A TO Z Literary Principles from History of English Literature: Note 101
A Set of 26 Objective Questions & Answers
UGC NET ENGLISH QUESTION BANK
1. Duchess of Malfi; Hamlet; Gorboduc are Revenge Tragedy.
2. Alice Munro’s Meneseteung is a rich tale spanning
several decades.
3. George Saunders’s Pastoralia focuses on a man who is
stuck in a life he hates in a dystopian future.
4. Kingsley Amis’s novel You can’t do both is a semi autobiographical novel. His other novels and the types:
Lucky Jim
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criticizes academic society
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That Uncertain Feeling
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temptation towards adultery
|
I Like It Here
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contemptuous view of “abroad”
|
Take a Girl Like You
|
semi autobiographical- concerns of sex and love in
ordinary modern life
|
6. Lines and the text
Lines
|
Text
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‘If music be the food of love, play on’
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Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night
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“Hieronimo is mad again”
|
|
“Alone ,alone, all all alone/ Alone on a wide, wide
sea”
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The Rime of the Ancient Mariner poem by S.T Coleridge
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“Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:”
|
Shakespeare’s Tempest, Ariel sings this to Ferdinand
about his father Alonso, King of Naples
|
7. Rudyard Kipling’s The Mowgli stories in
The Jungle Book are followed by a series of animal fables that pursue
similar themes. These stories feature such familiar characters as the mongoose
Riki-Tikki-Tavi. Some editions of Kipling's work place all the stories of
Mowgli in one volume and all of the animal stories in a second volume.
8. Best Matches:
Text/ Art
|
Author/ Artist/Genre/ Inventor
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Lycidas
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Milton’s pastoral elegy
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Beowulf
|
Anglo Saxon Epic
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The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog
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Dylan Thomas
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Troilus and Criseyde
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Chaucer
|
Pamela
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Richardson’s epistolary novel
|
9. A manor house is a country house that historically
formed the administrative centre of a manor, the lowest unit of territorial organization
in the feudal system in Europe. The term is applied to country houses that
belonged to the gentry and other grand stately homes.
10.
Ezra
Pound: “Literature is language charged with meaning”. “Great literature is
simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree”.
11.
Form of poetry
has the defining characteristics, namely: imagery, sound, rhythm and diction.
Imagery is the sensory language used in poetry. By sensory we imply that the
language appeals to or affects the senses of the reader or audience. Sound is
the auditory aspect or quality inherent in poetry. Rhythm is the wave-like
movement discernible in poetry. It accounts, along with sound, for the musical
quality in poetry. Diction refers to the special choice or selection of words utilized
by the poet in his work.
12. Popular examples of the elegy in English
literature: John Milton’s Lycidas; Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam ; WH
Auden’s In Memory of WB Yeats and William Gray’s Elegy, Written in a CountryChurchyard.
13. Characteristics
or elements of Drama are: action, plot, dialogue, characterization and setting.
14.
Elements
or defining features of Novel/Prose Fiction: story, plot, setting and
characterization.
15.
Impulse
behind poetic literature: Imitative (Mimetic): The innate human instinct to
imitate things, which one can observe even in young children and Monkeys; Aesthetic/Emotional:
The natural pleasure of recognizing good or effective mimicry. This is why
Aristotle referred to poetry as “an imitative art”; Musical: The impulse or
instinct for tune, music and rhythm as means of expressing and thus giving vent
to emotions.
16.
Definitionsof Poetry: The following are well-known definitions of poetry which illustrate
the varied view of this genre:
·
Poetry
is the language that tells us, through a more or less emotional reaction,
something that cannot be said. All poetry, great or small, does this. - Edwin
Arlington Robinson.
·
An
actual poem is the succession of experiences – sounds, images, thoughts,
emotions – through which we pass when we are reading as poetically as we can. -
Andrew Bradley
·
the
rhythmic, inevitably narrative, movement from an over clothed blindness to a
naked vision. – Dylan Thomas
·
I
would define poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of beauty. Its sole
arbiter is taste. With the intellect or with the conscience it has only
collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either
with duty or with truth. – Edgar Allan Poe
·
Poetry
is the imaginative expression of strong feeling, usually rhythmical...the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility. –
William Wordsworth
·
The
proper and immediate object of Science is the acquirement or communication of
truth; the proper and immediate object of Poetry is the communication of
pleasure. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
·
Poetry
is the record of the best and happiest moments of the best and happiest minds. –
Percy Bysshe Shelley
·
If I
read a book and it makes my whole body so cold that no fire can ever warm me, I
know that it is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were
taken off, I know that it is poetry. – Emily Dickinson
17.
Kinaesthetic
imagery refers to those images that call forth in the mind of the reader the
perception of movement. In other words, these are images that appeal to the
reader’s sense of movement or motion. Examples of this type of imagery are: And
‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever/It flung up momently the sacred
river./Five miles meandering with a mazy motion/Through wood and dale the
sacred river ran./Then reached the caverns measureless to man,/And sank in
tumult to a lifeless ocean: Coleridge “Kubla Khan”
18. Characteristics
of an Epic: Whether folk or art, epics share a set of common general
characteristics and conventions as follows:
·
The
poet commences his narration by stating his theme and invokes the Muse to
inspire and instruct him in his task
·
The
story begins ‘in medias res’, that is in the middle of things and proceeds to
recount the great deeds of the heroes with objectivity.
·
The
action in which supernatural forces participate is one, great and entire Story
is of great length and scope with the action taking place over a long period of
time and extending over several nations or the imagined universe.
·
The
hero who is a person of great stature and legendary and historical significance
and performs superhuman actions is more of the concern of the audience or
reader because he symbolizes the aspirations and destiny of his nation or race.
·
Narrative
style is grand and alternates between the sublime or sustained elevation and
grand simplicity.
·
Story
includes elaborate formal speeches by the main characters. The constituent
episodes of narrative easily arise from the main story and, as a result, there
are no parts that could be detached from it without loss to the whole.
·
Epic
poet incorporates a long list of warriors, armies, war machines which
necessitate employment of the fitting vehicle of the epic simile or extended
comparison.( Holman, Abrams, etc.)
19.
Well known examples
of the epic in English literature include the following: Traditional/folk/primary
– Homer’s Iliad, Odyssey; Anglo-Saxon Beowulf; the Indian Mahabharata,
the French Chanson de Roland and the Spanish El Cid.;Art/Literary/Secondary
– Virgil’s Aeneid; Milton’s Paradise Lost. The term epic has also been
loosely applied to other works; both poetry and prose, written on a grand scale
and attempt or aspire to the spirit of the epic in matter/subject and
manner/style. These include Dante’s Divine Comedy, Spenser’s Faerie
Queene, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace,
Ezra Pound’s Cantos and Niane’s Sundiata.
20. Cavalier poets
are the band of poets in 17th Century who supported Charles I.
They are Ben Jonson, Thomas Carew, Richard Lovelace, John Suckling, and Robert
Herrick. Though Herrick was not a court poet, his style makes him a Cavalier
poet.
21. 1215 and
1337/1338: 1215 is important because Magna Carta was signed by King John in this
year. It is the first step to the democratic process in England. 1337/1338 is important because it is the year
when The Hundred Year’s war with France. (1453 ended)
22. 1349 and 1381:1349 is important because The
Plague called Black Death occurred in this year. 1381 is important because the
Peasant Revolt occurred in this year.
23. Influences of the Norman Conquest of England
on the English Literature: First, new literary forms such as metrical romances,
allegory, and lyrics on various subjects came to English poetry. Secondly, the
rhymed verse replaced the Anglo-saxon alliteration.
24.
Lazamon wrote
Brut. Brut is about the history of Britain from the landing of Brutus to the
death of Cadwallader.
25. Important early Middle English religious and
didactic poems: Ormulum, The Owl and the Nightingale, Prick of Conscience by
Richard Rolle of Hampolle.
26. Early Middle Ages:
alliterative - Pearl, Purity, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight;
metrical romances related to the matter of England- King Horn, Guy of Warwick;
metrical romances related to the matter of Britain- Morte’d Arthur, Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight; metrical romances related to the matter of Rome- King Alisaunder, The
Destruction of Troy; metrical romances related to the matter of France- Rauj
Coilzear, Sir Ferumbras; romances dealing with love- Amis and Amilaun , Floris
and Blauchefleur; allegorical poems of middle ages- Sir Gawain and the Green
Night, The Owl and the Nightingale;
prose works of Middle English period / Anglo-Norman period- Ancrene Riwle,
Azenbite of Inwyt.
Ref: 1. History of English Literature- Albert
2. The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature
3. UGC NET OLD QUESTION PAPERS
4. Baugh, A.C and Cable T (2001). A
History of the English Language. 5th ed. London: Routledge
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