LITERARIST: June 2010

1. The epithet “a comic epic in prose” is best applied to

(A) Richardson’s Pamela

(B) Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey

(C) Fielding’s Tom Jones

(D) Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe

("Comic prose epics" is a type of epic derived from the serious epic that satirizes contemporary ideas or conditions in a form and style burlesquing the serious epic. It is also noted as mock epics Exm: The Rape of the Lock (1712) by the English poet Alexander Pope. Several novels also fall into this category. Fielding himself refers to his two novels, Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, as "comic prose epics". In the preface Joseph Andrews, Fielding described his own fictional form as "a comic romance" or a "comic epic poem in prose," and in Tom Jonesas a "heroical, historical prosaic poem" ; a form of "prosai-comi-epic writing" . In defining the novel as an epic genre, Fielding emphasized its function in presenting a broad picture of an era, but one, unlike verse epic, in which primarily the weaknesses of humanity are put on display. So the critics do vary on the genre of these novels. Nonetheless from the given options as Joseph Andrews is not there,Tom Jones is right option. )

2. Muriel Spark has written a dystopian novel called

(A) Memento Mori

(B) The Prime of Miss Jean

Brodie

(D) The Ballad of Peckham Rye

( The Republic( 4th century bc ) by Greek philosopher Plato,Sir Thomas More 's Utopia (1516), Francis Bacon 's The New Atlantis (1627) dealt with the fictional island of ideal society which is better than reality. They are popularly known as 'utopian' novel. However, many other works followed and established a slight new genre, named dystopian(antiutopian) fiction where life is worse than reality. Dystopia is found in Spark’s best known novel is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)other example: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. It is the story of an eccentric Edinburgh schoolteacher seen through the eyes of an admiring (but later disenchanted) pupil. Rowe has written that "Nothing is wasted in [The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie], which is so much about a waste of human energy." Other close option is The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) authored by Spark . But here Spark wanted “to write something light and lyrical – as near a poem as a novel could get, and in as few words as possible”)

3. Samuel Butler’s Erewhon is an example of

(A) Feminist Literature

(B) Utopian Literature

(D) Famine Literature

(Erewhon satirizes various aspects of Victorian society, including criminal punishment, religion and anthropocentrism. For example, according to Erewhonian law, offenders are treated as if they were ill whilst ill people are looked upon as criminals. Another feature of Erewhon is the absence of machines; this is due to the widely shared perception by the Erewhonians that they are potentially dangerous. This last aspect of Erewhon reveals the influence of Charles Darwin's evolution theory; Butler had read On the Origin of Species soon after it was published in 1859.)

4. The line “moments of unageing intellect” occurs in Yeats’s

(A) Byzantium

(B) Among School Children

(C) Sailing to Byzantium

(D) The Circus Animals’

Desertion

( Read this poem: Sailing To Byzantium)

5. In his 1817 review of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, Francis Jeffrey grouped the following poets together as the ‘Lake School of Poets’ :

(A) Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge

(B) Wordsworth, Byron and Coleridge

(D) Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey

(They are called Lake Poets because they all lived in the Lake districtof England at the turn of the nineteenth century. As a group, reviewed by Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review they shared their common habitation but no such poetic ideology. However, they are considered part of the Romantic Movement. Dorothy Wordsworth, Charles Lloyd, Hartley Coleridge, John Wilson, and Thomas De Quincy are other poets of this group.)

6. Which of the following novels is not by Patrick White ?

(A) The Vivisector

(B) The Tree of Man

(D) Oscar and Lucienda

( The Vivisector suggests White's vision of his protagonist's approach to art. The novel is by and large a ruthless vivisection of the artist ,Hurtle Duffield, from early childhood to death. The Tree of Man is forth published novel of this Australian writer . It is an ideological and cultural survey of Parker family and their sea saw fortune. Voss, 5th novel by Patrick White is a expedition novel on Prussian explorer and naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt. The story has a strong religious favour too. While Oscar and Lucienda is Peter Carey's novel describing a gumbling story.)

7. The famous line “……. where ignorant armies clash by night” is taken from a poem by

(A) Wilfred Owen

(B) W.H. Auden

(D) Matthew Arnold

( The line is in Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach that tells about value of love, faith, religiosity and peace.Here the ignorant armies are the citizen of this materialist world who are madly striking each other ignorantly- a scene of total anarchy or waste.)

8. Which among the following novels is not written by Margaret Atwood ?

(A) Surfacing

(B) The Blind Assassin

(D) The Stone Angel

( Margaret Atwood and Margaret Laurence are Canadian writers.

Surfacing, Margaret Atwood's second novel is structured around the point of view of a young woman who travels with her friends on a lake in Northern Quebec, to search for her missing father. This psychological mystery tale presents a compelling study of a woman who is also searching for herself- present, past and future. The Blind Assassin, centred on the protagonist, Iris Chase, and her sister Laura, this Margaret Atwood's novel is pictorial details of lives around the time of the Second World War. The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian novel by Margaret Atwood, explores themes of women in subjugation and the various means by which they gain individualism engaging with the social structure. The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence is most controversial story of Hagar Shipley, a 90-year old woman struggling to come to grips with a life of intransigence and loss.)

9. The term ‘theatre of cruelty’ was coined by

(A) Robert Brustein

(B) Antonin Artaud

(D) Luigi Pirandello

( lDuring the early 1930s, the French poet, actor, and theorist Antonin Artaud put forth a theory for a Surrealist experimental theater called the Theater of Cruelty that shades a major influence on avant-garde 20th-century theater. lBased on ritual and fantasy, this form of theater launches an attack on the spectators' subconscious in an attempt to release deep-rooted fears and anxieties that are normally suppressed, forcing people to view themselves and their natures without the shield of civilization. By cruelty, he meant not exclusively sadism or causing pain, but just as often a violent, physical determination to shatter the false reality. He believed that text had been a tyrant over meaning, and advocated, instead, for a theater made up of a unique language, halfway between thought and gesture. )

10. The verse form of Byron’s Childe Harold was influenced by

(A) Milton

(B) Spenser

(D) Pope

(Ottava rima is a stanza of eight lines: a verse form made up of eight lines in iambic pentameter with the rhyme scheme abababcc. The stanza is remodeled by Edmund Spenser as seen in his long allegorical romance The Faerie Queene (1590–6). {Spenserian stanza, an English poetic stanza of nine iambic lines, the first eight being pentameters while the ninth is a longer line known either as an iambic hexameter or as an alexandrine. The rhyme scheme is ababbcbcc. }The meter is again revived successfully by the younger English Romantic poets of the early 19th century: Byron used it for Childe Harold's Pilgrimage(1812, 1816), Keats for ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ (1820), and Shelley forThe Revolt of Islam (1818) and Adonais (1821).

Is thy face like thy mother's, my fair child!

Ada! sole daughter of my house and heart?

When last I saw thy young blue eyes they smiled,

And when we parted,—not as now we part,

But with a hope.—

Awaking with a start,

The waters heave around me; and on high

The winds lift up their voices: I depart,

Whither I know not; but the hour's gone by,

When Albion's lessening shores could grieve or glad mine eye.)

11. Tennyson’s Ulysses is

(I) a poem expressing the need for going forward and braving the struggles of life

(II) a dramatic monologue

(III) a morbid poem

(IV) a poem making extensive use of satire The right combination for the above statement, according to the code, is

(A) I & IV

(B) II and III

(D) I and II

(Read the critical appreciation of the poem, Ulysses)

12. Which post-war British poet was involved in a disastrous marriage with Sylvia Plath ?

(A) Philip Larkin

(B) Ted Hughes

(D) Geoffrey Hill

(Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), American poet and prose writer,married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956 and they lived together first in theUnited States and then England, having two children together: Frieda and Nicholas. She separated from Hughes in 1962 and took an apartment in London with her two children. Following a long struggle with depression and a marital separation, Plath committed suicide in 1963, at the age of 30 shortly after separating from Hughes. Many Plath fans and scholars have assigned much of the blame for her death to Hughes.Controversy continues to surround the events of her life and death, as well as her writing and legacy.)

13. Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowles is in part

(I) a puzzle

(II) a debate

(III) a threnody

(IV) a beast fable

The correct combination for the above statement, according to the code, is

(A) I, II & IV

(B) II, III & IV

(D) II & IV

(The Parlement of Foules,a dream poem, shows the influence of Dante and of Giovanni Boccaccio on Chaucer. In The Parlement we witnesses an inconclusive debate about love among the different classes of birds. The Parlement of Foules contains a mixture of comedy and serious speculation about the puzzling nature of love.)

14. Who among the following wrote a book with the title The Age of Reason ?

(A) William Godwin

(B) Edmund Burke

(C) Thomas Paine

(D) Edward Gibbon

(In 1794 Part I of The Age of Reason was published while Paine was still in prison; Part II in 1795 and a portion of Part III in 1807.)

15. The Restoration comedy has been criticized mainly for its

(A) excessive wit and humour

(B) bitter satire and cynicism

(C) indecency and permissiveness

(D) superficial reflection of society

16. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses is an essay by

(A) Terry Eagleton

(B) Karl Marx

(D) Louis Althusser

( Louis Althusser (1918-1990), French philosopher, is best known for his contributions to the debate over the origins and development of the theories of German philosopher Karl Marx.His Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses was first published: in La Pensée, 1970 in French)

17. Sexual possessiveness is a theme of Shakespeare’s

(A) Coriolanus

(B) Julius Caesar

(D) A Midsummer Night’s Dream

18. The term ‘Cultural Materialism’ is associated with

(A) Stephen Greenblatt

(B) Raymond Williams

(D) Richard Hoggart

( Raymond Williams (1921 - 1988) British critic and novelist. notable work :Culture and Society)

19. Which of the following author book pair is correctly matched ?

(A) Muriel Spark – Under the Net

(B) William – Girls of Golding Slender Means

(D) Doris Lessing – The Grass is Singing

(Doris Lessing, , British novelist and short-story writer, published The Grass is Singing in 1950, in which Africa provides the setting for The novel.)

20. Who among the following is a Canadian critic ?

(A) I.A. Richards

(B) F.R. Leavis

(D) Northrop Frye

(Northrop Frye (1912-1991), Canadian literary critic, best known as a major proponent of archetypal criticism, has most important work,Anatomy of Criticism (1957), introducing archetypal criticism, identifying and discussing basic archetypal patterns as found in myths, literary genres, and the reader’s imagination.)

21. Sethe is a character in

(A) The Colour Purple

(B) The Women of Brewster Place

(C) Beloved

(D) Lucy

(Sethe,a mother who kills her daughter Beloved rather than have her grow up as a slave, is the main character in Toni Morrison's 1987 Pulitzer-prize winning novel Beloved.The book mainly explores black Americans' relationship to slavery.)

22. Imagined Communities is a book by

(A) Aijaz Ahmad

(B) Edward Said

(D) Benedict Anderson

23. Who among the following is a Cavalier poet ?

(A) Henry Vaughan

(B) Richard Crashaw

(C) John Suckling

(D) Anne Finch

(Cavalier Poets are the group of 17th-century English lyric poets, associated with the Royalists,i. e. the followers of King Charles I at the time of the English Civil War. Three of them—Thomas Carew, Sir John Suckling, and Richard Lovelace—were attached to the court of Charles, and one, Robert Herrick, was a clergyman. These poets were influenced by Ben Jonson and formed an informal social, as well as literary circle.)

24. Which play of Wilde has the subtitle, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People ?

(A) A Woman of No Importance

(B) Lady Windermere’s Fan

(C) The Importance of Being Earnest

(D) An Ideal Husband

25. Which of the following plays is not written by Wole Soyinka ?

(A) The Lion and the Jewel

(B) The Dance of the Forests

(C) Master Harold and the Boys

(D) Kongi’s Harvest

(Master Harold and the Boys is written by Athol Fugard, South African playwright, director, and actor.)

26. Which of the following plays by William Wycherley is in part an adaptation of Moliere’s The Misanthrope ?

(A) The Plain Dealer

(B) The Country Wife

(D) The Gentleman Dancing Master

27. ‘Inversion’ is the change in the word order for creating rhetorical effect, e.g. this book I like. Another term for inversion is

(A) Hypallage

(B) Hubris

(D) Hyperbaton

28. The phrase ‘the willing suspension of disbelief ’ occurs in

(A) Biographia Literaria

(B) Preface to Lyrical Ballads

(D) Poetics

29. The religious movement Methodism in the 18th century England was founded by

(A) John Tillotson

(B) Bishop Butler

(D) John Welsey

(Methodism, worldwide Protestant movement dating from 1729, started when a group of students at the University of Oxford, England, began to assemble for worship, study, and Christian service.)

30. My First Acquaintance with Poets, an unforgettable account of meeting with literary heroes, is written by

(A) Charles Lamb

(B) Thomas de Quincey

(D) William Hazlitt

31. The figure of the Warrior Virgin in Spenser’s Faerie Queene is represented by the character

(A) Britomart

(B) Gloriana

(D) Duessa

(The hero of Book III, the female warrior virgin, who represents Chastity. )

32. The book Speech Acts is written by

(A) John Austin

(B) John Searle

(D) Ferdinand de Saussure

(John Searle's The book Speech Acts is an essay in the Philosophy of Language.)

33. Which among the following is not a sonnet sequence ?

(A) Philip Sydney – Astrophel

and Stella

(B) Samuel Daniel – Delia

(C) Derek Walcott – Omeroos

(D) D.G. Rossetti – The House

of Life

(Derek Walcott, born in 1930, West Indian poet, playwright, and Nobel laureate, who is known for his vivid portrayal of Caribbean culture and his inventive use of language wrote the epic poem Omeroos .)

34. ‘Incunabula’ refers to

(A) books censured by the Roman Emperor

(B) books published before the year 1501

(D) books wrongly attributed to an author

(Incunabula is a collective term denoting books printed before the year 1501. The study of incunabula is important as a source of information regarding the early development of the art of typography, and also because priceless items of incunabula include the first printed versions of many classical, medieval, and Renaissance works.)

35. The most notable achievement in Jacobean prose was

(A) Bacon’s Essays

(B) King James’ translation of the Bible

(D) None of the above

36. The Court of Chancery is a setting in Dickens’

(A) Little Dorrit

(B) Hard Times

(D) Bleak House

37. Which romantic poet coined the famous phrase ‘spots of time’ ?

(A) John Keats

(B) William Wordsworth

(D) Lord Byron

(William Wordsworth, English romantic poet, wrote about the concept of "spots of time"

There are in our existence spots of time,

That with distinct pre-eminence retain

A renovating virtue, whence, depressed

By false opinion and contentious thought,

Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,

In trivial occupations, and the round

Of ordinary intercourse, our minds

Are nourished and visibly repaired...

-William Wordsworth, from The Prelude, Book Twelfth )

38. The statement ‘I think, therefore, I am’ is by

(A) Schopenhauer

(B) Plato

(C) Descartes

(D) Sartre

(French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician René Descartes publishes Philosophical Essays in 1637. Descartes applies the rational inquiry of science to philosophy and argues that one can only be certain of one’s own existence. All else derives from this basic premise which Descartes states as cogito ergo sum (Latin for “I think, therefore I am”).)

39. Verse that has no set theme – no regular meter, rhyme or stanzaic pattern is

(I) open form

(II) flexible form

(III) free verse

(IV) blank verse

The correct combination for the statement, according to the code, is

(A) I, II and III are correct

(B) III and IV are correct

(D) I and III are correct

40. Which is the correct sequence of publication of Pinter’s plays ?

(A) The Room, One for theRoad, No Man’s Land, The Homecoming

(B) The Homecoming, NoMan’s Land, The Room,One for the Road

(C) The Room, The Homecoming, No Man’s Land, One for the Road

(D) One for the Road, TheRoom, The Homecoming,No Man’s Land

(The Room (1957),The Homecoming (1964), The Basement (1966), No Man’s Land (1974), One for the Road (1984).)

41. Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language was published in the year

(A) 1710

(B) 1755

(D) 1759

(The Dictionary of the English Language appeared in 1755.)

42. The literary prize, Booker of Bookers, was awarded to

(A) J.M. Coetzee

(B) Nadine Gordimer

(D) Salman Rushdie

43. In Keats’ poetic career, the most productive year was

(A) 1816

(B) 1817

(D) 1819

(Keats’s great creative outpouring came in the year of 1819, when he composed a group of five odes.)

44. Pope’s The Rape of the Lock was published in 1712 in

(A) three cantos

(B) four cantos

(D) two cantos

( Pope’s most famous poem, The Rape of the Lock (first published 1712; revised edition published 1714), is a fanciful and ingenious mock-heroic work based on a true story.)

45. Stephen Dedalus is a fictional character associated with

I. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

II. Sons and Lovers

III. Ulysses

IV. The Heart of Darkness

The correct combination for the above statement according to the code is

(A) I & II

(B) I, II & III

(D) I & III

(A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a semi autobiographical novel and Ulysses is focused on the events of a single day and related them to one another in thematic patterns based on Greek mythology. Both figure Stephen Dedalus as a lead role.)

46. In Moby Dick Captain Ahab falls for his

(A) ignorance

(B) pride

(D) drunkenness

(Becoming an isolated madman—and some critics have compared Ahab with Shakespeare’s King Lear—Ahab battles his evil forces alone and is destroyed as a result.)

47. The first complete printed English Bible was produced by

(A) William Tyndale

(B) William Caxton

(C) Miles Coverdale

(D) Roger Ascham

(In 1535 AD, Myles Coverdale's Bible; The first complete Bible wasprinted in the English Language)

48. Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Mary Barton is sub-titled

(A) The Two Nations

(B) A Tale of Manchester Life

(D) The Factory Girl

( Mary Barton sub-titled as A Tale of Manchester Life (1848) examines the schism between rich and poor in industrial Manchester, England, during the 1840s.)

49. Some of the Jacobean playwrights were prolific. One of them claimed to have written 200 plays. The playwright is

(A) John Ford

(B) Thomas Dekker

(D) Thomas Heywood

(Thomas Heywood (1574?-1641), according to his own testimony, wrote more than 220 plays for the English stage. Although not always tightly constructed and sometimes resorting to cliché, His plays exhibit a remarkable talent for dramatic and fanciful situations and pleasing an audience. Heywood's best plays are A Woman Killed with Kindness (performed 1603, printed 1607), The Fair Maid of the West(1631) and The English Traveller (1633). )

50. The concept of “Star-equilibrium” in connection with man-woman relationship appears in

(A) Women in Love

(B) Maurice

(D) The Old Wives’ Tales

( Women in Love discloses Lawrence’s assertion of establishing the

equilibrium Male / Female relationship.)

June 2010

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