HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE COURSE

STUDY TEST QUESTIONS

These questions are meant to help you check your learning. This is basically what you should know about the
literary periods covered by this course. The answer for each question is in the course and seminar materials. The
exam topics may be formulated differently, they may combine several of these questions, or they may ask you to
illustrate something form these questions with examples from the literary works you are expected to read.

THE ENGLISH EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL-INTELLECTUAL BACKGROUND

1. What is the meaning of the phrase “the long eighteenth century”? What are the major historical events of this
period?
2. What made England a model of civilization for the Western world in the 18th century?
3. What is the Enlightenment? What intellectual attitudes and values characterize this age?
4. Can you mention some of the most important thinkers of this age and specify their contribution to Enlightenment
thought?
5. What is Deism and who are its main representatives? What is the contribution of Deist thinkers to moral
philosophy and what is their view on human nature?
6. Explain the concept of Great Chain of Being.
7. In what context did the Evangelical Revival and the rise of Methodism take place? What tendency in the field of
social morals accompanies the spirit of Methodism?
8. Explain the shift from the cult of Reason to the cult of Feeling in the latter part of the 18th century.

THE AUGUSTAN AGE: LITERARY BACKGROUND

1. Explain the name of Augustan Age that is often used for the English 18th century.
2. Which were the great models of English literary Neoclassicism?
3. Mention the most important principles of Neoclassical poetics.
4. Explain the Augustan precept of following/copying Nature.
5. What did the Augustan ideal of style reflect? Mention the features of the characteristic style of the Augustans.
6. Define the concept of wit, as the Augustans understood it.
7. What was the context of the emergence of a new prose style and what were its main features?
8. What were the role of literature and the mission of the writer for the English Augustans?
9. Why was satire such a prominent literary genre in the Augustan Age? How did it serve the double purpose
assumed by Enlightenment literature?
10. What are the characteristics and the main representatives of Augustan satire in England?

JONATHAN SWIFT

1. Which are Swift’s great satirical works? What are the targets of satire in each of them?
2. What is the effect of the use of the persona as a satirical device in Swift’s works? Give examples.
3. What is the essence of Swift’s ironic method in A Modest Proposal? Can you detect it in Gulliver’s Travels, too?
4. What are the targets of satire in each of the four books of Gulliver’s Travels and how does Swift convey them?
(Give examples)
5. Why can we say that Swift’s is a critique of the utopian imagination? What makes each of the four books both a
utopia and an anti-utopia?
 6. What is Gulliver’s position in Book IV? What interpretations have been given to the Houyhnhms and the
Yahoos?
7. Which are the two philosophical views on human nature that are set in a satirical contrast in Book IV?
8. Is Gulliver only a satirical device, or can he be seen as an object of satire? What aspects of human nature do you
think are satirized in the character of Gulliver?
9. How is the presence of a work like Gulliver’s Travels to be explained in the context of the optimistic Age of
Reason and Enlightenment? (Think of Swift’s assertion that by his work he wanted to “vex” the world, not to
entertain it.)

THE RISE OF THE NOVEL

1. With what aspects of the socio-cultural and intellectual context can the rise of the novel be associated?
2. What are the main differences between novel and romance? Point out that the novel reflects especially a new
view of character in fiction.
3. Point out the place of the novel with respect to the Neoclassical poetics. How does the novel, for instance, interpret
the Neoclassic precept of copying / following Nature, and how does it accomplish the double purpose of all
Augustan literature, that of both diverting and instructing?
4. What are the most popular types of novels in eighteenth century England? What distinctive features does each of
them display?
5. Which are the most important English novelists of the eighteenth century? What are their main works and what
type(s) of novel do they illustrate?
6. What double socio-cultural tendency of the Enlightenment does the novel illustrate and what are the corresponding
tendencies in character delineation in eighteenth century fiction?
7. Explain the transition from the “Life and Adventures” type of novel to that of “Life and Opinions”. How is
“realism” to be understood in each case?

DANIEL DEFOE

1. What shift in fiction writing do Defoe’s novels represent?

2. What are the features of the typical hero/heroine in Defoe’s novels?
3. What inspired Defoe in writing Robinson Crusoe?
4. What is the relevance of the motif of the island in Defoe’s novel? Can we identify elements of utopia in Robinson
Crusoe?
5. What thematic elements make possible the reading of Robinson Crusoe as a “Puritan autobiography”? (Make
sure you know what Puritanism is and what its basic tenets are.)
6. Does Robinson represent the essence of Englishness, British imperialism, or “universal man”? What arguments
may be brought in each case?
7. What makes Defoe’s novel an “honest cheat”? Think about the main characteristics of Defoe’s style in Robinson
Crusoe.

LAURENCE STERNE

1. What does Sterne’s novel, Tristram Shandy, bring new in the landscape of 18th century fiction?
2. What typological features can you identify in Sterne’s novel?
3. What are the oddities in Sterne’s narrative manner? How can we describe Tristram as a narrator?
4. What is peculiar in Sterne’s treatment of character? What kind of characters does he create?
5. Why can we describe Tristram Shandy as an anti-novel? What is peculiar in the narrative construction of this
novel? Mention some of the conventions of realistic fiction that Sterne defamiliarizes or treats parodically.
 6. What is the role of digressions in Tristram Shandy?
7. What makes Tristram Shandy a work of metafiction?
8. How does Sterne suggest the inefficiency of language as a means of communication and how does he challenge
the claim of fiction to represent life faithfully?
9. What other metafictional themes does Sterne’s novel deal with?
10. What future trends in fiction does Sterne’s experimental novel anticipate and influence?

THE RISE OF THE PRE-ROMANTIC AND ROMANTIC SENSIBILITY

1. What is the context in which the Pre-Romantic sensibility emerged?

2. Which are the main traits and concerns that define Pre-Romantic poetry?
3. Which are the most important Pre-Romantic poets in England? Mention those features of their works that
anticipate the coming of the Romantic Age.
4. Can you identify any aspects of continuity between the Age of the Enlightenment and the Romantic Age?
5. Define Romanticism in terms of contrast with the values of the Enlightenment.
6. Explain the difference between the Romantic expressive view of art and the Augustan view, which emphasised
mainly the mimetic and pragmatic dimension of art. Can you explain M. H. Abrams’ metaphors of the mirror
and the lamp as descriptions of the nature of 18th century and Romantic art, respectively?
7. Which are the main traits and concerns of Romantic poetry and art?
8. What do Romantic poets most forcefully reject from Augustan aesthetics and why?

WILLIAM BLAKE

1. What does Blake bring new in English poetry and how does his work reflect the emerging Romantic spirit?
2. What is the place of Songs of Innocence and of Experience in Blake’s work and what does its originality consist
in?
3. What are the marks/features of the world (or state) of “Innocence” in Blake’s poems? And those of
“Experience”?
4. How can Blake’s distinction between Innocence and Experience be interpreted?
5. Comment on the symbolic meaning of childhood as the unfallen state of man. Argue, starting from the indicated
poems, that “innocence” and “experience” are not necessarily connected with age, but represent “contrary states
of the human soul”.
6. What prepared the way for childhood to become a literary theme with the Romantics?
7. What is the difference between John Locke’s empiricist-rationalist view on childhood and education, and that of
J. J. Rousseau?
8. What is Blake’s attitude towards systems and institutions? Find evidence of this attitude in the poems indicated for
study which reveal elements of social criticism.
9. What does Imagination represent for Blake?
10. Read the poem The Tyger and develop a commentary on its imagery, starting from the assumption that the “Tyger”
is a symbol of the free energy of the Imagination.
11. What are Blake’s Prophetic Books? Mention the most important ones.
12. What does the symbolic conflict in America. A Prophecy consist in?
13. How does Blake re-interpret the Biblical myth of creation in his Prophetic Books?
14. Compare the poems The Lamb and The Tyger as two opposite views on the act of creation and on the nature of
the creator.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

 1. Which are the two main categories in which Coleridge’s poems may be grouped? Mention the most important
poems in each category.
2. What are the main influences on Coleridge’s critical concepts? What is the importance of his major work of
criticism and poetic theory?
3. Which are the two kinds of Imagination that Coleridge distinguishes, and what is the function of each of them?
4. To what faculty does Coleridge oppose Secondary Imagination? What is the main difference between them?
5. How did Coleridge and his friend Wordsworth divide their poetic task in the volume Lyrical Ballads? What are the
two complementary functions of poetry, according to them, and which one does Coleridge’s poems illustrate?
6. Can you explain Coleridge’s formula ”willing suspension of disbelief”?
7. What makes The Rime of the Ancient Mariner a “lyrical ballad”?
8. Mention some of the main symbols in this poem. What archetype does the character of the Ancient Mariner
represent? How can his story be interpreted?
9. What kind of “Paradise” does the symbolic imagery of Kubla Khan build? Argue that Kubla Khan may be read
as poem about the workings of Secondary/Poetic Imagination.

JOHN KEATS

1. What distinguishes Keats as a poet among his fellow Romantics?

2. Mention the poems which illustrate Keats’ Romantic attraction to the Middle Ages, and state their themes.
3. Point out the possible meanings of Lamia.
4. Argue that La Belle Dame Sans Merci, like Lamia, may be read as an allegory of the relation between
imagination and reality, of the encounter with Poetry and the capacity (or failure) to live up to its high claims.
5. Which are Keats’s great Odes and what does he explore in each and all of them?
6. How does Keats define Negative Capability ? How does it enable the poet to create an ironic tension in the
representation of human experience in his poems? How is Negative Capability manifested in each of them?
7. How does Keats define the Poetic Character? What relation does he establish between poetic genius and self-
identity? Can you apply this definition to the reading of La Belle Dame Sans Merci?