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📚 Literary Criticism — 100 Previous Year Questions (UGC NET English)
1. The line “Poetry is a criticism of life” occurs in:
2. New Criticism considers text as a:
3. Eliot’s theory of “objective correlative” appeared in his essay entitled:
4. Dr. Johnson’s The Lives of The Poets is an example of:
5. The soul of tragedy, according to Aristotle is:
6. Arrange the following Shakespeare critics in correct chronological order:
7. Mimetic criticism views literary work as:
8. Choose the correct chronological sequence:
9. Coleridge’s statement that imagination “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates in order to recreate” relates to:
10. “Peripetia” means:
11. Pope’s “Essay on Criticism” sums up the art of poetry as taught first by:
12. The quotation “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” appears in:
13. The quotation “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reasons” is a definition of:
14. “Hamartia” means:
15. The author of Ars Poetica is:
16. Which of the following is not a work by Dr. Johnson:
17. Which modern critic described value judgements as ‘the donkey’s carrot of literary criticism’?
18. ‘Anagnorisis’ is a term used by Aristotle for describing:
19. “Poetry is a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.” Who made the above statement?
20. The most obvious feature of Johnson’s The Lives of the Poets is the equipoise between:
21. Anti-sentimental comedy is a criticism of:
22. ‘Formal Criticism’ relates to the structure of:
23. In the formalistic school of criticism, art is:
24. The phrase ‘dissociation of sensibility’ was first used by:
25. Philip Sidney wrote An Apology for Poetry in immediate response to:
26. Assertion (A): Dr Johnson’s The Lives of the Poets does not carry a life of William Wordsworth. Reason (R): Dr Johnson singled out poets whom he adored, which explains his omission of Wordsworth.
27. In a 1817 review of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, Francis Jeffrey coined the term ‘Lake School of Poets’ grouping…
28. The phrase ‘the willing suspension of disbelief’ occurs in:
29. What is the following a description of? ‘A loose sally of the mind; an irregular indigested piece’
30. What does the phrase ‘ut pictura poesis’ from Horace’s Art of Poetry mean?
31. Who distinguished between “the literature of Knowledge” and “the literature of Power”?
32. Jeremy Collier’s Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698) attacked:
33. One of the most important themes debated in Dryden’s An Essay on Dramatic Poesy is:
34. The author who wrote “I have attempted, through the medium of biography, to present some Victorian visions to the modern eye” about Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold, and General Gordon is:
35. In his attack on the theatre, Jeremy Collier specially arraigned:
36. Virginia Woolf borrowed the idea of the ‘common reader’ from Dr. Johnson. To which particular work does she remain indebted?
37. In Aristotle’s Poetics: ‘it is the imitation of an action that is complete and whole, and of a certain magnitude…having a beginning, a middle, and an end.’ What is ‘it’?
38. Which character finds that complete happiness is elusive and that “while you are making the choice of life, you neglect to live”?
39. Who wrote a book titled The Age of Reason?
40. _______ is a theological term brought into literary criticism by _______.
41. The word “Catharsis” signifies:
42. According to Matthew Arnold, what are the ‘touchstones’ that help us test truth and seriousness in poetry?
43. Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’ can best be read as a poem of:
44. In Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’, who is Mrs. Brown?
45. D.H. Lawrence uses the expression ‘a bright book of life’ to describe:
46. The term “Stream of Consciousness” was taken from the book:
47. Which work by Johnson is an imitation of the tenth satire of Juvenal?
48. “Nothing odd will do long. ______ did not last long.” Dr. Johnson had this to say about which novel?
49. Ben Jonson disliked:
I. Fantastic comedy
II. Wide-ranging chronicle-history and stupendous tragedy
III. The comedies of Terence and Plautus
IV. The ability of satire to expose human vices and follies
The correct combination according to the code is:
50. According to Longinus, the sublime has the following features EXCEPT:
51. The issue of privileging speech over writing was taken up for discussion in Plato’s:
52. Though Coleridge refers to “Motivehunting of a motiveless malignity”, the “human villain” Iago’s motives are:
I. He has been disappointed of military promotion
II. He suspects Othello of cuckolding him
III. He has been in love with Desdemona
IV. He wants to become Othello
The correct combination is:
53. What is Johnson’s opinion regarding the “Violation” of the three unities in Shakespeare’s plays?
I. Shakespeare should have followed the Unities
II. Shakespeare followed the important Unity of Action satisfactorily
III. Shakespeare’s plays suffered because they did not follow the Unities
IV. Unity of Time and Place arise from false assumptions
The correct combination is:
54. The passage describing the quality of greatness beginning “No man is truly great, who is great only in his lifetime…” is taken from:
55. “Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night, God said Let Newton be! And all was Light.” Pope’s couplet captures:
56. In which volume do you find a charming appreciation of the Wordsworth household by Thomas de Quincey?
57. “I suffered from impaired eye-sight, depression and poverty and left Oxford without a degree…” Identify the writer, the magazine and the journal.
58. In John Dryden’s Essay on Dramatic Poesy, Neander defends the English invention of:
59. Pope’s An Essay on Man is based on the ideas of:
60. T.S. Eliot in “The Metaphysical Poets” says: “a dissociation of sensibility set in…aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, ___ and ___.”
61. The term ‘poetic justice’ was coined by:
62. “Where there is leisure for fiction, there is little grief” was Samuel Johnson’s criticism of which poem?
63. What term does Philip Sidney use for plays that mingle kings and clowns, and which unity do they violate?
64. Identify the correct matching of critics and their works:
65. In his Introduction to The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (1973), Philip Larkin underlines the importance of a native tradition with _____ seen as the major poet of the Modern Period.
66. Philip Sidney defended poetry against descriptions of it as “the mother of lies.” His main argument is:
67. In 1668, Dryden wrote Of Dramatic Poesie: An Essay which uses _____ separate characters to dramatise conflicting viewpoints.
68. In Keats’s letter to Bailey (November 1817): “What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth.” Which sentence follows this passage?
69. Who is the author of the statement: “The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in the glass”?
70. Aristotle argued that poetry provides a/an _______ outlet for the release of intense emotions.
71. According to Coleridge, the secondary imagination dissolves, diffuses, _________, in order to recreate. Choose the right word:
72. Edmund Burke’s challenge to Neoclassical tenets of form and reason was titled:
73. In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge defines imagination as the faculty by which:
74. In An Essay of Dramatic Poesy, to whom does Dryden refer with the phrase “he needed not the spectacles of books to read Nature”?
75. 11,396 definitions of romanticism were given by:
76. The term ‘a stream of consciousness’ is derived from the writing of:
77. In Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, what is the “best and most accomplished kind of poetry”?
78. Which ancient critics does Alexander Pope commend as exemplary in Essay on Criticism?
79. “In honoured poverty thy voice did weave / Songs consecrate to truth and liberty, – / Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve” — from “To Wordsworth”. Who is the poet?
80. In Thomas Hobbes’s grand metaphor in Leviathan, a commonwealth is like:
81. The form of Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy is:
82. Which work by a famous poet does Thomas de Quincey refer to as “the feeblest and least interesting” of his writings, “being substantially a mere versification…of common places”?
83. The Advancement of Learning attempted to distinguish between theological Truth and ‘scientific’ Truth based on reason. It was written by:
84. In Defence of Poesy, what arguments does Sidney make for considering the Biblical Psalms poetry?
I. They are written in meter
II. They originated in Church choirs
III. They were written by a single author
IV. David uses imagery and personification to portray faith
The correct combination is:
85. The critical concept of “willing suspension of disbelief” owes its origin to Chapter _____ of Biographia Literaria.
86. Thomas Carlyle’s phrases ‘Everlasting Nay’ and ‘Everlasting Yea’ came from:
87. Which of these lines is NOT in Pope’s Essay on Criticism?
88. In his theory of Mimesis, Plato gives the example of a _______ to argue that art is an imitation of an imitation.
M highly greatful for this
Really helpful and accurate notes. Thank you very much.