M A Entrance Exams in English Literature

M.A.
ENTRANCE
EXAMS IN
English
Literature
Mahdi Javidshad
Amirhossein Nemati
precise answers
accurate sources
First Edition online exams
‫جاویدشاد‪ ،‬مهدی‪- ۱۳۶۳ ،‬‬ ‫‪:‬‬ ‫سرشناسه‬
‫‪Javidshad, Mahdi‬‬
‫‪M.A. Entrance Exams in English Literature/ Mahdi Javidshad and Amirhossein Nemati.‬‬ ‫‪:‬‬ ‫عنوان و نام پدیدآور‬
‫تهران‪ :‬مهدی جاویدشاد‪۲۰۱۷ =۱۳۹۶ ،‬م‪.‬‬ ‫‪:‬‬ ‫مشخصات نشر‬
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‫انگلیسی‪.‬‬ ‫‪:‬‬ ‫یادداشت‬
‫ام‪ .‬ا‪... .‬‬ ‫‪:‬‬ ‫آوانویسی عنوان‬
‫دانشگاهها و مدارس عالی ‪ --‬ایران ‪ --‬آزمونهای ورودی‬ ‫‪:‬‬ ‫موضوع‬
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‫نعمتی‪ ،‬امیرحسین‪- ۱۳۷۶ ،‬‬ ‫‪:‬‬ ‫شناسه افزوده‬
‫‪Nemati, Amirhossein‬‬ ‫‪:‬‬ ‫شناسه افزوده‬
‫‪۸ ۱۳۹۶‬الف‪۲‬ج‪LB۲۳۵۳/‬‬ ‫‪:‬‬ ‫رده بندی کنگره‬
‫‪۳۷۸/۱۶۶4‬‬ ‫‪:‬‬ ‫رده بندی دیویی‬
‫‪۵۰۲۰۷۲۱‬‬ ‫‪:‬‬ ‫شماره کتابشناسی ملی‬
‫عنوان‪M.A. Entrance Exams in English Literature :‬‬

‫مؤلفین‪ :‬مهدی جاویدشاد‪ ،‬امیرحسین نعمتی‬
‫ناشر‪ :‬مؤلف‬
‫تیراژ‪300 :‬‬
‫چاپ اول‪( :‬ویرایش اول) ‪1396‬‬
‫قیمت‪ 220000 :‬ریال‬
‫چاپ‪ :‬خانه چاپ‬
‫صحافی‪ :‬خانه چاپ‬
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‫‪ 09011334787‬تماس حاصل فرمایید‪.‬‬
Content
M.A. Entrance Exam 1392 1
Explanatory Answers and Sources 16
References 166
Preface
O
ne of the main concerns of M.A. candidates of entrance exam in English literature is to
know what sources to read in their preparation course. Since the exam requires
candidates to have a word-for-word knowledge of certain sources, a thorough detection
of them is the most important step in the preparation. Certainly, the best way to overcome this
beginning step is to analyze previous exams and investigate the sources question for question.
This hard and exhausting work has been done in the present book with utmost precision. In
addition, for each question, this book presents the excerpts from which questions have been
made. Thus, candidates can be sure to have explanatory answers and exact sources for each
question. It is noteworthy that some questions have been made through Internet sources and this
book, to accomplish the mission of presenting exact sources, provides readers with their online
links. It might seem that the bulk of sources makes it difficult for candidates to overcome all of
them. While this argument is true, it should be born in mind that candidates should be selective
in their sources as the experience of previous years shows that they are not supposed to answer a
high percentage of questions. In the end, you are advised to regularly consult our website
(JavidEdu.com) for newer editions of the book and take online exams in a simulated
environment.
Mahdi Javidshad (Ph.D. Candidate in English Literature)
Amirhossein Nemati
1
1392 – Questions
2
M.A. Entrance Exams in English Literature Javidshad & Nemati
LITERARY CRITICISM AND TERMS

1- Which of the following is TRUE about Longinus (1st c. C.E.)?
1) Like Aristotle and Horace, he concentrates on single elements of a text.
2) We do not need to take account of the ‘intellect’ in our discussions of the sublime
3) He equally emphasizes author, reader and text in his discussion of the sublime.
4) Following Plato, he moves exclusively within the indigenous Greek literary tradition
2- In his An Apology for Poetry (1595), Sir Philip Sidney -----------------.
1) argues that by moving the mind, poetry, like philosophy, is a teacher of virtue.
2) values history over poetry but contends that the ‘chief passages of best histories’ are
essentially poetry
3) maintains that, far from counterfeiting or figuring forth, poetry is mimesis or representing
4) asserts that by engaging the reader’s emotions, poets blend truth with symbolism
3- The neoclassical critic Joseph Addison (1672-1719) ------------------.
1) believed that the aim of literary criticism is not to dissect the writer of genius but to look
at what occurs in the interaction of literature and its audience
2) maintained that ancient critics have not (contrary to what his contemporary critics Dryden
and Pope held) already said all there is to say, and to write after them is to expand upon
and even occasionally modify their past criticism
3) considered morality as the ultimate touchstone for a truly great work of art, and set his
literary goal as endeavoring to promote morality even at the expense of wit
4) argued that greatness in literature is not mechanical superiority but the prowess to display
the immensity of life in a way that the imagination is able to absorb.
4- According to the Russian formalist critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), ---------------.
1) the truth of the polyphonic novel is an active creation in the consciousness of the reader,
allowing genuine surprises even to the creator of the work himself
2) polyphonic novels have a carnival sense of the world, a sense of careful deliberation
where voices can be heard each in their own turn only obliquely influencing their hearers
3) the polyphonic nature of the novel implies that there are many truths and that each
character speaks and thinks his or her own truth
4) whatever meaning the language of the text possesses, resides in the polyphony of the text
itself which is nevertheless ‘ever and inevitably tempered by the intention of the
individual reader’
5- In his Of Grammatology (1974), the French critic Jacques Derrida best asserts that
----------------.
1) writing is directly related to what Saussure believed to be the basic element of language:
difference
2) the element of ‘undecidability’ does not hold equally well for all aspects of a written
system of communication
3) the meaning of the written word is decided in the interplay between various signifiers
pitted against one another
4) writing can, in a final analysis, be reduced to letters or symbols which are ‘inscribed’ on a
page
3
1392 – Questions
6- The psychoanalytic critic Sigmund Freud (1859-1939) / his proponents best believed
that -----------------.
1) the hidden meanings of a story can never be unlocked
2) a text is ‘a writer’s dreams undisguised’
3) artistic creation plunges the artist deep into a state of neurosis
4) a literary text must be analyzed like a dream
7- In a deconstructionist reading of a text ------------------.
1) the meaning of a text depends on the close interaction of the text, the reader and social
and cultural elements
2) there is no affinity the way a text is read (in a deconstructive way) and other types of
reading or interpretive process
3) we have every right to stop finding meaning in a text upon our first reading of it, as our
subsequent readings would, in abstract terms, offer the same result
4) the criticism of a text takes the upper hand of the text being read in terms of the essential
value it yields
8- Which of the following is NOT (best) a concern with contemporary African-American
criticism?
1) reading race into all American literature
2) significance of slavery as past historical events and its present day implications
3) social, political, economic, ideological and literary oppression
4) discovering signs of black art in modern American white art
9- The American critic John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974) would ------------------.
1) explore, in a sense of important critical essays, the distinctive expressions of
consciousness in several Western authors, spanning the Renaissance to the modern
period.
2) consider the “ethical” approach of the New Humanism and Marxism as ‘false’ and find
fault with the teaching of literature in universities by literary historians and scholars
3) assert that all kinds of criticism serve useful purposes and will be even more useful if the
critic is explicit enough about his goals
4) in his seminal essay “Marxism and Literature,” (1938) strongly advocate contemporary
attempts to connect Marxism and literature
4
10- Which of the following statements as regards the structuralist critic Roman Jakobson
(1896-1982) and the American New Critics is TRUE?
1) Jakobson and the New Critics would both oppose ‘vulgar biographism’ and the
‘intentional fallacy’, but would, at the same time, analyze the myth of the poet as a
function of cultural history
2) Jakobson tended to frame interpretation within a working sense of imagination and mind,
whereas the New Critics subjected the largest and the smallest patterns to linguistic and
cultural analysis, without regard for individual craft.
3) Jakobson welcomed the contributions of science to the work of literary studies, while the
New Critics were trying to defend “humanistic” values against the spread of scientific
“professionalism”
4) Jakobson did not believe in the unity of the human imagination as the New Critics did,
and would, contrary to the New Critics, contend that no critic could ever hope to entirely
capture the human imagination
11- The form of Japanese theater, kabuki, -------------------.
1) enjoys, lavishly designed sets, costumes, and makeup all contributing to its popularity
2) was first developed in medieval Japan, and introduced and taken up in Europe (first in
France) early in the 16th century
3) is, like its sister form, the Noh theater, a highly abstract type of “artistic theatre” with
very minimal action
4) uniquely employs an all-woman cast (thus making it a particular favorite in feminist
criticism)
12- The term ‘Gilded Age’ would originally refer to features of the American society as in
the ----------------.
1) decade of prosperity ensuing World War I
2) idyllic Romantic life of the early settlers in the American East
3) 1920s pre-depression period
4) post-Civil War (1861-1865) era
13- As a philosophical system based on the doctrines of Plato, Neoplatonism --------------.
1) sets up a vision of existence in which all things emanate from the universe of visible
manner
2) incorporates elements of Asian mysticism with the ideas of Plato and, in some periods,
was frequently combined with Christian mysticism
3) was developed in its modern form by such Enlightenment philosophers as Hume and
Rousseau in the 18th century
4) finds its fullest modern expression in two works by Kant: The Critique of Judgment and
The Critique of Pure Reason
5
1392 – Questions
14- Which of the following about the ‘heroic couplet’ is TRUE?

1) It would often take advantage of two end-stopped lines which were broken into two
subunits by Caesuras, or medial pause in their syntax
2) It was the predominant English measure, along with blank verse, for all the poetic kinds
during the Neoclassical period
3) As a verse form, it was first introduced into English poetry by Geoffrey Chaucer in such
works as The Legend of Good Woman
4) The closed neoclassic couplet was later partly taken up in such characteristically
Romantic poems as Keats’ Endymion
15- The ‘term: term definition’ DO NOT, as far as narratology is concerned, match in
---------------.
1) ‘story: the organized and meaningful structure of a literary plot’
2) ‘narrative: the explicit or implicit person or audience to whom the narrator addresses the
narrative’
3) ‘fabula: the elemental materials of a story’
4) ‘syuzhet: the concrete representation used to convey the story
16- Light verse (‘applied to poems that use an ordinary speaking voice and a relaxed
manner’) would ------------------.
1) develop its subjects out of concepts that are petty or essentially inconsequential but have
great applications for social satire
2) evolve as a large subclass to ‘verse de societe’ originally dealing with relationships,
concerns and doings of polite society
3) find one of its exponents in the children’s nonsense verse of the Victorian era—as in
Edward Lear’s The Owl and the Pussy Cat
4) be written initially as nursery rhymes which were then popularized as ribald or decorous
limericks
17- Which of the following about the term ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ is TRUE?
1) They were called “deadly” because they were considered to put the soul of anyone
manifesting them in peril of eternal perdition: such sins could never be forgiven
2) They were usually identified as Pride, Covetousness, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Anger, and
Sloth in medieval and later Christian theology.
3) They were regarded with even more disgust that cardinal sins and were defined and
discussed at length by such major theologians as Gregory the Great and Thomas Aquinas.
4) They played an important role in many works of medieval and Renaissance literature—
sometimes in elaborately developed personifications—including Chaucer’s “The Miller’s
Tale,” and Marlow’s “Hero and Leander”
18- Which of the following works best represent a ‘Juvenalian satire’?
1) Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy
2) Pope’s Moral Essays
3) Rabelias’ Gargantua and Pantagruel
4) Samuel Johnson’s London
6
19- The term ‘subversion-containment dialectic’ best pertains to the concerns and ideas
held by -----------------.
1) New historicist critics of Renaissance literature
2) History of ideas critics of the Romantic period
3) Critical theorists of the Frankfurt School
4) Yale School of deconstructionists
20- Which of the following about ‘Black Arts Movement’ is TRUE?
1) Its purely artistic, socially-pacifist ethics influenced the American postmodern literature
of the 1970s and 80s
2) It complemented, in intellectual terms, the ‘high art’ and modernist forms developed by
Ralph Ellison and other African-American writers in the 1950s
3) It designates a number of African-American writers whose work was shaped by the social
and political turbulence of the 1930s
4) It was associated with the Black Power movement in politics, whose spokesmen,
including Malcolm X advocated black separatism and black pride
HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

21- The Elizabethan poet, Edmund Spenser The Shepheardes Calendar (1579) ----------------.
1) makes sharply satirical comments on controversial religious and political issues of his
day such as Elizabeth’s suppression of Puritan clergy in the Church of England
2) is an allegorical pastoral based on the subject of a visit to London and is written as a
lightly veiled account of the trip
3) celebrates, memorializes, and critiques the Tudor dynasty much in the tradition of
Virgil’s Aeneids celebration of Augustus Caesar’s Rome (as it suggests that the Tudor
lineage can be connected to King Arthur)
4) was basically written to introduce (and expand upon) the scriptural readings prescribed
by the Book of Common Prayer for specific dates in the year it was published
22- Which of the following about John Donne (1572-1631) and his work is NOT TRUE?
1) He wrote An Anatomy of the World (1611) to mark the first anniversary of the death of
one of his friends and patrons
2) His collection Songs and Sonnets (1633) directly challenges the popular Petrarchan
sonnet sequences of the 1590s: it contains only one formal sonnet and the ‘songs’ are not
lyrical
3) He penned Pseudo-Martyr (1610) as a Catholic to denounce King James’s insistence that
Catholic take the Oath of Allegiance and subscribe to Protestant ethics.
4) His ‘Divine Poems’, a variety of religious poems, include a group of ‘Holy Sonnets’ that
reflect his interest in Jesuit and especially Protestant meditative procedures.
7
1392 – Questions
23- As pioneer essayist, Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) would ----------------.

1) rarely deal with topics ‘Civil and Moral’: his essays are tentative in structure; witty,
expansive, and reflective in style: and intimate, candid and affable in tone
2) stand at almost the opposite pole from his French predecessor, Michel de Montaigne,
who proposed to learn about humankind by an intensive analysis of his own body and
mind
3) often use his ‘I’ to present himself as challenging his society’s supposedly accumulated
wisdom
4) generally, write his essays from the vantage point of a profound moralist rather the point
of view of a man of affairs—even when writing on such topics as truth, marriage and
love
24- Which of the following about John Milton’s career after the execution of Charles I in
1649 is NOT TRUE?
1) He was appointed Latin Secretary to the Commonwealth government, which meant that
he wrote official letters to foreign heads of states in Latin
2) He published the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates in defense of revolution and regicide
3) He wrote the masque called Comus, in which the villain is portrayed as a refined,
seductive and dissolute Cavalier
4) He wrote Eikonoklastes to counter the powerful emotional effect of Eikon Basilike
written by the king just before his death
25- John Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe (published 1682) would ------------------.
1) be the outcome of a series of personal, professional and critical collaborations between
Dryden and the Restoration poet Thomas Shadwell
2) brilliantly exploit the crudity of the poet Thomas Shadwell’s farces (notably The
Virtuoso) and critical writings
3) (usually for a Restoration satirical masterpiece) take advantage of a few allusions, either
modern or literature
4) also bitterly satirize work done by other Restoration dramatists, notably his own friend
and disciple William Congreve
26- Jonathan Swift’s Journal to Stella a series of intimate letters (1710-13) mainly to his
beloved Esther Johnson --------------------.
1) is addressed, contrary to the ‘Stella’ of the title, to Stella’s life-long companion and friend
Rebecca Dingley
2) uniquely contains sketches of fictional adventures originally written to entertain Stella
but later on developed and incorporated into his Gulliver’s Travels
3) is devoted exclusively to his love for her and is interspersed with some of Swift’s most
poignant love poems
4) gives a vivid account of Swift’s daily life in London where he was in close touch with
Tory ministers
8
27- Which of the following important ‘sets of pictures’ does not belong to the 18th c. painter
and engraver William Hogarth (1697-1764) (who had considerable influence on Swift,
Fielding and Sterne, among others)?
1) A Harlot’s Progress
2) A Wandering Scholar in the Levant
3) A Rake’s Progress
4) Marriage A-la-Mode
28- Which of the following two 18th c. figures were (best) in a kind of dialogue (albeit in
fierce negation of each other) on the subject of women in some of their prominent
work?
1) Mary Wollstonecraft and Samuel Johnson
2) Samuel Johnson and Mary Astell
3) Alexander Pope and Anne Finch
4) Jonathan Swift and Mary Montagu
29- Which of the following ‘emancipations’ WAS NOT on Edmund Burke’s (1729-97)
literary / political agenda in the second half of the 18th c.?
1) emancipation of Ireland
2) emancipation of American colonies
3) emancipation of India from the misgovernment of East India Company
4) emancipation of women
30- The English revolutionary and pamphleteer Thomas Paine (1737-1809) ---------------.
1) wrote his Age of Reason (1794) while imprisoned in France by the Jacobins for a year in
1793-94 while awaiting the guillotine
2) wrote about his active service in the American War of Independence in his Common
Sense (1776)
3) dedicated his Rights of Man (1791), in reaction to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the
Revolution in France to the French revolutionary Georges Danton
4) published his Rights of Man in two instalments in the radical English journal, The Free
Englishman in 1790
31- Which of the following Romantic figures, in her advocacy of natural language and
subject matter in her work, prefigured and duly influenced Wordsworth and
Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads?
1) Maria Edgeworth in her Letters for Literary Ladies
2) Charlotte Smith in her Elegiac Sonnets and Other Essays
3) Joanna Baillie in her Series of Plays
4) Anna Barbauld in her Devotional Pieces
9
1392 – Questions
32- Which of the following about the Romantic poet William Blake (1757-1827) is NOT
TRUE?
1) His first attempt to articulate his full humanity’s present, past, and future was The Four
Zoas.
2) In his trenchant prophetic satire, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (written in the early
1790s) he represented the French Revolution as a kind f purifying violence.
3) Two of his major prophetic books on which he worked until about 1820 were Milton, and
Jerusalem.
4) His Poetical Sketches was idiosyncratically developed largely in illustrations and
engravings with only minimal poetry-in-handwriting inserted between.
33- The ‘Romantic essayist / work’ match in all the following EXCEPT ------------------.
1) Thomas De Quinccy / ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’
2) Charles Lamb / ‘On the Tragedies of Shakespeare’
3) Thomas De Quinccy / ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’
4) Charles Lamb / ‘On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror’
34- William Beckford’s Gothic novel Vathek -----------------.
1) heavily inspired (and is now regarded as the progenitor of)—through its revival of the
medieval Gothic ethos—later-eighteenth century Gothic garden design and architecture
2) is widely regarded as the initiating prototype to the genre (published nearly a decade
before Walpole’e Otranto appeared)
3) is ‘oriental’ rather than medieval but would, nevertheless, blend cruelty, terror and
eroticism
4) purported to be a translation from a twelfth century Italian work, thus setting the fashion
for (spuriously) attributing Gothic works’ authorship to the medieval times
35- Which of the following about Thomas Carlyle in Past and Present (1843) is TRUE?
1) He would call for heroic leadership of the type England had previously experienced in
Thomas Cromwell and particularly Abbot Samson, a medieval monk.
2) He was particularly concerned with the destructive mobs (now thinly disguised as the
‘Working Aristocracy’) who had to be suppressed at any cost.
3) He had completely washed hands off the ‘present Captains of Victorian Industry’ in
matching the artisans of the past in bringing about peace and prosperity to the people of
England.
4) He placed enormous confidence on the landed aristocracy as the traditional anchors
stability for the British nation in time of trouble.
10
36- The Victorian critic-poet-essayist Mathew Arnold (1822-1888) would -----------------.

1) contend in Culture and Anarchy (1869) that the world of the future, in England at any
rate, would be a working-class world fraught with periodic challenges to it by the middle-
classes and aristocracy
2) argue, in his Essays in Criticism (1865-1888), that a literary canon made exclusively of
classical Greek masters can provide all the virtues a modern civilized nation lacks
3) develop three full-length studies of the Bible, including Literature and Dogma (1873)
which is considered as a post-script to his social criticism
4) display deep appreciation for Chaucer’s humor in his ‘The Study of Poetry’ (1880) and
recommends he be taken up by the Victorian reading public as the model for a
distinctively ‘English’ kind of virtue
37- The early twentieth-century figure T.E. Hulme (1883-1917) ------------------.
1) wrote numerous ambitiously long poems to break the mold of the brief imagist lyric to
prove the application of the newly emerging modernist principles to poems both short
and long
2) would, as a prototypical modernist, sharply repudiate the ‘split religion’ of Romanticism,
responsible for vagueness in the arts
3) would, along with Wyndham Lewis, help found a new modernist movement in the arts,
vorticism, which emphasized dynamism of content
4) encouraged the Italian poet F.T. Marinetti to organize his hugely influential modernist-
avant-garde ideas into his first futurist manifesto in the first decade of the 20th c.
38- George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1993) -----------------.
1) is a vivid account of his experiences of extremely difficult times in Paris (where he had
gone to earn a living by teaching) followed by a spell as a tramp in England
2) compares the gruesome living conditions of the industrial workers living in around the
two cities of Paris and London in the early 1930s
3) defends the socialist tendencies of the government in France—as compared to England—
in providing its poorer classes with the bare necessities of life
4) sets down his vision of egalitarian urban life as it could have been potentially lived in
Paris and London, had the absurdity of politicians’ decisions allowed that to happen
39- ‘Author / work’ do NOT match in ---------------.
1) Chinua Achebe / Arrow of God
2) Ted Hughes / Tales from Ovid
3) Brian Friel / Faith Healer
4) V.S. Naipaul / Anthills of the Savannah
40- Virginia Woolf’s A Sketch of the Past -----------------.
1) is a very early work mainly concerned with the origins of her own aristocratic family
2) is devoted to the life and work of the fellow Bloomsbury post-impressionistic painter
Roger Fry
3) was written just before World War II and deals with her bright memories of childhood
4) explores the history of the Renaissance to reconstruct the portrait of the true British
cavalier
11
1392 – Questions
LITERARY GENRES
41- In Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, -------------------, an abbreviated version of
Boccaccio’s Teseida, is an appropriately high-minded history of the rivalry of two noble
cousins for the love of a princess, a history elegantly complemented by accounts of
supernatural intervention in human affairs and equally elegant and decisive human
ceremonial.
1) ‘The Knight’s Tale’
2) ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’
3) ‘The Squire’s Tale’
4) ‘The Franklin’s Tale’
42- John Donne’s ‘The Bait’ (1633) opens with -------------------.
1) ‘Come with me and be my love / And we will some new pleasures prove / Of golden
sands and crystal brooks / With silver lines and silver hooks…’
2) ‘Twice or thrice had I loved thee / Before I knew thy face or name / So in a voice, so in a
shapeless flame / Angels affect us oft, and worshipped be…’
3) When by thy scorn, O murderess, I am dead / And that thou thinkst thee free / From all
solicitation from me / …’
4) ‘Some that have deeper digged love’s mine that I / say where his centric happiness doth
lie / I have loved, and got, and told…’
43- Alexander Pope’s Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735) ------------------.
1) is ‘a major satire on a minor incident’ by comparing it to the epic world of the gods—it
was based on an actual incident recounted by Dr. Arbuthnot
2) is regarded as one of his major forays into the realm of natural history, citing many
scientists and philosophers of his time including Newton, Locke and Dr. Arbuthnot
himself
3) would, in fact, form part of sequences of epistles he wrote as Moral Essays (which
included also his Epistle to a Lady and Epistle to Burlington)
4) is his ‘most directly autobiographical work,’ has Dr. Arbuthnot speaking from time to
time in the poem thus converting the original letter to a dramatic dialogue.
44- William Wordsworth’s Michael: A Pastoral Poem (1800) opens with -----------------.
1) ‘If from the public ways you turn steps / Up the tumultuous brook of Green-head Ghyll /
You will suppose that with an upright path / Your feet must struggle…’
2) ‘—It seems a day / (I speak of one from singled out) / One of those heavenly days that
cannot die / When in the eagerness of boyish hope / I left our cottage threshold…’
3) ‘There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream / The earth, and every common sight
/ To me did seem appareled in celestial light…’
4) ‘Twas summer and the sun was mounted high / Along the south the uplands feebly glared
/ Through a pale steam, and all the northern downs / In clearer air ascending shewed far
off…’
12
45- Which of the following about Matthew Arnold’s Scholar Gypsy (published 1867) is NOT
TRUE?
1) It begins in pastoral mode, invoking a shepherd and describing the beauties of a rural
scene, with Oxford in the distance.
2) It has the ‘scholar’ of the poem like Keats’s nightingale, escape ‘the weariness, the fever
and the fret’ of modern life.
3) It is partly on the spirit of the scholar in the title which has achieved immortality by a
serene pursuit of the secret human existence.
4) It tells the story of an impoverished Oxford scholar who joined a band of gypsies and was
lovesick for life with the beauty of a ‘gypsy enchantress’.
46- T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding (1942) opens with -------------------.
1) ‘Midwinter spring is its own season / Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown /
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic / When short day is brightest with frost and
fire…’
2) ‘A cold night we had f it / Just the worst time of the year / For a journey, and such a long
journey / The ways deep and the weather sharp / The very dead of winter…’
3) ‘Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future
contained in time past / If all time is eternally present / All time in unredeemable…’
4) ‘In my beginning is my end. In succession / Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended /
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place / Is an open field, or a factory, or a
bypass…’
47- W. H. Auden’s poem Spain (1937) beginning ‘Yesterday all the past / The language of
size / Spreading to China along the trade-routes’ -----------------.
1) predicts future for Spain where the ‘children of the continent’ would feel merry in the
streets of Barcelona, however grim the prospects of the Civil War appear
2) traces the history of Spain from the glory of its colonial times to the utter decline and
devastation it was suffering in the Spanish Civil War—it contains a woven pastiche of
nearly all the major wars Spain had been through up to that time
3) describes the history that led up to the Spanish Civil War, then the arrival of the
International Brigades at the war itself, then foresees a possible future that may result
from the war
4) compares the ancient civilization of Spain to some oldest civilizations of the world
(including that of China) and hopes peace and prosperity will be restored to the country
once the Civil War comes to an end
48- It can be said of Philip Larkin (1922-1985) as a poet that he -----------------.
1) fashions a mythical consciousness in his poems embodied in violent metaphors, blunt
syntax, harsh alliterative clusters and a dark brooding tone
2) presents the welfare-state world of post-imperial Britain more vividly, unsparingly and
tenderly than any other poet
3) was early identified with the other liberal and leftist Oxford poets such as Stephen
Spender and C. Day Lewis
4) widely adapted various European literary archetypes (e.g. the Greek character Philocctes)
and forms (epic, quatrain, terza rima, etc.)
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1392 – Questions
49- ‘18th c. novelist / novel’ do not match in ------------------.

1) Tobias Smollet / The Adventures of Roderick Random
2) Daniel Defoe / Amelia
3) Lawrence Sterne / A sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
4) Henry Fielding / Jonathan Wild
50- Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic Novel The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) -----------------.
1) is concerned with a Faust-like figure whose character is revealed through several nested
stories-within-a-story that work backwards through time
2) starts in Naples, Italy in the early 18th century, in the church Santa Maria del Pianto,
where an Englishman is speaking with an Italian friar; the Englishman notices a man in a
shadowy area of the church, who is an assassin, according to the friar.
3) deals with the adventures of Sir Philip Harelay, who returns to medieval England to find
that the castle seat and estate of his friend Lord Lovel have been usurped.
4) follows the fortunes of Emily St. Aubert who suffers, among other misadventures, the
death of her father, supernatural terrors in a gloomy castle, and the machinations of an
Italian brigand.
51- ‘Jane Austen’s novel / novel characters’ match in -----------------.
1) Emma / Jane Fairfax, Harriet Smith and Mr. Weston
2) Sense and Sensibility / Miss Bates, Mr. Henry Woodhouse and Isabella Knightly
3) Northanger Abbey / John Willoughby, Edward Ferrars and Elinsor Dashwood
4) Persuasion / Mrs. Norris, Maria Bertram and Mr. Henry Crawford
52- ‘Character / character description’ in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) match in
-----------------.
1) ‘Mrs. Sparsit / the wife of Mr. Gradgrind, is an invalid and complains constantly’
2) ‘Rachael / a very pale classmate of Sissy’s who brought up on facts only and is taught to
operate according to self-interest’
3) ‘Stephen Blackpool / a worker at one of Bounderby’s mills who forms a close bond with
Rachael, a co-worker, whom he wishes to marry’
4) ‘James Harthouse / is a hard-working upper-class gentleman, who wins over Louisa’s
heart and eventually marries her’
53- Joseph Conrad’s ------------------ is set in the late 19th century and centers on the life of a
Dutch trader in the Borneo jungle and his relationship to his half-caste daughter Nina.
1) An Outcast of the Islands (1896)
2) Almayer’s Folly (1895)
3) Typhoon (1902)
4) Nostromo (1904)
54- Which of the following about Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is NOT TRUE?
1) It lacks an omniscient narrator (except in its second part); instead the plot unfolds through
shifting perspectives of each character’s stream of consciousness.
2) It centers on the Ramsays and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910
and 1920.
3) It includes four parts: The Window, Time Passes, Sea Voyage and The Lighthouse.
4) The novel recalls childhood emotions and highlights adult relationships.
14
55- Kingsley Amis’s novel Lucky Jim (1954), one of the best-known examples of a campus
novel in the English language, --------------------.
1) tells the story of the six-month academic exchange between fictional universities located
in two cities both called Cambridge in England and the USA
2) follows the exploits of the eponymous hero, a reluctant medieval history lecturer at an
unnamed provincial English university
3) describes encounters between Robyn Penrose, a university teacher specializing in the
‘industrial novel’, and Jim Wilcox, the manager of an engineering firm
4) deals humorously with the life of a university student who has to work as a circus clown
to maintain a living in the London of the early 1950s
56- The 2000 novel White Teeth which foucuses on the later lives of two wartime friends—
the Bangladeshi Samad Iqbal and the Englishman Archie Jones, and their families in
London is by the British author ------------------.
1) Julian Barnes
2) Angela Carter
3) Zadie Smith
4) Pat Barker
57- Which of the following about William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar
(1599) is NOT TRUE?
1) The play is characterized by swift, panoramic shifts in geographical locations and in
registers, alternating between sensual, imaginative Alexandria and the more pragmatic,
austere Rome.
2) Although the title is Julius Caesar, Caesar is not the most visible character in its action;
he appears in only three scenes, and is killed at the beginning of the third act.
3) It is one of several Roman plays that Shakespeare wrote, based on true events from
Roman history, which would also include Coriolanus.
4) The play contains many anachronistic elements from the Elizabethan period, objects such
as hats and doublets (large, heavy jackets)—neither of which existed in ancient Rome.
58- Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (1993) is set in a(n) -------------------.
1) Fictional island off the coast of Samoa, which represents a country of perfect bliss in the
play
2) Real location small village south of London at the turn of the twentieth century
3) Elizabethan Renaissance mansion (imaginary home of Sir Philip Sidney)
4) English country house, in both the years 1809-1812 and the present day
59- ‘Playwright / play’ do not match in -----------------.
1) ‘Samuel Beckett / No Man’s Land’
2) ‘Brian Friel / Translations’
3) ‘Harold Pinter / Victoria Station’
4) ‘John Osborne / The Entertainer’
15
1392 – Questions
60- In Edward Bond’s ------------------, John Clare, the working class poet whose class anger
is real enough, is forced into frustrated compromise and madness because he cannot
find the ideological weapons with which to fight his oppressors.
1) The Fool (1974)
2) In the Company of Men (1987)
3) Narrow Road to the Deep North (1968)
4) The Worlds (1979)
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17
1392 – Explanatory Answers and Sources
LITERARY CRITICISM AND TERMS

1- Which of the following is TRUE about Longinus (1st c. C.E.)?
Answer: Choice 3
Emphasizing the author (one who must possess a great mind and a great soul), the work itself
(a text that must be composed of dignified and elevated diction while simultaneously
disposing the reader to high thoughts), and the reader’s response (the reaction of a learned
audience in large part determines the value or worth of any given text), Longinus’s critical
method foreshadows New Criticism, reader-oriented criticism, and other schools of
twentieth-century criticism.
Source: Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice by Charles E. Bressler,

5th edition, p. 26
2- In his An Apology for Poetry (1595), Sir Philip Sidney --------------.
Answer: Choice 4
Throughout An Apology for Poetry, Sidney stalwartly defends poetry against those who
would view it as a mindless or immoral activity. For Sydney, creative poetry is akin to
religion, for both guide and achieve their purpose by stirring the emotions of the reader. The
poet, says Sydney, not only affirms morality, but by engaging the reader’s emotions, blends
truth with symbolism, “delighting every sense and faculty of the whole being.”

5th edition, p. 30
3- The neoclassical critic Joseph Addison (1672-1719) ------------------.
Answer: Choice 1
The aim of the literary critic, attests Addison, is not to dissect the writer of genius, but to
look at what occurs in the interaction of literature and its audience. Our curiosity, says
Addison, is one of the strongest and most lasting appetites implanted in us.
Source Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice by Charles E. Bressler, 5th
edition, p. 33
4- According to the Russian formalist critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), ----------------
Answer: Choice 3
For Bakhtin, the polyphonic nature of the novel implies that there are many truths, not just
one, and that each character speaks and thinks his or her own truth. Although one truth may
be preferred to others by a character, a reader, or the author, no truth is particularly certain.

5th edition, p. 46
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5- In his Of Grammatology (1974), the French critic Jacques Derrida best asserts that
-----------------.
Answer: Choice 1
Derrida asserts that we broaden our understanding of writing. Writing, he declares, cannot be
reduced to letters or other symbols inscribed on a page. Rather, it is directly related to what
Saussure believed to be the basic element of language: difference.

5th edition, p. 113
6- The psychoanalytic critic Sigmund Freud (1859-1939) / his proponents best believed
that -----------------.
Answer: Choice 4
Beginning with the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, Freud lays the
foundation for how our minds operate. Hidden from the workings of the conscious mind, the
unconscious, he believes, plays a large part in how we act, think, and feel. According to
Freud, the best avenue for discovering the content and the activity of the unconscious is
through our dreams.

5th edition, p. 124
7- In a deconstructionist reading of a text ------------------.
Answer: Choice 1
According to a deconstructionist reading of a text, because texts have no external referents,
their meanings depend on a close interactions of the text, the reader, and the social and
cultural elements both within the reader and the text, as does reading or every interpretive
process.

5th edition, p. 116
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8- Which of the following is NOT (best) a concern with contemporary African-American

criticism?
Answer: Choice 4
An examination of Wheatley’s life highlights the multiple concerns of contemporary
African-American criticism:
 Marginalization of blacks
 Reading race into all American literature
 Significance of slavery as past historical events and its present day implications
 Social, political, economic, ideological and literary oppression
 Celebrating that which is black in black art
5th edition, p. 212
9- The American critic John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974) would ------------------.
Answer: Choice 2
Ransom’s attempt to define the business of criticism—what it is not and what it should be.
He lists a number of false or misleading types of current criticism including the “ethical”
approach of the New Humanism and Marxism—but he focuses primarily on the teaching of
literature—in universities by literary historians and scholars who stress backgrounds,
sources; and influences rather than the poems themselves.
Source: Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st edition, p. 110

10- Which of the following statements as regards the structuralist critic Roman Jakobson
(1896-1982) and the American New Critics is TRUE?
Answer: Choice 3
It was not that Jakobson did not believe in the unity of the human imagination, but precisely
that he believed in it so much that he thought he was in no danger of departing from it.
Jakobson welcomed the contributions of science to the work of literary studies, while the
New Critics were trying to defend “humanistic” values against the spread of scientific
“professionalism.”

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11- The form of Japanese theater, kabuki, -------------------.

Answer: Choice 1
Kabuki is a form of Japanese theater that employs dance, music, and story. Its lavishly
designed sets, costumes, and makeup all contribute to the popularity of the form, which has
existed since the 17th century. Long regarded as inferior to its rival forms, the NO¯ and
Bunraku, Kabuki is an actor’s theater. The actors, all men, some of whom are female
impersonators, are more important than the play. The great Kabuki actors have large devoted
followings, particularly the onnagata, or female impersonator.
Source: A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms by Edward Quinn, 2nd edition, p. 232
12- The term ‘Gilded Age’ would originally refer to features of the American society as in
the ---------------.
Answer: Choice 4
Gilded Age is a term for the post–Civil War era when rampant acquisitiveness became a
prominent feature of American society. These were years of great changes in American
society: technological advances such as the inventions of the telegraph and the telephone; the
growth of industry; massive increases in immigrant populations; the rapid development of
new urban centers like Chicago and San Francisco; and the feverish spread of speculation in
land and on the stock market. The name derives from The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today
(1873), a novel written by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. The novel satirizes
unscrupulous land speculation and its connections with corrupt politicians. The social
criticism built into this novel reflected the spirit of realism/naturalism that defined the
literature of the age.
13- As a philosophical system based on the doctrines of Plato, Neoplatonism -------------------.
Answer: Choice 2
A philosophical system based on the doctrines of Plato. The system was established by the
philosopher Plotinus in the third century B.C. in the city of Alexandria. Incorporating
elements of Asian mysticism with the ideas of Plato, Neoplatonism set up a vision of
existence in which all things emanate from The One or The Good. Neoplatonism exerted a
powerful influence on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, in which it frequently
combined with Christian mysticism. Neoplatonic themes have been identified in a number of
important Renaissance texts, including Castiglione’s The Courtier (1528) and Shakespeare’s
Sonnets (1609)
14- Which of the following about the ‘heroic couplet’ is TRUE?
Answer: Choice 3
Heroic Couplets are lines of iambic which rhyme in pairs: aa, bb, cc, and so on. The adjective
“heroic” was applied in the later seventeenth century because of the frequent use of such
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couplets in heroic (that is, epic) poems and in heroic dramas. This verse form was introduced
into English poetry by Geoffrey Chaucer (in The Legend of Good Women and most of The
Canterbury Tales), and has been in constant use ever since.
Source: A Glossary of Literary Terms by M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, 10th
edition, p. 158
15- The ‘term: term definition’ DO NOT, as far as narratology is concerned, match in
---------------.
Answer: Choice 1
Narratologists, do not treat a narrative in the traditional way, as a fictional representation of
life and the world, but as a systematic and purely formal construction. A primary interest of
structural narratologists is in the way that narrative discourse fashions a story—a mere
sequence of events in time—into the organized and meaningful structure of a literary plot.
(The Russian formalists had made a parallel distinction between the fabula—the elemental
materials of a story—and the syuzhet, the concrete representation used to convey the story.)
edition, p. 234
16- Light verse (‘applied to poems that use an ordinary speaking voice and a relaxed
manner’) would ------------------.
Answer: Choice 3
Light verse is a term applied to a great variety of poems that use an ordinary speaking voice
and a relaxed manner to treat their subjects gaily, or playfully, or wittily, or with good-
natured satire. The subject matter of light verse need not be in itself petty or inconsequential;
the defining quality is the tone of voice used, and the attitude of the lyric or narrative speaker
toward the subject. Nursery rhymes and other children’s verses are another type of light
verse. Edward Lear (“The Jumblies,” “The Owl and the Pussy Cat”) and Lewis Carroll
(“Jabberwocky,” The Hunting of the Snark) made children’s nonsense verses into a Victorian
specialty.
edition, p. 191 and 192
17- Which of the following about the term ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ is TRUE?
Answer: Choice 2
In medieval and later Christian theology these sins were usually identified as Pride,
Covetousness, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Anger, and Sloth. They were called “deadly” because
they were considered to put the soul of anyone manifesting them in peril of eternal perdition;
such sins could be expiated only by absolute penitence. Among them, Pride was often
considered primary, since it was believed to have motivated the original fall of Satan in
heaven. Sloth was accounted a deadly sin because it signified not simply laziness, but a
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torpid and despondent spiritual condition that threatened to make a person despair of any
chance of achieving divine Grace.
edition, p. 364
18- Which of the following works best represent a ‘Juvenalian satire’?
Answer: Choice 4
In ‘Juvenalian satire’ the speaker is a serious moralist who uses a dignified and public
utterance to decry modes of vice and error which are no less dangerous because they are
ridiculous, and who undertakes to evoke from readers’ contempt, moral indignation, or an
unillusioned sadness at the aberrations of humanity. Samuel Johnson’s “London” (1738) and
“The Vanity of Human Wishes” (1749) are distinguished instances of Juvenalian satire.
edition, p. 354
19- The term ‘subversion-containment dialectic’ best pertains to the concerns and ideas
held by -----------------.
Answer: Choice 1
In Greenblatt’s reading, the dialogue and events of the Henry plays reveal the degree to
which princely power is based on predation, calculation, deceit, and hypocrisy; at the same
time, the plays do not scruple to record the dissonant and subversive voices of Falstaff and
various other representatives of Elizabethan subcultures. These counter-establishment
discourses in Shakespeare’s plays, however, in fact are so managed as to maneuver their
audience to accept and even glorify the power structure to which that audience is itself
subordinated. Greenblatt applies to these plays a conceptual pattern, the subversion-
containment dialectic, which has been a central concern of new historicist critics of
Renaissance literature. The thesis is that, in order to sustain its power, any durable political
and cultural order not only to some degree allows, but also actively fosters “subversive”
elements and forces, yet in such a way as more effectively to “contain” such challenges to the
existing order.
edition, p. 249
20- Which of the following about ‘Black Arts Movement’ is TRUE?
Answer: Choice 4
‘The Black Arts Movement’ designates a number of African-American writers whose work
was shaped by the social and political turbulence of the 1960s—the decade of massive
protests against the Vietnam War, demands for the rights of African-Americans that led to
repeated and sometimes violent confrontations, and the riots and burnings in Los Angeles,
Detroit, New York, Newark, and other major cities. The literary movement was associated
23
with the Black Power movement in politics, whose spokesmen, including Stokely
Carmichael and Malcolm X, opposed the proponents of integration, and instead advocated
black separatism, black pride, and black solidarity. Representatives of the Black Arts put
their literary writings at the service of these social and political aims.
edition, p. 29

21- The Elizabethan poet, Edmund Spenser The Shepheardes Calendar (1579) ------------.
Answer: Choice 1
The singers of the pastoral, or eclogue, were depicted as simple rustics who inhabited a world
in which human beings and nature lived in harmony, but the form was always essentially
urban, and Spenser, a Londoner, was self-consciously assuming a highly conventional
literary role. That role enabled him at once to lay claim to the prestige of classical poetry and
to insist upon his native Englishness, an insistence that is signaled by the deliberately archaic,
pseudo-Chaucerian language. The rustic mask also allowed Spenser, in certain of the
eclogues, to make sharply satirical comments on controversial religious and political issues
of his day, such as Elizabeth’s suppression of Puritan clergy in the Church of England, and to
reflect on his own marginal position.
Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 708

22- Which of the following about John Donne (1572-1631) and his work is NOT TRUE?
Answer: Choice 3
As his family grew, Donne made every effort to reinstate himself in the favor of the great. To
win the approval of James I, he penned Pseudo-Martyr (1610), defending the king’s
insistence that Catholics take the Oath of Allegiance. This set an irrevocable public stamp on
his renunciation of Catholicism, and Donne followed up with a witty satire on the Jesuits,
Ignatius His Conclave (1611).
23- As pioneer essayist, Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) would -------------------.
Answer: Choice 2
As an essayist Bacon stands at almost the opposite pole from his great French predecessor
Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), who proposed to learn about humankind by an intensive
analysis of his own body and mind and of his sensations, emotions, attitudes, and ideas.
Bacon’s essays are instead on topics “Civil and Moral.” Montaigne’s are tentative in
structure; witty, expansive, and reflective in style; intimate, candid, and affable in tone; and
he speaks constantly in the first person.

24
24- Which of the following about John Milton’s career after the execution of Charles I in
1649 is NOT TRUE?
Answer: Choice 3
In 1649, just after Charles I was executed, Milton published The Tenure of Kings and
Magistrates, which defends the revolution and the regicide and was of considerable
importance in developing a “contract theory” of government based on the inalienable
sovereignty of the people—a version of contract very different from that of Thomas Hobbes.
Milton was appointed Latin Secretary to the Commonwealth government (1649-53) and to
Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate (1654-58), which meant that he wrote the official letters—
mostly in Latin—to foreign governments and heads of state. He also wrote polemical
defenses of the new government: Eikonoklastes (1649), to counter the powerful emotional
effect of Eikon Basilike, supposedly written by the king just before his death, and two Latin
Defenses upholding the regicide and the new republic to European audiences.

25- John Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe (published 1682) would ------------------.
Answer: Choice 2
Between 1678 and 1681, when he was nearing fifty, Dryden discovered his great gift for
writing formal verse satire. A quarrel with the playwright Thomas Shadwell prompted the
mock-heroic episode “Mac Flecknoe,” probably written in 1678 or 1679 but not published
until 1682.

26- Jonathan Swift’s Journal to Stella a series of intimate letters (1710-13) mainly to his
beloved Esther Johnson --------------------.
Answer: Choice 4
Esther Johnson (Swift’s “Stella”) was the daughter of Temple’s steward, and when Swift first
knew her, she was little more than a child. He educated her, formed her character, and came
to love her as he was to love no other person. After Temple’s death she moved to Dublin,
where she and Swift met constantly, but never alone. While working with the Tories in
London, he wrote letters to her, later published as The Journal to Stella (1766), and they
exchanged poems as well. Whether they were secretly married or never married—and in
either case why—has been often debated.

25
27- Which of the following important ‘sets of pictures’ does not belong to the 18th c. painter
and engraver William Hogarth (1697-1764) (who had considerable influence on Swift,
Fielding and Sterne, among others)?
Answer: Choice 2
Hogarth never forgot “the cruel treatment” of his father by booksellers, and he resolved to
make his living without relying on dealers; he would always be aggressively independent.
Apprenticed as an engraver, he trained himself to sketch scenes quickly or catch them in
memory. He also learned to paint, studying with the Serjeant Painter to the King, Sir James
Thornhill, whose daughter he married (late in life Hogarth himself would become Serjeant
Painter). Gradually he won a reputation for portraits and conversation pieces—group
portraits in which members of a family or assembly interact in a social situation. But his
popular fame was forged by sets of pictures that told a story: A Harlot’s Progress (1731 -
32), A Rake’s Progress (1734-35), and Marriage A-la-Mode (1743-45).

28- Which of the following two 18th c. figures were (best) in a kind of dialogue (albeit in
fierce negation of each other) on the subject of women in some of their prominent
work?
Answer: Choice 4
Montagu did not like Swift. She objected to his politics, his friendship with Pope, his vanity,
and his defiant indecency. Her reply to Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room” mimics it style,
but substitutes vulgar names for its mock-pastoral and personal pique for its moralistic
conclusions.
29- Which of the following ‘emancipations’ WAS NOT on Edmund Burke’s (1729-97)
literary / political agenda in the second half of the 18th c.?
Answer: Choice 4
Burke’s political life was devoted to five ‘great, just and honorable causes’: the emancipation
of the House of Commons from the control of George III and the ‘King’s friends’; the
emancipation of the American colonies; the emancipation of Ireland; the emancipation of
India from the misgovernment of the East India Company; and opposition to the atheistical
Jacobinism displayed in the French Revolution.
Source: The Oxford Companion to English Literature by Margaret Drabble, 6th edition, p.
150
30- The English revolutionary and pamphleteer Thomas Paine (1737-1809) -----------------.
Answer: Choice 1
Although he was born and lived his first thirty-seven years in England, Thomas Paine
(1737—1809) enters the debate as a visitor from America, where by writing Common Sense
(1776) and the sixteen Crisis pamphlets, beginning “These are the times that try men’s souls”
26
(1776—83), he had served as the most effective propagandist for American independence.
His Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke’s Attack on the French Revolution,
published in March 1791 with a dedication “To George Washington, President of the United
States of America,” has the full weight of the American revolutionary experience behind it
and is the strongest statement against hereditary monarchy of any of the works replying to
Burke in this “war of pamphlets.” Paine published a second part of Rights of Man the
following year and, when charged with treason by the British, fled to France, where he was
made a citizen and a member of the Convention. With the fall of the more moderate
Girondists, he was imprisoned by the Jacobins for a year in 1793—94, during which he wrote
his last famous work, The Age of Reason (1794)
Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 1790
31- Which of the following Romantic figures, in her advocacy of natural language and
subject matter in her work, prefigured and duly influenced Wordsworth and
Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads?
Answer: Choice 3
Joanna Baillie preface to the original Series of Plays, a seventy-page “introductory
discourse” advocating naturalness of language and subject matter, influenced both the
Advertisement to Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which appeared six months
later, and Wordsworth’s longer and more famous Preface two years later. “Those works,” she
wrote, “which most strongly characterize human nature in the middling and lower classes of
society, where it is to be discovered by stronger and more unequivocal marks, will ever be
the most popular”; the writer should forsake “the enchanted regions of simile, metaphor,
allegory, and description” in favor of “the plain order of things in this every-day world.”
32- Which of the following about the Romantic poet William Blake (1757-1827) is NOT
TRUE?
Answer: Choice 4
As Blake’s mythical character Los said, speaking for all imaginative artists, “I must Create a
System or be enslaved by another Man’s.” This coherent but constantly altering and
enlarging system composed the subject matter first of Blake’s “minor prophecies,” completed
by 1795, and then of the major prophetic books on which he continued working until about
1820: The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem. In The French Revolution, America: A Prophet
Europe: A Prophecy, and the trenchant prophetic satire The Marriage of Heaven and Hell—
all of which Blake wrote in the early 1790s while he was an ardent supporter of the French
Revolution—he, like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and a number of radical English
theologians, represented the contemporary Revolution as the purifying violence that,
according to biblical prophecy, portended the imminent redemption of humanity and the
world.

27
33- The ‘Romantic essayist / work’ match in all the following EXCEPT ------------------.
Answer: Choice 4
Published in 1773 in the Aikins’ Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose, “On the Pleasure Derived
from Objects of Terror” built on Walpole's innovation in Otranto. It gave the next generation
of Gothic authors a critical justification for their engagement with the supernatural and for
their swerve away from the didacticism that had valued fiction writers only when they
seemed to be educating readers for real life.
34- William Beckford’s Gothic novel Vathek -----------------.
Answer: Choice 3
William Beckford’s Vathek (1786), which is “oriental” rather than medieval but similarly
blends cruelty, terror, and eroticism; two extremely popular works by Radcliffe, the “Queen
of Terror,” The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794);
Matthew Lewis’s concoction of devilry, sadism, and mob violence, The Monk (1796).
35- Which of the following about Thomas Carlyle in Past and Present (1843) is TRUE?
Answer: Choice 1
Past and Present, a book written in seven weeks, was a call for heroic leadership. Cromwell
and other historic leaders are cited, but the principal example from the past is Abbot Samson,
a medieval monk who established order in the monasteries under his charge. Carlyle hoped
that the “Captains of Industry” might provide a comparable leadership in 1843.
36- The Victorian critic-poet-essayist Mathew Arnold (1822-1888) would -----------------.
Answer: Choice 3
Arnold’s three full-length studies of the Bible, including Literature and Dogma (1873), are
thus best considered a postscript to his social criticism. The Bible, to Arnold, was a great
work of literature like the Odyssey, and the Church of England was a great national
institution like Parliament. Both Bible and Church must be preserved not because historical
Christianity was credible but because both, when properly understood, were agents of what
he called “culture”—they contributed to making humanity more civilized.
37- The early twentieth-century figure T.E. Hulme (1883-1917) ------------------.
Answer: Choice 2
Although he published only six poems during his brief life, T. E. Hulme (1883—1917),
English poet, philosopher, and critic, was one of the strongest intellectual forces behind the
development of modernism. In this essay, probably composed in either 1911 or 1912 and
probably delivered as a lecture in 1912, Hulme prophesies a “dry, hard, classical verse” that
28
exhibits precision, clarity, and freshness. He sharply repudiates the “spilt religion” of
Romanticism, responsible for vagueness in the arts. Hulme sees human beings as limited and
capable of improvement only through the influence of tradition. These ideas were an
important influence on the thought and poetry of T. S. Eliot. Hulme’s views of conventional
language, the visual image, and verbal exactitude also shaped the imagism and vorticism of
Ezra Pound and others.
38- George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1993) -----------------.
Answer: Choice 1
Orwell went to Paris to try to earn a living by teaching while he made his first attempts at
writing. His extremely difficult time in Paris was followed by a spell as a tramp in England,
and he vividly recorded both experiences in his first book, Down and Out in Paris and
London (1933). Orwell did not have to suffer the dire poverty that he seems to have courted
(he had influential friends who would have been glad to help him); he wanted, however, to
learn firsthand about the life of the poor, both out of humane curiosity and because, as he
wrote, if he did so “part of my guilt would drop from me.”
39- ‘Author / work’ do NOT match in ---------------.
Answer: Choice 4
Anthills of the Savannah (1987) is by Chinua Achebe
His other major works are:

 Things Fall Apart (1958)
 No Longer at Ease (1960)
 Arrow of God (1964)
 A Man of the People (1966)
Chinua Achebe is an author, born and educated in Nigeria, where his father taught in a school
under the Church Missionary Society. He studied at University College, Ibadan, 1948-53,
then worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting Service in Lagos. One of the most highly
regarded of African writers in English, Achebe’s reputation was founded on his first four
novels, which can be seen as a sequence recreating Africa’s journey from tradition to
modernity. Things Fall Apart (1958) seems to derive from W. B. Yeats its vision of history
as well as its title; it was followed by No Longer at Ease (1960); Arrow of God (1964), a
portrayal of traditional society at the time of its first confrontation with European society (a
traditional society recreated in Achebe’s novels by the use of Ibo legend and proverb); and A
Man of the People (1966), which breaks new ground. Bitterness and disillusion lie just
beneath the sparkling satiric surface, and the novel provides further evidence of Achebe’s
mastery of a wide range of language, from the English of Ibo-speakers and pidgin, to various
levels of formal English. Anthills of the Savannah (1987), a novel told in several narrative
voices, pursues Achebe’s bold, pessimistic, and sardonic analysis of West African politics
29
and corruption in its portrayal of the fate of two friends, one minister of information in the
fictitious state of Kangan, the other a poet and radical editor: their resistance to the regime of
the country’s Sandhust-educated dictator ends in death. Other works include Beware, Soul
Brother and Other Poems (1971), The Trouble with Nigeria (1983), and Hopes and
Impediments (essays, 1988). He has been emeritus professor at the University of Nigeria,
Nsukka, since 1985.
40- Virginia Woolf’s A Sketch of the Past -----------------.
Answer: Choice 3
“A Sketch of the Past” is an autobiographical essay written by Virginia Woolf in 1939 (just
before World War II). Woolf returned to her own childhood with “A Sketch of the Past,” a
memoir about her mixed feelings toward her parents and her past and about memoir writing
itself. (Here surfaced for the first time in writing a memory of the teenage Gerald Duckworth,
her other half-brother, touching her inappropriately when she was a girl of perhaps four or
five.) Through last-minute borrowing from the letters between Fry and Vanessa, Woolf
finished her biography. Though convinced that Roger Fry (1940) was more granite than
rainbow, Virginia congratulated herself on at least giving back to Vanessa “her Roger.”
LITERARY GENRES
41- In Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, -------------------, an abbreviated version of
Boccaccio’s Teseida, is an appropriately high-minded history of the rivalry of two noble
cousins for the love of a princess, a history elegantly complemented by accounts of
supernatural intervention in human affairs and equally elegant and decisive human
ceremonial.
Answer: Choice 1
Although it has been suggested that the Knight’s professional career has been marked by a
series of military disasters and that both his portrait and his tale can be read ironically, it
would seem likely that the overall scheme of The Canterbury Tales, had it ever been
completed, would have served to enhance his dignity rather than to undermine it. The Host of
the Tabard proposes that each of the pilgrims should tell two tales on the way to Canterbury
and two on the return journey. Even in the fragmentary and unfinished form in which the
poem has come down to us (only twenty-four tales are told), it is clear that the Knight’s
taking precedence as the first story-teller is not merely a matter of chance. The narrator
comments that although he cannot tell whether it was a matter of ‘aventure, or sort, or cas
[chance]’ that the luck of the draw fell to such a natural leader, the fact that it did so both
pleases the other pilgrims and satisfies the demands of social decorum. The Knight’s Tale, an
abbreviated version of Boccaccio’s Teseida, is an appropriately high-minded history of the
rivalry of two noble cousins for the love of a princess, a history elegantly complemented by
30
accounts of supernatural intervention in human affairs and equally elegant and decisive
human ceremonial.
Source: The Short Oxford History of English Literature by Andrew Sanders, p. 57

42- John Donne’s ‘The Bait’ (1633) opens with -------------------.
Answer: Choice 1
Choice 2 is part of John Donne’s Air and Angles
Choice 3 is part of John Donne’s Apparition
Choice 4 is part of John Donne’s Love’s Alchemy
Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 1274, 1270, and 1272
43- Alexander Pope’s Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735) ------------------.
Answer: Choice 4
The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot is a satire in poetic form written by Alexander Pope and
addressed to his friend John Arbuthnot, a physician. It was first published in 1735 and
composed in 1734, when Pope learned that Arbuthnot was dying. Pope described it as a
memorial of their friendship. It has been called Pope’s “most directly autobiographical
work,” in which he defends his practice in the genre of satire and attacks those who had been
his opponents and rivals throughout his career.
Source: The Alexander Pope Encyclopedia by Pat Rogers, p. 110
44- William Wordsworth’s Michael: A Pastoral Poem (1800) opens with -----------------.
Answer: Choice 1
Choice 2 is part of William Wordsworth’s Nutting
Choice 3 is part of William Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality
Choice 4 is part of William Wordsworth’s Excursion
Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 292, 279, and 306
45- Which of the following about Matthew Arnold’s Scholar Gypsy (published 1867) is NOT
TRUE?
Answer: Choice 4
The Scholar Gypsy is the story of a seventeenth-century student (not an impoverished Oxford
scholar) who left Oxford and joined a bands of gypsies.
Source: See the entry before the poem in Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th
edition, p. 1360
31
46- T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding (1942) opens with -------------------.

Answer: Choice 1
Choice 2 is part of T. S. Eliot’s The Journey of Magi
Choice 3 is part of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets
Choice 4 is part of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: East Coker
Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 2312-13
47- W. H. Auden’s poem Spain (1937) beginning ‘Yesterday all the past / The language of
size / Spreading to China along the trade-routes’ -----------------.
Answer: Choice 3
Written after his visit to the Spanish Civil War, “Spain” was described by George Orwell as
“one of the few decent things that have been written about the Spanish war.” It was written
and published in 1937. Auden donated all the profits from the sale of Spain to the Spanish
Medical Aid Committee. The poem describes the history that led up to the Spanish Civil
War, then the arrival of the International Brigades at the war itself, then foresees a possible
future that may result from the war.
Source: https://www.revolvy.com/main/index.php?s=Spain%20(Auden)
OR
W.H. Auden Encyclopedia by David Garrett Izzo, p. 245

48- It can be said of Philip Larkin (1922-1985) as a poet that he -----------------.
Answer: Choice 2
Larkin was the dominant figure in what came to be known as “the Movement,” a group of
university poets that included Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, and Thorn Gunn, gathered
together in Robert Conquest’s landmark anthology of 1956, New Lines. Their work was seen
as counteracting not only the extravagances of modernism but also the influence of Dylan
Thomas’s high-flown, apocalyptic rhetoric: like Larkin, these poets preferred a civil grammar
and rational syntax over prophecy, suburban realities over mythmaking. No other poet
presents the welfare-state world of post-imperial Britain so vividly, so unsparingly, and so
tenderly. “Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are,” Larkin said; “I don’t
want to transcend the commonplace, I love the commonplace life.
32
49- ‘18th c. novelist / novel’ do not match in ------------------.

Answer: Choice 2
Amelia is by Henry Fielding
Other major works by Fielding are: An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews / The
History of Tom Jones, a Foundling / Joseph Andrews

50- Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic Novel The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) -----------------.
Answer: Choice 4
The Mysteries of Udolpho follows the fortunes of Emily St. Aubert, who suffers, among
other misadventures, the death of her father, supernatural terrors in a gloomy castle and the
machinations of an Italian brigand. Often cited as the archetypal Gothic novel, The Mysteries
of Udolpho, along with Radcliffe’s novel The Romance of the Forest, plays a prominent role
in Jane Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey, in which an impressionable young woman, after
reading Radcliffe’s novel, comes to see her friends and acquaintances as Gothic villains and
victims with amusing results.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysteries_of_Udolpho
51- ‘Jane Austen’s novel / novel characters’ match in -----------------.
Answer: Choice 1
Miss Bates, Mr. Henry Woodhouse and Isabella KnightlyEmma
John Willoughby, Edward Ferrars and Elinsor DashwoodSense and Sensibility
Mrs. Norris, Maria Bertram and Mr. Henry CrawfordMansfield Park
326, 640, and 915
52- ‘Character / character description’ in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) match in
-----------------.
Answer: Choice 3
Stephen Blackpool is a worker at one of Bounderby’s mills. He has a drunken wife who no
longer lives with him but who appears from time to time. He forms a close bond with
Rachael, a co-worker, whom he wishes to marry. After a dispute with Bounderby, he is
dismissed from his work at the Coketown mills and, shunned by his former fellow workers,
is forced to look for work elsewhere. While absent from Coketown, he is wrongly accused of
robbing Bounderby’s bank. On his way back to vindicate himself, he falls down a mine-shaft.
He is rescued but dies of his injuries.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Times_(novel)
33
53- Joseph Conrad’s ------------------ is set in the late 19th century and centers on the life of a
Dutch trader in the Borneo jungle and his relationship to his half-caste daughter Nina.
Answer: Choice 2
Almayer’s Folly is Joseph Conrad’s first novel. It was published in 1895. Set in the late 19th
century, it centers on the life of the Dutch trader Kaspar Almayer in the Borneo jungle and
his relationship to his half-caste daughter Nina.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almayer%27s_Folly
54- Which of the following about Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is NOT TRUE?
Answer: Choice 3
To the Lighthouse is a 1927 novel by Virginia Woolf. The novel centers on the Ramsays and
their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920. The novel lacks an
omniscient narrator (except in the second section: Time Passes); instead the plot unfolds
through shifting perspectives of each character’s consciousness. Shifts can occur even mid-
sentence, and in some sense they resemble the rotating beam of the lighthouse itself. Unlike
James Joyce’s Stream of Consciousness technique, however, Woolf does not tend to use
abrupt fragments to represent characters’ thought processes; her method is more one of
lyrical paraphrase. The lack of an omniscient narrator means that, throughout the novel, no
clear guide exists for the reader and that only through character development can we
formulate our own opinions and views because much is morally ambiguous.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_the_Lighthouse
55- Kingsley Amis’s novel Lucky Jim (1954), one of the best-known examples of a campus
novel in the English language, --------------------.
Answer: Choice 2
The story of Lucky Jim is set sometimes around 1950. Jim, the titular character and
protagonist of the novel, follows the exploits of the eponymous James Dixon, called Jim.
James Dixon was a reluctant medieval history lecturer at an anonymous provincial English
university.
Source: http://www.self.gutenberg.org/articles/eng/Lucky_Jim
34
56- The 2000 novel White Teeth which foucuses on the later lives of two wartime friends—
the Bangladeshi Samad Iqbal and the Englishman Archie Jones, and their families in
London is by the British author ------------------.
Answer: Choice 3
White Teeth is a 2000 novel by the British author Zadie Smith. It focuses on the later lives of
two wartime friends—the Bangladeshi Samad Iqbal and the Englishman Archie Jones—and
their families in London. The novel is centered around Britain’s relationships with people
from formerly colonized countries in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean
OR
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Teeth
57- Which of the following about William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar
(1599) is NOT TRUE?
Answer: Choice 1
Known more formally as The Tragedy of Julius Caesar it was written in 1599 and portrays
the 44 BC conspiracy against the Roman dictator Julius Caesar, his assassination and the
defeat of the conspirators at the Battle of Philippi. It is one of several Roman plays that
Shakespeare wrote, based on true events from Roman history, which also include Coriolanus
and Antony and Cleopatra. Although the title of the play is Julius Caesar, Caesar is not the
most visible character in its action; he appears in only three scenes, and is killed at the
beginning of the third act. The play contains many anachronistic elements from the
Elizabethan period, objects such as hats and doublets (large, heavy jackets)—neither of
which existed in ancient Rome.
Source: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/524981152
OR
The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature by Dinah Birch and Katy Hooper, 3rd
edition, p. 377
35
58- Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (1993) is set in a(n) -------------------.

Answer: Choice 4
Arcadia is a 1993 play by Tom Stoppard concerning the relationship between past and
present, order and disorder, certainty and uncertainty. It has been praised by many critics as
the finest play from one of the most significant contemporary playwrights in the English
language. In 2006, the Royal Institution of Great Britain named it one of the best science-
related works ever written. Arcadia is set in Sidley Park, an English country house in
Derbyshire, and takes place in both 1809/1812 and the present day (1993 in the original
production). The activities of two modern scholars and the house’s current residents are
juxtaposed with those of the people who lived there in the earlier period.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcadia_(play)
OR
Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 2752
59- ‘Playwright / play’ do not match in -----------------.
Answer: Choice 1
No Man’s Land is by Harold Pinter
Some other works by Pinter are: One for the Road (1984) / Mountain Language (1988) / The
New World Order (1991) / Party Time (1991) / Moonlight (1993) / Ashes to Ashes (1996) /
Celebration (1999) / Remembrance of Things Past
60- In Edward Bond’s —------------------, John Clare, the working class poet whose class
anger is real enough, is forced into frustrated compromise and madness because he
cannot find the ideological weapons with which to fight his oppressors.
Answer: Choice 1
In The Fool: Scenes of Bread and Love, John Clare, the working-class poet whose class
anger is real enough, is forced into frustrated compromise and madness because he cannot
find the ideological weapons with which to fight his oppressors. In the most emotionally
challenging of Bond’s plays, Lear, he not only drastically revises the King Lear story but also
re-engages with Shakespeare’s themes of blindness, madness, and the exercise of power.
There is little room for what might conventionally or comfortingly be seen as ‘poetry’ or
‘tragedy’.
36
37
1393 – Questions
LITERARTY TERMS AND CRITICISM

1- Which of the following statements about the term ‘actant’, as developed in the
narratology of A. J. Greimas is TRUE?
1) It comprises six basic categories of fictional role found in all stories.
2) Actants are never paired in binary oppositions.
3) An actant may be realized in a non-human creature.
4) A character can be an individualized manifestation of only one actant.
2- In the eighteenth century, a number of poets wrote georgics (on the model of Virgil)
describing in verse -----------------.
1) such utilitarian arts as sheepherding and running a sugar plantation
2) complicated philosophical matters for the use of the non-professional reader
3) how matters of the state should be tackled by modern day courtiers
4) aristocratic love as it was practiced in contemporary society
3- As a supplement to perfect rhyme, ‘slant rhyme’ or ‘pararhyme’ -----------------.
1) was denigrated by such poets as W. B. Yeats and Gerald Manley Hopkins as ‘an ancient
form inappropriate to the modern poetic sensibility’
2) emerged at the turn of the end 19th century in response to Romantic poet’s use of
common ordinary speech
3) was extremely widespread in 18th century heroic poetry (as in Pope’s translation of the
Iliad)
4) is fairly common in serious 20th century poetry as well as in folk poetry such as
children’s verse
4- Chronicle Plays, dramatic works based on the historical materials in the English
Chronicles by Raphael Holinshed and others, ------------------.
1) would, early in their development, present a loosely knit series of events during the reign
of an English king and depended for effect mainly on a bustle of stage battles, pageantry,
and spectacle
2) went out of fashion with the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, which fostered a
demand for ‘real’ plays dealing with English history.
3) were selected, rearranged and replicated by such Elizabethan dramatists as Christopher
Marlowe, in his Tamburlaine the Great (1592) to compose a unified drama of character
4) is often applied broadly to any drama based mainly on historical materials, such as
Shakespeare’s Roman plays Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra
5- The character ‘Vice’ in ---------------- is regarded by some literary historians as a
precursor of such figures in Elizabethan drama as ---------------.
1) mystery plays / Shakespeare’s Falstaff
2) morality plays / Shakespeare’s Falstaff
3) morality plays / Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus
4) mystery plays / Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus
38
6- Richard Crashaw’s description, in his mid-seventeenth-century poem “Saint Mary

Magdalene,” of the tearful eyes of the repentant Magdalene as ‘two faithful fountains /
Two walking baths, two weeping motions, / Portable and compendious oceans’ best
typifies a(n) ----------------.
1) mixed metaphor
2) implicit metaphor
3) metaphysical conceit
4) extended simile
7- As a form of burlesque ‘lampoon’ -----------------.
1) was an 18th century theatre form mocking serious plays
2) is a sub-branch of caricature, mainly used in written art for comic purposes
3) allegedly described the inner mind of a particular person in a ridiculous way
4) is a short satirical work, or a passage in a longer work
8- In discussions of ‘ecriture’, ‘recuperation’ ----------------.
1) is the text’s representation of the world as no more than an effect generated by the
process of reading
2) takes place through such habitual procedures in reading as assigning the text to a specific
genre
3) concerns the fact that a text is simply a structure of signs whose significance is
constituted by ideology
4) is used to signify the multiple ways in which any one literary text is made up of other
texts
9- The term ‘thick description’, as developed by Clifford Geertz, originally evolved in the
discipline of ------------------.
1) ‘cultural anthropology’
2) ‘political philosophy’
3) ‘Lacanian psychoanalysis’
4) ‘postmodern fiction’
10- The term ‘new pragmatism’ basically concerns ------------------.
1) evaluation of a work based on collective critical opinion
2) consideration of history of ideas in the generation of recent theory
3) skepticism about the efficacy of theory on practice
4) irrelevance of old theories to the newly developing ones
11- Which of the following on Aristotle / his Poetics is NOT TRUE?
1) He contends that poetry is more universal, more general than things as they are.
2) He disagrees with Plato that all arts—from epic poetry to flute-playing—are imitations.
3) He generally maintains that the thoughts expressed through language (and not language
itself) are a poet’s utmost concern.
4) He never addresses the didactic value of poetry or literature in the Poetics.
12- The Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) believes that in a
‘polyphonic’ novel the ------------------.
1) polyphonic nature of the work implies the existence of one all-encompassing truth
2) author knows the ending of the novel while writing the novel’s beginning
3) truth of the novel is mainly an active creation in the consciousness of the reader
4) novel is not a working out of the authors worldview or understanding of truth
39
1393 – Questions
13- ‘The Fugitives’, a 1920s group that believed in and practiced similar approaches to a
text, had strong critical affinities with the later-formed -----------------.
1) German neo-Romantics
2) Chicago Neo-Aristotelians
3) New Humanists
4) Southern Agrarians
14- In Wolfgang Iser’s brand of reader-oriented criticism -----------------.
1) a text is properly ‘concretized’ only when it is de-registered and automatically viewed in
the reader’s consciousness
2) texts, in and of themselves, possess meanings, which are then only decoded by the active
consciousness of the reader
3) texts do not tell the reader everything that needs to be known about a character, a
situation. etc. and the reader must automatically fill in these ‘gaps’ using their own
knowledge base
4) the text— ‘ideally and in the final analysis’— should come to have one and only one
correct meaning
15- In Hans Robert Jauss’ conception of reception theory, ----------------.
1) an ‘interpretive community’ is a like-minded group of readers
2) the text does not play much of a role in the interpretive process
3) a final assessment about any literary work is ultimately impossible
4) evaluation of a text is not ‘essentially’ different in different historical periods
16- Structuralism maintains that literary meaning can only be found by / through
----------------.
1) a profound transactional response to a text’s latent structure
2) analysis of the system of rules that comprise literature itself
3) recourse to readers’ private and public experiences across time
4) attention to the author’s intention and the text’s semantic structuration
17- A deconstructor begins textual analysis by assuming that a text (the text’s)
----------------.
1) allows countless reinterpretations by the reader
2) possesses a special ontological status
3) meaning is ultimately decidable, albeit ‘hazily’
4) ascetic quality precludes truly genuine re-readings
18- Freud’s Dynamic Model of the human psyche would posit that ------------------.
1) the preconscious in our mind takes priority over the conscious
2) the human psyche functions according to the principles of ‘reality’ and ‘pleasure’
3) our minds are a dichotomy consisting of the conscious and the unconscious
4) nearly all manifest desires have their roots in the aggressive instinct
19- The American critic Fredric Jameson asserts that when analyzing a text, critics should
possess ‘dialectical self-awareness’: they must -----------------.
1) deal initially resolve their contradictory ideological standpoints
2) be aware of their own ideology
3) try to merge their ideology with their literary inclinations
4) stay away from any ideology
40
20- The Cultural Poetics approach to textual analysis -------------------.

1) generally, bases its philosophical premises on Aristotle’s view of art as mimesis
2) deals with a text as an autonomous work of art that contains all the necessary cultural
elements within it
3) examines the text’s ‘cultural’ concerns as divorced from its ‘aesthetic’ aspects
4) questions the very act of how we can arrive at meaning for any human activity
21- The 15th c. figure Sir Thomas Malory (d. 1471) was ----------------.
1) imitated in several enormously long fifteenth-century French prose romances
2) a passionate devotee of chivalry, which he personified in his hero Sir Lancelot
3) the first to divide the long romance Morte Darthur into a book for publication
4) a translator of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and Gower’s Confession Amantis into
modern English
22- The 16th c. Book of Homilies -----------------.
1) was composed of hundreds of sermons developed in English for official services at the
royal court
2) introduced the old Latin liturgy in the English vernacular for the newly-founded
protestant Church
3) was a moderate, though often ambiguous compromise between Catholic and Protestant
positions at a time when rivalry between the two camps was extremely rife
4) put together twelve sermons that were, by royal and ecclesiastical decree, to be read over
and over, in the order in which they were set forth, in parish churches throughout
England
23- Elizabethan poet / poem DO NOT match in ------------------.
1) Henry Howard. Earl of Surrey / ‘Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest’
2) Edmund Spenser / ‘Of this worlds Theatre in which we stay’
3) Sir Philip Sidney / ‘When Nature made her chief work, Stella’s eyes’
4) William Shakespeare / ‘Poor soul, the center of my sinful earth’
24- Early 17th c. literature events occurred in the correct order in ------------------.
1) Jonson’s Volpone“King James” BibleDonne’s The Second AnniversaryBacon’s
Novum Organum
2) “King James” BibleJonson’s VolponeBacon’s Novum OrganumDonne’s The
Second Anniversary
3) Bacon’s Novum OrganumJonson’s VolponeDonne’s The Second Anniversary
“King James” Bible
4) Donne’s The Second AnniversaryJonson’s VolponeBacon’s Novum Organum
“King James” Bible
25- Which of the following about John Donne’s verse satires is TRUE?
1) They have an elegiac quality as he had at the time—early 17th c.—been appointed as the
dean of St. Paul’s in England.
2) His satires were nearly always written in an urbane and witty style.
3) They were developed as an effort in the 1590s (by Donne and Jonson among others) to
naturalize it as a classical form in England.
4) The models for his satires were contemporary French and Italian poets (and not as could
have been expected) ancients like Horace and Juvenal.
41
1393 – Questions
26- Sir Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis -----------------.

1) has at its center an account of a research establishment, Solomon’s House, that could
exist in any society
2) is based on Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) in nearly every detail
3) is modelled after a real island, Bensalem, discovered in 1568 in the Pacific, famous for its
inhabitants’ unusually enlightened attitude towards life
4) starts after an imaginary journey in which the narrator, Zakary, discovers an island
strangely immersed in Hebrew and Greek thought
27- Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy ------------------.
1) finds it ill-advised to include any digression, or what he called ‘picaresque disorder’, in
its analysis of ‘melancholia’
2) impersonates in its ‘Democritus’ Junior’ the madness of the Greek “laughing
philosopher” Democritus
3) analyzes in encyclopedic detail the ubiquitous Jacobean theory of four humors
4) assumes that knowledge of psychology, not science, is humankind’s greatest need
28- Daniel Defoe’s Roxana, or The Fortunate Mistress is ------------------.
1) about a woman saved from ruin by an honest Dutch merchant
2) the story, told by herself, of a beautiful and ambitious courtesan
3) set in the early seventeenth century in an anonymous ‘north of England’ town
4) the tale of an ‘opportune’ marriage succeeding the heroine’s long career of ill-repute
29- Eighteenth century figure / work do NOT MATCH in ------------------.
1) Joseph Addison / ‘On the Scale of Being’
2) William Hogarth / ‘Marriage A-la-Mode’
3) Alexander Pope / ‘Fantomina: or, Love in a Maze’
4) Jonathan Swift / ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’
30- The ballads in Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802—03) were
----------------.
1) later on extensively used in his Waverly novels, an important set of historical novels he
wrote in the 1820s and 30s.
2) genuine literary copies of traditional folk songs as he found them recited in the English-
Scottish border
3) mostly prompted by his chance discovery of a seventeenth-century manuscript in which a
number of ancient had been copied down
4) set down on paper at the dictation of the people among whom the old poems were still
being recited and sung
31- Which of the following about Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) is TRUE?
1) He never wrote for newspapers but undertook to write, publish, and distribute a
periodical, The Friend, with a distinguished group of fellow poets and critics.
2) He grew less and less radical as he aged: he finally became a conservative in politics—a
highly philosophical one—and a staunch Anglican in religion.
3) He planned to establish an ideal democratic community called “Pantisocracy” with the
help of sonic fellow poets in Southern England.
4) He was, as a major Romantic, an anti-elitist in arts and letters with a firm belief in the
role ordinary people might play in modern states.
42
32- Byron’s poem ‘Beppo’, written in Venice, ------------------.

1) was a sequel to his The Vision of Judgement which had been famously derided by critics
2) is based on material he gathered for his plays The Two Foscari, Sardanapalus and Cain
3) was his first work in the ironic, colloquial style which was to lead him to Don Juan
4) shows his deep involvement with the cause of the Italian and Greek patriots
33- John Keats’s Eve of St Agnes -----------------.
1) is composed of a sequence of short lyric grouped around the theme of love
2) was his poem in a satirical vein which was, however, initially conceived as an epic
3) is a long ballad describing a knight fatally enthralled by an elfin woman
4) includes the characters Madeline and his love Porphyro (who comes from a family hostile
to Madeline’s)
34- Which of the following about the British historical novel is TRUE?
1) A convenient generic starting point for it is Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto
(1764).
2) Such factual works such as Macaulay’s History of England (1848) nearly ruined the
respectability of the emergent historical fiction in the Victorian period.
3) Attempts in such works as Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii to reconstruct the
historical novel along Greco-Roman classical lines were met with huge public
disapproval in their own time.
4) Beginning with the 1830s, the historical novel lost almost all its Scott-established status
as a respected genre of fiction.
35- The ‘Time of Troubles’ in the Victorian period, which left its mark on the early
Victorian literature, refers to ------------------.
1) huge expansion of British colonies and the human and economic costs it brought about,
particularly from 1830s
2) challenges made to the government of Ireland by Britain well into the century after the
Irish Act of Union in 1800
3) economic and social difficulties attendant on industrialization in the 1830s and 1840s
4) the population boom in the Early-Victorian era which caused mass-unemployment
problems in the first half of the 19th c
36- Which of the following works does NOT typify the influence of the ‘utilitarian spirit’
prevalent in the Victorian age?
1) Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus
2) Pater’s Marias the Epicurean
3) Mill’s Autobiography
4) Dickens’s Hard Times
37- In his essay ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, the English poet, philosopher, and critic T.
E. Hulme (1883-1917) ----------------.
1) espoused views of conventional language and the visual image which were at odds with
those of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound
2) sharply repudiates the “spilt religion” of Romanticism, responsible for vagueness in the
arts
3) sees human beings as limited and capable of improvement only through the rejection of
tradition.
4) calls for abandoning the fashionable ‘dry, hard, classical verse’ for verse that exhibits
‘precision, clarity, and freshness’
43
1393 – Questions
38- As a term applied to English cultural history, Edwardian suggests a period in which
-----------------.
1) the moral atmosphere of the pre-War years was relaxed in the years after the War, both as
regarded the literature of the time and the general life of the public
2) ‘social injustice’ in between the wars was the dominant theme of British public life
3) the social and economic stabilities of the Victorian age remained largely unimpaired,
though on the level of ideas a sense of change and liberation existed
4) there was what can be called a ‘lull’ immediately before the storm of World War I
39- Which is the correct order of texts in the twentieth century?
1) T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” E. M. Forster’s A Passage to
IndiaWilliam Butler Yeats’ The Tower
2) William Butler Yeats’ The TowerT. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India
3) T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” William Butler Yeats’ The
TowerE. M. Forster’s A Passage to India
4) William Butler Yeats’ The TowerE. M. Forster’s A Passage to IndiaT. S. Eliot’s
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
40- An important feature of the 1930s English literature is that ------------------.
1) the emerging poets and novelists of the time were relatively unaffected by the rise of
Hitler and the shadow of Fascism and Nazism over Europe.
2) the younger writers of the period were technically far more daring and inventive than
such modernists as Eliot and Woolf.
3) writers generally turned “anti-red” as they were horrified by the events in Russia after the
Bolshevik Revolution there in 1917.
4) such established figures as T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, W. B. Yeats
and Ezra Pound turned to the political right.
LITERARY GENRES
41- Which of the following about William Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello (written between
1602 to 1604) is NOT TRUE?
1) Cassio is the character in the play who helps Othello court his wife and whom Othello
promotes to be his lieutenant in the course of the play.
2) Desdemona, the daughter of Brabantio, a Venetian senator, has secretly married Othello,
a Moor in the service of the state.
3) In the middle of a storm which disperses the Turkish fleet, Othello lands on Cyprus with
Desdemona and Cassio, a young Florentine.
4) Iago persuades his wife Emilia to plead in his favor with Cassio, which she does secretly,
albeit unwillingly and with a sense of guilt.
42- Combining elements of Spanish intrigue comedy and fast-moving farce, the Restoration
comedy ---------------- shows the exploits of two English cavaliers, Wildblood and
Bellamy, in Madrid at carnival time.
1) John Dryden’s An Evening’s Love
2) William Congreve’s The Old Bachelor
3) William Congreve’s The Mourning Bride
4) John Dryden’s All for Love
44
43- Which of the following is NOT a character in Oliver Goldsmith’s comedy She Stoops to
Conquer, or The Mistakes of a Night (produced 1773)?
1) Hardcastle, who loves ‘everything that’s old: old friends, old times, old manners, …’
2) Tony Lumpkin, a frequenter of the Three Jolly Pigeons, idle and ignorant, but cunning
and mischievous, and doted on by his mother.
3) Heartwell, a ‘surly old pretended woman-hater’.
4) Young Marlow, “one of the most ‘bashful’ and ‘reserved’ young fellows in the world”.
44- The term ---------------- has been used by the twentieth century playwright Howard
Barker to describe his own brand of theatre.
1) “Theatre of Maladjustment”
2) “Drama of Desire”
3) “Drama of Revelation”
4) “Theatre of Catastrophe”
45- Edward Bond’s 1965 play Saved ----------------.
1) takes its surreal setting from a painting of drab city streets by ‘some unknown German
artist’
2) evokes a bleak south London landscape of domestic and street violence and the
somewhat caricatured impoverished pastimes of the working class
3) takes place in the somber Victorian atmosphere of 1840s in a backdrop of urban unrest
4) adapts its modern surroundings to that of a remote region in the heartlands of Australia
where ‘nothing but storms of sand reign’
46- Which of the following plays written (in 1987) largely in rhyming verse opens with a
short satirical extract from a 1693 comedy by Thomas Shadwell?
1) Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money
2) David Hare’s Plenty
3) Tony Harrison’s The Laborers of Herakles
4) Alan Bennett’s forty Years On
47- ‘Novel / character / character description’ from works by George Eliot (1819-80) match
in ---------------.
1) Adam Bede / Dinah Morris / pretty, vain, and self-centered, niece of the genial farmer
Martin Poyser of Hall Farm
2) Silas Marner / Arthur Donnithorne / Dunstan’s elder brother in the novel in love with
Nancy Lammeter, but secretly and unhappily married to a woman of low class in a
neighboring town.
3) Felix Holt / Esther / heir to the Transonic estate gradually falling in love with Felix in the
course of the novel
4) The Mill on the Floss / Maggie / a Methodist preacher of a very strong, serious, and calm
nature
45
1393 – Questions
48- Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904) opens with ----------------.

1) “To begin with I wish to disclaim the possession of those high gifts of imagination and
expression which would have enabled my pen to create for the reader the personality of
the man who called himself, after the Russian custom, Cyril son of Isidor—Kirylo
Sidorovitch—Razumov.”
2) “On my right hand there were lines of fishing stakes resembling a mysterious system of
half-submerged bamboo fences, incomprehensible in its division of the domain of
tropical fishes, and crazy of aspect as if abandoned forever by some nomad tribe of
fishermen now gone to the other end of the ocean; for there was no sign of human
habitation as far as the eye could reach.”
3) “Mr. Verloc, going out in the morning, left his shop nominally in charge of his brother-
in-law. It could be done, because there was very little business at any time, and
practically none at all before the evening. Mr. Verloc cared but little about his ostensible
business. And, moreover, his wife was in charge of his brother-in-law.”
4) “In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of Sulaco—the
luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its antiquity—had never been
commercially anything more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local trade
in ox-hides and indigo.”
49- Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse (1927) is written in three sections, the section
second of which, ----------------.
1) describes the exhausting but finally successful efforts of Lily, through her painting, to
recapture the revelation of shape-in-chaos which she owes to the vanished Mrs. Ramsay
2) deals in accurate detail with the desire of Mr. Ramsay, Camilla, and James to reach the
lighthouse, which they finally accomplish, despite the undercurrents of rivalry, loss, and
rebellion that torment them.
3) records with laconic brevity the death of Mrs. Ramsay and of her son Andrew, killed in
the war, and dwells with a desolate lyricism on the abandoning of the family home, and
its gradual post-war reawakening
4) is focused on the frictions of a hectic day that are finally, though only momentarily,
resolved around the dinner table (with Mrs. Ramsay famously reflecting at the end of the
section that ‘something ... is immune from change, and shines out... in the face of the
flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby’.)
50- Henry James (1843-1916) ‘novel / novel characters’ DO NOT match in ----------------.
1) The Portrait of a Lady / Douglas, Miss Jessel and Peter Quint
2) Washington Square / Catherine, Dr. Sloper and Morris Townsend
3) The Ambassadors / Lambert Strether, Chad Newsome and Marie de Vionnet
4) The Wings of the Dove / Kate Croy, Merton Densher and Milly Theale
51- Which of the following about Samuel Beckett’s Murphy (1938) is NOT TRUE?
1) Murphy has conversations with his friend and mentor Neary an eccentric from Ireland
who has the ability to stop his heart.
2) The main character is a recluse ‘eking out his meagre existence on the margins of the
Paris conurbation’.
3) The main character is urged by the character Celia to find a job, and begins work as a
nurse at the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat in north London.
4) It opens with the protagonist having tied himself naked to a rocking chair in his
apartment, rocking back and forth in the dark.
46
52- ‘Novelist / novel’ match in -----------------.

1) V. S. Naipaul / The Kingdom of the Wicked
2) Kazuo Ishiguro / Enderby Outside
3) Angela Carter / Nights at the Circus
4) Dorris Lessing / The Enemy in the Blanket
53- Which of the following about John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) is TRUE?
1) The action of the poem begins in median res (in the middle of things), prior to the poet’s
statement of his theme and invocation of his Muse.
2) There are several passages of straightforward reference in the work to the political
questions at stake in the English Revolution and the Restoration.
3) The setting of the epic encompasses Heaven, Hell, primordial Chaos, but precludes the
planet earth.
4) The poet highlights the choices and difficulties he faced in creating his poem in the
opening passages of Books 1, 3, 7, and 9 of the book
54- William Blake’s ‘The Book of Thel’ (1791) opens with Thel’s Motto -----------------.
1) “Cruelty has a Human Heart / And Jealousy a Human Face, / Terror, the Human Form
Divine. / And Secrecy, the Human Dress.”
2) “Does the Eagle know what is in the pit? / Or wilt thou go ask the Mole? / Can Wisdom
be put in a silver rod? / Or Love in a golden bowl?”
3) “I was angry with my friend: / I told my wrath, my wrath did end. / I was angry with my
foe: / I told it not. my wrath did grow.”
4) “Pity would be no more. / If we did not make somebody Poor: / And Mercy no more
could be. / If all were as happy as we.”
55- The Romantic Poet Lord Byron was not particularly influenced—as ‘a recognizable
antecedent’— by --------------- in his composition of Don Juan.
1) Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound
2) Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
3) Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas
4) Laurence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy
56- Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott (1832) opens with -----------------.
1) “Courage!” he said, and pointed toward the land. / “This mounting wave will roll us
shoreward soon...”
2) “On either side the river lie / Long fields of barley and of rye. / That clothe the wold and
meet the sky...”
3) “At Francis Allen’s on the Christmas eve—The game of forfeits done—the girls all
kissed Beneath the sacred bush and passed away...”
4) “Comrades, leave me here a little, while as yet 'tis early morn; / Leave me here, and when
you want me, sound upon the bugle horn...”
57- ‘Poet /poem’ DO NOT match in -----------------.
1) Ernest Dowson / ‘Cynara’
2) Oscar Wilde / ‘Impression du Matin’
3) Dante Gabriel Rossetti / ‘The Defence of Guenevere’
4) Algernon Gabriel Swinburne / ‘Ave atque Vale’
47
1393 – Questions
58- Which of the following about the poet W. H. Auden (1907-1973) is NOT TRUE?
1) He was influenced early on in his poetry by popular and folk culture, particularly the
songs of the English music hall and, later, American blues singers.
2) He learned metrical and verbal techniques from Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wilfred Owen
and T. S. Eliot.
3) He, along with Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis and Louis MacNeice would form what
was later termed as the ‘Auden Group’.
4) He was not quite concerned with the Waste Land of poverty and ‘depressed areas’ that
was the 1930s England in his poetry.
59- The Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978) -----------------.
1) mourned the state of the English language in his In Memoriam James Joyce and called
for a return to the natural rhythms of English
2) would, in an essay, argue vehemently against confining ‘British literature’ to the standard
English literature of England
3) published nearly all his poetry in ‘Lallan’, a language he developed out of several strands
of old and modern Scots
4) wrote much of his poetry, as one of the founders of the Scottish Renaissance Movement,
in the vernacular Scots after the mid-1950s
60- Which of the following poets / group of poets can be seen as an antecedent / an influence
upon the Movement poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985)
1) A. E. Housman, Wilfred Owen and W. H. Auden
2) T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound
3) Dyland Thomas and the New Apocalypse poets
4) Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning
48
49
1- Which of the following statements about the term ‘actant’, as developed in the
narratology of A. J. Greimas is TRUE?
Answer: Choice 3
In the narratology of A. J. Greimas, one of six basic categories of fictional role common to
all stories. The actants are paired in binary opposition: Subject/Object, Sender/Receiver,
Helper/Opponent. A character (or acteur) is an individualized manifestation of one or more
actants; but an actant may be realized in a non-human creature (e.g. a dragon as Opponent)
or inanimate object (e.g. magic sword as Helper, or Holy Grail as Object), or in more than
one acteur.
Source: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms by Chris Baldick, 2nd edition, p. 3
2- In the eighteenth century, a number of poets wrote georgics (on the model of Virgil)
describing in verse -----------------.
Answer: Choice 1
In the eighteenth century, a number of poets wrote georgics (on the model of Virgil),
describing in verse such utilitarian arts as sheepherding, running a sugar plantation, and
making cider. Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism and his Essay on Man are eighteenth-
century didactic poems on the subjects of literary criticism and of moral philosophy.
edition, p. 88
3- As a supplement to perfect rhyme, ‘slant rhyme’ or ‘pararhyme’ -----------------.
Answer: Choice 4
Many modern poets, however, deliberately supplement perfect rhyme with ‘imperfect
rhyme’ (also known as ‘partial rhyme’, or else as ‘approximate rhyme’, ‘slant rhyme’, or
‘pararhyme’). This effect is fairly common in folk songs such as children’s verses, and it was
employed occasionally by various writers of art lyrics such as Henry Vaughan in the
seventeenth, William Blake in the late eighteenth, and very frequently by Emily Dickinson in
the nineteenth century. Later, Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, and
other poets systematically exploited partial rhymes, in which the vowels are only
approximate or else quite different, and occasionally even the rhymed consonants are similar
rather than identical.
edition, p. 349-50
50
4- Chronicle Plays, dramatic works based on the historical materials in the English
Chronicles by Raphael Holinshed and others, ------------------.
Answer: Choice 1
Chronicle plays were dramatic works based on the historical materials in the English
Chronicles by Raphael Holinshed and others. They achieved high popularity late in the
sixteenth century, when the patriotic fervor following the defeat of the Spanish Armada in
1588 fostered a demand for plays dealing with English history. The early chronicle plays
presented a loosely knit series of events during the reign of an English king and depended for
effect mainly on a bustle of stage battles, pageantry, and spectacle. Christopher Marlowe,
however, in his Edward II (1592) selected and rearranged materials from Holinshed’s
Chronicles to compose a unified drama of character, and Shakespeare’s series of chronicle
plays, encompassing the succession of English kings from Richard II to Henry VIII, includes
such major artistic achievements as Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V
edition, p. 50
5- The character ‘Vice’ in ---------------- is regarded by some literary historians as a
precursor of such figures in Elizabethan drama as ---------------.
Answer: Choice 2
Morality plays were dramatized allegories of a representative Christian life in the plot form
of a quest for salvation, in which the crucial events are temptations, sinning, and the
climactic confrontation with death. The usual protagonist represents Mankind, or Everyman;
among the other characters are personifications of virtues, vices, and Death, as well as angels
and demons who contest for the prize of the soul of Mankind. A character known as the Vice
often played the role of the tempter in a fashion both sinister and comic; he is regarded by
some literary historians as a precursor both of the cynical, ironic villain and of some of the
comic figures in Elizabethan drama, including Shakespeare’s Falstaff.
edition, p. 224
51
6- Richard Crashaw’s description, in his mid-seventeenth-century poem “Saint Mary

Magdalene,” of the tearful eyes of the repentant Magdalene as ‘two faithful fountains /
Two walking baths, two weeping motions, / Portable and compendious oceans’ best
typifies a(n) ----------------.
Answer: Choice 3
An oft-cited instance of the chilly ingenuity of the metaphysical conceit when it is
overdriven is Richard Crashaw’s description, in his mid-seventeenth-century poem “Saint
Mary Magdalene,”
of the tearful eyes of the repentant Magdalene as
two faithful fountains
Two walking baths, two weeping motions,
Portable and compendious oceans.
edition, p. 59
7- As a form of burlesque ‘lampoon’ -----------------.
Answer: Choice 4
A form of burlesque is the ‘lampoon’: a short satirical work, or a passage in a longer work,
which describes the appearance and character of a particular person in a way that makes that
person ridiculous. It typically employs ‘caricature’, which in a verbal description (as in
graphic art) exaggerates or distorts, for comic effect, a person’s distinctive physical features
or personality traits.
edition, p. 39
8- In discussions of ‘ecriture’, ‘recuperation’ ----------------.
Answer: Choice 2
The system of linguistic and literary conventions that constitute a literary text are said by
structuralist and poststructuralist critics to be “naturalized” in the activity of reading, in that
the artifices of a nonreferential “textuality” are made to seem vraisemblable (credible)—that
is, made to give the illusion of referring to reality—by being brought into accord with modes
of discourse and cultural stereotypes that are so familiar and habitual as to seem natural.
Naturalization (an alternative term is recuperation) takes place through such habitual
procedures in reading as assigning the text to a specific genre, or taking a fictional text to be
the speech of a credibly human narrator, or interpreting its artifices as signifying characters,
actions, and values that represent, or accord with, those in an extratextual world.
edition, p. 401
52
9- The term ‘thick description’, as developed by Clifford Geertz, originally evolved in the
discipline of ------------------.
Answer: Choice 1
Developments in cultural anthropology, especially Clifford Geertz’s view that a culture is
constituted by distinctive sets of signifying systems, and his use of what he calls ‘thick
descriptions’—the close analysis, or “reading,” of a particular social production or event so
as to recover the meanings it has for the people involved in it, as well as to discover, within
the overall cultural system, the network of conventions, codes, and modes of thinking with
which the particular item is implicated, and which invest the item with those meanings.
edition, p. 245
10- The term ‘new pragmatism’ basically concerns ------------------.
Answer: Choice 3
The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard has also mounted an influential attack against
“theory,” which he regards as an attempt to impose a common vocabulary and set of
principles in order illegitimately to control and constrain the many independent “language-
games” that constitute discourse; see his The Postmodern Condition (1984). One response to
this skepticism about the efficacy of theory on practice (a skepticism that is often labeled the
new pragmatism) is that, while no general theory of meaning entails consequences for the
practice of interpretation (in the strict logical sense of “entails”), it is a matter of common
observation that diverse current theories have in actual fact served both to foster and to
corroborate diverse and novel interpretive practices by literary critics.
edition, p. 314
11- Which of the following on Aristotle / his Poetics is NOT TRUE?
Answer: Choice 2
At the beginning of the Poetics, Aristotle notes that “epic poetry, tragedy, comedy,
dithyrambic poetry, and most forms of flute and lyre playing all happen to be in general,
imitations.” Although all of these imitations differ in how and what they imitate, Aristotle
agrees with Plato that all arts are imitations.
5th edition, p. 23
12- The Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) believes that in a
‘polyphonic’ novel the ------------------.
Answer: Choice 4
In a polyphonic novel, there is no overall outline structure or prescribed outcome, nor is the
text a working out of the author’s worldview or understanding of truth. The truth of the
53
polyphonic novel is an active creation in the consciousness of the author, the reader, and the
characters, allowing for genuine surprises for all concerned.
5th edition, p. 46
13- ‘The Fugitives’, a 1920s group that believed in and practiced similar approaches to a
text, had strong critical affinities with the later-formed -----------------.
Answer: Choice 4
While teaching at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, in the 1920s, John Crowe
Ransom, along with several other professors and students, formed the Fugitives, a group of
scholars and critics who believed in and practiced similar interpretive approaches to a text.
Other sympathetic groups, such as the Southern Agrarians (also in Nashville, Tennessee),
soon formed.
5th edition, p. 53
14- In Wolfgang Iser’s brand of reader-oriented criticism -----------------.
Answer: Choice 3
Since texts, however, do not tell the reader everything that needs to be known about a
character, a situation, a relationship, and other such textual elements, readers must
automatically fill in these ‘gaps’ using their own knowledge base, grounded as it is in a
particular worldview. In addition, each reader creates his or her own horizon of
expectations—that is a reader’s expectations about what will or may or should happen next.
5th edition, p. 78
15- In Hans Robert Jauss’ conception of reception theory, ------------------.
Answer: Choice 3
Jauss argues that since each historical period establishes its own horizon of expectations, the
overall value and meaning of any text can never become fixed or universal. Readers from
any given historical period establish for themselves, Jauss maintains, what they value in a
text. A text, then does not have one and only one correct interpretation because its supposed
meaning changes from one historical period to another. A final assessment about any literary
work thus becomes impossible.
5th edition, p. 78
54
16- Structuralism maintains that literary meaning can only be found by / through -----------.
Answer: Choice 2
Declaring both isolated text and author to be of little importance, structuralism attempts to
strip literature of its magical powers or so-called hidden meanings that can be discovered by
only a small, elite group of highly trained specialists. Meaning can be found, it declares, by
analyzing the system of rules that comprise literature itself.
5th edition, p. 100
17- A deconstructor begins textual analysis by assuming that a text (the text’s)
---------------------.
Answer: Choice 1
A deconstructionist begins textual analysis by assuming that a text has multiple
interpretations and that a text allow itself to be reread and thus reinterpreted countless times.
5th edition, p. 116
18- Freud’s Dynamic Model of the human psyche would posit that ------------------.
Answer: Choice 3
Early in his career, Freud developed the dynamic model, asserting that our minds are a
dichotomy consisting of the conscious (the rational) and the unconscious (the irrational).
5th edition, p. 125
19- The American critic Fredric Jameson asserts that when analyzing a text, critics should
possess ‘dialectical self-awareness’: they must -----------------.
Answer: Choice 2
In Marxism and Form (1971), a text revered by American Marxists, Jameson asserts that all
critics must be aware of their own ideology when analyzing a text, possessing what he calls
dialectical self-awareness.
5th edition, p. 174
55
20- The Cultural Poetics approach to textual analysis -------------------.

Answer: Choice 4
Cultural Poetics claims that it provides its adherents with a practice of literary textual
analysis that:
 Highlights the interrelatedness of all human activities
 Admits its own prejudices
 Gives a more complete understanding of a text than does the old historicism and
other interpretive approaches
5th edition, p. 183
21- The 15th c. figure Sir Thomas Malory (d. 1471) was ----------------.
Answer: Choice 2
The works of Sir Thomas Malory (d. 1471) gave the definitive form in English to the legend
of King Arthur and his knights. Malory spent years in prison Englishing a series of Arthurian
romances that he translated and abridged chiefly from several enormously long thirteenth-
century French prose romances. Malory was a passionate devotee of chivalry, which he
personified in his hero Sir Lancelot. In the jealousies and rivalries that finally break up the
round table and destroy Arthur’s kingdom, Malory saw a distant image of the civil wars of
his own time.

22- The 16th c. Book of Homilies -----------------.
Answer: Choice 4
The Protestant archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, was responsible in 1547 for the
publication of the Book of Homilies. Hoping to curb the influence of “ignorant preachers”
and fearing the spread of unauthorized beliefs, Cranmer brought together twelve sermons
that were, by royal and ecclesiastical decree, to be read over and over, in the order in which
they were set forth, in parish churches throughout the realm.
23- Elizabethan poet / poem DO NOT match in ------------------.
Answer: Choice 1
‘Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest’ is Shakespeare’s sonnet number 3.
Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 1062, 904, 977, and
1076
56
24- Early 17th c. literature events occurred in the correct order in ------------------.
Answer: Choice 1
Jonson’s Volpone (1606) “King James” Bible (1611) Donne’s The Second Anniversary
(1612) Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620)
25- Which of the following about John Donne’s verse satires is TRUE?
Answer: Choice 3
In satire 3 John Donne holds a subject up to ridicule. Like his elegies, Donne’s five verse
satires were written in his twenties and are in the forefront of an effort in the 1590s (by
Donne, Ben Jonson, Joseph Hall, and John Marston) to naturalize those classical forms in
England. While elements of satire figure in many different kinds of literature, the great
models for formal verse satire were the Roman poets Horace and Juvenal, the former for an
urbanely witty style, the latter for an indignant or angry manner.
26- Sir Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis -----------------.
Answer: Choice 1
Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) set a fashion for accounts of imaginary communities with
more or less ideal forms of government. Bacon’s imaginary community has at its center an
account of a research establishment, Solomon’s House, that could exist in any society;
indeed, a version of it was established in England in 1662 as the Royal Society.
27- Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy ------------------.
Answer: Choice 4
Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy assumes, unlike Bacon, that knowledge of
psychology, not science, is humankind’s greatest need. His enormous, baggy, delightful
treatise analyzes in encyclopedic detail that ubiquitous Jacobean malady, melancholy,
supposedly caused, according to contemporary humor theory, by an excess of black bile.
28- Daniel Defoe’s Roxana, or The Fortunate Mistress is ------------------.
Answer: Choice 2
Roxana, or The Fortunate Mistress, is the story, told by herself, of a beautiful and ambitious
courtesan. A bad marriage and early poverty drive her to a career of prostitution, at which
she succeeds brilliantly until eventually her past catches up with her.
57
29- Eighteenth century figure / work do NOT MATCH in ------------------.

Answer: Choice 3
‘Fantomina: or, Love in a Maze’ is by Eliza Haywood
2590
30- The ballads in Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-03) were
----------------.
Answer: Choice 4
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (3 vols, 1802-3), a collection of ballads compiled by Sir W.
Scott, who divided them into three sections, Historical Ballads, Romantic Ballads, and
Imitations of the Ancient Ballad. He was aided by various friends and advisers, who included
Leyden, J. Hogg, R. Surtees, and many old women (including Hogg’s mother) who kept
alive the oral traditions.
31- Which of the following about Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) is TRUE?
Answer: Choice 2
Coleridge’s later works and unpublished lectures develop his critical ideas, concerning
Imagination and Fancy; Reason and Understanding; Symbolism and Allegory; Organic and
Mechanical Form; Culture and Civilization. The dialectical way he expresses them is one of
his clearest debts to German Romantic philosophy. His final position is that of a Romantic
conservative and Christian radical. Coleridge has been variously criticized as a political
turncoat, a drug addict, a plagiarist, and a mystic humbug, whose wrecked career left nothing
but a handful of magical early poems. But the importance of his highly imaginative criticism
is now generally accepted, as is his position (with Wordsworth) as one of the two great
progenitors of the English Romantic spirit.
32- Byron’s poem ‘Beppo’, written in Venice, ------------------.

Answer: Choice 3
Byron returned to Venice and there wrote Beppo, his first work in the ironic, colloquial style
which was to lead him to Don Juan. Feeling more and more trapped by the poetic modes that
had won him his popularity, Byron tested out an entirely new mode in Beppo: A Venetian
Story, a comic verse tale about a deceived husband in which he previewed the playful
narrative manner and the ottava rima stanzas of Don Juan. In December 1818 he began the
composition of Don Juan.
Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature, edited by Dinah Birch and
Katy Hooper, p. 104
58
33- John Keats’s Eve of St Agnes -----------------.

Answer: Choice 4
The Eve of St Agnes is a narrative poem in Spenserian stanzas by John Keats, written 1819,
published 1820. Madeline has been told the legend that on St Agnes’s Eve (January 20th)
maidens may have visions of their lovers. Madeline’s love, Porphyro, comes from a family
hostile to her own, yet he contrives to steal into the house during a ball on St Agnes’s Eve,
and with the aid of old Angela is secreted in Madeline’s room. When she wakes from dreams
of him, aroused by his soft singing, she finds him by her bedside. Silently they escape from
the house, and fly ‘away into the storm’.
Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature, edited by Dinah Birch and
Katy Hooper, p. 234
34- Which of the following about the British historical novel is TRUE?
Answer: Choice 1
The origins of the British historical novel can be located in the medieval romances of
chivalry, but a convenient generic starting point is Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto
(1764), which patented many of the conventional devices of the Gothic–historical tale.
Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature by Dinah Birch and Katy
Hooper, p. 331
35- The ‘Time of Troubles’ in the Victorian period, which left its mark on the early
Victorian literature, refers to ------------------.
Answer: Choice 3
The economic and social difficulties attendant on industrialization were so severe that the
1830s and 1840s became known as the ‘Time of Troubles’. After a period of prosperity from
1832 to 1836, a crash in 1837, followed by a series of bad harvests, produced a period of
unemployment, desperate poverty, and rioting.
36- Which of the following works does NOT typify the influence of the ‘utilitarian spirit’
prevalent in the Victorian age?
Answer: Choice 2
Some rationalist challenges to religious belief that developed before the Victorian period
maintained their influence. The most significant was Utilitarianism, also known as
Benthamism or Philosophical Radicalism. Utilitarianism derived from the thought of Jeremy
Bentham (1748—1832) and his disciple James Mill (1773—1836), the father of John Stuart
Mill. Bentham believed that all human beings seek to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.
The criterion by which we should judge a normally correct action, therefore, is the extent to
which it provides the greatest pleasure to the greatest number. Measuring religion by this
moral arithmetic, Benthamites concluded that it was an outmoded superstition; it did not
meet the rationalist test of value. Utilitarianism was widely influential in providing a
59
philosophical basis for political and social reforms, but it aroused considerable opposition on
the part of those who felt it failed to recognize people’s spiritual needs. Raised according to
strict utilitarian principles by his father, John Stuart Mill came to be critical of them. In the
mental and spiritual crisis portrayed in his Autobiography (1873), Mill describes his
realization that his utilitarian upbringing had left him no power to feel. In Sartor Resartus
(1833—34) Carlyle describes a similar spiritual crisis in which he struggles to rediscover the
springs of religious feeling in the face of his despair at the specter of a universe governed
only by utilitarian principles. Later both Dickens, in his portrayal of Thomas Gradgrind in
Hard Times (1854), “a man of facts and calculations” who is “ready to weigh and measure
any parcel of human nature,” and Ruskin, in his Unto This Last, attack utilitarianism.
37- In his essay ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, the English poet, philosopher, and critic T.
E. Hulme (1883-1917) ----------------.
Answer: Choice 2
Although he published only six poems during his brief life, T. E. Hulme (1883—1917),
English poet, philosopher, and critic, was one of the strongest intellectual forces behind the
development of modernism. In this essay, probably composed in either 1911 or 1912 and
probably delivered as a lecture in 1912, Hulme prophesies a “dry, hard, classical verse” that
exhibits precision, clarity, and freshness. He sharply repudiates the “spilt religion” of
Romanticism, responsible for vagueness in the arts.
38- As a term applied to English cultural history, Edwardian suggests a period in which
-----------------.
Answer: Choice 3
Edwardian as a term applied to English cultural history suggests a period in which the social
and economic stabilities of the Victorian age—country houses with numerous servants, a
flourishing and confident middle class, a strict hierarchy of social classes—remained
unimpaired, though on the level of ideas a sense of change and liberation existed.
39- Which is the correct order of texts in the twentieth century?
Answer: Choice 1
T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917) E. M. Forster’s A Passage to
India (1924)William Butler Yeats’ The Tower (1928)
60
40- An important feature of the 1930s English literature is that ------------------.

Answer: Choice 4
Depression and unemployment in the early 1930s, followed by the rise of Hitler and the
shadow of Fascism and Nazism over Europe, with its threat of another war, deeply affected
the emerging poets and novelists of the time. While Eliot, Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis,
Yeats, Pound, and others of the older generation turned to the political right, the impotence
of capitalist governments in the face of Fascism combined with economic dislocation to turn
the majority of young intellectuals (and not only intellectuals) in the 1930s to the political
left.
LITERARY GENRES
41- Which of the following about William Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello (written between
1602 to 1604) is NOT TRUE?
Answer: Choice 4
Iago uses Roderigo, “a gulled gentleman” in love with Desdemona, to fight with Cassio after
he has got him drunk, so that Othello deprives him of his new rank. He then persuades
Cassio to ask Desdemona to plead in his favor with Othello, which she warmly does.
Hooper, 3rd edition, p. 522
42- Combining elements of Spanish intrigue comedy and fast-moving farce, the Restoration
comedy ---------------- shows the exploits of two English cavaliers, Wildblood.
Answer: Choice 1
An Evening’s Love or The Mock Astrologer, a comedy by Dryden, produced 1668, published
1671. Combining elements of Spanish intrigue comedy and fast-moving farce with sexually
explicit language, it proved a commercial though not an artistic success. The plot, borrowed
from M. de Scudéry, Corneille, Quinault, Molière, and others, shows the exploits of two
English cavaliers, Wildblood and Bellamy, in Madrid at carnival time.
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43- Which of the following is NOT a character in Oliver Goldsmith’s comedy She Stoops to
Conquer, or The Mistakes of a Night (produced 1773)?
Answer: Choice 3
Heartwell, a ‘surly old pretended woman-hater’ is a character in The Old Bachelor which is
the first play written by British playwright William Congreve, produced in 1693.
Hooper, 3rd edition, p. 652 and 514
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44- The term ---------------- has been used by the twentieth century playwright Howard
Barker to describe his own brand of theatre.
Answer: Choice 4
Howard Baker (1946–2014) came to prominence with a series of scathing dramas about the
injustices of society: these included Stripwell (1975), and two plays set in a nightmarish
Britain of the future, That Good between Us (1977) and The Hang of the Gaol (1978). From
Victory (1983), a wonderfully grotesque epic about the birth of capitalism in 17th-century
England, his work, never wholly realistic, gradually became more darkly comic in tone, and
less direct in its attack on Establishment targets: as witness The Castle (1985), Seven Lears
(1989), and Ten Dilemmas (1992). He attacks the idea of a didactic theatre and insists that
his audiences find their own meaning from what he has termed his ‘Theatre of Catastrophe’.
45- Edward Bond’s 1965 play Saved ----------------.
Answer: Choice 2
Saved is a play by E. Bond, which caused much controversy when it was first seen (members
only) at the Royal Court in 1965, having been refused a license for public performance. In
short, minimalist-realist scenes, with dialogue of stark and stylized crudity, Bond evokes a
bleak south London landscape of domestic and street violence and the somewhat caricatured
impoverished pastimes of the working class—fishing, football pools, TV, pop music.
899
46- Which of the following plays written (in 1987) largely in rhyming verse opens with a
short satirical extract from a 1693 comedy by Thomas Shadwell?
Answer: Choice 1
Serious Money is by Caryl Churchill (perf. 1987). Inspired by the deregulation of the City in
1986, known as the Big Bang, the play, written largely in spirited rhyming verse, evokes the
ruthless greed, buoyant materialism, changing culture, and cynicism of the financial world in
the monetarist 1980s. The play opens with a short satirical extract on speculation from
Shadwell’s comedy The Volunteers, or The Stockjobbers (pub. 1693), and then introduces a
noisy gallery of contemporary traders, dealers, jobbers, bankers, and stockbrokers.
916
62
47- ‘Novel / character / character description’ from works by George Eliot (1819-80) match
in ---------------.
Answer: Choice 3
Felix Holt is a novel by George Eliot, published 1866. Set in 1832 in Loamshire, it vividly
evokes the political ferment and corrupt electioneering tactics of the times. Harold Transome
arrives home after many years in the East to inherit the family estate, and startles his family
by standing as a Radical candidate. His political convictions are not incompatible with
buying beer for the local workers to secure their support, and his character is strongly
contrasted with that of Felix Holt, austere, idealistic, and passionate, who has chosen the life
of an artisan, and aims to stir his fellow workers to a sense of their own worth and destiny.
The heroine, Esther, who supposes herself to be the daughter of old Lyon, the Independent
minister, has an innate love of refinement, and when Felix chastises her for her frivolity she
gains a new consciousness, and gradually falls in love with him. A complex chain of events
reveals that Esther is in fact the heir to the Transome estate; Harold woos her, from motives
not entirely mercenary, and Esther is forced to choose between his worldly attractions, and
poverty with Felix. She renounces her claim to the estate and chooses Felix. It is finally
revealed to Harold (the reader having known from the beginning) that he is not his father’s
son, but the son of the hated lawyer Jermyn; the account of the years of suffering of the
proud and lonely Mrs. Transome, subjected in secrecy to a man she no longer respects, ever
fearful of her son’s discovery, befriended only by her faithful servant Denner, is often
considered the most powerful feature of the novel.
48- Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904) opens with ----------------.
Answer: Choice 4
Choice 1 is from Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad
Choice 2 is from The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad
Choice 3 is from The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
Source: An Introduction to the English Novel by Arnold Kettle, Vol II, p. 62
49- Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) is written in three sections, the section
second of which, ----------------.
Answer: Choice 3
The novel is in three sections, of which the first and longest, ‘The Window’, describes the
late afternoon and evening of an Edwardian September day, with the Ramsays on holiday
with their eight children and assorted guests, including the lethargic elderly poet Augustus
Carmichael; the painter Lily Briscoe; and the awkward young academic Charles Tansley.
Family tension centers on the desire of the youngest child, James, to visit the lighthouse, and
his father’s apparent desire to thwart him; the frictions of the day are momentarily resolved
around the dinner table. The second section, ‘Time Passes’, is a comparatively brief, lyrical
treatment of the 1914–18 period and records, parenthetically, the deaths of Mrs. Ramsay, her
63
son Andrew (killed in the war), and daughter Prue, who dies in childbirth. It dwells with a
desolate lyricism on the abandonment of the family summer home and its gradual post-war
revival, and ends with the arrival of the Ramsays, Lily Briscoe, Carmichael, and others in
September 1919. The last section, ‘The Lighthouse’, describes the finally successful efforts
of Lily to complete the painting which she had abandoned ten years earlier and the parallel
but equally successful efforts of Mr. Ramsay, and two of his surviving children, Cam and
James, to reach the lighthouse, despite the undercurrents of rivalry, loss, and rebellion that
torment them.
50- Henry James (1843-1916) ‘novel / novel characters’ DO NOT match in -----------------.
Answer: Choice 1
“Douglas, Miss Jessel and Peter Quint” belong to The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
The Turn of the Screw is a novella by Henry James, published 1898. The narrator is a young
governess, sent off to a country house, Bly, to take charge of two orphaned children, Miles
and Flora. She gradually becomes convinced that the children are communicating with the
spirits of an ex-valet and former governess, both dead. The narrative is a classic example of
James’s ambiguity and incorporates his interest in psychical research. Benjamin Britten
wrote a chamber opera (1954) based on this tale.
51- Which of the following about Samuel Beckett’s Murphy (1938) is NOT TRUE?
Answer: Choice 2
Murphy’s solitary title character, who ‘sat it out, as though he were free, in a mew in West
Brompton’, is an Irishman in London, precisely placed in time and space (it is Thursday, 12
September 1935 and he has an unbroken view from his window to the north-west). His
‘mew’ (a bird-coop, originally one designed for moulting falcons) is condemned (we
presume as unfit for human habitation) and Murphy must contemplate the upheaval of
removal (‘Soon he would have to buckle to and start eating, drinking, sleeping and putting
his clothes on and off, in quite alien surroundings’). Ostensibly, Murphy is constructed
around the drab rituals and the vacuous repetitions of a largely inert life passed in a confined
urban space. More profoundly, it seeks to represent a man’s energetic inner life which finds
its own repetitive rhythms and patterns and its own time-scheme distinct from those of the
outside world.
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52- ‘Novelist / novel’ match in -----------------.

Answer: Choice 3
The Kingdom of the Wicked is by Anthony Burgess
Enderby Outside is by Anthony Burgess
The Enemy in the Blanket is by Anthony Burgess
53- Which of the following about John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) is TRUE?
Answer: Choice 4
Paradise Lost is ultimately about the human condition, the Fall that caused “all our woe,”
and the promise and means of restoration. It is also about knowing and choosing, about free
will. In the opening passages of Books 1, 3, 7, and 9, Milton highlights the choices and
difficulties he faced in creating his poem.
54- William Blake’s ‘The Book of Thel’ (1791) opens with Thel’s Motto -----------------.
Answer: Choice 2
Choice 1 is from A Divine Image by William Blake
Choice 3 is from A Poison Tree by William Blake
Choice 4 is from The Human Abstract by William Blake
55- The Romantic Poet Lord Byron was not particularly influenced—as ‘a recognizable
antecedent’— by --------------- in his composition of Don Juan.
Answer: Choice 1
Some recognizable antecedents of Don Juan are Jonathon Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and
Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, both of which had employed the naïve traveler as a satiric
device, and Laurence Stern’s novel Tristram Shandy, with its comic exploitation of a
narrative medium blatantly subject to the whimsy of the author.
56- Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott (1832) opens with -----------------.
Answer: Choice 2
Choice 1 is from The Lotos-Eaters by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Choice 3 is from The Epic by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Choice 4 is from Locksley Hall by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 1114, 1119, 1127, and
1129
65
57- ‘Poet /poem’ DO NOT match in -----------------.

Answer: Choice 3
‘The Defence of Guenevere’ is by William Morris
1500
58- Which of the following about the poet W. H. Auden (1907-1973) is NOT TRUE?
Answer: Choice 4
The Depression that hit America in 1929 hit England soon afterward, and Auden and his
contemporaries looked out at an England of industrial stagnation and mass unemployment,
seeing not Eliot’s metaphorical Waste Land but a more literal Waste Land of poverty and
“depressed areas”.
59- The Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978) -----------------.
Answer: Choice 2
From the 1920s MacDiarmid was the central figure of the Scottish Renaissance movement.
He published short lyrics in a revived Scots, or “Lallans” (i.e., Lowland Scots), a language
that fused the rich vocabulary of medieval Scottish poets, modern dialect Scots, and Standard
English. In A Drunk Man Loolzs at the Thistle (1926), he built up an epic statement about
Scotland out of a series of related lyrics and passages of descriptive and reflective poetry. In
such early poems MacDiarmid proved the vigor and robust physicality of Scots as a medium
for modern poetry, after the Burns tradition had declined into sentimentality and imitation. In
essays such as “English Ascendancy in British Literature”, he argued vehemently against
confining “British literature” to the Standard English literature of England, championing
instead the varieties of Scottish, Irish, and Welsh literatures written in locally distinctive
forms of English and other languages of the British Isles.
60- Which of the following poets / group of poets can be seen as an antecedent / an
influence upon the Movement poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985)
Answer: Choice 1
Also rejecting the international modernism of Eliot and Pound because of its mythical
allusions, polyglot discourse, and fragmentary syntax, Larkin reclaimed a more direct,
personal, formally regular model of poetry, supposedly rooted in a native English tradition of
Wordsworth, Hardy, A.E. Housman, Wilfred Owen, and W.H. Auden.
66
67
1394 – Questions

1- ‘Fabian society’, a society founded in 1884 by a group of English intellectuals,
-----------------.
1) had among its leading theorists and practitioners the critic Walter Pater and the poet
Ernest Dowson
2) originated in the poetry of such mid-19th century Symbolist French poets us Charles
Baudelaire and Stephane Mallarme
3) rejected the idea of a socialist revolution but supported the gradual transformation of
English government
4) advocated a modified form of the early 19th century policy of laissez-faire
2- The contemporary school of American poets ‘language poets’ ------------------.
1) emphasizes a number of defamiliarization techniques, including the condensation and
distortion of words, phrases, and sentences
2) aims to produce ‘absolute forgetfulness’ of language that conforms with the existing
codes pervading contemporary culture
3) is best represented in the poetry of William Carlos Williams and particularly Wallace
Stevens
4) values poetry’s artistic purpose at the expense of its social and political functions
3- Which of the following about the stock character in classical drama ‘the eiron’ is NOT
true?
1) The eiron is a basic figure in comedy, often portrayed as the good friend of the hero.
2) His pose as a self-deprecating, humble figure enables him to outwit his opponents,
particularly the alazon or boaster in the play.
3) The real life prototype of the eiron was the philosopher Socrates, who always professed
his own ignorance while exposing the faulty thinking of others.
4) As friends with and confidant to a number of important characters in the play, he often
has them reveal their inner feelings to the audience.
4- All the following about the term ‘vaudeville’ are true EXCEPT that -----------------.
1) it was the American equivalent of the British music hall
2) it enjoyed great popularity as a form of entertainment in the late 19th century and early
20th century
3) it saw the height of its popularity near the end of the 18th c. with the plays starring
Edward Garrick
4) it might include as performance jugglers, acrobats, magicians, dramatic soliloquies, and
slapstick comedy
5- A(n) ------------------ is a pictorial and poetic device containing a motto, an engraving
that symbolically depicts the motto, and a short verse that comments on the motto and
the engraving.
1) ‘emblem’
2) ‘debat’
3) ‘trouveres’
4) ‘recension’
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6- The term ‘well-made play’ refers to a play ----------------.

1) in which the audience sits in front of a stage ‘framed like a picture’ that is revealed by the
opening of the curtain
2) that is skillfully constructed to please the audience, but lacks the substance and
complexity of serious drama
3) that exemplifies a dramatic conflict which is finally shown to be part of a larger—and
often unresolvable—social or moral paradox
4) which generally represents the world as a vast theatre in which human history can be
played out
7- The poem termed ‘complaint’ was ------------------.
1) a long lament on the cruelty of fate on the fortune of the aspiring poet
2) an 18th c. type of ‘socio-political’ poem written by a poet to the sovereign
3) appended to various petitions demanding justice in a particular case
4) a kind of monologue which became highly conventional in love poetry
8- ‘City comedy’ or ‘citizen comedy’ is a kind of comic drama produced in the London
theatres of the ---------------, characterized by its contemporary urban subject-matter
and its, ---------------- portrayal of ---------------- life and manners
1) early l7th c. / usually approving / middle-class
2) early 17th c. / often satirical / middle-class
3) Victorian age / usually approving / lower-class
4) Victorian age / often satirical / middle class
9- A doggerel is clumsy verse, usually ---------------- rhymed, rhythmically --------------,
----------------.
1) monotonously / awkward / and shallow in sentiment
2) monotonously / consistent / and deep in sentiment
3) variously / consistent / but shallow in sentiment
4) variously / awkward / but deep in sentiment
10- Which of the following about the Roman critic Horace (65-8 B.C.E.) / his Ars Poetica is
NOT true?
1) He developed the concept of decorum in his Ars Poetica according to which the poet had
to fit the part to the whole, the subject to the appropriate genre, and meter and language
to both character and circumstance,
2) His Ars Poetica is less a formal verse epistle than a long conversational poem about
poetry.
3) He managed to break away with the Aristotelian tradition of criticism and theory (as
represented in Potties and Rhetoric) in Ars Poetica and thus create new ground for an
indigenous ‘Roman’ kind of criticism.
4) He is celebrated for his criticism as well as his poetry: he produced numerous lyric
poems, odes, satires, and verse epistles (letters).
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1394 – Questions
11- To the French critic Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893) ------------------.

1) the text is ‘a living being’, never an ‘object’ to be ‘dissected’ for the discovery of its
meaning
2) a text is similar to a fossil shell that naturally contains the likeness of its inhabiter, the
author
3) a complete analysis of the text is possible without considering its author or his or her
inner psyche
4) accurate understanding of a literary text depends on an investigation into the life and
works of its author’s peers
12- All the following statements about the cotemporary French literary theorist Julia
Kristeva (b. 1941) / her work is true EXCEPT that she ----------------.
1) develops the concept of the ‘ideologeme’ based on Bakhtin and Medvedev’s The Formal
Method in Literary Scholarship
2) provides a complex account, based in psychoanalytic theory, of the relationship between
the ‘normal’ and the ‘poetic’ (in her The Revolution in Poetic Language)
3) offers at once a radical critique of psychoanalysis—drawing on, but going beyond,
Lacan—and a close textual method for the reading of texts which she terms
‘schizoanalysis’
4) draws on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and the Russian Formalists to propose the idea of
‘intertextuality’, later associated with developments in poststructuralism
13- The French literary theorist Roland Barthes (1915-1980) posits the idea that
-----------------.
1) ‘the text of bliss’ ‘unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions…
brings a crisis to his relation with language’
2) a realistic novel offers an ‘open’ text with unlimited meaning—like any other text that
encourages the reader to produce meanings
3) when we read as critics, we always step outside discourse and adopt a position
invulnerable to a subsequent interrogative reading
4) readers are free to open and close the text’s signifying process only through veneration of
the signified
14- Homi K. Bhabha’s (b. 1949) mode of post-colonial criticism -------------------.
1) is characterized by his demotion of the idea of ‘colonial ambivalence’ and by his negation
of aesthetic terms and categories for literary analysis
2) rejects the idea differance within an analysis of colonialism in favor of the performative
dimension of cultural articulation
3) focuses on the ‘experience of social integration’ as it emerges in canonical cultural forms
or is produced and legitimized within non-canonical cultural forms
4) deploys a specifically poststructuralist repertoire (Foucault, Derrida, Lacanian and
Kleinian psychoanalysis) for his explorations of colonial discourse
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15- The Hungarian theorist Georg Lukacs (1885-1971) posits that ------------------.
1) a randomly presented sequence of images should always be interpreted as an objective
and impartial reflection of reality regardless of its author or social milieu
2) reality is ‘mere flux’, a mechanical collision of fragments, which nevertheless possesses
an ‘order’, which the novelist renders in an ‘intensive’ form
3) the truly realistic work possesses an ‘intensive totality’ through the ‘artistic necessity’ of
its images which corresponds to the ‘extensive totality’ of the world itself
4) the writer imposes an abstract order upon the world and presents the reader with an image
of the richness and complexity of life from which a sense of the order emerges
16- According to the French theorist Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) ------------------.
1) signs no longer correspond to or mask, their ‘real-life’ referent but replace it in a world of
autonomous ‘floating signifies’
2) the ‘explosion of signifiers’ in our time leads ‘into a non-space of reality’, reality being
defined in terms of the often electronic media (as opposed to more traditional forms of
communication) in which it moves
3) everything is ‘reverentially’ on display, moving translucently through a depth where there
are numerous controls to stabilize reference or any prospect of transformation
4) such image-creating communication technologies as the television have tended to
obliterate the self-generating potential of images across the postmodern surface
17- Hans Robert Jauss (1921-1997), the German exponent of ‘reception’ theory
(Rezeptioitasthetik), ----------------------.
1) believed that a literary work is an object which stands by itself and which offers
essentially the same face to each reader in each period
2) tried to achieve a compromise between Russian Formalism which ignores history; and
social theories which ignore the text
3) argued in his work that a writer can never affront the prevailing expectations of his or her
day
4) applied Heidegger's situational approach to literary theory in his Truth and Method
(1975)
18- Which of the following statements about the English critic Raymond Williams / his
thought and work (1921-1988) is TRUE?
1) He related the ‘whole process of individuation’ to structures of power and influence as
well as to the poststructuralist notion of binary oppositions.
2) He began his critical writing with a reaffirmation of the main English tradition of critical
cultural thought which regarded ‘culture’ as ‘a whole way of life’.
3) He rejected the characterization of his theoretical work as ‘Marxist’ and developed his
own critique of Marx in his (Marxism and Literature, 1977),
4) His general project—the study of all forms of signification in their actual conditions of
production—was always emphatically historical and materialist.
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1394 – Questions
19- In his Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), the American
Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson ------------------.
1) reads the odd materialist mysticism of Walter Benjamin ‘against the grain’ to produce a
revolutionary and innovative Marxist criticism of capitalism
2) looks in particular to the strategy he terms ‘cognitive mapping’ (as applied to the
Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles) for the necessary understanding, critique and
transcendence of the world capitalist system
3) reviews the culture of ‘the aesthetic’ in post-Enlightenment Europe dialectically—seen as
a binding agent in the formation of ‘normal’ capitalist subjectivity
4) maintains that, as a totalizing system, postmodernism is merely a style, with no particular
relevance to the ‘cultural dominant’ four time, which is ‘high capitalism’
20- The French poststructuralist critic Michel Foucault (1926-1984) -------------------.
1) regards discourse as a central human activity, but not as a universal ‘general text’, a vast
sea of signification
2) is interested in the historical dimension of discursive constants—what it is possible to say
will slay effectively the same from one era to another
3) argues that the set of structural rules which informs the various fields of knowledge is
within individual consciousness
4) posits that individuals working within particular discursive practices think or speak
without necessarily obeying the unspoken ‘archive’ of rules and constraints

21- Pre- Renaissance ‘author: work’ do NOT match in -----------------.
1) Geoffrey of Monmouth: The History of the Kings of Britain
2) John Gower: The Tale of Philomena and Tereus
3) William Langland: The Lover’s Confession
4) Thomas of England: Le Roman de Tristran
22- Julian Norwich’s (1342-1416) A Book of Showings was --------------------.
1) built around the Virgin Mary's joys, sorrows, and the mystery of her virgin motherhood
2) composed of devotional hymns taken from the Latin Bible and the liturgy of the church
3) a long dramatic lyric dealing with the Christ's Crucifixion
4) a collection of sixteen mystical visions received by the author
72
23- Which of the following descriptions is related to the Renaissance figure John Skelton
(1460- 1529)?
1) In his satires, he rejects the ornate rhetorical devices and aureate language that
characterized his period’s most ambitious poetry; he writes in short, rhymed lines, having
from two to five beats, and the lines can keep on rhyming helter-skelter until the
resources of the Language give out.
2) His book (entitled in full) Acts and Monuments of these latter and perilous days, touching
matters of the church, wherein are comprehended and described the great persecution
and horrible troubles that have been wrought and practiced by the Romish prelates from
the year of Our Lord a thousand to the time now present was in Latin in its first version
and dealt with the persecutions suffered by the early reformers.
3) Many of his works, including his satires and his psalm translations, express an intense
longing for ‘steadfastness’ and an escape from the corruption, anxiety, and duplicity of
the court. The praise, in his verse epistle to John Poins, of a quiet retired life in the
country and the harsh condemnation of courtly hypocrisy derive from his own
experience.
4) His main concern in his major works is law in general and the several kinds of law; the
nature, authority, and adequacy of Scripture; the rites, ceremonies, worship, and
government of the English church; and various embodiments of authority, legitimate and
illegitimate—elders, bishops, kings, and popes.
24- One of the great and influential books of the Renaissance, II Cortegiano (The Courtier)
(1530-1566), translated by the humanist and diplomat Sir Thomas Hoby and published
in 1561, describes ------------------- in the years 1504-08 the qualities of the ideal courtier.
1) through long passages of exquisite expository precision from the mouth of an imaginary
man-of-the-world Duke Costello (written)
2) by means of dialogues between actual men and women living at the court of the duke of
Urbino
3) through a blend of flowery prose and long verse epistles exposing the inner thoughts of
some early Renaissance courtiers
4) in a lengthy correspondence between two ‘courtiers-about-town’, Count Zepirelli and
Count Escada
25- Which of the following statements is NOT related to a description of the late sixteenth
century figure Michael Drayton (1563-1631)?
1) His self-styled masterpiece is Poty-Olbion, a thirty-thousand-line historical-geographical
poem celebrating all the counties of England and Wales.
2) He wrote tragedies, court masques, a historical epic called The Civil Wars Between the
Two Houses of Lancaster and York, a prose History of England, several fine verse
epistles, one of the best Elizabethan sonnet sequences, Delia, and a verse dialogue on the
purpose of writing poetry, Musophilus.
3) He made a significant contribution as well to the period’s vogue for sonnets, publishing a
sequence called Idea’s Mirror (1594) that, following substantial revision, he republished
as Idea.
4) He collaborated on plays, wrote scriptural paraphrases, pastorals, odes, poetic epistles,
verse legends, and a historical epic called The Barons’ Wars.
73
1394 – Questions
26- Ben Jonson’s Timber, or Discoveries—‘the most important English commentary on

poetics between Sidney and Thomas Hobbes’—(posthumously published 1640-41)
would draw upon all the following EXCEPT -------------------.
1) recent Continental critics
2) major classical theorists like Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Quintilian, and Horace
3) Sir Philip Sidney's Defense of Poesy
4) medieval scholastic scholars William Oakham and Duns Scotus
27- Compared to his contemporary Michel de Montaigne's essays, Sir Francis Bacon (1561-
1626) in his essays -----------------.
1) seldom uses ‘I’, but instead presents himself as a mouthpiece for society’s accumulated
practical wisdom
2) employs few, if any aphorisms, and exhibits a lone of pure subjectivity in his lucid and
yet unadorned sentences
3) proposes to learn about humankind by an intensive analysis of his own body and mind
and of his sensations, emotions, attitudes, and ideas
4) is tentative in structure: witty, expansive, and reflective in style; intimate, candid, and
affable in tone; and he speaks constantly in the First person
28- The correct order of the appearance of 18th c. texts is ---------------------.
1) Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram ShandyHenry Fielding’s Tom JonesFrancis Burney’s
Eveliva
2) Henry Fielding’s Tom JonesFrancis Burney’s EvelivaLawrence Sterne’s Tristram
Shandy
3) Henry Fielding’s Torn JonesLawrence Sterne’s Tristram ShandyFrancis Burney's
Eveliva
4) Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram ShandyFrancis Burney's EvelivaHenry Fielding’s Tom
Jones
29- Events in the 18th c. happened in the correct order in ----------------.
1) James Cook voyages to Australia and New ZealandDeath of Queen AnnRobert
Walpole comes to power
2) Death of Queen AnnRobert Walpole comes to powerJames Cook voyages to
Australia and New Zealand
3) Death of Queen AnnJames Cook voyages to Australia and New ZealandRobert
Walpole comes to power
4) James Cook voyages to Australia and New ZealandRobert Walpole comes to
powerDeath of Queen Ann
30- All the following about John Dryden’s All for Love (1677) is true EXCEPT that it is
-----------------.
1) observant of the unities of time, place and action
2) his only tragedy
3) based on Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra
4) written in heroic couplets
74
31- Which of the following statements about the 1730s Alexander Pope is TRUE?
1) There appeared, or reappeared, a youthful vein in his poetry, a tender concern with
natural beauty and love which he tried to express with the publication of The Pastorals.
2) The reigns of George I and George II appeared to him, as to Swift and other like-minded
figures, a period of rapid moral, political, and cultural development on a national scale.
3) He became a champion of the newly-emerging and vibrant mercantile class he would
later appreciatively call the nouveaux riche in his work,
4) He moved on to philosophical, ethical and political subjects in such works as the
Imitations of Horace and the Epistles to Several Persons.
32- Samuel Johnson's periodical the Rambler (1750-52) was ------------------.
1) far more relaxed and less serious in tone limn his Taller and Spectator
2) co-written with Addison (with Steele appearing only in one issue)
3) almost wholly written by Johnson himself
4) published side by side with his Taller and Spectator
33- William Blake (1757-1827) wrote The French Revolution, America: A Prophecy, Europe:
A Prophecy, and the trenchant prophetic satire The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
------------------.
1) in the early 1790s while he was an ardent supporter of the French Revolution
2) near the end of his life (in short succession in 1821, 1823 and 1824 and 1826)
disillusioned with die consequences of revolutions in France and America
3) in the heat of the Napoleonic wars with France in the 1800s (when his works were, in
fact, banished from publication)
4) in the late 1790s in anticipation of the grim consequences of massive social upheavals in
Europe and America
34- Which of the following essays is NOT by the Romantic essayist Charles Lamb (1775-
1834)?
1) “Old China”
2) “On Gusto”
3) “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage
Representation”
4) “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading”
35- Lord Byron’s conventional volume of poetry Hours of Idleness (1807) was so harshly
treated by the ----------------- that he was provoked to write in reply his first important
poem English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, a vigorous satire in which he incorporated
brilliant ridicule of important contemporaries, including ----------------------.
1) Edinburgh Review / Scott, Wordsworth, and Coleridge
2) Edinburgh Review / Robert Burns and Thomas Carlyle
3) Blackwood's Magazine / Scott, Wordsworth, and Coleridge
4) Blackwood's Magazine / Robert Burns and Thomas Carlyle
36- Victorian ‘author: work’ match in --------------------.
1) Elizabeth Gaskell: Silly Novels by Lady Novelists
2) Thomas Henry Huxley: Literature and Science
3) Henry Newman: The Idea of a University
4) George Eliot: Old Nurse's Story
75
1394 – Questions
37- Which of the following two Victorian works draw upon the same subject matter for
their creation, albeit in different fashions?
1) Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son and Charles Dickens’s Hard Times
2) Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke and Waller Besani's The Queen’s Reign
3) William Morris’s The Defence of Guenevere and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the
King
4) Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Ave atque Vale and George Meredith’s Modern Love
38- Which of the following about the South African writer Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014) is
NOT true?
1) She has drawn criticism both for her apparent lack of attention to feminism in favor of
race issues and for the wholeness and unfashionable completeness of her novels—their
politeness, meticulous scene paintings, fully realized characters.
2) She wrote ‘Telephone Conversation,’ a mini verse drama of sorts in which two
characters, a racist English landlady and an African trying to rent an apartment, are
wittily pitted against one another.
3) In her non-fiction, she self-consciously plates her writing within a tradition of European
realism, most notably that defined by the Hungarian philosopher and Critic Georg Lukacs
(1885-1971).
4) Her The House Gun (1998) and The Pickup (2001) show an uncompromising locus on me
inhabitants of a racially fractured culture.
39- ‘Modernist manifestos’ in the early 20th c. takes on the different forms mentioned below
EXCEPT that some are -----------------.
1) individual statements, such as Hulme’s lecture ‘Romanticism and Classicism’
2) meant to be declarations on behalf of an emergent group or movement, such as “A Few
Don'ts by an Imagiste”
3) a non-public declaration, unpublished in the author’s lifetime, as in the case of Mina
Loy’s ‘Feminist Manifesto’
4) intended to delineate the duties of the avant-garde artist in the 'current deplorable state of
cultural crisis', as in W. B. Yeats’ Responsibilities
40- The seminal 20th century texts below appeared in the correct under in -----------------.
1) Philip Larkin, The Whitsun WeddingsChinua Achebe, Things Fall ApartPremiere of
Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot
2) Premiere of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for GodotChinua Achebe, Things Fall
ApartPhilip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings
3) Philip Larkin, The Whitsun WeddingsPremiere of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for
GodotChinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
4) Premiere of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for GodotPhilip Larkin, The WhitsunChinua
Achebe, Things Fall Apart
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LITERARY GENRES
41- A well-known poem by John Donne (1572-1631) opens with the lines ------------------.
1) ‘When by thy scorn, O murderess, I am dead, / And that thou thinkst thee free / From all
solicitation from me, / Then shall my ghost come to thy bed, / And thee, feigned vestal, in
worse arms shall see.’
2) ‘Adieu, farewell, earth’s bliss, / This world uncertain is; / Fond are life’s lustful joys, /
Death proves them alt but toys, / None from his darts can fly; /1 am sick, I must die. /
Lord, have mercy on us!’
3) There is a garden in her face. / Where roses and white lilies grow; / A heavenly paradise
is that place, / Wherein all pleasant fruits do flow. / There cherries grow, which none may
buy / Till ‘Cherry ripe!’ themselves do cry.’
4) ‘Now winter nights enlarge / The number of their hours, / And clouds their storms
discharge / Upon the airy towers. / Let now the chimneys blaze / And cups overflow with
wine, / Let well-tuned words amaze / With harmony divine.’
42- Which of the following statements about John Milton's II Penseroso (1645) is NOT
true?
1) It had a considerable influence on the meditative graveyard poems of the 18th cent., and
there are echoes in Pope’s ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, and later Gothic-works.
2) It is an invocation to the goddess Melancholy, bidding her bring Peace, Quiet, Leisure,
and Contemplation.
3) It challenges the goddess Mirth to a verbal duel on its utter futility amid the ‘deceitful
delights’ of ‘towered cities’ and the ‘busy hum of men’.
4) It describes the pleasures of die studious, meditative life, of tragedy, epic poetry, and
music.
43- The lines ‘Ye distant spires, ye antique towers, / That crown the watery glade, / Where
grateful Science still adores / Her Henry’s holy shade; / And ye, that from the stately
brow / Of Windsor’s heights the expanse below / Of grove, of lawn, of mead survey, /
Whose turf, whose shade, whose flowers among / Wanders the hoary Thames along /
His silver-winding way’ open an 18th c. poem by ---------------.
1) Oliver Goldsmith
2) William Collins
3) James Thomson
4) Thomas Gray
44- John Keats's Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1818) ------------------.
1) is a poem of about 800 lines based on the classical myth of a mortal detested by the
goddess of the moon
2) offers at its conclusion a way of resolving the opposition in the poem between the
inevitably mortal pleasures of this world and the possibility of delights that would be
eternal
3) deals partly with Endymion’s vision of his love for a Chinese Queen offered to him by
Bacchus, god of wine and revelry
4) tells of Endymion’s long but pleasurable search for a mortal goddess, an earthly figure,
whom he had seen in his childhood visions
77
1394 – Questions
45- Robert Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi (1855) -------------------.

1) charts the account of the hero’s marriage to a beautiful widow, Lucrezia, ‘an artful
woman who made him do as she pleased in all things.’
2) traces the feelings and emotions of a speaker whose students are bearing the body of their
scholarly master (whose devotion to the Greek language made it possible for others to
enjoy the more recognizably significant aspects of the revival of learning) to the
mountain top for burial
3) seeks to explain why a Florentine master, one of the most skillful painters of the
Renaissance, never altogether fulfilled the promise he had shown early in his career and
why he had never arrived at the level of such artists as Raphael
4) portrays the dawn of the Renaissance in Italy at a point when the medieval attitude
toward life and art was about to be displaced by a fresh appreciation of earthly pleasures.
46- ‘First World War poet: poem’ match in -------------------.
1) Edward Thomas: “Adlestrop”
2) Isaac Rosenberg: “The Owl”
3) Ivor Gurney: “The Cherry Trees”
4) Sigfried Sassoon: “As the Team’s Head Brass”
47- Which of the following does NOT open a poem by Philip Larkin (1922-1985)?
1) Once I am sure there’s nothing going on / I step inside, letting the door thud Shut…’
2) ‘Those long uneven lines / Standing as patiently / As if they were stretched outside / The
Oval or Villa Park...’
3) ‘I have heard that hysterical women say / They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow / Of
poets that are always gay…’
4) ‘Next year we are to bring the soldiers home / For lack of money, and it is all right /
Places they guarded, or kept orderly…’
48- Ann Carson’s (b. 1950) poem ‘The Glass Essay’ --------------------.
1) is a poetic parody of Agatha Christie’s classic country-house murder-mystery play, The
Mousetrap
2) is a long semiautobiographical ‘tale’ into which she weaves commentary on the writings
of Charlotte and Emily Bronte
3) is about conversion to Roman Catholicism and its implications for a writer living and
writing on the margins of the British Empire
4) is a dramatic monologue in which she assumes the voices of mythological, historical and
fictive characters, such a Medusa or Lazarus’s imaginary wife
49- The set of characters -------------------- appear in William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night,
or What You Will (written circa 1601).
1) ‘Valentine, Silvia, Julia’
2) ‘Solinus, Egeon, Emilia’
3) ‘Duke Frederick, Rosalind, Celia’
4) ‘Sebastian, Orsino, Viola’
78
50- ‘Character: character description’ in William Congreves Restoration Comedy The Way
of the World (premiered 1700) do NOT match in ------------------.
1) ‘Petulant: the booby squire from the country, who serves to throw into relief the high
good breeding and fineness of nature of the hero and heroine’
2) ‘Fainall and Mrs. Marwood: the two villains as well as fully realized characters of the
play whose stratagems and relations move the play’
3) ‘Witwoud: the would-be wit and character Foil, with whom we contrast the true wit of
Mirabell and Millamant’
4) ‘Lady Wishfort: though aging and ugly, she still longs for love, gallantry, and courtship
and is led by her appetites into the trap that Mirabell lays for her’
51- Which of the following sets of plays are made exclusively of George Bernard Shaw’s
(1856-1950) ‘Plays Pleasant’ (1898)?
1) Man and Superman, Candida, The Doctor’s Dilemma
2) Arms and the Man, The Man of Destiny, Candida
3) Man and Superman, The Doctor’s Dilemma, Major Barbara
4) Arms and the Man, Major Barbara, The Man of Destiny
52- ‘Twentieth century playwright: play’ do NOT correspond in -------------------.
1) ‘David Hare: The Blue Room’
2) ‘Tom Stoppard: Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth’
3) ‘Sam Shepherd: Fool for Love’
4) ‘Edward Bond: The Secret Rapture’
53- ‘Character / character description’ in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is correct in
-------------------.
1) ‘Justine Morris / the monster creature’s childhood playmate; the monster is in love with
her and at one stage even attempts to marry her’
2) ‘Robert Walton / the novel begins with his death and the narrative is framed in such a
way as to finally account for it’
3) ‘Victor Frankenstein / the monster creature’s ‘creator’; born into an affluent family, he
hopes to leave a lasting impression upon his fellow humanity
4) ‘William Frankenstein / Victor Frankenstein’s friend, who stays with the monster
creature in the novel out of a sense of compassion and is loved by him in return for it’
54- Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) opens with -------------------.
1) ‘When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an
unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles
appeared round them…’
2) ‘To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. At
the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock: the
holly whistles as it battles with itself…’
3) The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. The miller at
Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and horse to carry his goods to the city of
his destination, about twenty miles off…’
4) ‘On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from
Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blakemore, or Blackmoor…’
79
1394 – Questions
55- ‘Novelist: novel’ do NOT correspond in --------------------.

1) Ian McEwan: Amsterdam
2) Evelyn Waugh: Men at Arms
3) Doris Lessing: Leading the Cheers
4) Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale
56- Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women (1971) is a --------------------.
1) bleakly funny novel, a dark example of both satire and feminism, tracing the revenge
taken by one character on her husband
2) novel of human observation and interpretive commentary uses for its point of departure a
gathering of anthropologists
3) comic novel featuring a first-person narrator, Fleur Talbot, who is herself a novelist
4) special kind of bildungsroman known as a ‘kunstlerroman’ or novel of the development
of an artist’s gifts
57- John Fowles’ The Magus (1965) is --------------------.
1) based on the experiences of the author in the Greek Aegean Islands and is deeply
informed by classical mythology, Jungian psychology, and archetypal literary devices
2) a bildungsroman featuring an ingenuous first-person narrator, Christopher Lloyd, who
examines his life at three different periods
3) the last of the novels that chronicle the experiences of the first-person narrator, Nicholas
Jenkins during World War II and as such it sums up the war’s toll on Britain
4) set among the barge-dwellers along the Thames River at Battersea, and draws on the
author’s own residence in a barge community along the Thames in the 1960s
58- The novelist J. M. Coetzee’s (h. 1940) most compelling indictment of colonialism
----------------- takes its title and theme from ------------------.
1) Waiting for the Barbarians / A Larum for London, or the Siedge of Antwerp, a rather
obscure play by an anonymous Elizabethan playwright
2) Dusklands / A Larum for London, or the Siedge of Antwerp, a rather obscure play by an
anonymous Elizabethan playwright
3) Waiting for the Barbarians / a well-known poem by the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy
4) Dusklands / a well-known poem by the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy
59- V. S. Naipaul (b. 1932) ‘work: work description’ match in ----------------.
1) In a Free State: a travel narrative about the United States
2) The Mystic Masseur: comedy of manners set in Trinidad
3) House for Mr. Biswas: concerns the fortunes of Santosh, an Indian immigrant to the US,
4) Turn in the South: tragicomedy following the declining fortune of a gentle hero from
cradle to grave
60- Which of the following about the novelist Jean Rhys (1890-1979) is NOT true?
1) Her novel Voyage in the Dark is an account of a nineteen-year-old chorus girl in London
who has come from Dominica.
2) She wrote the stories of her first book, The Left Bank: Sketches and Studies of Present-
Day Bohemian Paris, while living in Paris.
3) Her fiction frequently depicts single, economically challenged women, rootless outsiders
living in bohemian London or Paris.
4) Her novel, Postures, set in Jamaica and Dominica in the 1830s and 1840s, is often taken
as prelude to her masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea.
80
81

1- ‘Fabian society’, a society founded in 1884 by a group of English intellectuals,
-----------------.
Answer: Choice 3
‘Fabian society’ is a society founded in 1884 by a group of English intellectuals who
advocated a modified form of socialism. Rejecting the idea of a socialist revolution, the
Fabians advocated the gradual transformation of English government. The leading figures
and spokespersons of the Society were Beatrice and Sidney Webb and George Bernard Shaw.
Shaw edited Fabian Essays (1889), which led to the formation of the British Labor Party in
1900. From
Source: A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms, Edward Quinn, 2nd edition, p. 157
2- The contemporary school of American poets ‘language poets’ ------------------.
Answer: Choice 1
‘language poets’ is a contemporary school of American poets emphasizing a number of
defamiliarization techniques, including the condensation and distortion of words, phrases,
and sentences. The aim is to produce an awareness of language that will create a resistance to
the existing codes that pervade contemporary culture. Thus language poets regard themselves
as having a social and political, as well as artistic, purpose. Among the poets associated with
this movement are Ron Silliman, Bob Perelman, and Lyn Hejinian.
3- Which of the following about the stock character in classical drama ‘the eiron’ is NOT
true?
Answer: Choice 4
‘Eiron’ is a stock character in classical comedy, whose pose as a self-deprecating, humble
figure enables him to outwit his opponents, particularly the alazon or boaster. The real life
prototype of the eiron was the philosopher Socrates, who always professed his own ignorance
while exposing the faulty thinking of others. The eiron is a basic figure in comedy, often
portrayed as the good friend of the hero. The type is also recognizable today in the homespun
humorist, such as Will Rogers or Andrew Rooney, or Peter Falk’s dirty-raincoat-clad
detective in the television series Columbo.
4- All the following about the term ‘vaudeville’ are true EXCEPT that -----------------.
Answer: Choice 3
‘Vaudeville’ is the American equivalent of the British Music Hall, vaudeville entertainment
enjoyed great popularity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A true variety show, a
vaudeville performance might include singers, dancers, animal acts, jugglers, acrobats,
magicians, dramatic soliloquies, and slapstick comedy.
82
The popularity of motion pictures, particularly “talkies” spelled the end of vaudeville in the
1920s, although the format survived on television for many years on the Ed Sullivan Show.
Neil Simon’s play (later film) The Sunshine Boys (1972, 1975) evokes the era through the
aging eyes of two former comics
Source: A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms, Edward Quinn, 2nd edition, p. 435-36
5- A(n) ------------------ is a pictorial and poetic device containing a motto, an engraving
that symbolically depicts the motto, and a short verse that comments on the motto and
the engraving.
Answer: Choice 1
‘Emblem’ is a pictorial and poetic device containing a motto, an engraving that symbolically
depicts the motto, and a short verse that comments on the motto and the engraving. In the
16th and 17th centuries, many of these were collected and published in book form.
6- The term ‘well-made play’ refers to a play ----------------.
Answer: Choice 2
Well-made play (pièce bien faite) is a play that is skillfully constructed to please the
audience, but lacks the substance and complexity of serious drama. The term originally
described the 19th-century plays of Eugène Scribe, a phenomenally successful French
playwright. Scribe’s formula included a plot based upon a secret that is not revealed until the
climactic moment of the play, and the building up of suspense by such tried and true devices
as mistaken identities, hidden clues, and letters delivered to the wrong person. Immediately
prior to the climactic revelation, the protagonist would be reduced to despair, only to emerge
triumphant once the secret is revealed.
7- The poem termed ‘complaint’ was ------------------.
Answer: Choice 4
‘Complaint’ is a kind of lyric poem common from the Middle Ages to the 17th century, in
which the speaker bewails either the cruelty of a faithless lover or the advent of some
misfortune like poverty or exile. This kind of monologue became highly conventional in love
poetry, as can be seen from ‘The Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse’, in which the poet
wittily addresses his light purse as if it were a ‘light’ (i.e. promiscuous) mistress. Chaucer
also wrote serious complaints, as did Villon, Surrey, and Spenser.
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8- ‘City comedy’ or ‘citizen comedy’ is a kind of comic drama produced in the London
theatres of the ------------------, characterized by its contemporary urban subject-matter
and its, --------------------- portrayal of ---------------------- life and manners.
Answer: Choice 2
‘City comedy’ or ‘citizen comedy’, a kind of comic drama produced in the London theatres
of the early 17th century, characterized by its contemporary urban subject-matter and its
portrayal, often satirical, of middle-class life and manners. The principal examples are John
Marston's The Dutch Courtezan (1605), Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair (1614), and Thomas
Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613)
9- A doggerel is clumsy verse, usually ------------------ rhymed, rhythmically -----------------,
-------------------.
Answer: Choice 1
‘Doggerel’ is a clumsy verse, usually monotonously rhymed, rhythmically awkward, and
often shallow in sentiment, as in greetings cards. The notoriously irregular verses of William
McGonagall (71830-1902) are doggerel. Some poets, like Skelton and Stevie Smith, have
deliberately imitated doggerel for comic effect.
10- Which of the following about the Roman critic Horace (65-8 B.C.E.) / his Ars Poetica is
NOT true?
Answer: Choice 3
The Ars Poetica is less a formal verse epistle, however—the trappings of the letter form are
superficial at best—than a long conversational poem about poetry, written by an experienced
and famous poet of the day. Horace is celebrated for his poetry; between 39 and 10 B.C.E., he
produced numerous epodes (lyric poems), odes, satires, and verse epistles (letters). Another
key principle that dominates the whole of the Ars Poetica is decorum. Briefly defined,
decorum is the discernment and use of appropriateness, propriety, proportion, and unity in
the arts, whether in painting, sculpture, or poetry. This is the Horatian principle that most
appealed to later French and English neoclassical critics (see, for example, Pope, below),
who often applied standards of decorum more rigidly than Horace himself would have. For
Horace, decorum required that the poet fit the part to the whole, the subject to the appropriate
genre, and meter and language to both character and circumstance.

11- To the French critic Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893) ------------------.
Answer: Choice 2
Determined to be scientific, Taine decides to approach literature in much the same way as the
biologist approaches his specimen. A literary document is like a fossil shell. It bears the
imprint of the organism that lived in it. “Under the shell there was an animal, and behind the
document there was a man.” Both the document and the shell are lifeless, but both may be
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examined as clues to living existences. It would be a mistake to study them as if they were
isolated.
Source: A Short History of Literary Criticism by Vernon Hall Jr., New York University
Press, 1963, p. 105
12- All the following statements about the cotemporary French literary theorist Julia
Kristeva (b. 1941) / her work is true EXCEPT that she ----------------.
Answer: Choice 3
In the latter, in two essays, ‘The Bounded Text’ and ‘Word Dialogue and Novel’, written in
the late 1960s, Kristeva draws on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and the Russian Formalists to
propose the idea of ‘intertextuality’, later associated with developments in post-structuralism.
Thus she writes of ‘text’ as comprising ‘a permutation of texts, an intertextuality’, and of
how ‘in the space of a given text, several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and
neutralise one another’. In addition, seeking to connect the linguistic with the ideological (in
common with other members of the Tel Quel group in Paris with which she was then
associated), she draws on Bahktin and Medvedev’s The Formal Method in Literary
Scholarship to introduce the concept of the ‘ideologeme’. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,
in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia ([1972], 1983) and Kafka: Towards a Minor
Literature ([1975], 1986), offer at once a radical critique of psychoanalysis—drawing on, but
going beyond, Lacan—and a close textual method for the reading of texts which they term
‘schizoanalysis’.
Source: A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory by Raman Selden, 5th edition, p.
161
13- The French literary theorist Roland Barthes (1915-1980) posits the idea that -------------.
Answer: Choice 1
The more limited reading of pleasure is a comfortable practice which conforms to cultural
habits. The text of bliss ‘unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions
. . . brings a crisis to his relation with language’. It is clear that such a text does not conform
to the sort of easily enjoyed pleasure demanded in the market economy. Indeed, Barthes
considers that ‘bliss’ is very close to boredom: if readers resist the ecstatic collapse of
cultural assumptions, they will inevitably find only boredom in the modernist text. How
many blissful readers of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake have there been?
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14- Homi K. Bhabha’s (b. 1949) mode of post-colonial criticism -------------------.
Answer: Choice 4
Homi Bhabha’s mode of postcolonial criticism also deploys a specifically poststructuralist
repertoire (Foucault, Derrida, Lacanian and Kleinian psychoanalysis) for his explorations of
colonial discourse. Bhabha’s primary interest is in the ‘experience of social marginality’ as it
emerges in noncanonical cultural forms or is produced and legitimized within canonical
cultural forms. The writings collected as The Location of Culture (1994) are characterized by
his promotion of the ideas of ‘colonial ambivalence’ and ‘hybridity’ and by his use of
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aesthetic terms and categories (mimesis, irony, parody, trompe l’œil) to mobilize an analysis
of the terms of (inter-) cultural engagement within the context of empire.
226
15- The Hungarian theorist Georg Lukacs (1885-1971) posits that ------------------.
Answer: Choice 3
A ‘correct’ reflection of reality, therefore, according to Lukács, involves more than the mere
rendering of external appearances. Interestingly, his view of reflection undermines at the
same time both naturalism and modernism. A randomly presented sequence of images may
be interpreted either as an objective and impartial reflection of reality (as Zola and the other
exponents of ‘naturalism’ might be taken as saying) or as a purely subjective impression of
reality (as Joyce and Virginia Woolf seem to show). The randomness can be seen as a
property either of reality or of perception. Either way, Lukács rejects such merely
‘photographic’ representation. Instead, he describes the truly realistic work which gives us a
sense of the ‘artistic necessity’ of the images presented; they possess an ‘intensive totality’
which corresponds to the ‘extensive totality’ of the world itself. Reality is not a mere flux, a
mechanical collision of fragments, but possesses an ‘order’, which the novelist renders in an
‘intensive’ form.
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16- According to the French theorist Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) ------------------.
Answer: Choice 1
Baudrillard’s first influential work, Simulacra et Simulation (1981, translated in 1983 and
1994), explores this depthless world of unreflecting images. According to Baudrillard, signs
no longer correspond to, or mask, their ‘real-life’ referent but replace it in a world of
autonomous ‘floating signifiers’; there has been ‘an implosion of image and reality’. This
implosion, as Neville Wakefield comments, leads ‘into the simulated non-space of
hyperreality. The “real” is now defined in terms of the media in which it moves.’
201
17- Hans Robert Jauss (1921-1997), the German exponent of ‘reception’ theory
(Rezeptioitasthetik), ----------------------.
Answer: Choice 2
Jauss, an important German exponent of ‘reception’ theory (Rezeption-ästhetik), gave a
historical dimension to reader-oriented criticism. He tried to achieve a compromise between
Russian Formalism which ignores history, and social theories which ignore the text. Writing
during a period of social unrest at the end of the 1960s, Jauss and others wanted to question
the old canon of German literature and to show that it was perfectly reasonable to do so.
50
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18- Which of the following statements about the English critic Raymond Williams / his
thought and work (1921-1988) is TRUE?
Answer: Choice 4
Beginning with a critical reassessment of the main English tradition of critical cultural
thought (Culture and Society 1780–1950, 1958), Williams embarked on a radical theoretical
construction of the whole domain of social meaning – ‘culture’ as ‘a whole way of life’. This
general perspective was developed in particular studies of drama, the novel, television, and
historical semantics as well as further theoretical work. Williams’s general project—the
study of all forms of signification in their actual conditions of production—was always
emphatically historical and materialist.
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19- In his Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), the American
Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson ------------------.
Answer: Choice 2
Jameson’s strong ‘epistemological’ understanding of narrative illuminates the political
motivation of what remains his most important work to date, Postmodernism, or the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). He maintains that postmodernism is not merely a style but
rather the ‘cultural dominant’ of our time: a totalizing system which, in league with the
operations of the global market under ‘late capitalism’, saturates all aspects of social, cultural
and economic life, and so conditions, at the deepest levels, what we can know of the
contemporary world. He looks in particular to the strategy he terms ‘cognitive mapping’
(derived in part from critical urban geography and introduced in a celebrated discussion of
the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles) for the necessary understanding, critique and
transcendence of the world capitalist system.
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20- The French poststructuralist critic Michel Foucault (1926-1984) -------------------.
Answer: Choice 1
Like other poststructuralists Michel Foucault regards discourse as a central human activity,
but not as a universal ‘general text’, a vast sea of signification. He is interested in the
historical dimension of discursive change—what it is possible to say will change from one
era to another. In science a theory is not recognized in its own period if it does not conform
to the power consensus of the institutions and official organs of science.
178
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21- Pre- Renaissance ‘author: work’ do NOT match in -----------------.
Answer: Choice 3
The Lover’s Confession is by John Gower
22- Julian Norwich’s (1342-1416) A Book of Showings was --------------------.
Answer: Choice 4
A Book of Showings survives in a short and a long version. The longer text, from which the
following excerpts are taken, was the product of fifteen and more years of meditation on the
meaning of the visions in which much had been obscure to Julian. Apparently the mystical
experiences were never repeated, but through constant study and contemplation the showings
acquired a greater clarity, richness, and profundity as they continued to be turned over in a
mind both gifted with spiritual insight and learned in theology. Her editors document her
extensive use of the Bible and her familiarity with medieval religious writings in both
English and Latin. Julian's sixteen revelations are each treated in uneven numbers of
Chapters; these groupings of chapters form an extended meditation on a given vision.
23- Which of the following descriptions is related to the Renaissance figure John Skelton
(1460- 1529)?
Answer: Choice 1
Skelton’s poems gain some of their most startling effects by mixing high and low styles and
by playing bawdy and scatological verbal games with the Catholic liturgy. The games are not
necessarily sacrilegious, for the Catholic Church, as yet unchallenged by the Reformation,
was capable of tolerating a wide range of expression, but they seem risk-taking and
obstreperous, an impression heightened by the way they are written. In his satires, Skelton
rejects the ornate rhetorical devices and aureate language that characterized his period's most
ambitious poetry; he writes in short, rhymed lines, having from two to five beats, and the
lines can keep on rhyming helter-skelter until the resources of the language give out.
24- One of the great and influential books of the Renaissance, II Cortegiano (The Courtier)
(1530-1566), translated by the humanist and diplomat Sir Thomas Hoby and published
in 1561, describes ------------------- in the years 1504-08 the qualities of the ideal courtier.
Answer: Choice 2
Castiglione’s book describes, by means of dialogues between actual men and women living
at the court of the duke of Urbino in the years 1504-08, the qualities of the ideal courtier.
Supreme among these qualities is grace, the mysterious attribute which renders a person’s
speech and actions not merely impressive or accomplished but persuasive, touching, and
beautiful. Though a few people are born with grace, most actually learn to have it by the
mastery of certain techniques.
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25- Which of the following statements is NOT related to a description of the late sixteenth
century figure Michael Drayton (1563-1631)?
Answer: Choice 2
Michael Drayton was born about a year before Shakespeare and in the same county,
Warwickshire. He had a long career as poet, extending from the early 1590s until well into
the seventeenth century. He collaborated on plays, wrote scriptural paraphrases, pastorals,
odes, poetic epistles, verse legends, and a historical epic called The Barons’ Wars. His self-
styled masterpiece is Poly-Olbion, a thirty-thousand-line historical-geographical poem
celebrating all the counties of England and Wales. He made a significant contribution as well
to the period's vogue for sonnets, publishing a sequence called Idea’s Mirror (1594) that,
following substantial revision, he republished as Idea. It was in fact Drayton’s standard
practice to revise and add to his poems in each new edition, so that one can trace his response
to shifting fashions, his rethinking of his antiquarian fascinations, and his development from
an Elizabethan to a seventeenth century poet.
26- Ben Jonson’s Timber, or Discoveries— ‘the most important English commentary on
poetics between Sidney and Thomas Hobbes’— (posthumously published 1640-41)
would draw upon all the following EXCEPT -------------------.
Answer: Choice 4
Timber, or Discoveries Published posthumously in the Works (1640-41), Jonson’s
observations on literary matters had their origins in a commonplace book that culled extracts
from Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy, from major classical theorists like Aristotle,
Cicero, Seneca, Quintilian, and Horace; and from recent Continental critics. Jonson digested
all this under various topics, setting it forth in his own voice and intermixing trenchant
observations on his own contemporaries. Among his major precepts are that the essence of
poetry is its “fiction” or imitation; that natural talent is the major quality needed in a poet,
though “art” and practice are also necessary; that one learns to become a poet by first
imitating a single model, that good sense should have priority over style; and that the
language of poetry should be clear, strong, and succinct. In the tradition of the Renaissance
humanists, Jonson insists that the good poet is also the good man, who properly comprehends
encyclopedic wisdom in himself, fitting him to be a counselor to rulers. Despite its disjointed
form, Timber is the most important English commentary on poetics between Sidney and
Thomas Hobbes.
27- Compared to his contemporary Michel de Montaigne’s essays, Sir Francis Bacon (1561-
1626) in his essays -----------------.
Answer: Choice 1
As an essayist Bacon stands at almost the opposite pole from his great French predecessor
Michel de Montaigne (1533—1592), who proposed to learn about humankind by an intensive
analysis of his own body and mind and of his sensations, emotions, attitudes, and ideas.
Bacon’s essays are instead on topics “Civil and Moral.” Montaigne’s are tentative in
structure; witty, expansive, and reflective in style; intimate candid and affable in tone; and he
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speaks constantly in the first person. By contrast, Bacon adopts an aphoristic structure and a
curt, often disjunctive style, as well as a tone of cool objectivity and weighty sententiousness;
he seldom uses “I,” but instead presents himself as a mouthpiece for society’s accumulated
practical wisdom.
28- The correct order of the appearance of 18th c. texts is ------------------.
Answer: Choice 3
Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760) Francis
Burney’s Eveliva (1778)
29- Events in the 18th c. happened in the correct order in -------------------.
Answer: Choice 2
Death of Queen Ann (1714) Robert Walpole comes to power (1721)James Cook
voyages to Australia and New Zealand (1768)
30- All the following about John Dryden’s All for Love (1677) is true EXCEPT that it is
--------------------.
Answer: Choice 4
Between 1664 and 1681, however, Dryden was mainly a playwright. The newly chartered
theaters needed a modern repertory, and he set out to supply the need. Dryden wrote his
plays, as he frankly confessed, to please his audiences, which were not heterogeneous like
Shakespeare’s but were largely drawn from the court and from people of fashion. In the style
of the time, he produced rhymed heroic plays, in which incredibly noble heroes and heroines
face incredibly difficult choices between love and honor; comedies, in which male and
female rakes engage in intrigue and bright repartee; and later, libretti for the newly
introduced dramatic form, the opera. His one great tragedy. All for Love (1677), in blank
verse, adapts Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra to the unities of time, place, and action.
As his Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668) shows, Dryden had studied the works of the great
playwrights of Greece and Rome, of the English Renaissance, and of contemporary France,
seeking sound theoretical principles on which to construct the new drama that the age
demanded.
31- Which of the following statements about the 1730s Alexander Pope is TRUE?
Answer: Choice 4
In the 1730s Pope moved on to philosophical, ethical, and political subjects in An Essay on
Man, the Epistles to Several Persons, and the Imitations of Horace. The reigns of George I
and George II appeared to him, as to Swift and other Tories, a period of rapid moral,
political, and cultural deterioration.
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32- Samuel Johnson’s periodical the Rambler (1750-52) was ------------------.

Answer: Choice 3
The Rambler, almost wholly written by Johnson himself, appeared every Tuesday and
Saturday from March 20, 1750, to March 14, 1752—years in which Johnson was writing the
Dictionary. It is a successor of the Tatler and the Spectator, but it is much more serious in
tone than the earlier periodicals. Johnson’s reputation as a moralist and a stylist was
established by these essays; because of them Boswell first conceived the ambition to seek
Johnson’s acquaintance.
Source: See the footnote in Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p.
2675
33- William Blake (1757-1827) wrote The French Revolution, America: A Prophecy, Europe:
A Prophecy, and the trenchant prophetic satire The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
------------------
Answer: Choice 1
In The French Revolution, America: A Prophet Europe: A Prophecy, and the trenchant
prophetic satire The Marriage of Heaven and Hell—all of which Blake wrote in the early
1790s while he was an ardent supporter of the French Revolution—he, like Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Southey, and a number of radical English theologians, represented the
contemporary Revolution as the purifying violence that, according to biblical prophecy,
portended the imminent redemption of humanity and the world. In Blake’s later poems ‘Ore’,
the fiery spirit of violent revolution, gives way as a central personage to Los, the type of the
visionary imagination in the fallen world.
34- Which of the following essays is NOT by the Romantic essayist Charles Lamb (1775-
1834)?
Answer: Choice 2
“On Gusto” is an essay by William Hazlitt
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35- Lord Byron’s conventional volume of poetry Hours of Idleness (1807) was so harshly
treated by the ----------------- that he was provoked to write in reply his first important
poem English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, a vigorous satire in which he incorporated
brilliant ridicule of important contemporaries, including ------------------.
Answer: Choice 1
Despite his distractions at the university, Byron found time to try his hand at lyric verse,
some of which was published in 1807 in a slim and conventional volume titled Hours of
Idleness. This was treated so harshly by the Edinburgh Review that Byron was provoked to
write in reply his first important poem, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, a vigorous
satire in which he incorporated brilliant ridicule (whose tactlessness he later came to regret)
of important contemporaries, including Scott, Wordsworth, and Coleridge.
36- Victorian ‘author: work’ match in --------------------.
Answer: Choice 3
Silly Novels by Lady Novelists is by George Eliot
Literature and Science is by Matthew Arnold
Old Nurse’s Story is by Elizabeth Gaskell
1222
37- Which of the following two Victorian works draw upon the same subject matter for
their creation, albeit in different fashions?
Answer: Choice 3
The year after Morris’s poem appeared, four books of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King,
including one that focused on Guenevere, were published. It is interesting to compare the two
portraits of the queen, especially their pictoral qualities, but Morris's powerful depiction of an
eloquent Guenevere is very different from Tennyson's subdued representation of a guilt-
ridden wife. Equally fascinating is a comparison of the two poems with Morris’s painting
Queen Guenevere (1858). Despite his copious production of visual artifacts, this is the only
full-size oil painting Morris ever finished. His model for Guenevere, who stands pensively in
front of a rumpled bed, was Jane Burden, who became his wife the following year.
38- Which of the following about the South African writer Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014) is
NOT true?
Answer: Choice 2
Gordimer has drawn criticism both for her apparent lack of attention to feminism in favor of
race issues and for the wholeness and unfashionable completeness of her novels—their
plottedness, meticulous scene painting, fully realized characters. However, the searching
symbolism and complexity of her narratives generally work against such judgments.
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A prominent feature of her writing is to give a number of different perspectives on a

situation, in some cases most poignantly those of apartheid's supporters, and in this way to
represent the broader anatomy of a diseased potitics. Gordimer's subject, as she emphasizes,
is much more than apartheid; it is the human being in history.
39- ‘Modernist manifestos’ in the early 20th c. takes on the different forms mentioned below
EXCEPT that some are -----------------.
Answer: Choice 4
Modernist manifestos take on a variety of different forms. Some are individual statements,
such as Hulme’s lecture “Romanticism and Classicism.” Others are meant to be declarations
on behalf of an emergent group or movement, such as “A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste” or the
Blast manifesto. Occasionally, and paradoxically, a manifesto is a nonpublic declaration,
unpublished in the author's lifetime, as in the case of Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto.” Although
the manifesto is not an art form in the same sense as a poem or painting is, manifestos
became an important literary genre in the modernist era, and some are more than mere
declarations of doctrine. The vorticist manifesto and Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto,” for
example, cross poetry with poster art, creatively manipulating words on the page for
maximum effect.
40- The seminal 20th century texts below appeared in the correct under in -------------------.
Answer: Choice 2
Premiere of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953) Chinua Achebe, Things Fall
Apart (1958) Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings (1964)
LITERARY GENRES
41- A well-known poem by John Donne (1572-1631) opens with the lines ----------------.
Answer: Choice 1
Choice 1 is from “The Apparition” by John Donne
Choice 2 is from “A Litany in the Time of Plague” by Thomas Nash
Choice 3 is from “Cherry-Ripe” by Thomas Campion
Choice 4 is from “Now Winter Nights Enlarge” by Thomas Campion
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42- Which of the following statements about John Milton's II Penseroso (1645) is NOT
true?
Answer: Choice 3
II Penseroso is a poem in rhymed octosyllabics by John Milton, written? 1631, printed 1645;
a companion piece to ‘L’Allegro’. The title means ‘the contemplative man’. The poem is an
invocation to the goddess Melancholy, bidding her bring Peace, Quiet, Leisure, and
Contemplation. It describes the pleasures of the studious, meditative life, of tragedy, epic
poetry, and music. It had a considerable influence on the meditative graveyard poems of the
18th century.
43- The lines ‘Ye distant spires, ye antique towers, / That crown the watery glade, / Where
grateful Science still adores / Her Henry’s holy shade; / And ye, that from the stately
brow / Of Windsor’s heights the expanse below / Of grove, of lawn, of mead survey, /
Whose turf, whose shade, whose flowers among / Wanders the hoary Thames along /
His silver-winding way’ open an 18th c. poem by ----------------.
Answer: Choice 4
The mentioned lines open Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College by Thomas Gray.

44- John Keats’s Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1818) ------------------.
Answer: Choice 2
This poem of more than four thousand lines (based on the classical myth of a mortal beloved
by the goddess of the moon) tells of Endymion’s long and agonized search for an immortal
goddess whom he had seen in several visions. In the course of his wanderings, he comes
upon an Indian maid who had been abandoned by the followers of Bacchus, god of wine and
revelry. To his utter despair, he succumbs to a sensual passion for her, in apparent betrayal of
his love for his heavenly ideal. The conclusion to Keats’s “romance” offers a way of
resolving this opposition, which runs throughout the poem, between the inevitably mortal
pleasures of this world and the possibility of delights that would be eternal: the Indian maid
reveals that she is herself Cynthia (Diana), goddess of the moon, the celestial subject of his
earlier visions.
Source: See the footnote of the poem in Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th
edition, p. 883
45- Robert Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi (1855) -------------------.
Answer: Choice 4
“Fra Lippo Lippi” is a monologue portraying the dawn of the Renaissance in Italy at a point
when the medieval attitude toward life and art was about to be displaced by a fresh
appreciation of earthly pleasures. It was from Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Painters (1550)
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that Browning derived most of his information about the life of the Florentine painter and
friar Lippo Lippi (1406-1469), but the theory of art propounded by Lippi in the poem was
developed by the poet.
Source: See the footnote of the poem in Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th
edition, p. 1271
46- ‘First World War poet: poem’ match in -------------------.
Answer: Choice 1
“The Owl” is by Edward Thomas
“The Cherry Trees” is by Edward Thomas
“As the Team’s Head Brass” is by Edward Thomas
1959
47- Which of the following does NOT open a poem by Philip Larkin (1922-1985)?
Answer: Choice 3
Choice 1 opens “Church Going” by Philip Larkin
Choice 2 opens “MCMXIV” by Philip Larkin
Choice 3 opens “Lapis Lazuli” by William Butler Yeats
Choice 4 opens “Homage to a Government” by Philip Larkin
2571
48- Ann Carson’s (b. 1950) poem ‘The Glass Essay’ --------------------.
Answer: Choice 2
One of Carson’s greatest works, a long poem titled ‘The Glass Essay’ (in Glass, Irony and
God), is a kind of Yeatsian ‘dialogue’, written out of the tradition of the duality of soul and
body. Carson’s context is, as it must be in this kind of poem, personal – a lost relationship.
Like all poems that leave one reeling, ‘The Glass Essay’ offers sensuous and bold surfaces
that also call up unutterable subtexts. ‘First Chaldaic Oracle’, published Canadian Poetry 315
in Men in the Off Hours, a collection that demonstrates the impressive range of Carson’s
formal skill as a poet, engages in word-play that lightly echoes John Ashbery’s.
49- The set of characters ----------------- appear in William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or
What You Will (written circa 1601).
Answer: Choice 4
‘Valentine, Silvia, Julia’ appear in Shakespeare’s “The Two Gentlemen of Verona”

‘Solinus, Egeon, Emilia’ appear in Shakespeare’s “Comedy of Errors”
‘Duke Frederick, Rosalind, Celia’ appear in Shakespeare’s “As You Like It”
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50- ‘Character: character description’ in William Congreves Restoration comedy The Way
of the World (premiered 1700) do NOT match in ------------------.
Answer: Choice 1
At the center of the action of The Way of the World are four fully realized characters—
Mirabell and Millamant, the hero and heroine, and Fainall and Mrs Marwood, the two
villains—whose stratagems and relations move the play. Around them are characters who
serve in one way or another as foils. Witwoud, the would-be wit, with whom we contrast the
true wit of Mirabell and Millamant. Petulant, a “humor” character, who affects bluff candor
and cynical realism, but succeeds only in being offensive, and Sir Wilfull Witwoud, the
booby squire from the country, who serves with Petulant to throw into relief the high good
breeding and fineness of nature of the hero and heroine Finally there is one of Congreve’s
finest creations, Lady Wishfort (‘wish for it’), who though aging and ugly still longs for love,
gallantry, and courtship and who is led by her appetites into the trap that Mirabell lays for
her.
Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 2226-27
51- Which of the following sets of plays are made exclusively of George Bernard Shaw’s
(1856-1950) ‘Plays Pleasant’ (1898)?
Answer: Choice 2
Shaw’s early plays, The Philanderer and the far more assured Mrs Warren’s Profession (both
written in 1893), fell victims to the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship and had to wait until the
early 1900s for private productions (Mrs Warren’s Profession received its license for public
performance only in the mid-1920s!). Of such official censorship Shaw complained in 1898
in the Preface to the published version of the two plays, classifying them, together with
Widowers’ Houses, as what he called ‘Unpleasant Plays’. Mrs Warren’s Profession boldly
confronts two contemporary women’s issues: the future professional careers of educated,
would-be independent women, and the oldest profession, female prostitution. The arguments
of the play suggest the propriety of both vocations, but its internal tensions derive from the
juxtaposition of a liberated daughter, Vivie Warren, and her unashamed, brothel-keeping
mother who sees ‘the only way for a woman to provide for herself decently is for her to be
good to some man that can afford to be good to her’. The play ends not with reconciliation,
compromise or empty gestures of feminine solidarity, but with a slammed door and an
isolated Vivie happily engrossed in her work. Shaw was justly proud of this ‘unpleasant’
play, but his discovery that, as he put it, ‘the New Drama, in England at least, was a figment
of the revolutionary imagination’ virtually obliged him to write an alternative series of
‘pleasant’ plays for the commercial theatre. Arms and the Man: An Anti-Romantic Comedy
(1894) sets out to subvert ideas of soldierly and masculine heroism in a fanciful Balkan
setting; Candida: A Mystery (1897) turns Ibsen’s A Doll’s House upside down within the
context of a Christian Socialist household; and the cleverly diverting You Never Can Tell
(1899) allows for the happy, liberating victory of a new generation over the old.
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52- ‘Twentieth century playwright: play’ do NOT correspond in -------------------.

Answer: Choice 4
The Secret Rapture (1988) is by David Hare
53- ‘Character / character description’ in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is correct in
-------------------.
Answer: Choice 3
Born to an affluent, loving family, Victor Frankenstein hopes to leave a lasting impression on
his fellow humanity. He leaves home to attend the University of Ingolstadt, where he studies
natural sciences. His professor M. Waldman inspires him to push his experiments beyond the
realm of “acceptable” science, so he begins to determine the limits of human mortality.
Collecting cadaver parts from graveyards, he slowly pieces together the form of a human
being. It takes him two years to complete his experiment, but when he finally gives his
creature the spark of life, Victor can only run in fear. The creature’s hideous appearance
appalls Victor, upsetting him so much that he becomes very ill. He knows nothing about the
creature’s whereabouts until the creature finally approaches him.
Source: http://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/frankenstein
OR
54- Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) opens with -------------------.
Answer: Choice 1
Later in the nineteenth century, readers expected very full character delineations. In Far from
the Madding Crowd (1874), Thomas Hardy satisfies that expectation in his opening
presentation of Gabriel Oak: When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till
they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and
diverging wrinkles appeared round them extending upon his countenance like the rays in a
rudimentary sketch of the rising sun.
Choice 2 is from Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy: Chapter 1
Choice 3 is from Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy
Choice 4 is from Tess of the d'Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy
Source: Mastering English Literature by Richard Gill, 3rd edition, p. 18
55- ‘Novelist: novel’ do NOT correspond in --------------------.
Answer: Choice 3
Leading the Cheers is by Justin Cartwright (not by Doris Lessing)
Cartwright’s first novel, The Revenge (1978), is a roman à clef about an American president
(based on Richard Nixon) who tries to arrange for the assassination of a rival candidate. His
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1995 novel, In Every Face I Meet, was short-listed for the Booker Prize, and in 1998 Leading
the Cheers won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. Other well-reviewed works include
Masai Dreaming (1993), about a journalist researching the life of an anthropologist who had
been studying the Masai tribe in Africa in the period before World War II, but who was later
sent to Auschwitz with her family, and Half in Love (2001), about a protagonist loosely
based on British prime minister Tony Blair.
Source: The Facts on File Companion to the British Novel by Virginia Brackett and Victoria
Gaydosik, Vol II, p. 70
OR
56- Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women (1971) is a --------------------.
Answer: Choice 4
A novel constructed from a series of interlinking short stories, Lives of Girls and Women is a
special kind of bildungsroman known as a “Kunstler roman” or novel of the development of
an artist’s gifts. The first-person narrator of the eight stories that make up the novel is Del
Jordan, daughter of Addie Jordan. The stories follow Del’s life from about the age of 11 until
shortly after her graduation from high school. Del is observant enough to recognize her
desire to wield power over her own life when it crops up, and she is strong enough to choose
a course of action that will make it possible for her to do so.
Gaydosik, Vol II, p. 262
57- John Fowles’ The Magus (1965) is --------------------.
Answer: Choice 1
Probably the most important novel of this important 20th-century author, The Magus draws
on the experiences of the author in the Greek Aegean Islands; it is an engrossing, hypnotic
novel featuring layer upon layer of illusion. The story is deeply informed by classical
mythology, Jungian psychology, and archetypal literary devices. The first-person narrator,
Nicholas Urfe (“earth,” as Fowles explains in the preface to the revised edition), takes a job
in the early 1950s teaching English at a private Greek school modeled on the English Public
School system. He accepts the position more out of desperation than love of teaching
English: No better prospects for employment have turned up, and he wishes to end his love
affair with Alison Kelly, an intelligent and independent Australian woman. Nicholas
imagines that on Phraxos (inspired by the real-life island of Spetsai), he will spend his
abundant and isolated leisure time writing poetry. He fancies himself to be a great poet,
although he has yet to produce significant examples of verse.
Gaydosik, Vol II, p. 275-6
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58- The novelist J. M. Coetzee’s (h. 1940) most compelling indictment of colonialism
-------------- takes its title and theme from ---------------.
Answer: Choice 3
Coetzee is at once a passionate political novelist and an intensely literary one, both qualities
emerging in his most compelling indictment of colonialism, Waiting for the Barbarians
(1980). This novel takes its title and theme from a well-known poem by the Greek poet
Constantine Cavafy (1863—1933).
59- V. S. Naipaul (b. 1932) ‘work: work description’ match in ----------------.
Answer: Choice 2
Naipaul’s first three books, The Mystic Masseur (1957), The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), and
Miguel Street (short stories, 1959), are comedies of manners, set in a Trinidad viewed with
an exile’s acute and ironic eye.
60- Which of the following about the novelist Jean Rhys (1890-1979) is NOT true?
Answer: Choice 4
Rhys’s fiction frequently depicts single, economically challenged women, rootless outsiders
living in Bohemian London or Paris. Her early sketches were followed by her first novel,
Postures (1928), in part an account of her affair with Ford.
99
1395 – Questions
100
LITERARY TERMS AND CRITICISM

1- ‘Theatre of cruelty’, a term introduced by the French actor Antonin Artaud in a series
of manifestos in the 1930s, ---------------------.
1) refers to his projected revolution in drama, whereby great stress was placed on a theatre
of psychology intended to lead the audience to a violent awareness of man's inner mind
2) derived its idea partly from surrealism and the idea that the audience should undergo a
catharsis through being possessed by a ‘plague’ or epidemic of irrational responses
3) never proved to be practical on stage—Peter Brook’s production in 1964 of Peter Weiss’s
Marat/Sade was one of the most notable instances of its utter failure with the audience
4) is best exemplified in the huge success and popularity of the playwright’s own attempts at
putting his theory into dramatic practice—in works such as Les Cenci
2- The term ‘surfiction’, coined in 1973 by the American writer Raymond Federman,
would best designate a kind of fiction in which -------------------.
1) ‘character development’ is so much impeded by the narrative's ‘plot’ that the reader is
practically faced by a ‘narrative hall’ in the work
2) the idea of meta fiction is represented as having had its origins in the I9th century writer’s
penchant for intruding into his narrative
3) realism is abandoned in favor of metafiction, self-consciously advertising its own
fictional status
4) the writer employs a blend of realistic conventions for resolutely postmodern novels and
short stories
3- ‘Perlocutionary act’, a term used in speech act theory, refers to an utterance that
-------------------.
1) has an effect upon the actions, thoughts, or feelings of the listener
2) would induce the listener to accept the truth validity of a statement
3) attempts to he convincing without being alarming, insulting or boring
4) is concerned with the emotive (and not the ‘factual’) content of statements
4- ‘Analepsis’ and ‘prolepsis’ are specifically two basic forms of --------------------.
1) ‘apocrypha’
2) ‘anachrony’
3) ‘anapest’
4) ‘aubadc’
5- ‘Caesura’, a pause in a line of verse, often coinciding with a break between clauses or
sentences, ---------------------.
1) is also applied to a break between words within a ‘foot’
2) is almost always placed in the middle of the line of a poem
3) was called ‘feminine caesura’ if it followed a stressed syllable
4) was used in the Old English and Middle English alliterative meter
6- Typical ---------------- involves the unveiling of a disguised character or the
reappearance of one assumed by the audience to be dead.
1) ‘deus ex machina’
2) ‘peripeteia’
3) ‘coups de theatre’
4) ‘feuilleton’
101
1395 – Questions
7- ‘Hyperbaton’ is a very common form of -------------------, of which ---------------------

affords many spectacular examples.
1) ‘poetic licence’ / Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
2) ‘elegaic metre’ / Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
3) ‘elegaie metre’ / Milton’s Paradise Lost
4) ‘poetic licence’ / Milton’s Paradise Lost
8- Which of the following about a ‘madrigal’ is TRUE?
1) There is no fixed metrical form or rhyme scheme for a madrigal, but it usually ends with
a rhyming couplet.
2) It originated in 14th-century Italy, but it was revived and adopted by composers
throughout Europe in the 16th century.
3) It is a variety of long lyric poetry, usually of love and courtly life, developed in extremely
elaborate metrical patterns,
4) Madrigals were often set to music as a song for one or two voices with minimal
instrumental accompaniment.
9- ‘New Comedy’, as (eventually) applied to the comic theatre of, for instance, the 17 th
century playwright Moliere, --------------------.
1) portrayed the fortunes of a family whose members consisted mainly of stock characters
2) was preceded by a phase of ‘low comedy’ (of which almost nothing has survived)
3) abandoned topical satire in favor of fictional plots based on contemporary life
4) employed a chorus which would then act as part of an extensive musical interlude
10- The term ‘strophe’ is applied in a special sense to --------------------.
1) stanzas, or any regular subdivision of a poem, that have to be sung for their effect
2) the opening section (and even third succeeding section) of a Greek choral ode
3) a section in a Pindaric ode made up of two epodes followed by an antistrophe
4) the chorus having to chant it in a play while standing in front of the audience
11- John Dryden's An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668; rev. 1684) best treats, through his
four speakers, the ------------------.
1) strengths of Restoration comedy (his own preferred genre), relationship between the
ancients and the moderns, and the use of blank verse in drama
2) relationship between the ancients and the moderns. French dramatic theory and English
practice, and the use of rhyme in drama
3) strengths of Restoration comedy (his own preferred genre), English dramatic theory, and
the use of blank verse in drama
4) relationship between the ancients and the moderns, English dramatic theory, the use of
rhyme in drama
102
12- Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) maintained that we had no way of knowing a text
creator’s purpose other than through ‘reconstruction’ and outlined several types of
positive hermeneutical reconstruction ------------------.
1) consisting, of two types of grammatical or objective reconstruction and two types of
psychological or subjective reconstruction
2) based solely on rigorous objective criteria to the exclusion of what he termed
‘reconstructive psychologism’
3) more having to do the with the psychological or subjective processes at work in the
creation of a text's meaning
4) developed upon a complex conflation of grammatical / objective factors and
psychological / subjective factors
13- In what they practiced as ‘critical theory’, major thinkers of the Frankfurt School
--------------------.
1) embraced realism whole-heartedly despite the fact that some, such as Brecht and Lukacs.
held conflicting views of the school
2) regarded the social system, in Hegelian fashion, as a totality in which all the aspects
reflected the same essence
3) practiced a wide-ranging form of social analysis grounded in Marxism and resolutely
negating Freudian concepts
4) argued that great literature has to, is indeed forced to, directly address social reality
though not in strictly realistic fashion
14- Which of the following about Louis Althusser, the French Marxist philosopher who has
had a major influence on Marxist literary theory, is TRUE?
1) He believes in the idea of the ‘social formation’, which he regards as a ‘decentered’
structure—unlike a living organism this structure has no governing principle, no
originating seed, no overall unity to him.
2) He does not treat the text as a ‘production’ in which disparate materials are worked over
and changed in the process—he regards it instead as a ‘creation’ or a self-contained
artefact.
3) He maintains dial irrespective of prevailing aesthetic norms and authorial intentions, the
artistic text, in working the pre-given materials, is always fully ‘aware of what it is
doing’.
4) He tends to treat art as simply a form of ideology: in ‘A Letter on Art’, he locates it right
inside the everyday praxis of ideological knowledge.
15- The key to understanding postmodernist thinker Jean Baudrillard’s thought is his
------------------.
1) concept of the consumer’s triumph whereby our natural needs or desires are able to defeat
the desires stimulated by cultural discourses of the media
2) argument that the things signified have now taken priority over signs thus leaving the
signs devoid of any real significance
3) reversal of the commonsense understanding of the relation of culture to nature, of sign to
thing signified
4) idea of ‘simulacra’ in which representations can represent only the ‘surface’ of the
objects they purport to represent
103
1395 – Questions
16- Major twentieth-century ‘critic / theorist; work’ match in --------------------.

1) ‘Edward Said: The Resistance to Theory’
2) ‘Harold Bloom: Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism’
3) ‘Haydon White: Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche,
Rilke, and Proust’
4) ‘Paul de Man: Blindness and Insight; Essay's in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism’
17- Which of the following central figures in French structuralism would, following
Aristotle’s view of plot as the prime category of tragedy, take plot as the central
abstract structure of narrative in his / her development of narratology?
1) Roland Barthes
2) Tzvetan Todorov
3) Gerald Graff
4) Julia Kristeva
18- The Indian-American critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak ------------------.
1) continually interrogates and undermines the ‘polities of the open end’ in which
deconstruction works in effect to the detriment ‘alterities’
2) would tend to de-emphasize deconstruction’s interest in hierarchical binary oppositions
and thus carve a passage from literary Theory to radical politics
3) writes against the ‘epistemic violence’ done by discourses of knowledge that carve up the
world and condemn to oblivion the pieces that do not easily fit
4) self-consciously explores in her works what she dubs ‘structures of affection’ in an
attempt to counteract ‘the despotism of the binary’ persistent in Western culture
19- As a literary critical school, New Historicism begins its quest to be political by denying
that ------------------.
1) the literary work, due to its special constructed status, can play a significant role in the
competition among various groups to gain their ends
2) fictional works can reveal the growth of forms of power that continuously affect subjects’
lives in actual human societies
3) literary symbols can have any real capacity to bind social agents emotionally to
institutions and practices
4) any social world is stable and that artworks are separated from the power struggles
constituting social reality
20- Which of the following works opens with the famous exhortation ‘Always historicize!’
thus effectively setting out the methodological approach called ‘metacommentary’ and
providing a theoretically sophisticated answer to the perennial question of the relation
of aesthetics to social history?
1) Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious
2) Terry Eagleton’s Marxism and Literary Theory
3) Stuart Halt’s Cultural Studies find its Theoretical Legacies
4) Stephen Greenblatt’s The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance
104

21- Medieval dramas known as the morality plays ------------------.
1) were, unlike mystery plays, composed individually and not in cycles
2) address questions of the ultimate fate of the soul and the body on earth
3) enjoy the same methods of attaining their religions purpose as mystery plays
4) dramatize biblical and sacred history from the creation of the world to Judgment
22- Which of the following about John Donne’s ‘Satire 3’ opening with ‘Kind pity chokes
my spleen; brave scorn forbids / Those tears to issue which swell my eyelids’ is TRUE?
1) It was written in the early 17th century urbane and witty English style to defend King
James’s Protestant religious politics.
2) It would, unusually for an early Donne satire, steer completely away from the topical
theological problems of the day.
3) It resembles the satires of the third Roman satirist, Persius, known for an abstruse style
and moralizing manner.
4) It is one of his five verse satires written in the 1590s in protest against the vogue for
‘classical’ satires in England.
23- The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) ---------------------.
1) has been generally described as an anti-Nominalist, owing to his disregard for established
definition of the meaning of terms
2) resembles Francis Bacon (1561-1626) in the practical or utilitarian importance that he
attaches to knowledge
3) is concerned with nature and man as objects of his enquiry and shares the general
scientific zest of his time for the inductive method
4) considers man's intellect as the basis of all knowledge but maintains that the intellect
alone is less than sufficient for man's prosperity
24- Jonathan Swift’s The Drapier’s Letters (1724) was ---------------.
1) a long vociferous letter in several instalments addressed to ‘the right honorable people of
Ireland’ on the question of me ‘imported English mint of brass’
2) addressed to ‘Lord Chancellor Middleton’ and to ‘both Houses of Parliament’ warning of
the dangers of ‘circulating, brass in Dublin the brain of Ireland’
3) a collection of letters in plain language asking the Irish populace to rise against the idea
of getting ‘an English mint’ established in Dublin
4) a series of four pamphlets in which he prophesies economic ruin to the Irish if ‘Wood’s
half-pence’ were admitted into circulation in Ireland
25- Which of the following statements about William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning
Political Justice (1793) is correct?
1) Law and government and the idea of property would be strengthened as part of a gradual
process by which human perfectibility can be achieved.
2) Rousseau’s cult of sensibility and his innate religiosity is substituted for a rigid adherence
to the leading principle of reason.
3) He looks forward to a gradual melting away of all government to be replaced by a new
system of radical anarchy.
4) He views human happiness and social well-being as only one of the purposes of man’s
existence.
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1395 – Questions
26- Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) ------------------.

1) includes a passage on the downfall of Marie Antoinette leading to the lament that ‘the age
of chivalry is gone… All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off’
2) asserts that the king of England owes his throne to the choice of the people, who are
constitutionally at liberty to cashier him for misconduct ‘if need be’
3) argues that the inherited rights of which the English are tenacious can be consistent with
the ‘rights of man’ as promulgated in post-Revolution France
4) extols the goodwill of the men who made the French Revolution, but censures the bloody
turn of events instigated by the French National Assembly
27- A chance discovery of a seventeenth-century manuscript in which a number of ballads
had been copied down led to the three-volume ballad collection -------------------.
1) F. J. Child English and Scottish Popular Ballads
2) Bishop Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
3) Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border
4) Robert Burns’ The Melodies of Scotland
28- William Blake’s An Island in the Moon (1784-5) is ------------------.
1) an epic of the First Crusade, with the addition of romantic and fabulous elements
2) despite its title, a fictionalized romantic comedy, framed by the comments of Oberon,
king of fairies
3) a pamphlet poem in praise of idealistic social causes in England
4) a satirical portrait of scientific and cultural dilettantism and pretension
29- The Romantic figure ------------------ excelled as a songwriter both in standard English
(as in “Up! quit thy bower”) and in the Scottish dialect (as in “Woo’d and married”).
1) ‘Joanna Baillie’
2) ‘Charlotte Smith’
3) ‘Mary Robinson’
4) ‘Maria Edgeworth’
30- Wordsworth and Coleridge's landmark Lyrical Ballads appeared in 1798 along with
-------------------.
1) Walter Scott’s The Lay of the Last and Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk
2) William Godwin’s Caleb Williams and Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho
3) John Clare’s Poems Descriptive of Rival Life and Felicia Hemans’s Records of Woman
4) Jeremy Bentham’s Political Economy and Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle
of Population
31- The novel written (roughly) in the Romantic period ----------------- has as its hero /
heroine a ‘natural’ man, a primitive who is brought up by American Indians without
the constrictions of civilized religion, morality, and ethics.
1) Mary Wollstonecraft’s Mary
2) Robert Bage’s Hermsprong
3) Frances Burney’s Evelina
4) Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and Art
106
32- The following events, important as part of context material for the Romantic period,
occurred in three consecutive years in ------------------.
1) the Fall of the BastilleThe reign of TerrorThe fall of Robespierre
2) W. A. Mozart’s Don GiovanniNapoleon crowned emperorBlackwood’s Edinburgh
Magazine founded
3) Abolition of the slave trade in BritainLudwig van Beethoven’s Symphonies 5 and
6Quarterly Review Founded
4) Parliamentary Union of Ireland and Great BritainThe Prince of Wales becomes regent
for George IIIBlackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine founded
33- The Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) --------------------.
1) concurred with other major poets of her generation, such as Arnold, that the Victorian age
did not contain the right materials for an epic poetry
2) wrote her Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), a sequence of eighty-three sonnets, some
in the Portuguese, to record the stages of her love for Robert Browning
3) tended, in her early work, to use the visionary modes of Romantic narrative poetry, but
she turned increasingly to contemporary topics, particularly to liberal causes of her day
4) depicted the growth of a woman poet in her verse novel Aurora Leigh (1857), the first
extensive poem in English by a woman poet written in tribute to another woman poet
34- Idylls of the King, a series of 12 connected poems by Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892),
--------------------.
1) presents the story of Arthur, from his first meeting with Guinevere to the ruin of his
kingdom and his death in the ‘last, dim, weird battle of the west’
2) of which a major portion is ‘The Passing of Arthur’ (subsequently incorporated in ‘Morte
d’Arthur’) was composed after his friend’s Hallam’s death in 1850
3) depicts major protagonists such as Lancelot and Elaine in detail—at the expense of
dealing with the fates of its various minor characters
4) was begun in 1833-4 with ‘Enid’, which he followed by ‘Merlin and Vivien’, later
developed into ‘The Marriage of Geraint’
35- The Victorian light verse as reprinted by W.S. Gilbert (1836-1911) -----------------.
1) creates its comic worlds through exaggeration and absurdity removed from the ordinary
world and its everyday concerns
2) has proved especially attractive to psychoanalytically minded readers interested in
literary parody and philosophical speculation
3) embraces a wide variety of humorous material from nonsense poetry to songs
for the stage to pseudo-serious satire of political events
4) was written in the burlesque mode, employed to poke fun at a host of social and political
issues and figures, similar to what was found in the pages of the Punch
36- ‘Victorian figure / work’ are both correct in -----------------.
1) Henry Mayhew: London Labour and the London Poor AND Annie Besant: The “White
Slavery” of London Match Workers’
2) Thomas Babington Macaulay: ‘Minute on Indian Education’ AND James Anthony
Froude: ‘On the Study of Celtic Literature’
3) Charles Kingsley: The Great Towns AND Coventry Patmore: The Angel in the House
4) Mona Caird: ‘Marriage’ AND Walter Besant: A Review of Southey's Colloquies’
107
1395 – Questions
37- Which of the following statements about Samuel Beckett (1906-89) is TRUE?
1) His The Unnamable opens with the characteristic sentence ‘I shall soon be quite dead at
last in spite of all’.
2) His early attempts at drama were influenced by the work of the South African playwright
and stage-director Athol Fugard.
3) His first published work was an essay on Joyce (1929) and he assisted with the
translation into French of part of his Finnegans Wake.
4) His trilogy Molloy (1953), Malone Dies (1958) and The Unnamable (1960) were all
(except Malone Dies) originally written in French and were then translated into English.
38- The description -------------------- matches the contemporary British poet and playwright
Carol Ann Duffy (b. 1955).
1) ‘Along with poetry, she has published books of criticism on classical literature,
translations front Greece and a novel in verse Autobiography of Red’
2) ‘The great puzzle of her career has been how to embrace Irish identity while rejecting
certain male-centered assumptions that have long dominated Irish literary culture.’
3) ‘She illustrates many of her poems with line drawings (‘doodles’) that reinforce the effect
of mock-naiveté—in part, as a gendered deflection and subversion of masculine cultural
norms’
4) ‘She is particularly skillful in her use of dramatic monologue, fashioning and assuming
the voices of mythological, historical and active characters such as Medusa or Lazarus’s
imaginary wife’
39- The British Poet C. Day-Lewis (1904-1972) -----------------.
1) seems never to have fallen for the idea of feeling small when laced with a working-class
Communist: ‘My sympathies are Left. On paper and in my soul’, he wrote. ‘But not in
my heart or my guts.’
2) with his Overtures to Death (1938) and Poems in Wartime (1940) signaled that he like
Stephen Spender, had begun to retreat from confident Marxist analyses as the Second
World War approached
3) published, at the beginning of his career, a series of verse dialogues with the title
‘eclogue’ (‘Eclogue for Christmas’, ‘Eclogue by a Five-barred Gale’, ‘Eclogue from
Iceland’, and ‘Eclogue between the Motherless’)
4) describes in his unfinished autobiography, The Strings Are False, his enthusiasm as a
schoolboy for The Waste Land, an enthusiasm which expressed itself in paddling a hired
canoe ‘beneath the gas works, a line place... for reading Webster’.
40- Samuel Beckett’s one foray into the cinéma, Film (1964) was -------------------.
1) a complex ‘script’ as a tribute to Buster Keaton
2) based on his private interviews with Charles Chaplin
3) partly inspired by his own Words and Music, his 1962 radio play
4) a montage of comedy films made in France since the invention of the cinema
108
LITERARY GENRES
41- The poem -------------------- is a personal testament or book of worship, antiphonally
Arranged in lines beginning alternately with Let and For, seeks to join the material and
spiritual universes in one unending prayer.
1) A Better Answer by Matthew Prior
2) Jubilate Agno by Christopher Smart
3) The Definition of Love by Andrew Marvel
4) Silence, and Stealth of Days by Henry Vaughan
42- Which of the following about James Thomson’s (1700-1748) The Seasons is correct?
1) The distinction of the poem was recognized not as lying with the prevalent 18th c.
emphasis on didacticism but with the force and diversity its meditations.
2) Mercantile enterprise is interpreted as an interference with the natural organism of nature
all to the detriment of man’s real happiness and prosperity.
3) The working landscape of the four seasons emanates best from Home Counties around
London and spreads thence to the fertile island of Britain.
4) Throughout the work great emphasis is laid on the interrelationship, and not the conflict,
of the interests of the country and the town.
43- The poems ------------------ ALL appeared in William Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads
(1800).
1) ‘Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways’, ‘Simon Lee, the old Huntsman’ and ‘The Thorn’
2) ‘Nutting’, ‘Simon Lee, the old Huntsman’ and ‘Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways’
3) ‘Nutting’, ‘Simon Lee, the old Huntsman’ and ‘The Thorn’
4) ‘The Thorn’, ‘Nutting’ and ‘Surprised by joy’
44- ‘Victorian poet: poem’ match in -------------------.
1) Matthew Arnold: ‘Lines Written in Kensington Gardens’
2) Dante Gabriel Rossetti: ‘The Starlight Night’
3) Robert Browning: ‘Tithonus’
4) Alfred Tennyson: ‘The Lost Leader’
45- The poem ‘Invictus’ opening ‘Out of the night that covers me / Black as the Pit from
pole to pole / I thank whatever gods may be / For my unconquerable soul’ is by the
Victorian poet ------------------.
1) Gerard Manley Hopkins
2) Michael Field
3) Rudyard Kipling
4) W. E. Henley
46- The following poems fry W. B. Yeats (1856-1939) appeared in the correct order in
-------------------.
1) ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’‘The Second Coming’The Lake Isle of Innisfree’
2) ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’The Wild Swans at Coole’The Second Coming’
3) ‘The Wild Swans at CooleThe Lake Isle of Innisfree’The Second Coming’
4) ’The Lake Isle of lnnisfree’The Second Coming’The Wild Swans at Coole’
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1395 – Questions
47- T. S. Eliot’s poem ‘East Coker’ in his Four Quartets (1943) opens with ---------------.
1) ‘Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future
contained in time past. / If all time is eternally present / All time is unredeemable...’
2) I do not know much about gods; but I mink that the river/ Is a strong brown god—sullen,
untamed and intractable, / Patient to some degree, at first recognized as a frontier...’
3) In my beginning is my end. In succession / Houses, rise and fall, crumble, are extended, /
Are removed, destroyed, restored, of in their place / Is an open filed, or a factory, or a by-
pass…’
4) ‘Midwinter spring is its own season / Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown, /
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic, / When the short day is brightest, with frost
and fire...’
48- Which of the following about the poetry of Philip Larkin (1922-1985) is correct?
1) He explores eternal themes of death and change within novel rhythms and syntax, and
innovative poetic forms.
2) His vision is unsentimental, albeit at times unrealistic, and he prefers to be indirect and
ironic.
3) He writes about what appears to be normal and every day, while exploring the paradox
that the mundane is both familiar and limited.
4) He strongly asserts and (re-)claims the right of the poet to exploit his own personal
experience for the creation of poetry.
49- Seamus Heaney’s ‘Punishment’ (1975) opens with -------------------.
1) ‘I almost love you / but would have cast, I know / the stones of silence / I am the artful
voyeur’
2) ‘I can feel the tug / of the halter at the nape / of her neck, the wind / on her naked front’
3) ‘As if he had been poured / in tar, he lies / on a pillow of turf / and seems to Weep’
4) ‘It was a day of cold’ Raw silence, wind-blown / Surplice and soutane’
50- Which of the following statements about the Scottish novelist Tobias Smollett (1721-
1771) / work by him is correct?
1) Smollett often selects his characters from the ranks of high society and, unlike his
contemporary Sterne, shows little interest in servants as engines for his fiction.
2) His Peregrine Pickle is concerned with and supports the kind of grand tour which Sterne
had mocked in his A Sentimental Journey.
3) In his enthusiasm for comic effects, Smollett tends to shun the harsh realities of life in his
tales, and usually stops short of introducing controversial issues.
4) Like many of his contemporaries, including William Goldsmith, Smollett used journalism
as a vehicle for his ideas which are frequently dominated by anger.
110
51- George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) opens with -----------------.

1) ‘With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any
chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you,
reader. With this drop of ink at the end of my pen…’
2) ‘On the first of September, in the memorable year 1832, someone was expected at
Transome Court. As early as two o’clock in the afternoon the aged lodge-keeper had
opened the heavy gate, green as the tree trunks were green…’
3) ‘Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture
behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life
of Saint Theresa…’
4) ‘More than three centuries and a half ago, in the mid spring-time of 1492, we are sure
that the angel of the dawn, as he travelled with broad slow wing from the Levant to the
Pillars of Hercules…’
52- Which of the following about Anne Bronte / her work is correct?
1) Her Agnes Grey was co-published with her sister Charlotte's The Professor in 1846.’
2) Her The Tenant of Windfell Hall (1848) deals with the fortunes and misfortunes of its
heroine Helen Graham.
3) She was the only one of the Bronte sisters who chose to be published under her name
(and not under a pseudonym).
4) She co-wrote (with Harriet Martinueau) and published several important proto-feminist
pamphlets in the Quarterly Review.
53- Thomas Hardy’s use of ‘dialect’ for his characters in his fiction was -----------------.
1) primarily to distinguish between his characters, particularly with reference to their social
position and to the social and psychological contexts in which they find themselves
2) done in an effort to neutralize the linguistic and social dualities and clashes in values
produced, by the employment of seldom-heard types of speech
3) usually applied to dialects-peaking characters who were idiosyncratic, lacked education,
or who were exaggeratedly ‘low’ in society
4) sometimes done with a view to representing the speech of his characters in dialect form
to entertain the audience for his work
54- Arguably one of the most innovative mid successful exponents of the ‘conversational or
dialogue novel’, Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969) ------------------.
1) chooses one-word titles such as Caught (1943), Loving (1945), and Nothing (1950) for
the published novels, which takes the form to new heights, being written almost entirely
in dialogue form
2) depicts, in the novel of the factory floor, Living (1929), a vivid example of the dialogue
novel—colloquial, ungrammatical, and highly revealing about both the workers and the
managerial class
3) develops a style described as combining the upper class with the demotic, with novels in
many ways marking the transition between the novel of upper- and middle-class concerns
and the working-class novels of the 1950s
4) provides the reader with chilling and disturbing pictures of family and society largely
written in dialogue, and depicts an enclosed world somewhere before the First World
War—she is more frequently compared with post-Impressionism in painting than with
the literary fashions of the time
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1395 – Questions
55- Several writers in English have followed the French writer Marcel Proust’s
Remembrance of Things Past in writing multi-novel sequences, a prime example being
----------------- which consists of eleven novels.
1) Hartley’s The Go-Between
2) Greene’s The Power and the Glory
3) Snow’s Strangers and Brothers
4) Waugh’s Officers and Gentlemen
56- ‘Novelist: description’ match in ------------------.
1) ‘Barbara Comyns: her characters are frequently spinsters, and her novels of loneliness
and pain, such as Hotel du Lac, are among the most classically refined treatments of the
theme of solitude in the twentieth century’
2) ‘May Sinclair: her novels such as Our Spoons Came from Woolworth’s (1950) and Mr.
Fox (1987) combine the everyday with the macabre in a very individual way in their
treatment of poverty’
3) ‘Barbara Pym: From Excellent Women in 1952 to the tragic Quartet in Autumn in 1977,
she explores a world that is small in scale, but profound in its emotional impact’
4) ‘Anita Brookner: in novels such as Who Was Changed and Who was Dead (1954) deals
with the effects of the plague on a village’
57- Which of the following set of characters in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar are
among the conspirators against Caesar?
1) Trebonius and Caius Legarius
2) Calpurnia and Portia Cinna
3) Lepidus and Flavius
4) Artemidorus and Marullus
58- The prologue of William Congreve’s comedy The Way of the World (1700) ‘Spoken by
Mr. Betterton’ opens with -----------------.
1) ‘What flocks of critics hover here to-day / As vultures wait on armies for their prey /All
gaping for the carcase of a play! / With croaking notes they bode some dire event / And
follow dying poets by the scent’
2) ‘Of those few fools, who with ill stars are cursed / Sure scribbling fools, called poets, fare
the worst / For they’re a sort of fools which fortune makes / And after she has made ‘em
fouls, forsakes.’
3) ‘Now, luck yet send us, and a little wit / Will serve to make our play hit / According to
the palates of the season / Here is rhyme not empty of reason.’
4) ‘Why should a foolish marriage vow / Which long ago was made / Oblige us to each
other now / When passion is decayed?’
59- Which of the following three are entirely made up of D.H Lawrence’s plays about
working class life?
1) The Plough and the Stars, A Collier’s Friday Night, The Daughter-in-Law
2) The Silver Tassie, The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd, A Collier’s Friday Night
3) The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd, Juno and Paycock, The Daughter-in-Law
4) A Collier’s Friday Night, The Daughter-in-Law, The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd
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60- John Osborne’s hero, Jimmy Porter, in his Look Back in Anger (1956) -----------------.
1) is married to a wife who has had to spend her childhood and part of her adolescent years
with her family in the British African colonies
2) has a brother-in-law educated at the expensive Sandhurst academy and is now a member
of Parliament (characterized as ‘the platitude from outer space’)
3) is a revolutionary with ‘revolutions to fight for’, or, to put it in terms readily grasped in
the 1950s, he is a rebel with ‘causes he has to put to the right through hard action
4) has been an obsessive reader of Shakespeare and Eliot for the last couple of years though
he fulminates against the crumbling authority of what he identifies as Establishment
values
113
114

1- ‘Theatre of cruelty’, a term introduced by the French actor Antonin Artaud in a series
of manifestos in the 1930s, ---------------------.
Answer: Choice 2
‘Theatre of cruelty’ is a term introduced by the French actor Antonin Artaud in a series of
manifestos in the 1930s, collected as Le Theatre et son double (1938). It refers to his
projected revolution in orama, whereby the rational ‘theatre of psychology’ was to be
replaced by a more physical and primitive rite intended to shock the audience into an
awareness of life’s cruelty and violence. The idea, derived partly from surrealism, was that
the audience should undergo a catharsis through being possessed by a ‘plague’ or epidemic
of irrational responses.
Source: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms by Chris Baldick, 2nd edition, p.
258
2- The term ‘surfiction’, coined in 1973 by the American writer Raymond Federman,
would best designate a kind of fiction in which -------------------.
Answer: Choice 3
‘Surficion’ is a term coined in 1973 by the American experimental writer Raymond
Federman to designate a new kind of fiction which is now more often referred to as
postmodernist. Rather than attempt to mirror some pre-existing reality, surfiction abandons
realism in favor of metafiction, self-consciously advertising its own fictional status.
Federman proposed that ‘the new fiction will not attempt to be meaningful, truthful, or
realistic’.
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3- ‘Perlocutionary act’, a term used in speech act theory, refers to an utterance that
-------------------.
Answer: Choice 1
‘Perlocutionary act’ is a term used in speech act theory to designate an utterance that has an
effect upon the actions, thoughts, or feelings of the listener, e.g. convincing, alarming,
insulting, boring. The perlocutionary effect of an utterance may differ from the intended
effect of the speaker’s illocutionary act.
Source: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms by Chris Baldick, 2nd edition,
p.189
115
4- ‘Analepsis’ and ‘prolepsis’ are specifically two basic forms of ------------------.

Answer: Choice 2
‘Analepsis’, is a form of anachrony by which some of the events of a story are related at a
point in the narrative after later story events have already been recounted.
Source: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms by Chris Baldick, 2nd edition, p.10
5- ‘Caesura’, a pause in a line of verse, often coinciding with a break between clauses or
sentences, ------------------.
Answer: Choice 4
‘Caesura’ is a pause in a line of verse, often coinciding with a break between clauses or
sentences. It is usually placed in the middle of the line (‘medial caesura’), but may appear
near the beginning (‘initial’) or towards the end (‘terminal’).
6- Typical ------------------- involves the unveiling of a disguised character or the
reappearance of one assumed by the audience to be dead.
Answer: Choice 3
‘Coup de theatre’ is a sudden, surprising tum of events that gives a new twist to the plot of a
play. Typical coups de theatre involve the unveiling of a disguised character or the
reappearance of one the unveiling of a disguised character or the reappearance of one
assumed by the audience to be dead.
7- ‘Hyperbaton’ is a very common form of -------------------, of which ---------------------
affords many spectacular examples.
Answer: Choice 4
‘Hyperbaton’ is a figure of speech by which the normal order of words in a sentence is
significantly altered. A very common of poetic license, of which Milton’s Paradise Lost
affords many form.
p.119
116
8- Which of the following about a ‘madrigal’ is TRUE?

Answer: Choice 1
‘Madrigal’ is a short lyric poem, usually of love or pastoral life, often set to music as a song
for several voices without instrumental accompaniment. As a poetic form, it originated in
14th-century Italy, but it was revived and adopted by composers throughout Europe in the
16th century; the English madrigal flourished from the 1580s to the 1620s. There is no fixed
metrical form or rhyme scheme, but the madrigal usually ends with a rhyming couplet.
p.145
9- ‘New Comedy’, as (eventually) applied to the comic theatre of, for instance, the 17 th
century playwright Moliere, --------------------.
Answer: Choice 3
New Comedy is the name given to the kind of comedy that superseded the Old Comedy of
Aristophanes in Athens from the late 4th century BCE, providing the basis for later Roman
comedy and eventually for the comic theatre of Moliere and Shakespeare. Preceded by a
phase of ‘middle comedy’ (of which almost nothing has survived), New Comedy abandoned
topical satire in favor of fictional plots based on contemporary life: these portrayed the
tribulations of young lovers caught up among stock characters such as the miserly father and
the boastful soldier.
p.170
10- The term ‘strophe’ is applied in a special sense to --------------------.
Answer: Choice 2
‘Strophe’ is a stanza, or any less regular subdivision of a poem, such as a verse paragraph. In
a special sense, the term is applied to the opening section (and every third succeeding
section) of a Greek choral ode. In the Pindaric ode, sometimes imitated in English, the
strophe is followed by an antistrophe having the same number of lines and the same complex
metrical arrangement; this is then followed by an epode of differing length and structure, and
the triadic pattern may then be repeated a number of times.
p.245
11- John Dryden’s An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668; rev. 1684) best treats, through his
four speakers, the ------------------.
Answer: Choice 2
Dryden’s strengths and limits as a critic are displayed in his best-known critical work, the
lengthy conversation An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668; rev. 1684), from which we take our
selection. His stated purpose is “to vindicate the honor of our English writers from the
censure of those who unjustly prefer the French before them.” Through his four speakers, he
117
treats the relationship between the ancients and the moderns, French dramatic theory and
English practice, and the use of rhyme in drama, commenting along the way, as in our
excerpt, on Shakespeare, Jonson, and other authors.
Source: Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st edition, p.380

12- Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) maintained that we had no way of knowing a text
creator’s purpose other than through ‘reconstruction’ and outlined several types of
positive hermeneutical reconstruction ------------------.
Answer: Choice 1
Helpfully, Schleiermacher outlines four types of positive hermeneutical reconstruction. There
are two types of grammatical or objective reconstruction—historical and divinatory—and
two types of psychological or subjective reconstruction-historical and divinatory.
Interpretation for Schleiermacher is at once psychological and grammatical, intuitive and
comparative.
13- In what they practiced as ‘critical theory’, major thinkers of the Frankfurt School
--------------------.
Answer: Choice 2
While Brecht and Lukács held conflicting views of realism, the Frankfurt School of Marxist
aesthetics rejected realism altogether. The Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt practiced
what it called ‘Critical Theory’, which was a wide-ranging form of social analysis grounded
in Hegelian Marxism and including Freudian elements. The leading figures in philosophy
and aesthetics were Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. Exiled in 1933,
the Institute was relocated in New York, but finally returned to Frankfurt in 1950 under
Adorno and Horkheimer. They regarded the social system, in Hegelian fashion, as a totality
in which all the aspects reflected the same essence. Their analysis of modern culture was
influenced by the experience of fascism which had achieved hegemonic dominance at every
level of social existence in Germany.
91
14- Which of the following about Louis Althusser, the French Marxist philosopher who has
had a major influence on Marxist literary theory, is TRUE?
Answer: Choice 1
Louis Althusser, the French Marxist philosopher, has had a major influence on Marxist
literary theory especially in France and Britain. His work is clearly related to structuralism
and has been claimed for poststructuralism. He rejects the Hegelian revival within Marxist
philosophy, and argues that Marx’s real contribution to knowledge stems from his ‘break’
with Hegel. He criticizes Hegel’s account of ‘totality’, according to which the essence of the
whole is expressed in all its parts. Althusser avoids terms such as ‘social system’ and ‘order’,
because they suggest a structure with a centre which determines the form of all its
118
emanations. Instead he talks of the ‘social formation’, which he regards as a ‘decentred’

structure. Unlike a living organism this structure has no governing principle, no originating
seed, no overall unity. The implications of this view are arresting.
97
15- The key to understanding postmodernist thinker Jean Baudrillard’s thought is his
------------------.
Answer: Choice 3
The key to Baudrillard’s thought is his reversal of the commonsense understanding of the
relation of culture to nature, of sign to thing signified. Conventional thought holds that nature
(both human and nonhuman, such as trees, weather, ecological systems, the law of gravity)
precedes culture (the human-made), which is built on top of it. Similarly, we think of a thing
as existing in the world, and then of a word being invented and used to designate that thing.
16- Major twentieth-century ‘critic / theorist; work’ match in -----------------.
Answer: Choice 4
The Resistance to Theory is by Paul de Man
Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism is by Paul de Man
Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust is by
Paul de Man
Source: Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st edition, p. 1510, 1511, and 1512
17- Which of the following central figures in French structuralism would, following
Aristotle’s view of plot as the prime category of tragedy, take plot as the central
abstract structure of narrative in his / her development of narratology?
Answer: Choice 2
Following Aristotle’s view of plot as the prime category of tragedy, Todorov (and
narratology in general) takes plot as the central abstract structure of narrative, analyzing the
hundred tales in the Decameron on the basis of the similarity of their plots.
18- The Indian-American critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak ----------------------.
Answer: Choice 3
Deconstruction, according to Spivak, “is constantly and persistently looking into how truths
are produced. That’s why deconstruction doesn’t say logocentrism is a pathology, or
metaphysical enclosures are something you can escape. Deconstruction, if one wants a
formula, is among other things, a persistent critique of what one cannot not want.” She writes
against the “epistemic violence” done by discourses of knowledge that carve up the world
and condemn to oblivion the pieces that do not easily fit. Characteristically, she does not
119
claim to avoid such violence herself; rather, she self-consciously explores structures of vio-
lence without assuming a final, settled position.
19- As a literary critical school, New Historicism begins its quest to be political by denying
that --------------------.
Answer: Choice 4
New Historicism, begins its quest to be political by denying that any social world is stable
and that artworks are separated from the power struggles constituting social reality. The
literary work is a player in the competition among various groups to gain their ends, a
competition that takes place on many levels. New Historicism accepts Foucault’s insistence
that power operates through myriad capillary channels; these include not just direct coercion
and governmental action but also, crucially, daily routines and language.
20- Which of the following works opens with the famous exhortation ‘Always historicize!’
thus effectively setting out the methodological approach called ‘metacommentary’ and
providing a theoretically sophisticated answer to the perennial question of the relation
of aesthetics to social history?
Answer: Choice 1
By the mid-1970s, Jameson and Terry Eagleton were being hailed as the most significant
Marxist literary critics and theorists in the Anglophone world, but it was not until the
publication of The Political Unconscious that the originality of Jameson's project became
clear. Opening with the famous exhortation “Always historicize!” he sets out the
methodological approach he calls “metacommentary,” which provides a theoretically
sophisticated answer to the perennial question of the relation of aesthetics to social history.
21- Medieval dramas known as the morality plays ------------------.
Answer: Choice 1
Everyman is a late example of a kind of medieval drama known as the morality play.
Morality plays apparently evolved side by side with the mystery plays, although they were
composed individually and not in cycles. They too have a primarily religious purpose, but
their method of attaining it is different.

120
22- Which of the following about John Donne's ‘Satire 3’ opening with ‘Kind pity chokes
my spleen; brave scorn forbids / Those tears to issue which swell my eyelids’ is TRUE?
Answer: Choice 3
While elements of satire figure in many different kinds of literature, the great models for
formal verse satire were the Roman poets Horace and Juvenal, the former for an urbanely
witty style, the latter for an indignant or angry manner. While Donne’s other satires call on
these models, his third satire more nearly resembles those of a third Roman satirist, Persius,
known for an abstruse style and moralizing manner. This work is a strenuous discussion of an
acute theological problem, for the age and for Donne himself: How may one discover the true
Christian church among so many claimants to that role?

23- The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) ---------------.
Answer: Choice 2
One English writer who did influence Hobbes profoundly was Francis Bacon, whose
amanuensis Hobbes had been in Bacon’s last years. Ironically, Hobbes was not invited to join
the Royal Society, established after the Restoration on Baconian principles, because his
religious views were suspect and because he had quarreled with several of the society’s
founders. Yet Hobbes is truly Bacon’s heir, sharing Bacon’s utter lack of sentimentality and a
memorably astringent prose style.

24- Jonathan Swift’s The Drapier’s Letters (1724) was ---------------.
Answer: Choice 4
A patent had been granted to the duchess of Kendal for supplying copper coins for use in
Ireland, and by her had been sold to a certain William Wood for £10,000. In 1723 the Irish
Houses of Parliament voted addresses protesting against the transaction, and Swift, writing in
the character of a Dublin draper, published a series of four letters in which he prophesied
economic ruin to the Irish if ‘Wood’s half‐pence’ were admitted into circulation; a fifth letter
of protest, also signed Drapier, was addressed to Molesworth. The letters produced an
immense effect and the government was forced to abandon the project and compensate
Wood.
299
25- Which of the following statements about William Godwin's Enquiry Concerning
Political Justice (1793) is correct?
Answer: Choice 3
The Enquiry is Godwin’s most systematic theoretical work. He views human happiness and
social well-being as the sole purpose of existence, but unlike Rousseau (whose influence
pervades the work) he looks forward to a gradual melting away of all government to be
121
replaced by a new system of radical anarchy. A rigid adherence to the leading principle of
reason is substituted for Rousseau’s cult of sensibility and his innate religiosity. Law,
government, property, inequality, and marriage would be abolished as part of a gradual
process by which human perfectibility, conditioned by human reason, would transcend
existing limitations and impediments to fulfilled happiness.
26- Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) ------------------.
Answer: Choice 1
Burke examines the character of the men who made the French Revolution, and the
proceedings of their National Assembly, a ‘profane burlesque of that sacred institute’. The
well-known eloquent passage on the downfall of Marie Antoinette leads to the lament that
‘the age of chivalry is gone. . . All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off’ in
deference to ‘the new conquering empire of light and reason’. His general conclusion is that
the defective institutions of the old regime should have been reformed, not destroyed.
850
27- A chance discovery of a seventeenth-century manuscript in which a number of ballads
had been copied down led to the three-volume ballad collection -------------------.
Answer: Choice 2
The English and Scottish popular ballads were originally narrative poems transmitted orally
and only rarely recorded in some manuscript or song book until systematic efforts were made
to collect and publish them in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. It is therefore
difficult to fit them into an anthology divided into historical periods because their anonymity
and oral provenance resist periodization. The earlier collectors chose to believe that their
material was very old. Among the first, Bishop Percy (1729—1811), whose literary interest
in ballads was awakened by his chance discovery of a seventeenth-century manuscript in
which a number of them had been copied down, called his three-volume collection Reliques
of Ancient English Poetry (1765). There is no evidence, however, that any but a handful of
the surviving ballads are older than the seventeenth century.

122
28- William Blake’s An Island in the Moon (1784-5) is ------------------.

Answer: Choice 4
An Island in the Moon is an untitled burlesque fragment by W. Blake, written c. 1784-5, first
printed (though inaccurately) in 1907 by E. J. Ellis in The Real Blake. It is a satirical portrait
of scientific and cultural dilettantism and pretension, interspersed with songs (some of them
bawdy) including the fragment with the lines ‘Winking and blinking I Like Doctor Johnson’;
its characters include ‘Sipsop the Pythagorean’ and ‘Inflammable Gas’, the latter probably
inspired by J. Priestley.
522
29- The Romantic figure ------------------ excelled as a songwriter both in standard English
(as in “Up! quit thy bower”) and in the Scottish dialect (as in “Woo’d and married”).
Answer: Choice 1
Baillie’s 1823 “Address to a Steamvessel” likewise anticipates by a decade Wordsworth’s
“Steamboats, Viaducts, and Bailways,” and it parallels, in its determination to make poetry
accountable to new technology and in its mixed feelings about a modern tourist industry’s
marketing of picturesque nature, Wordsworth’s ambivalent project in his 1810 guidebook to
the Lake District. Baillie also excelled as a songwriter both in standard English (as in “Up!
quit thy bower”) and, like her contemporary Robert Burns, in the Scottish dialect (as in
“Woo’d and married”)
30- Wordsworth and Coleridge’s landmark Lyrical Ballads appeared in 1798 along with
-------------------.
Answer: Choice 4
1798: Joanna Baillie, Plays on the Passions, volume 1. Bentham, Political Economy. Thomas
Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads

123
31- The novel written (roughly) in the Romantic period ----------------- has as its hero /
heroine a ‘natural’ man, a primitive who is brought up by American Indians without
the constrictions of civilized religion, morality, and ethics.
Answer: Choice 2
Hermsprong is the novel which, more than any other, makes its hero a ‘natural’ man – a
primitive, brought up by American Indians without the constrictions of civilized religion,
morality, and ethics. It thus becomes a satire on the values which Hermsprong finds in the
civilized society to which he returns. Many views—for example on social class and privilege,
and on equality for women—are aired in ways which are critical of conventional English
society.
Source: The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland by John McRae,
Ronald Carter, 2nd edition, p. 254
32- The following events, important as part of context material for the Romantic period,
occurred in three consecutive years in ------------------.
Answer: Choice 3
(1787) W. A. Mozart, Don Giovanni. Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade
founded(1808) Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphonies 5 and 6(1809) Quarterly Review
founded

33- The Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) ------------------.
Answer: Choice 3
Barrett Browning’s poetry is characterized by a fervent moral sensibility. In her early work
she tended to use the visionary modes of Romantic narrative poetry, but she turned
increasingly to contemporary topics, particularly to liberal causes of her day. For example, in
1843, when government investigations exposed the exploitation of children employed in coal
mines and factories, she wrote “The Cry of the Children,” a powerful indictment of the
appalling use of child labor.
34- Idylls of the King, a series of 12 connected poems by Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892),
--------------------.
Answer: Choice 1
Idylls of the King is a series of 12 connected poems by Tennyson, of which ‘Morte d’Arthur’,
subsequently incorporated in ‘The Passing of Arthur’, was composed in 1833 after A. H.
Hallam’s death and published in 1842. It was a project that preoccupied Tennyson over many
years, during which he studied Malory, The Mabinogion, Layamon, and other sources of
Arthurian legend. In 1855-6 he began writing the first Idyll, which was to become ‘Merlin
and Vivien’, which he followed with 'Enid', later divided into ‘The Marriage of Geraint’ and
‘Geraint and Enid’. The first four were published in 1859 as ‘Enid’, ‘Vivien’, ‘Elaine’, and
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‘Guinevere’ and constituted, though with many revisions, roughly half of the final version.
They were extremely successful, selling 10,000 copies in six weeks. In 1869 followed ‘The
Coming of Arthur’, ‘The Holy Grail’, ‘Pelleas and Ettarre’, and ‘The Passing of Arthur’.
‘The Last Tournament’ was published in the Contemporary Review in 1871, then, with
‘Gareth and Lynette’, in 1872. ‘Balin and Balan’, written 1872-4, did not appear until 1885.
The sequence as now printed first appeared in 1891. The poems present the story of Arthur,
from his first meeting with Guinevere to the ruin of his kingdom and his death in the ‘last,
dim, weird battle of the west’. The protagonists are Arthur and Guinevere, Launcelot and
Elaine, but the design embraces the fates of various minor characters.
514
35- The Victorian light verse as reprinted by W.S. Gilbert (1836-1911) -----------------.
Answer: Choice 4
The Victorian era produced a remarkable outburst of humorous prose and verse from the time
of Charles Dickens's Pickwick Papers (1836-37) at the beginning of the period to the operas
of W. S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan near the end. The following selections provide
examples of two varieties of Victorian light verse. One, represented by Gilbert, makes
lighthearted mockery of institutions such as the Court of Chancery and marriage, as well as
prevalent cultural trends and styles. This burlesque mode, employed to poke fun at a host of
social and political issues and figures, can also be found in the pages of Punch, a humorous
and satirical magazine that began publication in 1841.
36- ‘Victorian figure / work’ are both correct in -----------------.
Answer: Choice 1
On the Study of Celtic Literature is by Mathew Arnold
The Great Towns is by Friedrich Engels
A Review of Southey’s Colloquies is by Lord Macaulay
Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 1576, 1577, 1610,
1619, 1565, 1585, 1601, and 1557
37- Which of the following statements about Samuel Beckett (1906-89) is TRUE?
Answer: Choice 3
Having produced an insightful essay on the early stages of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in
1929, Beckett also worked as Joyce's amanuensis (secretary) and translator. In 1937 he
settled permanently in Paris, where during World War II he joined an underground group in
the anti-Nazi resistance and, after his group was betrayed, barely escaped into unoccupied
France.
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38- The description ----------------- matches the contemporary British poet and playwright
Carol Ann Duffy (b. 1955).
Answer: Choice 4
A playwright as well as poet, Duffy is especially skillful in her use of dramatic monologue,
fashioning and assuming the voices of mythological, historical, and active characters such as
Medusa or Lazarus’s imaginary wife. Such poetic ventriloquism is well suited to her feminist
revisions of myth and history.
39- The British Poet C. Day-Lewis (1904-1972) -----------------.
Answer: Choice 2
Day-Lewis’s volumes Overtures to Death (1938) and Poems in Wartime (1940) signaled that
he, like Spender, had begun to retreat from confident Marxist analyses as the Second World
War approached. The faded elegance of a nineteenth-century terrace in ‘Regency Houses’
may be a metaphor for condemned bourgeois society, but the poem goes on to evoke a
different melancholy, the disillusion of those who ‘in younger days, | Hoping too much, tried
on | The habit of perfection’ and who have now ‘learnt how it betrays | Our shrinking flesh’.
40- Samuel Beckett’s one foray into the cinéma, Film (1964) was -------------------.
Answer: Choice 1
Beckett’s one foray into the cinema, Film (a complex ‘script’ designed as a tribute to Buster
Keaton in 1964), was remarkable not simply for its nods to a cinematic comedy rooted in
music-hall and for its visual puns on the philosophical ideas of being and seeing but also for
its silence broken only by the sound of a voice saying ‘sssh’.
LITERARY GENRES
41- The poem -------------------- is a personal testament or book of worship, antiphonally
Arranged in lines beginning alternately with Let and For, seeks to join the material and
spiritual universes in one unending prayer.
Answer: Choice 2
Jubilate Agno (Rejoice in the Lamb), written a few lines at a time during Smart’s
confinement, is (1) a record of his daily life and thoughts; (2) the notebook of a scholar,
crammed with puns and obscure learning, which sets out elaborate correspondences between
the world of the Bible and modern England; and (3) a personal testament or book of worship,
antiphonally arranged in lines beginning alternately with Let and For, which seeks to join the
material and spiritual universes in one unending prayer. It has also come to be recognized,
since first published in 1939 by W. F. Stead, as a poem—a poem unique in English for its
ecstatic sense of the presence of the divine spirit. The most famous passage describes Smart's
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cat, Jeffrey, his only companion during the years of confinement: “For I am possessed of a
cat, surpassing in beauty, from whom f take occasion to bless Almighty God.”

42- Which of the following about James Thomson’s (1700-1748) The Seasons is correct?
Answer: Choice 4
Throughout The Seasons great emphasis is laid on the interrelationship, and not the conflict,
of the interests of the country and the town; national prosperity is tied to pictures of
agricultural well-being. Nature, the ‘vast Lyceum’, is a grand encircling theatre of education,
but, as Thomson’s frequent recourse to descriptions of happy, therapeutic walks in the rustic
environs of London suggest, he is insistent on the co-operative functioning of civilization.
43- The poems ------------------ ALL appeared in William Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads
(1800).
Answer: Choice 3
Here are some of the major poems featured in Lyrical Ballads, in which the poems in choice
3 are all found
 ‘The Tables Turned; an Evening Scene, on the Same Subject’
 ‘Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree which stands near the Lake of Esthwaite’
 ‘The Foster-Mother's Tale’ (Coleridge)
 ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’
 ‘The Thorn’
 ‘Nutting’
 ‘We are Seven’
 ‘Anecdote for Fathers’
 ‘Simon Lee, the old Huntsman’
 ‘Lines written in early Spring’
 ‘The Nightingale, written in April 1798’ (Coleridge)
Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 244 (Wordswoth’s
entry) and 279 (the footnote of ‘Nutting’)
44- ‘Victorian poet: poem’ match in -------------------.
Answer: Choice 1
‘The Starlight Night’ is by Gerald Manley Hopkins
‘Tithonus’ is by Alfred Lord Tennyson
‘The Lost Leader’ is by Robert Browning
1256
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45- The poem ‘Invictus’ opening ‘Out of the night that covers me / Black as the Pit from
pole to pole / I thank whatever gods may be / For my unconquerable soul’ is by the
Victorian poet ------------------.
Answer: Choice 4
Invictus By William Ernest Henley
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
46- The following poems fry W. B. Yeats (1856-1939) appeared in the correct order in
-------------------.
Answer: Choice 2
‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (1890) The Wild Swans at Coole (1916) The Second
Coming (1919)
Source: See the dates at the end of each poem in Norton Anthology of English Literature,
Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 2025, 2033, 2036
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47- T. S. Eliot’s poem ‘East Coker’ in his Four Quartets (1943) opens with ---------------.
Answer: Choice 3
T. S. Eliot’s poem ‘East Coker’ in his Four Quartets opening lines:
In my beginning is my end.
In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.
Source: The Harper Anthology of Poetry by John Frederick Nims, p. 578
48- Which of the following about the poetry of Philip Larkin (1922-1985) is correct?
Answer: Choice 3
The poetry of Philip Larkin plays with and against the Romantic tradition in poetry. Larkin
does not assert the importance of his own personal experience. His vision is realistic and
unsentimental, preferring to be indirect and ironic. He continues, however, the tradition of
Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and later poets, particularly Thomas Hardy, by
exploring eternal themes of death and change within established rhythms and syntax, and he
generally uses conservative poetic forms. Like Hardy, he writes about what appears to be
normal and everyday, while exploring the paradox that the mundane is both familiar and
limited.
129
49- Seamus Heaney’s ‘Punishment’ (1975) opens with -------------------.

Answer: Choice 2
Opening lines of Punishment by Seamus Heaney
I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.
It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.
I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.
50- Which of the following statements about the Scottish novelist Tobias Smollett (1721-
1771) / work by him is correct?
Answer: Choice 4
Smollett was Scottish. This was important in the context of the Union of the Parliaments in
1707, which, 104 years after the Union of the Crowns, theoretically made the United
Kingdom a whole. Smollett’s finest novel, Humphry Clinker (1771) is one of many works, in
the novel and in poetry, and by a wide range of authors, which underline difference rather
than unity in the newly United Kingdom. Like many of his contemporaries, including
Goldsmith, Smollett used journalism as a vehicle for his ideas.
Ronald Carter, 2nd edition. p. 154
51- George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) opens with -----------------.
Answer: Choice 1
George Eliot’s Adam Bede opens:
With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any
chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader.
With this drop of ink at the end of my pen, I will show you the roomy workshop of Mr.
Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder, in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the
eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799.
Source: A Companion to George Eliot by Amanda Anderson and Harry E. Shaw, p. 113
130
52- Which of the following about Anne Bronte / her work is correct?
Answer: Choice 2
The third sister, Anne, wrote The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), which has been
overshadowed by Charlotte and Emily’s more spectacular successes. It is, however, an
important novel in its own right. In the novel Anne Brontë depicts a bitterly unhappy
marriage followed by the departure of the wife, Helen Huntingdon, and her search for new
freedom. One critic wrote that the ‘slamming of Helen’s bedroom door against her husband
reverberated throughout Victorian England’.
Ronald Carter, 2nd edition. p. 240
53- Thomas Hardy’s use of ‘dialect’ for his characters in his fiction was -----------------.
Answer: Choice 1
Of course, Hardy knew that to transcribe local speech too accurately would cause problems
for his readers, but he believed it was important to retain the spirit of the talk of certain of his
characters. He was, however, primarily interested in using speech differences to distinguish
between his characters, particularly with reference to their social position and to the social
and psychological contexts in which they find themselves.
54- Arguably one of the most innovative mid successful exponents of the ‘conversational or
dialogue novel’, Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969) ------------------.
Answer: Choice 4
Green and Compton-Burnett’s both had privileged backgrounds, and their novels share a
highly distinctive approach to prose, especially to dialogue. Compton-Burnett’s novels and
their chilling and disturbing pictures of family and society are largely written in dialogue,
and depicts an enclosed world somewhere before the First World War—she is more
frequently compared with post-Impressionism in painting than with the literary fashions of
the time.
55- Several writers in English have followed the French writer Marcel Proust’s
Remembrance of Things Past in writing multi-novel sequences, a prime example being
----------------- which consists of eleven novels.
Answer: Choice 3
Several writers in English have followed the French writer Marcel Proust in writing multi-
novel sequences, of which Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (1912–27) – in English,
Remembrance of Things Past – is the prime example. One of the followers is C.P. Snow
whose sequence Strangers and Brothers (1940–70) consists of eleven novels following the
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career of Lewis Eliot in his progress from a humble provincial upbringing, like the author’s
own, through Cambridge University to a law career and politics.
56- ‘Novelist: description’ match in ------------------.
Answer: Choice 3
Barbara Pym’s novels explore the note of sadness in spinster life in small parishes, often in
cities, and touch upon emotional depths in what always seems to be a rather comic setting.
From Excellent Women in 1952 to the tragic Quartet in Autumn in 1977, Pym explores a
world that is small in scale, but profound in its emotional impact.
57- Which of the following set of characters in William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar are
among the conspirators against Caesar?
Answer: Choice 1
Trebonius is one of the conspirators against Caesar. He attends the meeting at Brutus’s house
when they bind themselves to the murder. He is charged with getting Antony out of the way
prior to the deed, and witnesses his flight from the Capitol. He also presses a suit on Caesar
that distracts the dictator from reading Artemidorus’s petition.
Caius Ligarius is one of the conspirators against Caesar. He spoke well of Pompey and
was mistreated by Caesar for doing so, which he bears against the dictator. Learning that
Brutus is involved in the conspiracy, he visits him to be certain of his purpose, and on being
reassured joins in with the others whole-heartedly.
545
132
58- The prologue of William Congreve’s comedy The Way of the World (1700) ‘Spoken by
Mr. Betterton’ opens with -----------------.
Answer: Choice 2
“Prologue”
Spoken by MR. BETTERTON
OF those few fools, who with ill stars are curst,
Sure scribbling fools, called poets, fare the worst:
For they’re a sort of fools which fortune makes,
And, after she has made ’em fools, forsakes.
With Nature’s oafs ’tis quite a diff’rent case,
For Fortune favours all her idiot race.
In her own nest the cuckoo eggs we find,
O’er which she broods to hatch the changeling kind:
No portion for her own she has to spare,
So much she dotes on her adopted care.

59- Which of the following three are entirely made up of D.H Lawrence’s plays about
working class life?
Answer: Choice 4
Of D. H. Lawrence’s three remarkable, if somewhat static, explorations of working-class
life—A Collier’s Friday Night (written c. 1909 and published 1934), The Daughter-in-Law
(1912), and The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd (1914)—only the last received a London
performance, under the auspices of the Stage Society in 1926.
60- John Osborne’s hero, Jimmy Porter, in his Look Back in Anger (1956) -----------------.
Answer: Choice 2
Jimmy Porter is a revolutionary without a revolution, or, to put it in terms readily grasped in
the 1950s, he is a rebel without a cause. He fulminates against the crumbling authority of
what he identifies as Establishment values; his wife’s middle-class and ex-Indian army
parents; his Sandhurst-educated, Member of Parliament brother-in-law (characterized as ‘the
platitude from outer space’); bishops and church bells; the intellectually pretentious Sunday
newspapers; English music (Vaughan Williams) and English literature (Shakespeare, Eliot,
and ‘Auntie Wordsworth’).
133
1396 – Questions
134

1- Which of the following statements about the dramatic term ‘farce’ is not correct?
1) Two of its basic elements are absurd situations and improbable events (even impossible
ones and therefore fantastic) and surprises in the form of unexpected appearances and
disclosures.
2) The farce was at its full force in the 19th c. England in the work of such masters as Pinero
and also W. S. Gilbert who helped to popularize the form.
3) There was a noticeable decline of farcical episodes in Restoration comedy and 18th c.
comedy with the rise in burlesque plays in the era.
4) In farce, character and dialogue are nearly always subservient to plot and situation.
2- The New England movement called ‘transcendentalism’ ---------------------.
1) would try to stay away from the current political climate and social responsibility by a
retreat to what the poet Thoreau called ‘the carefree gaieties of the American wilderness’
2) was basically religious and emphasized the role and importance of the individual
conscience, and the value of intuition in matters of moral guidance and inspiration
3) was coined in the 1840s by one of its main lenders and practitioners Ralph Waldo
Emerson (1803-82) in his The Transcendentalist
4) had its roots in European romanticism and in the post-Kantian idealism which S. T.
Coleridge had attempted to negate
3- The term ‘boulevard drama’ us applied to the French theatre -------------------.
1) developed after 1791 when the French theatres were barred from commercial activity and
many theatres were closed down
2) signaled the end of the Romantic movement in the French theatre (and by extension
English theatre)
3) was originally developed as an anti-thesis of melodrama in its light-hearted presentation
of tragic events
4) was a generic term for popular French drama from the mid-l9th c. onwards
4- All the following statements about ‘concrete poetry’ are correct except that
-----------------.
1) it can be the ultimate form of poetry’s effort to dissociate itself from its subject, to keep
‘trope’ at a distance from ‘scheme’
2) concrete poets use words as elements in visual patterns, to make us look in surprise at
their sometimes dizzying texts
3) it was an experimental movement inaugurated in 1953 by the Swiss writer Eugen
Gomringer
4) concrete poems are extreme examples of pattern poetry
5- Art historians have generally agreed to regard the ‘Baroque’ as the ---------------------
Renaissance style with its center in ------------------ and its quintessential representative
in -------------------.
1) first/ Florence / da Vinci
2) third / Rome / Bernini
3) first / Florence / Bernini
4) third / Rome / da Vinci
135
1396 – Questions
6- The German term ‘angst’ was best used by ------------------ to denote a state of anguish
that we feel as we are confronted by the burden of our freedom and the accompanying
responsibility to impose values and meanings on an absurd universe.
1) Schleiermacher in The Christian Faith
2) Kierkegaard in The Concept of Dread
3) Kierkegaard in Sickness onto Death
4) Schleiermacher in Religion
7- All the following are examples of a ‘problem play’ except --------------------
1) William Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well
2) George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren's Profession
3) George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House
4) William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure
8- The term ‘hagiography’ -----------------------.
1) was a characteristically mannerist literary art form specifically devoted to the lives of
Christian saints and martyrs
2) refers to writing devoted to recording and glorifying the lives of court notables during the
Renaissance
3) generally, applies to biographies that treat their subjects with irreverence as if they were
‘hags’
4) was a form of Christian propaganda much in vogue and practiced in the Middle Ages
9- Which of the following statements about ‘macaronic verse’ is not correct?
1) It denotes a kind of comic verse in which words from a vernacular language are
introduced into Latin (or other foreign-language) verses and given Latin inflections.
2) It applies to (mainly) early Renaissance poetry which was interspersed with phrases or
lines from ancient Latin and Greek poetry.
3) In modem times, the poems of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot have been called macaronic for
their use of lines in several languages.
4) Macaronic verse had a vogue among students in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, but
is rare in English.
10- As a very common figure of speech ‘ploce’ or ‘ploche’ has its opposite in --------------.
1) ‘epizeuxis’
2) ‘hypotaxis’
3) ‘alinea’
4) ‘lauda’
11- ‘Spasmodic School’, a title applied mockingly by the Scottish poet and critic W. E.
Aytoun in 1854, does not particularly relate to ----------------.
1) work by Lord Byron
2) poetry by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
3) such poems by Alfred Tennyson as Maud
4) a group of late 18th c. nature poets led by Oliver Goldsmith
12- The term ‘troubadour’ refers to --------------.
1) poets practicing forms such as aubade, the chanson, and the pastourelle
2) mainly layman minstrels rather than aristocratic poets in the period 1100-1350
3) poets composing simple and unadorned lyrics of everyday love in the Middle Ages
4) a poet of southern France (or sometimes northern Italy) writing in Provencal in the late
Renaissance
136
13- In Umberto Eco’s aesthetics, the work of art -------------------.

1) generates multi-coded messages whose actualization is largely independent of the
receivers’ activity of interpretation
2) is seen more as a product of the artist’s poetics to which the reader, listener, or viewer
responds through an act of interpretation
3) moves towards the influential aesthetics of Benedetto Croce, who had considered the
work of art as the artist's expression of an intuition
4) leads to a kind of “induction”, a term that suggests the various hypotheses that the writer
proposes in an attempt to appreciate the reader's sensibility
14- Which of the following about the ‘materialist critical discourse’ is not generally
correct?
1) The primary emphasis of materialist critical discourse is on the notion of critique itself.
2) When a materialist perspective is brought to bear on human affairs, the emphasis falls
primarily on the politics of civil society and the rights of the individual.
3) The materialist discourse is rarely presented as external to or independent of the
development of the human or social sciences,
4) History, as it is characteristically viewed in materialist discourse, plays a much more
prominent role in this critical discourse than in most others.
15- Which of the following about the Bulgarian-French theorist Julia Kristeva (b. 19-41) /
her work/ thought is not correct?
1) In Revolution in Poetic Language, she maintains that all signification entails the
dialectical interaction of the symbolic and the semiotic.
2) She diverges from other contemporary theorists in her insistence on the corporeal origins
of subjectivity and of artistic practice.
3) She finds two forces competing for expression in the language of poetry: the symbolic
and the semiotic.
4) Besides Barthes and Levi-Strauss, she acknowledges intellectual debts to Lacan, Deleuze
and Freud.
16- The leading proponent of New Historicism, Stephen Greenblatt, became a key figure in
the shift from ---------------- in U.S. English departments in the 1980s and 1990s.
Inspired mainly by ---------------- groundbreaking work, the New Historicists see the
literary work as a vessel tossed in a social sea of competing interests, antagonistic
values, and contradictions.
1) literary to textual and from cultural poetics to contextual interpretation / Hayden White’s
2) literary to cultural poetics and from textual to contextual interpretation / Hayden White’s
3) literary to cultural poetics and from textual to contextual interpretation / Michel
Foucault’s
4) literary to textual and from cultural poetics to contextual interpretation / Michel
Foucault’s
137
1396 – Questions
17- The American critic -------------------- maintains in his work that contemporary
approaches to literature within English departments have undermined ‘the power of
language to connect us with the world,’ and recommends a novel and subsequently
influential method for bringing coherence to what he sees as an increasingly disjointed
curriculum, a method he calls -----------------.
1) Gerald Graff/ ‘teaching of conflicts’
2) Stanley Fish / ‘teaching of conflicts’
3) Gerald Graff/ ‘closure of curricula’
4) Stanley Fish / ‘closure of curricula’
18- ‘Critic/ theorist: work’ match in ------------------.
1) Gilles Deleuze: The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists
2) Raymond Williams: Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature
3) Tzvetan Todorov: Grammar of the Decameron
4) Louis Althusser: The Sociology of Culture
19- In his seminal essay ‘The Commitment to Theory’, the Indian-American theorist Homi
K. Bhabha (b. 1949) defines ‘hybridity’ as what ------------------ which emerges from a
------------------.
1) ‘is latent, less this and less the other’ / ‘Third Space’
2) ‘is new, neither the one nor the other’ / ‘Third Space’
3) ‘is latent, less this and less the other’ / ‘Liminal Space’
4) ‘is new, neither the one nor the other’ / ‘Liminal Space’
20- The African American critic / theorist W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) would
-------------------.
1) take advantage and endorse the use of ‘high’ theory by invoking concepts drawn
particularly from Hegel and Marx and would place black literature on a par with
canonical masterpieces that are deemed worthy of sophisticated analysis and prolonged,
intensive attention
2) support the use of native African traditions and languages in America but, at the same
time, contend that by writing in the language of their adopted homeland, African writers
will capture a far wider readership and ‘will thus have more of an impact on the world at
large’
3) argue that the African American artist’s main problem is his ‘heterogeneous audience’:
he knows chat both black and white people are potential readers of his work yet those two
audiences have very different expectations and demands
4) not only examine the history of slavery and segregation in the United States in his major
work but also emphasize, more generally, that ‘the problem of the Twentieth Century is
the problem of the color line.’
138

21- The correct order of the following Middle Ages events is --------------------
1) First Viking raids on EnglandSt. Patrick begins mission to convert IrelandBirth of St.
Francis of Assisi
2) First Viking raids on EnglandBirth of St. Francis of AssisiSt. Patrick begins mission
to convert Ireland
3) St. Patrick begins mission to convert IrelandFirst Viking raids on EnglandBirth of St.
Francis of Assisi
4) St. Patrick begins mission to convert IrelandBirth of St. Francis of AssisiFirst Viking
raids on England
22- Which of the fallowing about Beowulf, the oldest of the great long poems written in
English, is not correct?
1) The historical period the poem concerns is a time after the initial invasion of England by
Germanic tribes in the middle of the fifth century.
2) The poet's references, to quasi-historical and legendary material show that his audience
was still familiar with many old stories.
3) Although the poem itself is English in language arid origin, it deals with two south
Scandinavian tribes.
4) The poem was originally composed in the dialect of what was then Cumbria, the North
West of England today.
23- The Renaissance figure Arthur Golding (1536-1605) -------------------.
1) wrote one of the most celebrated sixteenth-century exegeses to Plato’s Symposium
2) translated seven works of Calvin as well as Ovid's Metamorphoses into English
3) co-wrote and translated the Latin aphorisms in Roger Ascham's Schoolmaster
4) delivered his ‘Golden Speech’ to Queen Elizabeth’s last Parliament in 1601
24- Which of the following about Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (published 1590 to
1596) is not correct?
1) The Faerie Queene herself much like the sixteenth-century Queen Elizabeth—takes an
active role in the heroic adventures of the poem and is never satisfied to act only as the
symbolic embodiment of what can be called a shared national destiny.
2) The whole of The Faerie Queene is written in a remarkable nine-line stanza of closely
interlocking rhymes (ababbcbcc), the first eight lines with five stresses each (iambic
pentameter) and the final line with six stresses (iambic hexameter or alexandrine).
3) He deliberately fashioned himself after the great Roman poet Virgil, who began his
poetic career with pastoral poetry and moved on to his epic poem, the Aeneid.
4) In developing the poem, he wove together classical and medieval sources, drawing on
pictorial traditions, and adapting whole episodes from Ariosto and Tasso
139
1396 – Questions
25- Which of the following about the Welsh poet Henry Vaughan (1621-1695) is correct?
1) His collection of religions poems The Church is a rich collection of sonnets, songs,
hymns, laments, meditative poems, dialogue poems, acrostic poems and emblematic
poems.
2) His Latin epigrams, published were much influenced by Jesuit epigram style and are
among the best by an Englishman,
3) While his secular poetry recalls Ben Jonson’s, his religious poetry overtly and
consciously models itself on Herbert's.
4) A Roman Catholic convert, he was profoundly influenced by the Counter-Reformation,
which reacted against Protestant austerity by linking heightened spirituality to vivid
bodily experiences.
26- ‘Author: work’ match in -------------------.
1) Samuel Butler: Mac Flecknoe
2) Margaret Cavendish: Thanksgivings
3) Thomas Traherne: Centuries of Meditations
4) Aphra Behn: A Satire against Reason and Mankind
27- Which of the following essay openings is not by Joseph Addison (1672-1719) or Richard
Steele (1672-1 729)?
1) ‘There is no place in the town which I so much love to frequent as the Royal Exchange, it
gives me a secret satisfaction, and in some measure gratifies my vanity as I am an
Englishman, to see so rich an assembly of countrymen and foreigners consulting together
upon the private business of mankind...’
2) ‘Arietta is visited by all persons of both sexes who have any pretense to wit and gallantry.
She is in that time of life which is neither affected with the follies of youth or infirmities
of age; and her conversation is so mixed with gaiety and prudence that she is agreeable
both to the young and the old.’
3) ‘There is nothing in nature so irksome as general discourses, especially when they turn
chiefly upon words. For this reason, I shall waive the discussion of that point which was
started some years since. Whether Milton's Paradise Lost may be called a heroic poem?’
4) ‘Many moralists have remarked, that Pride has of all human vices the widest dominion,
appears in the greatest multiplicity of forms, and lies hid under the greatest variety of
disguises; of disguises, which, like the moon's veil of brightness, are both its luster and its
shade....’
28- Which of the following is the correct order of publication for the following Romantic
era landmark works?
1) Scott’s The Lay of the Last MinstrelByron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (cantos 1 and
2) John Clare’s Poems Descriptive of Rural Life
2) John Clare’s Poems Descriptive of Rural lifeScott’s The Lay of the Last
MinstrelByron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (cantos 1 and 2)
3) John Clare’s Poems Descriptive of Rural LifeByron's Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
(cantos 1 and 2) Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel
4) Scott’s The Lay of the Last MinstrelJohn Clare’s Poems Descriptive of Rural
LifeByron's Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (cantos 1 and 2)
140
29- Which of the following about the Romantic era essayist Charles Lamb (1775-1814) is
not correct?
1) He shared Wordsworth’s concern with memories’ power to transform the present
moment and, like him, interjected a sense of the ideal into his representations of the
actual and every day.
2) Along with many of the important writers of the age, he developed a kind of fervent
radicalism in both politics and religion and managed to produce several masterpieces of
extreme Romantic dissidence.
3) He could not abide Shelley or his poetry and he distrusted Coleridge’s supernaturalism
and Wordsworth's oracular sublimities and religion of nature, preferring those elements
in their poems that were human and realistic.
4) He lacked almost all the traits and convictions we think of as characteristically
‘Romantic’ and lived happily all his life in the city of London and its environs.
30- ‘Thomas Carlyle work: description’ is not correct in -----------------.
1) Past and Present / his pamphleteering seen at its best (published 1843)
2) ‘Characteristics’ / his most significant early essay (appeared in The Edinburgh Review in
1831)
3) Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell / Cromwell was a Puritan leader of heroic
dimensions in Carlyle’s eyes (edited in 1845)
4) Sartor Resartus / humorous account of the life and opinions of an imaginary tailor,
Diogenes Teufelsdrockh (published 1836)
31- The English philosopher and essayist John Stuart Mill (1806-1 873) --------------------.
1) would, true to his Utilitarian heritage, characterize poetry as ‘an idle pastime of pushpin
moral value’ in his early essay ‘What Is Poetry?’
2) was profoundly influenced by his contemporaries the literary-cultural critic Matthew
Arnold and the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne and would, in turn, have a large impact
on the early fiction of Thomas Hardy
3) appreciated, though coming from a Utilitarian background, the values of such anti-
Utilitarians as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle and whenever possible,
incorporated some of these values into the Utilitarian system
4) began his intellectual career as a disciple of the Utilitarian theories of his lather and of
Jeremy Bentham and remained devoutly attached to their teachings throughout his life
32- Which of the following about the 1840s and 1850s Charles Dickens (1812-1870) is not
correct?
1) Throughout the period key elements of Victorian society, particularly the Victorian
prison— as represented in his 1842 essay ‘A Visit to Newgate’— take on multiple layers
of significance and are worked and reworked into many of his works.
2) Some of his masterpieces including David Copperfield. Bleak House, Hard Times and A
Tale of Two Cities were produced in this period.
3) During this time, he founded and edited the weekly magazine Household words (finally
incorporated into All the Year Round), which published fiction by Elizabeth Gaskell and
Wilkie Collins, among others.
4) He began a series of widely-read Christmas books in this period, the first of which was
the celebrated A Christmas Carol.
141
1396 – Questions
33- ‘Late Victorian figure: description’ match in ------------------.

1) William Ernest Henley: he edited the National Observer and other periodicals in London,
where he became a powerful figure in literary circles
2) Michael Field: his Lyra Heroica is filled with poetic accounts of selfless and noble deeds
that often involve dying for one’s country in battle
3) Robert Louis Stevenson: the accent of the London cockney was one of the qualities that
gained him an immediate audience for his, Barrack-Room Ballads
4) Ernest Dowson: his first volume of poetry Long Ago (1889) was inspired by Henry
Wharton’s 1885 edition of the writings of the ancient Greek poet Sappho
34- Which of the following about the English novelist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is not
correct?
1) In 1917, she co-founded the Hogarth Press, which published work by such figures as
T. S. Eliot, Maxim Gorky, Katherine Mansfield, E. M. Forster and Sigmund Freud.
2) She developed her own style, a carefully modulated flow that brought into prose fiction
something of the rhythms and imagery of lyric poetry only after writing two
conventionally realistic novels. The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919)
3) In her Monday or Tuesday (1921), a series of sketches, she explored the possibilities of
moving between action and contemplation, between retrospection and anticipation,
between specific external events and delicate tracings of the flow of consciousness.
4) As a fiction writer she would react against nearly all her realist contemporaries except
John Galsworthy, whose Forsyte Saga she used as inspiration for a number of her works
including Mrs., Dalloway.
35- Samuel Beckett’s Murphy (1938) --------------------.
1) includes an extended monologue as its epilogue
2) is hailed as a precursor of postmodern fiction
3) contains little plot and nearly no characterization
4) forms, with Malone Dies, part of his Molloy trilogy
36- The Irish poet Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) --------------------.
1) was also a translator of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Goethe’s Faust
2) wrote poetry with the Church of England in backdrop late in his career
3) was heavily indebted to Gerard Manley Hopkins and Wilfred Owen for his metrical and
verbal techniques
4) would claim in his essay ‘Writing’ that poetry is a form of truth-telling that should
‘disenchant and disintoxicate’
37- ‘Writer / work with a World War II backdrop’ do not match in -------------------.
1) Edith Sitwell / ‘Still Falls the Rain’
2) Henry Reed / ‘Lessons of the War’
3) Charles Causley / ‘Aristocrats’
4) Keith Douglas / ‘Gallantry’
142
38- The poet Louise Bennett would ------------------.

1) drawing, on the example of the Scottish poet Robert Burns, harness Jamaican idiom in
the influential volumes of poetry Constab Ballads and Songs of Jamaica
2) in her poetry often assume the perspective of a West Indian trickster such as the woman
who cunningly subverts gender and geographic hierarchies in ‘Jamaica Oman [Woman]’
3) switch from Jamaican to Standard English thus helping precipitate the Harlem
Renaissance with Harlem Shadows (which included sonnets addressing the vexed racial
experience of an Afro-American immigrant)
4) for most of the 1920s and 1930s identify with the radical left, lived and wrote novels and
short stories mainly in England, France and Morocco
39- Which of the following works hybridizes African oral traditions with European literary
paradigms and fuses African rhetoric, myth, and ritual with the verbal extravagance of
Elizabethan and Jacobean theater?
1) Brian Friel’s Translations (1980)
2) John Agard’s Listen Mr. Oxford Don (1985)
3) Wole Soyinka's Death and the King’s Horseman (1975)
4) Kamau Brathwaite's The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1973)
40- ‘Doris Lessing novel: description’ do not match in -------------------.
1) The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974): combines psychological autobiography with powerful
explorations of the relationship between blacks and whites in southern Africa
2) The Golden Notebook (1962): partly probes the political conscience of an ex-communist
and the needs and dilemmas of a creative writer
3) Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971): explores myth and fantasy, restrained within a
broadly realist context
4) Canopus in Argos: Archives (written between 1979 and 1983): draws on her reading of
the Old and New Testaments, the Apocrypha and the Koran to deal with the life of a
superhuman
LITERARY GENRES
41- All the following about Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852-53) are correct except that
----------------.
1) the destiny of the aristocracy is by chance entangled with the humblest characters: the
disreputable rag-and-bones man Krook. for instance, is made to resemble the Lord
Chancellor
2) the center of the novel's dramatic action is the sensational mystery surrounding Lady
Dedlock—as Inspector Bucket points out. “She is the pivot it all turns on.”
3) the novel set the pattern of the so-called Sensation Novel of the 1860s, novels such as
Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley’s Secret,
and Mrs. Henry Wood’s East Lynne
4) Esther Summerson, who shares half of the book’s narration, is, unlike Oliver in Dickens's
Oliver Twist, the legitimate child of an heiress, though her identity remains in doubt for
the first half of the novel
143
1396 – Questions
42- ‘Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer (1867) character: description’ do not match in ---------------.
1) Joe Harper: known as a “half breed,” meaning he is half white and half Native American,
he is the villain of the novel and a force of evil in Tom Sawyer’s St. Petersburg
2) The Model Boy: Hated by all the boys in town, the Model Boy is “the pride of all the
matrons” because he is so polite and well-behaved
3) Sid Sawyer: Tom’s younger half-brother, he is “a quiet boy” with “no adventurous,
troublesome ways,” and so he and Tom do not get along with each other
4) Mary: Tom Sawyer’s cousin, she is Aunt Polly’s daughter and treats Tom sweetly,
patiently helping him learn his Scripture verses and get dressed up for church
43- Which of the following about Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) is not correct?
1) The novel uses, for the most part, a third-person narrator but the point of view (or
perspective) from which the story is told changes, from section to section.
2) Morrison makes use of idiom in Beloved to help re-create the sense of a specific
community, that of African Americans in Reconstruction Ohio.
3) There is one motif throughout Beloved that is repeated with regularity: a description of
the characters’ ancestors, how they were born and how they were eventually robbed of
their identity.
4) The narrator structures the story in such a way that past events are related as a way of
explaining the present.
44- Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) opens in the year 2495 ------------------.
1) in a flashback with the character Lenina wandering around the vast desolate
2) area called the Reservation and horrified by the sight of mothers nursing their own infants
3) with the character John rushing to the dystopian Park Lane Hospital just in time to see his
mother die, and having to face ‘yet another completely mind-boggling crisis’
4) with the exotic John (now known as “the Savage,” or “Mr. Savage”) being initiated into
the secret Alpha society ‘where man's fate is planned in advance for them’ at the Central
London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, a research facility and factory that mass-
produces and then socially-conditions test-tube babies
45- Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952) -------------------.
1) compares Manolin’s predicament to that of Christ’s suffering and crucifixion
2) takes place entirely in a small fishing village near Tampa, Florida
3) falls, quite unconventionally, into one monolithic part
4) uses the omniscient, or “all-knowing,” point of view
46- Which of the following sets of characters belongs to E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975)?
1) Biff Brannon, Doctor Benedict Copeland and Harry Minowitz
2) Willie Conklin, Harry Houdini and Mother’s Younger Brother
3) Captain Buynovsky, Caesar Markovich and Thin Tartar
4) Freddie Jones, Alena Jasaityte and Mike Scully
144
47- Which of the following about James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man (1916)
is not / least correct?
1) He evokes the city of Dublin in far more detail in the novel than his earlier short story
collection Dubliners or in his last novel Finnegans Wake.
2) The novel is divided into five chapters, each chapter dealing with a different period in the
first twenty years of Stephen Dedalus.
3) Although Joyce gives specific settings for the incidents in the book, he does not give
dates for the events that he is reporting.
4) Every narrative detail in the novel is filtered through the character Stephen Dedalus’s
consciousness.
48- John Steinbeck’s The Crapes of Wrath (1939) follows the trials and tribulations of the
----------------- family as they leave the dust bowl of ------------------- for a better life in
-----------------.
1) Tyler / Oklahoma / California
2) Joad / Oklahoma / California
3) Joad / Kansas / Oregon
4) Tyler / Kansas / Oregon
49- Which of the following descriptions matches the character ‘Anse Bundren’ in William
Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930)?
1) He appears in only a few scenes in the novel, but his presence is felt almost everywhere
in the story. He is generally portrayed as an amiable man. but there is also a sense of
failure about him. He is known as a storyteller. During the novel, he suffers some
financial misfortune.
2) He is a prisoner of his guilt over his wife's death years before. His melancholy balances
the family’s experiences. His sense of guilt causes him to blame all the family’s
misfortunes on what he thinks of as his sin.
3) He is the legendary political boss who runs the entire district on behalf of the owners of
the big packing houses. He has the power to give out political favors to the rich and jobs
to the poor through an organization he himself has started.
4) He is the patriarch of the family. A selfish and lazy man, he claims sweat will kill him.
and therefore refuses to work. Instead, he connives to get others to work for him.
Physically, he is hunchbacked, and his hands are gnarled.
50- Which of the following excerpts opens a ‘holy sonnet’ by John Donne (1572-1631)?
1) ‘Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, / The bridal of the earth and sky: / The dew shall
weep thy fall tonight, / For thou must die.’
2) ‘I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers, / Of April, May, of June, and July
flowers. I sing of Maypoles, hock carts, wassails, wakes, / Of bridegrooms, brides, and of
their bridal cakes.’
3) ‘1 am a little world made cunningly / Of elements, and an angelic sprite; / But black sin
hath betrayed to endless night / My world’s both parts, and O, both parts must die.’
4) ‘1 traveled on, seeing the hill where lay / My expectation. / A long it was and weary way.
/ The gloomy cave of desperation / I left on the one, and on the other side / The rock of
pride/
145
1396 – Questions
51- ‘Poet: poem’ do not match in -------------------.

1) John Milton: ‘The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn’
2) Andrew Marvell: ‘A Dialogue Between the Soul and Body’
3) George Herbert: ‘The Bunch of Grapes’
4) Abraham Cowley: ‘Ode: Of Wit’
52- Which of the following does not open a poem by Alexander Pope (1688-1744)?
1) ‘What dire offense from amorous causes springs, / What mighty contests rise from trivial
things, / I sing—This verse to Caryll, Muse! is due: / This, even Belinda may vouchsafe
to view: / Slight is the subject, but not so the praise. / If she inspire, and he approve my
lays,’
2) ‘Shut, shut the door, good John! (fatigued, I said), / Tie up the knocker, say I’m sick, I'm
dead. / The Dog-Star rages! nay 'tis past a doubt / All Bedlam or Parnassus, is let out: /
Fire in each eye, and papers in each hand, / They rave, recite, and madden round the
land.’
3) ‘As Rochefoucauld his maxims drew / From nature, I believe ‘em true: / They argue no
corrupted mind / In him: the fault is in mankind. / This maxim more than all the rest / Is
thought too base for human breast’
4) ‘In these deep solitudes and awful cells, / Where heavenly-pensive contemplation dwells,
/ And ever-musing melancholy reigns: / What means this tumult in a vestal’s veins?’
53- The correct order of the appearance of poems by William Wordsworth (1770-1850) is
--------------------.
1) Resolution and IndependenceSteamboats, Viaducts, and RailwaysTintern Abbey
2) Tintern AbbeyResolution and IndependenceSteamboats, Viaducts, and Railways
3) Resolution and IndependenceTintern AbbeySteamboats, Viaducts, and Railways
4) Tintern AbbeySteamboats, Viaducts, and RailwaysResolution and Independence
54- Which of the following poem openings is by the Imagist Poet T. E. Hulme?
1) Whirl up, sea— / Whirl your pointed pines, / Splash your great pines / On our rocks. /
Hurl your green over us, / Cover us with your pools of fir.
2) Rose, harsh rose, / marred and with stint of petals, / meagre flower, thin, / sparse of leaf, /
more precious / than a wet rose, / single on a stem— / you are caught in the drift.
3) I made my song a coat / Covered with embroideries / Out of old mythologies / From heel
to throat; / But the fools caught it, / Wore it in the world’s eyes / As though they’d
wrought it. / Song, let them take it, / For there’s more enterprise / In walking naked.
4) A touch of cold in the Autumn night— / I walked abroad, / And saw the ruddy moon lean
over a hedge / a red-faced farmer. / I did not stop to speak, hut nodded. / And roundabout
were the wistful stars / With white faces like town children.
55- Which of the following about William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is not correct?
1) Winding stairs, spinning lops, ‘gyres,’ spirals of all kinds, are important symbols and
hallmarks of his 1890s symbolic phase of poetry.
2) Like Pound, T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, Yeats was attracted to right-wing politics,
and in the 1930s he was briefly drawn to fascism.
3) His Vision is based on a theory of the movements of history and of the different types of
personality, each movement and type being related to a different phase of the moon.
4) In poems of his middle period, such as ‘Adam's Curse’, he combines the colloquial with
the formal, enacting in his more austere diction, casual rhythms, and a passionate syntax.
146
56- Which of the follow does not close a poem by T. S. Eliot (I888-1965)?
1) ‘And sang within the bloody wood / When Agamemnon cried aloud / And let their liquid
sittings fall / To stain the stiff dishonored shroud.’
2) ‘Swings the heart renewed with peace / even of oblivion, / Oh build your ship of death,
oh build it / for you will need it, / For the voyage of oblivion awaits you.’
3) ‘This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / This is the way the
world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.’
4) ‘We returned to our places, these Kingdoms / But no longer at ease here, in the old
dispensation / With an alien people clutching their gods. / I should be glad of another
death.’
57- Which of the following sets of characters is entirely made of characters from William
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1594-95)?
1) Oberon / Nick Bottom: Weaver / Demetrius
2) Demetrius / Oberon / Diana: Daughter to the Widow
3) Nick Bottom: Weaver / Demetrius / Lafew, an old Lord
4) Diana: Daughter to the Widow / Nick Bottom: Weaver / Demetrius
58- ‘Character / description’ in George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren’s Profession (first
performed in London in 1902) do not match in --------------------.
1) Sir George Crofts: a tall, powerfully built man of about fifty, fashionably dressed, is a
‘gentlemanly combination of the most brutal types of city man, sporting man, and man
about town.’
2) Frank Gardner: a charming, well-dressed, ‘good-for-nothing’ man of twenty with an
‘agreeably disrespectful manner’
3) Vivie Warren: refuses to act in a traditional feminine manner, always speaking her mind
and demanding that others treat her as an individual
4) Mrs. Kitty Warren: an attractive, sensible, highly educated young woman whose intense
self-confidence can sometimes be Overwhelming
59- John Osborne’s Inadmissible Evidence (1964) -----------------.
1) tells the true story of five American men and one American woman who were convicted
and sentenced to death for crimes they did not commit
2) is a reversed-gender Pygmalion, a 1912 play by George Bernard Shaw in which a
professor makes a bet that he can turn a working-class flower girl into a lady
3) chronicles the menial disintegration of middle-aged solicitor Bill Maitland over the
course of two days as he experiences the breakdown of his professional and personal life
4) includes, at its heart, the poet Alison Stanhope, whose family, their relationships, and the
discovery of a portfolio containing hundreds of previously unknown poems form the
action of the play
60- Playwright / play do not match in ------------------.
1) Edward Bond / Lear
2) Sam Shepard / True West
3) David Hare / Children of a Lesser God
4) Tennessee Williams / The Rose Tattoo
147
148

1- Which of the following statements about the dramatic term ‘farce’ is not correct?
Answer: Choice 3
In Restoration comedy and 18th century comedy there are plentiful farcical episodes,
particularly in burlesque plays. In the 18th century also we find a number of short farces used
as curtain raisers. Farce is a kind of ‘low’ comedy, and its basic elements are exaggerated
physical action (often repeated); exaggeration of character and situation; absurd situations
and improbable events (even impossible ones and therefore fantastic); and surprises in the
form of unexpected appearances and disclosures. Fully developed and mature farce finally
established itself in the 19th century: in France with the work of Labiche and Feydeau; in
England with the work of Pinero. W. S. Gilbert also helped to popularize the form.
Source: A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory by J.A. Cuddon, 5th edition, p.
269-70
2- The New England movement called ‘transcendentalism’ ---------------------.
Answer: Choice 2
‘Transcendentalism’ is a New England movement which flourished from c. 1835 to 1860. It
had its roots in romanticism and in the post-Kantian idealism by which Coleridge was
influenced. It had a considerable influence on American art and literature. Basically religious,
it emphasized the role and importance of the individual conscience, and the value of intuition
in matters of moral guidance and inspiration. The actual term was coined by opponents of the
movement, but accepted by its members (e.g. Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803–82, one of the
leaders, published The Transcendentalist in 1841). The group were also social reformers.
Source: A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory by J.A. Cuddon, 5th edition,
p.734
3- The term ‘boulevard drama’ us applied to the French theatre -------------------.
Answer: Choice 4
‘Boulevard drama’ fostered the Romantic movement in the French theatre. Eventually
boulevard drama became a generic term for popular French drama from the mid-19th century
onwards. The plays consisted for the most part of farce and domestic comedy and were a
distinctly commercial entertainment.
Source: A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory by J.A. Cuddon, 5th edition, p.
88
149
4- All the following statements about ‘concrete poetry’ are correct except that
-----------------.
Answer: Choice 1
A recent development of the altar poem and the carmen figuratum. The object is to present
each poem as a different shape. It is thus a matter of pictorial typography which produces
‘visual poetry’. It may be on the page, or on glass, stone, wood and other materials. It is
extremely diffcult to do well but the technique lends itself to great subtlety, as Apollinaire
demonstrated in Calligrammes (1918). The modern concept of concrete poetry was
developed under the influence of Max Bill (1908–1994) and Eugen Gomringer (1925–) and
presented at an exhibition of concrete art at São Paulo in 1956. This was the work of
Brazilian designers and poets.
Source: A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory by J.A. Cuddon, 5th edition,
p.148
5- Art historians have generally agreed to regard the ‘Baroque’ as the ------------------
Renaissance style with its center in ---------------- and its quintessential representative in
-----------------.
Answer: Choice 2
‘Baroque’ is a term denoting a distinctive style deeply characteristic of the seventeenth
century, long since firmly established for critics of art and music, whose application to
literature has been problematic and controversial. However, it has offered possibilities for
cultural analysis. Like Romanticism, it submits to an enormous number of seemingly
disconnected and even contradictory usages, as phrases like ‘Baroque grandeur’, ‘Baroque
eccentricity’, ‘Baroque mysticism’, ‘Baroque exuberance’ attest; it is even more
polymorphously perverse in its frequent appearances outside the seventeenth century in
labels like ‘The Contemporary Baroque’.
Art historians have generally agreed to regard the Baroque as the third Renaissance style,
setting in around 1600, with its center in Rome and its quintessential representative in
Bernini, and with important Catholic and post-tridentine tendencies.
Source: Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms by Peter Childs and Roger Fowler, p. 16
6- The German term ‘angst’ was best used by ------------------ to denote a state of anguish
that we feel as we are confronted by the burden of our freedom and the accompanying
responsibility to impose values and meanings on an absurd universe.
Answer: Choice 2
‘Angst’ is the German word for ‘anxiety’ or ‘dread’, used by the philosophers of
existentialism notably the Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard in Begrebet Angst (The
Concept of Dread, 1844)—to denote a state of anguish that we feel as we are confronted by
the burden of our freedom and the accompanying responsibility to impose values and
meanings on an absurd universe.
150
7- All the following are examples of a ‘problem play’ except --------------------

Answer: Choice 3
Significant examples of ‘problem play’ are Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879), on
women’s subordination in marriage, and George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession
(1902) on prostitution. In studies of Shakespeare, however, the term has been used to
designate a group of his plays written in the first years of the 17th century: Measure for
Measure, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Troilus and Cressida.
205
8- The term ‘hagiography’ -----------------------.

Answer: Choice 4
‘Hagiography’ is a writing devoted to recording and glorifying the lives of saints and
martyrs. This form of Christian propaganda was much practiced in the Middle Ages but has
few equivalents in modern literary equivalents apart from G. B. Shaw’s play Saint Joan
(1923). By extension, the term is now often applied to modern biographies that treat their
subjects reverentially as if they were saints. A writer of such works is a hagiographer.
Adjective: hagiographic.
109
9- Which of the following statements about ‘macaronic verse’ is not correct?
Answer: Choice 2
‘Macaronic verse’ is a poetry in which two or more languages are mixed together. Strictly,
the term denotes a kind of comic verse in which words from a vernacular language are
introduced into Latin (or other foreign-language) verses and given Latin inflections; such
verse had a vogue among students in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, but is rare in
English. More loosely, the term is applied to any verses in which phrases or lines in a foreign
language are frequently introduced: several medieval English poems have Latin refrains or
alternating Latin and English lines, and in modem times the poems of Ezra Pound and
T. S. Eliot have been called macaronic for their use of lines in several languages.
145
151
10- As a very common figure of speech ‘ploce’ or ‘ploche’ has its opposite in
-------------------.
Answer: Choice 1
‘Ploce’ or ‘pioche’ is a very common figure of speech that consists in a delayed repetition of
the same word or words. By contrast with epizeuxis (immediate repetition), it interposes
some other words between the two occurrences of the terms emphasized.
195
11- ‘Spasmodic School’, a title applied mockingly by the Scottish poet and critic W. E.
Aytoun in 1854, does not particularly relate to ----------------------.
Answer: Choice 4
‘Spasmodic School’ is a title applied mockingly by the Scottish poet and critic W. E. Aytoun
in 1854 to a group of poets who had lately achieved some popularity in Britain: P. J. Bailey,
Sydney Dobell, Alexander Smith, and others. Their work is marked by extravagant attempts
to represent emotional turmoil, sometimes in a manner derived from Byron.
240
12- The term ‘troubadour’ refers to ------------------.
Answer: Choice 1
The ‘troubadours’, mostly aristocratic poets rather than wandering minstrels or jongleurs,
flourished in the period 1100-1350, composing elaborate lyrics of courtly love which had an
extensive influence on Western poetry and culture. Among the best known are Guillaume
d’Aquitaine, Arnaut Daniel, and Betran de Born. Their favoured poetic forms included the
aubade, the chanson, and the pastourelle.
264
13- In Umberto Eco’s aesthetics, the work of art -------------------.
Answer: Choice 2
‘Opera aperta’ moved away from the influential aesthetics of Benedetto Croce, who had
considered the work of art as the artist’s expression of an intuition. This approach excluded,
among other things, the analysis of the processes of conceptualization, reception, and
consumption. Eco’s aesthetics, on the other hand, sees the work of art more as a product of
the artist’s poetics to which the reader, listener, or viewer responds through an act of
interpretation.
Source: The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory, edited by Michael Ryan, p. 568
152
14- Which of the following about the ‘materialist critical discourse’ is not generally
correct?
Answer: Choice 2
When a materialist perspective is brought to bear on human affairs, the emphasis does not
fall primarily on the politics of civil society and the rights of the individual, or on the
understanding of texts and their meanings, but on the material processes by which human
beings collectively produce the means by which their basic needs are met, reproduce
themselves as a species, and configure their social arrangements.
Source: Culture and Critique: An Introduction to the Critical Discourses of Cultural Studies
by Jean Paul Surber, p. 69
15- Which of the following about the Bulgarian-French theorist Julia Kristeva (b. 19-41) /
her work/ thought is not correct?
Answer: Choice 4
Besides Barthes, Lucien Goldmann (an influential sociological critic), and Claude Levi-
Strauss, who were her teachers, Kristeva acknowledges intellectual debts to other twentieth-
century figures: Mikhail Bakhtin, Emile Benveniste (an important linguist), Jacques Lacan,
Melanie Klein (a theorist of pre-Oedipal development), and, of course, Sigmund Freud.
Source: Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st edition, p. 2165-66

16- The leading proponent of New Historicism, Stephen Greenblatt, became a key figure in
the shift from ---------------- in U.S. English departments in the 1980s and 1990s.
Inspired mainly by ---------------- groundbreaking work, the New Historicists see the
literary work as a vessel tossed in a social sea of competing interests, antagonistic
values, and contradictions.
Answer: Choice 3
The leading proponent of “New Historicism,” Stephen Greenblatt became a key figure in the
shift from literary to cultural poetics and from textual to contextual interpretation in U.S.
English departments in the 1980s and 19905. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s historical
investigations of medical and penal institutions and his theoretical understanding of power,
the New Historicists see the literary work as a vessel tossed in a social sea of competing
interests, antagonistic values, and contradictions.

17- The American critic -------------------- maintains in his work that contemporary
approaches to literature within English departments have undermined ‘the power of
language to connect us with the world,’ and recommends a novel and subsequently
influential method for bringing coherence to what he sees as an increasingly disjointed
curriculum, a method he calls -----------------.
Answer: Choice 1
The American critic Gerald Graff maintains in his work that contemporary approaches to
literature within English departments have undermined ‘the power of language to connect us
153
with the world,’ and recommends a novel and subsequently influential method for bringing
coherence to what he sees as an increasingly disjointed curriculum, a method he calls
‘teaching of conflicts’
Source: Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st edition, p. 2056-57
18- ‘Critic/ theorist: work’ match in --------------.
Answer: Choice 3
The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists is by Raymond Williams
Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature is by Gilles Deleuze
The Sociology of Culture is by Raymond Williams
Grammar of the Decameron is by Tzvetan Todorov
Source: Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st edition, p. 1567, 1594, and 2097
19- In his seminal essay ‘The Commitment to Theory’, the Indian-American theorist Homi
K. Bhabha (b. 1949) defines ‘hybridity’ as what --------------- which emerges from a
---------------.
Answer: Choice 2
Bhabha borrows but adapts Derrida’s analysis of how binary oppositions structure Western
thought, arguing that such dichotomies are too reductive because they imply that any national
culture is unitary, homogeneous, and defined by “fixity” or an essential core. Instead, Bhabha
proposes that nationalities, ethnicities, and identities are dialogic, indeterminate, and
characterized by “hybridity”—one of his key terms. In “The Commitment to Theory,” he
defines hybridity as what “is new, neither the one nor the other,” which emerges from a
“Third Space.”
20- The African American critic / theorist W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) would
--------------.
Answer: Choice 4
In his major work The Souls of Black Folk (1903), he not only examines the history of
slavery and segregation in the United States but also emphasizes, more generally, that “the
problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.” Still, his focus is
American; The Souls of Black Folk includes essays, sketches, and stories on African
American politics, history, education, music, and culture.
154

21- The correct order of the following Middle Ages events is --------------------
Answer: Choice 3
St. Patrick begins mission to convert Ireland (432) First Viking raids on England (787)
Birth of St. Francis of Assisi (1182)

22- Which of the fallowing about Beowulf, the oldest of the great long poems written in
English, is not correct?
Answer: Choice 4
Although the poem itself is English in language and origin, it deals not with native
Englishmen but with their Germanic forebears, especially with two south Scandinavian
tribes, the Danes and the Geats, who lived on the Danish island of Zealand and in southern
Sweden. Thus the historical period the poem concerns—insofar as it may be said to refer to
history at all—is some centuries before it was written—that is, a time after the initial
invasion of England by Germanic tribes in the middle of the fifth century but before the
Anglo-Saxon migration was completed. The one datable fact of history mentioned in the
poem is a raid on the Franks in which Hygelac, the king of the Geats and Beowulf’s lord, was
killed, and this raid occurred in the year 520. Yet the poet’s elliptical references to quasi-
historical and legendary material show his audience was still familiar with many old stories,
the outlines of which we can only infer, sometimes with the help of later analogous tales in
other Germanic languages.

23- The Renaissance figure Arthur Golding (1536-1605) -------------------.
Answer: Choice 2
A prolific translator, especially from Latin and French, Arthur Golding belonged to a
wealthy, well-connected family in Essex and was educated at Jesus College, Cambridge.
Golding was an ardent Puritan; he translated seven works of Calvin into English. His most
celebrated rendering, however, was of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The first complete English
version of this poem to be published (four books in 1565, the full work in 1567), Golding's
translation is in rhyming couplets of “fourteeners” (lines of fourteen syllables).
24- Which of the following about Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (published 1590 to
1596) is not correct?
Answer: Choice 1
The whole of The Faerie Queen is written in a remarkable nine-line stanza of closely
interlocking rhymes (ababbcbec), the first eight lines with five stresses each (iambic
pentameter) and the final line with six stresses (iambic hexameter or alexahdrine). The poem
155
is also an epic. In moving from The Shepheardes Calender to The Faerie Queen Spenser
deliberately fashioned herself after the great Roman poet Virgil, who began his poetic career
with pastoral poetry and moved on to his epic poem, the Aeneid. In weaving together
classical and medieval sources, drawing on pictorial traditions, and adapting whole episodes
from Ariosto and Tasso, he was providing his country with the epic it had hitherto lacked.
Like Virgil, Spenser is deeply concerned with the dangerous struggles and painful
renunciations required to achieve the highest values of human civilization.
25- Which of the following about the Welsh poet Henry Vaughan (1621-1695) is correct?
Answer: Choice 3
In the preface to Silex Scintillans Vaughan places himself among the many “pious converts”
gained by George Herbert’s holy life and verse. While his secular poetry recalls Ben
Jonson’s, the religious poetry overtly and consciously models itself on Herbert’s. Some
twenty-six poems appropriate their titles from The Temple, several owe their metrical form to
Herbert, and many begin by quoting one of Herbert’s lines (compare Vaughan’s
“Unprofitableness” with Herbert’s “The Flower”). Yet no one with an ear for poetry will
mistake Vaughan’s long, loose poetic lines for Herbert's artful precision. Vaughan’s religious
sensibility too differs markedly from Herbert's.
26- ‘Author: work’ match in -------------------.
Answer: Choice 3
Mac Flecknoe is by John Dryden
A Satire against Reason and Mankind is by John Wilmot
Margaret Cavendish wrote The Poetess’s Hasty Resolution and The Hunting of the Hare

27- Which of the following essay openings is not by Joseph Addison (1672-1719) or Richard
Steele (1672-1 729)?
Answer: Choice 4
‘Choice 4’ is part of ‘Idleness, The Idler no. 31’ by Samuel Johnson
2678
156
28- Which of the following is the correct order of publication for the following Romantic
era landmark works?
Answer: Choice 1
Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (cantos 1
and 2) (1812) John Clare’s Poems Descriptive of Rural Life (1820)

29- Which of the following about the Romantic era essayist Charles Lamb (1775-1814) is
not correct?
Answer: Choice 2
Charles Lamb was a near contemporary of Wordsworth and Coleridge. He numbered these
two poets among his close friends, published his own early poems in combination with those
of Coleridge in 1796 and 1797, and supported the Lyrical Ballads and some of the other new
poetry of his time. Yet Lamb lacks almost all the traits and convictions we think of as
characteristically “Romantic.” He happily lived all his life in the city and its environs. He
could not abide Shelley or his poetry, and he distrusted Coleridge’s supernaturalism and
Wordsworth’s oracular sublimities and religion of nature, preferring those elements in their
poems that were human and realistic. In an age when many of the important writers were
fervent radicals and some became equally fervent reactionaries, Lamb remained
uncommitted in both politics and religion.
30- ‘Thomas Carlyle work: description’ is not correct in -----------------.
Answer: Choice 4
Carlyle’s most significant early essay, “Characteristics,” appeared in The Edinburgh Review
in 1831. A year earlier he had begun writing Sartor Resartus, an account of the life and
opinions of an imaginary philosopher, Professor Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, a work that he had
great difficulty in persuading anyone to publish. In book form Sartor first appeared in
America in 1836, where Carlyle’s follower Emerson had prepared an enthusiastic audience
for this unusual work.
31- The English philosopher and essayist John Stuart Mill (1806-1 873) --------------------.
Answer: Choice 3
Though Mill was raised in this no-nonsense, reforming tradition, his honesty and open-
mindedness enabled him to appreciate the values of such anti-Utilitarians as Samuel Taylor
Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle and, whenever possible, to incorporate some of these values
into the Utilitarian system.
157
32- Which of the following about the 1840s and 1850s Charles Dickens (1812-1870) is not
correct?
Answer: Choice 1
Through the 1840s and 1850s Dickens continued to write novels at an intense pace,
producing Barnaby Rudge (1841), Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44), Dombey and Son (1846-48),
David Copperfield (1849-50), Bleak House (1852-53), Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit
(1855-57), and A Tale of Two Cities (1859). He also became deeply involved in a number of
other activities, including traveling, working for charities, and acting. During this time, he
founded and edited the weekly magazine Household Words (incorporated in 1859 into All the
Year Round), which published fiction by Elizabeth Gaskell, Willkie Collins, Dickens
himself, and other novelists as well as opinion pieces about political and social issues. And
he began a series of Christmas books, the first of which was A Christmas Carol (1843).
33- ‘Late Victorian figure: description’ match in ------------------.
Answer: Choice 1
During the 1880s and 1890s William Ernest Henley edited the National Observer and other
periodicals in London, where he became a powerful figure in literary circles. The affectionate
regard in which he was held by his contemporaries was enhanced by his courageously
confronting long years of crippling physical pain caused by tuberculosis of the bone. William
Butler Yeats said of him: “I disagreed with him about everything, but I admired him beyond
words.”
1823
34- Which of the following about the English novelist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is not
correct?
Answer: Choice 4
In 1917 the Woolfs had founded the Hogarth Press, which published some of the most
interesting literature of their time, including T. S. Eliot’s Poems [1919], fiction by Maxim
Gorky, Katherine Mansfield, and E. M. Forster, the English translations of Freud, and
Virginia’s novels.) As a fiction writer Woolf rebelled against what she called the
“materialism’ of novelists such as her contemporaries Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy,
who depicted suffering and social injustice through gritty realism, and she sought to render
more delicately those aspects of consciousness in which she felt the truth of human
experience lay. In her essay “Modern Fiction” she defines the task of the novelist as looking
within, as conveying the mind receiving “a myriad of impressions,” as representing the
“luminous halo” or “semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of
consciousness to the end.” In her novels she abandoned linear narratives in favor of interior
monologues and stream of consciousness narration, exploring with great subtlety problems of
personal identity and personal relationships as well as the significance of time, change, loss,
and memory for human personality. After two conventionally realistic novels, The Voyage
158
Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919), she developed her own style, a carefully modulated
flow that brought into prose fiction something of the rhythms and imagery of lyric poetry.
35- Samuel Beckett’s Murphy (1938) --------------------.
Answer: Choice 2
Beckett’s early novels—Murphy (1938; Eng. trans., 1957), Watt (1953), and the trilogy,
Molloy (1951; 1955), Malone Dies (1951; 1956), and The Unnameable (1953; 1958)—have
been hailed as masterpieces and precursors of postmodern fiction; but he is best-known for
his plays, especially Waiting for Godot (1952; 1954) and Endgame (1957; 1958). He
received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969.
36- The Irish poet Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) --------------------.
Answer: Choice 1
Louis MacNeice was a pioneer of radio drama, playwright, a translator of Aeschylus’
Agamemnon and Goethe’s Faust, and a literary critic.
37- ‘Writer / work with a World War II backdrop’ do not match in -------------------.
Answer: Choice 3
“Aristocrats: I Think I’m Becoming A God” is a poem by Keith Douglas
2456
38- The poet Louise Bennett would ------------------.
Answer: Choice 2
From a young age Bennett felt the humor, wit, and vigor of Creole were largely untapped
possibilities for writing and performing poetry, even though this commitment to Jamaican
English prevented her from being recognized as a poet until after the black cultural
revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s. In her poetry often assume the perspective of a West
Indian trickster such as the woman who cunningly subverts gender and geographic
hierarchies in ‘Jamaica Oman [Woman]’.
39- Which of the following works hybridizes African oral traditions with European literary
paradigms and fuses African rhetoric, myth, and ritual with the verbal extravagance of
Elizabethan and Jacobean theater?
Answer: Choice 3
In 1986 Soyinka became the first black African writer to receive the Nobel Prize in
Literature, recognized for plays, such as Death and the King’s Horseman (1975), that
159
inventively hybridize Yoruba oral traditions with European literary paradigms, fuse African
rhetoric, myth, and ritual with the verbal extravagance of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater.
40- ‘Doris Lessing novel: description’ do not match in -------------------.
Answer: Choice 1
Lessing’s combination of psychological introspection, political anal documentary, and
feminism gives a characteristic tone to her novels and stories. These elements are effectively
combined in her novel The Golden Notebook (1962), which explores with un-exhibitionist
frankness the sexual problems of an independent woman while at the same time probing the
political conscience of an ex-communist and the needs and dilemmas of a creative writer. In
the early influenced by the writings of the renegade psychologist R. D. Laing and by the prin-
ciples of Sufism (the mystical, ecstatic aspects of Islam), Lessing’s realistic investigations of
social issues took a different turn. In Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) and The
Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), she explores myth and fantasy, restrained within a broadly
realist context. In a series of novels with the general title Canopus in Argos: Archives
(written between 1979 and 1983), she draws on her reading of the Old and New Testaments,
the Apocrypha, and the Koran and borrows conventions from science fiction to describe the
efforts of a superhuman, extraterrestrial race to guide human history.
LITERARY GENRES
41- All the following about Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852-53) are correct except that
----------------.
Answer: Choice 4
At the center of Bleak House is a sensational mystery around which several lesser secrets,
surprises, and a large cast revolve. Dickens had employed mystery before in his novels, most
notably in Oliver Twist, but in Bleak House the mysteries are truly labyrinthine. Esther
Summerson, who shares half of the book’s narration, is, like Oliver, illegitimate, and her
identity remains in doubt for the first half of the novel. Also, as in Oliver Twist, there is a
disputed inheritance, and the secret of Esther’s identity is joined to the interminable and
destructive Chancery case of Jarndyce versus Jarndyce. However, in Bleak House Dickens
greatly expands his range from Oliver Twist, connecting two plots rather than combining
them in one character’s history like Oliver’s.
Source: The Novel 100 (Revised Edition) A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time by
Daniel S. Burt, p.54
160
42- ‘Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer (1867) character: description’ do not match in ---------------.
Answer: Choice 1
Injun Joe: known as a “half-breed,” meaning he is half white and half Native American,
Injun Joe is the villain of the novel and a force of evil in St. Petersburg. He is also an angry,
vengeful, amoral man.
Source: http://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/adventures-tom-
sawyer#Characters
43- Which of the following about Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) is not correct?
Answer: Choice 3
For the most part, Beloved uses a third-person narrator—one who tells the story by
describing the action of other people (“he said,” “they did”). Because the narration describes
what various characters are thinking and doing, it can also be classified as omniscient (all-
knowing) narration.
Throughout Beloved, there is one such motif that is repeated with regularity: a description
of the characters’ eyes and how they see. “The eyes are windows to the soul,” goes the
common saying, and the eyes of the novel’s characters are likewise revealing.
Source: http://www.novelexplorer.com/beloved/construction-7/
44- Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) opens in the year 2495 ------------------.
Answer: Choice 4
Brave New World opens in the year 2495 at the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning
Centre, a research facility and factory that mass-produces and then socially-conditions test-
tube babies. Such a factory is a fitting place to begin the story of mass-produced characters in
a techno-futurist dystopia, a world society gone mad for pleasure, order, and conformity. The
date is A.F. 632, A.F.—After Ford—being a notation based on the birth year (1863) of Henry
Ford, the famous automobile manufacturer and assembly line innovator who is worshiped as
a god in Huxley's fictional society.
Source: http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-bravenewworld/summary.html
161
45- Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (1952) -------------------.
Answer: Choice 4
The Old Man and the Sea uses the omniscient, or “all-knowing,” point of view of the author,
who acts as a hidden narrator. The omniscient point of view enables the author to stand
outside and above the story itself, and thus to provide a wider perspective from which to
present the thoughts of the old man and the other characters. Thus at the beginning of the
tale, the omniscient narrator tells us not only what Santiago and the boy said to each other,
but what the other fishermen thought of the old man.
Source: http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-oldmansea/style.html
OR
Encyclopedia of American Literature, 1607-to the present, edited by Brett Barney, 2nd
edition, p. 847
46- Which of the following sets of characters belongs to E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975)?
Answer: Choice 2
The set of characters in choice 1 all belong to The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson
McCullers.
The set of characters in choice 3 all belong to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by
Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
The set of characters in choice 4 all belong to The Jungle by Utpon Sinclair.
Hooper, 3rd edition, related entries
47- Which of the following about James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man (1916)
is not / least correct?
Answer: Choice 1
There is no plot as such in the novel; the narrative is not continuous but fragmented, with
gaps in the chorology. The focus is exclusively on the central character, Stephen Dedalus,
who is present on virtually every page. Every narrative detail is filtered through Stephen’s
consciousness. A Portrait of the Artist is divided into five chapters. Each chapter deals with a
different period in the first twenty years of the central character, Stephen Dedalus. Each also
addresses a specific theme related to Stephen’s development as an artist. Although Joyce
gives specific settings for the incidents in the book, he does not give dates for the events that
he is reporting.
162
Joyce himself was a Dubliner by birth and upbringing. He does not evoke the city of
Dublin in as much detail here as in his earlier short story collection Dubliners or in his later
novels Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Nonetheless, in A Portrait, Dublin is prominent both as
a physical city and as a symbol of the center of Irish consciousness. In any case, whether he
is writing about Stephen’s life at school, at home, or at large in Dublin or in particular
neighborhoods elsewhere in Ireland, Joyce’s larger subject is always Ireland—a subject that
he renders in an ambivalent stance.
Source: http://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/portrait-artist-young-man
48- John Steinbeck's The Crapes of Wrath (1939) follows the trials and tribulations of the
------------------- family as they leave the dust bowl of ------------------ for a better life in
-----------------.
Answer: Choice 2
The Grapes of Wrath follows the trials and tribulations of the Joad family as they leave the
dust bowl of Oklahoma for a better life in California. The narrative begins with Tom Joad
hitchhiking across the Oklahoma panhandle to his parents’ forty-acre farm. Tom has just
been paroled after serving four years in prison for manslaughter. He meets ex-preacher Jim
Casy, who is alone and singing by the side of the road.
Source: http://www.novelexplorer.com/category/the-grapes-of-wrath/
OR
Source: Encyclopedia of American Literature, 1607-to the present, edited by Brett Barney,
2nd edition, p. 453
49- Which of the following descriptions matches the character ‘Anse Bundren’ in William
Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930)?
Answer: Choice 4
Anse is the patriarch of the Bundren family. A selfish and lazy man, he claims sweat will kill
him, and therefore refuses to work. Instead, he connives to get others to work for him, and
therefore refuses to work for him. Physically, he is hunchbacked, and his hands are gnarled.
Though his wife is dying, he allows Darl and Jewel to leave her deathbed to work. He
considers himself to be a right-thinking, hardworking man who is victimized by God.
Source: http://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/i-lay-dying
163
50- Which of the following excerpts opens a ‘holy sonnet’ by John Donne (1572-1631)?
Answer: Choice 3
Choice 1 opens ‘Virtue’ by George Herbert

Choice 2 opens ‘The Argument of his Book’ by Robert Herrick
Choice 4 opens ‘The Pilgrimage’ by George Herbert
1618
51- ‘Poet: poem’ do not match in -------------------.
Answer: Choice 1
‘The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn’ is by Andrew Marvell
1688
52- Which of the following does not open a poem by Alexander Pope (1688-1744)?
Answer: Choice 3
Choice 3 opens Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, by Jonathan Swift
2532
53- The correct order of the appearance of poems by William Wordsworth (1770-1850) is
---------------.
Answer: Choice 2
‘Tintern Abbey’ (1798) ‘Resolution and Independence’ (1802) ‘Steamboats, Viaducts,
and Railways’ (1833)
Source: See the end of each poem in Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th
edition, p. 262, 305, and 320
54- Which of the following poem openings is by the Imagist Poet T. E. Hulme?
Answer: Choice 4
Choice 1 opens ‘Oread’ by H. D.
Choice 2 opens ‘Sea Rose’ by H.D.
Choice 3 opens ‘A Coat’ by William Butler Yeats
Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 2008, 2009, and 2029
55- Which of the following about William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is not correct?
Answer: Choice 1
He compressed and embodied his personal mythology in visionary poems of great scope,
linguistic force, and incantatory power, such as “The Second Coming” and “Leda and the
Swan.” In poems of the 1920s and 1930s, winding stairs, spinning tops, “gyres,” spirals of all
164
kinds, are important symbols, serving as a means of resolving some of the contraries that had
arrested him from the beginning—paradoxes of time and eternity, change and continuity,
spirit and the body, life and art.
Like Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Windham Lewis, Yeats was attracted to right-wing politics,
and in the 1930s he was briefly drawn to fascism. His late interest in authoritarian politics
arose in part from his desire for a feudal, aristocratic society that, unlike middle-class culture,
in his view, might allow the imagination to flourish, and in part from his anti-colonialism,
since he thought a fascist Spain, for example, would “weaken the British Empire.”
56- Which of the follow does not close a poem by T. S. Eliot (I888-1965)?
Answer: Choice 2
Choice 1 closes ‘Sweeney among the Nightingales’ by T. S. Eliot
Choice 2 closes ‘The Ship of Death’ by D.H. Lawrence
Choice 3 closes ‘The Hollow Men’ by T S Eliot
Choice 4 closes ‘The Journey of the Magi’ by T.S. Eliot
Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 2283, 2293, 2309,
2312
57- Which of the following sets of characters is entirely made of characters from William
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1594-95)?
Answer: Choice 1
Lafew, an old lord has appeared in All’s Well That Ends Well.
Diana: Daughter to the Widow has appeared in All’s Well That Ends Well.
58- ‘Character / description’ in George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren’s Profession (first
performed in London in 1902) do not match in --------------------.
Answer: Choice 4
It is Vivie Warren who is an attractive, sensible, highly educated young woman whose
intense self-confidence can sometimes be overwhelming. She refuses to act in a traditional
feminine manner, always speaking her mind and demanding that others treat her as an
individual.
Source: http://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/mrs-warrens-profession
59- John Osborne’s Inadmissible Evidence (1964) ----------------------.
Answer: Choice 3
The first performance of Inadmissible Evidence at the Royal Court Theatre in London on
September 9, 1964, by the English Stage Company, was a resounding critical and popular
success. It also reinforced John Osborne's status as England's most important post-World
165
War II dramatist. The play chronicles the mental disintegration of middle-aged, London
solicitor Bill Maitland over the course of two days as he experiences the breakdown of his
professional and personal life. Osborne combines elements of realism and theater of the
absurd as he illustrates Bill's nightmarish world that ironically Bill has constructed himself.
Source: http://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/inadmissible-evidence
60- Playwright / play do not match in ------------------.
Answer: Choice 3
Written by Mark Medoff in 1979, Children of a Lesser God illuminates, within a love story,
the experience—often misunderstood by those who can hear—of being deaf in a hearing
world. After the New York production in 1980, the play won the Tony Award.
Source: The Facts on File Companion to American Drama by Jackson R. Bryer, Mary C.
Hartig, p. 95
166
References
References
Abrams, M. H., and Geoffrey G. Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 10th ed. Boston, Mass:
Thomson Wadsworth, 2011.
Anderson, Amanda, and Harry E. Shaw, eds. A Companion to George Eliot. Vol. 82. Hoboken:
John Wiley & Sons, 2016.
Baldick, Chris. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford, England: New York:
Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press, 1990.
Barney, Brett, gen. ed. Encyclopedia of American Literature, 1607-to the Present. 2nd ed. New
York: Facts on File, 2008.
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• 5 years of M.A. entrance exams in English literature
• 300 multiple-choice questions accompanied by
thoroughly-revised explanatory answers
• Exact, reliable sources, the precise details of which
are offered question for question

Acting as an essential companion, this invaluable guide
assists anyone in navigating their way through
preparing for M.A. entrance exam in English literature
by providing them with a survey of the sources on
which questions of the recent years are based.
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‫عنوان‪M.A. Entrance Exams in English Literature :‬‬

M.A. Entrance Exam 1392 1

Explanatory Answers and Sources 16

M.A. Entrance Exam 1393 36

Explanatory Answers and Sources 48

M.A. Entrance Exam 1394 66

Explanatory Answers and Sources 80

M.A. Entrance Exam 1395 99

Explanatory Answers and Sources 113

M.A. Entrance Exam 1396 133

Explanatory Answers and Sources 147

LITERARY CRITICISM AND TERMS

14- Which of the following about the ‘heroic couplet’ is TRUE?

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

23- As pioneer essayist, Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) would ----------------.

36- The Victorian critic-poet-essayist Mathew Arnold (1822-1888) would -----------------.

49- ‘18th c. novelist / novel’ do not match in ------------------.

LITERARY CRITICISM AND TERMS

Source: Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice by Charles E. Bressler,

Source: Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice by Charles E. Bressler,

Source: Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice by Charles E. Bressler,

Source: Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice by Charles E. Bressler,

Source: Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice by Charles E. Bressler,

Source: Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice by Charles E. Bressler,

8- Which of the following is NOT (best) a concern with contemporary African-American

Source: Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st edition, p. 110

Source: Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st edition, p. 1255

11- The form of Japanese theater, kabuki, -------------------.

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 708

Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 1551

Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 1788

Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 2083

Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 2302

Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 2657

Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 77

His other major works are:

Source: The Short Oxford History of English Literature by Andrew Sanders, p. 57

46- T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding (1942) opens with -------------------.

W.H. Auden Encyclopedia by David Garrett Izzo, p. 245

49- ‘18th c. novelist / novel’ do not match in ------------------.

Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 9th edition, p. 2437

58- Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (1993) is set in a(n) -------------------.

LITERARTY TERMS AND CRITICISM

6- Richard Crashaw’s description, in his mid-seventeenth-century poem “Saint Mary

20- The Cultural Poetics approach to textual analysis -------------------.

26- Sir Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis -----------------.

32- Byron’s poem ‘Beppo’, written in Venice, ------------------.

48- Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904) opens with ----------------.

52- ‘Novelist / novel’ match in -----------------.

LITERARTY TERMS AND CRITICISM

6- Richard Crashaw’s description, in his mid-seventeenth-century poem “Saint Mary

20- The Cultural Poetics approach to textual analysis -------------------.

Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 14

29- Eighteenth century figure / work do NOT MATCH in ------------------.

32- Byron’s poem ‘Beppo’, written in Venice, ------------------.

33- John Keats’s Eve of St Agnes -----------------.

40- An important feature of the 1930s English literature is that ------------------.

52- ‘Novelist / novel’ match in -----------------.

57- ‘Poet /poem’ DO NOT match in -----------------.

LITERARTY TERMS AND CRITICISM

6- The term ‘well-made play’ refers to a play ----------------.