A TO Z Literary Principles from History of English Literature: Note 77

A Set of 26 Objective Questions &  Answers

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1. Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (Hero: Raskolnikov ) explores the psychological depths of man. It examines tragedy as represented through the existential beliefs of many philosophers. Existentialist theory expresses the idea that man can satisfy his own needs, regardless of social codes, if he has the energy and ambition to act. Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)    Raskolnikov has the ambition to act, but struggles internally with their actions, frightened of the consequences.  The story is very close to Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

2. Pecola is a character in: The Bluest Eye which is Toni Morrison's novel published in 1970.

3. Virginia Woolf was associated with the “Bloomsbury Group”( T. S. Eliot ,W. B. Yeats, T. E. Hulme  ). She is British novelist, essayist, and critic, who helped create the modern novel. Her writing often explores the concepts of time, memory, and people’s inner consciousness, and is remarkable for its humanity and depth of perception.

4. Lucky appears in Waiting for Godot.

5. We could find the ‘Philosophic’ approach operating behind and conditioning the various themes of E. M. Froster’s A Passage to India. Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)    There is not just one theme but a number of themes. The word ‘Passage’ implies a gap that is to be bridged. Here we could find a number of gaps operating at various levels of perception and experience, and thus necessitating a number of bridges or journeys. Some of these could be enumerated as follow:

i) Passage from the familiar to the unfamiliar;

ii) From the occident to the orient;

iii) From body to spirit;

iv) From the finite to the infinite;

v) From   isolation-individual/racial to inclusive totality;

vi) From the earthly to the divine;

v1) From “muddle” to “mystery”.

6.   T. S. Eliot write “A thought to him was an experience” about Donne. Donne’s longest poem The Progresse of the Soule (1601) ironically depicts the transmigration of the soul of Eve's apple.   Donne may have collaborated with Morton in writing pamphlets that appeared under Morton's name from 1604 to 1607.   

7. The title The Sound and the Fury is taken from:  Macbeth, tragedy in five acts, written by English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. First performed in about 1606, the play was originally printed in the 1623 edition of Shakespeare's works known as the First Folio. Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)  The author’s principal source for Macbeth was Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1577) by English chronicler Raphael Holinshed. The play’s title role is loosely based on the career of a King Macbeth of Scotland. A commander under King Duncan I, Macbeth murdered Duncan in 1040 and claimed the kingdom for himself. After a rule of 17 years, Macbeth was killed by Duncan’s son Malcolm, who later became King Malcolm III.

8. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is above all a portrait of Stephen Dedalus. Themes of the the novel are Developed through Allusions to Classical Mythology.
9.    Chaucer used the rhyme royal, a stanzaic form in some of his major poems. He was the author of The Legend of Good Women. He wrote in English when the court poetry of his day was written in Anglo-Norman and Latin.

 10. Material feminism studies inequality in terms of both class and gender. Close to Marxist-feminist theory, Material feminism extends   to an examination of the economic and material exploitation of women, the sexual division of labor, especially in domestic work and childcare, and women’s inequality within the workplace. Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)  It is taken up by materialist feminists that women as a class are oppressed by material conditions and social relations.

11. The famous diary of 17th-century English civil servant Samuel Pepys gives an enthralling eyewitness account of the British history. Entries in The Diary of Samuel Pepys covers The Restoration period 1660 to 1669.

12. “The pen is mightier than the sword” is an example of metonymy.

13. An epilogue is suffixed to a text which it sums up or extends.

 14. A Tale of Two Cities affords ample evidence of Dickens’ capacity for character –portrayal. The wide and penetrating studies of characters (e.g.Monsieur Defarge and Madame Defarge) in A Tale of Two Cities   allow the characters to reveal themselves through incidents and through their deeds and actions rather than through dialogues only.

15. The term ‘the comedy of menace’ which humorously and cynically depict people attempting to communicate as they react to an invasion or threat of an invasion of their lives, is associated with the early plays of  Harold Pinter.  Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)   The drama critic Irving Wardle used the term ‘comedy of menace’ to describe the plays of David Campton, Harold Pinter, Nigel Dennis and N.F Simpson.  The term was borrowed from the sub title of David Campton’s play The lunatic view: A comedy of menace.

16. Name the poet who chooses his successor and the successor-poet whom Dryden satirizes in his famous poem Mac Flecknoe Richard Flecknoe and Thomas Shadwell.

 17. “If__ winter ____ comes, can__  spring _____ be far behind ?” (Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind”)

18.   Hamlet,The Duchess of Malfi, Gorboduc are revenge tragedy .

19.   Neologism :A word newly coined or used in a new sense

20. Thomas Love Peacock classified poetry into 4 periods. They are : iron, gold, silver and brass

21. Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands is   an essay that propounds an anti essentialist view of place. Imaginary Homelands is a collection of essays written by Salman Rushdie covering a wide variety of topics.

22.    BASIC was an experiment initiated by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards from 1926 to about 1940. It was an attempt to reduce the number of essential words to 850.

23.   U.S. writer and humorist Mark Twain gives an account of his visit to India in   Following the Equator. In 1895 Twain began a successful worldwide lecture tour. The tour and the book based on it, Following the Equator (1897), paid off Twain's debts. But while Twain was touring, his daughter Suzy died of meningitis.

24. William Blake’s famous poems such as “London”, “The Sick Rose”, and “The Tyger” appear in Songs of Experience.

25. Madam Merle is a villain character in  The Portrait of a Lady. Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)  The Portrait of a Lady concerns a young American woman, Isabel Archer, who comes to England after her father dies. Archer is ardent, vibrant, hungry for experience, and committed to her personal freedom. She forms a friendship with an older woman, Madam Merle, who introduces her to Gilbert Osmond, the man Archer marries. Archer believes Osmond to be a man of impeccable taste with whom she can share an intense but liberated life. Instead he turns out to be a cynical dilettante and totally conventional. Eventually Archer learns that Osmond and Madam Merle have been lovers and have plotted her marriage to get hold of her fortune.

26. In The pub scene of The Waste Land   we have a departure from Standard English.

   Ardhendu De

Ref: 1. History of English Literature- Albert     

2. The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature

3. UGC NET OLD QUESTION PAPERS