1000+ Literary Theory MCQs – Part 25: Background: Classical Thought, Romanticism & Modernism

1. Who wrote The Republic?

1. Plato
2. Socrates
3. Aristotle
4. Bhartrihari

2. Select the wrong statement from the list below.

1. Plato was Aristotle’s disciple.
2. Alexander was taught by Aristotle.
3. Socrates was sentenced to death after being charged with impiety towards the Athenian gods.
4. Aristotle received intellectual training under Plato.

3. The first thirty years of Plato’s life were spent under the shadow of the second Peloponnesian War. This war was fought between which two city-states?

1. Athens and Troy
2. Ithaca and Crete
3. Crete and Troy
4. Athens and Sparta

4. Which of the following statements is true with reference to the opinions of Socrates about mimesis as presented in The Republic?

1. Mimesis confuses our sense of distinction between knowledge and ignorance and is hence corrupting.
2. Mimesis deals with appearances rather than with reality and is situated at a fourth remove from the true form of a thing.
3. Mimesis is the product of a vain and lazy mind and is thus banal.
4. Mimesis is a kind of plagiarism and is immoral.

5. Who among these writers did not contribute to the literary production of ancient Greek society?

1. Homer
2. Hesiod
3. Aeschylus
4. Dante

6. Select the correct statement from the list below.

1. Plato contributed towards the revival of Athenian democracy.
2. Plato was born at a time when the democratic system of government in Athens was already faltering.
3. Aristotle left Athens for southern Italy after the execution of Plato in around 399 BCE.
4. Aristotle had to shut down the Lyceum due to the second Peloponnesian War.

7. Where was the ancient Greek school, the Academy, located?

1. Sparta
2. Tuscany
3. Crete
4. none of the above

8. Select the incorrect statement from the options below.

1. Ancient Greece represented a cultural sphere that extended beyond the Greek peninsula.
2. Ancient Greece was constituted of a number of city-states.
3. Ancient Greece and modern Greece share the same political boundary.
4. The independent city-states of ancient Greece were called poleis.

9. Which among the following is an incorrect statement with regard to Aristotle’s theory?

1. The Poetics does not unfold in the form of a Platonic dialogue.
2. Aristotle’s Poetics defends mimesis against Plato’s accusations.
3. The object of mimesis gains primary focus in Aristotle’s critique of Plato’s position on mimesis.
4. Plato’s basic idea that all art is mimetic is questioned in the Poetics.

10. The authorship of the treatise Peri Hypsous, preserved in a tenth-century manuscript, is contested between which of the following authors?

1. Dionysius and Plato
2. Longinus and Dionysius
3. Longinus and Aristotle
4. Aristotle and Plato

11. Pick out the wrong statement with reference to Peri Hypsous.

1. This treatise, originally written in Latin, exists in a number of editions.
2. The oldest version of the text is a tenth-century manuscript preserved in the French national library.
3. The tenth-century manuscript names the author of the text as Dionysius or Longinus.
4. The title of the treatise is usually translated into English as On the Sublime.

12. What great thinker believed plot to be the most significant part of a story?

1. Aristotle
2. Beauvoir
3. Plato
4. Voltaire

13. Who among the following is a well-known Neo-Aristotelian critic?

1. R.P. Blackmur
2. John Crowe Ransom
3. R.S. Crane
4. Lionel Trilling

14. The ‘Chicago School’ includes:

1. Roman Jakobson, René Wellek, Jan Mukařovský
2. R.S. Crane, Elder Olson, Wayne C. Booth, Norman Maclean
3. Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Merrill Moore
4. Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller

15. According to Aristotle, the closest form of representation that mimesis attains is:

1. Mirroring
2. Symbolic
3. Iconic
4. None of the above

16. What is the Greek title of Pseudo-Longinus’ book On the Sublime?

1. Pro Sublimos
2. Mimesis
3. Ars Poetica
4. Peri Hypsous

17. In whose opinion is ‘the theatre not a hospital’, in reaction to the Aristotelian concept of catharsis?

1. J. Hillis Miller
2. J.W.H. Atkins
3. Michel Foucault
4. F.L. Lucas

18. The Chicago School of critics are also called ____.

1. Neo-Aristotelians
2. Deconstructionists
3. Structuralists
4. New Historicists

19. Who accused Aristotle of social snobbishness and arrogance?

1. Willy Loman
2. Henry James
3. Arthur Miller
4. David

20. In ________ (1821), Percy Bysshe Shelley saw poetry as essentially engaged in what a group of twentieth-century Russian critics later called “defamiliarisation”.

1. Queen Mab
2. A Defence of Poetry
3. The Necessity of Atheism
4. The Cenci

21. Who among the following is associated with the ideology of Utilitarianism?

1. J.A. Froude
2. J.S. Mill
3. Charles Kingsley
4. Cardinal Newman

22. When did the Age of Enlightenment begin?

1. Between the late 16th and early 17th century
2. Between the late 17th and early 18th century
3. Between the late 18th and early 19th century
4. Between the late 19th and early 20th century

23. Which of the following names is most closely associated with Romantic literature?

1. James Blunt
2. Christina Rossetti
3. William Wordsworth
4. Wilfred Owen

24. Which of the following statements is correct?

1. New Criticism preceded Structuralism.
2. The Romantic movement preceded the Enlightenment.
3. Postcolonial criticism preceded the Romantic movement.
4. Structuralism preceded the Enlightenment.

25. When did the French Revolution take place?

1. Late fourteenth century
2. Late sixteenth century
3. Late nineteenth century
4. Late eighteenth century

26. Which Greek philosopher’s ideas were developed by the Romantic poets?

1. Aristotle
2. Immanuel Kant
3. Plotinus
4. Homer

27. The idea of the ‘noble savage’ is theorised by which of the following philosophers?

1. William Blake
2. Immanuel Kant
3. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
4. None of the above

28. The French Revolution burst onto the world stage with a raging crowd that stormed the fortress of the Bastille. When did this happen?

1. 14th of July, 1789
2. 14th of July, 1749
3. 14th of June, 1789
4. 14th of June, 1749

29. Which of the options below is incorrect with regard to the image of man that is foregrounded in Romantic literature?

1. The Romantic subject can be a motley crowd of individuals with no aristocratic bearing.
2. The Romantic subject symbolised the oppressed, the marginalised and the disenfranchised.
3. The Romantic subject breaks away from the image of a mature man of the bourgeois public sphere.
4. The Romantic subject is always violent and revolutionary.

30. Which year saw the replacement of the Russian monarchy with a communist government?

1. 1918
2. 1917
3. 1919
4. 1921

31. The American Revolution, which contributed towards upending the previously existing theocentric society, took place between ________.

1. 1768-1785
2. 1765-1783
3. 1785-1793
4. 1779-1793

32. What nationality was Rousseau?

1. African
2. British
3. French
4. Russian

33. What idea did Rousseau help to develop?

1. Evolution
2. The benefits of marriage
3. Financial awareness
4. Individuality

34. Who said “The Child is father of the Man”?

1. Wordsworth
2. Cummings
3. Yeats
4. Wilkes

35. The line “Poetry is a criticism of life” occurs in

1. Culture and Anarchy
2. The Study of Poetry
3. Modern Painters
4. Sartor Resartus

36. Matthew Arnold’s model of culture was based on

1. Industrialisation
2. Scientific progress
3. Inner purification and integrity
4. Material prosperity

37. What does Matthew Arnold mean by the term ‘disinterestedness’?

1. The critic’s ability to look at the text objectively
2. Intellectual analysis
3. Marginalizing the affective elements of literature
4. Ignoring the spirit of the times

38. An English exponent of Utilitarianism:

1. T.S. Eliot
2. J.M. Keynes
3. Milton Friedman
4. J.S. Mill

39. What does Arnold call “the study of perfection”?

1. Culture
2. Pedagogy
3. Art
4. Philosophy

40. Culture and Anarchy is a work by:

1. T.S. Eliot
2. G.H. Lewes
3. George Eliot
4. Matthew Arnold

41. The poet who coined the terms “inscape” and “instress”:

1. Swinburne
2. Hopkins
3. Browning
4. Longfellow

42. ________ might be described as a moral or philosophical critic who argues that works must have “high seriousness”.

1. Eliot
2. Derrida
3. Arnold
4. C.S. Lewis

43. Matthew Arnold refers to the English middle class as ____.

1. Philistines
2. Populace
3. Barbarians
4. Traders

44. Which early nineteenth-century American writer received considerable attention from both structuralists and post-structuralists?

1. Washington Irving
2. Mark Twain
3. Victor Hugo
4. Edgar Allan Poe

45. Max Ernst and André Breton are related to which of the following movements?

1. Postmodernism
2. Modernism
3. Ecocriticism
4. Post-structuralism

46. Select the correct statement with regard to the text Natyashastra.

1. It was originally composed by Anandavardhana.
2. It has its roots in the Western philosophy of thought.
3. It proposes the ‘rasa’ theory, based on the idea of emotional essences.
4. It is a treatise on Mimamsa philosophy.

47. What non-fiction literary device does Jane Eyre mimic?

1. An article
2. A biography
3. A diary
4. An autobiography

48. “How can what an Englishman believes be heresy? It is a contradiction in terms.” This means

1. 1 and 4 are correct
2. 2 and 1 are correct
3. 1 and 3 are correct
4. 2 and 4 are correct

49. One of the most highly revered, scholarly, and passionate interpreters of English and world literatures, he was appointed the Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College, London in 1967, and later King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge in 1974, an appointment made by the Crown at the suggestion of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1991. Entitled to designate himself as “Sir,” he never did, but wrote an autobiography entitled Not Entitled in 1995. The epigraph to this book came from Coriolanus: “He was a kind of nothing, titleless.” Who among the following is this writer/critic?

1. F.R. Leavis
2. Frank Kermode
3. I.A. Richards
4. David Lodge

50. The earliest woman novelist of significance in the 18th century is

1. Mary Russell
2. Aphra Behn
3. Maria Edgeworth
4. Mrs Gaskell

51. Which of the following white female authors is sympathetic to the cause of the Blacks?

1. Nadine Gordimer
2. Margaret Drabble
3. Muriel Spark
4. Jean Rhys

52. Who among the following displays in her best work the dual influence of feminism and magic realism?

1. Angela Carter
2. Muriel Spark
3. Pat Barker
4. J.K. Rowling

53. Tennyson’s poem about women’s rights and women’s sphere is

1. Maud
2. The Princess
3. Idylls of the King
4. In Memoriam

54. Anna Barbauld, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson and Felicia Hemans are

1. first-wave feminists
2. nineteenth-century stage artists
3. Victorian writers of popular fiction
4. women poets of the Romantic period

55. Which of these is NOT essential for research in the Digital Humanities?

1. Computer literacy
2. Open-access databases
3. Knowledge of computer languages
4. Text analysis

56. The phrase ‘New Journalism’ was codified with its current meaning by

1. Truman Capote
2. Tom Wolfe
3. Norman Mailer
4. Hunter S. Thompson

57. Who among the following described science fiction as a gamut of ‘speculation and social criticism, hardware and exotic adventure’?

1. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
2. Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin
3. Paul de Man
4. Robert Scholes and Eric Rabkin

58. What is EBSCOhost?

1. An anti-plagiarism software
2. A search engine
3. A text database
4. A citation protocol

59. Which critic made a scathing attack on T. S. Eliot in the 1920s, wrote a standard introduction to the Poetics and authored The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal?

1. F. L. Lucas
2. E. V. Lucas
3. F. R. Leavis
4. Middleton Murry

60. Who is the author of The Age of Uncertainty?

1. Nirad C. Chaudhuri
2. Amartya Sen
3. John Kenneth Galbraith
4. W.H. Auden

61. Which of the following is an example of academic research in the humanities?

1. Wings of Fire
2. My Experiments with Truth
3. Passage to England
4. Orientalism

62. “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged…” This statement is from an essay on fiction written by:

1. E.M. Forster
2. Virginia Woolf
3. D.H. Lawrence
4. Henry James

63. The phrase “stream of consciousness” was used by ____ in his Principles of Psychology (1890).

1. William James
2. Sigmund Freud
3. C.G. Jung
4. D.H. Lawrence

64. The notion of “World Englishes” was propounded by:

1. George Bernard Shaw
2. Noam Chomsky
3. Braj B. Kachru
4. Dwight D. Eisenhower

65. Woman to Man (1949) and The Other Half (1966) are collections of poetry by:

1. A.D. Hope
2. Judith Wright
3. Les Murray
4. Jill Jones

66. Surrealism was launched as a concerted artistic movement in France with the publication of André Breton’s:

1. Manifesto of Surrealism
2. Origins of Surrealism
3. History of Surrealism
4. Literary Origins of Surrealism

67. Bertrand Russell wrote the book ____ in collaboration with A.N. Whitehead.

1. The Conquest of Happiness
2. A History of Western Philosophy
3. The Problems of Philosophy
4. Principia Mathematica

68. Choose the correct words to fill in the blanks: “____ and ____ life was generally chosen, because, in that condition, the essential ____ of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language.”

1. Humble, rustic, passions
2. Simple, frugal, emotions
3. Ordinary, uneventful, feelings
4. Modest, everyday, sentiments

69. Which of these are part of modernism?

1. I, II and III only
2. I, II and IV only
3. II, III and IV only
4. I and IV only

70. “An image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” This statement was made by:

1. T.S. Eliot
2. Ezra Pound
3. Cleanth Brooks
4. I.A. Richards

71. Which book by J.G. Ballard is about a virus that freezes anything it comes in contact with?

1. Concrete Island
2. Kingdom Come
3. The Drowned World
4. The Crystal World

72. The following lines capture the central trope of a well-known 18th-century satirical tract: “I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child, well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food…” Identify the tract from the options below.

1. John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty”
2. Francis Bacon, “Of Death”
3. Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal”
4. Robert Graves, “Warning to Children”

73. The most powerful early work on the Holocaust is

1. Fontamara
2. The First Circle
3. Night
4. Nostromo

74. Which of the following phenomena is usually associated with the rise of the novel as a literary genre in the West?

1. Rise of feudalism
2. Rise of the bourgeoisie
3. Development of printing technology
4. Rise of republicanism

75. “On Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature” is an essay written by:

1. R.L. Stevenson
2. H.G. Wells
3. Charles Dickens
4. J.B. Priestley

76. G. Wilson Knight’s The Wheel of Fire is a collection of essays on ____.

1. Goethe’s Faust
2. T.S. Eliot’s poetry
3. Dante’s The Divine Comedy
4. Shakespeare’s plays

77. “Individualism, Experimentation, Absurdity, Symbolism” are the main characteristics of which kind of literature?

1. Postmodernist
2. Post-structural
3. Structuralist
4. Modernist