1. Which British University figures in William Wordsworth’s Prelude ?
(1) Durham
(2) Glasgow
(3) Cambridge
(4) Oxford
Answer: 3
2. Who is the author of A Woman Killed with Kindness ?
(1) John Marston
(2) Thomas Middleton
(3) John Fletcher
(4) Thomas Heywood
Answer: 4
3. In William Congreve’s The Way of the World identify the speaker of the line : “One’s
cruelty is one’s power, and when one parts with one’s cruelty, one parts with one’s power.”
(1) Mirabell
(2) Witwoud
(3) Millamant
(4) Mincing
Answer: 3
4. T.S. Eliot found spiritual support in
(1) Christianity
(2) Hinduism
(3) Buddhism
(4) Judaism
Answer: 1
5. By what name is Gulliver known in Brobdingnag ?
(1) Grildrig
(2) Glumdalclitch
(3) Splacknuck
(4) Mannikin
Answer: 1
6. Who among the following was born in India ?
(1) Paul Scott
(2) Lawrence Durrell
(3) E.M. Forster
(4) V.S. Naipaul
Answer: 2
7. What metaphor does Edmund Spenser employ (Faerie Queene Book 1 Canto 12) to frame his tale and to describe the relationship between the tale and its readers?
(1) That of a caravan of lost souls, traversing a desert.
(2) That of a stagecoach, which picks up diverse passengers along the way.
(3) That of a ship filled with jolly mariners.
(4) That of a riderless horse, following his own direction.
Answer: 3
8. Who among the following is not associated with Russian formalism?
(1) Roman Jakobson
(2) Georges Poulet
(3) Boris Eichenbaum
(4) Victor Shklovsky
Answer: 2
9. Which character in Dickens keeps on hoping that “something will turn up”?
(1) Barkis
(2) Micawber
(3) Uriah Heep
(4) Miss Havisham
Answer: 2
10. What is the name of the boat that rescues Ishmael in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick?
(1) Pequod
(2) Rachel
(3) Hagar
(4) Sphinx
Answer: 2
11. Northanger Abbey is a parody of the ………….. romance.
(1) Oriental
(2) French
(3) Gothic
(4) Popular
Answer: 3
12. Who among the following authors were greatly influenced by Thomas Carlyle’s writings?
I. Charles Dickens
II. Elizabeth Gaskell
III. Emily Bronte
IV. Oscar Wilde
The right combination according to the code is
(1) I and II
(2) II and III
(3) I and IV
(4) I and III
Answer: 1
13. Which of the following is another term to describe “art for art’s sake”?
(1) Aestheticism
(2) Didacticism
(3) Realism
(4) Neo-realism
Answer: 1
14. The statement that there are “none so credulous as infidels” is an illustration of
(1) Oxymoron
(2) Antithesis
(3) Paradox
(4) Metonomy
Answer: 3
15. Who narrates Heart of Darkness?
(1) Marlow
(2) Director of Companies
(3) Kurtz
(4) An unnamed narrator
Answer: 4
16. The Mistakes of a Night is the subtitle of
(1) The Conscious Lovers
(2) The Good Natur’d Man
(3) She Stoops to Conquer
(4) The Rivals
Answer: 3
17. Identify the first novel written by Patrick White :
(1) The Living and the Dead
(2) The Tree of Man
(3) Happy Valley
(4) The Aunt’s Story
Answer: 3
18. In King Lear for what reason does Kent assume a disguise?
(1) To continue to serve Lear, though Lear has banished him.
(2) To spy on Edmund.
(3) To antagonize Goneril and Regan.
(4) To revenge upon Lear for banishing him.
Answer: 1
19. What is a feminine rhyme?
(1) A rhyme on two syllables in which the last syllable is unstressed.
(2) A rhyme on two syllables.
(3) A rhyme on three syllables.
(4) A poem in which every third syllable rhymes.
Answer: 1
20. Identify two of the following written by Christopher Fry :
I. French Without Tears
II. The Lady’s Not for Burning
III. Venus Observed
IV. The Deep Blue Sea
The right combination according to the code is
(1) II and III
(2) I and III
(3) II and IV
(4) I and IV
Answer: 1
21. In “Tradition and Individual Talent”, according to T.S. Eliot, the term “Traditional”
usually means
(1) something positive
(2) something negative
(3) something historical
(4) something old
Answer: 2
22. Who of the following is a Cavalier poet?
(1) George Herbert
(2) John Donne
(3) Robert Herrick
(4) Andrew Marvell
Answer: 3
23. Which of the following is not Jacques Derrida’s work?
(1) Of Spirit : Heidegger and the Question
(2) The Transcendence of the Ego
(3) Of Grammatology
(4) The Work of Mourning
Answer: 2
24. In Paradise Lost which character narrates the story of the making of Eve from a rib in
Adam’s side?
(1) Adam
(2) Eve
(3) Raphael
(4) God
Answer: 1
25. A.S. Byatt’s Possession attempts the imitation of the work of two Victorian poets, loosely
based on
I. Alfred Tennyson
II. Robert Browning
III. Christina Rossetti
IV. William Morris
The right combination according to the code is
(1) I and II
(2) II and IV
(3) II and III
(4) III and IV
Answer: 3
26. The Dark Lady of the Sonnets is a short comedy by
(1) Bernard Shaw
(2) W.B. Yeats
(3) J.M. Synge
(4) John Osborne
Answer: 1
27. John Milton’s description of gold as a “precious bane” (Paradise Lost, Book II) is best
described as
(1) a dactyl
(2) an oxymoron
(3) enjambment
(4) zeugma
Answer: 2
28. There is a play on the name of Machiavelli in the prologue to Christopher Marlowe’s
(1) Doctor Faustus
(2) The Jew of Malta
(3) Tamburlaine, the Great
(4) Edward II
Answer: 2
29. Shakespeare famously neglects to observe Aristotle’s rules concerning the three dramatic unities, and Samuel Johnson undertakes to defend Shakespeare from these criticisms in his Preface to Shakespeare. Which of the Aristotelian dramatic unities does Johnson believe Shakespeare to observe most successfully?
(1) Time
(2) Place
(3) Action
(4) Johnson does not feel that the Aristotelian dramatic unities are important
Answer: 3
30. Who among the following was praised and patronized as a “Ploughman Poet”?
(1) John Clare
(2) George Crabbe
(3) Robert Burns
(4) Walter Scott
Answer: 3
31. Which novel of Doris Lessing ends with a projection forward in time after a devastating
atomic war?
(1) The Grass is Singing
(2) The Golden Notebook
(3) The Four-Gated City
(4) A Proper Marriage
Answer: 3
32. Name the dominant meter of the following quatrain :
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
(1) Iambic Hexameter
(2) Trochaic Pentameter
(3) Iambic Pentameter
(4) Terza Rima
Answer: 3
33. Which two novels of Buchi Emecheta provide a fictionalized portrait of poor, young
Nigerian women struggling to bring up their children in London?
I. The Slave Girl
II. The Joys of Motherhood
III. Second Class Citizen
IV. In the Ditch
The right combination according to the code is
(1) I and II
(2) II and III
(3) III and IV
(4) I and IV
Answer: 3
34. In John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress who keeps Christian’s head above water in the River of Death?
(1) Hopeful
(2) Helpful
(3) Faithful
(4) Cheerful
Answer: 1
35. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is a
(1) religious allegory
(2) fairy tale
(3) long poem
(4) Utopian novel
Answer: 3
36. In Thomas More’s Utopia which of the following leisure pastimes is not a favourite
among Utopians?
(1) Music
(2) Public lectures
(3) Conversation
(4) Dicing and cards
Answer: 4
37. Which of the following statements does not describe Michel Foucault’s position?
(1) In Foucault’s work sexuality is literally written on the body.
(2) Power operates through discourse.
(3) There is connection between power and knowledge.
(4) Where there is power, it is possible to find resistance.
Answer: 1
38. In which year did the Great Exhibition take place?
(1) 1851
(2) 1857
(3) 1861
(4) 1871
Answer: 1
39. When Fidessa says, “O but I fear the fickle freakes …./ Of fortune false, and oddes of
armes in field” (Faerie Queene, Book I, Canto 5), this is a fine example of
(1) Alliteration
(2) Allegory
(3) Assonance
(4) Antithesis
Answer: 1
40. Match the work with author :
I. “The Excursion”
II. “Christabel”
III. Milton
IV. Queen Mab
A. S.T. Coleridge
B. P.B. Shelley
C. William Wordsworth
D. William Blake
I II III IV
(1) C A B D
(2) C A D B
(3) B C A D
(4) B A C D
Answer: 2
41. Which of the following phrases is not found in Thomas Gray’s “Elegy written in a
Country Churchyard”?
(1) “Far from the madding crowd”
(2) “A youth to Fortune and Fame unknown”
(3) “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen”
(4) “All nature is but art, unknown to thee”
Answer: 4
42. Robert Browning’s “Rabbi Ben Ezra” is a defence of
(1) youth against old age
(2) old age against youth
(3) power against knowledge
(4) knowledge against power
Answer: 2
43. In Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the pilgrims, like the medieval society of which
they are a part, are made up of three social groups or “estates”. What are the three estates?
(1) Nobility, church and commoners
(2) Royalty, nobility and peasantry
(3) Royalists, republicans and peasants
(4) Country, city and commons
Answer: 1
44. Which novel of Toni Morrison tells the wrenching story of a protagonist who murders her
child rather than to allow him/her to live as a slave?
(1) Sula
(2) Tar Baby
(3) Song of Solomon
(4) Beloved
Answer: 4
45. Who among the following translated Homer?
(1) Thomas Gray
(2) Samuel Johnson
(3) Oliver Goldsmith
(4) Alexander Pope
Answer: 4
46. Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy is a
(1) Picaresque novel
(2) Epistolary novel
(3) Diary novel
(4) Coming-of-age novel
Answer: 4
47. When was the English ban on James Joyce’s Ulysses lifted?
(1) 1924
(2) 1945
(3) 1936
(4) 1962
Answer: 3
48. Who among the following is not an imagist?
(1) Ezra Pound
(2) W.B. Yeats
(3) Amy Lowell
(4) T.E. Hulme
Answer: 2
49. Thomas Carew’s Poems appeared in print in 1640 and contain a variety of amorous
addresses to and reflections on, a fictional mistress known as
(1) Celia
(2) Julia
(3) Anne
(4) Melanie
Answer: 1
50. Match the novelists with their work :
I. William Golding
II. Salman Rushdie
III. Graham Swift
IV. Peter Ackroyd
A. Grimus
B. Hawksmoor
C. Darkness Visible
D. Waterland
I II III IV
(1) D A C B
(2) C A D B
(3) B C A D
(4) B A C D
Answer: 2