A TO Z Literary Principles from History of English Literature: Note 81




A Set of 26 Objective Questions & Answers

UGC NET ENGLISH QUESTION BANK

1. One important feature of Charles Lamb’s style is humour and pathos. Lamb's literary career included the writing of poetry, plays, essays (Essays of Elia in 1823 and Last Essays of Elia in 1833)., stories(Tales from Shakespeare in 1807) and literary criticism (Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare in 1808). Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)    


2. The title of the poem The Second Coming is taken from The Bible (Matthew 24:29-31; Mark 13:24-27; Luke 21:25-28).

3. The main character in Paradise Lost Book I and Book II is Satan.

4. Feminist critiques of To the Lighthouse have drawn very different conclusions about its gender politics. Elaine Showalter suggests that the novel is a retreat from feminism into mysticism, while Toril Moi argues that it is a radical feminist attack on the logic of patriarchal male society.

5. In Sons and Lovers, Paul Morel’s mother’s name is Mrs. Gertrude Morel.
Other characters: (Paul Morel)  ,(Clara Dawes) ,(Miriam Lievers) ,(William) ,(Baxter Dawes) ,(Pappleworth) ,(Henry Hadlock) ,(Miriam's Mother) ,(Mrs. Leivers) ,(Mrs. Radford)  ,(Mrs. Bonner) ,(Rose) ,(Arthur) ,(Dr. Ansell) ,(Betty) ,(Fanny) ,(Polly) ,(Collie)
Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)    

6. Most of the Golding’s novels are religious myths or parables, stories written to illustrate a moral point. Lord of the Flies symbolically relates Golding's idea of what happens when human beings refuse to deal with the destructive forces in their own nature.

 7. Mr. Jaggers, in Great Expectations, is a lawyer. Other charters:
(Pip Pirrip),
(Estella, her mother) ,(Joe Gargery) ,(Miss Havisham) ,(Abel Magwitch) ,(Herbert) ,(Wemmick) ,(Mrs. Gargery) ,(Bentley Drummle) ,(Biddy) ,(Uncle Pumblechook) ,(Compeyson) ,(Aged parent) ,(Sarah Pocket) ,(Mr. Wopsle) ,(Mrs. Wopsle) ,(Mike) ,(Night porter) ,(Mrs. Whimple) Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)    
8. Which is the correct sequence: Thackeray> Bronte Sisters> George Eliot> D. G. Rossetti. During the last two-thirds of the 19th century, the Victorian era produced an amazing number of popular novelists and poets. Perhaps the most famous author of this time was Charles Dickens( hardships of the working class while criticizing middle-class life) , George Eliot( intense, moral novels), William Makepeace Thackeray( humorous portrayals of middle- and upper-class life) the Brontë sisters—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne( autobiographical) Anthony Trollope( observer of politics and upper Victorian society), Robert Louis Stevenson( children’s books, adventure stories, and poetry) The most popular  Victorian poets : Alfred, Lord Tennyson. , Matthew Arnold, Christina Rossetti, and Robert Browning and his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

9. Shakespeare’s The Tempest has an epilogue. Henry IV, Pt I, Hamlet, Twelfth Night

10. Hamlet’s famous speech ‘To be,or not to be; that is the question’ occurs in Act III, Scene I.

11. Gonzalo in The Tempest   is referred to as an honest old counselor.

12. The sub-title of the play Twelfth Night is Or, What you Will. Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)    

13.   Shakespeare’s Hamlet, according to T. S. Eliot, is ‘artistic failure’.

14.  Thomas Percy in Henry IV, Pt I is Earl of Northumberland. Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)    

15. R.K. Narayan’s Swami and Friends (1935)-experiences as a village schoolteacher;

The English Teacher (1945) and The Vendor of Sweets (1967)- a gently humorous, elegantly crafted picture of daily life in a fictitious southern Indian town. 

Waiting for the Mahatma (1955) _ Ghandhian philosophy;

The Guide (1958)- a saint born;

The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961), and A Tiger for Malgudi (1983)- a fictitious adventure.

A Horse and Two Goats (1970), Malgudi Days (1982), and Grandmother's Tale (1994) - collections of Narayan's short stories

The Ramayana (1972) and The Mahabharata (1978)_epic retold in modern surroundings.

16. Anita Desai's

In Custody(1984) - a college lecturer seeking to meet the great poet who has been his hero since childhood

Journey to Ithaca (1995)-a Western couple traveling in India in search of spirituality;

Fasting, Feasting (1999)- three children in an Indian family who take different paths in life.

 17.   The first recipient of the Sahitya Academi Award for English literature: R.K. Narayan.

18. The line “A man can be destroyed but not defeated” appears in:  The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. It is   about an elderly fisherman’s efforts to catch an enormous marlin. The old man faces the elements and his own fears as he tries to land the fish.

19.Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq (1964), a modern experimental and avant-garde political satire based on the life of a sultan of medieval Delhi.( same in the genre   Vijay Tendulkar’s Shantata! Court Chalu Ahe (Silence! The Court Is in Session, 1978); and Badal Sircar’s   Evam Indrajit (1962; And Indrajit, 1979). Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)    

20. The Fakir of Jhungheera was written by one of the first Indo-Anglian poets. The poem is often hailed as a "Competent narrative verse with Byronic echoes." -  Henry Derozio

 21. He is a Sahitya Akademi Award Winner and he loves to write for children. ..Ruskin Bond

22.Arthur Symons :   literary critic and poet:  The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899)   Charles Baudelaire (1920),  Days and Nights (1889) and Silhouettes (1892), The Romantic Movement in English Poetry (1909), Studies in the Elizabethan Drama (1920), and the autobiographical Confessions (1930). Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)    23. The gap-toothed character in “prologue” to The Centerbury Tales is :

the Wife of Bath.

“Wommen desiren to have sovereynetee
As wel over hir housbond as hir love.”

Geoffrey Chaucer (1343? - 1400)

English poet.

The Canterbury Tales, "The Wife of Bath's Tale"

24.  Dalit (Oppressed) writing:  In Dalit writing, men and women of marginalized and low-caste communities write poetry and fiction about their own lives and communities. Poisoned Bread (1992), edited by Arjun Dangle, is an important anthology of Dalit writing.  Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)    

25. Nirad C. Chaudhary’s Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1950) is about the clash of British and Indian civilizations. His A Passage to England (1959) is real account of his visit.

26. Ruth Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust (1975), which was awarded Britain's highest literary award, the Booker Prize, in 1975, sets the experiences of a young English woman in modern India against the affair of her grandfather's first wife with an Indian prince in the 1920s.


Ref: 1. History of English Literature- Albert     
2. The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature
3. UGC NET OLD QUESTION PAPERS


Emily Dickinson’s Vision of ‘Death’ and ‘Eternity’ in “Because I could not stop for Death”


“Because I could not stop for Death”

Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –

Or rather – He passed Us –
The Dews drew quivering and Chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle –

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice – in the Ground –

Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity –

Heralded as one of the most gifted American writers, Emily Dickinson’s  poems were struck by her succinct style and the intensity of emotions that the poems contained. In the poem Because I could not stop for Death, the ballad-metre has been used and the poet’s encounter with Death is told like a story. Again, Dickinson’s poems are familiar teaching devices that reveal moral lessons through short and simple stories. Her poem's simplicity lends it a timeless quality. For this reason, Dickinson’s poems hold relevance today in parabolic sense. Dickinson’s poems can also be enigmatic sayings or tales, which obviously contain a message though the precise meaning is anyone's guess. In this poem, Because I Could Not Stop for Death Dickinson focused on themes relating to death, eternity, and love, usually in short four-line stanzas. It may be noted that some of the lines arc rhyming. But the others are not

A TO Z Literary Principles from History of English Literature: Note 80





A Set of 26 Objective Questions & Answers

UGC NET ENGLISH QUESTION BANK

1.  Derrida............. Deconstruction: With the publication of Writing and Difference, French philosopher Jacques Derrida pioneers the method of literary criticism known as deconstruction. Under deconstruction, texts are subjected to new methods of analysis that reveal hidden layers of meaning. The analysis examines the intent of the author, as well as how the concepts, language, and images of the text have been previously used.

2.  Psychological Criticism: Writers’ as well as creative process’s analysis. (Origin Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan)  Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)   

3.   Archetypal / Myth Criticism: Frye’s most important work, Anatomy of Criticism (1957), introduced archetypal criticism, identifying and discussing basic archetypal patterns as found in myths, literary genres, and the reader’s imagination.( origin C. G. Jung & Joseph Campbell)

4.   The correct sequence of the following schools of criticism:

  Structuralism> Deconstruction>Reader-Response> New Historicism

5.   Ezekiel’s Night of the Scorpion shares a moving picture of a mother's suffering.

 6.   Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve is widely acclaimed for its portrayal of the culture clash between whites and nonwhites, and its success at revealing the commonality of the human condition. It received rave reviews and won the American Library Association’s Notable Book Award in 1955.  A to Z (Objective Questions)  

7.  A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth is the story of an Indian mother's search for a suitable match for her daughter. The tale is set against the panoramic backdrop of life in India just after the country gained independence from Britain in 1947. A to Z (Objective Questions)  

 8.   The Satanic Verses (1988) was banned in several Islamic countries. Salman Rushdie came under ‘fatwa’ for t his controversial novel, issued by Muslim countries. The book was so controversial that Rushdie had to go into hiding for several years. A to Z (Objective Questions)  

9. Amitav Ghosh’s first major novel, The Shadow Lines (1988) simultaneously traces the histories of two families, one Indian and one British, and exposes the senseless nature of the violence that accompanied the division of the Indian state of Bengal, leading to the formation of East Pakistan in 1947 and then of Bangladesh in 1971. The Shadow Lines questions the validity of all sorts of boundaries, national and international. His other works include The Circle of Reason (1986), In an Antique Land (1992), and The Calcutta Chromosome (1996).

 10.  A Time to Change, Sixty Poems, The Third, The Unfinished Man:  Kamala Das

 11. Sea Hawk is Bhabani Bhattacharya’s col­lection of short stories.

 12. Anita Desai’s Baumgartner's Bombay is a novel about a German Jew who remains an outsider all his life, in his country because he is a Jew and in India, where he is a firangi.  

 13. “Hamartia” means: error of judgment

14. “gynocriticism” coined by : Elaine Showalter

15.  Though not a literary artist, ÆLFRED (849-901) had the best qualities of the scholar, including an insatiable love alike for the acquisition and the communication of knowledge. He translated several of the best books then existing. Among the books he translated or edited were (1) The Handbook, a collection of extracts on religious subjects; (2) The Cura Pastoralis, or Herdsman's book of Gregory the Great, with a preface by himself which is the first English prose; (3) Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English; (4) The English Chronicle, which, already brought up to 855, he continued up to the date of writing; it is probably by his own hand; (5) Orosius's History of the World, which he adapted for English readers with many historical and geographical additions; (6) the De Consolatione Philosophiæ of Boethius; and (7) a translation of some of the Psalms. A to Z (Objective Questions)  

16. Dominique Lapierre wrote an appealing ac­count of the sordid squalor of an Indian city,  Calcutta in his book The City of Joy.

 17. Sarojini Naidu’s famous poems: The Gift of India, Bangle-seller, The Anthem of Love, Palanquin Bearers.

 18.   Bina Agarwal wrote the hard-hitting poem  Sita Speak indicating the society for the injustice meted out to women down the ages.

19. Feminist critiques of To the Lighthouse have drawn very different conclusions about its gender politics. Elaine Showalter suggests that the novel is a retreat from feminism into mysticism, while Toril Moi argues that it is a radical feminist attack on the logic of patriarchal male society.

20.   Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities opens with the words “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times ....” A Tale of Two Cities works out a   theme of self-sacrifice. Important characters: Sydney Carton, Lucie Manette, Charles Darnay. A to Z (Objective Questions)   

21. The term “The Fleshly School of Poetry” is associated with the Pre-Raphaelites, a group of 19th-century English painters, poets, and critics who reacted against Victorian materialism and the neoclassical conventions of academic art by producing earnest, quasi-religious works. The group was inspired by medieval and early Renaissance painters up to the time of the Italian painter Raphael. They were also influenced by the Nazarenes, young German artists who formed a brotherhood in Rome in 1810 to restore Christian art to its medieval purity.A to Z (Objective Questions)  

22. The line “The sea is calm tonight” occurs in:  Arnold’s Dover Beach. Arnold’s  Dover Beach  (1867) and  Shakespeare  (1849) are contemplative poems. Rather than tell a story or relate a single incident to the reader, this type of poem conveys the author’s meditations on an idea or a person.

23. The term “gothic”, a category of fiction, also applies to : architecture

24. William Sydney Porter, popularly known as O.Henry chooses his characters from a variety of social classes, ranging from rich ladies to poor maids, from policemen to vagabonds.

25. Parody is the imitation of the style of another work, writer or genre, which relies on deliberate exaggeration to achieve comic or satirical effect. It is usually necessary to be familiar with the original in order to appreciate the parody, though some parodies have become better known than the poems they imitate. The very act of writing leaves every poet vulnerable to parody, but some seem irresistible.   Wendy Cope’s Waste Land Limericks (T S Eliot) A to Z (Objective Questions)  

26. A pastiche is a work whose style imitates that of another writer or period. Pastiche differs from parody in that it is usually intended as a kind of tribute rather than a satire. Examples:
 Ancient Music by Ezra Pound (where an English rota song is being imitated)
 Ozymandias Revisited by Morris Bishop
“Ozymandias Revisited” reproduces the first two stanzas of Shelley’s poem verbatim, then closes:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Also the names of Emory P. Gray,
Mr. and Mrs. Dukes, and Oscar Baer
Of 17 West 4th St., Oyster Bay


Ref: 1. History of English Literature- Albert     
2. The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature
3. UGC NET OLD QUESTION PAPERS

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