

(A) Virgil

(B) Homer

(C) Aurobindo

(D) Rabindra Nath Tagore

Question’s Answer: Aurobindo


Who wrote the book Love of Dust?

(A) Ruth P. Jhabvala

(B) Humayun Kabir

(C) K.S. Venkataramani

(D) Shanker Ram

Question’s Answer: Shanker Ram


The term ‘stream-of-consciousness’ was first used by which of the following?______.

(A) James Joyce

(B) Virginia Woolf

(C) William James

(D) T.S. Eliot

Question’s Answer: William James


“Milton” is a symbolic poem by______.

(A) Yeats

(B) Gray

(C) Blake

(D) Auden

Question’s Answer: Blake


Which is Ngugi wa Thoingo’s novel writ- ten against the backdrop of Mau Mau Rebellion?

(A) Weep Not, Child

(B) A Grain of Wheat

(C) Petals of Blood

(D) All of these

Question’s Answer: A Grain of Wheat


The Great Indian Novel is a reworking of which of the following?

(A) The Ramayana

(B) Kathasaritsagara

(C) The Mahabharata

(D) Panchatantra

Question’s Answer: The Mahabharata


The rhyme scheme of a Spenserian stanza is_______.

(A) abbcabbcc

(B) ababbcbcd

(C) abbaabbaa

(D) ababbebec

Question’s Answer: ababbebec


Who called Kyd “Sporting Kyd”?

(A) Dr. Johnson

(B) Ben Jonson

(C) T.S. Eliot

(D) Dryden

Question’s Answer: Ben Jonson


Angry Young Man is the autobiography of_______.

(A) John Osborne

(B) Kingsley Amis

(C) Leslie Paul

(D) John Wain

Question’s Answer: Leslie Paul


Caesar and Cleopatra is a play by______.

(A) William Shakespeare

(B) Dryden

(C) Bernard Shaw

(D) Drinkwater

Question’s Answer: Bernard Shaw


Esemplastic in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s theory refers to______.

(A) shaping power

(B) flexible

(C) fancy

(D) force of imagination

Question’s Answer: shaping power


“And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.”

These lines  are taken from aa poem by which of the following poet?

(A) R.S. Thomas

(B) Philip Larkin

(C) Dylan Thomas

(D) Robert Graves

Question’s Answer: Dylan Thomas


The setting of Hardy’s The Dynasts is______.

(A) Napoleanic wars

(B) Spanish Civil War

(C) World War I

(D) American Civil War

Question’s Answer: Napoleanic wars


Who wrote the verse drama Becket?

(A) Oscar Wilde

(B) Osborne

(C) Tennyson

(D) Yeats

Question’s Answer: Tennyson


Who are the Trench poets?

  1. Siegfried Sassoon
  2. Issac Rosenberg
  3. Rupert Brooke
  4. Wilfred Owen
  5. Wystan Hugh Auden

Where do you find these lines, “When composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline”?

(A) Biographia Literaria

(B) Arnold’s Essays in Criticism

(C) Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry

(D) F.R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition

Question’s Answer: Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry


Who wrote the verse drama Becket?

(A) Oscar Wilde

(B) Osborne

(C) Tennyson

(D) Yeats

Question’s Answer: Tennyson


Who are the Trench poets?

  1. Siegfried Sassoon
  2. Issac Rosenberg
  3. Rupert Brooke
  4. Wilfred Owen
  5. Wystan Hugh Auden

Millament is the heroine in______.

(A) She Stoops to Conquer

(B) The Way of the World

(C) The White Devil

(D) The Rivals

Question’s Answer: The Way of the World


The line “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” is an example for______.

(A) Hyperbole

(B) Simile

(C) Euphemism

(D) Personification

Question’s Answer: Simile


Existentialism in its religious aspect goes back to______.

(A) Sartre

(B) Camus

(C) Kierkegaard

(D) Hegel

Question’s Answer: Kierkegaard


The Dark Lady of the Sonnets is a one-act play by______.

(A) J. M. Synge

(B) W.B. Yeats

(C) Galsworthy

(D) Bernard Shaw

Question’s Answer: J. M. Synge


The last (sixth) book of The Faerie Queene deals with_______.

(A) The adventures of Redcrosse Knight

(B) The legend of Chastity

(C) The adventures of the Knight of Temperance

(D) The adventures of Sir Calidore

Question’s Answer: The adventures of Sir Calidore


Which classical writers did Chaucer translate into English?

(A) Boethius

(B) Aristotle

(C) Homer

(D) Bede

Question’s Answer: Boethius


Which classical writer was Pope’s Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot modelled on?

(A) Homer

(B) Theophrastus

(C) Boccaccio

(D) Horace

Question’s Answer: Horace


Who was the founder editor of the periodical “The Examiner”?

(A) Johnson

(B) Lockhart

(C) Leigh Hunt

(D) William Hazlitt (English essayist)

Question’s Answer: Leigh Hunt


“Yo! We have heard tell of the majesty of the Speardanes, of the Folk-kings, how the princes did valorous deeds.” These lines are taken from which of the following?

(A) Caedmon’s Hymn

(B) Canterbury Tales

(C) Beowulf

(D) Piers Plowman

Question’s Answer: Beowulf


Who finished “Hero and Leander,” a poem by Marlowe that was left unfinished?

(A) John Marston

(B) Sir Philip Sidney

(C) Richard Marriot

(D) George Chapman

Question’s Answer: George Chapman



“Hudibras” is:

  1. an English mock heroic and narrative poem
  2. from the 17th century
  3. written by Samuel Butler
  4. from the 18th century

In Prologue and Canterbury Tales Chaucer employed the

(A) Ottawa Rhyme

(B) Rhyme Royal

(C) Heroic Couplet

(D) Both A and C

Question’s Answer: Heroic Couplet


Chaucer has been criticized for presenting an incomplete picture of his times, because

(A) he overemphasizes the rights of the lower class

(B) he exaggerates the courtly benevolence

(C) he writes for the court and cultivated classes and neglects the suffering of the poor

(D) he supports the Lolland and the Pear ant Revolution too fervently

Question’s Answer: he writes for the court and cultivated classes and neglects the suffering of the poor


“…the error of evaluating a poem by its ef- fects-especially its emotional effects- upon the reader” is:

(A) Affective Fallacy

(B) Intentional Fallacy

(C) Both A and B

(D) Pathetic Fallacy

Question’s Answer: Affective Fallacy





According to S.T. Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

  1. Primary imagination has the “esem- plastic” power.
  2. On the way to the supernatural from natural if the poet fails to carry on he ends up as a “materialist”.

Allegory is superior to symbol.


Who translated the “Seafarer”?

(A) Ezra Pound

(B) A.L. Tennyson

(C) T.S.Eliot

(D) Sylvia Plath (American poet)

Question’s Answer: Ezra Pound


Marlowe’s tragedies are:

(A) one-man tragedies

(B) love tragedies

(C) tragedies of noble men

(D) revenge plays

Question’s Answer: one-man tragedies


Who coined the phrase, “Marlowe’s mighty line?

(A) Richard Steele

(B) Samuel Johnson

(C) OR.L.Stevenson

(D) Ben Jonson

Question’s Answer: Ben Jonson


From the four main dialects that were popular before Chaucer, the one that became standard English during Chaucer’s time  was _____

(A) the Northern

(B) the Southern

(C) the West-Midland

(D) the East-Midland

Question’s Answer: the East-Midland


Which statements is incor rect regarding medieval literature?

(A) Chaucer exploited the dream-vision convention in The Canterbury Tales.

(B) The dream-vision convention was prevalent

(C) Allegory was frequent and usual

(D) There was often an undercurrent of moral and dialectic strain.

Question’s Answer: Chaucer exploited the dream-vision convention in The Canterbury Tales.


According to_____,  the writer should be “outside the whale”, because otherwise, the state or society could swallow the writer up, as the whale had swallowed Jonah.

(A) Andrew Marvell

(B) S.T.Samuel Taylor Coleridge

(C) George Orwell

(D) T.S.Eliot

Question’s Answer: George Orwell


“I have used similitude.” _____said this about _______.

(A) Thomas Hobbes about ‘Leviathan’.

(B) Alexander Pope (English poet) about ‘The Dunciad’

(C) Milton about ‘Paradise Lost’

(D) Bunyan about ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’

Question’s Answer: Bunyan about ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’


Which is wrong?

(A) Samuel Johnson-The Vanity of Human Wishes-Imitation of Juvenal’s 10th satire

(B) Jonathan Dr Jonathan Swift-A Modest Proposal-Pamphlet-1728

(C) Robinson Crusoe Friday-Colonialism

(D) Henry Feilding-Tom Jones-Story of a foundling

Question’s Answer: Jonathan Dr Jonathan Swift-A Modest Proposal-Pamphlet-1728


Who are the two gentlemen in “the Two Gentlemen of Verona”?

(A) Douglas and Calvin

(B) Lovelace and Herrick

(C) Henry Bailey and Davenant

(D) Valentine and Protons

Question’s Answer: Valentine and Protons


What is the meaning of the word ‘testament?

(A) the word ‘testament’ comes from the Latin, and is a translation of the Greek word meaning covenant

(B) the word ‘testament’ comes from the Greek language and it means a religious story

(C) the word ‘testament’ means words of God

(D) None of the above

Question’s Answer: the word ‘testament’ comes from the Latin, and is a translation of the Greek word meaning covenant


Which statements can be considered as correct?

(A) Koine language reflects the influence of the language that was the common

tongue of the Palestinian and which Jesus himself employed

(B) “Revelation” is the first book in The Bible

(C) Jesus Christ is the author of The New Testament

(D) None of the above

Question’s Answer: Koine language reflects the influence of the language that was the common

tongue of the Palestinian and which Jesus himself employed


Who popularized the inductive method for arriving at a conclusion through his Novum Organum?

(A) Ben Jonson

(B) Dr.Johnson

(C) Addison and Steel

(D) Francis Bacon

Question’s Answer: Francis Bacon


Thomas Hardy’s life and career are obliquely depicted in:

(A) The Return of the Native

(B) Tess of the d’Urbervilles

(C) Jude the Obscure

(D) The Mayor of Casterbridge

Question’s Answer: Jude the Obscure


In Homer’s Iliad Achilles refuses to take fur ther part in a war.  What could be the reason?

(A) Achilles felt tired

(B) Agamemnon, the commander-in-chief of the Achaean Army

had seized Briseis, the slave concubine of Achilles

(C) Achillies knew that the army was very strong

(D) none of the above

Question’s Answer: Agamemnon, the commander-in-chief of the Achaean Army

had seized Briseis, the slave concubine of Achilles


In the context of Aeschylus Agamemnon, Which statement is correct?

(A) Agamemnon was the king of Argos. He happily married Clytemnestra and was elected

commander of the Greek Host that went to Troy to recover Helen

(B) Helen was the wife of Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus

(C) Helen was carried off by Paris

(D) all the above statements are correct

Question’s Answer: all the above statements are correct


In the context of Sophocles Oedipus, the King,  which statements can be considered as correct?

(A) Oedipus was the son of Laius, king of Thebes and Jocasta

(B) Oedipus’ father was informed by an oracle that he must perish at his son’s hands

(C) in ignorance of his parentage, Oedipus slew Lais, his father and happily married his mother, Jocasta

(D) all the above statements can be considered as correct

Question’s Answer: all the above statements can be considered as correct


Which statements is correct in the context of More’s Utopia?

(A) All the cities in Utopia are built on the same plan and are of about the same size

(B) the streets are very dirty, not well- drained

(C) the houses are built without any planning

(D) in Utopia nobody is required to work on the farms or in trade

Question’s Answer: All the cities in Utopia are built on the same plan and are of about the same size


What events don’t mentioned in “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy?

(A) Napoleon had been proclaimed Em- peror of the French

(B) Napoleon had annexed Genoa, seized Hanover from the British

(C) England was Napoleon’s enemy

(D) Russia was friend of Napoleon

Question’s Answer: Russia was friend of Napoleon


What is God’s plan for man in Faust?

(A) man may be tempted and beguiled but he cannot be misled forever

because he retains the instinct for the one correct divine way

(B) man errs

(C) man falls but is capable of arising

(D) man created in the image of God, so ba- sically he is good

Question’s Answer: man may be tempted and beguiled but he cannot be misled forever

because he retains the instinct for the one correct divine way


The Wild Duck is based on

(A) the idea of a wild a goose chase

(B) the legend that when a wild duck is wounded it does not return to

the flock but dives deep and fastens itself to sea- weed

(C) the belief that a wild duck can never be tamed or caged

(D) the spirit of wilderness, freedom

Question’s Answer: the legend that when a wild duck is wounded it does not return to

the flock but dives deep and fastens itself to sea- weed


The Prince advocates that

(A) a state should run strictly on the principles of truth and non-violence

(B) a state is free to do anything necessary to strengthen itself

(C) a state should perish but never adopt unfair means even though

the unfair means may be for the welfare of the state

(D) none of these

Question’s Answer: a state is free to do anything necessary to strengthen itself


Which statements can be considered as correct in the context of Maupassant’s Pierre Et Jean?

(A) Madame Rosenilly is a neighbour of Monsieur Roland

(B) Monsieur Marechal of Paris is a former friend of the Rolands

(C) Monsieur Marechal has pass away and has left all his money to jean

(D) all the above statements are correct

Question’s Answer: all the above statements are correct


In Maupassant’s Pierre Et Jean what was the suspicion in the mind of Pierre?

(A) his younger brother Jean was conspiring to kill him

(B) his younger brother was not his father’s son

(C) his younger brother Jean was conspiring to kill his

(D) none of these

Question’s Answer: his younger brother was not his father’s son


Which parts of “The Playboy of the Western World” by Synge might not be true?

(A) Christy said that he had killed his father, but his father appeared alive

(B) Christy had killed his father

(C) Christy was engaged to Pegeen

(D) Mahon, Christy’s father, is proud to be led off by the son who has become a man

Question’s Answer: Christy had killed his father


Which statements can be considered as correct in the context of Dante’s The Divine Comedy?

(A) The Divine Comedy is a description of the Trojan War

(B) The Divine Comedy is a description of heaven, hell and purgatory

(C) The Divine Comedy is a mock epic presenting the war between man and woman

(D) The Divine Comedy is a mock epic pre- senting the war between man and women

Question’s Answer: The Divine Comedy is a mock epic presenting the war between man and woman


What happens after Wang Lung’s death in The Good Earth?

(A) the sons remain wealthy and powerful through inheritance

(B) the sons divorce their lives from the soil and lose their pre-eminence for they lacked the vigour and intensity

(C) the sons join other ways of livelihood and lose contact with reality

(D) the good earth is neglected

Question’s Answer: the sons divorce their lives from the soil and lose their pre-eminence for they lacked the vigour and intensity


Lolita became famous because

(A) it presents an unusual sexual story

(B) it presents a story of a mature man’s sexual fantasy – which attracts as well as repels

(C) it tells of Humbert seducing his own step daughter

(D) a unique story of love and sex between 13 year old girl and her step father of 56 years

Question’s Answer: it presents a story of a mature man’s sexual fantasy – which attracts as well as repels


What happens in A Doll’s House (1879)?

(A) a woman declares independence

(B) Nora awakens to her responsibility and leaves her husband to be herself

(C) it deals with woman emancipation

(D) new-world order

Question’s Answer: Nora awakens to her responsibility and leaves her husband to be herself

English literature MCQs

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