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English Year 2018
M.A. ENTRANCE EXAMS IN
English Literature Mahdi Javidshad Amirhossein Nemati
First Edition
precise answers accurate sources online exams
جاویدشاد ،مهدی- ۱۳۶۳ ،
سرشناسه
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عنوان و نام پدیدآور
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M.A. Entrance Exams in English Literature/ Mahdi Javidshad and Amirhossein Nemati.
مشخصات نشر
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تهران :مهدی جاویدشاد۲۰۱۷ =۱۳۹۶ ،م.
مشخصات ظاهری
:
۱۷۶ص.
شابک
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978-600-04-9284-7
وضعیت فهرست نویسی
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فیپا
یادداشت
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انگلیسی.
آوانویسی عنوان
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ام .ا... .
موضوع
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دانشگاهها و مدارس عالی --ایران --آزمونهای ورودی
موضوع
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Universities and colleges --Iran -- Entrance examinations
موضوع
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ادبیات انگلیسی --آزمونها و تمرینها (عالی)
موضوع
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)English literature -- Examinations, questions, etc. (Higher
موضوع
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آزمون دورههای تحصیالت تکمیلی --ایران --راهنمای مطالعه
موضوع
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Graduate Record Examination -- Iran -- Study guides
شناسه افزوده
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نعمتی ،امیرحسین- ۱۳۷۶ ،
شناسه افزوده
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Nemati, Amirhossein
رده بندی کنگره
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۸ ۱۳۹۶الف۲جLB۲۳۵۳/
رده بندی دیویی
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۳۷۸/۱۶۶4
شماره کتابشناسی ملی
:
۵۰۲۰۷۲۱
Javidshad, Mahdi
عنوانM.A. Entrance Exams in English Literature : مؤلفین :مهدی جاویدشاد ،امیرحسین نعمتی ناشر :مؤلف تیراژ300 : چاپ اول( :ویرایش اول) 1396 قیمت 220000 :ریال چاپ :خانه چاپ صحافی :خانه چاپ این کتاب به دو صورت چاپی و الکترونیکی منتشر می شود .جهت دریافت پستی نسخه چاپی کتاب ،با شماره 09011334787تماس حاصل فرمایید.
Content M.A. Entrance Exam 1392 Explanatory Answers and Sources M.A. Entrance Exam 1393 Explanatory Answers and Sources M.A. Entrance Exam 1394 Explanatory Answers and Sources M.A. Entrance Exam 1395 Explanatory Answers and Sources M.A. Entrance Exam 1396 Explanatory Answers and Sources References
1 16 36 48 66 80 99 113 133 147 166
Preface
O
ne of the main concerns of M.A. candidates of entrance exam in English literature is to know what sources to read in their preparation course. Since the exam requires candidates to have a word-for-word knowledge of certain sources, a thorough detection of them is the most important step in the preparation. Certainly, the best way to overcome this beginning step is to analyze previous exams and investigate the sources question for question. This hard and exhausting work has been done in the present book with utmost precision. In addition, for each question, this book presents the excerpts from which questions have been made. Thus, candidates can be sure to have explanatory answers and exact sources for each question. It is noteworthy that some questions have been made through Internet sources and this book, to accomplish the mission of presenting exact sources, provides readers with their online links. It might seem that the bulk of sources makes it difficult for candidates to overcome all of them. While this argument is true, it should be born in mind that candidates should be selective in their sources as the experience of previous years shows that they are not supposed to answer a high percentage of questions. In the end, you are advised to regularly consult our website (JavidEdu.com) for newer editions of the book and take online exams in a simulated environment. Mahdi Javidshad (Ph.D. Candidate in English Literature) Amirhossein Nemati
1392 – Questions
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LITERARY CRITICISM AND TERMS 1- Which of the following is TRUE about Longinus (1st c. C.E.)? 1) Like Aristotle and Horace, he concentrates on single elements of a text. 2) We do not need to take account of the ‘intellect’ in our discussions of the sublime 3) He equally emphasizes author, reader and text in his discussion of the sublime. 4) Following Plato, he moves exclusively within the indigenous Greek literary tradition 2- In his An Apology for Poetry (1595), Sir Philip Sidney -----------------. 1) argues that by moving the mind, poetry, like philosophy, is a teacher of virtue. 2) values history over poetry but contends that the ‘chief passages of best histories’ are essentially poetry 3) maintains that, far from counterfeiting or figuring forth, poetry is mimesis or representing 4) asserts that by engaging the reader’s emotions, poets blend truth with symbolism 3- The neoclassical critic Joseph Addison (1672-1719) ------------------. 1) believed that the aim of literary criticism is not to dissect the writer of genius but to look at what occurs in the interaction of literature and its audience 2) maintained that ancient critics have not (contrary to what his contemporary critics Dryden and Pope held) already said all there is to say, and to write after them is to expand upon and even occasionally modify their past criticism 3) considered morality as the ultimate touchstone for a truly great work of art, and set his literary goal as endeavoring to promote morality even at the expense of wit 4) argued that greatness in literature is not mechanical superiority but the prowess to display the immensity of life in a way that the imagination is able to absorb. 4- According to the Russian formalist critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), ---------------. 1) the truth of the polyphonic novel is an active creation in the consciousness of the reader, allowing genuine surprises even to the creator of the work himself 2) polyphonic novels have a carnival sense of the world, a sense of careful deliberation where voices can be heard each in their own turn only obliquely influencing their hearers 3) the polyphonic nature of the novel implies that there are many truths and that each character speaks and thinks his or her own truth 4) whatever meaning the language of the text possesses, resides in the polyphony of the text itself which is nevertheless ‘ever and inevitably tempered by the intention of the individual reader’ 5- In his Of Grammatology (1974), the French critic Jacques Derrida best asserts that ----------------. 1) writing is directly related to what Saussure believed to be the basic element of language: difference 2) the element of ‘undecidability’ does not hold equally well for all aspects of a written system of communication 3) the meaning of the written word is decided in the interplay between various signifiers pitted against one another 4) writing can, in a final analysis, be reduced to letters or symbols which are ‘inscribed’ on a page
1392 – Questions 6- The psychoanalytic critic Sigmund Freud (1859-1939) / his proponents best believed that -----------------. 1) the hidden meanings of a story can never be unlocked 2) a text is ‘a writer’s dreams undisguised’ 3) artistic creation plunges the artist deep into a state of neurosis 4) a literary text must be analyzed like a dream 7- In a deconstructionist reading of a text ------------------. 1) the meaning of a text depends on the close interaction of the text, the reader and social and cultural elements 2) there is no affinity the way a text is read (in a deconstructive way) and other types of reading or interpretive process 3) we have every right to stop finding meaning in a text upon our first reading of it, as our subsequent readings would, in abstract terms, offer the same result 4) the criticism of a text takes the upper hand of the text being read in terms of the essential value it yields 8- Which of the following is NOT (best) a concern with contemporary African-American criticism? 1) reading race into all American literature 2) significance of slavery as past historical events and its present day implications 3) social, political, economic, ideological and literary oppression 4) discovering signs of black art in modern American white art 9- The American critic John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974) would ------------------. 1) explore, in a sense of important critical essays, the distinctive expressions of consciousness in several Western authors, spanning the Renaissance to the modern period. 2) consider the “ethical” approach of the New Humanism and Marxism as ‘false’ and find fault with the teaching of literature in universities by literary historians and scholars 3) assert that all kinds of criticism serve useful purposes and will be even more useful if the critic is explicit enough about his goals 4) in his seminal essay “Marxism and Literature,” (1938) strongly advocate contemporary attempts to connect Marxism and literature
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10- Which of the following statements as regards the structuralist critic Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) and the American New Critics is TRUE? 1) Jakobson and the New Critics would both oppose ‘vulgar biographism’ and the ‘intentional fallacy’, but would, at the same time, analyze the myth of the poet as a function of cultural history 2) Jakobson tended to frame interpretation within a working sense of imagination and mind, whereas the New Critics subjected the largest and the smallest patterns to linguistic and cultural analysis, without regard for individual craft. 3) Jakobson welcomed the contributions of science to the work of literary studies, while the New Critics were trying to defend “humanistic” values against the spread of scientific “professionalism” 4) Jakobson did not believe in the unity of the human imagination as the New Critics did, and would, contrary to the New Critics, contend that no critic could ever hope to entirely capture the human imagination 11- The form of Japanese theater, kabuki, -------------------. 1) enjoys, lavishly designed sets, costumes, and makeup all contributing to its popularity 2) was first developed in medieval Japan, and introduced and taken up in Europe (first in France) early in the 16th century 3) is, like its sister form, the Noh theater, a highly abstract type of “artistic theatre” with very minimal action 4) uniquely employs an all-woman cast (thus making it a particular favorite in feminist criticism) 12- The term ‘Gilded Age’ would originally refer to features of the American society as in the ----------------. 1) decade of prosperity ensuing World War I 2) idyllic Romantic life of the early settlers in the American East 3) 1920s pre-depression period 4) post-Civil War (1861-1865) era 13- As a philosophical system based on the doctrines of Plato, Neoplatonism --------------. 1) sets up a vision of existence in which all things emanate from the universe of visible manner 2) incorporates elements of Asian mysticism with the ideas of Plato and, in some periods, was frequently combined with Christian mysticism 3) was developed in its modern form by such Enlightenment philosophers as Hume and Rousseau in the 18th century 4) finds its fullest modern expression in two works by Kant: The Critique of Judgment and The Critique of Pure Reason
1392 – Questions 14- Which of the following about the ‘heroic couplet’ is TRUE? 1) It would often take advantage of two end-stopped lines which were broken into two subunits by Caesuras, or medial pause in their syntax 2) It was the predominant English measure, along with blank verse, for all the poetic kinds during the Neoclassical period 3) As a verse form, it was first introduced into English poetry by Geoffrey Chaucer in such works as The Legend of Good Woman 4) The closed neoclassic couplet was later partly taken up in such characteristically Romantic poems as Keats’ Endymion 15- The ‘term: term definition’ DO NOT, as far as narratology is concerned, match in ---------------. 1) ‘story: the organized and meaningful structure of a literary plot’ 2) ‘narrative: the explicit or implicit person or audience to whom the narrator addresses the narrative’ 3) ‘fabula: the elemental materials of a story’ 4) ‘syuzhet: the concrete representation used to convey the story 16- Light verse (‘applied to poems that use an ordinary speaking voice and a relaxed manner’) would ------------------. 1) develop its subjects out of concepts that are petty or essentially inconsequential but have great applications for social satire 2) evolve as a large subclass to ‘verse de societe’ originally dealing with relationships, concerns and doings of polite society 3) find one of its exponents in the children’s nonsense verse of the Victorian era—as in Edward Lear’s The Owl and the Pussy Cat 4) be written initially as nursery rhymes which were then popularized as ribald or decorous limericks 17- Which of the following about the term ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ is TRUE? 1) They were called “deadly” because they were considered to put the soul of anyone manifesting them in peril of eternal perdition: such sins could never be forgiven 2) They were usually identified as Pride, Covetousness, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Anger, and Sloth in medieval and later Christian theology. 3) They were regarded with even more disgust that cardinal sins and were defined and discussed at length by such major theologians as Gregory the Great and Thomas Aquinas. 4) They played an important role in many works of medieval and Renaissance literature— sometimes in elaborately developed personifications—including Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale,” and Marlow’s “Hero and Leander” 18- Which of the following works best represent a ‘Juvenalian satire’? 1) Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy 2) Pope’s Moral Essays 3) Rabelias’ Gargantua and Pantagruel 4) Samuel Johnson’s London
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19- The term ‘subversion-containment dialectic’ best pertains to the concerns and ideas held by -----------------. 1) New historicist critics of Renaissance literature 2) History of ideas critics of the Romantic period 3) Critical theorists of the Frankfurt School 4) Yale School of deconstructionists 20- Which of the following about ‘Black Arts Movement’ is TRUE? 1) Its purely artistic, socially-pacifist ethics influenced the American postmodern literature of the 1970s and 80s 2) It complemented, in intellectual terms, the ‘high art’ and modernist forms developed by Ralph Ellison and other African-American writers in the 1950s 3) It designates a number of African-American writers whose work was shaped by the social and political turbulence of the 1930s 4) It was associated with the Black Power movement in politics, whose spokesmen, including Malcolm X advocated black separatism and black pride HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 21- The Elizabethan poet, Edmund Spenser The Shepheardes Calendar (1579) ----------------. 1) makes sharply satirical comments on controversial religious and political issues of his day such as Elizabeth’s suppression of Puritan clergy in the Church of England 2) is an allegorical pastoral based on the subject of a visit to London and is written as a lightly veiled account of the trip 3) celebrates, memorializes, and critiques the Tudor dynasty much in the tradition of Virgil’s Aeneids celebration of Augustus Caesar’s Rome (as it suggests that the Tudor lineage can be connected to King Arthur) 4) was basically written to introduce (and expand upon) the scriptural readings prescribed by the Book of Common Prayer for specific dates in the year it was published 22- Which of the following about John Donne (1572-1631) and his work is NOT TRUE? 1) He wrote An Anatomy of the World (1611) to mark the first anniversary of the death of one of his friends and patrons 2) His collection Songs and Sonnets (1633) directly challenges the popular Petrarchan sonnet sequences of the 1590s: it contains only one formal sonnet and the ‘songs’ are not lyrical 3) He penned Pseudo-Martyr (1610) as a Catholic to denounce King James’s insistence that Catholic take the Oath of Allegiance and subscribe to Protestant ethics. 4) His ‘Divine Poems’, a variety of religious poems, include a group of ‘Holy Sonnets’ that reflect his interest in Jesuit and especially Protestant meditative procedures.
1392 – Questions 23- As pioneer essayist, Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) would ----------------. 1) rarely deal with topics ‘Civil and Moral’: his essays are tentative in structure; witty, expansive, and reflective in style: and intimate, candid and affable in tone 2) stand at almost the opposite pole from his French predecessor, Michel de Montaigne, who proposed to learn about humankind by an intensive analysis of his own body and mind 3) often use his ‘I’ to present himself as challenging his society’s supposedly accumulated wisdom 4) generally, write his essays from the vantage point of a profound moralist rather the point of view of a man of affairs—even when writing on such topics as truth, marriage and love 24- Which of the following about John Milton’s career after the execution of Charles I in 1649 is NOT TRUE? 1) He was appointed Latin Secretary to the Commonwealth government, which meant that he wrote official letters to foreign heads of states in Latin 2) He published the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates in defense of revolution and regicide 3) He wrote the masque called Comus, in which the villain is portrayed as a refined, seductive and dissolute Cavalier 4) He wrote Eikonoklastes to counter the powerful emotional effect of Eikon Basilike written by the king just before his death 25- John Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe (published 1682) would ------------------. 1) be the outcome of a series of personal, professional and critical collaborations between Dryden and the Restoration poet Thomas Shadwell 2) brilliantly exploit the crudity of the poet Thomas Shadwell’s farces (notably The Virtuoso) and critical writings 3) (usually for a Restoration satirical masterpiece) take advantage of a few allusions, either modern or literature 4) also bitterly satirize work done by other Restoration dramatists, notably his own friend and disciple William Congreve 26- Jonathan Swift’s Journal to Stella a series of intimate letters (1710-13) mainly to his beloved Esther Johnson --------------------. 1) is addressed, contrary to the ‘Stella’ of the title, to Stella’s life-long companion and friend Rebecca Dingley 2) uniquely contains sketches of fictional adventures originally written to entertain Stella but later on developed and incorporated into his Gulliver’s Travels 3) is devoted exclusively to his love for her and is interspersed with some of Swift’s most poignant love poems 4) gives a vivid account of Swift’s daily life in London where he was in close touch with Tory ministers
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27- Which of the following important ‘sets of pictures’ does not belong to the 18th c. painter and engraver William Hogarth (1697-1764) (who had considerable influence on Swift, Fielding and Sterne, among others)? 1) A Harlot’s Progress 2) A Wandering Scholar in the Levant 3) A Rake’s Progress 4) Marriage A-la-Mode 28- Which of the following two 18th c. figures were (best) in a kind of dialogue (albeit in fierce negation of each other) on the subject of women in some of their prominent work? 1) Mary Wollstonecraft and Samuel Johnson 2) Samuel Johnson and Mary Astell 3) Alexander Pope and Anne Finch 4) Jonathan Swift and Mary Montagu 29- Which of the following ‘emancipations’ WAS NOT on Edmund Burke’s (1729-97) literary / political agenda in the second half of the 18th c.? 1) emancipation of Ireland 2) emancipation of American colonies 3) emancipation of India from the misgovernment of East India Company 4) emancipation of women 30- The English revolutionary and pamphleteer Thomas Paine (1737-1809) ---------------. 1) wrote his Age of Reason (1794) while imprisoned in France by the Jacobins for a year in 1793-94 while awaiting the guillotine 2) wrote about his active service in the American War of Independence in his Common Sense (1776) 3) dedicated his Rights of Man (1791), in reaction to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France to the French revolutionary Georges Danton 4) published his Rights of Man in two instalments in the radical English journal, The Free Englishman in 1790 31- Which of the following Romantic figures, in her advocacy of natural language and subject matter in her work, prefigured and duly influenced Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads? 1) Maria Edgeworth in her Letters for Literary Ladies 2) Charlotte Smith in her Elegiac Sonnets and Other Essays 3) Joanna Baillie in her Series of Plays 4) Anna Barbauld in her Devotional Pieces
1392 – Questions 32- Which of the following about the Romantic poet William Blake (1757-1827) is NOT TRUE? 1) His first attempt to articulate his full humanity’s present, past, and future was The Four Zoas. 2) In his trenchant prophetic satire, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (written in the early 1790s) he represented the French Revolution as a kind f purifying violence. 3) Two of his major prophetic books on which he worked until about 1820 were Milton, and Jerusalem. 4) His Poetical Sketches was idiosyncratically developed largely in illustrations and engravings with only minimal poetry-in-handwriting inserted between. 33- The ‘Romantic essayist / work’ match in all the following EXCEPT ------------------. 1) Thomas De Quinccy / ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’ 2) Charles Lamb / ‘On the Tragedies of Shakespeare’ 3) Thomas De Quinccy / ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ 4) Charles Lamb / ‘On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror’ 34- William Beckford’s Gothic novel Vathek -----------------. 1) heavily inspired (and is now regarded as the progenitor of)—through its revival of the medieval Gothic ethos—later-eighteenth century Gothic garden design and architecture 2) is widely regarded as the initiating prototype to the genre (published nearly a decade before Walpole’e Otranto appeared) 3) is ‘oriental’ rather than medieval but would, nevertheless, blend cruelty, terror and eroticism 4) purported to be a translation from a twelfth century Italian work, thus setting the fashion for (spuriously) attributing Gothic works’ authorship to the medieval times 35- Which of the following about Thomas Carlyle in Past and Present (1843) is TRUE? 1) He would call for heroic leadership of the type England had previously experienced in Thomas Cromwell and particularly Abbot Samson, a medieval monk. 2) He was particularly concerned with the destructive mobs (now thinly disguised as the ‘Working Aristocracy’) who had to be suppressed at any cost. 3) He had completely washed hands off the ‘present Captains of Victorian Industry’ in matching the artisans of the past in bringing about peace and prosperity to the people of England. 4) He placed enormous confidence on the landed aristocracy as the traditional anchors stability for the British nation in time of trouble.
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36- The Victorian critic-poet-essayist Mathew Arnold (1822-1888) would -----------------. 1) contend in Culture and Anarchy (1869) that the world of the future, in England at any rate, would be a working-class world fraught with periodic challenges to it by the middleclasses and aristocracy 2) argue, in his Essays in Criticism (1865-1888), that a literary canon made exclusively of classical Greek masters can provide all the virtues a modern civilized nation lacks 3) develop three full-length studies of the Bible, including Literature and Dogma (1873) which is considered as a post-script to his social criticism 4) display deep appreciation for Chaucer’s humor in his ‘The Study of Poetry’ (1880) and recommends he be taken up by the Victorian reading public as the model for a distinctively ‘English’ kind of virtue 37- The early twentieth-century figure T.E. Hulme (1883-1917) ------------------. 1) wrote numerous ambitiously long poems to break the mold of the brief imagist lyric to prove the application of the newly emerging modernist principles to poems both short and long 2) would, as a prototypical modernist, sharply repudiate the ‘split religion’ of Romanticism, responsible for vagueness in the arts 3) would, along with Wyndham Lewis, help found a new modernist movement in the arts, vorticism, which emphasized dynamism of content 4) encouraged the Italian poet F.T. Marinetti to organize his hugely influential modernistavant-garde ideas into his first futurist manifesto in the first decade of the 20th c. 38- George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1993) -----------------. 1) is a vivid account of his experiences of extremely difficult times in Paris (where he had gone to earn a living by teaching) followed by a spell as a tramp in England 2) compares the gruesome living conditions of the industrial workers living in around the two cities of Paris and London in the early 1930s 3) defends the socialist tendencies of the government in France—as compared to England— in providing its poorer classes with the bare necessities of life 4) sets down his vision of egalitarian urban life as it could have been potentially lived in Paris and London, had the absurdity of politicians’ decisions allowed that to happen 39- ‘Author / work’ do NOT match in ---------------. 1) Chinua Achebe / Arrow of God 2) Ted Hughes / Tales from Ovid 3) Brian Friel / Faith Healer 4) V.S. Naipaul / Anthills of the Savannah 40- Virginia Woolf’s A Sketch of the Past -----------------. 1) is a very early work mainly concerned with the origins of her own aristocratic family 2) is devoted to the life and work of the fellow Bloomsbury post-impressionistic painter Roger Fry 3) was written just before World War II and deals with her bright memories of childhood 4) explores the history of the Renaissance to reconstruct the portrait of the true British cavalier
1392 – Questions LITERARY GENRES 41- In Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, -------------------, an abbreviated version of Boccaccio’s Teseida, is an appropriately high-minded history of the rivalry of two noble cousins for the love of a princess, a history elegantly complemented by accounts of supernatural intervention in human affairs and equally elegant and decisive human ceremonial. 1) ‘The Knight’s Tale’ 2) ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ 3) ‘The Squire’s Tale’ 4) ‘The Franklin’s Tale’ 42- John Donne’s ‘The Bait’ (1633) opens with -------------------. 1) ‘Come with me and be my love / And we will some new pleasures prove / Of golden sands and crystal brooks / With silver lines and silver hooks…’ 2) ‘Twice or thrice had I loved thee / Before I knew thy face or name / So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame / Angels affect us oft, and worshipped be…’ 3) When by thy scorn, O murderess, I am dead / And that thou thinkst thee free / From all solicitation from me / …’ 4) ‘Some that have deeper digged love’s mine that I / say where his centric happiness doth lie / I have loved, and got, and told…’ 43- Alexander Pope’s Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735) ------------------. 1) is ‘a major satire on a minor incident’ by comparing it to the epic world of the gods—it was based on an actual incident recounted by Dr. Arbuthnot 2) is regarded as one of his major forays into the realm of natural history, citing many scientists and philosophers of his time including Newton, Locke and Dr. Arbuthnot himself 3) would, in fact, form part of sequences of epistles he wrote as Moral Essays (which included also his Epistle to a Lady and Epistle to Burlington) 4) is his ‘most directly autobiographical work,’ has Dr. Arbuthnot speaking from time to time in the poem thus converting the original letter to a dramatic dialogue. 44- William Wordsworth’s Michael: A Pastoral Poem (1800) opens with -----------------. 1) ‘If from the public ways you turn steps / Up the tumultuous brook of Green-head Ghyll / You will suppose that with an upright path / Your feet must struggle…’ 2) ‘—It seems a day / (I speak of one from singled out) / One of those heavenly days that cannot die / When in the eagerness of boyish hope / I left our cottage threshold…’ 3) ‘There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream / The earth, and every common sight / To me did seem appareled in celestial light…’ 4) ‘Twas summer and the sun was mounted high / Along the south the uplands feebly glared / Through a pale steam, and all the northern downs / In clearer air ascending shewed far off…’
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45- Which of the following about Matthew Arnold’s Scholar Gypsy (published 1867) is NOT TRUE? 1) It begins in pastoral mode, invoking a shepherd and describing the beauties of a rural scene, with Oxford in the distance. 2) It has the ‘scholar’ of the poem like Keats’s nightingale, escape ‘the weariness, the fever and the fret’ of modern life. 3) It is partly on the spirit of the scholar in the title which has achieved immortality by a serene pursuit of the secret human existence. 4) It tells the story of an impoverished Oxford scholar who joined a band of gypsies and was lovesick for life with the beauty of a ‘gypsy enchantress’. 46- T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding (1942) opens with -------------------. 1) ‘Midwinter spring is its own season / Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown / Suspended in time, between pole and tropic / When short day is brightest with frost and fire…’ 2) ‘A cold night we had f it / Just the worst time of the year / For a journey, and such a long journey / The ways deep and the weather sharp / The very dead of winter…’ 3) ‘Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past / If all time is eternally present / All time in unredeemable…’ 4) ‘In my beginning is my end. In succession / Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended / Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place / Is an open field, or a factory, or a bypass…’ 47- W. H. Auden’s poem Spain (1937) beginning ‘Yesterday all the past / The language of size / Spreading to China along the trade-routes’ -----------------. 1) predicts future for Spain where the ‘children of the continent’ would feel merry in the streets of Barcelona, however grim the prospects of the Civil War appear 2) traces the history of Spain from the glory of its colonial times to the utter decline and devastation it was suffering in the Spanish Civil War—it contains a woven pastiche of nearly all the major wars Spain had been through up to that time 3) describes the history that led up to the Spanish Civil War, then the arrival of the International Brigades at the war itself, then foresees a possible future that may result from the war 4) compares the ancient civilization of Spain to some oldest civilizations of the world (including that of China) and hopes peace and prosperity will be restored to the country once the Civil War comes to an end 48- It can be said of Philip Larkin (1922-1985) as a poet that he -----------------. 1) fashions a mythical consciousness in his poems embodied in violent metaphors, blunt syntax, harsh alliterative clusters and a dark brooding tone 2) presents the welfare-state world of post-imperial Britain more vividly, unsparingly and tenderly than any other poet 3) was early identified with the other liberal and leftist Oxford poets such as Stephen Spender and C. Day Lewis 4) widely adapted various European literary archetypes (e.g. the Greek character Philocctes) and forms (epic, quatrain, terza rima, etc.)
1392 – Questions 49- ‘18th c. novelist / novel’ do not match in ------------------. 1) Tobias Smollet / The Adventures of Roderick Random 2) Daniel Defoe / Amelia 3) Lawrence Sterne / A sentimental Journey Through France and Italy 4) Henry Fielding / Jonathan Wild 50- Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic Novel The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) -----------------. 1) is concerned with a Faust-like figure whose character is revealed through several nested stories-within-a-story that work backwards through time 2) starts in Naples, Italy in the early 18th century, in the church Santa Maria del Pianto, where an Englishman is speaking with an Italian friar; the Englishman notices a man in a shadowy area of the church, who is an assassin, according to the friar. 3) deals with the adventures of Sir Philip Harelay, who returns to medieval England to find that the castle seat and estate of his friend Lord Lovel have been usurped. 4) follows the fortunes of Emily St. Aubert who suffers, among other misadventures, the death of her father, supernatural terrors in a gloomy castle, and the machinations of an Italian brigand. 51- ‘Jane Austen’s novel / novel characters’ match in -----------------. 1) Emma / Jane Fairfax, Harriet Smith and Mr. Weston 2) Sense and Sensibility / Miss Bates, Mr. Henry Woodhouse and Isabella Knightly 3) Northanger Abbey / John Willoughby, Edward Ferrars and Elinsor Dashwood 4) Persuasion / Mrs. Norris, Maria Bertram and Mr. Henry Crawford 52- ‘Character / character description’ in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) match in -----------------. 1) ‘Mrs. Sparsit / the wife of Mr. Gradgrind, is an invalid and complains constantly’ 2) ‘Rachael / a very pale classmate of Sissy’s who brought up on facts only and is taught to operate according to self-interest’ 3) ‘Stephen Blackpool / a worker at one of Bounderby’s mills who forms a close bond with Rachael, a co-worker, whom he wishes to marry’ 4) ‘James Harthouse / is a hard-working upper-class gentleman, who wins over Louisa’s heart and eventually marries her’ 53- Joseph Conrad’s ------------------ is set in the late 19th century and centers on the life of a Dutch trader in the Borneo jungle and his relationship to his half-caste daughter Nina. 1) An Outcast of the Islands (1896) 2) Almayer’s Folly (1895) 3) Typhoon (1902) 4) Nostromo (1904) 54- Which of the following about Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is NOT TRUE? 1) It lacks an omniscient narrator (except in its second part); instead the plot unfolds through shifting perspectives of each character’s stream of consciousness. 2) It centers on the Ramsays and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920. 3) It includes four parts: The Window, Time Passes, Sea Voyage and The Lighthouse. 4) The novel recalls childhood emotions and highlights adult relationships.
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55- Kingsley Amis’s novel Lucky Jim (1954), one of the best-known examples of a campus novel in the English language, --------------------. 1) tells the story of the six-month academic exchange between fictional universities located in two cities both called Cambridge in England and the USA 2) follows the exploits of the eponymous hero, a reluctant medieval history lecturer at an unnamed provincial English university 3) describes encounters between Robyn Penrose, a university teacher specializing in the ‘industrial novel’, and Jim Wilcox, the manager of an engineering firm 4) deals humorously with the life of a university student who has to work as a circus clown to maintain a living in the London of the early 1950s 56- The 2000 novel White Teeth which foucuses on the later lives of two wartime friends— the Bangladeshi Samad Iqbal and the Englishman Archie Jones, and their families in London is by the British author ------------------. 1) Julian Barnes 2) Angela Carter 3) Zadie Smith 4) Pat Barker 57- Which of the following about William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar (1599) is NOT TRUE? 1) The play is characterized by swift, panoramic shifts in geographical locations and in registers, alternating between sensual, imaginative Alexandria and the more pragmatic, austere Rome. 2) Although the title is Julius Caesar, Caesar is not the most visible character in its action; he appears in only three scenes, and is killed at the beginning of the third act. 3) It is one of several Roman plays that Shakespeare wrote, based on true events from Roman history, which would also include Coriolanus. 4) The play contains many anachronistic elements from the Elizabethan period, objects such as hats and doublets (large, heavy jackets)—neither of which existed in ancient Rome. 58- Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (1993) is set in a(n) -------------------. 1) Fictional island off the coast of Samoa, which represents a country of perfect bliss in the play 2) Real location small village south of London at the turn of the twentieth century 3) Elizabethan Renaissance mansion (imaginary home of Sir Philip Sidney) 4) English country house, in both the years 1809-1812 and the present day 59- ‘Playwright / play’ do not match in -----------------. 1) ‘Samuel Beckett / No Man’s Land’ 2) ‘Brian Friel / Translations’ 3) ‘Harold Pinter / Victoria Station’ 4) ‘John Osborne / The Entertainer’
1392 – Questions 60- In Edward Bond’s ------------------, John Clare, the working class poet whose class anger is real enough, is forced into frustrated compromise and madness because he cannot find the ideological weapons with which to fight his oppressors. 1) The Fool (1974) 2) In the Company of Men (1987) 3) Narrow Road to the Deep North (1968) 4) The Worlds (1979)
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1392 – Explanatory Answers and Sources LITERARY CRITICISM AND TERMS 1- Which of the following is TRUE about Longinus (1st c. C.E.)? Answer: Choice 3 Emphasizing the author (one who must possess a great mind and a great soul), the work itself (a text that must be composed of dignified and elevated diction while simultaneously disposing the reader to high thoughts), and the reader’s response (the reaction of a learned audience in large part determines the value or worth of any given text), Longinus’s critical method foreshadows New Criticism, reader-oriented criticism, and other schools of twentieth-century criticism. Source: Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice by Charles E. Bressler, 5th edition, p. 26 2- In his An Apology for Poetry (1595), Sir Philip Sidney --------------. Answer: Choice 4 Throughout An Apology for Poetry, Sidney stalwartly defends poetry against those who would view it as a mindless or immoral activity. For Sydney, creative poetry is akin to religion, for both guide and achieve their purpose by stirring the emotions of the reader. The poet, says Sydney, not only affirms morality, but by engaging the reader’s emotions, blends truth with symbolism, “delighting every sense and faculty of the whole being.” Source: Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice by Charles E. Bressler, 5th edition, p. 30 3- The neoclassical critic Joseph Addison (1672-1719) ------------------. Answer: Choice 1 The aim of the literary critic, attests Addison, is not to dissect the writer of genius, but to look at what occurs in the interaction of literature and its audience. Our curiosity, says Addison, is one of the strongest and most lasting appetites implanted in us. Source Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice by Charles E. Bressler, 5th edition, p. 33 4- According to the Russian formalist critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), ---------------Answer: Choice 3 For Bakhtin, the polyphonic nature of the novel implies that there are many truths, not just one, and that each character speaks and thinks his or her own truth. Although one truth may be preferred to others by a character, a reader, or the author, no truth is particularly certain. Source: Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice by Charles E. Bressler, 5th edition, p. 46
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5- In his Of Grammatology (1974), the French critic Jacques Derrida best asserts that -----------------. Answer: Choice 1 Derrida asserts that we broaden our understanding of writing. Writing, he declares, cannot be reduced to letters or other symbols inscribed on a page. Rather, it is directly related to what Saussure believed to be the basic element of language: difference. Source: Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice by Charles E. Bressler, 5th edition, p. 113 6- The psychoanalytic critic Sigmund Freud (1859-1939) / his proponents best believed that -----------------. Answer: Choice 4 Beginning with the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, Freud lays the foundation for how our minds operate. Hidden from the workings of the conscious mind, the unconscious, he believes, plays a large part in how we act, think, and feel. According to Freud, the best avenue for discovering the content and the activity of the unconscious is through our dreams. Source: Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice by Charles E. Bressler, 5th edition, p. 124 7- In a deconstructionist reading of a text ------------------. Answer: Choice 1 According to a deconstructionist reading of a text, because texts have no external referents, their meanings depend on a close interactions of the text, the reader, and the social and cultural elements both within the reader and the text, as does reading or every interpretive process. Source: Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice by Charles E. Bressler, 5th edition, p. 116
1392 – Explanatory Answers and Sources 8- Which of the following is NOT (best) a concern with contemporary African-American criticism? Answer: Choice 4 An examination of Wheatley’s life highlights the multiple concerns of contemporary African-American criticism: Marginalization of blacks Reading race into all American literature Significance of slavery as past historical events and its present day implications Social, political, economic, ideological and literary oppression Celebrating that which is black in black art Source: Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice by Charles E. Bressler, 5th edition, p. 212 9- The American critic John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974) would ------------------. Answer: Choice 2 Ransom’s attempt to define the business of criticism—what it is not and what it should be. He lists a number of false or misleading types of current criticism including the “ethical” approach of the New Humanism and Marxism—but he focuses primarily on the teaching of literature—in universities by literary historians and scholars who stress backgrounds, sources; and influences rather than the poems themselves. Source: Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st edition, p. 110 10- Which of the following statements as regards the structuralist critic Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) and the American New Critics is TRUE? Answer: Choice 3 It was not that Jakobson did not believe in the unity of the human imagination, but precisely that he believed in it so much that he thought he was in no danger of departing from it. Jakobson welcomed the contributions of science to the work of literary studies, while the New Critics were trying to defend “humanistic” values against the spread of scientific “professionalism.” Source: Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st edition, p. 1255
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11- The form of Japanese theater, kabuki, -------------------. Answer: Choice 1 Kabuki is a form of Japanese theater that employs dance, music, and story. Its lavishly designed sets, costumes, and makeup all contribute to the popularity of the form, which has existed since the 17th century. Long regarded as inferior to its rival forms, the NO¯ and Bunraku, Kabuki is an actor’s theater. The actors, all men, some of whom are female impersonators, are more important than the play. The great Kabuki actors have large devoted followings, particularly the onnagata, or female impersonator. Source: A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms by Edward Quinn, 2nd edition, p. 232 12- The term ‘Gilded Age’ would originally refer to features of the American society as in the ---------------. Answer: Choice 4 Gilded Age is a term for the post–Civil War era when rampant acquisitiveness became a prominent feature of American society. These were years of great changes in American society: technological advances such as the inventions of the telegraph and the telephone; the growth of industry; massive increases in immigrant populations; the rapid development of new urban centers like Chicago and San Francisco; and the feverish spread of speculation in land and on the stock market. The name derives from The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873), a novel written by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. The novel satirizes unscrupulous land speculation and its connections with corrupt politicians. The social criticism built into this novel reflected the spirit of realism/naturalism that defined the literature of the age. Source: A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms by Edward Quinn, 2nd edition, p. 181 13- As a philosophical system based on the doctrines of Plato, Neoplatonism -------------------. Answer: Choice 2 A philosophical system based on the doctrines of Plato. The system was established by the philosopher Plotinus in the third century B.C. in the city of Alexandria. Incorporating elements of Asian mysticism with the ideas of Plato, Neoplatonism set up a vision of existence in which all things emanate from The One or The Good. Neoplatonism exerted a powerful influence on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, in which it frequently combined with Christian mysticism. Neoplatonic themes have been identified in a number of important Renaissance texts, including Castiglione’s The Courtier (1528) and Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609) Source: A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms by Edward Quinn, 2nd edition, p. 283 14- Which of the following about the ‘heroic couplet’ is TRUE? Answer: Choice 3 Heroic Couplets are lines of iambic which rhyme in pairs: aa, bb, cc, and so on. The adjective “heroic” was applied in the later seventeenth century because of the frequent use of such
1392 – Explanatory Answers and Sources couplets in heroic (that is, epic) poems and in heroic dramas. This verse form was introduced into English poetry by Geoffrey Chaucer (in The Legend of Good Women and most of The Canterbury Tales), and has been in constant use ever since. Source: A Glossary of Literary Terms by M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, 10th edition, p. 158 15- The ‘term: term definition’ DO NOT, as far as narratology is concerned, match in ---------------. Answer: Choice 1 Narratologists, do not treat a narrative in the traditional way, as a fictional representation of life and the world, but as a systematic and purely formal construction. A primary interest of structural narratologists is in the way that narrative discourse fashions a story—a mere sequence of events in time—into the organized and meaningful structure of a literary plot. (The Russian formalists had made a parallel distinction between the fabula—the elemental materials of a story—and the syuzhet, the concrete representation used to convey the story.) Source: A Glossary of Literary Terms by M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, 10th edition, p. 234 16- Light verse (‘applied to poems that use an ordinary speaking voice and a relaxed manner’) would ------------------. Answer: Choice 3 Light verse is a term applied to a great variety of poems that use an ordinary speaking voice and a relaxed manner to treat their subjects gaily, or playfully, or wittily, or with goodnatured satire. The subject matter of light verse need not be in itself petty or inconsequential; the defining quality is the tone of voice used, and the attitude of the lyric or narrative speaker toward the subject. Nursery rhymes and other children’s verses are another type of light verse. Edward Lear (“The Jumblies,” “The Owl and the Pussy Cat”) and Lewis Carroll (“Jabberwocky,” The Hunting of the Snark) made children’s nonsense verses into a Victorian specialty. Source: A Glossary of Literary Terms by M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, 10th edition, p. 191 and 192 17- Which of the following about the term ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ is TRUE? Answer: Choice 2 In medieval and later Christian theology these sins were usually identified as Pride, Covetousness, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Anger, and Sloth. They were called “deadly” because they were considered to put the soul of anyone manifesting them in peril of eternal perdition; such sins could be expiated only by absolute penitence. Among them, Pride was often considered primary, since it was believed to have motivated the original fall of Satan in heaven. Sloth was accounted a deadly sin because it signified not simply laziness, but a
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torpid and despondent spiritual condition that threatened to make a person despair of any chance of achieving divine Grace. Source: A Glossary of Literary Terms by M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, 10th edition, p. 364 18- Which of the following works best represent a ‘Juvenalian satire’? Answer: Choice 4 In ‘Juvenalian satire’ the speaker is a serious moralist who uses a dignified and public utterance to decry modes of vice and error which are no less dangerous because they are ridiculous, and who undertakes to evoke from readers’ contempt, moral indignation, or an unillusioned sadness at the aberrations of humanity. Samuel Johnson’s “London” (1738) and “The Vanity of Human Wishes” (1749) are distinguished instances of Juvenalian satire. Source: A Glossary of Literary Terms by M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, 10th edition, p. 354 19- The term ‘subversion-containment dialectic’ best pertains to the concerns and ideas held by -----------------. Answer: Choice 1 In Greenblatt’s reading, the dialogue and events of the Henry plays reveal the degree to which princely power is based on predation, calculation, deceit, and hypocrisy; at the same time, the plays do not scruple to record the dissonant and subversive voices of Falstaff and various other representatives of Elizabethan subcultures. These counter-establishment discourses in Shakespeare’s plays, however, in fact are so managed as to maneuver their audience to accept and even glorify the power structure to which that audience is itself subordinated. Greenblatt applies to these plays a conceptual pattern, the subversioncontainment dialectic, which has been a central concern of new historicist critics of Renaissance literature. The thesis is that, in order to sustain its power, any durable political and cultural order not only to some degree allows, but also actively fosters “subversive” elements and forces, yet in such a way as more effectively to “contain” such challenges to the existing order. Source: A Glossary of Literary Terms by M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, 10th edition, p. 249 20- Which of the following about ‘Black Arts Movement’ is TRUE? Answer: Choice 4 ‘The Black Arts Movement’ designates a number of African-American writers whose work was shaped by the social and political turbulence of the 1960s—the decade of massive protests against the Vietnam War, demands for the rights of African-Americans that led to repeated and sometimes violent confrontations, and the riots and burnings in Los Angeles, Detroit, New York, Newark, and other major cities. The literary movement was associated
1392 – Explanatory Answers and Sources with the Black Power movement in politics, whose spokesmen, including Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X, opposed the proponents of integration, and instead advocated black separatism, black pride, and black solidarity. Representatives of the Black Arts put their literary writings at the service of these social and political aims. Source: A Glossary of Literary Terms by M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, 10th edition, p. 29 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 21- The Elizabethan poet, Edmund Spenser The Shepheardes Calendar (1579) ------------. Answer: Choice 1 The singers of the pastoral, or eclogue, were depicted as simple rustics who inhabited a world in which human beings and nature lived in harmony, but the form was always essentially urban, and Spenser, a Londoner, was self-consciously assuming a highly conventional literary role. That role enabled him at once to lay claim to the prestige of classical poetry and to insist upon his native Englishness, an insistence that is signaled by the deliberately archaic, pseudo-Chaucerian language. The rustic mask also allowed Spenser, in certain of the eclogues, to make sharply satirical comments on controversial religious and political issues of his day, such as Elizabeth’s suppression of Puritan clergy in the Church of England, and to reflect on his own marginal position. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 708 22- Which of the following about John Donne (1572-1631) and his work is NOT TRUE? Answer: Choice 3 As his family grew, Donne made every effort to reinstate himself in the favor of the great. To win the approval of James I, he penned Pseudo-Martyr (1610), defending the king’s insistence that Catholics take the Oath of Allegiance. This set an irrevocable public stamp on his renunciation of Catholicism, and Donne followed up with a witty satire on the Jesuits, Ignatius His Conclave (1611). Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 1261 23- As pioneer essayist, Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) would -------------------. Answer: Choice 2 As an essayist Bacon stands at almost the opposite pole from his great French predecessor Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), who proposed to learn about humankind by an intensive analysis of his own body and mind and of his sensations, emotions, attitudes, and ideas. Bacon’s essays are instead on topics “Civil and Moral.” Montaigne’s are tentative in structure; witty, expansive, and reflective in style; intimate, candid, and affable in tone; and he speaks constantly in the first person. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 1551
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24- Which of the following about John Milton’s career after the execution of Charles I in 1649 is NOT TRUE? Answer: Choice 3 In 1649, just after Charles I was executed, Milton published The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, which defends the revolution and the regicide and was of considerable importance in developing a “contract theory” of government based on the inalienable sovereignty of the people—a version of contract very different from that of Thomas Hobbes. Milton was appointed Latin Secretary to the Commonwealth government (1649-53) and to Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate (1654-58), which meant that he wrote the official letters— mostly in Latin—to foreign governments and heads of state. He also wrote polemical defenses of the new government: Eikonoklastes (1649), to counter the powerful emotional effect of Eikon Basilike, supposedly written by the king just before his death, and two Latin Defenses upholding the regicide and the new republic to European audiences. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 1788 25- John Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe (published 1682) would ------------------. Answer: Choice 2 Between 1678 and 1681, when he was nearing fifty, Dryden discovered his great gift for writing formal verse satire. A quarrel with the playwright Thomas Shadwell prompted the mock-heroic episode “Mac Flecknoe,” probably written in 1678 or 1679 but not published until 1682. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 2083 26- Jonathan Swift’s Journal to Stella a series of intimate letters (1710-13) mainly to his beloved Esther Johnson --------------------. Answer: Choice 4 Esther Johnson (Swift’s “Stella”) was the daughter of Temple’s steward, and when Swift first knew her, she was little more than a child. He educated her, formed her character, and came to love her as he was to love no other person. After Temple’s death she moved to Dublin, where she and Swift met constantly, but never alone. While working with the Tories in London, he wrote letters to her, later published as The Journal to Stella (1766), and they exchanged poems as well. Whether they were secretly married or never married—and in either case why—has been often debated. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 2302
1392 – Explanatory Answers and Sources 27- Which of the following important ‘sets of pictures’ does not belong to the 18th c. painter and engraver William Hogarth (1697-1764) (who had considerable influence on Swift, Fielding and Sterne, among others)? Answer: Choice 2 Hogarth never forgot “the cruel treatment” of his father by booksellers, and he resolved to make his living without relying on dealers; he would always be aggressively independent. Apprenticed as an engraver, he trained himself to sketch scenes quickly or catch them in memory. He also learned to paint, studying with the Serjeant Painter to the King, Sir James Thornhill, whose daughter he married (late in life Hogarth himself would become Serjeant Painter). Gradually he won a reputation for portraits and conversation pieces—group portraits in which members of a family or assembly interact in a social situation. But his popular fame was forged by sets of pictures that told a story: A Harlot’s Progress (1731 32), A Rake’s Progress (1734-35), and Marriage A-la-Mode (1743-45). Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 2657 28- Which of the following two 18th c. figures were (best) in a kind of dialogue (albeit in fierce negation of each other) on the subject of women in some of their prominent work? Answer: Choice 4 Montagu did not like Swift. She objected to his politics, his friendship with Pope, his vanity, and his defiant indecency. Her reply to Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room” mimics it style, but substitutes vulgar names for its mock-pastoral and personal pique for its moralistic conclusions. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 2593 29- Which of the following ‘emancipations’ WAS NOT on Edmund Burke’s (1729-97) literary / political agenda in the second half of the 18th c.? Answer: Choice 4 Burke’s political life was devoted to five ‘great, just and honorable causes’: the emancipation of the House of Commons from the control of George III and the ‘King’s friends’; the emancipation of the American colonies; the emancipation of Ireland; the emancipation of India from the misgovernment of the East India Company; and opposition to the atheistical Jacobinism displayed in the French Revolution. Source: The Oxford Companion to English Literature by Margaret Drabble, 6th edition, p. 150 30- The English revolutionary and pamphleteer Thomas Paine (1737-1809) -----------------. Answer: Choice 1 Although he was born and lived his first thirty-seven years in England, Thomas Paine (1737—1809) enters the debate as a visitor from America, where by writing Common Sense (1776) and the sixteen Crisis pamphlets, beginning “These are the times that try men’s souls”
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(1776—83), he had served as the most effective propagandist for American independence. His Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke’s Attack on the French Revolution, published in March 1791 with a dedication “To George Washington, President of the United States of America,” has the full weight of the American revolutionary experience behind it and is the strongest statement against hereditary monarchy of any of the works replying to Burke in this “war of pamphlets.” Paine published a second part of Rights of Man the following year and, when charged with treason by the British, fled to France, where he was made a citizen and a member of the Convention. With the fall of the more moderate Girondists, he was imprisoned by the Jacobins for a year in 1793—94, during which he wrote his last famous work, The Age of Reason (1794) Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 1790 31- Which of the following Romantic figures, in her advocacy of natural language and subject matter in her work, prefigured and duly influenced Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads? Answer: Choice 3 Joanna Baillie preface to the original Series of Plays, a seventy-page “introductory discourse” advocating naturalness of language and subject matter, influenced both the Advertisement to Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which appeared six months later, and Wordsworth’s longer and more famous Preface two years later. “Those works,” she wrote, “which most strongly characterize human nature in the middling and lower classes of society, where it is to be discovered by stronger and more unequivocal marks, will ever be the most popular”; the writer should forsake “the enchanted regions of simile, metaphor, allegory, and description” in favor of “the plain order of things in this every-day world.” Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 213 32- Which of the following about the Romantic poet William Blake (1757-1827) is NOT TRUE? Answer: Choice 4 As Blake’s mythical character Los said, speaking for all imaginative artists, “I must Create a System or be enslaved by another Man’s.” This coherent but constantly altering and enlarging system composed the subject matter first of Blake’s “minor prophecies,” completed by 1795, and then of the major prophetic books on which he continued working until about 1820: The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem. In The French Revolution, America: A Prophet Europe: A Prophecy, and the trenchant prophetic satire The Marriage of Heaven and Hell— all of which Blake wrote in the early 1790s while he was an ardent supporter of the French Revolution—he, like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and a number of radical English theologians, represented the contemporary Revolution as the purifying violence that, according to biblical prophecy, portended the imminent redemption of humanity and the world. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 77
1392 – Explanatory Answers and Sources 33- The ‘Romantic essayist / work’ match in all the following EXCEPT ------------------. Answer: Choice 4 Published in 1773 in the Aikins’ Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose, “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror” built on Walpole's innovation in Otranto. It gave the next generation of Gothic authors a critical justification for their engagement with the supernatural and for their swerve away from the didacticism that had valued fiction writers only when they seemed to be educating readers for real life. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 582 34- William Beckford’s Gothic novel Vathek -----------------. Answer: Choice 3 William Beckford’s Vathek (1786), which is “oriental” rather than medieval but similarly blends cruelty, terror, and eroticism; two extremely popular works by Radcliffe, the “Queen of Terror,” The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794); Matthew Lewis’s concoction of devilry, sadism, and mob violence, The Monk (1796). Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 577 35- Which of the following about Thomas Carlyle in Past and Present (1843) is TRUE? Answer: Choice 1 Past and Present, a book written in seven weeks, was a call for heroic leadership. Cromwell and other historic leaders are cited, but the principal example from the past is Abbot Samson, a medieval monk who established order in the monasteries under his charge. Carlyle hoped that the “Captains of Industry” might provide a comparable leadership in 1843. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 1024 36- The Victorian critic-poet-essayist Mathew Arnold (1822-1888) would -----------------. Answer: Choice 3 Arnold’s three full-length studies of the Bible, including Literature and Dogma (1873), are thus best considered a postscript to his social criticism. The Bible, to Arnold, was a great work of literature like the Odyssey, and the Church of England was a great national institution like Parliament. Both Bible and Church must be preserved not because historical Christianity was credible but because both, when properly understood, were agents of what he called “culture”—they contributed to making humanity more civilized. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 1353 37- The early twentieth-century figure T.E. Hulme (1883-1917) ------------------. Answer: Choice 2 Although he published only six poems during his brief life, T. E. Hulme (1883—1917), English poet, philosopher, and critic, was one of the strongest intellectual forces behind the development of modernism. In this essay, probably composed in either 1911 or 1912 and probably delivered as a lecture in 1912, Hulme prophesies a “dry, hard, classical verse” that
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exhibits precision, clarity, and freshness. He sharply repudiates the “spilt religion” of Romanticism, responsible for vagueness in the arts. Hulme sees human beings as limited and capable of improvement only through the influence of tradition. These ideas were an important influence on the thought and poetry of T. S. Eliot. Hulme’s views of conventional language, the visual image, and verbal exactitude also shaped the imagism and vorticism of Ezra Pound and others. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 1998 38- George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1993) -----------------. Answer: Choice 1 Orwell went to Paris to try to earn a living by teaching while he made his first attempts at writing. His extremely difficult time in Paris was followed by a spell as a tramp in England, and he vividly recorded both experiences in his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). Orwell did not have to suffer the dire poverty that he seems to have courted (he had influential friends who would have been glad to help him); he wanted, however, to learn firsthand about the life of the poor, both out of humane curiosity and because, as he wrote, if he did so “part of my guilt would drop from me.” Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 1966 39- ‘Author / work’ do NOT match in ---------------. Answer: Choice 4 Anthills of the Savannah (1987) is by Chinua Achebe His other major works are: Things Fall Apart (1958) No Longer at Ease (1960) Arrow of God (1964) A Man of the People (1966) Chinua Achebe is an author, born and educated in Nigeria, where his father taught in a school under the Church Missionary Society. He studied at University College, Ibadan, 1948-53, then worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting Service in Lagos. One of the most highly regarded of African writers in English, Achebe’s reputation was founded on his first four novels, which can be seen as a sequence recreating Africa’s journey from tradition to modernity. Things Fall Apart (1958) seems to derive from W. B. Yeats its vision of history as well as its title; it was followed by No Longer at Ease (1960); Arrow of God (1964), a portrayal of traditional society at the time of its first confrontation with European society (a traditional society recreated in Achebe’s novels by the use of Ibo legend and proverb); and A Man of the People (1966), which breaks new ground. Bitterness and disillusion lie just beneath the sparkling satiric surface, and the novel provides further evidence of Achebe’s mastery of a wide range of language, from the English of Ibo-speakers and pidgin, to various levels of formal English. Anthills of the Savannah (1987), a novel told in several narrative voices, pursues Achebe’s bold, pessimistic, and sardonic analysis of West African politics
1392 – Explanatory Answers and Sources and corruption in its portrayal of the fate of two friends, one minister of information in the fictitious state of Kangan, the other a poet and radical editor: their resistance to the regime of the country’s Sandhust-educated dictator ends in death. Other works include Beware, Soul Brother and Other Poems (1971), The Trouble with Nigeria (1983), and Hopes and Impediments (essays, 1988). He has been emeritus professor at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, since 1985. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 2623 40- Virginia Woolf’s A Sketch of the Past -----------------. Answer: Choice 3 “A Sketch of the Past” is an autobiographical essay written by Virginia Woolf in 1939 (just before World War II). Woolf returned to her own childhood with “A Sketch of the Past,” a memoir about her mixed feelings toward her parents and her past and about memoir writing itself. (Here surfaced for the first time in writing a memory of the teenage Gerald Duckworth, her other half-brother, touching her inappropriately when she was a girl of perhaps four or five.) Through last-minute borrowing from the letters between Fry and Vanessa, Woolf finished her biography. Though convinced that Roger Fry (1940) was more granite than rainbow, Virginia congratulated herself on at least giving back to Vanessa “her Roger.” Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 2155 LITERARY GENRES 41- In Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, -------------------, an abbreviated version of Boccaccio’s Teseida, is an appropriately high-minded history of the rivalry of two noble cousins for the love of a princess, a history elegantly complemented by accounts of supernatural intervention in human affairs and equally elegant and decisive human ceremonial. Answer: Choice 1 Although it has been suggested that the Knight’s professional career has been marked by a series of military disasters and that both his portrait and his tale can be read ironically, it would seem likely that the overall scheme of The Canterbury Tales, had it ever been completed, would have served to enhance his dignity rather than to undermine it. The Host of the Tabard proposes that each of the pilgrims should tell two tales on the way to Canterbury and two on the return journey. Even in the fragmentary and unfinished form in which the poem has come down to us (only twenty-four tales are told), it is clear that the Knight’s taking precedence as the first story-teller is not merely a matter of chance. The narrator comments that although he cannot tell whether it was a matter of ‘aventure, or sort, or cas [chance]’ that the luck of the draw fell to such a natural leader, the fact that it did so both pleases the other pilgrims and satisfies the demands of social decorum. The Knight’s Tale, an abbreviated version of Boccaccio’s Teseida, is an appropriately high-minded history of the rivalry of two noble cousins for the love of a princess, a history elegantly complemented by
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accounts of supernatural intervention in human affairs and equally elegant and decisive human ceremonial. Source: The Short Oxford History of English Literature by Andrew Sanders, p. 57 42- John Donne’s ‘The Bait’ (1633) opens with -------------------. Answer: Choice 1 Choice 2 is part of John Donne’s Air and Angles Choice 3 is part of John Donne’s Apparition Choice 4 is part of John Donne’s Love’s Alchemy Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 1274, 1270, and 1272 43- Alexander Pope’s Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735) ------------------. Answer: Choice 4 The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot is a satire in poetic form written by Alexander Pope and addressed to his friend John Arbuthnot, a physician. It was first published in 1735 and composed in 1734, when Pope learned that Arbuthnot was dying. Pope described it as a memorial of their friendship. It has been called Pope’s “most directly autobiographical work,” in which he defends his practice in the genre of satire and attacks those who had been his opponents and rivals throughout his career. Source: The Alexander Pope Encyclopedia by Pat Rogers, p. 110 44- William Wordsworth’s Michael: A Pastoral Poem (1800) opens with -----------------. Answer: Choice 1 Choice 2 is part of William Wordsworth’s Nutting Choice 3 is part of William Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality Choice 4 is part of William Wordsworth’s Excursion Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 292, 279, and 306 45- Which of the following about Matthew Arnold’s Scholar Gypsy (published 1867) is NOT TRUE? Answer: Choice 4 The Scholar Gypsy is the story of a seventeenth-century student (not an impoverished Oxford scholar) who left Oxford and joined a bands of gypsies. Source: See the entry before the poem in Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 1360
1392 – Explanatory Answers and Sources 46- T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding (1942) opens with -------------------. Answer: Choice 1 Choice 2 is part of T. S. Eliot’s The Journey of Magi Choice 3 is part of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets Choice 4 is part of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: East Coker Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 2312-13 47- W. H. Auden’s poem Spain (1937) beginning ‘Yesterday all the past / The language of size / Spreading to China along the trade-routes’ -----------------. Answer: Choice 3 Written after his visit to the Spanish Civil War, “Spain” was described by George Orwell as “one of the few decent things that have been written about the Spanish war.” It was written and published in 1937. Auden donated all the profits from the sale of Spain to the Spanish Medical Aid Committee. The poem describes the history that led up to the Spanish Civil War, then the arrival of the International Brigades at the war itself, then foresees a possible future that may result from the war. Source: https://www.revolvy.com/main/index.php?s=Spain%20(Auden) OR W.H. Auden Encyclopedia by David Garrett Izzo, p. 245 48- It can be said of Philip Larkin (1922-1985) as a poet that he -----------------. Answer: Choice 2 Larkin was the dominant figure in what came to be known as “the Movement,” a group of university poets that included Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, and Thorn Gunn, gathered together in Robert Conquest’s landmark anthology of 1956, New Lines. Their work was seen as counteracting not only the extravagances of modernism but also the influence of Dylan Thomas’s high-flown, apocalyptic rhetoric: like Larkin, these poets preferred a civil grammar and rational syntax over prophecy, suburban realities over mythmaking. No other poet presents the welfare-state world of post-imperial Britain so vividly, so unsparingly, and so tenderly. “Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are,” Larkin said; “I don’t want to transcend the commonplace, I love the commonplace life. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 2566
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49- ‘18th c. novelist / novel’ do not match in ------------------. Answer: Choice 2 Amelia is by Henry Fielding Other major works by Fielding are: An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews / The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling / Joseph Andrews Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 9th edition, p. 2437 50- Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic Novel The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) -----------------. Answer: Choice 4 The Mysteries of Udolpho follows the fortunes of Emily St. Aubert, who suffers, among other misadventures, the death of her father, supernatural terrors in a gloomy castle and the machinations of an Italian brigand. Often cited as the archetypal Gothic novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho, along with Radcliffe’s novel The Romance of the Forest, plays a prominent role in Jane Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey, in which an impressionable young woman, after reading Radcliffe’s novel, comes to see her friends and acquaintances as Gothic villains and victims with amusing results. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysteries_of_Udolpho 51- ‘Jane Austen’s novel / novel characters’ match in -----------------. Answer: Choice 1 Miss Bates, Mr. Henry Woodhouse and Isabella KnightlyEmma John Willoughby, Edward Ferrars and Elinsor DashwoodSense and Sensibility Mrs. Norris, Maria Bertram and Mr. Henry CrawfordMansfield Park Source: The Oxford Companion to English Literature by Margaret Drabble, 6th edition, p. 326, 640, and 915 52- ‘Character / character description’ in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) match in -----------------. Answer: Choice 3 Stephen Blackpool is a worker at one of Bounderby’s mills. He has a drunken wife who no longer lives with him but who appears from time to time. He forms a close bond with Rachael, a co-worker, whom he wishes to marry. After a dispute with Bounderby, he is dismissed from his work at the Coketown mills and, shunned by his former fellow workers, is forced to look for work elsewhere. While absent from Coketown, he is wrongly accused of robbing Bounderby’s bank. On his way back to vindicate himself, he falls down a mine-shaft. He is rescued but dies of his injuries. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Times_(novel)
1392 – Explanatory Answers and Sources 53- Joseph Conrad’s ------------------ is set in the late 19th century and centers on the life of a Dutch trader in the Borneo jungle and his relationship to his half-caste daughter Nina. Answer: Choice 2 Almayer’s Folly is Joseph Conrad’s first novel. It was published in 1895. Set in the late 19th century, it centers on the life of the Dutch trader Kaspar Almayer in the Borneo jungle and his relationship to his half-caste daughter Nina. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almayer%27s_Folly 54- Which of the following about Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is NOT TRUE? Answer: Choice 3 To the Lighthouse is a 1927 novel by Virginia Woolf. The novel centers on the Ramsays and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920. The novel lacks an omniscient narrator (except in the second section: Time Passes); instead the plot unfolds through shifting perspectives of each character’s consciousness. Shifts can occur even midsentence, and in some sense they resemble the rotating beam of the lighthouse itself. Unlike James Joyce’s Stream of Consciousness technique, however, Woolf does not tend to use abrupt fragments to represent characters’ thought processes; her method is more one of lyrical paraphrase. The lack of an omniscient narrator means that, throughout the novel, no clear guide exists for the reader and that only through character development can we formulate our own opinions and views because much is morally ambiguous. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_the_Lighthouse 55- Kingsley Amis’s novel Lucky Jim (1954), one of the best-known examples of a campus novel in the English language, --------------------. Answer: Choice 2 The story of Lucky Jim is set sometimes around 1950. Jim, the titular character and protagonist of the novel, follows the exploits of the eponymous James Dixon, called Jim. James Dixon was a reluctant medieval history lecturer at an anonymous provincial English university. Source: http://www.self.gutenberg.org/articles/eng/Lucky_Jim
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56- The 2000 novel White Teeth which foucuses on the later lives of two wartime friends— the Bangladeshi Samad Iqbal and the Englishman Archie Jones, and their families in London is by the British author ------------------. Answer: Choice 3 White Teeth is a 2000 novel by the British author Zadie Smith. It focuses on the later lives of two wartime friends—the Bangladeshi Samad Iqbal and the Englishman Archie Jones—and their families in London. The novel is centered around Britain’s relationships with people from formerly colonized countries in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 9th edition, p. 3057 OR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Teeth 57- Which of the following about William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar (1599) is NOT TRUE? Answer: Choice 1 Known more formally as The Tragedy of Julius Caesar it was written in 1599 and portrays the 44 BC conspiracy against the Roman dictator Julius Caesar, his assassination and the defeat of the conspirators at the Battle of Philippi. It is one of several Roman plays that Shakespeare wrote, based on true events from Roman history, which also include Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra. Although the title of the play is Julius Caesar, Caesar is not the most visible character in its action; he appears in only three scenes, and is killed at the beginning of the third act. The play contains many anachronistic elements from the Elizabethan period, objects such as hats and doublets (large, heavy jackets)—neither of which existed in ancient Rome. Source: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/524981152 OR The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature by Dinah Birch and Katy Hooper, 3rd edition, p. 377
1392 – Explanatory Answers and Sources 58- Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (1993) is set in a(n) -------------------. Answer: Choice 4 Arcadia is a 1993 play by Tom Stoppard concerning the relationship between past and present, order and disorder, certainty and uncertainty. It has been praised by many critics as the finest play from one of the most significant contemporary playwrights in the English language. In 2006, the Royal Institution of Great Britain named it one of the best sciencerelated works ever written. Arcadia is set in Sidley Park, an English country house in Derbyshire, and takes place in both 1809/1812 and the present day (1993 in the original production). The activities of two modern scholars and the house’s current residents are juxtaposed with those of the people who lived there in the earlier period. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcadia_(play) OR Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 2752 59- ‘Playwright / play’ do not match in -----------------. Answer: Choice 1 No Man’s Land is by Harold Pinter Some other works by Pinter are: One for the Road (1984) / Mountain Language (1988) / The New World Order (1991) / Party Time (1991) / Moonlight (1993) / Ashes to Ashes (1996) / Celebration (1999) / Remembrance of Things Past Source: The Short Oxford History of English Literature by Andrew Sanders, p. 623 60- In Edward Bond’s —------------------, John Clare, the working class poet whose class anger is real enough, is forced into frustrated compromise and madness because he cannot find the ideological weapons with which to fight his oppressors. Answer: Choice 1 In The Fool: Scenes of Bread and Love, John Clare, the working-class poet whose class anger is real enough, is forced into frustrated compromise and madness because he cannot find the ideological weapons with which to fight his oppressors. In the most emotionally challenging of Bond’s plays, Lear, he not only drastically revises the King Lear story but also re-engages with Shakespeare’s themes of blindness, madness, and the exercise of power. There is little room for what might conventionally or comfortingly be seen as ‘poetry’ or ‘tragedy’. Source: The Short Oxford History of English Literature by Andrew Sanders, p. 627
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1393 – Questions LITERARTY TERMS AND CRITICISM 1- Which of the following statements about the term ‘actant’, as developed in the narratology of A. J. Greimas is TRUE? 1) It comprises six basic categories of fictional role found in all stories. 2) Actants are never paired in binary oppositions. 3) An actant may be realized in a non-human creature. 4) A character can be an individualized manifestation of only one actant. 2- In the eighteenth century, a number of poets wrote georgics (on the model of Virgil) describing in verse -----------------. 1) such utilitarian arts as sheepherding and running a sugar plantation 2) complicated philosophical matters for the use of the non-professional reader 3) how matters of the state should be tackled by modern day courtiers 4) aristocratic love as it was practiced in contemporary society 3- As a supplement to perfect rhyme, ‘slant rhyme’ or ‘pararhyme’ -----------------. 1) was denigrated by such poets as W. B. Yeats and Gerald Manley Hopkins as ‘an ancient form inappropriate to the modern poetic sensibility’ 2) emerged at the turn of the end 19th century in response to Romantic poet’s use of common ordinary speech 3) was extremely widespread in 18th century heroic poetry (as in Pope’s translation of the Iliad) 4) is fairly common in serious 20th century poetry as well as in folk poetry such as children’s verse 4- Chronicle Plays, dramatic works based on the historical materials in the English Chronicles by Raphael Holinshed and others, ------------------. 1) would, early in their development, present a loosely knit series of events during the reign of an English king and depended for effect mainly on a bustle of stage battles, pageantry, and spectacle 2) went out of fashion with the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, which fostered a demand for ‘real’ plays dealing with English history. 3) were selected, rearranged and replicated by such Elizabethan dramatists as Christopher Marlowe, in his Tamburlaine the Great (1592) to compose a unified drama of character 4) is often applied broadly to any drama based mainly on historical materials, such as Shakespeare’s Roman plays Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra 5- The character ‘Vice’ in ---------------- is regarded by some literary historians as a precursor of such figures in Elizabethan drama as ---------------. 1) mystery plays / Shakespeare’s Falstaff 2) morality plays / Shakespeare’s Falstaff 3) morality plays / Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus 4) mystery plays / Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus
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6- Richard Crashaw’s description, in his mid-seventeenth-century poem “Saint Mary Magdalene,” of the tearful eyes of the repentant Magdalene as ‘two faithful fountains / Two walking baths, two weeping motions, / Portable and compendious oceans’ best typifies a(n) ----------------. 1) mixed metaphor 2) implicit metaphor 3) metaphysical conceit 4) extended simile 7- As a form of burlesque ‘lampoon’ -----------------. 1) was an 18th century theatre form mocking serious plays 2) is a sub-branch of caricature, mainly used in written art for comic purposes 3) allegedly described the inner mind of a particular person in a ridiculous way 4) is a short satirical work, or a passage in a longer work 8- In discussions of ‘ecriture’, ‘recuperation’ ----------------. 1) is the text’s representation of the world as no more than an effect generated by the process of reading 2) takes place through such habitual procedures in reading as assigning the text to a specific genre 3) concerns the fact that a text is simply a structure of signs whose significance is constituted by ideology 4) is used to signify the multiple ways in which any one literary text is made up of other texts 9- The term ‘thick description’, as developed by Clifford Geertz, originally evolved in the discipline of ------------------. 1) ‘cultural anthropology’ 2) ‘political philosophy’ 3) ‘Lacanian psychoanalysis’ 4) ‘postmodern fiction’ 10- The term ‘new pragmatism’ basically concerns ------------------. 1) evaluation of a work based on collective critical opinion 2) consideration of history of ideas in the generation of recent theory 3) skepticism about the efficacy of theory on practice 4) irrelevance of old theories to the newly developing ones 11- Which of the following on Aristotle / his Poetics is NOT TRUE? 1) He contends that poetry is more universal, more general than things as they are. 2) He disagrees with Plato that all arts—from epic poetry to flute-playing—are imitations. 3) He generally maintains that the thoughts expressed through language (and not language itself) are a poet’s utmost concern. 4) He never addresses the didactic value of poetry or literature in the Poetics. 12- The Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) believes that in a ‘polyphonic’ novel the ------------------. 1) polyphonic nature of the work implies the existence of one all-encompassing truth 2) author knows the ending of the novel while writing the novel’s beginning 3) truth of the novel is mainly an active creation in the consciousness of the reader 4) novel is not a working out of the authors worldview or understanding of truth
1393 – Questions 13- ‘The Fugitives’, a 1920s group that believed in and practiced similar approaches to a text, had strong critical affinities with the later-formed -----------------. 1) German neo-Romantics 2) Chicago Neo-Aristotelians 3) New Humanists 4) Southern Agrarians 14- In Wolfgang Iser’s brand of reader-oriented criticism -----------------. 1) a text is properly ‘concretized’ only when it is de-registered and automatically viewed in the reader’s consciousness 2) texts, in and of themselves, possess meanings, which are then only decoded by the active consciousness of the reader 3) texts do not tell the reader everything that needs to be known about a character, a situation. etc. and the reader must automatically fill in these ‘gaps’ using their own knowledge base 4) the text— ‘ideally and in the final analysis’— should come to have one and only one correct meaning 15- In Hans Robert Jauss’ conception of reception theory, ----------------. 1) an ‘interpretive community’ is a like-minded group of readers 2) the text does not play much of a role in the interpretive process 3) a final assessment about any literary work is ultimately impossible 4) evaluation of a text is not ‘essentially’ different in different historical periods 16- Structuralism maintains that literary meaning can only be found by / through ----------------. 1) a profound transactional response to a text’s latent structure 2) analysis of the system of rules that comprise literature itself 3) recourse to readers’ private and public experiences across time 4) attention to the author’s intention and the text’s semantic structuration 17- A deconstructor begins textual analysis by assuming that a text (the text’s) ----------------. 1) allows countless reinterpretations by the reader 2) possesses a special ontological status 3) meaning is ultimately decidable, albeit ‘hazily’ 4) ascetic quality precludes truly genuine re-readings 18- Freud’s Dynamic Model of the human psyche would posit that ------------------. 1) the preconscious in our mind takes priority over the conscious 2) the human psyche functions according to the principles of ‘reality’ and ‘pleasure’ 3) our minds are a dichotomy consisting of the conscious and the unconscious 4) nearly all manifest desires have their roots in the aggressive instinct 19- The American critic Fredric Jameson asserts that when analyzing a text, critics should possess ‘dialectical self-awareness’: they must -----------------. 1) deal initially resolve their contradictory ideological standpoints 2) be aware of their own ideology 3) try to merge their ideology with their literary inclinations 4) stay away from any ideology
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20- The Cultural Poetics approach to textual analysis -------------------. 1) generally, bases its philosophical premises on Aristotle’s view of art as mimesis 2) deals with a text as an autonomous work of art that contains all the necessary cultural elements within it 3) examines the text’s ‘cultural’ concerns as divorced from its ‘aesthetic’ aspects 4) questions the very act of how we can arrive at meaning for any human activity HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 21- The 15th c. figure Sir Thomas Malory (d. 1471) was ----------------. 1) imitated in several enormously long fifteenth-century French prose romances 2) a passionate devotee of chivalry, which he personified in his hero Sir Lancelot 3) the first to divide the long romance Morte Darthur into a book for publication 4) a translator of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and Gower’s Confession Amantis into modern English 22- The 16th c. Book of Homilies -----------------. 1) was composed of hundreds of sermons developed in English for official services at the royal court 2) introduced the old Latin liturgy in the English vernacular for the newly-founded protestant Church 3) was a moderate, though often ambiguous compromise between Catholic and Protestant positions at a time when rivalry between the two camps was extremely rife 4) put together twelve sermons that were, by royal and ecclesiastical decree, to be read over and over, in the order in which they were set forth, in parish churches throughout England 23- Elizabethan poet / poem DO NOT match in ------------------. 1) Henry Howard. Earl of Surrey / ‘Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest’ 2) Edmund Spenser / ‘Of this worlds Theatre in which we stay’ 3) Sir Philip Sidney / ‘When Nature made her chief work, Stella’s eyes’ 4) William Shakespeare / ‘Poor soul, the center of my sinful earth’ 24- Early 17th c. literature events occurred in the correct order in ------------------. 1) Jonson’s Volpone“King James” BibleDonne’s The Second AnniversaryBacon’s Novum Organum 2) “King James” BibleJonson’s VolponeBacon’s Novum OrganumDonne’s The Second Anniversary 3) Bacon’s Novum OrganumJonson’s VolponeDonne’s The Second Anniversary “King James” Bible 4) Donne’s The Second AnniversaryJonson’s VolponeBacon’s Novum Organum “King James” Bible 25- Which of the following about John Donne’s verse satires is TRUE? 1) They have an elegiac quality as he had at the time—early 17th c.—been appointed as the dean of St. Paul’s in England. 2) His satires were nearly always written in an urbane and witty style. 3) They were developed as an effort in the 1590s (by Donne and Jonson among others) to naturalize it as a classical form in England. 4) The models for his satires were contemporary French and Italian poets (and not as could have been expected) ancients like Horace and Juvenal.
1393 – Questions 26- Sir Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis -----------------. 1) has at its center an account of a research establishment, Solomon’s House, that could exist in any society 2) is based on Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) in nearly every detail 3) is modelled after a real island, Bensalem, discovered in 1568 in the Pacific, famous for its inhabitants’ unusually enlightened attitude towards life 4) starts after an imaginary journey in which the narrator, Zakary, discovers an island strangely immersed in Hebrew and Greek thought 27- Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy ------------------. 1) finds it ill-advised to include any digression, or what he called ‘picaresque disorder’, in its analysis of ‘melancholia’ 2) impersonates in its ‘Democritus’ Junior’ the madness of the Greek “laughing philosopher” Democritus 3) analyzes in encyclopedic detail the ubiquitous Jacobean theory of four humors 4) assumes that knowledge of psychology, not science, is humankind’s greatest need 28- Daniel Defoe’s Roxana, or The Fortunate Mistress is ------------------. 1) about a woman saved from ruin by an honest Dutch merchant 2) the story, told by herself, of a beautiful and ambitious courtesan 3) set in the early seventeenth century in an anonymous ‘north of England’ town 4) the tale of an ‘opportune’ marriage succeeding the heroine’s long career of ill-repute 29- Eighteenth century figure / work do NOT MATCH in ------------------. 1) Joseph Addison / ‘On the Scale of Being’ 2) William Hogarth / ‘Marriage A-la-Mode’ 3) Alexander Pope / ‘Fantomina: or, Love in a Maze’ 4) Jonathan Swift / ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’ 30- The ballads in Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802—03) were ----------------. 1) later on extensively used in his Waverly novels, an important set of historical novels he wrote in the 1820s and 30s. 2) genuine literary copies of traditional folk songs as he found them recited in the EnglishScottish border 3) mostly prompted by his chance discovery of a seventeenth-century manuscript in which a number of ancient had been copied down 4) set down on paper at the dictation of the people among whom the old poems were still being recited and sung 31- Which of the following about Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) is TRUE? 1) He never wrote for newspapers but undertook to write, publish, and distribute a periodical, The Friend, with a distinguished group of fellow poets and critics. 2) He grew less and less radical as he aged: he finally became a conservative in politics—a highly philosophical one—and a staunch Anglican in religion. 3) He planned to establish an ideal democratic community called “Pantisocracy” with the help of sonic fellow poets in Southern England. 4) He was, as a major Romantic, an anti-elitist in arts and letters with a firm belief in the role ordinary people might play in modern states.
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32- Byron’s poem ‘Beppo’, written in Venice, ------------------. 1) was a sequel to his The Vision of Judgement which had been famously derided by critics 2) is based on material he gathered for his plays The Two Foscari, Sardanapalus and Cain 3) was his first work in the ironic, colloquial style which was to lead him to Don Juan 4) shows his deep involvement with the cause of the Italian and Greek patriots 33- John Keats’s Eve of St Agnes -----------------. 1) is composed of a sequence of short lyric grouped around the theme of love 2) was his poem in a satirical vein which was, however, initially conceived as an epic 3) is a long ballad describing a knight fatally enthralled by an elfin woman 4) includes the characters Madeline and his love Porphyro (who comes from a family hostile to Madeline’s) 34- Which of the following about the British historical novel is TRUE? 1) A convenient generic starting point for it is Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). 2) Such factual works such as Macaulay’s History of England (1848) nearly ruined the respectability of the emergent historical fiction in the Victorian period. 3) Attempts in such works as Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii to reconstruct the historical novel along Greco-Roman classical lines were met with huge public disapproval in their own time. 4) Beginning with the 1830s, the historical novel lost almost all its Scott-established status as a respected genre of fiction. 35- The ‘Time of Troubles’ in the Victorian period, which left its mark on the early Victorian literature, refers to ------------------. 1) huge expansion of British colonies and the human and economic costs it brought about, particularly from 1830s 2) challenges made to the government of Ireland by Britain well into the century after the Irish Act of Union in 1800 3) economic and social difficulties attendant on industrialization in the 1830s and 1840s 4) the population boom in the Early-Victorian era which caused mass-unemployment problems in the first half of the 19th c 36- Which of the following works does NOT typify the influence of the ‘utilitarian spirit’ prevalent in the Victorian age? 1) Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus 2) Pater’s Marias the Epicurean 3) Mill’s Autobiography 4) Dickens’s Hard Times 37- In his essay ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, the English poet, philosopher, and critic T. E. Hulme (1883-1917) ----------------. 1) espoused views of conventional language and the visual image which were at odds with those of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound 2) sharply repudiates the “spilt religion” of Romanticism, responsible for vagueness in the arts 3) sees human beings as limited and capable of improvement only through the rejection of tradition. 4) calls for abandoning the fashionable ‘dry, hard, classical verse’ for verse that exhibits ‘precision, clarity, and freshness’
1393 – Questions 38- As a term applied to English cultural history, Edwardian suggests a period in which -----------------. 1) the moral atmosphere of the pre-War years was relaxed in the years after the War, both as regarded the literature of the time and the general life of the public 2) ‘social injustice’ in between the wars was the dominant theme of British public life 3) the social and economic stabilities of the Victorian age remained largely unimpaired, though on the level of ideas a sense of change and liberation existed 4) there was what can be called a ‘lull’ immediately before the storm of World War I 39- Which is the correct order of texts in the twentieth century? 1) T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” E. M. Forster’s A Passage to IndiaWilliam Butler Yeats’ The Tower 2) William Butler Yeats’ The TowerT. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India 3) T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” William Butler Yeats’ The TowerE. M. Forster’s A Passage to India 4) William Butler Yeats’ The TowerE. M. Forster’s A Passage to IndiaT. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 40- An important feature of the 1930s English literature is that ------------------. 1) the emerging poets and novelists of the time were relatively unaffected by the rise of Hitler and the shadow of Fascism and Nazism over Europe. 2) the younger writers of the period were technically far more daring and inventive than such modernists as Eliot and Woolf. 3) writers generally turned “anti-red” as they were horrified by the events in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution there in 1917. 4) such established figures as T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound turned to the political right. LITERARY GENRES 41- Which of the following about William Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello (written between 1602 to 1604) is NOT TRUE? 1) Cassio is the character in the play who helps Othello court his wife and whom Othello promotes to be his lieutenant in the course of the play. 2) Desdemona, the daughter of Brabantio, a Venetian senator, has secretly married Othello, a Moor in the service of the state. 3) In the middle of a storm which disperses the Turkish fleet, Othello lands on Cyprus with Desdemona and Cassio, a young Florentine. 4) Iago persuades his wife Emilia to plead in his favor with Cassio, which she does secretly, albeit unwillingly and with a sense of guilt. 42- Combining elements of Spanish intrigue comedy and fast-moving farce, the Restoration comedy ---------------- shows the exploits of two English cavaliers, Wildblood and Bellamy, in Madrid at carnival time. 1) John Dryden’s An Evening’s Love 2) William Congreve’s The Old Bachelor 3) William Congreve’s The Mourning Bride 4) John Dryden’s All for Love
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43- Which of the following is NOT a character in Oliver Goldsmith’s comedy She Stoops to Conquer, or The Mistakes of a Night (produced 1773)? 1) Hardcastle, who loves ‘everything that’s old: old friends, old times, old manners, …’ 2) Tony Lumpkin, a frequenter of the Three Jolly Pigeons, idle and ignorant, but cunning and mischievous, and doted on by his mother. 3) Heartwell, a ‘surly old pretended woman-hater’. 4) Young Marlow, “one of the most ‘bashful’ and ‘reserved’ young fellows in the world”. 44- The term ---------------- has been used by the twentieth century playwright Howard Barker to describe his own brand of theatre. 1) “Theatre of Maladjustment” 2) “Drama of Desire” 3) “Drama of Revelation” 4) “Theatre of Catastrophe” 45- Edward Bond’s 1965 play Saved ----------------. 1) takes its surreal setting from a painting of drab city streets by ‘some unknown German artist’ 2) evokes a bleak south London landscape of domestic and street violence and the somewhat caricatured impoverished pastimes of the working class 3) takes place in the somber Victorian atmosphere of 1840s in a backdrop of urban unrest 4) adapts its modern surroundings to that of a remote region in the heartlands of Australia where ‘nothing but storms of sand reign’ 46- Which of the following plays written (in 1987) largely in rhyming verse opens with a short satirical extract from a 1693 comedy by Thomas Shadwell? 1) Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money 2) David Hare’s Plenty 3) Tony Harrison’s The Laborers of Herakles 4) Alan Bennett’s forty Years On 47- ‘Novel / character / character description’ from works by George Eliot (1819-80) match in ---------------. 1) Adam Bede / Dinah Morris / pretty, vain, and self-centered, niece of the genial farmer Martin Poyser of Hall Farm 2) Silas Marner / Arthur Donnithorne / Dunstan’s elder brother in the novel in love with Nancy Lammeter, but secretly and unhappily married to a woman of low class in a neighboring town. 3) Felix Holt / Esther / heir to the Transonic estate gradually falling in love with Felix in the course of the novel 4) The Mill on the Floss / Maggie / a Methodist preacher of a very strong, serious, and calm nature
1393 – Questions 48- Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904) opens with ----------------. 1) “To begin with I wish to disclaim the possession of those high gifts of imagination and expression which would have enabled my pen to create for the reader the personality of the man who called himself, after the Russian custom, Cyril son of Isidor—Kirylo Sidorovitch—Razumov.” 2) “On my right hand there were lines of fishing stakes resembling a mysterious system of half-submerged bamboo fences, incomprehensible in its division of the domain of tropical fishes, and crazy of aspect as if abandoned forever by some nomad tribe of fishermen now gone to the other end of the ocean; for there was no sign of human habitation as far as the eye could reach.” 3) “Mr. Verloc, going out in the morning, left his shop nominally in charge of his brotherin-law. It could be done, because there was very little business at any time, and practically none at all before the evening. Mr. Verloc cared but little about his ostensible business. And, moreover, his wife was in charge of his brother-in-law.” 4) “In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of Sulaco—the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its antiquity—had never been commercially anything more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local trade in ox-hides and indigo.” 49- Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse (1927) is written in three sections, the section second of which, ----------------. 1) describes the exhausting but finally successful efforts of Lily, through her painting, to recapture the revelation of shape-in-chaos which she owes to the vanished Mrs. Ramsay 2) deals in accurate detail with the desire of Mr. Ramsay, Camilla, and James to reach the lighthouse, which they finally accomplish, despite the undercurrents of rivalry, loss, and rebellion that torment them. 3) records with laconic brevity the death of Mrs. Ramsay and of her son Andrew, killed in the war, and dwells with a desolate lyricism on the abandoning of the family home, and its gradual post-war reawakening 4) is focused on the frictions of a hectic day that are finally, though only momentarily, resolved around the dinner table (with Mrs. Ramsay famously reflecting at the end of the section that ‘something ... is immune from change, and shines out... in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby’.) 50- Henry James (1843-1916) ‘novel / novel characters’ DO NOT match in ----------------. 1) The Portrait of a Lady / Douglas, Miss Jessel and Peter Quint 2) Washington Square / Catherine, Dr. Sloper and Morris Townsend 3) The Ambassadors / Lambert Strether, Chad Newsome and Marie de Vionnet 4) The Wings of the Dove / Kate Croy, Merton Densher and Milly Theale 51- Which of the following about Samuel Beckett’s Murphy (1938) is NOT TRUE? 1) Murphy has conversations with his friend and mentor Neary an eccentric from Ireland who has the ability to stop his heart. 2) The main character is a recluse ‘eking out his meagre existence on the margins of the Paris conurbation’. 3) The main character is urged by the character Celia to find a job, and begins work as a nurse at the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat in north London. 4) It opens with the protagonist having tied himself naked to a rocking chair in his apartment, rocking back and forth in the dark.
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52- ‘Novelist / novel’ match in -----------------. 1) V. S. Naipaul / The Kingdom of the Wicked 2) Kazuo Ishiguro / Enderby Outside 3) Angela Carter / Nights at the Circus 4) Dorris Lessing / The Enemy in the Blanket 53- Which of the following about John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) is TRUE? 1) The action of the poem begins in median res (in the middle of things), prior to the poet’s statement of his theme and invocation of his Muse. 2) There are several passages of straightforward reference in the work to the political questions at stake in the English Revolution and the Restoration. 3) The setting of the epic encompasses Heaven, Hell, primordial Chaos, but precludes the planet earth. 4) The poet highlights the choices and difficulties he faced in creating his poem in the opening passages of Books 1, 3, 7, and 9 of the book 54- William Blake’s ‘The Book of Thel’ (1791) opens with Thel’s Motto -----------------. 1) “Cruelty has a Human Heart / And Jealousy a Human Face, / Terror, the Human Form Divine. / And Secrecy, the Human Dress.” 2) “Does the Eagle know what is in the pit? / Or wilt thou go ask the Mole? / Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod? / Or Love in a golden bowl?” 3) “I was angry with my friend: / I told my wrath, my wrath did end. / I was angry with my foe: / I told it not. my wrath did grow.” 4) “Pity would be no more. / If we did not make somebody Poor: / And Mercy no more could be. / If all were as happy as we.” 55- The Romantic Poet Lord Byron was not particularly influenced—as ‘a recognizable antecedent’— by --------------- in his composition of Don Juan. 1) Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound 2) Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels 3) Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas 4) Laurence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy 56- Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott (1832) opens with -----------------. 1) “Courage!” he said, and pointed toward the land. / “This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon...” 2) “On either side the river lie / Long fields of barley and of rye. / That clothe the wold and meet the sky...” 3) “At Francis Allen’s on the Christmas eve—The game of forfeits done—the girls all kissed Beneath the sacred bush and passed away...” 4) “Comrades, leave me here a little, while as yet 'tis early morn; / Leave me here, and when you want me, sound upon the bugle horn...” 57- ‘Poet /poem’ DO NOT match in -----------------. 1) Ernest Dowson / ‘Cynara’ 2) Oscar Wilde / ‘Impression du Matin’ 3) Dante Gabriel Rossetti / ‘The Defence of Guenevere’ 4) Algernon Gabriel Swinburne / ‘Ave atque Vale’
1393 – Questions 58- Which of the following about the poet W. H. Auden (1907-1973) is NOT TRUE? 1) He was influenced early on in his poetry by popular and folk culture, particularly the songs of the English music hall and, later, American blues singers. 2) He learned metrical and verbal techniques from Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wilfred Owen and T. S. Eliot. 3) He, along with Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis and Louis MacNeice would form what was later termed as the ‘Auden Group’. 4) He was not quite concerned with the Waste Land of poverty and ‘depressed areas’ that was the 1930s England in his poetry. 59- The Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978) -----------------. 1) mourned the state of the English language in his In Memoriam James Joyce and called for a return to the natural rhythms of English 2) would, in an essay, argue vehemently against confining ‘British literature’ to the standard English literature of England 3) published nearly all his poetry in ‘Lallan’, a language he developed out of several strands of old and modern Scots 4) wrote much of his poetry, as one of the founders of the Scottish Renaissance Movement, in the vernacular Scots after the mid-1950s 60- Which of the following poets / group of poets can be seen as an antecedent / an influence upon the Movement poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985) 1) A. E. Housman, Wilfred Owen and W. H. Auden 2) T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound 3) Dyland Thomas and the New Apocalypse poets 4) Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning
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1393 – Explanatory Answers and Sources LITERARTY TERMS AND CRITICISM 1- Which of the following statements about the term ‘actant’, as developed in the narratology of A. J. Greimas is TRUE? Answer: Choice 3 In the narratology of A. J. Greimas, one of six basic categories of fictional role common to all stories. The actants are paired in binary opposition: Subject/Object, Sender/Receiver, Helper/Opponent. A character (or acteur) is an individualized manifestation of one or more actants; but an actant may be realized in a non-human creature (e.g. a dragon as Opponent) or inanimate object (e.g. magic sword as Helper, or Holy Grail as Object), or in more than one acteur. Source: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms by Chris Baldick, 2nd edition, p. 3 2- In the eighteenth century, a number of poets wrote georgics (on the model of Virgil) describing in verse -----------------. Answer: Choice 1 In the eighteenth century, a number of poets wrote georgics (on the model of Virgil), describing in verse such utilitarian arts as sheepherding, running a sugar plantation, and making cider. Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism and his Essay on Man are eighteenthcentury didactic poems on the subjects of literary criticism and of moral philosophy. Source: A Glossary of Literary Terms by M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, 10th edition, p. 88 3- As a supplement to perfect rhyme, ‘slant rhyme’ or ‘pararhyme’ -----------------. Answer: Choice 4 Many modern poets, however, deliberately supplement perfect rhyme with ‘imperfect rhyme’ (also known as ‘partial rhyme’, or else as ‘approximate rhyme’, ‘slant rhyme’, or ‘pararhyme’). This effect is fairly common in folk songs such as children’s verses, and it was employed occasionally by various writers of art lyrics such as Henry Vaughan in the seventeenth, William Blake in the late eighteenth, and very frequently by Emily Dickinson in the nineteenth century. Later, Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, and other poets systematically exploited partial rhymes, in which the vowels are only approximate or else quite different, and occasionally even the rhymed consonants are similar rather than identical. Source: A Glossary of Literary Terms by M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, 10th edition, p. 349-50
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4- Chronicle Plays, dramatic works based on the historical materials in the English Chronicles by Raphael Holinshed and others, ------------------. Answer: Choice 1 Chronicle plays were dramatic works based on the historical materials in the English Chronicles by Raphael Holinshed and others. They achieved high popularity late in the sixteenth century, when the patriotic fervor following the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 fostered a demand for plays dealing with English history. The early chronicle plays presented a loosely knit series of events during the reign of an English king and depended for effect mainly on a bustle of stage battles, pageantry, and spectacle. Christopher Marlowe, however, in his Edward II (1592) selected and rearranged materials from Holinshed’s Chronicles to compose a unified drama of character, and Shakespeare’s series of chronicle plays, encompassing the succession of English kings from Richard II to Henry VIII, includes such major artistic achievements as Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V Source: A Glossary of Literary Terms by M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, 10th edition, p. 50 5- The character ‘Vice’ in ---------------- is regarded by some literary historians as a precursor of such figures in Elizabethan drama as ---------------. Answer: Choice 2 Morality plays were dramatized allegories of a representative Christian life in the plot form of a quest for salvation, in which the crucial events are temptations, sinning, and the climactic confrontation with death. The usual protagonist represents Mankind, or Everyman; among the other characters are personifications of virtues, vices, and Death, as well as angels and demons who contest for the prize of the soul of Mankind. A character known as the Vice often played the role of the tempter in a fashion both sinister and comic; he is regarded by some literary historians as a precursor both of the cynical, ironic villain and of some of the comic figures in Elizabethan drama, including Shakespeare’s Falstaff. Source: A Glossary of Literary Terms by M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, 10th edition, p. 224
1393 – Explanatory Answers and Sources 6- Richard Crashaw’s description, in his mid-seventeenth-century poem “Saint Mary Magdalene,” of the tearful eyes of the repentant Magdalene as ‘two faithful fountains / Two walking baths, two weeping motions, / Portable and compendious oceans’ best typifies a(n) ----------------. Answer: Choice 3 An oft-cited instance of the chilly ingenuity of the metaphysical conceit when it is overdriven is Richard Crashaw’s description, in his mid-seventeenth-century poem “Saint Mary Magdalene,” of the tearful eyes of the repentant Magdalene as two faithful fountains Two walking baths, two weeping motions, Portable and compendious oceans. Source: A Glossary of Literary Terms by M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, 10th edition, p. 59 7- As a form of burlesque ‘lampoon’ -----------------. Answer: Choice 4 A form of burlesque is the ‘lampoon’: a short satirical work, or a passage in a longer work, which describes the appearance and character of a particular person in a way that makes that person ridiculous. It typically employs ‘caricature’, which in a verbal description (as in graphic art) exaggerates or distorts, for comic effect, a person’s distinctive physical features or personality traits. Source: A Glossary of Literary Terms by M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, 10th edition, p. 39 8- In discussions of ‘ecriture’, ‘recuperation’ ----------------. Answer: Choice 2 The system of linguistic and literary conventions that constitute a literary text are said by structuralist and poststructuralist critics to be “naturalized” in the activity of reading, in that the artifices of a nonreferential “textuality” are made to seem vraisemblable (credible)—that is, made to give the illusion of referring to reality—by being brought into accord with modes of discourse and cultural stereotypes that are so familiar and habitual as to seem natural. Naturalization (an alternative term is recuperation) takes place through such habitual procedures in reading as assigning the text to a specific genre, or taking a fictional text to be the speech of a credibly human narrator, or interpreting its artifices as signifying characters, actions, and values that represent, or accord with, those in an extratextual world. Source: A Glossary of Literary Terms by M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, 10th edition, p. 401
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9- The term ‘thick description’, as developed by Clifford Geertz, originally evolved in the discipline of ------------------. Answer: Choice 1 Developments in cultural anthropology, especially Clifford Geertz’s view that a culture is constituted by distinctive sets of signifying systems, and his use of what he calls ‘thick descriptions’—the close analysis, or “reading,” of a particular social production or event so as to recover the meanings it has for the people involved in it, as well as to discover, within the overall cultural system, the network of conventions, codes, and modes of thinking with which the particular item is implicated, and which invest the item with those meanings. Source: A Glossary of Literary Terms by M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, 10th edition, p. 245 10- The term ‘new pragmatism’ basically concerns ------------------. Answer: Choice 3 The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard has also mounted an influential attack against “theory,” which he regards as an attempt to impose a common vocabulary and set of principles in order illegitimately to control and constrain the many independent “languagegames” that constitute discourse; see his The Postmodern Condition (1984). One response to this skepticism about the efficacy of theory on practice (a skepticism that is often labeled the new pragmatism) is that, while no general theory of meaning entails consequences for the practice of interpretation (in the strict logical sense of “entails”), it is a matter of common observation that diverse current theories have in actual fact served both to foster and to corroborate diverse and novel interpretive practices by literary critics. Source: A Glossary of Literary Terms by M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, 10th edition, p. 314 11- Which of the following on Aristotle / his Poetics is NOT TRUE? Answer: Choice 2 At the beginning of the Poetics, Aristotle notes that “epic poetry, tragedy, comedy, dithyrambic poetry, and most forms of flute and lyre playing all happen to be in general, imitations.” Although all of these imitations differ in how and what they imitate, Aristotle agrees with Plato that all arts are imitations. Source: Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice by Charles E. Bressler, 5th edition, p. 23 12- The Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) believes that in a ‘polyphonic’ novel the ------------------. Answer: Choice 4 In a polyphonic novel, there is no overall outline structure or prescribed outcome, nor is the text a working out of the author’s worldview or understanding of truth. The truth of the
1393 – Explanatory Answers and Sources polyphonic novel is an active creation in the consciousness of the author, the reader, and the characters, allowing for genuine surprises for all concerned. Source: Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice by Charles E. Bressler, 5th edition, p. 46 13- ‘The Fugitives’, a 1920s group that believed in and practiced similar approaches to a text, had strong critical affinities with the later-formed -----------------. Answer: Choice 4 While teaching at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, in the 1920s, John Crowe Ransom, along with several other professors and students, formed the Fugitives, a group of scholars and critics who believed in and practiced similar interpretive approaches to a text. Other sympathetic groups, such as the Southern Agrarians (also in Nashville, Tennessee), soon formed. Source: Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice by Charles E. Bressler, 5th edition, p. 53 14- In Wolfgang Iser’s brand of reader-oriented criticism -----------------. Answer: Choice 3 Since texts, however, do not tell the reader everything that needs to be known about a character, a situation, a relationship, and other such textual elements, readers must automatically fill in these ‘gaps’ using their own knowledge base, grounded as it is in a particular worldview. In addition, each reader creates his or her own horizon of expectations—that is a reader’s expectations about what will or may or should happen next. Source: Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice by Charles E. Bressler, 5th edition, p. 78 15- In Hans Robert Jauss’ conception of reception theory, ------------------. Answer: Choice 3 Jauss argues that since each historical period establishes its own horizon of expectations, the overall value and meaning of any text can never become fixed or universal. Readers from any given historical period establish for themselves, Jauss maintains, what they value in a text. A text, then does not have one and only one correct interpretation because its supposed meaning changes from one historical period to another. A final assessment about any literary work thus becomes impossible. Source: Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice by Charles E. Bressler, 5th edition, p. 78
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16- Structuralism maintains that literary meaning can only be found by / through -----------. Answer: Choice 2 Declaring both isolated text and author to be of little importance, structuralism attempts to strip literature of its magical powers or so-called hidden meanings that can be discovered by only a small, elite group of highly trained specialists. Meaning can be found, it declares, by analyzing the system of rules that comprise literature itself. Source: Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice by Charles E. Bressler, 5th edition, p. 100 17- A deconstructor begins textual analysis by assuming that a text (the text’s) ---------------------. Answer: Choice 1 A deconstructionist begins textual analysis by assuming that a text has multiple interpretations and that a text allow itself to be reread and thus reinterpreted countless times. Source: Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice by Charles E. Bressler, 5th edition, p. 116 18- Freud’s Dynamic Model of the human psyche would posit that ------------------. Answer: Choice 3 Early in his career, Freud developed the dynamic model, asserting that our minds are a dichotomy consisting of the conscious (the rational) and the unconscious (the irrational). Source: Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice by Charles E. Bressler, 5th edition, p. 125 19- The American critic Fredric Jameson asserts that when analyzing a text, critics should possess ‘dialectical self-awareness’: they must -----------------. Answer: Choice 2 In Marxism and Form (1971), a text revered by American Marxists, Jameson asserts that all critics must be aware of their own ideology when analyzing a text, possessing what he calls dialectical self-awareness. Source: Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice by Charles E. Bressler, 5th edition, p. 174
1393 – Explanatory Answers and Sources 20- The Cultural Poetics approach to textual analysis -------------------. Answer: Choice 4 Cultural Poetics claims that it provides its adherents with a practice of literary textual analysis that:
Highlights the interrelatedness of all human activities Admits its own prejudices Gives a more complete understanding of a text than does the old historicism and other interpretive approaches
Source: Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice by Charles E. Bressler, 5th edition, p. 183 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 21- The 15th c. figure Sir Thomas Malory (d. 1471) was ----------------. Answer: Choice 2 The works of Sir Thomas Malory (d. 1471) gave the definitive form in English to the legend of King Arthur and his knights. Malory spent years in prison Englishing a series of Arthurian romances that he translated and abridged chiefly from several enormously long thirteenthcentury French prose romances. Malory was a passionate devotee of chivalry, which he personified in his hero Sir Lancelot. In the jealousies and rivalries that finally break up the round table and destroy Arthur’s kingdom, Malory saw a distant image of the civil wars of his own time. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 14 22- The 16th c. Book of Homilies -----------------. Answer: Choice 4 The Protestant archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, was responsible in 1547 for the publication of the Book of Homilies. Hoping to curb the influence of “ignorant preachers” and fearing the spread of unauthorized beliefs, Cranmer brought together twelve sermons that were, by royal and ecclesiastical decree, to be read over and over, in the order in which they were set forth, in parish churches throughout the realm. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 635 23- Elizabethan poet / poem DO NOT match in ------------------. Answer: Choice 1 ‘Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest’ is Shakespeare’s sonnet number 3. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 1062, 904, 977, and 1076
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24- Early 17th c. literature events occurred in the correct order in ------------------. Answer: Choice 1 Jonson’s Volpone (1606) “King James” Bible (1611) Donne’s The Second Anniversary (1612) Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620) Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 1258 25- Which of the following about John Donne’s verse satires is TRUE? Answer: Choice 3 In satire 3 John Donne holds a subject up to ridicule. Like his elegies, Donne’s five verse satires were written in his twenties and are in the forefront of an effort in the 1590s (by Donne, Ben Jonson, Joseph Hall, and John Marston) to naturalize those classical forms in England. While elements of satire figure in many different kinds of literature, the great models for formal verse satire were the Roman poets Horace and Juvenal, the former for an urbanely witty style, the latter for an indignant or angry manner. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 1284 26- Sir Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis -----------------. Answer: Choice 1 Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) set a fashion for accounts of imaginary communities with more or less ideal forms of government. Bacon’s imaginary community has at its center an account of a research establishment, Solomon’s House, that could exist in any society; indeed, a version of it was established in England in 1662 as the Royal Society. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 1569 27- Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy ------------------. Answer: Choice 4 Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy assumes, unlike Bacon, that knowledge of psychology, not science, is humankind’s greatest need. His enormous, baggy, delightful treatise analyzes in encyclopedic detail that ubiquitous Jacobean malady, melancholy, supposedly caused, according to contemporary humor theory, by an excess of black bile. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 1573 28- Daniel Defoe’s Roxana, or The Fortunate Mistress is ------------------. Answer: Choice 2 Roxana, or The Fortunate Mistress, is the story, told by herself, of a beautiful and ambitious courtesan. A bad marriage and early poverty drive her to a career of prostitution, at which she succeeds brilliantly until eventually her past catches up with her. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 2289
1393 – Explanatory Answers and Sources 29- Eighteenth century figure / work do NOT MATCH in ------------------. Answer: Choice 3 ‘Fantomina: or, Love in a Maze’ is by Eliza Haywood Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 2566, 2490, 2658, and 2590 30- The ballads in Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-03) were ----------------. Answer: Choice 4 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (3 vols, 1802-3), a collection of ballads compiled by Sir W. Scott, who divided them into three sections, Historical Ballads, Romantic Ballads, and Imitations of the Ancient Ballad. He was aided by various friends and advisers, who included Leyden, J. Hogg, R. Surtees, and many old women (including Hogg’s mother) who kept alive the oral traditions. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 406 31- Which of the following about Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) is TRUE? Answer: Choice 2 Coleridge’s later works and unpublished lectures develop his critical ideas, concerning Imagination and Fancy; Reason and Understanding; Symbolism and Allegory; Organic and Mechanical Form; Culture and Civilization. The dialectical way he expresses them is one of his clearest debts to German Romantic philosophy. His final position is that of a Romantic conservative and Christian radical. Coleridge has been variously criticized as a political turncoat, a drug addict, a plagiarist, and a mystic humbug, whose wrecked career left nothing but a handful of magical early poems. But the importance of his highly imaginative criticism is now generally accepted, as is his position (with Wordsworth) as one of the two great progenitors of the English Romantic spirit. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 424 32- Byron’s poem ‘Beppo’, written in Venice, ------------------. Answer: Choice 3 Byron returned to Venice and there wrote Beppo, his first work in the ironic, colloquial style which was to lead him to Don Juan. Feeling more and more trapped by the poetic modes that had won him his popularity, Byron tested out an entirely new mode in Beppo: A Venetian Story, a comic verse tale about a deceived husband in which he previewed the playful narrative manner and the ottava rima stanzas of Don Juan. In December 1818 he began the composition of Don Juan. Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature, edited by Dinah Birch and Katy Hooper, p. 104
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33- John Keats’s Eve of St Agnes -----------------. Answer: Choice 4 The Eve of St Agnes is a narrative poem in Spenserian stanzas by John Keats, written 1819, published 1820. Madeline has been told the legend that on St Agnes’s Eve (January 20th) maidens may have visions of their lovers. Madeline’s love, Porphyro, comes from a family hostile to her own, yet he contrives to steal into the house during a ball on St Agnes’s Eve, and with the aid of old Angela is secreted in Madeline’s room. When she wakes from dreams of him, aroused by his soft singing, she finds him by her bedside. Silently they escape from the house, and fly ‘away into the storm’. Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature, edited by Dinah Birch and Katy Hooper, p. 234 34- Which of the following about the British historical novel is TRUE? Answer: Choice 1 The origins of the British historical novel can be located in the medieval romances of chivalry, but a convenient generic starting point is Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), which patented many of the conventional devices of the Gothic–historical tale. Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature by Dinah Birch and Katy Hooper, p. 331 35- The ‘Time of Troubles’ in the Victorian period, which left its mark on the early Victorian literature, refers to ------------------. Answer: Choice 3 The economic and social difficulties attendant on industrialization were so severe that the 1830s and 1840s became known as the ‘Time of Troubles’. After a period of prosperity from 1832 to 1836, a crash in 1837, followed by a series of bad harvests, produced a period of unemployment, desperate poverty, and rioting. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 983 36- Which of the following works does NOT typify the influence of the ‘utilitarian spirit’ prevalent in the Victorian age? Answer: Choice 2 Some rationalist challenges to religious belief that developed before the Victorian period maintained their influence. The most significant was Utilitarianism, also known as Benthamism or Philosophical Radicalism. Utilitarianism derived from the thought of Jeremy Bentham (1748—1832) and his disciple James Mill (1773—1836), the father of John Stuart Mill. Bentham believed that all human beings seek to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. The criterion by which we should judge a normally correct action, therefore, is the extent to which it provides the greatest pleasure to the greatest number. Measuring religion by this moral arithmetic, Benthamites concluded that it was an outmoded superstition; it did not meet the rationalist test of value. Utilitarianism was widely influential in providing a
1393 – Explanatory Answers and Sources philosophical basis for political and social reforms, but it aroused considerable opposition on the part of those who felt it failed to recognize people’s spiritual needs. Raised according to strict utilitarian principles by his father, John Stuart Mill came to be critical of them. In the mental and spiritual crisis portrayed in his Autobiography (1873), Mill describes his realization that his utilitarian upbringing had left him no power to feel. In Sartor Resartus (1833—34) Carlyle describes a similar spiritual crisis in which he struggles to rediscover the springs of religious feeling in the face of his despair at the specter of a universe governed only by utilitarian principles. Later both Dickens, in his portrayal of Thomas Gradgrind in Hard Times (1854), “a man of facts and calculations” who is “ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature,” and Ruskin, in his Unto This Last, attack utilitarianism. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 986 37- In his essay ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, the English poet, philosopher, and critic T. E. Hulme (1883-1917) ----------------. Answer: Choice 2 Although he published only six poems during his brief life, T. E. Hulme (1883—1917), English poet, philosopher, and critic, was one of the strongest intellectual forces behind the development of modernism. In this essay, probably composed in either 1911 or 1912 and probably delivered as a lecture in 1912, Hulme prophesies a “dry, hard, classical verse” that exhibits precision, clarity, and freshness. He sharply repudiates the “spilt religion” of Romanticism, responsible for vagueness in the arts. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 1998 38- As a term applied to English cultural history, Edwardian suggests a period in which -----------------. Answer: Choice 3 Edwardian as a term applied to English cultural history suggests a period in which the social and economic stabilities of the Victorian age—country houses with numerous servants, a flourishing and confident middle class, a strict hierarchy of social classes—remained unimpaired, though on the level of ideas a sense of change and liberation existed. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 1830 39- Which is the correct order of texts in the twentieth century? Answer: Choice 1 T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917) E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924)William Butler Yeats’ The Tower (1928) Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 1848
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40- An important feature of the 1930s English literature is that ------------------. Answer: Choice 4 Depression and unemployment in the early 1930s, followed by the rise of Hitler and the shadow of Fascism and Nazism over Europe, with its threat of another war, deeply affected the emerging poets and novelists of the time. While Eliot, Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Yeats, Pound, and others of the older generation turned to the political right, the impotence of capitalist governments in the face of Fascism combined with economic dislocation to turn the majority of young intellectuals (and not only intellectuals) in the 1930s to the political left. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 1832 LITERARY GENRES 41- Which of the following about William Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello (written between 1602 to 1604) is NOT TRUE? Answer: Choice 4 Iago uses Roderigo, “a gulled gentleman” in love with Desdemona, to fight with Cassio after he has got him drunk, so that Othello deprives him of his new rank. He then persuades Cassio to ask Desdemona to plead in his favor with Othello, which she warmly does. Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature by Dinah Birch and Katy Hooper, 3rd edition, p. 522 42- Combining elements of Spanish intrigue comedy and fast-moving farce, the Restoration comedy ---------------- shows the exploits of two English cavaliers, Wildblood. Answer: Choice 1 An Evening’s Love or The Mock Astrologer, a comedy by Dryden, produced 1668, published 1671. Combining elements of Spanish intrigue comedy and fast-moving farce with sexually explicit language, it proved a commercial though not an artistic success. The plot, borrowed from M. de Scudéry, Corneille, Quinault, Molière, and others, shows the exploits of two English cavaliers, Wildblood and Bellamy, in Madrid at carnival time. Source: The Oxford Companion to English Literature by Margaret Drabble, 6th edition, p. 340 43- Which of the following is NOT a character in Oliver Goldsmith’s comedy She Stoops to Conquer, or The Mistakes of a Night (produced 1773)? Answer: Choice 3 Heartwell, a ‘surly old pretended woman-hater’ is a character in The Old Bachelor which is the first play written by British playwright William Congreve, produced in 1693. Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature by Dinah Birch and Katy Hooper, 3rd edition, p. 652 and 514
1393 – Explanatory Answers and Sources 44- The term ---------------- has been used by the twentieth century playwright Howard Barker to describe his own brand of theatre. Answer: Choice 4 Howard Baker (1946–2014) came to prominence with a series of scathing dramas about the injustices of society: these included Stripwell (1975), and two plays set in a nightmarish Britain of the future, That Good between Us (1977) and The Hang of the Gaol (1978). From Victory (1983), a wonderfully grotesque epic about the birth of capitalism in 17th-century England, his work, never wholly realistic, gradually became more darkly comic in tone, and less direct in its attack on Establishment targets: as witness The Castle (1985), Seven Lears (1989), and Ten Dilemmas (1992). He attacks the idea of a didactic theatre and insists that his audiences find their own meaning from what he has termed his ‘Theatre of Catastrophe’. Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature by Dinah Birch and Katy Hooper, 3rd edition, p. 44 45- Edward Bond’s 1965 play Saved ----------------. Answer: Choice 2 Saved is a play by E. Bond, which caused much controversy when it was first seen (members only) at the Royal Court in 1965, having been refused a license for public performance. In short, minimalist-realist scenes, with dialogue of stark and stylized crudity, Bond evokes a bleak south London landscape of domestic and street violence and the somewhat caricatured impoverished pastimes of the working class—fishing, football pools, TV, pop music. Source: The Oxford Companion to English Literature by Margaret Drabble, 6th edition, p. 899 46- Which of the following plays written (in 1987) largely in rhyming verse opens with a short satirical extract from a 1693 comedy by Thomas Shadwell? Answer: Choice 1 Serious Money is by Caryl Churchill (perf. 1987). Inspired by the deregulation of the City in 1986, known as the Big Bang, the play, written largely in spirited rhyming verse, evokes the ruthless greed, buoyant materialism, changing culture, and cynicism of the financial world in the monetarist 1980s. The play opens with a short satirical extract on speculation from Shadwell’s comedy The Volunteers, or The Stockjobbers (pub. 1693), and then introduces a noisy gallery of contemporary traders, dealers, jobbers, bankers, and stockbrokers. Source: The Oxford Companion to English Literature by Margaret Drabble, 6th edition, p. 916
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47- ‘Novel / character / character description’ from works by George Eliot (1819-80) match in ---------------. Answer: Choice 3 Felix Holt is a novel by George Eliot, published 1866. Set in 1832 in Loamshire, it vividly evokes the political ferment and corrupt electioneering tactics of the times. Harold Transome arrives home after many years in the East to inherit the family estate, and startles his family by standing as a Radical candidate. His political convictions are not incompatible with buying beer for the local workers to secure their support, and his character is strongly contrasted with that of Felix Holt, austere, idealistic, and passionate, who has chosen the life of an artisan, and aims to stir his fellow workers to a sense of their own worth and destiny. The heroine, Esther, who supposes herself to be the daughter of old Lyon, the Independent minister, has an innate love of refinement, and when Felix chastises her for her frivolity she gains a new consciousness, and gradually falls in love with him. A complex chain of events reveals that Esther is in fact the heir to the Transome estate; Harold woos her, from motives not entirely mercenary, and Esther is forced to choose between his worldly attractions, and poverty with Felix. She renounces her claim to the estate and chooses Felix. It is finally revealed to Harold (the reader having known from the beginning) that he is not his father’s son, but the son of the hated lawyer Jermyn; the account of the years of suffering of the proud and lonely Mrs. Transome, subjected in secrecy to a man she no longer respects, ever fearful of her son’s discovery, befriended only by her faithful servant Denner, is often considered the most powerful feature of the novel. Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature by Dinah Birch and Katy Hooper, 3rd edition, p. 245 48- Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904) opens with ----------------. Answer: Choice 4 Choice 1 is from Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad Choice 2 is from The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad Choice 3 is from The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad Source: An Introduction to the English Novel by Arnold Kettle, Vol II, p. 62 49- Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) is written in three sections, the section second of which, ----------------. Answer: Choice 3 The novel is in three sections, of which the first and longest, ‘The Window’, describes the late afternoon and evening of an Edwardian September day, with the Ramsays on holiday with their eight children and assorted guests, including the lethargic elderly poet Augustus Carmichael; the painter Lily Briscoe; and the awkward young academic Charles Tansley. Family tension centers on the desire of the youngest child, James, to visit the lighthouse, and his father’s apparent desire to thwart him; the frictions of the day are momentarily resolved around the dinner table. The second section, ‘Time Passes’, is a comparatively brief, lyrical treatment of the 1914–18 period and records, parenthetically, the deaths of Mrs. Ramsay, her
1393 – Explanatory Answers and Sources son Andrew (killed in the war), and daughter Prue, who dies in childbirth. It dwells with a desolate lyricism on the abandonment of the family summer home and its gradual post-war revival, and ends with the arrival of the Ramsays, Lily Briscoe, Carmichael, and others in September 1919. The last section, ‘The Lighthouse’, describes the finally successful efforts of Lily to complete the painting which she had abandoned ten years earlier and the parallel but equally successful efforts of Mr. Ramsay, and two of his surviving children, Cam and James, to reach the lighthouse, despite the undercurrents of rivalry, loss, and rebellion that torment them. Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature by Dinah Birch and Katy Hooper, 3rd edition, p. 784 50- Henry James (1843-1916) ‘novel / novel characters’ DO NOT match in -----------------. Answer: Choice 1 “Douglas, Miss Jessel and Peter Quint” belong to The Turn of the Screw by Henry James The Turn of the Screw is a novella by Henry James, published 1898. The narrator is a young governess, sent off to a country house, Bly, to take charge of two orphaned children, Miles and Flora. She gradually becomes convinced that the children are communicating with the spirits of an ex-valet and former governess, both dead. The narrative is a classic example of James’s ambiguity and incorporates his interest in psychical research. Benjamin Britten wrote a chamber opera (1954) based on this tale. Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature by Dinah Birch and Katy Hooper, 3rd edition, p. 733 51- Which of the following about Samuel Beckett’s Murphy (1938) is NOT TRUE? Answer: Choice 2 Murphy’s solitary title character, who ‘sat it out, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton’, is an Irishman in London, precisely placed in time and space (it is Thursday, 12 September 1935 and he has an unbroken view from his window to the north-west). His ‘mew’ (a bird-coop, originally one designed for moulting falcons) is condemned (we presume as unfit for human habitation) and Murphy must contemplate the upheaval of removal (‘Soon he would have to buckle to and start eating, drinking, sleeping and putting his clothes on and off, in quite alien surroundings’). Ostensibly, Murphy is constructed around the drab rituals and the vacuous repetitions of a largely inert life passed in a confined urban space. More profoundly, it seeks to represent a man’s energetic inner life which finds its own repetitive rhythms and patterns and its own time-scheme distinct from those of the outside world. Source: The Short Oxford History of English Literature by Andrew Sanders, p. 592
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52- ‘Novelist / novel’ match in -----------------. Answer: Choice 3 The Kingdom of the Wicked is by Anthony Burgess Enderby Outside is by Anthony Burgess The Enemy in the Blanket is by Anthony Burgess Source: The Short Oxford History of English Literature by Andrew Sanders, p. 617 53- Which of the following about John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) is TRUE? Answer: Choice 4 Paradise Lost is ultimately about the human condition, the Fall that caused “all our woe,” and the promise and means of restoration. It is also about knowing and choosing, about free will. In the opening passages of Books 1, 3, 7, and 9, Milton highlights the choices and difficulties he faced in creating his poem. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 1830 54- William Blake’s ‘The Book of Thel’ (1791) opens with Thel’s Motto -----------------. Answer: Choice 2 Choice 1 is from A Divine Image by William Blake Choice 3 is from A Poison Tree by William Blake Choice 4 is from The Human Abstract by William Blake Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 97 55- The Romantic Poet Lord Byron was not particularly influenced—as ‘a recognizable antecedent’— by --------------- in his composition of Don Juan. Answer: Choice 1 Some recognizable antecedents of Don Juan are Jonathon Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, both of which had employed the naïve traveler as a satiric device, and Laurence Stern’s novel Tristram Shandy, with its comic exploitation of a narrative medium blatantly subject to the whimsy of the author. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 669 56- Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott (1832) opens with -----------------. Answer: Choice 2 Choice 1 is from The Lotos-Eaters by Alfred, Lord Tennyson Choice 3 is from The Epic by Alfred, Lord Tennyson Choice 4 is from Locksley Hall by Alfred, Lord Tennyson Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 1114, 1119, 1127, and 1129
1393 – Explanatory Answers and Sources 57- ‘Poet /poem’ DO NOT match in -----------------. Answer: Choice 3 ‘The Defence of Guenevere’ is by William Morris Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 1483, 1824, 1687, and 1500 58- Which of the following about the poet W. H. Auden (1907-1973) is NOT TRUE? Answer: Choice 4 The Depression that hit America in 1929 hit England soon afterward, and Auden and his contemporaries looked out at an England of industrial stagnation and mass unemployment, seeing not Eliot’s metaphorical Waste Land but a more literal Waste Land of poverty and “depressed areas”. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 2421 59- The Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978) -----------------. Answer: Choice 2 From the 1920s MacDiarmid was the central figure of the Scottish Renaissance movement. He published short lyrics in a revived Scots, or “Lallans” (i.e., Lowland Scots), a language that fused the rich vocabulary of medieval Scottish poets, modern dialect Scots, and Standard English. In A Drunk Man Loolzs at the Thistle (1926), he built up an epic statement about Scotland out of a series of related lyrics and passages of descriptive and reflective poetry. In such early poems MacDiarmid proved the vigor and robust physicality of Scots as a medium for modern poetry, after the Burns tradition had declined into sentimentality and imitation. In essays such as “English Ascendancy in British Literature”, he argued vehemently against confining “British literature” to the Standard English literature of England, championing instead the varieties of Scottish, Irish, and Welsh literatures written in locally distinctive forms of English and other languages of the British Isles. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 2465 60- Which of the following poets / group of poets can be seen as an antecedent / an influence upon the Movement poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985) Answer: Choice 1 Also rejecting the international modernism of Eliot and Pound because of its mythical allusions, polyglot discourse, and fragmentary syntax, Larkin reclaimed a more direct, personal, formally regular model of poetry, supposedly rooted in a native English tradition of Wordsworth, Hardy, A.E. Housman, Wilfred Owen, and W.H. Auden. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 2565
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1394 – Questions LITERARTY TERMS AND CRITICISM 1- ‘Fabian society’, a society founded in 1884 by a group of English intellectuals, -----------------. 1) had among its leading theorists and practitioners the critic Walter Pater and the poet Ernest Dowson 2) originated in the poetry of such mid-19th century Symbolist French poets us Charles Baudelaire and Stephane Mallarme 3) rejected the idea of a socialist revolution but supported the gradual transformation of English government 4) advocated a modified form of the early 19th century policy of laissez-faire 2- The contemporary school of American poets ‘language poets’ ------------------. 1) emphasizes a number of defamiliarization techniques, including the condensation and distortion of words, phrases, and sentences 2) aims to produce ‘absolute forgetfulness’ of language that conforms with the existing codes pervading contemporary culture 3) is best represented in the poetry of William Carlos Williams and particularly Wallace Stevens 4) values poetry’s artistic purpose at the expense of its social and political functions 3- Which of the following about the stock character in classical drama ‘the eiron’ is NOT true? 1) The eiron is a basic figure in comedy, often portrayed as the good friend of the hero. 2) His pose as a self-deprecating, humble figure enables him to outwit his opponents, particularly the alazon or boaster in the play. 3) The real life prototype of the eiron was the philosopher Socrates, who always professed his own ignorance while exposing the faulty thinking of others. 4) As friends with and confidant to a number of important characters in the play, he often has them reveal their inner feelings to the audience. 4- All the following about the term ‘vaudeville’ are true EXCEPT that -----------------. 1) it was the American equivalent of the British music hall 2) it enjoyed great popularity as a form of entertainment in the late 19th century and early 20th century 3) it saw the height of its popularity near the end of the 18th c. with the plays starring Edward Garrick 4) it might include as performance jugglers, acrobats, magicians, dramatic soliloquies, and slapstick comedy 5- A(n) ------------------ is a pictorial and poetic device containing a motto, an engraving that symbolically depicts the motto, and a short verse that comments on the motto and the engraving. 1) ‘emblem’ 2) ‘debat’ 3) ‘trouveres’ 4) ‘recension’
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6- The term ‘well-made play’ refers to a play ----------------. 1) in which the audience sits in front of a stage ‘framed like a picture’ that is revealed by the opening of the curtain 2) that is skillfully constructed to please the audience, but lacks the substance and complexity of serious drama 3) that exemplifies a dramatic conflict which is finally shown to be part of a larger—and often unresolvable—social or moral paradox 4) which generally represents the world as a vast theatre in which human history can be played out 7- The poem termed ‘complaint’ was ------------------. 1) a long lament on the cruelty of fate on the fortune of the aspiring poet 2) an 18th c. type of ‘socio-political’ poem written by a poet to the sovereign 3) appended to various petitions demanding justice in a particular case 4) a kind of monologue which became highly conventional in love poetry 8- ‘City comedy’ or ‘citizen comedy’ is a kind of comic drama produced in the London theatres of the ---------------, characterized by its contemporary urban subject-matter and its, ---------------- portrayal of ---------------- life and manners 1) early l7th c. / usually approving / middle-class 2) early 17th c. / often satirical / middle-class 3) Victorian age / usually approving / lower-class 4) Victorian age / often satirical / middle class 9- A doggerel is clumsy verse, usually ---------------- rhymed, rhythmically --------------, ----------------. 1) monotonously / awkward / and shallow in sentiment 2) monotonously / consistent / and deep in sentiment 3) variously / consistent / but shallow in sentiment 4) variously / awkward / but deep in sentiment 10- Which of the following about the Roman critic Horace (65-8 B.C.E.) / his Ars Poetica is NOT true? 1) He developed the concept of decorum in his Ars Poetica according to which the poet had to fit the part to the whole, the subject to the appropriate genre, and meter and language to both character and circumstance, 2) His Ars Poetica is less a formal verse epistle than a long conversational poem about poetry. 3) He managed to break away with the Aristotelian tradition of criticism and theory (as represented in Potties and Rhetoric) in Ars Poetica and thus create new ground for an indigenous ‘Roman’ kind of criticism. 4) He is celebrated for his criticism as well as his poetry: he produced numerous lyric poems, odes, satires, and verse epistles (letters).
1394 – Questions 11- To the French critic Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893) ------------------. 1) the text is ‘a living being’, never an ‘object’ to be ‘dissected’ for the discovery of its meaning 2) a text is similar to a fossil shell that naturally contains the likeness of its inhabiter, the author 3) a complete analysis of the text is possible without considering its author or his or her inner psyche 4) accurate understanding of a literary text depends on an investigation into the life and works of its author’s peers 12- All the following statements about the cotemporary French literary theorist Julia Kristeva (b. 1941) / her work is true EXCEPT that she ----------------. 1) develops the concept of the ‘ideologeme’ based on Bakhtin and Medvedev’s The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship 2) provides a complex account, based in psychoanalytic theory, of the relationship between the ‘normal’ and the ‘poetic’ (in her The Revolution in Poetic Language) 3) offers at once a radical critique of psychoanalysis—drawing on, but going beyond, Lacan—and a close textual method for the reading of texts which she terms ‘schizoanalysis’ 4) draws on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and the Russian Formalists to propose the idea of ‘intertextuality’, later associated with developments in poststructuralism 13- The French literary theorist Roland Barthes (1915-1980) posits the idea that -----------------. 1) ‘the text of bliss’ ‘unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions… brings a crisis to his relation with language’ 2) a realistic novel offers an ‘open’ text with unlimited meaning—like any other text that encourages the reader to produce meanings 3) when we read as critics, we always step outside discourse and adopt a position invulnerable to a subsequent interrogative reading 4) readers are free to open and close the text’s signifying process only through veneration of the signified 14- Homi K. Bhabha’s (b. 1949) mode of post-colonial criticism -------------------. 1) is characterized by his demotion of the idea of ‘colonial ambivalence’ and by his negation of aesthetic terms and categories for literary analysis 2) rejects the idea differance within an analysis of colonialism in favor of the performative dimension of cultural articulation 3) focuses on the ‘experience of social integration’ as it emerges in canonical cultural forms or is produced and legitimized within non-canonical cultural forms 4) deploys a specifically poststructuralist repertoire (Foucault, Derrida, Lacanian and Kleinian psychoanalysis) for his explorations of colonial discourse
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15- The Hungarian theorist Georg Lukacs (1885-1971) posits that ------------------. 1) a randomly presented sequence of images should always be interpreted as an objective and impartial reflection of reality regardless of its author or social milieu 2) reality is ‘mere flux’, a mechanical collision of fragments, which nevertheless possesses an ‘order’, which the novelist renders in an ‘intensive’ form 3) the truly realistic work possesses an ‘intensive totality’ through the ‘artistic necessity’ of its images which corresponds to the ‘extensive totality’ of the world itself 4) the writer imposes an abstract order upon the world and presents the reader with an image of the richness and complexity of life from which a sense of the order emerges 16- According to the French theorist Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) ------------------. 1) signs no longer correspond to or mask, their ‘real-life’ referent but replace it in a world of autonomous ‘floating signifies’ 2) the ‘explosion of signifiers’ in our time leads ‘into a non-space of reality’, reality being defined in terms of the often electronic media (as opposed to more traditional forms of communication) in which it moves 3) everything is ‘reverentially’ on display, moving translucently through a depth where there are numerous controls to stabilize reference or any prospect of transformation 4) such image-creating communication technologies as the television have tended to obliterate the self-generating potential of images across the postmodern surface 17- Hans Robert Jauss (1921-1997), the German exponent of ‘reception’ theory (Rezeptioitasthetik), ----------------------. 1) believed that a literary work is an object which stands by itself and which offers essentially the same face to each reader in each period 2) tried to achieve a compromise between Russian Formalism which ignores history; and social theories which ignore the text 3) argued in his work that a writer can never affront the prevailing expectations of his or her day 4) applied Heidegger's situational approach to literary theory in his Truth and Method (1975) 18- Which of the following statements about the English critic Raymond Williams / his thought and work (1921-1988) is TRUE? 1) He related the ‘whole process of individuation’ to structures of power and influence as well as to the poststructuralist notion of binary oppositions. 2) He began his critical writing with a reaffirmation of the main English tradition of critical cultural thought which regarded ‘culture’ as ‘a whole way of life’. 3) He rejected the characterization of his theoretical work as ‘Marxist’ and developed his own critique of Marx in his (Marxism and Literature, 1977), 4) His general project—the study of all forms of signification in their actual conditions of production—was always emphatically historical and materialist.
1394 – Questions 19- In his Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), the American Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson ------------------. 1) reads the odd materialist mysticism of Walter Benjamin ‘against the grain’ to produce a revolutionary and innovative Marxist criticism of capitalism 2) looks in particular to the strategy he terms ‘cognitive mapping’ (as applied to the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles) for the necessary understanding, critique and transcendence of the world capitalist system 3) reviews the culture of ‘the aesthetic’ in post-Enlightenment Europe dialectically—seen as a binding agent in the formation of ‘normal’ capitalist subjectivity 4) maintains that, as a totalizing system, postmodernism is merely a style, with no particular relevance to the ‘cultural dominant’ four time, which is ‘high capitalism’ 20- The French poststructuralist critic Michel Foucault (1926-1984) -------------------. 1) regards discourse as a central human activity, but not as a universal ‘general text’, a vast sea of signification 2) is interested in the historical dimension of discursive constants—what it is possible to say will slay effectively the same from one era to another 3) argues that the set of structural rules which informs the various fields of knowledge is within individual consciousness 4) posits that individuals working within particular discursive practices think or speak without necessarily obeying the unspoken ‘archive’ of rules and constraints HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 21- Pre- Renaissance ‘author: work’ do NOT match in -----------------. 1) Geoffrey of Monmouth: The History of the Kings of Britain 2) John Gower: The Tale of Philomena and Tereus 3) William Langland: The Lover’s Confession 4) Thomas of England: Le Roman de Tristran 22- Julian Norwich’s (1342-1416) A Book of Showings was --------------------. 1) built around the Virgin Mary's joys, sorrows, and the mystery of her virgin motherhood 2) composed of devotional hymns taken from the Latin Bible and the liturgy of the church 3) a long dramatic lyric dealing with the Christ's Crucifixion 4) a collection of sixteen mystical visions received by the author
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23- Which of the following descriptions is related to the Renaissance figure John Skelton (1460- 1529)? 1) In his satires, he rejects the ornate rhetorical devices and aureate language that characterized his period’s most ambitious poetry; he writes in short, rhymed lines, having from two to five beats, and the lines can keep on rhyming helter-skelter until the resources of the Language give out. 2) His book (entitled in full) Acts and Monuments of these latter and perilous days, touching matters of the church, wherein are comprehended and described the great persecution and horrible troubles that have been wrought and practiced by the Romish prelates from the year of Our Lord a thousand to the time now present was in Latin in its first version and dealt with the persecutions suffered by the early reformers. 3) Many of his works, including his satires and his psalm translations, express an intense longing for ‘steadfastness’ and an escape from the corruption, anxiety, and duplicity of the court. The praise, in his verse epistle to John Poins, of a quiet retired life in the country and the harsh condemnation of courtly hypocrisy derive from his own experience. 4) His main concern in his major works is law in general and the several kinds of law; the nature, authority, and adequacy of Scripture; the rites, ceremonies, worship, and government of the English church; and various embodiments of authority, legitimate and illegitimate—elders, bishops, kings, and popes. 24- One of the great and influential books of the Renaissance, II Cortegiano (The Courtier) (1530-1566), translated by the humanist and diplomat Sir Thomas Hoby and published in 1561, describes ------------------- in the years 1504-08 the qualities of the ideal courtier. 1) through long passages of exquisite expository precision from the mouth of an imaginary man-of-the-world Duke Costello (written) 2) by means of dialogues between actual men and women living at the court of the duke of Urbino 3) through a blend of flowery prose and long verse epistles exposing the inner thoughts of some early Renaissance courtiers 4) in a lengthy correspondence between two ‘courtiers-about-town’, Count Zepirelli and Count Escada 25- Which of the following statements is NOT related to a description of the late sixteenth century figure Michael Drayton (1563-1631)? 1) His self-styled masterpiece is Poty-Olbion, a thirty-thousand-line historical-geographical poem celebrating all the counties of England and Wales. 2) He wrote tragedies, court masques, a historical epic called The Civil Wars Between the Two Houses of Lancaster and York, a prose History of England, several fine verse epistles, one of the best Elizabethan sonnet sequences, Delia, and a verse dialogue on the purpose of writing poetry, Musophilus. 3) He made a significant contribution as well to the period’s vogue for sonnets, publishing a sequence called Idea’s Mirror (1594) that, following substantial revision, he republished as Idea. 4) He collaborated on plays, wrote scriptural paraphrases, pastorals, odes, poetic epistles, verse legends, and a historical epic called The Barons’ Wars.
1394 – Questions 26- Ben Jonson’s Timber, or Discoveries—‘the most important English commentary on poetics between Sidney and Thomas Hobbes’—(posthumously published 1640-41) would draw upon all the following EXCEPT -------------------. 1) recent Continental critics 2) major classical theorists like Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Quintilian, and Horace 3) Sir Philip Sidney's Defense of Poesy 4) medieval scholastic scholars William Oakham and Duns Scotus 27- Compared to his contemporary Michel de Montaigne's essays, Sir Francis Bacon (15611626) in his essays -----------------. 1) seldom uses ‘I’, but instead presents himself as a mouthpiece for society’s accumulated practical wisdom 2) employs few, if any aphorisms, and exhibits a lone of pure subjectivity in his lucid and yet unadorned sentences 3) proposes to learn about humankind by an intensive analysis of his own body and mind and of his sensations, emotions, attitudes, and ideas 4) is tentative in structure: witty, expansive, and reflective in style; intimate, candid, and affable in tone; and he speaks constantly in the First person 28- The correct order of the appearance of 18th c. texts is ---------------------. 1) Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram ShandyHenry Fielding’s Tom JonesFrancis Burney’s Eveliva 2) Henry Fielding’s Tom JonesFrancis Burney’s EvelivaLawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy 3) Henry Fielding’s Torn JonesLawrence Sterne’s Tristram ShandyFrancis Burney's Eveliva 4) Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram ShandyFrancis Burney's EvelivaHenry Fielding’s Tom Jones 29- Events in the 18th c. happened in the correct order in ----------------. 1) James Cook voyages to Australia and New ZealandDeath of Queen AnnRobert Walpole comes to power 2) Death of Queen AnnRobert Walpole comes to powerJames Cook voyages to Australia and New Zealand 3) Death of Queen AnnJames Cook voyages to Australia and New ZealandRobert Walpole comes to power 4) James Cook voyages to Australia and New ZealandRobert Walpole comes to powerDeath of Queen Ann 30- All the following about John Dryden’s All for Love (1677) is true EXCEPT that it is -----------------. 1) observant of the unities of time, place and action 2) his only tragedy 3) based on Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra 4) written in heroic couplets
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31- Which of the following statements about the 1730s Alexander Pope is TRUE? 1) There appeared, or reappeared, a youthful vein in his poetry, a tender concern with natural beauty and love which he tried to express with the publication of The Pastorals. 2) The reigns of George I and George II appeared to him, as to Swift and other like-minded figures, a period of rapid moral, political, and cultural development on a national scale. 3) He became a champion of the newly-emerging and vibrant mercantile class he would later appreciatively call the nouveaux riche in his work, 4) He moved on to philosophical, ethical and political subjects in such works as the Imitations of Horace and the Epistles to Several Persons. 32- Samuel Johnson's periodical the Rambler (1750-52) was ------------------. 1) far more relaxed and less serious in tone limn his Taller and Spectator 2) co-written with Addison (with Steele appearing only in one issue) 3) almost wholly written by Johnson himself 4) published side by side with his Taller and Spectator 33- William Blake (1757-1827) wrote The French Revolution, America: A Prophecy, Europe: A Prophecy, and the trenchant prophetic satire The Marriage of Heaven and Hell ------------------. 1) in the early 1790s while he was an ardent supporter of the French Revolution 2) near the end of his life (in short succession in 1821, 1823 and 1824 and 1826) disillusioned with die consequences of revolutions in France and America 3) in the heat of the Napoleonic wars with France in the 1800s (when his works were, in fact, banished from publication) 4) in the late 1790s in anticipation of the grim consequences of massive social upheavals in Europe and America 34- Which of the following essays is NOT by the Romantic essayist Charles Lamb (17751834)? 1) “Old China” 2) “On Gusto” 3) “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation” 4) “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading” 35- Lord Byron’s conventional volume of poetry Hours of Idleness (1807) was so harshly treated by the ----------------- that he was provoked to write in reply his first important poem English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, a vigorous satire in which he incorporated brilliant ridicule of important contemporaries, including ----------------------. 1) Edinburgh Review / Scott, Wordsworth, and Coleridge 2) Edinburgh Review / Robert Burns and Thomas Carlyle 3) Blackwood's Magazine / Scott, Wordsworth, and Coleridge 4) Blackwood's Magazine / Robert Burns and Thomas Carlyle 36- Victorian ‘author: work’ match in --------------------. 1) Elizabeth Gaskell: Silly Novels by Lady Novelists 2) Thomas Henry Huxley: Literature and Science 3) Henry Newman: The Idea of a University 4) George Eliot: Old Nurse's Story
1394 – Questions 37- Which of the following two Victorian works draw upon the same subject matter for their creation, albeit in different fashions? 1) Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son and Charles Dickens’s Hard Times 2) Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke and Waller Besani's The Queen’s Reign 3) William Morris’s The Defence of Guenevere and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King 4) Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Ave atque Vale and George Meredith’s Modern Love 38- Which of the following about the South African writer Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014) is NOT true? 1) She has drawn criticism both for her apparent lack of attention to feminism in favor of race issues and for the wholeness and unfashionable completeness of her novels—their politeness, meticulous scene paintings, fully realized characters. 2) She wrote ‘Telephone Conversation,’ a mini verse drama of sorts in which two characters, a racist English landlady and an African trying to rent an apartment, are wittily pitted against one another. 3) In her non-fiction, she self-consciously plates her writing within a tradition of European realism, most notably that defined by the Hungarian philosopher and Critic Georg Lukacs (1885-1971). 4) Her The House Gun (1998) and The Pickup (2001) show an uncompromising locus on me inhabitants of a racially fractured culture. 39- ‘Modernist manifestos’ in the early 20th c. takes on the different forms mentioned below EXCEPT that some are -----------------. 1) individual statements, such as Hulme’s lecture ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ 2) meant to be declarations on behalf of an emergent group or movement, such as “A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste” 3) a non-public declaration, unpublished in the author’s lifetime, as in the case of Mina Loy’s ‘Feminist Manifesto’ 4) intended to delineate the duties of the avant-garde artist in the 'current deplorable state of cultural crisis', as in W. B. Yeats’ Responsibilities 40- The seminal 20th century texts below appeared in the correct under in -----------------. 1) Philip Larkin, The Whitsun WeddingsChinua Achebe, Things Fall ApartPremiere of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot 2) Premiere of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for GodotChinua Achebe, Things Fall ApartPhilip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings 3) Philip Larkin, The Whitsun WeddingsPremiere of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for GodotChinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart 4) Premiere of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for GodotPhilip Larkin, The WhitsunChinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
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LITERARY GENRES 41- A well-known poem by John Donne (1572-1631) opens with the lines ------------------. 1) ‘When by thy scorn, O murderess, I am dead, / And that thou thinkst thee free / From all solicitation from me, / Then shall my ghost come to thy bed, / And thee, feigned vestal, in worse arms shall see.’ 2) ‘Adieu, farewell, earth’s bliss, / This world uncertain is; / Fond are life’s lustful joys, / Death proves them alt but toys, / None from his darts can fly; /1 am sick, I must die. / Lord, have mercy on us!’ 3) There is a garden in her face. / Where roses and white lilies grow; / A heavenly paradise is that place, / Wherein all pleasant fruits do flow. / There cherries grow, which none may buy / Till ‘Cherry ripe!’ themselves do cry.’ 4) ‘Now winter nights enlarge / The number of their hours, / And clouds their storms discharge / Upon the airy towers. / Let now the chimneys blaze / And cups overflow with wine, / Let well-tuned words amaze / With harmony divine.’ 42- Which of the following statements about John Milton's II Penseroso (1645) is NOT true? 1) It had a considerable influence on the meditative graveyard poems of the 18th cent., and there are echoes in Pope’s ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, and later Gothic-works. 2) It is an invocation to the goddess Melancholy, bidding her bring Peace, Quiet, Leisure, and Contemplation. 3) It challenges the goddess Mirth to a verbal duel on its utter futility amid the ‘deceitful delights’ of ‘towered cities’ and the ‘busy hum of men’. 4) It describes the pleasures of die studious, meditative life, of tragedy, epic poetry, and music. 43- The lines ‘Ye distant spires, ye antique towers, / That crown the watery glade, / Where grateful Science still adores / Her Henry’s holy shade; / And ye, that from the stately brow / Of Windsor’s heights the expanse below / Of grove, of lawn, of mead survey, / Whose turf, whose shade, whose flowers among / Wanders the hoary Thames along / His silver-winding way’ open an 18th c. poem by ---------------. 1) Oliver Goldsmith 2) William Collins 3) James Thomson 4) Thomas Gray 44- John Keats's Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1818) ------------------. 1) is a poem of about 800 lines based on the classical myth of a mortal detested by the goddess of the moon 2) offers at its conclusion a way of resolving the opposition in the poem between the inevitably mortal pleasures of this world and the possibility of delights that would be eternal 3) deals partly with Endymion’s vision of his love for a Chinese Queen offered to him by Bacchus, god of wine and revelry 4) tells of Endymion’s long but pleasurable search for a mortal goddess, an earthly figure, whom he had seen in his childhood visions
1394 – Questions 45- Robert Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi (1855) -------------------. 1) charts the account of the hero’s marriage to a beautiful widow, Lucrezia, ‘an artful woman who made him do as she pleased in all things.’ 2) traces the feelings and emotions of a speaker whose students are bearing the body of their scholarly master (whose devotion to the Greek language made it possible for others to enjoy the more recognizably significant aspects of the revival of learning) to the mountain top for burial 3) seeks to explain why a Florentine master, one of the most skillful painters of the Renaissance, never altogether fulfilled the promise he had shown early in his career and why he had never arrived at the level of such artists as Raphael 4) portrays the dawn of the Renaissance in Italy at a point when the medieval attitude toward life and art was about to be displaced by a fresh appreciation of earthly pleasures. 46- ‘First World War poet: poem’ match in -------------------. 1) Edward Thomas: “Adlestrop” 2) Isaac Rosenberg: “The Owl” 3) Ivor Gurney: “The Cherry Trees” 4) Sigfried Sassoon: “As the Team’s Head Brass” 47- Which of the following does NOT open a poem by Philip Larkin (1922-1985)? 1) Once I am sure there’s nothing going on / I step inside, letting the door thud Shut…’ 2) ‘Those long uneven lines / Standing as patiently / As if they were stretched outside / The Oval or Villa Park...’ 3) ‘I have heard that hysterical women say / They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow / Of poets that are always gay…’ 4) ‘Next year we are to bring the soldiers home / For lack of money, and it is all right / Places they guarded, or kept orderly…’ 48- Ann Carson’s (b. 1950) poem ‘The Glass Essay’ --------------------. 1) is a poetic parody of Agatha Christie’s classic country-house murder-mystery play, The Mousetrap 2) is a long semiautobiographical ‘tale’ into which she weaves commentary on the writings of Charlotte and Emily Bronte 3) is about conversion to Roman Catholicism and its implications for a writer living and writing on the margins of the British Empire 4) is a dramatic monologue in which she assumes the voices of mythological, historical and fictive characters, such a Medusa or Lazarus’s imaginary wife 49- The set of characters -------------------- appear in William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or What You Will (written circa 1601). 1) ‘Valentine, Silvia, Julia’ 2) ‘Solinus, Egeon, Emilia’ 3) ‘Duke Frederick, Rosalind, Celia’ 4) ‘Sebastian, Orsino, Viola’
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50- ‘Character: character description’ in William Congreves Restoration Comedy The Way of the World (premiered 1700) do NOT match in ------------------. 1) ‘Petulant: the booby squire from the country, who serves to throw into relief the high good breeding and fineness of nature of the hero and heroine’ 2) ‘Fainall and Mrs. Marwood: the two villains as well as fully realized characters of the play whose stratagems and relations move the play’ 3) ‘Witwoud: the would-be wit and character Foil, with whom we contrast the true wit of Mirabell and Millamant’ 4) ‘Lady Wishfort: though aging and ugly, she still longs for love, gallantry, and courtship and is led by her appetites into the trap that Mirabell lays for her’ 51- Which of the following sets of plays are made exclusively of George Bernard Shaw’s (1856-1950) ‘Plays Pleasant’ (1898)? 1) Man and Superman, Candida, The Doctor’s Dilemma 2) Arms and the Man, The Man of Destiny, Candida 3) Man and Superman, The Doctor’s Dilemma, Major Barbara 4) Arms and the Man, Major Barbara, The Man of Destiny 52- ‘Twentieth century playwright: play’ do NOT correspond in -------------------. 1) ‘David Hare: The Blue Room’ 2) ‘Tom Stoppard: Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth’ 3) ‘Sam Shepherd: Fool for Love’ 4) ‘Edward Bond: The Secret Rapture’ 53- ‘Character / character description’ in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is correct in -------------------. 1) ‘Justine Morris / the monster creature’s childhood playmate; the monster is in love with her and at one stage even attempts to marry her’ 2) ‘Robert Walton / the novel begins with his death and the narrative is framed in such a way as to finally account for it’ 3) ‘Victor Frankenstein / the monster creature’s ‘creator’; born into an affluent family, he hopes to leave a lasting impression upon his fellow humanity 4) ‘William Frankenstein / Victor Frankenstein’s friend, who stays with the monster creature in the novel out of a sense of compassion and is loved by him in return for it’ 54- Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) opens with -------------------. 1) ‘When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them…’ 2) ‘To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock: the holly whistles as it battles with itself…’ 3) The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty miles off…’ 4) ‘On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blakemore, or Blackmoor…’
1394 – Questions 55- ‘Novelist: novel’ do NOT correspond in --------------------. 1) Ian McEwan: Amsterdam 2) Evelyn Waugh: Men at Arms 3) Doris Lessing: Leading the Cheers 4) Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale 56- Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women (1971) is a --------------------. 1) bleakly funny novel, a dark example of both satire and feminism, tracing the revenge taken by one character on her husband 2) novel of human observation and interpretive commentary uses for its point of departure a gathering of anthropologists 3) comic novel featuring a first-person narrator, Fleur Talbot, who is herself a novelist 4) special kind of bildungsroman known as a ‘kunstlerroman’ or novel of the development of an artist’s gifts 57- John Fowles’ The Magus (1965) is --------------------. 1) based on the experiences of the author in the Greek Aegean Islands and is deeply informed by classical mythology, Jungian psychology, and archetypal literary devices 2) a bildungsroman featuring an ingenuous first-person narrator, Christopher Lloyd, who examines his life at three different periods 3) the last of the novels that chronicle the experiences of the first-person narrator, Nicholas Jenkins during World War II and as such it sums up the war’s toll on Britain 4) set among the barge-dwellers along the Thames River at Battersea, and draws on the author’s own residence in a barge community along the Thames in the 1960s 58- The novelist J. M. Coetzee’s (h. 1940) most compelling indictment of colonialism ----------------- takes its title and theme from ------------------. 1) Waiting for the Barbarians / A Larum for London, or the Siedge of Antwerp, a rather obscure play by an anonymous Elizabethan playwright 2) Dusklands / A Larum for London, or the Siedge of Antwerp, a rather obscure play by an anonymous Elizabethan playwright 3) Waiting for the Barbarians / a well-known poem by the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy 4) Dusklands / a well-known poem by the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy 59- V. S. Naipaul (b. 1932) ‘work: work description’ match in ----------------. 1) In a Free State: a travel narrative about the United States 2) The Mystic Masseur: comedy of manners set in Trinidad 3) House for Mr. Biswas: concerns the fortunes of Santosh, an Indian immigrant to the US, 4) Turn in the South: tragicomedy following the declining fortune of a gentle hero from cradle to grave 60- Which of the following about the novelist Jean Rhys (1890-1979) is NOT true? 1) Her novel Voyage in the Dark is an account of a nineteen-year-old chorus girl in London who has come from Dominica. 2) She wrote the stories of her first book, The Left Bank: Sketches and Studies of PresentDay Bohemian Paris, while living in Paris. 3) Her fiction frequently depicts single, economically challenged women, rootless outsiders living in bohemian London or Paris. 4) Her novel, Postures, set in Jamaica and Dominica in the 1830s and 1840s, is often taken as prelude to her masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea.
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1394 – Explanatory Answers and Sources LITERARTY TERMS AND CRITICISM 1- ‘Fabian society’, a society founded in 1884 by a group of English intellectuals, -----------------. Answer: Choice 3 ‘Fabian society’ is a society founded in 1884 by a group of English intellectuals who advocated a modified form of socialism. Rejecting the idea of a socialist revolution, the Fabians advocated the gradual transformation of English government. The leading figures and spokespersons of the Society were Beatrice and Sidney Webb and George Bernard Shaw. Shaw edited Fabian Essays (1889), which led to the formation of the British Labor Party in 1900. From Source: A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms, Edward Quinn, 2nd edition, p. 157 2- The contemporary school of American poets ‘language poets’ ------------------. Answer: Choice 1 ‘language poets’ is a contemporary school of American poets emphasizing a number of defamiliarization techniques, including the condensation and distortion of words, phrases, and sentences. The aim is to produce an awareness of language that will create a resistance to the existing codes that pervade contemporary culture. Thus language poets regard themselves as having a social and political, as well as artistic, purpose. Among the poets associated with this movement are Ron Silliman, Bob Perelman, and Lyn Hejinian. Source: A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms, Edward Quinn, 2nd edition, p. 235 3- Which of the following about the stock character in classical drama ‘the eiron’ is NOT true? Answer: Choice 4 ‘Eiron’ is a stock character in classical comedy, whose pose as a self-deprecating, humble figure enables him to outwit his opponents, particularly the alazon or boaster. The real life prototype of the eiron was the philosopher Socrates, who always professed his own ignorance while exposing the faulty thinking of others. The eiron is a basic figure in comedy, often portrayed as the good friend of the hero. The type is also recognizable today in the homespun humorist, such as Will Rogers or Andrew Rooney, or Peter Falk’s dirty-raincoat-clad detective in the television series Columbo. Source: A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms, Edward Quinn, 2nd edition, p. 135 4- All the following about the term ‘vaudeville’ are true EXCEPT that -----------------. Answer: Choice 3 ‘Vaudeville’ is the American equivalent of the British Music Hall, vaudeville entertainment enjoyed great popularity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A true variety show, a vaudeville performance might include singers, dancers, animal acts, jugglers, acrobats, magicians, dramatic soliloquies, and slapstick comedy.
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The popularity of motion pictures, particularly “talkies” spelled the end of vaudeville in the 1920s, although the format survived on television for many years on the Ed Sullivan Show. Neil Simon’s play (later film) The Sunshine Boys (1972, 1975) evokes the era through the aging eyes of two former comics Source: A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms, Edward Quinn, 2nd edition, p. 435-36 5- A(n) ------------------ is a pictorial and poetic device containing a motto, an engraving that symbolically depicts the motto, and a short verse that comments on the motto and the engraving. Answer: Choice 1 ‘Emblem’ is a pictorial and poetic device containing a motto, an engraving that symbolically depicts the motto, and a short verse that comments on the motto and the engraving. In the 16th and 17th centuries, many of these were collected and published in book form. Source: A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms, Edward Quinn, 2nd edition, p. 136 6- The term ‘well-made play’ refers to a play ----------------. Answer: Choice 2 Well-made play (pièce bien faite) is a play that is skillfully constructed to please the audience, but lacks the substance and complexity of serious drama. The term originally described the 19th-century plays of Eugène Scribe, a phenomenally successful French playwright. Scribe’s formula included a plot based upon a secret that is not revealed until the climactic moment of the play, and the building up of suspense by such tried and true devices as mistaken identities, hidden clues, and letters delivered to the wrong person. Immediately prior to the climactic revelation, the protagonist would be reduced to despair, only to emerge triumphant once the secret is revealed. Source: A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms, Edward Quinn, 2nd edition, p. 441 7- The poem termed ‘complaint’ was ------------------. Answer: Choice 4 ‘Complaint’ is a kind of lyric poem common from the Middle Ages to the 17th century, in which the speaker bewails either the cruelty of a faithless lover or the advent of some misfortune like poverty or exile. This kind of monologue became highly conventional in love poetry, as can be seen from ‘The Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse’, in which the poet wittily addresses his light purse as if it were a ‘light’ (i.e. promiscuous) mistress. Chaucer also wrote serious complaints, as did Villon, Surrey, and Spenser. Source: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms by Chris Baldick, 2nd edition, p. 47
1394 – Explanatory Answers and Sources 8- ‘City comedy’ or ‘citizen comedy’ is a kind of comic drama produced in the London theatres of the ------------------, characterized by its contemporary urban subject-matter and its, --------------------- portrayal of ---------------------- life and manners. Answer: Choice 2 ‘City comedy’ or ‘citizen comedy’, a kind of comic drama produced in the London theatres of the early 17th century, characterized by its contemporary urban subject-matter and its portrayal, often satirical, of middle-class life and manners. The principal examples are John Marston's The Dutch Courtezan (1605), Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair (1614), and Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613) Source: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms by Chris Baldick, 2nd edition, p. 40 9- A doggerel is clumsy verse, usually ------------------ rhymed, rhythmically -----------------, -------------------. Answer: Choice 1 ‘Doggerel’ is a clumsy verse, usually monotonously rhymed, rhythmically awkward, and often shallow in sentiment, as in greetings cards. The notoriously irregular verses of William McGonagall (71830-1902) are doggerel. Some poets, like Skelton and Stevie Smith, have deliberately imitated doggerel for comic effect. Source: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms by Chris Baldick, 2nd edition, p. 70 10- Which of the following about the Roman critic Horace (65-8 B.C.E.) / his Ars Poetica is NOT true? Answer: Choice 3 The Ars Poetica is less a formal verse epistle, however—the trappings of the letter form are superficial at best—than a long conversational poem about poetry, written by an experienced and famous poet of the day. Horace is celebrated for his poetry; between 39 and 10 B.C.E., he produced numerous epodes (lyric poems), odes, satires, and verse epistles (letters). Another key principle that dominates the whole of the Ars Poetica is decorum. Briefly defined, decorum is the discernment and use of appropriateness, propriety, proportion, and unity in the arts, whether in painting, sculpture, or poetry. This is the Horatian principle that most appealed to later French and English neoclassical critics (see, for example, Pope, below), who often applied standards of decorum more rigidly than Horace himself would have. For Horace, decorum required that the poet fit the part to the whole, the subject to the appropriate genre, and meter and language to both character and circumstance. Source: Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st edition, p. 122 11- To the French critic Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893) ------------------. Answer: Choice 2 Determined to be scientific, Taine decides to approach literature in much the same way as the biologist approaches his specimen. A literary document is like a fossil shell. It bears the imprint of the organism that lived in it. “Under the shell there was an animal, and behind the document there was a man.” Both the document and the shell are lifeless, but both may be
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examined as clues to living existences. It would be a mistake to study them as if they were isolated. Source: A Short History of Literary Criticism by Vernon Hall Jr., New York University Press, 1963, p. 105 12- All the following statements about the cotemporary French literary theorist Julia Kristeva (b. 1941) / her work is true EXCEPT that she ----------------. Answer: Choice 3 In the latter, in two essays, ‘The Bounded Text’ and ‘Word Dialogue and Novel’, written in the late 1960s, Kristeva draws on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and the Russian Formalists to propose the idea of ‘intertextuality’, later associated with developments in post-structuralism. Thus she writes of ‘text’ as comprising ‘a permutation of texts, an intertextuality’, and of how ‘in the space of a given text, several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neutralise one another’. In addition, seeking to connect the linguistic with the ideological (in common with other members of the Tel Quel group in Paris with which she was then associated), she draws on Bahktin and Medvedev’s The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship to introduce the concept of the ‘ideologeme’. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia ([1972], 1983) and Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature ([1975], 1986), offer at once a radical critique of psychoanalysis—drawing on, but going beyond, Lacan—and a close textual method for the reading of texts which they term ‘schizoanalysis’. Source: A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory by Raman Selden, 5th edition, p. 161 13- The French literary theorist Roland Barthes (1915-1980) posits the idea that -------------. Answer: Choice 1 The more limited reading of pleasure is a comfortable practice which conforms to cultural habits. The text of bliss ‘unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions . . . brings a crisis to his relation with language’. It is clear that such a text does not conform to the sort of easily enjoyed pleasure demanded in the market economy. Indeed, Barthes considers that ‘bliss’ is very close to boredom: if readers resist the ecstatic collapse of cultural assumptions, they will inevitably find only boredom in the modernist text. How many blissful readers of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake have there been? Source: A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory by Raman Selden, 5th edition, p. 151 14- Homi K. Bhabha’s (b. 1949) mode of post-colonial criticism -------------------. Answer: Choice 4 Homi Bhabha’s mode of postcolonial criticism also deploys a specifically poststructuralist repertoire (Foucault, Derrida, Lacanian and Kleinian psychoanalysis) for his explorations of colonial discourse. Bhabha’s primary interest is in the ‘experience of social marginality’ as it emerges in noncanonical cultural forms or is produced and legitimized within canonical cultural forms. The writings collected as The Location of Culture (1994) are characterized by his promotion of the ideas of ‘colonial ambivalence’ and ‘hybridity’ and by his use of
1394 – Explanatory Answers and Sources aesthetic terms and categories (mimesis, irony, parody, trompe l’œil) to mobilize an analysis of the terms of (inter-) cultural engagement within the context of empire. Source: A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory by Raman Selden, 5th edition, p. 226 15- The Hungarian theorist Georg Lukacs (1885-1971) posits that ------------------. Answer: Choice 3 A ‘correct’ reflection of reality, therefore, according to Lukács, involves more than the mere rendering of external appearances. Interestingly, his view of reflection undermines at the same time both naturalism and modernism. A randomly presented sequence of images may be interpreted either as an objective and impartial reflection of reality (as Zola and the other exponents of ‘naturalism’ might be taken as saying) or as a purely subjective impression of reality (as Joyce and Virginia Woolf seem to show). The randomness can be seen as a property either of reality or of perception. Either way, Lukács rejects such merely ‘photographic’ representation. Instead, he describes the truly realistic work which gives us a sense of the ‘artistic necessity’ of the images presented; they possess an ‘intensive totality’ which corresponds to the ‘extensive totality’ of the world itself. Reality is not a mere flux, a mechanical collision of fragments, but possesses an ‘order’, which the novelist renders in an ‘intensive’ form. Source: A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory by Raman Selden, 5th edition, p. 87 16- According to the French theorist Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) ------------------. Answer: Choice 1 Baudrillard’s first influential work, Simulacra et Simulation (1981, translated in 1983 and 1994), explores this depthless world of unreflecting images. According to Baudrillard, signs no longer correspond to, or mask, their ‘real-life’ referent but replace it in a world of autonomous ‘floating signifiers’; there has been ‘an implosion of image and reality’. This implosion, as Neville Wakefield comments, leads ‘into the simulated non-space of hyperreality. The “real” is now defined in terms of the media in which it moves.’ Source: A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory by Raman Selden, 5th edition, p. 201 17- Hans Robert Jauss (1921-1997), the German exponent of ‘reception’ theory (Rezeptioitasthetik), ----------------------. Answer: Choice 2 Jauss, an important German exponent of ‘reception’ theory (Rezeption-ästhetik), gave a historical dimension to reader-oriented criticism. He tried to achieve a compromise between Russian Formalism which ignores history, and social theories which ignore the text. Writing during a period of social unrest at the end of the 1960s, Jauss and others wanted to question the old canon of German literature and to show that it was perfectly reasonable to do so. Source: A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory by Raman Selden, 5th edition, p. 50
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18- Which of the following statements about the English critic Raymond Williams / his thought and work (1921-1988) is TRUE? Answer: Choice 4 Beginning with a critical reassessment of the main English tradition of critical cultural thought (Culture and Society 1780–1950, 1958), Williams embarked on a radical theoretical construction of the whole domain of social meaning – ‘culture’ as ‘a whole way of life’. This general perspective was developed in particular studies of drama, the novel, television, and historical semantics as well as further theoretical work. Williams’s general project—the study of all forms of signification in their actual conditions of production—was always emphatically historical and materialist. Source: A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory by Raman Selden, 5th edition, p. 100 19- In his Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), the American Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson ------------------. Answer: Choice 2 Jameson’s strong ‘epistemological’ understanding of narrative illuminates the political motivation of what remains his most important work to date, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). He maintains that postmodernism is not merely a style but rather the ‘cultural dominant’ of our time: a totalizing system which, in league with the operations of the global market under ‘late capitalism’, saturates all aspects of social, cultural and economic life, and so conditions, at the deepest levels, what we can know of the contemporary world. He looks in particular to the strategy he terms ‘cognitive mapping’ (derived in part from critical urban geography and introduced in a celebrated discussion of the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles) for the necessary understanding, critique and transcendence of the world capitalist system. Source: A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory by Raman Selden, 5th edition, p. 107 20- The French poststructuralist critic Michel Foucault (1926-1984) -------------------. Answer: Choice 1 Like other poststructuralists Michel Foucault regards discourse as a central human activity, but not as a universal ‘general text’, a vast sea of signification. He is interested in the historical dimension of discursive change—what it is possible to say will change from one era to another. In science a theory is not recognized in its own period if it does not conform to the power consensus of the institutions and official organs of science. Source: A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory by Raman Selden, 5th edition, p. 178
1394 – Explanatory Answers and Sources HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 21- Pre- Renaissance ‘author: work’ do NOT match in -----------------. Answer: Choice 3 The Lover’s Confession is by John Gower Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 320, 118, and 136 22- Julian Norwich’s (1342-1416) A Book of Showings was --------------------. Answer: Choice 4 A Book of Showings survives in a short and a long version. The longer text, from which the following excerpts are taken, was the product of fifteen and more years of meditation on the meaning of the visions in which much had been obscure to Julian. Apparently the mystical experiences were never repeated, but through constant study and contemplation the showings acquired a greater clarity, richness, and profundity as they continued to be turned over in a mind both gifted with spiritual insight and learned in theology. Her editors document her extensive use of the Bible and her familiarity with medieval religious writings in both English and Latin. Julian's sixteen revelations are each treated in uneven numbers of Chapters; these groupings of chapters form an extended meditation on a given vision. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 371 23- Which of the following descriptions is related to the Renaissance figure John Skelton (1460- 1529)? Answer: Choice 1 Skelton’s poems gain some of their most startling effects by mixing high and low styles and by playing bawdy and scatological verbal games with the Catholic liturgy. The games are not necessarily sacrilegious, for the Catholic Church, as yet unchallenged by the Reformation, was capable of tolerating a wide range of expression, but they seem risk-taking and obstreperous, an impression heightened by the way they are written. In his satires, Skelton rejects the ornate rhetorical devices and aureate language that characterized his period's most ambitious poetry; he writes in short, rhymed lines, having from two to five beats, and the lines can keep on rhyming helter-skelter until the resources of the language give out. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 514 24- One of the great and influential books of the Renaissance, II Cortegiano (The Courtier) (1530-1566), translated by the humanist and diplomat Sir Thomas Hoby and published in 1561, describes ------------------- in the years 1504-08 the qualities of the ideal courtier. Answer: Choice 2 Castiglione’s book describes, by means of dialogues between actual men and women living at the court of the duke of Urbino in the years 1504-08, the qualities of the ideal courtier. Supreme among these qualities is grace, the mysterious attribute which renders a person’s speech and actions not merely impressive or accomplished but persuasive, touching, and beautiful. Though a few people are born with grace, most actually learn to have it by the mastery of certain techniques. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 645
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25- Which of the following statements is NOT related to a description of the late sixteenth century figure Michael Drayton (1563-1631)? Answer: Choice 2 Michael Drayton was born about a year before Shakespeare and in the same county, Warwickshire. He had a long career as poet, extending from the early 1590s until well into the seventeenth century. He collaborated on plays, wrote scriptural paraphrases, pastorals, odes, poetic epistles, verse legends, and a historical epic called The Barons’ Wars. His selfstyled masterpiece is Poly-Olbion, a thirty-thousand-line historical-geographical poem celebrating all the counties of England and Wales. He made a significant contribution as well to the period's vogue for sonnets, publishing a sequence called Idea’s Mirror (1594) that, following substantial revision, he republished as Idea. It was in fact Drayton’s standard practice to revise and add to his poems in each new edition, so that one can trace his response to shifting fashions, his rethinking of his antiquarian fascinations, and his development from an Elizabethan to a seventeenth century poet. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 999 26- Ben Jonson’s Timber, or Discoveries— ‘the most important English commentary on poetics between Sidney and Thomas Hobbes’— (posthumously published 1640-41) would draw upon all the following EXCEPT -------------------. Answer: Choice 4 Timber, or Discoveries Published posthumously in the Works (1640-41), Jonson’s observations on literary matters had their origins in a commonplace book that culled extracts from Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy, from major classical theorists like Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Quintilian, and Horace; and from recent Continental critics. Jonson digested all this under various topics, setting it forth in his own voice and intermixing trenchant observations on his own contemporaries. Among his major precepts are that the essence of poetry is its “fiction” or imitation; that natural talent is the major quality needed in a poet, though “art” and practice are also necessary; that one learns to become a poet by first imitating a single model, that good sense should have priority over style; and that the language of poetry should be clear, strong, and succinct. In the tradition of the Renaissance humanists, Jonson insists that the good poet is also the good man, who properly comprehends encyclopedic wisdom in himself, fitting him to be a counselor to rulers. Despite its disjointed form, Timber is the most important English commentary on poetics between Sidney and Thomas Hobbes. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 1448 27- Compared to his contemporary Michel de Montaigne’s essays, Sir Francis Bacon (15611626) in his essays -----------------. Answer: Choice 1 As an essayist Bacon stands at almost the opposite pole from his great French predecessor Michel de Montaigne (1533—1592), who proposed to learn about humankind by an intensive analysis of his own body and mind and of his sensations, emotions, attitudes, and ideas. Bacon’s essays are instead on topics “Civil and Moral.” Montaigne’s are tentative in structure; witty, expansive, and reflective in style; intimate candid and affable in tone; and he
1394 – Explanatory Answers and Sources speaks constantly in the first person. By contrast, Bacon adopts an aphoristic structure and a curt, often disjunctive style, as well as a tone of cool objectivity and weighty sententiousness; he seldom uses “I,” but instead presents himself as a mouthpiece for society’s accumulated practical wisdom. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 1551 28- The correct order of the appearance of 18th c. texts is ------------------. Answer: Choice 3 Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760) Francis Burney’s Eveliva (1778) Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 2082 29- Events in the 18th c. happened in the correct order in -------------------. Answer: Choice 2 Death of Queen Ann (1714) Robert Walpole comes to power (1721)James Cook voyages to Australia and New Zealand (1768) Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 2081 30- All the following about John Dryden’s All for Love (1677) is true EXCEPT that it is --------------------. Answer: Choice 4 Between 1664 and 1681, however, Dryden was mainly a playwright. The newly chartered theaters needed a modern repertory, and he set out to supply the need. Dryden wrote his plays, as he frankly confessed, to please his audiences, which were not heterogeneous like Shakespeare’s but were largely drawn from the court and from people of fashion. In the style of the time, he produced rhymed heroic plays, in which incredibly noble heroes and heroines face incredibly difficult choices between love and honor; comedies, in which male and female rakes engage in intrigue and bright repartee; and later, libretti for the newly introduced dramatic form, the opera. His one great tragedy. All for Love (1677), in blank verse, adapts Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra to the unities of time, place, and action. As his Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668) shows, Dryden had studied the works of the great playwrights of Greece and Rome, of the English Renaissance, and of contemporary France, seeking sound theoretical principles on which to construct the new drama that the age demanded. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 2083 31- Which of the following statements about the 1730s Alexander Pope is TRUE? Answer: Choice 4 In the 1730s Pope moved on to philosophical, ethical, and political subjects in An Essay on Man, the Epistles to Several Persons, and the Imitations of Horace. The reigns of George I and George II appeared to him, as to Swift and other Tories, a period of rapid moral, political, and cultural deterioration. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 2494
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32- Samuel Johnson’s periodical the Rambler (1750-52) was ------------------. Answer: Choice 3 The Rambler, almost wholly written by Johnson himself, appeared every Tuesday and Saturday from March 20, 1750, to March 14, 1752—years in which Johnson was writing the Dictionary. It is a successor of the Tatler and the Spectator, but it is much more serious in tone than the earlier periodicals. Johnson’s reputation as a moralist and a stylist was established by these essays; because of them Boswell first conceived the ambition to seek Johnson’s acquaintance. Source: See the footnote in Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 2675 33- William Blake (1757-1827) wrote The French Revolution, America: A Prophecy, Europe: A Prophecy, and the trenchant prophetic satire The Marriage of Heaven and Hell -----------------Answer: Choice 1 In The French Revolution, America: A Prophet Europe: A Prophecy, and the trenchant prophetic satire The Marriage of Heaven and Hell—all of which Blake wrote in the early 1790s while he was an ardent supporter of the French Revolution—he, like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and a number of radical English theologians, represented the contemporary Revolution as the purifying violence that, according to biblical prophecy, portended the imminent redemption of humanity and the world. In Blake’s later poems ‘Ore’, the fiery spirit of violent revolution, gives way as a central personage to Los, the type of the visionary imagination in the fallen world. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 78 34- Which of the following essays is NOT by the Romantic essayist Charles Lamb (17751834)? Answer: Choice 2 “On Gusto” is an essay by William Hazlitt Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 538
1394 – Explanatory Answers and Sources 35- Lord Byron’s conventional volume of poetry Hours of Idleness (1807) was so harshly treated by the ----------------- that he was provoked to write in reply his first important poem English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, a vigorous satire in which he incorporated brilliant ridicule of important contemporaries, including ------------------. Answer: Choice 1 Despite his distractions at the university, Byron found time to try his hand at lyric verse, some of which was published in 1807 in a slim and conventional volume titled Hours of Idleness. This was treated so harshly by the Edinburgh Review that Byron was provoked to write in reply his first important poem, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, a vigorous satire in which he incorporated brilliant ridicule (whose tactlessness he later came to regret) of important contemporaries, including Scott, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 609 36- Victorian ‘author: work’ match in --------------------. Answer: Choice 3 Silly Novels by Lady Novelists is by George Eliot Literature and Science is by Matthew Arnold Old Nurse’s Story is by Elizabeth Gaskell Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 1342, 1415, 1035, and 1222 37- Which of the following two Victorian works draw upon the same subject matter for their creation, albeit in different fashions? Answer: Choice 3 The year after Morris’s poem appeared, four books of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, including one that focused on Guenevere, were published. It is interesting to compare the two portraits of the queen, especially their pictoral qualities, but Morris's powerful depiction of an eloquent Guenevere is very different from Tennyson's subdued representation of a guiltridden wife. Equally fascinating is a comparison of the two poems with Morris’s painting Queen Guenevere (1858). Despite his copious production of visual artifacts, this is the only full-size oil painting Morris ever finished. His model for Guenevere, who stands pensively in front of a rumpled bed, was Jane Burden, who became his wife the following year. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 1483 38- Which of the following about the South African writer Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014) is NOT true? Answer: Choice 2 Gordimer has drawn criticism both for her apparent lack of attention to feminism in favor of race issues and for the wholeness and unfashionable completeness of her novels—their plottedness, meticulous scene painting, fully realized characters. However, the searching symbolism and complexity of her narratives generally work against such judgments.
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A prominent feature of her writing is to give a number of different perspectives on a situation, in some cases most poignantly those of apartheid's supporters, and in this way to represent the broader anatomy of a diseased potitics. Gordimer's subject, as she emphasizes, is much more than apartheid; it is the human being in history. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 2574 39- ‘Modernist manifestos’ in the early 20th c. takes on the different forms mentioned below EXCEPT that some are -----------------. Answer: Choice 4 Modernist manifestos take on a variety of different forms. Some are individual statements, such as Hulme’s lecture “Romanticism and Classicism.” Others are meant to be declarations on behalf of an emergent group or movement, such as “A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste” or the Blast manifesto. Occasionally, and paradoxically, a manifesto is a nonpublic declaration, unpublished in the author's lifetime, as in the case of Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto.” Although the manifesto is not an art form in the same sense as a poem or painting is, manifestos became an important literary genre in the modernist era, and some are more than mere declarations of doctrine. The vorticist manifesto and Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto,” for example, cross poetry with poster art, creatively manipulating words on the page for maximum effect. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 1997 40- The seminal 20th century texts below appeared in the correct under in -------------------. Answer: Choice 2 Premiere of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953) Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958) Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings (1964) Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 1849 LITERARY GENRES 41- A well-known poem by John Donne (1572-1631) opens with the lines ----------------. Answer: Choice 1 Choice 1 is from “The Apparition” by John Donne Choice 2 is from “A Litany in the Time of Plague” by Thomas Nash Choice 3 is from “Cherry-Ripe” by Thomas Campion Choice 4 is from “Now Winter Nights Enlarge” by Thomas Campion Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 1274, 1232, and 1230
1394 – Explanatory Answers and Sources 42- Which of the following statements about John Milton's II Penseroso (1645) is NOT true? Answer: Choice 3 II Penseroso is a poem in rhymed octosyllabics by John Milton, written? 1631, printed 1645; a companion piece to ‘L’Allegro’. The title means ‘the contemplative man’. The poem is an invocation to the goddess Melancholy, bidding her bring Peace, Quiet, Leisure, and Contemplation. It describes the pleasures of the studious, meditative life, of tragedy, epic poetry, and music. It had a considerable influence on the meditative graveyard poems of the 18th century. Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature by Dinah Birch and Katy Hooper, 3rd edition, p. 353 43- The lines ‘Ye distant spires, ye antique towers, / That crown the watery glade, / Where grateful Science still adores / Her Henry’s holy shade; / And ye, that from the stately brow / Of Windsor’s heights the expanse below / Of grove, of lawn, of mead survey, / Whose turf, whose shade, whose flowers among / Wanders the hoary Thames along / His silver-winding way’ open an 18th c. poem by ----------------. Answer: Choice 4 The mentioned lines open Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College by Thomas Gray. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 2863 44- John Keats’s Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1818) ------------------. Answer: Choice 2 This poem of more than four thousand lines (based on the classical myth of a mortal beloved by the goddess of the moon) tells of Endymion’s long and agonized search for an immortal goddess whom he had seen in several visions. In the course of his wanderings, he comes upon an Indian maid who had been abandoned by the followers of Bacchus, god of wine and revelry. To his utter despair, he succumbs to a sensual passion for her, in apparent betrayal of his love for his heavenly ideal. The conclusion to Keats’s “romance” offers a way of resolving this opposition, which runs throughout the poem, between the inevitably mortal pleasures of this world and the possibility of delights that would be eternal: the Indian maid reveals that she is herself Cynthia (Diana), goddess of the moon, the celestial subject of his earlier visions. Source: See the footnote of the poem in Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 883 45- Robert Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi (1855) -------------------. Answer: Choice 4 “Fra Lippo Lippi” is a monologue portraying the dawn of the Renaissance in Italy at a point when the medieval attitude toward life and art was about to be displaced by a fresh appreciation of earthly pleasures. It was from Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Painters (1550)
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that Browning derived most of his information about the life of the Florentine painter and friar Lippo Lippi (1406-1469), but the theory of art propounded by Lippi in the poem was developed by the poet. Source: See the footnote of the poem in Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 1271 46- ‘First World War poet: poem’ match in -------------------. Answer: Choice 1 “The Owl” is by Edward Thomas “The Cherry Trees” is by Edward Thomas “As the Team’s Head Brass” is by Edward Thomas Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 1956, 1957, 1958, and 1959 47- Which of the following does NOT open a poem by Philip Larkin (1922-1985)? Answer: Choice 3 Choice 1 opens “Church Going” by Philip Larkin Choice 2 opens “MCMXIV” by Philip Larkin Choice 3 opens “Lapis Lazuli” by William Butler Yeats Choice 4 opens “Homage to a Government” by Philip Larkin Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 2566, 2568, 2046, and 2571 48- Ann Carson’s (b. 1950) poem ‘The Glass Essay’ --------------------. Answer: Choice 2 One of Carson’s greatest works, a long poem titled ‘The Glass Essay’ (in Glass, Irony and God), is a kind of Yeatsian ‘dialogue’, written out of the tradition of the duality of soul and body. Carson’s context is, as it must be in this kind of poem, personal – a lost relationship. Like all poems that leave one reeling, ‘The Glass Essay’ offers sensuous and bold surfaces that also call up unutterable subtexts. ‘First Chaldaic Oracle’, published Canadian Poetry 315 in Men in the Off Hours, a collection that demonstrates the impressive range of Carson’s formal skill as a poet, engages in word-play that lightly echoes John Ashbery’s. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 2864 49- The set of characters ----------------- appear in William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or What You Will (written circa 1601). Answer: Choice 4 ‘Valentine, Silvia, Julia’ appear in Shakespeare’s “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” ‘Solinus, Egeon, Emilia’ appear in Shakespeare’s “Comedy of Errors” ‘Duke Frederick, Rosalind, Celia’ appear in Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 1077
1394 – Explanatory Answers and Sources 50- ‘Character: character description’ in William Congreves Restoration comedy The Way of the World (premiered 1700) do NOT match in ------------------. Answer: Choice 1 At the center of the action of The Way of the World are four fully realized characters— Mirabell and Millamant, the hero and heroine, and Fainall and Mrs Marwood, the two villains—whose stratagems and relations move the play. Around them are characters who serve in one way or another as foils. Witwoud, the would-be wit, with whom we contrast the true wit of Mirabell and Millamant. Petulant, a “humor” character, who affects bluff candor and cynical realism, but succeeds only in being offensive, and Sir Wilfull Witwoud, the booby squire from the country, who serves with Petulant to throw into relief the high good breeding and fineness of nature of the hero and heroine Finally there is one of Congreve’s finest creations, Lady Wishfort (‘wish for it’), who though aging and ugly still longs for love, gallantry, and courtship and who is led by her appetites into the trap that Mirabell lays for her. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 2226-27 51- Which of the following sets of plays are made exclusively of George Bernard Shaw’s (1856-1950) ‘Plays Pleasant’ (1898)? Answer: Choice 2 Shaw’s early plays, The Philanderer and the far more assured Mrs Warren’s Profession (both written in 1893), fell victims to the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship and had to wait until the early 1900s for private productions (Mrs Warren’s Profession received its license for public performance only in the mid-1920s!). Of such official censorship Shaw complained in 1898 in the Preface to the published version of the two plays, classifying them, together with Widowers’ Houses, as what he called ‘Unpleasant Plays’. Mrs Warren’s Profession boldly confronts two contemporary women’s issues: the future professional careers of educated, would-be independent women, and the oldest profession, female prostitution. The arguments of the play suggest the propriety of both vocations, but its internal tensions derive from the juxtaposition of a liberated daughter, Vivie Warren, and her unashamed, brothel-keeping mother who sees ‘the only way for a woman to provide for herself decently is for her to be good to some man that can afford to be good to her’. The play ends not with reconciliation, compromise or empty gestures of feminine solidarity, but with a slammed door and an isolated Vivie happily engrossed in her work. Shaw was justly proud of this ‘unpleasant’ play, but his discovery that, as he put it, ‘the New Drama, in England at least, was a figment of the revolutionary imagination’ virtually obliged him to write an alternative series of ‘pleasant’ plays for the commercial theatre. Arms and the Man: An Anti-Romantic Comedy (1894) sets out to subvert ideas of soldierly and masculine heroism in a fanciful Balkan setting; Candida: A Mystery (1897) turns Ibsen’s A Doll’s House upside down within the context of a Christian Socialist household; and the cleverly diverting You Never Can Tell (1899) allows for the happy, liberating victory of a new generation over the old. Source: The Short Oxford History of English Literature by Andrew Sanders, p. 479
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52- ‘Twentieth century playwright: play’ do NOT correspond in -------------------. Answer: Choice 4 The Secret Rapture (1988) is by David Hare Source: The Short Oxford History of English Literature by Andrew Sanders, p. 626 53- ‘Character / character description’ in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is correct in -------------------. Answer: Choice 3 Born to an affluent, loving family, Victor Frankenstein hopes to leave a lasting impression on his fellow humanity. He leaves home to attend the University of Ingolstadt, where he studies natural sciences. His professor M. Waldman inspires him to push his experiments beyond the realm of “acceptable” science, so he begins to determine the limits of human mortality. Collecting cadaver parts from graveyards, he slowly pieces together the form of a human being. It takes him two years to complete his experiment, but when he finally gives his creature the spark of life, Victor can only run in fear. The creature’s hideous appearance appalls Victor, upsetting him so much that he becomes very ill. He knows nothing about the creature’s whereabouts until the creature finally approaches him. Source: http://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/frankenstein OR Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 955 54- Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) opens with -------------------. Answer: Choice 1 Later in the nineteenth century, readers expected very full character delineations. In Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Thomas Hardy satisfies that expectation in his opening presentation of Gabriel Oak: When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun. Choice 2 is from Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy: Chapter 1 Choice 3 is from Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy Choice 4 is from Tess of the d'Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy Source: Mastering English Literature by Richard Gill, 3rd edition, p. 18 55- ‘Novelist: novel’ do NOT correspond in --------------------. Answer: Choice 3 Leading the Cheers is by Justin Cartwright (not by Doris Lessing) Cartwright’s first novel, The Revenge (1978), is a roman à clef about an American president (based on Richard Nixon) who tries to arrange for the assassination of a rival candidate. His
1394 – Explanatory Answers and Sources 1995 novel, In Every Face I Meet, was short-listed for the Booker Prize, and in 1998 Leading the Cheers won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. Other well-reviewed works include Masai Dreaming (1993), about a journalist researching the life of an anthropologist who had been studying the Masai tribe in Africa in the period before World War II, but who was later sent to Auschwitz with her family, and Half in Love (2001), about a protagonist loosely based on British prime minister Tony Blair. Source: The Facts on File Companion to the British Novel by Virginia Brackett and Victoria Gaydosik, Vol II, p. 70 OR Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 2543 56- Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women (1971) is a --------------------. Answer: Choice 4 A novel constructed from a series of interlinking short stories, Lives of Girls and Women is a special kind of bildungsroman known as a “Kunstler roman” or novel of the development of an artist’s gifts. The first-person narrator of the eight stories that make up the novel is Del Jordan, daughter of Addie Jordan. The stories follow Del’s life from about the age of 11 until shortly after her graduation from high school. Del is observant enough to recognize her desire to wield power over her own life when it crops up, and she is strong enough to choose a course of action that will make it possible for her to do so. Source: The Facts on File Companion to the British Novel by Virginia Brackett and Victoria Gaydosik, Vol II, p. 262 57- John Fowles’ The Magus (1965) is --------------------. Answer: Choice 1 Probably the most important novel of this important 20th-century author, The Magus draws on the experiences of the author in the Greek Aegean Islands; it is an engrossing, hypnotic novel featuring layer upon layer of illusion. The story is deeply informed by classical mythology, Jungian psychology, and archetypal literary devices. The first-person narrator, Nicholas Urfe (“earth,” as Fowles explains in the preface to the revised edition), takes a job in the early 1950s teaching English at a private Greek school modeled on the English Public School system. He accepts the position more out of desperation than love of teaching English: No better prospects for employment have turned up, and he wishes to end his love affair with Alison Kelly, an intelligent and independent Australian woman. Nicholas imagines that on Phraxos (inspired by the real-life island of Spetsai), he will spend his abundant and isolated leisure time writing poetry. He fancies himself to be a great poet, although he has yet to produce significant examples of verse. Source: The Facts on File Companion to the British Novel by Virginia Brackett and Victoria Gaydosik, Vol II, p. 275-6
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58- The novelist J. M. Coetzee’s (h. 1940) most compelling indictment of colonialism -------------- takes its title and theme from ---------------. Answer: Choice 3 Coetzee is at once a passionate political novelist and an intensely literary one, both qualities emerging in his most compelling indictment of colonialism, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). This novel takes its title and theme from a well-known poem by the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863—1933). Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 2838 59- V. S. Naipaul (b. 1932) ‘work: work description’ match in ----------------. Answer: Choice 2 Naipaul’s first three books, The Mystic Masseur (1957), The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), and Miguel Street (short stories, 1959), are comedies of manners, set in a Trinidad viewed with an exile’s acute and ironic eye. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 2729 60- Which of the following about the novelist Jean Rhys (1890-1979) is NOT true? Answer: Choice 4 Rhys’s fiction frequently depicts single, economically challenged women, rootless outsiders living in Bohemian London or Paris. Her early sketches were followed by her first novel, Postures (1928), in part an account of her affair with Ford. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 2356
1395 – Questions
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LITERARY TERMS AND CRITICISM 1- ‘Theatre of cruelty’, a term introduced by the French actor Antonin Artaud in a series of manifestos in the 1930s, ---------------------. 1) refers to his projected revolution in drama, whereby great stress was placed on a theatre of psychology intended to lead the audience to a violent awareness of man's inner mind 2) derived its idea partly from surrealism and the idea that the audience should undergo a catharsis through being possessed by a ‘plague’ or epidemic of irrational responses 3) never proved to be practical on stage—Peter Brook’s production in 1964 of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade was one of the most notable instances of its utter failure with the audience 4) is best exemplified in the huge success and popularity of the playwright’s own attempts at putting his theory into dramatic practice—in works such as Les Cenci 2- The term ‘surfiction’, coined in 1973 by the American writer Raymond Federman, would best designate a kind of fiction in which -------------------. 1) ‘character development’ is so much impeded by the narrative's ‘plot’ that the reader is practically faced by a ‘narrative hall’ in the work 2) the idea of meta fiction is represented as having had its origins in the I9th century writer’s penchant for intruding into his narrative 3) realism is abandoned in favor of metafiction, self-consciously advertising its own fictional status 4) the writer employs a blend of realistic conventions for resolutely postmodern novels and short stories 3- ‘Perlocutionary act’, a term used in speech act theory, refers to an utterance that -------------------. 1) has an effect upon the actions, thoughts, or feelings of the listener 2) would induce the listener to accept the truth validity of a statement 3) attempts to he convincing without being alarming, insulting or boring 4) is concerned with the emotive (and not the ‘factual’) content of statements 4- ‘Analepsis’ and ‘prolepsis’ are specifically two basic forms of --------------------. 1) ‘apocrypha’ 2) ‘anachrony’ 3) ‘anapest’ 4) ‘aubadc’ 5- ‘Caesura’, a pause in a line of verse, often coinciding with a break between clauses or sentences, ---------------------. 1) is also applied to a break between words within a ‘foot’ 2) is almost always placed in the middle of the line of a poem 3) was called ‘feminine caesura’ if it followed a stressed syllable 4) was used in the Old English and Middle English alliterative meter 6- Typical ---------------- involves the unveiling of a disguised character or the reappearance of one assumed by the audience to be dead. 1) ‘deus ex machina’ 2) ‘peripeteia’ 3) ‘coups de theatre’ 4) ‘feuilleton’
1395 – Questions 7- ‘Hyperbaton’ is a very common form of -------------------, of which --------------------affords many spectacular examples. 1) ‘poetic licence’ / Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard 2) ‘elegaic metre’ / Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard 3) ‘elegaie metre’ / Milton’s Paradise Lost 4) ‘poetic licence’ / Milton’s Paradise Lost 8- Which of the following about a ‘madrigal’ is TRUE? 1) There is no fixed metrical form or rhyme scheme for a madrigal, but it usually ends with a rhyming couplet. 2) It originated in 14th-century Italy, but it was revived and adopted by composers throughout Europe in the 16th century. 3) It is a variety of long lyric poetry, usually of love and courtly life, developed in extremely elaborate metrical patterns, 4) Madrigals were often set to music as a song for one or two voices with minimal instrumental accompaniment. 9- ‘New Comedy’, as (eventually) applied to the comic theatre of, for instance, the 17 th century playwright Moliere, --------------------. 1) portrayed the fortunes of a family whose members consisted mainly of stock characters 2) was preceded by a phase of ‘low comedy’ (of which almost nothing has survived) 3) abandoned topical satire in favor of fictional plots based on contemporary life 4) employed a chorus which would then act as part of an extensive musical interlude 10- The term ‘strophe’ is applied in a special sense to --------------------. 1) stanzas, or any regular subdivision of a poem, that have to be sung for their effect 2) the opening section (and even third succeeding section) of a Greek choral ode 3) a section in a Pindaric ode made up of two epodes followed by an antistrophe 4) the chorus having to chant it in a play while standing in front of the audience 11- John Dryden's An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668; rev. 1684) best treats, through his four speakers, the ------------------. 1) strengths of Restoration comedy (his own preferred genre), relationship between the ancients and the moderns, and the use of blank verse in drama 2) relationship between the ancients and the moderns. French dramatic theory and English practice, and the use of rhyme in drama 3) strengths of Restoration comedy (his own preferred genre), English dramatic theory, and the use of blank verse in drama 4) relationship between the ancients and the moderns, English dramatic theory, the use of rhyme in drama
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12- Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) maintained that we had no way of knowing a text creator’s purpose other than through ‘reconstruction’ and outlined several types of positive hermeneutical reconstruction ------------------. 1) consisting, of two types of grammatical or objective reconstruction and two types of psychological or subjective reconstruction 2) based solely on rigorous objective criteria to the exclusion of what he termed ‘reconstructive psychologism’ 3) more having to do the with the psychological or subjective processes at work in the creation of a text's meaning 4) developed upon a complex conflation of grammatical / objective factors and psychological / subjective factors 13- In what they practiced as ‘critical theory’, major thinkers of the Frankfurt School --------------------. 1) embraced realism whole-heartedly despite the fact that some, such as Brecht and Lukacs. held conflicting views of the school 2) regarded the social system, in Hegelian fashion, as a totality in which all the aspects reflected the same essence 3) practiced a wide-ranging form of social analysis grounded in Marxism and resolutely negating Freudian concepts 4) argued that great literature has to, is indeed forced to, directly address social reality though not in strictly realistic fashion 14- Which of the following about Louis Althusser, the French Marxist philosopher who has had a major influence on Marxist literary theory, is TRUE? 1) He believes in the idea of the ‘social formation’, which he regards as a ‘decentered’ structure—unlike a living organism this structure has no governing principle, no originating seed, no overall unity to him. 2) He does not treat the text as a ‘production’ in which disparate materials are worked over and changed in the process—he regards it instead as a ‘creation’ or a self-contained artefact. 3) He maintains dial irrespective of prevailing aesthetic norms and authorial intentions, the artistic text, in working the pre-given materials, is always fully ‘aware of what it is doing’. 4) He tends to treat art as simply a form of ideology: in ‘A Letter on Art’, he locates it right inside the everyday praxis of ideological knowledge. 15- The key to understanding postmodernist thinker Jean Baudrillard’s thought is his ------------------. 1) concept of the consumer’s triumph whereby our natural needs or desires are able to defeat the desires stimulated by cultural discourses of the media 2) argument that the things signified have now taken priority over signs thus leaving the signs devoid of any real significance 3) reversal of the commonsense understanding of the relation of culture to nature, of sign to thing signified 4) idea of ‘simulacra’ in which representations can represent only the ‘surface’ of the objects they purport to represent
1395 – Questions 16- Major twentieth-century ‘critic / theorist; work’ match in --------------------. 1) ‘Edward Said: The Resistance to Theory’ 2) ‘Harold Bloom: Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism’ 3) ‘Haydon White: Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust’ 4) ‘Paul de Man: Blindness and Insight; Essay's in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism’ 17- Which of the following central figures in French structuralism would, following Aristotle’s view of plot as the prime category of tragedy, take plot as the central abstract structure of narrative in his / her development of narratology? 1) Roland Barthes 2) Tzvetan Todorov 3) Gerald Graff 4) Julia Kristeva 18- The Indian-American critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak ------------------. 1) continually interrogates and undermines the ‘polities of the open end’ in which deconstruction works in effect to the detriment ‘alterities’ 2) would tend to de-emphasize deconstruction’s interest in hierarchical binary oppositions and thus carve a passage from literary Theory to radical politics 3) writes against the ‘epistemic violence’ done by discourses of knowledge that carve up the world and condemn to oblivion the pieces that do not easily fit 4) self-consciously explores in her works what she dubs ‘structures of affection’ in an attempt to counteract ‘the despotism of the binary’ persistent in Western culture 19- As a literary critical school, New Historicism begins its quest to be political by denying that ------------------. 1) the literary work, due to its special constructed status, can play a significant role in the competition among various groups to gain their ends 2) fictional works can reveal the growth of forms of power that continuously affect subjects’ lives in actual human societies 3) literary symbols can have any real capacity to bind social agents emotionally to institutions and practices 4) any social world is stable and that artworks are separated from the power struggles constituting social reality 20- Which of the following works opens with the famous exhortation ‘Always historicize!’ thus effectively setting out the methodological approach called ‘metacommentary’ and providing a theoretically sophisticated answer to the perennial question of the relation of aesthetics to social history? 1) Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious 2) Terry Eagleton’s Marxism and Literary Theory 3) Stuart Halt’s Cultural Studies find its Theoretical Legacies 4) Stephen Greenblatt’s The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance
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HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 21- Medieval dramas known as the morality plays ------------------. 1) were, unlike mystery plays, composed individually and not in cycles 2) address questions of the ultimate fate of the soul and the body on earth 3) enjoy the same methods of attaining their religions purpose as mystery plays 4) dramatize biblical and sacred history from the creation of the world to Judgment 22- Which of the following about John Donne’s ‘Satire 3’ opening with ‘Kind pity chokes my spleen; brave scorn forbids / Those tears to issue which swell my eyelids’ is TRUE? 1) It was written in the early 17th century urbane and witty English style to defend King James’s Protestant religious politics. 2) It would, unusually for an early Donne satire, steer completely away from the topical theological problems of the day. 3) It resembles the satires of the third Roman satirist, Persius, known for an abstruse style and moralizing manner. 4) It is one of his five verse satires written in the 1590s in protest against the vogue for ‘classical’ satires in England. 23- The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) ---------------------. 1) has been generally described as an anti-Nominalist, owing to his disregard for established definition of the meaning of terms 2) resembles Francis Bacon (1561-1626) in the practical or utilitarian importance that he attaches to knowledge 3) is concerned with nature and man as objects of his enquiry and shares the general scientific zest of his time for the inductive method 4) considers man's intellect as the basis of all knowledge but maintains that the intellect alone is less than sufficient for man's prosperity 24- Jonathan Swift’s The Drapier’s Letters (1724) was ---------------. 1) a long vociferous letter in several instalments addressed to ‘the right honorable people of Ireland’ on the question of me ‘imported English mint of brass’ 2) addressed to ‘Lord Chancellor Middleton’ and to ‘both Houses of Parliament’ warning of the dangers of ‘circulating, brass in Dublin the brain of Ireland’ 3) a collection of letters in plain language asking the Irish populace to rise against the idea of getting ‘an English mint’ established in Dublin 4) a series of four pamphlets in which he prophesies economic ruin to the Irish if ‘Wood’s half-pence’ were admitted into circulation in Ireland 25- Which of the following statements about William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) is correct? 1) Law and government and the idea of property would be strengthened as part of a gradual process by which human perfectibility can be achieved. 2) Rousseau’s cult of sensibility and his innate religiosity is substituted for a rigid adherence to the leading principle of reason. 3) He looks forward to a gradual melting away of all government to be replaced by a new system of radical anarchy. 4) He views human happiness and social well-being as only one of the purposes of man’s existence.
1395 – Questions 26- Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) ------------------. 1) includes a passage on the downfall of Marie Antoinette leading to the lament that ‘the age of chivalry is gone… All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off’ 2) asserts that the king of England owes his throne to the choice of the people, who are constitutionally at liberty to cashier him for misconduct ‘if need be’ 3) argues that the inherited rights of which the English are tenacious can be consistent with the ‘rights of man’ as promulgated in post-Revolution France 4) extols the goodwill of the men who made the French Revolution, but censures the bloody turn of events instigated by the French National Assembly 27- A chance discovery of a seventeenth-century manuscript in which a number of ballads had been copied down led to the three-volume ballad collection -------------------. 1) F. J. Child English and Scottish Popular Ballads 2) Bishop Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry 3) Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border 4) Robert Burns’ The Melodies of Scotland 28- William Blake’s An Island in the Moon (1784-5) is ------------------. 1) an epic of the First Crusade, with the addition of romantic and fabulous elements 2) despite its title, a fictionalized romantic comedy, framed by the comments of Oberon, king of fairies 3) a pamphlet poem in praise of idealistic social causes in England 4) a satirical portrait of scientific and cultural dilettantism and pretension 29- The Romantic figure ------------------ excelled as a songwriter both in standard English (as in “Up! quit thy bower”) and in the Scottish dialect (as in “Woo’d and married”). 1) ‘Joanna Baillie’ 2) ‘Charlotte Smith’ 3) ‘Mary Robinson’ 4) ‘Maria Edgeworth’ 30- Wordsworth and Coleridge's landmark Lyrical Ballads appeared in 1798 along with -------------------. 1) Walter Scott’s The Lay of the Last and Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk 2) William Godwin’s Caleb Williams and Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho 3) John Clare’s Poems Descriptive of Rival Life and Felicia Hemans’s Records of Woman 4) Jeremy Bentham’s Political Economy and Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population 31- The novel written (roughly) in the Romantic period ----------------- has as its hero / heroine a ‘natural’ man, a primitive who is brought up by American Indians without the constrictions of civilized religion, morality, and ethics. 1) Mary Wollstonecraft’s Mary 2) Robert Bage’s Hermsprong 3) Frances Burney’s Evelina 4) Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and Art
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32- The following events, important as part of context material for the Romantic period, occurred in three consecutive years in ------------------. 1) the Fall of the BastilleThe reign of TerrorThe fall of Robespierre 2) W. A. Mozart’s Don GiovanniNapoleon crowned emperorBlackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine founded 3) Abolition of the slave trade in BritainLudwig van Beethoven’s Symphonies 5 and 6Quarterly Review Founded 4) Parliamentary Union of Ireland and Great BritainThe Prince of Wales becomes regent for George IIIBlackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine founded 33- The Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) --------------------. 1) concurred with other major poets of her generation, such as Arnold, that the Victorian age did not contain the right materials for an epic poetry 2) wrote her Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), a sequence of eighty-three sonnets, some in the Portuguese, to record the stages of her love for Robert Browning 3) tended, in her early work, to use the visionary modes of Romantic narrative poetry, but she turned increasingly to contemporary topics, particularly to liberal causes of her day 4) depicted the growth of a woman poet in her verse novel Aurora Leigh (1857), the first extensive poem in English by a woman poet written in tribute to another woman poet 34- Idylls of the King, a series of 12 connected poems by Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892), --------------------. 1) presents the story of Arthur, from his first meeting with Guinevere to the ruin of his kingdom and his death in the ‘last, dim, weird battle of the west’ 2) of which a major portion is ‘The Passing of Arthur’ (subsequently incorporated in ‘Morte d’Arthur’) was composed after his friend’s Hallam’s death in 1850 3) depicts major protagonists such as Lancelot and Elaine in detail—at the expense of dealing with the fates of its various minor characters 4) was begun in 1833-4 with ‘Enid’, which he followed by ‘Merlin and Vivien’, later developed into ‘The Marriage of Geraint’ 35- The Victorian light verse as reprinted by W.S. Gilbert (1836-1911) -----------------. 1) creates its comic worlds through exaggeration and absurdity removed from the ordinary world and its everyday concerns 2) has proved especially attractive to psychoanalytically minded readers interested in literary parody and philosophical speculation 3) embraces a wide variety of humorous material from nonsense poetry to songs for the stage to pseudo-serious satire of political events 4) was written in the burlesque mode, employed to poke fun at a host of social and political issues and figures, similar to what was found in the pages of the Punch 36- ‘Victorian figure / work’ are both correct in -----------------. 1) Henry Mayhew: London Labour and the London Poor AND Annie Besant: The “White Slavery” of London Match Workers’ 2) Thomas Babington Macaulay: ‘Minute on Indian Education’ AND James Anthony Froude: ‘On the Study of Celtic Literature’ 3) Charles Kingsley: The Great Towns AND Coventry Patmore: The Angel in the House 4) Mona Caird: ‘Marriage’ AND Walter Besant: A Review of Southey's Colloquies’
1395 – Questions 37- Which of the following statements about Samuel Beckett (1906-89) is TRUE? 1) His The Unnamable opens with the characteristic sentence ‘I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all’. 2) His early attempts at drama were influenced by the work of the South African playwright and stage-director Athol Fugard. 3) His first published work was an essay on Joyce (1929) and he assisted with the translation into French of part of his Finnegans Wake. 4) His trilogy Molloy (1953), Malone Dies (1958) and The Unnamable (1960) were all (except Malone Dies) originally written in French and were then translated into English. 38- The description -------------------- matches the contemporary British poet and playwright Carol Ann Duffy (b. 1955). 1) ‘Along with poetry, she has published books of criticism on classical literature, translations front Greece and a novel in verse Autobiography of Red’ 2) ‘The great puzzle of her career has been how to embrace Irish identity while rejecting certain male-centered assumptions that have long dominated Irish literary culture.’ 3) ‘She illustrates many of her poems with line drawings (‘doodles’) that reinforce the effect of mock-naiveté—in part, as a gendered deflection and subversion of masculine cultural norms’ 4) ‘She is particularly skillful in her use of dramatic monologue, fashioning and assuming the voices of mythological, historical and active characters such as Medusa or Lazarus’s imaginary wife’ 39- The British Poet C. Day-Lewis (1904-1972) -----------------. 1) seems never to have fallen for the idea of feeling small when laced with a working-class Communist: ‘My sympathies are Left. On paper and in my soul’, he wrote. ‘But not in my heart or my guts.’ 2) with his Overtures to Death (1938) and Poems in Wartime (1940) signaled that he like Stephen Spender, had begun to retreat from confident Marxist analyses as the Second World War approached 3) published, at the beginning of his career, a series of verse dialogues with the title ‘eclogue’ (‘Eclogue for Christmas’, ‘Eclogue by a Five-barred Gale’, ‘Eclogue from Iceland’, and ‘Eclogue between the Motherless’) 4) describes in his unfinished autobiography, The Strings Are False, his enthusiasm as a schoolboy for The Waste Land, an enthusiasm which expressed itself in paddling a hired canoe ‘beneath the gas works, a line place... for reading Webster’. 40- Samuel Beckett’s one foray into the cinéma, Film (1964) was -------------------. 1) a complex ‘script’ as a tribute to Buster Keaton 2) based on his private interviews with Charles Chaplin 3) partly inspired by his own Words and Music, his 1962 radio play 4) a montage of comedy films made in France since the invention of the cinema
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LITERARY GENRES 41- The poem -------------------- is a personal testament or book of worship, antiphonally Arranged in lines beginning alternately with Let and For, seeks to join the material and spiritual universes in one unending prayer. 1) A Better Answer by Matthew Prior 2) Jubilate Agno by Christopher Smart 3) The Definition of Love by Andrew Marvel 4) Silence, and Stealth of Days by Henry Vaughan 42- Which of the following about James Thomson’s (1700-1748) The Seasons is correct? 1) The distinction of the poem was recognized not as lying with the prevalent 18th c. emphasis on didacticism but with the force and diversity its meditations. 2) Mercantile enterprise is interpreted as an interference with the natural organism of nature all to the detriment of man’s real happiness and prosperity. 3) The working landscape of the four seasons emanates best from Home Counties around London and spreads thence to the fertile island of Britain. 4) Throughout the work great emphasis is laid on the interrelationship, and not the conflict, of the interests of the country and the town. 43- The poems ------------------ ALL appeared in William Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1800). 1) ‘Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways’, ‘Simon Lee, the old Huntsman’ and ‘The Thorn’ 2) ‘Nutting’, ‘Simon Lee, the old Huntsman’ and ‘Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways’ 3) ‘Nutting’, ‘Simon Lee, the old Huntsman’ and ‘The Thorn’ 4) ‘The Thorn’, ‘Nutting’ and ‘Surprised by joy’ 44- ‘Victorian poet: poem’ match in -------------------. 1) Matthew Arnold: ‘Lines Written in Kensington Gardens’ 2) Dante Gabriel Rossetti: ‘The Starlight Night’ 3) Robert Browning: ‘Tithonus’ 4) Alfred Tennyson: ‘The Lost Leader’ 45- The poem ‘Invictus’ opening ‘Out of the night that covers me / Black as the Pit from pole to pole / I thank whatever gods may be / For my unconquerable soul’ is by the Victorian poet ------------------. 1) Gerard Manley Hopkins 2) Michael Field 3) Rudyard Kipling 4) W. E. Henley 46- The following poems fry W. B. Yeats (1856-1939) appeared in the correct order in -------------------. 1) ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’‘The Second Coming’The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ 2) ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’The Wild Swans at Coole’The Second Coming’ 3) ‘The Wild Swans at CooleThe Lake Isle of Innisfree’The Second Coming’ 4) ’The Lake Isle of lnnisfree’The Second Coming’The Wild Swans at Coole’
1395 – Questions 47- T. S. Eliot’s poem ‘East Coker’ in his Four Quartets (1943) opens with ---------------. 1) ‘Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past. / If all time is eternally present / All time is unredeemable...’ 2) I do not know much about gods; but I mink that the river/ Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable, / Patient to some degree, at first recognized as a frontier...’ 3) In my beginning is my end. In succession / Houses, rise and fall, crumble, are extended, / Are removed, destroyed, restored, of in their place / Is an open filed, or a factory, or a bypass…’ 4) ‘Midwinter spring is its own season / Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown, / Suspended in time, between pole and tropic, / When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire...’ 48- Which of the following about the poetry of Philip Larkin (1922-1985) is correct? 1) He explores eternal themes of death and change within novel rhythms and syntax, and innovative poetic forms. 2) His vision is unsentimental, albeit at times unrealistic, and he prefers to be indirect and ironic. 3) He writes about what appears to be normal and every day, while exploring the paradox that the mundane is both familiar and limited. 4) He strongly asserts and (re-)claims the right of the poet to exploit his own personal experience for the creation of poetry. 49- Seamus Heaney’s ‘Punishment’ (1975) opens with -------------------. 1) ‘I almost love you / but would have cast, I know / the stones of silence / I am the artful voyeur’ 2) ‘I can feel the tug / of the halter at the nape / of her neck, the wind / on her naked front’ 3) ‘As if he had been poured / in tar, he lies / on a pillow of turf / and seems to Weep’ 4) ‘It was a day of cold’ Raw silence, wind-blown / Surplice and soutane’ 50- Which of the following statements about the Scottish novelist Tobias Smollett (17211771) / work by him is correct? 1) Smollett often selects his characters from the ranks of high society and, unlike his contemporary Sterne, shows little interest in servants as engines for his fiction. 2) His Peregrine Pickle is concerned with and supports the kind of grand tour which Sterne had mocked in his A Sentimental Journey. 3) In his enthusiasm for comic effects, Smollett tends to shun the harsh realities of life in his tales, and usually stops short of introducing controversial issues. 4) Like many of his contemporaries, including William Goldsmith, Smollett used journalism as a vehicle for his ideas which are frequently dominated by anger.
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51- George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) opens with -----------------. 1) ‘With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader. With this drop of ink at the end of my pen…’ 2) ‘On the first of September, in the memorable year 1832, someone was expected at Transome Court. As early as two o’clock in the afternoon the aged lodge-keeper had opened the heavy gate, green as the tree trunks were green…’ 3) ‘Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa…’ 4) ‘More than three centuries and a half ago, in the mid spring-time of 1492, we are sure that the angel of the dawn, as he travelled with broad slow wing from the Levant to the Pillars of Hercules…’ 52- Which of the following about Anne Bronte / her work is correct? 1) Her Agnes Grey was co-published with her sister Charlotte's The Professor in 1846.’ 2) Her The Tenant of Windfell Hall (1848) deals with the fortunes and misfortunes of its heroine Helen Graham. 3) She was the only one of the Bronte sisters who chose to be published under her name (and not under a pseudonym). 4) She co-wrote (with Harriet Martinueau) and published several important proto-feminist pamphlets in the Quarterly Review. 53- Thomas Hardy’s use of ‘dialect’ for his characters in his fiction was -----------------. 1) primarily to distinguish between his characters, particularly with reference to their social position and to the social and psychological contexts in which they find themselves 2) done in an effort to neutralize the linguistic and social dualities and clashes in values produced, by the employment of seldom-heard types of speech 3) usually applied to dialects-peaking characters who were idiosyncratic, lacked education, or who were exaggeratedly ‘low’ in society 4) sometimes done with a view to representing the speech of his characters in dialect form to entertain the audience for his work 54- Arguably one of the most innovative mid successful exponents of the ‘conversational or dialogue novel’, Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969) ------------------. 1) chooses one-word titles such as Caught (1943), Loving (1945), and Nothing (1950) for the published novels, which takes the form to new heights, being written almost entirely in dialogue form 2) depicts, in the novel of the factory floor, Living (1929), a vivid example of the dialogue novel—colloquial, ungrammatical, and highly revealing about both the workers and the managerial class 3) develops a style described as combining the upper class with the demotic, with novels in many ways marking the transition between the novel of upper- and middle-class concerns and the working-class novels of the 1950s 4) provides the reader with chilling and disturbing pictures of family and society largely written in dialogue, and depicts an enclosed world somewhere before the First World War—she is more frequently compared with post-Impressionism in painting than with the literary fashions of the time
1395 – Questions 55- Several writers in English have followed the French writer Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past in writing multi-novel sequences, a prime example being ----------------- which consists of eleven novels. 1) Hartley’s The Go-Between 2) Greene’s The Power and the Glory 3) Snow’s Strangers and Brothers 4) Waugh’s Officers and Gentlemen 56- ‘Novelist: description’ match in ------------------. 1) ‘Barbara Comyns: her characters are frequently spinsters, and her novels of loneliness and pain, such as Hotel du Lac, are among the most classically refined treatments of the theme of solitude in the twentieth century’ 2) ‘May Sinclair: her novels such as Our Spoons Came from Woolworth’s (1950) and Mr. Fox (1987) combine the everyday with the macabre in a very individual way in their treatment of poverty’ 3) ‘Barbara Pym: From Excellent Women in 1952 to the tragic Quartet in Autumn in 1977, she explores a world that is small in scale, but profound in its emotional impact’ 4) ‘Anita Brookner: in novels such as Who Was Changed and Who was Dead (1954) deals with the effects of the plague on a village’ 57- Which of the following set of characters in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar are among the conspirators against Caesar? 1) Trebonius and Caius Legarius 2) Calpurnia and Portia Cinna 3) Lepidus and Flavius 4) Artemidorus and Marullus 58- The prologue of William Congreve’s comedy The Way of the World (1700) ‘Spoken by Mr. Betterton’ opens with -----------------. 1) ‘What flocks of critics hover here to-day / As vultures wait on armies for their prey /All gaping for the carcase of a play! / With croaking notes they bode some dire event / And follow dying poets by the scent’ 2) ‘Of those few fools, who with ill stars are cursed / Sure scribbling fools, called poets, fare the worst / For they’re a sort of fools which fortune makes / And after she has made ‘em fouls, forsakes.’ 3) ‘Now, luck yet send us, and a little wit / Will serve to make our play hit / According to the palates of the season / Here is rhyme not empty of reason.’ 4) ‘Why should a foolish marriage vow / Which long ago was made / Oblige us to each other now / When passion is decayed?’ 59- Which of the following three are entirely made up of D.H Lawrence’s plays about working class life? 1) The Plough and the Stars, A Collier’s Friday Night, The Daughter-in-Law 2) The Silver Tassie, The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd, A Collier’s Friday Night 3) The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd, Juno and Paycock, The Daughter-in-Law 4) A Collier’s Friday Night, The Daughter-in-Law, The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd
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60- John Osborne’s hero, Jimmy Porter, in his Look Back in Anger (1956) -----------------. 1) is married to a wife who has had to spend her childhood and part of her adolescent years with her family in the British African colonies 2) has a brother-in-law educated at the expensive Sandhurst academy and is now a member of Parliament (characterized as ‘the platitude from outer space’) 3) is a revolutionary with ‘revolutions to fight for’, or, to put it in terms readily grasped in the 1950s, he is a rebel with ‘causes he has to put to the right through hard action 4) has been an obsessive reader of Shakespeare and Eliot for the last couple of years though he fulminates against the crumbling authority of what he identifies as Establishment values
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LITERARY TERMS AND CRITICISM 1- ‘Theatre of cruelty’, a term introduced by the French actor Antonin Artaud in a series of manifestos in the 1930s, ---------------------. Answer: Choice 2 ‘Theatre of cruelty’ is a term introduced by the French actor Antonin Artaud in a series of manifestos in the 1930s, collected as Le Theatre et son double (1938). It refers to his projected revolution in orama, whereby the rational ‘theatre of psychology’ was to be replaced by a more physical and primitive rite intended to shock the audience into an awareness of life’s cruelty and violence. The idea, derived partly from surrealism, was that the audience should undergo a catharsis through being possessed by a ‘plague’ or epidemic of irrational responses. Source: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms by Chris Baldick, 2nd edition, p. 258 2- The term ‘surfiction’, coined in 1973 by the American writer Raymond Federman, would best designate a kind of fiction in which -------------------. Answer: Choice 3 ‘Surficion’ is a term coined in 1973 by the American experimental writer Raymond Federman to designate a new kind of fiction which is now more often referred to as postmodernist. Rather than attempt to mirror some pre-existing reality, surfiction abandons realism in favor of metafiction, self-consciously advertising its own fictional status. Federman proposed that ‘the new fiction will not attempt to be meaningful, truthful, or realistic’. Source: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms by Chris Baldick, 2nd edition, p. 249 3- ‘Perlocutionary act’, a term used in speech act theory, refers to an utterance that -------------------. Answer: Choice 1 ‘Perlocutionary act’ is a term used in speech act theory to designate an utterance that has an effect upon the actions, thoughts, or feelings of the listener, e.g. convincing, alarming, insulting, boring. The perlocutionary effect of an utterance may differ from the intended effect of the speaker’s illocutionary act. Source: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms by Chris Baldick, 2nd edition, p.189
1395 – Explanatory Answers and Sources 4- ‘Analepsis’ and ‘prolepsis’ are specifically two basic forms of ------------------. Answer: Choice 2 ‘Analepsis’, is a form of anachrony by which some of the events of a story are related at a point in the narrative after later story events have already been recounted. Source: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms by Chris Baldick, 2nd edition, p.10 5- ‘Caesura’, a pause in a line of verse, often coinciding with a break between clauses or sentences, ------------------. Answer: Choice 4 ‘Caesura’ is a pause in a line of verse, often coinciding with a break between clauses or sentences. It is usually placed in the middle of the line (‘medial caesura’), but may appear near the beginning (‘initial’) or towards the end (‘terminal’). Source: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms by Chris Baldick, 2nd edition, p.32 6- Typical ------------------- involves the unveiling of a disguised character or the reappearance of one assumed by the audience to be dead. Answer: Choice 3 ‘Coup de theatre’ is a sudden, surprising tum of events that gives a new twist to the plot of a play. Typical coups de theatre involve the unveiling of a disguised character or the reappearance of one the unveiling of a disguised character or the reappearance of one assumed by the audience to be dead. Source: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms by Chris Baldick, 2nd edition, p.52 7- ‘Hyperbaton’ is a very common form of -------------------, of which --------------------affords many spectacular examples. Answer: Choice 4 ‘Hyperbaton’ is a figure of speech by which the normal order of words in a sentence is significantly altered. A very common of poetic license, of which Milton’s Paradise Lost affords many form. Source: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms by Chris Baldick, 2nd edition, p.119
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8- Which of the following about a ‘madrigal’ is TRUE? Answer: Choice 1 ‘Madrigal’ is a short lyric poem, usually of love or pastoral life, often set to music as a song for several voices without instrumental accompaniment. As a poetic form, it originated in 14th-century Italy, but it was revived and adopted by composers throughout Europe in the 16th century; the English madrigal flourished from the 1580s to the 1620s. There is no fixed metrical form or rhyme scheme, but the madrigal usually ends with a rhyming couplet. Source: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms by Chris Baldick, 2nd edition, p.145 9- ‘New Comedy’, as (eventually) applied to the comic theatre of, for instance, the 17 th century playwright Moliere, --------------------. Answer: Choice 3 New Comedy is the name given to the kind of comedy that superseded the Old Comedy of Aristophanes in Athens from the late 4th century BCE, providing the basis for later Roman comedy and eventually for the comic theatre of Moliere and Shakespeare. Preceded by a phase of ‘middle comedy’ (of which almost nothing has survived), New Comedy abandoned topical satire in favor of fictional plots based on contemporary life: these portrayed the tribulations of young lovers caught up among stock characters such as the miserly father and the boastful soldier. Source: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms by Chris Baldick, 2nd edition, p.170 10- The term ‘strophe’ is applied in a special sense to --------------------. Answer: Choice 2 ‘Strophe’ is a stanza, or any less regular subdivision of a poem, such as a verse paragraph. In a special sense, the term is applied to the opening section (and every third succeeding section) of a Greek choral ode. In the Pindaric ode, sometimes imitated in English, the strophe is followed by an antistrophe having the same number of lines and the same complex metrical arrangement; this is then followed by an epode of differing length and structure, and the triadic pattern may then be repeated a number of times. Source: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms by Chris Baldick, 2nd edition, p.245 11- John Dryden’s An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668; rev. 1684) best treats, through his four speakers, the ------------------. Answer: Choice 2 Dryden’s strengths and limits as a critic are displayed in his best-known critical work, the lengthy conversation An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668; rev. 1684), from which we take our selection. His stated purpose is “to vindicate the honor of our English writers from the censure of those who unjustly prefer the French before them.” Through his four speakers, he
1395 – Explanatory Answers and Sources treats the relationship between the ancients and the moderns, French dramatic theory and English practice, and the use of rhyme in drama, commenting along the way, as in our excerpt, on Shakespeare, Jonson, and other authors. Source: Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st edition, p.380 12- Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) maintained that we had no way of knowing a text creator’s purpose other than through ‘reconstruction’ and outlined several types of positive hermeneutical reconstruction ------------------. Answer: Choice 1 Helpfully, Schleiermacher outlines four types of positive hermeneutical reconstruction. There are two types of grammatical or objective reconstruction—historical and divinatory—and two types of psychological or subjective reconstruction-historical and divinatory. Interpretation for Schleiermacher is at once psychological and grammatical, intuitive and comparative. Source: Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st edition, p. 611 13- In what they practiced as ‘critical theory’, major thinkers of the Frankfurt School --------------------. Answer: Choice 2 While Brecht and Lukács held conflicting views of realism, the Frankfurt School of Marxist aesthetics rejected realism altogether. The Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt practiced what it called ‘Critical Theory’, which was a wide-ranging form of social analysis grounded in Hegelian Marxism and including Freudian elements. The leading figures in philosophy and aesthetics were Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. Exiled in 1933, the Institute was relocated in New York, but finally returned to Frankfurt in 1950 under Adorno and Horkheimer. They regarded the social system, in Hegelian fashion, as a totality in which all the aspects reflected the same essence. Their analysis of modern culture was influenced by the experience of fascism which had achieved hegemonic dominance at every level of social existence in Germany. Source: A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory by Raman Selden, 5th edition, p. 91 14- Which of the following about Louis Althusser, the French Marxist philosopher who has had a major influence on Marxist literary theory, is TRUE? Answer: Choice 1 Louis Althusser, the French Marxist philosopher, has had a major influence on Marxist literary theory especially in France and Britain. His work is clearly related to structuralism and has been claimed for poststructuralism. He rejects the Hegelian revival within Marxist philosophy, and argues that Marx’s real contribution to knowledge stems from his ‘break’ with Hegel. He criticizes Hegel’s account of ‘totality’, according to which the essence of the whole is expressed in all its parts. Althusser avoids terms such as ‘social system’ and ‘order’, because they suggest a structure with a centre which determines the form of all its
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emanations. Instead he talks of the ‘social formation’, which he regards as a ‘decentred’ structure. Unlike a living organism this structure has no governing principle, no originating seed, no overall unity. The implications of this view are arresting. Source: A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory by Raman Selden, 5th edition, p. 97 15- The key to understanding postmodernist thinker Jean Baudrillard’s thought is his ------------------. Answer: Choice 3 The key to Baudrillard’s thought is his reversal of the commonsense understanding of the relation of culture to nature, of sign to thing signified. Conventional thought holds that nature (both human and nonhuman, such as trees, weather, ecological systems, the law of gravity) precedes culture (the human-made), which is built on top of it. Similarly, we think of a thing as existing in the world, and then of a word being invented and used to designate that thing. Source: Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st edition, p. 1730 16- Major twentieth-century ‘critic / theorist; work’ match in -----------------. Answer: Choice 4 The Resistance to Theory is by Paul de Man Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism is by Paul de Man Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust is by Paul de Man Source: Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st edition, p. 1510, 1511, and 1512 17- Which of the following central figures in French structuralism would, following Aristotle’s view of plot as the prime category of tragedy, take plot as the central abstract structure of narrative in his / her development of narratology? Answer: Choice 2 Following Aristotle’s view of plot as the prime category of tragedy, Todorov (and narratology in general) takes plot as the central abstract structure of narrative, analyzing the hundred tales in the Decameron on the basis of the similarity of their plots. Source: Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st edition, p. 2098 18- The Indian-American critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak ----------------------. Answer: Choice 3 Deconstruction, according to Spivak, “is constantly and persistently looking into how truths are produced. That’s why deconstruction doesn’t say logocentrism is a pathology, or metaphysical enclosures are something you can escape. Deconstruction, if one wants a formula, is among other things, a persistent critique of what one cannot not want.” She writes against the “epistemic violence” done by discourses of knowledge that carve up the world and condemn to oblivion the pieces that do not easily fit. Characteristically, she does not
1395 – Explanatory Answers and Sources claim to avoid such violence herself; rather, she self-consciously explores structures of violence without assuming a final, settled position. Source: Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st edition, p. 2193 19- As a literary critical school, New Historicism begins its quest to be political by denying that --------------------. Answer: Choice 4 New Historicism, begins its quest to be political by denying that any social world is stable and that artworks are separated from the power struggles constituting social reality. The literary work is a player in the competition among various groups to gain their ends, a competition that takes place on many levels. New Historicism accepts Foucault’s insistence that power operates through myriad capillary channels; these include not just direct coercion and governmental action but also, crucially, daily routines and language. Source: Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st edition, p. 2250 20- Which of the following works opens with the famous exhortation ‘Always historicize!’ thus effectively setting out the methodological approach called ‘metacommentary’ and providing a theoretically sophisticated answer to the perennial question of the relation of aesthetics to social history? Answer: Choice 1 By the mid-1970s, Jameson and Terry Eagleton were being hailed as the most significant Marxist literary critics and theorists in the Anglophone world, but it was not until the publication of The Political Unconscious that the originality of Jameson's project became clear. Opening with the famous exhortation “Always historicize!” he sets out the methodological approach he calls “metacommentary,” which provides a theoretically sophisticated answer to the perennial question of the relation of aesthetics to social history. Source: Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st edition, p. 1933 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 21- Medieval dramas known as the morality plays ------------------. Answer: Choice 1 Everyman is a late example of a kind of medieval drama known as the morality play. Morality plays apparently evolved side by side with the mystery plays, although they were composed individually and not in cycles. They too have a primarily religious purpose, but their method of attaining it is different. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 463
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22- Which of the following about John Donne's ‘Satire 3’ opening with ‘Kind pity chokes my spleen; brave scorn forbids / Those tears to issue which swell my eyelids’ is TRUE? Answer: Choice 3 While elements of satire figure in many different kinds of literature, the great models for formal verse satire were the Roman poets Horace and Juvenal, the former for an urbanely witty style, the latter for an indignant or angry manner. While Donne’s other satires call on these models, his third satire more nearly resembles those of a third Roman satirist, Persius, known for an abstruse style and moralizing manner. This work is a strenuous discussion of an acute theological problem, for the age and for Donne himself: How may one discover the true Christian church among so many claimants to that role? Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 1284 23- The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) ---------------. Answer: Choice 2 One English writer who did influence Hobbes profoundly was Francis Bacon, whose amanuensis Hobbes had been in Bacon’s last years. Ironically, Hobbes was not invited to join the Royal Society, established after the Restoration on Baconian principles, because his religious views were suspect and because he had quarreled with several of the society’s founders. Yet Hobbes is truly Bacon’s heir, sharing Bacon’s utter lack of sentimentality and a memorably astringent prose style. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 1595 24- Jonathan Swift’s The Drapier’s Letters (1724) was ---------------. Answer: Choice 4 A patent had been granted to the duchess of Kendal for supplying copper coins for use in Ireland, and by her had been sold to a certain William Wood for £10,000. In 1723 the Irish Houses of Parliament voted addresses protesting against the transaction, and Swift, writing in the character of a Dublin draper, published a series of four letters in which he prophesied economic ruin to the Irish if ‘Wood’s half‐pence’ were admitted into circulation; a fifth letter of protest, also signed Drapier, was addressed to Molesworth. The letters produced an immense effect and the government was forced to abandon the project and compensate Wood. Source: The Oxford Companion to English Literature by Margaret Drabble, 6th edition, p. 299 25- Which of the following statements about William Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) is correct? Answer: Choice 3 The Enquiry is Godwin’s most systematic theoretical work. He views human happiness and social well-being as the sole purpose of existence, but unlike Rousseau (whose influence pervades the work) he looks forward to a gradual melting away of all government to be
1395 – Explanatory Answers and Sources replaced by a new system of radical anarchy. A rigid adherence to the leading principle of reason is substituted for Rousseau’s cult of sensibility and his innate religiosity. Law, government, property, inequality, and marriage would be abolished as part of a gradual process by which human perfectibility, conditioned by human reason, would transcend existing limitations and impediments to fulfilled happiness. Source: The Short Oxford History of English Literature by Andrew Sanders, p. 337 26- Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) ------------------. Answer: Choice 1 Burke examines the character of the men who made the French Revolution, and the proceedings of their National Assembly, a ‘profane burlesque of that sacred institute’. The well-known eloquent passage on the downfall of Marie Antoinette leads to the lament that ‘the age of chivalry is gone. . . All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off’ in deference to ‘the new conquering empire of light and reason’. His general conclusion is that the defective institutions of the old regime should have been reformed, not destroyed. Source: The Oxford Companion to English Literature by Margaret Drabble, 6th edition, p. 850 27- A chance discovery of a seventeenth-century manuscript in which a number of ballads had been copied down led to the three-volume ballad collection -------------------. Answer: Choice 2 The English and Scottish popular ballads were originally narrative poems transmitted orally and only rarely recorded in some manuscript or song book until systematic efforts were made to collect and publish them in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. It is therefore difficult to fit them into an anthology divided into historical periods because their anonymity and oral provenance resist periodization. The earlier collectors chose to believe that their material was very old. Among the first, Bishop Percy (1729—1811), whose literary interest in ballads was awakened by his chance discovery of a seventeenth-century manuscript in which a number of them had been copied down, called his three-volume collection Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). There is no evidence, however, that any but a handful of the surviving ballads are older than the seventeenth century. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 2898
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28- William Blake’s An Island in the Moon (1784-5) is ------------------. Answer: Choice 4 An Island in the Moon is an untitled burlesque fragment by W. Blake, written c. 1784-5, first printed (though inaccurately) in 1907 by E. J. Ellis in The Real Blake. It is a satirical portrait of scientific and cultural dilettantism and pretension, interspersed with songs (some of them bawdy) including the fragment with the lines ‘Winking and blinking I Like Doctor Johnson’; its characters include ‘Sipsop the Pythagorean’ and ‘Inflammable Gas’, the latter probably inspired by J. Priestley. Source: The Oxford Companion to English Literature by Margaret Drabble, 6th edition, p. 522 29- The Romantic figure ------------------ excelled as a songwriter both in standard English (as in “Up! quit thy bower”) and in the Scottish dialect (as in “Woo’d and married”). Answer: Choice 1 Baillie’s 1823 “Address to a Steamvessel” likewise anticipates by a decade Wordsworth’s “Steamboats, Viaducts, and Bailways,” and it parallels, in its determination to make poetry accountable to new technology and in its mixed feelings about a modern tourist industry’s marketing of picturesque nature, Wordsworth’s ambivalent project in his 1810 guidebook to the Lake District. Baillie also excelled as a songwriter both in standard English (as in “Up! quit thy bower”) and, like her contemporary Robert Burns, in the Scottish dialect (as in “Woo’d and married”) Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 213 30- Wordsworth and Coleridge’s landmark Lyrical Ballads appeared in 1798 along with -------------------. Answer: Choice 4 1798: Joanna Baillie, Plays on the Passions, volume 1. Bentham, Political Economy. Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 24
1395 – Explanatory Answers and Sources 31- The novel written (roughly) in the Romantic period ----------------- has as its hero / heroine a ‘natural’ man, a primitive who is brought up by American Indians without the constrictions of civilized religion, morality, and ethics. Answer: Choice 2 Hermsprong is the novel which, more than any other, makes its hero a ‘natural’ man – a primitive, brought up by American Indians without the constrictions of civilized religion, morality, and ethics. It thus becomes a satire on the values which Hermsprong finds in the civilized society to which he returns. Many views—for example on social class and privilege, and on equality for women—are aired in ways which are critical of conventional English society. Source: The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland by John McRae, Ronald Carter, 2nd edition, p. 254 32- The following events, important as part of context material for the Romantic period, occurred in three consecutive years in ------------------. Answer: Choice 3 (1787) W. A. Mozart, Don Giovanni. Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade founded(1808) Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphonies 5 and 6(1809) Quarterly Review founded Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 23 33- The Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) ------------------. Answer: Choice 3 Barrett Browning’s poetry is characterized by a fervent moral sensibility. In her early work she tended to use the visionary modes of Romantic narrative poetry, but she turned increasingly to contemporary topics, particularly to liberal causes of her day. For example, in 1843, when government investigations exposed the exploitation of children employed in coal mines and factories, she wrote “The Cry of the Children,” a powerful indictment of the appalling use of child labor. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 1078 34- Idylls of the King, a series of 12 connected poems by Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892), --------------------. Answer: Choice 1 Idylls of the King is a series of 12 connected poems by Tennyson, of which ‘Morte d’Arthur’, subsequently incorporated in ‘The Passing of Arthur’, was composed in 1833 after A. H. Hallam’s death and published in 1842. It was a project that preoccupied Tennyson over many years, during which he studied Malory, The Mabinogion, Layamon, and other sources of Arthurian legend. In 1855-6 he began writing the first Idyll, which was to become ‘Merlin and Vivien’, which he followed with 'Enid', later divided into ‘The Marriage of Geraint’ and ‘Geraint and Enid’. The first four were published in 1859 as ‘Enid’, ‘Vivien’, ‘Elaine’, and
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‘Guinevere’ and constituted, though with many revisions, roughly half of the final version. They were extremely successful, selling 10,000 copies in six weeks. In 1869 followed ‘The Coming of Arthur’, ‘The Holy Grail’, ‘Pelleas and Ettarre’, and ‘The Passing of Arthur’. ‘The Last Tournament’ was published in the Contemporary Review in 1871, then, with ‘Gareth and Lynette’, in 1872. ‘Balin and Balan’, written 1872-4, did not appear until 1885. The sequence as now printed first appeared in 1891. The poems present the story of Arthur, from his first meeting with Guinevere to the ruin of his kingdom and his death in the ‘last, dim, weird battle of the west’. The protagonists are Arthur and Guinevere, Launcelot and Elaine, but the design embraces the fates of various minor characters. Source: The Oxford Companion to English Literature by Margaret Drabble, 6th edition, p. 514 35- The Victorian light verse as reprinted by W.S. Gilbert (1836-1911) -----------------. Answer: Choice 4 The Victorian era produced a remarkable outburst of humorous prose and verse from the time of Charles Dickens's Pickwick Papers (1836-37) at the beginning of the period to the operas of W. S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan near the end. The following selections provide examples of two varieties of Victorian light verse. One, represented by Gilbert, makes lighthearted mockery of institutions such as the Court of Chancery and marriage, as well as prevalent cultural trends and styles. This burlesque mode, employed to poke fun at a host of social and political issues and figures, can also be found in the pages of Punch, a humorous and satirical magazine that began publication in 1841. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 1527 36- ‘Victorian figure / work’ are both correct in -----------------. Answer: Choice 1 On the Study of Celtic Literature is by Mathew Arnold The Great Towns is by Friedrich Engels A Review of Southey’s Colloquies is by Lord Macaulay Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 1576, 1577, 1610, 1619, 1565, 1585, 1601, and 1557 37- Which of the following statements about Samuel Beckett (1906-89) is TRUE? Answer: Choice 3 Having produced an insightful essay on the early stages of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in 1929, Beckett also worked as Joyce's amanuensis (secretary) and translator. In 1937 he settled permanently in Paris, where during World War II he joined an underground group in the anti-Nazi resistance and, after his group was betrayed, barely escaped into unoccupied France. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 2393
1395 – Explanatory Answers and Sources 38- The description ----------------- matches the contemporary British poet and playwright Carol Ann Duffy (b. 1955). Answer: Choice 4 A playwright as well as poet, Duffy is especially skillful in her use of dramatic monologue, fashioning and assuming the voices of mythological, historical, and active characters such as Medusa or Lazarus’s imaginary wife. Such poetic ventriloquism is well suited to her feminist revisions of myth and history. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 2873 39- The British Poet C. Day-Lewis (1904-1972) -----------------. Answer: Choice 2 Day-Lewis’s volumes Overtures to Death (1938) and Poems in Wartime (1940) signaled that he, like Spender, had begun to retreat from confident Marxist analyses as the Second World War approached. The faded elegance of a nineteenth-century terrace in ‘Regency Houses’ may be a metaphor for condemned bourgeois society, but the poem goes on to evoke a different melancholy, the disillusion of those who ‘in younger days, | Hoping too much, tried on | The habit of perfection’ and who have now ‘learnt how it betrays | Our shrinking flesh’. Source: The Short Oxford History of English Literature by Andrew Sanders, p. 560 40- Samuel Beckett’s one foray into the cinéma, Film (1964) was -------------------. Answer: Choice 1 Beckett’s one foray into the cinema, Film (a complex ‘script’ designed as a tribute to Buster Keaton in 1964), was remarkable not simply for its nods to a cinematic comedy rooted in music-hall and for its visual puns on the philosophical ideas of being and seeing but also for its silence broken only by the sound of a voice saying ‘sssh’. Source: The Short Oxford History of English Literature by Andrew Sanders, p. 589 LITERARY GENRES 41- The poem -------------------- is a personal testament or book of worship, antiphonally Arranged in lines beginning alternately with Let and For, seeks to join the material and spiritual universes in one unending prayer. Answer: Choice 2 Jubilate Agno (Rejoice in the Lamb), written a few lines at a time during Smart’s confinement, is (1) a record of his daily life and thoughts; (2) the notebook of a scholar, crammed with puns and obscure learning, which sets out elaborate correspondences between the world of the Bible and modern England; and (3) a personal testament or book of worship, antiphonally arranged in lines beginning alternately with Let and For, which seeks to join the material and spiritual universes in one unending prayer. It has also come to be recognized, since first published in 1939 by W. F. Stead, as a poem—a poem unique in English for its ecstatic sense of the presence of the divine spirit. The most famous passage describes Smart's
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cat, Jeffrey, his only companion during the years of confinement: “For I am possessed of a cat, surpassing in beauty, from whom f take occasion to bless Almighty God.” Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 2874 42- Which of the following about James Thomson’s (1700-1748) The Seasons is correct? Answer: Choice 4 Throughout The Seasons great emphasis is laid on the interrelationship, and not the conflict, of the interests of the country and the town; national prosperity is tied to pictures of agricultural well-being. Nature, the ‘vast Lyceum’, is a grand encircling theatre of education, but, as Thomson’s frequent recourse to descriptions of happy, therapeutic walks in the rustic environs of London suggest, he is insistent on the co-operative functioning of civilization. Source: The Short Oxford History of English Literature by Andrew Sanders, p. 293 43- The poems ------------------ ALL appeared in William Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1800). Answer: Choice 3 Here are some of the major poems featured in Lyrical Ballads, in which the poems in choice 3 are all found ‘The Tables Turned; an Evening Scene, on the Same Subject’ ‘Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree which stands near the Lake of Esthwaite’ ‘The Foster-Mother's Tale’ (Coleridge) ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’ ‘The Thorn’ ‘Nutting’ ‘We are Seven’ ‘Anecdote for Fathers’ ‘Simon Lee, the old Huntsman’ ‘Lines written in early Spring’ ‘The Nightingale, written in April 1798’ (Coleridge) Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 244 (Wordswoth’s entry) and 279 (the footnote of ‘Nutting’) 44- ‘Victorian poet: poem’ match in -------------------. Answer: Choice 1 ‘The Starlight Night’ is by Gerald Manley Hopkins ‘Tithonus’ is by Alfred Lord Tennyson ‘The Lost Leader’ is by Robert Browning Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 1360, 1516, 1125, and 1256
1395 – Explanatory Answers and Sources 45- The poem ‘Invictus’ opening ‘Out of the night that covers me / Black as the Pit from pole to pole / I thank whatever gods may be / For my unconquerable soul’ is by the Victorian poet ------------------. Answer: Choice 4 Invictus By William Ernest Henley Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds and shall find me unafraid. It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 1642 46- The following poems fry W. B. Yeats (1856-1939) appeared in the correct order in -------------------. Answer: Choice 2 ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (1890) The Wild Swans at Coole (1916) The Second Coming (1919) Source: See the dates at the end of each poem in Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 2025, 2033, 2036
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47- T. S. Eliot’s poem ‘East Coker’ in his Four Quartets (1943) opens with ---------------. Answer: Choice 3 T. S. Eliot’s poem ‘East Coker’ in his Four Quartets opening lines: In my beginning is my end. In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth Which is already flesh, fur and faeces, Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf. Houses live and die: there is a time for building And a time for living and for generation And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto. Source: The Harper Anthology of Poetry by John Frederick Nims, p. 578 48- Which of the following about the poetry of Philip Larkin (1922-1985) is correct? Answer: Choice 3 The poetry of Philip Larkin plays with and against the Romantic tradition in poetry. Larkin does not assert the importance of his own personal experience. His vision is realistic and unsentimental, preferring to be indirect and ironic. He continues, however, the tradition of Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and later poets, particularly Thomas Hardy, by exploring eternal themes of death and change within established rhythms and syntax, and he generally uses conservative poetic forms. Like Hardy, he writes about what appears to be normal and everyday, while exploring the paradox that the mundane is both familiar and limited. Source: The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland by John McRae, Ronald Carter, 2nd edition, p. 388
1395 – Explanatory Answers and Sources 49- Seamus Heaney’s ‘Punishment’ (1975) opens with -------------------. Answer: Choice 2 Opening lines of Punishment by Seamus Heaney I can feel the tug of the halter at the nape of her neck, the wind on her naked front. It blows her nipples to amber beads, it shakes the frail rigging of her ribs. I can see her drowned body in the bog, the weighing stone, the floating rods and boughs. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 2826 50- Which of the following statements about the Scottish novelist Tobias Smollett (17211771) / work by him is correct? Answer: Choice 4 Smollett was Scottish. This was important in the context of the Union of the Parliaments in 1707, which, 104 years after the Union of the Crowns, theoretically made the United Kingdom a whole. Smollett’s finest novel, Humphry Clinker (1771) is one of many works, in the novel and in poetry, and by a wide range of authors, which underline difference rather than unity in the newly United Kingdom. Like many of his contemporaries, including Goldsmith, Smollett used journalism as a vehicle for his ideas. Source: The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland by John McRae, Ronald Carter, 2nd edition. p. 154 51- George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) opens with -----------------. Answer: Choice 1 George Eliot’s Adam Bede opens: With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader. With this drop of ink at the end of my pen, I will show you the roomy workshop of Mr. Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder, in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799. Source: A Companion to George Eliot by Amanda Anderson and Harry E. Shaw, p. 113
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52- Which of the following about Anne Bronte / her work is correct? Answer: Choice 2 The third sister, Anne, wrote The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), which has been overshadowed by Charlotte and Emily’s more spectacular successes. It is, however, an important novel in its own right. In the novel Anne Brontë depicts a bitterly unhappy marriage followed by the departure of the wife, Helen Huntingdon, and her search for new freedom. One critic wrote that the ‘slamming of Helen’s bedroom door against her husband reverberated throughout Victorian England’. Source: The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland by John McRae, Ronald Carter, 2nd edition. p. 240 53- Thomas Hardy’s use of ‘dialect’ for his characters in his fiction was -----------------. Answer: Choice 1 Of course, Hardy knew that to transcribe local speech too accurately would cause problems for his readers, but he believed it was important to retain the spirit of the talk of certain of his characters. He was, however, primarily interested in using speech differences to distinguish between his characters, particularly with reference to their social position and to the social and psychological contexts in which they find themselves. Source: The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland by John McRae, Ronald Carter, 2nd edition, p. 257 54- Arguably one of the most innovative mid successful exponents of the ‘conversational or dialogue novel’, Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969) ------------------. Answer: Choice 4 Green and Compton-Burnett’s both had privileged backgrounds, and their novels share a highly distinctive approach to prose, especially to dialogue. Compton-Burnett’s novels and their chilling and disturbing pictures of family and society are largely written in dialogue, and depicts an enclosed world somewhere before the First World War—she is more frequently compared with post-Impressionism in painting than with the literary fashions of the time. Source: The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland by John McRae, Ronald Carter, 2nd edition, p. 412 55- Several writers in English have followed the French writer Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past in writing multi-novel sequences, a prime example being ----------------- which consists of eleven novels. Answer: Choice 3 Several writers in English have followed the French writer Marcel Proust in writing multinovel sequences, of which Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (1912–27) – in English, Remembrance of Things Past – is the prime example. One of the followers is C.P. Snow whose sequence Strangers and Brothers (1940–70) consists of eleven novels following the
1395 – Explanatory Answers and Sources career of Lewis Eliot in his progress from a humble provincial upbringing, like the author’s own, through Cambridge University to a law career and politics. Source: The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland by John McRae, Ronald Carter, 2nd edition, p. 424 56- ‘Novelist: description’ match in ------------------. Answer: Choice 3 Barbara Pym’s novels explore the note of sadness in spinster life in small parishes, often in cities, and touch upon emotional depths in what always seems to be a rather comic setting. From Excellent Women in 1952 to the tragic Quartet in Autumn in 1977, Pym explores a world that is small in scale, but profound in its emotional impact. Source: The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland by John McRae, Ronald Carter, 2nd edition, p. 427 57- Which of the following set of characters in William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar are among the conspirators against Caesar? Answer: Choice 1 Trebonius is one of the conspirators against Caesar. He attends the meeting at Brutus’s house when they bind themselves to the murder. He is charged with getting Antony out of the way prior to the deed, and witnesses his flight from the Capitol. He also presses a suit on Caesar that distracts the dictator from reading Artemidorus’s petition. Caius Ligarius is one of the conspirators against Caesar. He spoke well of Pompey and was mistreated by Caesar for doing so, which he bears against the dictator. Learning that Brutus is involved in the conspiracy, he visits him to be certain of his purpose, and on being reassured joins in with the others whole-heartedly. Source: The Oxford Companion to English Literature by Margaret Drabble, 6th edition, p. 545
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58- The prologue of William Congreve’s comedy The Way of the World (1700) ‘Spoken by Mr. Betterton’ opens with -----------------. Answer: Choice 2 “Prologue” Spoken by MR. BETTERTON OF those few fools, who with ill stars are curst, Sure scribbling fools, called poets, fare the worst: For they’re a sort of fools which fortune makes, And, after she has made ’em fools, forsakes. With Nature’s oafs ’tis quite a diff’rent case, For Fortune favours all her idiot race. In her own nest the cuckoo eggs we find, O’er which she broods to hatch the changeling kind: No portion for her own she has to spare, So much she dotes on her adopted care. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 2229 59- Which of the following three are entirely made up of D.H Lawrence’s plays about working class life? Answer: Choice 4 Of D. H. Lawrence’s three remarkable, if somewhat static, explorations of working-class life—A Collier’s Friday Night (written c. 1909 and published 1934), The Daughter-in-Law (1912), and The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd (1914)—only the last received a London performance, under the auspices of the Stage Society in 1926. Source: The Short Oxford History of English Literature by Andrew Sanders, p. 542 60- John Osborne’s hero, Jimmy Porter, in his Look Back in Anger (1956) -----------------. Answer: Choice 2 Jimmy Porter is a revolutionary without a revolution, or, to put it in terms readily grasped in the 1950s, he is a rebel without a cause. He fulminates against the crumbling authority of what he identifies as Establishment values; his wife’s middle-class and ex-Indian army parents; his Sandhurst-educated, Member of Parliament brother-in-law (characterized as ‘the platitude from outer space’); bishops and church bells; the intellectually pretentious Sunday newspapers; English music (Vaughan Williams) and English literature (Shakespeare, Eliot, and ‘Auntie Wordsworth’). Source: The Short Oxford History of English Literature by Andrew Sanders, p. 591
1396 – Questions
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LITERARY TERMS AND CRITICISM 1- Which of the following statements about the dramatic term ‘farce’ is not correct? 1) Two of its basic elements are absurd situations and improbable events (even impossible ones and therefore fantastic) and surprises in the form of unexpected appearances and disclosures. 2) The farce was at its full force in the 19th c. England in the work of such masters as Pinero and also W. S. Gilbert who helped to popularize the form. 3) There was a noticeable decline of farcical episodes in Restoration comedy and 18th c. comedy with the rise in burlesque plays in the era. 4) In farce, character and dialogue are nearly always subservient to plot and situation. 2- The New England movement called ‘transcendentalism’ ---------------------. 1) would try to stay away from the current political climate and social responsibility by a retreat to what the poet Thoreau called ‘the carefree gaieties of the American wilderness’ 2) was basically religious and emphasized the role and importance of the individual conscience, and the value of intuition in matters of moral guidance and inspiration 3) was coined in the 1840s by one of its main lenders and practitioners Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) in his The Transcendentalist 4) had its roots in European romanticism and in the post-Kantian idealism which S. T. Coleridge had attempted to negate 3- The term ‘boulevard drama’ us applied to the French theatre -------------------. 1) developed after 1791 when the French theatres were barred from commercial activity and many theatres were closed down 2) signaled the end of the Romantic movement in the French theatre (and by extension English theatre) 3) was originally developed as an anti-thesis of melodrama in its light-hearted presentation of tragic events 4) was a generic term for popular French drama from the mid-l9th c. onwards 4- All the following statements about ‘concrete poetry’ are correct except that -----------------. 1) it can be the ultimate form of poetry’s effort to dissociate itself from its subject, to keep ‘trope’ at a distance from ‘scheme’ 2) concrete poets use words as elements in visual patterns, to make us look in surprise at their sometimes dizzying texts 3) it was an experimental movement inaugurated in 1953 by the Swiss writer Eugen Gomringer 4) concrete poems are extreme examples of pattern poetry 5- Art historians have generally agreed to regard the ‘Baroque’ as the --------------------Renaissance style with its center in ------------------ and its quintessential representative in -------------------. 1) first/ Florence / da Vinci 2) third / Rome / Bernini 3) first / Florence / Bernini 4) third / Rome / da Vinci
1396 – Questions 6- The German term ‘angst’ was best used by ------------------ to denote a state of anguish that we feel as we are confronted by the burden of our freedom and the accompanying responsibility to impose values and meanings on an absurd universe. 1) Schleiermacher in The Christian Faith 2) Kierkegaard in The Concept of Dread 3) Kierkegaard in Sickness onto Death 4) Schleiermacher in Religion 7- All the following are examples of a ‘problem play’ except -------------------1) William Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well 2) George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren's Profession 3) George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House 4) William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure 8- The term ‘hagiography’ -----------------------. 1) was a characteristically mannerist literary art form specifically devoted to the lives of Christian saints and martyrs 2) refers to writing devoted to recording and glorifying the lives of court notables during the Renaissance 3) generally, applies to biographies that treat their subjects with irreverence as if they were ‘hags’ 4) was a form of Christian propaganda much in vogue and practiced in the Middle Ages 9- Which of the following statements about ‘macaronic verse’ is not correct? 1) It denotes a kind of comic verse in which words from a vernacular language are introduced into Latin (or other foreign-language) verses and given Latin inflections. 2) It applies to (mainly) early Renaissance poetry which was interspersed with phrases or lines from ancient Latin and Greek poetry. 3) In modem times, the poems of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot have been called macaronic for their use of lines in several languages. 4) Macaronic verse had a vogue among students in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, but is rare in English. 10- As a very common figure of speech ‘ploce’ or ‘ploche’ has its opposite in --------------. 1) ‘epizeuxis’ 2) ‘hypotaxis’ 3) ‘alinea’ 4) ‘lauda’ 11- ‘Spasmodic School’, a title applied mockingly by the Scottish poet and critic W. E. Aytoun in 1854, does not particularly relate to ----------------. 1) work by Lord Byron 2) poetry by Elizabeth Barrett Browning 3) such poems by Alfred Tennyson as Maud 4) a group of late 18th c. nature poets led by Oliver Goldsmith 12- The term ‘troubadour’ refers to --------------. 1) poets practicing forms such as aubade, the chanson, and the pastourelle 2) mainly layman minstrels rather than aristocratic poets in the period 1100-1350 3) poets composing simple and unadorned lyrics of everyday love in the Middle Ages 4) a poet of southern France (or sometimes northern Italy) writing in Provencal in the late Renaissance
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13- In Umberto Eco’s aesthetics, the work of art -------------------. 1) generates multi-coded messages whose actualization is largely independent of the receivers’ activity of interpretation 2) is seen more as a product of the artist’s poetics to which the reader, listener, or viewer responds through an act of interpretation 3) moves towards the influential aesthetics of Benedetto Croce, who had considered the work of art as the artist's expression of an intuition 4) leads to a kind of “induction”, a term that suggests the various hypotheses that the writer proposes in an attempt to appreciate the reader's sensibility 14- Which of the following about the ‘materialist critical discourse’ is not generally correct? 1) The primary emphasis of materialist critical discourse is on the notion of critique itself. 2) When a materialist perspective is brought to bear on human affairs, the emphasis falls primarily on the politics of civil society and the rights of the individual. 3) The materialist discourse is rarely presented as external to or independent of the development of the human or social sciences, 4) History, as it is characteristically viewed in materialist discourse, plays a much more prominent role in this critical discourse than in most others. 15- Which of the following about the Bulgarian-French theorist Julia Kristeva (b. 19-41) / her work/ thought is not correct? 1) In Revolution in Poetic Language, she maintains that all signification entails the dialectical interaction of the symbolic and the semiotic. 2) She diverges from other contemporary theorists in her insistence on the corporeal origins of subjectivity and of artistic practice. 3) She finds two forces competing for expression in the language of poetry: the symbolic and the semiotic. 4) Besides Barthes and Levi-Strauss, she acknowledges intellectual debts to Lacan, Deleuze and Freud. 16- The leading proponent of New Historicism, Stephen Greenblatt, became a key figure in the shift from ---------------- in U.S. English departments in the 1980s and 1990s. Inspired mainly by ---------------- groundbreaking work, the New Historicists see the literary work as a vessel tossed in a social sea of competing interests, antagonistic values, and contradictions. 1) literary to textual and from cultural poetics to contextual interpretation / Hayden White’s 2) literary to cultural poetics and from textual to contextual interpretation / Hayden White’s 3) literary to cultural poetics and from textual to contextual interpretation / Michel Foucault’s 4) literary to textual and from cultural poetics to contextual interpretation / Michel Foucault’s
1396 – Questions 17- The American critic -------------------- maintains in his work that contemporary approaches to literature within English departments have undermined ‘the power of language to connect us with the world,’ and recommends a novel and subsequently influential method for bringing coherence to what he sees as an increasingly disjointed curriculum, a method he calls -----------------. 1) Gerald Graff/ ‘teaching of conflicts’ 2) Stanley Fish / ‘teaching of conflicts’ 3) Gerald Graff/ ‘closure of curricula’ 4) Stanley Fish / ‘closure of curricula’ 18- ‘Critic/ theorist: work’ match in ------------------. 1) Gilles Deleuze: The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists 2) Raymond Williams: Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature 3) Tzvetan Todorov: Grammar of the Decameron 4) Louis Althusser: The Sociology of Culture 19- In his seminal essay ‘The Commitment to Theory’, the Indian-American theorist Homi K. Bhabha (b. 1949) defines ‘hybridity’ as what ------------------ which emerges from a ------------------. 1) ‘is latent, less this and less the other’ / ‘Third Space’ 2) ‘is new, neither the one nor the other’ / ‘Third Space’ 3) ‘is latent, less this and less the other’ / ‘Liminal Space’ 4) ‘is new, neither the one nor the other’ / ‘Liminal Space’ 20- The African American critic / theorist W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) would -------------------. 1) take advantage and endorse the use of ‘high’ theory by invoking concepts drawn particularly from Hegel and Marx and would place black literature on a par with canonical masterpieces that are deemed worthy of sophisticated analysis and prolonged, intensive attention 2) support the use of native African traditions and languages in America but, at the same time, contend that by writing in the language of their adopted homeland, African writers will capture a far wider readership and ‘will thus have more of an impact on the world at large’ 3) argue that the African American artist’s main problem is his ‘heterogeneous audience’: he knows chat both black and white people are potential readers of his work yet those two audiences have very different expectations and demands 4) not only examine the history of slavery and segregation in the United States in his major work but also emphasize, more generally, that ‘the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.’
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HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 21- The correct order of the following Middle Ages events is -------------------1) First Viking raids on EnglandSt. Patrick begins mission to convert IrelandBirth of St. Francis of Assisi 2) First Viking raids on EnglandBirth of St. Francis of AssisiSt. Patrick begins mission to convert Ireland 3) St. Patrick begins mission to convert IrelandFirst Viking raids on EnglandBirth of St. Francis of Assisi 4) St. Patrick begins mission to convert IrelandBirth of St. Francis of AssisiFirst Viking raids on England 22- Which of the fallowing about Beowulf, the oldest of the great long poems written in English, is not correct? 1) The historical period the poem concerns is a time after the initial invasion of England by Germanic tribes in the middle of the fifth century. 2) The poet's references, to quasi-historical and legendary material show that his audience was still familiar with many old stories. 3) Although the poem itself is English in language arid origin, it deals with two south Scandinavian tribes. 4) The poem was originally composed in the dialect of what was then Cumbria, the North West of England today. 23- The Renaissance figure Arthur Golding (1536-1605) -------------------. 1) wrote one of the most celebrated sixteenth-century exegeses to Plato’s Symposium 2) translated seven works of Calvin as well as Ovid's Metamorphoses into English 3) co-wrote and translated the Latin aphorisms in Roger Ascham's Schoolmaster 4) delivered his ‘Golden Speech’ to Queen Elizabeth’s last Parliament in 1601 24- Which of the following about Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (published 1590 to 1596) is not correct? 1) The Faerie Queene herself much like the sixteenth-century Queen Elizabeth—takes an active role in the heroic adventures of the poem and is never satisfied to act only as the symbolic embodiment of what can be called a shared national destiny. 2) The whole of The Faerie Queene is written in a remarkable nine-line stanza of closely interlocking rhymes (ababbcbcc), the first eight lines with five stresses each (iambic pentameter) and the final line with six stresses (iambic hexameter or alexandrine). 3) He deliberately fashioned himself after the great Roman poet Virgil, who began his poetic career with pastoral poetry and moved on to his epic poem, the Aeneid. 4) In developing the poem, he wove together classical and medieval sources, drawing on pictorial traditions, and adapting whole episodes from Ariosto and Tasso
1396 – Questions 25- Which of the following about the Welsh poet Henry Vaughan (1621-1695) is correct? 1) His collection of religions poems The Church is a rich collection of sonnets, songs, hymns, laments, meditative poems, dialogue poems, acrostic poems and emblematic poems. 2) His Latin epigrams, published were much influenced by Jesuit epigram style and are among the best by an Englishman, 3) While his secular poetry recalls Ben Jonson’s, his religious poetry overtly and consciously models itself on Herbert's. 4) A Roman Catholic convert, he was profoundly influenced by the Counter-Reformation, which reacted against Protestant austerity by linking heightened spirituality to vivid bodily experiences. 26- ‘Author: work’ match in -------------------. 1) Samuel Butler: Mac Flecknoe 2) Margaret Cavendish: Thanksgivings 3) Thomas Traherne: Centuries of Meditations 4) Aphra Behn: A Satire against Reason and Mankind 27- Which of the following essay openings is not by Joseph Addison (1672-1719) or Richard Steele (1672-1 729)? 1) ‘There is no place in the town which I so much love to frequent as the Royal Exchange, it gives me a secret satisfaction, and in some measure gratifies my vanity as I am an Englishman, to see so rich an assembly of countrymen and foreigners consulting together upon the private business of mankind...’ 2) ‘Arietta is visited by all persons of both sexes who have any pretense to wit and gallantry. She is in that time of life which is neither affected with the follies of youth or infirmities of age; and her conversation is so mixed with gaiety and prudence that she is agreeable both to the young and the old.’ 3) ‘There is nothing in nature so irksome as general discourses, especially when they turn chiefly upon words. For this reason, I shall waive the discussion of that point which was started some years since. Whether Milton's Paradise Lost may be called a heroic poem?’ 4) ‘Many moralists have remarked, that Pride has of all human vices the widest dominion, appears in the greatest multiplicity of forms, and lies hid under the greatest variety of disguises; of disguises, which, like the moon's veil of brightness, are both its luster and its shade....’ 28- Which of the following is the correct order of publication for the following Romantic era landmark works? 1) Scott’s The Lay of the Last MinstrelByron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (cantos 1 and 2) John Clare’s Poems Descriptive of Rural Life 2) John Clare’s Poems Descriptive of Rural lifeScott’s The Lay of the Last MinstrelByron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (cantos 1 and 2) 3) John Clare’s Poems Descriptive of Rural LifeByron's Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (cantos 1 and 2) Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel 4) Scott’s The Lay of the Last MinstrelJohn Clare’s Poems Descriptive of Rural LifeByron's Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (cantos 1 and 2)
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29- Which of the following about the Romantic era essayist Charles Lamb (1775-1814) is not correct? 1) He shared Wordsworth’s concern with memories’ power to transform the present moment and, like him, interjected a sense of the ideal into his representations of the actual and every day. 2) Along with many of the important writers of the age, he developed a kind of fervent radicalism in both politics and religion and managed to produce several masterpieces of extreme Romantic dissidence. 3) He could not abide Shelley or his poetry and he distrusted Coleridge’s supernaturalism and Wordsworth's oracular sublimities and religion of nature, preferring those elements in their poems that were human and realistic. 4) He lacked almost all the traits and convictions we think of as characteristically ‘Romantic’ and lived happily all his life in the city of London and its environs. 30- ‘Thomas Carlyle work: description’ is not correct in -----------------. 1) Past and Present / his pamphleteering seen at its best (published 1843) 2) ‘Characteristics’ / his most significant early essay (appeared in The Edinburgh Review in 1831) 3) Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell / Cromwell was a Puritan leader of heroic dimensions in Carlyle’s eyes (edited in 1845) 4) Sartor Resartus / humorous account of the life and opinions of an imaginary tailor, Diogenes Teufelsdrockh (published 1836) 31- The English philosopher and essayist John Stuart Mill (1806-1 873) --------------------. 1) would, true to his Utilitarian heritage, characterize poetry as ‘an idle pastime of pushpin moral value’ in his early essay ‘What Is Poetry?’ 2) was profoundly influenced by his contemporaries the literary-cultural critic Matthew Arnold and the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne and would, in turn, have a large impact on the early fiction of Thomas Hardy 3) appreciated, though coming from a Utilitarian background, the values of such antiUtilitarians as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle and whenever possible, incorporated some of these values into the Utilitarian system 4) began his intellectual career as a disciple of the Utilitarian theories of his lather and of Jeremy Bentham and remained devoutly attached to their teachings throughout his life 32- Which of the following about the 1840s and 1850s Charles Dickens (1812-1870) is not correct? 1) Throughout the period key elements of Victorian society, particularly the Victorian prison— as represented in his 1842 essay ‘A Visit to Newgate’— take on multiple layers of significance and are worked and reworked into many of his works. 2) Some of his masterpieces including David Copperfield. Bleak House, Hard Times and A Tale of Two Cities were produced in this period. 3) During this time, he founded and edited the weekly magazine Household words (finally incorporated into All the Year Round), which published fiction by Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins, among others. 4) He began a series of widely-read Christmas books in this period, the first of which was the celebrated A Christmas Carol.
1396 – Questions 33- ‘Late Victorian figure: description’ match in ------------------. 1) William Ernest Henley: he edited the National Observer and other periodicals in London, where he became a powerful figure in literary circles 2) Michael Field: his Lyra Heroica is filled with poetic accounts of selfless and noble deeds that often involve dying for one’s country in battle 3) Robert Louis Stevenson: the accent of the London cockney was one of the qualities that gained him an immediate audience for his, Barrack-Room Ballads 4) Ernest Dowson: his first volume of poetry Long Ago (1889) was inspired by Henry Wharton’s 1885 edition of the writings of the ancient Greek poet Sappho 34- Which of the following about the English novelist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is not correct? 1) In 1917, she co-founded the Hogarth Press, which published work by such figures as T. S. Eliot, Maxim Gorky, Katherine Mansfield, E. M. Forster and Sigmund Freud. 2) She developed her own style, a carefully modulated flow that brought into prose fiction something of the rhythms and imagery of lyric poetry only after writing two conventionally realistic novels. The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919) 3) In her Monday or Tuesday (1921), a series of sketches, she explored the possibilities of moving between action and contemplation, between retrospection and anticipation, between specific external events and delicate tracings of the flow of consciousness. 4) As a fiction writer she would react against nearly all her realist contemporaries except John Galsworthy, whose Forsyte Saga she used as inspiration for a number of her works including Mrs., Dalloway. 35- Samuel Beckett’s Murphy (1938) --------------------. 1) includes an extended monologue as its epilogue 2) is hailed as a precursor of postmodern fiction 3) contains little plot and nearly no characterization 4) forms, with Malone Dies, part of his Molloy trilogy 36- The Irish poet Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) --------------------. 1) was also a translator of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Goethe’s Faust 2) wrote poetry with the Church of England in backdrop late in his career 3) was heavily indebted to Gerard Manley Hopkins and Wilfred Owen for his metrical and verbal techniques 4) would claim in his essay ‘Writing’ that poetry is a form of truth-telling that should ‘disenchant and disintoxicate’ 37- ‘Writer / work with a World War II backdrop’ do not match in -------------------. 1) Edith Sitwell / ‘Still Falls the Rain’ 2) Henry Reed / ‘Lessons of the War’ 3) Charles Causley / ‘Aristocrats’ 4) Keith Douglas / ‘Gallantry’
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38- The poet Louise Bennett would ------------------. 1) drawing, on the example of the Scottish poet Robert Burns, harness Jamaican idiom in the influential volumes of poetry Constab Ballads and Songs of Jamaica 2) in her poetry often assume the perspective of a West Indian trickster such as the woman who cunningly subverts gender and geographic hierarchies in ‘Jamaica Oman [Woman]’ 3) switch from Jamaican to Standard English thus helping precipitate the Harlem Renaissance with Harlem Shadows (which included sonnets addressing the vexed racial experience of an Afro-American immigrant) 4) for most of the 1920s and 1930s identify with the radical left, lived and wrote novels and short stories mainly in England, France and Morocco 39- Which of the following works hybridizes African oral traditions with European literary paradigms and fuses African rhetoric, myth, and ritual with the verbal extravagance of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater? 1) Brian Friel’s Translations (1980) 2) John Agard’s Listen Mr. Oxford Don (1985) 3) Wole Soyinka's Death and the King’s Horseman (1975) 4) Kamau Brathwaite's The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1973) 40- ‘Doris Lessing novel: description’ do not match in -------------------. 1) The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974): combines psychological autobiography with powerful explorations of the relationship between blacks and whites in southern Africa 2) The Golden Notebook (1962): partly probes the political conscience of an ex-communist and the needs and dilemmas of a creative writer 3) Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971): explores myth and fantasy, restrained within a broadly realist context 4) Canopus in Argos: Archives (written between 1979 and 1983): draws on her reading of the Old and New Testaments, the Apocrypha and the Koran to deal with the life of a superhuman LITERARY GENRES 41- All the following about Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852-53) are correct except that ----------------. 1) the destiny of the aristocracy is by chance entangled with the humblest characters: the disreputable rag-and-bones man Krook. for instance, is made to resemble the Lord Chancellor 2) the center of the novel's dramatic action is the sensational mystery surrounding Lady Dedlock—as Inspector Bucket points out. “She is the pivot it all turns on.” 3) the novel set the pattern of the so-called Sensation Novel of the 1860s, novels such as Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley’s Secret, and Mrs. Henry Wood’s East Lynne 4) Esther Summerson, who shares half of the book’s narration, is, unlike Oliver in Dickens's Oliver Twist, the legitimate child of an heiress, though her identity remains in doubt for the first half of the novel
1396 – Questions 42- ‘Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer (1867) character: description’ do not match in ---------------. 1) Joe Harper: known as a “half breed,” meaning he is half white and half Native American, he is the villain of the novel and a force of evil in Tom Sawyer’s St. Petersburg 2) The Model Boy: Hated by all the boys in town, the Model Boy is “the pride of all the matrons” because he is so polite and well-behaved 3) Sid Sawyer: Tom’s younger half-brother, he is “a quiet boy” with “no adventurous, troublesome ways,” and so he and Tom do not get along with each other 4) Mary: Tom Sawyer’s cousin, she is Aunt Polly’s daughter and treats Tom sweetly, patiently helping him learn his Scripture verses and get dressed up for church 43- Which of the following about Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) is not correct? 1) The novel uses, for the most part, a third-person narrator but the point of view (or perspective) from which the story is told changes, from section to section. 2) Morrison makes use of idiom in Beloved to help re-create the sense of a specific community, that of African Americans in Reconstruction Ohio. 3) There is one motif throughout Beloved that is repeated with regularity: a description of the characters’ ancestors, how they were born and how they were eventually robbed of their identity. 4) The narrator structures the story in such a way that past events are related as a way of explaining the present. 44- Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) opens in the year 2495 ------------------. 1) in a flashback with the character Lenina wandering around the vast desolate 2) area called the Reservation and horrified by the sight of mothers nursing their own infants 3) with the character John rushing to the dystopian Park Lane Hospital just in time to see his mother die, and having to face ‘yet another completely mind-boggling crisis’ 4) with the exotic John (now known as “the Savage,” or “Mr. Savage”) being initiated into the secret Alpha society ‘where man's fate is planned in advance for them’ at the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, a research facility and factory that massproduces and then socially-conditions test-tube babies 45- Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952) -------------------. 1) compares Manolin’s predicament to that of Christ’s suffering and crucifixion 2) takes place entirely in a small fishing village near Tampa, Florida 3) falls, quite unconventionally, into one monolithic part 4) uses the omniscient, or “all-knowing,” point of view 46- Which of the following sets of characters belongs to E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975)? 1) Biff Brannon, Doctor Benedict Copeland and Harry Minowitz 2) Willie Conklin, Harry Houdini and Mother’s Younger Brother 3) Captain Buynovsky, Caesar Markovich and Thin Tartar 4) Freddie Jones, Alena Jasaityte and Mike Scully
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47- Which of the following about James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man (1916) is not / least correct? 1) He evokes the city of Dublin in far more detail in the novel than his earlier short story collection Dubliners or in his last novel Finnegans Wake. 2) The novel is divided into five chapters, each chapter dealing with a different period in the first twenty years of Stephen Dedalus. 3) Although Joyce gives specific settings for the incidents in the book, he does not give dates for the events that he is reporting. 4) Every narrative detail in the novel is filtered through the character Stephen Dedalus’s consciousness. 48- John Steinbeck’s The Crapes of Wrath (1939) follows the trials and tribulations of the ----------------- family as they leave the dust bowl of ------------------- for a better life in -----------------. 1) Tyler / Oklahoma / California 2) Joad / Oklahoma / California 3) Joad / Kansas / Oregon 4) Tyler / Kansas / Oregon 49- Which of the following descriptions matches the character ‘Anse Bundren’ in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930)? 1) He appears in only a few scenes in the novel, but his presence is felt almost everywhere in the story. He is generally portrayed as an amiable man. but there is also a sense of failure about him. He is known as a storyteller. During the novel, he suffers some financial misfortune. 2) He is a prisoner of his guilt over his wife's death years before. His melancholy balances the family’s experiences. His sense of guilt causes him to blame all the family’s misfortunes on what he thinks of as his sin. 3) He is the legendary political boss who runs the entire district on behalf of the owners of the big packing houses. He has the power to give out political favors to the rich and jobs to the poor through an organization he himself has started. 4) He is the patriarch of the family. A selfish and lazy man, he claims sweat will kill him. and therefore refuses to work. Instead, he connives to get others to work for him. Physically, he is hunchbacked, and his hands are gnarled. 50- Which of the following excerpts opens a ‘holy sonnet’ by John Donne (1572-1631)? 1) ‘Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, / The bridal of the earth and sky: / The dew shall weep thy fall tonight, / For thou must die.’ 2) ‘I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers, / Of April, May, of June, and July flowers. I sing of Maypoles, hock carts, wassails, wakes, / Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal cakes.’ 3) ‘1 am a little world made cunningly / Of elements, and an angelic sprite; / But black sin hath betrayed to endless night / My world’s both parts, and O, both parts must die.’ 4) ‘1 traveled on, seeing the hill where lay / My expectation. / A long it was and weary way. / The gloomy cave of desperation / I left on the one, and on the other side / The rock of pride/
1396 – Questions 51- ‘Poet: poem’ do not match in -------------------. 1) John Milton: ‘The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn’ 2) Andrew Marvell: ‘A Dialogue Between the Soul and Body’ 3) George Herbert: ‘The Bunch of Grapes’ 4) Abraham Cowley: ‘Ode: Of Wit’ 52- Which of the following does not open a poem by Alexander Pope (1688-1744)? 1) ‘What dire offense from amorous causes springs, / What mighty contests rise from trivial things, / I sing—This verse to Caryll, Muse! is due: / This, even Belinda may vouchsafe to view: / Slight is the subject, but not so the praise. / If she inspire, and he approve my lays,’ 2) ‘Shut, shut the door, good John! (fatigued, I said), / Tie up the knocker, say I’m sick, I'm dead. / The Dog-Star rages! nay 'tis past a doubt / All Bedlam or Parnassus, is let out: / Fire in each eye, and papers in each hand, / They rave, recite, and madden round the land.’ 3) ‘As Rochefoucauld his maxims drew / From nature, I believe ‘em true: / They argue no corrupted mind / In him: the fault is in mankind. / This maxim more than all the rest / Is thought too base for human breast’ 4) ‘In these deep solitudes and awful cells, / Where heavenly-pensive contemplation dwells, / And ever-musing melancholy reigns: / What means this tumult in a vestal’s veins?’ 53- The correct order of the appearance of poems by William Wordsworth (1770-1850) is --------------------. 1) Resolution and IndependenceSteamboats, Viaducts, and RailwaysTintern Abbey 2) Tintern AbbeyResolution and IndependenceSteamboats, Viaducts, and Railways 3) Resolution and IndependenceTintern AbbeySteamboats, Viaducts, and Railways 4) Tintern AbbeySteamboats, Viaducts, and RailwaysResolution and Independence 54- Which of the following poem openings is by the Imagist Poet T. E. Hulme? 1) Whirl up, sea— / Whirl your pointed pines, / Splash your great pines / On our rocks. / Hurl your green over us, / Cover us with your pools of fir. 2) Rose, harsh rose, / marred and with stint of petals, / meagre flower, thin, / sparse of leaf, / more precious / than a wet rose, / single on a stem— / you are caught in the drift. 3) I made my song a coat / Covered with embroideries / Out of old mythologies / From heel to throat; / But the fools caught it, / Wore it in the world’s eyes / As though they’d wrought it. / Song, let them take it, / For there’s more enterprise / In walking naked. 4) A touch of cold in the Autumn night— / I walked abroad, / And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge / a red-faced farmer. / I did not stop to speak, hut nodded. / And roundabout were the wistful stars / With white faces like town children. 55- Which of the following about William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is not correct? 1) Winding stairs, spinning lops, ‘gyres,’ spirals of all kinds, are important symbols and hallmarks of his 1890s symbolic phase of poetry. 2) Like Pound, T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, Yeats was attracted to right-wing politics, and in the 1930s he was briefly drawn to fascism. 3) His Vision is based on a theory of the movements of history and of the different types of personality, each movement and type being related to a different phase of the moon. 4) In poems of his middle period, such as ‘Adam's Curse’, he combines the colloquial with the formal, enacting in his more austere diction, casual rhythms, and a passionate syntax.
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56- Which of the follow does not close a poem by T. S. Eliot (I888-1965)? 1) ‘And sang within the bloody wood / When Agamemnon cried aloud / And let their liquid sittings fall / To stain the stiff dishonored shroud.’ 2) ‘Swings the heart renewed with peace / even of oblivion, / Oh build your ship of death, oh build it / for you will need it, / For the voyage of oblivion awaits you.’ 3) ‘This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.’ 4) ‘We returned to our places, these Kingdoms / But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation / With an alien people clutching their gods. / I should be glad of another death.’ 57- Which of the following sets of characters is entirely made of characters from William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1594-95)? 1) Oberon / Nick Bottom: Weaver / Demetrius 2) Demetrius / Oberon / Diana: Daughter to the Widow 3) Nick Bottom: Weaver / Demetrius / Lafew, an old Lord 4) Diana: Daughter to the Widow / Nick Bottom: Weaver / Demetrius 58- ‘Character / description’ in George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren’s Profession (first performed in London in 1902) do not match in --------------------. 1) Sir George Crofts: a tall, powerfully built man of about fifty, fashionably dressed, is a ‘gentlemanly combination of the most brutal types of city man, sporting man, and man about town.’ 2) Frank Gardner: a charming, well-dressed, ‘good-for-nothing’ man of twenty with an ‘agreeably disrespectful manner’ 3) Vivie Warren: refuses to act in a traditional feminine manner, always speaking her mind and demanding that others treat her as an individual 4) Mrs. Kitty Warren: an attractive, sensible, highly educated young woman whose intense self-confidence can sometimes be Overwhelming 59- John Osborne’s Inadmissible Evidence (1964) -----------------. 1) tells the true story of five American men and one American woman who were convicted and sentenced to death for crimes they did not commit 2) is a reversed-gender Pygmalion, a 1912 play by George Bernard Shaw in which a professor makes a bet that he can turn a working-class flower girl into a lady 3) chronicles the menial disintegration of middle-aged solicitor Bill Maitland over the course of two days as he experiences the breakdown of his professional and personal life 4) includes, at its heart, the poet Alison Stanhope, whose family, their relationships, and the discovery of a portfolio containing hundreds of previously unknown poems form the action of the play 60- Playwright / play do not match in ------------------. 1) Edward Bond / Lear 2) Sam Shepard / True West 3) David Hare / Children of a Lesser God 4) Tennessee Williams / The Rose Tattoo
1396 – Explanatory Answers and Sources
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LITERARY TERMS AND CRITICISM 1- Which of the following statements about the dramatic term ‘farce’ is not correct? Answer: Choice 3 In Restoration comedy and 18th century comedy there are plentiful farcical episodes, particularly in burlesque plays. In the 18th century also we find a number of short farces used as curtain raisers. Farce is a kind of ‘low’ comedy, and its basic elements are exaggerated physical action (often repeated); exaggeration of character and situation; absurd situations and improbable events (even impossible ones and therefore fantastic); and surprises in the form of unexpected appearances and disclosures. Fully developed and mature farce finally established itself in the 19th century: in France with the work of Labiche and Feydeau; in England with the work of Pinero. W. S. Gilbert also helped to popularize the form. Source: A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory by J.A. Cuddon, 5th edition, p. 269-70 2- The New England movement called ‘transcendentalism’ ---------------------. Answer: Choice 2 ‘Transcendentalism’ is a New England movement which flourished from c. 1835 to 1860. It had its roots in romanticism and in the post-Kantian idealism by which Coleridge was influenced. It had a considerable influence on American art and literature. Basically religious, it emphasized the role and importance of the individual conscience, and the value of intuition in matters of moral guidance and inspiration. The actual term was coined by opponents of the movement, but accepted by its members (e.g. Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803–82, one of the leaders, published The Transcendentalist in 1841). The group were also social reformers. Source: A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory by J.A. Cuddon, 5th edition, p.734 3- The term ‘boulevard drama’ us applied to the French theatre -------------------. Answer: Choice 4 ‘Boulevard drama’ fostered the Romantic movement in the French theatre. Eventually boulevard drama became a generic term for popular French drama from the mid-19th century onwards. The plays consisted for the most part of farce and domestic comedy and were a distinctly commercial entertainment. Source: A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory by J.A. Cuddon, 5th edition, p. 88
1396 – Explanatory Answers and Sources 4- All the following statements about ‘concrete poetry’ are correct except that -----------------. Answer: Choice 1 A recent development of the altar poem and the carmen figuratum. The object is to present each poem as a different shape. It is thus a matter of pictorial typography which produces ‘visual poetry’. It may be on the page, or on glass, stone, wood and other materials. It is extremely diffcult to do well but the technique lends itself to great subtlety, as Apollinaire demonstrated in Calligrammes (1918). The modern concept of concrete poetry was developed under the influence of Max Bill (1908–1994) and Eugen Gomringer (1925–) and presented at an exhibition of concrete art at São Paulo in 1956. This was the work of Brazilian designers and poets. Source: A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory by J.A. Cuddon, 5th edition, p.148 5- Art historians have generally agreed to regard the ‘Baroque’ as the -----------------Renaissance style with its center in ---------------- and its quintessential representative in -----------------. Answer: Choice 2 ‘Baroque’ is a term denoting a distinctive style deeply characteristic of the seventeenth century, long since firmly established for critics of art and music, whose application to literature has been problematic and controversial. However, it has offered possibilities for cultural analysis. Like Romanticism, it submits to an enormous number of seemingly disconnected and even contradictory usages, as phrases like ‘Baroque grandeur’, ‘Baroque eccentricity’, ‘Baroque mysticism’, ‘Baroque exuberance’ attest; it is even more polymorphously perverse in its frequent appearances outside the seventeenth century in labels like ‘The Contemporary Baroque’. Art historians have generally agreed to regard the Baroque as the third Renaissance style, setting in around 1600, with its center in Rome and its quintessential representative in Bernini, and with important Catholic and post-tridentine tendencies. Source: Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms by Peter Childs and Roger Fowler, p. 16 6- The German term ‘angst’ was best used by ------------------ to denote a state of anguish that we feel as we are confronted by the burden of our freedom and the accompanying responsibility to impose values and meanings on an absurd universe. Answer: Choice 2 ‘Angst’ is the German word for ‘anxiety’ or ‘dread’, used by the philosophers of existentialism notably the Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard in Begrebet Angst (The Concept of Dread, 1844)—to denote a state of anguish that we feel as we are confronted by the burden of our freedom and the accompanying responsibility to impose values and meanings on an absurd universe. Source: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms by Chris Baldick, 2nd edition, p. 12
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7- All the following are examples of a ‘problem play’ except -------------------Answer: Choice 3 Significant examples of ‘problem play’ are Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879), on women’s subordination in marriage, and George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1902) on prostitution. In studies of Shakespeare, however, the term has been used to designate a group of his plays written in the first years of the 17th century: Measure for Measure, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Troilus and Cressida. Source: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms by Chris Baldick, 2nd edition, p. 205 8- The term ‘hagiography’ -----------------------. Answer: Choice 4 ‘Hagiography’ is a writing devoted to recording and glorifying the lives of saints and martyrs. This form of Christian propaganda was much practiced in the Middle Ages but has few equivalents in modern literary equivalents apart from G. B. Shaw’s play Saint Joan (1923). By extension, the term is now often applied to modern biographies that treat their subjects reverentially as if they were saints. A writer of such works is a hagiographer. Adjective: hagiographic. Source: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms by Chris Baldick, 2nd edition, p. 109 9- Which of the following statements about ‘macaronic verse’ is not correct? Answer: Choice 2 ‘Macaronic verse’ is a poetry in which two or more languages are mixed together. Strictly, the term denotes a kind of comic verse in which words from a vernacular language are introduced into Latin (or other foreign-language) verses and given Latin inflections; such verse had a vogue among students in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, but is rare in English. More loosely, the term is applied to any verses in which phrases or lines in a foreign language are frequently introduced: several medieval English poems have Latin refrains or alternating Latin and English lines, and in modem times the poems of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot have been called macaronic for their use of lines in several languages. Source: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms by Chris Baldick, 2nd edition, p. 145
1396 – Explanatory Answers and Sources 10- As a very common figure of speech ‘ploce’ or ‘ploche’ has its opposite in -------------------. Answer: Choice 1 ‘Ploce’ or ‘pioche’ is a very common figure of speech that consists in a delayed repetition of the same word or words. By contrast with epizeuxis (immediate repetition), it interposes some other words between the two occurrences of the terms emphasized. Source: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms by Chris Baldick, 2nd edition, p. 195 11- ‘Spasmodic School’, a title applied mockingly by the Scottish poet and critic W. E. Aytoun in 1854, does not particularly relate to ----------------------. Answer: Choice 4 ‘Spasmodic School’ is a title applied mockingly by the Scottish poet and critic W. E. Aytoun in 1854 to a group of poets who had lately achieved some popularity in Britain: P. J. Bailey, Sydney Dobell, Alexander Smith, and others. Their work is marked by extravagant attempts to represent emotional turmoil, sometimes in a manner derived from Byron. Source: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms by Chris Baldick, 2nd edition, p. 240 12- The term ‘troubadour’ refers to ------------------. Answer: Choice 1 The ‘troubadours’, mostly aristocratic poets rather than wandering minstrels or jongleurs, flourished in the period 1100-1350, composing elaborate lyrics of courtly love which had an extensive influence on Western poetry and culture. Among the best known are Guillaume d’Aquitaine, Arnaut Daniel, and Betran de Born. Their favoured poetic forms included the aubade, the chanson, and the pastourelle. Source: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms by Chris Baldick, 2nd edition, p. 264 13- In Umberto Eco’s aesthetics, the work of art -------------------. Answer: Choice 2 ‘Opera aperta’ moved away from the influential aesthetics of Benedetto Croce, who had considered the work of art as the artist’s expression of an intuition. This approach excluded, among other things, the analysis of the processes of conceptualization, reception, and consumption. Eco’s aesthetics, on the other hand, sees the work of art more as a product of the artist’s poetics to which the reader, listener, or viewer responds through an act of interpretation. Source: The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory, edited by Michael Ryan, p. 568
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14- Which of the following about the ‘materialist critical discourse’ is not generally correct? Answer: Choice 2 When a materialist perspective is brought to bear on human affairs, the emphasis does not fall primarily on the politics of civil society and the rights of the individual, or on the understanding of texts and their meanings, but on the material processes by which human beings collectively produce the means by which their basic needs are met, reproduce themselves as a species, and configure their social arrangements. Source: Culture and Critique: An Introduction to the Critical Discourses of Cultural Studies by Jean Paul Surber, p. 69 15- Which of the following about the Bulgarian-French theorist Julia Kristeva (b. 19-41) / her work/ thought is not correct? Answer: Choice 4 Besides Barthes, Lucien Goldmann (an influential sociological critic), and Claude LeviStrauss, who were her teachers, Kristeva acknowledges intellectual debts to other twentiethcentury figures: Mikhail Bakhtin, Emile Benveniste (an important linguist), Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein (a theorist of pre-Oedipal development), and, of course, Sigmund Freud. Source: Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st edition, p. 2165-66 16- The leading proponent of New Historicism, Stephen Greenblatt, became a key figure in the shift from ---------------- in U.S. English departments in the 1980s and 1990s. Inspired mainly by ---------------- groundbreaking work, the New Historicists see the literary work as a vessel tossed in a social sea of competing interests, antagonistic values, and contradictions. Answer: Choice 3 The leading proponent of “New Historicism,” Stephen Greenblatt became a key figure in the shift from literary to cultural poetics and from textual to contextual interpretation in U.S. English departments in the 1980s and 19905. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s historical investigations of medical and penal institutions and his theoretical understanding of power, the New Historicists see the literary work as a vessel tossed in a social sea of competing interests, antagonistic values, and contradictions. Source: Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st edition, p. 2250 17- The American critic -------------------- maintains in his work that contemporary approaches to literature within English departments have undermined ‘the power of language to connect us with the world,’ and recommends a novel and subsequently influential method for bringing coherence to what he sees as an increasingly disjointed curriculum, a method he calls -----------------. Answer: Choice 1 The American critic Gerald Graff maintains in his work that contemporary approaches to literature within English departments have undermined ‘the power of language to connect us
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1396 – Explanatory Answers and Sources with the world,’ and recommends a novel and subsequently influential method for bringing coherence to what he sees as an increasingly disjointed curriculum, a method he calls ‘teaching of conflicts’ Source: Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st edition, p. 2056-57 18- ‘Critic/ theorist: work’ match in --------------. Answer: Choice 3 The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists is by Raymond Williams Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature is by Gilles Deleuze The Sociology of Culture is by Raymond Williams Grammar of the Decameron is by Tzvetan Todorov Source: Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st edition, p. 1567, 1594, and 2097 19- In his seminal essay ‘The Commitment to Theory’, the Indian-American theorist Homi K. Bhabha (b. 1949) defines ‘hybridity’ as what --------------- which emerges from a ---------------. Answer: Choice 2 Bhabha borrows but adapts Derrida’s analysis of how binary oppositions structure Western thought, arguing that such dichotomies are too reductive because they imply that any national culture is unitary, homogeneous, and defined by “fixity” or an essential core. Instead, Bhabha proposes that nationalities, ethnicities, and identities are dialogic, indeterminate, and characterized by “hybridity”—one of his key terms. In “The Commitment to Theory,” he defines hybridity as what “is new, neither the one nor the other,” which emerges from a “Third Space.” Source: Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st edition, p. 2377 20- The African American critic / theorist W. E. --------------. Answer: Choice 4
B. Du Bois (1868-1963) would
In his major work The Souls of Black Folk (1903), he not only examines the history of slavery and segregation in the United States but also emphasizes, more generally, that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.” Still, his focus is American; The Souls of Black Folk includes essays, sketches, and stories on African American politics, history, education, music, and culture. Source: Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st edition, p. 978
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HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 21- The correct order of the following Middle Ages events is -------------------Answer: Choice 3 St. Patrick begins mission to convert Ireland (432) First Viking raids on England (787) Birth of St. Francis of Assisi (1182) Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 22 22- Which of the fallowing about Beowulf, the oldest of the great long poems written in English, is not correct? Answer: Choice 4 Although the poem itself is English in language and origin, it deals not with native Englishmen but with their Germanic forebears, especially with two south Scandinavian tribes, the Danes and the Geats, who lived on the Danish island of Zealand and in southern Sweden. Thus the historical period the poem concerns—insofar as it may be said to refer to history at all—is some centuries before it was written—that is, a time after the initial invasion of England by Germanic tribes in the middle of the fifth century but before the Anglo-Saxon migration was completed. The one datable fact of history mentioned in the poem is a raid on the Franks in which Hygelac, the king of the Geats and Beowulf’s lord, was killed, and this raid occurred in the year 520. Yet the poet’s elliptical references to quasihistorical and legendary material show his audience was still familiar with many old stories, the outlines of which we can only infer, sometimes with the help of later analogous tales in other Germanic languages. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 30 23- The Renaissance figure Arthur Golding (1536-1605) -------------------. Answer: Choice 2 A prolific translator, especially from Latin and French, Arthur Golding belonged to a wealthy, well-connected family in Essex and was educated at Jesus College, Cambridge. Golding was an ardent Puritan; he translated seven works of Calvin into English. His most celebrated rendering, however, was of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The first complete English version of this poem to be published (four books in 1565, the full work in 1567), Golding's translation is in rhyming couplets of “fourteeners” (lines of fourteen syllables). Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 703 24- Which of the following about Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (published 1590 to 1596) is not correct? Answer: Choice 1 The whole of The Faerie Queen is written in a remarkable nine-line stanza of closely interlocking rhymes (ababbcbec), the first eight lines with five stresses each (iambic pentameter) and the final line with six stresses (iambic hexameter or alexahdrine). The poem
1396 – Explanatory Answers and Sources is also an epic. In moving from The Shepheardes Calender to The Faerie Queen Spenser deliberately fashioned herself after the great Roman poet Virgil, who began his poetic career with pastoral poetry and moved on to his epic poem, the Aeneid. In weaving together classical and medieval sources, drawing on pictorial traditions, and adapting whole episodes from Ariosto and Tasso, he was providing his country with the epic it had hitherto lacked. Like Virgil, Spenser is deeply concerned with the dangerous struggles and painful renunciations required to achieve the highest values of human civilization. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 715 25- Which of the following about the Welsh poet Henry Vaughan (1621-1695) is correct? Answer: Choice 3 In the preface to Silex Scintillans Vaughan places himself among the many “pious converts” gained by George Herbert’s holy life and verse. While his secular poetry recalls Ben Jonson’s, the religious poetry overtly and consciously models itself on Herbert’s. Some twenty-six poems appropriate their titles from The Temple, several owe their metrical form to Herbert, and many begin by quoting one of Herbert’s lines (compare Vaughan’s “Unprofitableness” with Herbert’s “The Flower”). Yet no one with an ear for poetry will mistake Vaughan’s long, loose poetic lines for Herbert's artful precision. Vaughan’s religious sensibility too differs markedly from Herbert's. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 1625 26- ‘Author: work’ match in -------------------. Answer: Choice 3 Mac Flecknoe is by John Dryden A Satire against Reason and Mankind is by John Wilmot Margaret Cavendish wrote The Poetess’s Hasty Resolution and The Hunting of the Hare Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 1770 27- Which of the following essay openings is not by Joseph Addison (1672-1719) or Richard Steele (1672-1 729)? Answer: Choice 4 ‘Choice 4’ is part of ‘Idleness, The Idler no. 31’ by Samuel Johnson Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 2476, 2478, 2485, and 2678
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28- Which of the following is the correct order of publication for the following Romantic era landmark works? Answer: Choice 1 Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (cantos 1 and 2) (1812) John Clare’s Poems Descriptive of Rural Life (1820) Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 24 29- Which of the following about the Romantic era essayist Charles Lamb (1775-1814) is not correct? Answer: Choice 2 Charles Lamb was a near contemporary of Wordsworth and Coleridge. He numbered these two poets among his close friends, published his own early poems in combination with those of Coleridge in 1796 and 1797, and supported the Lyrical Ballads and some of the other new poetry of his time. Yet Lamb lacks almost all the traits and convictions we think of as characteristically “Romantic.” He happily lived all his life in the city and its environs. He could not abide Shelley or his poetry, and he distrusted Coleridge’s supernaturalism and Wordsworth’s oracular sublimities and religion of nature, preferring those elements in their poems that were human and realistic. In an age when many of the important writers were fervent radicals and some became equally fervent reactionaries, Lamb remained uncommitted in both politics and religion. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 491 30- ‘Thomas Carlyle work: description’ is not correct in -----------------. Answer: Choice 4 Carlyle’s most significant early essay, “Characteristics,” appeared in The Edinburgh Review in 1831. A year earlier he had begun writing Sartor Resartus, an account of the life and opinions of an imaginary philosopher, Professor Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, a work that he had great difficulty in persuading anyone to publish. In book form Sartor first appeared in America in 1836, where Carlyle’s follower Emerson had prepared an enthusiastic audience for this unusual work. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 1003 31- The English philosopher and essayist John Stuart Mill (1806-1 873) --------------------. Answer: Choice 3 Though Mill was raised in this no-nonsense, reforming tradition, his honesty and openmindedness enabled him to appreciate the values of such anti-Utilitarians as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle and, whenever possible, to incorporate some of these values into the Utilitarian system. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 1043
1396 – Explanatory Answers and Sources 32- Which of the following about the 1840s and 1850s Charles Dickens (1812-1870) is not correct? Answer: Choice 1 Through the 1840s and 1850s Dickens continued to write novels at an intense pace, producing Barnaby Rudge (1841), Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44), Dombey and Son (1846-48), David Copperfield (1849-50), Bleak House (1852-53), Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit (1855-57), and A Tale of Two Cities (1859). He also became deeply involved in a number of other activities, including traveling, working for charities, and acting. During this time, he founded and edited the weekly magazine Household Words (incorporated in 1859 into All the Year Round), which published fiction by Elizabeth Gaskell, Willkie Collins, Dickens himself, and other novelists as well as opinion pieces about political and social issues. And he began a series of Christmas books, the first of which was A Christmas Carol (1843). Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 1237 33- ‘Late Victorian figure: description’ match in ------------------. Answer: Choice 1 During the 1880s and 1890s William Ernest Henley edited the National Observer and other periodicals in London, where he became a powerful figure in literary circles. The affectionate regard in which he was held by his contemporaries was enhanced by his courageously confronting long years of crippling physical pain caused by tuberculosis of the bone. William Butler Yeats said of him: “I disagreed with him about everything, but I admired him beyond words.” Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 1641, 1637, 1643, and 1823 34- Which of the following about the English novelist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is not correct? Answer: Choice 4 In 1917 the Woolfs had founded the Hogarth Press, which published some of the most interesting literature of their time, including T. S. Eliot’s Poems [1919], fiction by Maxim Gorky, Katherine Mansfield, and E. M. Forster, the English translations of Freud, and Virginia’s novels.) As a fiction writer Woolf rebelled against what she called the “materialism’ of novelists such as her contemporaries Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy, who depicted suffering and social injustice through gritty realism, and she sought to render more delicately those aspects of consciousness in which she felt the truth of human experience lay. In her essay “Modern Fiction” she defines the task of the novelist as looking within, as conveying the mind receiving “a myriad of impressions,” as representing the “luminous halo” or “semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” In her novels she abandoned linear narratives in favor of interior monologues and stream of consciousness narration, exploring with great subtlety problems of personal identity and personal relationships as well as the significance of time, change, loss, and memory for human personality. After two conventionally realistic novels, The Voyage
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Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919), she developed her own style, a carefully modulated flow that brought into prose fiction something of the rhythms and imagery of lyric poetry. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 2081 35- Samuel Beckett’s Murphy (1938) --------------------. Answer: Choice 2 Beckett’s early novels—Murphy (1938; Eng. trans., 1957), Watt (1953), and the trilogy, Molloy (1951; 1955), Malone Dies (1951; 1956), and The Unnameable (1953; 1958)—have been hailed as masterpieces and precursors of postmodern fiction; but he is best-known for his plays, especially Waiting for Godot (1952; 1954) and Endgame (1957; 1958). He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 2393 36- The Irish poet Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) --------------------. Answer: Choice 1 Louis MacNeice was a pioneer of radio drama, playwright, a translator of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Goethe’s Faust, and a literary critic. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 2441 37- ‘Writer / work with a World War II backdrop’ do not match in -------------------. Answer: Choice 3 “Aristocrats: I Think I’m Becoming A God” is a poem by Keith Douglas Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 2458, 2453, 2455, and 2456 38- The poet Louise Bennett would ------------------. Answer: Choice 2 From a young age Bennett felt the humor, wit, and vigor of Creole were largely untapped possibilities for writing and performing poetry, even though this commitment to Jamaican English prevented her from being recognized as a poet until after the black cultural revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s. In her poetry often assume the perspective of a West Indian trickster such as the woman who cunningly subverts gender and geographic hierarchies in ‘Jamaica Oman [Woman]’. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 2469 39- Which of the following works hybridizes African oral traditions with European literary paradigms and fuses African rhetoric, myth, and ritual with the verbal extravagance of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater? Answer: Choice 3 In 1986 Soyinka became the first black African writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, recognized for plays, such as Death and the King’s Horseman (1975), that
1396 – Explanatory Answers and Sources inventively hybridize Yoruba oral traditions with European literary paradigms, fuse African rhetoric, myth, and ritual with the verbal extravagance of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 2529 40- ‘Doris Lessing novel: description’ do not match in -------------------. Answer: Choice 1 Lessing’s combination of psychological introspection, political anal documentary, and feminism gives a characteristic tone to her novels and stories. These elements are effectively combined in her novel The Golden Notebook (1962), which explores with un-exhibitionist frankness the sexual problems of an independent woman while at the same time probing the political conscience of an ex-communist and the needs and dilemmas of a creative writer. In the early influenced by the writings of the renegade psychologist R. D. Laing and by the principles of Sufism (the mystical, ecstatic aspects of Islam), Lessing’s realistic investigations of social issues took a different turn. In Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) and The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), she explores myth and fantasy, restrained within a broadly realist context. In a series of novels with the general title Canopus in Argos: Archives (written between 1979 and 1983), she draws on her reading of the Old and New Testaments, the Apocrypha, and the Koran and borrows conventions from science fiction to describe the efforts of a superhuman, extraterrestrial race to guide human history. Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 2543
LITERARY GENRES 41- All the following about Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852-53) are correct except that ----------------. Answer: Choice 4 At the center of Bleak House is a sensational mystery around which several lesser secrets, surprises, and a large cast revolve. Dickens had employed mystery before in his novels, most notably in Oliver Twist, but in Bleak House the mysteries are truly labyrinthine. Esther Summerson, who shares half of the book’s narration, is, like Oliver, illegitimate, and her identity remains in doubt for the first half of the novel. Also, as in Oliver Twist, there is a disputed inheritance, and the secret of Esther’s identity is joined to the interminable and destructive Chancery case of Jarndyce versus Jarndyce. However, in Bleak House Dickens greatly expands his range from Oliver Twist, connecting two plots rather than combining them in one character’s history like Oliver’s. Source: The Novel 100 (Revised Edition) A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time by Daniel S. Burt, p.54
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42- ‘Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer (1867) character: description’ do not match in ---------------. Answer: Choice 1 Injun Joe: known as a “half-breed,” meaning he is half white and half Native American, Injun Joe is the villain of the novel and a force of evil in St. Petersburg. He is also an angry, vengeful, amoral man. Source: http://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/adventures-tomsawyer#Characters 43- Which of the following about Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) is not correct? Answer: Choice 3 For the most part, Beloved uses a third-person narrator—one who tells the story by describing the action of other people (“he said,” “they did”). Because the narration describes what various characters are thinking and doing, it can also be classified as omniscient (allknowing) narration. Throughout Beloved, there is one such motif that is repeated with regularity: a description of the characters’ eyes and how they see. “The eyes are windows to the soul,” goes the common saying, and the eyes of the novel’s characters are likewise revealing. Source: http://www.novelexplorer.com/beloved/construction-7/ 44- Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) opens in the year 2495 ------------------. Answer: Choice 4 Brave New World opens in the year 2495 at the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, a research facility and factory that mass-produces and then socially-conditions testtube babies. Such a factory is a fitting place to begin the story of mass-produced characters in a techno-futurist dystopia, a world society gone mad for pleasure, order, and conformity. The date is A.F. 632, A.F.—After Ford—being a notation based on the birth year (1863) of Henry Ford, the famous automobile manufacturer and assembly line innovator who is worshiped as a god in Huxley's fictional society. Source: http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-bravenewworld/summary.html
1396 – Explanatory Answers and Sources 45- Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (1952) -------------------. Answer: Choice 4 The Old Man and the Sea uses the omniscient, or “all-knowing,” point of view of the author, who acts as a hidden narrator. The omniscient point of view enables the author to stand outside and above the story itself, and thus to provide a wider perspective from which to present the thoughts of the old man and the other characters. Thus at the beginning of the tale, the omniscient narrator tells us not only what Santiago and the boy said to each other, but what the other fishermen thought of the old man. Source: http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-oldmansea/style.html OR Encyclopedia of American Literature, 1607-to the present, edited by Brett Barney, 2nd edition, p. 847 46- Which of the following sets of characters belongs to E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975)? Answer: Choice 2 The set of characters in choice 1 all belong to The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. The set of characters in choice 3 all belong to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The set of characters in choice 4 all belong to The Jungle by Utpon Sinclair. Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature by Dinah Birch and Katy Hooper, 3rd edition, related entries 47- Which of the following about James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man (1916) is not / least correct? Answer: Choice 1 There is no plot as such in the novel; the narrative is not continuous but fragmented, with gaps in the chorology. The focus is exclusively on the central character, Stephen Dedalus, who is present on virtually every page. Every narrative detail is filtered through Stephen’s consciousness. A Portrait of the Artist is divided into five chapters. Each chapter deals with a different period in the first twenty years of the central character, Stephen Dedalus. Each also addresses a specific theme related to Stephen’s development as an artist. Although Joyce gives specific settings for the incidents in the book, he does not give dates for the events that he is reporting.
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Joyce himself was a Dubliner by birth and upbringing. He does not evoke the city of Dublin in as much detail here as in his earlier short story collection Dubliners or in his later novels Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Nonetheless, in A Portrait, Dublin is prominent both as a physical city and as a symbol of the center of Irish consciousness. In any case, whether he is writing about Stephen’s life at school, at home, or at large in Dublin or in particular neighborhoods elsewhere in Ireland, Joyce’s larger subject is always Ireland—a subject that he renders in an ambivalent stance. Source: http://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/portrait-artist-young-man 48- John Steinbeck's The Crapes of Wrath (1939) follows the trials and tribulations of the ------------------- family as they leave the dust bowl of ------------------ for a better life in -----------------. Answer: Choice 2 The Grapes of Wrath follows the trials and tribulations of the Joad family as they leave the dust bowl of Oklahoma for a better life in California. The narrative begins with Tom Joad hitchhiking across the Oklahoma panhandle to his parents’ forty-acre farm. Tom has just been paroled after serving four years in prison for manslaughter. He meets ex-preacher Jim Casy, who is alone and singing by the side of the road. Source: http://www.novelexplorer.com/category/the-grapes-of-wrath/ OR Source: Encyclopedia of American Literature, 1607-to the present, edited by Brett Barney, 2nd edition, p. 453 49- Which of the following descriptions matches the character ‘Anse Bundren’ in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930)? Answer: Choice 4 Anse is the patriarch of the Bundren family. A selfish and lazy man, he claims sweat will kill him, and therefore refuses to work. Instead, he connives to get others to work for him, and therefore refuses to work for him. Physically, he is hunchbacked, and his hands are gnarled. Though his wife is dying, he allows Darl and Jewel to leave her deathbed to work. He considers himself to be a right-thinking, hardworking man who is victimized by God. Source: http://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/i-lay-dying
1396 – Explanatory Answers and Sources 50- Which of the following excerpts opens a ‘holy sonnet’ by John Donne (1572-1631)? Answer: Choice 3 Choice 1 opens ‘Virtue’ by George Herbert Choice 2 opens ‘The Argument of his Book’ by Robert Herrick Choice 4 opens ‘The Pilgrimage’ by George Herbert Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 1295, 1614, 1654, and 1618 51- ‘Poet: poem’ do not match in -------------------. Answer: Choice 1 ‘The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn’ is by Andrew Marvell Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 1700, 1699, 1617, and 1688 52- Which of the following does not open a poem by Alexander Pope (1688-1744)? Answer: Choice 3 Choice 3 opens Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, by Jonathan Swift Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I, 8th edition, p. 2304, 2513, 2548, and 2532 53- The correct order of the appearance of poems by William Wordsworth (1770-1850) is ---------------. Answer: Choice 2 ‘Tintern Abbey’ (1798) ‘Resolution and Independence’ (1802) ‘Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways’ (1833) Source: See the end of each poem in Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 262, 305, and 320 54- Which of the following poem openings is by the Imagist Poet T. E. Hulme? Answer: Choice 4 Choice 1 opens ‘Oread’ by H. D. Choice 2 opens ‘Sea Rose’ by H.D. Choice 3 opens ‘A Coat’ by William Butler Yeats Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 2008, 2009, and 2029 55- Which of the following about William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is not correct? Answer: Choice 1 He compressed and embodied his personal mythology in visionary poems of great scope, linguistic force, and incantatory power, such as “The Second Coming” and “Leda and the Swan.” In poems of the 1920s and 1930s, winding stairs, spinning tops, “gyres,” spirals of all
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kinds, are important symbols, serving as a means of resolving some of the contraries that had arrested him from the beginning—paradoxes of time and eternity, change and continuity, spirit and the body, life and art. Like Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Windham Lewis, Yeats was attracted to right-wing politics, and in the 1930s he was briefly drawn to fascism. His late interest in authoritarian politics arose in part from his desire for a feudal, aristocratic society that, unlike middle-class culture, in his view, might allow the imagination to flourish, and in part from his anti-colonialism, since he thought a fascist Spain, for example, would “weaken the British Empire.” Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 2022 56- Which of the follow does not close a poem by T. S. Eliot (I888-1965)? Answer: Choice 2 Choice 1 closes ‘Sweeney among the Nightingales’ by T. S. Eliot Choice 2 closes ‘The Ship of Death’ by D.H. Lawrence Choice 3 closes ‘The Hollow Men’ by T S Eliot Choice 4 closes ‘The Journey of the Magi’ by T.S. Eliot Source: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, 8th edition, p. 2283, 2293, 2309, 2312 57- Which of the following sets of characters is entirely made of characters from William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1594-95)? Answer: Choice 1 Lafew, an old lord has appeared in All’s Well That Ends Well. Diana: Daughter to the Widow has appeared in All’s Well That Ends Well. Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature by Dinah Birch and Katy Hooper, 3rd edition, p. 464 58- ‘Character / description’ in George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren’s Profession (first performed in London in 1902) do not match in --------------------. Answer: Choice 4 It is Vivie Warren who is an attractive, sensible, highly educated young woman whose intense self-confidence can sometimes be overwhelming. She refuses to act in a traditional feminine manner, always speaking her mind and demanding that others treat her as an individual. Source: http://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/mrs-warrens-profession 59- John Osborne’s Inadmissible Evidence (1964) ----------------------. Answer: Choice 3 The first performance of Inadmissible Evidence at the Royal Court Theatre in London on September 9, 1964, by the English Stage Company, was a resounding critical and popular success. It also reinforced John Osborne's status as England's most important post-World
1396 – Explanatory Answers and Sources War II dramatist. The play chronicles the mental disintegration of middle-aged, London solicitor Bill Maitland over the course of two days as he experiences the breakdown of his professional and personal life. Osborne combines elements of realism and theater of the absurd as he illustrates Bill's nightmarish world that ironically Bill has constructed himself. Source: http://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/inadmissible-evidence 60- Playwright / play do not match in ------------------. Answer: Choice 3 Written by Mark Medoff in 1979, Children of a Lesser God illuminates, within a love story, the experience—often misunderstood by those who can hear—of being deaf in a hearing world. After the New York production in 1980, the play won the Tony Award. Source: The Facts on File Companion to American Drama by Jackson R. Bryer, Mary C. Hartig, p. 95
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166 References References Abrams, M. H., and Geoffrey G. Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 10th ed. Boston, Mass: Thomson Wadsworth, 2011. Anderson, Amanda, and Harry E. Shaw, eds. A Companion to George Eliot. Vol. 82. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2016. Baldick, Chris. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford, England: New York: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press, 1990. Barney, Brett, gen. ed. Encyclopedia of American Literature, 1607-to the Present. 2nd ed. New York: Facts on File, 2008. Birch Dinah, and Katy Hooper, editors. Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature. 4th ed. Oxford, England: New York: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press, 2013. Bracket, Virginia. The Facts on File Companion to the British Novel. New York: Facts on File, 2006. Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. 5th ed. London: Pearson Longman, 2011. Bryer, Jackson R., and Mary C. Hartig. The Facts on File companion to American drama. Infobase Publishing, 2010. Burt, Daniel S. The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time. New York: Checkmark Books, 2010. Carter, Ronald, and John McRae. The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2001. Childs, Peter, and Roger Fowler. The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms. London: Routledge, 2006. Cuddon, J. A. A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. 5th ed. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. Drabble, Margaret. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Ferguson, Margaret, Salter, Mary Jo, and Stallworthy, Jon, eds. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 5th ed. New York: WW Norton, 2004. Gill, Richard. Mastering English Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Greenblatt, Stephen, gen. ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 8th ed. Vols. A-B. New York: Norton, 2006. Hall Jr. Vernon. A Short History of Literary Criticism. New York: New York University Press. 1963. Izzo, David Garrett. WH Auden Encyclopedia. Jefferson: McFarland, 2004.
167 References Kettle, Arnold. An introduction to the English novel. Vol. 2. London: Routledge, 2016. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 1st ed. New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2001. Nims, John Frederick. The Harper Anthology of Poetry. New York: Harpercollins College Division, 1981. Quinn, Edward. A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms. 2nd ed. New York: Facts on File, 2006. Rogers, Pat. The Alexander Pope Encyclopedia. California: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004. Ryan, Michael, gen, ed. The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Selden, Raman. A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. 5th ed. London: Pearson Longman, 2005. Stade, Goerge, and Karen Karbiener, editors. Encyclopedia of British Writers, 1800 to the Present. New York: Facts on File, 2009. Surber, Jere Paul, Culture and Critique: An Introduction to the Critical Discourses of Cultural Studies. Bouler, Colorado: Westview Press, 1997.
• 5 years of M.A. entrance exams in English literature • 300 multiple-choice questions accompanied by thoroughly-revised explanatory answers • Exact, reliable sources, the precise details of which are offered question for question Acting as an essential companion, this invaluable guide assists anyone in navigating their way through preparing for M.A. entrance exam in English literature by providing them with a survey of the sources on which questions of the recent years are based.
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