UPDATE: Now, you can get these 3000+ questions in booklet/hardcopy format. Click here to know more.
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:
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?
3. The Kite Runner, a novel by Khaled Hosseini tells the story of:
4. In which of the following travel books does Mark Twain give an account of his visit to India?
5. In the opening stanza of “Song of Myself”, Whitman begins his spiritual awakening at the age of:
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”
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 _______.
7. Larry Slade is a character in:
8. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman relies for its tragic seriousness on the fate of:
9. “And miles to go before I sleep” is a line from a poem by:
10. In Moby Dick Captain Ahab falls for his:
11. Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms is divided into:
12. ‘Nasal tone’ in speech is a distinguishing feature of:
13. Willy in Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman compares Biff and Happy to the mythic characters/figures:
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)
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?
16. Which of the American novelists is associated with the series of five books about Natty Bumppo, an old hunter, also called Leatherstocking?
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?
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!
19. Imamu Amiri Baraka is:
20. Edward Braithwaite’s poem Calypso assumes that you are familiar with:
21. Emily Dickinson’s use of “open form” or “free verse” is comparable to her contemporary American poet:
22. The epitaph on her tombstone that Emily Dickinson composed herself reads:
23. The word “Calamus”, a kind of water reed referenced in the title Calamus Poems, is a symbol for Whitman of:
24. Which of the following is NOT true about Albert Camus’s novel, The Plague?
25. Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”, a key work of the Beat Movement, was dedicated to:
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:
27. Identify the right chronological sequence:
28. Which of the following images does not figure in Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts”?
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?
30. Who among the following is not a beat writer?
31. ‘The Figure a Poem Makes’ is an essay by:
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?
33. ‘The Lost Generation’ refers to the generation that came to maturity in the:
34. The new humanism school of philosophy and literary criticism was popular in America during:
35. “The Kelson of creation is love”. The line occurs in Walt Whitman’s:
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
37. Who among the following writers belonged to the American Beat Movement?
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”?
39. Wallace Stevens’ “The Man with the Blue Guitar” may be linked to the work of the following artist:
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.
41. David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life is a retelling of the story of:
42. “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” The above lines are from:
43. Patrick White’s Voss is a novel about:
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:
45. Which post-war British poet was involved in a disastrous marriage with Sylvia Plath?
46. Who amongst the following is not a Jewish-American novelist?
47. Isaac Bashevis Singer is an:
48. The character, Nathan Zuckerman, is associated with the fiction of:
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
50. F. Turner’s famous hypothesis is that:
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:
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?
53. At the end of The Great Gatsby, the narrator Nick Carraway observes: “They were careless people”. Who were they?
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?
55. Which of the following poems deals with neighbourly relations?
56. Who among the following poets defined free verse as playing tennis without a net?
57. Which American poet wrote: “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”?
58. Among the following playwrights, who was awarded the Pulitzer prize in 1920?
59. Who among the following is not an American modernist poet?
60. Which of the following stories is NOT written by Nathaniel Hawthorne?
61. What is the name of the boat that rescues Ishmael in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick?
62. Poe’s “The Raven” mourns the death of Poe’s:
63. Who made the comment that, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn”?
64. Which of the following characters in Moby Dick falls overboard and turns insane as a result?
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
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)
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.”
68. Who among the following is mourned in Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!”?
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?
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?
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:
72. Which of the following is a collaborative work of W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood?
73. In which of the following poems does W.H. Auden call 1930s “a low dishonest decade”?
74. Who is the author of the poems “Elegy for Mrs. Virginia Woolf” and “William Butler in Limbo”?
75. Which one of the following observations of “Lost Generation”, a term coined by Gertrude Stein, is correct?
76. Who among the following are associated with the ‘Jazz Age’?
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:
78. Which one of the following Sherlock Holmes stories refers to a significant event in English history?
79. Which among the following novels includes a questionnaire for the reader such as “Do you like the story so far? Yes ( ) No ( )”?
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:
These 3000+ questions r a blast for every aspirant…. I have read only these questions n m sooo grateful to u fr such efforts.
The answer for Jazz Age will be Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald.