UGC NET English Literature Questions with Answers

1. One important feature of Jane Austen’s style is?

(A) boisterous humour
(B) humour and pathos
(C) subtlety of irony
(D) stream of consciousness

2. The title of the poem ‘The Second Coming’ is taken from?

(A) The Bible
(B) The Irish mythology
(C) The German mythology
(D) The Greek mythology

3. The following lines are an example……… of image.
‘The river sweats
Oil and tar’

(A) visual
(B) kinetic
(C) erotic
(D) musical

4. Who invented the term ‘Sprung rhythm’?

(A)Hopkins
(B)Tennyson
(C)Browning
(D)Wordsworth

5. Which of the following plays of Shakespeare has an epilogue?

(A) The Tempest
(B) Henry IV, Pt I
(C) Hamlet
(D) Twelfth Night

6. Which of the following poems of Coleridge is a ballad?

(A) Work Without Hope
(B) Frost at Midnight
(C) The Rime of the Ancient
(D) Youth and Age

7. The second series of Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb was published in?

(A) 1823

(B) 1826
(C) 1834
(D) 1833

8. Identify the poet, whom Queen Victoria, regarded as the perfect poet of ‘love and loss’—

(A) Tennyson
(B) Browning
(C) Swinburne
(D) D. G. Rossetti

9. A verse form using stanza of eight lines, each with eleven syllables, is known as?

(A) Spenserian Stanza
(B) Ballad
(C) OttavaRima
(D) Rhyme Royal

10. Identify the rhetorical figure used in the following line of Tennyson “Faith un-faithful kept him falsely true.”

(A) Oxymoron
(B) Metaphor
(C) Simile
(D) Synecdoche

11. Who called ‘The Waste Land ‘a music of ideas’?

(A) Allen Tate
(B) J. C. Ransom
(C) I. A. Richards
(D) F. R Leavis

12. Which book of John Ruskin influenced Mahatma Gandhi?

(A) Sesame and Lilies
(B) The Seven Lamps of Architecture
(C) Unto This Last
(D) Fors Clavigera

13. The twins in Lord of the Flies are?

(A)Ralph and Jack
(B) Simon and Eric
(C) Ralph and Eric
(D) Simon and Jack

14. Which of the following plays of Shakespeare, according to T. S.
Eliot, is ‘artistic failure’?

(A) The Tempest
(B) Hamlet
(C) Henry IV, Pt I
(D) Twelfth Night

15. What does ‘I’ stand for in the following line?
‘To Carthage then I came’

(A) Buddha
(B) Tiresias
(C) Smyrna Merchant
(D) Augustine

16. Identify the work by Ruskin which began as a defence of contemporary landscape artist
especially Turner-
(A) The Stones of Venice
(B) The Two Paths
(C) The Seven Lamps of Architecture
(D) Modern Painters

17. The term ‘the Palliser Novels’ is used to describe the political novels of—
(A) Charles Dickens
(B) Anthony Trollope
(C) W.H.White
(D) B. Disraeli

18. Identify the poet whom Queen Victoria, regarded as the perfect poet of ‘1ove and loss’-
(A) Tennyson
(B) Browning
(C) Swinburne
(D) D. G. Rossetti

19. A verse form using stanza of eight lines, each with eleven syllables, is known as•—
(A) Spenserian Stanza
(B) Ballad
(C) Ottava Rima
(D) Rhyme Royal

20. Identify the writer who first used blank verse in English poetry~—
(A) Sir Thomas Wyatt
(B) William Shakespeare
(C) Earl of Surrey
(D) Milton

21. The phrase ‘Pathetic fallacy’ is coined by-
(A) Milton
(B) Coleridge
(C) Carlyle
(D) John Ruskin

22. Tracts for the Times relates to-
(A) The Oxford Movement
(B) The Pre-Raphaelite Movement
(C) The Romantic Movement
(D) The Symbolist Movement

23. The Chartist Movement sought-
(A) Protection of the political rights of the working class
(B) Recognition of chartered trading companies
(C) Political rights for women
(D) Protection of the political rights of the middle class

24. Who wrote Biographia Literaria ?
(A) Byron
(B) Shelley
(C) Coleridge
(D) Lamb

25. Who was Fortinbras ?
(A) Claudius’s son
(B) Son to the king of Norway
(C) Ophelia’s lover
(D) Hamlet’s friend

26. How many soliloquies are spoken by Hamlet in the play Hamlet ?
(A) Nine
(B) Seven
(C) Five
(D) Three

27. “The best lack all conviction,
while the worst are full of passionate intensity’
The above lines have been taken from— `
(A) The Waste Land
(B) Tintern Abbey
(C) The Second Coming
(D) Prayer for My Daughter

28. William Morel in Sons and Lovers is drawn after—
(A) Lawrence’s father
(B) Lawrence’s brother
(C) Lawrence himself
(D) None of these

29. The most notable characteristic of Keats’ poetry is-
(A) Satire
(B) Sensuality
(C) Sensuousness
(D) Social reform

30. The keynote of Browning’s philosophy of life is-
(A) agnosticism
(B) optimism
(C) pessimism
(D) skepticism

31.The term, ‘curtal sonnet’, was coined by

(A) John Milton
(B) William Blake
(C) Gerald Manley Hopkins
(D) Matthew Arnold

32. The author of the pamphlet Short View of Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698) was

(A) John Bunyan

(B) Jeremy Collier
(C) William Wycherley
(D) John Vanbrugh

33. Identify a play in the following list that is not written by Oscar Wilde :

(A) A Woman of No Importance
(B) The Importance of Being Earnest
(C) Saints and Sinners
(D) An Ideal Husband

34. Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in the year
(A) 1995

(B) 1996
(C) 1997
(D) 1998

35. Which of the following arrangements of English novels is in the correct chronological sequence ?

(A) Kim, A Passage to India, Sons and Lovers, Brave New World
(B) Sons and Lovers, A Passage to India, Kim, Brave New World
(C) Kim, Sons and Lovers, A Passage to India, Brave New World
(D) Brave New World, Kim, Sons and Lovers, A Passage to India

36. “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift” is written by

(A) Alexander Pope
(B) Samuel Johnson
(C) John Gay
(D) Jonathan Swift

37. Widowers’ Houses was written by

(A) Oscar Wilde
(B) T.S. Eliot
(C) John Galsworthy
(D) G.B. Shaw

38. Who among the following Marxist critics has reconsidered the classic problem of ‘base and superstructure” in relation to literature ?

(A) Edmund Wilson
(B) Raymond Williams
(C) Lucien Goldmann
(D) Walter Benjamin

39. “Heteroglossia” refers to

(A) the multiple readings of a text.
(B) the juxtaposition of multiple voices in a text.
(C) the comments on the margins of a text.
(D) the gloss or commentary relating to a text.

40. Margaret Drabble is the author of

(A) The Memoirs of a Survivor

(B) The Witch of Exmoor(C) The Service of Clouds
(D) The Godless in Eden

41. MacFlecknoe is an attack on Dryden’s literary rival,

(A) Richard Flecknoe
(B) Thomas Shadwell
(C) John Wilmot
(D) Matthew Prior

42. Eighteenth century writers used satire frequently for

(A) attacking human vices and follies.(B) inciting the reading public.
(C) glorifying the culture of the upper classes.
(D) pleasing their women readers.

43. Byron’s “The Vision of Judgement” is a satire directed against

(A) Charles Lamb
(B) John Keats
(C) Henry Hallam
(D) Robert Southey

44. Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man was published in

(A) 1790
(B) 1791
(C) 1792
(D) 1793

45. Andrew Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland” was written in

(A) 1647
(B) 1649
(C) 1650
(D) 1648

46. “The Rime of Ancient Mariner” is about

(A) a perilous adventure in the sea
(B) the accidental killing of an octopus
(C) the curse of a sea God
(D) the guilt and expiation of the Ancient Mariner

47. “To Daffodils” is a poem, written by

(A) Robert Herrick
(B) William Wordsworth
(C) John Keats
(D) P.B. Shelley

48. Which of the following novels reconstructs the historical events of the Indian Mutiny ?

(A) The Jewel in the Crown
(B) The Siege of Krishnapur
(C) The Day of the Scorpion
(D) The Towers of Silence

49. “England, my England” is a poem by

(A) W.E. Henley
(B) A.E. Housman
(C) R.L. Stevenson
(D) Rudyard Kipling

50. Shelley was expelled from the Oxford University due to the publication of

(A) The Revolt of Islam
(B) The Necessity of Atheism
(C) The Triumph of Life
(D) The Masque of Anarchy