1. To refer to the unresolvable difficulties a text may open up, Derrida makes use of the term:

(A) aporia

(B) difference

(C) erasure

(D) supplement

Answer: (A)

2. Who, among the following English playwrights, scripted the film Shakespeare in Love?

(A) Harold Pinter

(B) Alan Bennett

(C) Caryl Churchill

(D) Tom Stoppard

Answer: (D)

3. Arrange the following in the chronological order:

1. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women

2. Lyrical Ballads

3. French Revolution

4. Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry

(A) 4, 3, 1, 2

(B) 3, 2, 1, 2

(C) 1, 2, 4, 3

(D) 2, 1, 3, 4

Answer: (A)

4. Which of the following employs a narrative structure in which the main action is relayed at second hand through an enclosing frame story?

(A) Sons and Lovers

(B) Ulysses

(C) The Power and the Glory

(D) Heart of Darkness

Answer: (D)

5. The Irish Dramatic Movement was heralded by such figures as

(A) W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn

(B) Jonathan Swift and his contemporaries

(C) H. Drummond, Edward Irving and John Ervine

(D) Oscar Wilde and his contemporaries

Answer: (A)

6. Which poem by Chaucer was written on the death of Blanche, Wife of John of Gaunt?

(A) Troilus and Criseyde

(B) The House of Fame

(C) The Book of Duchess

(D) The Legend of Good Women

Answer: (C)

7. The Tragedy of Ferrex and Porrex is the other title of

(A) Gorboduc

(B) Ralph Roister Doister

(C) Damon and Pythias

(D) Lamentable Tragedy

Answer: (A)

8. Who of the following poets is Australian?

(A) Austin Clarke

(B) Judith Wright

(C) Edwin Muir

(D) Derek Walcott

Answer: (B)

9. “He found it [English] brick and left it marble”, remarked one great writer on another. Who were they?

(A) Milton on Shakespeare

(B) Dryden on Milton

(C) Johnson on Dryden

(D) Jonson on Shakespeare

Answer: (C)

10. Who, among the following, is a Nobel Laureate?

(A) Tony Morrison

(B) Seamus Heaney

(C) Ted Hughes

(D) Geoffrey Hill

Answer: (A & B)

11. List – I

I. “Because I could not stop for death…”

II. “O Captain ! My Captain!”

III. “Two roads diverged in a wood….”

IV. “So much depends /upon”

List – II

a. Robert Frost

b. William Carlos Williams

c. Emily Dickinson

d. Walt Whitman

The correctly matched series would be :

(A) I-d; II-c; III-b; IV-a

(B) I-a; II-b; III-c; IV-d

(C) I-b; II-a; III-d; IV-c

(D) I-c; II-d; III-a; IV-b

Answer: (D)

12. The predominant tone and thrust of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” are

(A) comic

(B) solemn

(C) hortatory

(D) irony

Answer: (D)

13. I sit in one of the dives On Fifty Second Street, Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade. So begins Auden’s “September 1, 1939”. What is the meaning of the word in italics?

(A) bench

(B) night club

(C) house

(D) park

Answer: (B)

14. C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards were reputed in the 1930s for introducing

(A) Practical Criticism

(B) New Criticism

(C) Standard English Project

(D) Basic English Project

Answer: (D)

15. In which of the following works does Mrs. Malaprop appear ?

(A) The Rivals

(B) She Stoops to Conquer

(C) The Mysteries of Udolpho

(D) The Way of the World

Answer: (A)

16. Which of the following statements about Christopher Marlowe are true?

I. Edward II was written in the last year of Marlowe’s life.

II. Many critics consider Doctor Faustus to be Marlowe’s best play.

III. His Spanish Tragedy comes a close second.

IV. Marlowe was less educated than Shakespeare.

(A) I and II are true.

(B) II and III are true.

(C) II and IV are true.

(D) III and IV are true.

Answer: (A)

17. “Art for Art’s Sake” became a rallying cry for

(A) the Aesthetes

(B) the Symbolists

(C) the Imagists

(D) the Art Noveau School

Answer: (A)

18. Confessions of an English Opium Eater is a literary work by

(A) S. T. Coleridge

(B) P. B. Shelley

(C) Thomas De Quincey

(D) Lord Byron

Answer: (C)

19. Which of the following statements about The Canterbury Tales is true?

(A) “The General Prologue’ is appended to The Canterbury Tales.

(B) In all, Chaucer tells thirty tales in this work.

(C) The Canterbury Tales remained unfinished at the time of its author’s death.

(D) The Wife of Bath, The Clerk, Sir Gawain and The Franklin are characters and tale-tellers in this work.

Answer: (C)

20. Who, among the following, was a Catholic novelist, an Intelligence Officer, a film critic and set his fictions in far-away places wrecked by political conflicts?

(A) Anthony Powell

(B) Evelyn Waugh

(C) William Golding

(D) Graham Greene

Answer: (D)

21. List – I

1. Good sense is the body of poetic genius

2. Poetry is the breath and a finer spirit of all knowledge

3. Literary criticism is a description and evaluation of its object

4. Nature never set forth the earth in as rich a tapestry as diverse poets have done

List – II

I. Brooks, “The Formalist Critic”

II. Sidney, Defence/ An Apology for Poetry

III. Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads

IV. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria

1 2 3 4

(A) IV III I II

(B) II IV III I

(C) III II I IV

(D) IV II I III

Answer: (A)

22. In which of the following travel books does Mark Twain give an account of his visit to India?

(A) A Tramp Abroad

(B) Roughing It

(C) The Innocents Abroad

(D) Following the Equator

Answer: (D)

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

(A) Songs of Innocence

(B) Songs of Experience

(C) The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

(D) Vision of the Daughters of Albion

Answer: (B)

24. Who among the following English artists illustrated the novels of Dickens and Scott?

(A) Richard Hogarth

(B) Joshua Reynolds

(C) George Cruishank

(D) John Tennial

Answer: (C)

25. The last of Gulliver’s Travels is to

(A) The Land of the Houyhnhnms

(B) The Land of Homosapiens

(C) The Land of the Hurricanes

(D) The Newfound Land

Answer: (A)

26. Madam Merle is a character in

(A) The Great Gatsby

(B) The Portrait of a Lady

(C) The Jungle

(D) The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Answer: (B)

27. In which of the following scenes of The Waste Land do we have a departure from Standard English?

(A) The typist scene

(B) The pub scene

(C) The hyacinth garden scene

(D) The Chapel Perilous scene

Answer: (B)

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

(A) Hamlet

(B) Lear

(C) Othello

(D) Macbeth

Answer: (D)

29. John Dryden’s Absalom and Achotophel a

(A) religious tract

(B) political allegory

(C) comic verse epic

(D) comedy

Answer: (B)

30. The term ‘the comedy of menace’ is associated with the early plays of

(A) Arnold Wesker

(B) John Arden

(C) Harold Pinter

(D) David Hare

Answer: (C)

31. Examine the following statements and identify one of them which is not true.

(A) Rudyard Kipling died in the year 1936.

(B) He was born in India but schooled in England.

(C) He returned to India as a police constable in Burma.

(D) He is the author of Jungle Book and Barrack Room Ballads.

Answer: (C)

32. What is the correct combination of the following?

I. Balachandra Rajan

II. R. K. Narayan

III. Kamala Markandaya

IV. Romen Basu

a. The Tamarind Tree

b. The Coffer Dams

c. The Dark Dancer

d. The Dark Room

(A) I – c; II – d; III – b; IV – b

(B) I – d; II – a; III – b; IV – c

(C) I – c; II – a; III – d; IV – b

(D) I – d; II – c; III – a; IV – b

Answer: * (Marks given to all)

33. Name the poet who chooses his successor and the successor-poet whom Dryden satirises in his famous poem.

(A) James Shirley and Chris Shirley

(B) Henry Treece and Charles Triesten

(C) Richard Flecknoe and Thomas Shadwell

(D) Thomas Percy and Samuel Pepys

Answer: (C)

34. “If______ comes, can_______ be far behind ?” (Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind”)

(A) winter, spring

(B) autumn, summer

(C) wind, rains

(D) spring, winter

Answer: (A)

35. The following passages are the very first lines of well-known works. Match the lines and the works:

a. Moby Dick

b. Macbeth

c. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

d. Tristram Shandy

e. “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”

I. Let us go then, you and I…..

II. Call me Ishmael…..

III. When shall we three meet again?

IV. He disappeared in the dead of winter

V. I wish either….begot me …..

(A) I-c; II-a; III-b; IV-e; V-d

(B) I-e; II-b; III-a; IV-c; V-d

(C) I-b; II-a; III-d; IV-e; V-c

(D) I-b; II-e; III-d; IV-c; V-a

Answer: (A)

36. Which of the following is not a revenge tragedy?

(A) Hamlet

(B) The Duchess of Malfi

(C) Volpone

(D) Gorboduc

Answer: (C)

37. What is a neologism?

(A) A word with roots in a native language

(B) A word whose meaning changes with every renewed use

(C) A word newly coined or used in a new sense

(D) An obsession with new words and phrases

Answer: (C)

38. Which of the following is not true of Edward Said’s Orientalism?

(A) Makes use of Foucault’s concept of discursive formulation

(B) Is one of the founding texts of Postcolonial theory

(C) Makes use of Barthes’s concept of writerly text

(D) Utilises the Gramscian notion of hegemony

Answer: (C)

39. Thomas Love Peacock classified poetry into 4 periods. They are:

(A) carbon, gold, silver and brass

(B) brass, silver, gold and diamond

(C) iron, gold, silver and brass

(D) gold, platinum, silver and diamond

Answer: (C)

40. Which among the following novels has more than one ending?

(A) Lucky Jim

(B) The Prime of Jean Brodie

(C) The French Lieutenant’s Woman

(D) The Clockwork Orange

Answer: (C)

41. “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man” is an example of

(A) Bathos

(B) Epistrophe

(C) Chiasmus

(D) Anti-climax

Answer: (C)

42. Which of the following statements is NOT correct?

(A) Chaucer used the rhyme royal, a stanzaic form in some of his major poems.

(B) Chaucer was the author of The Legend of Good Women.

(C) Chaucer wrote in English when the court poetry of his day was written in Anglo-Norman and Latin.

(D) Chaucer wrote The Book Named the Governor

Answer: (D)

43. Material feminism studies inequality in terms of

(A) only gender

(B) only class

(C) both class and gender

(D) only patriarchy

Answer: (C)

44. Who among the following is not an Irish writer?

(A) Oscar Wilde

(B) Oliver Goldsmith

(C) Edmund Burke

(D) Thomas Gray

Answer: (D)

45. Entries in The Diary of Samuel Pepys begins after

(A) The Restoration

(B) The Glorious Revolution

(C) The Reformation

(D) The French Revolution

Answer: (A)

46. In a poem, a line may either be end-stopped or

(A) rhymed

(B) broken

(C) accented

(D) run-on

Answer: (D)

47. Which of the following poets wrote the essay “Naipaul’s India and Mine”?

(A) Kamala Das

(B) R. Parthasarthy

(C) A. K. Ramanujam

(D) Nissim Ezekiel

Answer: (D)

48. Match the following :

1. Peter Ackroyd

2. James Boswell

3. Samuel Johnson

4. Richard Ellman

I. James Joyce

II. T. S. Eliot

III. Life of Johnson

IV. Lives of Poets

(A) I-3, II-4, III-1, IV-2

(B) I-4, II-1, III-2, IV-3

(C) I-1, II-2, III-3, IV-4

(D) I-2, II-3, III-1, IV-4

Answer: (B)

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

(A) simile

(B) image

(C) conceit

(D) metonymy

Answer: (D)

50. An epilogue is

(A) prefixed to a text which it introduces.

(B) suffixed to a text which it sums up or extends.

(C) a piece of writing or speech that formally begins a book.

(D) a piece of writing or speech that bears no relation to the text at hand.

Answer: (B)