Here you will find 800 plus solved English Literature Past Papers Mcqs which helps you to prepare for the Tests of PPSC, SPSC, NTS, CSS PMS, KPPSC, NAVY, PAF, ARMY, POLICE departments.
601.Renaissance thinkers argued that women should be educated
a)just the same as men
b)with emphasis on science and mathematics
c)not at all
d)confined solely to music, dancing, and knitting
602.An important feature of the Renaissance was an emphasis on
a)alchemy and magic
b)the literature of Greece and Rome
c)chivalry of the Middle Ages
d)the teaching of St. Thomas Acquinas
603.Which was NOT a characteristic of the Renaissance?
a)emphasis on individuality
b)confidence in human rationality
c)the emergence of merchant oligarchies
d)the development of social insurance programs
604.The northern Renaissance differed from the Italian Renaissance
a)growth of religious activity among common people
b)earlier occurrence
c)greater appreciation of pagan writers
d)decline in the use of Latin
605.For ordinary women, the Renaissance
a)had very little impact
b)greatly improved the material conditions of their lives
c)worsened their social status
d)allowed them access to education for the first time
606.Thomas More’s Utopia placed the blame for society’s problems on
a)human nature
b)God’s will
c)society itself
d)the Church
Random MCQs
607. In which century was Piers Plowman written?
a)14th
b)12th
c)10th
d)11th
608. Geoffrey Chaucer served which king?
a)Richard III
b)James 1
c)Edward III
d)Henry II
609. The 18th century work ‘Tom Jones” was written by whom?
a)Samuel Johnson
b)Henry Fielding
c)John Donne
d)Tobias Smollett
610. In 1905, Virginia Woolf began to write for which publication?
a)The Time’s Literary Supplement
b)The Lady’s Home Journal
c)Strand Magazine
d)Reader Magazine
611. Joyce’s novel ‘Ulysses’ takes place over what period of time?
a)A week
b)24 hours
c)A lifetime
d)6 months
612. What was the nationality of Oscar Wilde?
a)Irish
b)Scottish
c)French
d)English
613. Who wrote the poem “Requiem”?
a)Robert Louis Stevenson
b)William Shakespeare
c)Samuel Johnson
d)John Milton
614. the prevailing feature of Chaucer’s humour is its
a)urbanity
b)crudity
c)triviality
d)sanctity
615. who is the first great English critic-poet?
a)Shakespeare
b)Arnold
c)Sir Philip Sidney
d)Chaucer
616. HYMN TO ADVERSITY is a poem by
a)Thomas gray
b)Alexander Pope
c)Edward gibbon
d)William Blake
617. Who wrote the poem ‘The Seven Ages’?
a)John Milton
b)Geoffrey Chaucer
c)William Shakespeare
d)Edward Gibbon
618. who write the story “Story Teller” ?
a)William Wordsworth
b)William Shakespeare
c)Thomas Grey
d)Saki
619. What happened in 1707 that would forever alter the relationship between England, Wales,
and Scotland?
a)the trial and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots
b)the Toleration Act
c)the failed invasion of the Spanish Armada
d)the Bishops’ War
e)the Act of Union
620. Which of the following was a major factor in the unprecedented economic wealth of Great
Britain during the eighteenth century?
a)formal diplomatic relations with China
b)the exploitation of colonial resources, labor, and the slave trade
c)the American and French revolutions
d)the creation of the bourgeois novel as a commodity
e)the union of England and Wales with Scotland
621. What was “restored” in 1660?
a)the monarchy, in the person of Charles II
b)the dominance of the Tory Party
c)the “Book of Common Prayer”
d)toleration of religious dissidents
e)Irish independence.
622. What literary work best captures a sense of the political turmoil, particularly regarding the
issue of religion, just after the Restoration?
a)Gay’s Beggar’s Opera
b)Butler’s Hudibras
c)Fielding’s Jonathan Wild
d)Pope’s Dunciad
e)Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel
623. Who was deposed from the English throne in the Glorious, or Bloodless, Revolution in 1688?
a)Elizabeth I
b)James II
c)George II
d)William and Mary
e)Anne
624. Who became the first “prime minister” of Great Britain in the reign of George II?
a)Henry St. John
b)Robert Harley
c)John Churchill
d)Robert Walpole
e)Matthew Prior
625. In the late seventeenth century, a “battle of the books” erupted between which two groups?
a)abolitionists and enthusiasts for slavery
b)round-earthers and flat-earthers
c)the Welsh and the Scots
d)champions of ancient and modern learning
e)Oxfordians and Baconians
626. Which of the following best describes the doctrine of empiricism?
a)All knowledge is derived from experience.
b)Human perceptions are constructed and reflect structures of political power.
c)The search for essential or ultimate principles of reality.
d)The sensory world is an illusion.
e)God is the center of an ordered and just universe.
627. Against which of the following principles did Jonathan Swift inveigh?
a)theoretical science
b)metaphysics
c)abstract logical deductions
d)a and b only
e)a, b, and c
628. Whose great Dictionary, published in 1755, included more than 114,000 quotations?
a)William Hogarth
b)Jonathan Swift
c)Samuel Johnson
d)Ben Jonson
e)James Boswell
629. According to Samuel Johnson, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for…:
a)love.”
b)honor.”
c)money.”
d)his party.”
e)fun.”
630. What name is given to the English literary period that emulated the Rome of Virgil, Horace,
and Ovid?
a)Augustan
b)Metaphysical
c)Romantic
d)Neo-Romantic
e)Caesarian
631. Horace’s doctrine “ut pictura poesis” was interpreted to mean:
a)A picture is worth a thousand words.
b)Poetry is the supreme artistic form.
c)Art should hold a mirror up to nature.
d)Poetry ought to be a visual as well as a verbal art.
e)Paintings of poets should be prized over those of kings.
632. What was most frequently considered a source of pleasure and an object of inquiry by
Augustan poets?
a)civilization
b)woman
c)God
d)alcohol
e)nature
633. What word did writers in this period use to express quickness of mind, inventiveness, a
knack for conceiving images and metaphors and for perceiving resemblances between things
apparently unlike?
a)wit
b)sprezzatura
c)naturalism
d)gusto
e)metaphysics
634. Which of the following was probably not a stock phrase in eighteenth-century poetry?
a)verdant mead
b)checkered shade
c)simian rivalry
d)shining sword
e)bounding main
635. Which metrical form was Pope said to have brought to perfection?
a)the heroic couplet
b)blank verse
c)free verse
d)the ode
e)the spondee
636. Which poet, critic and translator brought England a modern literature between 1660 and
1700?
a)Addison
b)Bunyan
c)Crabbe
d)Dryden
e)Equiano
637. Which of the following is not an example of Restoration comedy?
a)Etherege’s The Man of Mode
b)Wycherley’s The Country Wife
c)Behn’s The Rover
d)Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus
e)Congreve’s Love for Love
638. Which group of intellectual women established literary clubs of their own around 1750 under
the leadership of Elizabeth Vesey and Elizabeth Montagu?
a)the Behnites
b)the bluestockings
c)the coteries of plenty
d)the Pre-Raphaelites
e)the tattlers and spectators
639. Which work exposes the frivolity of fashionable London?
a)Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
b)Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
c)Behn’s Oroonoko
d)Richardson’s Clarissa
e)Pope’s The Rape of the Lock
640. What London locale, where many poor writers lived, became synonymous with hacks and
scandal mongers?
a)Elephant and Castle
b)Grub Street
c)Covent Garden
d)Cheapside
e)Piccadilly Circus
641. With its forbidden themes of incest, murder, necrophilia, atheism, and torments of sexual
desire, Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, created which literary genre?
a)the revenge tragedy
b)the Gothic romance
c)the epistolary novel
d)the comedy of manners
e)the mystery play
642. Which of the following is not indebted to the Gothic genre?
a)William Beckford’s Vathek
b)Matthew Lewis’s The Monk
c)Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Randsom
d)Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian
e)William Godwin’s Caleb Williams
643. While compiling what sort of book did Samuel Richardson conceive of the idea for
hisPamela, or Virtue Rewarded?
a)a history of everyday life
b)an instructional manual for manners
c)a book of devotion
d)a book of model letters
e)a chapbook
644. Who was the ancient Gaelic warrior-bard considered by Napoleon and Thomas Jefferson to
have been greater than Homer?
a)Macpherson
b)Merlin
c)Decameron
d)Taliesin
e)Ossian
645. John Donne is, in some sense, the originator of metaphysical poetry. But who is most
closely associated with the “founding” of neoclassical poetry?
a)William Wordsworth
b)Alexander Pope
c)Ben Jonson
d)George Herbert
646. Which of the following is not generally considered to be a neoclassical poet?
a)John Dryden
b)Henry Vaughan
c)Alexander Pope
d)Ben Jonson
647. Which of the following is not a common feature of neoclassical poetry?
a)Imitation of classical forms and allusion to mythology
b)An effort to represent human nature
c)Use of the rhymed couplet
d)Fantastic comparisons
648. Neoclassicists tended to view poetry as the result of genius overflowing from the mind out
onto the page. They also considered poetry to be an expression of the individual, inner self.
a)True
b)False
649. Most neoclassical poets viewed the world in terms of a strictly ordered hierarchy. What was
this hierarchy called?
a)The Way of the World
b)The Foundational Ladder
c)The Order of Angels
d)The Great Chain of Being
650. He wrote both religious and secular poetry. One of his poems urged virgins to make the
most of their time.
a)Ben Jonson
b)Alexander Pope
c)Robert Herrick
d)John Dryden
651. Why didn’t Alexander Pope attend an English university?
a)He lived in Italy until the age of 27
b)Asthma, headaches, and spinal deformity made him an invalid
c)He was a Catholic, and therefore forbidden from attending
d)He just wasn’t bright enough
652. Alexander Pope coined many a modern day cliché. Which of the following did not originate
with him?
a)To err is human, to forgive divine
b)Let not the sun go down upon your wrath
c)A little learning is a dangerous thing
d)Fools rush in where angels fear to tread
653. John Dryden wrote “Absalom and Achitophel.” Who was Achitophel, historically speaking?
a)King David’s son
b)A Judge of Israel
c)Bathsheba’s first husband
d)Absalom’s advisor
654. Who did Dryden use Absalom to represent, allegorically, in his satire “Absalom and
Achitophel”?
a)The Duke of Monmouth
b)Charles II
c)The Earl of Shaftesbury
d)Cromwell
655. Complete this famous quote by John Dryden: “Who think too little, and who talk too ____”
a)often
b)long
c)much
d)fast
656. What Pope poem begins, “In these deep solitudes and awful cells, / Where heav’nly-pensive
contemplation dwells, / And ever-musing melancholy reigns; / What means this tumult in a
vestal’s veins?”
a)The Rape of the Lock
b)Solitude: An Ode
c)The Dunciad
d)Eloisa to Abelard
657. Pope made money by selling subscriptions to his translation of this classical epic.
a)The Bahagavad Gita
b)The Odyssey
c)The Illiad
d)The Aeneid
658. This famous neoclassical poet wrote on profound themes such as death, but he also had a
lighter side. He once wrote an ode to a cat drowned in a tub of gold fishes.
a)Alexander Pope
b)William Collins
c)Thomas Gray
d)Ben Jonson
659. His “To Penthurst” is considered to be one of the primary texts of the neoclassical
movement.
a)Sir John Denham
b)Ben Jonson
c)Thomas Carew
d)John Dryden
660. Sir John Denham commemorated this poet, referring to him as “Old Chaucer” who, “like the
morning star”, descends “to the shades,” so that “Darkness again the Age invades.”
a)William Shakespeare
b)John Donne
c)Abraham Cowley
d)John Dryden
661. What mock epic begins: “What dire offence from am’rous causes springs, / What mighty
contests rise from trivial things”?
a)Dryden’s “Mac Flecknoe”
b)Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock”
c)Pope’s “The Dunciad”
d)Dryden’s “Absalom and Achitophel”
662.When the Parliament, controlled by the puritans, took power in England, one of the acts that
greatly influenced Literature of that time was
a)The closing of theatres
b)The return of the King.
c)King Arthurs’ dead
d)King to exile
663:Who wrote: “Reader, I married him.”?
a)Jane Austen
b)Charlotte Bronte
c)Edith Wharton
d)Emily Bronte
664.Who wrote: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”?
a)William Butler Yeats
b)James Joyce
c)Thomas Moore
d)Edgar Allan Poe
665.In which work do you read: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”?
a)The Canturbury Tales
b)The Dark Angel
c)The Wild Swans of Coole
d)The Second Coming
666.Who wrote: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”?
a)John Keats
b)William Shakespeare
c)Samuel Butler
d)Samuel Taylor Coleridge
667.In which work do you read: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”?
a)Adonais
b)Bright Star
c)Ode on a Grecian Urn
d)La Bell Dame Sans Merci
668.Who wrote: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure dome decree…”?
a)Samuel Taylor Coleridge
b)Robert Browning
c)John Keats
d)Walt Whitman
669.In which work do you read: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure dome decree…”?
a)Kubla Khan
b)Hellas
c)The Phoenix and the Turtle
d)The Castaway
670.A side note: Which drug/substance was Samuel Taylor Coleridge addicted to?
a)Heroine
b)Cocaine
c)Alcohol
d)Opium
671.Who wrote: “I would prefer not to.”?
a)Edgar Allan Poe
b)Herman Melville
c)Thomas Gray
d)Henry David Thoreau
672.Who wrote: “There can be no freedom or beauty about a home life that depends on
borrowing and debt.”?
a)Henry David Thoreau
b)Benjamin Franklin
c)Robert Browning
d)Henrik Ibsen
673.In which work do you read: “There can be no freedom or beauty about a home life that
depends on borrowing and debt.”?
a)A Doll’s House
b)Riders to the Sea
c)A Handful of Dust
d)The Fatal Curiosity
674.Who wrote: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings / Look on my works ye mighty, and
despair!”?
a)Lord Byron
b)Percy Bysshe Shelley
c)William Woodsworth
d)Emily Dickinson
675.In which work do you read: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings / Look on my works ye
mighty, and despair!”?
a)The Man of Feeling
b)In Memoriam
c)Song to Aella
d)Ozymandias
676.Who wrote: “That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall / looking as if she were alive.”?
a)Lord Byron
b)Oscar Wilde
c)Robert Browning
d)William Wordsworth
677.In which work do you read: “That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall /looking as if she
were alive.”?
a)Porphyria’s Lover
b)My Last Duchess
c)The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
d)Fra Lippo Lippi
678.Who wrote: “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”?
a)William Carlos Williams
b)T.S. Eliot
c)Ernest Hemingway
d)Hart Crane
679.In which work do you read: “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”?
a)Lovesong of J.Alfred Prufrock
b)Sonnets from the Portuguese
c)Prelude
d)The Last Decalogue
680.A “classic” book is usually one that possesses what quality?
a)It has universal appeal.
b)It can stand the test of time.
c)It makes connections.
d)All of the above.
681. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens involves which two cities?
a)London and Rome
b)Paris and Rome
c)London and Paris
d)Berlin and London
682.The Catcher in the Rye takes place in what city?
a)New York City
b)Stanford, Connecticut
c)Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
d)Boston, Massachusetts
683.Which book was not written by Jane Austen?
a)Sense and Suspensibility
b)Emma
c)Pride and Prejudice
d)Mansfield Park
684.What is Shakespeare’s longest play?
a)Taming of the Shrew
b)Romeo and Juliet
c)A Midsummer Night’s Dream
d)Hamlet
685)The poem ‘The Battle of Maldon’ celebrates events which took place in the 10th century, but
who was it between
a)Danes and English
b)Dutch and English
c)Normans and English
d)French and English
686)The Faerie Queene was written during the reign of which monarch?
a)James I
b)Mary Tudor
c)Elizabeth Tudor
d)Henry VII
687)Becky sharp was the heroine in which novel?
a)Vanity Fair
b)Sense and Sensibility
c)Pride and Prejudice
d)Mansfield Park
688) How many children were there in the Bronte family?
a)3
b)4
c)5
d)6
689)Who composed The Preludes?
a)S T Coleridge
b)William Wordsworth
c)William Shakespeare
d)William Blake
690)Who is termed as “The Morning Star of Renaissance”?
a)Spenser
b)John Gower
c)Chaucer
d)Langland
691)Who began the tradition of revenge play ?
a)Goorge peele
b)Samuel daniel
c)Phineas fletcher
d)Thomas kyd
692)How many lines are there in a Sonnet?
a)10
b)16
c)14
d)22
693)What are the names of the two feuding families in Romeo and Juliet?
a)Capulet And Montague
b)Breslow and Felsher
c)Fuech and Goodside
d)Dawson and Hurley
694)Which bird did the Ancient Mariner kill?
a)Seagull
b)Albatross
c)Humming Bird
d)Crow
695)What was the name of the Bronte sister’s only brother?
a)Anderson
b)Branwell
c)Richard
d)Pearson
696)In which county was Jane Austin born?
a)Sussex
b)Hampshire
c)Yorkshire
d)Norfolk
697)In which Dickens novel does Pip appear?
a)Bleak House
b)Great Expectations
c)A Tale of Two Cities
d)The Pickwick Papers
698. Which of the following English groups were supportive of the French Revolution during its
early years?
a) Tories
b) Republicans
c) Liberals
d) Radicals
e) both c and d
699. Which statement(s) about inventions during the Industrial Revolution are true?
a) Hand labor became less common with the invention of power-driven machinery.
b) Velcro replaced buttons and snaps.
c) Steam, as opposed to wind and water, became a primary source of power.
d) The invention of textile processing machines marked the end of the Industrial Revolution.
e) both a and c
700. What is the name for the process of dividing land into privately owned agricultural holdings?
a) partition
b) segregation
c) enclosure
d) division
e) subtraction
701. Which social philosophy, dominant during the Industrial Revolution, dictated that only the
free operation of economic laws would ensure the general welfare and that the government
should not interfere in any person’s pursuit of their personal interests?
a) economic independence
b) the Rights of Man
c) laissez-faire
d) enclosure
e) lazy government
702. What served as the inspiration for P. B. Shelley’s poems to the working classes A Song:
“Men of England” and England in 1819?
a) the organization of a working class men’s choral group in Southern England
b) the Battle of Waterloo
c) the Peterloo Massacre
d) the storming of the Bastille
e) the first Reform Bill, passed in 1832, which aimed to bring greater Parliamentary
representation to the working classes
703. Who applied the term “Romantic” to the literary period dating from 1785 to 1830?
a) Wordsworth because he wanted to distinguish his poetry and the poetry of his friends from
that of the ancien régime, especially satire
b) English historians half a century after the period ended
c) “The Satanic School” of Byron, Percy Shelley, and their followers
d) Oliver Goldsmith in The Deserted Village (1770)
e) Harold Bloom
704. Which poets collaborated on the Lyrical Ballads of 1798, thus demonstrating the “spirit of
the age,” which, in an era of revolutionary thinking, depended on a belief in the limitless
possibilities of the poetic imagination?
a) Mary Wollstonecraft and William Blake
b) Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Percy B. Shelley
c) William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
d) Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt
e) Dorothy Wordsworth and Sally Ashburner
705. Which of the following became the most popular Romantic poetic form, following on
Wordsworth’s claim that poetic inspiration is contained within the inner feelings of the individual
poet as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”?
a) the lyric poem written in the first person
b) the sonnet
c) doggerel rhyme
d) the political tract
e) the ode
706. Romantic poetry about the natural world uses descriptions of nature _________.
a) for their own sake; to merely describe natural phenomenon
b) to depict a metaphysical concept of nature by endowing it with traits normally associated with
humans
c) as a means to demonstrate and discuss the processes of human thinking
d) symbolically to suggest that natural objects correspond to an inner, spiritual world
e) b, c, and d
707. How would “Natural Supernaturalism” be best characterized as a Romantic notion
introduced by Carlyle?
a) a form of animism in which objects in the natural world are believed to be inhabited by spirits
b) a spontaneous belief in the supernatural based upon a surprise encounter with a supernatural
being
c) a process by which things that are familiar and thought to be ordinary are made to
appear miraculous and new to our eyes
d) the experience of hallucinating contact with the supernatural world when taking opium
e) an oxymoron that nobody understood and that cannot be explained in the context of a
discussion of Romantic literature
708. Which setting could you not imagine a work of Romantic literature employing?
a) a field of daffodils
b) the “Orient”
c) a graveyard
d) a medieval castle
e) All of the above would be appropriate settings for Romantic literature.
709. Which poet asserted in practice and theory the value of representing rustic life and
language as well as social outcasts and delinquents not only in pastoral poetry, common before
this poet’s time, but also as the major subject and medium for poetry in general?
a) William Blake
b) Alfred Lord Tennyson
c) Samuel Johnson
d) William Wordsworth
e) Mary Wollstonecraft
710. What is the term we now use for what the Romantics called “mesmerism,” one of the
“occult” practices that allowed people to explore altered states of consciousness?
a) smoking opium
b) hypnotism
c) psychoanalysis
d) dream interpretation
e) Satanism
711. Romantic poets would have enjoyed, agreed with, and perhaps written about which of the
following figures as depicted?
a) Goethe’s Faust in Faust, who is sinful because he attempts to exceed the bounds of human knowledge by making
a pact with the devil but is nonetheless redeemed in his striving to break free of the bounds of mortality
b) Icarus, who is killed in attempting to fly because only Gods have the power to fly and mortals
must be taught the limitations of human existence
c) Prometheus, who succeeds in stealing fire from the Gods and thereby surpasses the limitations
placed on humans by the Gods
d) all of the above
e) a and c only: Romantics were more interested in representations of humans as
they were able to exceed their human limitations.
712. Which of the following best describes the sort of language and tone most often used when
Romantic writers discuss the French Revolution?
a) snide indifference
b) biblical reverence
c) condemning censure
d) satirical derision
e) none of the above: Romantic writers had no interest in the French Revolution.
713. Which of the following descriptions would not have applied to any Romantic text?
a) a spiritual autobiography written in an epic style
b) a lyric poem written in the first person
c) a comedy of manners
d) a political tract demanding labor reform
e) a novel written about the intellectual and emotional development of a monster created by a
scientist
714. Which of the following poems describe or celebrate an apocalyptic regeneration of humanity
and the world effected by the creative capacity of the human mind?
a) Coleridge’s Dejection: An Ode
b) Blake’s “Prophetic Books”
c) Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus
d) Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman
e) all but d
715. Which sorts of political reform took place during the Romantic period?
a) Parliamentary reform, increasing representation of the working classes
b) Labor reform, improving working conditions for industrial laborers
c) Voting reform, extending suffrage to men and women
d) Educational reform, producing a dramatic increase in literacy
e) a and d only: Significant labor and voting reform would have to wait for the
Victorian era and later.
716. Which of the following factors contributed to literature becoming a profitable business?
a) Commercial and public lending libraries were established in order to provide for an enlarged reading public.
b) Education reform increased literacy, thus creating a demand for commercial and public lending
libraries.
c) A new aesthetics of valuing literature for its own sake emphasized reading for pleasure.
d) People had more leisure time to read and more disposable income to spend on reading
materials.
e) all of the above
717. Which of the following periodical publications (reviews and magazines) appeared in the
Romantic era?
a) London Magazine
b) The Spectator
c) The Edinburgh Review
d) The Tatler
e) a and c only
718. According to a theater licensing act, repealed in 1843, what was meant by “legitimate”
drama?
a) The dramaturge and playwright had to be related.
b) All of the actors were male.
c) All of the actors were British.
d) The play was spoken.
e) The play had to be a full musical or produced in full pantomime.
719. The Gothic novel, a popular genre for the Romantics, exemplified in the writing of Horace
Walpole and Ann Radcliffe, could contain which of the following elements?
a) supernatural phenomenon
b) perversion and sadism, often involving a maiden’s persecution
c) plots of mystery and terror set in inhospitable, sullen landscapes
d) secret passages, decaying mansions, gloomy castles, and dark dungeons
e) all of the above
720. Given the popularity of the Gothic novel and the novel of purpose, which of the following
novelists wrote fiction that is closer in subject matter to the novel of manners than it is to the
writing of her own era?
a) Fanny Burney
b) Mary Wollstonecraft
c) Anna Letitia Barbauld
d) Jane Austen
e) Mary Shelley
721. Which two writers can be described as writing historical novels?
a) Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley
b) William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
c) Sir Walter Scott and Maria Edgeworth
d) Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë
e) none of the above: Romantic novelists never wrote historical novels.
722. Which of the following texts addresses class as a social and economic reality?
a) William Godwin’s Inquiry Concerning Political Justice
b) Percy Bysshe Shelley’s England in 1819
c) William Godwin’s Caleb Williams
d) Sir Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian
e) all of the above
723. Which Romantic writer(s) wrote in more than one of these popular literary forms: essay,
novel, drama, poetry?
a) Percy Bysshe Shelley
b) William Wordsworth
c) George Gordon, Lord Byron
d) Samuel Taylor Coleridge
e) all of the above
724. Which of the following would not have been an appropriate protagonist for a Romantic
literary text?
a) a French revolutionary
b) a Greek or Roman mythological figure
c) a monster fabricated in a laboratory
d) a vagrant, gypsy, or any other itinerant social outcast
e) All would have been appropriate protagonists for a Romantic literary text.
725. In which of the following works is the social outcast represented and addressed?
a) Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein
b) William Worsworth’s Lyrical Ballads
c) Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
d) John Keats’s “To Autumn”
e) all but d
726. Looking to the ancient past, many Romantic poets identified with the figure of the
a) troubadour
b) skald
c) chorister
d) minstrel
e) bard
727. What did Byron deride with his scathing reference to “‘Peddlers,’ and ‘Boats,’ and
‘Wagons’!”?
a) the neo-classical influence of Pope and Dryden
b) the clumsiness of Shakespeare’s plots
c) the Orientalist fantasies of Coleridge
d) Wordsworth’s devotion to the ordinary and everyday
e) Blake’s apocalyptic visions
728. Wordsworth described all good poetry as
a) the rhythmic expression of moral intuition
b) the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings
c) the polite patter of a corrupted age
d) the divine gift of grace
e) the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
729. Which poet asserted in practice and theory the value of representing rustic life and
language as well as social outcasts and delinquents not only in pastoral poetry, common before
this poet’s time, but also as the major subject and medium for poetry in general?
a) William Blake
b) Alfred Lord Tennyson
c) Samuel Johnson
d) William Wordsworth
e) Mary Wollstonecraft
730. Which of the following was a typically Romantic means of achieving visionary states?
a) opium
b) dreams
c) childhood
d) a and b
e) a, b and c
731. Which philosopher had a particular influence on Coleridge?
a) Aristotle
b) Duns Scotus
c) David Hume
d) Immanuel Kant
e) Bertrand Russell
732. Which of the following was not considered a type of the alienated, romantic visionary?
a) Prometheus
b) Satan
c) Cain
d) Napoleon
e) George III
733. Who remained without the vote following the Reform Bill of 1832?
a) about half of middle class men
b) almost all working class men
c) all women
d) b and c
e) a, b and c
734. Which of the following charges were commonly leveled at the novel by its detractors at the
dawn of the Romantic era?
a) Too many of its readers were women.
b) It required less skill than other genres.
c) It lacked the classical pedigree of poetry and drama.
d) Too many of its authors were women.
e) all of the above
735. Which chilling novel of surveillance and entrapment had the alternative title Things as They
Are?
a) Jane Austen’s Emma
b) Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
c) William Godwin’s Caleb Williams
d) Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley
e) Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto
736. Which of the following is a typically Romantic poetic form?
a) the fractal
b) the figment
c) the fragment
d) the aubade
e) the comedy of manners
737. Who exemplified the role of the “peasant poet”?
a) John Clare
b) John Keats
c) Robert Burns
d) a and c only
e) b and c only
738. Who in the Romantic period developed a new novelistic language for the workings of the
mind in flux?
a) Maria Edgeworth
b) Sir Walter Scott
c) Thomas De Quincey
d) Joanna Baillie
e) Jane Austen
739. Which ruler’s reign marks the approximate beginning and end of the Victorian era?
a) King Henry VIII
b) Queen Elizabeth I
c) Queen Victoria
d) King John
e) all of the above, in that order, with Victoria’s reign marking the most pivotal period for
England’s colonial efforts in India, Africa, and the West Indies
740. Which city became the perceived center of Western civilization by the middle of the
nineteenth century?
a) Paris
b) Tokyo
c) London
d) Amsterdam
e) New York
741. By 1890, what percentage of the earth’s population was subject to Queen Victoria?
a) 1%
b) 10%
c) 15%
d) 25%
e) 95%
742. What did Thomas Carlyle mean by “Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe”?
a) Britain’s preeminence as a global power will depend on mastery of foreign languages.
b) Even a foreign author is better than a homegrown scoundrel.
c) Abandon the introspection of the Romantics and turn to the higher moral purpose
found in Goethe.
d) In a carefully veiled critique of the monarchy, Byron and Goethe stand in symbolically for
e) Leave England and emigrate to Germany.
743. To whom did the Reform Bill of 1832 extend the vote on parliamentary representation?
a) the working classes
b) women
c) the lower middle classes
d) slaves
e) conservative landowners
744. Elizabeth Barrett’s poem The Cry of the Children is concerned with which major issue
attendant on the Time of Troubles during the 1830s and 1840s?
a) women’s rights and suffrage
b) child labor
c) Chartism
d) the prudishness and old-fashioned ideals of her fellow Victorians
e) insurrection in the colonies
745. Who were the “Two Nations” referred to in the subtitle of Disraeli’s Sybil (1845)?
a) the rich and the poor
b) Anglicans and Methodists
c) England and Ireland
d) Britain and Germany
e) the industrial north and the agrarian south
746. Which of the following novelists best represents the mid-Victorian period’s contentment with
the burgeoning economic prosperity and decreased restiveness over social and political change?
a) Anthony Trollope
b) Charles Dickens
c) John Ruskin
d) Friedrich Engels
e) Oscar Wilde
747. Which event did not occur as part of the rise of the British Empire under Queen Victoria?
a) Between 1853 and 1880, 2,466,000 emigrants left Britain, many bound for the colonies.
b) In 1876, Queen Victoria was named empress of India.
c) To save costs and maximize profits, the day-to-day government of India was
transferred from Parliament to the private East India Company.
d) From 1830 to 1870, the sum total of investments abroad by British capitalists had risen from
£300 billion to £800 billion.
e) In 1867 the Canadian provinces were unified into the Dominion of Canada.
748. What does the phrase “White Man’s Burden,” coined by Kipling, refer to?
a) Britain’s manifest destiny to colonize the world
b) the moral responsibility to bring civilization and Christianity to the peoples of the
world
c) the British need to improve technology and transportation in other parts of the world
d) the importance of solving economic and social problems in England before tackling the world’s
problems
e) a Chartist sentiment
749. Which of the following best defines Utilitarianism?
a) a farming technique aimed at maximizing productivity with the fewest tools
b) a moral arithmetic, which states that all humans aim to maximize the greatest
pleasure to the greatest number
c) a critical methodology stating that all words have a single meaningful function within a given
piece of literature
d) a philosophy dictating that we should only keep what we use on a daily basis.
e) a form of nonconformism
750. Which of the following discoveries, theories, and events contributed to Victorians feeling
less like they were a uniquely special, central species in the universe and more isolated?
a) geology
b) evolution
c) discoveries in astronomy about stellar distances
d) all of the above
e) tractarianism
751. Which of the following contributed to the growing awareness in the Late Victorian Period of
the immense human, economic, and political costs of running an empire?
a) the India Mutiny in 1857
b) the Boer War in the south of Africa
c) the Jamaica Rebellion in 1865
d) the Irish Question
e) all of the above
752. Which of the following authors promoted versions of socialism?
a) William Morris
b) John Ruskin
c) Edward FitzGerald
d) Karl Marx
e) all but c
753. Which best describes the general feeling expressed in literature during the last decade of
the Victorian era?
a) studied melancholy and aestheticism
b) sincere earnestness and Protestant zeal
c) raucous celebration mixed with self-congratulatory sophistication
d) paranoid introspection and cryptic dissent
e) all of the above
754. Which of the following acts were not passed during the Victorian era?
a) a series of Factory Acts
b) the Custody Act
c) the Women’s Suffrage Act
d) the Married Women’s Property Rights Acts
e) the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act
755. Which contemporary discussions on women’s rights did Tennyson’s The Princess address?
a) the grueling working conditions for women in textile factories
b) the debate on women’s suffrage
c) the need to enlarge and improve educational opportunities for women, resulting in
the establishment of the first women’s college in London
d) the question of monarchical succession and if a woman should hold royal power
e) the establishment of a civil divorce court
756. Fill in the blanks from Tennyson’s The Princess.
Man for the field and woman for the _____:
Man for the sword and for the _____ she:
Man with the head and woman with the _____:
Man to command and woman to _____.
a) crop; scabbard; foot; agree
b) throne; scepter; soul; decree
c) school; scalpel; pen; set free
d) hearth; needle; heart; obey
e) field; sword; head; command
757. Which of the following Victorian writers regularly published their work in periodicals?
a) Thomas Carlyle
b) Matthew Arnold
c) Charles Dickens
d) Elizabeth Barrett Browning
e) all of the above: (In addition to short fiction, most Victorian novels appeared
serialized in periodicals.)
758. What best describes the subject of most Victorian novels?
a) the representation of a large and comprehensive social world in realistic detail
b) a surrealist exploration of alternate states of consciousness
c) a mythic dream world
d) the attempt of a protagonist to define his or her place in society
e) a and d
759. Why did the novel seem a genre particularly well-suited to women?
a) It did not carry the burden of an august tradition like poetry.
b) It was a popular form whose market women could enter easily.
c) It was seen as a frivolous form where one shouldn’t make serious statements about society.
d) It often concerned the domestic world with which women were familiar.
e) all but c
760. What was the relationship between Victorian poets and the Romantics?
a) The Romantics remained largely forgotten until their rediscovery by T. S. Eliot in the 1920s.
b) The Victorians were disgusted by the immorality and narcissism of the Romantics.
c) The Romantics were seen as gifted but crude artists belonging to a distant, semi-barbarous
age.
d) The Victorians were strongly influenced by the Romantics and experienced a sense
of belatedness.
e) The Victorians were aware of no distinction between themselves and the Romantics; the
distinction was only created by critics in the twentieth century.
761. Experimentation in which of the following areas of poetic expression characterize Victorian
poetry and allow Victorian poets to represent psychology in a different way?
a) the use of pictorial description to construct visual images to represent the emotion or situation
of the poem
b) sound as a means to express meaning
c) perspective, as in the dramatic monologue
d) all of the above
e) none of the above: Victorians were not experimental in their poetry.
762. What type of writing did Walter Pater define as “the special and opportune art of the
modern world”?
a) the novel
b) nonfiction prose
c) the lyric
d) comic drama
e) transcripts of Parliamentary debates
763. What factors contributed to the increased popularity of nonfiction prose?
a) a new market position for nonfiction writing and an exalted sense of the didactic
function of the writer
b) a Puritanical distrust of fictions and a thirst for trivia
c) the forbiddingly high cost of three-volume novels and the difficulty of finding poetry in
bookshops outside of London
d) the deconstruction of the truth-fiction dichotomy and an accompanying relativistic sense that
every opinion was of equal value
e) c and d
764. For what do Matthew Arnold’s moral investment in nonfiction and Walter Pater’s aesthetic
investment together pave the way?
a) a renewed secularism in the twentieth century
b) modern literary criticism
c) late–nineteenth-century and early–twentieth-century satirical drama
d) the surrealist movement
e) none of the above: Victorian prose was mostly forgotten until recently and had little impact on
literature of or after its time.
765. Which of the following comic playwrights made fun of Victorian values and pretensions?
a) W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
b) Oscar Wilde
c) George Bernard Shaw
d) Robert Corrigan
e) all but d
20th Century
766. Which of the following phrases best characterizes the late-nineteenth century aesthetic
movement which widened the breach between artists and the reading public, sowing the seeds of
modernism?
a) art for intellect’s sake
b) art for God’s sake
c) art for the masses
d) art for art’s sake
e) art for sale
767. What was the impact on literature of the Education Act of 1870, which made elementary
schooling compulsory?
a) the emergence of a mass literate population at whom a new mass-produced
literature could be directed
b) a new market for basic textbooks which paid better than sophisticated novels or plays
c) a popular thirst for the “classics,” driving contemporary writers to the margins
d) a, b and c
e) none of the above
768. Which text exemplifies the anti-Victorianism prevalent in the early twentieth century?
a) Eminent Victorians
b) Jungle Books
c) Philistine Victorians
d) The Way of All Flesh
e) both a and d
769. With which enormously influential perspective or practice is the early-twentieth-century
thinker Sigmund Freud associated?
a) eugenics
b) psychoanalysis
c) phrenology
d) anarchism
e) all of the above
770. Which thinker had a major impact on early-twentieth-century writers, leading them to re-
imagine human identity in radically new ways?
a) Sigmund Freud
b) Sir James Frazer
c) Immanuel Kant
d) Friedrich Nietzsche
e) all but c
771. Which scientific or technological advance did not take place in the first fifteen years of the
twentieth century?
a) Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity
b) wireless communication across the Atlantic
c) the creation of the internet
d) the invention of the airplane
e) the mass production of cars
772. Which best describes the imagist movement, exemplified in the work of T. E. Hulme and
Ezra Pound?
a) a poetic aesthetic vainly concerned with the way words appear on the page
b) an effort to rid poetry of romantic fuzziness and facile emotionalism, replacing it
with a precision and clarity of imagery
c) an attention to alternate states of consciousness and uncanny imagery
d) the resurrection of Romantic poetic sensibility
e) a neo-platonic poetics that stresses the importance of poetry aiming to achieve its ideal “form”
773. What characteristics of seventeenth-century Metaphysical poetry sparked the enthusiasm of
modernist poets and critics?
a) its intellectual complexity
b) its union of thought and passion
c) its uncompromising engagement with politics
d) a and b
e) a,b, and c
774. In the 1930s, younger writers such as W. H. Auden were more _______ but less _______
than older modernists such as Eliot and Pound.
a) popular; reverenced
b) brash; confident
c) radical; inventive
d) anxious; haunting
e) spiritual; orthodox
775. Which poet could be described as part of “The Movement” of the 1950s?
a) Thom Gunn
b) Dylan Thomas
c) Pablo Picasso
d) Philip Larkin
e) both a and d
776. Which British dominion achieved independence in 1921-22, following the Easter Rising of
1916?
a) the southern counties of Ireland
b) Canada
c) Ulster
d) India
e) Ghana
777. Which of the following writers did not come from Ireland?
a) W. B. Yeats
b) James Joyce
c) Seamus Heaney
d) Oscar Wilde
e) none of the above; all came from Ireland
778. Which phrase indicates the interior flow of thought employed in high-modern literature?
a) automatic writing
b) confused daze
c) total recall
d) stream of consciousness
e) free association
779. Which of the following is not associated with high modernism in the novel?
a) stream of consciousness
b) free indirect style
c) irresolute open endings
d) the “mythical method”
e) narrative realism
780. Which novel did T. S. Eliot praise for utilizing a new “mythical method” in place of the old
“narrative method” and demonstrates the use of ancient mythology in modernist fiction to think
about “making the modern world possible for art”?
a) Virginia Woolf’s The Waves
b) Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
c) James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake
d) E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India
e) James Joyce’s Ulysses
781. Who wrote the dystopian novel Nineteen-Eighty-Four in which Newspeak demonstrates the
heightened linguistic self-consciousness of modernist writers?
a) George Orwell
b) Virginia Woolf
c) Evelyn Waugh
d) Orson Wells
e) Aldous Huxley
782. Which of the following novels display postwar nostalgia for past imperial glory?
a) E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India
b) Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea
c) Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
d) Paul Scott’s Staying On
e) c and d
783. When was the ban finally lifted on D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, written in
1928.
a) 1930
b) 1945
c) 1960
d) 2000
e) The ban has not yet been formally lifted.
784. Which of the following was originally the Irish Literary Theatre?
a) the Irish National Theatre
b) the Globe Theatre
c) the Independent Theatre
d) the Abbey Theatre
e) both a and d
785. What did T. S. Eliot attempt to combine, though not very successfully, in his plays Murder in
the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party?
a) regional dialect and political critique
b) religious symbolism and society comedy
c) iambic pentameter and sexual innuendo
d) witty paradoxes and feminist diatribe
e) all of the above
786. How did one critic sum up Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot?
a) “nothing happens-twice”
b) “political correctness gone mad”
c) “kitchen sink drama”
d) “angry young men
e) “better than Cats”
787. What event allowed mainstream theater companies to commission and perform work that
was politically, socially, and sexually controversial without fear of censorship?
a) the abolition of the Lord Chamberlain’s office in 1968
b) the illegal performance of work by Howard Brenton and Edward Bond
c) the collapse of liberal humanist consensus in the late 1960s
d) the foundation of the Field Day Theater Company in 1980
e) the establishment of the Abbey Theater
788. Which of the following has been a significant development in British theater since the
abolition of censorship in 1968?
a) the rise of workshops and the collaborative ethos
b) the emergence of a major cohort of women dramatists
c) the diversifying impact of playwrights from the former colonies
d) the death of the musical
e) all but d
789. What did Henry James describe as “loose baggy monsters”?
a) novels
b) plays
c) the English
d) publishers
e) his trousers