Home / Past Year Papers

Paper 2- December 2010

1. Jeremy Collier’s A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage attacked among others.

(A) John Bunyan

(B) Thomas Rhymer

(D) Henry Fielding

Answer: C

2. The Crystal Palace, a key exhibit of the Great Exhibition, was designed by

(A) Charles Darwin

(B) Edward Moxon

(D) Richard Owen

Answer: C

3. Influence of the Indian Philosophy is seen in the writings of

(A) G.B. Shaw

(B) Noel Coward

(D) T.S. Eliot

Answer: D

4. In which of his voyages, Gulliver discovered mountain-like beings ?

(A) The land of the Lilliputians

(B) The land of the Brobdingnagians

(D) The land of the Houyhnhnms

Answer: B

5. Patrick White’s Voss is a novel about

(A) the sea

(B) the capital market

(D) the judicial system

Answer: C

6. Although Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney writes in English, in voice and subject matter, his poems are

(A) Welsh

(B) Scottish

(D) Polish

Answer: C

7. To whom is Mary Shelley’s famous work Frankenstein dedicated ?

(A) Lord Byron

(B) Claire Clairmont

(D) P.B. Shelley

Answer: C

8. Which among the following poems by Philip Larkin records his impressions while travelling to London by train ?

(A) “Aubade”

(B) “Church Going”

(D) “An Arundel Tomb”

Answer: C

9. The English satirist who used the sharp edge of praise to attack his victims was

(A) Ben Jonson

(B) John Donne

(D) Samuel Butler

Answer: A

10. One of the most famous movements of direct address to the reader – “Reader, I married him” – occurs in

(A) Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones

(B) Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre

(D) George Eliot’s Middlemarch

Answer: B

11. Langland’s Piers Plowman is a satire on

(A) aristocracy

(B) chivalry

(D) clergy

Answer: D

12. Which of the following thinkerconcept pair is correctly matched ?

(A) I.A. Richards – Archetypal Criticism

(B) Christopher Frye – Mysticism

(D) Terry Eagleton – Psychological Criticism

Answer: C

13. Sexual jealousy is a theme in Shakespeare’s

(A) The Merchant of Venice

(B) The Tempest

(D) King Lear

Answer: C

14. The title, The New Criticism, published in 1941, was written by

(A) Cleanth Brooks

(B) John Crowe Ransom

(D) Allan Tate

Answer: B

15. Which of the following is not a Revenge Tragedy ?

(A) The White Devil

(B) The Duchess of Malfi

(D) The Spanish Tragedy

Answer: C

16. Who of the following playwrights rejects the Aristotelian concept of tragic play as imitation of reality ?

(A) G.B. Shaw

(B) Arthur Miller

(D) John Galsworthy

Answer: C

17. The label ‘Diasporic Writer’ can be applied to

I. Meena Alexander

II. Arundhati Roy

III. Kiran Desai

IV. Shashi Deshpande

The correct combination for the statement, according to the code, is

(A) I and IV are correct.

(B) II and III are correct.

(D) I and III are correct.

Answer: D

18. The letter ‘A’ in The Scarlet Letter stands for

I. Adultery

II. Able

III. Angel

IV. Appetite

The correct combination for the statement, according to the code, is

(A) I and II are correct.

(B) II and III are correct.

(D) I, II and III are correct.

Answer: D

19. A monosyllabic rhyme on the final stressed syllable of two lines of verse is called

(A) monorhyme

(B) feminine rhyme

(D) eye rhyme

Answer: C

20. A fatwa was issued in Salman Rushdie’s name following the publication of :

(A) Midnight’s Children

(B) Shame

(D) Grimus

Answer: C

21. “There is nothing outside the text” is a key statement emanating from

(A) Feminism

(B) New Historicism

(D) Structuralism

Answer: C

22. The Augustan Age is called so because

(A) King Augustus ruled over England during this period

(B) The English writers imitated the Roman writers during this period

(D) This was an age of sensibility

Answer: B

23. One of the important texts of Angry Young Man Movement is

(A) Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis

(B) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

(D) The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles

Answer: C

24. Whom does Alexander Pope satirise in the portrait of Sporus ?

(A) Lady Wortley Montague

(B) Joseph Addison

(D) Lord Harvey

Answer: D

25. The hero of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine was born as a

(A) carpenter

(B) goldsmith

(D) fisherman

Answer: C

26. In a letter to his brother George in September 1819, John Keats had this to say about a fellow romantic poet : “He describes what he sees – I describe what I imagine – Mine is the hardest task.” The poet under reference is

(A) Wordsworth

(B) Coleridge

(D) Southey

Answer: C

27. A sequence of repeated consonantal sounds in a stretch of language is

(A) alliteration

(B) acrostic

(D) syllable

Answer: A

28. Reformation was predominantly a movement in

(A) politics

(B) literature

(D) education

Answer: C

29. The motto “only connect” is taken from

(A) Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo

(B) Rudyard Kipling’s Kim

(D) E.M. Forster’s Howards End

Answer: D

30. English Iambic Pentameter was brought to its first maturity in

(A) sonnet

(B) dramatic verse

(D) elegy

Answer: B

31. Who among the following was not a member of the Bloomsbury Group ?

(A) Lytton Strachey

(B) Clive Bell

(D) Winston Churchill

Answer: D

32. The concept of human mind as tabula rasa or blank tablet was propounded by

(A) Bishop Berkley

(B) David Hume

(D) John Locke

Answer: D

33. The terms ‘resonance’ and ‘wonder’ are associated with

(A) Stephen Greenblatt

(B) Terence Hawkes

(D) Ronald Barthes

Answer: A

34. The rhetorical pattern used by Chaucer in The Prologue to Canterbury Tales is

(A) ten-syllabic line

(B) eight-syllabic line

(D) ottava rima

Answer:A

35. Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species was published in the year

(A) 1859

(B) 1879

(D) 1866

Answer: A

36. Who of the following is the author of Juno and the Paycock ?

(A) Lady Gregory

(B) W.B. Yeats

(D) Sean O’Casey

Answer: D

37. The title of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is taken from a play by

(A) Christopher Marlowe

(B) William Shakespeare

(D) John Webster

Answer: B

38. “Silverman has never read Browning.” This is an example of

(A) chiasmus

(B) conceit

(D) metonymy

Answer: D

39. The term ‘Intentional Fallacy’ is first used by

(A) William Empson

(B) Northrop Frye

(D) Wimsatt and Beardsley

Answer: D

40. “Recessional : A Victorian Ode”, Kipling’s well-known poem,

I. laments the end of an Era

II. marks a new commitment to scientific knowledge

III. expresses the sincerity of his religious devotion

IV. was occasioned by Queen Victoria’s 1897 Jubilee Celebration

The correct combination for the statement, according to the code, is

(A) I, II and III are correct.

(B) III and IV are correct.

(D) I, III and IV are correct.

Answer: B

41. Who among the following is not a Restoration playwright ?

(A) William Congreve

(B) William Wycherley

(D) George Etherege

Answer: C

42. Which famous Romantic poem begins with the line : ‘Hail to thee, blithe spirit ! / Bird thou never wert” ?

(A) “Ode to a Nightingale”

(B) “To the Cuckoo”

(D) “To the Daisy”

Answer: C

43. Who among the following Victorian poets disliked his middle name ?

(A) Arthur Hugh Clough

(B) Dante Gabriel Rossetti

(D) Algernon Charles Swinburne

Answer: C

44. Aston is a character in Pinter’s

(A) The Birthday Party

(B) The Caretaker

(D) The Homecoming

Answer: B

45. Byron’s English Bards and Scottish Reviewers is about

I. the survey of English poetry

II. evangelism in English poetry

III. contemporary literary scene

IV. the early English travelers

The correct combination for the statement, according to the code, is

(A) III and IV are correct.

(B) II, III and IV are correct.

(D) I and III are correct.

Answer: D

46. Which Eliotian character utters the question – “Do I eat a peach” ?

(A) Marina

(B) Prufrock

(D) Stetson

Answer: B

47. Which among the following works by Daniel Defoe landed him in prison and the pillory ?

(A) The True-Born Englishman

(B) Captain Singleton

(D) Moll Flanders

Answer: C

48. The arrival of printing in fifteenth century England was engineered by

(A) Sir Thomas Malory

(B) John Gower

(D) William Caxton

Answer: D

49. About which nineteenth century English writer was it said that “He had succeeded as a writer not by conforming to the Spirit of the Age, but in opposition to it” ?

(A) Lord Byron on Coleridge

(B) Coleridge on Keats

(D) De Quincey on Crabbe

Answer: C

50. The Restoration comedy, The Double Dealer was written by

(A) John Dryden

(B) William Wycherley

(D) George Etherege

Answer: C