1. To refer to the unresolvable difficulties a text may open up, Derrida makes use of the term :
(A) aporia
(B) difference
(C) erasure
(D) supplement
2. Who, among the following English playwrights, scripted the film Shakespeare in Love?
(A) Harold Pinter
(B) Alan Bennett
(C) Caryl Churchill
(D) Tom Stoppard
3. Arrange the following in the chronological order :
1. Mary Wollstonecraft’sVindication of the Rights of Women
2. Lyrical Ballads
3. French Revolution
4. Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
(A) 4, 3, 1, 2
(B) 3, 2, 1, 2
(C) 1, 2, 4, 3
(D) 2, 1, 3, 4
4. Which of the following employs a narrative structure in which the main action is relayed at second hand through an enclosing frame story ?
(A) Sons and Lovers
(B) Ulysses
(C) The Power and the Glory
(D) Heart of Darkness
5. The Irish Dramatic Movement was heralded by such figures as
(A) W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregoryand Edward Martyn
(B) Jonathan Swift and his contemporaries
(C) H. Drummond, Edward Irving and John Ervine
(D) Oscar Wilde and his contemporaries
6. Which poem by Chaucer was written on the death of Blanche, Wife of John of Gaunt ?
(A) Troilus and Criseyde
(B) The House of Fame
(C) The Book of Duchess
(D) The Legend of Good Women
7. The Tragedy of Ferrex and Porrex is the other title of
(A) Gorboduc
(B) Ralph Roister Doister
(C) Damon and Pythias
(D) Lamentable Tragedy
8. Who of the following poets is Australian ?
(A) Austin Clarke
(B) Judith Wright
(C) Edwin Muir
(D) Derek Walcott
9. “He found it [English] brick and left it marble”, remarked one great writer on another. Who were they ?
(A) Milton
(B) Dryden on Milton
(C) Johnson on Dryden
(D) Jonson on Shakespeare
10. Who, among the following, is a Nobel Laureate ?
(A) Tony Morrison
(B) Seamus Heaney
(C) Ted Hughes
(D) Geoffrey Hill
11. List – I List – II
II. “O Captain ! My Captain!” b. William Carlos Williams
III. “Two roads diverged in a wood….” c. Emily Dickinson
IV. “So much depends /upon” d. Walt Whitman
The correctly matched series would be :
(A) I-d; II-c; III-b; IV-a
(B) I-a; II-b; III-c; IV-d
(C) I-b; II-a; III-d; IV-c
(D) I-c; II-d; III-a; IV-b
12. The predominant tone and thrust of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” are
(A) comic
(B) solemn
(C) hortatory
(D) irony
13. I sit in one of the dives On Fifty Second Street
(A) bench
(B) night club
(C) house
(D) park
14. C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards were reputed in the 1930s for introducing
(A) Practical Criticism
(B) New Criticism
(C) Standard English Project
(D) Basic English Project
15. In which of the following works does Mrs. Malaprop appear ?
(A) The Rivals
(B) She Stoops to Conquer
(C) The Mysteries of Udolpho
(D) The Way of the World
16. Which of the following statements about Christopher Marlowe are true ?
I. Edward II was written in the last year of Marlowe’s life.
II. Many critics consider Doctor Faustus to be Marlowe’s best play.
III. His Spanish Tragedy comes a close second.
IV. Marlowe was less educated than Shakespeare.
(A) I and II are true.
(B) II and III are true.
(C) II and IV are true.
(D) III and IV are true.
17. “Art for Art’s Sake” became a rallying cry for
(A) the Aesthetes
(B) the Symbolists
(C) the Imagists
(D) the Art Noveau School
18. Confessions of an English Opium Eater is a literary work by
(A) S. T. Coleridge
(B) P. B. Shelley
(C) Thomas De Quincey
(D) Lord Byron
19. Which of the following statements about The Canterbury Tales is true ?
(A) “The General Prologue’ is appended to The Canterbury
(B) In all, Chaucer tells thirty tales in this work.
(C) The Canterbury Tales remained unfinished at the time of its author’s death.
(D) The Wife of Bath
20. Who, among the following, was a Catholic novelist, an Intelligence Officer, a film critic and set his fictions in far-away places wrecked by political conflicts ?
(A) Anthony Powell
(B) Evelyn Waugh
(C) William Golding
(D) Graham Greene
21. List – I List – II
1. Good sense is the body of poetic genius I. Brooks, “The Formalist Critic”
2. Poetry is the breath and a finer spirit of II. Sidney
all knowledge.
3. Literary criticism is a description III. Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads
and evaluation of its object
and evaluation of its object
4. Nature never set forth the earth in as rich IV. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria
a tapestry as diverse poets have done
1 2 3 4
(A) IV III I II
(B) II IV III I
(C) III II I IV
(D) IV II I III
22. In which of the following travel books does Mark Twain give an account of his visit to India
(A) A Tramp Abroad
(B) Roughing It
(C) The Innocents Abroad
(D) Following the Equator
23. William Blake’s famous poems such as “London
(A) Songs of Innocence
(B) Songs of Experience
(C) The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
(D) Vision of the Daughters of Albion
24. Who among the following English artists illustrated the novels of Dickens and Scott ?
(A) Richard Hogarth
(B) Joshua Reynolds
(C) George Cruishank
(D) John Tennial
25. The last of Gulliver’s Travels is to
(A) The Land of the Houyhnhnms
(B) The Land of Homosapiens
(C) The Land of the Hurricanes
(D) The Newfound Land
26. Madam Merle is a character in
(A) The Great Gatsby
(B) The Portrait of a Lady
(C) The Jungle
(D) The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
27. In which of the following scenes of The Waste Land do we have a departure from Standard English ?
(A) The typist scene
(B) The pub scene
(C) The hyacinth garden scene
(D) The Chapel Perilous scene
28. The words “If it were done when tis one, then twere well / It were done quickly…” are uttered by
(A) Hamlet
(B) Lear
(C) Othello
(D) Macbeth
29. John Dryden’s Absalom and Achotophel a
(A) religious tract
(B) political allegory
(C) comic verse epic
(D) comedy
30. The term ‘the comedy of menace’ isassociated with the early plays of
(A) Arnold
(B) John Arden
(C) Harold Pinter
(D) David Hare
31. Examine the following statements and identify one of them which is not true.
(A) Rudyard Kipling died in the year 1936.
(B) He was born in India but schooled in England
(C) He returned to India as a police constable in Burma
(D) He is the author of Jungle Book and Barrack Room Ballads.
32. What is the correct combination of the following ?
I. Balachandra Rajan a. The TamarindTree
II. R. K. Narayan b. The Coffer Dams
III. Kamala Markandaya c. The Dark Dancer
IV. Romen Basu d. The Dark Room
(A) I – c; II – d; III – b; IV – b
(B) I – d; II – a; III – b; IV – c
(C) I – c; II – a; III – d; IV – b
(D) I – d; II – c; III – a; IV – b
33. Name the poet who chooses his successor and the successor-poet whom Dryden satirises in his famous poem.
(A) James Shirley and Chris Shirley
(B) Henry Treece and Charles Triesten
(C) Richard Flecknoe and Thomas Shadwell
(D) Thomas Percy and Samuel Pepys
34. “If______ comes, can_______ be far behind ?” (Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind”)
(A) winter, spring
(B) autumn, summer
(C) wind, rains
(D) spring, winter
35. The following passages are the very first lines of well-known works. Match the lines and the works :
I. Let us go then, you and I…..
II. Call me Ishmael…..
III. When shall we three meet again ?
IV. He disappeared in the dead of winter
V. I wish either….begot me …..
a. Moby Dick
b. Macbeth
c. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
d. Tristram Shandy
e. “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”
(A) I-c; II-a; III-b; IV-e; V-d
(B) I-e; II-b; III-a; IV-c; V-d
(C) I-b; II-a; III-d; IV-e; V-c
(D) I-b; II-e; III-d; IV-c; V-a
36. Which of the following is not a revenge tragedy ?
(A) Hamlet
(B) The Duchess of Malfi
(C) Volpone
(D) Gorboduc
37. What is a neologism ?
(A) A word with roots in a nativelanguage
(B) A word whose meaning changes with every renewed use
(C) A word newly coined or used in a new sense
(D) An obsession with new words and phrases
38. Which of the following is not true of Edward Said’s Orientalism ?
(A) Makes use of Foucault’s concept of discursive formulation
(B) Is one of the founding texts of Postcolonial theory
(C) Makes use of Barthes’s concept of writerly text
(D) Utilises the Gramscian notion of hegemony
39. Thomas Love Peacock classified poetry into 4 periods. They are :
(A) carbon, gold, silver and brass
(B) brass, silver, gold and diamond
(C) iron, gold, silver and brass
(D) gold, platinum, silver and diamond
40. Which among the following novels has more than one ending ?
(A) Lucky Jim
(B) The Prime of Jean Brodie
(C) The French Lieutenant’s Woman
(D) The Clockwork Orange
41. “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was
made a man” is an example of
(A) Bathos
(B) Epistrophe
(C) Chiasmus
(D) Anti-climax
42. Which of the following statements is NOT correct ?
(A) Chaucer used the rhyme royal, a stanzaic form in some of his major poems.
(B) Chaucer was the author of The Legend of Good Women.
(C) Chaucer wrote in English when the court poetry of his day was written in Anglo-Norman and Latin.
(D) Chaucer wrote The Book Named the Governor
43. Material feminism studies inequality in terms of
(A) only gender
(B) only class
(C) both class and gender
(D) only patriarchy
44. Who among the following is not an Irish writer ?
(A) Oscar Wilde
(B) Oliver Goldsmith
(C) Edmund Burke
(D) Thomas Gray
45. Entries in The Diary of Samuel Pepys begins after
(A) The Restoration
(B) The Glorious Revolution
(C) The Reformation
(D) The French Revolution
46. In a poem, a line may either be endstopped or
(A) rhymed
(B) broken
(C) accented
(D) run-on
47. Which of the following poets wrote the essay “Naipaul’s India
(A) Kamala Das
(B) R. Parthasarthy
(C) A. K. Ramanujam
(D) Nissim Ezekiel
48. Match the following :
I. James Joyce 1. Peter Ackroyd
II. T. S. Eliot 2. James Boswell
III. Life of Johnson 3. Samuel Johnson
IV. Lives of 4. Poets 4. Richard Ellman
(A) I-3, II-4, III-1, IV-2
(B) I-4, II-1, III-2, IV-3
(C) I-1, II-2, III-3, IV-4
(D) I-2, II-3, III-1, IV-4
49. “The pen is mightier than the sword” is an example of
(A) simile
(B) image
(C) conceit
(D) metonymy
50. An epilogue is
(A) prefixed to a text which it introduces.
(B) suffixed to a text which it sums up or extends.
(C) a piece of writing or speech that formally begins a book.
(D) a piece of writing or speech that bears no relation to the text at hand.
