A TO Z Literary Principles from History of English Literature: Note 83

A Set of 26 Objective Questions & Answers

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 1. The term “Negritude” was coined by :  Ainee Cesaire and Leopold Senghor.  Aime Cesaire in his poem Notebook of a Return to the native Land 1939 first coined the term. Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)    

2. Bertolt Brecht’s concept of theatre was influenced by:  Irwin Piscator .In fact, Brecht had collaborated with Erwin Piscator, father of political theatre. Piscator's theatre was utilitarian.  Just like Brecht, Piscator's theatre was a direct response to the events taking place around him.

3. The relationship between Othello and Iago is an example of:  inversion .Inversion (thetre), a rearrangement of the ideas/ characters of a drama, or a reversal of position or order in a sequence of incidents. Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)    

4. A metrical foot consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable is:

  iamb.

5. The rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean sonnet is:  abab, cdcd, efef, gg . A theme is developed and elaborated in the quatrains, and a concluding thought is presented in the couplet. Sonnet 116 is typical of the form and excellence of the poems.

6. Using “the Bench” for the judiciary is an example of:  metonymy

7. Four feet, comprising a monosyllable, trochee, dactyl and first paeon is often called:

  sprung rhythm.  Hopkins’ The Windhover, Pied Beauty, Duns Scotus' Oxford, and Henry Purcell exemplify this. These lyrics are attempts to capture the uniqueness—or inscape, as Hopkins termed it—of natural objects, by the use of internal rhyme, alliteration, and compound metaphor and by the use of “sprung rhythm.” This verse structure, so named by Hopkins because it seems abrupt in contrast to the running rhythm typical of the poetry of his time, approximates the stresses of natural speech. Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)     It differs from the conventional system of a regular number of stressed and unstressed syllables per foot.

8. Apart from the irregular spelling, much of the vocabulary in Chaucer’s works is recognizable to the modern reader. Chaucer is also recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary as the first author to use many common English words in his writings. These words were probably frequently used in the language at the time but Chaucer, with his ear for common speech, is the earliest manuscript source. Acceptable, alkali, altercation, amble, angrily, annex, annoyance, approaching, arbitration, armless, army, arrogant, arsenic, arc, artillery and aspect are just some of the many English words first attested in Chaucer. These words are still in use and have influenced the diction of prose fiction over the years. Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)    

9. Which of the following is not a Revenge Tragedy: Volpone or The Fox is a comedy by Ben Jonson.  Gorboduc or ‘Ferrex and Porrex’ is the first English tragedy by Thomas Norton and Sackville in 1561.  Ferrex and Porrex are the sons of king Gorboduc. The best of Jonson's comedies are Volpone (1606) and The Alchemist (1610). Professing themselves his disciples, the dramatists Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher collaborated on a number of so-called tragicomedies (for example, Philaster, 1610?) in which morally dubious situations, surprising reversals of fortune, and sentimentality combine with hollow rhetoric.

10. Miracle plays are based on the lives of: Saints

11. The Red Cross Knight is Spenser’s Faerie Queene represents: Truth Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)    

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12. The line “Present fears/Are less than horrible imaginings” appear in:  Macbeth  .

 Macbeth (play), 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. 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.

Horace was born Quintus Horatius Flaccus in December 65 bc, the son of a freedman, in

13. Which of the following is not a work by Dr. Johnson :

(A) Preface to the English Dictionary (B) Preface to Shakespeare

(C) Lives of English Poets (D) Cowley Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)    

Abraham Cowley (1618-1667), English poet and essayist, was highly regarded as a poet during his lifetime. He adapted the style of the ancient Greek lyric poet Pindar to form the English Pindaric ode. He is best known for the cycle of love poems The Mistress (1647) and for Miscellanies (1656), containing “Pindarique Odes,” also love poems, and “Davideis,” an unfinished epic on the biblical king David. Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)    

14. Moll Flanders of Daniel Defoe was considered to be the best by E. M. Forster.

15. Edmund Burke denounced the French Revolution in: Reflections

16. An epic has been generally described as a long narrative poem, on a grand scale about the deeds of warriors and heroes, kings and gods. It is a polygonal heroic story incorporating myth, legend, folktale and history. Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)    Epics are mostly of national significance, since that they embody the history and aspirations of nations in a lofty or grandeur manner. An epic is a culture mirror with a fixed ideological stance, often reflecting the best noblest principles of nation’s ethos.

17. T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland and Thomas Mauve in The Magic Mountain have both told the death knell of heroism, divinity, love and all nobler virtues in the post war modern world which portrayed, rightly enough, as a fragmented, hellish insubstantial circle of spiritual vacuity and ideals .

18. Old and Middle English alliterative poems are commonly written in form of four-stress lines. Of these poems, William Langland’s The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman, better known as Piers Plowman, is the most significant.

19.The Pearl is an elegy for the death of a small girl. However the girl is the Christian symbol of innocence, heaven and love. Optimistically, thus, the work ends with an impressive vision of heaven, from which the dreamer awakes. Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)    

20."Hamlet" is one of the best revenge plays in English Literature. However, T. S. Eliot considered Hamlet to be an artistic failure. Of all the plays it is the longest and is precisely one on which Shakespeare spent most pains, yet left on it superfluous and inconsistent scenes.

21.About the year 450 A.D members of various tribes—Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians - from around the mouth of the Rhine river invaded Roman Britain.

22. The Britons had been speaking the “Celtic” language (related to modern Welsh, Breton, and Irish and Scots Gaelic) before being conquered by Rome.

23. The Anglo-Saxons were pagan: they worshipped a collection of gods that included the war god Tiu; Woden, the clever one-eyed leader of the gods; thunder-hammering Thor; and Freya, the seductive love-goddess. Four of the modern days of our week are named after these gods: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)    

24. Faithful Observation, personal detachment, and a fine sense of ironic comedy are among Jane Austen’s Chief Characteristics as a writer.

25. Wordsworth’s verdict about Blake (on his death) was that "There was no doubt that this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott. Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)    

26. The predominant almost exclusive theme of W.Blake's short poems is based on the feeling of a child's unpassioned soul; the tone is simple while the emotions possess a pure ardour.

 Ardhendu De

Ref: 1. History of English Literature- Albert     

2. The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature

3. UGC NET OLD QUESTION PAPERS