English Literature Quiz-1

Correct Option: (A)

Explanation: 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.

Correct Option: (B)

Explanation: 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”

Correct Option: (C)

Explanation: 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. 

Correct Option: (D)

Explanation: 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.

Correct Option: (A)

Explanation: 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.”

Correct Option: (B)

Explanation: 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.

Correct Option: (C)

Explanation: 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.

Correct Option: (D)

Explanation: “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.

Correct Option: (A)

Explanation: 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.

Correct Option: (B)

Explanation: 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.

Correct Option: (C)

Explanation: 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.

Correct Option: (D)

Explanation: 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.

Correct Option: (A)

Explanation: Sea of Poppies is a 2008 novel written by the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008.

Correct Option: (B)

Explanation: 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.

Correct Option: (C)

Explanation: 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.

Correct Option: (D)

Explanation: 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.

Correct Option: (A)

Explanation: ‘Paradox’ and ‘Tension’ are critical terms promoted by Tate and Brooks.

Correct Option: (B)

Explanation: 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.

Correct Option: (C)

Explanation: The Long Revolution, by Raymond Williams, (P.1961) is a book on the theory of culture and historical studies of English.

Correct Option: (D)

Explanation: 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.”