A TO Z Literary Principles from History of English Literature: Note 82
A Set of 26 Objective Questions & Answers
UGC NET ENGLISH QUESTION BANK
A. Prose
poetry should be considered as neither primarily poetry nor prose but is
essentially a hybrid or fusion of the two, and accounted a separate genre
altogether. Prose poetry originated in early 19th century France and Germany as
a reaction against dependence upon traditional uses of line in verse.
Read More A to Z (Objective Questions) Prose poetry dates back to the ancient writings of Hebrew scholars. It was used in the King James version of the Bible in the Book of Psalms.
Read More A to Z (Objective Questions) Prose poetry dates back to the ancient writings of Hebrew scholars. It was used in the King James version of the Bible in the Book of Psalms.
Examples
Psalm 93
“The Lord reigneth, he is clothed with majesty;the Lord is clothed with strength, wherewith he hath girded himself: the world also is stablished, that it cannot be moved.
Thy throne is established of old: thou art from everlasting.
The floods have lifted up, Oh Lord, the floods have lifted up their voice; the floods lift up their waves.
The Lord on high is mightier than the noise of many waters, yea, than the mighty waves of the sea.
Thy testimonies are very sure: holiness becometh thine house, O Lord, forever.”
Psalm 93
“The Lord reigneth, he is clothed with majesty;the Lord is clothed with strength, wherewith he hath girded himself: the world also is stablished, that it cannot be moved.
Thy throne is established of old: thou art from everlasting.
The floods have lifted up, Oh Lord, the floods have lifted up their voice; the floods lift up their waves.
The Lord on high is mightier than the noise of many waters, yea, than the mighty waves of the sea.
Thy testimonies are very sure: holiness becometh thine house, O Lord, forever.”
B. Narrative
poetry gives a verbal representation, in verse, of a sequence of connected
events; it propels characters through a plot. Read More UGC NET It is always told by a narrator.
Narrative poems might tell of a love story (like Tennyson’s Maud), the story of
a father and son (like Wordsworth’s Michael) or the deeds of a hero or heroine
(like Walter Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel). Epic poems are very vital to
narrative poems, although it is thought that narrative poems were created to
explain oral traditions. The focus of narrative poetry is often the pros and
cons of life.
Examples
• The Book of the Duchess by Geoffrey Chaucer
• The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
• The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• The Divine Comedy by Dante
• Don Juan by Lord Byron
• The Eve of St. Agnes by John Keats
Examples
• The Book of the Duchess by Geoffrey Chaucer
• The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
• The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• The Divine Comedy by Dante
• Don Juan by Lord Byron
• The Eve of St. Agnes by John Keats
C. Dramatic poetry, also known as dramatic verse or verse drama, is a written work
that both tells a story and connects the reader to an audience through emotions
or behavior. Read More UGC NET A form of narrative closely related to acting, it usually is
performed physically and can be either spoken or sung. Normally, it uses a set
rhyming or meter pattern, setting it apart from prose. It has evolved since its
start in ancient Greece, but it still survives today, especially in opera
librettos. A lack of strict guidelines makes it somewhat debatable what exactly
counts as a dramatic poem, but in general, the four main accepted forms include
soliloquy, dramatic monologue, character sketch and dialogue.
Dramatic poetry can take one of several forms: soliloquy, dramatic monologue, character sketch and dialogue.
Dramatic poetry can take one of several forms: soliloquy, dramatic monologue, character sketch and dialogue.
Examples.
The Raven, by Edgar Allan Poe
The Raven, by Edgar Allan Poe
“Prophet!”
said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us—by that God we both adore—
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”
By that Heaven that bends above us—by that God we both adore—
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”
‘Out-Out’,
by Robert Frost
Doing
a man’s work, though a child at heart
He saw all spoiled. “Don’t let him cut my hand off
The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!”
So. But the hand was gone already.
A Dream, by William Blake
He saw all spoiled. “Don’t let him cut my hand off
The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!”
So. But the hand was gone already.
A Dream, by William Blake
Pitying,
I dropped a tear:
But I saw a glow-worm near,
Who replied, “What wailing wight
Calls the watchman of the night?
But I saw a glow-worm near,
Who replied, “What wailing wight
Calls the watchman of the night?
D. The
poem Journey of the Magi has been penned down by Nobel prize winner TS Eliot
an is a contrast of experiences based on the nativity of Christ. The monologue
describes the journey of the Magi to Bethlahem in search of spiritual
pacification and is an account of Eliot’s own conversion to Anglican faith,
making the journey and objective correlation for Eliot.
E. An
Essay on Man is a poem published by Alexander Pope in 1734. Read More UGC NET Pope’s Essay on Man
and Moral Epistles were designed to be the parts of a system of ethics which he
wanted to express in poetry. Moral Epistles have been known under various other
names including Ethic Epistles and Moral Essays. On its publication, An Essay
on Man met with great admiration throughout Europe. Voltaire called it “the
most beautiful, the most useful, the most sublime didactic poem ever written in
any language”.
F. In Guerrillas
(1975) and A Bend in the River (1979) Naipaul dealt in fictional form
with events in the West Indies and Zaire, respectively. Guerrillas
concerns a would-be West Indian revolutionary; A Bend in the River
probes the search for identity in a newly independent African nation. Though cast
as novels, The Enigma of Arrival (1987) and A Way in the World
(1994) are to a great extent autobiographical, dealing with Naipaul’s recurrent
themes of exile and the idea of home. Read More UGC NET In these works Naipaul is haunted by a
landscape that reflects the past yet is marked more and more by profound social
change.
G. A Clockwork
Orange 1962 novel by Anthony Burgess is about a near future in which gangs of boys roam the
streets of England in search of people to rob or rape. Alex , the teenage leader of one of those gangs, gets arrested for raping
and killing a woman during a night of violent debauchery. In jail he is
brainwashed so that ideas of sex and violence nauseate him, and he emerges a
changed and vulnerable man. After a series of misadventures and another trip to
jail, Alex returns to his amoral ways. Read More A
to Z (Objective Questions)
H. Anthony
Powell, a friend and Oxford classmate of Evelyn Waugh, also wrote
wittily about the higher echelons of English society, but with more affection
and on a broader canvas. His 12-volume series of novels, grouped under the
title A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-1975), is a highly readable
account of the intertwined lives and careers of people in the arts and politics
from before World War II to many years afterward. His four-volume
autobiography, To Keep the Ball Rolling (1977-1983), complements the fictionalized
details that form the basis of his novels.
I. A Farewell
to Arms, 1929 novel by American author Ernest Hemingway, earned
Academy Awards for cinematography and sound recording. Read More UGC NET Released in 1932, the
film examines how World War I (1914-1918) impacted the lives of American
ambulance driver Lieutenant Frederic Henry , British
nurse Catherine Barkley , and a variety of other characters.
Barkley nurses Henry back to health after he is injured in the war, and the two
fall in love. Once Henry recovers, he must return to the war, but he soon
escapes to be with Barkley. She gets pregnant and nearly dies in childbirth.
J. Evelyn Waugh
(1903-66), English author of satirical novels. Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh was
born in London and educated at the University of Oxford. Between 1928 and 1938
he published five novels notable for their wit and pure satire on such aspects
of upper-class British life as colonialism, public schools, and the manners and
morals of high society. These novels are Decline and Fall (1928), Vile
Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust
(1934), and Scoop (1938). Put Out More Flags (1942) is a novel
about the British effort during World War II. Read More A
to Z (Objective Questions)
K. Born in
Trinidad of East Indian ancestry, Naipaul received recognition for novels that
focus on Indians living in the Caribbean, including A House for Mr. Biswas
(1961) and Guerrillas (1975). His later fiction and nonfiction focused
more often on countries in Asia and Africa. Lovelace, also from Trinidad,
discusses education, poverty, and village life in his novels, which include The
Schoolmaster (1968), The Dragon Can’t Dance (1979), and Salt
(1996), which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize.
L. A PASSAGE TO INDIA by E.M. Forster: The English
novelist E.M. Forster explores in his work the barriers in communication that
separate one person from another. In A Passage to India, the barrier is
culture. Among his other notable novels are Where Angels Fear to Tread
(1905), Howard's End (1910), and A Room With a View (1908).
M. Irving's
fourth novel, The World According to Garp ,
which follows the tumultuous life of a writer, was such a commercial success
that Irving was able to leave teaching and devote full time to writing. The
book was nominated for both the National Book Award and the National Book
Critics Circle Award. Irving's other works include The Hotel New Hampshire
(1981; motion picture, 1984), The Cider House Rules (1985; motion picture,
1999), A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), A Son of the Circus
(1994), Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (1996), and A Widow for One Year
(1998). He received an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for The
Cider House Rules. His insights into the process of adapting a novel for
the screen are recorded in the memoir My Movie Business (1999).
N. Outside
the works of H. G. Wells, the most important scientific romances produced
before World War I were Shiel’s The Purple Cloud , Hodgson’s The House
on the Borderland and The Lost World (1912) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The most
important American writer who contributed to this genre in this period was Jack
London in such work as The Iron Heel (1907). Read More A
to Z (Objective Questions)
O. The Canterbury Tales is written in Middle
English, which bears a close visual resemblance to the English written and
spoken today. Read More UGC NET
In contrast, Old English (the language of Beowulf, for example) can be read only in modern translation or by students of Old English. Students often read The Canterbury Tales in its original language, not only because of the similarity between Chaucer’s Middle English and our own, but because the beauty and humor of the poetry—all of its internal and external rhymes, and the sounds it produces—would be lost in translation.Read More UGC NET
P. E.V.
Ramakrishnan is a bilingual writer who has published poetry and criticism in
English and Malayalam. Read More UGC NET He is the author of three books of poetry, publishing
each after symmetrical intervals of fourteen years: Being Elsewhere in Myself
(1980), A Python in a Snake Park (1994) and Terms of Seeing: New and Selected
Poems (2008). He is also the author of a landmark book of translations of
modern Indian poetry.
Q. A novel is a literary work
where the author narrates a fictitious story in the prose form which can taken the place of
the ancient epics if not in The magnitude of epic by the volume or narrative
enlargement; rather by expansion of thought and perception. The term,
'novel' has been coined from the Italian word novella during the late
18th century. Though the novel form was introduced much later than the other
forms of literature namely, the poetry and drama; novel, today has gained
immense popularity among the masses. Read More A
to Z (Objective Questions)
R. The
"Golden Age" of English biography emerged in the late eighteenth
century, the century in which the terms "biography" and
"autobiography" entered the English lexicon. The classic works of the
period were Samuel Johnson's Critical Lives of the Poets (1779–81) and
James Boswell's massive Life of Johnson (1791). Read More A
to Z (Objective Questions) The Boswellian approach
to biography emphasized uncovering material and letting the subject "speak
for itself." While Boswell compiled, Samuel Johnson composed. Johnson did
not follow a chronological narration of the subject's life but used anecdotes
and incidents selectively.
S. A
Brief History of Time
(subtitled "From the Big Bang to Black Holes") is a popular science
book written by Stephen Hawking and first published by the Bantam Dell
Publishing Group in 1988. It became a best-seller and has sold more than 10
million copies. It was also on the London Sunday Times best-seller list
for more than four years. Read More A
to Z (Objective Questions)
T. George
Elliot (a pseudonym for Mary Ann Evans, 1819-80) was an intellectual who wrote
about German philosophy, worried about deep theological issues, and published
her first novel (Adam Bede) at the
age of forty. Read More A
to Z (Objective Questions) Her fiction combines intelligence, imagination, and human
sympathy in a way that even the best English fiction rarely does; Virginia
Woolf found Middle march (1872) “one
of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”
U. Frankenstein,
quite a different sort of novel. Frankenstein
was written by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851)—daughter of two famous
reforming philosophers, and wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Read More A
to Z (Objective Questions)
V. Arms and the Man is both an amusing
and thought-provoking drama that retains its relevance even today, more than a
century after it was first conceived. Shaw mocks at the popular theories on war
and love and combines a military satire with a taunt on love and family
structure.
W. In
1798, two young English poets—William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge (1772-1834) published a book of poems called Lyrical Ballads. In 1800 an expanded edition was published, with a
preface—a kind of poetic manifesto—by Wordsworth. Read More A
to Z (Objective Questions) This is generally regarded as
the official beginning of Romanticism
in England.
X. Bede (c.672-735) is remembered as a great
historian and theologian. His Old English works provide us with a glimpse into
an otherwise mysterious period known as the "Dark Ages."
Y. Religion is an important and recurring theme in
James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Through his experiences with religion,
Stephen Dedalus both matures and progressively becomes more individualistic as he
grows. Read More A
to Z (Objective Questions)
Z. In the Preface to his edition of Shakespeare
(1765), Samuel Johnson begins by considering what makes writers of the past worth
reading, and then moves to a more particular consideration of Shakespeare’s own
strengths and weaknesses.
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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