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F01 UGC NET English Paper 2 Prelims XXXX 01.indd 1 2/15/2021 5:45:28 PM

UGC

NET I SET I JRF
ENGLISH
P A P E R II 2021

Copyright © 2021 Pearson India Education Services Pvt. Ltd
Although the author and publisher have made every effort to ensure that the information in this book was
correct at the time of editing and printing, the author and publisher do not assume and hereby disclaim any
liability to any party for any loss or damage arising out of the use of this book caused by errors or omissions,
whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident or any other cause. Further, names, pictures,
images, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination
or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead or actual events is purely
coincidental and do not intend to hurt sentiments of any individual, community, sect or religion.
In case of binding mistake, misprints or missing pages etc., the publisher’s entire liability and your exclusive
remedy is replacement of this book within reasonable time of purchase by similar edition/reprint of the book
ISBN: 978-93-905-3114-1
First Impression
Published by Pearson India Education Services Pvt. Ltd, CIN: U72200TN2005PTC057128.
Head Office:15th Floor, Tower−B, World Trade Tower, Plot No. 1, Block−C, Sector−16,
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Dedicated to my elder brother Navneet Singh who
is not only a brother but a true ‘guru’ guiding me
to cherish humanity.
CONTENTS
Preface xi Augustan Age (1700–1800) 3.5
Acknowledgment xiii Romantic Age (1798–1837) 3.10
About the author xv Victorian Age (1837–1901) 3.15
Exam analysis xvii Modern Age (1900–1945) 3.23
NTA 2020 - Shift 1 xix Contemporary Period (Post 1945) 3.30
NTA 2020 - Shift 2 xxx American Literature in Brief 3.36
Non British or New Literature in English 3.39
Chapter 1 British poetry 1.1 Read and Recall 3.42
Old English Poetry 1.1
Middle English Poetry 1.5 Chapter 4 Nonfictional prose 4.1
The Revival of Learning 1.10 An Introduction to Nonfiction Writing 4.1
The Renaissance 1.16 Features of Nonfiction Writings 4.2
The Poetry of Puritan and Types of Nonfiction 4.2
The Restoration Age 1.21 Nonfiction During Anglo-norman and
The Pre-romantic Age 1.28 Chaucerian Period 4.4
The Romantic Age 1.34 Nonfiction Writings in the Age of Revival 4.5
Characteristics of English Romantic Poetry 1.35 Nonfiction in the Elizabethan Era 4.6
The Victorian Age 1.44 Nonfiction Writing in Puritan Age 4.6
Modernism 1.49 Nonfiction in the Restoration Period 4.7
Postmodernism 1.57 Nonfiction in Romantic Period 4.8
Read and Recall 1.63 Nonfiction in Victorian Period 4.8
The Contemporary Nonfiction 4.9
Chapter 2 British Drama 2.1 Read and Recall 4.11
Ancient Drama 2.1
Transition and Medieval Theatre 2.4 Chapter 5 Language: Basic Concepts,
Drama Before Shakespeare 2.5 theories and pedagogy, english in Use 5.1
Elizabethan Age 2.9 What is Language? 5.1
William Shakespeare 2.9 Basic Language Skills 5.3
Contemporaries and Successors of Theories of Language Acquisition 5.4
Shakespeare 2.14 First Language Theory 5.5
Other Early 17th Century Dramatists 2.15 Methods of Second Language
Restoration Age 2.17 Acquisition (Say, English) 5.5
Augustan Age and the Age of Johnson 2.20 Natural Approach to Language
Victorian Age 2.21 Learning and Acquisition 5.6
Modern Age 2.22 Other Methods and Approaches 5.8
Contemporary Drama 2.25 Some Important Terms 5.9
Read and Recall 2.29 English in Use 5.9
Read and Recall 5.11
Chapter 3 Fiction and Short Stories 3.1
What is Fiction? 3.1 Chapter 6 english in India:
Fiction in Medieval Period (1066–1500) 3.2 history, evolution and Future 6.1
The Age of Revival (1400–1550) 3.3 History of English Language in India 6.1
Elizabethan Age (1550–1625) 3.3 English in the Indian Subcontinent 6.2
Puritan Age 3.4 The Origin of English in India 6.3
Restoration Age 3.5 Three Language Formula 6.7
x Contents
Future of English in India 6.10 Reader-response Theory/Reader

Read and Recall 6.12 Oriented Theory 9.9
Phenomenology9.10
Chapter 7 Cultural Studies7.1 Feminist Criticism 9.10
Cultural Studies: An Overview 7.1 Cultural Materialism 9.12
Frankfurt School of Thought 7.2 Orientalism and Its Relevance 9.13
Feminism 7.3 Marxist Theories 9.14
Postcolonialism 7.7 Post-colonialism9.15
Read and Recall 7.11 New Historicism 9.16
Read and Recall 9.18
Chapter 8 Literary Criticism8.1
Chapter 10 Research Methods and
Nature and Functions of Criticism 8.1
Materials in English10.1
Forms of Literary Criticism 8.2
Important Critics and Their Works 8.4 Research and Its Meaning 10.1
Other Important Writers in Literary Criticism 8.23 What is Research Methodology? 10.2
Read and Recall 8.25 What is a Literary Research? 10.2
Types of Research 10.3
Research Process 10.4
Chapter 9 Literary Theory Post World War II9.1
Materials of Research 10.5
Introduction9.1 Tools of Research 10.5
Russian Formalism 9.3 Research Methods 10.5
Structuralism, Post-structuralism and Read and Recall 10.9
Deconstruction9.4
New Criticism 9.6 Exam Vault A.1
Archetypal/Myth Criticism 9.7 Mock Tests M.1
Psychoanalytic Criticism 9.8
PREFACE
I am delighted to present the first edition of a much needed book—Pearson’s NTA UGC NET/SET/JRF Paper II - English which
will effectively become a handbook for NET, SET, SLET, CUCET and various university entrance exams. This book, that has
been prepared after close examination of previous years’ papers to understand the examination pattern, will be a panacea for
students appearing in those exams. It consists of all requirements of students giving them comprehensive content to save their
time with effective method of learning. This is based on the latest syllabus and all the efforts have been made to enlist each
important topic.
Some basic units and topics have been written by avoiding unnecessary details and putting emphasis only on direct ques-
tions and their explanations.
I have spent maximum time to work on literary theory, cultural studies, postcolonial literature, aspects of language and
English language teaching.
In British poetry and drama, literary criticism, and world literature portions, I have researched on latest questions asked
in the examination.
Literature is like an ocean and it’s impossible to sum up everything in books. Sincere efforts have been applied to make it
into a reliable source for students to minimize their preparation time while providing maximum information in exam targeted
manner. All suggestions are most welcome and will be helpful in improving this book further.
Vineet Pandey
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This book is a result of many people standing by my side helping, motivating and guiding me. Thanks to the Pearson editorial
team for their support and guidance, without them this book would not have been possible.
I extend my heartfelt thanks to Deeksha Tripathi, Shweta Pandey, Abhishek Pandey, Amit Pandey, Mrs Shweta Navneet
Singh, Sarwan Singh, Piyush Godara, Manish and my entire team.
I would like to thank you Papa for bringing me in this field and showing me the future, and Mummy it was you who made
me strong and confident like yourself.
I cannot move further without thanking Mr Anurag Sharma and Aishwarya Lakshmi—my friends and motivators, Tiger—
my love, my kid, and all my students who have done amazing contribution in supporting me.
I may have forgotten some names here. I wish to express my love and regard towards all those who have helped me directly
or indirectly in the making of this book.
Vineet Pandey
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vineet Pandey was an Assistant Professor at the University of Delhi. He’s a well known name in the
UGC NET/JRF field at present. He has qualified NET several times with two times JRF and multiple
times SET/SLET examination. He has a hands-on understanding of the pattern and problems of
students in passing these examinations. His ground study and analysis made him perfect in this field
and he has given seven NET toppers with a huge number of success through his YouTube classes.
He hails from a small town and has faced all the problems faced by students studying in remote
areas with less opportunities which makes him special as he assimilates the problems of students
and solves them.
EXAM ANALYSIS
In recent years, we have seen a drastic change in the examination pattern. The biggest issue in UGC NET exam is that syllabus
is not properly detailed. For example, when the syllabus mentions Drama as a topic, it means all the literature written in
this genre in the English language, which further implies that Indian drama in English translation can also be asked. This
has happened in previous years’ examinations as well. In order to avoid confusion of reading too many texts from the endless
list of literatures from around the world, I go by a basic rule which is: ‘Read unknown works of known writers and known
works of unknown writers’.
While reading British history, students must remember that chronology is most important. Names of eminent writers,
their birth and death years, and publication years of famous books along with opening and ending lines are very important.
While going through English in India and Aspects of Language units, remember abbreviations, important commissions
and schools of thoughts significant to language acquisition theories.
Literary theory has always scared students; here, I have tried to make it easy and comprehensible for all the students by
using simple language.
Why I Chose to Write This Book?

Literature in India has been introduced in schools and colleges and becomes the first direct connection through prescribed syl-
labus. There are around 46 central universities, 150+ state universities and 500+ deemed or autonomous universities. This
has given us a great variety in literature, but that also generates the biggest problems. In realty, no university syllabus alone
is enough to be a good base for NET examination and most of the students rely solely on that. This is the reason students find
themselves clueless, not knowing what to read and from where to read.
With plethora of content available to students both offline and online, it becomes difficult for them to decide the best
resource for their exam preparation. With the right balance of theory and practice questions, I sincerely hope this book proves
as a single point of reference and helps the students score high in the examination.
All suggestions are most welcome and will be helpful in improving this book further.
How to prepare for UGC NET examination?

Any fresher student appearing in this examination should follow some basic rules before starting to prepare.
• Read British history from two or three sources and use this Pearson handbook to find out important facts, points and
details. Make short notes in this book by using pencils and highlighters as you just have to mark points and facts and
rewrite those in your notebook.
• After completing British history, solve the MCQs given after every unit and use pencil to mark. Once done with it, erase
your own markings and reattempt the MCQs after a revision of the unit. Keep doing it till you get good results.
• Literary criticism and literary theory are two topics that should be read after British poetry and drama. Some students
start reading everything side by side without finding a connection in those topics. In criticism, focus on opinions and rules
made by those philosophers, and in literary theory, terminologies, their coinage and their meaning play a vital role in the
examination. Set an order in literary genre and make a list of their thinkers. Mark the publications of important books on
literary theory.
• We have summarized the requirements of the syllabus in all the units, but it would be beneficial if students keep any book
on history of English literature for reference. It will give them enough understanding of specific periods.
• Cultural studies is a unit that’s introduced recently and a good number of questions are being asked from this section in the
recent years’ examinations.
• A good amount of research has gone into writing the ‘Research Methods and Materials in English’ unit.
• NET exam has a system of asking questions randomly from any topic. Hence, I would suggest students to stay updated with
latest awards, publications and literary trends.
Lastly, remember that practice makes you perfect. So, do not leave any stone unturned and be ready to burn midnight oil if you
seek success in this examination. Best wishes to you all.
F01 UGC NET English Paper 2 Prelims XXXX 01.indd 17 18-Feb-21 5:42:35 PM
NTA UGC NET 2020 Paper II English
Shift 1
1. The deductive method differs from the inductive (c) He asserted the value of poetry by giving prefer-
method in drawing its conclusions from ence to rhetoric over imitation (mimesis).
(a) verification (b) particular instances (d) He asserted the value of poetry by focusing on imi-
(c) applications (d) general truths tation (mimesis) rather than rhetoric.
2. Which one of the following journals publishes articles 8. Who said of the blank verse, quoting an unnamed critic,
related to critical theory exclusively? that it is ‘...verse only to the eye’, adding further that it
(a) Salmagundi (b) Diacritics ‘has neither the easiness of prose, nor the melody of
(c) Callaloo (d) Grand Street numbers’?
3. Which one of the following assumptions best expresses (a) John Dryden
the position of Post-Structuralist criticism? (b) Alexander Pope
(a) Definite structures underlie empirical events. (c) Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(b) Language is representational. (d) Samuel Johnson
(c) Apprehension of reality is a construct. 9. Poetry according to Sir Philip Sidney is of three kinds.
(d) Knowledge operates according to procedures that They are
are axiomatic. (a) religious, dramatic, romantic
4. Which one of the following is correct about Saussure’s (b) classical, romantic, neo-classical
analysis of language? (c) philosophical, imaginative, narrative
(a) La langue is the system of a language. (d) religious, philosophical, imaginative
(b) Parole focuses on language as a system at a par- 10. In Anxiety of Influence which of the following defini-
ticular time. tions is given by Harold Bloom to explain the term
(c) La langue is the particular instance of speech and ‘clinamen’?
writing. (a) poetic hyperbole (b) poetic misprision
(d) Parole is the study of language over a period of (c) poetic sublime (d) poetic supplement
time.
11. Who among the following is known to have popular-
5. Who among the following theorists particularly ized the term ‘glocalization’?
emphasized the social and historical dimensions of a (a) Ronald Robertson (b) Francis Fukuyama
text’s reception? (c) John Urry (d) John Tomlinson
(a) Wolfgang Iser (b) Stanley Fish
(c) Hans Robert Jauss (d) Pierre Bourdieu 12. Who among the following coined the dictum, ‘the
medium is the message’?
6. Which one among the following is a set of the Meta-
(a) Raymond Williams
physical Poets?
(b) Erving Goffman
(a) John Dryden, George Herbert, and Alexander
(c) Marshall McLuhan
Pope
(d) John Fiske
(b) Henry Vaughan, John Dryden, and John Donne
(c) John Donne, Henry Vaughan, and Andrew Marvel 13. Who among the following presented the concept
(d) Samuel Johnson, T.S. Eliot and Herbert Grierson of ‘multi-accentuaiity’ of the sign, saying that signs
possess an ‘inner dialectical quality’ and ‘evaluative
7. Which one of the following statements is true about
accent’?
Aristotle’s poetics?
(a) Roland Barthes
(a) He asserted the value of poetry by integrating
(b) Stuart Hall
rhetoric and imitation (mimesis).
(c) Jacques Derrida
(b) He asserted the value of poetry by focusing on
(d) Vaientin Voloshinov
both rhetoric and imitation (mimesis).
F02 UGC NET English Paper 2 XXXX 01_2020 Papers.indd 19 18-Feb-21 5:48:40 PM
xx NTA 2020 - Shift 1
14. On December 11, 1823, Rammohan Roy addressed a 21. Which according to Thomas Hobbes is the only ‘sci-
letter to the British authority which pleaded for mod- ence’ God has bestowed on mankind, that informs the
ern western education and is considered historically structure of his monumental work Leviathan?
important for the introduction of English education in (a) Astronomy (b) Architecture
India. Who was the letter addressed to? (c) Occult sciences (d) Geometry
(a) Lord Amherst (b) Lord Minto 22. As mentioned in ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’
(c) Lord Macaulay (d) Lord Bentick which poet does William Hazlitt describe as the ‘only
15. Which British administrator sought ‘to make every- person I ever knew who answered the idea of a man of
thing as English as possible in a country which resem- genius’?
bles England in nothing’, as recorded by Sir Thomas (a) Coleridge (b) Wordsworth
Munro? (c) Byron (d) Shelley
(a) Lord Bentick (b) Lord Hastings 23. Which one of the following essays holds that ‘As a
(c) Lord Cornwallis (d) Lord Wellesley method, realism is a complete failure’?
16. Who among the following was the first Director of the (a) Virginia Woolf, The Mark on the Wall
Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages. (b) Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying
Hyderabad (now EFL University)? (c) D.H Lawrence, Why the Novel Matters
(a) Prof V. K. Gokak (b) Prof C. D. Narasimhaiah (d) Mary McCarthy, My Confession
(c) Prof C. J. Daswani (d) Prof K. R. S. Iyengar 24. Which of the following novels is structured into a poem
17. Which one of the following best explains the term of 999 lines, preceded by a Foreword, followed by a
‘paralanguage’? Commentary and an Index?
(a) The ways in which people mask what they mean (a) Ragtime
by the words they use (b) Pale Fire
(b) The ways in which people show what they mean (c) The Inner Side of the Wind
other than by the words they use (d) Hourglass
(c) The ways in which words carry meanings unin- 25. Which among the following novels includes a question-
tended by the speaker naire for the reader such as ‘Do you like the story so
(d) The ways in which the silence underlying speech far? Yes () No()’?
communicates wrong meanings (a) Mantissa by John Fowles
18. Which two of the following oppositions are best evoked (b) Watertand by Graham Swift
by Hamlet’s utterance - To be or not to be’? (c) Snow White by Donald Barthelme
(A) between life and death (d) If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
(B) between action and emotion 26. What is the subject of Ivan’s controversial essay in
(C) between affirmation and confirmation Brothers Karamazov?
(D) between doing and abstaining from doing (a) Transubstantiation (b) The evils of clergy
Choose the correct answer from the options given
(c) The Eucharist (d) Ecclesiastical courts
below. 27. Which one of the following Sherlock Holmes stories
(a) A and D only (b) B and D only refers to a significant event in English history?
(c) C and A only (d) D and C only (a) The Musgrove Ritual
19. Who among the following linguists proposed the terms, (b) The Speckled Band
‘competence’ and ‘performance’? (c) The Solitary Cyclist
(a) Noah Webster (b) Steven Pinker (d) The Red-Headed League
(c) Roman Jakobson (d) Noam Chomsky 28. Harold Skimpole is a character in
20. Which one of these statements defines the scope of (a) Bleak House (b) Dombey and Son
semiotics? (c) Great Expectations (d) Oliver Twist
(a) Semiotics studies the sound systems of a language. 29. Who is the author of A Fragment (1819), one of the ear-
(b) Semiotics is a study of sign systems. liest vampire stories in English?
(c) Semiotics studies human sign system only. (a) P. B. Shelley (b) Lord Byron
(d) Semiotics is a study of non-human sign systems (c) Bram Stoker (d) Mary Shelley
only.
F02 UGC NET English Paper 2 XXXX 01_2020 Papers.indd 20 2/15/2021 5:45:55 PM
NTA 2020 - Shift 1 xxi
30. Lala Kanshi Ram is a character in 39. What game do the characters play in Act II of Harold
(a) Arun Joshi’s The Apprentice Pinter’s The Birthday Party?
(b) Chaman Nahal’s Azadi (a) A game of chess (b) A game of cards
(c) Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain (c) Blind man’s buff (d) Musical chairs
(d) Kamala Markandaya’s A Handful of Rice
40. The Duchess of Malfi is based on
31. Which of the following poems by Philip Larkin deals (a) a French romance (b) an Italian novella
with the trauma of a rape victim who says ‘Even so dis- (c) a Geman fable (d) a Scottish chronicle
tant. I can taste the grief’?
41. Which two of the following strictly follow the parame-
(a) Deceptions (b) Faith Healing
ters of documentation prescribed by the eighth edition
(c) Sad Steps’ (d) Wild Oats
of the MLA Handbook?
32. In which of the Bog poems does Seamus Heaney speak (A) Nunberg, Geoffrey, editor. The Future of the Book.
about the ‘perishable treasure’ of a body ‘Murdered, U of California P, 1996.
forgotten, nameless, terrible’? (B) Puig, Manuel. Kiss of the Spider Woman. Trans.
(a) Bog Queen (b) Grauballe Man Thomas Colchie. London: Vintage, 1991.
(c) Punishment (d) Strange Fruit (C) Nunberg, Geoffrey, ed. The Future of the Book.
33. Which book of Paradise Lost incorporates the speech Berkeley: U of California P, 1996.
rhythms of Adam and Eve’s marital quarrel? (D) Puig, Manuel. Kiss of the Spider Woman. Translated
(a) Book 4 (b) Book 6 by Thomas Colchie. Vintage Books, 1991.
(c) Book 7 (d) Book 9 Choose the correct answer from the options given

34. Who among the following wrote Mazeppa, a long nar- below.
rative poem about a seventeenth-century military (a) A and B only (b) A and C only
leader of Ukraine? (c) A and D only (d) B and C only
(a) William Cowper (b) Lord Byron
42. A research hypothesis is
(c) P. B. Shelley (d) S. T. Coleridge
(A) a proposition which is always true
35. Which one of the following statements is appropriately (B) a provisional explanation of anything
true of Harold Pinter’s plays? (C) a theory which will be disproved by evidence
(a) Menace is in the air and it leads to bloody violence. (D) a statement which is assumed to be true for the
(b) Menace is in the air and it is realized through the sake of argument
female characters.
Choose the most appropriate answer from the options

(c) Menace is in the air, but it is not pinned down, or
given below.
explained.
(a) A and B only (b) B and C only
(d) Menace is in the air and anarchy follows in a sys-
(c) B and D only (d) A and C only
tematic manner.
36. To which mythological character is Faustus compared 43. Which two of the following aspects are to be scrupu-
in the prologue of Dr. Faustus? lously followed to avoid the trap of plagiarism?
(a) Perseus (b) Theseus (A) Subjectivity (B) Acknowledgement
(c) Icarus (d) Achilles (C) Citation (D) Interpretation
37. Who makes the following speech in Samuel Beckett’s Choose the most appropriate answer from the options

Waiting for Godot? given below.
(a) A and B only (b) A and C only
‘Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the

(c) C and D only (d) B and C only
hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the forceps,’
(a) Estragon (b) Lucky 44. Which two texts among the following are linked to lit-
(c) Vladimir (d) Pozzo erary feminism?
(A) A Small Place (B) The Yellow Wallpaper
38. Which of the following are the major themes in William
(C) Emma (D) A Room of One’s Own
Congreve’s The Way of the World?
(a) Jealousy and revenge Choose the correct answer from the options given

(b) Love and intrigue below.
(c) Intrigue and death (a) A and D only (b) C and D only
(d) Love and loyalty (c) B and D only (d) A and C only
xxii NTA 2020 - Shift 1
45. Who among the following feminist theorists posited a 49. Who among the following are the two great masters
separate realm of female experience captured in a style of the French language that T. S. Eliot contrasts with
of writing different from men’s? Dryden and Milton in The Metaphysical Poets?
(A) Elaine Showalter (A) Francois Villon (B) Jean Racine
(B) Luce Irigaray (C) Charles Baudelaire (D) Arthur Rimbaud
(C) Kate Millett Choose the correct answer from the options given

(D) Simone de Beauvoir below.
(E) Helene Cixous (a) A and C only (b) A and D only
(c) B and C only (d) B and D only
below. 50. Which two terms from among the following are specifi-
(a) A, C and D only (b) B and D only cally linked to the work of Pierre Bourdieu?
(c) C, D and E only (d) B and E only (A) Habitus (B) Consciousness
46. Which of these statements describe correctly the basic (C) Desire (D) Distinction
assumption of Structuralism? Choose the correct answer from the options given

(A) Structuralism is concerned with signs and below.
signification. (a) A and C only (b) A and D only
(B) A structuralist theory considers only verbal con- (c) B and D only (d) C and D only
ventions and codes.
51. Macaulay’s Minute of 1835 sought to
(C) Structuralism began in the works of Jacques
(A) promote European literature and science among
Derrida that influenced the 20th-century literary
the natives.
criticism.
(B) impart knowledge of English literature and sci-
(D) Structuralism challenges the long-standing belief
ence through translated texts.
that literature reflects a given reality.
(C) encourage branches of native learning by more
(E) All signs are arbitrary but without them we cannot
useful studies.
comprehend reality.
(D) stop expenditure on the publication of oriental
works and spend funds only on English education.
below.

(a) A, C and E only (b) A, D and E only
below.
(c) A, B and C only (d) A, B and E only
(a) A and D only (b) B and D only
47. Which two terms among the following are associated (c) A and C only (d) B and C only
with formalist criticism?
52. Which two of the following statements are applicable
(A) Aura (B) Actant
to ‘metalanguage’?
(C) Narratee (D) Defamiliarization
It is
(E) Foregrounding
(A) a technical language which describes the proper-
ties of language.
below. (B) known as a ‘first-order’ language.
(a) A and C only (b) B and D only (C) a ‘second-order’ language that replaces a ‘first-
(c) B and C only (d) D and E only order’ language with metaphors.
48. Who among the following believed that rhyme is not an (D) a ‘second-order’ language.
integral part of poetry? Choose the correct answer from the options given

(A) William Wordsworth below.
(B) Horace (a) A and B only (b) C and D only
(C) Samuel Daniel (c) A and D only (d) B and C only
(D) Philip Sidney
53. ‘Hari wrote a poem on the mountains’. Which two of
the following are admissible statements about the
given below. above sentence?
(a) A and C only (b) B and D only (A) The sentence is an example of lexical ambiguity.
(c) A and D only (d) D and C only (B) The sentence is an example of structural ambiguity.
NTA 2020 - Shift 1 xxiii
(C) The sentence involves two deep structures. 58. Which two of the following are the titles of the sections
(D) The sentence involves two surface structures. in Thomas De Quincey’s The English Mail - Coach?
Choose the correct answer from the options given (A) The Glory of Mobility
below. (B) The Vision of Sudden Death
(a) A and B only (b) B and C only (C) The Glory of Motion
(c) B and D only (d) C and D only (D) The Vision of Unexpected Truth
54. Which two of the following events are described in Choose the correct answer from the options given

Samuels Pepys’s Diary? below.
(A) The Plague in London (a) A and B only (b) A and D only
(B) The Great Fire of London (c) B and C only (d) B and D only
(C) The War of Spanish Succession 59. Which two of the following books are explorations of
(D) Essex Rebellion the art of the novel by novelists?
Choose the correct answer from the options given (A) The Brief Compass
below. (B) The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist
(a) A and B only (b) A and C only (C) The Visionary Company
(c) B and C only (d) B and D only (D) Testaments Betrayed
55. Which two of the following inspired the rise of the peri- Choose the most appropriate answer from the options

odical essay? given below.
(A) Robert Burton (a) A and B only (b) A and C only
(B) Francois Rabelais (c) B and C only (d) B and D only
(C) Francis Bacon
(D) Michel de Montaigne 60. The lives of which of the following writers have been
the subject matter of novels by Anthony Burgess?

(A) Milton (B) Marlowe
given below.
(C) Shelley (D) Keats
(a) C and A only (a) A and B only
(b) C and D only (c) B and D only Choose the correct answer from the options given

below.
56. Which two of the following works does Walter Pater
(a) A and B only (b) A and D only
regard as examples of ‘great art’ in his essay ‘Style’?
(c) B and C only (d) B and D only
(A) Iliad (B) The Divine Comedy
(C) Les Miserables (D) Faust 61. Which two rivers are mentioned by Andrew Marvell at
Choose the most appropriate answer from the options the beginning of To His Coy Mistress?
given below. (A) The Ganges (B) Thames
(a) A and B only (b) A and D only (C) Humber (D) The Jhelum
(c) B and C only (d) B and D only Choose the correct answer from the options given

57. According to his essay ‘Civil Disobedience’, what two below.
things did Thoreau learn from the night he spent in (a) A and D only (b) A and B only
jail? (c) A and C only (d) B and C only
(A) He concluded that the State is ultimately weak. 62. Which two poems in the following list are examples of
(B) He realized that captivity inspires courage. dramatic monologue?
(C) He realized that the neighbours are only friends (A) Alfred Tennyson, Ulysses
during good times. (B) Philip Larkin, Church Going
(D) He concluded that captivity brings wisdom about (C) Carol Ann Duffy, Medusa
human affairs. (D) Katherine Philips, A Married State

below. below.
(a) A and B only (b) A and C only (a) A and D only (b) B and C only
(c) A and D only (d) C and D only (c) C and D only (d) A and C only
xxiv NTA 2020 - Shift 1
63. Which two of the following poems are by Robert 68. Match List I with List II
Browning? List I (Critics) List II (Text)
(A) Locksley Hall
(A) Horace I. A Defence of Rhyme
(B) The Pied Piper of Hamelin
(C) The Lady of Shalott (B) John Dryden II. Timber: or, Discoveries
(D) Two in the Campagna (C) Samuel Daniel III. Ars Poetica
Choose the correct answer from the options given below.
(D) Ben Jonson IV. Of Dramatic Poesy
(a) A and D only (b) B and C only Choose the correct answer from the options given below.

(c) A and C only (d) B and D only (a) A - II, B - I, C - IV, D - III
64. Which two of the following dramatists are associated (b) A - III, B - IV, C - II, D - I
with the Epic Theatre? (c) A - III, B - IV, C - I, D - II
(A) Fernando Arrabal (B) Bertolt Brecht (d) A - II, B - IV, C - I. D - III
(C) Arnolt Bronnen (D) James Saunders 69. Match List I with List II
List I (Author) List II (Text)
(a) A and B only (b) B and C only (A) Michel de Certeau I. Distinction
(c) A and D only (d) B and D only
(B) John Fiske II. Betiding the Romance
65. Which two characters/speakers among the following
III. Understanding Popular
exhibit the studious abstraction of scholars?
(C) Pierre Bourdieu Culture
(A) Shylock (B) Hamlet
(C) Il Penseroso (D) Mosca IV. The Practice of Everyday
(D) Janice Rad way Life

(a) A and D only (b) B and C only Choose the correct answer from the options given below.

(c) C and D only (d) A and C only (a) A - IV, B - I, C - II, D - III
(b) B - III, C - IV, D - I, A - II
66. Match List I with List II
(c) A - IV, B - III, C - I, D - II
List I (Terms) List II (Theorists) (d) B - III, C - I, D - IV, A - II
(A) arche-ecriture I. Julia Kristeva 70. Match List I with List II
(B) cyborg II. Donna Haraway List I (Linguist) List II (Concept)
(C) genotext III. Friedrich Schleiermacher (A) Paul Grice I. language death
(D) hermeneutic circle IV. Jacques Derrida (B) Edward Sapir II. linguistic signs
(C) Ferdinand de
(a) A - IV, B - II, C - I, D - III Saussure III. linguistic relativity
(b) A - III, B - I, C - II, D - IV (D) Nancy Dorian IV. cooperative principle
(c) A - III, B - II, C - IV, D - I

(d) A - IV, B - I, C - II, D - III
(a) A - I, B - III, C - II, D - IV
67. Match List I with List II (b) A - IV, B - III, C - II, D - I
List I (Terms) List II (Theorists) (c) A - III, B - IV, C - I, D - II
(d) A - III, B - IV, C - II, D - I
(A) Superreader I. Michel Foucault
(B) Biopower II. Mikhail Bakhtin 71. Match List I with List II
(C) Bricolage III. Michael Riffaterre List I List II
(D) Chronotope IV. Claude Levi-Strauss (Word Borrowed) (Source Indian Language)
(A) mongoose I. Tamil
(a) A - III, B - II, C - IV, D - I (B) loot II. Malayalam
(b) A - III, B - I, C - IV, D - II (C) curry III. Hindi/ Urdu
(c) A - IV, B - I, C - III, D - II
(D) betel IV. Marathi
(d) A - II, B - I, C - IV, D - III
NTA 2020 - Shift 1 xxv


(a) A - IV, B - IIl, C - I, D - II below;
(b) A - IV, B - II, C - I, D - III (a) A - lll, B - IV, C - II, D - I
(c) A - II, B - III, C - IV, D - I (b) A - III, B - II C - IV, D - II
(d) A - II, B - I, C - IV, D - III (c) A - III, B - IV, C - I, D - II
(d) A - II, B - l, C - IV, D - III
List 1 (Essayist) List II (Essay) List I (Author) List II (Work)
(A) George Orwell I. On the Artificial Comedy (A) John Keats I. Alastor
of the Last Century
(B) William Wordsworth II. Songs of Experience
(C) P. B. Shelley III. Lamia
(B) Michel de II. Why I Write
Montaigne (D) William Blake IV. The Excursion
(C) Charles Lamb Ill. A Modest Proposal Choose the correct answer from the options given

below.
(D) Jonathan Swift IV. On the Cannibals
(a) A - III, B - I, C - IV, D - II
(b) A - III, B - IV, C - I, D - II
(a) A - lll, B - IV, C - III, D -I (c) A - I, B - IV, C - III, D - II
(b) A - II, B - IV, C - I, D - III (d) A - IV, B - II, C - I, D - III
(c) A - IV, B - III, C - II, D - I 76. Arrange the following terms in the chronological order
(d) A - II, B - III, C - I, D - IV of emergence.
(A) Heresy of Paraphrase
(B) Stream of Consciousness
List I (Author) List II (Text) (C) Practical Criticism
(A) Thomas Pynchon I. G. (D) Defamiliarization
(B) Howard Jacobson II. V Choose the correct answer from the options given

below.
(C) Anthony Burgess III. J
(a) D, B, C, A (b) B, D, A, C
(D) John Berger IV. M/F (c) B, D, C, A (d) D, C, B, A
77. Arrange the following critical works in their chrono-
below. logical order of publication.
(a) A - II, B - IV, C - I. D - III (A) Preface to Lyrical Ballads
(b) A - II, B - Ill, C - IV, D - I (B) A Defence of Rhyme
(c) A - II, B - III, C - I, D - IV (C) Life of Cowley
(d) A - IV, B - III, C - l, D - II (D) The Frontiers of Criticism

below.
List I (Lines) List II (Poems) (a) A, C, B and D (b) B, A, C and D
(A) ‘Monuments of I. Leda and the Swan (c) B, C, A and D (d) C, A, D and B
unaging intellect’ 78. Arrange the following in the chronological order of
(B) ‘In the foul rag-and- II. Adam’s Curse publication.
bone shop of the (A) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax
heart’ (B) Course in General Linguistics
(C) Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language
(C) ‘So mastered by the III. Sailing to Byzantium
(D) How to Do Things with Words
brute blood of the air’

(D) ‘As weary-hearted as IV. The Circus Animals’
(a) D, B, A, C (b) C, B, A, D
that hollow moon’ Desertion
(c) B, D, A, C (d) B, A, D, C
xxvi NTA 2020 - Shift 1
79. Arrange the following in the chronological order of 84. Arrange the following plays in their chronological
publication. order
(A) Advancement of Learning (A) The Country Wife
(B) The Origin of Species (B) Cymbeline
(C) On Heroes and Hero Worship (C) The Spanish Tragedy
(D) The Lives of the Poets (D) The Rivals

below. below.
(a) D, A, C, B (b) D, A, B, C (a) B, A, C, D (b) B, C, D. A
(c) A, D, C, B (d) A, D, B, C (c) C, B, A, D (d) C, A, B, D
80. Arrange the following 18th-century magazines in the 85. Arrange the following plays in the chronological order
chronological order of publication. of publication.
(A) The Critical Review
(A) All for Love
(B) The Monthly Review
(B) Venice Preserved
(C) The Gentleman’s Magazine
(C) The School for Scandal
(D) The Rambler
(D) The Country Wife

below. Choose the correct answer from the options given

(a) A, D, B, C (b) D, A, B, C below.
(c) B, A, C, D (d) C, B, D, A (a) B, C, A, D (b) D, A, B, C
(c) C, B, D, A (d) A, D, C, B
81. Arrange the following in the chronological order of
publication. 86. Given below are two statements: one is labelled as
(A) Crome Yellow Assertion A and the other is labelled as Reason R
(B) Sons and Lovers Assertion A: Research methods are a range of tools
(C) Mrs Dalloway that are used for different types of inquiry.
(D) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Reason R: The tools used in research are products of
the situations in which they are applied. In light of the
below. above statements, choose the correct answer from the
(a) B, A, D, C (b) A, B, D, C options given below.
(c) A, C, B, D (d) B, D, A, C (a) Both A and R are true and R is the correct explana-
82. Arrange the following women novelists in the chrono- tion of A
logical order (by date of birth). (b) Both A and R are true and R is NOT the correct
(A) Anne Bronte (B) Jane Austen explanation of A
(C) Ann Radcliffe (D) Fanny Burney (c) A is true but R is false
(E) Maria Edgeworth (d) A is false but R is true
87. Given below are two statements: one is labelled as
below. Assertion A and the other is labelled as Reason R
(a) B, A, D, C, E (b) C, D, B, E, A Assertion A: Signs are never neutral or Innocent.
(c) D, C, E, B, A (d) A, B, C, E, D
Reason R: In all cases signs are organized into systems
83. Arrange the following authors in the chronological that convey some meaning.
order of their birth.
In light of the above statements, choose the correct
(A) Oscar Wilde (B) William Langland
answer from the options given below.
(C) Geoffrey Chaucer (D) John Dryden
(a) Both A and R are true and R is the correct explana-
(E) Alexander Pope
tion of A
(b) Both A and R are true but R is NOT the correct
below. explanation of A
(a) B, C, D, E, A (b) A, B, C, E, D (c) A is true but R is false
(c) B, C, D, A, E (d) C, B, A, D, E (d) A is false but R is true
NTA 2020 - Shift 1 xxvii
88. Given below are two statements. Swimming with blue through the rose flesh of dawn,
Statement I: Consumption is an outcome of self-inter- From her dew of lips, the drop of one word
est and a maximization of personal pleasure. Fell, from a dawn of fountains, when she murmured
‘Darling,’ — upon my heart the song of the first bird.
Statement II: There are strong correlations between
social status and such things as housing styles, musical ‘My dream glides in my dream,’ she said, ‘come true,
tastes and food preferences. I waken from you to my dream of you.’
In light of the above statements, choose the correct O, then my waking dream dared to assume
answer from the options given below. The audacity of her sleep. Our dreams
(a) Both Statement I and Statement II are true Flowed into each other’s arms, like streams.’
(b) Both Statement I and Statement II are false —Stephen Spender
(c) Statement I is correct but Statement II is false 91. Which among the following best describes the lady’s
(d) Statement I is incorrect but Statement II is true face as ‘At dawn she lay...’ asleep?
89. Given below are two statements. (a) Her face appears to be that of a stone sculpture’s.
Statement I: The Orientalists in British India were not (b) The side-view of her face appears to be that of a
sympathetic towards India’s ancient learning. sculpted angel’s.
Statement II: William Jones thought that in ‘imagina- (c) Her face appears to be that of a stone-angel.
tion’, ‘ratiocination’, and philosophy, Indians were by (d) The side-view of her face appears to be that of an
no means inferior to Europeans. angel’s.
In light of the above statements, choose the correct 92. Match List I with List II
(a) Both Statement I and Statement II are true List I (The Item) List II (What it is an
(b) Both Statement I and Statement II are false example of)
(c) Statement I is correct but Statement II is false (A) ‘Her hair’ I. player
(d) Statement I is incorrect but Statement II is true (B) ‘pillows’ II. ‘a harp’
90. Given below are two statements: one is labelled as (C) ‘breeze’ III. ‘rose’
Assertion A and the other is labelled as Reason R.
(D) ‘cheeks’ IV. ‘cloud’
Assertion A: The introduction of English in India was pri-
marily for the benefit and consolidation of British power. Choose the correct answer from the options given

Reason R: English catered to the social and economic below.
aspirations of the emerging middle class and urban (a) A - I, B - II, C - IV, D - III
elites in India. (b) A - III, B - I, C - II, D - IV
In light of the above statements, choose the correct (c) A - II, B - IV, C - I, D - III
answer from the options given below. (d) A - IV, B - III, C - I, D - II
(a) Both A and R are true and R is the correct explana- 93. Match List I with List II
tion of A List I (item) List II (Whet it is an
(b) Both A and R are true but R is NOT the correct example of)
explanation of A
(A) ‘Her hair a harp’ I. Simile
(c) A is true but R is false
(d) A is false but R is true (B) ‘the hand of a breeze’ II. Metaphor
(C) ‘seems the stone face’ III. Oxymoron
Direction for Questions 91–93: Read the given passage and
(D) ‘my waking dream’ IV. Synecdoche
answer the questions that follow Daybreak.

‘At dawn she lay with her profile at that angle below.
Which, sleeping, seems the stone face of an angel; (a) A - ll, B - IV, C - I, D - III
Her hair a harp the hand of a breeze follows (b) A - IV, B - II, C - III, D - I
To play, against the white cloud of the pillows. (c) A - IV, B - III, C - II, D - I
Then in a flush of rose she woke, and her eyes were open, (d) A - I, B - IV, C - II, D - III
xxviii NTA 2020 - Shift 1
Direction for Questions 94–95: Read the given passage and Through tatter’d clothes small vices do appear;
answer the questions that follow. Robes and furr’d gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold,
Logic cannot have any empirical part; that is, a part in And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks;
which the universal and necessary laws of thought should Arm it in rags, a pigmy’s straw doth pierce it.’
rest on grounds taken from experience; otherwise it would —King Lear
not be logic, i.e., a canon for the understanding or the reason, 96. Who speaks these lines and to whom?
valid for all thought, and capable of demonstration. Natural (a) Edgar to Lear
and moral philosophy, on the contrary, can each have their (b) Goneril to Edgar
empirical part since the former has to determine the laws of (c) Lear to Gloucester
nature as an object of experience; the latter, the laws of the (d) Gloucester to Lear
human will, so far as it is affected by nature: the former, how-
97. In the passage, the church officer is asked to whip his
ever, being laws according to which everything does hap-
own back rather than the prostitute’s because
pen; the latter, laws according to which everything ought to
(a) as a religious man he should punish himself for
happen. Ethics, however, must also consider the conditions
others’ sins.
under which what ought to happen frequently does not.
(b) he at one time had lusted after her.
—Immanuel Kant
(c) men like him make them prostitutes.
94. ‘Logic cannot have any empirical part’, because (d) he does not have the authority to whip a woman.
(A) laws of thought are subjective.
98. The two sentences in the lines from ‘Through tatter’d
(B) it propounds laws whose applicability can be
clothes....’ to ‘...straw doth pierce it’ deal with two foi-
shown.
bles, (i) vice and (ii) sin. About these two, the speaker
(C) its laws are valid for all thought
says that
(D) its laws are valid for everyone’s experience.
(a) Vice afflicts all but sin afflicts only the weak.
(b) Sin afflicts all but vice afflicts only the strong.
given below.
(c) Sin and vice are seen in both the weak and the
(a) A and D only
strong.
(b) B and C only
(d) Sin and vice are palpable in the weak and impalpa-
(c) A and C only
ble in the strong.
(d) B and D only
95. Based on the given passage which two of the following Direction for Questions 99–100: Read the given passage
statements are correct? and answer the questions that follow.
(A) For natural philosophy, nature influences the laws. The surgeon deposited it in her arms. She imprinted
(B) For moral philosophy, nature is to be experienced. her cold, white lips passionately on its forehead; passed her
(C) Natural philosophy does not describe how things hands over her face; gazed wildly around; shuddered; fell
actually do happen. back — and died. They chafed her breast, hands, temples;
(D) Moral philosophy accounts for what should be, but the blood had stopped forever. They talked of hope and
comfort. They had been strangers too long. ‘It’s all over, Mrs.

Thingummy!’, said the surgeon at last.
below.
—Dickens, Oliver Twist
(a) A and C only (b) B and D only
(c) C and D only (d) A and D only 99. In the expression, ‘passed her hands over her face’, the
‘face’ is of
Direction for Questions 96–98: Read the given passage and (a) the lady surgeon (b) the child
answer the questions that follow. (c) the nurse (d) the patient
‘And the creature run from the cur? 100. The implication of ‘they had been strangers too long’ is
There thou mightst behold the great image of authority: (a) Those who spoke of ‘hope and comfort’ had been
a dog’s obeyed in office. — strangers too long,
Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand! (b) ‘Hope’ had been stranger to ‘comfort’ for too long.
Why dost thou lash that where? Strip thine own back; (c) ‘Hope and comfort’ had been stranger to the
Thou hotly lust’st to use her in that kind patient too long.
For which thou whipp’st her. The usurer hangs the (d) ‘Hope and comfort’ had been strangers to the sur-
cozener. geon, nurse and the patient too long.
NTA 2020 - Shift 1 xxix
answer keys
1. (d) 2. (b) 3. (c) 4. (a) 5. (c) 6. (c) 7. (d) 8. (d) 9. (d) 10. (b)
11. (a) 12. (c) 13. (d) 14. (a) 15. (c) 16. (a) 17. (b) 18. (a) 19. (d) 20. (b)
21. (d) 22. (a) 23. (b) 24. (b) 25. (c) 26. (d) 27. (a) 28. (a) 29. (b) 30. (b)
31. (a) 32. (d) 33. (d) 34. (b) 35. (c) 36. (c) 37. (c) 38. (b) 39. (c) 40. (b)
41. (c) 42. (c) 43. (d) 44. (c) 45. (d) 46. (b) 47. (d) 48. (b) 49. (c) 50. (b)
51. (a) 52. (c) 53. (b) 54. (a) 55. (c) 56. (c) 57. (b) 58. (c) 59. (d) 60. (d)
61. (c) 62. (d) 63. (d) 64. (b) 65. (b) 66. (a) 67. (b) 68. (c) 69. (c) 70. (b)
71. (a) 72. (b) 73. (b) 74. (c) 75. (b) 76. (c) 77. (c) 78. (c) 79. (c) 80. (d)
81. (d) 82. (c) 83. (a) 84. (c) 85. (b) 86. (b) 87. (a) 88. (a) 89. (d) 90. (b)
91. (b) 92. (c) 93. (a) 94. (b) 95. (d) 96. (c) 97. (c) 98. (d) 99. (d) 100. (c)
NTA UGC NET 2020 Paper II English
Shift 2
1. Inductive method differs from deductive method in (c) neither metaphor nor simile is rooted in
drawing its conclusion from comparison.
(a) Verification (b) Particular instances (d) simile involves superimposition while metaphor
(c) Applications (d) General truths involves comparison.
2. Which of the following information has now been 8. The two broad divisions of reality in Plato’s theory of
excluded while making an entry for a book in the 8th reality are
edition of MLA Hand book for Writers of Research (a) visible and assumable
Papers? (b) intelligible and opinable
(a) Year of publication (c) visible and intelligible
(b) Place of publication (d) intelligible and shadows
(c) Name of the publisher
9. Who among the following called the ‘Poetasters’. ‘The
(d) Omission of subtitle
rhyming friends’?
3. Which of the following journals deals with the analysis (a) Lucan (b) Horace
of only theoretical concepts? (c) Pindar (d) Plato
(a) Granta (b) Manoa
(c) Boundary 2 (d) Arethusa 10. Who among the following refutes Plato’s charge that
poets are liars, by arguing that the poet ‘nothing
4. Which one of the following statements by Roman
affirms, and therefore never lieth’?
Jacobson is true about metaphor and metonymy?
(a) John Dryden (b) Philip Sidney
(a) Metaphor is alien to the continuity disorder
(c) George Puttenham (d) Richard Hooker
whereas metonymy is alien to similarity disorder.
(b) Metaphor is alien to the similarity disorder and 11. Who among the following coined the term, ‘aesthetics’?
metonymy to the continuity disorder. (a) Arthur Danto
(c) Metaphor is alien to both similarity disorder and (b) Alexander Baumgarten
continuity disorder and metonymy is common to (c) Immanuel Kant
both. (d) David Hume
(d) Metaphor is common to both similarity disorder 12. Who among the following drew attention to the role
and continuity disorder but metonymy is alien to of print languages in enabling the rise and spread of
both. nationalism?
5. Who among the following theorists defines novel as (a) Ernest Gellner
‘a phenomenon multiform in style and variform in (b) Charles Jenks
speech and voice’? (c) Benedict Anderson
(a) E. M. Forster (b) Henry James (d) Frederic Jameson
(c) Mikhail Bakhtin (d) Eric Auerbach
13. Which one of the following captures accurately the
6. Who among the following critics is said to have devel- view of Frankfart School of Critical Theory?
oped the notion of ‘interpretive communities’? (a) The culture industries in still in their mass audi-
(a) Terry Eagleton (b) Jane Tompkins ences a capacity to question and transform.
(c) Roland Barthes (d) Stanley Fish (b) The culture industries engender passivity and con-
7. Metaphor differs from simile in that formity among their mass audiences.
(a) a comparison in metaphor is usually explicit (c) Power and culture are two distinct modes of social
whereas in simile it is implicit. articulation, separate from each other.
(b) a comparison in metaphor is usually implicit (d) The analysis of culture should be divorced from
whereas in simile it is explicit. politics and power relations.
F02 UGC NET English Paper 2 XXXX 01_2020 Papers.indd 30 18-Feb-21 5:48:48 PM
NTA 2020 - Shift 2 xxxi
14. Which of the following groups of words correctly states 22. In Advancement of Learning, Francis Bacon divides
the stages of communication as envisioned by Stuart poetry into three divisions
Hall in his essay ‘Encoding, Decoding’? (a) Philosophical, religious, imaginative
(a) Production, transference, circulation, contact, (b) Epic, dramatic, lyrical
reproduction (c) Narrative, representative, allusive
(b) Production, circulation, realisation, consumption, (d) Odes, sonnets, eclogues
reproduction 23. Which one of these essays by Ezra Pound defines an
(c) Production, circulation, distribution, consump- Image as ‘that which presents an intellectual and emo-
tion, reproduction tional complex in an instant of time’?
(d) Production, dissemination, transference, con- (a) A Retrospect (b) The Tradition
sumption, reproduction (c) The Renaissance (d) How to Read
15. Who among the following held that ‘the people of
24. Who wrote the essay Naipaul’s India and Mine (1984)
Hindustan’ are ‘a race of men lamentably degener-
as a reply to V. S. Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness?
ate and base, retaining but a feeble sense of moral
(a) A. K. Ramanujan (b) Nissim Ezekiel
obligation...’?
(c) Nayantara Sahgal (d) Mahesh Dattani
(a) Charles Wilkins (b) Thomas Macaulay
(c) Charles Grant (d) David Hare 25. Which of the following short stories by Jorge Luis Borges
has its epigraph from The Anatomy of Melancholy?
16. Which agency among the following made a distinc-
(a) Borges and I
tion between the teaching of English as a skill and the
(b) Death and the Compass
teaching of English literature?
(c) The Library of Babel
(a) The University Education Commission, 1948–49
(d) The Garden of Forking Paths
(b) The Secondary Education Commission, 1952–53
(c) Indian Universities Commission, 1902 26. How does Christ respond to the Grand Inquisitor’s
(d) The Education Commission, 1964–66 accusations in Brothers Karamazov?
(a) He kneels before the Grand Inquisitor
17. Which agency among the following was of the view that
(b) He kisses the Grand Inquisitor on his lips
‘use of English... divides the people into two nations,
(c) He begins to weep in remorse
the few who govern and the many who are governed’?
(d) He says. ‘Mea culpa, mia culpa, mia maxima culpa’
(a) The Kunzru Committee (1955)
(b) The Education Commission (1948) 27. In which short story does the narrator witness a con-
(c) The Education commission (1964-66) sumptive young man named Mr. Shaynor recreate ‘The
(d) The working Group (UGC) on Regional Languages Eve of St. Agnes’ in a trance?
(1978) (a) E. M. Forster’s The Eternal Moment
18. Who is the author of The Complete Plain Words? (b) Rudyard Kipling’s Wireless
(a) Samuel Jhonson (b) Daniel Jones (c) Somerset Maugham’s The Creative Impulse
(c) Ernest Gowers (d) Michael Everson (d) Aldous Huxley’s The Bookshop
19. Who among the following has coined the term, 28. Mr. Pumblechook is a character in
‘genderlect’? (a) Little Dorret (b) Nicholas Nickleby
(a) Lydia Callis (b) Kate Burridge (c) Hard Times (d) Great Expectations
(c) Deborah Tannen (d) Mary Haas 29. To which of these boarding schools is Jane Eyre sent by
20. ‘Nice day again, isn’t it?’ This sentence is an example of her aunt Mrs. Reed?
(a) Code-switching (a) Lowood School (b) Hailsham school
(b) Multiple negation (c) Abbey Mount (d) Greyfriar’s School
(c) Phatic communication 30. Which of the following short stories by Edgar Allan Poe
(d) Nominalization has a narrator who has a rival with the same name and
21. Language allows us to talk about the things and events uncanny physical resemblance?
not present in immediate environment. Which of the (a) Hop-Frog
following terms describes this property of language? (b) William Wilson
(a) Arbitrariness (b) Displacement (c) The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether
(c) Productivity (d) Discreteness (d) The Imp of the Perverse
xxxii NTA 2020 - Shift 2
31. What does the titular Setebos in Robert Browning’s (c) The Folio edition appeared during his lifetime and
Caliban upon Setebos refer to? the ‘quartos’ appeared posthumously.
(a) The original name of Sycorax, Caliban’s mother (d) The ‘quartos’ refer to works written between 1594
(b) The brutal god in whom Caliban believes and 1599 and the Folio includes works written
(c) The name of the island in which Caliban lives between 1608 and 1613.
(d) The monster whom Caliban is afraid of 40. Who is the author of the short play The Dark Lady of the
32. Which of the following poems by Philip Larkin ends Sonnets?
with the line ‘Never such innocence again’? (a) Ben Jonson
(a) An Arundel Tomb (b) MCMXIV (b) George Bernard Shaw
(c) This Be the Verse (d) Aubade (c) Oscar Wilde
33. Which of the following is true in relation to Edmund (d) Oliver Goldsmith
Spenser’s Faerie Queene? 41. Which two of the following citations conform to the
(a) A letter addressed to Sir Walter Raleigh was pre- documentation format of the eighth edition of the MLA
fixed to the 1590 edition of the poem. Hand book?
(b) A letter addressed to Sir Walter Raleigh was (A) Baron, Naomi S. ‘Redefining Reading: The impact
appended to the 1590 edition of the poem. of Digital Communication Media’. PMLA, vol 128.
(c) A letter addressed to Sir Walter Raleigh was pre- no.1, Jan.2013, PP. 193-200.
fixed to the 1596 edition of the poem. (B) Adichie, Chimamanda Ngosi. ‘On Monday of
(d) A letter addressed to Sir Walter Raleigh was Last Week’, The Thing Around Your Neck. London:
appended to the 1596 edition of the poem. Knopf, 2009. 74-94
34. Who was Milton’s model when he recast the first edi- (C) Baron, Naomi S. ‘Redefining Reading: The impact
tion (1667) of Paradise Lost in 10 books to 12 books of of Digital communication Media’. PMLA 128.1
the second edition (1674)? (2013): 193-200.
(a) Lucan (b) Ovid (D) Adichie, Chimamanda Ngosi ‘On Monday of Last
(c) Virgil (d) Homer Week’. The Thing Around Your Neck, Alfred A.
35. In Harold Pinter’s play The Birthday Party, who sug- Knopf, 2009, PP. 74-94.
gests the idea of having a birthday party? Choose the correct answer from the options given

(a) Meg (b) Goldberg below:
(c) Lulu (d) McCann (a) (A) and (B) only (b) (A) and (D) only
36. Which of the following characters instruct Faustus in (c) (B) and (C) only (d) (C) and (D) only
the dark arts? 42. While assembling a working bibliography which two
(a) Robin and Rafe (b) Cornelius and Valdes of the following reference sources will be particularly
(c) Wagner and Bruno (d) Old Man and Evil Angel useful to a literary researcher?
37. What is the content of the suitcases that Lucky carries (A) MLA International Bibliography
in the second act of Waiting for Godot? (B) New Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics
(a) Books (b) Pozzo’s Clothing (C) Library of Congress Catalogue
(c) Sand (d) Tiny Skulls (D) Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature
38. In which act of William Congreve’s The Way of the Choose the correct answer from the options given

World does the Proviso scene between Mirabell and below.
Millamant take place? (a) (A) and (B) only (b) (B) and (C) only
(a) Act I (b) Act II (c) (A) and (D) only (d) (C) and (D) only
(c) Act III (d) Act IV 43. Which two of the following periodicals are devoted to
39. Which of the following statements is correct in relation feminist theoretical discussion?
to Shakespeare’s works? (A) Spectrum (B) Signs
(a) The Folio edition appeared in the sixteenth cen- (C) Chrysalis (D) Transition
tury and the ‘quartos’ appeared in the seventeenth Choose the correct answer from the options given

century. below.
(b) The ‘quartos’ appeared during his lifetime and the (a) (B) and (C) only (b) (A) and (C) only
Folio edition appeared posthumously. (c) (B) and (D) only (d) (A) and (D) only
NTA 2020 - Shift 2 xxxiii
44. Which two of the following features shall apply to Choose the most appropriate answer from the options

Roland Barthes’s notion of a ‘writerly text’? given below.
(A) In case of writerly text, the reader accepts the (a) (B) and (C) Only (b) (C) and (D) Only
meaning without too much reading effort. (c) (B) and (A) Only (d) (A) and (C) Only
(B) A writerly text tends to focus attention on what is 49. Which two of the following plays are mentioned in T. S.
written. Eliot’s Tradition and Individual Talent?
(C) A writerly text makes the reader a producer. (A) Agamemnon (B) Antigone
(D) A writerly text tends to be self-conscious. (C) Othello (D) Dr. Faust us

below: below.
(a) (A) and (B) Only (b) (B) and (C) Only (a) (A) and (D) Only (b) (A) and (C) Only
(c) (A) and (C) Only (d) (C) and (D) Only (c) (B) and (C) Only (d) (B) and (D) Only
45. A deconstructive reading of a text shows that 50. Which two of the following essays have proved particu-
(A) a text is to be read always in a context larly productive in the disciplinary practices of Cultural
(B) there is nothing except the text Studies?
(C) a text may betray itself (A) Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative
(D) a text may possess an ascertainable meaning Cinema
(E) there is an endless postponement of meaning (B) Viktor Shklovsky, Art as Technique
(C) Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny
below. (D) Stuart Hall, Encoding/decoding
(a) (A), (B) and (C) Only Choose the most appropriate answer from the options

(b) (C), (D) and (E) Only given below.
(c) (B), (C) and (E) Only (a) (A) and (B) Only (b) (B) and (C) Only
(d) (B), (C) and (D) Only (c) (A) and (D) Only (d) (A) and (C) Only
46. Which two of the following edited the defining work of 51. Which of these following statements are true about
third-wave feminism, This Bridge Called My Back: Writ- Pidgin and Creole?
ings by Radical Women of Color? (A) Pidgin begins as Creole and eventually becomes
(A) Audre Lorde (B) Barbara Smith the first language of a speech community.
(C) Gloria Anzaldua (D) Cherrie Moraga (B) Creole begins as Pidgin and eventually becomes
the first language of a speech community.

(C) Pidgin is simple but a rule governed language
below:
developed for communication whereas Creole in
(a) (A) and (B) Only (b) (C) and (D) Only
free from grammatical rules.
(c) (A) and (C) Only (d) (B) and (D) Only
(D) Pidgin and Creole evolve successively out of a situ-
47. Which two of the following poets defended poetry ation where speakers of mutually unintelligible
against Plato’s denigration of Poetry? languages develop a shared language for commu-
(A) John Dryden (B) P. B. Shelley nication (often based on one of those languages).
(C) T. S. Eliot (D) Philip Sidney Choose the correct answer from the options given

below.
given below. (a) (A) and (B) Only (b) (B) and (D) Only
(a) (B) and (D) Only (b) (A) and (B) Only (c) (C) and (D) Only (d) (A) and (D) Only
(c) (B) and (C) Only (d) (C) and (A) Only 52. Which two of the following words are borrowed into
48. Which two of the following are Samuel Johnson’s state- English from Czech?
ments about metaphysical poets? (A) pistol (B) robot
(A) They were singular in their thoughts (C) sauna (D) coach
(B) They were careful in their diction Choose the correct answer from the options given below.

(C) They effected combination of dissimilar images (a) (A) and (B) Only (b) (A) and (C) Only
(D) They avoided occult resemblances (c) (B) and (C) Only (d) (A) and (D) Only
xxxiv NTA 2020 - Shift 2
53. Which two of the following meanings are admissible Choose the correct answer from the options given
for the following sentences? below.
‘You do not know how good oysters taste’ (a) (A) and (B) Only (b) (A) and (C) Only
(A) You do not know that oysters taste good as food (c) (B) and (C) Only (d) (B) and (D) Only
(B) You do not know how the oysters taste when 58. Which two of the followings are part of Virginia Woolf’s
cooked collection of autobiographical essays?
(C) You do not know what the oysters taste when they (A) A Will to Word It
eat (B) A Sketch of the Past
(D) You do not know how the good oysters taste when (C) A Faint Hue of the Past
they eat (D) Am I a Snob
Choose the most appropriate answer from the options Choose the correct answer from the options given
given below: below.
(a) (A) and (D) Only (b) (B) and (C) Only (a) (A) and (B) Only (b) (A) and (C) Only
(c) (B) and (D) Only (d) (C) and (D) Only (c) (B) and (C) Only (d) (B) and (D) Only
54. Which two of the following works are Daniel Defoe’s 59. Which two of the following novels are part of Paul Aus-
historical narratives? ter’s New York Trilogy?
(A) History of the Rebellion (A) The Book of Illusions
(B) Meditations on a Broomstick (B) Ghosts
(C) A Journal of the Plague Year (C) The Locked Room
(D) Memories of a Cavalier (D) Winter Journal
Choose the correct answer from the options given Choose the correct answer from the options given
below. below.
(a) (A) and (B) Only (b) (B) and (C) Only (a) (A) and (B) Only (b) (A) and (C) Only
(c) (B) and (D) Only (d) (C) and (D) Only (c) (B) and (C) Only (d) (B) and (D) Only
55. Which two of the following are non-fictional works by 60. Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth, considered by many to
Peter Ackroyd? be his masterpiece, is part of a trilogy of novels. Which
(A) Escape from Earth two titles from the following list belong to this trilogy?
(B) The Great Fire of London (A) Aissa Saved
(C) The English Ghost (B) To Be a Pilgrim
(D) English Music (C) Herself Surprised
Choose the correct answer from the options given (D) Charley Is My Darling
(a) (A) and (B) Only (b) (A) and (C) Only below.
(c) (B) and (C) Only (d) (B) and (D) Only (a) (A) and (B) Only (b) (B) and (C) Only
56. Which two of the following were published in the year (c) (C) and (D) Only (d) (A) and (D) Only
1859? 61. Which two of the following are the interludes in John
(A) On the Origin of Species Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga (1922)?
(B) A Tale of Two Cities (A) To Let
(C) Alice in Wonderland (B) Indian Summer of a Forsyte
(D) Silas Marner (C) Awakening
Choose the correct answer from the options given (D) In Chancery
(a) (A) and (B) Only (b) (A) and (C) Only below.
(c) (B) and (C) Only (d) (B) and (D) Only (a) (A) and (B) Only (b) (A) and (C) Only
57. In his ‘Self-Reliance’ which two qualities does Emerson (c) (B) and (C) Only (d) (B) and (D) Only
refer to as ‘the Chancellors of God’? 62. Which two poems in the following list are odes written
(A) Truth (B) Cause in the Horatian manner?
(C) Spirit (D) Effect
NTA 2020 - Shift 2 xxxv
(A) Ben Jonson, ‘To the Immortal Memory and Choose the correct answer from the options given
Friendship of that Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and below.
Sir H. Morison’ (a) (A)-(iii), (B)-(iv), (C)-(ii), (D)-(i)
(B) Andrew Harwell, Upon Cromwell’s Return from (b) (A)-(iv), (B)-(i), (C)-(ii), (D)-(iii)
Ireland (c) (A)-(iv), (B)-(i), (C)-(iii), (D)-(ii)
(C) Alexander Pope, Ode on Solitude (d) (A)-(i), (B)-(iv), (C)-(iii), (D)-(ii)
(D) Alfred Tennyson, Ode on the Death of the Duke of 67. Match List I with List II
Wellington
List I (Authors) List II (Works)
below. (A) Ferdinand de (i) Two Aspects of Language
(a) (A) and (B) Only (b) (B) and (C) Only Sausme and Two Types of
(c) (C) and (D) Only (d) (A) and (D) Only Aphasic Disturbances
(B) Edward Sapir (ii) Of Grammatology
63. Which two of the following poems by Seamus Heaney
come under his Bog Poems? (C) Jacques Derrida (iii) A Course in General
(A) Personal Helicon (B) Punishment Linguistics
(C) The Early Purges (D) Tollund Man (D) Roman Jakobson (iv) Language
Choose the correct answer from the options given Choose the correct answer from the options given
below. below.
(a) (A) and (B) Only (b) (A) and (C) Only (a) (A)-(iii), (B)-(ii), (C)-(i), (D)-(iv)
(c) (B) and (C) Only (d) (B) and (D) Only (b) (A)-(ii), (B)-(i), (C)-(iii), (D)-(iv)
(c) (A)-(iii), (B)-(iv), (C)-(ii), (D)-(i)
64. In which, two of the following plays does the blind seer
(d) (A)-(iv), (B)-(i), (C)-(iii), (D)-(ii)
Tiresias, appear?
(A) Oedipus the King (B) Agamemnon 68. Match List I with List II
(C) Antigone (D) Oedipus at Colonus List I (Terms) List II (Theorists)
Choose the correct answer from the options given (A) Heteroglossia (i) Michel Foucault
below.
(B) Heterotopia (ii) Louis Althusser
(a) (A) and (B) Only (b) (A) and (C) Only
(c) (B) and (C) Only (d) (C) and (D) Only (C) Grand Narrative (iii) Mikhail Bakhtin
(D) Interpellation (iv) Jean–Francois Lyotard
65. Which two of the following plays were written by John
Osborne?
below.
(A) Look Back in Anger (B) Loot
(a) (A)-(ii), (B)-(i), (C)-(iv), (D)-(iii)
(C) Funeral Games (D) Dejavu
(b) (A)-(iii), (B)-(ii), (C)-(iv), (D)-(i)
(c) (A)-(iii), (B)-(i), (C)-(iv), (D)-(ii)
below.
(d) (A)-(iv), (B)-(i), (C)-(iii), (D)-(ii)
(a) (A) and (B) Only
(b) (A) and (C) Only 69. Match List I with List II
(c) (A) and (D) Only List I (Clitics) List II (Essays)
(d) (B) and (C) Only (A) L.(C) Knights (i) The Study of Poetry
66. Match List I with List II (B) Lionel Trilling (ii) Restoration Comedy
List I (Institutions) List II (Locations) The Reality and the
Myth
(A) The Bhandarkar Oriental (i) Shimla
Research Institute (C) Matthew Arnold (iii) Poetry for Poetry’s Sake
(B) Indian Institute of (ii) New Delhi (D) A.(C) Bradley (iv) The Sense of the Past
Advanced Study Choose the correct answer from the options given below.
(a) (A)-(iii), (B)-(iv), (C)-(i), (D)-(ii)
(C) National Library of India (iii) Kolkata
(b) (A)-(iv), (B)-(i), (C)-(ii), (D)-(iii)
(D) Nehru Memorial Museum (iv) Pune
(c) (A)-(ii), (B)-(iv), (C)-(i), (D)-(iii)
and Library
(d) (A)-(iv), (B)-(iii), (C)-(i), (D)-(ii)
xxxvi NTA 2020 - Shift 2
70. Match List I with List II Choose the correct answer from the options given
List I (Text) List II (Author) below.
(a) (A)-(iv), (B)-(iii), (C)-(i), (D)-(ii)
(A) After Amnesia (i) Gauri Viswanathan
(b) (A)-(ii), (B)-(iv), (C)-(iii), (D)-(i)
(B) T
he Indianization of (ii) Harish Trivedi (c) (A)-(iii), (B)-(iv), (C)-(ii), (D)-(i)
English (d) (A)-(iii), (B)-(iv), (C)-(i), (D)-(ii)
(C) Masks of Conquest (iii) G. N. Devy 74. Match List I with List II
(D) Colonial (iv) B.B. Kachru List I (Novel) List II (Character)
Transactions
(A) Barnaby Rudge (i) Miss La Creevy
(a) (A)-(iv), (B)-(iii), (C)-(i), (D)-(ii) (B) Little Dorrit (ii) Miss Dolly
(b) (A)-(ii), (B)-(iv), (C)-(i), (D)-(iii) (C) Nicholas Nickleby (iii) Mrs. Boffin
(c) (A)-(iii), (B)-(iv), (C)-(i), (D)-(ii) (D) Our Mutual Friend (iv) Mrs. Flintwinch
(d) (A)-(iii), (B)-(i), (C)-(iv), (D)-(ii) Choose the correct answer from the options given
71. Match List I with List II below.
List I (Word Borrowed) List II (Source (a) (A)-(i), (B)-(iii), (C)-(ii), (D)-(iv)
Language) (b) (A)-(iii), (B)-(ii), (C)-(iv), (D)-(i)
(c) (A)-(ii), (B)-(iv), (C)-(i), (D)-(iii)
(A) Caste (i) Norse
(d) (A)-(iv), (B)-(i), (C)-(iii), (D)-(ii)
(B) Beef (ii) German
(C) Blunder (iii) Portuguese
List I (Poet) List II (Poem)
(D) Flak (iv) French
(A) John Donne (i) The Retreat
(a) (A)-(iii), (B)-(i), (C)-(iv), (D)-(ii) (B) Andrew Marvell (ii) A Valediction of
(b) (A)- iii), (B)-(iv), (C)-(iii), (D)-(i) Weeping
(c) (A)-(iii), (B)-(iv), (C)-(i), (D)-(ii) (C) George Herbert (iii) The Garden
(d) (A)-(ii), (B)-(iv), (C)-(i), (D)-(iii) (D) Henry Vaugham (iv) The Collar
72. Match List I with List II Choose the correct answer from the options given
List I (Concepts) List II (Theorists) below.
(a) (A)-(iv), (B)-(iii), (C)-(ii), (D)-(i)
(A) Competence/ (i) Noam Chomsky
(b) (A)-(iv), (B)-(i), (C)-(ii), (D)-(iii)
Performance
(c) (A)-(ii), (B)-(iv), (C)-(i), (D)-(iii)
(B) Signifier/Signified (ii) Roman Jakobson (d) (A)-(ii), (B)-(iii), (C)-(iv), (D)-(i)
(C) Metaphor/ (iii) Louis Hjelmslev 76. Which of the following is the correct sequence of stages
Metonomy in empirical research?
(D) Content/Expression (iv) Ferdinand de (A) Data Collection (B) Hypothesis
Saussure (C) Validation (D) Findings
Choose the correct answer from the options given below. (E) Analysis
(a) (A)-(iii), (B)-(ii), (C)-(i), (D)-(iv) Choose the correct answer from the options given
(b) (A)-(ii), (B)-(iii), (C)-(i), (D)-(iv) below.
(c) (A)-(iii), (B)-(iv), (C)-(ii), (D)-(i) (a) (A), (E), (D), (B) and (C)
(d) (A)-(i), (B)-(iv), (C)-(ii), (D)-(iii) (b) (B), (A), (E), (C) and (D)
73. Match List I with List II (c) (B), (C), (A), (D) and (E)
(d) (A), (C), (B), (E) and (D)
List I (Author) List II (Autobiography/
Memoir) 77. Arrange the following critical works in the chronologi-
(A) Pablo Neruda (i) Under My Skin cal order of publication.
(A) Preface to Lyrical Ballads
(B) Graham Greene (ii) Speak, Memory
(B) A Defence of Rhyme
(C) Doris Lessing (iii) Memoirs (C) Life of Cowley
(D) Vladimir Nabakov (iv) A Sort of Life (D) Frontiers of Criticism
NTA 2020 - Shift 2 xxxvii
Choose the correct answer from the options given Choose the correct answer from the options given below.
below. (a) (D), (B), (C), (A) (b) (B), (D), (C), (A)
(a) (A), (C), (B) and (D) (c) (B), (C), (A), (D) (d) (B), (C), (D), (A)
(b) (B), (A), (C) and (D) 83. Arrange the following in their chronological order of
(c) (B), (C), (A) and (D) publication.
(d) (C), (A), (D) and (B) (A) The Pisan Canto
78. Arrange the following in the chronological order of (B) Ballad of Reading Goal
publication. (C) Mourn not for Adonais
(A) Modern English Usage (D) First step up Parnassus
(B) Proposals for Perfecting the English Language (E) The Complaint of Troilus
(C) Usage and Abusage Choose the correct answer from the options given
(D) An American Dictionary of the English Language below.
Choose the correct answer from the options given (a) (E), (D), (B), (C), (A)
below. (b) (B), (C), (A), (E), (D)
(a) (D), (B), (C), (A) (b) (B), (C), (D), (A) (c) (C), (A), (B), (D), (E)
(c) (B), (D), (A), (C) (d) (D), (C), (A), (B) (d) (E), (D), (C), (B), (A)
79. Arrange these autobiographical texts in the chronolog- 84. Arrange in the chronological order of publication.
ical order of publication. (A) The Unfinished Man
(A) Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (B) Gitanjali
(B) My Experiments with Truth (C) Jejuri
(C) Prison and Chocolate Cake (D) The Sceptred Flute
(D) My Story Choose the correct answer from the options given
below. (a) (B), (A), (D), (C) (b) (D), (B), (C), (A)
(a) (D), (A), (C), (B) (b) (C), (B), (A), (D) (c) (B), (D), (A), (C) (d) (B), (D), (C), (A)
(c) (B), (A), (C), (D) (d) (B), (C), (A), (D) 85. Arrange the following plays in their chronological
80. Arrange the following 19th Century magazines in the order.
chronological order of their publication. (A) The Tempest
(A) The London Magazine (B) All For Love
(B) Quarterly Review (C) Volpone
(C) The Spectator (D) The School for Scandal
(D) Edinburgh Review Choose the correct answer from the options given
below. (a) (A), (C), (B), (D) (b) (C), (A), (B), (D)
(a) (A), (D), (C), (B) (b) (B), (A), (D), (C) (c) (C), (B), (A), (D) (d) (A), (D), (B), (C)
(c) (D), (B), (A), (C) (d) (C), (D), (B), (A) 86. Given below are two statements, One is labelled as
81. Arrange the following in the chronological order of Assertion A and the other is labelled as Reason R.
their publication. Assertion (A): No piece of research will be the first of
(A) Past and Present its kind.
(B) Leviathan Reason (R): The reliability of progress in knowledge is
(C) Unto This Last dependent on the honesty of the researchers.
(D) The Life of Samuel Johnson In the light of the above statements, choose the correct
Choose the correct answer from the options given below. answer from the options given below.
(a) (B), (D), (A), (C) (b) (C), (D), (A), (B) (a) Both (A) and (R) are true and (R) is the correct
(c) (B), (A), (D), (C) (d) (C), (A), (D), (B) explanation of (A)
82. Arrange the following novels in the chronological order (b) Both (A) and (R) are true but (R) is NOT the cor-
of their publication. rect, explanation of (A)
(A) The White Tiger (B) A Tiger for Malgudi (c) (A) is true but (R) is false
(C) A Suitable Boy (D) Heat and Dust (d) (A) is false but (R) is true
xxxviii NTA 2020 - Shift 2
87. Given below are two statements. In the light of the above statements, choose the Correct
Statement. I: Cultures and cultural meanings are the answer from the options given below.
same the world over. (a) Both Statement I and Statement II are true
Statement. II: It is impossible to divide the world into (b) Both Statement I and Statement II are false
exclusive cultural blocs. (c) Statement I is correct but Statement II is false
In the light of the above statements, choose the Correct (d) Statement I is incorrect but Statement II is true
Direction for Questions 91–93: Read the following passage
(a) Both Statement I and Statement II are true
and answer the questions that follow.
(b) Both Statement I and Statement II are false
(c) Statement I is correct but Statement II is false ‘WHEN I’M ALONE
(d) Statement I is incorrect but Statement II is true ‘When I’m alone’– the words tripped off his tongue
88. Given below are two statements, One is labelled as As though to be alone were nothing strange.
Assertion A and the other is labelled as Reason R. ‘When I was young’, he said, *when I was young ...’
Assertion (A): Understanding the meaning of any cul- I thought of age, and loneliness, and change,
tural form would not simply locate it within a specific I thought how strange we grow when we re alone,
culture. And how unlike the selves that meet, and talk,
Reason (R): Cultural forms are best studied in terms And blow the candles out, and say good-night,
of how these fit into the intersection between different Alone ...The word is life endured and known.
cultural networks. It is the stillness where our spirits walk
In the light of the above statements, choose the most And all but in most faith is overthrown.]
appropriate answer from the options given below: —Siegfried Sassoon
(a) Both (A) and (R) are correct and (R) is the cor- 91. For the speaker of the words ‘When I’m alone’, being
rect explanation of (A) alone is
(b) Both (A) and (R) are correct but (R) is NOT the (a) The normal fate of a human being all his life
correct explanation of (A) (b) The normal fate of a human being when he is
(c) (A) is correct but (R) is not correct young
(d) (A) is not correct but (R) is correct (c) Not unlike being with others whom we meet
89. Given below are two statements, One is labelled as (d) Not strange as a person should feel alone
Assertion A and the other is labelled as Reason R. 92. For the poet, ‘Being alone’ is a condition conducive to
Assertion (A): English today is not only the language (a) happiness of the self
we teach but also the subject that enables its learners (b) becoming different from others
to become subtle and tough minded readers (c) growing up in an unexpected way
Reason (R): Students are encouraged to think and (d) thinking in a strange way
analyse the historical and ontological status of the tests 93. Which two of the following statements aptly captures
they read, and how best to read them. the meaning of ‘Alone’ for thinking beings?
In the light of the above statements, choose the most (A) Meeting talking and bidding goodnight
appropriate answer from the options given below. (B) Quietude and calmness of self
(a) Both (A) and (R) are correct and (R) is the correct (C) Life lived and understood
explanation of (A) (D) Becoming free from faith
(b) Both (A) and (B) are correct but (R) is NOT the Choose the correct answer from the options given
correct explanation of (A) below.
(c) (A) is correct but (R) is not correct (a) (A) and (B) Only (b) (B) and (C) Only
(d) (A) is not correct but (R) is correct (c) (C) and (A) Only (d) (D) and (B) Only
90. Given below are two statements. Direction for Questions 94–95: Read the following passage
Statement I: The Education Commission (1964-66) and answer questions that follow.
recommended the removal of English as a medium of Poetry, as a mania - one of Plato’s two higher forms of
instruction at the college level. ‘divine’ mania – has, in all its species, a mere insanity inci-
Statement II: English is still largely the language of dental to it, the ‘defect of its quality’, into which it may lapse
administration and jurisprudence in India. in its moment of weakness; and the insanity which follows a
NTA 2020 - Shift 2 xxxix
vivid poetic anthropomorphism like that of Rossetti may be 96. Who is the speaker of the above lines?
noted here and there in his work, in a forced and almost gro- (a) Helena (b) Thisbe
tesque materialising of abstractions, as Dante also became at (c) Peasblossom (d) Hermia
times a mere subject of the scholastic realism of the Middle 97. The above lines are addressed to
Age. (a) Theseus (b) Egeus
—Walter Pater (c) Oberon (d) Plilostrate
94. In the above, passage poetry is described as one of 98. Who was in love with Demetrius?
Plato’s two higher forms of ‘divine’ madness. Which is (a) Hippolyte (b) Helena
the other one? (c) Thisbe (d) Hermia
Choose the correct option?
(a) Beloved (b) Love Direction for Questions 99–100: Read the following and
(c) Jealously (d) Lover then answer the questions that follow.
He went to work in this preparatory lesson, not unlike
95. In Rossetti, the forced personifications may be Morgiana in the Forty Thieves looking into all the vessels
(A) an incidental defect of poetic quality ranged before him, one after another, to see what they con-
(B) examples of a madness of thought tained. Say, good M’Choakumchild. When from thy boiling
(C) an exaggerated concretisation of things store, thou shalt fill each jar brim full by-and-by; dost thou
(D) a divinely inspired poetic expression think that thou wilt always kill outright the robber Fancy lurk-
Choose the most appropriate answer from the options ing within — or sometimes only maim him and distort him.
given below. —Dickens Hard Times
(a) (A) and (B) Only (b) (D) and (C) Only
99. In the expression ‘... looking into all the vessels ranged
(c) (B) and (A) Only (d) (C) and (A) Only
before him...’, which one of the following devices is
Direction for Questions 96–98: Read the following passage used?
and answer questions. (a) Synecdoche (b) Metonymy
‘I do entreat your grace to pardon me. (c) Metaphor (d) Simile
I know not by what power I am made bold, 100. ‘Fancy’ is opposed to which two of the following?
Nor how it may concern my modesty. (A) Emotion (B) Reason
In such a presence here to plead my thoughts: (C) Fact (D) Imagination
But I beseech your grace that I may know Choose the correct answer from the options given
The worst that may be fall me in this case. below.
If I refuse to wed Demetrius.’ (a) (B) and (C) Only (b) (C) and (D) Only
— A Midsummer’s Night Dream (c) (A) and (C) Only (d) (B) and (D) Only
answer keys
1. (b) 2. (b) 3. (c) 4. (b) 5. (c) 6. (d) 7. (b) 8. (c) 9.∗ (b) 10. (b)
11. (b) 12. (c) 13. (b) 14. (c) 15. (c) 16. (d) 17. (b) 18. (c) 19. (c) 20. (c)
21. (b) 22. (c) 23. (a) 24. (b) 25. (c) 26. (b) 27. (b) 28. (d) 29. (a) 30. (b)
31. (b) 32. (b) 33. (b) 34. (c) 35. (b) 36. (b) 37. (c) 38. (d) 39. (b) 40. (b)
41.∗ (a) 42. (c) 43. (a) 44. (d) 45. (c) 46. (b) 47. (a) 48. (d) 49. (b) 50. (c)
51. (b) 52. (a) 53. (a) 54. (d) 55. (b) 56. (a) 57. (d) 58. (d) 59. (c) 60. (b)
61. (c) 62. (b) 63. (d) 64. (b) 65. (c) 66. (c) 67. (c) 68. (c) 69. (c) 70. (c)
71. (c) 72. (d) 73. (d) 74. (c) 75. (d) 76. (b) 77. (c) 78. (c) 79. (c) 80. (c)
81. (a) 82. (a) 83.∗ (d) 84. (c) 85. (b) 86. (b) 87. (d) 88. (a) 89. (a) 90. (d)
91. (a) 92. (c) 93. (b) 94. (b) 95. (d) 96. (d) 97. (a) 98. (b) 99. (c) 100. (a)
* This question has been dropped by NTA.
British Poetry 1.1
CHAPTER
British Poetry 1
IN THIS CHAPTER
➧ Old English Poetry ➧ The Pre-romantic Age
➧ Middle English Poetry ➧ The Romantic Age
➧ The Revival of Learning ➧ Characteristics of English Romantic Poetry
➧ The Renaissance ➧ The Victorian Age
➧ The Poetry of Puritan and ➧ Modernism
The Restoration Age ➧ Postmodernism
Old English Poetry only his Hymn on creation is extant. We don’t know—where,
when, by who, or for whom these poems were produced.
Only some 30,000 lines of Old English Poetry are extant
which roughly is equivalent to the total output of Chaucer. Features of the Old English Poetry
Old English Poetry comes out of four manuscripts—Vercelli,
• Old English poetry was written in continuous lines just
Exeter, Beowulf and Junius manuscripts. Junius’s manu-
like prose. No punctuation marks or capitalisation is pre-
script is coherently planned and carefully written. Poems
sent in the composition of lines.
are divided into 56 numbered sections. An important poem
• Lack of record of authorship for the majority of poems,
in this manuscript is Christ and Satan. Vercelli’s manuscript
since Old English Poetry was transmitted orally and was
contains only religious poetry. From its 23 Homilies and six
collected and written down by scribes of the Church and
poems, The Dream of the Rood is one of the important poems.
not by the real composers. Authors of the poems are
Exeter contains both religious and secular poetry. The manu-
known only in three cases:
script consists of elegiac poems like The Wanderer and The ■9-lines of poem: Hymns attributed to Caedmon.
Seafarer. It contains 95 riddles also. ■5-lines of Bede’s death song attributed to The Venerable
Much of Old English Poetry probably existed in oral
Bede.
form since Beowulf references various heroes from earlier ■4 poems: The fates of the apostles, Elene, Christ and
poetry only and a Latin writer William of Malmesbury said
Juliana—all attributed to Cynewulf.
that the source of Anglo Saxon kings contained in his writ-
• Digressions, alliteration, compounding, enjambment
ings is from the old English songs. The extant body of Old
are chief characteristics of Old English Poetry.
English Poetry is the composition of the Church since only
the Church had a monopoly overwriting. So, this way, reli- Heroic or Historical Poetry
gious poems fared better.
The Angles, Saxons and Jutes (Germanic tribes) brought
Most of the secular poems were never written and the
with them to England, a code of heroic values, i.e., profound
religious poetry also disappeared as it became unintelligi-
loyalty to kin and countrymen, devotion to duty and a mutual
ble to the scribes of that time. The Venerable Bede says that
sense of obligation. These heroic values further translated
Caedmon composed a vast corpus of religious poetry, but
M01 UGC NET English Paper 2 XXXX 01.indd 1 2/15/2021 5:36:47 PM

1.2 Chapter 1
into sharing of war booty, a collective desire of possessing the epic. For example, a northern chronicler Chochilaicus’
honour and glory and a love of oral poetry, which often dealt plundering expedition to the Rhine; his battles with the
with narrating the history of their people. The tradition of Franks, were a great feat achieved by the nephew of Hygelac
adherence to values was taken utmost sincerely. For exam- when he crosses a great distance just by swimming. But some
ple, it was a disgrace for a chief to be surpassed by his fol- scholars assume that all the events which inspired Beowulf
lowers in courage and it was deemed a lifelong shame and took place on English soil.
infamy if the followers returned to their homelands without Beowulf remains the greatest epic in all of English
chief (i.e., returning alive after the chief’s death in a battle). Literature.
With such bravery, it was only natural to remain occupied
with the speculations and aspirations of battles, honour, kin-
The Battle of Maldon
ship and thus borne out the Anglo Saxon heroic poetry. ‘…and that was broken. Then Byrhtnoth
Let’s look at some of the representative Old English commanded his courageous warriors To dismount
Heroic Poetry. quickly and drive off their horses, Move forward
on foot, trusting hands and hearts’
Beowulf
The poem describes the battle fought between Anglo Saxons
swá begnornodon Géata léode
and Vikings in the year 991. Anglo Saxons are portrayed to
hláfordes hryre, heorðgenéatas,
be an advantage. Grand speeches were made in the middle
cwaédon þæt hé waére wyruldcyninga
of violent clashes. Moral judgments were taken when the
manna mildust ond monðwaérust,
arrows were suspended in the air. Though the poem recounts
léodum líðost ond lofgeornost.
actual battle, the reporting is not rather the narration is done
thus be mourned the people of the Geats as done in the heroic poetry. Vikings ask the Anglo Saxon
their lord’s fall, his hearth-companions: representative Byrhtnoth to play a fair battle, so he allows the
they said that he was, of all kings of the world, former a safe passage owing to his overweening pride and
the most generous of men, and the most gracious, the Vikings’ mocking of the English. This decision eventually
the most protective of his people, and the most eager for decided the outcome of the battle.
the honour.
Deor’s Lament
Beowulf is possibly the oldest surviving Old English Poem.
The date of its composition is not certain however, it is sup- ‘A man sits alone in the clutch of sorrow, Separated
posed to be written between the Eighth and the Eleventh from joy, thinking to himself That his share of
Century. This is classified as an epic, which consists of 3182 suffering is endless. The man knows that all
alliterative lines. through middle-earth, Wise God goes, handing out
The poem’s setting is Scandinavia. Beowulf is the hero fortunes, Giving grace to many—power, prosperity,
who belongs to Geatland. He comes to help Hrothgar, the wisdom, wealth—but some a share of woe.’
king of Danes. Hrothgar is terrified by a monster that attacks Deor’s Lament is a special poem in a way that it contains stan-
his mead hall situated in Heorot. Beowulf soon kills the mon- zas that include a refrain (explained below). The poem can
ster, cutting his arm. Grendel’s killing is followed by the mon- be interpreted variously as—a dramatic monologue, a beg-
ster’s mother, which is also defeated the next night. Beowulf ging poem, an elegy, a poem of consolation and a charm
is rewarded for this deed, lands and titles are given to him. for good fortune. Deor, the narrator makes stories out of
Beowulf then returns to his home (Geatland) where he’s pro- the Germanic legends and history and shapes moral reflec-
claimed as the king of Geats (Beowulf was the nephew of for- tions on them. The poem is divided into stanzas in which a
mer Geat King, Hygelac). After around 50 years, his people are different story of misfortune and suffering is narrated. Each
again terrified by a robbed dragon, which the brave Beowulf stanza, however, ends up with a refrain,
also defeats. In this battle, everyone flees except Wiglaf who
‘That passed over–so can this.’
strikes the dragon with a fatal blow, Beowulf then cut the
dragon into two pieces. But he’s fatally wounded in this final The refrain is added to assert that sorrow is a commonplace
battle as his sword failed him. The unselfish hero is then given and a temporary thing, one should be hopeful that it shall
an honourable funeral by his people in the Geatland. pass away soon with time.
The poem is assumed by the northern legends of Beowa, The opening stanza deals with the story of a famous
a half-divine hero and the legends of monster Grendel. smith Weland (also mentioned in the poem Beowulf) who
Various historical events and personages are celebrated in is enslaved and wounded by King Nithhad so that he can

British Poetry 1.3
make beautiful objects for him. To avenge, Weland seduces The Wanderer
the King’s daughter Beadohild, kills his sons and present ‘Often alone at the edge of dawn, I must wake to
him bowls shaped out of his sons’ skulls. In the second the sound of my sorrow,
stanza, Beadohild’s pain surpasses the sorrow of her broth- The mute song of a muffled heart, Sung to no
ers’ death when she discovers that she is conceiving a child. listener, no lord alive.’
According to some legends, however, Weland and Beadohild
reconciled later and their son Widia became a great hero. This is a powerful as well as a puzzling poem that has inspired
The third stanza narrates the story of Mæthhild and Geat poets like W. H. Auden and writers like J. R. R. Tolkien to
who shared ‘bottomless love’. Mæthhild remains anxious such extent that they used the elements of this poem in their
and spends ‘sleepless nights’ for being in unfulfilled love. works. It is a monologue.
The fourth stanza narrates the story of King Theodoric who The speaker of the poem is a wanderer who is in the
ruled a place Mærings for thirty winters (in Anglo Saxon worst possible situation that any Anglo Saxon warrior can
England, years were marked from winters). He is portrayed be in his heroic age. He has lost his lord and comrades and
in various legends, a tyrant at some, while a victim at other therefore he has no place and identity in society. He is alone
places. The fifth stanza deals with the story of a Fourth- physically and mentally. The enemy can seize him anytime.
Century tyrant King Ermanaric. His subjects are so fed up The speaker wants to find a resolution and recovery to his
with him that they wish some outsider attacks the kingdom dilemma. He wants to renew himself into a wiser self and
and dethrone him. seeks a new homeland, ‘philosophical’ or religious. The
In the second part of the poem after the fifth stanza, speaker constantly moves between personal sorrow and gen-
Deor narrates his own story. He tells that he was once a scop eralisations of it to console himself.
or a singer in the court of Heodenings before being replaced First-person and Third-person narrative are used.
by another singer Heorrenda. So Deor shows a transition (Third-person narration is employed to perceive the dis-
from being at a beloved place in a King’s Court to spend- heartening situation of the speaker with balanced, unbiased
ing life in loneliness and exile. His pain is twofold—firstly, and reflective eyes. And to make the speaker realise that it
he misses his comfortable life at the court and secondly, he happens with everyone (pain is universal). The wanderer
cannot recall the songs he once used to sing. He remembers generalises that ‘the wise man who ponders this ruin of a life’
them now only in bits and pieces. will remember his past hall-joys, so on pondering he cries
out, ‘Where has the horse gone? Where is the rider? Where is
Elegies the giver of the gifts?’
While we think of an Elegy as a lamentation on a particu- The Latin motif Ubi Sunt which implies (where are they)
lar person’s death and the celebrations of the subject’s life expresses the lament over the loss and the recognition of
achievements, but the Old English Elegies were different. transience. With this realisation, the speaker says that every-
These Elegies were dramatic monologues in which the thing in life is fleeting—friends, goods, kith and kin. On the
speaker expressed some sense of separation and suffering speaker’s realisation, the poet comments that this is a wise
and then tried to come to terms with the reality by some form man reflecting upon his past.
of consolation. Keeping his faith, the speaker at the end finally sits
These Elegies share some common elements which are in contemplation, not concerned about the pain any-
as follows: more. He must now seek mercy from his Father in heaven,
as that is the only place where transience of the world is
• Contain a lamenting speaker who is isolated or exiled. transcended. The wanderer can ‘perform a cure on his
• Speaker reveals the longing for earlier days and the own heart.’
loved ones.
• The mental states of the speaker keep fluctuating (hal- The Seafarer
lucination, dreams and memories). ‘Let us aspire to arrive in eternal bliss, where life
• Speaker analyses the misfortunes through reason and is attained in the love of the Lord,
rationality.
• Use of proverbial wisdom.
Where hope and joy reside in the heavens. Thanks
• A constant search for consolation (often in religious
be to Holy God, the Lord of Glory, Who honoured
thoughts).
us and made us worthy, Our glorious Creator,
• Depicts bad weather to symbolise the unstable and cha-
eternal through all time. Amen.’
otic mental states.

1.4 Chapter 1
This poem is a bit puzzling to critics due to the different (between us)’ has baffled the critics now and ever. However,
voices it echoes. In the first half of the dramatic monologue, most critics agree that this is a dramatic monologue by a
the speaker comments on his journey to the sea. He contrasts woman who is separated from her lover Wulf and is in an
it with the joys of the hall, songs and communal food to the unhappy marriage with her husband Eadwacer.
tumult of waves of the high seas, preferring the latter happily. The poem is addressed to Wulf, who’s probably her
The journey to the sea is the test of his strength and spirit. lover. Eadwacer is mentioned in line 19, but the problem is
Strangely, the speaker does not mention the sea or land that ‘Eadwacer’ literally means ‘guardian of wealth or for-
again in the middle of the poem. And he turns contemplative tune’. So critics cannot decide exactly whether Eadwacer is a
and religious. This act of forgetting is symbolic of the renun- different person (and probably husband) or Wulf himself, or
ciation of the temporal world and the approval of the quest God. The only certainty is the speaker’s lamentation over the
for eternal bliss. separation and fear for the safety of her lost one.
While the Wanderer was reluctantly pushed to exile and a There is another theory that guesses Wulf as the speak-
lifelong road of suffering, the Seafarer deliberately chooses his er’s child and that the poem is a mother’s lament for her lost
path of loneliness and suffering. Because only through suffer- or separated son.
ing can, he realises the transience of this life and realises the
stability of the eternal afterlife. The poem ends with ‘Amen’. Riddles
The Wife’s Lament There are over 90 Riddles in the Exeter manuscript. These
Riddles are lyrical and largely based on Latin Riddles. They
‘I tell this story from my grasp of sorrow—I tear this
may be the compositions of a single or multiple author(s).
song from a clutch of grief. My stretch of misery
(Cynewulf was once considered the author, but that is
from birth to bed rest has been unending, no more
unlikely due to the difference in stylistics).
than now. My mind wanders—my heart hurts.’
The use of Riddles or Riddlic metaphors served as a rhe-
This poem is variously read like a riddle, an allegory for the torical device in medieval dialogue poetry. It also expanded
longing of Christ, a retainer’s lament for the lost lord and the limits of the perceptive powers of the receiver of Riddles
even as a cry of a soul from beyond the grave. But the critics when they started the guessing game. It helped to move
largely agree on it as a poem of love and lament of a woman beyond the ordinary mode of thought and helped to appreci-
speaker who has lost her husband. ate the otherness of the world, especially the natural world.
It follows the pattern of other Old English Elegies. The Old English Riddles are based upon the techniques of
It begins with a heartfelt cry, shows the struggle for finding metaphors and metamorphosis.
consolation in the middle and ends with a generalised piece J. R. R. Tolkien perceives Riddles to have a connection
of wisdom. The speaker does not know why her husband left with ‘the spirit of poetry’ which sees things, whether famil-
her. She discovers that he was probably plotting a murder. iar or strange, in the light of resemblance to other things
The husband hid his thoughts and remains enigmatic to her. and in comparison illuminates both the thing and the thing
So she constantly moves between the memories of their time observed—a cloud as a bird, smoke, a sail, cattle on a blue
together and the realisation of this enigmatic element and pasture’.
overall loss.
The uncertainty and enigma on the part of the husband Gnomic or Wisdom Poems
confuse her. She cannot decide whether to pity or curse him. This category includes a diversity of genres like Charms,
She is not sure of anything, the only surety in her elegiac Maxims or Gnomes, Proverbs, Advice Poems and Homiletic
song. Longing and anger are beautifully mixed in this elegy. Poems.
Wulf and Eadwacer The Gnomic Poems are didactic and moralistic. The
writers of these poems impart life advice or chant them to
‘Wulf, my Wulf, my old longings, My hopes, and
cure illness or tell them how to act in various situations.
fears, have made me ill; You’re seldom coming
These poems beautifully mix mystery, ambiguity and gaps in
and my worrying heart Have made me sick, not
meaning.
lack of food.’
Examples: Maxims II (Cotton Maxims), Charm for Wens
The language of this Elegy is deliberately obscure. The (or Tumours), Charms for a Swarm of Bees, Charm for a
enigmatic half-line refrain, ‘It’s different (unlike) for us Sudden Stitch, The Fortunes of Men, etc.

British Poetry 1.5
Religious Poems is described as ‘The Measurer’, ‘The Glory-Father’, ‘Eternal

Lord’, ‘Holy Creator’. The ‘Holy Creator’ first created heaven
Christianity was introduced to the Germanic pagan invader’s
as a ‘roof’ for the ‘men’s sons’. After the sky, the earth is cre-
Anglo Saxons when they settled permanently in England.
ated (middle earth) by the ‘Master Almighty’.
The Anglo Saxon King Edwin asks his counsellors about the
The poem contains various figures of speech like Simile,
new faith. His chief priest admits that the old religion now
Alliteration, Caesura, Kenning and Metaphors. The theme is
seems powerless and bereft of any value.
Religion and Time.
The Religious Poetry in Old English includes the nar-
rative treatment of Old Testament Stories, Stories of Saint’s
lives, Depictions of Christ as a hero and Homiletic Poems. The KEY POINTS
Dream of the Rood and Caedmon’s Hymn are included as reli-
• On 26 November 1882, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote to
gious poems.
his fellow poet and friend Robert Bridges: ‘I am learning
Below are the famous Old English Religious Poems
Anglo Saxon and it is a vastly superior thing to what we
Caedmon’s Hymn have now.’
• W. H. Auden too was inspired by his first experience of
‘Now let us praise the Creator and Guardian Old English Literature: ‘I was spellbound. This poetry, I
Of the heavenly kingdom, his power, and knew, was going to be my dish. . . I learned enough to
purpose, His mind and might, his wondrous read it, and Anglo Saxon and Middle English Poetry have
works. He shaped each miraculous beginning, been one of my strongest, most lasting influences.’
each living creature, each earthly kind.’ • The list of modern poets who have been influenced by
Caedmon’s Hymn is a milestone in Anglo Saxon history. It is Old English Literature (that term is now generally pre-
the first poem that sets down the new Christian teachings, ferred to ‘Anglo Saxon’ when referring to the language
newly accepted by the Germanic settlers. Caedmon is con- and vernacular writings of Pre-Conquest England)
sidered as the first English poet who wrote the first English could be extended to include Pound, Graves, Wilbur and
poem. His poems contained new forms and new imageries many others.
and were treated as the product of a Christian miracle. • ‘Beowulf’ was translated by Irish poet Seamus Heaney
Caedmon’s Hymn is extant due to the writings of and ‘The Seafarer’ by Ezra Pound.
Venerable. The Venerable Bede, as Caedmon himself was an • W. H. Auden reintroduced Anglo Saxon accentual meter
illiterate farmer. According to The Venerable Bede’s story, (fixed number of stresses per line or stanza regardless
Caedmon was a local peasant turned poet turned monk. of the number of syllables that are present) to English
Caedmon drank mead (an alcoholic beverage), was illiterate, poetry.
tone-deaf and shy. During feasts, people used to sing turn by
turn. He was so shy that when his turn came to sing and the
harp (a musical instrument) came near him, he gave up his Middle English Poetry
food in the middle and used to leave the feast. But one such
night as he left, he saw in a dream someone who is inspiring
Norman Conquest/Battle of Hastings
him to sing some song. When he woke up, he sang that song (1066–1340)
often and after. Caedmon’s words became a rage, when The Norman Conquest was the military conquest of England by
Venerable Bede came across those words he recorded it as William, Duke of Normandy, primarily effected by his deci-
Caedmon’s Hymn in a line by a line Latin translation. sive victory at the Battle of Hastings (1066) and resulting
This nine-line poem beautifully describes the creation of ultimately in profound political, administrative and social
everything—the establishment of the Universe, the creation changes in the British Isles. There was an overthrow of the
of the Earth, the inauguration of Time and the origination Government of England in 1066 by forces of Normandy, a
of Humans. Caedmon praises God for the creation of every- province of northern France, under the leadership of William
thing. It is spoken in the first person plural (‘Now we must the Conqueror. William proclaimed himself King of England
praise Heaven-Kingdom’s Guardian’) where God is described after defeating the English King Harold at the Battle of
as the ‘Heaven-kingdom’s Guardian’. The poem contains the Hastings. Before the Normans, the Saxons ruled England for
technique of Kenning and Caesura. In the next few lines, God 600 years since Roman times.

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to one of his “Fabliaux.” A sinner lies dying, and an angel and a
fiend, after disputing the right to his soul, agree to settle the affair by
a throw of dice. The fiend gets the first chance, and the fatal cubes
come up—two sixes! He chuckles and rubs his claws, for everybody
knows that no higher number is possible. But the angel thinks
otherwise, throws, and, behold, a six and seven! And thus it is, that
when the understanding has done its best, when it has reached, as it
thinks, down to the last secret of music and meaning that language
is capable of, the poetical sense comes in with its careless miracle,
and gets one more point than there are in the dice.
Imagination is not necessarily concerned with poetic expression.

Nothing can be more poetical than the lines of Henry More the
Platonist:
What doth move

The nightingale to sing so fresh and clear?
The thrush or lark, that mounting high above,
Chants her shrill notes to heedless ears of corn,
Heavily hanging in the dewy morn.
But compare it with Keats’
Ruth, when sick for home,

She stood in tears amid the alien corn.
The imagination has touched that word “alien,” and in it we see the
field through Ruth’s eyes, as she looked round on the hostile spikes,
and not through those of the poet.
Imagination enters more or less into the composition of all great

minds, all minds that have what we call breadth as distinguished
from mere force or acuteness. We find it in philosophers like Plato
and Bacon, in discoverers like Kepler and Newton, in fanatics like
George Fox, and in reformers like Luther.
The shape which the imaginative faculty will take is modified by the
force of the other qualities with which it is coördinated in the mind. If
the moral sense predominates, the man becomes a reformer, or a
fanatic, and his imagination gets itself uttered in his life. Bunyan
would have been nothing but a fanatic, if he had not been luckily
shut up in Bedford jail, alone with his imagination, which, unable to
find vent in any other way, possessed and tortured him till it had
wrung the “Pilgrim’s Progress” out of him—a book the nearest to a
poem, without being one, that ever was written. Uniting itself with the
sense of form, Imagination makes a sculptor; with those of form and
color, a painter; with those of time and tune, a musician. For in itself
it is dumb, and can find expression only through the help of some
other faculty.
Imagination plus the poetic sense is poesy, minus the poetic sense it
is science, though it may clothe itself in verse. To those who are
familiar with Dr. Donne’s verses, I need only mention his name as a
proof of my last position. He solves problems in rhyme, that is all.
Shakspeare was so charged with the highest form of the poetic

imagination, as some persons are with electricity, that he could not
point his finger at a word without a spark of it going out of him. I will
illustrate it by an example taken at random from him. When Romeo
is parting from Juliet, Shakspeare first projects his own mind into
Romeo, and then, as Romeo becomes so possessed with the
emotion of the moment that his words take color from it, all nature is
infected and is full of partings. He says:
But look what envious streaks

Do lace the severing clouds.
Shakspeare’s one hundred and thirteenth sonnet was here also

quoted in illustration.
The highest form of imagination, Mr. Lowell said, is the dramatic, of

which Shakspeare must always stand for the only definition. Next is
the narrative imagination, where the poet forces his own personal
consciousness upon us and makes our senses the slaves of his
own. Of this kind Dante’s “Divina Commedia” is the type. Below this
are the poems in which the imagination is more diffused; where the
impression we receive is rather from mass than from particulars;
where single lines are not so strong in themselves as in forming
integral portions of great sweeps of verse; where effects are
produced by allusion and suggestion, by sonorousness, by the use
of names which have a traditional poetic value. Of this kind Milton is
the type.
Lastly, said Mr. Lowell, I would place in a class by themselves those

poets who have properly no imagination at all, but only a pictorial
power. These we may call the imaginary poets, writers who give us
images of things that neither they nor we believe in or can be
deceived by, like pictures from a magic lantern. Of this kind are the
Oriental poems of Southey, which show a knowledge of Asiatic
mythologies, but are not livingly mythologic.
Where the imagination is found in combination with great acuteness

of intellect, we have its secondary or prose form. Lord Bacon is an
example of it. Sir Thomas Browne is a still more remarkable one—a
man who gives proof of more imagination than any other Englishman
except Shakspeare.
Fancy is a frailer quality than Imagination, and cannot breathe the

difficult air of the higher regions of intuition. In combination with
Sentiment it produces poetry; with Experience, wit. The poetical
faculty is in closer affinity with Imagination; the poetical temperament
with Fancy. Contrast Milton with Herrick or Moore. In illustration Mr.
Lowell quoted from Marvell, the poet of all others whose fancy hints
always at something beyond itself, and whose wit seems to have
been fed on the strong meat of humor.
As regards man, Fancy takes delight in life, manners, and the result
of culture, in what may be called Scenery; Imagination is that
mysterious something which we call Nature—the unfathomed base
on which Scenery rests and is sustained. Fancy deals with feeling;
Imagination with passion. I have sometimes thought that
Shakspeare, in the scene of the “Tempest,” intended to typify the isle
of Man, and in the characters, some of the leading qualities or
passions which dwell in it. It is not hard to find the Imagination in
Prospero, the Fancy in Ariel, and the Understanding in Caliban; and,
as he himself was the poetic imagination incarnated, is it considering
too nicely to think that there is a profound personal allusion in the
breaking of Prospero’s wand and the burying of his book to the
nature of that man who, after such thaumaturgy, could go down to
Stratford and live there for years, only collecting his dividends from
the Globe Theatre, lending money on mortgage, and leaning over
the gate to chat and chaffer with his neighbors?
I think that every man is conscious at times that it is only his borders,
his seaboard, that is civilized and subdued. Behind that narrow strip
stretches the untamed domain, shaggy, unexplored, of the natural
instincts. Is not this so? Then we can narrow our definition yet
farther, and say that Fancy and Wit appear to the artificial man;
Imagination and Humor to the natural man. Thus each of us in his
dual capacity can at once like Chaucer and Pope, Butler and Jean
Paul, and bury the hatchet of one war of tastes.
And now, finally, what is the secret of the great poet’s power over
us? There is something we love better than love, something that is
sweeter to us than riches, something that is more inspiring to us than
success—and that is the imagination of them. No woman was ever
loved enough, no miser was ever rich enough, no ambitious man
ever successful enough, but in imagination. Every desire of the heart
finds its gratification in the poet because he speaks always
imaginatively and satisfies ideal hungers. We are the always-
welcome guests of his ennobling words.
This, then, is why the poet has always been held in reverence
among men. All nature is dumb, and we men have mostly but a
stunted and stuttering speech. But the longing of every created thing
is for utterance and expression. The Poet’s office, whether we call
him Seer, Prophet, Maker, or Namer, is always this—to be the Voice
of this lower world. Through him, man and nature find at last a
tongue by which they can utter themselves and speak to each other.
The beauties of the visible world, the trembling attractions of the
invisible, the hopes and desires of the heart, the aspirations of the
soul, the passions and the charities of men; nay, the trees, the rocks,
our poor old speechless mother, the earth herself, become voice and
music, and attain to that humanity, a divine instinct of which is
implanted in them all.
LECTURE II
PIERS PLOUGHMAN’S VISION
(Friday Evening, January 12, 1855)
II
In literature, as in religion and politics, there is a class of men who
may be called Fore-runners. As there were brave men before
Agamemnon, so there must have been brave poets before Homer.
All of us, the great as well as the little, are the result of the entire
Past. It is but just that we should remember now and then that the
very dust in the beaten highways of thought is that of perhaps
nameless saints and heroes who thought and suffered and died to
make commonplace practicable to us. Men went to the scaffold or
the stake for ideas and principles which we set up in our writings and
our talk as thoughtlessly as a printer sticks his type, and the country
editor, when he wrote his last diatribe on the freedom of the press,
dipped his pen without knowing it in the blood of the martyrs. It would
be well for us to remember, now and then, our dusty benefactors,
and to be conscious that we are under bonds to the Present to the
precise amount that we are indebted to the Past.
Thus, from one point of view, there is nothing more saddening than a
biographical dictionary. It is like a graveyard of might-have-beens
and used-to-be’s, of fames that never ripened and of fames already
decayed. Here lies the great Thinker who stammered and could not
find the best word for his best thought, and so the fame went to
some other who had the gift of tongues. Here lies the gatherer of
great masses of learning from which another was to distil the
essence, and to get his name upon all the phials and show-bills. But
if these neglected headstones preach the vanity of a selfish
ambition, they teach also the better lesson that every man’s activity
belongs not to himself but to his kind, and whether he will or not
must serve at last some other, greater man. We are all foot-soldiers,
and it is out of the blood of a whole army of us that iron enough is
extracted to make the commemorative sword that is voted to the
great Captain.
In that long aqueduct which brings the water of life down to us from
its far sources in the Past, though many have done honest day-labor
in building it, yet the keystone that unites the arch of every period is
engraved with the name of the greatest man alone. These are our
landmarks, and mentally we measure by these rather than by any
scheme of Chronology. If we think of Philosophy, we think of four or
five great names, and so of Poetry, Astronomy, and the rest. Geology
may give what age she will to the globe; it matters not, it will still be
only so many great men old; and wanting these, it is in vain that
Egypt and Assyria show us their long bead-roll of vacant centuries. It
is in the life of its great men that the life and thought of a people
becomes statuesque, rises into poetry, and makes itself sound out
clearly in rhythm and harmony.
These great persons get all the fame and all the monuments like the
generals of armies, though we may lead the forlorn hope, or make a
palpitating bridge with our bodies in the trenches. Rank and file may
grumble a little—but it is always so, and always must be so. Fame
would not be fame if it were or could be divided infinitesimally, and
every man get his drachm and scruple. It is good for nothing unless it
come in a lump. And besides, if every man got a monument or an
epitaph who felt quite sure he deserved it, would marble hold out, or
Latin?
The fame of a great poet is made up of the sum of all the

appreciations of many succeeding generations, each of which he
touches at some one point. He is like a New World into which
explorer after explorer enters, one to botanize, one to geologize, one
to ethnologize, and each bringing back his report. His great snowy
mountains perhaps only one man in a century goes to the top of and
comes back to tell us how he saw from them at once the two great
oceans of Life and Death, the Atlantic out of which we came, the
Pacific toward which we tend.
Of the poet we do not ask everything, but the best expression of the
best of everything. If a man attain this but once, though only in a frail
song, he is immortal; while every one who falls just short of it, if only
by a hair’s breadth, is as sure to be forgotten. There is a wonderful
secret that poets have not yet learned, and this is that small men
cannot do great things, but that the small man who can do small
things best is great. The most fatal ill-success is to almost succeed,
as, in Italy, the worst lemons are those large ones which come
nearest to being oranges. The secret of permanent fame is to
express some idea the most compactly, whether in your life, your
deed, or your writing. I think that if anything is clear in history, it is
that every idea, whether in morals, politics, or art, which is laboring
to express itself, feels of many men and throws them aside before it
finds the one in whom it can incarnate itself. The noble idea of the
Papacy (for it was a noble one—nothing less than the attempt to
embody the higher law in a human institution) whispered itself to
many before it got the man it wanted in Gregory the Great. And
Protestantism carried numbers to the stake ere it entered into Luther:
a man whom nature made on purpose—all asbestos so that he could
not burn. Doubtless Apollo spoiled many a reed before he found one
that would do to pipe through even to the sheep of Admetus, and the
land of song is scattered thick with reeds which the Muse has
experimented with and thrown away.
It is from such a one that I am going to try to draw a few notes of

music and of mirth to-night. Contemporary with Chaucer lived a man
who satirized the clergy and gave some lively pictures of manners
before the “Canterbury Tales” were written. His poem was very
popular, as appears from the number of manuscript copies of it
remaining, and after being forgotten for two centuries, it was revived
again, printed, widely read, and helped onward the Reformation in
England. It has been reprinted twice during the present century. This
assures us that it must have had a good deal of original force and
vivacity. It may be considered, however, to be tolerably defunct now.
This poem is the vision of Piers Ploughman.
I have no hope of reviving it. Dead poets are something very dead,
and critics blow their trumpets over them in vain. What I think is
interesting and instructive in the poem is that it illustrates in a
remarkable manner what may be considered the Anglo-Saxon
element in English poetry. I refer to race, and not to language. We
find here a vigorous common-sense, a simple and hearty love of
nature, a certain homely tenderness, held in check always by a
dogged veracity. Instead of Fancy we have Feeling; and, what more
especially deserves notice, there is almost an entire want of that
sense of form and outline and proportion which alone brings
anything within the province of Art. Imagination shows itself now and
then in little gleams and flashes, but always in the form of Humor.
For the basis of the Anglo-Saxon mind is beef and beer; what it
considers the real as distinguished from, or rather opposed to, the
ideal. It spares nothing merely because it is beautiful. It is the Anglo-
Saxon who invented the word Humbug, the potent exorcism which
lays the spirit of poetry in the Red Sea. It is he who always translates
Shows into Shams.
Properly speaking, “Piers Ploughman’s Vision” is not a poem at all. It

is a sermon rather, for no verse, the chief end of which is not the
representation of the beautiful, and whose moral is not included in
that, can be called poetry in the true sense of the word. A thought
will become poetical by being put into verse when a horse hair will
turn into a snake by being laid in water. The poetical nature will
delight in Mary Magdalen more for her fine hair than for her
penitence. But whatever is poetical in this book seems to me
characteristically Saxon. The English Muse has mixed blood in her
veins, and I think that what she gets from the Saxon is a certain
something homely and practical, a flavor of the goodwife which is
hereditary. She is the descendant on one side of Poor Richard,
inspired, it is true, but who always brings her knitting in her pocket.
The light of the soul that shines through her countenance, that “light
that never was on land or sea,” is mingled with the warm glow from
the fireside on the hearth of Home. Indeed, may it not be attributed
to the Teutonic heart as something peculiar to it, that it has breadth
enough to embrace at once the chimney-corner and the far-reaching
splendors of Heaven? Happy for it when the smoke and cookery-
steam of the one do not obscure the other!
I find no fault with the author of Piers Ploughman for not being a
poet. Every man cannot be a poet (fortunately), nor every poet a
great one. It is the privilege of the great to be always
contemporaneous, to speak of fugacious events in words that shall
be perennial. But to the poets of the second rate we go for pictures
of manners that have passed away, for transitory facts, for modes of
life and ways of thinking that were circumstantial merely. They give
us reflections of our outward, as their larger brethren do of our
inward, selves. They deal, as it were, with costume; the other with
man himself.
But these details are of interest, so fond are we of facts. We all have
seen the congregation which grew sleepy while the preacher talked
of the other world give a stir of pleased attention if he brought in a
personal anecdote about this. Books are written and printed, and we
read them to tell us how our forefathers cocked their hats, or turned
up the points of their shoes; when blacking and starch were
introduced; who among the Anglo-Saxons carried the first umbrella,
and who borrowed it.
These trifles, also, acquire importance in proportion as they are

older. If a naturalist showed us a toad, we should be indifferent, but if
he told us that it had been found in a block of granite, we should
instantly look with profound interest on a creature that perhaps ate
moths in Abel’s garden, or hopped out of the path of Lamech. And
the same precious jewel of instruction we find in the ugly little facts
embedded in early literatures. They teach us the unchangeableness
of man and his real independence of his accidents. He is the same
old lay figure under all his draperies, and sits to one artist for a John
and to another for a Judas, and serves equally well for both portraits.
The oldest fable reappears in the newest novel. Aristophanes makes
coats that fit us still. Voltaire is Lucian translated into the eighteenth
century. Augustus turns up in Louis Napoleon. The whirligig of Time
brings back at regular intervals the same actors and situations, and
under whatever names—Ormuzd and Ahriman, Protestantism and
Catholicism, Reform and Conservatism, Transcendentalism and
Realism. We see the same ancient quarrel renewed from generation
to generation, till we begin to doubt whether this be truly the steps of
a Tower of Babel that we are mounting, and not rather a treadmill,
where we get all the positive good of the exercise and none of the
theoretic ill which might come if we could once solve the problem of
getting above ourselves. Man’s life continues to be, as the Saxon
noble described it, the flight of a sparrow through a lighted hall, out
of one darkness and into another, and the two questions whence?
and whither? were no tougher to Adam than to us. The author of
Piers Ploughman’s Vision has offered us his theory of this world and
the next, and in doing so gives some curious hints of modes of life
and of thought. It is generally agreed that one of his names was
Langland, and it is disputed whether the other was Robert or William.
Robert has the most authority, and William the strongest arguments
in its favor. It is of little consequence now to him or us. He was
probably a monk at Malvern. His poem is a long one, written in the
unrhymed alliterative measure of the Anglo-Saxon poetry, and the
plan of it is of the simplest kind. It is a continued allegory, in which all
the vices, passions, and follies of the time, the powers of the mind,
the qualities of the spirit, and the theological dogmas of the author,
are personified and mixed up with real personages with so much
simplicity, and with such unconscious interfusion of actual life as to
give the whole an air of probability.
The author of Piers Ploughman’s Vision avoids any appearance of

incongruity by laying his scene in a world which is neither wholly real
nor wholly imaginary—the realm of sleep and dreams. There it does
not astonish us that Langland should meet and talk with the
theological virtues, and that very avoirdupois knights, monks, abbots,
friars, and ploughmen should be found in company with such
questionable characters as Do-well, Do-better, Do-best, Conscience,
Nature, Clergy, and Activa Vita. He has divided his poem into twenty
“steps,” as he calls them, in each of which he falls asleep, has a
dream, and wakes up when it becomes convenient or he is at a loss
what else to do. Meanwhile his real characters are so very real, and
his allegorical ones mingle with them on such a common ground of
easy familiarity, that we forget the allegory altogether. We are not
surprised to find those Utopian edifices, the Tower of Truth and the
Church of Unity, in the same street with an alehouse as genuine as
that of Tam o’ Shanter, and it would seem nothing out of the common
if we should see the twelve signs of the Zodiac saving themselves
from Deucalion’s flood in an arc of the Ecliptic.
Mr. Lowell here read long extracts from the poem, with a
commentary of his own, generally brief, of which we can give only
the following fine passage on Personification.
The truth is, that ideal personifications are commonly little better than
pinchbeck substitutes for imagination. They are a refuge which
unimaginative minds seek from their own sterile imaginativeness.
They stand in the same relation to poetry as wax figures to sculpture.
The more nearly they counterfeit reality, the more unpleasant they
are, and there is always a dejected irresponsibleness about the legs
and a Brattle street air in the boots that is ludicrous. The imagination
gives us no pictures, but the thing itself. It goes out for the moment
to dwell in and inform with its own life the object of its vision—as
Keats says somewhere in one of his letters, “I hop about the gravel
and pick up crumbs in the sparrows.” And so, in personifying, the
imagination must have energy to project its own emotion so as to
see it objectively—just as the disease of the hypochondriac runs
before him in a black dog. Thus it was that the early poets, “who
believed the wonders that they sang,” peopled the forests, floods,
and mountains with real shapes of beauty or terror; and accordingly
in primitive times ecstasy is always attributed to the condition of the
poetic mind. To the great poets these ecstasies are still possible, and
personification had its origin in the tradition of these, and the
endeavor of inferior minds to atone for their own languor by what we
may call historical or reminiscental imagination. Here is indicated the
decline from faith to ritual. Shakspeare has illustrated the true secret
of imaginative personification when he makes the conscience of
Macbeth become external and visible to him in the ghastly shape at
the banquet which he alone can see, and Lady Macbeth’s afterwards
in the blood-stain on her hand. This is the personification of the
creative mind whose thoughts are not images, but things. And this
seems to have been the normal condition of Shakspeare’s genius,
as it is the exceptional one of all other poets. He alone has
embodied in flesh and blood his every thought and fancy and
emotion, his every passion and temptation. Beside him all other
poets seem but the painters and not the makers of men. He sent out
his profound intellect to look at life from every point of view, and
through the eyes of all men and women from the highest to the
lowest. In every one he seems to have tapped it with the knuckles, to
have said sadly, Tinnit, inane est, It rings, it is hollow; and then to
have gone down quietly to wait for death and another world at
Stratford.
As fine an example as any of the prose imagination, of the intellect

acting pictorially, is where Hobbes compares the Papacy to the ghost
of the Roman Empire sitting upon its tomb. This implies a foregone
personification, but the pleasure it gives springs chiefly from our
sense of its historic and intellectual truth. And this subordinate form
of imagination uses typically and metaphorically those forms in which
ecstasy had formerly visibly clothed itself, flesh-and-blooded itself,
so to speak; as where Lord Bacon says that Persecution in the name
of Religion is “to bring down the Holy Ghost, not in the likeness of a
dove, but in the shape of a vulture or a raven.”
After reading more extracts from the poem, Mr. Lowell concluded his
lecture in these words:
Truly it seems to me that I can feel a heart beat all through this old
poem, a manly, trustful, and tender one. There are some men who
have what may be called a vindictive love of Truth—whose love of it,
indeed, seems to be only another form of hatred to their neighbor.
They put crooked pins on the stool of repentance before they invite
the erring to sit down on it. Our brother Langland is plainly not one of
these.
What I especially find to our purpose in Piers Ploughman, as I said

before, is that it defines with tolerable exactness those impulses
which our poetry has received from the Anglo-Saxon as
distinguished from the Anglo-Norman element of our race. It is a
common Yankee proverb that there is a great deal of human nature
in man. I think it especially true of the Anglo-Saxon man. We find in
this poem common sense, tenderness, a love of spiritual goodness
without much sensibility to the merely beautiful, a kind of domestic
feeling of nature and a respect for what is established. But what is
still more noticeable is that man is recognized as man, and that the
conservatism of Langland is predicated upon the well-being of the
people.
It is impossible to revive a dead poem, but it is pleasant, at least, to

throw a memorial flower upon its grave.
LECTURE III
THE METRICAL ROMANCES
(Tuesday Evening, January 16, 1855)
III
Where is the Golden Age? It is fifty years ago to every man and
woman of three-score and ten. I do not doubt that aged Adam
babbled of the superiority of the good old times, and, forgetful in his
enthusiasm of that fatal bite which set the teeth of all his
descendants on edge, told, with a regretful sigh, how much larger
and finer the apples of his youth were than that to which the great-
grandson on his knee was giving a preliminary polish. Meanwhile the
great-grandson sees the good times far in front, a galaxy of golden
pippins whereof he shall pluck and eat as many as he likes without
question. Thus it is that none of us knows when Time is with him, but
the old man sees only his shoulders and that inexorable wallet in
which youth and beauty and strength are borne away as alms for
Oblivion; and the boy beholds but the glowing face and the hands
stretched out full of gifts like those of a St. Nicholas. Thus there is
never any present good; but the juggler, Life, smilingly baffles us all,
making us believe that the vanished ring is under his left hand or his
right, the past or the future, and shows us at last that it was in our
own pocket all the while.
So we may always listen with composure when we hear of Golden

Ages passed away. Burke pronounced the funeral oration of one—of
the age of Chivalry—the period of Metrical Romances—of which I
propose to speak to-night. Mr. Ruskin—himself as true a knight-
errant as ever sat in a demipique saddle, ready to break a lance with
all comers, and resolved that even the windmills and the drovers
shall not go about their business till they have done homage to his
Dulcinea—for the time being joins in the lament. Nay, what do we
learn from the old romances themselves, but that all the heroes were
already dead and buried? Their song also is a threnody, if we listen
rightly. For when did Oliver and Roland live? When Arthur and
Tristem and Lancelot and Caradoc Break-arm? In that Golden Age of
Chivalry which is always past.
Undoubtedly there was a great deal in the institution of Chivalry that

was picturesque; but it is noticeable in countries where society is still
picturesque that dirt and ignorance and tyranny have the chief hand
in making them so. Mr. Fenimore Cooper thought the American
savage picturesque, but if he had lived in a time when it was
necessary that one should take out a policy of insurance on his scalp
or wig before going to bed, he might have seen them in a different
light. The tourist looks up with delight at the eagle sliding in smooth-
winged circles on the icy mountain air, and sparkling back the low
morning sun like a belated star. But what does the lamb think of him?
Let us look at Chivalry a moment from the lamb’s point of view.
It is true that the investiture of the Knight was a religious ceremony,

but this was due to the Church, which in an age of brute force always
maintained the traditions at least of the intellect and conscience. The
vows which the Knights took had as little force as those of god-
parents, who fulfil their spiritual relation by sending a piece of plate
to the god-child. They stood by each other when it was for their
interest to do so, but the only virtue they had any respect for was an
arm stronger than their own. It is hard to say which they preferred to
break—a head, or one of the Ten Commandments. They looked
upon the rich Jew with thirty-two sound teeth in his head as a
providential contrivance, and practised upon him a comprehensive
kind of dental surgery, at once for profit and amusement, and then
put into some chapel a painted window with a Jewish prophet in it for
piety—as if they were the Jewish profits they cared about. They
outraged and robbed their vassals in every conceivable manner,
and, if very religious, made restitution on their death-beds by giving a
part of the plunder (when they could keep it no longer) to have
masses sung for the health of their souls—thus contriving, as they
thought, to be their own heirs in the other world. Individual examples
of heroism are not wanting to show that man is always paramount to
the institutions of his own contriving, so that any institution will yield
itself to the compelling charms of a noble nature. But even were this
not so, yet Sir Philip Sidney, the standard type of the chivalrous,
grew up under other influences. So did Lord Herbert of Cherbury, so
did the incomparable Bayard; and the single fact that is related as a
wonderful thing of Bayard, that, after the storming of Brescia, he
respected the honor of the daughter of a lady in whose house he
was quartered, notwithstanding she was beautiful and in his power,
is of more weight than all the romances in Don Quixote’s library.
But what form is that which rises before us, with features in which
the gentle and forgiving reproach of the woman is lost in the aspiring
power of the martyr?
We know her as she was,
The whitest lily in the shield of France,

With heart of virgin gold,
that bravest and most loyal heart over whose beatings knightly armor
was ever buckled, that saintly shape in which even battle looks
lovely, that life so pure, so inspired, so humble, which stands there
forever to show us how near womanhood ever is to heroism, and
that the human heart is true to an eternal instinct when it paints Faith
and Hope and Charity and Religion with the countenances of
women.
We are told that the sentiment of respect for woman, a sentiment

always remarkable in the Teutonic race, is an inheritance from the
Institution of Chivalry. But womanhood must be dressed in silk and
miniver that chivalry may recognize it. That priceless pearl hidden in
the coarse kirtle of the peasant-girl of Domremy it trampled under its
knightly feet—shall I say?—or swinish hoofs. Poor Joan! The
chivalry of France sold her; the chivalry of England subjected her to
outrages whose burning shame cooled the martyr-fire, and the King
whom she had saved, the very top of French Knighthood, was toying
with Agnes Sorel while the fagots were crackling around the savior of
himself and his kingdom in the square of Rouen! Thank God, that
our unchivalric generation can hack the golden spurs from such
recreant heels! A statue stands now where her ashes were gathered
to be cast into the Seine, but her fittest monument is the little
fountain beneath it, the emblem of her innocence, of her inspiration,
drawn not from court, or castle, or cloister, but from the inscrutable
depths of that old human nature and that heaven common to us all—
an emblem, no less, that the memory of a devoted life is a spring
where all coming times may drink the holy waters of gratitude and
aspiration. I confess that I cannot see clearly that later scaffold in the
Place de la Révolution, through the smoke of this martyr-fire at
Rouen, but it seems to me that, compared with this woman, the
Marie Antoinette, for whose sake Burke lamented the downfall of
chivalry, is only the daughter of a king.
But those old days, whether good or bad, have left behind them a
great body of literature, of which even yet a large part remains
unprinted. To this literature belong the Metrical Romances.
Astonished by the fancy and invention so abundantly displayed by
the writers of these poems, those who have written upon the subject
have set themselves gravely to work to find out what country they
could have got them from. Mr. Warton, following Dr. Warburton,
inclines to assign them to an Oriental origin. Dr. Percy, on the other
hand, asserts a Scandinavian origin; while Ritson, who would have
found it reason enough to think that the sun rose in the West if
Warton or Percy had taken the other side, is positive that they were
wholly French. Perhaps the truth lies somewhere between the
positions of Percy and Ritson. The Norman race, neither French nor
Scandinavian, was a product of the mingled blood of both, and in its
mental characteristics we find the gaiety and lively fancy of the one
tempering what is wild in the energy and gloomy in the imagination
of the other.
We know the exact date of the arrival of the first Metrical Romance in
England. Taillefer, a Norman minstrel, brought it over in his head,
and rode in the front at the battle of Hastings singing the song of
Roland. Taillefer answers precisely the description of a Danish skald,
but he sang in French, and the hero he celebrated was one of the
peers of Charlemagne, who was himself a German.
Taillefer, who well could sing a strain,

Upon a swift horse rode amain
Before the Duke and chanted loud
Of Charlemagne and Roland good,
Of Oliver and vassals brave
Who found at Roncesvalles their grave.
What this song of Roland was it is impossible to say, as the only

copy of it seems to have perished with Taillefer at the battle of
Hastings; but it was probably of the same kind with many of those
which have survived and brought down to us the exploits of Arthur
and his knights.
With regard to a large part of the romances of the Round Table, and
those which grew out of them, it is tolerably certain that, although
written in French, they were made in England.
One of the great charms of the Metrical Romances is the innocent

simplicity with which they commit anachronisms. Perhaps it would be
more exact to call them synchronisms, for, with the most undoubting
faith, they compel all other times to adopt the dress, manners, and
conventionalities of their own. To them there was no one world, nor
ever had been any, except that of Romance. They conferred
retrospective knighthood upon the patriarchs; upon Job, David, and
Solomon. Joseph of Arimathea became Sir Joseph of that ilk. Even
the soldier who pierced the side of Jesus upon the cross was made
into Sir Longinus and represented as running a tilt with our Lord. All
the heroes of the Grecian legend were treated in the same way.
They translated the old time and the old faith into new, and thus
completed the outfit of their own imaginary world, supplying it at a
very cheap rate with a Past and with mythology. And as they
believed the gods and genii of the Pagan ancients to have been evil
spirits who, though undeified, were imperishable in their essence,
they were allowed to emigrate in a body from the old religion into the
new, where they continued to exercise their functions, sometimes
under their former names, but oftener in some disguise. These
unfortunate aliens seem to have lived very much from hand to
mouth, and after the invention of holy water (more terrible to them
than Greek-fire) they must have had rather an uncomfortable time of
it. The giants were received with enthusiasm, and admitted to rights
of citizenship in the land of Romance, where they were allowed to
hold fiefs and castles in consideration of their eminent usefulness in
abducting damsels, and their serving as anvils to the knights, who
sometimes belabored them for three days at a time, the fight ending
at last, not from failure of breath on the part of the combatants but of
the minstrel. As soon as he has enough, or sees that his hearers
have, the head of the unhappy giant becomes loose on his
shoulders.
Another charm of the romances is their entire inconsequentiality. As

soon as we enter this wonderful country the old fetters of cause and
effect drop from our limbs, and we are no longer bound to give a
reason for anything. All things come to pass in that most charming of
ways which children explain by the comprehensive metaphysical
formula—“’cause.” Nothing seems to be premeditated, but a knight
falls in love, or out of it, fights, goes on board enchanted vessels that
carry him to countries laid down on no chart, and all without asking a
question. In truth, it is a delightful kind of impromptu life, such as we
all should like to lead if we could, with nothing set down in the bills
beforehand.
But the most singular peculiarity of Romance-land remains to be

noticed—there are no people in it, that is, no common people. The
lowest rank in life is that of a dwarf. It is true that if a knight loses his
way there will always be a clown or two to set him right. But they
disappear at once, and seem to be wholly phantasmagoric, or, at
best, an expedient rendered necessary by the absence of guide-
posts, and the inability of the cavaliers to read them if there had
been any. There are plenty of Saracens no doubt, but they are more

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NTA UGC NET/SET/JRF: Paper II -

English 2021 | First Edition| By Pearson

NET I SET I JRF

Published by Pearson India Education Services Pvt. Ltd, CIN: U72200TN2005PTC057128.

Compositor: SRS Global, Puducherry

Future of English in India 6.10 Reader-response Theory/Reader

Why I Chose to Write This Book?

How to prepare for UGC NET examination?

Choose the correct answer from the options given below.

* This question has been dropped by NTA.

M01 UGC NET English Paper 2 XXXX 01.indd 1 2/15/2021 5:36:47 PM

M01 UGC NET English Paper 2 XXXX 01.indd 2 2/15/2021 5:36:48 PM

M01 UGC NET English Paper 2 XXXX 01.indd 3 2/15/2021 5:36:48 PM

M01 UGC NET English Paper 2 XXXX 01.indd 4 2/15/2021 5:36:48 PM

Religious Poems is described as ‘The Measurer’, ‘The Glory-Father’, ‘Eternal

M01 UGC NET English Paper 2 XXXX 01.indd 5 2/15/2021 5:36:48 PM

Imagination is not necessarily concerned with poetic expression.

What doth move

But compare it with Keats’

Ruth, when sick for home,

Imagination enters more or less into the composition of all great

Shakspeare was so charged with the highest form of the poetic

But look what envious streaks

Shakspeare’s one hundred and thirteenth sonnet was here also

The highest form of imagination, Mr. Lowell said, is the dramatic, of

Lastly, said Mr. Lowell, I would place in a class by themselves those

Where the imagination is found in combination with great acuteness

Fancy is a frailer quality than Imagination, and cannot breathe the

(Friday Evening, January 12, 1855)

The fame of a great poet is made up of the sum of all the

It is from such a one that I am going to try to draw a few notes of

Properly speaking, “Piers Ploughman’s Vision” is not a poem at all. It

These trifles, also, acquire importance in proportion as they are

The author of Piers Ploughman’s Vision avoids any appearance of

As fine an example as any of the prose imagination, of the intellect

What I especially find to our purpose in Piers Ploughman, as I said

It is impossible to revive a dead poem, but it is pleasant, at least, to

(Tuesday Evening, January 16, 1855)

So we may always listen with composure when we hear of Golden

Undoubtedly there was a great deal in the institution of Chivalry that

It is true that the investiture of the Knight was a religious ceremony,

We know her as she was,

The whitest lily in the shield of France,

We are told that the sentiment of respect for woman, a sentiment

Taillefer, who well could sing a strain,

What this song of Roland was it is impossible to say, as the only

One of the great charms of the Metrical Romances is the innocent

Another charm of the romances is their entire inconsequentiality. As

But the most singular peculiarity of Romance-land remains to be

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Future of English in India 6.10 Reader-response Theory/Reader