1. Who wrote Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats?
(A) T.S. Eliot
(B) Sylvia Plath
(C) Wallace Stevens
(D) W.H. Auden
Correct Option: (A)
[Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) is a collection of whimsical light poems by T. S. Eliot about feline psychology and sociology, published by Faber and Faber. It is the basis for the musical Cats.]
2. The name of a mathematician and philosopher who won the Nobel Prize for Literature is:
(A) Winston Churchill
(B) Bertrand Russel
(C) V.S. Naipaul
(D) W.B. Yeats
Correct Option: (B)
[Bertrand Arthur William Russell (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, essayist, social critic, political activist, and Nobel laureate. In 1950, Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought”]
3. The fictional era created by Aldous Huxley in his epoch-making novel Brave New World is:
(A) After Darwin
(B) After Marx
(C) After Ford
(D) After Armageddon
Correct Option: (C)
[Brave New World is a dystopian novel by English author Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published in 1932. The book presents a nightmarish vision of a future society. This novel is set in 2540 CE (Common Era or Christian era), which the novel identifies as the year AF 632. AF stands for “after Ford”]
4. The theatre which Yeats launched in 1904 with his associate J.M. Synge was:
(A) Drury Lane Theatre
(B) Royal Court Theatre
(C) The Rose
(D) Abbey Theatre
Correct Option: (D)
[The theatre which Yeats launched in 1904 with his associate J.M. Synge was Abbey Theatre. It was also known as the National Theatre of Ireland.]
5. Newspeak is an artificial language – “designed to diminish the range of thought”. In which book can you read about it?
(A) 1984
(B) Brave New World
(C) The Cancer Ward
(D) Animal Farm
Correct Option: (A)
[Newspeak is the language of Oceania, a fictional totalitarian state and the setting of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (P. 1949), by Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell. Its a dystopian novel. (Here, dystopian means= a work of fiction describing an imaginary place where life is extremely bad because of deprivation or oppression or terror. The term “newspeak” was coined by George Orwell in his 1949 anti-utopian novel 1984. In Orwell’s fictional totalitarian state, Newspeak was a language favoured by the minions of Big Brother and, in Orwell’s words, “designed to diminish the range of thought.”]
6. Which of the following novels takes its title from a work by John Bunyan?
(A) Dombey and Son
(B) Vanity Fair
(C) Lord Jim
(D) Jane Eyre
Correct Option: (B)
[The novel Vanity Fair, pub. in 1847 by William Makepeace Thackeray, takes its title from a work The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World, to That Which Is to Come by John Bunyan pub. in 1678.]
7. The struggle for radical social reform in the 19th Century forms the background of:
(A) Cranford
(B) A Tale of Two Cities
(C) Felix Holt
(D) Pride and Prejudice
Correct Option: (C)
[Felix Holt, the Radical (1866) is a social novel written by George Eliot about political disputes in a small English town at the time of the First Reform Act of 1832.]
8. “In Memorium” was written in memory of:
(A) Keats
(B) Thomas Arnold
(C) P.B. Shelley
(D) A.H. Hallam
Correct Option: (D)
[“In Memoriam” is a poem by the British poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, completed in 1849 and published in March 1850. It is a requiem for the poet’s beloved Cambridge friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage in Vienna in 1833.]
9. Sissy Jupe is a character in:
(A) Hard Times
(B) Middlemarch
(C) Jude the Obscure
(D) David Copperfield
Correct Option: (A)
[The character Sissy Jupe appears in the novel Hard Times by Charles Dickens. She is the daughter of a circus performer, who comes to live with the Gradgrinds as a servant when her father abandons her.]
10. The writer who wrote a poem in memory of Yeats is:
(A) Eliot
(B) Auden
(C) C. Day Lewis
(D) Edith Sitwell
Correct Option: (B)
[The poem ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’ by W. H. Auden (B.1907- D.1973) was written in 1939, following the death of the Irish poet W. B. Yeats in January of that year. As well as being an elegy for the dead poet, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’ is also a meditation on the role and place of poetry in the modern world.]
11. With which of the following political movements was G.B. Shaw associated:
(A) The Fourth International
(B) The New Left
(C) Fabian Society
(D) Labour Party
Correct Option: (C)
[George Bernard Shaw (Born on 26 July 1856 & Died on 2 November 1950), was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. By the mid-1880s he had become a respected theatre and music critic. Following a political awakening, he joined the gradualist Fabian Society and became its most prominent pamphleteer.]
12. The character whose nickname is Rabbit (an ordinary middle-class man lost in the sterility of modern world) is featured in the works of:
(A) Saul Bellow
(B) Simclair Lewis
(C) Huxley
(D) Updike
Correct Option: (D)
[Rabbit, Run is a 1960 novel by John Updike. The novel depicts three months in the life of a 26-year-old former high school basketball player named Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom who is trapped in a loveless marriage and a boring sales job, and his attempts to escape the constraints of his life.]
13. Sea of Poppies is written by:
(A) Amitav Ghosh
(B) Vikram Seth
(C) Arvind Adiga
(D) Raja Rao
Correct Option: (A)
[Sea of Poppies is a 2008 novel written by the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008.]
13. “Sea of Poppies” is written by:
(A) Amitav Ghosh
(B) Vikram Seth
(C) Arvind Adiga
(D) Raja Rao
Correct Option: (A)
[Sea of Poppies is a 2008 novel written by the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008.]
14. “Anxiety of Influence” – the term has been coined by:
(A) Lionel Trilling
(B) Harold Bloom
(C) Cleanth Brooks
(D) Derrida
Correct Option: (B)
[Anxiety of Influence is a type of literary criticism established by Harold Bloom in 1973, in his book, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. It refers to the psychological struggle of aspiring authors to overcome the anxiety posed by the influence of their literary antecedents.]
15. Which of the following is a formalistic critic?
(A) Arnold
(B) Northrop Frye
(C) Empson
(D) Ezra Pound
Correct Option: (C)
[Sir William Empson (27 September 1906 – 15 April 1984) was an English literary critic and poet, widely influential for his practice of closely reading literary works, a practice fundamental to New Criticism. William Empson advocated formalist criticism by writing his book Seven Types of Ambiguity in 1930.]
16. Of the four seminal feminist texts, which one is written by a man?
(A) A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(B) The Second Sex
(C) A Room of One’s Own
(D) An Essay on the Subjection of Women
Correct Option: (D)
[A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (P.1792), is written by the 18th-century British proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. The Second Sex (P. 1949) is a book by the French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir, in which the author discusses the treatment of women throughout history. A Room of One’s Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf, first published in September 1929. The Subjection of Women is an essay by English philosopher, political economist and civil servant John Stuart Mill published in 1869.]
17. ‘Paradox’ and ‘Tension’ are critical terms promoted by:
(A) Tate and Brooks
(B) Wordsworth and Coleridge
(C) Pound and Eliot
(D) Johnson and Pater
Correct Option: (A) [‘Paradox’ and ‘Tension’ are critical terms promoted by Tate and Brooks.]
18. According to Coleridge, what it is that dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate………. and to unify:
(A) Fancy
(B) Secondary Imagination
(C) Epiphany
(D) Sensibility
Correct Option: (B)
[According to Coleridge [The secondary imagination] dissolves, diffuses, dissipates in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify.]
19. The Long Revolution (1961) is written by:
(A) David Daiches
(B) Terry Eagleton
(C) Raymond Williams
(D) Jonathan Culler
Correct Option: (C)
[The Long Revolution, by Raymond Williams, (P.1961) is a book on the theory of culture and historical studies of English cultural development.]
20. ‘Difference’ is a critical concept introduced by:
(A) Foucault
(B) Lacan
(C) Edward Said
(D) Derrida
Correct Option: (D)
[Différance is a French term coined by Jacques Derrida. It is a central concept in Derrida’s deconstruction, a critical outlook concerned with the relationship between text and meaning. The term différance means “difference and deferral of meaning.”]
21. Which poetic device has been used in the lines “Success is counted sweetest/By those who never succeed”?
(A) Hyperbole
(B) Ambiguity
(C) Conceit
(D) Paradox
Correct Option: (D)
[The poetic device used in the lines “Success is counted sweetest / By those who never succeed” is Paradox. A paradox is a figure of speech in which a statement appears to contradict itself.]
22. ‘darkness visible’ and ‘fearful joy’ are examples of:
(A) Oxymoron
(B) Antithesis
(C) Anti-climax
(D) Simile
Correct Option: (A)
[‘darkness visible’ and ‘fearful joy’ are examples of- Oxymoron. Oxymoron is a figure of speech in which two opposite ideas are joined to create an effect.]
23. Who, of the following, is supposed to be the exponent of the theory of dhvani (suggestion):
(A) Bharatamuni
(B) Anandavardhana
(C) Abhinavagupta
(D) Kuntaka
Correct Option: (B) [Anandavardhana was the chief exponent of the Dhvani Theory.]
24. Which of the following is not a dramatic monologue?
(A) Ulysses (Tennyson)
(B) Fra Lippo Lippi (Browning)
(C) On His Blindness (Milton)
(D) The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (Eliot)
Correct Option: (C)
[Ulysses, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson is a blank-verse poem written in 1833 and published in 1842 in his well-received second volume of poetry. It is a dramatic monologue. Fra Lippo Lippi is an 1855 dramatic monologue written by the Victorian poet Robert Browning which first appeared in his collection Men and Women (a collection of fifty-one poems in two volumes) The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, commonly known as “Prufrock”, is the first professionally published poem by American-born British poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965). Eliot began writing “Prufrock” in February 1910, and it was first published in the June 1915 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse at the instigation of Ezra Pound. In this dramatic monologue, Eliot narrates the experience of Prufrock using the stream of consciousness technique developed by his fellow Modernist writers. “On His Blindness” is a Petrarchan sonnet, a lyric poem with fourteen lines.]
25. “The pen is mightier than the sword”–this is an example of:
(A) pathetic fallacy
(B) synecdoche
(C) transferred epithet
(D) metonymy
Correct Option: (D)
[The poetic device used here is metonymy. Its a figure of speech that replaces the name of a thing with the name of something else with which it is closely associated. Here in the line- “The pen is mightier than the sword.” Pen refers to written words, and sword refers to military force.]
26. Who, of the following, did coin the word – “Yahoo”?
(A) Swift
(B) Twain
(C) Wodehouse
(D) Orwell
Correct Option: (A)
[The word “yahoo” was coined by Jonathan Swift in the fourth section of Gulliver’s Travels, a prose satire, Published on 28 October 1726.]
27. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was written by:
(A) Iris Murdoch
(B) Muriel Spark
(C) Virginia Woolf
(D) G.B. Shaw
Correct Option: (B) [The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a novel by Muriel Spark, Published in 1961.]
28. Which of the following was the first novel in English written by an Indian writer?
(A) Kanthapura
(B) Untouchable
(C) Rajmohan’s Wife
(D) Murugan, The Tiller
Correct Option: (C)
[The first novel in English was Rajmohan’s Wife, (Originally published in 1864) written by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay.]
29. Which of the following is written by Sri Aurobindo?
(A) The Religion of Man
(B) The Mark of Vishnu
(C) Delhi: A Novel
(D) The Future Poetry
Correct Option: (D)
[The Religion of Man is a 1931 compilation of lectures by Rabindranath Tagore. “The Mark of Vishnu” is a short story which was published in The Mark of Vishnu and Other Stories in 1950 by Khushwant Singh, an Indian novelist, lawyer, journalist, politician and short story writer. Delhi: A Novel (published 1990) is a historical novel by Indian writer Khushwant Singh.) Future Poetry, is a book by Sri Aurobindo published in 1953.]
30. Which of the following is written by Raja Rao?
(A) The Meaning of India
(B) Two Lives
(C) The Death of Vishnu
(D) The English Teacher
Correct Option: (A)
[The Meaning of India, is a collection of essays and speeches, published in 1996, by Raja Rao. Two Lives, divided into five parts, is second non-fiction work of Vikram Seth Published in September 2005. Another work-Two Lives (1991) consists of a pair of novellas by Irish writer William Trevor published as a single book. The Death of Vishnu (Pub. in 2001) is a novel by Indian-American writer Manil Suri. The book is about the spiritual journey of a dying man named Vishnu living on a landing of a Bombay apartment building, as well as the lives of the residents living in the building. The English Teacher is a 1945 novel written by R. K. Narayan. It is a part of a series of novels and collections of short stories set in “Malgudi”.]
31. The 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to:
(A) Chinua Achebe
(B) Alice Munro
(C) Margaret Atwood
(D) Wole Soyinka
Correct Option: (B)
[The Nobel Prize in Literature 2013 was awarded to a Canadian short-story writer Alice Munro “master of the contemporary short story.”]
32. Which of the following Indian writers was given the Sahitya Academy Award for English in 2013?
(A) Allan Sealy
(B) Vikram Seth
(C) Temsula Ao
(D) Anjum Hasan
Correct Option: (C)
[The Sahitya Akademi Award, Instituted in 1954, is the second-highest literary honor in India, given for works published in any of the 24 languages recognised by the akademi. Irwin Allan Sealy was given the Sahitya Academy Award for his Novel The Trotter-Nama in 1991. Vikram Seth was given the Sahitya Academy Award for his Novel The Golden Gate in 1988. Temsula Ao, a poet, short story writer and ethnographer was given the Sahitya Academy Award for her Short stories- Laburnum For My Head in 2013.]
33. The central character in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is:
(A) Padma
(B) Dr. Narlikar
(C) Shiva
(D) Saleem Sinai
Correct Option: (D)
[Midnight’s Children (Pub. in 1981) is a novel by British Indian author Salman Rushdie. It deals with India’s transition from British colonialism to independence and the partition of British India. It is considered an example of postcolonial, postmodern, and magical realist literature. The central character- chief protagonist in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is Saleem Sinai.]
34. The Gunny Sack is written by:
(A) M.G. Vassanji
(B) Nadine Gordimer
(C) Wole Soyinka
(D) Alan Paton
Correct Option: (A)
[The Gunny Sack (1989) is a novel by Moyez G. Vassanji, a Canadian novelist and editor, who writes under the name M. G. Vassanji.]
35. Which of the following novels is written by Margaret Atwood?
(A) Cry, the Beloved Country
(B) Foe
(C) The Handmaid’s Tale
(D) A Man of the People
Correct Option: (C)
[Cry, the Beloved Country is a novel by Alan Paton, published in 1948. Foe (Pub.1986) is a novel by South African-born Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee. The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, originally published in 1985. A Man of the People (Pub. 1966) is a novel by Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe.]
36. Which of the following novels is the sequel to Chinua Achebe’s first novel – Things Fall Apart (1958)?
(A) Arrow of God
(B) A Man of the People
(C) Anthills of the Savannah
(D) No Longer at Ease
Correct Option: (D)
[Continuing his relationship with Heinemann(a publisher of professional resources and a provider of educational services for teachers and educators from kindergarten through college.), Achebe published four other novels: No Longer at Ease (the 1960 sequel to Things Fall Apart- (P.1958), Arrow of God (P.1964), A Man of the People (P.1966), and Anthills of the Savannah (P. 1987). So here the novel No Longer at Ease is the sequel to Chinua Achebe’s first novel – Things Fall Apart.]
37. July’s People is a novel written by:
(A) Nadine Gordimer
(B) Coetzee
(C) Alan Paton
(D) Wole Soyinka
Correct Option: (A)
[July’s People (Pub.1981) is a novel by the South African writer Nadine Gordimer. It is set in a near future version of South Africa where Apartheid is ended through a civil war.]
38. Who, of the following writers, is credited with having, coined the term, ‘cyberspace’?
(A) Bruce Sterling
(B) Rudy Rucker
(C) William Gibson
(D) Neal Stephenson
Correct Option: (C)
[The term cyberspace was first used by the American-Canadian author William Gibson in 1982 in a story published in Omni magazine and then in his book Neuromancer, a 1984 science fiction novel. In this science-fiction novel, Gibson described cyberspace as the creation of a computer network in a world filled with artificially intelligent beings.]
39. The Playboy of the Western World is a play by:
(A) Bertolt Brecht
(B) G.B. Shaw
(C) J.M. Synge
(D) Inoesco
Correct Option: (C)
[Millington Synge and first performed at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, on 26 January 1907.]
40. ‘The Time Machine’ is a novel written by:
(A) Erelyn Waugh
(B) Aldous Huxley
(C) George Orwell
(D) H.G. Wells
Correct Option: (D) [The Time Machine is a science fiction novella by H. G. Wells, published in 1895.]
41. Roland Barthes is the author of one of the following texts:
(A) “The Death of Tragedy”
(B) “The Death of the Author”
(C) “The Death of Literature”
(D) “The Death of a Hero”
Correct Option: (B)
[“The Death of Tragedy”, is a 1961 work of literary criticism by George Steiner. “The Death of the Author” is a 1967 essay by the French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes. “The Death of Literature” is a 1990 book by American literary critic and professor Alvin Kernan. “Death of a Hero” is a World War I novel by Richard Aldington. It was his first novel, published by Chatto & Windus in 1929, and thought to be partly autobiographical.]
42. The Brothers Karamazov, the famous novel was written by:
(A) Leo Tolstoy
(B) Chekhov
(C) Dostoevsky
(D) Pushkin
Correct Option: (C)
[The Brothers Karamazov, the famous Russian novel (Pub. in November 1880) was written by Fyodor Dostoevsky.]
43. The Waste Land, the famous poem by T.S. Eliot is divided into:
(A) Three parts
(B) Four parts
(C) Six parts
(D) Five parts
Correct Option: (D)
[The poem The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot is divided into five sections; ‘The Burial of the Dead’, ‘A Game of Chess’, ‘The Fire Sermon’, ‘Death by Water’, and ‘What Thunder Said’.]
44. Who, of the following, said that ‘Milton belongs to the Devil’s party without knowing it’?
(A) William Blake
(B) William Empson
(C) C.S. Lewis
(D) Frank Kermode
Correct Option: (A)
[It was William Blake who observed that Milton belonged to the Devil’s party without knowing it. The remark implies that Milton unconsciously glorified Satan, especially in Book-I of Paradise Lost.]
45. Strophe, antistrophe and epode form a three part structure in:
(A) a Greek ode
(B) a Classic ode
(C) a Medieval ode
(D) a Petrarchan sonnet
Correct Option: (B)
[An ode is a type of lyrical stanza. It is an elaborately structured poem praising or glorifying an event or individual, describing nature intellectually as well as emotionally. A classic ode is structured in three major parts: the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode.]
46. The Well-Wrought Urn is written by:
(A) Rene Wellek
(B) Winsatt
(C) Cleanth Brooks
(D) Terry Eagleton
Correct Option: (C)
[‘The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry’ (Pub.1947) is a collection of essays by Cleanth Brooks. It is considered a seminal text in the New Critical school of literary criticism. The title contains an allusion to the fourth stanza of John Donne’s poem, “The Canonization”, which is the primary subject of the first chapter of the book.]
47. The soul of tragedy, according to Aristotle is:
(A) Character
(B) Thought
(C) Spectacle
(D) Plot
Correct Option: (D)
[In the Poetics, Aristotle compares tragedy to such other metrical forms as comedy and epic. According to him- the principal element in the structure of tragedy is not character but plot. “Most important of all,” Aristotle said, “is the structure of the incidents. For tragedy is an imitation not of men but of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality.” Aristotle considered the plot to be the soul of a tragedy, with character in second place.]
48. The author of The Hungry Tide is:
(A) Amitav Ghosh
(B) Vikram Seth
(C) Shobha De
(D) Upamanyu Chatterjee
Correct Option: (A) Amitav Ghosh [The author of “The Hungry Tide” is Amitav Ghosh]
49. The woman character who is an artist by profession in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse is:
(A) Mrs. Ramsay
(B) Lily Briscoe
(C) Mrs. Dalloway
(D) Miriam
Correct Option: (B)
[The woman character who is an artist by profession in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse is Lily Briscoe]
50. The poet who described poetry as “inspired mathematics” is:
(A) T.S. Eliot
(B) G.M. Hopkins
(C) Ezra Pound
(D) Yeats
Correct Option: (C [The poet who described poetry as “inspired mathematics” is Ezra Pound.]
