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American Literature – (Previous Year Questions NET | GATE)

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American Literature – (Previous Year Questions UGC-NET English)
1. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison is widely recognized as a masterpiece. It is also one of the finest examples of:
  • (A)science fiction
  • (B)picaresque novel
  • (C)coming-of-age novel
  • (D)crime thriller
2. William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying contains one of the shortest chapters in literary history. Which of these sentences is the chapter in its entirety?
  • (A)“For the love of God, where is my hat?”
  • (B)“My mother is a fish.”
  • (C)“Addie Bundren was dead, to begin with.”
  • (D)“Apricot jam is the worst sort of jam.”
3. The Kite Runner, a novel by Khaled Hosseini tells the story of:
  • (A)Ahmed
  • (B)Nadira
  • (C)Amir
  • (D)Amourrah
4. 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
5. In the opening stanza of “Song of Myself”, Whitman begins his spiritual awakening at the age of:
  • (A)37
  • (B)15
  • (C)24
  • (D)61
6. Read the following lines:
“You are your words. Your listeners see
Written on your face the poems they hear
Like letters carved in a tree’s bark
The sight and sounds of solitudes endured”
These are lines from a poem by _______ on the death of _______.
  • (A)T. S. Eliot ; Robert Frost
  • (B)Siegfried Sassoon ; Wilfred Owen
  • (C)Stephen Spender ; W. H. Auden
  • (D)Dylan Thomas ; Robert Bridges
7. Larry Slade is a character in:
  • (A)Desire Under the Elms
  • (B)The Emperor Jones
  • (C)The Iceman Cometh
  • (D)Hairy Ape
8. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman relies for its tragic seriousness on the fate of:
  • (A)Willy Loman
  • (B)Estragon
  • (C)Vladimir
  • (D)Lucky
9. “And miles to go before I sleep” is a line from a poem by:
  • (A)Emily Dickinson
  • (B)Walt Whitman
  • (C)Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • (D)Robert Frost
10. In Moby Dick Captain Ahab falls for his:
  • (A)ignorance
  • (B)pride
  • (C)courage
  • (D)drunkenness
11. Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms is divided into:
  • (A)two books
  • (B)three books
  • (C)four books
  • (D)five books
12. ‘Nasal tone’ in speech is a distinguishing feature of:
  • (A)British English
  • (B)Scottish English
  • (C)Australian English
  • (D)American English
13. Willy in Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman compares Biff and Happy to the mythic characters/figures:
  • (A)Venus and Adonais
  • (B)Adonais and Hercules
  • (C)Jupiter and Hercules
  • (D)Venus and Hercules
14. Match the following:
Poets and Works:
(a) Christina Rossetti : Goblin Market
(b) Matthew Arnold : Sohrab and Rustom
(c) Robert Browning : The Ring and the Book
(d) Arthur Hugh Clough : The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich
Descriptions:
(i) The tale of a father who inadvertently destroys his son
(ii) Gently satiric account of an Oxford student on vacation
(iii) Story of pleasure-seeking Laura and the conventionally moral Lizzie who resists temptations
(iv) A sensational 17th century murder presented through multiple dramatic monologues

(a) (b) (c) (d)

  • (A)(iii) (iv) (i) (ii)
  • (B)(ii) (iv) (iii) (i)
  • (C)(iii) (i) (iv) (ii)
  • (D)(iv) (ii) (iii) (i)
15. What was the name of the experimental theatre group founded in 1915 by Susan Glaspell, Eugene O’Neill and other dramatists in order to challenge Broadway’s control over American drama?
  • (A)The Wall Street Theatre Group
  • (B)The Washington Square Players
  • (C)The Actor’s Studio
  • (D)The Provincetown Players
16. Which of the American novelists is associated with the series of five books about Natty Bumppo, an old hunter, also called Leatherstocking?
  • (A)Stephen Crane
  • (B)James Fennimore Cooper
  • (C)Herman Melville
  • (D)Jack London
17. The Gilded Age refers to a period of American history between 1870 and the first decades of the twentieth century. Who among the following American writers is credited with the coining of the term?
  • (A)F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • (B)Mark Twain
  • (C)William Dean Howells
  • (D)Theodore Dreiser
18. Arrange the following sentences in the order in which they appear in Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”:
(a) To be great is to be misunderstood.
(b) Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh.
(c) If it is so bad then to be misunderstood!
(d) It is a right fool’s word.
(e) Misunderstood!
  • (A)(a), (e), (d), (c), (b)
  • (B)(e), (a), (b), (c), (d)
  • (C)(c), (d), (a), (b), (e)
  • (D)(e), (d), (c), (b), (a)
19. Imamu Amiri Baraka is:
  • (A)A Caribbean writer
  • (B)An American writer
  • (C)An Arab writer
  • (D)A Sri Lankan writer
20. Edward Braithwaite’s poem Calypso assumes that you are familiar with:
  • (A)the business of Calypso during the Middle Passage
  • (B)the West Indian music in syncopated African rhythm
  • (C)the folk ways and mores of Trinidadian merchants
  • (D)the operatic performance of Banjos
21. Emily Dickinson’s use of “open form” or “free verse” is comparable to her contemporary American poet:
  • (A)Anne Bradstreet
  • (B)Robert Lowell
  • (C)Walt Whitman
  • (D)Sylvia Plath
22. The epitaph on her tombstone that Emily Dickinson composed herself reads:
  • (A)The List is done
  • (B)Redemption – Brittle Lady
  • (C)Judge tenderly – of Me
  • (D)Called Back
23. The word “Calamus”, a kind of water reed referenced in the title Calamus Poems, is a symbol for Whitman of:
  • (A)water nymphs
  • (B)male companions
  • (C)the spirit of American democracy
  • (D)the impending American Civil War
24. Which of the following is NOT true about Albert Camus’s novel, The Plague?
  • (A)Dr. Rieux describes the phenomenon of dying rats using the metaphors of disease, especially the bubonic plague
  • (B)Paneloux interprets the plague in his first sermon as a sign of the Apocalypse
  • (C)M. Michel is the first victim of the plague
  • (D)Tarrou thinks that the plague symbolizes human indifference
25. Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”, a key work of the Beat Movement, was dedicated to:
  • (A)Lucien Carr
  • (B)Carl Solomon
  • (C)Herbert Huncke
  • (D)Jack Kerouac
26. Using a non-linear narrative, this American novel explores the psychic damage to a veteran of World War II and shows how a measure of healing is attained through his acceptance of Laguna myths and rituals. Identify the work:
  • (A)Dred
  • (B)Beloved
  • (C)Ceremony
  • (D)End Zone
27. Identify the right chronological sequence:
  • (A)The American Pastoral – Sister Carrie – The Great Gatsby – Beloved
  • (B)The Great Gatsby – Sister Carrie – Beloved – The American Pastoral
  • (C)Sister Carrie – The Great Gatsby – Beloved – The American Pastoral
  • (D)Sister Carrie – The Great Gatsby – The American Pastoral – Beloved
28. Which of the following images does not figure in Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts”?
  • (A)a boy falling out of the sky
  • (B)children … skating on a pond at the edge of wood
  • (C)ranches of isolation and the busy griefs
  • (D)the dogs go on with their doggy life
29. Ray Bradbury has titled one of his short story collections – Golden Apples of the Sun – after the last line of a W.B. Yeats poem. Which poem?
  • (A)“The Death of Cuchulain”
  • (B)“The Peacock”
  • (C)“The Hour Before Dawn”
  • (D)“The Song of Wandering Aengus”
30. Who among the following is not a beat writer?
  • (A)Jack Kerouac
  • (B)Allen Ginsberg
  • (C)Robert Lowell
  • (D)William Burroughs
31. ‘The Figure a Poem Makes’ is an essay by:
  • (A)Henry James
  • (B)Sylvia Plath
  • (C)Robert Frost
  • (D)Wallace Stevens
32. What common link do you find among “The Disquieting Muses” by Sylvia Plath, “The Starry Night” by Anne Sexton, “Mourning Picture” by Adrienne Rich, and “Musee des Beaux Arts” by W.H. Auden?
  • (A)They inspired paintings
  • (B)They are confessional poems
  • (C)They are all inspired by paintings
  • (D)They are all inspired by Van Gogh’s paintings
33. ‘The Lost Generation’ refers to the generation that came to maturity in the:
  • (A)1920s
  • (B)1930s
  • (C)1910s
  • (D)1940s
34. The new humanism school of philosophy and literary criticism was popular in America during:
  • (A)1920-1940
  • (B)1910-1930
  • (C)1930-1940
  • (D)1900-1910
35. “The Kelson of creation is love”. The line occurs in Walt Whitman’s:
  • (A)Paumonak
  • (B)Passage to India
  • (C)O Captain, My Captain
  • (D)Song of Myself
36. Match the character with the novel:
Characters:
1. Caddy
2. Lennie
3. Jake Barnes
4. Tommy Wilhelm
Novels:
5. The Sound and the Fury
6. Of Mice and Men
7. The Sun Also Rises
8. Seize the Day
  • (A)1-5, 2-6, 3-7, 4-8
  • (B)2-7, 1-8, 3-5, 4-6
  • (C)3-5, 4-6, 2-8, 1-7
  • (D)4-5, 3-8, 2-7, 1-8
37. Who among the following writers belonged to the American Beat Movement?
  • (A)Allen Ginsberg
  • (B)Mark Beard
  • (C)Isaac McCaslin
  • (D)Charles Beard
38. “The Lost Generation” is a name applied to the disillusioned intellectuals and aesthetes of the years following the First World War. Who called them “The Lost Generation”?
  • (A)H.L. Mencken
  • (B)Willa Cather
  • (C)Jack London
  • (D)Gertrude Stein
39. Wallace Stevens’ “The Man with the Blue Guitar” may be linked to the work of the following artist:
  • (A)Modigliani
  • (B)Chagall
  • (C)Picasso
  • (D)Cezanne
40. Which of the following options is correct?
(i) Transcendentalism was a philosophical and literary movement.
(ii) It flourished in the Southern States of America in the 19th century.
(iii) It was a reaction against 18th century rationalism and the skeptical philosophy of Locke.
(iv) Among the major texts of Transcendentalist thought are the essays of Emerson, Thoreau’s Walden and the writings of Margaret Fuller.
  • (A)(i) and (iv) are correct
  • (B)(ii) and (iii) are correct
  • (C)(iii) and (iv) are correct
  • (D)(iv) is correct
41. David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life is a retelling of the story of:
  • (A)Aristotle
  • (B)Juvenal
  • (C)Ovid
  • (D)Horace
42. “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” The above lines are from:
  • (A)Walt Whitman
  • (B)Edgar Allan Poe
  • (C)Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • (D)John Greenleaf Whittier
43. Patrick White’s Voss is a novel about:
  • (A)the sea
  • (B)the capital market
  • (C)the landscape
  • (D)the judicial system
44. The letter ‘A’ in The Scarlet Letter stands for:
I. Adultery
II. Able
III. Angel
IV. Appetite

The correct combination for the statement is:

  • (A)I and II are correct
  • (B)II and III are correct
  • (C)I, II and IV are correct
  • (D)I, II and III are correct
45. Which post-war British poet was involved in a disastrous marriage with Sylvia Plath?
  • (A)Philip Larkin
  • (B)Ted Hughes
  • (C)Stevie Smith
  • (D)Geoffrey Hill
46. Who amongst the following is not a Jewish-American novelist?
  • (A)J.D. Salinger
  • (B)Henry Green
  • (C)William Faulkner
  • (D)Philip Roth
47. Isaac Bashevis Singer is an:
  • (A)African-American writer
  • (B)American-Jewish writer
  • (C)American-Indian writer
  • (D)American-Asian writer
48. The character, Nathan Zuckerman, is associated with the fiction of:
  • (A)Norman Mailer
  • (B)Saul Bellow
  • (C)Philip Roth
  • (D)Bernard Malamud
49. Match the following:
Nicknames:
1. The Sage of Concord
2. The Nun of Amherst
3. Mark Twain
4. Old Possum
Authors:
5. Emily Dickinson
6. R.W. Emerson
7. T.S. Eliot
8. Samuel L. Clemens
  • (A)1–6; 2–5; 3–8; 4–7
  • (B)1–5; 2–6; 3–7; 4–8
  • (C)1–8; 2–7; 3–6; 4–5
  • (D)1–7; 2–8; 3–5; 4–6
50. F. Turner’s famous hypothesis is that:
  • (A)The Frontier has outlived its ideological utility in American civilization
  • (B)The Frontier has posed a challenge to the American creative imagination
  • (C)The Frontier has been the one great determinant of American civilization
  • (D)The Frontier has been the one great deterrent to American progress
51. Match the opening lines with the poets:
Opening Lines:
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”
Poets:
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
52. Which of the following novels is structured into a poem of 999 lines, preceded by a Foreword, followed by a Commentary and an Index?
  • (A)Ragtime
  • (B)Pale Fire
  • (C)The Inner Side of the Wind
  • (D)Hourglass
53. At the end of The Great Gatsby, the narrator Nick Carraway observes: “They were careless people”. Who were they?
  • (A)Tom and Daisy
  • (B)The Wilsons
  • (C)Gatsby and his friends
  • (D)The people of East Egg
54. What common link do you find among “The Disquieting Muses” by Sylvia Plath, “The Starry Night” by Anne Sexton, “Mourning Picture” by Adrienne Rich, and “Musee des Beaux Arts” by W.H. Auden?
  • (A)They inspired paintings
  • (B)They are confessional poems
  • (C)They are all inspired by paintings
  • (D)They are all inspired by Van Gogh’s paintings
55. Which of the following poems deals with neighbourly relations?
  • (A)“Birches”
  • (B)“Home Burial”
  • (C)“Mending Wall”
  • (D)“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
56. Who among the following poets defined free verse as playing tennis without a net?
  • (A)Robert Frost
  • (B)Ezra Pound
  • (C)Philip Larkin
  • (D)William Carlos Williams
57. Which American poet wrote: “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”?
  • (A)Robert Lowell
  • (B)Walt Whitman
  • (C)Wallace Stevens
  • (D)Langston Hughes
58. Among the following playwrights, who was awarded the Pulitzer prize in 1920?
  • (A)Eugene O’Neill
  • (B)Sean O’Casey
  • (C)William Somerset Maugham
  • (D)J.B. Priestley
59. Who among the following is not an American modernist poet?
  • (A)William Carlos Williams
  • (B)Ezra Pound
  • (C)William Ellery Channing, the younger
  • (D)Marianne Moore
60. Which of the following stories is NOT written by Nathaniel Hawthorne?
  • (A)“The Minister’s Black Veil”
  • (B)“Young Goodman Brown”
  • (C)“The Purloined Letter”
  • (D)“My Kinsman, Major Molineux”
61. What is the name of the boat that rescues Ishmael in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick?
  • (A)Pequod
  • (B)Rachel
  • (C)Hagar
  • (D)Sphinx
62. Poe’s “The Raven” mourns the death of Poe’s:
  • (A)lost Lenore
  • (B)lost Abigail
  • (C)pet animal
  • (D)lost heritage
63. Who made the comment that, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn”?
  • (A)Henry James
  • (B)William Faulkner
  • (C)Jack London
  • (D)Ernest Hemingway
64. Which of the following characters in Moby Dick falls overboard and turns insane as a result?
  • (A)Pip
  • (B)Queequeg
  • (C)Starbuck
  • (D)Tashtego
65. Identify from among the following list those that cannot be called War Fiction:
A. A Modern Instance
B. Catch-22
C. The Age of Innocence
D. The Naked and the Dead
  • (A)(a) and (b)
  • (B)(b) and (c)
  • (C)(a) and (c)
  • (D)(b) and (d)
66. Match the characters with the novels:
Characters:
(a) Arthur Seaton
(b) Marlene
(c) Anna Wulf
(d) Beckwith
Novels:
(i) Top Girls
(ii) The Golden Notebook
(iii) The Swimming Pool Library
(iv) Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

(a) (b) (c) (d)

  • (A)(ii) (iii) (i) (iv)
  • (B)(iv) (i) (ii) (iii)
  • (C)(iii) (iv) (ii) (i)
  • (D)(ii) (iv) (iii) (i)
67. Albert Camus borrows the following epigraph to his novel The Plague from:
“It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not.”
  • (A)James Hogg’s The Confessions of a Justified Sinner
  • (B)Jeremy Bentham’s The Principles of Morals and Legislation
  • (C)Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy
  • (D)Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
68. Who among the following is mourned in Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!”?
  • (A)R. W. Emerson
  • (B)John Keats
  • (C)P. B. Shelley
  • (D)Abraham Lincoln
69. Which one of the following groups of novelists has, in the given order, Captain Ahab, Hester Prynne, Roderick Usher and Daisy Miller as characters in their novels?
  • (A)Henry James, Edgar A. Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville
  • (B)Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar A. Poe, Henry James
  • (C)Edgar A. Poe, Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville
  • (D)Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar A. Poe, Henry James, Herman Melville
70. Which one of the following words best describes the heroes of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Thomas Mann’s The Confessions of Felix Krull?
  • (A)Ficelle
  • (B)Picaro
  • (C)Mannequin
  • (D)Philanderer
71. In the study of Anglo-American literatures, certain distinguished names in critical/editorial scholarship become synonymous with famous writers and periods of literary history. Match the following names with their respective areas of scholarship:
Scholars:
(a) Edward Mendelson
(b) Jerome McGann
(c) Stanley Fish
(d) Hugh Kenner
Areas of Scholarship:
(i) John Milton
(ii) Ezra Pound
(iii) W. H. Auden
(iv) Textual Scholarship

Choose the correct option from those given below:

  • (A)(a)-(ii); (b)-(i); (c)-(iv); (d)-(iii)
  • (B)(a)-(iii); (b)-(iv); (c)-(i); (d)-(ii)
  • (C)(a)-(iv); (b)-(iii); (c)-(ii); (d)-(i)
  • (D)(a)-(iii); (b)-(ii); (c)-(iv); (d)-(i)
72. Which of the following is a collaborative work of W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood?
  • (A)Letters from Iceland
  • (B)The Dance of Death
  • (C)The Ascent of F6
  • (D)The Orators
73. In which of the following poems does W.H. Auden call 1930s “a low dishonest decade”?
  • (A)“September 1, 1939”
  • (B)“In Memory of W.B. Yeats”
  • (C)“No Change of Place”
  • (D)“The Watershed”
74. Who is the author of the poems “Elegy for Mrs. Virginia Woolf” and “William Butler in Limbo”?
  • (A)Keith Douglas
  • (B)W.H. Auden
  • (C)Sidney Keyes
  • (D)Stephen Spender
75. Which one of the following observations of “Lost Generation”, a term coined by Gertrude Stein, is correct?
  • (A)German Jews who survived the Second World War and went to Israel
  • (B)The American expatriates in Europe after the First World War
  • (C)The Irish Freedom fighters of the early Twentieth Century
  • (D)The European living in America
76. Who among the following are associated with the ‘Jazz Age’?
  • (A)Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald
  • (B)Scott Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos
  • (C)John Dos Passos and Sherwood Anderson
  • (D)Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson
77. According to his essay ‘Civil Disobedience’, what two things did Thoreau learn from the night he spent in jail?
A. He concluded that the State is ultimately weak.
B. He realized that captivity inspires courage.
C. He realized that the neighbours are only friends during good times.
D. He concluded that captivity brings wisdom about human affairs.

Choose the correct answer from the options given below:

  • (A)A and B only
  • (B)A and C only
  • (C)A and D only
  • (D)C and D only
78. Which one of the following Sherlock Holmes stories refers to a significant event in English history?
  • (A)“The Musgrave Ritual”
  • (B)“The Speckled Band”
  • (C)“The Solitary Cyclist”
  • (D)“The Red-Headed League”
79. Which among the following novels includes a questionnaire for the reader such as “Do you like the story so far? Yes ( ) No ( )”?
  • (A)Mantissa by John Fowles
  • (B)Waterland by Graham Swift
  • (C)Snow White by Donald Barthelme
  • (D)If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
80. Match List I and List II:
List I (Author):
A. Thomas Pynchon
B. Howard Jacobson
C. Anthony Burgess
D. John Berger
List II (Text):
I. G.
II. V.
III. J
IV. M/F

Choose the correct answer from the options given below:

  • (A)A – II, B – IV, C – I, D – III
  • (B)A – II, B – III, C – IV, D – I
  • (C)A – II, B – III, C – I, D – IV
  • (D)A – IV, B – III, C – I, D – II

2 thoughts on “American Literature – (Previous Year Questions NET | GATE)”

  1. These 3000+ questions r a blast for every aspirant…. I have read only these questions n m sooo grateful to u fr such efforts.

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