A TO Z Literary Principles from History of English Literature: Note 78

A Set of 26 Objective Questions & Answers

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1. Items in a published book appear in the following order: Copyright Page, Footnotes, Bibliography, and Index.

 2. The books of Gulliver’s Travels are:

 Part I “Voyage to Lilliput”, Lemuel Gulliver describes the habits and politics of the people of Lilliput and the neighboring nation of Blefuscu.

 Part II “Voyage to Brobdingnag”, another voyage takes Gulliver to Brobdingnag, a land where every living being is twelve times larger than in England.

Part III “Voyage to Laputa”   Gulliver visits the islands of Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdribb, and Japan. Laputa, the Flying Island, is an allegory of the court and government of George I.

In Part IV “Voyage to Houyhnhnms”, Gulliver journeys to the land of the Houyhnhnms, rational horses, and the Yahoos, appallingly irrational humans. 

3. In Ben Jonson’s Volpone, the animal imagery includes- the fox and the vulture; the fly, the crow and the raven. Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)    Ben Jonson's Volpone is his sardonic farce, satirizing greed, blended Renaissance masque with mummery and satire. In Volpone, or, The Fox (1605), Jonson mocks the way money can corrupt individuals. Volpone, the main character, is an unmarried businessman who, with the help of his assistant, Mosca, cheats other wealthy people out of their money.  The main characters in the play are: Volpone – Fox, Voltore – Vulture, Mosca – Gad fly, the parasite, Corbaccio – Crow, Corvino- the raven, celia corvino’s wife, Nano-the dwarf, Androgyno – the hermaphrodite, Castrone –eunuch. 

4. Swift’s most famous writing against the English landlords in Ireland was the pamphlet A Modest Proposal. This is indispensable reading for any student of justice, history, or social planning.

5. Addison and Steele edited The Tatler. Similarly noteworthy for the quality of their prose are the Spectator papers (1711-1712; 1714), written mainly by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. Published daily, these essays, like many others, corresponded to the newly felt need of the day for popular journalism, but their enlightened comment and their criticism of contemporary society separate them from the mass of similar publications.  Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)     

  

 6.  Francis Bacon had moved in the rationalist direction by advocating reasoning and scientific investigation in Advancement of Learning (1605) and The New Atlantis (1627). Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), by John Locke, is the product of a belief in experience as the exclusive basis of knowledge, a view pushed to its logical extreme in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) by David Hume. John Locke’s “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” is about nature of the human mind. Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)     Locke himself continued to profess faith in divine revelation, but this residual belief was weakened among the similarly rationalist Deists, who tended to base religion on what reason could find in the world God had created around humans.

7. Restoration Comedy marks the restoration of monarchy .Restoration Comedy, style of English theater, dating from the Restoration, when the English monarchy was reestablished under King Charles II in 1660. Restoration comedy witnessed the first appearance of women on the English stage. The so-called breeches part was specially created in order to costume female actors in male attire in order to reveal the female figure. The genre placed much emphasis on wit and sexual intrigues. Examples include The Country Wife (1674?) by William Wycherley, The Way of the World (1700) by William Congreve, and The Beaux’ Stratagem (1707) by George Farquhar. 

8.   Alexander Pope’s poem “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot”  begins with the line “Shut, shut the door, good John, fatigued I said”.

9. The words “If it were done when tis done, then twere well / It were done quickly…” are uttered by Macbeth.

10. John Dryden’s Absalom and Achotophel  is a political allegory.

11. The French Lieutenant’s Woman   has more than one ending:  i. Charles marries Ernestina, but their marriage is a disaster, Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)     ii. Charles and Sarah become intimate and his engagement with Ernestina ends with unwanted consequences, Charles loses everything and Sarah flees to London, later to be found by Charles, with his child, iii.  Charles finds Sarah but without child and she is not interested in continuing their affair.

12. “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man” is an example of Chiasmus. Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)     Chiasmus is the rhetorical device in which the second half of an expression is balanced against the first with the parts reversed.( like antimetabole).

13. Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus is a fictional biography. Sartor Resartus means The Tailor Retailored.   Here Carlyle expressed in a vehement, idiosyncratic style a heroic philosophy of work, courage, and the cultivation of the godlike in human beings, by means of which life might recover its true worth and nobility.

14. Hopkins’s Curtal Sonnet consists of 10¹/₂lines.

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things – 1

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; 2

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; 3

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; 4

Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; 5

And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. 6

All things counter, original, spare, strange; 7

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) 8

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; 9

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 10

Praise him.1/2

15. God is referred to as the ‘president of Immortals” in Tess of the d'Urbervilles. "President of the Immortals" translates a phrase from Prometheus Bound (1.169), by Aeschylus; Hardy finishes the novel by suggesting that the highest power in the universe uses human beings for "sport."

16. Maurya is a character in Riders to the Sea. It is one of the greatest irish tale in poetic verse.

17. English poet Matthew Arnold referred to Oxford as “that sweet city with her dreaming spires” in Thyrsis of Arnold.  Parts of this poem appear in ‘Oxford Elegy’ by Ralph Vaughan Williams.

18. “Cover her face, mine eyes dazzle; She died young” – this was said by Ferdinand about the Duchess of Malfi.

19. The criterion of Leavis’s Great Tradition is reader-response.

20. In ‘Culture and Anarchy’, collection of essays Mathew Arnold recommends fusion of Hellenism and Hebraism. He defended culture against scientific materialism in this collection of essays. Arnold believed that literature shaped culture, and he argued for England to become sensitized to art and to accept high standards of literary judgment.

21. Lamia is a poem by Keats.

22.  In Robinson Crusoe,   Crusoe's unfortunate journey was on 1659 September 30.  He returned to England on 1686 Dec.  19. Total period is 27 years two months and 19 days

23.  The Great Exhibition, the first true world’s fair takes place in   1851. Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, organized the international event, which attracted more than 6 million visitors and became a showcase for British achievement in industry and design. Crystal Palace was erected in London’s Hyde Park to house the exhibition. Built entirely of cast iron and glass, the palace was a symbol of advances in modern architecture. 

24. The Chartist Movement sought Extension of the political rights to the working class.

Chartism was the first mass working class movement for the political rights from 1838 – 48 in England.   It got its name from the people’s charter in 1838. Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)    The People's Charter contained six specific demands, including suffrage for all male citizens 21 years of age and over, elections by secret ballot, and annual parliamentary elections. When these demands were rejected by the House of Commons, the association launched a nationwide campaign for its program, and about 1,250,000 persons signed a petition to Parliament requesting that the charter be enacted into law.

25. Confessions of an English Opium Eater is written by De Quincey. Dreams, fantasy, art, and poetry are really confused here. 

26. The dictum ‘only connect’ is central to the writings of E.M Forster.

“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.”-E. M. Forster "Only Connect!" is famous as the epigraph to Howards End. It also appears in the text of the novel Howards End.

   Ardhendu De

Ref: 1. History of English Literature- Albert     

2. The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature

3. UGC NET OLD QUESTION PAPERS