A TO Z Literary Principles from History of English Literature: Note 105

A Set of Objective Questions & Answers

UGC NET ENGLISH QUESTION BANK
Here is some kind of random stuff for the test with the sole purpose of time management. 

1. Match the List I with List II

List I	List II
1 Dr. Johnson says	A . “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”
2 The Mistakes of a Night	B fictional biography
3 Oscar Wilde	C “There is no moral purpose in Shakespeare”
4 Cavalier poets	D   first used by Swift  in The Battle of the Books
5 Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus	E Geoffrey Chaucer
6 The phrase ‘Sweetness and Light’	F sub-title of She Stoops to Conquer
7 Lord Peter’s forcibly cutting of a lock of Miss Arabella Fermor’s hair	G not a member of the ‘pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’
8"Father of English Poetry"	H an elegy written on the death of John Keats
9 Adonis	IThe Rape of the Lock
10 Modern Fiction, Virginia Woolf	J band of poets in 17th Century who supported Charles I.  They are Ben Jonson, Thomas Carew, Richard Lovelace, John Suckling, and Robert Herrick.

Ans: 1C, 2 F,3G,4J ,5B,6D,7I,8E,9H,10A

2. ‘Negative Capability’ is depersonalized empathy with experience

3.

In the 18th century reason was given importance and emotion and imagination were belittled. It is the age of Locke (philosopher) and Newton (scientist). Classical ideals of perfection of style and appeal to intellect dominated the literature. Prose was suited to the age and prose developed in different spheres. So, the 18th century was the age of reason and prose.

4. Name two prose-works by Jonathan Swift.

Ans: A Tale of a Tub, Gulliver’s Travels.

5. Name two lyrics and early satire of Alexander Pope. To whom the satire was dedicated?

Ans: Pastorals, and Windsor Forest- two lyrics.

 The Rape of the Lock, his earliest satire, is dedicated to Miss Arabella Fermor.

6. “The Lunatic, the love and the poet are of imagination all compact”. These lines occur in A Midsummer Night’s Dream In Act V, Theseus remarks it.

7. Hopkins’s Curtal Sonnet consists of 10 and 1/2lines

8. Osborne’s Look Back in Anger was first staged in 1956.

9. Rossetti is a poet as well as a painter.

10. Referred to Oxford as “that sweet city with her dreaming spires” Matthew Arnold in Thyrsis of Arnold.  Parts of this poem appear in ‘Oxford Elegy’ by Ralph Vaughan Williams.

11. “Cover her face, mine eyes dazzle; She died young” – this was said by Ferdinand about the Duchess of Malfi.

12. Synaesthesia in Keats is a natural concomitant of other qualities of his poetry. Free from all moral degree, Keats’ poetry has the most compiling enchantment for lovers of pure beauty. Keats’s odes depict a skillful fusion of a seeking of beauty which endures and an impassioned meditation of death.

13. Edmund Spenser, famous for his epic poem, ‘The Faerie Queene’, an allegorical poem written in the praise of Queen Elizabeth I.

14 William Shakespeare Often called The National Poet of England and the “Bard of Avon” wrote as much as 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems ‘Venus and Adonis’, and ‘The Rape of Lucrece’, and a few other verses. Regarding the literary supremacy of his sonnets, Saintsbury says, “verse and form cannot be better moulded to the melodious suggestion of beauty.” It is not chiefly their skill that takes us captive, but the intensity of their quiet personal appeal. By virtue of this they hold their place with the greatest poetry in the world.

15. The master of ‘metaphysical poetry’, John Donne is famous for the virtues of his inherent sensibility, the ambivalent nature of his personal experience, and his passionate apprehension of thought, they are richly evident in his imagery. He has written numerous masterpieces like The Ecstasy,  The Anniversarie,  A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucies Day Being the Shortest Day’, ‘The Good-Morrow’ to name a few.

16. The supreme quality of Milton’s poetry is sublimity. He is best known for epic poem ‘Paradise Lost’ (1667), written in blank verse. Only a man of Milton’s imagination could have shaped Paradise Lost. Milton is second only to Shakespeare as a sonneteer. He wrote sonnets at intervals throughout the period of his pamphleteering and his work for the Commonwealth.

17. Dryden wrote one of the greatest satires in the English literature, “Absalom and Achitophel”  in 1681 remarkable for its dexterity in the handling of the Heroic Couplet, neat and polished style and diction, skilful portraiture of contemporary personalities, and marvelous skill in argumentation.

18. Pope was the high-priest of a rationalistic and fashionable age. He’s famous for his mock-epic, The Rape of the Lock,which satirises the high society. It deals with Lord Peter’s forcibly cutting of a lock of Miss Arabella Fermor’s hair and subsequently a quarrel between the two families.

19. Gray began as a classicist and ended as a romanticist. He began in the tradition of Dryden and Pope, but ended in the style and manner of Wordsworth. He’s most famous for his Elegy written in a Country Churchyard (1751). 

20. Collins was second in influence to Thomas Gray as precursor of romantic poetry and has left behind 1500 lines which carry great importance in the history of English Poetry. He is famous for The Persian Eclogues (1742), Ode to Thompson, Ode to Evening’ and Ode Written in the Beginning of the Year 1746.

21. God is referred to as the ‘president of Immortals” in Tess

22 Wordsworth, the high-priest of nature along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, launched the Age of Romanticism in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads (1798).

 23George Gordon Byron, simply known as Lord Byron was one of the most vigorous and powerful satirists of England during the 19th century. Among Byron's best-known works are the lengthy narrative poems Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and the short lyric She Walks in Beauty. Among his other works,The Vision of Judgement (1882) in Ottava Rima is very popular for its ridicules and burlesques.

24.Shelleys temperament was peculiarly responsible to lyrical impulses. With his keen ardour of passion, eager, sensitiveness of personal sorrow, Shelley could not be anything else except a lyric poet. He is best known for his range and variety of lyrics, which includeOde to the West Wind, The Skylark, The Cloud, Lines written among the Eugene Hills, Worlds Wanderers, Music When Soft Voices Die, The Flower that Smiles to-day, The Recollection, etc. They produce a phantasmagoria of visual images, dissolved and reappearing with a swiftness which contributed in part by the flowing current of rhythm.

26 Keats is one of the major poets of the Romantic Revival of the early 19th century. Along with Byron and Shelley he forms the trio of the younger romantic poets. Keats was greatly fascinated by classical literature comprising the poetry of Homer and Virgil. His emotional reacting to Homers poetry is conveyed in his early sonnet On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer. However, despite his love of Greek lore and his interest in classical literature, Keats is thoroughly a romantic poet. Keats developed his own romantic theory of poetry and expressed it in his poem Sleep and Poetry, just as Wordsworth and Coleridge had formulated their romantic theory of poetry in the preface to Lyrical Ballads about two decades ago. He is most famous for his odes, which are marked by sensuous qualities. 
 

 Ardhendu De

Ref: 1. History of English Literature- Albert     

2. The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature

3. UGC NET OLD QUESTION PAPERS

4. Baugh, A.C and Cable T . A History of the English Language. th ed. London: Routledge