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Literary Criticism – (Previous Year Questions UGC NET English)
1. In Aristotle’s Poetics we read that 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’?
2. Which of the following characters finds that complete happiness is elusive and that “while you are making the choice of life, you neglect to live”?
3. Who among the following wrote a book with the title The Age of Reason?
4. _______ is a theological term brought into literary criticism by _______.
5. The word “Catharsis” signifies:
6. According to Matthew Arnold, ‘touchstones’ help us test truth and seriousness that constitute the best poetry. What are the ‘touchstones’?
7. Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’ can best be read as a poem of:
8. Virginia Woolf rubbished the idea of character and the understanding of realism of writers like Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy and H.G. Wells. Her famous essay is called ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’. Who is Mrs. Brown?
9. D.H. Lawrence uses the expression ‘a bright book of life’ to describe:
10. The term “Stream of Consciousness” was taken from the book:
11. Which of the following works by Johnson is an imitation of the tenth satire of Juvenal?
12. What is the following a description of? ‘A loose sally of the mind; an irregular indigested piece’
13. What does the phrase ut pictura poesis from Horace’s Art of Poetry mean?
14. Who distinguished between “the literature of Knowledge” and “the literature of power”?
15. The line “Poetry is a criticism of life” occurs in:
16. Eliot’s theory of “objective correlative” appeared in his essay entitled:
17. Jeremy Collier’s Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698) attacked:
18. One of the most important themes the speakers debate in Dryden’s An Essay on Dramatic Poesy is:
19. The author of the book observes “I have attempted, through the medium of biography, to present some Victorian visions to the modern eye”. The four main characters in this book are Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold and General Gordon. Who is this author?
20. In his attack delivered on the theatre in A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, Jeremy Collier specially arraigned ______ and _______.
21. Virginia Woolf borrowed the idea of the common reader from Dr. Johnson. To which particular work of Johnson’s does she remain indebted?
22. “Nothing odd will do long. ______ did not last long.” Dr. Johnson had this to say about one of the eighteenth-century novels. Identify it from the following list:
23. 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:
24. According to Longinus, the sublime has the following features except:
25. The issue of privileging speech over writing was taken up for discussion in Plato’s:
26. Though Coleridge refers to “Motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity”, the “human villain” Iago is far from “motiveless”. His 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
Find the most appropriate combination according to the code:
27. What is Johnson’s opinion regarding the “Violation” of the three unities in the plays of Shakespeare?
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 according to the code is:
28. “No man is truly great, who is great only in his lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history…” This passage describing the quality of greatness is taken from:
29. Identify the critics and their respective works:
30. 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.
31. Philip Sidney defended poetry against such descriptions of it as “the mother of lies” and “the nurse of abuse.” His main argument here is:
32. In 1668, Dryden wrote Of Dramatic Poesie: An Essay which uses _______ separate characters to dramatise the conflicting viewpoints which new theatrical activity had produced.
33. In his famous letter to Benjamin Bailey (November 22, 1817) John Keats wrote: “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination – What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth.” Which of the following sentences follows this passage?
34. 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”?
35. Aristotle argued that poetry provides a/an _______ outlet for the release of intense emotions.
36. “Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night, God said Let Newton be! And all was Light.” Alexander Pope’s famous couplet impressively captures:
37. In which of the following volumes do you find a charming appreciation of the Wordsworth household by Thomas de Quincey?
38. “I suffered from impaired eye-sight, depression and poverty and left Oxford without a degree. After a period as a teacher and my marriage to a widow twice my age, I left for London, to begin writing for a magazine, I produced my own journal.” Choose the correct answer, identifying the writer, the magazine and the journal.
39. In John Dryden’s Essay on Dramatic Poesy Neander defends the English invention of:
40. Pope’s An Essay on Man is based on the ideas of:
41. “In the seventeenth century,” writes T. S. Eliot in “The Metaphysical Poets,” “a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, _______ and _______.
42. The term ‘poetic justice’ was coined by:
43. “Where there is leisure for fiction, there is little grief,” was Samuel Johnson’s criticism of a famous poem. Which poem was it?
44. “How all their plays be neither right tragedies, nor right comedies, mingling kings and clowns, not because the matter so carrieth it, but thrust in the clown by head and shoulders to play a part in majestical matters.” What term does Philip Sidney use to characterize such plays and which of the unities of Aristotle do they violate?
45. According to Coleridge, the secondary imagination dissolves, diffuses, _______, in order to recreate… Choose the right word for the blank.
46. A famous challenge to the Neoclassical tenets of form and reason in aesthetic considerations came from Edmund Burke. His work was titled:
47. In Biographia Literaria S.T. Coleridge defines the imagination as the faculty by which:
48. In An Essay of Dramatic Poesy to whom does Dryden refer with the phrase “he needed not the spectacles of books to read Nature”?
49. 11,396 definitions of romanticism were given by:
50. The term ‘a stream of consciousness’ is derived from the writing of:
51. In his Defence of Poesy what is the “best and most accomplished kind of poetry” in Sidney’s estimation?
52. Which of the following ancient critics does Alexander Pope commend as exemplary in Essay on Criticism?
53. “In honoured poverty thy voice did weave/songs consecrate to truth and liberty, – / Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve” are lines from “To Wordsworth”. Who is the poet?
54. In Thomas Hobbes’s grand metaphor in Leviathan, a commonwealth is like:
55. The form of Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy is:
56. 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, like a metrical multiplication table, of common places, the most mouldy with which criticism has baited its rat-traps”?
57. ______ attempted to draw a distinction between two kinds of Truth, a theological Truth ‘drawn from the word and oracles of God’ and determined by faith, and a ‘scientific’ Truth based on the light of nature and the dictates of reason.
58. 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 right combination according to the code is:
59. The critical concept of a “Willing suspension of disbelief” owes its origin to Chapter _______ of Biographia Literaria.
60. Thomas Carlyle coined two evocative phrases, ‘Everlasting Nay’ and ‘Everlasting Yea’ to suggest the swing in the national mood of his times. The phrases came from:
61. Which of these lines is NOT in Pope’s Essay on Criticism?
62. In his theory of Mimesis, Plato says that all art is mimetic by nature; art is an imitation of life. To argue his case he gives the example of a:
63. For Coleridge, our power to perceive symbols gleaned from the world about us is related to the category of:
64. What, among the following, is ruled out by Longinus as a way of achieving the sublime?
65. In The Advancement of Learning Bacon noted the need for more studies of:
I. moral knowledge
II. forbidden knowledge
III. civil knowledge
IV. spiritual knowledge
The right combination according to the code is:
66. As Sidney argues in A Defence of Poesy which discipline is more useful and praiseworthy – history or poetry?
67. Which of the following books proposes a political theory?
68. The phrase “dissociation of sensibility” was first used by:
69. A philosophical attitude pervading much of modern literature is:
70. ‘Fancy’ deals with:
71. The most obvious feature of Johnson’s The Lives of the Poets is the equipoise between:
72. With whom was Dr. Johnson intimately associated in his personal life?
73. Philip Sidney wrote An Apology for Poetry in immediate response to:
74. Dr. Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes” expresses:
75. Read the following statements:
Assertion (A):
Dr Johnson’s The Lives of the Poets carries critical and biographical studies of poets he admired. It does not, however, carry a life of William Wordsworth.
Reason (R):
Dr. Johnson singled out poets whom he not only admired but also adored. This explains his omission of Wordsworth.
76. “He is not fully recognized at home; he is not recognized at all abroad. Yet I firmly believe that the poetical performance of _______ is, after that of Shakespeare and Milton, undoubtedly most considerable in our language.” To whom does Matthew Arnold refer in the above statement?
77. The concept of human mind as tabula rasa or blank tablet was propounded by:
78. The phrase ‘the willing suspension of disbelief’ occurs in:
79. Which romantic poet coined the famous phrase ‘spots of time’?
80. Who, amongst the following, does not belong to the ‘Great Tradition’, enunciated by F. R. Leavis?
81. Put the following books of Pope in a sequence of publication:
(i) The Dunciad
(ii) The Rape of the Lock
(iii) An Essay on Man
(iv) An Essay on Criticism
82. The term “egotistical sublime” was coined by:
83. “The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry… our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay.” – This claim for poetry is made in:
84. Plato censured poetry because he believed it:
85. Eliot uses the term “objective correlative” in his essay:
86. Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man was published in:
87. In Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), who opens the discussion on behalf of the ancients?
88. Whom did Keats regard as the prime example of ‘negative capability’?
89. “He found it [English] brick and left it marble”, remarked one great writer on another. Who were they?
90. Match the following:
List – I:
1. Good sense is the body of poetic genius
2. Poetry is the breath and a finer spirit of all knowledge
3. Literary criticism is a description and evaluation of its object
4. Nature never set forth the earth in as rich a tapestry as diverse poets have done
List – II:
I. Brooks, “The Formalist Critic”
II. Sidney, Defence/An Apology for Poetry
III. Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads
IV. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria
1 2 3 4
91. “The story and the novel, the idea and the form, are the needle and thread, and I never heard of a guild of tailors who recommended the use of the thread without the needle, or the needle without the thread.” This famous passage describing the relation of idea to form is found in:
92. William Wordsworth’s statement of purpose in publishing the Lyrical Ballads carries the following phrase. (Complete the phrase correctly). “to choose incidents from common life and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as possible, ______.”
93. One English poet addressing another: “Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart; Thou hast a voice whose sound was like the sea: Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, So didst thou travel on life’s common way, In cheerful godliness…” Whose lines are these? To whom are they addressed?
94. Samuel Johnson’s Lives of Poets (1781) was originally a series of introductions to the poets he wrote for a group of London publishers. They were collected as:
95. Who claimed: “I have not published a single paper that is not written in a spirit of benevolence and with a love of mankind”?
96. In the Advancement of Learning Bacon attempted a preliminary survey of the entire field of learning, by analyzing the principal obstacles to its advancement. Identify from among the following choices the one that he did not mention as an obstacle:
97. Who among the following theorists formulated the concept of the utile dulci, profit combined with delight?
98. Out of the four humours of the body, the Jacobeans thought of themselves as especially prone to:
99. In the Defence of Poetry, what did Sidney attribute to poetry?
100. Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding is a classic statement of _______ Philosophy.
101. Who among the following English poets defined poetic imagination as “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite ‘I AM'”?
102. The Uncertainty Principle is attributed to:
103. Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is a work associated with:
104. “All Rising to Great Place is by a _____ staire.” (Francis Bacon)
105. New Science is a work associated with:
106. Which of the following works is not actually a prose essay?
107. Identify the incorrect factor in Henry James’ theory of the novel:
108. D.H. Lawrence popularized the concept of _______ in his novels.
109. Who, among the following, advanced the theory that the mind is a tabula rasa at birth, and acquires all ideas by experience?
110. In the Defense of Poesy Sidney says: “Now as in geometry the oblique must be known as well as right and in arithmetic, the odd as well as the even, so in the actions of our life who seeth not the filthiness of evil wanteth a great foil to perceive the beauty of virtue”. Which of the following forms of poesy offers a foil that helps us perceive the beauty of virtue?
111. Matthew Arnold’s “touchstones” were “short passages, even single lines” of classic poetry beside which the lines of other poets may be placed in order to detect the presence or absence of high poetic quality. In his “Study of Poetry” Arnold cited “touchstones” from such non-English poets as Homer and Dante and also from the English poets, Shakespeare and Milton. Which English poet did he disapprovingly call “not one of the great classics” in the list below?
112. In the lines “With gold jewels cover every part, /And hide with ornaments their want of art” (Essay on Criticism), Pope rejects:
113. The author of the essay “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” is:
114. In which chapter of Poetics does Aristotle use the word ‘catharsis’ in his definition of tragedy?
115. Match the following:
List – I:
(a) “The Function of Criticism”
(b) “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”
(c) The Function of Criticism: From ‘The Spectator’ to Poststructuralism
(d) “The Function of English at the Present Time”
List – II:
(i) Terry Eagleton
(ii) Richard Ohmann
(iii) Matthew Arnold
(iv) T. S. Eliot
(a) (b) (c) (d)
116. Samuel Johnson’s use of the term “metaphysical” in a piece of criticism was:
117. F. R. Leavis and Q. D. Leavis launched a critical journal devoted to the moral centrality of English Studies. Name the Journal.
118. In “Tradition and Individual Talent” Eliot describes the workings of the poet’s mind in terms of which of the following?
119. The pre-eminent evaluative criterion of F.R. Leavis’s Great Tradition is:
120. In “Tradition and Individual Talent”, according to T.S. Eliot, the term “Traditional” usually means:
121. Shakespeare famously neglects to observe Aristotle’s rules concerning the three dramatic unities, and Samuel Johnson undertakes to defend Shakespeare from these criticisms in his Preface to Shakespeare. Which of the Aristotelian dramatic unities does Johnson believe Shakespeare to observe most successfully?
122. In his Defence of Poesy which of the following works does Sidney commend as good examples of English Poesy?
I. The Mirror of Magistrates
II. The Shepherd’s Calendar
III. Lament for the Makers
IV. Ballad of Scottish King
123. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent” T.S Eliot uses the analogy of the catalyst to elucidate his theory of impersonal poetry. He cites the example of a filament of platinum and, in the poetic process this is equivalent to:
124. Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets combines the following except:
125. Samuel Johnson denounced the metaphysical poets saying, “About the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets”. In the biography of which of the following poets in his Lives of Poets did Johnson make this remark?
126. In An Essay of Dramatic Poesy whom does John Dryden refer to as “the most learned and judicious Writer which any Theater ever had”?
127. What does the phrase ut pictura poesis from Horace’s Art of Poetry mean?
128. Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis is about a utopian state called:
129. What does Philip Sidney call poet-haters in his Defence of Poesie?
130. The four Moral Essays of Alexander Pope are addressed to carefully selected figures. Identify:
131. Where, according to T.S. Eliot, are we likely to find “not only the best, but the most individual parts of a poet’s work”?
132. Samuel Johnson has the following to say about an English poet: “These images are marked by glittering accumulations of ungraceful ornaments: they strike, rather than please. The images are magnified by affectation: the language is labored into harshness. The mind of the writer seems to work with unnatural violence -‘Double, double, toil and trouble’. He has a kind of strutting dignity, and is tall by walking on tiptoe. His art and his struggle are too visible, and there is too little appearance of ease and nature.” Identify the poet.
133. Who among the ancients prescribed that poetry should both instruct and delight?
134. In imitation of which classical poet did Samuel Johnson write his London and The Vanity of Human Wishes?
135. In his essay “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1864) Matthew Arnold contended that:
136. Why did Plato banish the poet from his ideal state?
137. From among the following, identify the two correct statements in Johnson’s criticism of Shakespeare:
(a) His Athenians are not sufficiently Greek and his kings not completely royal
(b) He sacrifices virtue to convenience and is more careful to please than to instruct
(c) He adheres to strict chronology and gives to one age or nation only its own customs and opinions
(d) He sacrifices reason, property and truth to pursue even a poor and barren quibble
138. Which two writers have written essays on the defence of poetry?
(a) Sir Philip Sidney
(b) P. B. Shelley
(c) Matthew Arnold
(d) T. S. Eliot
139. What, in sum, is Sidney’s point in the following? “Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done; neither with pleasant rivets, fruitless trees, sweet-smelling flowers, not what so ever else may make the too-much-loved earth more lovely. Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden”
140. Why did T. S. Eliot assert that Virgil, not Homer, is the poet of Europe?
141. Which one of the following of Plato’s beliefs/acts was Shelley countering by saying that ‘poets are the acknowledged legislators of mankind’?
142. Which of the following statements is correct?
143. Of the five conditions of the Sublime, according to Longinus, the most important condition is:
144. What does Socrates mean when in Plato’s Ion, he says “Poets are nothing but the interpreters of gods”?
145. Following Plato, which two of the following statements about ‘Phantasm and Semblance’ are correct?
(a) ‘Phantasm’ is an image, while ‘Semblance’ is the real object
(b) ‘Phantasm’ is the real object while ‘Semblance’ is only a resemblance
(c) ‘Phantasm’ unlike semblance has the same proportional as the object
(d) ‘Semblance’ is unreal but looks ‘real’ as compared to phantasm
146. Which of the following is true of Aristotle’s Critical Position?
147. Match List I and List II:
List I – Critics:
A. Horace
B. John Dryden
C. Samuel Daniel
D. Ben Jonson
List II – Text:
I. A Defence of Rhyme
II. Timber: or, Discoveries
III. Ars Poetica
IV. Of Dramatic Poesy
A B C D
148. Who said of the blank verse, quoting an unnamed critic, that it is “…verse only to the eye”, adding further that it “has neither the easiness of prose, nor the melody of numbers”?
149. Which one of the following statements is true about Aristotle’s poetics?
150. Arrange the following in the chronological order of publication:
A. Advancement of Learning
B. The Origin of Species
C. On Heroes and Hero Worship
D. The Lives of the Poets
151. Poetry according to Sir Philip Sidney is of three kinds. They are:
152. Which according to Thomas Hobbes is the only ‘science’ God has bestowed on mankind, that informs the structure of his monumental work, Leviathan?
Excellent sir… Thank you…. Really waiting for this quick review… Today just completed thit topic….
Thanks. Glad it helped. Please keep on visiting the page to find new questions. 🙂
Excellent ?
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Keep updating such great content. Thank you!
You’re welcome, Archana. Glad that you liked the post. All the best for your exams. 🙂
It was really helpful. Thanks sir for your sincere effort.?
you proved what you said- quality over quantity. I really admire your efforts . Thankyou for such good content.
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Thanks sir for exam time of that such kind of help in preparation
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It is helpful .
But I did not find Charles Dickens questions.
Will update soon. Keep visiting the website.
Very helpful ..Thankyou so much Sir .
You’re welcome, Nancy. All the best for your exams.
Too many questions sirji . But a fabulous job.
Please mention how many are there in each section, so we can divide it easily and complete day by day .