In imitation of which classical poet did Samuel Johnson write his "London and The Vanity of Human Wishes" ?

Identify the character, a black-eyed dwarf who "constantly revealed a few discoloured fangs that were yet scattered in his mouth, and gave him the aspect of a panting dog" .

There are helpers and harmers among fellow pilgrims in Christian's journey in "Pilgrim's Progress". Who among the following is not a helper ?

Adherents of the fourteenth century religious movement associated with vernacular preaching, translation of "New Testament" into English, and challenges to the authority of priests and bishops were called :

Match the term with the theorist :
(Term)                                                 (Theorist)
(a) Negritude                                    1. Alice Walker
(b) Womanism                                  2.Jurgen Habermas
(c) Interpellation                               3. Aime Cesaire
(d) Public Sphere                             4. Louis Althusser
Codes :

In his essay "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" (1864) Matthew Arnold contended that :

David Malouf's novel "Ransom" is based on :

The title of Dylan Thomas's Deaths and Entrances was taken from :

What type of writing Walter Pater define as "the special and opportune art of the modern world" ?

It was the first narrative on the life of a black woman slave to be published in England in 1831. It has profound influence on the abolition movement in Britain. Identify the book and its author .

1992 demolition of the disputed structure in Ayodhya produced two controversial literary responses. Identify them .

What is peculiar about the reference in the following in some poets' names in the plural? "it is a freezing, bleak day in January, and I am looking for poetry. I see a few Chaucer’s, a few Shakespeare’s, and a hardcover, three dollar History of Modern Poetry published in 1987" .

Deconstructionist critics argue that texts are never free from :

"What is honour ? A word. What is that word honour ? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o' Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it ? No. is it insensible, then ? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living ? No. why ? Detraction will not suffer it, therefore. I'll none of it: Honour is a mere escutcheon; and so ends my catechism."
Which character in the following Shakespeare's dramas made this statement about honour ?

Why did Plato banish the poet from his ideal state ?

"Search the heads of the greatest rivers in the world, you shall find them but bubbles of water." Who is the author of this line ?

Match the work with the character :
(Name of Work)                                                        (Character)
(a) Sons and lovers                                                  1. Rupert Birkin
(b) Kangaroo                                                            2. Lydia Lensky
(c) Women in love                                                    3. Miriam Leivers
(d) The Rainbow                                                      4. Richard Somers
Codes :

Which ancient writer's name is directly mentioned in Lord Byron's poem "the Isles of Greece" ?

What attitude towards death would you find in such poems as Tennyson's "Crossing the bar," Whitman's "Death Carol," and Kipling's "L'Envoi" ?

One of the most flexible metres_____ is a five foot line. It was introduced by Geoffrey Chaucer in the fourteenth century and has since then become the commonest of metres in English poetry .

The utular figure of Federico Garcia Lorca's elegy "Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias" was :

The fault of Cowley and perhaps of all the writers of the metaphysical race is that of pursuing his thoughts to their ramifications, by which he loses the grandeur of generality; for of the greatest things the parts are little; what is little can be but pretty and by claiming dignity becomes ridiculous. Thus all the power of description is destroyed by a scrupulous enumeration; and the force of metaphors is lost, when the mind by the mention of particulars is turned more upon the original than the secondary sense, more upon that from which the illustration is drawn than that to which it is applied.
What Dr. Johnson actually faults here is :

In Marlow's "Doctor Faustus", what books does Valdes council Faustus to study in preparation for conjuring up spirits ?
(a) the works of Bacon and Abanus
(b) the Hebrew Psalter and New Testament
(c) the works of Ovid and Homer
(d) the works of Baxter and Horst
The right combination according to the code is :

Match the following concepts with their definitions :
(Concepts)                                                                (Definitions)
(a) Collocation                                                         1. A semantic relationship of one-to-many
(b) Corpus                                                               2. A grid used in lexical analysis
(c) Hyponymy                                                          3. A combination of two lexical items in a grammatical pattern
(d) Matrix                                                                 4. A large body of texts
Codes :

Who among the following exemplified the role of the "peasant poet" ?
(a) John Clare                                             
(b) John Keats
(c) William Cobbett                                     
(d) Robert Burns
The right combination is: according to the code is :

"The good thing about words, "Hanif Kureishi remarks in "loose tongues", "is that their final effect is incalculable. [...] you can never know what your words might turn out to mean for yourself or for someone else; or what the world they make will be like. Anything could happen. The problem with silence is that we know exactly what it will be like ."
Kureishi, in sum, suggests  :
(a) There is always some risk involved in writing/speaking
(b) It is better to avoid using words than to risk miscommunication
(c) Words being predictable, are always open to misinterpretation
(d) The unpredictable, in deed, is the strength of words
Determine the correct combination according to the code is :

Which interpretation of Keats's "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" best represents the mimetic perspective ?

"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
______in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last____ of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That ______and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is _____no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing."
Fill in the blanks . Choose the set that carries the correct words .

What is an "implied reader" ?

Read the lines from the poem .
Alas! what boots it with uncessant care
To tend the homely, slighted Shepherd's trade,
And strictly meditate the thankless Muse ?
Were it not better done, as others use,
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair ?
Who are Amaryllis and Neaera in the above extract from John Milton's "Lycidas" ?

"The chapter on the fall of the rupee you may omit. It is somewhat too sensational. Even these metallic problems have their melodramatic side." The fall of the Indian rupee in the final decades of 19 century is referred to in one of Oscar Wilde's plays. Identify the play .

"Why don't we have a little game? Let's pretend that we're human beings, and that we are actually alive ."
This passage forms part of :

What tone will be best suited to the following poem ?
THE COMING OF WISDOM WITH AGE
Through leaves are many, the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth .

Match the author with the title :
  (Author)                                                                     (Title)
(a) Alan Paton                                                            1. Open City
(b) Ngugi wa Thiong'o                                                2. Cry, the Beloved Country
(c) Teju Cole                                                              3. A Grain of Wheat
(d) Wole Soyinka                                                      4. The Interpreters
Codes :

Which of the following is the most accurate statement by W.E.B. Du Bois's famous articulation of the 'twoness' of black Americans ?

Match the plays to their setting :
(a) Krapp's Last Tape                                             1. a country road; a tree Tape
(b) Happy Days                                                      2. bare interior; two small windows high up : grey light
(c) Waiting for Godot                                              3. expanse of scorched grass forming a low mound; blinding light
(d) Endgame                                                          4. a late evening in future, white light
Codes :

Albert Camus borrows the following epigraph to his novel The Plague form____ .
"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,"

"We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single "theological" meaning (the "message" of the Author-god) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash ... literature ... by refusing to assign a "secret", an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text) liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end to refuse god and his hypostases reason, science, law." The passage comes from which of the following essays ?

The Norman Conquest was a significant landmark in English history. What French did the Normans speak and what was it known as ?

Nicholas Nickleby firmly established Charles Dickens as a dominant novelist of his time and the book as an unrivalled literacy phenomenon. To celebrate the completion of the book, a painter noted that there had been nothing comparable to him since the days of Samuel Richardson. Identify the painter .

Match the writer with the work :
  (Name of Work)                                                                    (Writer)
(a) Leviathan                                                                    1. George Puttenham
(b) The Practice of Piety                                                   2. Thomas Spart
(c) The Art of English Poesy                                             3. Lewis Bayly
(d) The History of the Royal Society                                 4. Thomas Hobbes
Codes :

Which of the following is not indebted to the Gothic genre ?

Jonathan Swift arrived in London in 1710 and confronted a rapidly changing world in the new Tory ministry. His reactions to this world are vividly recorded in his journal to Stella, a series of letters addressed to :
(a) Hester Vanhomrigh
(b) Esther Johnson
(c) Rebecca Dingley
(d) Lady Mary Montagu
The right combination according to the code is :

____read Adam Bede with such pleasure that she not only keenly recommended it to her relatives but also commissioned two paintings of scenes from the novel .

Which of the following statements on "Rajmohan's Wife" is not true ?

In Thomas Moore's "Utopia (Book2)", the reader is told that in this new world there are few mistakes in marriage because :

"Reality is that nothing happens. How many of the events of history have occurred, ask yourselves, for this and for that reason, but for no other reason, fundamentally, than the desire to make things happen? I present to you History, the fabrication, the diversion, the reality-obscuring drama." Which postmodern novel thus subverts the truth claims of traditional historiography ?

In which of his novels does Italo Calvino construct his narrative through a tarot pack of cards and re-interpret the Western canon providing new versions of Oedipus Rex, Faust, Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear ?

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware Beware
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
Lines 4 and 5 in the above evoke :

Which post-war British poet ends a poem with the line, "get stewed: books are aload of crap" ?